North of Hope (3 page)

Walking back to Waldo Arms, I realized I had a piece of whale skin stuck in my teeth and worked on getting it out. It was persistent. It took my mind off the wind.

Back inside, I curled into an overstuffed blue plaid chair and pulled out the five map sheets Dad and Kathy had used to float the river. The paper was soft as worn felt. The maps led from Grasser’s Airstrip to the coast. Alaska—North Slope Borough, Mt. Michelson Quadrangle, 1:63,360 series, topographic. United States Department of the Interior Geological Survey. Maps indicate, among many things, a declination angle showing the variance from true north to magnetic north; earth’s magnetic fields skew a compass reading from true north as indicated on maps. Without taking this variance into account, a person could end up far from her destination. Our best understanding of direction is far removed from earth’s reality. On maps I had used before, the declination angle might be five or even seven degrees. This far north, the maps indicated an astonishing mean declination of thirty-five degrees from true north. Reconciling the different realities, the different “norths,” would require huge adjustments.

My fingers traced a tear in one of the maps. A rip from regular
use, or from the bear rampaging through the campsite? I had asked that the police destroy anything from the campsite that was mauled by the bear, terrified of opening a box containing blood-soaked shreds of nylon. But in the box of what remained from the campsite sent by the police, several things arrived intact. I used the map case Dad and Kathy had used to hold maps, their book of Alaska’s wildflowers, and a waterproof REI journal. Now I flipped through Dad and Kathy’s journal, as I had so many times before. They had alternated entries, in Kathy’s smooth hand and Dad’s almost unintelligible scrawl. Since they measured their progress by how far north they had traveled on the river, the latitude and date began each entry, the longitude determined by the course of the river. I marked each of their camps along the river and numbered the maps in order of use. I was glad for my extensive experience in map reading during years of flying helicopters in the army. This was the first opportunity I had had to mark a route on a map since my last flight, six years earlier.

As I sat with the contents of the map case, the present intruded uncomfortably on the past. What was I doing here? How did I think I was in any way qualified for this trip? I had never been to the Arctic. And the physical risks were the least of my concerns. I’d become good at taking those risks over the years. But as much as I had sought adventure, I had avoided emotional connection, a protective mechanism I had perfected rapidly after my mom left the family when I was twelve. Perpetual motion excused avoiding emotional engagement. This expedition, though, was taking me to one of the most remote areas of the world, and also to the darkest recesses of my pain. I didn’t have nearly enough experience in that landscape. My resolve flickered like a flame in a gusty wind. I willed the wick to hold on to that tiny flame. It was all I had.

The landscape and the language are the same.
And we ourselves are landscape and are land.

—Conrad Aiken, “A Letter from Li Po”

W
aldo Arms housed a varied crowd. We crossed paths at the picnic tables in the dining area. A researcher, a couple of photographers, someone who recorded bird sounds. Some were interested in the native culture, and others did not try to hide their disapproval of native practices. All expressed strong opinions on the wilderness, Alaskan wilderness guides, and animal biology. Several suggested far from subtle agendas. Though I was not overt about the reason for our trip, the extended conversations we had during the weather delay, characterized by rare and probing honesty made possible only in times and places marked by remoteness, rapidly unveiled everyone’s circumstances, including my own.

Each meal came with a serving of unsolicited opinion about the bear last year. “He must have been a garbage bear,” one naturalist confided with wrinkled brow. “Prudhoe Bay gets bears accustomed to people with all of their trash.” A couple of birders peered at me intently. “It’s the native fish camps,” they said, as though confiding a deep secret. “They leave trash all over the tundra, and the bears are used to people having food.” Each suggestion validated someone’s agenda; none were verifiable. Certainly none of them changed the outcome.

Our pilot, Tom, who had flown Dad and Kathy into Grasser’s Airstrip, came into the dining room after dinner. His graying hair and beard framed the weathered eyes of someone who has peered long into Alaska’s unknown.

“Anyone up for a polar bear swim?” he asked with a chuckle. “A German photographer did it last year!”

“Sounds cold,” I said.

“You sure you don’t want to go?”

