On the Edge of Ice, by Monica Devine
ON THE EDGE OF ICE
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.
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