Impossible Owls

by Brian Phillips

  Andri didn’t believe in ghosts herself, but she’d heard the stories. Her own philosophy was, don’t rule anything out until you’ve looked into it. She had a friend who with her own eyes had seen the ircenrraat, the little people of Alaska, sinister gnomelike creatures who inhabit the deep tundra. And not a friend who goes in for those kinds of legends, Andri said; a responsible friend. Around Nome, where alien abductions were reported with unusual frequency, those who reported them told eerily similar stories, often involving the number 333 and the appearance of a strange white owl. They’d wake, late at night, from a dream of the owl and find the clock flashing 3:33. Each year five out of every thousand Alaskans go missing. People vanish without a trace at twice the rate of Outside. Start reading about why the disappearances happen, Andri said, and you’ll encounter rumors of a dark or underground pyramid, a huge structure, bigger than the Great Pyramid at Giza, buried beneath the ice west of Denali. There were anomalies in the aerial photographs, men in black uniforms, hints on Google Earth. There was a little-understood link between the pyramid and the abandoned airport inside the Farewell Burn. Some speculation held that the pyramid was a covered-up nuclear site; further speculation countered that the nuclear-site rumors were themselves a cover-up meant to divert attention away from the pyramid’s true identity as an ancient power source of unknown origin. Andri was an expert, had in fact corresponded with the leading amateur researcher into the pyramid’s presumed existence until his e-mails suddenly ceased, a cessation that was itself troublingly mysterious. Some people said that the pyramid would be capable of powering half of North America. It made sense, didn’t it, because if the government had discovered an energy source of that magnitude, it’d do everything it could to keep it secret. So the lack of evidence became a kind of evidence. Sitting by the fire in the hunting cabin, a million miles from everywhere, I could believe it was down there, darkly pulsing.

  The first mushers passed us the next morning, on the river just below the cabin’s porch. They were close enough to talk to. Mitch had moved into the lead. “How far ahead is he?” a couple of the guys who went by next called out to us.

  “Shoot, you can practically see him,” Jay called back.

  How had the trail been? we called. “Slow,” they said. “Awful night. Awful. So slow.”

  In eight miles they’d stop at Unalakleet, at the checkpoint. Then they’d start the final phase of the Iditarod: the long sprint up the coast of Norton Sound, two hundred miles on the sea ice.

  5. ENDS OF THE EARTH

  We flew to Russia. It was the Frenchmen’s idea. For two days in the cabin, Christophe had spent all his free time studying this giant map of western Alaska, folded up to show one square of the Bering Sea coast; he kept making little marks with a mechanical pencil and frowning. Then he and Bernard huddled over the map together, murmuring in French. Finally they went to Jay.

  “Ah, oui,” Christophe said. “I inquire. Is it possible … we go to Diomède?”

  “The Diomede Islands?” Jay said. His lips stretched in an exaggerated grimace. “It’s … possible. I’ve never done it, but it’s possible. Let me hop on the radio.”

  Christophe had circled two tiny islands in the middle of the Bering Strait, the stretch of water, just fifty-three miles across, that separates Alaska from the eastern coast of Russia. The islands couldn’t have been more than a couple of miles apart. The border, as well as the international date line, ran right between them. Big Diomede was on the Russian side, Little Diomede on the American.

  “Okay,” Jay said the next day. “What I’m hearing is, during the winter, they carve an airstrip on the sea ice right plum in the middle of the islands. Weather’s only clear for a Cub to land about two percent of the time. Partner, it is rough stuff out there. But we can darn sure give it a crack.”

  On Monday we set out for the Diomedes. It meant flying on past Nome, past the Iditarod’s finish line, and losing touch with the race for a day. But when you’re on an Arctic expedition and fate beckons you to a frozen sea on the edge of Chukotka, how can you say no?

  Once you leave behind the spruce forests, and leave behind the tundra, and go out over the sea ice, Alaska becomes a different thing, even huger, almost unbearably bright. The sheets of ice crack and collide and form fault lines, spaces of open sea called leads, so that the world becomes a field of snow that’s crazed in places with zigzags of black water.

