Looking for Alaska

by Peter Jenkins

  These Inupiats’ lives have always required massive amounts of patience. They wait for hours and hours for the seals to come to their breathing holes. They cannot have much warning, there is no sound until the seals are there. There is almost no warning when the time comes to try for your whale. But you cannot lose your focus, become moody, or need to be entertained. You must look and be ready because at any moment it emerges from the water and there is your chance. One hundred years ago, if you were ready, you and your family might live. If not, you might starve to death. The ability to concentrate and be still was absolutely necessary no matter how cold, how hard the storms blew.

  Oliver and his crew, all whalers, do not do what they do in order to brag, to take pictures or video, or to have their catch mounted. (Think of the house that it would take to display a whale—maybe Bill Gates’s place would have a wall big enough.) We sat on the caribou skins for hours, hours that would turn into days. Oliver and Hubert found it slightly peculiar that ESPN makes such a big deal about programs that show people catching one-and-a-half-pound large-mouth bass, or even five-pound bass. That they could at any moment catch and bring to their people a hundred-thousand-pound whale has nothing to do with any kind of trophy.

  Oliver told me many stories as we sat on the edge of the ice and waited for a whale to come. One time, he and fellow whaling captain Jake Adams were down south. South to them isn’t south to me. They can travel almost fifteen hundred air miles south and east and still be in Alaska. They were fishing somewhere around Bristol Bay at the base of the Aleutians for king salmon. Also staying at their remote lodge were a father and a son from Minnesota. The father, in his seventies, had never before been to Alaska; the biggest fish he’d ever caught was a four-pound walleye in one of the freshwater lakes of northern Minnesota. After three days the gentleman finally caught a king salmon that weighed close to forty pounds. That night at the lodge this white-haired man, shining with pride, had a few drinks, Tanqueray on the rocks. Then he had a few more. He began to brag about his king salmon, a mighty wild fish indeed. He was getting borderline obnoxious, Oliver said; his son tried to get his dad to quiet down, kick back. But he wouldn’t. Then he started to focus his arrogance on Oliver and Jake.

  Jake’s a restrained, sensitive, yet powerful man. The old man wanted to show somebody up, and he got in Jake’s face.

  “What’s the biggest fish you ever caught?” he said to Jake, almost growling.

  Jake didn’t really want any part of a contest, but the man persisted. The Native people hold their elders in the highest reverence.

  “I said, what’s the biggest thing you ever had on the line, anyway?” the man from Minnesota said, punching with his words.

  Jake could tell the man would not let up. So he told him: “Oh, about fifty tons.”

  “Fifty what?” the white-haired man said, thinking Jake might have said fifty pounds, bigger than his king salmon.

  “Dad,” the son interjected, trying to diffuse the situation, “this man is an Eskimo whaler. He said fifty tons, that’s one hundred thousand pounds.”

  The man got quiet and left the dining room shortly thereafter. Jake didn’t rub it in, he was proud for the old man. A king salmon could feed several members of that man’s family. But a bowhead whale can feed many more.

  TO KNOW ICE

  When a crew like Oliver’s or Jake’s does get a whale, there is a tradition about how the whale is divided up. First they pull the whale to the edge of the ice. Then the word goes out and many people, a hundred or more, start making their way to the place on the shore-fast ice. They will help to pull the whale out onto the ice using large ropes, a block and tackle, and much muscle. Then the butchering begins. The back third of the whale is reserved for the captain and crew. However, this meat is used for three separate celebrations—their summer festival, which includes the jubilant blanket toss; a celebration at Thanksgiving; and one at Christmas. This clearly shows how the whale reigns at the center of this thriving culture.

  Two fourteen-inch “belts” are cut from the whale. One goes for a village-wide party the captain and the crew put on. The captain flies the crew’s flag from his house; often, a block-long line of people are waiting to come into Oliver and Annie’s small home for their taste of the whale. The meat and muktuk and blubber from the other fourteen-inch belt goes in equal shares to all of the crew for their personal use. Then the close to two-thirds of the bowhead left is divided equally among the other crews.

