America’s really only a kind of Russia.
Anthony Burgess,
Honey for the Bears
THIRTEEN THOUSAND YEARS ago – possibly earlier – the first Americans pursued herds of mammoth and bison eastwards over the Bering Strait land bridge. Some kept going east to the edge of the ice sheet, others dropped south. Many stayed in what became Alaska. They paddled their seal-skin umiaks to the fairs of Kotzebue Sound to trade with ancient rivals, thousands of slender craft looping the floes towards camping grounds infused with the stench of reindeer and blubber.
Metaphorically as well as physically outside the rest of the USA, the 49th state still beckons the free spirit, the dreamer, the pioneer. Yet there is much of America in Arctic Alaska and its history. Just as Chukotka cannot conceal its Russian context, Alaska reveals the unbridled force of the entrepreneurial spirit and the open conflicts of a democratic country. Here are the environmentalists and the oil executives; the dispossessed, the vulnerable and the truth-seekers; indigenous hunters and refugees from the Lower 48. Chukotka has no roads because successive governments couldn’t afford any. Alaska has one of the greatest roads on the planet – the fabled Dalton Highway, the only land route to the Arctic Ocean, the all-time über-road that met every engineering challenge in the sacred service of oil. Could this 414-mile technological triumph hold the key to the American Arctic experience? I went to Alaska to take a road trip on the Dalton Highway – and to follow the Trans-Alaska pipeline that sashays alongside.
Before the pipelines, Alaska had another road to riches. The story of non-renewables in the Arctic is not over, but no matter how long it continues, the Klondike will always set the standard for thrills. The Klondike goldfields were in Canada, but the shortest routes to them went via Alaska. The rush began in the 1860s, when a Hudson’s Bay Company clerk at Fort Yukon, on the great bend of the Yukon River where it touches the Arctic Circle, reported that a missionary had seen so much gold in a local river ‘that he could have gathered it with a spoon’ (one wonders why he didn’t). Prospectors began arriving in the upper Yukon valley in the early 1870s, finding mainly placer gold until, in 1896, an American sieved up a nugget on Rabbit Creek, a tributary of the Klondike hastily renamed Bonanza Creek and staked out from end to end. In July 1897, a prospector disembarked from his steamer at Seattle with 90 kilograms of gold in his suitcase. It was Klondike now, or bust. Over the next twelve months, in excess of 100,000 men and women stampeded to the goldfields, many crossing into Canada over the treacherous Chilkoot Pass from Skagway – the symbolic precursor of the Dalton Highway. In the last half of 1897 alone three thousand horses started up the single-file White Pass adjacent to the Chilkoot. Barely one survived. When a horse fell on the trail, men coming behind trampled over it, so that by the end of the day nothing remained but a head on one side and a tail on the other. Even when they were over the mountains, prospectors had to build boats to float down the Yukon rapids and on 800 miles to Dawson City, the gold town hard by the border; either that or mush in over the ice. Besides spreading TB through the indigenous communities, killing hundreds, many newcomers left the hostile Klondike half-dead, or indeed dead. Meanwhile, Dawson City flourished. The currency in the saloons was gold dust, weighed in scales on the bar at $16 an ounce. Prostitutes had their own scales, though the best among them charmed prospectors out of their entire poke. Girls singing on the stage of the Savoy or the Monte Carlo were pelted with nuggets (in a friendly way, and they got to keep the nuggets if they weren’t brained). Meanwhile shortages in the overcrowded town meant that salt was the same price as gold. Typhoid broke out in 1898, and undertakers worked round the clock to embalm bodies in preparation for shipment to loved ones in the Lower 48. In an attempt to avoid starvation, Canadian authorities imposed a one-ton supply minimum on each prospector. It took forty climbs to haul the ton up the one-in-three gradient of the Chilkoot Pass, even after entrepreneurs had set up chains of buckets. Those that survived kept coming back. It was the finding that counted, as Robert Service, the poet of the Yukon diggings, well knew:
There’s gold, and it’s haunting and haunting;
It’s luring me on as of old;
But it isn’t the gold that I’m wanting
So much as just finding the gold.