  It’s the other side of the mist. Beluga whales swam up into the leads and you would see these little divots in the water where their foreheads poked through. White forms streaming down beneath the divots. We surprised a small herd of musk ox near some sort of deserted military compound on the coast and flew low over them while they formed their protective circle. We chased a herd of caribou. I saw three seals lying on the edges of three adjacent leads.

  Steve chimed in over the radio: “Dad, we might want to go to line abreast. We’ve got bear tracks everywhere down there.” And there were. Heavy dashed lines across the snow, like blue stitches around the edges of the leads. Jay had gone searching for polar bears every year on the Iditarod expedition and never found one. (He’d gotten up close and personal with the bears that destroyed Nugget, but that was farther north, way up in the Arctic Circle. “Only time I see those little pukes,” he told me, “they’re chomping on my airplane.”) We circled for ten minutes, fifteen minutes without luck. The flight to the Diomedes was already going to stretch our fuel reserves to the limit; we’d have to break off in another couple of minutes. “They hide from me!” Jay moaned. “They always hide.”

  Then I saw her.

  She was almost invisible: a tiny yellow-white spot against the rim of the water, a slight imperfection in the snow. I screamed something that might as well have been in Japanese and Jay banked the plane hard and dove while I whipped my head around trying to keep the polar bear in view. I couldn’t keep my o’clocks straight. “Polar bear at three o’clock! Twelve forty-five! Eight seventeen! No! Eight seventeenish!” Then Jay saw her, too.

  The nine seconds of video I managed to shoot during the first pass we made over the bear shows a tiny lumbering ivory something, the size of a fly on a kitchen floor, galloping across the ice shelf under Nugget’s yellow right wingtip. We made a second pass and got close enough to see her haunches shuddering, but by that point I’d dropped the camera.

  Everybody pretty jaded here? Fantastic.

  I couldn’t feel my spine, she was so beautiful.

  * * *

  In the summer, I guess they look like islands, but in the winter, when the sea freezes, the Diomedes just look like cliffs, dusty white rocks towering up out of the snow. The runway between the islands was a thin plowed line, too rough to land on; we touched down beside it, on the sea ice. The day was bright and clear. Apparently we’d picked a moment that fell within the lucky 2 percent. On the American island, a tiny village was bunched in one corner at the base of the cliff—home, we’d read, to about a hundred Inupiat. There had once been a sister village on the Russian island, but it was forcibly disbanded by the Soviets, to prevent ideological contamination. (Communism, unaccountably, fell anyway.) Now the Russian side held only a border guard headquarters and a weather station.

  We were only supposed to look. That was the deal. We’d hop out of our planes, eat a sandwich, and take a picture of Russia. Then we’d head home. Anything more would be illegal. But I was so giddy from the flight and the polar bear (we all were, we were grinning like idiots) that as soon as I’d finished throwing an engine blanket on Nugget I turned to the villager who took care of the airstrip—Henry, his name was, he’d come out on a snow machine to greet us—and asked how far to the border.

  “Oh, about four hundred yards over yonder,” Henry said.

  And I took off. I didn’t ask permission. Looking back, I can see that I was undergoing pretty intense mood swings as a result of the PTSD from all the amazing experiences I’d been having. But I was free, wasn’t I, in Alaska? It was slow going, becau
se I was too free to bother with snowshoes and thus had to churn through thirty inches of snow.

  I headed across the frozen strait, toward the jagged white rock of Big Diomede.

  This was it—the actual end of America. Sure, we had borders with other countries. We had nothing close to this.

  Every way you could think of that sentence was true.

  How far I’d come! Hundreds and hundreds of miles to reach this place. You couldn’t fathom how huge Alaska was until you’d seen it from a Super Cub, one horizon crawling into the next, day after day after day. And the white rock in front of me was the end. Somewhere behind it lay the beginning of Siberia.

  When I estimated I’d gone five or six hundred yards, I went up on tiptoe and waved like mad to the Russian side. I thought I saw something flash, like light striking a mirror, off a tower whose top could just be made out over the rock. But that was the only thing that happened.

  A few minutes later, Steve and the Frenchmen caught up with me. When I’d bolted for the border, they’d taken it as an excuse to follow. I’d built a lead because they put on snowshoes first. Jay, who was an adult, had stayed behind with the airplanes.

