As far north as one can travel in Alaska, a good 300 miles above the  Arctic Circle, a string of small coastal villages speckle the landscape on a vast backdrop of snow and sea and ice.  The villages, spanning an area of about 500 miles east to west, starve for light in the winter months.  By late November, the sun makes its final exit, dipping below the tundra line, and not showing face again until the end of January.  This is a fascinating occurrence, one the villagers take note of, watching from the windows of their homes and workplaces and stepping outdoors to witness the ultimate pausing of light.

Of all my travels across numerous Alaskan land and seascapes, these small villages at the top of the world, locked in a snowy darkness in winter, and void of vegetation but for thick tundra grasses in the abbreviated summers, intrigue me most.  It is there I have seen a cerulean sky vibrant against thick May snows, a color I could not reproduce on film though I have tried many times; a color that made my heart leap.  And the seeming emptiness of the arctic is truly magical; undisturbed by development, there’s legroom, breathing space, a virtual freedom one can taste.  Walking the tundra grasses in August and being swallowed up in silence invariably empties me of my self-conceived boundaries; and temporarily, even my burdens.

What I find most astonishing, though, is the sea ice, an almost steady companion of the northern people from early fall through early summer.  It has a strange motility and like an angry ocean or foreboding wind, a detached and unforgiving character.  Yet people who live and travel on the sea ice trust it completely and live their lives with an acute focus and resolve required of living within, and not separate from a landscape that requires due diligence.  There is one tenet upon which all circumpolar people agree: when the sea ice starts moving, absolutely nothing can stop it.

***

Circling over Barrow in a Beech 99 on an early December visit, I scanned the sky and land, looking for a clear demarcation between the two, but there was none. The plane shuddered and hummed, suspended in a void of dull gray space as we waited for an opening in the overcast air. After twenty minutes, the grid of town became visible and an array of streetlights insolently pierced the early morning fog.  On the other side of this manufactured light, the frozen tundra extended into a vast and dark emptiness that at a glance, belied feasible life.

On the ground, ice fog hovered over buildings and billows of exhaust coughed from buses and cars in this village of roughly five thousand.  Barrow, the largest and northern most settlement on the shores of the Beaufort Sea, boasts a recently built modern grocery store, a generous public library, and an Inupiat Cultural Center that vividly interprets the Eskimo’s lifestyle past to present, highlighting the juxtaposition of land and people in one of the harshest environments on earth.

The following day, I set out at dawn, which is late morning this far north, and walked a dirt road that parallels the shoreline in Barrow.  Though the skies were clear, it was still dusky and the bright snow offered but a paltry light.  The temperature hung at 15 below, exacerbated by a heavy-handed wind scouring the streets of town, spitting up grit and snow in tornado-like squalls around my feet.  The sea was black and choppy and water lapped the beach in curls of flimsy white foam.

Returning to my hotel in the darkness of late afternoon, I was startled to see house-sized chunks of ice, old ice that had migrated shoreward from the North Pole ice pack, magically littering the shoreline in chaotic formations.  The ice blocks, lusterless and sodden with debris lie stark and naked; out of place and strange compared to the relatively flat shoreline view I’d witnessed just hours earlier.  By nightfall the wind shifted, urging the fugitive blocks from their places of rest, and expedited them out to open sea.  Remarkably, in a brushstroke of time the wind died, the blocks disappeared, and the sea assumed an eerily flat and black calmness as though nothing monumental had occurred there at all.

I had never before thought of ice as being old, or young, or new, or rotting.  But after spending weeks in the arctic throughout various seasons, I have come to understand its changing faces, how ice never knows stillness.  While traveling near the coastal village of Pt. Hope in a small plane, I made a mental note of the directions printed on the door:  “To open, hold button in, pull handle.”  I rehearsed this in case we’d go down; how to open the door if it were not wedged into sea ice, if water did not wash over us in the freezing twisted metal.  In a world parallel to ours the unimaginable happens.  It had been only weeks since a similar small plane crashed when immense fog closed in just before takedown.  Five whalers; brothers, sons and fathers of the nearby village, were tragically pulled through the slipknot of eternity in a plane that nose-dived into young sea ice.

Over the past ten years, unseasonably warm temperatures have permeated the villages on the arctic coast.  Before this gradual warming trend, it was common by the end of September for large masses of ice from the northern ice pack to break off and migrate south to connect with newly frozen ice on shore, forming shorefast ice that is solid enough for travel.  But in recent years, I’ve heard villagers talk of how the ice is breaking up earlier in the spring and freezing later in winter, sometimes as late as January.  Thin ice disrupts the spring and fall whale hunts, making it difficult to travel by snow machine to traditional whaling hunting grounds miles off shore.  It also provides for less area available for a villager’s recreation.  “We used to go riding around on the sea until the beginning of June,” one elder told me.  “But this year the ice is too thin.”

A sign that reads, Whale Spoken Here, hangs in the arctic entryway of Daniel Akootchook’s small wood framed home in Kaktovik, a village on Barter Island east of Barrow.  A picture of the Last Supper hangs above his kitchen table next to a British Petroleum Exploration calendar and a sprawling geological map of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.  Whale muktuk and blubber for the dogs fill a huge metal bowl next to the door.  A retired whaling captain, Daniel eagerly feeds my fascination with the perennial behavior of sea ice through his stories and personal recollections. “Sometimes we go ten, twenty miles out,” he says.  “We never know when the whale will come.  If it gets too windy, the ice could break up so we wait.  Wait for good weather.”

Elders and hunters along the arctic coast, who are authorities at traveling and living on sea ice, wait patiently for old ice to come in and stay, or for new ice to pile up and thicken until it’s deep and stable enough for travel.  Near the village of Nuiqsut, west of Kaktovik, old ice rarely forms.  Rather than push old ice from the northern ice pack, the wind runs parallel to the coast at freeze-up and there is only new, first year ice.  If old ice does show up, it is usually towards late summer and it rarely stays long.  Never still the ice fractures and splits with audible groans marking the turbulence of change.  With westerly winds, it shapes the shoreline in upheaving folds, pushing up and caving in on itself.  As mysterious as their arrival, the huge bodies of rotting ice meander back out to sea, sometimes surviving multi-years, obliged to the rhythms of changing winds and currents.

One spring on a visit to Barrow, I was invited to travel out on the ice with a young Inupiat man to watch a whaling crew keep vigil.  Adhering to tradition, it was required he ask the whaling captain for permission to bring along an “outsider.”  One whaler looked me over and inquired if I was with child; due to the inherent dangers, pregnant women are not allowed out on the ice.  I unzipped my parka to reveal a camera with long lens, where I kept it snug and free from the frigid May air.  The sun’s angle, sharp and concentrated, shines like a laser beam, yet the slightest of arctic breezes can numb fingers and toes within seconds.  Satisfied, the whaler nodded; I was good to go.

John, a humble man in his late twenties, was my guide.  He carried a rifle on his back to ward off polar bears and wore a white traditional whaling parka to blend in with the austere landscape.  The trail was bumpy; I squeezed my thighs into the machine and held onto him tightly.  Bouncing along, we skirted massive chunks of sea-foam green ice sculpted skillfully in the midday sun.  We stopped to view polar bear tracks filled with frost crystals, probably a day old, and twice as big as my own footprint.  John said that after a whale or seal catch, bears often follow a man’s trail over sea ice, if scented with blood or seal oil.  For the remainder of the ride I kept a steady surveillance over my shoulder.  Black beady eyes and nose, its coat blending superbly with the stark landscape, I imagined a hunkering bear crossing the trail, curiously drawn to the scent of intruders weaving through its frozen turf.

The sea horizon or, one could call it the ice horizon, unfolded in all directions, radiant against a polished sky.  On the ice, the world appeared immense and whitewashed clean.  The constraints of time and space melted away, and my heart simply soared with joy.  The dreamlike backdrop of sun and sky and ice, the cold on my cheeks, the fresh clean bursts of air drew out a visceral contentment that is rarely glimpsed in my everyday life cluttered with busy work, people and possessions.  On the sea ice, miles away from the comforts of town in a place equally dangerous as breathtaking; the sky so close I felt wrapped in it, and the magnificent air, real as a glass of cold white wine.

We traveled another few miles, speeding over hard rippled waves.  The trail turned into smooth hard-packed snow further on then narrowed into a burnished glaze.  I leaned into John’s back as he negotiated wiry switchbacks and we swerved around piles of crushed sea ice.  Arriving at camp, we parked the machine and walked to the ice edge. A couple other whaling crews were camped along the lead, their white tents and distinctive colored flags emblazoned with the whaling captain’s name, hung motionless in the cold still air.

