Looking for Alaska

by Peter Jenkins

  Late summer is fishing time. The salmon are coming up the rivers. We mostly see seine nets here. My first year here, I went out with five women. (Fishing is women’s work.) We pulled in about three hundred salmon in one netful. My friend Omie and her sister Eckie showed me how to use an ulu to filet the fish and hang them to dry. After three nights of backaching labor, I finally cut all of my share of the fish, and I ate good for months. Also, even though I could never quite meet their standards of ulu proficiency, I did learn enough to turn heads on the riverbanks in more urban areas.

  Fall time is moose hunting. Eric and I got one last September. I sent a hundred pounds or so to a sausage place in Anchorage. That’s been one of my staples this year. Not to mention the steaks and roasts and soup I’ve been eating!

  Also during fall, people pick berries by the bucketful. First, blackberries and salmonberries. They call salmonberries upiks. Then, blueberries, and finally, cranberries. Also during this time, various other plants are harvested. I have a friend here named Millie. She goes “trading.” Apparently, it’s an ancient tradition. The mice on the tundra gather the roots of the mussu plant. They store these in their holes. Well, Millie cuts up vegetables such as carrots and celery and goes looking for the mouse caches. She knows just how to spot them and distinguish them from the other nondescript little rises on the tundra. She cuts open the mouse cache and takes the mussu, leaving her vegetables in trade, always careful to cover the hole just how she found it.

  After reading about Millie, I called Rita over to read it. I knew she’d be fascinated by Dean’s tales. She was watching her favorite show, Emeril Live, the only TV show she sits still to watch, but she agreed to read it before she went to bed.

  Later in the fall and in early winter, people go ice fishing. Early winter, like Thanksgiving weekend or for the month prior, they catch tomcods. These little fish you can catch dozens of in an hour or two. We just pile them up on the ice, careful to keep them apart. That way, when they’ve frozen, they are frozen separately, so as not to have a big chunk of frozen fish, but rather, individuals. Who wants to thaw out fifty fish just to boil up five?

  I know I haven’t covered every single activity throughout the year … what about spearfishing for trout, or gathering up the flightless molting ducks, or gathering their eggs. Hunting spotted seals with a .22 and a harpoon, a hybrid of ancient and new hunting tactics. So much goes on, you have to come see it all!

  My family is always a good audience for my stories. I spent Christmas in Fort Worth, TX. Every time I was introduced, my family member would say one of two things: either, “This is Dean. He lives with Eskimos in Alaska,” or, “This is Dean. He’s the one I’ve been telling you about!”

  Amazing. Man, where else do you find this kind of stuff? I mean, I’m sure that plenty of other people in the world are doing these types of things, but to actually take part, to be there—that’s why I came up here.

  Tell you what, I’ve got to go. It’s Sunday night, my lesson plans are done, but I’ve got chores at home to do and I have to get some sleep. Looking forward, Peter, to hearing from you again.

  GO TO DEERING

  Deering. I would get there and meet Dean and Eric. The longer I traveled in Alaska, the deeper I was drawn into the maze of it all. It appeared that Dean and Eric had become a real part of village life. Over the next few months Eric and Dean sent me more E-mails. Eric’s address gave me some hint into who he was: idahohippy@excite.com.

  Months passed. Pieces of their E-mails often floated into my mind.

  From Dean: “It’s really amazing to stop the snow machine and turn off the engine and look around and all you see is frozen ocean. Like nothing else in the world!”

  From Eric:

  The snow is so deep along the riverbanks that you are actually riding your snow machine on a crust that looks like it has small willow branches sticking through it. In reality these are the tips of willow trees deep under the snow. It’s common to step off your snow machine and sink up to your armpits. It can be really time-consuming digging out your stuck snow machine. Let’s see, at the beginning of the month Dean and I rode our machines to Kotzebue, and if you pull out a map, just draw a straight line between the two and you will see pretty much the route we took. With the ocean all frozen it takes several miles off the trip, but you are always wondering about that one bad spot that could be anywhere around you. Some places you are simply picking a route through large chunks of ice that have been pushed upward kind of like the movements of the earth with plate tectonics. This time of year is nice, you never run out of ice cubes. Everyone has big chunks of ice they have carried from the river. Typically this is piled up outside the door to your house. A few Saturdays ago we had one of our five Saturday school days for the year.

