Moby-Duck

by Donovan Hohn

  Swannell picks his floe and sets us down, bouncing three times to test the thickness, and we all unbuckle ourselves and step out, cryonauts, onto the frozen sea, boots crunching on the lunar snow. The hummock Swannell chose, like those he did not choose, is shaped like a sand trap, or an amoeba. Around us ten thousand other hummocks shine and ten thousand pools of melt sparkle. They look delicious, these pools. I’d like to kneel down beside them and drink my fill, but I’m scared I might slip in, and besides I have a role to play, the role of a human in an inhuman landscape. Chocolate-covered cliffs, streaked with snow, rise up to the east and west of us, but we’re in the middle of the ocean—the ocean! Most inhuman of all is the silence. There are no sounds besides the crunching of our boots and the rustling of our outerwear. Not even the melt pools lap.

  Near the edge of the hummock the Phaeton cinematographer sets up his camera on a tripod and aims it north, the direction from which we expect the Louis to approach. “What do we do if a crack does open up?” he asks of our floe.

  “I have no idea,” says Swannell. “Try to get out. What you really don’t want is for the ice to close back in on you. I’ve seen that happen to seals. They just go sppppt”—he pinches two fingers together—“like a pimple.”

  The Louis appears. The red smudge of the ship grows into the red triangle of the looming bow and the faint murmur crescendos. As it breaks the ice, water and snow shoot up around the bow in feathery plumes, and with it comes the sound of ice buckling—the creak as it stretches, the crack as it gives way, a low grumble as big blue-white blocks of ice heave upward, spilling over each other, into ridges that paw along the hull. What the breaking of ice sounds most like out here is fireworks heard from afar.

  The cameraman finally gives me my cue, and I stand before the camera, as close to the edge of our hummock as I dare to go, the big red ship passing behind me. When the shoot ends I search my pocket for the yellow duck Ebbesmeyer gave me three years ago. I’d meant to leave it here, Marpol Annex V and environmental impacts and my promise to return it to Ebbesmeyer be damned. I meant to leave it here as a kind of wish. But grapnelling my pocket, I come up empty. Evidently I left the thing back in my cabin.

  While the film crew pack up their equipment, I scan the hummocks for bears, having learned from Barry Lopez that the specially adapted fur on a polar bear’s paws makes its tread almost silent. Their coats, of course, make them nearly invisible. For all I know there is a bear nearby, but here in Peel Sound, there’s no sign of them, nor of any other life. As Swannell and the two cinematographers climb back aboard helicopter 363, I linger a little, making the moment last, trying to imagine what it would feel like to find myself marooned out here alone and wishing again that I’d brought my yellow duck. As consolation I kneel down and scoop up a handful of snow. And eat it. It tastes good, a teensy bit salty, but good. Then I take in one last drink of the scenery. At the edges of some of the melt pools, I notice, a breeze is kicking up capillary waves. And there, on the snow, are our boot prints.

  The Louis by now has steamed far ahead. The blue-white blocks chopped up by its propellers flow back into its wake, and you can hear them flowing, a slushy river whose currents gradually slow until once again, nothing is moving and nothing besides us makes any sound.

  WANTED

  We didn’t turn back in the end. Captain Rothwell, after a suspenseful conference call with “all the powers that be” at Coast Guard headquarters, had decided to press on, breaking, bubbling, backing and filling, whatever the risks. Expensive, nonrefundable plane tickets hung in the balance, including my own. By the following day the ice conditions had improved—for us if not for the polar bears. Leads opened. The ice parted. Parted because it had melted enough. And would continue to melt. The melt of 2008 would be among the worst on record, coming in second only to that of 2007. It’s possible, maybe even probable, that in my lifetime toys from China will be arriving via the Northwest Passage.

  My last day aboard the Louis, I had one of those unexpectedly memorable moments that justify travel. Marie-Éve Randlett, graduate student, was in the main lounge, playing the piano. And I was out on the bow, playing an air piano, tinkling my cold fingertips on the starboard rail. I could hear Randlett’s water music. And in the distance was a water sky, a blackness spreading across the underside of the overhanging clouds. Open water ahead. And I thought, This rail is cold. And then I thought, What a wonderful phrase, “water sky.”

