The Ragged Edge of the World (25 page)

Then there were the nuclear tests, several of which released radioactive debris into the area. Alekseev told me that levels of plutonium 239 and 240 in parts of Yakutia rivaled those in the soils adjacent to Chernobyl for contamination. Finally, there is the curse called the Arctic Front, an artifact of geophysics that defines the boundary between polar and subpolar climate zones. It is the product of global air currents that collect contaminants from throughout the Northern Hemisphere and pool them over the polar region during wintertime. Its role in the distribution of toxics came to light in the 1970s, when an American scientist taking air samples discovered to his amazement that at certain times of the year the remote Far North has worse air pollution readings than many cities in the United States.

The contaminants condense and fall with snow, and then during the spring melt they enter the tundra food chain, where they are taken up by animals and plants and the people who eat them. Men, women and children living thousands of miles north of industrial cities carry mercury in their hair and blood and carcinogens in their fat, and often suffer cancers and other afflictions more commonly associated with jobs in factories and mines. Alekseev casually enumerated the burden that both local and distant pollution places upon isolated Yakutia: high rates of cancer, gastrointestinal illnesses, kidney problems, and opportunistic infections that take advantage of weak immune systems.

Cherski was a run-down port town that had lost half its population over the years. Huge cranes—the Russians have a thing for enormous equipment—stood idle everywhere. As I was to discover, the river between Cherski and the Arctic Ocean had not been dredged or charted in many decades. The one anomalous note was a number of fit young men wearing track warm-ups, the uniform of choice for hit men. Andrei told us that the town is a “riverbed,” a place where mafia hit men chill out between jobs. Our local contact, Olga Kulishova, said she didn't mind the presence of the mafia, because the bigger criminals kept the local thugs in line, and because the mafia supplied the police department with cars and equipment.

Between them Andrei and Olga lined up a boat to take us up to the Arctic Ocean. It was a Russian-government pilot vessel, over a hundred feet long and with a crew of ten. (In those days, almost anything was available for rent in Russia.) With nothing else to do, the captain, Vladimir, was happy to charter it to us for the three-day trip up and back for $500.

We set off, and not too far north of Cherski we ran aground on a sand bar for the first time. After some rocking we were off, and then about an hour later we ran aground again. In the course of the trip this would recur over a dozen times, with subsequent delays ranging from a few minutes to three hours. It was all too clear that the Russian coast guard could have used some updated charts. During our enforced idleness we watch a pirated version of the original
The Poseidon Adventure
.

Gradually making our way farther north, we came upon a tiny native settlement and were invited into the main, reindeer-skin tent-house, which had an open fire burning at its center. The chief, Slava Kemlil, wiry and weathered, told us that there were about thirty Chukchi elders in this community. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, he explained, they had been left alone, not that they'd had much contact with officials before. “Nobody brings us anything,” he said, “and we were the last to be supplied, anyway. Now we are absolutely independent, and it's better. No chiefs order us around.”

The Chukchis are probably the most isolated group in the Northern Hemisphere. While the Soviets might have wanted to bring them under their influence, they probably had a hard time finding anyone willing to take on the task of riding herd on these reindeer hunters. They live in the coldest place in the Northern Hemisphere, scraping out a life despite constant howling winds. Even in the summer, bone-chilling fogs sap the joy from the long days. In my notebook, my notes read, “coldest fog imaginable!”

Not everyone in the room agreed that things were better now. One pointed out that only when a Chukot named Nikolai held a position in government had any attention been paid to their needs—mostly medical—but then admitted, “After him, nobody cared.” Another pointed out that in some of the other villages, people had not received any payments from the government in six years.

What little cash this settlement, called Yaronga, received came from the sale of caribou meat. They devised their own system of income distribution: half to those who did the work and half to the community. Given the importance of community to each member's survival, the system had a brilliant simplicity.

In certain respects this village was closer to its traditional roots than were the Penan villages. The people were quite hospitable, ceremoniously inviting us for tea. As Slava told it, they lived a mostly barter existence, living on caribou and fish, and hunting polar wolf and polar bear for skins to make clothes. Without elaboration, he said that they still practiced their traditional religion, and that the entire group joined in songfests—traditionally, they compose a song when each child is born, mentioning every member of the baby's extended family. The firstborn takes the surname of the father, the second born that of the mother. Slava then added, “And so on,” though I had no idea what that meant for the third, fourth, and other successive children.

My first impression was that these natives had a truly miserable existence, but as I listened to Slava's common sense and tried to get Olga to translate the matriarch's witty interjections, that initial notion gave way to one of respect. These were relatively happy people. After a mild comment about the bureaucracy in Yakutia, Slava said, “We know it's a sin to complain—if we want to make things better we should work.” I can't remember the last time I heard a remark like that in the developed world. That sentiment may have been a legacy of having survived a regime where a complaint could land you in the gulag just downstream, but the Soviet Union had collapsed several years earlier, and more likely it reflected the ethos of an ancient people whose survival depended on what they did, not good intentions.

Where the Chukchis make their living is where Stalin sent his imagined enemies to die. The Russian leader paid his respects to the harshness of life on the edge of the Arctic Ocean by sending political prisoners to a place where the extraordinarily harsh environment provided security and the weather did his killing for him. From 1938 until 1953, tens of thousands were sent to Ambarchik, a bleak, flimsy encampment hard by the Arctic Ocean, where very few survived. Most were fit for work only for the first three months from their arrival, after which the combination of cold, starvation, abuse and hard labor mortally sapped their will to live.

