by Cash Peters
“Avoid oil and fat at all costs,” the doctor said to me, last thing.
“But I already do.”
“Well, obviously not!”
Bottom line: my gall bladder was now a ticking time bomb. One that could go off without warning at any moment, day or night. And there were still many more shows left to shoot.
Not that the guy in the street that day seemed to notice how bad I looked. Draping his arm around my shoulder, instantly incriminating me in a bank heist should he now commit one—“Here we are, me and Chris, just before the raid”—he got his picture and left.
I reached the office ten minutes later, first time I'd dropped in since my impromptu layover in London,2 to find the entire production team teetering on the precipice of manic excitement.
“Did you hear, did you hear?” The usual junior hobbit rushed over.
“Huh?”
“You're—going—to—be—on TV!”
“But… I'm already on TV.”
“Yes, but this is real TV. A major network. NBC. It's sooooo awesome,” she gurgled, mouth open so wide I could see her tongue stud. “Conan O'Brien wants you on!”
Wow.
The timing couldn't have been more perfect. Lukewarm reviews in the New York Times and other places meant that the show's ratings were not as tip-top as they might have been (scheduled up against popular programs on other networks, we were placed roughly 45,000th in our time slot, I believe; lower even than Celebrity Tools, which broke my heart).
“But hey, that's okay,” The Thumb assured me during one of our many off-the-record phone conversations. We both knew that a failure at this stage would have been catastrophic. He and I had conceived this baby together, and nobody wants to believe they've given birth to the ugliest kid on the block. “Anything new and innovative takes time to gain traction. That's just a fact. Give it a few weeks before you rush to judgment.”
Still, what better way to fan the flames of public curiosity about our wonderful new series, and to raise my profile, than with an appearance on a major talk show?
Or, failing that, on Conan O'Brien's show?
Shortly after, a triumphant Fat Kid summoned me to his office to deliver the news personally.
“DID YOU HEAR? CONAN O'BRIEN'S PEOPLE HAVE BEEN ON. THEY WANT YOU TO FLY TO NEW YORK NEXT MONTH TO BE A GUEST.” Behind the desk, he finished tapping out an e-mail, put a call on hold, took a swig from his water bottle, bit into an apple, checked an instant message on his PDA, then sprang to his feet, eyes on fire. “ISN'T THAT GREAT?”
“Yes, I know,” I said quietly. “Someone already told me.”
“Oh.” And his fire fizzled right out.
I guess he was expecting backflips. Everyone in TV performs backflips. Hysteria is in their genes. But by this point I barely had the strength to unzip my own fly, much less jump about with excitement the way, say, someone who was well-fed, well-rested, unstressed, and not borderline suicidal with anxiety might.
“I may even come to New York with you!” he threw in, lowering the ante.
“You will?”
Once again, my resistance to leaping up and down had him nonplussed.
In fact, for one reason or another, Fat Kid was pretty nonplussed most of the time we worked together, I'd say. Nonplussed or pissed. I could never tell which.
One time he came bowling along the corridor toward me like I was the last pin in the lane. He'd just seen the final edit of our Moscow episode and loved it. LOVED IT! “Right there,” he said, his little Hawaiian face beaming, eyes bulging wider than is medically advisable. “That's your Emmy, right there.”
I'm sorry—what?
I felt the frozen fingers of delusion skitter up my back. What did he just say?
A man with no awards cabinet in his office—“You're telling me not a single episode of Celebrity Tools was nominated for a Golden Globe? Not even the one about Bill O'Reilly?”—but who, by the look on his face, was already mentally flicking through the IKEA catalogue in readiness, had dared utter the “E” word, the third most hallowed word in all of television, after Regis and Philbin.
Sadly, he was way off the mark. As entertaining and beautifully crafted as the Moscow show was, it was still only a “reality” show about a guy bumbling through Red Square making like he was lost, when both the critics and the audience had long since figured out that he wasn't really. We may as well face facts. No way would a “perfectly pleasant show” like that get as much as a nod, much less walk off with an actual award. Not, that is, unless a freak event happened, such as everyone else who was making reality programs in the same year accidentally dying. Short of that, we didn't stand a chance.
