In the Empire of Ice

by Gretel Ehrlich

  Islands were particularly susceptible to hunger. If the seals and walruses and bowheads didn’t come by, and the ice was bad, there was nothing islanders could do. When hunger struck one village, its people packed up and moved to a village on the other side. Food was always shared, even if it meant eventual starvation for everyone.

  James Aningayou of St. Lawrence Island remembers hunger: “We had short of meat, and poor year, poor spring. We had a little meat from the spring hunting, so we had used up during the summer. Then in the fall we have nothing to eat while waiting for the ice to appear. My stepfather had two dogs, I think. He kill one, is very fat. Then he boil the muscle of the hind legs and front legs. That was good.”

  A villager said: “The best hunting was when the ice first got here. When it started coming, everybody would go to the top of the mountain, they were so glad to see the ice coming in. They had been eating old meat for a while, some families were out of meat, they had been along the beach all the time looking for seaweed so they would have something fresh to eat. Everybody wanted the ice. It meant they would have food.”

  COMING DOWN FROM the hill at the far end of Wales, we pass a man on a side hill in front of his house. His snow machine is in pieces on the snow. He’d tried to get to Shishmaref but ran out of gas. “Walked home. Pretty cold with that wind. Now I’m trying to get this old snow-go going.” He offers to sell Joe a carving. He needs the money to buy gas. It’s a fossilized piece of mammoth ivory etched with images of ice age animals. Joe turns it over and over carefully. “You’re not asking enough for this. You should sell it in town, in Anchorage. You’d get a lot for it.”

  The man protests. “Anchorage is a long way away,” he says. Joe gives him a hundred dollars in cash but refuses to take the carving. We slide down a steep hill in deep snow to the high school. It’s a modern building with central heating and flush toilets. The classrooms are equipped with computers; moviemaking equipment; art rooms for painting, carving, and woodworking; and a biology lab. Two enthusiastic high school girls ask if they can film Joe and me at the end of the day. “Are you doing oral histories in your community?” I ask. They shrug.

  Between classes the halls fill with students of all ages. The mood is high-spirited and friendly, with students, teachers, janitors, and administrators intermingling easily. Ray’s son Clifford, who works as a school janitor and unofficial counselor, waves. He’s busy showing a young boy how to hold a carving tool. Joe looks in and nods approvingly.

  I’m snagged by a teacher to say hi to her first graders. No rows of desks for these kids. The class dynamics are free-form and enthusiastic. The kids fire hundreds of questions, and two older girls interview us using a new video camera on a tripod.

  “But no one speaks Inupiat, our language,” Joe says as we put on our parkas. It’s 50 below zero outside with the wind chill and getting dark. “They are using someone else’s language and they don’t even know it. English doesn’t have the words to explain who we are, what we know about the land and ice, and how the ice is changing.”

  One of the young teachers invites us for dinner. She’s a gregarious Vermonter who has lived in the North for years. Her house is modern and cozy. Her ponytailed Inuit boyfriend, from Little Diomede, is carving a walrus-ivory handle in the shape of a polar bear for an ulu. It’s exquisite, and Joe compliments him on his carving. “My father thought that with every generation, things were being done less well. But seeing this, I’m not so sure,” he says. For dinner, we have a reheated tuna-noodle casserole and tea brewed from local herbs.

  They lend us a flashlight for our walk home in the dark. The old part of town where Joe grew up is covered with hoarfrost. He shines a dim light on the broken boards. “We were never cold,” he says. “We always had fires going and food on the stove. Mountains of food—ducks, walrus, and seal meat. They’d divide it all up so everyone had something to eat whether their hunt was successful or not,” he says, switching off the flashlight. The ruined houses shine in the night.

  JOE KEEPS SAYING we’re losing daylight, but all I see is the night sky wiped clean by the white cloth of snow. Maybe what he means is that his grasp of who he was and who he is in Wales is elusive. The whiteout is nearly continuous, with only short glimpses of the revolving airport light or the headlights of a snow machine dashing by. A wind picks up and gusts hard, shaking the windows. Earlier in the week five polar bears were sighted nearby.

