Martha Swan befriended the author and took him to church in Kivalina.
Anthony Dalton
Chapter 6
Steaming with anger at the senseless destruction of my property, I prepared to manhandle Audacity back into the water. Stuffing the remains of my possessions into kit bags, I reloaded and began dragging her bow around to face the sea. Hauling her out had been a problem. Relaunching her, particularly with anger adding to my strength, was simply an exercise in gravity once she was poised on the lip of the beach. Jeff Anderson and Bob Phoenix, two visiting telephone engineers from Alascom, came by to help. Between us we pushed Audacity, bow first, down the bank. One of the guys pressed a small package of date bread into my hand as I stepped aboard.
Once afloat I wasted no time. A few words of thanks to Jeff and Bob and then, without looking back at Point Hope, I started the motor and set course for Cape Thompson.
The murres skittering across the sea failed to amuse me this time. I surged past the cape, through and over the biggest waves, taking little notice of birds or the wind. Keeping a hundred metres offshore all the way, I worked Audacity hard. The current held me back; the outboard motor pushed me on. Conserving fuel didn’t enter the equation anymore. There was enough to get me to Kivalina; beyond that, only time would tell. A few litres more or less in the tanks would make little difference.
I was angry, and anger makes people careless. I took risks I would never normally have considered at sea. My burning rage swept me full tilt for Kivalina, even though I knew, behind the fury, that I was taking too many foolish chances. Fortunately my instincts retained a modicum of control and managed to balance the impetuosity of my black mood against ingrained survival skills. As Kivalina came in sight, I came closer to the land and entered the narrow channel between the sandbars. A sharp left turn at the end, followed by another left turn and a short run, put me in familiar territory.
Four hours and 27 minutes after I left Point Hope, I stopped, with bow touching the shore, in the tranquillity of Kivalina Lagoon. It was evening. The packet of date bread was on the seat beside me where I had dropped it as I left Point Hope. Hungrily I wolfed down every morsel, mentally thanking the donor.
Stripping off my life jacket and flotation suit, down to corduroy pants and thick sweater, I put on my parka and wrapped a woollen scarf round my neck to keep comfortable. Audacity sat in almost the same spot as she had two days before. All I had achieved was a brief look at conditions ahead. On the other side of the coin, I had wasted a lot of gasoline and been robbed of important supplies. My mood was black.
Sylvester wandered over to greet me. “You got back quick,” he said in surprise.
“Yeah, I had a good run. Any idea when the supply ship is coming in?”
“Soon. Maybe today, maybe tomorrow.”
“Where’s the guy who looks after the gas? Or is he still up river?”
“He’s not back yet. Nothing for him to do until the ship comes.” With that, Sylvester walked away.
If he was still up the river, I wondered how he would know when the ship arrived. Someone would, I supposed, have to go and get him.
I was stitching the front of my tent when an elderly Inupiat woman approached me. Wearing a long rust-coloured coat with a pattern of gold leaves, she was the embodiment of late autumn preparing to greet winter. Her coat was gathered at the cuffs to keep out the wind, and its high collar extended to become a cowl of black and sand wolverine fur. Her hair, a few strands of which strayed untidily to play round her expressive face, was white. Once her eyebrows had been black, as had her hair; now they were grey, turning to snow. Her wrinkled face and hooded almond eyes intimated kindness. Her full lips suggested a sensuality that belied her years. I guessed her age at 75, because of the lines on her face. She was probably younger. I could see she must have been stunningly beautiful when she was in her prime.
“Have you come far?” she asked in a gentle voice, standing close, looking up at me.
“Yes,” I smiled in return, “I’ve come from Nome.”
“Ah, yes,” she nodded. “I’ve never been there but I know it is a long way. You must be tired.”
“A little, but I enjoy being on the sea.”
“Would you like a mug of coffee?”
I smiled my thanks and followed her back the way she had come. I noticed she wore sensible soft-sided hiking boots over bright orange socks.
“My name is Martha Swan,” she introduced herself. “This is my home.”