Claims were bought, sold, bought back and restaked. When, in 1898, a greenhorn found placer gold at Cape Nome on the south coast of the Seward Peninsula in west Alaska, thousands raced out of Dawson and tore across to found the settlement of Nome. By the summer of 1900, 12,500 men and women were camped on the beach. Three years later they stampeded again, out of Nome to Fairbanks. That was the last of the big rushes.
At about that time, Hudson Stuck, archdeacon of the Yukon, travelled 14,000 miles across Arctic Alaska by dog sled. ‘What is the Alaskan legacy,’ he wondered of the lust for gold that had brought southerners to the northlands, ‘of all those thousands of men and hundreds of thousands of dollars they brought? Those creeks, stripped, gutted, and deserted; this town, waiting for a kindly fire with a favouring breeze to wipe out its useless emptiness; a few half-breed children at mission schools; a hardy native tribe, sophisticated, diseased, demoralised, and largely dead – that seems the net result.’ He well knew, he said, the ‘low-down white’ of Service’s ballad, and he endorsed the asperity of the poet’s judgement. ‘It is unquestionable’, Stuck wrote, ‘that the best natives in the country are those that have had the least intimacy with the white man.’
Stuck’s aim was to bring succour of the Episcopal variety to the far-flung Inupiat, an Inuit people who shared a similar ethnic heritage with the Chukchi; but he also loved the Arctic. He respected both ‘Eskimo and Indian’, knowing each well, and expressed contempt for government workers who taught Inupiat to call themselves Mr and Mrs (he made the acquaintance of a Mrs Shortanddirty), nonetheless relishing the spectacle of ‘a native woman in a Merry Widow hat and a blood-stained parka gutting salmon on the river bank’. Imitation of the white man, he warned without irony, was a perilous strategy. On a fork of the Chandalar River he conducted funerals of babies who had died of diphtheria. (The valley of the Upper Kuskokwim had almost been depopulated by the disease.) In 1912, people there prayed daily to Our Sovereign Lady Queen Victoria and Albert Edward Prince of Wales, both long in the ground, like the babies. Stuck knew all the ice – crumble ice, shell ice, rotting ice, thin sheets of overflow ice (the latter the most treacherous on a river, and the most frequent cause of tenderfeet losing their feet, and sometimes the lives went along with the feet). At seventy below it was impossible to break trail, and at those times, when Stuck was stuck, he and his native boy had to snuggle in the tent and wait it out. When occasionally he came across a group of Inupiat who had not been saved he ripped through the Incarnation, Crucifixion, Resurrection, Ascension and what he called the cardinal rules of morality. So much for not imitating the white man. It was a Five-Year Plan by any other name; but Stuck was saving souls.
Out for twenty hours at a stretch (‘my moose-hide breeches froze solid’), carrying a translation of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, Stuck wore caribou socks, and claimed one day that his Adam’s apple froze. He went from creek to creek, giving divine mass to native and prospector alike in a roadhouse or a store or a tent with a cloudy seal-gut window, the flock with frosted parka hoods and white breath, snowshoes under their arms. The service was adjourned when a dogfight broke out, cold air shooting in like a steam jet while someone went outside to separate the offenders. When two different local groups were present, two interpreters were required, with the result that a twenty-minute sermon went on for an hour. Stuck’s book records the soft-tissue of Arctic history: the perishable bits. He writes of buying fish with packets of gold dust, and of burying lone prospectors who had frozen to death. Nothing dented his enthusiasm. He wrote of ‘the bounding of the spirit’ induced by an Arctic sunset, concluding that ‘surely for its pageantry of burning, living colour, for purity and depth and intensity of tint, the Far North with its setting of snow surpasses all other regions of the earth’.
Besides diphtheria, Stuck identified TB and whiskey as the chief dangers threatening the well-being of Arctic Alaskans (some would also add Bible-bashing Christianity), and of these two, whiskey was the worst. In the archdeacon’s view, all laws controlling it amounted to ‘a dead letter’ in so large a country. Alcohol abuse was as old a story as contact itself in Russia and America alike: it was among the experiences shared on both sides of the Bering Strait. A traveller in the 1880s already talks of the ‘whiskey howl’ of the Indians, and of a tribe ‘whiskied nearly out of existence’. But Inupiat, masters of landfast ice, had lived unmolested for centuries throughout the Alaskan Arctic before the arrival of missionaries and traders. A yearning for the white man’s goods only set in when Inupiat began to convert the spoils of the hunt into dollars during the 1870s. Whalebone corsets and buttons brought the cash in first, followed by fox furs. When nobody wanted either whale or fox, Inupiat were obliged to take salaried employment, as they could not now return to their old ways: they were dependent on the store and its booty, as were their Siberian kin. The story resonates round the Arctic. Less than a century after the first fur was exchanged for a glistening silver dollar, the main Inupiat settlement, at Barrow, famously the most northerly town in the Americas, functioned purely as a cash economy, and people hunted only on their day off.