  In the Cambridge Bay airport terminal, a small room that scarcely deserved to be called a terminal, itinerant Russian miners in muddy boots were sleeping on the metal benches. A taxidermy musk ox stood inside a knee-high picket fence beside the plate-glass windows. There were muddy bootprints on the floor. As I and other supernumeraries were helicoptering off the Louis, the scientists and sailors who would be taking our places for the third leg of the voyage, had assembled here, waiting to get on.

  If Resolute was the place of dirt and dust, then Cambridge Bay, the morning we arrived, seemed to be the place of chilly mud and chilly rain. Riding in a taxicab from the airport to town, I noticed, through the scummy windshield, way out on the tundra, white, faceted spheres. These were part of the North Warning System, a chain of radar stations that Canada and America had strung across the Arctic during the Cold War. The North Warning System is the reason Cambridge Bay exists. Until the Cold War, the local Inuit mostly lived, as the Nunavut saying goes, “out on the land.”

  I’d arranged to spend two days there, beachcombing, posting my WANTED posters, talking to the locals. I had, however, neglected to arrange for lodging, and lodging in Cambridge Bay, during summer months, is hard to come by, it turns out. Lots of gold miners and gold-mining geologists and gold-mining middle managers. Lots of scientists. Erin Freeland-Ballantyne, the elfin Rhodes scholar, rescued me. She had a friend in Cambridge Bay, a young doctoral candidate in archaeology named Brendan Griebel. Griebel happened to be house-sitting for a couple who’d adopted several Inuit children. They were all now on vacation, in Maine. There were plenty of spare rooms. It really was no problem. Which is how I found myself that first afternoon napping on the bunk bed of an adopted Inuit child I’d never met, atop a camouflage bedspread.

  The next day Freeland-Ballantyne volunteered to help me in my search, acting as a kind of fixer. We began at the public library, talking to Emily Angulalik (“pronounced like ‘Uncle Alec,’” she said), who curated the town’s historical archives. I told her the story of the bath toys lost at sea and showed her my poster, which she studied awhile and then said, dryly, “I saw that one,” pointing at the frog. “Just kidding.” She was curious to know what kind of toys they were, and I told her what I knew about polyethylene and blow-molding and Guangdong. “Are they harmful ?” she asked, and I told her about plastic pollution and seabirds, and about the currents that carry plastic and other pollutants to Arctic waters. “Now you’ve got me thinking,” she said.

  She suggested that we speak with some of the elders, but then added, “summertime is not the best time to meet. People are out on the land. Or sleeping all day.” She contacted one elder to see if he could speak with me, but returned a moment later with bad news: “He’s drunk right now.” She did have one idea: Try the Ekaluktutiat Hunters and Trappers Organization.

  The Ekaluktutiat Hunters and Trappers Organization matched Inuit guides with tourists keen to bag musk ox, or polar bears, or grizzly bears, the last of which had only recently begun appearing this far north. Photos of hunters holding up their dead trophies decorated one wall of the organization’s office, maps of Nunavut covered another. Again I told my story and shared my poster. In charge of the office that day was Cathy Aitaok. She had plenty to tell us. First she told us about a rich, white American dude who came up to Cambridge Bay hoping to bag a polar bear and who lost two fingers to frostbite while he was out on the ice, a detail that made her snicker. (Behind her, pinned to a bulletin board, I noticed a postcard featuring a San Francisco cable car.) More pertinently, she suggeste
d that we locate an elder named Annie Anuvaluk. Perhaps, also, Peter Avalak, the DJ at the radio station, would let me send out an on-air announcement. The radio station, a single-story box of a building with brown siding, was straight down on Michuk.

