Four Quarters of Light

by Brian Keenan

  While walking around the town I came across a signpost telling me I was 180 miles from Russia, 4,000 miles from Washington, 6,000 miles from Greenland and 1,500 miles from the North Pole. There were two blank spaces beside the words ‘Sunset’ and ‘Sunrise’. I tried to work out if the spaces were blank because at this time of year there was neither a sunrise nor sunset worth talking about, or if it was simply another wry Eskimo joke, much like Fanny’s.

  I walked on, smiling, through the block sections of unpaved roads, past the Quaker church established in 1897. I couldn’t imagine who had brought the Quakers here over a hundred years ago, but I could imagine how bleak and desolate it must have been. Many of the cabins along these roads seemed to rise out from a midden of over-wintering debris. Dog sleds lay on the roof alongside racks of caribou antlers. The ground was piled with driftwood; ribcages of seal or perhaps walrus lay yellowing amid barrels, snow machines’ outboard motors, and mountains of netting and oil drums, and every household had a long wooden rack for drying fish. Occasionally the remains of such fish hung black and shrivelled like melted rubber tyre, unrecognizable as fish.

  I walked past a huge wooden structure uplifted on spars with a sign that read ‘Alaska Commercial Company’. I climbed the ramp to the entrance and went inside. It was a supermarket chock-a-block with everything you would expect to be in a supermarket and lots and lots of all the necessary items that living in this extreme place required: Gore-Tex clothing, rubber boots, engine parts, fishing tackle of monstrous proportions, hand-held harpoons and harpoon guns, shotguns, rifles and ammunition to suit, knives of every description – the list could go on. Looking at all this, I wondered just how far these people had come from the Eskimo hunter who’d fished with tackle made of whale baleen, bone, bear claw and sharpened ivory, and who’d used braided sinew instead of nylon-coated lines of incredible strength.

  As I walked out of the shop and down the ramp two old women approached me wearing fur-lined parkas and heavy baggy trousers tied into traditional Eskimo boots. Sled mittens hung round their necks and dangled at their waist. Their faces were buried in the huge cowl of their parkas and were wrinkled and lined to such an incredible degree that they looked like images in a daguerreotype photo. They pressed some money into my hands and asked me to go and buy some ‘soda pop’ for them. I laughed and told them to go and buy it for themselves, but they were insistent, and I did as I was bid. When I returned with the cans of soft drink, they shuffled off in gratitude and delight. I don’t know why these women didn’t want to go into the store, but something about them informed me that no matter what modernism had brought to these people, they still inhabited their own very different world.

  I still had time to call into the Museum of the Arctic. I caught the end of a slide show illustrating the changing seasons in this corner of the Arctic. I was trying to imagine this world when the screen faded to black and a single seal-oil lamp lit the place. Out of that soft dark emerged images of the bowhead whale, walrus and seal. Dall sheep, moose, caribou and musk ox appeared and disappeared like ghost creatures, and behind them the Inupiat drums beat and dancers arose. But this dancing was so different from the raw, shuffling, bestial energy of the Gwich’in and their caribou dance. These dances are almost Oriental or Hindu. The story is told through the movement of hand-held fans trimmed with fur and feathers. The gestures, creating accentuated features, unfold the tale. The dancer’s body moving to the rhythm of a drumbeat adds to the fascination.

  On the way out, I studied some old black and white prints of the Eskimo people who had inhabited this land long before I was born. Their enigmatic Asiatic faces told of hardship and endurance that few other humans on the planet could have survived, and as they looked out across endless windswept whiteness you sensed that they could see something more than the blasted whiteness. Out in the street again I thought about the two old women who had stopped me and come and gone in an instant with their bottles of soda pop. They could have walked out of any of the old photos I had been looking at. But just because I had seen them and spoken with them didn’t make them real. The Inupiat other world had already invaded my consciousness without my knowing. Was this a preparation for what was to come, or was it a warning? These thoughts were rolling round in the back of my head as I headed back to Fanny Mendenhall’s cabin.

