Both were there. As we approached, they bounded toward us exuberantly. The dog that I had declared half dead leaped up on me, tail whipping in the chill air, demanding a pat on the head.
From a house nearby, a man and a boy walked up. I told them that I had seen the dog the day before, and that he had seemed really sick. They laughed. The dog—his name was Headache—was fine. He’d been a little under the weather, they explained, because the island’s walrus-meat inventory was low, and he’d been eating less protein-filled food.
The owners were really friendly people. And I, clueless in an alien culture, hadn’t known what the hell I was talking about.
Also, lemmings do not commit mass suicide. It’s a myth. I looked it up.
MICHAEL AND I appeared before a tribunal of Savoonga’s leaders, to obtain permission to go ice fishing. Afterward, we got to talking with them. I asked how, given their isolation, Savoongans avoided the dangers of inbreeding. Did they have strict rules, such as prohibiting marriage between cousins? They looked at me like I was crazy.
“I am married to my cousin,” said Linda Akeya, laughing. She is secretary of the village corporation, an attractive woman who is missing a front tooth. Then, she said, “When it’s seventy or eighty below, our kids are at school.”
Meaning?
“You have to be tough to live here.”
The Eskimos of Savoonga are a particularly tough distillate of some of the toughest people on Earth. They are descendants of Gambell residents who left the comparatively easy village life to live in camps as reindeer herders; several reindeer camps coalesced into the village of Savoonga in 1920. What Linda Akeya was saying is that they will do what it takes to make the best of their circumstances, and they will survive, and they will propagate, and that doesn’t mean living by the niceties, or rules, of mainlanders.
Morris Toolie, the president of the village corporation, said the community is facing many challenges—among them, the loss of language: The young adults today tend to understand Siberian Yupik but cannot speak it. The next step is as apparent as the passage of another generation.
Gingerly, I asked about the suicides. In the past few days, we had heard more details, more heartbreaking stories: The high school girl who had let it be known that there was a bullet with her name on it—literally—that she was keeping at the ready. The boy who shot himself after a hanging attempt failed. The girl who’d be dead today, except the rope broke. The fourteen-year-old girl whose rope did not break.
Understandably, this is a subject the adults of Savoonga are hesitant to talk about with strangers. Toolie spoke only obliquely of the youths’ disaffection. He blames TV for much of it. Linda Akeya agreed: “There’s violence, even in cartoons.” But she added: “We have a lack of jobs, a lack of things to do. It’s just boring for them.”
What Savoongans need, she said, is more money for more jobs and more recreation, and this is how she said they need to get it: The kids need to leave Savoonga, get a college education, become expert in the ways of bureaucracy, then come back to help the village as community leaders, writing grant applications in a way that will ensure their approval.
I didn’t ask the question that was in my mind, because it would have seemed impertinent, and culturally unthinkable: Isn’t that assuming a lot, that they would come back?
THE NIGHT BEFORE it was time to leave, Michael and I decided to go back to the school. We realized this was becoming a story about the kids.
The basketball court was being spiffied up for the tournament. Mike Kimber was there—Mike is always there—but almost no young people.
Where were they?
Probably at Yugni’s, Mike said.
Yugni’s?
The place all the kids go, he said.
In four days of asking everyone about everything, this was the first we’d heard of Yugni’s. No one had volunteered that such a place existed.
It wasn’t easy to find, because from the outside, it looked just like a boarded-up house. Our clue was the cluster of little kids—six, seven, eight years old, hanging around the entrance, cracking open the door, peeking inside.
“They’re smoking marijuana in there!” one of them giggled, pantomiming sucking on a joint.
Yugni’s place had once been a single-family home, but that must have been a long time ago. The insides were stripped bare, the windows boarded up, the floors pitted plywood, the walls painted the color of industrial rust. All the furniture was gone, replaced by a foosball game and a battered pool table with duct-taped felt.
There was no pot that we could detect. The room smelled only of desperation and languor.