  Above the sky is darkness, and below the advancing and retreating ice pack counterbalances dusky days. When the ice came down the strait from the north, nanoq, the polar bear, was often seen hitching a ride. Bears travel, hunt ringed seals from their white deck of drift ice, eat prey, beachcomb, grab eider ducks, and wander the land between Tin City, where Joe’s father once worked, and Wales.

  Villagers don’t want polar bears too close, yet they are always watching them, learning from them. They found a den carved in a wind-hardened snowdrift at the second inlet to the Lopp Lagoon near town. When spring came, the bears swam across gaping leads in the ice. Between March and May they began moving north again, hitching rides on pack ice as it receded from the shore. Another hunter found a denning female on the east side of Little Diomede Island that had excavated a cave in the cliff 50 feet above the shore. It was 4 feet high, with two chambers each 13 feet long. Only females hibernate. Once they go in a den, the males have been observed blocking the entrance with hardened snow, then going off until spring.

  A hunter from St. Lawrence Island said he once had trouble with too many bears coming near, so he lit a bonfire using bear fat to ignite it. The smell scared the bears. They dived into the ocean and began swimming. Others joined them, forming a wedge in the dark sea that he said “looked like a large white ice floe.”

  In the morning there are no bears in sight. Ronnie, Winton Weyapuk, and others come to work in the office, a small room off the main hall. We talk to Winton about uncontrolled natural resource extraction, about sovereignty, self-rule, sustainable economies, and indigenous peoples—issues that are always on the front burner up here, but about a hundred years too late, Joe says.

  Winton explains that the 1971 Alaska Claims Settlement Act provided the 80,000 Alaskan natives with 44 million acres of land and $962 million as payment for lands given up. But the question of how to use this “tool of money” for the benefit and health of the land and its people is a continual debate. Still, spend it they do.

  Oil and gas development have been intense and have brought great wealth to the North Slope Borough in Barrow. Drilling on land and sending the oil south through pipelines bother the Alaskan natives less than the idea of the offshore oil drilling being proposed by Shell Oil. These people are maritime hunters, and the impact on marine mammals would be crushing. Oil spills from tankers have shown the world that petroleum extraction is environmentally perilous no matter how you move the crude oil around.

  North of Point Hope, where the Bering Sea meets the Beaufort, Shell Oil has been issued an exploration permit to look for oil using seismic testing that, in itself, endangers bowhead whales, walruses, birds, and fish in those waters. As the pace of global oil grabs accelerates, environmental impacts are seldom thoroughly assessed. Now, after a lawsuit put forward by Earth Justice on behalf of the Inuit hunters of northern Alaska, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has halted Shell Oil. But it is only a delay. It now must decide whether the potential for environmental damage was properly considered by the federal agency, the Department of Interior, when it issued the exploration permit to the oil company.

  “The climate is our biggest problem,” Winton says. He’s aware of some of the complexities of the ocean-atmosphere exchange and its effect on the warming or cooling of the planet. “Maybe whatever we do will be wrong because it’s not been going in a good way for a long time. If it gets hotter, it will be bad; if it got real cold, there would be no cracks in the ice and all the marine mammals would die.”

  He’s been keeping weekly sea-ice observations in an attempt to c
hart the course of global warming on the Bering Strait. He hands me a sheaf of paper with his writings:

  January 8, 2007: Winds are calm. People reported that they heard the ice piling on the pressure ridges. One resident said he heard it before midnight and it sounded like a jet engine, a continuous loud roar.

  January 10, 2007: Strong storm overnight with winds from the SE gusting to 50 mph. Snow and blowing snow.

  January 12, 2007: Winds decreased to 10 to 15 mph from the SE. The pressure ridges look as if they have been sheared off and a new row of ridges formed closer to shore. Three seals can be seen on top of the smooth ice three-quarters mile from the village.

  January 19, 2007: The winds have been from the NE for four days. There is extensive open water beyond the shore ice.