  Debra was with the two boatmen, who were already packing our gear onto their truck to run it down to the beach. They said nothing as we drove the short distance to where an aluminium skiff with a powerful outboard motor lay on the boulder-and-rock shoreline of the Kotzebue Sound. I wondered if Debra had any more ideas about where we would be going. No. It had been many years since her last visit to Charlie’s fish camp and she would never be able to find it again. In any case, although families return to the same camp year after year for generations to stock up on fish, wild berries, duck, seal and caribou, sometimes natural disaster forces them to move. However, unlike the rest of their people, Charlie and Lena chose to live at their fish camp all year round. These fish camps are in such remote locations that people work them only in the summer, when the salmon are running. In the depths of an Arctic winter they are impossible to get to.

  Debra questioned the boatmen, who were relatives of Charlie’s. They confirmed that he was still at the same place, though the route to reach him was different from the last time she had visited. ‘Seasons are all changing and it’s changing the river course too. Charlie thinks he’s gonna stay at the fish camp for ever. Charlie’s old man now, will have to move into town soon.’ As he finished speaking and loading the last of our bags, and some supplies for Charlie, the boatman looked at me. ‘You best put something warm on. It’ gonna get cold out on the sound until we get across.’ It was said matter-of-factly, and he and his friend began to shove the boat into the water. I looked out at the murky stretch of ocean that was already throwing up wind-tossed whites. The boat suddenly seemed very small with its load; with the addition of the four of us it would look pathetic. I know nothing about boats, and I never learned to swim, so what the hell was I doing heading out into the Chukchi Sea in a tiny tin boat that sat so low in the water? The sea was already lapping at my fingertips as I clung to the sides before we had even moved off.

  As the small boat pushed out into the choppy waters of the Kotzebue Sound, I noticed how carefully the boatmen had loaded us and our cargo of supplies and belongings. The larger of the two men sat up front with some of the heavier baggage behind him; I squatted in the middle with the light bags behind me; Debra and the other boatman took up the rear as the outboard roared us out across the waters. I quickly learned the reason for all this meticulous storage as the boat bucked in the choppy ocean and slapped back down into the troughs between waves. It was cold and intimidating way out in the middle of the sound. The sea was murky and ugly, as if ten million tons of earth had been stirred up. It was tiresomely slow, too, perhaps because you had nothing to look at but the soupy ocean and the waves banging against the hull. ‘If it was wintertime we would be crossing with a dog team,’ Debra volunteered. I looked out on the expanse of heaving water and found it hard to imagine it frozen solid. Nor could I really imagine a cold so intense that it could freeze an ocean. I had seen images of ice-breakers moving through ice-bound seas on TV, but sitting in this tiny skip with the cold numbing me and the waves wanting to tumble us all into its seething emptiness I was finding it difficult to believe what I knew to be fact.

  There seemed no end to the tedium of the uncomfortable journey. Apart from Debra’s one statement, no-one spoke. The man in front of me sat in silence and never took his eyes off the water; the erratic rise and fall of the boat had no impact on his stillness. I tried to imitate his impervious demeanour, but the icy sea was only inches from me and we were miles from anywhere. I looked behind me at Debra and the helmsman, but she had turned her back to me to take the brunt of the wind. The man at the motor had fastened his parka up to the bridge of his nose and his face had disappeared into the dark fo
lds of his fur-lined hood. A human voice would have been comforting, or some kind gesture to let me know where these speechless, faceless men were taking me, or even how much longer we would have to endure the dreadful journey. But everyone had turned into themselves. I pulled the collar of my coat about my ears. All my questions about what I was doing, where I was going and why fell into the sea or were blown away by the wind.

  It seemed to take for ever to reach the far side, but eventually a perceptible lessening in the bouncing of the boat woke me from my oblivion. Now we were moving easily up a wide river slough. The banks on either side were steep and I stood to appreciate the lie of the land. Rolling away on both sides was endless tundra as far as the eye could see. Not a tree grew to break up the remoteness of the blasted heath. I sat down again. The high banks provided a shelter and I was beginning to warm up again, but still no-one spoke; only the outboard droned softly as we glided over the dark, still waters and penetrated deeper into the wild. For about another three quarters of an hour we followed the river course and through all that time I watched anxiously as cloud upon cloud of mosquitoes gathered into dizzying spiral columns and hovered like sentinels, each no more than a few yards from the next and some of them reaching fifteen to twenty feet in height. There had to be millions of them in each of these seething black pillars. I knew that my supply of repellents would be useless against this infernal plague. I tried to convince myself that perhaps they would remain near the river and that Charlie and Lena’s place would be sensibly placed far back from it.

