by Cash Peters
“You have? What is it?”
“Barrow, Alaska—we put the ‘ice’ in isolated.”
Isn't that great? They should have leaflets made.
Aroun doesn't appear to be as impressed with the idea as I am, though he smiles graciously anyway, bless him. Meanwhile I, at his side, am helpless—“My God, it's a winner! It's a winner!”—unraveling in giggles.
Seated behind me in the truck, Fat Kid,3 Eric, and Chuck are helpless too, suppressing roars of laughter by stuffing fingers in their mouths to prevent them registering on the microphone.
“Sorry,” Fat Kid says afterwards, which of course registers on the microphone. Then he bursts into laughter again, and so does that.
I must say, removed from his normal office environment he's an entirely different animal: lively, relaxed, pleasant, slightly juvenile, but heaps of fun with it. Gone is the loud, laddish masculinity of the superhero-with-something-to-prove persona he puts on in L.A., replaced here by a mellower clarkkentish side I've not seen before, making him altogether more approachable, both charming and disarming. Indeed, if I were a cynical man, which I'm not, but if I were, which I stress again I am not, but if I were,4 then I might even wonder what could possibly have prompted such a sudden about-turn, and what he's really up to.
Hm.
At one point, he confides that there's a bottle of booze in the truck. We're going to use it to toast our success at the end of shooting what might be a grueling episode. Sounds great. At least to begin with. But really it's not the brightest of ideas.
As if a contemptible climate and months of perpetual darkness, all the way through from nippivik tatqiq to siqinyasaq tatqiq, don't make life tough enough already, the sale of booze is outlawed. Barrow is not “dry” exactly, more “damp.” If you want alcohol, you have to import it yourself, and even then you'll probably need a permit.
There's a good reason for this. Not surprisingly, it dates back to one of the oddest eras ever, Historical Times.
In 1826, two explorers, Tom Elson and Bill Smythe, sailed across the Atlantic from Britain, thinking they'd drop in on Alaska, see what was going down; maybe even map out a bit of the coastline if there was time.
When they arrived, they discovered a primitive settlement populated by the ancestors of today's Inupiat Eskimos, nomadic hunters from Siberia who'd lived here for four thousand years or more. Back then, the town was called Utquiagvik, an old Eskimo word meaning “out-of-the-way frozen hellhole.” But since convention demanded that every place name be immediately changed by European explorers to something they liked better, and face it, nobody could pronounce Utquiagvik anyway, the settlement was quickly rechristened—though not in honor of the men who discovered it, as much as they may have wanted that (“How about Cape Elsmythe? Or even Smyleport? I LOVE Smyleport.”), but after some aristocrat back home who'd funded their expedition: Sir John Barrow.
Within a few years, the people of Smyleport, as it was known right up until the “Welcome to Barrow” signs arrived from the supplier, were overrun with European merchants. They sailed in, bombed and harpooned whales, killed caribou for food and for the hides, and blithely shot wolves, polar bears, and arctic foxes for fur, then sailed away again to become very rich on the proceeds. Though it has to be said, this arrangement wasn't all one-sided. In the name of fairness, the Europeans did give the Eskimos many things in return, including a wacky new invention that had the exploring world abuzz at the time, called the gun; plus ammunition, ivory, and several lethal strains of influenza. The Inupiat were also introduced to alcohol. And that's when their problems really started.
Life in these remote outposts back then was dull and depressing. Even more than it is now, as hard as that is to imagine. There was so little to do half the time that people would resort to booze as an anesthetic to numb themselves against the reality of how wretchedly empty their wilderness existence was.
And I guess it's not changed much.
“If you don't do something here, the boredom, the seclusion will get to you,” our gopher on this show, a sweet little Inupiat native called Morgan, confirms.
“How many days of night d'you get here?”
“Sixty days without sun.”
“So you'd just go insane.”
“You could. The endless dark, the endless cold, it tears a person apart mentally and physically. So you have to do something to override that.”
And I guess the Eskimos chose alcohol. Trouble is, this led in some cases to domestic violence. Certain Inupiat men, when they got drunk, would go nuts and start beating their wives, forcing the government to step in and designate alcohol consumption a public safety issue, limiting its availability. The locals could import a certain quota of liquor from the outside if they wanted to, the authorities said, but the actual sale of alcohol in town would be banned.
