We like him. He help a lot too. He help the people too, in springtime haul the meat, yeah.
—Kitty Kinneeveauk
He was my best friend and stayed close to us.
—Elijah Attungana
He lived closely with the people and learned with us.
—Teddy Frankson
At Dartmouth College, Don Foote was charismatic and handsome, lighting up a room with brains and energy and wit. Les Viereck was lank and craggy, soft-spoken and shy. Women were always falling for Foote’s white-toothed smile and his attentive way of listening when they spoke. Viereck had the mild, intelligent eyes of a saint, though at times they could show wariness, even alarm. Although they were at Dartmouth at the same time, and had many mutual friends, they moved in different circles and were only casual acquaintances. No one who knew them both at Hanover would have guessed that in a few years, at the far end of the continent, they would become fast friends . . . or that in a few more years Les Viereck would unfold his long frame to stand up and deliver a simple, moving, Gettysburg-like eulogy over Foote, the Wunderkind, dead at thirty-seven.
• • •
Foote was born Don Carlos Barbito in New York City in 1931. His father, a Spaniard with a love of the racetrack, left the family when Don was two and his younger brother, José, a toddler. Eventually, the boys’ mother Anglicized her sons’ names and changed their surnames to Foote, her maiden name. The family lived for a few years in New Jersey, and briefly in Arizona and California, but from about the time when Don was eight, they lived in Bridgewater, New Hampshire, a place so rural that Joe called it a hermitage. Mrs. Foote wanted a better education for the boys than was available locally, and that meant a boarding school. Over Don’s emphatic protests, the boys’ new stepfather, with whom Don often had violent confrontations, prevailed in sending him to a military academy in Virginia.
Don hated it. After a disastrous first year, Joe Foote remembers his brother coming home and telling his parents, “Well, you’ve had your shot. Now I’m going to pick a school.” His mother said that would be fine, but she would not be able to help him financially. Don selected the Proctor Academy in Andover, New Hampshire, landed a scholarship, and flourished there. He was elected class president, made captain of the baseball team, and named valedictorian. Delivering the valedictory address in 1949, Don spoke confidently of man’s imminent destiny in space. Parents and teachers exchanged glances and quiet snickers, commiserating with each other in an amused tolerance of youth and illusion. But just eight years later, Sputnik whirled across the night sky, heralding the space age and validating one young scholar’s prescience.
Foote entered Dartmouth with a full scholarship, but without definite career objectives. Then in 1951, after his second year, everything changed. He landed a summer job with the U.S. Weather Bureau and found himself aboard a research vessel bound for Greenland. There he was transfixed by the ice sheet, half a million square miles of it, averaging 1,000 feet in thickness. Once, he saw a polar bear. The clean, cold beauty of the Arctic world struck him with awe—he had been bitten by what the Norwegians call polarbasillen, the “polar bug.” The twenty-year-old suddenly knew all at once and with complete conviction that he wanted to be an Arctic geographer. “From there it was a straight shot,” says his brother Joe, “a single-minded pursuit of that objective.”
The next summer, Foote went to Scandinavia and saw Norway, Sweden, and Iceland. Then, after graduating from Dartmouth in 1953, he worked on the Russian-Norwegian boundary study funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research. He stayed on into the following year, studying at the University of Oslo, revisiting Sweden and adding Finland, Denmark, and the Spitsbergen Islands to his list of places seen, before the U.S. Army drafted him into service. Even during his stint in the army, Foote contrived to be posted to Norway, and by the time he was discharged, he spoke fluent Norwegian. In 1957, he began graduate studies at Montreal’s McGill University, which, like Dartmouth, was known for its excellent Northern studies program.
Foote earned his master’s degree in geography in 1958 and had begun his Ph.D. studies when restlessness overtook him. He thought McGill was too dominated by Cambridge dons who, though they were knowledgeable enough, had never really done anything in the Arctic. He wanted to be in the North again. He wanted to see Alaska. After securing a Carnegie Foundation travel grant, Foote began inquiring about summer employment in the newest American state. He soon learned about a research project that might fit his bill. A regional study under the auspices of the Atomic Energy Commission was to commence shortly in the Cape Thompson area of northwest Alaska near the village of Point Hope. Just what the purpose of the study was, Foote did not know. But he wrote to the AEC’s Lawrence Radiation Laboratory to announce his availability for summer work. Writing in generalities, he mentioned his interest in “regional studies, planning and development in the northern fringe areas of the world.”