The lighting was dim, like a skid-row saloon. The place was wall to wall with Savoonga’s youth, from eight to their mid-twenties. Some played pool, as little kids wove and tumbled through their legs. Most just stood around, talking, or not talking, just standing.
“Fuck you,” an eight-year-old screamed to his buddy, as he wrestled him to the ground. It was, oddly, the first profanity we had heard in the village.
In the kitchen, coffee and watery Kool-Aid were for sale, 50 cents a cup, beside a photocopied drawing of Jesus and the words “Happy Holiday, the love of Christ controls us.”
Pool was 50 cents a game. Collecting the cash was Yugni, whose English name is Maynard Kava. He’s the proprietor, and the mayor’s brother-in-law. Yugni is fiftyish, toothless, with a sunken face and long stringy hair. He speaks in an unintelligible mumble. After he failed to sell us a carving of a walrus, he took his seat beside the cash box and paid us no mind. He ignored the kids; the kids ignored him.
Some older kids were playing pool, stone-faced, almost robotic. One hauntingly beautiful girl with long chestnut hair and charcoal eyes would lean over the table, barely aim, take a bad shot, return to her spot against an old bar rail, silent, impassive, her face a mask. She moved like a zombie.
Little kids swarmed us. They groped Michael’s camera, queued up for the entertainment of serially peering through the fogged-up lens of my eyeglasses.
Throughout Savoonga, the Writing on the Wall had been an occasional sighting—a few furtive scribblings here and there. In this place, it was an entire infrastructure of despair. Every inch of wall space was covered in writing that had been scrawled in, or scratched in, or seared in by cigarette. Even the ceiling. It was overwhelming—almost unendurable:
“JDS—One Day Without Toking 1/20/05”
“We Were Here 1-26-2004, Bored Out.”
“Boring Boring Big Time”
Next to a drawing of a daisy with a frowning face: “Really, Really Bored.”
“I Wish I Die Now.”
“Wanna Die Right Now.”
“I Can’t Wait Til It’s My Turn.”
I plopped into a seat at the only table, and younger kids descended on me. I didn’t want to interrogate little kids, but they wanted to interrogate me. They told me their names, insisted I write ’em down. A ten-year-old boy pointed to a drawing on the wall behind me. “That guy is thinking about marijuana!” It was a cartoon of a man, with a thought balloon containing a marijuana leaf. Another showed me a wall inscription “P.I.M.P.”
“That means pot in my pipe!”
Then he leaned forward, conspiratorially. “My mom is in jail. I can’t say for what.”
I recognized an older kid: Lanky and fresh-faced, Freeman Kingeekuk had been effortlessly hitting twenty-foot jump shots at the gym a couple of days before. Freeman, fifteen, likes Savoonga, is an avid hunter and fisherman. No complaints?
Booze and bingo, he said.
Bingo? “The [adults] go three nights a week, and if one night has to be canceled, they’ll set it up for another night that week.”
The beautiful, stone-faced girl is named Carolina Burgos. I learned that when I went up and spoke to her. She turned at the sound of my voice, her face unfroze, and she smiled, as though awakened from something. Carolina is a high school senior.
Yes, she dislikes Savoonga: “It’s like w
e live in a freezer.” She wants to go to college in Anchorage, to study finance.
I thought: This is Linda Akeya’s dream. Maybe.
Does Carolina plan to return?
She rolled her eyes. No.
“When I was young,” she said, “I thought Savoonga was the best place. There was so much to do. Now…” She just looked around the room, then down at her pool cue. “One of my cousins locked herself into a room and shot herself. I guess it was 2001. She was drinking that night.”
Why did she do it?
“I don’t know.” That is what everyone in Savoonga says, when you ask why.
Watching the pool game, at the old bar, is Jason Noongwook, twenty-five. His sad eyes peek from under a Nike cap, on top of which is a cloth woodworker’s mask. Jason is an ivory carver. He showed us a half-finished walrus. Nice.
Jason said he plans to stay in Savoonga, because he’s figured out how to make a life here. It hasn’t been easy. Then he started talking and didn’t stop for a while.