  You don’t get to be a member of a whaling crew because you want to; you can’t pay to join. Basically, you have to be family and you have to be very capable. Everyone has a job; the whaling captain is absolute boss. In fact he must supply and pay for all equipment and food, cover any costs. On Oliver’s crew is Hubert, who is considered one of the best hunters on the North Slope. There is Oliver’s son, Billy-Jens, twenty-seven, the harpooner. There is Ambrose Oliver, twenty-seven, Oliver’s nephew. He is what Oliver calls a generalist; he does whatever is needed. Johnson Booth, forty-nine, is married to Oliver’s cousin. Lester Suvlu, in his early thirties, a good all-around hand, is some kind of cousin. And Leo Kaleak, in his early thirties, is also part of the crew.

  Oliver’s crew had other full-time jobs, of course. Hubert and Johnson worked for the North Slope Borough government as administrators of capital improvements, overseeing building projects. Billy-Jens was a carpenter’s helper, a general laborer. Leo works in the oil fields. Ambrose is a trained mechanic but does mostly odd jobs. Lester works for the Barrow police department, and Oliver Leavitt handles governmental relations and is chairman of the Arctic Slope Regional Corporation. If they had to choose between their jobs and whaling—well, they just wouldn’t. They have built lives that mingle the ancient with the new and do well at both. They do not seek anyone else’s approval about their way of life.

  There were long moments of silence on the ice, or not quite silence, but moments without human noise. The winds blew from far-off places; the new ice made a light crackling sound when it collided with the land-fast ice. The icebergs spoke softly as they went by, but all knew of their power. Eider ducks flew by, their wings hissing in the wind; the whales exhaled from many different distances around us, and their breathing was one of the world’s greatest sounds to Oliver and his people. The ones that breathed too far out might give themselves to another crew or live on to return next spring.

  Every part of me that touched the caribou hide felt like a sun-warmed rock on a cold fall day. Even though I wore my Trans-Alaska boots, my feet resting without moving on the three-foot-thick ice got cold sometimes. I had expected this part of Alaska to be the least attractive, most boring, least inspiring. Instead I was inspired, awed, humbled. Last night as I had slept in the tent with those who didn’t have to stay up all night, a fresh snow had fallen, three or four inches. It had coated all the irregular chunks of ice that had been broken apart and pushed into piles by the immense strength of the moving ice. The whalers used these little “mountains” of ice as lookout posts. I could see far down the coast; on every pile stood an Eskimo in his white parka with its wolverine ruff standing watching for the whales. We did not have a lookout “mountain” near us and so just watched from our bench.

  Today, the second day, the ocean-blue water showed in thin bands between the ice with a light chop on the surface. Between these open leads were moving icebergs surrounded by new ice. Since it’s moving, it gives the impression that the whole surface is shimmering. And amid the shimmering silver are the huge icebergs and the black backs of the surfacing whales.

  At different times the men of the whaling crew ate and slept. The tent was warm, with a propane heater and the heat of a floor full of snoring or silent sleeping whalers and me.

  Hubert offered me some raw, aged caribou, a slice of hindquarter, when he saw me watching what he ate. He told me to dip it in seal oil. Instead of using heat, many meats are prepared with extreme cold, aged to a person’s liking. It’s like cheese; some like bland c
heeses, some like ripe blue cheese. Hubert had noticed me stomping my cold feet on the ice. He said if I ate this aged, raw caribou, dipped in seal oil, first I would feel a bit cooler, then my body would heat up like a furnace. It’s an old trick the Eskimos learned long ago. My body did precisely that. One old whaler had told me that his favorite food was “stink flipper.” You won’t see Martha Stewart prepare this dish. They take the flipper from a walrus, put it in a box so no bugs can get to it, then leave it to “age.” Some might use the word rot. Once aged just so, it is consumed as one of the highest joys in life. I wondered if anyone had some out here, would offer it to me now that I’d surprised Oliver by eating aged, raw caribou hindquarter dipped in seal oil.