He must have been bowled over when a Western Union telegram arrived shortly thereafter requesting that he draw up a budget. Still unaware of the AEC’s plans for Cape Thompson, within twenty-four hours Foote sent off an outline for a program of studies that “involves a complete mapping of the study area, to include topography, soils (including permafrost), vegetation, drainage lines and run-off rates, existing settlements, communication and transportation links and industry” and more. Almost before he knew it, he had landed a $50,000 research project.
Crowding his luck, Foote made a handful of major life decisions all at once. He put graduate school on hold, invited his brother Joe to join him on the drive to Alaska, and arranged to visit his Norwegian sweetheart, Berit Arnstad, in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories. He wanted Berit to marry him, to head off with him to an Eskimo village in Arctic Alaska and who knew what adventures.
• • •
Don and Joe Foote left the East Coast for Alaska in a Volkswagen bus on the fifth of August, 1959. On the thirteenth, at Edmonton, they separated, Don catching a plane to Yellowknife, and Joe continuing north and west to Dawson Creek, B.C. At Yellowknife, on the shore of Great Slave Lake, Don met Berit, who was staying with friends and working at a fisheries job. The next day, he entered an uncharacteristically bland notation in his journal, “Berit and I, in a rather cool northwest wind, wrestled her fish cans about on the Wardair dock. In the afternoon we finally decided to be married.”
They made arrangements with a somewhat overformal minister called Douglas, and the next day drove to the church with a couple who had agreed to be witnesses. The Reverend Mr. Douglas only grudgingly consented when Don turned off the fluorescent lights “to allow the setting sun to light the church.”
The important part of the ceremony was simple and impressive enough despite the good minister’s dogmatic concepts of who should stand where, whose hand should be in whose hand, etc. Any atmosphere of meaning was exploded when Douglas started to preach a little sermon which had no place in the ceremony and certainly nothing to do with Berit and me.
At a small dinner party later, some of the artificiality of the affair was lifted when, as Don wrote, “old Jake Woolgar gave us one of the most sincere and impressive congratulations with a ‘Goddamn it, God bless you both,’ and a whiskey kiss for Berit.”
On the first full day of his marriage, as might befit a bright, idealistic twenty-eight-year-old of the 1950s, Foote seems to have run through emotions ranging from the romantic to the existential:
SUNDAY AUGUST 16, 1959: A magnificent day. Berit and I lingered over breakfast as perhaps only she and I can do. Some work for Fisheries, the sounding line, and short trips around town picture taking from the wildlife truck.
Visits . . . took most of the afternoon and evening and it was not until midnight did we arrive back at Dick’s hut. A near-full moon sawed through a high cloud layer, northern lights snaked low over our heads, Jake Woolgar opened another bottle of Scotch and an Indian beat out some slow monotonous rhythm on a sauce pan.
I understand very little of what is happening here but there is no serious effect which would indicate fundamental violations of an inner self. Marriage remains as much a mystery to me as Berit
Two days later, on Berit’s birthday, Don flew off by himself to rendezvous with brother Joe and the Volkswagen at Dawson Creek, the start of the Alaska Highway. Berit would shortly return to Norway, then fly back in early November to join Don in Alaska. The Volkswagen reached the end of the road, Fairbanks, on August 25.
Nine days later, Don Foote and his research assistant, Tom Stone, landed at Point Hope. When they had retrieved their gear from Wien’s twin-engine Beechcraft at the Point Hope airstrip, they were directed to Browning Hall, an old army mess hall with a Quonset hut attached that served as both movie house and town hall. There they met David Frankson, an important umialik (whaling captain), who was also the village postmaster and had just succeeded Dan Lisbourne as president of the village council. At forty-nine, Frankson was thin, bespectacled, and a full head shorter than his wife Dinah. But this shrewd, tough man was one of Point Hope’s strongest leaders in modern times.
Before he could brief Frankson on Project Chariot, Foote had to sit through a showing of the aptly titled film Rebel in Town. Then, in a three-hour session, he described the nature of his contract work for the AEC and told the council president that he would need the full cooperation of the Point Hope people in order to document their hunting economy and their use of the land.
The following night, nine-tenths of the village population attended a church party at Browning Hall. Tea and cake were served as the Reverend Keith Lawton showed slides. Afterwards, Foote took advantage of the assembly to explain Project Chariot. With maps and diagrams, he outlined the proposed nuclear blast and the scope of the environmental studies while David Frankson translated into Inupiaq. He said, “It is my personal opinion, and that of the AEC, that if Chariot proves harmful to the local people it should not be carried out.” As a result of his up-front approach, Foote said later, he got 100 percent cooperation from the people of Point Hope. But that didn’t mean they were signing off on Project Chariot.