Not only was I reluctant to submerse myself in an ice bath with polar bears, I wasn’t particularly interested in goofing off. This was not how I wanted to begin a trip fraught with so much meaning, even meaning I couldn’t quite define.

“Come on—the photographer did it! I recorded it! Watch this!”

Merilyn came into the room and leaned against the wall with a smile. “I think Tom was a little sweet on her,” she said.

Tom inserted a videotape into an ancient VCR, and the unlikely image of a pretty, laughing woman rushing into the icy ocean appeared on the old TV. She sprinted out as soon as she was in, and someone wrapped her in a towel. Laughter came from behind the camera, and the picture gave way to static.

“Brave,” I said, feeling a little inadequate.

“You sure you don’t want to swim?” The footage grayed out.

“I think I’m okay. I need to stay healthy for the river!” I smiled weakly, hoping my excuse would hold.

The fuzzy picture on the TV took form again with the faraway sound of rotor blades. We glanced back at the TV.

“Oh,” Tom said, and then he stiffened suddenly. His reaction, even fleeting, ricocheted throughout the room like a warning shot. We were not supposed to see what followed.

The tape showed a helicopter landing in fog so thick it seemed to muffle the sound of the rotor blades as they swung slowly to a stop, making a noise like a low bass chord on a piano. On the screen, the door of the helicopter opened and the pilot stepped out.
Though details were obscured by the low light and fog, his every physical aspect manifested solemnity.

“This is last year, the day they found your folks,” Tom said slowly. His confirmation of the obvious entered me like a cutting and consuming cold. I was exposed again to the elements, to the formidable forces threatening to subsume me. I was vaguely aware of a terror of the dark jokes that people make during uncomfortable circumstances—or an unseemly filming of all aspects of an event, no matter how gruesome or disturbing. But the pilot’s voice was barely audible on the videotape, deeply somber. And respectful.

The tape jumped to the next morning: an aerial view of the coastal plain, early morning sunshine deepening the rich greens of the tundra. I sucked my cheeks against my teeth. The tape showed a final view of the parked helicopter, shining white in the low-angle light, and then reverted to static. I relaxed. The few recorded scenes displayed a quiet respect for the circumstances and for Dad and Kathy. This community had a deep and elemental experience of tragedy. Natives and non-natives alike, Alaskans have a respect for the wilderness and for their own who venture into it, responding with an appropriate sense of gravity, and yet acceptance, when their adventurers do not return.

“Well, I think that’s about it,” Tom said.

“Do you think we could get a copy of that?” I asked.

“Sure thing,” Tom said.

As part of Nalukataq, the villagers had planned a dance for the evening. I headed again into the cold toward the community center, taking a seat with the few other non-natives in metal folding chairs against the far wall. Smiling children in tiny
mukluks
—embroidered boots made of skins—pranced across the floor, dancing with the happy abandon available only to small children, immersed in the joy of the moment and innocent of life’s losses. In the first row of chairs across the room, several men struck
qilaut
, large flat drums,
with sticks, the stretched skin surfaces responding with an intense resonance to the varied rhythms and force. Heavy vowel sounds emanated from deep in the men’s throats. People flowed in and out of the center of the room with exaggerated steps, reaching for the sky, gesturing to the ground. The music, the singing, the dancing seemed to invoke centuries of tradition and storytelling, prayer and incantation.

I sat awash in the energy of the room. The throaty vowels of the singers rode on the drumbeats, pulsing in the air. Somehow it seemed that these rhythms might connect dots in the picture I was trying to understand, that they might unlock a door into part of the mystery. It is said that Native American drums are the heartbeat of the world. I had forgotten my own heartbeat, but suddenly there was a fluttering at my throat.

In the Inuit (the circumpolar peoples of which the Inupiat are a part) dualistic metaphysical understanding, each person has a breath soul and a free soul. The breath soul gives life to a person, and after death becomes a name soul to protect later generations. The free soul might be located in the body or follow like a shadow. The individual breath soul is part of the cosmic breath soul, or
Sila
, also thought of as a creative life force.
¹
Words, spoken and especially sung, are expressions of this breath soul. From breath to song, the soul emerges. The cosmos speaks. If I could learn to hear it.