Indeed, the rather stiff middle-aged couple running our hotel has even gone one step further than that. They hand us forms to sign when we check in, making us promise—on threat of expulsion—that nobody on the crew will drink alcohol on the premises and none of us is bringing any kind of alcoholic beverage into our room.
Faced with no choice—well, where else are we going to go?—we all sign it, including Fat Kid. Then, while the owner's wife is turning around to get our keys, he pulls open his bag. “Look,” he hisses, nudging my arm.
Nestling at the bottom is a bottle of red wine.
“We can drink it in my room later.”
And a devilish gleam crosses his eye, vanishing the instant the woman turns around again.
Needing someone to tell my inspired new Barrow slogan to, I come up with a great plan, and set off through the snow to the offices of KBRW, the town's best, and only, radio station. It has a ten-thousand-watt transmitter and a staggering reach across eighty-eight thousand square miles. So every square mile gets about nine watts each.
I barge into the studio during a live broadcast, which I assume is what everyone does, because it meets with no resistance at all, and throw myself down next to the startled host, Fran Tate, a tiny woman with blonde bangs, big glasses, and mustard stretch pants.
Fran's a bigwig in town. Came to Barrow from Anchorage in 1970. An electrical engineer by trade, she used to earn her living designing airstrips. Now, in what is a bit of a career leap, she hosts her own afternoon program, Jazz Below Zero, on KBRW—“Your source for news and entertainment across the North Slope.” She also has a successful business selling septic tanks and owns Pepe's North of the Border, the best, and perhaps only, Mexican restaurant in town (“Please don't ask for a margarita”). Better still, she once got to appear on The Tonight Show and, by way of a gift, handed Johnny Carson the bone from a walrus's penis. Naturally, that made her quite the celebrity around here, and I'm a little in awe.
“I've got the greatest slogan for your town,” I tell her off-air.
“What?”
“D'you want to hear it?”
She doesn't really, I can tell. She owns a septic tank business and once gave a penis to Johnny Carson; I'm nothing to her. But what the hell?
“Barrow, Alaska—we put the ‘ice’ in isolated.” And I laugh as much this time as I did the first. “Isn't that the best?”
“Yeah, that's really good.” Fran chuckles.
“In fact,” I say, “quit your show, let's go and have leaflets made. Come on.”
But she can't. The current jazz track she's playing, a series of random notes apparently played in no particular order, is coming to an end.
If you ask me, jazz is a menace. It's as dangerous as alcohol and just as likely to drive a man to domestic violence. Basically, jazz is what's left of a song after you take the tune out. So why KBRW would devote an entire show to it I have no idea. It's just asking for trouble.
“You're listening to Jazz Below Zero, brought to you Saturdays at noon by a grant from Pepe's North of the Border.”
Oh, really? Hm.
At the control desk, two frail white hands mess about w
ith the faders, pushing one, dragging another, until another jangling jazz travesty begins. Then, Fran returns her attention to me.
“Basically, I've got no money,” I tell her, laying out the format of our program, “and no place to stay. So what if I went on air during your lovely show—because nobody's interested in jazz—and asked if someone could put me up for the night?”
“Oh, that might work,” she says.
Once the current CD track—a collection of odd musical phrases belted out by fourteen instruments at once for the benefit of people with a tin ear—herniates to a close, Fran adjusts the faders again and pulls the mic to her lips.
“We have an important announcement. We'd like people to help. This gentleman, Cash Peter”—almost right—“needs to find a place to stay for the night, or 'til whenever he can afford a ticket out of town. So could someone call in and offer him a home or an apartment or at least a cot to sleep on?”
“What I need,” I interrupt, grabbing a microphone, because I know how people are; they need an incentive, “is someone to come forward, some Barrow person, and let me stay in their home. If you do, I'll tell you my new slogan for Barrow, which is great, isn't it, Fran?”
“Oh, it's wonderful,” she coos, opening her mouth to say something else.
“No, don't tell them what it is!”
“Oh.”
“If you come forward and let me stay in your home, I will give you this slogan.”