Of course, you don't want to crush a guy's dream or rob him of all hope. That would be cruel. But it doesn't pay to lie to him either.
So: “It's not going to win an Emmy,” I put it to him soberly. “I'm sorry, it's just not.” And watched guiltily as he slunk away, crushed and robbed of all hope.
That was a major turning point in our relationship, I think.
By this one simple, honest admission—that our show at its very best probably wasn't good enough, not even in the eyes of its own host, to carry off a major award—I'd skewered Fat Kid's lingering fantasy, a fantasy every TV producer lives for, of standing up on that stage come Emmy night, tears in his eyes, and: (a) remarking on what a genius I was for thinking I could pull off a virtual carbon copy of Survivor and nobody would notice; and (b) offering his condolences to the families and loved ones of all those reality TV producers who'd died so tragically in the previous few months, but who by their sacrifice had made this very special moment possible.
Somehow things were never the same after that. A line had been crossed, his umbilical cord to almost-certain glory cut, causing him to seethe with disappointment.
“By the way,” he threw out, the next time I passed his office, “has anybody told you who'll be going to Alaska with you?”
“Yes. Tasha did,” I replied.
A bolt of frustration flickered across his face. “Oh, okay.”
And, scowling, he went back to typing e-mails.
1 I read somewhere that there's so much radiation on a commercial jet that every flight you take is equal to having one X-ray. Doing a quick tally, that meant I'd had around 153 X-rays in one year! Put in 1950s sci-fi terms, that's enough to turn a small blond-haired child into a knife-wielding monster that terrorizes a village.
2 The ordeal lasted a mere six days instead of the projected two weeks. In the end, rather than wait for the Consulate staff to sober up and get their asses in gear, I had my partner FedEx my green card to me and was home in time for New Year's. My stay in London wasn't without its share of fun revelations, however. I discovered, for example, that every Christmas Day, Mandy invites all her friends over for mince pies and hot tea, after which they exchange gifts and crowd around the TV and watch A Muppet Christmas Carol in its entirety. It's a lovely way to waste a national holiday.
17
Aaaaaagh—Bears!
“WE'RE—ALMOST—READY!!”
The silhouetted figure in the North Face jacket yells at me through a megaphone of gloved hands, the words barely audible over the screeching of jet engines.
“WAIT TWO MINUTES. THEN WALK IN THROUGH THIS DOOR—THIS DOOR HERE!”—indicating to his left—“ALRIGHT?”
I'd reply only my lips stopped working twenty minutes ago. Instead I signal back with a stiff wave. Two minutes. Walk. Through door. Got it.
With a thumbs-up, he trots away, but gingerly, across the frozen runway, past the “Welcome to Barrow” sign, and disappears indoors.
Behind me, airline workers unload boxes of tortilla chips from the belly of a 737, seemingly impervious to the minus-45-degree cold.
The wind, tearing at my clothes, creates towering eddies of daggered ice particles that swirl and whip like minitornadoes around my head, then suddenly turn on me, slamming into my face with the force of an eighteen-wheeler.
On s
econd thought, two minutes be damned!
I set off toward the hangar, using tiny steps on account of the fluid in my knees having seized up. By the time I reach the door, I'm a snowman.
“So,” I mumble to the clerk on the Alaska Airlines desk, who's called Aroun. “What's going on in Barrow?”
“It's the top of the world,” he explains. “The northernmost inhabited place in North America.”
“Is there anything to do here?”
“Yes. It's a good adventure place. You can come up here, see the Northern Lights, polar bears. What do you want to do?”
I survey the full breadth of my options, then come to a decision. “Leave.”