  They told me later when they knew me better that sometimes they would do anything to get out of the village, fighting feelings that were a combination of cabin fever and village fever. Two good-looking young guys, twenty-seven and twenty-nine, naturally they got the urge. Sometimes they got so feverish they’d head out in a blizzard across the frozen ocean to Kotzebue, the largest town in any direction. There, certain weekends there were dances at the Lions Club. Basically it was them, a few married guys with their wives, and a large number of Eskimo women who wanted to dance until night became day. They never had to ask anyone to dance, it was all they could do to dance with one woman at a time, especially a few hours into the dance, after some alcohol had been consumed. Sometimes six women would be lined up, all wanting to dance at once. A few times, after the dance had ended and they’d turned down all kinds of offers, they had to run their fast snow machines full throttle through the snow-covered streets of “Kotz” to escape a carful of good-looking women wanting the dancing to move to another level.

  Eric and Dean said they’d never imagined such a thing, but teachers hold a special place of respect in Alaska. In Alaska, as I’ve said, you don’t do something outside your village without your entire hometown knowing about it. Plus their bosses live in Kotzebue. Dean and Eric both said the people of Deering knew before they got home whom they’d danced with that night.

  * * *

  On Valentine’s Day, both our older daughters called us. Brooke, who’s in her early twenties, called us with news. We had noticed that she seemed happier in the last several months than in a long time, and we didn’t think it was because we were gone. Brooke wanted both Rita and me on the phone to tell us she was in love, and that someone had given her a very special present this day, a big rock. A guy we’d not yet met, Trey Buttrey from Thompson Station, the little town north of us, had asked her to marry him. She had said yes. It was wonderful news, and we told her how happy we were for her.

  Later on Rebekah also called. She’d spent some time with us in Alaska, but now was back in the States at school. She asked how we were doing. She told me that she had decided she’d like to come up for spring break, sometime in March. I said great, told her I would love to go off somewhere with her. There was a pause, and then she said that she would rather go somewhere by herself, perhaps to some village way out.

  This moment when your child no longer needs you should be cause for celebration, even in the last frontier. I should have been thrilled that she wanted to go somewhere constructive and have an adventure, rather than do some MTV spring break thing. But I felt a prick of sadness, a slight blue mist coming over me when she said it.

  Come to think of it, I had noticed distinct changes in her since last summer when she’d spent a month in the southeastern Oregon wilderness on a National Outdoor Leadership School trip. The effect on her seemed similar to the changes I’d seen in young men after boot camp. On our kayak trip in Aialik Bay and in Cordova, she had seemed more assured, more secure, more confident in her ability to take care of herself, to be by herself. It may have also had to do with her finding success in college; she had not had a positive high school experience.

  Dean, Eric, and Cody on Main Street in Deering. PHOTO B
Y PETER JENKINS

  I tried not to let my first reaction show over the phone, but Rebekah misses almost nothing. Eventually I got over it on the phone, got more excited; I told her sure, I would think about it and call her back. I asked her if she had any preferences; she said no, just someplace radical.

  I thought about what my parents must have thought but did not say when I, the eldest of their six children, told them I was going to walk across America, and then I sat down to think of a plan for her. I thought of possible places, places I’d been. The Brooks Range and Eric’s place. Hydaburg and Tina and her sister, Jody, and her boyfriend, Tony. Or what about Neva and Per? No, she wanted to go somewhere she hadn’t been. I called some friends I’d made in Fairbanks who were from an Athabascan village on the Yukon, but they said they wouldn’t recommend sending Rebekah there in the winter.

  What about Deering? But I didn’t think it was a good idea. I hadn’t even really met Dean and Eric yet. I knew that in small-village life in Alaska, there was often no resident police, only sometimes a VPO, a village police officer. I talked to a few friends; they said they would be cautious about sending their twenty-year-old daughter to a village near the end of winter, when any acting out would be at its worst, the frustrations of light deprivation and being closed in having built up all season long.