The lead, a wide linear crack in the ice where whale and seal are harvested, was several miles long.  Peering over the crusted lip, the ice, salient and immediate, was at once eclipsed by an immensely deep and blackened sea.  I looked down at my boots, hovering near the edge, and watched the flat water shimmer brightly.  The gradation between ice and water was distinct yet seamless; it was like standing on the edge of two disparate worlds, each boundless and titanic in its own right.  Bloodstained snow under my feet was evidence of a whale taken a week prior.  Nearby a young boy sat atop a hummock, the crushed sea ice piled fifteen feet beneath him, and patiently scanned the horizon.  The air was silent; the men still, watching and waiting for a whale to call their name.

A small whale, the beluga, surfaced twenty feet in front of us, its smooth white body lifting and plunging in an unsevered rhythm.  It was followed by a seamless pod of orchestrated movement; dozens of whales swimming like porpoises close enough to touch from the ice edge.  The whalers watched and waited, desiring the bowhead, the only baleen whale with a range restricted to icebound seas, for their catch.

John told me it is the whale that ultimately decides when it will come and offer itself to the crew; the process can never be hurried.  The whale is shot from a boat and floated back to the ice for butchering, yet he spoke of catching the twenty ton mammal as elegantly as a bird held softly in your hands.  Though my mind swirled with questions, John’s nonverbal language seemed to discourage them and through his example I found myself simply waiting and watching.  The whalers appeared to have enduring patience, quietly moving about on the ice (the whale can hear you) with a calm deliberance.  Some remained unmoving in boats readied to shove into the sea when the time was right; others watched from the ice edge with their weathered hands clasped around mugs of hot coffee, making mental notes of subtle shifts in clouds and wind and temperature.

Living its days under dark murky water, the bowhead whale’s eyesight is poor, but it hears sounds well; the sounds of men on ice, their heavy footfalls announcing intermittent bursts of activity.  Under the faint light of evening that never entirely turns dark, the sun’s reflection dissipated and a light mist hovered over the open lead.  A gentle wind blew a veil of weightless snow over our feet.  We had spent hours waiting and watching.  For reasons unknown to us, today the bowhead decided not to do its bidding.

We readied to leave.  In hushed tones, John told me if south-southwest winds pick up the crew would be disappointed; the winds could completely close the lead.  John motioned us past the tents to the row of red and yellow snow- machines, arresting blots of color suspended peacefully on the ice; a peculiar mixture of modern technology contrasted with a hunting ritual as ancient as man himself.  Hundreds of ducks in a spattered “V” clamored overhead.  Moments later, a hundred more skimmed the water’s surface then flushed skyward in a rush of activity.  We turned our backs to the sea and began the rugged ride under a dusky sky back to solid ground.

***

I had heard remarkable stories from the elders, of their lives on the ice prior to the 1960′s, before the advent of snowmachines.  In one, a party of five men and their dog team were traveling on the sea ice hunting for seal.  Mild spring temperatures and winds from the north created plentiful new leads.  In a matter of hours, the wind changed to the west and broke up the ice behind the men, setting them drifting on a single floe.  They did not know they were on a drifting piece of pack ice until nightfall when they were in the trough of big waves.  Mysteriously the moon kept disappearing below the horizon in a wavelike rhythm. For three days, cold and shaken, they lay stranded on floating ice, helpless and adrift.  At night, they climbed huge piles of crushed ice to sleep on.  By day they traveled carefully toward shore where the edge of the giant floe was shearing and crumbling against the safer, shorefast ice.

The moving ice creaked and rumbled beneath them as temperatures plummeted.  Crossing the ever-changing floe to the shorefast ice was risky.  The ice opened and closed so quickly one man’s feet were caught in a crack as he attempted to cross, and had to be chiseled free.  Avoiding further risk, the party built a snow shelter and stayed put in the hopes of waiting for a rescue.  Two of the younger men became impatient with the arrangement and pushed on, walking all day long.  Fraught with exhaustion, both fell asleep on the ice, never to awaken.  Meanwhile, the elder men, finding driftwood for a fire, and melting snow in a can for drinking water, lived to recount the story.

More recently, a group of experienced whalers and their crews floated helplessly when a floe of shorefast ice as large a football field broke off without warning into the Chukchi Sea.  Several crewmembers raced across the splitting ice on their snow-machines just in time to escape the emerging floe.  The sky drawn heavy with fog, made it nearly impossible to find the others until rescue teams turned to technology, using satellite-tracking equipment to find them.  Once located, daring helicopter pilots landed on the fog-entrenched floe and airlifted the crewmembers back to solid ground.  Within hours, the lilting ice rolled and pitched and severed into smaller floating islands as snowmachines and other oddments left behind slipped headlong into the stirring blackened sea.

***

Only a couple weeks remained of the spring whale hunt on the arctic coast, and by June or July, depending on wind and temperature, the sea ice would start rotting.  Old ice would become ungrounded and shift seaward; shorefast ice would melt.  The whalers would go home and wait for the ice to continue its eternal ritual, and ardently pray for an early solid freeze to ensure a productive hunt the following autumn.

In the meantime, villagers clad in T-shirts at 40 degrees drive their snowmachines as far out as the sea ice will hold them and sit for hours watching flocks of old squaw take wing.  Children ride their bikes on the frozen tundra, and jump small floes at the shoreline in their play.  The arctic sea ice, like our momentary lives, is always moving and changing; appearing and reappearing, as transient and predictable as a moonrise.  Yet what is certain to reside in the tracks of our impermanence is a solid and unwavering trust that we will be held and supported into the next, and the next, lucid season.

Ed Note: Ms. Devine’s essay, “On the Edge of Ice,” won first place in the Dorothy Churchill Cappon Award for Creative Nonfiction with the literary magazine New Letters. We are honored to include this among our many outstanding works.

I’ve always wondered why my husband Dan loves guiding for Arctic Wild. Every year since I’ve known him, he usually disappears for a few weeks in Alaska, returning sunburned, disheveled, yet also happy and more ‘centered’.

This year I had the opportunity to travel with him, on a trip with 4 other people canoeing the Kokolik river.

The first time I truly realized this trip was special was when it took two bush plane pick-up and landings to get there and back. I could see thousands of caribou during the flights. I also saw herds of muskox and watched a grizzly bear chase something, stumble and somersault! Before I knew it, our pilot Dirk was landing the plane next to the Kokolik river. I climbed off, helped unload the baggage and watched the plane fly away, leaving us far from civilization.

Photos really don’t do this place justice. I really hadn’t appreciated how far and wide and north Alaska is. The terrain and wide skies are beautiful. Even the clouds seem bigger here. The scenery was inspiring. After we set up camp, I followed some muddy caribou tracks to the river and found a place to sit, beginning a short series of trip sketches.

During our trip, we rowed over 60 miles through some varied landscapes. Initially we’d hoped to see the migrating caribou. On the very first day we began encountering animals I didn’t even think I’d have a chance to see.

Over the duration of the trip, we saw thousands of caribou (some with babies), some very close. Also 3 grizzlies, a beautiful white/tan wolf, 3 wolverines (I think it was a female and her 2 young), herds of muskoxen, 2 foxes, loads of fat marmots and arctic squirrels. Terrific birding- we saw and heard many ptarmigan, sandpipers, plovers, gulls, ruddy turnstones, harlequin ducks, perigrine, gyrfalcons, rough-legged hawks, gold eagles, merlins, canada geese and more.

There were no real trees. Many bushes, but mostly grass and flowers– food for caribou. The wildflowers were stunning.

Almost every day we hiked, then canoed to new places to camp. The sun never set, it was bright all night,

much to everyone’s delight- especially for the birders in the group.

Dan, as the guide, did the cooking and coffee making for us. No lower-48 restaurant has the view we enjoyed every night! He also brought a scope, and pointed out other views for us to see. He was quite busy, and obviously enjoying himself. I couldn’t hog him all to myself. After dinner the group would sip cider, coffee or tea and talk about what we’d seen during the day. We had an fun group of people with lively discussions, especially regarding trying to identify the bird songs we heard.

How was the weather? A little bipolar. Some days, warm in the upper 60′s turning quickly to cool and stormy. Hail, thunderstorms and wind. Rainbows, double and triple rainbows, sunny blue skies. Extremely beautiful clouds, stormclouds or white fluffy clouds.