Before heading up the Dalton Highway and following the oil pipeline to the Arctic Ocean, I heard a lot about ‘the freedoms’ of Alaska. There is a great deal of it in which to be free. By far the largest state in the union, at 572,000 mi2 Alaska is a fifth the size of the entire Lower 48 and six times the size of Great Britain. It has 100,000 glaciers and, with only a twentieth of 1 per cent of the land developed, 1.06 people per square mile. State licence plates bear the slogan, ‘The Last Frontier’. Arctic Alaska lies at an even further remove – isolated wilderness by the standards of a region that considers itself reasonably isolated and wild as it is. Covering a third of the state, with a tiny fraction of the population, Arctic Alaska is the last frontier of the last frontier. Yet the white man has repudiated the romance, first making the Arctic a Cold War battleground. Between 1955 and 1957 the US and Canada set up a chain of fifty-eight Distant Early Warning radar stations – the DEW line – along the 69th parallel, linking Alaska with Canada, Greenland and other Arctic islands. Then, when the notion of two superpowers and their titanic struggle had expired with the twentieth century, a fresh set of white men turned the Arctic into an energy frontier. In a rapine quest for natural resources, the outsider came to Alaska to take oil, just as he had done in Siberia. Hudson Stuck had identified TB and hard liquor as precursors of destruction. Oil was next on the list. Like a talisman for the circumpolar Arctic in its pitiful entirety, the Alaskan paradise yielded up the serpent.
Inupiat hunters have known where oil seeps for generations. By 1919, men from Outside knew where it might flow faster still: the US government had just published a report revealing an unusual 220-million-year-old sandstone and gravel formation under Prudhoe Bay. Subsequent earth heaves had locked in deep porous rocks capable of capturing migrating oil. But the Arctic was hostile territory, the season was short, and nobody knew how to extract the oil. The US navy, however, had already converted its warships from coal to oil, and just in case supplies ran short, in 1923 President Harding designated 37,000 mi2 (95,000 km2) of the North Slope Naval Petroleum Reserve Number 4. Investors included Laurel and Hardy and a constellation of other stars who, in 1936, poured movie dollars into a Hollywood oil consortium. Geological teams and wildcatters began arriving in Fairbanks before heading north with armies of seismic crews, between them drilling over 150 wells between 1901 and 1951 without a single discovery of commercial viability. With Eisenhower in the White House, the Federal government released previously closed lands cheaply for private oil exploitation, spurred by Iran’s decision to nationalise its petroleum business. In 1957 the Anchorage Times announced the first proper strike in 3-inch headlines. It happened on the Swanson River in southern Alaska. Two years later, statehood became a reality, Alaska beating Hawaii to full membership of the union by eight months. Half a century later, state legislators are still feuding about oil.
The next fortune was surely to be made on the North Slope and, with the relaxation of Federal controls in the sixties, explorations shifted to the top tier of Alaska. BP was among the first to buy leases. Significant Arctic oil began to gush in 1968 when Atlantic Richfield struck below Prudhoe Bay. The residents of Fairbanks literally danced in the streets. BP struck a year later, and other companies followed. As strikes proliferated, Wall Street too caught oil fever. But the companies still had to transport the crude to market. Tankers could only get in to Prudhoe Bay for two months each year. In mid-1969 the three major players – Atlantic Richfield, Humble Oil (now part of Exxon) and BP – announced there was to be a pipeline whatever the engineering challenges. Environmental groups put up a fight, but they faced a losing battle after OPEC countries restricted production in 1973. Nixon signed the Trans-Alaska Pipeline into law the following year.