  I began to wonder if there was anyplace I’d feel comfortable sending Rebekah. A week later she called to see if I had made any progress. I told her I hadn’t. She said that time was passing. “Come on, Dad, you can do it,” she said in a slightly mocking but motivating tone.

  I kept leaning toward the idea of Deering. Surely Eric and Dean were tough guys to have done all they’d done with their Eskimo hosts. Many teachers in Alaska do not get so involved in the hunting and the gathering, in village life. Eric and Dean would know how to watch out for Rebekah. No single available women were in Deering, though, and it had been a long winter. Rebekah would be the only single white woman in town. Where would she stay? I knew Eric and Dean both had their own homes. Maybe a woman or a family could take her in, give her some cover. I worried so much about this, debated all the possibilities. I didn’t want to be overprotective, yet I wanted to be as careful as possible. She planned to be here in only a bit more than two weeks. I E-mailed Eric and Dean to see what they thought.

  Dean and Eric,

  I would suspect that my experience in Alaska has been similar to yours; the longer I am here the more profound and intriguing and personal and surprising the experience becomes.

  As I think I mentioned to you guys, my daughter Rebekah, twenty, is traveling with me sometimes on her vacations from college.

  I think it would be great for her to spend some time by herself in a village, and I am wondering if you think she could come stay in Deering. She is getting here on the weekend of March 10 and staying through that next weekend. I realize sending an attractive twenty-year-old into a small village has its potential pitfalls. I also realize my wanting to send my daughter so that you guys could show her around would require trust on my part, but I think that can be handled.

  Rebekah could fly in on Saturday or Sunday to Kotzebue, March 10 or 11. I trust you guys enough to send my daughter there and realize also that you know how to watch out for her and who is who in Deering; you know what I mean. Let me know. Peter.

  They E-mailed me back in a few hours and said sure, they’d love to meet her and would arrange everything. They certainly seemed excited; they’d responded awfully fast. I couldn’t help but remember myself at twenty-seven or twenty-nine and tried to imagine living in a totally isolated Eskimo village of 150 with no easy way out or in. What if some guy wanted to send his twenty-year-old daughter for me to “take care of.” It would be like a dream come true. Plus I knew, and they didn’t, how attractive, cute, and quick to make friends Rebekah is. They told me about a wonderful Eskimo woman named Stella who worked at the school. She was in her fifties and lived alone; they even mentioned that she taught Sunday school. Were they trying too hard to assure me? I did feel that they would be on their best behavior, knowing I would be coming there after Rebekah did. Not that I’d ever really find out what had gone on, but still, I’d be there, meet them. After I got to know Eric and Dean, they told me that the word trust had sure stood out in my E-mail. I decided to send Rebekah there.

  FROM REBEKAH

  Deering

  I still can’t believe my father sent me, alone, his just-over-a-hundred-pound, twenty-year-old daughter to the Arctic Circle, to two men in their twenties who hadn’t seen a single white woman in a long time. Two men whom he had never met. My father had never even seen their faces. Everything we knew about them was from E-mails and phone conversations that my dad had had with them from Seward. We knew they were both teachers in the village, that both were originally from the lower forty-eight, and that they made up two of the six white men in Deering. One of them was a fan of Dad’s, had heard that he was traveling in Alaska, working on a new book, and had E-mailed him encouraging him to visit Deering. Scared? I was.

  First of all, it was spring break when I went up to Deering. Several of my friends were headed to Florida and Cancún to get wasted and sunburnt, maybe even tattooed. I was headed to a place where the water was frozen but where the sun still burnt, where the scarring came from blisters caused by the below-zero wind. I don’t believe I would ever have gone to Deering had it not been for NOLS.

  Before Dad and I embarked upon the wilds of Alaska together, he had heard about the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) from his friend Skip Yowell, the guy who co-founded JanSport and who knows everything about the almost underground world of adventure sports and schools. It didn’t take much convincing before Dad realized that NOLS would be a wonderful thing for me to do to prepare for the extremes of Alaska.