You can hopefully see from my sketches the basic camp that was set up– a cook tent, washing area and another tent where we could huddle inside if it was raining. Everyone set up their personal tents far away from the cook tent, and from each other. I was fascinated by the skies and textures of the rocks, flowers and grasses.

Unfortunately, despite the long sunny days, the trip seemed to end quickly. We canoed down the river one last time, unloaded our gear and waited for the plane to return us to Fairbanks.

I’m glad I was able to take the trip, and feel fortunate to have seen the wild in the wild. Who knows how long this piece of country will remain as it is? One day I hope to bring my son, so he’ll be able to view this beauty for himself.

Hard working guide

The Arctic Refuge turns 49 today, and it is time to think about the many dedicated people who have protected the refuge for the past 50 years.

Back in the 1950s two stellar adventurers and outstanding conservationists – Olaus and Mardi Murie visited the northeastern corner of Alaska. The federal government asked them to scope out the wildlife and wilderness values of this little known part of the North America. Long story short, the Muries discovered a great wilderness and dedicated a good portion of the rest of their lives to protecting it; the Arctic National Wildlife Range was created by President Eisenhower on Dec. 6, 1960. The effort by the Muries and others in pushing for the creation of the Arctic Range set the example that would be followed over the next 50 years– the importance of grassroots support and pressure.

During the 1970s the conservation community pushed to pass the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA) to protect millions of acres of critical wildlife habitat and special places across Alaska. One of the most controversial parts of this massive legislation was the coastal plain of the Arctic Range. The oil industry and their friends in DC wanted the coastal plain opened to oil development. Conservationists, scientists and many in the Alaska Native community wanted to see this area included in the Wilderness provisions of ANILCA. In the end, the ANILCA passed and was signed by President Carter in December of 1980. However, Congress settled on a compromise – the coastal plain was not put in Wilderness, yet it would require another act of Congress to open it to oil development – and this set up one of the most iconic struggles of the last 30 years. (The ANILCA changed the name of the Range to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and expanded it to almost 20 million acres. Still, the 1.5 million acres of the coastal plain remained the ‘biological heart’ and ground zero for the oil controversy.)

In the 1980s under President Reagan the oil industry yet again set their sights on the coastal plain. They made a serious push to include Arctic Refuge drilling in an energy bill. This prompted intense public reaction. In the spirit of the Muries and the champions of ANILCA, thousands of people engaged to resist the efforts of oil lobbyists. Many people like Glendon Brunk and Lenny Kohm put their lives on hold and took to the road to share the importance of the coastal plain of the Arctic Refuge. The two of them gave thousands of slideshows to  Americans across the country and urged folks to stand up to do something to protect this special place. The situation was pretty desperate.

Then the worst oil disaster in America’s history happened. The Exxon Valdez ran aground in Prince William Sound, spilling at least 11 million gallons of oil. This cooled the jets of the oil lobbyists, and the controversial disaster helped to keep the Refuge protected.

Again in the mid-90s the oil industry, with the help of Newt Gingrich and the ‘Republican Revolution’ put the Alaska’s delegation (Young, Murkowski, and Stevens) in powerful positions. They made another run at opening the Refuge, and once again people from all across the country and all walks of life stepped up to meet the challenge.

Arctic Activist, Dan Ritzman

This is where I enter the picture. I moved to Alaska and began working at the Northern Alaska Environmental Center in Fairbanks. On a lobby trip to Washington DC I met Ron Yarnell the owner of Arctic Wild, and convinced Ron that with my guiding background he should let me lead trips for him. I found myself on the Hulahula River which cuts right across the coastal plain and drains into the Arctic Ocean. I fell in love with the place and a big part of my life ever since has been working with folks across the county to keep the oil industry out of the Refuge. Thanks to the continued efforts of people like Lenny and Glendon, and Pam Miller, and David van den Berg, Adam Kolton, Brian O’Donnell  and hundreds of others, President Clinton stepped up and vetoed the bill with Arctic drilling in it. Newt blinked and the Arctic was safe again.

It’s still not over. In 2000 the Supreme Court appointed Bush 2 to the Presidency. Many political observers believed that the Refuge was doomed. But once again they discounted the power of the will of the people.  It has been demonstrated to me over and over that our political leaders can be moved. Again when it looked bad, some great leaders like Cindy Shogan stepped up. During this time I was living in Washington DC running the national grassroots efforts of the Alaska Coalition. We had organizers in key states across the country and it felt like we had volunteers everywhere.

We lost a key vote early in the House of Representatives and put all of our attention on the Senate. There were rallies across the country in big cities and small towns and there was creativity. In North Dakota an entire congregation of a Unitarian Church signed a letter to their Senator asking for protection of the coastal plain and it just so happened that that Senator’s father was the founder of that particular church. Activists rode their bikes across the country giving slideshows; all the stops were pulled out. Eventually the fight turned back to the House and we needed to convince the moderate Republicans to admit that conservation is a bipartisan issue. It appeared the refuge was going to be developed. But again people rose to the occasion. One of those moderates was Rep Reichert from WA. When he took office, Reichert looked like a vote against the Arctic Refuge but then the activists in his area started to organize. Working with Shannon Harp, a Sierra Club organizer, they put together a plan to show Reichert that the people of his District really wanted to protect the Refuge – that this was the right thing to do. After months of letters and phone calls and rallies, once again conservation prevailed.

Not only did Rep. Reichert vote to protect the Refuge but he became a leader on the Republican side for protecting the Refuge and other special places!

Unfotunately, this part of the story for me has a tragic ending. I moved to Seattle and took a job with the Sierra Club. Shannon Harp was one of the organizers in my region. Shannon’s life came to a senseless end in December of 2007 – a terrible blow to her family, her friends and the community. Shannon, incredibly, had never been to the Arctic Refuge. She still did her best to protect the place and made a lasting impression on at least one important decision maker. When I’m at my desk I can look up and see a poster that Shannon and the Sierra Club created with the Alaska Coalition. It highlights that drilling in the Refuge will not save any money at the gas pump and that drilling will ruin an amazing place for future generations. Working to protect the Refuge was one of Shannon’s gifts to future generations.

As we count down to the golden anniversary of the Arctic Refuge, we should remember all of the people who have worked hard to give this gift to future generations. I think our soul needs wild places and sometimes it is only through very strenuous action that these places are able to stay wild.

Thanks to all of you who have worked for the refuge.

Wolverine on the Utokok, by Josh Ferris

Lying in northwestern Alaska, the Utukok River twists 200 miles through sharply folded green hills with rocky ridges that stretched east and west in long rows – Archimedes Ridge, Meat Mountain, Eskimo Hill. Once you’re on a ridge the hiking is easy.

One night I turned from Richard and Sharon, saying I would take another route down and see them soon in camp, but instead of returning to camp, I decided to climb to the top of a nearby knoll for the view.  That knoll lead to a slightly higher knoll beyond, and then another.  I knew that I might never reach the summit, so I hiked faster and faster, trying to make the final peak that I felt was close.  But a moose cow and calf appeared in a ravine and scrambled to the top of the final knoll.  The cow and calf stood there framed in silhouette against the sun.  The cow approached the brow of a hillside and gauged the route of their escape.  The land fell sharply away in a steep decline.  I didn’t have the heart to push them on – they had come up here to take refuge from the mosquitoes that formed relentless clouds everywhere but on the windy hilltops.  I reluctantly turned back.  But with my goal abandoned, I turned to see that the low tundra and rocks were glowing in russet light.  Every blade of grass and flower stood out from deepening shadow.  I ran back down the hill feeling foolish and full of life, everything beat at once, and the world glowed.  Two figures emerged over the brow of a hill calling my name.  Long past midnight Richard and I sat talking in the cook tent, long enough to watch a wolverine scramble along the far bank in a roiling mass of fur and muscle, piss on a stump and hunt on again.

“The Wild Geese,” from The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry

Geese appear high over us, pass, and the sky closes.    Abandon, as in love or sleep, holds them to their way, clear, in the ancient faith: what we need is here.

The Canning River Delta, Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

June 4, 1:07 am

All night long under the midnight sun, the Arctic sings its spring song. Floating in from somewhere behind the wind are the voices of this land: the various musics of Greater White-fronted and Canada Geese, Pacific and Red-throated Loons, and Long-tailed Ducks (we used to call them Oldsquaws), along with a few quieter fowl I cannot name. Nestled in the candlelike glow inside my yellow tent, I lie awake, listening. The temperature hovers below freezing, half the tundra remains covered in snow, the lakes are still frozen over—but these water birds, eternal optimists of the Arctic plains, are arriving ’round the clock, en masse and in voice, for their summer ventures. Off to the north I hear the excited chatter of Tundra Swans. A few hours ago, outside my tent I looked up and watched seven of them materialize out of the mist: elegant, slow-winged creatures pure as snow, passing closely above with the grace of angels.

