Travelers' Tales Alaska

by Bill Sherwonit

  And now, of course, the Department of Fish and Game keeps track of the whole hunt. Though the Inupiat have hunted bowhead whales for over 2,000 years, though Barrow and other subsistence whaling communities have an enormous stake in the health of the bowhead whale, the International Whaling Commission has been keeping its nose in their business since the mid-1970s, when it placed a ban on Inupiat whale harvesting. In response to the ban, Native Alaskans formed the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission, to work toward compromise. Now the Inupiat work in conjunction with biologists like Craig to learn more about the stock of bowhead whales, and each season they set a limit on the harvest. Watching Craig and his colleagues at work, I saw that the scientists and whaling crews have a friendly relationship. Whaling captains contact the scientists once they’ve landed a whale. Then it is the scientists’ responsibility to get to the camp in time to take measurements, samples, and photographs. Afterward, the scientists and the whaling crew eat unullaq together, celebrating in the successful hunt.

  While I visited Barrow, I sensed a spirit of joy and expectancy. I can only compare it to harvest time in rural Minnesota, my home state. Barrow’s high school practically shuts down during whaling season, explained Jeremy, because the kids must be ready to help with whales if a family member, a neighbor, or a friend takes one. At the grocery store, women collect boxes for hauling the muktuk back to town. They stockpile coffee, Styrofoam cups, and food to cook at their whaling camp. Everyone carries a VHF radio, Barrow’s version of the cell phone. Word spreads quickly when whales are landed, and workers gather to help haul and clean the kill.

  For our second full day, Jeremy arranged a dogsled ride for us with Geoff, a friend of his who keeps a team for travel and sport. When we got to Geoff’s house, however, his wife, Marie, told us that her whaling captain brother had just landed a whale. She bubbled with joy. This was his first year as a captain, she told us, his first whale!

  The dogsled ride could wait. I hitched a ride with Geoff and Marie; Jeremy and Toby followed behind. Geoff pulled a long, wooden sled behind his snowmachine. Marie stood at its far end, her fur-lined parky hood flying in the wind. I sat in the sled and hung onto its plywood edges when we bumped over chunks of ice in the path.

  On our way, we got lost among the many tracks leading to different camps. Geoff kept stopping to radio the crew and ask for directions. We couldn’t see more than a hundred feet in any direction because huge chunks of ice blocked our view. Yet when we drove on to a next stop, everything looked the same, ice and snow for miles. Geoff asked, “Do you turn left or right at the first fork?”

  The voice on the other end of the radio asked, “Did you hit the Christmas tree yet?” We thought he was kidding, until we actually passed a small evergreen tree, planted in the snow as if it actually grew there. Everyone laughed, and I didn’t get the joke until I realized that there are no trees in Barrow. Permafrost does not allow landscaping.

  When we arrived, the crew was still in boats, towing the whale toward shore. Two crewmen stood on shore and pulled small ropes threaded through the points of the tail fin. Once the fin emerged, they attached the block and tackle’s wide yellow strap around its base. As the line of people grew along the yellow ropes of the block and tackle, I stayed out of the way, ready to take photos of the whale emerging from the water. I stood near two Inupiat women, watching, just about to snap my last photo, when the whaling captain spotted us. He yelled, in a deep authoritative voice, “You didn’t come here to take pictures! Get in line and help!” I felt like a child, castigated in public, ashamed. I really did have the best of intentions: staying out of the way, not intruding on the communal activity. This isn’t my culture, I thought. It would be rude to jump in and act like I belonged.

  But I had it all wrong. There was work to be done. I looked to my left and made an embarrassed face at the women who were scolded with me. Their bronzed faces mirrored my own. We scrambled to fall in line and help. The whaling captain and his crew stood near the waterline, watching the whale come up. Someone screamed for people to run to the next camp over, to have them come help.

