The Ultima Thule » oil drums http://theultimathule.org Journeys in America's Northernmost Lands: a web anthology of the Alaskan Arctic Thu, 02 Feb 2012 23:10:48 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Utukok River http://theultimathule.org/utukok-river/ http://theultimathule.org/utukok-river/#comments Fri, 09 Apr 2010 15:24:40 +0000 RKahn http://theultimathule.org/?p=1078 What are the elements off a perfect day? Here, in this place, this day played out in a perfect way…I woke up to hot sunlight streaming through he tent…The heat was a heavy weight pressing me down, the effort to move, to leave the tent required all the energy I could muster. I stepped out of the tent to bright blue sky, scattered white clouds, warm air and a light wind blowing away the heat. It was warm enough to bathe in the river. We watched caribou on the hills and packed our gear for a hike…We ferried the boats across the river and walked up to the scattered 55 gallon drums we had seen yesterday…There were two groups of drums…one high on a hill and a second larger group scattered lower across the tundra…There were bugs and tussocks and a gentle uphill climb…We reached the first group of drums, the sound of mosquitoes filling my ears, the foreign sweet smell of petroleum in the air. The drums scattered across the landscape were an obvious cliché, an insult to the place…the drums are rotting in a field of wild flowers, the hills around us are turning green in the heat…I wonder how someone could look at this place, the wandering caribou, hovering jaegers, the garden of wild flowers, rolling hills, blue sky and decide to treat this place as a dump…The clarity of the insensitivity to what this place is appeared as clear and sharp as the rotting drums leaking their toxic contents into the ground…Stamped on the drums were the letters USN…The harsh reality, it was the government who had created this mess…

I filmed easy images of stupidity,  a group of caribou appeared, caribou and drums…what a cliché…but there it was…a reality right in front of me…and so I filmed the caribou as they walked among the barrels and then wandered off across the tundra…This was a larger group of caribou than we have been seeing, they moved across the tundra with determination, down the hill towards the river…heading some place they know and we do not…some place they know or sense or feel, some place we can only imagine…which lives in our imagination and gives meaning to this place…We continued across mud sucking tussocks to the second group of drums…I filmed and took photographs and then we headed back to camp walking across a field of wild flowers…white, yellow, pink, blue until we reached the dark flowing river. Just above the river we found the partially eaten remains of a caribou calf…a reminder of the darker rules which govern this place…Then we were into the boat…dark mud and melting ice lines the bank leading down to the dark water…We crossed back to camp, prepared dinner as the sky filled with fast changing clouds…silver light…yellow shafts of sunlight raked the hills…and then the sky opened up with high scattered clouds lit by the low angled light of the sun…Three caribou descend the hill above us and cross the river…they disappear into the glare of light to bright to see…They leave a lone caribou on the hill, who suddenly jumps and runs…We watch as two grey wolves lope across the tundra in the direction of the lone caribou…a story to imagine, with no details to tell…There is a cold wind, there are clearing skies…

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