After leaving Slava, his nineteen grandchildren and their warm fire, we picked our way down to Ambarchik. Even in August, a couple of hours outside were barely tolerable. The pathetic fallacy was alive and well in Ambarchik, as we disembarked amid windblown fog so frigid that it was as if a cold ghost were invading your body core. Here and there we could see human bones sticking up through the soil. We could also see the remains of the wood lattice that made up the walls of the barracks that housed the prisoners, providing little protection against the elements. Slava and his family were far cozier in their animal-skin tents than any prisoner in Ambarchik. Stalin's loathsome minions succeeded in turning housing design into an instrument of murder. After touring this place of sorrow and death we headed back toward the relative warmth of Cherski and Yakutsk, again running aground constantly.

Yakutia's blood-drenched history and toxic legacies from the USSR notwithstanding, the republic still holds great promise. With good government, its tiny population might prospect the fantastic riches Yakutia contains in the form of diamonds, gold, base metals and minerals. That said, the vast country is also part of an Arctic time bomb that threatens the entire world. All of Yakutia lies on permafrost, and the permafrost both traps and caps enormous amounts of methane, a greenhouse gas with roughly twenty times the potency for warming of CO
₂
. Much of the methane is trapped in a permafrost structure called a clathrate, a cagelike structure that traps the gas in a lattice of frozen water. If the lattice melts, the gas is released, and there are an estimated 400 gigatons of methane contained in permafrost clathrates.

Throughout the Arctic, permafrost is proving less permanent than the name implies, which establishes the potential for one of those ugly surprises that could act as rocket fuel for global warming. As melting permafrost releases methane, for instance, it enhances warming, which in turn reduces the duration and extent of reflective snow cover, which further enhances warming, which speeds the melting of permafrost, releasing more methane, and on and on in a vicious circle. The nightmare scenario is that at some point this process could become out of control, or nonlinear, as scientists drily describe it, resulting in a sudden massive release of methane, either from the Arctic or perhaps from deep under the ocean. Such so-called methane burps are suspected as the cause of massive climate disruptions such as the Paleo-Eocene Thermal Maximum of 55 million years ago, and also as contributing to the greatest known extinction event at the end of the Permian epoch, 251 million years ago.

While it may someday kill us all, the melting permafrost is in the meantime performing one helpful, unexpected service—urban renewal. The hideous Stalin-era construction in Yakutia was built on top of permafrost. As it melts, many of these eyesores are beginning to lean and sometimes topple. The Sakha Republic may one day be able to invest some of its windfall from diamonds and minerals into replacing these derelict monuments to despair with better-designed, better-constructed buildings.

Climate change figured only indirectly in my trips to Beringia and Siberia, but it was the main reason I returned to the Arctic, or more precisely the near Arctic, in 2000. Much has been written about the ways in which the warming Arctic is affecting the web of life, but no one story more exquisitely frames its impact than the plight of the polar bear. Of all the polar bear populations throughout the Northern Hemisphere, the most vulnerable are the bears of Hudson Bay, whose existence depends entirely on the extent and duration of the winter sea ice.

The polar bear is a magnificent predator. It can swim over a hundred miles at a stretch, and the males can grow to 11 feet long and 2,000 pounds. (Not having to deal with gravity for a significant portion of your day removes one of the impediments to growing to enormous dimensions.) In Hudson Bay the bears get almost all of their sustenance by hunting ringed seals in a delicately balanced system: The seals use the sea ice as a platform from which to hunt capelin, an Arctic fish, and the bears use it in turn as a platform from which to hunt seals.

Currently, Hudson Bay is the southernmost limit of polar bears. During the Little Ice Age, a series of cold periods that is commonly dated from about the beginning of the fourteenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth, they did move farther south. The French explorer Jacques Cartier wrote about sightings of polar bears in the St. Lawrence River in the 1600s, something that hasn't occurred since. In July 2000 I flew up to Churchill on the western shores of Hudson Bay in the Canadian province of Manitoba, taking a room, appropriately enough, at the Polar Motel. As a town Churchill consists of a charmless strip of sheds and tilt-ups, but it draws tourists by the thousand due to its being the polar bear capital of Canada, thanks to its location on a peninsula that is directly in the line of the annual migration route cycle on and off the sea ice. If the ice freezes early—say, late October or the beginning of November—the bears, traveling north on the western side of the bay, will walk out onto the ice south of Churchill, but the later the freeze, the more likely they will pass through town. As the Arctic has warmed over recent decades, the average date of this freeze has moved from November 15 on into December. This creates a problem, because the town dump lies directly in the bears' migration path, and the bears, being opportunistic, will rummage around for food. Such Dumpster diving is dangerous for both bears and humans, and so Manitoba has instituted a policy of jailing bears to discourage the practice.

I had set up a series of meetings with various scientists and officials, and one of the first people I connected with was Wade Roberts, an officer of Manitoba Conservation, whose thankless job it was to jail the thousandpound predators. As he explained it, the drill is to dart the bears and then place them in the jail's twenty-three specially constructed barred cages for a few days before flying them 35 miles farther north to the ice edge, where they are released. The wildlife officials don't feed the incarcerated bears because they want the experience to be as unpleasant as possible. (In the past they did feed their animal captives, and some bears started trying to break into the jail in search of food.) Bears are smart and quickly figure out that the dump is to be avoided, but as with humans, the young bears are more prone to foolish mistakes than their wiser elders.