Looking for Alaska (60 page)

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.
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HOTO BY
P
ETER
J
ENKINS

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.”

Ray paused, then added, “I had no idea the trouble they were really in. Then I didn't understand the power of this ice.”

Price remembered that it was a shining moment for their Search and Rescue Unit. “There were forty-two crews on the ice. From ten miles north of Barrow to fifteen to twenty miles to the southwest, that's how far the crews were scattered. And then there were polar bears roaming around on this ice with us, looking for some fresh meat.”

Everything was saved but one boat. Every whaling camp on that ice was intact, while if they had located their camps on other parts of the ice, the camps would have been destroyed. When Ray asked Price why, Price said in classic Eskimo understatement, “We know the ice.”

Travel on the North Slope is so filled with risk that the North Slope Borough had purchased several personal operating beacons, or POBs, which are emergency location devices that they encourage people to carry with them when they go fishing or hunting. Even though no one on earth can find his way like an Inupiat Eskimo can over seemingly indistinguishable ice and snow, over the years many people have been lost. The helicopters are equipped with sophisticated heat-seeking viewing systems. They can see a white fox on white snow in a whiteout. These systems, called Flair, can differentiate the temperature of a snowmobile track two hours old from the snow next to it.

A young man who worked at Search and Rescue in general maintenance had gone caribou hunting. When the POB distress call came in specifying his location, just nine miles from the Search and Rescue base, they assumed because he was so close that he was severely injured. Otherwise he'd have ridden on in. It cost $6,000 an hour to search in one of their biggest helicopters. They launched, and nine miles out the pilot immediately saw a snow machine and two polar bears, but no person. They searched; still they saw no one. Their first thought was that the young guy had been eaten by the polar bears, a real possibility. The pilot, not wanting to waste time, switched on the heat-evaluation device. But then he saw something on a concrete monument nearby marking the spot where Will Rogers had died in a plane crash. As he circled, the concrete pillar came alive—an extra arm sprouted from the top of it and waved at them. The young man had climbed to the top to get away from the aggressive polar bears.

*   *   *

The whaling crew spent the night in Barrow. I ate some Mexican food at the farthest-north Mexican restaurant in North America. Another guy there, eating alone, turned out to be John Baker, an outstanding Native musher from Kotzebue. He was in town speaking to the schoolchildren; he is a hero to many in Alaska. We chatted during dinner, and when it came time to pay the bill, I reached in my pockets—oops. No money. John picked up the check.

Early the next morning, I was picked up by the same teenagers as before to head back to reestablish camp. My driver went faster across the ice this time. After this trip I might have to marry a chiropractor. When we got to where our camp had been yesterday, pieces of ice the size of small trucks were where the boat had been. The whaling crew next to us, who had set up in a small, covelike area yesterday, now found the cove filled with man-killer-size pieces of ice. They spent hours moving them out of the way with poles.

Everyone had a job, and camp was set up once again. We sat for a couple more days. One day we saw almost no whales, the next day we saw close to a hundred. The lead had become wider now, filled with new ice and icebergs and the surfacing black, rounded backs of the bowhead whale. Only once in all the time I was there sitting on the caribou skins did Hubert whisper to the crew that they should get ready. The harpooner climbed into the boat's bow and sat down. The crew moved to either side of the boat, ready to launch as silently as possible right as the whale exhaled. The whale might have heard something; for some reason it did not surface close enough for them to launch.

The Oliver Leavitt crew did not get a whale that springtime of 2000. They went to the edge of the ice together as much to preserve their way of life as to get a whale to eat. The whales gave themselves to other crews, and they shared the muktuk and the meat with the people, and there was bowhead whale to eat at special times during the year. Oliver and all whaling captains hope that if the world is still around in the year 3000, members of their families will go to live at the edge of the land-fast ice, seeking the bowhead whale.

18

Anything but Cyber Trash

Even in Alaska the cyber invaders find you and send you their crap. “Do you want to make $10,000 a week?” “Do you want to enlarge it?” I've got a Web site, so naturally people can reach me from almost anywhere in the world. They find you. Every place you ever shopped, they're after you. And there are those ten “contest notifications” that I had won a cruise to somewhere sent to me all in the space of two minutes. Depending on my mood, sometimes I just hold down the Delete key.

When will some marketer get politicians to outlaw the Delete key? Somehow they have figured out how to subvert it. I have to press Delete about ten times to just get rid of one of these crap mails. Anyway, more than once I have been pounding the Delete key when suddenly a familiar name comes up in the From area, or some interesting line in the Subject box. Usually it is already deleted by the time I react, and I have to retrieve it from the Trash. That's what happened this time. I returned from being away ten days to find my E-mail loaded with cyber pollution. I was deleting the hell out of it when I saw a familiar name go by. I retrieved it; there were two from my youngest sister, the ever creative and resilient Abby, who is a designer in and around New York City.