  January 22, 2007: The pressure ridges along the edge of the shore ice are about a half mile farther out than usual. We have not yet ventured out to the edge to examine their structure. They look fairly high. Hunters usually wait until they are certain that the ice is safe to travel on and will not break off and carry them away. It has changed to a near solid white color, which indicates it is safe enough for travel.

  Winton takes me for a quick drive to the shore on his snowmobile. The frigid air feels good on my face. There are cracks in the ice but no open leads. The sky has cleared, and far out I can see a white wall of pack ice and beyond a vague blue hump that is Little Diomede Island and Siberia—where Winton’s relatives originated thousands of years ago. He says his favorite sound is wind-driven pack ice piling up. I hold my hands behind my ears and listen: Blowing snow scratches, a tilted ramp of ice gives out a hollow crack as the tide goes out, but that’s all. No primordial collisions.

  Ice never sleeps. It has its own life. It is always moving. Maybe our ideas about time and consciousness come from sea ice. The way it piles up, pulls apart, melts, and freezes, spins and splinters into drifting islands carried by tidal currents to Siberia. The way its albedo drives heat away yet also sequesters black soot that causes it to melt and alters what climatologists call the surface energy budget.

  Winton, like all of us, tries to understand exactly what is happening. But if the consensus-driven climate models from the scientists at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have failed to give us accurate predictions, then where do we look? Winton says there’s nothing for him to do except observe. “We don’t have theories about ice and weather and climate. We have experience,” he says.

  I ask him to describe the ice we are seeing: “Tugayak means ‘shore ice breaking up and separating from the beach—ice going away.’” He has to yell over the wind. “Now the ivu, the pressure ridge, comes in fast and gets shoved up on the beach when the wind is strong like it is now, and the tide is high. Pressure ridges form where it just starts to get shallow. They aren’t as big as they used to be and they break up more easily. The pressure ridges act as a barrier allowing the ice to stay. It makes our world calm. It gives us nice weather. Wales was a place where winter once came easily. Now it’s stormier. Now winter may not come at all, or maybe too much of it will come. Either way, I think we are not going to prosper.”

  Back in the multi, Joe, Winton, and I scrounge around in the nearly empty cupboards for tea bags and cookies. Even a brief foray out into the deep cold brings on hunger. I ask Winton how many generations of Weyapuks have lived in Wales. He says it goes too far back to count. “For as long as humans have lived on the Bering Strait. Maybe 10,000 years or more.” He was brought into the world by a village midwife, as those before him were. “The women helped each other. Now they send mothers-to-be to Nome a month before the delivery date. The village doesn’t participate anymore, and the women come home with little strangers in their arms.”

  There’s a scratching sound on the side of the building, and we go to the window to see if it’s a bear. In Kivalina, one of the villages now slated to be moved because of coastal erosion, a young man tried to save his pregnant wife from a polar bear. “The bear attacked her” Winton says, “and the husband got the bear to chase him and let go of his wife. He was killed by that bear. The wife and baby live still.”

  Joe and Winton’s conversations go round and round as if driven by a circular wind, from talk of the old days in Wales to the new poverty of modern times to climate and weather.

  Winton says that in the last years a lot of beach has eroded, at least a hundred feet since 1990. “There used to be two rows of sand dunes, and both of them got washed away,” he says. The first row of houses is now in danger. They’re built on the beach, and if big storms keep coming, the way they have been, those houses will wash away.

  “Maybe a seawall will be built. I don’t know if that will help. Up the coast Shishmaref and Kivalina will soon have to move because of coastal erosion. There are more storms, worse storms, moving in more often. And now we have the warming ocean going against us. Wait until the sea level rises. We’ll all have to move.”

  “The hunter follows the ice,” Winton says. “In the spring we look for a smooth, low place to chop a trail through the pressure ice. We use pick axes and shovels and chop off clumps of ice and smooth them out to make a place to drag our boats out and wait for the whales. We do this in mid-March before whaling season begins.”