Barrow is 330 miles north of the Arctic Circle, cut off from the rest of Alaska by mountains called the Brooks Range, and so remote, so far from anywhere you've heard of, that it's almost impossible to reach by conventional means. I mean, you can try if you like. You could travel here: (a) on a barge, although that depends on the ocean melting, which it doesn't very often; or (b) on a dogsled, in which case we won't wait up for you; or (c) you could do what most rational people do: fly. That's how humorist Will Rogers got here in 1935. Sadly, he didn't quite get all the way here. His plane crashed into a lagoon seven miles outside of town, killing him and his pilot, Wiley Post. And I guess not much has happened since, because even today, eighty years later, this single acci-chievement seems to be what Barrow is most famous for.
Thankfully, Alaska Airlines has a much better track record vis-à-vis crashing into lagoons and has become the main carrier between Anchorage and Barrow. You've seen their planes—they're the ones with Bob Marley on the back. It's even rumored that they're sponsoring this episode of the show. I can't say for certain. Although I do seem to spend an inordinate length of time staring at their corporate logo on the wall, far more than I would in real life, while the crew films it and me from various angles.
By sheer luck, wink wink, Aroun happens to be coming to the end of his shift and says he'd be happy to drive me into town. From this I take it that he's a PR guy from the airline. I don't even bring up such things any more. It's a waste of my time and curiosity. But I do accept his kind offer.
As I step outside the Wiley Post-Will Rogers Memorial Airport1 once again, a brutal, unfriendly cold lacerates my flesh, freezing the breath in my throat and leaving my hair and goatee crusty to the touch.
Barrow in midwinter clearly doesn't believe in making a good first impression, and risks being mistaken for a very dismal place indeed. On dark, desolate corners, signposts flap in the wind, their street names dusted with frost and barely legible. Plumes of steam pump from vents into the sky. Icicles dangle from a festoon of overhead cables like glass fangs. Cars lie buried in snow up to their windows—and when it's not cars it's abandoned snowmobiles—outside sturdy clapboard homes that lurk evilly by the roadside, lost in a postapocalyptic gloom that doesn't lift; it's merely relieved here and there by fuzzy light from streetlamps folded deep into the mist.
“Close the door, Cash!”
I don't need to be told twice. Beneath an overcast sky the color of canned ham, Aroun throws his white Alaskan Airlines pickup into gear, ramps the heater up to full blast and eases forward, letting the tires roll into the icy troughs gouged out by previous vehicles before accelerating. There's no traffic to speak of today, nobody on the sidewalks. Now and then a Sno-Cat grinds by, spitting plumes of mush in its wake. Otherwise nothing. No people, no sounds. When our vehicle's engine stalls, it peters away into an all-enveloping silence. It might be dawn out here, but there's no dawn chorus. Because there are no birds. I mean, how would they survive? They wouldn't. They'd freeze to death on the twig. If there were twigs.
“So what's Barrow like after the snow clears?”
“Muddy,” Aroun admits, slowing down from 13 mph to 9 mph to let a snowplow go ahead of us. He and the driver exchange waves.
“No trees?”
“No trees. Just mud. And moss. And water. It's not very attractive. There's nothing here. Everything we need, we have to bring in from the outside.”
“But say we do a Thelma and Louise, and we just go, we keep driving. Would we ever get out of here?”
“No. It's like a circle,” he says. “You can't get out of Barrow.”
And on that cheery note, we accelerate to 14 mph and drive on.
A mile farther on, Aroun swings off the road and brings the truck to a stop.
“Come and see.”
Night has lifted a fraction, giving way to a cheerless smudgy twilight so depressing it would make even Pollyanna suicidal. This is as bright as it will get all day.
“We're on the Arctic Ocean,” Aroun shouts, a large blob of green padding stumbling ahead of me across the tundra, “and the Chukchi Sea.”
In 1778 Captain Cook came through here on his ship HMS Disoriented, looking for places to rename, and also searching for the legendary Northwest Passage, a possible trade route that other explorers and merchants had spent centuries hunting down without success. In fact, soon after, rather than break with this tradition, Cook gave up, turned around, and went home, stopping a mere thirty miles before he would have found it.2
Slithering across sheet ice, I flounder like a blind man. A block-solid wall of white consumes my vision up, down, above, below, and sideways, every way, offering no horizon and therefore no depth of vision, no discernible distinction between water and cloud, earth and sky.