The house was small, with a couple of rooms for eating and living, perhaps two bedrooms, no more. We sat in her tidy kitchen, on creaking wooden chairs at an old wooden table. The kitchen opened up into a larger room.
Martha handed me a steaming mug and poured another for herself. We talked far into the night, which didn’t get dark. I tried to explain my journey, needlessly as it happened. Martha understood long journeys in small boats. All Inupiat people understood.
“You have a good umiak.” She pointed out the window in Audacity’s direction. “It looks strong. Must have cost a lot of money.”
“It is a good boat,” I agreed, “and usually they are expensive. I didn’t have to pay for this one because I’m promoting the company while I’m travelling.”
Martha nodded, smiling. She liked that answer. “You got it for nothing? That’s a real good deal.”
Our conversation ranged from umiaks to kayaks, from Audacity to the imminent arrival of North Star. I explained my need for fuel and the problems I encountered at Point Hope. Martha’s eyes showed pain that a visitor had been treated so badly by her Inupiat relatives. She patted my hand, apologizing. Her wrinkled hands were surprisingly soft, yet obviously strong.
I went back to the lagoon soon after and wrapped myself up in my sleeping bag. For a few hours I slept fitfully, finally getting up to tackle the repairs again while I waited for water to boil for tea and oatmeal. With a bit more sewing, I decided, I could manufacture an effective new front that, while not pretty, would be functional. If it were positioned correctly each night, I would still be sheltered from the worst of the weather.
———
Kivalina is a village of 140 persons, perhaps only a quarter of whom were in residence during my stay. Many were inland at hunting camps, some were fishing and others were just … away. There has been a settlement on the low-lying spit of land for at least 150 years. A Russian naval officer noted the name “Kivualinagmut” as far back as 1847. This was close to where Thomas Lopp and his reindeer met Lieutenant Jarvis in 1898, before the herd turned inland for the north.
There is a gravel airstrip on the west side of the village, with a small cemetery between the runway and the sea. The village dump sits near the cemetery. Point Hope’s dump was similarly situated. The positioning seemed rather unkind to me.
Sylvester Swan mixes the technology of yesterday and today as he tows a traditional sled with a modern ATV.
Anthony Dalton
The only way to reach the village in summer is by air or by sea. There are no roads outside the community. Transport within Kivalina is on foot, ATV or snowmobile. I was surprised to see how well the single-tracked vehicles ran on packed earth and gravel. The twin skids slide over the ground well enough, but I assumed they had to be replaced often, as the abrasion factor of the hard-packed earth is far greater than that of snow.
———
Martha came to see me again after I’d eaten breakfast. I was putting the finishing touches to the front of my tent when she appeared.
“Sunday,” she announced. “We go to church.”
I folded the tent and tucked it out of sight under the tarpaulin. Obediently I followed my new friend to a weathered wooden building close to her home.
“We have two churches in Kivalina,” she told me. “That one over there is the French. We go to the Episcopalian.” Martha didn’t say so, but I assumed the French church was for the village’s Catholic residents.
People turned in their seats as we entered, some looking at me as if I had come from outer space, others smiling and nodding in recognition.
Sitting in a forward row with their families, Caleb and Ron Adams each raised a hand in greeting. I smiled and nodded to them. Martha and I sat together a few rows from the back. In front of us, a thin, frail-looking man turned round and asked Martha a question in Inupiaq. She replied in one sentence. He shyly extended a hand toward me over the pew. I clasped it.
“My name is Chester Bundy,” he said. I told him mine.
“Have coffee with me after,” he invited.
Martha sang beautifully in her native tongue. Around us, the other voices, strangely high-pitched to my ears, reminded me of services I had heard in the tropical islands of the South Pacific. There was an air of childlike enjoyment and expectation in the church. My thoughts wandered back to the service in Shishmaref, where I had experienced the same warm feeling.