Bowing into the morning fog on a raw northeast wind, I make my way to the cook tent to build a mug of boreal coffee. Six of us have established a temporary research camp here on the northern fringe of the delta, in the very northwestern corner of the refuge. I’ve joined the others as a volunteer biologist for a study of the nesting success of the local birdlife.

We arrived by bush plane over the past two days, as weather allowed, and set up our bivouac: six identical sleeping tents crowd together like a clutch of eggs, and fifty yards off stands a cooking tent and a warming tent with a wood stove. Farther yet our tiny, makeshift latrine enjoys a holy and priceless view. The tents are staked against the arctic wind with foot-long pieces of rebar hammered into the frozen ground. Yesterday we used ice chisels and sledges to pound larger holes to erect two separate three-wire bear fences, one around our sleeping quarters and one around the food tents. There are a few griz about, and we hope to see them, but they are not welcome inside. The fences are electrified by solar panels—powered by the sun like the living tundra itself.

Around us stretches the vast Arctic prairie, now a mosaic of white snow and golden brown cottongrass and sedges. When the ocean fog lifts (camp is only two miles from the shore of the Beaufort Sea), we can see thirty miles south to the Sadlerochits, last mountains before the North Pole, and beyond them to the massive Brooks Range, blue and infinite in the distance.

Out of the fog and that infinity, the feathered tribe continues to arrive. More Tundra Swans wing in from their winter waters on the Chesapeake Bay; White-fronted geese appear, with their high-pitched laughter, up from the Texas coast. The loons have come all the way from the Yellow Sea off China. We see two long lines of Black Brant—a subspecies of Brant—fifty or more in each, flying eastward, low over the whitened tundra along the coast, nearing the end of their jaunt from Mexico. Must be something about this place, something attractive and valuable that draws them here. Otherwise, why would so many species come from so many distant places for the most important function of life—reproduction? And I don’t mean only water birds. Arctic Terns and many of the shorebirds return here from even more distant places. Caribou and polar bears choose to give birth here. What some have blindly called a barren wasteland appears to me more like a coral reef of the north, a huge sponge of productivity.

Ten Snow Geese, then twenty more, fly across, white as alabaster under a cerulean blue sky. Pintails, Common Eiders, and King Eiders arc overhead in pairs and small groups. The commons are more likely to move out to the coastal barrier islands to breed. A drake King Eider flies close by at eye level. His body is black and white, but his head is the marvel: red bill, orange forehead, green cheek, blue crown and nape—nearly the full spectrum from the neck forward. The Harlequin Ducks are nearly as audacious, but we won’t see them here. They nest up in the mountains, where they walk underwater along the stream bottoms, foraging into the current in the fashion that the water ouzel made famous.

Of all the birds that nest in the refuge, I consider the Pacific Loon the most elegant. With its velvet gray hood, splendid black-and-white collar and cape, and polished poise on the water, it embodies a reserved handsomeness, dignity, and grace. I say this without bias, although my work has focused on loons for nearly three decades. In truth, I haven’t studied Pacific and Red-throated Loons much at all and still have a difficult time separating their voices.

Today we make our first formal visit to two of the twenty research plots established three years ago when the study began. My compatriots take a primary, focused interest in the shorebirds, our most numerous clients on the swaths of tundra. I’m keeping an eye out for loons and waterfowl—the larger feathered spirits. There’s something about how a swan can raise its cygnets from eggs to fifteen pounds over a short Arctic summer by eating cold vegetables that seems magic to me. The local Inupiat still hunt these creatures, and their knowledge of them is based upon the oldest research ever undertaken in these parts: the science of survival.

Swans float about like icebergs on the river in front of camp. A single Red-throated Loon rockets downriver. One minute later: cacophony at the river bend. She’s found some friends—or maybe antagonists. It’s hard to tell, given the caterwauling. Either way, it resounds with excitement.

As my colleagues pointed out, the racket these two species make can hardly be called a song at all. And by strict definition they are correct. Any ornithological text or field guide will tell you that neither loons nor waterfowl sing songs; they utter calls. In the absolute scientific sense, this is true. Problem is, I’m not an absolute scientist; romantic biologist might be a better description. I cherish these voices because they symbolize the north lands that I love. And if, as the bioacousticians suggest, these voices are tuned to carry through misty winds and above the white sound of driven waters, then they are tuned by the landscape—they are voices of the land, much as their very bodies are built of and powered by local stickleback and blackfish. Even the Red-throated Loon’s cry, compared by some to the sound of a cat in despair, rings eerily melodic if you happen to carry an affinity for loons as I do. To my ear all these voices, in their innocent melancholy and exuberance, reach to that place where laughter and tears meld, and life celebrates itself upon the land. It is music to me.

The wind whips up again in the evening, rattling and wrestling with the tents, another night of wild percussion drummed into our delicate human spirits. The wind, too, is a voice of the land—that same wind that lifts the wings of Tundra Swans and carries the yodels of loons.

Every day we walk the plots. Lapland Longspurs and a few sandpipers have already begun nesting in tiny alcoves in the sun-warmed and hay-scented tundra. The snowfields are disappearing by the acre despite the biting cold of the wind. Ice water collects in the polygons, fills the ponds, and seeps in slow, cold currents through the grasses and sedges into the river and down toward the sea. On average, only seven inches of precipitation fall here each year, but it’s hard to think of this place as a “polar desert” when we’re marching through water up to our knees. Unable to soak very deeply into the soil due to the solid barrier of permafrost, the snowmelt remains on the surface, available to wildlife and irrigating the grasses and sedges. Often we wade across ponds filled with a layer of water above ankle-deep muck, our soles treading upon the concrete hardpan of ice—the permafrost.

Purple saxifrage, first of the Arctic blooms, flowers around us from its low cushions on the drier soils. East of camp I found a broad scatter of swan feathers, a few bone fragments. Over by the river we stumbled onto the skull and rib cage of an arctic fox. A few miles to the north lies the entire skeleton of a muskox, its flesh eaten and the long bones gnawed apart. Here and there on the tundra we find the shells of Long-tailed Duck eggs, the antlers and ribs of caribou. We watch for the droppings of foxes and wolves, deposited on the peat mounds and often twisted with the hair of lemmings and occasionally caribou, sometimes containing the tips of feather shafts. There’s a grizzly track frozen into last year’s mud near my tent. On the riverbank we see many tracks—all sizes and makes of waterfowl—along with those of fox and weasel, and now and then a burst of feathers. All the chapters of life here lie open to the sky. Every walk is a treasure hunt.

Cold again; windy as usual. My crew finds the first Canada Goose nest today near study plot 4B: four eggs nestled in gray down upon a grassy bowl on a small island. The Tundra Swans, first of the waterfowl to nest, are incubating too, down on the lower delta.

Loons of both species, often singly, fly overhead almost constantly now, in different directions, reconnoitering the melt waters, one might assume. Loons are, of course, not waterfowl at all. According to current theory, they are more closely related to penguins and frigatebirds. Adapted to diving, they navigate poorly on land and require stretches of open water for take-offs and landings. Because of this, they will be among the last to alight upon the lakes as they thaw.

More and more waterfowl arrive. Red-breasted Mergansers have appeared, as well as a pair of Northern Shovelers. Someone has seen a pair of Spectacled Eiders, a threatened species listed formally under the Endangered Species Act and a rare nester here. Most of the United States Arctic population nests farther west, where oil leases are likely to be developed. But this was a pair, male and female, and they are known to prefer river deltas, so we are hopeful.

The Long-tailed Ducks would make an interesting study. Tens of thousands of them molt and gather into large groups to stage on the lagoons behind the barrier islands before fall migration. We see them floating, almost always in pairs, on the coldest-looking little ponds among chunks of ice. Common breeders on the coastal plain, they are unusual in two ways. Unlike the other waterfowl, Long-tailed Ducks utter sentence-long calls and molt continually in a sequence of phases from spring through fall, rendering a long series of ephemeral appearances far too numerous and variable to be represented in any field guide. Though ornately beautiful in earthen tones, for half the year it is impossible to match their color patterns with any page in a field guide.