“I lost my brother six years ago to suicide. He used to work for the water and sewer authority. He was a member of the [tribal] council. There was alcohol involvement. He didn’t look like he was going to do it, before. I guess he was hiding it, holding it inside. He didn’t come home for two days. He worked at the water plant, and he hung himself down there.
“Two months ago, my uncle attempted suicide. Actually, he attempted and succeeded. He shot himself. It was alcohol-related.
“Kids nowadays take a lot of pills and talk about suicide. I don’t see why people do that. Well, I guess I do. I have been there. I got depressed a few months after my brother died. I loved my brother. He taught me how to shoot a rifle, you know? So I tried it two times.”
Tried it?
“I planned it real hard. I didn’t even know who to talk to. I love my father, but I didn’t want to worry him. I was going to do it the same way my brother did. I used to work at the local washeteria. It was night work. I had a rope, tied it up, and I kicked the chair away, and the rope slipped off. I hit the ground.
“The second time, my girlfriend caught me trying it, and talked me out of it.”
After that, Jason said, he decided life in Savoonga was livable, if you kept yourself occupied. “I carve and do hunting. I avoid stress and depression.”
Digging outside of town, he recently found three fossilized ancient ivory dolls, one of which sold to a collector for $3,000. He’s doing okay. And he and his girlfriend have a baby, a two-year-old girl.
“I think about my daughter. She keeps me around. I’m staying alive because of her.”
Jason said he has a trick to keep his depression at bay: weightlifting.
“I lift rocks. That’s what I do. That is how I take it out.”
Take what out?
“My anger.”
THE TEMPERATURE WAS practically balmy. It was zero. So was the visibility. We could see one another, but, a few feet beyond, everything dissolved into white. It was as though the rest of the world had disappeared.
Deno Akeya, 29, was looking around nervously. What was wrong? Nothing, he said. It’s just that he had forgotten to bring his rifle.
Why did he need a rifle? I asked.
“Polar bear,” he said. Oh.
His uncle, Arthur Akeya, unloaded a gas-powered auger from his snowmobile, set the drill bit on the ice, fired it up, and began drilling a Frisbee-size hole. The drill sank one foot, two, three. Finally, it punched through. Arthur pulled it back up, and with it came a furious rush of seawater. We were 200 yards offshore, out in the Bering Sea. It was lightly snowing.
I dropped a hook in, and before the line touched bottom, I felt a hit. What I brought up through the hole was as hideous a thing as you will ever see. It’s a mottled beast the Eskimos call the uglyfish, the size of a shoe, full of warts and polyps and blebs. It looks to be a cross between a catfish and a bullfrog. It’s great eating, Arthur assured us.
More holes were being drilled, more lines dropped, and the fish were chewing the lures like popcorn.
Next, the kill. A quick whack behind the eyes with the wooden spool, to break the spine. Then, you gut it the way Eskimos have done for 2,000 years: You tromp on it with your boot, and the insides shoot out of the mouth. I’m a city boy and an animal lover, and none of this felt wrong.
Nor was I surprised to learn, two hours later, that those ghastly-looking creatures, boiled for twenty minutes and then drenched in melted butter, were as succulent as lobster.
Out there in the enveloping whiteness, it had been possible to lose yourself, fishing with Eskimos in the Bering Sea the way it has been done since the age of the igloo. There was no village, there were no dead kids, no fog of denial, no generation in agony, literally bored out of its mind. There were no soul-wrenching choices between survival of self and survival of a culture. There was just an exhilarating ritual, as old as a civilization, irreducible, unencumbered by a sense of guilt, not subject to misunderstanding or misinterpretation through cultural chauvinism. It was clear and it was clean. It was possible to comprehend the joy of surviving by your skills and savvy on the bounty of the Earth alone, in defiance of whatever hell nature and fate throw at you. And it was possible to understand why, lost in that moment, you could want to live that way forever.