Reverend Swan, one of many people with the same surname in Kivalina, conducted the service in English. The hymns were sung in Inupiaq. Some I remembered from my early years as a choir boy in Dorchester Abbey, near Oxford, England, and as a teenager in a smaller, less-historic parish church. The tunes were the same even though the words were foreign to me. The hour passed quickly and pleasantly.
Outside, Martha took her leave. “Go with Chester,” she told me.
First I persuaded her to sit on the wooden step leading to the church and pose for my camera. I wanted a portrait, a special tangible memory, of an encounter I would never forget.
Coffee, kukpak in Inupiaq, is as much a ritual among the natives of Alaska as tea is for people in Britain. They will seize any excuse to take a break for coffee and conversation. Chester Bundy was no exception to the rule. Slim, medium height, wearing tinted glasses and, most of the time, a battered baseball cap, Chester was a bachelor. I guessed he was close to my age, perhaps a year or two more. I later learned he was six years older, already 50. Chester lived alone and, I could tell, he got lonely.
“North Star won’t come today,” he warned after I told him why I was in Kivalina, “maybe tomorrow.”
We discussed the gasoline situation. Chester agreed there was no spare fuel around.
“What about the boat that went to Kotzebue for fuel last week?”
“He’s not back yet, I guess.”
“And the gas man is still upriver somewhere, fishing?”
“Yeah,” Chester agreed, “he’s still fishing up the Kivalina River, I guess. There’s no gas for him to sell anyway.”
I was getting really concerned by then. “What do you know about the other settlements north of Point Hope?”
“There’s 10 army guys at the DEW Line station at Cape Lisburne. They got gas but they can’t sell it to civilians. You can stay there overnight with them if you want to.”
That was more or less what I had been told in Point Hope.
“Maybe I should round up as much fuel as possible here and make a fast empty run to Kotzebue. Take a few empty tanks from here too; then I could fill up again when I get back and there would be some left for other people.”
Without any of my own equipment on board, just the tanks, Audacity could carry a considerable load of gasoline. Certainly enough to replace what I borrowed, leave a premium and get me well beyond troublesome Point Hope.
Chester advised against it simply and succinctly: “There’s a storm coming. North Star be here soon. It’s better to wait.”
The sky was overcast and the sea was rolling with a few whitecaps. Nothing I saw suggested the onset of a storm I couldn’t handle. I asked to use his phone to call the meteorological office in Kotzebue. It confirmed Chester’s forecast; a gale warning for the entire area that night. There was nothing for me to do but have another coffee with Chester.
He showed me his ivory carvings. They weren’t particularly artistic—his talents as a carver were definitely limited—but it was obvious he was proud of his work.
“What’s this?” I picked up a long spindly piece of bone, about 25 centimetres from end to end, which already showed evidence of his sharp knife.
“That’s oosik,” he answered, taking it from me and holding it up to the light. “That’s a walrus penis.”
Chester explained that the tusks and baculum, or penis support bone, of the walrus were prized by carvers. “Tourists from the south, they like them,” he grinned.
As our conversation progressed, Chester told me that his parents had met on Herschel Island, in the Canadian Arctic immediately north of the Yukon mainland. They travelled along the coast, maintaining themselves by hunting and fishing, until they reached Kivalina, where they settled. Chester had no idea how long the journey had been, but he thought they might have taken a couple of summers to complete it. He had been born in Noatak, on the Noatak River, but Kivalina was his home.
I learned that Chester had spent 23 years in the National Guard before his retirement, even training for a time with the Canadian army.
“Those Canucks were some smart dressers,” he told me. You should have seen the creases in their pants.”
In Kivalina he worked part-time looking after the village power plant. When he wasn’t busy, which he admitted was most of the time, he wandered around the village looking for something to do or someone to talk to. My enforced stay in the community gave him a new companion. Talking, about any subject, made Chester happy. He was a kind and gentle man who appreciated a new friend. We spent many hours together, chatting about Alaska and drinking coffee. Chester kept me from making rash decisions. His patience was a good example for me.