Off the corner of plot 4A I spot a Peregrine Falcon sitting dark and quiet upon a low peat mound, waiting patiently. There’s a reason the Peregrine was once called a “duck hawk,” but this hunter is more likely watching for the rustle of a sandpiper or a nice, warm lemming. (There are a lot of lemmings about this year, which might take some of the predation pressure off of the birdlife.) We honor the peregrine’s presence by pausing our survey so as not to scare up any study birds, duck or Dunlin, for its dinner. I carry no prejudice against predators, myself. After all, I belong to that league, and so does the cute little arctic fox, and the loon. We’re all part of the balance.

The wind howls, coating my spectacles with droplets of fog, burning color into the skin of my cheeks. A harsh land? Some would say so. Who could deny it? But it is this very harshness that illuminates by contrast the abundant and exuberant life here—song and sex and celebration, bloom and productivity. The harshness of winter here drastically reduces the numbers of predators. And the same latitude that creates the long, dark season also creates a summer with twenty-four-hour-a-day sunshine that swells the lowly cottongrass and sedge with solar energy, which in turn becomes goose feather and swan song.

I wonder if the wind tires the goose in the same manner that it soaks away my energy. If so, she doesn’t show it. Down puffed out against the chill, contour feathers preened with oil to shed the mist, that goose out there by 4B nestles down on five eggs tonight, facing the wind and keeping alert for the wrong kind of company.

Out on the plots the tundra is greening up. I find the single flower, bright and cheery, of a buttercup, second one I’ve seen this week. Who can call it a barren wasteland where the innocent buttercup blooms?

The loons are largely gone from the river now. We see them, as well as many of the waterfowl, in pairs on the ponds. One of the characteristics of loons, swans, and geese that seems to pique a certain human wistfulness is the fidelity of these mated pairs. They are said to mate for life, and scientific studies have illustrated that this is for the most part true. Some of them, the loons especially, hold a strong landscape fidelity as well. If Pacific and Red-throated Loons follow the behaviors of Common and Yellow-billed Loons, as we assume they do, they will return to the same lake or pond, and sometimes the same nest site, year after year.

Ducks are a different clan, with a different strategy. Most of them appear to flirt about each year, courting new mates and breaking up shortly after intentions are spent. Interestingly, it is the ducks that show different plumages between the sexes, males strutting about in bright breeding colors designed (by the great evolutionary stylist) to attract females, a necessary requirement every spring. The females are usually drab, giving the benefit of camouflage to the nest sitter. The loons, geese, and swans, which generally mate for life, have no need of such dress-up; plumages are identical (at least to the human eye) between genders.

Pair fidelity appears linked to brooding and rearing strategy as well. After breeding, most of the drake ducks have fulfilled their ecological responsibilities and disappear to the molting areas and an early start south. But both male and female loons, geese, and swans share in the raising of their young at least to fledgling (flying) age. Among them, only the loons share equally in incubation duties.

No loon nests yet. The Yellow-billed Loons I’ve studied in the western Arctic would be on eggs by now, secreted down by the narrow open margin of a larger frozen lake. But they are not known to nest on the coastal plain of the refuge, perhaps due to a relative paucity of larger lakes here. They seem to be social creatures, preferring the juxtaposition of many larger lakes in the western Arctic, where the plain is wider. But they migrate through here, and the local Natives know them well. A hunter from Kaktovik told me that he remembered a single Tuullik feeding thirteen people around his father’s table. And how did it taste? About a five, he said. On a scale of ten? No, he said, once every five years would be often enough.

Clearest hour of the season so far, tonight. We stare out across the green-gold prairies to the Sadlerochits, snow-veined and purple in their Arctic majesty. Above and beyond them, the rarefied pinnacles of Mounts Chamberlin and Michelson in the Brooks reach toward a three-quarter moon. The first little longspurs hatched today; I’ve seen the tiny miracles in their little grass caves. More of the geese are hunkered down laying eggs. The Pacific Loons are yodeling, defining and defending their territories, a behavior penultimate to breeding. But I hear another music beyond them, more a feeling than a sound: the subtle chords of exultation from the land itself. Or perhaps my own heart.

Today is a day off for me, and I plan to mosey overland to a distant set of ponds where I’ll scout for loon nests. We haven’t found one yet. I pack my field notebook, lunch, binoculars, and shotgun (in descending order of importance), and set out before noon. The gun is loaded with slugs for the rare case of a grizzly threat. Every team or individual from our crew venturing afield is required to carry one. Wouldn’t want to lose one of us; we have enough paperwork to do already.

I walk north in a set of parallel ruts that runs clear to the coast. Made decades ago by a vehicle driving on the tundra, they remain scars in the earth today and will for a long time to come. This may be a harsh land, but it is delicate, too. Its wounds heal slowly or not at all.

The water birds up here are the wariest I’ve ever seen. As I crest a low hill, a pair of Canada Geese a hundred yards away lifts off in fright, discussing it in counterpoint:

Gaak
Leek
Gaak
Leek
GaakLeek
GaakLeek
LeekGaak
Leek
Gaak
Leek
GaakLeek. . . . Polite, graceful, but intolerant of me, they disappear, still conversant, behind a low roll of tundra.

We already know many of the effects of industrial invasion on these timid creatures from studies conducted west of here, where oil and gas exploration and development have occurred. Obviously, a spill anywhere, particularly during staging or migration, would be catastrophic. Nesting and feeding habitat losses; disturbance of these wary and retiring creatures at critical times; changes in hydrological schemes and lake levels; and the usual increase in opportunistic predators, which feed on refuse and find shelter at developed sites. These include bears, foxes, ravens, and gulls, which also keep a hungry eye out for wild eggs and nestlings. All are factors either proven or considered likely to add to the challenges of breeding and survival of the waterfowl and loons here as well as shorebirds and other members of the feathered tribes.

The very study I am part of has been undertaken to better understand the significance of these factors, although the National Academy of Sciences has already reported them as part of the cumulative environmental effects of oil development. Although this Section 1002 area does not support a preponderance of nesting water birds, it is the refuge’s heart of production for waterfowl and loons, and includes critical migration habitats. Our site on the Canning River delta is important to the study because here there is no development. It serves as a “control” or “benchmark” area against which the effects at developed sites may be compared. The refuge’s coastal plain is the last part of our Arctic coastal plain that is not available for leasing—the last benchmark area. Everything from Point Thomson to Barrow is open for leasing or already developed. And, ironically, the Canning River delta could be the first spot in the refuge affected by industrial changes. This is the entry point from the existing oil fields to the west; the Alaska State government hopes to build a road nearly to the refuge boundary, just a few miles from here, if the oil companies don’t get to it first.

The value of this area as the final wild comparison was not missed in the argument for protecting these refuge lands the first time around. Lowell Sumner himself suggested that this is a place where the land could still have the “freedom to continue, unhindered and forever, if we are willing, the particular story of planet Earth unfolding here. . . . ”

If we are willing.

Don’t think about it, I’m thinking. We came here to celebrate, not to fret and mourn. The northeast wind whistles through the grass. The nesting geese hunker low, facing into it. A veil of down and breast feathers stretches off behind each one in the downwind, southwesterly direction, eroded from the thick, blanketlike covering that insulates their eggs. As I approach the ponds, one of them flops off her nest, calling in consternation.

So far I’ve been referring simply to the Canada Goose, or “CAGO” in the birders’ shorthand that I use in my field notes. But someone working the far opposite extreme of my field of wildlife science has been peeking into the genes of these geese and has decided that they ought to be divided into two species, Lesser Canada Goose (actually the larger of the two) and Cackling Goose. Because the Canadas here in the Arctic are of intermediate and differing sizes, the scientists aren’t certain what to call them, and so we have promised to collect a few feathers from each nest for DNA analysis.

Interesting work, but there is a danger, I think, as we divide and categorize life. Focus down too fine, and you lose the big picture. The poets recognize this: “Erase the lines:” wrote Robinson Jeffers, “I pray you not to love classifications. / The thing is like a river, from source to sea mouth / One flowing life.”

Amen to that. Nevertheless, biologist that I am, I wade out on the slick permafrost pond bed toward the nest. The goose flushed at my approach, and I have a responsibility now. I collect a dozen breast feathers from the veil into a plastic baggie and then reach down to close the downy nest liner over the clutch like a purse—field etiquette to minimize heat loss and camoflage the nest from predators until the goose returns. When I lean over the eggs, their radiant heat warms my face with remarkable intensity: six hot little globes of sunlight recycled and resurrected into life, cooking along embryologically at 100 degrees F out here upon the open prairie, eighteen inches above the ice age.