  NOLS helped me find the confidence within myself to do such a thing as go to Deering alone, without my father to protect me, without my mother to guide me, and without my friends to keep me company. NOLS helped me find the voice within myself that encourages me to persevere, to stay strong, to never give up. And what is most invaluable about what I found on my NOLS trip, out there in the high desert of Idaho and in Oregon paddling the Owyhee, making my own way through the treacherous, hot backcountry, is that voice within that screams, “You can do anything. Anything!” Before NOLS I would not have gone to Deering as willingly or as self-assuredly as I did. I would not have been so free of fear as I was out in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of hard-faced Eskimos. I did not know anyone or anything, and I loved every single precious minute.

  My mother, as well as a bunch of her lady friends, loves and trusts Jesus. My mother and twelve of these friends put their hands on me and prayed for me before I left. Yeah, I was a little apprehensive. I didn’t know these two guys. My dad didn’t know these two guys. I had imagined them, though. In my head they were handsome and rough and manly, the kind of men written about in those supermarket romance novels, in the books without covers in some ninety-nine-cent pile at any Goodwill store. They were also intellectuals far off the “I’m escaping” beaten path. My mother, as she listened to my anxiety, told me I was romanticizing the situation. At the same time, of course, she agreed that it really was romantic. So there I was, a young, adventurous, long-haired girl going up to a village in the Arctic Circle of 150 Eskimos, alone, to stay with Stella, the fifty-five-year-old, indigenous-to-Deering Eskimo woman: the woman who would protect me from the men (Dad and I never verbalized that, but it was what we both had concluded). Sometimes you have to expect the unexpected.

  When I got to Deering, Stella wasn’t even there. I was informed that she had gone down to Oklahoma to visit her children and grandchildren. This meant that I would be staying with Dean and Eric, the two handsome he-men I had created in my nonstop imagination. But that was okay. Just fine. Because when I stepped off that Bering Air bush plane, away from that young, ever-so-cute, flirtatious pilot who had let me sit in the copilot seat, I saw Dean Cummings
, the lean, twenty-seven-year-old playboy who had a perfect smile and an artist’s hands, and Eric Smith, the quieter, long-dark-haired twenty-nine-year-old whose expressions were those of a tormented rebel and a tender, careless hippie all rolled into one. They were not on horses. They were on Polaris snowmobiles. And I couldn’t believe they actually were both cute and tough-looking. They certainly knew what they were doing on those snow machines.

  They were waiting for me with an extralarge, army-green, down-filled coat. I had stepped off the plane in a lightweight North Face jacket. How they knew I would need that big green coat I do not know. But they did. I was a little nervous. What would I say? I got over that as I soon discovered that I was with two true long-lost-brother types. They weren’t going to hurt me, rape me, take me miles away from the village and chop me into wolf food. I was going to be all right.

  * * *

  One morning, I slowly stood up from Dean’s old, worn-out couch, my bed for last night, and whispered a silent thank-you to the cloudless sky that I have felt safe here, and not at all far from home. The plan for the day was to travel by snow machine to Buckland, the closest village, about fifty miles east of Deering, and then down to Koyuk. Dean and Eric wanted to take me to Koyuk to see the famous hot springs. The plan was to stay there for the weekend at an old cabin and enjoy the hot springs and maybe even catch a glimpse of the Iditarod mushers who would supposedly be passing through.

  Eight miles out of Deering, Eric and I stopped on a small rise in the frozen ground, turned off the snow machine, and waited for the others—Dean, Toni, and Matt—to catch up with us. Toni and Matt are a couple from Kotzebue whom Eric and Dean have befriended. Once the others reached us, word spread. I was cold. I couldn’t feel my fingers or my toes.

  I’d felt this numb before, within ten minutes of putting my feet on the ground in Deering. Eric had stashed me on the back of his snowmobile to head back to the village from the lone building that was the airport. When we’d reached Eric’s place, a little red house half-buried in snow, I’d asked him, “Will I get my fingers back?”