  And that was exactly how we found it. Charlie and Lena’s ‘fish camp’ was marked by a large white tent erected on the riverbank. Beside and adjacent to it was a long, rough table sitting on a platform of old timber boards. Around the table sat a collection of plastic basins and buckets along with barrels, tin oil drums and aluminium baths. Beside the work table and stretching out along the bank were several fish racks and a skinning horse – basically a plank of timber turned into its narrow end and held up at either end by timber supports. Over this, the skin of a seal was stretched. As it dried, the excess fatty membranes could be scraped off with an ulu, that famous half-moon-shaped cutting edge that native peoples in this region use for every task that requires a sharp edge. About 150 yards back from the river, perched on a high bluff that overlooked the river and the endless tundra plane, Charlie and Lena’s wooden cabin sat low and squat. A welcome windbreak of trees and bushes sheltered it, though its summer smoke belched out of the short pipe chimney.

  We hauled our bags across a stepping-stone path made in the marshy tundra and climbed up the thirty-foot incline to our new home. Apart from the cabin, there were three outhouses. One was the toilet, a replica of many all over Alaska. Two wooden planks had had a semi-circle cut from the centre of them and had been placed side by side across two large drum containers at either side of a large, deep hole in the ground. The other small outhouses consisted of a workshop full of tools and parts of snow machines, and a tanning shed for hides. Flung across a long cargo sled was the hide of a brown bear. Later, I discovered the body parts of animals in very advanced stages of decomposition hanging from the branches of trees at the perimeter of the camp. Only one tree had been left to grow in the centre of Charlie’s enclosed camp; all the others had been cut and cleared to let the wind blow through.

  It was a bright day, and the Arctic sun was heating up the place. Lena was overjoyed to see Debra and made a great fuss of her. When I was introduced she looked me up and down intently, then whispered something to Debra. Both women giggled as they regarded me again. Charlie, the old shaman healer, unlike his wife, made no fuss over our presence. Instead he sat on an old tubular-framed chair like a Buddha under his bodi tree. I knew Charlie was an old man, somewhere in his nineties, but his lean frame and drawn face were not purely the results of ageing. His narrow, angular face looked as if the skin had been stretched across his skull and left to dry there like the seal skin on the skinning horse. He walked with a stick, and it was obvious he was suffering some discomfort, but his hands still looked strong and his forearms displayed long strands of muscle under his skin. When we shook hands, his grasp confirmed what I suspected. As I looked from Charlie to Lena, I decided that you could only discern the classic Eskimo features in Charlie at a second glance. Charlie may have been living in this Arctic coast when few white men ever thought of coming here, but I was sure there was some white Russian or Scandinavian blood in his ancestry, maybe from the whaling ships or the fur traders who came here in the 1800s. But then, when I looked at him again, I thought he looked like a little old Japanese fisherman. There was an impassive stillness in his face that did not let you penetrate behind his exterior presence.

  Lena, on the other hand, was ethnically beautiful. She had the tiny round face of the true Inupiat. Her small, dark eyes glowed out from the Asian slant in which they were set. Though she was in her mid-sixties, her long black hair shone in the sun and the first traces of silver were only just beginning to show. Her face was full of life, spirit and fun, the way her husband’s was not. The lines on her face could have suggested that she was much older, but even her lack of teeth did not detract from the femininity that radiated from her. She laughed coyly behind her hands like a geisha, yet had no fear of the camera and posed effortlessly. I was mesmerized by her gorgeous, warm, womanly face, and by her infectious sense of girlish fun.

  Charlie hobbled inside his cabin on his aluminium hospital-issue walking stick. It was one of the few concessions to modernity I could see in this wilderness homestead. The curious irony struck me: here was this reputed shaman healer who had worked attested and medically inexplicable ‘healing’ on thousands of people supporting himself on this medically designed crutch. But the thought left me as soon as I entertained it. The people who live in these extreme regions are the ultimate pragmatists. They have survived for untold centuries by utilizing anything and everything. Charlie’s metal stick was light and adaptable to his height, and it would not rot, nor snap, forcing him to go and cut another piece of wood. It served him well.