The next day, to a great deal of excitement, the annual supply ship Northstar arrived. It sat at anchor about 800 yards off the beach; cargo was lightered ashore and practically the entire village turned out for the longshoring work. Straight-time wages paid by the Northstar varied according to the worker’s age, ranging from seventy-five cents an hour for those over eighteen to fifty cents a day for six- to eight-year-olds. Foote noted that the women seemed to account for the bulk of the heavy work—and it was no small thing to haul fifty- and sixty-pound loads up the beach through sand and loose gravel. One woman carried even 100-pound sacks of flour by herself. The men seemed to concentrate on sorting the goods into piles according to owner. When the Northstar departed, fall began.
• • •
As a researcher, Foote had hit the ground running, logging in the village’s hunting catch from his first day in residence. But between running down to the beach to count and weigh the animals whenever he saw a boat pull up and taking hunting trips with Dan Lisbourne, Antonio Weber, and the Reverend Mr. Lawton, he had to find a house and ready it for Berit’s arrival and winter. Besides, he was getting tired of writing up his notes to the accompaniment of the sound tracks of the shoot-’em-up westerns being shown in Browning Hall.
It took three weeks of searching and sending telegrams and letters to absentee owners. Finally, on September 28, he rented a small—perhaps fourteen-by-sixteen feet—two-story structure that he said was “without insulation, electricity, plumbing or water storage facilities. It lacks several windows, furniture, stove pipe and bed. Besides all this, the roof leaks.” Foote might have been thankful it was of frame construction; some Point Hopers still lived in the traditional semisubterranean sod houses framed up with whalebone. In fact whalebone was still probably the dominant structural form at Tikigaq. When a Fairbanks artist named Claire Fejes visited the same year Foote arrived, she wrote about Point Hope, “Georgia O’Keeffe, the artist, would have loved the bone architecture; bone instead of wood for walls, clothesline supports, boat racks, grave markers, skin-drying racks, umiak racks, stakes for tying huskies, and for decoration. Some whale bones were twice as high as the dwellings next to them.”
Foote set about repairing his wood-frame house “with those few materials available here in the village, i.e. sod and cardboard.” He gathered popcorn cartons from the movie house and other boxes from the mission’s used-clothes sale and used them to cover the interior walls. He convinced the AEC to send up some scrap lumber and insulation from the Chariot camp. To improve the exterior, he put plywood against the walls and stacked new sod up against them. He installed windows and scrounged parts for a crude wiring job so he could use a light bulb or two when the village generator ran between 8:00 P.M. and midnight. He plumbed an oil barrel to a small, gravity-fed furnace. Meanwhile the winds kicked up to nearly sixty miles per hour and temperatures dropped to below freezing. “House far too cold to work,” he wrote one fall night, “I sit right next to the stove and my left side is much too uncomfortable.” By October, he had the place in fair shape, though when it was windy, which was nearly always, the floor was quite cold. By November, he was writing the AEC again for “some type of sheeting to cover at least the north and east walls”—the walls facing the dominant wind. As he worked at his typewriter one night he noted that, with the furnace going full blast, a water bucket ten feet away and two feet off the ground was slowly freezing solid.
“He did everything to blend in,” said one Eskimo woman who remembered Foote. “He wasn’t like a teacher. Those were the three kinds of white people we saw: preachers, teachers and anthropologists. He ate the Eskimo food. Even his wife fit in.” Foote ate the Eskimo food all right, but it’s hard to tell if this was a matter of preference, necessity, or a sense of camaraderie and good sportsmanship. He wrote to the AEC in September that “both Tom [Stone] and I have suffered ill effects from the Native diet—while in the field and on local hunting trips—and perhaps the village water system.” But a short time later, in a letter to a former classmate back at Dartmouth, Foote sounded no less an advocate of the native diet than Stefansson himself:
There is little doubt that raw meat gives added warmth, and there is a continuous craving for fats. To date I have had no ill effects from the food which has included whale, oogruk (bearded seal), common seal, snowy owl, ptarmigan, caribou, walrus, tom cod, trout, grayling, salmon, squirrel, etc.