“Where does it begin, the ocean?”
Aroun etches a line in the snow with the heel of his boot, on what would normally be the beach, I guess—“The waves come up to here in the summertime.”—evidenced by a tide of petrified breakers standing to attention, frozen in place before they could reach shore, and crisscrossed by a mosaic of hairline cracks.
It's a ghostly, incredible sight. Like walking into a piece of contemporary art in which the painter thought his feelings could best be expressed by leaving the canvas blank and going for lunch instead. If at one time I was the least bit concerned about global warming and the ice caps melting, after visiting Alaska I'm not so sure any more.
Venturing out farther. “Am I on the ocean right now, d'you think?”
“Yes, you are. There's water underneath us, so don't tread on the cracks.”
“Why? Is it unlucky?”
“Unlucky for you if you do, yes.”
Apparently, if you step on a crack, it may split open and swallow you, sucking you into the icy waters below.
“In the summer,” he adds, “where you're standing right now, you'd be up to your shoulders in water—”
“I would?”
“—and maybe over your head.”
Well, that's all I need to know. Since that psychic planted in my mind years ago that I'd someday die by drowning, I've not been able to shake off my profound fear of water, which these days sits very comfortably alongside all my other profound fears: heights, enclosed spaces, dogs, genitalia, spiders, and the rest. But that's not the only reason I decide to turn back. Apparently, there are roaming polar bears out here, too.
TV commercials and kids’ picture books perpetuate the myth that a polar bear would make the perfect house pet: it's just a couch with a head after all, soft like chenille and super-cuddly to the touch. Now I discover from Aroun that this is nothing but clever PR. In truth they're ruthless, aggressive predatory carnivores, vicious as hell, who don't believe in snuggling. Try it, and they'll pounce on you, rip your arms and legs off, and use your lower intestines as a parasol. They do it to their own cubs sometimes, so why would they spare the likes of you?
Bears are a real menace in Barrow, particularly when they wander into town and roam the streets scavenging for food. Their top preference is for ring seals. Those are favorites. The bears will lie in wait by holes out on the ice, then, when the seals pop out, they grab them by the head, crush and kill them. When seals are scarce, though, they'll eat just about anything—baby walruses, moose, pets, trash, you. They're not fussy.
“You would? Why?”
“It would be over quicker.”
Gulp.
Continuing our ride into town, I'm startled by what a cadaver of a place this is, laid out on the slab of Alaska's North Slope, the rigor mortis of seemingly endless winter robbing it of all character, submerging anything that might be attractive about Barrow beneath sheets of snow and ice several feet thick.
“It's okay,” Aroun assures me from behind the wheel, “it'll be light soon.”
And by “soon” he means May. Just four months to go.
Up here, the sun sets in November (in their language, Inupiat, that's nippivik tatqiq, which translates as Moon of the Setting Sun) and doesn't rise again until the end of January (siqinyasaq tatqiq, or Moon of the Returning Sun), meaning it's night the whole time; then in May (suvluravik tatqiq, or Moon of the Flowing Rivers), after a few months of murky twilight, the sun eases back into view once more, bobbing a full 360 degrees around the horizon 'til August (aqavirvik tatqiq, or Moon When the Birds Molt), making it daylight the whole time. It's an awkward, extreme arrangement, forcing the locals to take drastic retaliatory measures to avoid a screwed-up body clock, from nailing thick black blankets (possibly made from the feathers of molting birds) over their windows during the long daytime months to help them fall asleep, to sometimes not bothering to sleep properly at all during the nighttime months. Instead, they'll nap for a while, then get up and do something else until they're tired again. It's a world unto itself. Time becomes irrelevant. If you like, you can play tennis at 3 A.M. or break for lunch at midnight. Nobody cares.
“You know what?” I say to Aroun, because a fabulous idea has just flashed into my mind and I can't keep it to myself. “I've thought of a slogan for your town.”