Walking back to Audacity, I stopped to chat with Sylvester. Once again he told me the long-awaited North Star would arrive the following morning. He also invited me to join him and his family for dinner that night.
“Alice, my wife, she is making a moose stew,” he added with a laugh and a slap on the back. “It will be good. Fill you up. Make you strong.”
Such an invitation I could not refuse. And, as Sylvester had predicted, the stew was delicious and filling. When we had eaten, he and I sat outside on his step, smoking, while he showed me the human faces he carved on whale vertebrae. They were better than some I had seen, certainly saleable in communities blessed with guaranteed tourist trade—but not exciting enough for me to carry on a long voyage.
In contrast to Chester, who had thin features, Sylvester had a rounded face topped by jet-black hair. Like many in Kivalina, he was slim but strongly built. His sinewy hands were powerful, yet capable of a surprisingly gentle touch.
Suddenly, in the midst of delicately carving an eye, Sylvester told me there were 15 bears seen near Kivalina the day I left for Point Hope.
“Fifteen?” I asked, surprised. “Were they all together?”
“No, different places.”
“What kind? Grizzlies? Or polar bears?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t see them. A guy told me later. I think a couple of polar bears were seen on the coast, up past the airstrip. The others were by the lagoon.”
I assumed the others were grizzlies and wondered about the numbers. Fifteen bears close to one settlement sounded like a heck of a lot of trouble to me. If the chained dogs had picked up their scent, they would have howled for days in fear. It occurred to me that I had probably passed the polar bears in Audacity without seeing them. Too busy concentrating on the task at hand, as usual.
In the morning, Chester reported another gale warning for the region. The seas at Point Hope and Cape Lisburne were predicted to reach heights in excess of 25 feet (8 metres), with winds blowing at over 40 knots.
“And it’s snowing at Barrow right now,” he added. “It will get rough here too.”
“I think I’d better get my boat out of the water, just in case,” I suggested.
Chester agreed and helped me haul Audacity out of the lagoon on log rollers. She sat a little down the slope, with her bow about a metre from my lean-to. We drained the accumulated rainwater and replaced the bungs. Once she was dry, I covered her with the tarpaulin and left her there. She was safer on land for the moment.
“Do you think the ship will come today?” I asked Chester.
“The ship will come when it comes,” he replied.
His patience did little to curb my frustration at being effectively tied to land. With nothing else to do, I spent a few hours walking the shore alone, marching along the coast way past the airstrip. Far from the village, I unexpectedly flushed a willow ptarmigan and discovered a pair of common eider ducks. Although I was actively seeking wildlife, my eyes rarely left the horizon for more than a minute or two. When the ship arrived I wanted to be the first to see it and the first to greet the fuel when it came ashore.
When I heard a plane coming in from the east in the mid-afternoon, I ran back to the airstrip for an expert’s viewpoint. The scheduled Cessna flight was en route from Kotzebue, via Kivalina, to Point Hope and then back the same way. I asked the pilot to bring me an up-to-date report on conditions at Point Hope.
“No chance,” he replied. “I’m not going anywhere near Point Hope with that storm blowing. I’m going straight back to Kotzebue. This is gonna be the worst storm this summer.”
He went on to explain that Point Hope was reporting 40-knot winds, gusting much higher, and Cape Lisburne had 45-knot winds blowing from the southwest. Seas, he added, were said to be mountainous. To add to the mayhem, heavy rain was falling and fog was drifting in. A real Siberian–Alaskan–Arctic blow.
I asked how much it would cost to have fuel flown in from Kotzebue. Based on the quantities I required, the cost was prohibitive. The pilot also advised patience.
“The North Star will be here today or tomorrow. Then there’ll be enough gas for a hundred motors,” he told me.
That night, as I returned to the village near midnight after another long solo hike, the disturbed sea was white without a trace of blue or grey. Overhead, the latest thick dark clouds scudded east with their burdens of precipitation. The wind pushed my body forward until my feet had to jog to keep up. The lagoon was erupting into nasty-looking waves, most of which battered the shore and Audacity. Another storm had arrived. I pulled my parka hood over my head and watched the sea gather its strength to help the wind flagellate Kivalina. My shelter was in danger of being blown away, with me in it.
