NOME
When John Muir arrived in the Alexander Archipelago for the first time, in 1879, the Tlingit he met referred to Americans as “Boston Men.” The name derived from the sailors who’d come from New England to capitalize on the riches of Alaska’s waters. “Boston” became an all-purpose adjective to describe non-Native behavior. “When we entered and passed the regular greetings,” Muir writes of his and Hall Young’s first stop at a Tlingit village after their visit to Glacier Bay, “the usual apologies as to being unable to furnish Boston food for us and inquiries whether we could eat Indian food were gravely made.” Boston Men had initially been lured west by the furs in places like the Pribilofs, but sailors from New Bedford and Nantucket quickly realized the Bering Sea’s potential for commercial whaling, too.
From Siberia, the Elder steamed east to Port Clarence, a whaling depot on the Alaskan mainland. Ten ships were secured in the harbor as the Elder anchored offshore. Harriman, perhaps indicating that the novelty of Alaskan culture was waning, invited the whaling captains aboard for drinks and cigars but declined to extend the offer to the Eskimos who approached, paddling umiaks.
One visitor who joined the group swapping stories on the Elder was the manager of a U.S. government reindeer station. (Reindeer are not native to Alaska—the missionary Sheldon Jackson had begun importing them from Siberia as a food source.) The reindeer man confided that animal husbandry was merely a sideline for him. His true calling was gold mining. Just fifty miles down the deserted coast, at Nome, ships filled with hopeful prospectors had in recent weeks begun arriving on the beaches.
Port Clarence was one of the last redoubts of America’s dying whaling industry. By the end of the nineteenth century, whale populations had been drastically reduced, and whale oil, which until the Civil War had been the primary source of fuel for lamps, had been replaced by other sources, including kerosene derived from petroleum. As ever in Alaska, the end of one boom left the door open for another.
In September 1898, a trio of Scandinavian prospectors—forever to be known as the “Three Lucky Swedes”—had found gold deposits along Anvil Creek. By the time word leaked out, the Swedes had locked up virtually every mining claim in the area. They had not accounted for the fortune in tiny flecks of gold that littered the beaches of Nome, deposits left in part by the advance and retreat of long-gone glaciers. Claims could not be staked on the beach. Unlike in Skagway, prospectors in Nome did not need to transport two thousand pounds of provisions across a steep pass littered with horse carcasses. All they had to do was step ashore and start sifting. As the Elder sat off Port Clarence, stampeders by the hundreds were revising plans to strike it rich in the Yukon and booking passage to Nome. By the end of 1899, the population had grown from a handful to two thousand. A year later, it was estimated at twenty thousand, most of them living in tents that stretched for miles along the beach.
Had they learned this news a month earlier, the Elder’s shipboard mineralogists would surely have asked to explore Nome and its impending gold rush. But Port Clarence was the northernmost stop of the Harriman Expedition, and the turnaround point. Its patron’s thoughts had already begun to wander back to Wall Street and the important railroad business that awaited him there. Several days after leaving Port Clarence, the steamship once again passed beneath the majestic fifteen-thousand-foot peaks of the Fairweather Range, this time on a rare clear day. Hart Merriam went to fetch Harriman, who was sitting with his wife on the opposite side of the ship.
“You are missing the most glorious scenery of the whole trip!” Merriam shouted.
“I don’t give a damn if I never see any more scenery” was Harriman’s curt reply.
Two distinctive landmarks are visible during the five-hundred-mile flight from Anchorage to Nome: Denali and the Yukon River. On the day I flew, America’s tallest peak was shrouded in its own slowly swirling bad-weather system. The twisting Yukon, cloudy with glacial silt carried as far as two thousand miles from the Juneau Icefield, turned sharply south as we approached the middle bulge of the three that protrude from Alaska’s west coast into the Pacific Ocean. This is the Seward Peninsula, which twenty thousand years ago was part of the Bering Land Bridge. It’s now a stub of tundra completely exposed to the fierce winds coming off the ocean.