In the second week of November, Berit arrived, and like her husband she leaped into the Eskimo lifestyle with a vigor still talked about in Point Hope today. By the end of November, Don wrote a friend, “She has her new mukluks, her parkie is in the making, and she has started my ‘fancy’ mukluks for the Christmas feast.” She “was just like an Eskimo woman,” says one man from Point Hope who remembers her, “she learned how to do everything the Eskimo women do.” Berit did learn to sew skins and butcher and cook sea mammals and caribou, but she was too adventurous to be limited to the woman’s role in Eskimo society. “She started to dress the way Eskimo men—young men—would dress, rather than the way Eskimo women would dress,” says Jackie Lawton, who lived at Point Hope with her husband Keith, the Episcopal minister. “She wore the tight mukluks that the young men would wear, not the type that the women would wear. . . . She wanted to be in the men’s circle.” For starters, she wanted to go hunting, and did manage to go on some caribou hunts, up into the hills by dog team. If Don was otherwise occupied, she sometimes teamed up with an Eskimo hunter on trips lasting several days—something native women did not do. And she very much wanted to be on a whaling crew. “They weren’t too happy about that idea,” remembers Jackie Lawton. “But finally when she, I guess, pushed herself a little bit more into the situation, they took her on. And . . . they treated her more like a boy . . . so she said they kept asking her to go and get things . . . the way they would use the young boys in camp. And this didn’t sit too well with her, but she was glad to be part of the whaling scene anyway.”
• • •
Those who knew Don Foote say he was a man of tremendous energy who could work for long stretches on very little sleep. And many of the hundreds of letters that issued from the drafty little shack on the Tikigaq spit indicate how he pushed himself through the long Arctic night, pounding out on the manual typewriter his reports, his letters and notes: “As I write the clock inches over 4:00 A.M. and an Arctic gale is into its 8th day.” And another time, “I wrote Les in my thirteenth hour on this devil machine and now I try one to you in the fourteenth.”
As the only investigator still in the area as the fall advanced, Foote was regularly beset with requests. The University of Alaska investigators wanted him to compile caribou data, and he tried to assist a disorganized marine-mammal study being run by other investigators. Then the AEC wrote him asking for his immediate assistance, to meet with the village council and “allay the anxiety of the natives.” It turned out that Dan Lisbourne, the former village council president, had written Alaska’s Sen. Bob Bartlett expressing his opposition to Chariot, and Bartlett had transmitted that concern to the AEC.
In Foote’s reply, he made it clear that he would “be honest with the people within the limits of my own knowledge.” The subtext here was that he had no intention of making unsupported guarantees of safety on behalf of the AEC. His letter went on to explain why the AEC might have expected the negative reaction from Point Hopers:
most Point Hopers were angered by speeches and lectures in Fairbanks, Juneau, Nome and Kotzebue, hundreds of miles from Ogotoruk Creek, while not one AEC representative visited Pt. Hope, just 31.5 miles from ground zero. . . . Even after Chariot operations were being completed for the summer [1959], most Point Hope residents were ignorant of AEC’s intentions in Ogotoruk Creek.
Foote said that Lisbourne was “well read and as concerned about fallout etc., as any good New Englander,” and that “Chariot should have been presented to the local people with the same philosophy as one would have used in any rural American area.” The AEC had badly misjudged the Tikirarmiut. At a special meeting of the village council called at Don Foote’s behest, the members declared: “The council discuss the possible dangers to people and animals and decide against this atomic explosion to be blasted at C. Thompson . . . the pres. asks Don Foote to ask the AEC that in future time some man come here and discuss with them more carefully and understand, and besides ask for films about this atomic explosion.”
Rather than relying solely on Foote’s intercession, the council two days later unanimously approved a petition to the AEC that put its position squarely on the record: “We the undersigned the Point Hope Village Council do not want to see the explosion at the near area of our village Point Hope for any reason and at any time.”
Having discharged his duty to discuss the project with the council, Foote went hunting. From the beginning, he had taken advantage of every opportunity to get out into the country. He got the AEC’s approval to spend a portion of the money he had budgeted for air surveys on dog-team rental instead. “In mid-October,” he wrote to a friend back at Dartmouth, “I took a 115 mile sled trip inland along the Kukpuk River to check the caribou hunting and fish camps. Then, on October 28th I started for Kivalina by dog team, again traveling via the Kukpuk to visit the fishing cabins. Unfortunately, the worst storm of the season, so far, chose to keep us wind-bound for three and a half days.” The meteorologist’s log at the Chariot camp notes that it was blowing to seventy miles per hour the day before Foote arrived. “I won’t be ‘polar explorerish’ and go into details,” Foote continued, going on to sound polar explorerish, “but one does like the comfort of seeing the lead dog now and again, and whereas blowing snow can be tolerated, sand and small stones smart one’s eyes.” Foote had hired a Native dog driver, and may well have been riding in the sled as the stones pelted him. At Kivalina, Foote also hired a local man and his team. Still, it was an impressive gambit for someone only eight weeks in the country.