A Wing and a Prayer
As I walked from the Metro to my office on this day, police were everywhere. People were nervously scanning the skies. The government had just issued a terrorism alert of the gravest nature but of dubious practical value: An attack of some sort, they said, from unknown agents, might be imminent. Somewhere.
This is about what happened on my walk from the Metro to my office in downtown Washington, D.C. It’s the shortest story in this collection. It’s about the meaning of life.
February 14, 2003
BUNDLED AGAINST THE chill of a very bad morning, people hurried down 15th Street in downtown Washington yesterday, past the row of newspaper boxes with front-page headlines weighing the likelihood of annihilation by radiation, by ballistic missile, by airborne cyanide, or by the pedestrian body-mounted suicide bomb. They hustled past the Radio Shack that had already sold nearly every battery-operated radio in the store, even the crystal sets that require earphones. Then, at L Street, they stopped to look in the window of the Rite Aid drugstore, which earlier in the week sold out of duct tape.
Many people went in, even those with nothing to buy.
“Do you know that…”
“Yes, we do,” said the store manager. “We’re working on it.”
Around 6 a.m., when the store was still closed but its doors were propped open for deliveries, a starling flew in. No one saw this, but you can figure out what must have happened next. The little bird flapped above the aisles, observed, perhaps, the absence of anything resembling habitat, banked over the cough and cold remedies, reversed direction, and headed for daylight.
It did not see the glass. It thudded headfirst into the front display window, dropping like a stone past the Valentine’s Day stuffed bears into a 5-inch-wide channel between the window and a dividing wall.
The starling was alive but trapped. It couldn’t spread its wings enough to fly. So it paced its small enclosure, helpless. On the other side of the divider, near the cash registers, the humans were helpless, too. They could climb a ladder and look over the top, but the bird was three arm lengths away. The humans looked down, and felt pity. The bird looked up; what it felt can only be surmised.
The store opened at seven, and immediately the parade of concerned citizens began. Men, women on their way to work. Police officers. Utility workers. Vagrants. By 9:45, store manager Rick Bromley had made a phone call, then used the store’s sale-tag printer to create two signs, which he taped to the front window. They were done in haste but with good intention. The first read: ANIMAL CNTRL. IS COMMING TO RESCUE BIRD.
That was for the Rite Aid’s beleaguered employees, to help stanch the inquiries. The second sign had a different
purpose.
“People were coming right up next to the window,” Bromley explains, “and the bird was, you know…”
The bird was petrified. This tore at the humans’ hearts. Animals may not understand that they are mortal, but in return for this comforting ignorance, they are denied a sense of proportion. They lack our capacity to rationalize fears, and prioritize them. They cannot be reassured by words. You just needed to look at this bird to know it was in an inconsolable panic. The humans were afraid it would die of fright.
Thus, the second sign: PLEASE DON’T SCARE THE BIRD THANKS.
So passersby mostly kept their distance, watching with concern as the starling paced and fidgeted, every once in a while sharply cocking its shiny, speckled head in that way birds do, as though they are alert to something you aren’t. This makes birds look smart and shrewd and prepared for anything, but it’s probably just an illusion.
At ten thirty-one, D.C. animal control officer Ted Deppner arrived, and, with a ladder and a net on a long handle, retrieved the starling and handed it to an assistant. She carried it outside and launched it free into the wind.
Everyone felt much better.
It’s nice when you can do something.
By noon, Rick Bromley had reordered duct tape, but his store was almost out of first-aid kits.
Tears for Audrey
On the Sunday this story was published, I was working in the office. My phone rang. The caller identified herself as Linda Tripp—the mystery snitch in the Monica Lewinsky scandal, which was just beginning to unfold.
At the time, Linda was in self-imposed exile; she held the key to the whole affair, but she wasn’t talking. Journalists were slavering to interview her.
But Linda wasn’t offering me that, at least not yet. She was calling about my story in the newspaper that day, about a grievously injured little girl beside whose bed religious figurines were said to be weeping oil. The story ends on an ambiguous note, Linda observed: It wasn’t clear what I thought was really happening in that house.
The Fiddler in the Subway Page 13