Looking for Alaska (63 page)

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?”

He smiled and said, “Yeah,” as if it were no big deal. I admit, it made me a little mad.

Today we were only eight miles out of the village and I was having these scary am-I-about-to-lose-my-fingers-and-toes thoughts. We still had a couple of hundred miles to go to the hot springs. Once Dean caught up and heard the news, he took off my boots and socks and put my feet up his jacket, under his shirt, and in his armpit. Whatever works, I thought. No problem. It was a different sort of romantic, my feet in some guy's armpit. Toni and Matt were trying to warm my hands with their hands, and Eric was standing there smoking a cigarette. We stayed like that for a while with my toes inside Dean's shirt until Eric convinced Dean that I shouldn't take the trip to Koyuk because I didn't have the right gear. Eric said I would be miserable if I tried to go, and I agreed—besides, I wasn't about to put myself in jeopardy. I understood that I knew nothing about this land other than how cold and dangerous it was. I was disappointed. Dean was disappointed. But I got over the disappointment rather quickly because not going meant Eric and I would have a long weekend together. No Stella. No Dean. We said our good-byes, told them to have fun, and off we went.

My favorite moments were riding on the back of Eric's Polaris, bumping over the hard, cold tundra, when my fingers and toes were warm, my body presented to the big blue sky and the still sea. Behind Eric, who, by the way, likes to drive his Polaris really fast—you could almost say irresponsibly—I smiled underneath my red and beige fleece scarf and gleamed happily because no one could see me: not the Eskimo kids who were playing in the snow, not the occasional passing snow machine, no one. No one knew my happiness, my feelings of pure joy. In just this one day, I knew the emotions of a lifetime. Everything about this village is beautiful: the frozen sea, the rolling tundra, the lack of trees and endless white horizon, the darker-skinned people. I am in awe. It is simple—I thought I had found heaven.

I felt overwhelmingly at home flying into Deering, experiencing the exhilaration that the Arctic Circle brings, that the frozen sea brings. I believe my calico curls have found themselves a home here among the isolation, the below-freezing blow, and among the men who have fled so far from their own homes to find solace and themselves here.

Should I be surprised that after only forty-eight hours I concluded that I could marry one of these men (it doesn't matter which) and build a life here surrounded by these silent, feisty Eskimos? I could be a wife, have nowhere to walk or drive to, other than this one, one-mile road. I could be happy inside, through the dark, depressing, aurora-graced winter, reading all those books planted on the school's classroom shelves. But after I'd been there a while longer, I realized that what Deering actually showed me was my own strength, my own desire to go, to see, to travel and experience other places like this, again and again.

NO MORE HONEY BUCKETS

Rebekah loved her spring break in Deering, and
love
is not too strong a word. Now it was my turn to fly over the still-frozen Kotzebue Sound, part of the Chukchi Sea, in possibly the same little plane. From this height it was hard to differentiate between the frozen ice and the frozen tundra, although it appeared that's all there was for hundreds of miles. When I finally saw Deering's maybe forty or fifty houses and a couple public buildings, it looked to me like a colony on a frozen planet. In a couple minutes we'd land in this town, built on a sand spit formed by the draining of the Inmachuk River. As we lost altitude for landing, I could see where the wind had sculpted the snow into frozen white waves. Someone at the Kotzebue airport had told me that thousands of caribou were right at the edge of Deering. They'd heard they were part of the gigantic Western Arctic Herd which numbered over four hundred thousand animals. Maybe I'd seen them from the air.

The Deering cemetery sits on a hill overlooking the town and the frozen ocean.
P
HOTO BY
R
EBEKAH
J
ENKINS

Dean, in the spirit of
A Walk Across America,
which he'd been reading to his fifth- and sixth-graders, walked with them to the “airport,” which was just a strip, a bit more than a half mile out of town. Two of the girls, Mary and Diane, both on Dean's wrestling team, asked me a hundred questions and said they were my bodyguards. One of them called me Stone Cold. Dean told me Stone Cold was their favorite WWF wrestler. Dean was tall, well built, energetic, and handsome. Rebekah had never mentioned what either of them looked like, come to think of it.