  A few minutes after that, a border-patrol agent came from the American side and called out that if we didn’t come back the Russians would start firing warning shots.

  On the way back I noticed that my face felt curiously sandblasted. Jay came forward to meet me. “We need to get these stinkers out of this cold, ASAP. If the engines freeze, we’ll never get out of here. Are you okay? Your face is as red as a beet.”

  Oh, right—it was cold! I’d had too much adrenaline to notice. Now I realized that the wind was roaring down the channel between the islands. I’d staggered through it without even realizing. Thirty knots, Jay said, whatever that meant. And we were looking at probably thirty-five below. Still, it was hard to move quickly. We ate our sandwiches and took pictures. The villagers who came out from Little Diomede told us ours were the first planes, not counting the helicopter that brought the mail, to land at the island all winter. More and more people kept coming out, just to look at us.

  Someone should have noticed that the Frenchmen had neglected to put a blanket on their plane. Afterward, there was disagreement about what had happened. Jay insisted that they’d asked him and he’d told them not to bother, which makes so little sense that I’m sure he was being diplomatic. Regardless, I am an idiot non-pilot who never even flew the Tahiti route for Air France, and I was out of my head with excitement, and I threw the blanket on Nugget without being told. It’s just something you do. And Steve described for me, in dark tones, the time Bernard had taken after we landed to retrieve and then put on his finespun red wool face mask, how carefully he’d straightened out the mouth. We wound up writing it off with a shrug as the final revenge of the ghost. Whatever happened, by the time we’d finished taking snapshots and meeting villagers, by the time we’d gotten our helmets strapped on and our windows latched, it was too late. Jay climbed out of Nugget and tried to manually start the Frenchmen’s propeller with a two-handed spin, the way you see in old movies. It was no use. Their engine was as dead as the island rock. It was as dead as a gun-shot ptarmigan. It was as dead as the alien civilization that had built the dark pyramid, probably.

  We were stranded out there for three hours. It was the first time I ever understood why freezing to death is sometimes described as “peaceful” or “soothing” or “just like falling asleep,” descriptions that had always seemed to hint at some unfathomable mind transformation within the freezing person, some power extreme cold had to enchant the brain’s basic mechanisms of homeostasis. It didn’t feel violent, that was the thing. Even with the wind ripping past you. Certain parts of your body accrued this strange hush. Like you were disappearing piece by piece. I thought I’d be warmer outside and walking around than inside Nugget, so I would sort of exaggeratedly move one limb at a time, my left arm or whatever, and while I was concentrating on my left arm, my right leg would start to be erased.

  More than affecting my sense perceptions, though, the cold seemed to affect the way I thought about my sense perceptions. I’d take my glove off to adjust a zipper and lose feeling in my hand, and instead of thinking Holy no I need to get my glove back on right this second, I’d sort of pause and go, My, how interesting that my hand feels physically translucent. Then my brain’s inbox would gently ding. PLEASE DON’T DIE.

  Jay had it the worst. He was out there the whole time, crouched under the plane, trying to get the engine heated. Villagers from Little Diomede kept forming little peering semicircles a few feet away from him. Finally he walked back to Nugget.

  “We’re taking off,” he said. It was the least cheerful I’d ever seen him. He almost looked mildly put out. Bernard and Christophe would stay in the village; the teachers had agreed to put them up at the school.

  The last I saw of our two French pilots, they were being carted away on snow machines, half-bewildered, waving back at us.

  * * *

  Nome, a northern Alaskan metropolis of 3,731 souls, may be the most steampunk city in the world. Imagine a Wild West mining town, the sort with free-swinging saloon doors and a jailhouse with a rocking chair on the porch—call it Buzzard Gulch—then transport it away from cacti and outcroppings to a snowy waste on the shore of a frozen bay. Modernize it some, give it electricity. Now litter it, and be enthusiastic, with twisted hulks of sheet metal, headless fuselages, giant noseless propellers, detritus of air travel that no one has the resources or motive to clean up. Picture McCabe & Mrs. Miller, only if the climactic battle involved two blimp armadas. Sink, at weird angles in the snow outside town, locomotives not used since the gold rush. Freeze eerie derelict mining ships into the ice. Now draw back. Look over your work. And: Nome.