Eventually, Foote would request modifications of his AEC budget to eliminate funds for hired dog drivers and substitute the cost of some hickory boards from which he would build his own dogsled. Foote’s intrepidity, his eagerness to do the things the local people did, and his nonchalance with respect to the cold—all of these were qualities respected in the North, and none of this was lost on the Eskimo people.
• • •
Earlier in the fall of 1959, the AEC hosted members of the press at Camp Icy Meadows—the name Holmes & Narver gave to the Chariot camp (though it never took). The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner’s Albro Gregory visited the project site on August 20, pleased that it had been “finally thrown open to the scrutiny of newsmen.” In the five articles he produced on the subject over the next week, however, Gregory exhibited more sycophancy than scrutiny, which tendency was (and remains) typical of the Alaska press’s approach to covering big dollar federal projects. Dutifully, he reproduced the AEC line, even when it contained obvious contradictions. On the twentieth, he wrote that after the shot, scientists would be able to inspect the irradiated crater lips “within three weeks.” By the twenty-seventh, the period of restriction had shrunken and “scientists would be allowed to approach the big crater in a matter of minutes after the blast.”
One of the three major purposes of the environmental study, wrote Gregory, copying accurately from the AEC press packet, was to determine the best time of the year for the detonation. But at the same time he was reporting that if the blast was approved, it “will be triggered in the spring of 1961.” The AEC said both things simultaneously and, illogical or not, Gregory simply reported both. “The scientists now roaming over the countryside,” he wrote, “appear to favor the March date for the blast because it is believed there will be less damage to the animal, bird, fish and plant populations at that time.” It is not at all clear on what basis Gregory made this assertion. While this was the message put out by the AEC, it is unlikely that researchers—who had no data whatever on March conditions at Ogotoruk Creek—would have been inclined to make such speculations. It is hard to imagine why they would tell the press that such conclusions were so easily foreseen when they had just been arguing so determinedly that only scientific studies could give those answers. In fact, several of the biologists would shortly write a letter of protest to the AEC and mention the apparent predetermination of the spring firing time as scientifically insupportable.
Reporter Gregory even went so far as to claim that the experiment was one “which most scientists already believe to be feasible and in the public interest.” He ignored the AEC’s public admission that the downsized crater would not accommodate deepwater vessels or result in significant economic development, and wrote instead that the “harbor” would be “ready to accept the largest ocean-going ships and to get them loaded with the wealth of the area—coal, principally, and perhaps petroleum products from the Arctic slope.”
It was typical News-Miner coverage of Native issues. The reporter repeatedly characterized the homeland of the Tikirarmiut as “this bleak outpost.” Gregory declared that “these Natives, living largely a primitive life, would not be disturbed by the proposed action or suffer future ill effects,” even though supporting data had not yet been gathered. Neglecting to mention that Point Hopers had utilized the Cape Thompson region seasonally as a hunting, trapping, or egg-gathering area for centuries, Gregory wrote that there were no “permanent residents” in the vicinity, that “only a few Natives pass by.” This picture fit nicely with a classified summary produced by Livermore a year earlier:
In the vicinity of the job site there are no known activities such as mining or trapping. . . . The only known population in the area is a community of Eskimos at Point Hope. These people are destitute and gain their existence from the sea, the Kukpuk River and the local reindeer herds.
In two of his articles, Gregory emphasized that the explosion “would apparently be the cleanest yet fired,” and “the explosion will be the cleanest ever fired in the ground.” Whether AEC spokesmen actually said this or whether Gregory missed the fine-print qualifiers, the fact is the AEC had already detonated several deeply buried shots in Nevada that produced no radioactivity at the surface. Because Gregory conceded Chariot would vent some radioactivity, it could not possibly be “the cleanest yet fired.” With respect to controlling fallout, Gregory conceded that “it is a matter of [to] what degree this can be accomplished,” but accepted on faith that it nonetheless “falls into the category of ‘clean’ use of the weapon.”