  This year, he tells me, the pressure ridge was out farther than normal, and since 2000 the whales have gone by much faster. “The leads in the ice used to close up, and that temporarily halted the migration. Now they are open all the time. We used to see whales for a month; now it’s down to two weeks. Same way with the walrus. They used to get up on ice floes that moved north for a whole month. Now that kind of ice lasts for only a few weeks, then it’s gone.”

  Summers they hunted geese and ducks and fished for salmon at the mouths of small rivers. In late August they went north of Shishmaref to hunt caribou. “In the old days we walked up the coast. Everyone had summer camps there. The women picked greens and preserved them in seal oil. Then we waited for the ice to come in.”

  Now the inland hunters from farther south tell Winton that there are lakes drying up, landslides along the rivers, and no berries. Warm winds come all the time from the west and the willows are bigger. There are no muskrats, no beavers, and ice collects on the caribou’s feet and makes it hard for them to travel. Like walking on broken glass.

  “These days there is no more multi-year ice. No old ice at all,” Winton says. “That’s what we all depended on for water because all the salt had percolated out. We started losing it maybe 10 or 15 years ago. That’s how long ago things like wind and ice began to go fast.”

  The Arctic is always changing. Twenty-three million years ago Alaska had the same climate as Pennsylvania today—the very same species of trees. A mass extinction of ice age animals began 15,000 years ago. Grasslands turned into bogs and grazing animals starved. Now the interglacial paradise in which we’ve been living is coming to an end as human-caused climate change escalates. While we should be headed for a new ice age as determined by Earth’s orbital cycles, the level of CO2 and methane emissions and the heating they are causing is overriding the natural cooling trend. A new wave of mass extinctions will surely come.

  JOE AND I VISIT the new houses at the shore. They’re roomy, but none have proper insulation or hurricane-proof stabilization. People complain about heating bills. Many, like Pete and Lena Sereadlook, can’t afford a phone. A wind turbine that could generate cheap energy for the whole village stands motionless. I ask why it’s not running. No one knows. “It’s owned by a Kotzebue energy company. It hasn’t worked for a while.”

  Pete and Lena live so close to the water it’s possible that the pack ice could come through their front window. Lena is feisty and tomboyish; Pete is older, frail, soft-spoken. Joe and I have come to look at the footage Pete has been shooting for 40 years, but it’s all on 8mm and his camera is broken, so there’s nothing to see.

  He says he was born in a sod house in the old part of the village. “It was real good.
We played outside all year round. We skated and played football with a ball made of reindeer skin. We made it ourselves. You don’t need to buy much. We had a big dogsled and seven dogs. I had my own windmill out there. It worked good, not like these new turbines. They aren’t even running. I guess they’re here for decoration! We had gas lamps and woodstoves, no toys. We used cans and rocks for toys. They work just as good. Dad made our skates from the frame of a steel bed. We tied them on over our mukluks. We didn’t believe in going to church. Whenever we heard the church bell ring, we ran away and skated out on the frozen ponds or else played Eskimo baseball. There are still two sod houses 15 miles up the beach at Sinauraq. That’s where my parents were born.”

  Pete says there were lots of whales and walruses back then. “We listened for them. You could hear them in the spring when they started coming up a lead. Now what you hear is snowmobiles.”

  Joe and I walk along the shoreline. There are skin boats, kayaks, and “aluminums” on racks. A yellowish hump at the shore looks like a pouting lip, but it’s only rotting ice. The bowhead whale hunters divided themselves up into family and working units headed by captains. There are four in Wales. One of them, Frank O., comes by. Young and fast talking, he grew up learning weather and ice from his father and uncle. “Now the barometer rises and falls too fast. And our seasonal storms, the ones that had winds of 30 to 50 mph, are 90 mph,” he says.

  His eyes narrow as he looks across the Bering Strait. “Our polar bears’ homeland is melting,” he says. “Can you believe it? This year we’ve had only one bear visit. Usually they’re all over the place. Eight or nine of them. I don’t know what’s going to become of them, or of us,” he says, taking off his mittens and rubbing his hands. They are chapped and meaty.