I walk the shoreline of another pond with a pair of Pacific Loons on it, and here I find what may be the very beginnings of nest construction—a rude circle of soggy grass pulled together on a shoal just offshore. The pair acts nervous and I leave quickly, but not before observing a pair of Spectacled Eiders nearby and a nesting Canada Goose with a pair of King Eiders hauled up and dozing against her nest, male on one side, female on the other. Relating these wondrous sightings to my colleagues over dinner, I hear of their own remarkable observations: Camp hit a record high of 39.5 degrees F today, three caribou appeared across the river, and someone collected the first mosquito (deceased).

Summer Solstice

We find a skiff of snow on our tents this morning. The Arctic summer arrives, and I must fly out tomorrow. I’ll miss the loons and the eiders laying their eggs, their newly hatched broods, the griz following the caribou in. Generously, I leave all that to my colleagues.

In the evening I take a seat on the saxifrage and look out over the complex of ponds on the lower delta. Geese, swans, gulls, loons, all varieties of ducks—Lord, everything I’ve been seeing seems to be out there in a huge array and concentration, and all of them are singing and shouting at once in so many tongues. Exuberant, self-willed, so full of life. I pause a long time here with my notebook on my knees, scribbling my thoughts and prayers beneath a warm Arctic sun. Biologists are concerned about the status of Northern Pintail and Long-tailed Duck populations. The Spectacled Eiders are threatened, and the King Eiders seem to be disappearing. Across a few decades, Alaska’s Red-throated Loon population declined by half. There is much to do, much to defend. But for now, and for a long time into the evening, I will tarry here and listen. It is enough that the night is magic, and down on the delta the angels are singing.

Kaktovik, Barter Island

September 13

Dropping out of the clouds over the Hulahula River, my first impression of the landscape is how red it appears. The tundra as far as I can see appears cloaked in rusty rubescence, not the tawny green I’d left behind nearly three months ago and fifty miles to the west. Autumn by the Beaufort Sea: season of the aurora borealis, the Inupiat whale hunt, the arrival of polar bears. And the final upshot of the water-bird season: the great migratory gatherings, the final exodus.

I walk south of town and onto the tundra. The sedges have turned to gold and the cottongrass is fading, too, its mop-tops looking a bit wind stressed. Along the edges of standing water, which is just about everywhere, the Arctophila grass has gone red (carotenes over chlorophyll)—the rouge I’d seen from the air.

Near a small freshwater lake, I come upon several hundred Greater White-fronted Geese hunkered down in the lee of the wind. They appear to be a congregation of family groups. Occasionally one or two of these short strings will take flight—laughing like schoolgirls. A significant number of white-fronts stage on the refuge coastal plain prior to fall migration, primarily in August, stripping the sedges to boost fat reserves for transit out of here. I suspect these may be among the last waves to fuel up on the local pasturage.

Scanning the lake I find to my delight a pair of Pacific Loons with a chick that still is not quite adult size. At my approach they utter a catlike MAAA-AAaaaaaaaw and move away. The pair has foregone the exodus of their conspecifics, remaining behind to fledge this chick. Given the late nesting dates over on the Canning, I imagine that such families throughout the area are right now challenging their deadlines in an ages-old drama in which the tooth of the arctic fox, the sharp eye of the peregrine, and the bite of autumn freeze-up contribute to the loons’ grace and survival by removing the slow, the inept, from their reproductive gene pool.

Walking the shoreline I find the tracks of a grizzly sow and cub, strolling the opposite way. On the horizon above the far shore, half a mile away, I see the griz herself, perched atop a peat mound like a circus elephant balanced on a barrel. I deduce from her movements that she is digging for lemmings. We peer at each other for a moment, across the distance. No threat for now, we’re both thinking, but we’ll keep an eye out.

A pair of swans with three blue-necked cygnets flutters in from somewhere, perhaps driven by my approach. The young are fledged but not yet as tall as their parents—another family pushing the deadline. Good luck to them, too. They swim together nonchalantly but directly to the south shore to continue on foot into the wetlands there. At a mile away they stop and begin to feed again, among numerous families of pintails I hadn’t noticed.

One of the loons takes off, flies above the bear uttering a phrase I hadn’t heard before, circles the lake, and disappears. Several white-fronts lift, fly off, but circle about and return. Excitement fills the air: die Zugunruhe, the behavior biologists used to call it—“unrest before the journey.” A hard chill rides in that same air, and my hands are growing stiff. The grizzlies remain occupied with their lemmings, the swans have disappeared in the marsh, and the loon adult and chick have moved to the center of the lake, safe from two-legged intruders. I sneak off to leave them all in peace, walking in the tracks of bears back toward town.

The wind has changed overnight and blows jauntily from the west now, under clearing skies. The fog has lifted, disappeared.

Out by the lake, and across all the tundra I cover, there are only a few geese to be seen. The pintail families are reduced to singles hunkered down in the ditches, lifting only at my immediate approach. Juveniles, I assume. A pair of scaup has appeared on the lake, en route eastward. They seem to prefer the company of Glaucous Gulls. Safety in numbers, perhaps. The loon chick floats beside one remaining adult. And with the swans I count only two cygnets. A Peregrine Falcon passes overhead; I’d seen it dive on a pintail earlier, narrowly missing. The bears have disappeared.

Through the rarefied air I can now gaze out past the island, across the mainland tundra, up the Sadlerochit River to the golden foothills and all the way to the mighty blue-and-white Brooks beyond. Somewhere out there, scattered across the refuge coastal plain, 300,000 Snow Geese may be feeding. They move in from western Canada to these rich prairies in mid-August to fuel up on cottongrass stems and horsetail shoots for their autumn migration. In three weeks they may consume as much as 4600 tons of cottongrass alone, biologists calculate. It may take years for the cottongrass stands to regenerate after an intensive harvest, so the geese require an extensive foraging area. For them and the Greater White-fronted Geese, these limited feeding areas across the entire coastal plain are crucial; loss of habitat or even disturbance there at this time of year could diminish their survival rates, particularly for juveniles. Aircraft disturbance is the primary concern. Disruption of feeding here could reduce their migration fat reserves by up to 50 percent, reducing their chances for survival along the way to their wintering grounds.

I scan the far-off tundra hard through the binoculars—10x42s, excellent glass—hoping for some distant waggling line of white against the burnished tundra, before the golden foothills, but see no sign of them. Perhaps they, too, have already left for the Sacramento Valley, Bosque del Apache, Chihuahua.

An air of anticlimax: On the saltwater in the lagoons I see only a few small groups of eiders (females and young; the males left a long time ago, avoiding all reproductive chores beyond conception), a pintail here and there, a few Red-breasted Mergansers, several bands of White-winged Scoters, and one solitary Surf Scoter, bouncing in the waves. Several larger flocks of twenty to fifty Long-tailed Ducks float about, but tens of thousands of them that had staged in the lagoons between here and Canada have left. The last of them that I see stream in before the pink twilight in nervous flights from the sea, coming in low over the barrier islands into the safety of the lagoons for the night.

On my final day of maneuvers, I walk a few miles west to a set of ponds where a local says he’s seen hundreds of waterfowl recently. The tundra around the ponds is littered with the feathers and droppings of geese, but the ponds are perfectly quiet and empty of birdlife. Only a family of Short-eared Owls remains in residence. They flap about and perch on the peat mounds, watching me from beneath Groucho Marx eyebrows.

A telling silence. As those spirits arrive with the spring snowmelt, so do they disappear on the autumn winds. The white-fronts, the pintails, and the rest of the swans wing eastward; the Brants, the eiders and Long-tailed Ducks, and the loons disappear into the west. The four-month burst of life under the all-night sun is over; only the stragglers remain. Even the whales are migrating past us toward warmer seas. The Kaktovik whalers beached their third bowhead last night, and the polar bears have swum a hundred miles from the pack ice to clean its bones. Time to leave this place to them, the Gyrfalcons and ptarmigan and other spirits who will keep watch on the place over winter. Among the latter is Cygnus, the swan, my celestial talisman. I saw her three nights ago, high in the sky with the aurora playing through her outstretched wings. The same constellation is also known as the Northern Cross. Cygnus, head down in the sky, becomes the crucifix, heads-up. “Anticipate resurrection,” wrote Terry Tempest Williams.