I was carrying a map of Alaska superimposed over the continental United States, on which Ketchikan and Metlakatla sat near Jacksonville. Anchorage aligned with Kansas City. Dutch Harbor floated somewhere in southwestern New Mexico, and Attu Island matched almost perfectly with San Francisco. The Seward Peninsula—roughly the size of West Virginia, with a population of perhaps ten thousand—straddled the state line between South Dakota and Nebraska. And about halfway between Omaha and Denver was the very small city of Nome, clinging to the edge of the continent.
The novelist Joy Williams once wrote that if one looks past Nome’s obvious lack of palm trees—and all the other absent varieties of arboreal flora—there is something about the place that evokes Key West, its antipodal twin dangling from the other end of the North American landmass. Both are small places with big reputations; both are known for heavy drinking; both feel vulnerable, since they are composed largely of late-Victorian wood-frame buildings that could be washed away like chalk drawings if the ocean ever lost its temper. Other than the weather, the biggest difference between Nome and Key West is the solitude. Unless you’re driving in from one of its handful of outlying villages, no roads lead to Nome.
The Nome visitor center is an octagonal building next to a liquor store on Front Street, a hundred or so feet from the ocean. Across the street stands the wooden arch that Iditarod finishers triumphantly mush through in March. When I called the visitor center from Dutch Harbor, inquiring about meeting Nome’s mayor, the person answering the phone had suggested stopping in when I got to town. “He’s not exactly hard to find,” I was told.
When I arrived at the center, a few locals were seated at a round table drinking coffee and talking about the search for a Nome resident whose car had been found parked by a roadside several miles outside of town. So many people used to disappear in Nome that the FBI was called in a decade ago to investigate the possibility of a serial killer. The truth was sadder. People were coming to the Sin City of the North, getting blitzed, and wandering off into the waves or the cold. (In early January, when the sun doesn’t rise in Nome so much as it appears for a few hours around lunchtime and rolls across the horizon like a pinball, overnight temperatures can plummet below minus forty degrees.) Late-night safety patrols had since all but eliminated the problem but had not completely ended speculation about another possible cause, alien abduction.
I’d been hoping to meet Mayor Richard Beneville, who doubled as Nome’s number-one booster and tour guide. He’d been all over the Alaska news for two weeks, talking about what impact the Crystal Serenity’s visit to Nome would have on the future of the city. No one could locate the mayor, so one of the guys hanging around the office—I’ll call him Robert—offered to take me for a spin. Unlike Dutch Harbor, Nome was still coasting, sort of, on its first big boom, the gold rush.
“Robert” requested that I not use his real name because he transacted much of his business in gold and considered the Internal Revenue Service illegitimate. He wore a trucker cap on which he had cellophane-taped a handwritten message: INFOWARS—WAKE UP AMERICA YOUR GOVERNMENT IS CORRUPT. His truck was an early-eighties Chevy Custom Deluxe, slowly dissolving from road salt and oxidation. “I got a break on the price because you have to jiggle it to make it start,” he said, his left hand agitating the steering column as his right turned the ignition. His very large mutt, named Nome, rode in the back seat and rested her head between us as we took off down Front Street.
Robert worked half the year in Nome, dredging its frigid waters for gold. “The season is ice to ice, roughly May to October,” he said. “We take a ten-inch vacuum cleaner and just start sucking.” If he and his partner were lucky, they’d sift through several tons of sediment and find a little bit of gold. “There’s an old saying in prospecting, ‘The sluice box doesn’t lie.’”