“Yeah,” Fran chips in, thrilled, “and you can make pamphlets!”
After this, and while yet another jazz tune is foisted upon the poor listeners—seriously, shouldn't this kind of abuse require a permit?—we sit back and wait for the switchboard in the other room to light up.
And we wait, and we wait.
But nothing happens.
Either their antenna's seized up on account of the ice and Fran's broadcasting to herself, or the zero in Jazz Below Zero refers to her audience figures, because out of a reach of eighty-eight thousand square miles my plea receives no response whatsoever. In fact, eventually she leaps in with an unprompted desperate plea of her own. “Come on, let's help this gentleman. We're known for our friendliness and togetherness and helping each other out during bad times. So please call in and offer him a room or a bed, someplace to sleep. Call in!”
But they don't.
Minutes go by, and still nothing.
“Come on, folks!” Her voice is shrill now: “This gentleman's going to sleep in the studio. We need to get him out of here.”
When that flounders too, she finally gives up. “I'm sorry, Peter …”
But wait, Fran! What's that?
A solitary light is flashing on the board.
The proprietor of Pepe's North of the Border couldn't be more relieved. KBRW's antenna hasn't frozen up like everyone thought! Somebody out there from their key demographic, the human race, is listening. A man. Calling from the high school. If I'd care to meet him there in half an hour, he says, he'll find me somewhere to stay.
“Great!”
Sweet victory!
Thanking Fran for her participation, and doing her a big favor on the way out by suggesting to the station manager that her format be changed to Country, because everyone loves Country, I brave the gnawing cold once more, shuffling along empty, icebound streets to the intersection of Okpik and Takpuk (that's your actual Eskimo right there), thrusting my flashlight between houses and behind cars as I go, in case of polar bears, and into the snug bosom of Barrow's best, and only, high school.
In recent years, the school has become the focal point of the community. There's a body shop and a metal shop. People swim here, meet up here, train and lift weights here, practice Native wood carving here, and maybe, it being a school, even study here, who knows? Though not necessarily. In many parts of the American education system, you'd swear that the word “education” slipped in entirely by accident, since the students seem to emerge at the end as ignorant as when they went in.
Barrow High is also “The Home of the Whalers,” according to a sign outside, though what the Whalers might be in this context I have no idea. And, oddly, no desire to find out.
In the lobby, I find a man waiting for me. Small, extremely cheerful, and clearly of Inupiat descent, bundled up in a thick woolen coat and hat. Spotting me, he steps up to shake my hand. “Welcome to Barrow,” he says. “I'm Morgan.”
“Yes, I know,” I'm tempted to reply.
Because I'd recognize our gopher anywhere.
Of Barrow's population of 4,500, 65 percent are Native Inupiat Eskimo and descendants of the original settlers, a heritage they take very seriously indeed.
As Morgan leads me on a tour of the school, a group of colorful local musicians decked out in full traditional Inupiat gear just happens at that moment (wink wink) to be rehearsing in the gymnasium, hammering out a thunderous primal beat on large, flat tambourine-like drums to an accompaniment of plaintive howling cries.
“Yaaaaaaay-eeeeaaaa-aaaaay. HUH! Awww-eeee-aaaaaa-eeeee-awwwwww.”
Meanwhile, a young man bedecked in feathers and jingle bells cavorts around like a wounded pelican, performing what they call the Welcome Dance, a vivacious display of shuddering spirals intermixed with spinning and kicking and the stomping of feet.
“Awww. HUH! Eeee-aaaaaaa-eeeee. HUH! Awwwww!”
As far as I can see, this is all it takes to make the perfect evening around here. Sing 'til you're hoarse, dance 'til you're pooped, then go home happy. I find it all quite captivating, and, if I'm honest, I'm left a wee bit jealous. Me, I could never settle for something this uncomplicated. My own needs are so much greater. I need external stimulation at all times. I need facilities, crowds, things going on. In short, I need Hollywood.
It's probably the wrong time to be thinking this, given that I'm supposed to be focused on making a TV show, but watching the Inupiat locals happily engaged in … well, whatever this is, finding boundless pleasure and joy in traditional family and social activities, it suddenly hits me—out of nowhere, bam! Just like that—how dreadfully homesick I am. And how wildly divorced I've become from the norms of everyday living, too. And, perhaps worst of all, how detached I'm starting to feel from all those people I meet on a daily basis who don't have their own travel shows. Which is basically everybody.