Of course. That age-old story of the cycle of life: departure and return—and then revival. Here we find it rendered by both the swans and the stars, the ecological texts and the Gospel (one a metaphor of the other). We are not at the end of a cycle after all, but rather a beginning—an embarkation. Here, those anxious voices have been crying all along—here is where it all begins.

I march eastward again, across the quiet and empty tundra toward my dinner, the big silver bird, and that other world down below. Nearly back to camp I hear, startlingly close above me but invisible in the mist, the excited laughter of geese.

© 2006. “Angels in the Mist” by Jeff Fair reprinted with permission of the publisher from Arctic Wings: Birds of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, published by Braided River, an imprint of The Mountaineers, Seattle, WA.

Jeff Fair is a wildlife biologist with four books to his credit, including Moose for Kids and The Great American Bear. His essays have appeared in Alaska Magazine, The Christian Science Monitor, the Boston Globe, Equinox, Ranger Rick, Audubon Magazine, and Appalachia, where he is a contributing editor. In 1998 he received the National Wildlife Federation’s Farrand/Strohm Writing Award, and in 2001 he was selected for the Alaska State Council on the Arts’ first Tumblewords roster.

July 26

It is hot and sunny. There is the relentless sound of the river flowing green and white as it moves north. The sunrise was pink and grey with the river shinning white and blue. The sky was filled with soft pink clouds and the mountains glowed pink in the east. Hidden within the pink horizon was a faintly glowing rainbow. I was a sleepwalker in this early morning light.

The river surprised us yesterday with a series of powerful rapids. One long rapid filled with waves and holes was a complex boulder garden that was easily Class IV. We threaded our way between big holes and boulders, alive in the warmth of the sun and the roaring sound of the river. At the bottom of the rapid, as we floated for a moment in calm water, a bull caribou stepped out of the willows and trotted along the shore before disappearing again into the thicket. It was a moment of magic.

The land here is open with long curves of green beneath the wide arch of the sky. We have become accustomed to this being in and on the land. It is a simple, solitary life with Sharon and me.  We haven’t seen another person since we began the trip nearly a month ago. Our life is spent on the river, surrounded by the rocks, the gravel, the alder, mountains and sky with our imagination filled with images of an animal world. This is a place to be quiet, it is a place to meditate on the meaning of things. It is an opportunity to find balance with the world around us. The place enters our lungs and fills our eyes.

My brain cycles through thoughts of the “other world,” of rectangles and schedules, of commerce and profit, of war and famine. I have a new and more emotional response to death and killing. Disgust for the forces, which see violence as a tool for freedom and safety. Here, miles from anyone, it is clear that you are responsible for your decisions. But in the world that we come from it is easy to believe that someone else will protect you. It is easy to lose the connection between what you have and where it came from, and to understand what it costs in dollars, resources and time.

Here in this simple world everything has a place. Less is certainly more and more is certainly less. There is no profit beyond experience. There is no commerce, there is no waste and nothing is ugly. There is nothing senseless, here, everything is exactly what it is, and there is no confusion.

July 27

I take the solitude, peace, harmony and quiet for granted.  It is just the way things are here. At times I look around and feel as though I am living in my photographs… The landscape fills every space of my being. In the past the lessons, revelations and images of the place would surprise me, having ventured into what was uncharted personal territory, I was filled with a need to share the story of my trip and the lessons I had leaned from the place. But this trip has made me quiet, wordless, but not thoughtless. The landscape has entered me, changed me.  The intensity of being here has not diminished even as it has become familiar. The wildness of the place, the visual intensity of each moment, the excitement that comes from being alone here fills me up, and for now at least it is what I am.

I am not a fool; I am a visitor to this place, at the moment a part of the place but inevitably apart from it. I know that each day here is precious, the time is difficult to come by, it is easy to squander and it is impossible to replace. The lessons of the place are intense. The volume of wilderness in sound, in size and in imagery can only be appreciated in small bites. I chew on each idea, each detail, and over time, bit by bit the place is revealed to me, my commitment to the “search” grows, my understanding moves ahead by inches.

The gravel bar is a jumble of jagged clay rock; there are fossils everywhere, worms and seashells, fragments of petrified wood, fern leaves, an ancient world frozen in stone. I imagine myself walking in an ancient arctic rain forest. We climb up the cliff above our tents following game trails and eating blueberries. There are caribou antlers laying in the tundra and caribou grazing on the distant hill.

Reaching the top of the cliff I can look across the river and see a distant oil rig. It is hard to know just how big it is, but it must be big, it fills a distant ridge. The rig unsettles me; I am looking at the last thing I want to see, like looking at a cancer cell under a microscope…there it is, real, solid, not a vision, or an idea…a reality, as real as the caribou or the fossils at my feet.

Later, with the sun low on the horizon, the hills are streaked with yellow and in the distance I can see the vertical tower of the oil rig…It is vertical in a horizontal landscape…it sits there alone…a sentinel that defines the looming threat of more towers, pipelines, roads, gravel pits…all of it representing millions of dollars of investment…money spent to pour oil into the sky.

There are caribou on the gravel bar, there are caribou on the surrounding hills…the river shines blue, the air has gotten colder, there is a light wind…I can barely hear the hum of the land

by Richard Kahn

The owl flies silently over my head, white and brown wings making no sound…over the river into the tundra, the owl drops out of sight and then emerges from a fold in the land a small creature tucked in its talons…Screeching peregrine chicks hidden somewhere on the cliff face, strident calls, chaotic screaming…pleading, hidden from view. The adult falcon, invisible, screeches a warning…

A group of silent black and white geese run across the gravel bar…Gulls watch, their incessant call not so much the call of the wilderness, but more like a reminder that the familiar lives in the most exotic places…or, perhaps, a reminder that the exotic is merely a perspective shift of the familiar.

Loons call, they are distant silhouettes on the water, sometimes sounding like ducks or geese…sometimes laughing…they run across the surface of the river beating their wings as their feet stir up white wakes…They leave the surface, turn and head upstream, heads down, necks extended, wings beating the air, they fight to fly unlike the hawks, eagles, falcons and owls who float effortlessly on the air…hovering, soaring, hurtling towards the ground, blasting straight into the sky.

And then there is the raven, dark shape, calls like a gull, flies like a hawk, soars with the eagles…In the middle of the night the raven’s call wakes me up…it is close, and unlike anything else I have heard here…sound like wind passing through a long pipe…a bird flute…it is unique and unlike the mimicking cries I hear from the raven during the day…If the caribou are the magician animals, dancing across the tundra, appearing and disappearing mysteriously in their own way, then the raven is the magician bird…dark like a shadow…silent or noisy at will, a mimic or a unique individual…secure, curious, nomadic…

Changing Paths, by Bill Sherwonit

Wilderness Music, excerpted from

Changing Paths: Travels and Meditations in Alaska’s Arctic Wilderness

©2010 by Bill Sherwonit

At age 50, nature writer and wilderness advocate Bill Sherwonit went on the longest backpack of his life: fifty miles in two weeks, across mostly untrailed wilderness in America’s remotest and arguably wildest parkland, Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve. Traveling alone, he explored parts of the Central Brooks Range first made famous by Robert Marshall’s Alaska Wilderness. America’s “ultimate mountains” are also where Sherwonit first got his taste of Alaska’s wilderness, while working as a geologist in the mid-1970s; in a very real way, the Brooks Range transformed his life.

The following excerpt is taken from Changing Paths: Travels and Meditations in Alaska’s Arctic Wilderness (published in fall 2009 by the University of Alaska Press), which describes Sherwonit’s solo trek and also moves across space and time while reflecting upon his days as a geologist, his Connecticut roots, the importance of wilderness to humans as a life-affirming, life-changing, and life-enriching presence, and, just as importantly, the inherent value of wild nature, in and of itself.

Camped alone deep in Alaska’s Brooks Range wilderness, I find a comfortable spot along the North Fork of the Koyukuk.  Then, placing my head beside the river’s churning aqua waters, I listen closely to its fluid play of sounds.  I’ve heard beautiful Celtic-like chanting, off and on, for the past few days.  The songs seem to come from outside me, from the forest and tundra and especially the river, but I suppose it could all be in my head.  I’ve even put words to some of the music: “Holy, ho-o-o-ly, holy . . . ”

As the melodies and words play through my head, I’m left wondering what combination of landscape and wind sounds mix with my memories and thought processes – and several days of solitude—to produce these voices, this music.