That same summer, at the “Undiscovered Earth” conference held in Birmingham, Alabama, Edward Teller outlined another contradictory version of the radiation picture. According to the Associated Press, Teller said Chariot could be fired without the venting of any radioactivity at all, promising the shot would not take place “until there is complete assurance that there would be no fallout.” But, because a cratering shot such as the one proposed for Chariot would necessarily vent some radiation as exploding gases ejected the dirt, it had to create fallout; AEC publications on Plowshare clearly state as much:
Any nuclear explosion designed for cratering will permit some radioactivity to enter the biosphere, the amount depending upon explosive yield, depth of burst, and fission/fusion ratio, as well as the chemical and physical properties of the medium.
• • •
As the fall of 1959 descended on Ogotoruk Creek, the camp population dropped sharply. Where seventy people crowded the mess hall at the beginning of August, only twenty-three sat down to eat by the sixth of September. Two weeks later, only the three Holmes & Narver caretakers remained. One of them, Harry Spencer, kept a daily journal through the coming fall and winter. On September 20, he wrote, the first snow fell at Ogotoruk Creek. On the twenty-third, the temperature dropped to fourteen degrees with roaring winds peaking at sixty miles per hour. Within a day, Ogotoruk Creek froze over, and two days later one of the men, finding nothing better to do, placed a case of dynamite on the creek and blew it up with rifle fire. Winter came anyway—and stayed a while.
On October 12, Spencer noted that all the ducks and birds were gone from the beach. On the twenty-seventh, a storm raged all night. Snow piled up high against the huts’ walls and found its way through every chink, settling in little drifts on the floor inside.
OCTOBER 28: Wind worse today. Up to 50 knots, not drifting snow now as most of it is gone. Things shaking off the shelves . . . buildings holding down OK.
OCTOBER 29: The 4th day of this. The wind got up to 70 mph several times today. . . . It was blowing so hard it was picking up the sea water.
The next day, ice formed on the sea. Seals and ugruk appeared, and Don Foote showed up with a Native dog driver. They were marooned three days by the storm. On November 2, the Wien plane brought in groceries but forgot to bring the mail. “Everyone was disappointed as we have had no mail since Oct. 23 and they have been here twice.” On November 16, 17, 18, 19, and 20, Spencer’s entries vary little: “Wind blew hard all day, up to 60 mph.”
NOVEMBER 22: Got up to 77 mph . . . all the stoves are operating on increased settings and the wind really takes the heat out.
DECEMBER 7: Ed went out to Kotzebue today and was a mighty happy guy to go. This is hard for some guys to take with long nights and monotonous old day after day.
December nights grew longer still until, on the twelfth, the sun did not rise. “Daytime” was defined by a few hours of twilight, and the yellow glow in the southern sky grew dimmer each day. December brought the darkness as well as the deep cold. On the thirtieth, Spencer’s thermometer stood at thirty-seven degrees below zero. The next day “a real howling storm,” with winds exceeding sixty miles per hour, blew out the year and the decade.
JANUARY 3: Saw the sun for the first time this year. It was visible for 35 minutes, approx. 1/3 of it was visible along the horizon. It sure makes a lot of difference . . .
JANUARY 8: I had to use the rope to get back to the shack this evening as I couldn’t see the radio shack from the weather house.
On the twentieth of January, along with “yowling, howling winds,” Spencer reported that some visiting officials from Livermore were getting a good idea about what shot conditions would be like in January. “They all went outside for about 5 minutes,” he said, which was about all a person could take.
February crawled by. “Good hard storms,” with winds blowing more than fifty miles per hour and temperatures decades below zero, frequently kept everyone inside all day. Pruitt ventured out with his dog driver when the weather moderated to minus twenty and winds at about forty-five miles per hour.
On March 14, 1960, a clear cold day when temperatures never got above zero, Harry Spencer noted the arrival of another party of AEC officials. They stopped an hour for lunch, then flew off to Point Hope. The AEC party had been in Alaska since March 3 and was now in the midst of an informational tour of the villages along the northwest coast. Besides Juneau, Anchorage, and Fairbanks, they had already visited Nome, Wales, Shishmaref, Deering, Kotzebue, and Kivalina. After Point Hope they would fly on to Noatak, Kiana, Selawik, Noorvik, Point Lay, Wainwright, and Barrow. As Harry Spencer sat out an Arctic spring that included temperatures to twenty-eight below zero in mid-March and scientists suffering frostbite in April, the visiting AEC party was having its own chilling effect on the region. But at every village, a shy and no doubt utterly nonplussed and confounded population raised “no significant questions,” as the AEC public relations officer noted in his trip report. At every village, that is, except one.