  It was hypnotic sitting and watching the slow-paced icebergs and whales and new ice flowing by us in the current. We experienced all types of weather while I stayed with Oliver’s crew. The people never moved too fast. It was mostly about sitting and watching and being ready. That’s why when I saw Hubert and Oliver stand up and stare out at the ice, then tell everyone to hurry, I knew something serious was up. I hadn’t noticed, but the moving slab ice and icebergs had moved closer to us on the land-fast ice.

  Oliver was barking out orders. He’d been calculating the current and ice movement and had determined that the icebergs and pack ice that had been flowing southwest, parallel to the shore and our resting place there, had shifted direction and were coming straight at us. I glanced over at the crews on either side of us; they were moving in all directions too.

  Oliver told his son and two of the younger guys to pack up all the food, then take down the tent and pack it up. He told a couple others to load up the boat, then pull over the snow machines and sleds. We were striking camp, an elaborate job. Oliver’s soft commands and the speed at which the crew carried them out had a definite sense of urgency. It was a gray, shadowless day, but it was obvious even to me that the big ice was coming to confront us.

  Oliver didn’t want to talk to me now, but he did. He told me to look at the house-size pressure ridges all around us. He explained this had once been all flat ice, but that moving ice now coming at us had caused these intense masses of ice wreckage. When stable ice is hit by moving ice, the force of the collision has to go somewhere, and ice breaks, shatters, goes up in the air in a jumble of ice blocks, some half the size of a two-story house. Oliver said no Eskimo would ever challenge this kind of ice: “Too much power,” he said as he folded up the caribou skins. This world has much to do with understanding ice. There are more than one hundred words to describe snow and its many types and moods; there are almost as many words for ice.

  Earlier, we’d sat together, the crew relaxed, and I’d looked out at the icebergs moving with the currents and the winds and thought about what would have to change to worry these men. Even as icebergs passed within fifteen feet of the edge of our ice, they knew immediately where their whaling boat sat, that the current carrying it was no concern. As long as the ice moved by us parallel, that was good.

  The snow machines were started. It took the most work to heft the boat onto the bare frame of a sled and tie it down so it wouldn’t fall off as we went over pressure ridges and ice blocks from previous ice tantrums. Billy was packing up the CB; Hubert had the delicate job of dismantling the harpoons. Oliver supervised. He had joked that he’d been demoted to steering the boat; his son had the fever to strike the whale. Oliver said it was time to use his brain and his son’s brawn. Steering the boat is considered the height of skill because it requires you to predict the whale’s behavior. In the Eskimo culture it seems important always to be self-effacing.

  “This ice coming fast. Wind’s getting stronger,” Oliver said. “Not long ago, near my house, archaeologists found the bones of some of my ancestors, they were four hundred years old. They’d been crushed by the moving ice. Their chest cavities were all compressed, they had been asleep when it happened.”

  The Leavitt crew boat near Barrow. PHOTO BY PETER JENKINS

  Oliver said some of the young guys in the crew might like to get back to Barrow anyway, get a chance to see their girlfriends, eat pizza at the northernmost pizzeria. Oliver remembered the time five years or so ago when a pizza place in Barrow used to offer to deliver anywhere. They had ordered several pizzas delivered to their tents on the ice several miles down the coast at that year’s spring whaling camp.

  The ice had exerted its dominance once again, and the people respected its power. We ran away from the possible destruction back to town. All of the gear was loaded; we crawled onto any available spot to ride back. I asked Oliver if I could walk. He said a polar bear had been around since the first whale had been landed. He said I could walk if I wanted, but polar bears stalk humans. I rode.

  * * *

  Whaling crews of today do a few things just the same as the crews of the past, but many things are different. During past whaling times, the whalers stayed at the edge of the land-fast ice from the first of April until the first week of June and did not go home. No tent was allowed; if there was rugged weather or a storm, the whalers had to create shelter by using skins or by getting under their boat. Raw food was not allowed, clothes could not be dried out, what meat was eaten was boiled. The rest of the family stayed on land and waited until a whale was struck and secured.