My musings are interrupted by an unmistakably “real” voice that has nothing to do with my imagination: a howling comes from the forest, behind my tent.  It is a loud, clear, resonant wail that rolls across the valley, of alto key.  The howl triggers an immediate physical and emotional response: heart races, pulse quickens, spirit lifts. Instinctively I turn from the river, binoculars in hand, and face the wooded hills above camp.  With all the tracks and scat on this riverbar and across the North Fork, I’ve anticipated – and sometimes imagined – wolf howls throughout my three-day campout here.  Each morning and night I’ve swept the hillsides with binoculars, hopeful of a miracle.  Now one has come to me.

I peer at two tundra knobs a few hundred feet above camp, then scan the spruce forest below.  Even as I do, the howling resumes.  The first baleful voice is joined by a second, higher pitched.  This one is more of a soprano.  The trembling howls blend and shift key.  Are there more than two wolves?  Hard to tell.  Wolves are known to mix their voices in a way that produces a magnified sense of numbers.

The rain is falling harder now, but I barely notice. The wolf songs last a minute or two, but resonate much longer.  This is what I dream about, to share the wilderness with howling wolves.

I ask myself which is more desirable, to see wolves or hear them sing?  There’s no simple answer, but there is this fact: over the years I’ve seen wolves a half-dozen times, yet heard them howling only once.  Those songs came from a distance in these very mountains, though in another valley, miles to the west. More than a quarter century has passed since that rainy autumn afternoon, but the haunting cries still ring out sharply in my memory.

I don’t think the wolves would disturb anything in camp, but to ease any nagging doubts I walk across the gravel bar and check my tarp and tent. Then back to the water’s edge for more searching.  Even before I reach my “lookout,” I spot a wolf, upstream from camp and halfway across the braided North Fork, not far from where I crossed the river three days ago.  Maybe 200 yards away.  I can’t be fully certain from this distance, but the wolf strikes me as female and that’s what the animal becomes.

If I had to name her color, I’d say white wolf.  But that ignores the subtleties of her coat.  Bringing her into focus with my glasses, I see she has a mostly white face, with some gray atop her head and on her neck.  Her flanks are light gray, legs are white, tail the color of gathering clouds, becoming darker, like storm clouds, at the tip.  In her wettened coat, the wolf appears lean but not skinny, and I assume, for no sure reason, that she’s in good health.

The wolf crouches low as she crosses the mid-river sand and gravel bars, as if to avoid detection.  She glances now and then in my direction and I’m sure she sees me.  Moving slowly, she reaches the final, deepest channel.  She steps gingerly at first, splashing across the milky green river.  Then, for the final few feet, she plunges and swims across.  The wolf stops at the forest’s edge and looks back intently – but this time not toward me.  I’ve swung the binoculars back and forth across the river two or three times, expecting another wolf to appear, but none follows.

The she-wolf moves into the forest and I assume our encounter’s over, but the wolf reappears, walking slowly along the woods’ margin.  Once she steps into the open, smells something on the bar.  Then back under the trees.  She takes one last look across the North Fork and turns away.  Her walk becomes a trot and she’s gone, melted into the forest’s shadows.

Minutes later, there’s more howling – from my side of the river, though farther downstream.  Perhaps the second wolf was unwilling to cross the stream within sight of me or the camp.  The white wolf sings back, briefly.  Then silence returns to the valley, except for the rushing, rattling, humming North Fork and tapping of rain.  In a growing downpour I stand still another 30 minutes, maybe even an hour.

Finally I give up my watch, grab shelter under the tarp.  I notice I’m shivering; from the wet chill, yes, but also from the song of Canis lupus.

I love grizzly bears.  They are one of my primary totem animals, maybe my most important.  To share the landscape with grizzlies is always an honor and delight (and occasionally worrisome).  But to be with howling wolves in the arctic wilds; well, there is no greater magic.  Beneath the tarp and later in the tent, I imagine distant, intermittent howling throughout the afternoon and evening.  It’s amazing how much a river or the wind can sound like wolves.

I’ve had a feeling about this place since first seeing the many wolf tracks along the river.  I’m convinced there’s a den not far away and have wished I might stumble upon it, or even see wolf pups from a distance while scanning the landscape.  But I’m satisfied now.  I’ve had my communion. Both body and soul have been stirred by songs that tell, without words, of mountains and rivers, of mysteries as ancient as music itself.

Throughout this trip, my most memorable times have come as moments of surprise: sudden (even if anticipated) encounters with the Valley of Precipices, Doonerak, grizzlies, a bear skull, now wolves.  Animals have been the best example of this.  For all the looking and “hunting” I’ve done, the wildlife I’ll remember most have come to me. It seems I’m being given new opportunities to let go of expectations and, at the same time, be open to possibilities. Both ideas, and the practice of them, have become important guideposts in my middle years.

After spending much of my life trying to keep things under control, I’m learning to surrender to life’s experiences, while also embracing the opportunities that come my way. It’s not easy, as demonstrated on this trip by my worrying, my off-and-on watch monitoring, and my efforts to stay dry and cozy in my overly large and weather-resistant tent. Yet I’ve remained flexible and taken some risks, both here and generally. It still sometimes seems amazing to me that a person so drawn to comfort and predictability would take the leaps of faith I’ve made, from geology to journalism and then to freelancing. And settling in Alaska, of all places! Not many of my childhood friends – or family members – would ever have guessed that the small, shy, sensitive boy of long ago would become an author, wilderness lover, and activist, or that he’d some day ascend the continent’s highest peak or trek alone across miles of untrailed Arctic wilderness.

The sun briefly returns in the evening and I hike to a rocky knob above camp.  From here I get a better sense of how the landscape sweeps out and away from the Ernie Creek-North Fork confluence and the two streams’ large gravel bars, first to lowland forest and then upland tundra meadows and willow thickets, and even higher to encircling tundra-topped foothills and mountains with bare, jagged ridgetops.  Beyond those hills and mountains are more waves of peaks and hidden valleys.

I feel so lucky, so happy, to be in the heart of this vast wilderness, where wild places still mostly free of human influence span dozens of miles in any direction.  I need these trips for so many reasons: to refresh my spirit, test my limits and stretch my horizons, embrace solitude, expand my sense of what’s possible, encounter “the other,” renew my bonds with wildness in its many forms, and see more clearly what’s important, both here in the wild and back at home.  Still, I can’t imagine making a home here (if it were allowed), so far from other people and the conveniences of modern living.  I don’t try to fool myself: this northern wilderness is a harsh, demanding place, and to live here year-round would require skills I haven’t acquired.

Thinking about the trials and perils of Arctic homesteading, I again recall Ernie Johnson, “the most famous trapper of the North Fork,” for whom Bob Marshall named Ernie Creek. According to Marshall, “Although [Johnson] had come north on a gold rush, he had also been drawn by his love of the woods in this greatest wilderness on the continent.  Here he spent all but about two weeks in the year out in the hills, away from the ‘cities’ of Wiseman (population 103) and Bettles (population 24). . . . He trapped and hunted, averaging a yearly income of about twenty-five hundred dollars.  ‘I can make better money as a carpenter,’ he said, ‘but I am staying out here because I like it among these ruggedy mountains better than anywhere else in the world.’ ”

Here was someone who’d chosen the hermit’s life I once talked about pursuing while fed up with people and relationships during my grad school days; someone who actually chose to spend most of his adult years in seclusion. What revelations and understandings did Ernie find here among the sheep and grizzlies? As much as I desire and seek out solitude, I can’t imagine a life so empty of people.

From the perch above camp I trace much of the route I’ve followed along Ernie Creek, from the Precipices to the North Fork.  Then I look downstream, where I’ll be walking tomorrow.  It appears I’m bound for “the dark forest.”  Thick stands of spruce press close against the meandering river.  I will likely cut through the woods in places, either to shorten my route or where pushed into the trees by steep, river-eroded cutbanks.  I hope it’s not too dense or brushy for easy path finding.

While plotting my route, I hear more howling, downriver.  The wolf song is loud and clear, but brief.  I wish for more, but instead hear only the rush of river. And gradually, more chanting voices.  These are less pleasing, more eerie.  My mind imagines a chorus of “sorry . . . sorry” sung in a mocking, almost malevolent tone.  Is the darkness in this chant tied to my worries about tomorrow’s route?  The chant unnerves me and I’m unable to get the words out of the head as I descend back to camp.  Can such things come from too much solitude?  Again I wonder how much I’m “hearing” and how much imagining.  The presence of these landscape sounds and voices has been among the stranger aspects of this trek.