By the time this is over, this series, this gaping hole I've dug for myself, I'll have lived in the television cocoon for over twelve months. That's twelve months I can never get back. Twelve months of giant bugs, sunburn, thirteen-hour flights, punishing schedules, food I shouldn't eat, and cultures that, as strange and captivating as they might be, I could happily have lived without seeing. Of relentless, round-the-clock, all-consuming immersion in a single pursuit—making television; stuck on the road, or in planes, or in hotels, or in edit bays, or voiceover studios recording narration; forcing myself by means of chocolate-covered coffee beans to stay up 'til all hours of the night writing scripts to a deadline; having my bags searched at countless security checkpoints (especially my little red-and-blue backpack, which every trained sniffer dog from Tokyo to Guadalajara is convinced contains explosives); checking in to unfamiliar hotels that don't seem to want me there; arriving home in Los Angeles after my partner's gone to sleep, then getting up again before he's awake to find a limo already sitting outside in the darkened street, engine murmuring, the driver propped up against the hood, yawning between puffs on his first cigarette of the morning, waiting to take me to the airport all over again for yet another baggage search—“Please step aside, sir, there appear to be explosives in your bag!”—followed by another trip to an alien destination that's bound to be unbearably hot and uncomfortable or unforgivably cold and uncomfortable, it doesn't matter which. And all for the sake of a cable TV show that hardly anybody's going to see anyway. I'm sorry, but that's how I feel.
I realize I ought to be more grateful. Logic tells me I should be basking in the magic of such a glorious, rare opportunity. In fact, The Thumb said th
e same thing to me recently, suggesting that I'm whining a little too much these days and that other people who got to travel around the world at somebody else's expense, were paid substantial amounts of money for doing so, enjoyed the cosseted life of a TV celebrity with all its attendant glories, and were given free gift vouchers to a local spa for their birthday might be slightly more appreciative.
Oh yeah? Well, good for them. I don't care. Right now, I'm tired, I'm cold, my feet hurt, and I want to go home.
“HUH! Yaaaay-eeeeaaaa-aaaaay,” the elders bray in unison as the man in the feathers continues to fling himself this way and that. “HUH! Awwwww-eeee-aaaaaaaaa-eeeee-awwwwww.”
Would it be presumptuous of me to suggest that these are in fact the Wailers, and they just spelled their name wrong on the sign?
“HUH! HUH!! Yaaaaaaay-eeeeeaaaaa-aaaaay. Awwwww-eeee-aaaaaaaaa-eeeee-awwwwww. HUH!”
Heading back to the lobby, with Fat Kid and the crew in tow, Morgan introduces me to an imposing thickset man with long black hair almost down to his waist.
“This is my cousin,” he says. “His name is Bunna.”
“I run trips to Point Barrow every day to look for polar bears,” Bunna says, his large round face curiously expressionless.
Really? How odd. “And why would you do that?”
This earns me a strange look. Seems not many people around here quibble over whether polar bears are interesting or not. They simply are and that's that.
According to Science, polar bears used to be raccoons. Don't ask me how, it's all very complicated and happened millions of years ago, before documentaries, but at some point in time the raccoons evolved into brown bears, and some of the brown bears then turned white. Or something. Honestly, I have no idea; that's what libraries are for.
Now, however, having lasted this long, the polar bears' very survival is teetering on the brink. There are, at current estimates, around sixteen thousand of them roaming the world, which still seems like more than we really need, but the number is getting smaller all the time, due in part to poachers illegally shooting them to sell their fur on the black market, but mainly because the polar ice cap is vanishing, slowly destroying the balance of the bears’ maritime habitat. Less pack ice means less territory for hunting. Some bears even exhaust themselves while they're swimming around looking for seals to crush and eat, and simply drown. Result: Science predicts that polar bears will have completely disappeared from Alaska by the year 2050. Of course, from a conservation standpoint, that would be a catastrophe. Whereas for the rest of us it merely means there's less chance that something big, white, and hairy will come running out of the wild someday and eat our kids.