Though Nome’s population of thirty-eight hundred is only a fraction of what it was during the stampede, it’s still a gold town. Within a block of my hotel, the Nome Nugget Inn, I spotted two businesses offering assaying and refining services. As Robert drove into the foothills back from the coast, mining sites, mostly one-man operations, dotted the bleak landscape. “This guy here is killing it,” he said, pointing at one spot. “These guys over here hit twenty-nine hundred ounces in six weeks.” We passed a gigantic hole like a sunken football stadium, with tiny trucks rolling around its dusty bottom. “That’s an open-pit mine. I hear their workers get a hundred and fifty thousand dollars per season.” That money didn’t go as far in Nome as it did elsewhere. Gas cost twice what it did in Anchorage. “Lunch here is twenty dollars.”
We followed a dirt road uphill toward Anvil Creek, where the Three Lucky Swedes had made their discovery. “This mountain right here was the big one in the gold rush,” Robert said. The hills were scored with dried-out water trenches and littered with piles of rubble from gold rush mining operations. “Watch your step if you get out of the truck,” Robert said. “There are hundred-foot-deep shafts all through here.” Herds of shaggy wild musk oxen, with enormous horns, stood along the roadside. On the top of Anvil Mountain stood four enormous white antennas, each like a weathered drive-in movie screen, Cold War remnants of the Distant Early Warning System pointed at the Soviet Union.
Coming back toward town, we passed an old guy shoveling mud into three tiny sluices. In the wake of a popular reality TV show (on which Robert had declined to show his face due to privacy concerns), Nome had struck up a decent trade in gold tourism. The sorts of dreamers who arrived by steamship in 1899 now flew in during summer vacation. Robert reversed the truck and rolled down his window to ask how the prospecting was going.
“Been out here a week, nothing so far,” the man said. “Got another week to go.”
“You never know when you’re gonna hit it,” Robert told him.
“That guy could pull up a nugget today,” Robert said as we pulled away. “It’s absolutely hit or miss—the gold could be three feet over and you don’t see it.”
We stopped at Robert’s cabin, which was in Nome’s version of a subdivision: a small congregation of plywood shacks and container cars. Each home had a dredge boat parked in front, vacuum arms hanging off the sides like Doctor Octopus. Inside the cabin were arranged a rusty stove, a fridge running off a gas generator, and a lot of canned goods. I stepped outside and Robert followed a minute later, holding something that he slapped into my palm. It was two small ingots of pure gold, slightly irregular in shape, each the size of a mini Hershey bar and worth about seven thousand dollars. “Twelve ounces between the both of them,” he said. “I do my own refining and molding.”
His cabin wasn’t exactly Fort Knox. I asked if he ever worried about theft. He shook his head.
“Anyone who’s carrying gold in Nome is armed,” he said. “And everyone knows it.”
The next morning I stopped by the visitor center to see if the mayor had picked up the message I left. He hadn’t, which seemed a little odd. Nome wasn’t a very big place, and judging from the hundreds of photos I’d seen online, Richard Beneville was not a man who ducked attention. The front page of the current Nome Nugget showed him performing for the guests of the Crystal Serenity with a native dance troupe. I was about to cross Front Street to try my luck at the city offices when a large white van pulled up. “Mayor’s here,” someone said.
A small, very thin man with a shaved head and large, deep-set eyes stepped out; he looked a little like a middle schooler in a skeleton costume. I introduced myself and said I was hoping to talk to him about the future of Nome. “The future of Nome? Hello, Central!” Beneville shouted. “Get in!”
In a state that honors its unusual characters, Beneville is summa cum laude: a chatty, gay, ex-alcoholic liberal who’d grown up as a military brat idolizing Ethel Merman and ended up in deepest Alaska after bottoming out in New York City. In the 1970s he’d had a successful musical theater career—“Upper West Side, tenor voice, chorus, a hair’s breadth from working on Broadway”—but drank so much that his phone eventually stopped ringing. “I was a mess.” His brother, who worked for Merrill Lynch in Anchorage, helped arrange a sales job in Barrow, the biggest oil town on Alaska’s North Slope, as a sort of intervention.