  The process reminded me of what I know about giving birth. There is pushing, and in between pushes, there are small breaks to check the position of the emerging infant, to verify that the mother is O.K. Then the pushing resumes. Bringing a whale to shore, this midwifery of death for the mammal and life for the village, happened in these same fits and starts. The captain would yell “PULL!” and the message would get relayed, telephone-style to the end of the line, as people along the way yelled in agreement, “PULL!” We all pulled, some people slipping and falling on the ice, and then the captain ordered “STOP!” and his command would come back to us through the series of intermediate yellers, and we would all let go of the rope, readjust our hats and mittens, and bounce up and down to keep warm. The whaling crew would readjust the position of the whale’s body, to make sure it was landed correctly And again, the message to pull.

  The whale slowly emerged from the ocean in a long, graceful tube of soot-toned flesh, its fins easing out from its sides like wings. I couldn’t actually see it come forth, standing so far down the rope line, but I could feel it emerge in my hands through the rope, in a vibration of beckoning; it answered our communal call, sliding gracefully out of its watery home. Once the final pull had secured the whale far enough onto the pack ice, our tug of war complete, the whaling crew ran joyfully to take photos with their catch. They stood, proud men in white parkys, baring shocks of white teeth against caramel skin.

  I felt an urge to run my hand down the length of the whale’s body, to caress the newly departed, to thank the gentle creature for offering itself to us humans. Before I could move from my place in line, a woman from the whaling camp nearby came to offer a huge stew pot full of unalluq, a gesture not only of nourishing calories to help the crew as it dismantled the new catch, but of community between whale camps, an acknowledgement of the shared goal of food for the entire village.

  This time, Jeremy, Toby, and I each took a slice, and toasted one another gaily, banging our unalluq against each other’s in a salute of friendship, of commonality, of a job well done. It tasted sweet and salty, like warm sushi. Marie and Geoff, Craig, and the other scientists celebrated with us, the warmth from our smiles almost palpable enough to melt the ice from our eyelashes.

  Heather Villars was born and raised in the flat, featureless Midwestern United States. Upon relocating to the snow-capped allure of Anchorage, Alaska, where she recently completed an M.F.A. in creative writing, her mouth hung open for several months. She has since grown used to writing under the mountains’ startling presence, but tries daily to remind herself of their treasure.

  NILES ELLIOT GOLDSTEIN

  In God’s Back Yard

  A young rabbi finds renewal on a dog sled’s runners.

  AFTER MY FIRST YEAR AS A RABBI, AS WELL AS MY FIRST experiences working in the professional Jewish world, I felt a deep need to return to Alaska. I wanted to reignite the spark that had originally propelled me into rabbinical school with so much zeal and idealism. As a young rabbi I had longed for a religious community that was bursting with pride, joy, passion, and vitality, that held as its eternal mandate the loving commitment to a sacred covenant between its members and God. What I discovered was something else: a cult of woe, a reactionary community that seemed to be obsessed with its own degeneration, with intermarriage, assimilation, anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust. I was losing my faith.

  I had to get away, to return to a place where I could once again find inspiration for my soul. I made arrangements to fly to Fairbanks, where I had worked for a summer three years before as the student rabbi for the town’s Jewish community. My friend Dave had been working up there as an environmentalist and wilderness guide and raised dogs on the side. We decided to meet in the early spring for a dogsledding adventure north of the Arctic Circle, our second mushing trip together. I spent most of March trying to find the appropriate gear in Manhattan for a tr
ip to the Last Frontier, but by the end of the month I had everything pieced together and I’d arrived in Fairbanks. Dave met me at the airport in his rusty shambles of a truck, and within fifteen minutes we were back at his cabin, unloading the sleds from the vehicle’s roof and hooking up our dogs to their tug lines for a practice run through the dark and icy night.

  It had been two years since I’d last stood on a dogsled. On our first trip, a five-day foray into a starkly beautiful area known as the White Mountains, everything was a challenge for me: putting harnesses on the team, learning the verbal commands for my lead dogs, making turns without falling off the sled into the snow. This time most of it came back to me within minutes. It was night, but because I had to be back in New York the following week, we didn’t have much time to wait for me to regain my bearings. It had been warm that past week, so by the time we got onto the trails the daytime melt had frozen and they were rock hard. We wore headlamps to make our way through the darkness. Whenever the dogs looked back toward me, their eyes flashed in the beams like blue moons. It took us just half an hour to mush around the outskirts of Fairbanks to Hidden Hill, a small Quaker community where some of Dave’s friends lived. They served us fresh salmon and homemade pumpkin pie.