  Peter Avalak was spinning classic rock when we poked our heads through the door. He waved us right in. It was an austere studio. A few shelves of discs and records. A table outfitted with microphones and equalizers. Avalak, a small wiry man wearing a black hoodie and a wispy goatee, was excited to learn I’d come all the way from New York. He’d gone to New York once, in high school, for the Model UN. “The first four days I was there I was afraid,” he said. “I thought the buildings might fall on me.” A song ended. He cued up another. I told him my story and showed him my poster, and he thought it was a pretty good story, and when the next track ended, he put me on the air, and into the homes and shops and boats of greater Cambridge Bay I delivered a nervous, stuttering parole ending with the instructions to give a call to Peter Avalak if you’d seen any of the four plastic animals matching the description I’d given.

  Finding Annie Anuvaluk proved far harder than finding the radio station. Peter Avalak had given us directions, and we thought we’d followed them, but there was no Annie Anuvaluk living in the first house we visited. Freeland-Ballantyne, trained in ethnographic etiquette, led the way, knocking on doors at random, asking whoever answered if they knew where Annie Anuvaluk lived. No. No. Sorry, no. Then Freeland-Ballantyne stopped a guy out walking a black Lab. “Just up the road. It’s an orange duplex.” We found a duplex that looked more yellow than orange, and were told that Annie Anuvaluk did not live there, she lived down that way.

  “What color is the house?” Freeland-Ballantyne asked.

  “Black.”

  Freeland-Ballantyne was dressed today in a long sky-blue tuniclike coat that looked influenced by the amautik we’d seen back in Resolute. She’d made it herself, she said. The voracious Arctic mosquitoes were biting, and it was cold, and muddy, and overcast, and the ramshackle squalor of the place was making me depressed. Stumbling about the shabby homes and down the broken roads of Cambridge Bay, I couldn’t help but think of Nunavut’s crippling poverty rate, to say nothing of its notable rates of suicide, both of which have risen steeply since the town was founded a little more than fifty years ago. Here, you can order alcohol by mail, which is expensive, but there are no bars—an ordinance meant to mitigate the epidemic of alcoholism in the area. And there was, I noticed, litter everywhere. I thought of something Charlie Moore had told me. Subtropical islands like Samoa also have a noticeable litter problem, he said. His explanation: the natives had for generations wrapped their food in biodegradable wrappers—leaves and the like. Toss a leaf on the ground, it disappears, as does a bone, as does just about everything. One of the trashiest spots Freeland-Ballantyne and I encountered was the little playground we happened on at an intersection: children scrambling over the jungle gym, the muddy ground below covered in candy wrappers and potato chip bags. By then, I was ready to give up and retreat to my bunk bed in Brendan Griebel’s borrowed house. Not Freeland-Ballantyne. The longer we searched, the more determined and cheerful she seemed. Down one road she actually started to skip, the hood of her amautik bouncing behind her.

  Finally we ran into an old man in coveralls who worked for Qulliq Energy, the local power utility. “See that window up there?” he said, pointing authoritatively up the road. “That house with the Christmas tree?”

  The house in question was a red one-story unit up on concrete blocks. The Christmas tree in question was a plastic one intended for a tabletop. Someone had bolted an upside-down crate to the facade and perched the Christmas tree on it, the white cord, unplugged, dangling down. We knocked and a small crinkly-eyed woman answered. Yes, she told us, her name was Annie. Freeland-Ballantyne, as usual, made the introductions, cueing me up to tell my story. Annie offered us coffee. Her “common-law” William joined us in the living room, where, taped all over the walls, were handmade pictures of crosses—the handiwork of a Sunday School class by the look of it. In the midst of the crosses was a big color photo of Inuit in fur parkas sledding on the ice—Annie’s grandparents, with whom she still remembered going “hunting and trapping, staying out on the land.” Spider-Man curtains hung in the windows. As we spoke Annie and William’s three-year-old boy, Sam, played among us, trying to draw the attention of the two strangers who’d come knocking. He landed his Lego airplane on my lap and kept wanting to touch Freeland-Ballantyne’s long, rusty hair.