  There’s a story that it was named by accident, through a misreading. Before anyone had thought what to call it, they penciled in “Name?” on the map. Some nearsighted cartographer mistook the writing and handed the wrong vowel to history.

  Front Street is where they’d have gunfights, if they had gunfights. It’s a skinny thoroughfare with its back to the sound; the drunks lurch-strutting to the next bar, of whom at any moment there are several, get glimpses of the sea between the buildings. The town’s put up Christmas lights to celebrate the end of the Iditarod. Big zigzagging strings of them. The snow-packed road terminates in a chute exactly like the one at the starting line in Anchorage. Above the chute there’s a wooden arch, and above the arch there’s a banner that reads FINISH.

  This is Tuesday, March 12. The end of the Iditarod, for the winners, anyway. Here’s how this works. It’s night. A small crowd turns out, maybe three hundred people, under the Christmas lights. I’m here alone, because Jay and Steve have flown back to Little Diomede on a mission to rescue the Frenchmen. There’s a screen the size of a king-sized bed hanging from the second story of one of the storefronts across the street. It’s playing “Idita-Rock n’ Roll,” a kid-friendly Iditarod-themed music video from the 1990s. The spectacle is largely financed by Anchorage Chrysler Dodge, one of the Iditarod’s major sponsors, whose owner, Rod Udd, is known as Idita-Rod due to his obsessive love of the race. The storefronts—Nome Liquor Store, Gold Buyers of Alaska, the Bering Sea Bar and Grill, Arctic Trading Post Gift Emporium, the Nugget Inn—are doing slow but respectable trade, almost none of which seems Iditarod related. The night is a very deep blue. It’s -2°F. The church next to the “Idita-Rock n’ Roll” screen has a banner in front advertising Icy 100.3 FM.

  This year’s race has come down to a straight fight between Mitch and Aliy. Unsurprisingly, given the times and distances involved, Iditarod finishes are rarely close, but this one’s going to be. Leaving the White Mountain checkpoint, seventy-five miles from the finish line, Aliy’s only thirteen minutes behind. In 1978, Lance Mackey’s father, Dick, won the Iditarod by just one second; certain reckless members of the crowd speculate within my hearing that we could be fixing to see that all over again.
Certainly the guy who seemed to be in charge at the media briefing an hour earlier said to expect both dog teams to be in the chute at once, something that hadn’t happened in his previous twenty-plus years of seeming to be in charge at Iditarod media briefings. Every single person I talk to wants Aliy to win, and so do I. There’s a feeling, when the crowd first assembles, that she has a slim but real chance.

  You find out early, though. Barring an actual photo finish, there’s almost no scenario in which the end of an Iditarod can be surprising. The mushers are half-mad and starved and frozen and the dogs have run a thousand miles in a week; the sleds are going maybe seven miles an hour; no one’s making up much ground under those circumstances. When the PA guy, after we’ve been standing around for an hour, says, “Mitch is three miles out,” it means Mitch has won, only you end up waiting another half an hour for him to finally arrive. In the end, Mitch pulls in at 10:40 p.m. and Aliy’s twenty-three minutes behind. It’s head-twistingly close by Iditarod standards, but Mitch has plenty of time to sob and embrace loved ones and commune with dogs and have camera lights pointed in his haggard frost-mustached face and shake hands for official photos and still clear out of the chute a good while before Aliy arrives.

  He’s the oldest winner in the history of the Iditarod, Mitch, at fifty-three. Last year, his son Dallas became the youngest champion when he won at twenty-four. Now they’re bookending all the other winners, age-wise, a fact that will lead most of the newspaper coverage tomorrow.

  There’s such goodwill at the press conference. Mitch and Aliy eat cheeseburgers and crack jokes. There’s no sense that one of them just suffered an agonizing defeat; instead, there’s an air of conspiratorial wonder, like, Oh wow, can you believe we made it? As the sporting event that most closely mimics the experience of sustained brutal catastrophe, the Iditarod is maybe uniquely designed to amplify sport’s natural euphoria-making power with basic human relief. Relief is one of the most thrilling things there is, if you think about it. Imagine if Game 7 were played on inflatable rafts in a shark tank; afterward LeBron would be all, That happened! I survived!