  Sated from my meal and anxious to get back to the dogs resting outside, I thanked our hosts and put on my boots. The air that had stung my face during our run to Hidden Hill was refreshing as I walked out of the cabin. (If you dressed warmly enough, the cold months in the Alaskan interior were bearable—unless you had to deal with wind.) Stars filled the sky, an immense swath of blackness. It was a different world from New York. It seemed a more real world. A dozen pairs of eyes stared at me silently. My feet crunched into the snow as I walked toward our sleds. Suddenly the dogs erupted into a frenzy of barking and lunging. The vague animal forms grew clearer as my vision adjusted to the night. There were our two teams, thrashing and howling in wild expectation of the trail. I recognized only a few of them from our last trip; Dave had borrowed several of these new dogs for me from a friend.…

  All of us in Alaska think of our state in different and personal ways, but somewhere in most of us there is love, an appreciation, an affection, for the land, for the wild, and for the raw beauty of this frontier. It is what drew many of us here, what keeps us here, what makes us Alaskans. Nothing touches this chord more strongly than sled-dog racing. Something in the sight of the powerful, eager, finely tuned animals mastering the wilderness, touches the romantic in us, expresses so vividly this kinship with the land.

  That’s why, come March, thousands of us listen for every scrap of information on who is where in the 1,100-mile Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race from Anchorage to Nome.

  —Lew Freedman, Iditarod Classics

  Mushing through a cold Alaskan night was unlike anything I had ever experienced. The sensation itself, similar to skiing or surfing, is not what is remarkable. It is the scene. You stand alone on a sled in darkness. Other than your headlamp, only the moon lights your way through the woods and over the streams and rivers. Frigid wind blasts your face. A team of animals, silenced by their exertions, pulls you forward over snow and ice with a focus that makes it seem as if nothing in the world but running ultimately matters to them. Little matters to you, either, but the moment.

  The following day, while Dave took care of some last-minute errands related to our sleds and camping gear, I drove around Fairbanks buying food for our trip. Dave had prepared two long lists for me, one for us and the other for the dogs. First I went to the supermarket. I got the basics for a cold weather journey: rice, beans, butter, cheese, meat (for him), fish (for me), and crackers that were hard enough to survive the rough and tumble of the trail. We would have to pack all of it, labeled by type of meal, tightly into our sleds. They would double as freezers. Liquor was a trickier issue. Beer did not have enough alcohol content to hold its liquid form, so unless we wanted to drink ice we had to purchase harder stuff. The spirit we settled on for our Arctic excursion was rum. When I was finished gathering our supplies, I concentrated on our teams. Dog food had never seemed so complicated. Because of all the energy the dogs would burn during the trip, Dave spelled out very carefully what I needed to buy in order to replenish them: beef fat (for a quick jolt of energy), dry dog food (to be mixed with warm water to help rehydrate them), and several fifty-pound sacks of ground and compressed meat with a bold label on them that read CONDEMNED CHICKEN CARCASSES: NOT FIT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION.

  After my tasks were completed, I had a couple of spare hours to see some of my former congregants. I’d been in touch by telephone with a few of them over the past three years. I visited Leah and Mike, who proudly showed me their new house—and I used a flush toilet for what I knew would be the last time in a week. I also met with Richard and Margot, who gave me a tour of the very first synagogue the Jews of Fairbanks had owned, which they had just bought (when I lived there in 1992, we held our Sabbath services in the chapel at Fort Wainwright, the town’s sprawling army base). Richard wept as he walked me through the building. While it was nice to catch up with old friends, seeing everybody again felt somewhat strange. The context was completely different. In my time of need, I wasn’t turning to the Jewish community for spiritual revitalization. I was turning to the wilderness.…