Every fall, the Inuit must find new songs as they prepare for feasts honoring the whale. Men go into the festival house, where no lamps can be lit. They sit in darkness and stillness and something called
qarrtsiluni
, meaning that one waits for something to happen. All men are involved, from the youngest able to speak to the oldest. They sit in this darkness and this stillness thinking only of beautiful things. As they do this, songs rise like bubbles in the sea seeking the surface, where they explode into air.
²

Everything is connected. In trying to understand an event so seemingly inexplicable and yet so much of the wilderness itself,
as were Dad and Kathy’s deaths, I had to believe this, even if I did not feel it. I had to believe in some sort of an order so that chaos would not overwhelm me. But I didn’t understand it. Not at all.

The party showed no signs of slowing, so at nine o’clock I quietly headed back to the bunkhouse to rest for the next day, walking on the frozen dirt roads under skies dimmed to an early twilight. I maneuvered down the gangplank into the bunkhouse, where Ned and Sally were already asleep, and wiggled into my sleeping bag atop the dingy mattress, closing my eyes against the filtered light.

Sleep was not to last long. An hour later, I blinked awake to banging on the makeshift door.

“There’s a polar bear at the bone pile!” a voice I quickly identified as belonging to our pilot, Tom, yelled. “We’re leaving in three minutes to take a look!”

“You guys going to go?” I asked quietly, unzipping my sleeping bag.

“Nope,” mumbled Sally, not moving.

“Yeah, of course!” said Ned.

Even in the middle of the night, a dawn-like light filtered through the cracks in the walls and broken windows, allowing just enough vision to quickly throw on polypropylene and hiking boots, which I did in about forty-five seconds. Despite the light, the air was frigid, as though the brightness lost from the day had stolen along with it all semblance of warmth, and the light breeze off the polar ice clawed at our bare faces. Along with six other intrepid tourists, Ned and I piled into an old Suburban. Tom sped down the gravel road, around the gravel airstrip, and past the aircraft hangars, bumping toward the pile of whale bones on the far edge of the village.

Ice extended to the horizon from just offshore, and but for the thin strip of water that separated the island from the ice, glistening black in the low light, the ice might have been a continuation of the land. Here were two worlds apart, yet one. The bone pile, a
record of successful autumn whaling expeditions, stood terrible against the white background. Countless bones, many larger than the Suburban, were silhouetted eerily in the soft light. And then we saw the bear. At first it was only a movement behind the bone pile, a shift in the landscape. And then his form emerged. His head was sleek as a seal, his Brobdingnagian body shaped smooth as a river-worn rock, all slopes and soft edges. He wore his sovereignty easily. Paws the size of dinner platters meant for swimming Arctic seas rummaged through hunks of whale fat among the bones, the same whale fat we had eaten as muktuk earlier that day. The bear looked toward the Suburban only briefly, more interested in finding his meal. We kept a reverent distance, each of us prickling with awareness and cold. Bodies hung out of every car window; freezing fingers pressed camera shutters. The bear lumbered toward us, swaying gently, then moved away again. He bore with surety the incongruity of ultimate power and a dancer’s lissome grace. I envied him his perfect design, his complete confidence in his body, his surroundings, his world. He was as elegant, as fluid, as water as he scavenged for sustenance among the remains of the dead.

Inuits believe that the bear is special. Every animal species has a collective breath soul, except for the bear, the whale, and the dog, which have individual breath souls. While most ceremonies related to animals are devoted to the entire species, those that celebrate the bear are devoted to the soul of the individual bear. The polar bear spirit Torngarsuk can be, as with grizzlies, part of a ritual for shamanic initiation involving the initiate’s reduction to a skeleton and then reconstitution as a shaman. Death, and resurrection into sacred life. Inuit in other parts of the world have considered the bear spirit the ruler of the afterlife, and other northern cultures have considered it a guide for souls.

Reduction. Reconstitution. How does one in the midst of reduction maintain faith in reconstitution? Quarrtsiluni. Waiting.