Hearing loud voices after I had gone to bed, I poked my head out of my tent. Sylvester and a couple of others were trotting along the lagoon edge, away from me. Audacity, no longer on land, bounced up and down on the lagoon, taking wave after wave over the transom. Fortunately she was anchored to a metal spike dug deep into the hard ground. I pulled my boots on and ran after the group.
The lagoon was kicking up such a fuss that all the village boats were in danger of swamping. As a team, we hauled half a dozen boats up on land, out of reach of the waves. Then Sylvester and his friends helped me pull Audacity back to safety as well. Strangely, two of the men had not seen her before. When Sylvester told them where I had come from and where I was going, they were cautiously impressed.
“Be careful off that cape up there. Cape Lisburne. Real bad winds there all the time,” one said. Then, patting Audacity, he added, “You’ll be okay in this boat.”
Audacity was full of water again, and after the men went home I found a long tear in the rubber material where the transom meets the hull. It would not affect the air chambers but would certainly allow water to seep into the hull. It had to be repaired before I left, which meant heating a sealing compound and applying a thick patch. It wasn’t easy in the wind, but I managed.
The weather was unkind, but the people of Kivalina were hospitality personified. Along with Chester and Sylvester, Martha stopped to chat with me regularly. All doors, I was told, were open to me. I began to feel like a long-time resident. Rarely on my travels throughout the world have I received such kindness from so many people in one place. Everybody I met on my walks, or when I was sitting on Audacity waiting for departure, stopped to talk. Most invited me home for coffee or for a meal. Without exception they were much disturbed by the treatment I had received at Point Hope. They went to great lengths to assure me that they, in Kivalina, as in most settlements, would never allow a visitor to be mishandled. As there is, according to my research, no word or phrase in the Inupiaq language that means “telling lies,” their sentiments were all the more favourably received.
The children, who I had avoided at first, were soon greeting me with loud shouts and big smiles. They often held my hands as they walked with me. Their cries of “Hey, Papa” echoed off clapboard walls when they saw me each day. Papa, I learned, was an affectionate name for a grandfather. Had I really aged so much during my stay in Alaska?
One consolation for my protracted sojourn in Kivalina was the opportunity to phone Penny regularly. There was nothing she could do to help, but our phone calls made us both feel better at the time. The inactivity, however, in spite of the warmth and friendliness of the people, began to wear me down. I found it difficult to focus on anything much, except the need for fuel and the way ahead. Sometimes I went to my tent and untied the front, only to crouch there wondering what I was doing. Only by concentrating hard and looking at every object inside could I conjure up the errand that had sent me there. Often I wished I had something to read. Normally a voracious reader, I realized I hadn’t held a book in my hands for weeks.
Although I tried, I couldn’t sleep for more than an hour or two at a time. Inevitably, insomnia created more boredom. The fewer hours I slept, the more hours I had to pass awake. Consequently I had more time to worry about the dilemma in which I found myself. The already long days lengthened accordingly.
Chester taught me a few words in Inupiaq. Some I already knew, such as komatik—sled, umiak—skin boat, nanook—polar bear, tuktu—caribou. Chester taught me the walrus is avik, a seal is nutchik, a whale is ahvik, the grizzly bear is ukluk and a moose is tinikuk. The dogs, which howled so loudly at night, were kipniks, and the house he lived in he called a toopik.
“You don’t have igloos in Alaska, do you?” I asked, quite sure that the stereotypical Eskimo dwelling—a rounded house made with blocks of ice—was limited to the Canadian Arctic.
“Yeah,” Chester said with a big laugh, looking around his house of well-insulated sheet plywood, “this is my igloo. It just means a house.”
Outside, the rain blasted down at 45 degrees. The wind turned the wavetops white with rage. The sea pounded Kivalina’s already flattened beach.