  Oliver told me about a furious storm in 1957, a time when a person was measured by his dog team. The team hauled driftwood for heat and ice to melt for fresh drinking and cooking water. The whalers that spring had had to run for their lives as we were now. One whaler did not even have time to get his parka on; he dragged it and ran. The ice opened and closed, grabbing it from him. Ice was breaking up all around them. The crew had to leave so fast they had to leave their dog teams on the ice to perish. The sounds of the ice breaking, cracking, killing, crushing—it was far more violent than it had been this time, at least where our camp had been.

  It is all about understanding the ice. As spring and whales arrive, the ice cannot be predicted and is at its most dangerous. At least two seal hunters disappeared while we were in Alaska. They go out on ice, maybe they are stalking a bearded seal, and the ice they are standing on at the moment is all part of one piece stretching to the land, and security. But it breaks off and they are suddenly on an island of ice that is moving away, lost in the forever of their surroundings. Like the bullfighter and the bull, the Eskimo must have intimate knowledge of the ice, this all-powerful force. The Eskimo hunter must get close to this changing, cracking, crushing, destructive force, as close as he can. To not take this risk meant starvation—to stay at home is not a choice. There was a real comfort in being on the ice with Oliver and his crew because they are confident in their knowledge of its behavior.

  But sometimes for all the experience in the world, they are caught. There are many reasons; maybe the ice had not taken anyone in several years and people are getting too relaxed. Who knows why, but something happened to 143 people and all their equipment on the ice in 1997. If it had not been for the North Slope Borough’s outstanding Search and Rescue Unit, which was founded in 1972, this moment when the ice did the unexpected could have caused one of the worst catastrophes in Alaska’s history. For days Search and Rescue had been patrolling the ice. A long, continuous crack three to four inches wide went for at least thirty miles. All the crews had crossed it and were at their camps whaling. One crew had struck a whale, and that added to the population on the ice. The communal butchering had begun.

  At midnight that crack popped and split; an island had broken off from the shore-fast ice and was adrift in the Arctic Ocean. On this forty-mile-long, floating “ice boat” were 143 people, 166 snow machines, 43 whaling boats, and all the gear that went with them. If something like this had happened before the Search and Rescue Unit had been established, this would have been an atrocity. E. Ray Poss Jr., Rescue’s chief helicopter pilot and one of the most experienced rescue pilots in the United States, was asleep when the call came in. He launched immediately. First thing he
did was contact his boss, Price Brower, an Inupiat who was at his whaling camp on the floating mass of ice. He located Price, but hovering at seventy feet the ice fog was so impenetrable he couldn’t see him. On the ground Price could hear him, but without visibility rescue was out of the question.

  Flying over at low altitude, eventually the helicopter rotors blew the fog away and then Ray could see Price. Then like an old-fashioned aluminum ice tray cracking open, right as Ray hovered over Price, the ice shattered into many more pieces, people on some, equipment on others. Ray radioed base, got their other rescue helicopter in the air, and their small helicopter too. All three helicopters flew for three hours. At times it was “0/0” visibility; other times they were able to see no more than one hundred feet. Finally everyone was rescued. They came back and went to bed.

  Eight hours later, Price and Ray were awakened by people anxious to get their equipment, their sealskin whaling boats, their harpoons, their snow machines, their parkas, their tents, everything, off the ice. It took Price and Ray seven days, twelve to thirteen hours a day. Price’s camp was the last one deconstructed and hauled out. In seven days the piece of ice that carried it had moved fifty-five miles into the cold and lonesome Arctic Ocean. It felt as if the whole population of Barrow gathered at a base camp twenty-five miles from town where all the equipment was flown for redistribution.

  Ray and Price told me this story at their high-tech, immaculate hangars. Ray had moved to Alaska from Las Vegas, where he was one of the main helicopter pilots who had rescued so many off the top of the MGM Grand Hotel during that terrible fire in 1980.

  “You know as a white man, and being relatively new to North Slope Borough, I’d be at the grocery store or getting gas, and the elders of the community would see me,” Ray said, remembering. “The elders would come up and say, ‘Ray, I want to thank you. You saved our lives.’ I’d say thanks, no problem, thinking no big deal. But these men were in tears. But no wonder they felt this way—because several years before, when there was no rescue squad, people died when the same thing happened. These men knew the danger.”