  Annie said they’d seen plenty of toys littering the coast but she’d always assumed they were from local kids. Neither she nor William recognized the animals on my poster, though William did have something to offer: “I threw a bottle in the ocean once. Put a note inside. Out on the ocean.” We could have left then. Instead we stayed awhile, listening to Annie and William talk about the changes they’d seen in their lifetimes—how there were the grizzly bears now, and the kingfishers. “The ice is really different this year,” William said. “There are open spaces where there shouldn’t be.” Annie added: “Usually you have the cracks that go straight like this.” She drew a line with her hand. “This year it’s all like zigzags. You have to go around them. We’ve never seen that before. My parents told me that when I was growing up so many things were changing in their lifetimes.” Of the future these changes portended, they were less certain. Annie had heard that the ice age might come back. William suspected that if the opposite happened, if the ice melted away, “all the fish would disappear.” This was the sort of information that Freeland-Ballantyne was meant to gather for Carmack, the firsthand observations and ancestral memories of people who have spent their lives up here. A plane was taking off in the distance, and young Sam climbed up onto the back of the couch and watched it through the window. Silently, we all watched the boy watch the plane.

  Late in our conversation, as I was checking the spelling of Annie’s name, we discovered we’d made a mistake. We’d been speaking to Annie Agligoetok, not Annie Anavaluk. We decided it didn’t matter, and after posting a few more posters in town, headed to have dinner with our host, the archaeologist, Brendan Griebel.

  That night, my last, we took a walk in the midnight sun. Griebel wanted me to see the land, by which Inuit mean the land beyond the limits of town. Setting out we passed back by the playground, where even at this late hour children were playing: three little girls and, standing a few feet away, looking on, an older kid, who when he saw us greeted Griebel happily. Griebel had been living in Cambridge Bay for months, and he’d done some volunteer work at the local school, and the boy, Puglik, was obviously fond of the archaeologist. He wore his hooded sweatshirt cinched tight into an oval around his face, about which there was something peculiar. He had the face of a child and of an old man. He wore his navy-blue sweatpants tucked into his white sneakers, visibly too big for his feet, and his matching navy-blue sweatshirt was stained here and there. “I’ll come with you,” he said. “I’m bored.”

  Although still in the sky, the sun was low and orange. As we walked, boots crunching, side by side, down the dirt road leading out of town, our elongated shadows walked beside us, and after we’d set our pace, Puglik commenced to talk, delivering a rambling monologue, much of which I scribbled in my notebook. It went something like this. “Geese eggs are three times the size of chicken eggs. Loon eggs taste like fish. Loons can’t fly so when the ice freezes you throw rocks at them. You know what I’d really like? A Nintendo Wii. My family’s scattered all over the place. Lots of adoption.”

  The road now followed a river flowing north through the tundra toward the sea.

  “People sure do catch a lot of fish out here. They’re jumping every day. What I do for spare money is I fix up bikes. You know kids can be bullies.”

  Up along a ridge to our left, backlit by the low sun, there appeared a low cruciform thicket—wooden crosses, tilted this way and that, in silhouette.

  “Well, ther
e’s the old graveyard. The old cemetery. It’s beginning to fall down the hill. Most of the old people who’ve passed away are out here. There’s a great fishing spot not far ahead by the old bridge. You could jump off the old bridge. ‘Geronimo!’ We call this part of the river ‘an Inuit Jacuzzi.’”

  We were a ways out now. Dusted across the tundra were little white flowers, and an icy wind blew from the north. I’d dressed warmly in many layers, but even still I could feel the wind sneaking through my collar. Puglik in his navy-blue sweatsuit must have been freezing. He’d pulled his sweatshirt cuffs over his hands and hugged his crossed arms tightly around him. He had a bad case of the sniffles and occasionally wiped his nose on his sleeve.

  “Here’s the picnic spot. It’s nice to get out here, out on the land. It’s real quiet, you can just hear the river.” He noticed a pair of ATV tracks in the dirt. “Somebody turned real hard right here. This is a good place to practice driving donuts. You have to be careful not to tip over. You don’t want to do a Donut of Death. It’s pretty, eh? Oh, I saw a rainbow!”