  We left Fairbanks the next day. After several more hours of loading a dozen barking dogs one at a time into the transport track above the truck, and then hauling and securing our two sleds over that, we headed north up the Dalton Highway, a relatively narrow road that extends all the way to the hulking oil-drilling rigs at Prudhoe Bay on the edge of the Arctic Ocean. Our destination was the Brooks Range, a majestic wedge of mountains that cuts across the northern half of the state. In three or four hours we reached the Yukon River and stopped for coffee at a small truck stop run by an elderly Christian fundamentalist couple. The only traffic we saw was an occasional tractor-trailer on its way to or returning from Prudhoe Bay. The air was much colder than it had been in Fairbanks, so we both put on additional layers of clothing and checked on the dogs, who looked out at us from their wooden cubicles (which they had begun to gnaw apart). As we drove on into the night, ice fog began to set in, frosting the tundra and imparting a ghostly hue to the landscape. Near midnight, over ten hours since we had left Fairbanks, we pulled into another truck stop at the “town” of Coldfoot. The place was a genuine frontier outpost: miners, trappers, and other assorted adventurers mingling over burgers and beer. Dave and I ate dinner, bought a new headlight for our vehicle, and got directions to Nolan, an active gold-mining camp about thirty miles north of Coldfoot and the site of our starting point.…

  It was numbingly cold when we reached Nolan. I tried (and failed) to sleep in the truck’s enclosed cabin, while Dave slept outside underneath the transport track. My sleeping bag did little to protect me from the frigid air, which turned my breath into white smoke: the truck’s windows frosted over within minutes. Our dogs slept quietly to the side of the road, each one attached by his collar to the picket line that linked them together. At dawn we got started. Before we had a chance to put food into their metal bowls, the dogs started barking. Endlessly. Only their breakfast shut them up, which gave us a few minutes of relative silence to take down our sleds, check the gear, and move our truck into a more secluded area. The trailhead was on the outskirts of the camp, a few hundred yards away from us. Our plan was to make a giant loop through a section of the Brooks Range and return to Nolan and the truck in a week.

  After I gathered the bowls, Dave and I put on the dogs’ harnesses and hooked them up to their respective sleds. They were fresh and excited—so excited that they lunged forward and jumped into the air in anticipation of the run. Sled dogs like it very cold, so they are at their strongest early in the morning. I learned that the hard way. When we were both safely on our sleds, we removed our anchors and raced down the road. Dave led the way to the trailhead and called for his lead dogs to turn right into the park. My team followed. We careen
ed off the road, barreled ahead another couple of hundred yards over taiga, then entered a wooded area. As the dogs dragged me helplessly around a spruce, my sled began to tilt precariously onto one runner. Suddenly it flipped over, and I skidded face first into a pile of snow. Luckily I had held on to the sled with one hand, and the weight of my body forced the team to come to a stop (if I hadn’t, they most likely would have sprinted on without me for miles). The dogs turned back and stared at me with expressions of befuddlement.

  We were mushing in Gates of the Arctic National Park, and the Brooks Range was just one region within it. Dave had selected one of the more remote and spectacular chunks of Arctic Alaska for our trip, but after thirty minutes of mushing we ran into a major challenge. Because we had decided to make this trip in early spring, we knew that we risked encountering overflow, even in the colder areas north of the Arctic Circle. Overflow occurs when, due to rising temperatures, the upper layers of ice melt over their frozen foundation, leaving up to several feet of slush hidden beneath a paper-thin, icy veneer. [Overflow may also occur on rivers throughout the winter, when water flows through a hole or crack in the ice onto the ice’s surface.] What looks like a frozen river can quickly crack under the weight of a sled, ruining supplies and sometimes drowning dogs.

  Wiseman Creek, which we needed to cross at several points during the first few days of our trip, was filled with overflow. It was not very deep, but because no other mushers had used our route in several weeks, we had no idea about the present condition of the creeks and rivers ahead. That left us with two alternatives. Either scrap the entire trip and return to Fairbanks or push on with the clear understanding that we were taking our chances, that when we tried to make our way back to the truck the following week we might be stranded. Dave was ambivalent. He wanted to mush, but he was worried that we could run into trouble or that I could be trapped and miss my flight back to New York. He left the decision to me. I thought about why I was there, about my self-imposed mission. And when I reflected on just what was at stake for me, the decision was easy. We moved on.