Dean told me I was going to stay at his house. He lived next door to the best ivory carver in Deering and across the street from Eric. The ivory carver also collected mastodon ivory in the summer, which could sometimes be found lying on the bottom of local rivers and creeks. He also searched for dead walrus skulls, which sometimes washed up on the beaches, to carve on. Pieces of these beaches might not have had a human footprint on them for fifty years, or ever. As we got to town, I saw that some of the tiny homes, most of which had been built by the government, were practically covered by snowbanks. People liked to keep them there as an insulative windbreak.

As I walked down the narrow gravel road that held everything that was Deering, a couple homes had freshly killed caribou lying on their snowbank. They may have been killed and skinned by a nephew for his auntie who cannot hunt, or by a son for his widowed mother and she hadn't cut it up yet. Eric had a large Alaskan malamute chained to the house he rented; he had painted the house barn-red. His was one of the only freshly painted houses in this section of Deering, which the guys called Downtown. Eric's dog, named Cody, was the size of a small bear and was every kid's favorite in the village.

The school was the center of this community. In a few days school would end for the summer, and the one member of the Deering senior class of 2000 would graduate. There are four full-time teachers in Deering; one of them, Pat Richardson, has been there for sixteen years. Her husband is a member of the National Space Society. Every year the NSS has the International Space Development Conference. Most members of this organization are not space cadets but serious people interested in the colonization of the moon and Mars, in space tourism, in outer-space B&Bs. You could immediately see that Deering was similar to a space colony, totally self-contained, thriving in a hostile environment.

Dean took me down to his house and showed me my bed, an old sofa. He let slip that Rebekah had used it. I had thought she was staying with Stella, the fifty-something Sunday-school teacher. My first reaction was this tiny home was empty and the sofa was in such tough shape that the Goodwill truck wouldn't take it. Then I thought about how one gets a sofa to outer space, I mean Deering. Obviously, you can't fly it in as extra luggage. It wouldn't even fit in the plane that comes to Deering. Was it hauled from Kotzebue across the frozen ocean on a sled? The freight bill alone to get it here must have been large. I had a new appreciation for the sofa. I began to look at everything in Deering larger than a suitcase the same way you'd look at stuff in space. How'd they ever get that four-wheeler here, that big-screen TV, that freezer, that generator? The difference between Deering and the moon, though, is that when the ice is gone, maybe some essentials, such as diesel fuel, sofas, big-screen TVs, and the one little pickup I saw, can float in on a barge. This is also one reason why when big things in a Native village like Deering break and can't be fixed, they tend to stay wherever they broke down. There's an old water truck right at Eric's house that has been there for several years.

It's not only a substantial challenge to bring stuff to outer-space colonies and villages like Deering, it's tough to get rid of what is not needed. Take human waste. (At least in Deering the stuff is not weightless, a whole separate challenge.) Getting rid of human sewage in Deering required some sophisticated engineering solutions and was a real challenge for whatever firm accepted it. It may have been an engineer trained at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, as they have one of the finest engineering schools in the country dealing in the specific problems of arctic conditions.

Until recently, waste was deposited in a “honey bucket,” not something that required an engineer. When full, the honey bucket, normally a five-gallon plastic pail, had to be hand-carried out onto the sea ice and emptied. They say that sometimes the stuff was frozen even before it hit the ice. Imagine, it's forty-two below zero and the honey bucket has to be emptied. You've waited long enough; there's no more room.

When Pat Richardson's husband goes to the International Space Development Conference in 2001 in Albuquerque, surely they will have a lecture by a space sewage expert. After all they have speakers on “space pharmacy,” “space tourism,” “economically self-sufficient space settlement on the moon,” and “taking advantage of Martian chemistry.” How well attended could the panel on “space sewage and its challenges” be? Probably pretty well, considering the seriousness of the problem. Some of the cosponsors this year were Boeing, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, the Air Force Research Laboratory, and the U.S. Department of Energy. Deering would be an excellent location for the U.S. government to put a training center for people going to live in space. It would also help in case there is alien life somewhere, because for some the adaptation to Deering's culture and way of life is difficult and challenging. Dean and Eric would receive outstanding grades for their adaptation; other teachers have not done well at all. Sometimes a teacher from the Outside wants to do it just the way he did in Las Vegas. What alien do you know who would want to do it the way they do it in Las Vegas?