  We entered the cabin through the kitchen area. There was no running water or cosy modern appliances; a small cooker running on bottled gas was the only concession to modern living. Pots and pans, bowls, plates, knives and forks were littered everywhere. The open shelves held an assortment of tins and dried foods. Underneath, the worktop revealed a plethora of containers, buckets and basins. Opposite the kitchen was a small storage area that was even more littered with too many things for me to decipher what exactly they were. The rest of the cabin comprised one large living-room area with two smaller rooms sectioned off as sleeping quarters, I assumed. Charlie’s big, handmade bed was set off to one side of the living area opposite a huge wood-burning stove. The heat it was throwing into the room was suffocating. It was high summer, but Charlie insisted on burning his woodstove.

  For an instant I imagined snow drifts engulfing the tiny cabin, Arctic windstorms howling across the tundra, the moon lighting up a wintery white-out landscape that would make you feel that you were the only person alive on the earth. The constant darkness, and the below-freezing temperatures so severe that to go even a few feet outside for firewood could mean risking your life, and to expose your hands for a few minutes longer than you should would certainly mean frostbite of such severity that you might have to amputate your own fingers to stop gangrene killing you. Even as I was thinking this I saw the huge CB radio system that was Charlie and Lena’s only connection to the outside world. In the worst of the winter months they might be able to contact someone in an emergency, but there was no guarantee that anyone could reach them.

  There was a big old sofa a few feet from the bedside. It looked as if it had been around a long time. There were also a couple of armchairs of different design, one by the radio and the other near the stove. These two seemed the worse for wear, but as Charlie and Lena had had thirteen children and God knows how many grandchildren who would have visited them over many
summers, I could understand their dishevelled, rickety appearance. In any case, it was a long way to go to the nearest furniture store! I noticed little in the way of decoration on the walls. I was sure neither of my hosts put much thought into the appearance of things.

  Behind one of the easy chairs was an old TV set. Piled in columns behind that were dozens of video cassette boxes and dozens more books. A bank of heavy-duty car batteries on the floor beside the radio confirmed the power source. Neither the titles of the books nor the films told me much about these people, except that they would read or watch whatever came their way. Years of living and raising a family in the wilderness had not allowed Charlie or his wife to develop any discerning tastes in literature or film. But then, that was my world, and it had no application here.

  Charlie had taken to his bed as soon as we had come into the room; he sat propped up with pillows and was explaining to Debra that he had had a bad fall from his snow machine last winter and had broken and fractured a few ribs and bones in his wrist and arm. He had been unable to get back to his cabin as the machine was too damaged and injuries to his foot and leg meant that he couldn’t walk. He had had to spend several days and nights out on the frozen wilderness waiting until his son picked up his trail and brought him back. I thought that anyone else would have given up and died out there. I stood at the window beside his bed and looked down on the river we had travelled along and out over the vast tundra beyond. I could imagine how this panorama changed with the seasons and even how the huge sky enfolding the horizon line could change daily. I could even imagine Charlie and Lena sitting at this window looking out over plains of snow with the aurora fusing and unfolding above them.

  As if she was reading my thinking, Debra informed me how during early autumn you could watch small herds of caribou and their young crossing the river and heading south. They sometimes stayed for days out on the tundra, filling up on the last long shoots of winter grass. I had noticed several racks of antlers piled up between the cabin and the fish camp. I asked Charlie about these, wondering if he had acquired his injury while out hunting caribou. He explained he never needed to travel after the animal; they came to him. He always shot the caribou in the water, where it was easier to retrieve; a wounded animal was also easier to finish off in the water, rather than having to run across the tundra. Charlie said he didn’t eat much caribou meat anyway during the autumn migration. The bull flesh was still strong from the rut, but their hides were at their best. Caribou hide was unequalled for warmth and made the finest winter clothing and sled blankets. Charlie declared that the caribou was a nomad like himself, and now that he was too old to travel much he had less reason to take a caribou.