“I arrived in the middle of the night, forty degrees below zero, snow blowing everywhere,” Beneville said as we sped down the two-lane coastal highway. “I stepped out of the jet in a camel hair wraparound coat, three-piece suit, tie, and a fedora like Indiana Jones. Boom! As I looked at the terminal, the fine Eskimo people are wiping the steam off the window, looking at me, saying, What the hell is that?”
Somehow he managed to sober up only after settling in booze-soaked Nome, eventually finding a niche in teaching. “I’ve put on more than thirty plays since I got here,” he said. “Unfortunately, I have a gap in my repertoire because I left New York in 1982. Cats had just opened on Broadway.”
Beneville’s cell phone rang every few minutes—constituents looking for help with minor problems that ranged from needing a ride to the hospital to agony aunt personal matters. Between calls, Beneville explained that after retiring from teaching the prior year, running for mayor seemed the natural next step. “Hello, Central!” he said. “The grass doesn’t grow under my feet!” (“Hello, Central,” it took me about twenty minutes to deduce, was Beneville’s multipurpose exclamation. He once hosted a local TV show called Hello Central.) The timing of his victory was fortuitous, he said, because after a century-long gold hangover, Nome was once again a town “on the brink,” ready for its next phase.
Beneville pulled the van off the road and pointed out to sea, where a large ship was anchored. The ship was part of a project that was taking advantage of the ice-free Northwest Passage to lay an undersea fiber-optic cable from England to Asia. Nome would serve as the connection point to Japan.
“This is all about a shrinking planet and the accessibility of the Bering Strait,” he said. “Everything is changing, and it’s happening so quickly. Ice that once formed in November is forming in late December. It’s breaking up in mid-May as opposed to June.” Climate change wasn’t forcing Nome to search for its next boom. In Nome, climate change was the next boom. “This is the new Arctic,” he said.
Keeping in mind that I was driving around with an elected official who was an actual song-and-dance man, I listened as Beneville touted the mostly good things that were coming for the people of Nome as temperatures rose. Project Chariot, the late-fifties plan to create a deepwater port a couple hundred miles north of Nome by exploding multiple atomic bombs, had been scrapped in part because there was no need for a port in the Bering Sea. Due to the thinning pack ice, that is no longer the case. Chinese companies have already started shipping goods to Hamburg via the Bering Sea, Beneville said, circumventing the Suez Canal and lopping more than three thousand miles off a trip. In the past decade, traffic at the Port of Nome had increased fivefold. As the ice-free season continues to grow, more traffic will surely follow. Both Nome and the old whaling hub Port Clarence were being considered by the Army Corps of Engineers as sites for a new deepwater port. The plan this time was to dredge rather than detonate.
“Climate change isn’t the herald of what is happening,” Beneville said. “It’s already happened. It’s here. And it’s an opportunity.”
I asked the mayor if any of the Crystal Serenity’s nine hundred upscale tourists had objected to being shuttled around in the Nome district’s yellow school buses. “Not all of them were absolutely filthy rich,” Beneville said. “Some of them were retired teachers, people who wanted to be a part of an historic event.” The Serenity’s owners hadn’t melted the ice. They were merely taking advantage of its disappearance to provide something people wanted. “My mantra about tourism is: If you can get there, people will go, period,” he said.
We drove out to the Port of Nome, and Beneville noted recent improvements, such as the third dock, added to relieve overcrowding. A deepwater port would allow fuel tankers and large military vessels to moor. Cruise ships like the Serenity could pull right into port, as they do in Skagway and Ketchikan. “The military, diplomats, everybody is referring to the Arctic Ocean as a new ocean,” Beneville said. “Everything about this is new and exciting.” With the Arctic warming twice as fast as most of the world, some scientists were predicting that within fifty years, cargo ships would be making regular trips across the North Pole.
“Hello, Central! I feel like we’re living in the times of the great explorers—like Portugal with Vasco da Gama, you know?” We stepped out of the van and walked to the edge of the dock, staring out into the infinite blue sea. “One guy said it’s like stumbling on the Mediterranean all over again.”