The 800-mile pipe was to decant at the northernmost harbour that doesn’t freeze in the big white of an Alaskan winter, and that was Valdez on Prince William Sound. Halfway down the pipeline corridor, Fairbanks boomed again. The oil companies set up a consortium to design, construct and maintain the pipe, but before leaping the technical hurdles, it had to clear the political ones. Any pipeline had to cross land occupied, but not owned, by indigenous peoples, and the spirit of the times meant that public bodies and private companies alike were unwilling to trample literally over their rights (as both groups had done for two centuries). Native organisations sprang forth to the rallying cry of Federal tyranny, and it quickly became clear that there would be no pipeline without appeasement. So it was that in 1971 the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act passed into law. In exchange for surrendering their ancestral lands, the settlement gave approximately 75,000 Inupiat and other groups $962 million in cash, and 44 million acres (about a tenth of the state’s land, but in return for surrendering any claim to the other 90 per cent). Religion and diphtheria in 1900, money and land in 1971. Life was looking up for Alaskan Inuit. Reservations were out of vogue and there were to be none in Alaska. Instead, twelve new regional corporations managed the wealth, investing half the money and disbursing the other half. The Act was designed to bring indigenous peoples into a business economy like all good Americans. (‘Into the mainstream of American life’, legislators called it. Passing the buck might be a more appropriate expression for what they did.) It was also designed to clear the way for large-scale non-native mineral extraction. Which it did.
Much has been written about the way in which the 1971 Settlement Act transformed native Alaskans into capitalists. The terms of a much earlier act allowed each individual to claim 160 acres. But there were few takers, as private ownership was not a familiar concept. But when the new Act craftily set a claims deadline, many felt they had better get in while they could, and they did register claims, despite the fact that this was in violation of their customary principles. Bad feeling inevitably followed. ‘The sense of private property that has been jacketed upon them [native Alaskans] is uncomfortable, and incompatible with subsistence harvesting and its changeful cycles,’ wrote one commentator. ‘Eskimos should make laws for those people outside,’ an Inupiat told an anthropologist. It was not all bad: in 1972 the North Slope Borough, an Inupiat initiative headquartered in Barrow, became the first native government set up by an Arctic people. It taxed the Prudhoe Bay oilfields, and Barrow itself became the richest settlement in the USA. Americans had hit on a capitalist solution. But it destroyed a culture as effectively as collectivisation.
As for the money: piranhas swam into view, offering advice, stock, trucks, lunch. Anthropologists called what they saw ‘rapid acculturation’. Unwise investments proliferated, as did whiskey. Scenting a story, the New Yorker despatched John McPhee to Arctic Alaska and the upper Yukon in 1976. The fine book that came out of the assignment, the bestselling Coming into the Country, returns obsessively to the Native Claims Settlement Act. A strong objector to the net effects of the Act, McPhee noted that all the Hungwitchin people had to do to get their share of the money was ‘turn white’. He camped and travelled among the Kobuk River peoples, and among both white settlers and Hungwitchin of the Eagle region. A future Pulitzer winner, McPhee conveys the tension between preservation and development, especially acute in the seventies, and besides revealing deep sympathy for the indigenous peoples of Alaska, he also lovingly records a series of unsentimental portraits of white settlers who had stuck it out.
On 20 June 1977, oil flowed. Would it turn out to be the most significant day in Arctic history? Soon 1.2 million barrels a day were speeding to Valdez to meet 25 per cent of US oil needs, and as the state received about 12 per cent in taxes on every barrel, dollars erupted over Alaska like lava from a volcano. The legislature in Juneau established a Permanent Savings Fund. That was a good thing. Corruption, fraud, racketeering, Teamsters Union scandals, organised crime, aborted impeachment proceedings, carpetbagging and lucrative oil industry contributions to political campaigns – they were bad things. To a certain extent the pipeline became a paradigm of 1980s greed, just as Russian oil became a paradigm of oligarchical enrichment a decade later. The industry got the tax and accounting breaks it wanted – it had the right people in the legislature to defend its interests – and effectively emasculated state mechanisms to protect people and the environment. Then came 24 March 1989. The 987-foot supertanker Exxon Valdez ran aground on Bligh Reef with 1,263,000 barrels of crude on board. The captain, almost certainly drunk, had been trying to avoid icebergs that had calved off the Columbia Glacier. Almost eleven million gallons of crude ran into Prince William Sound. Remember the television pictures of oil-stricken sea otters and tar-strangulated gulls? But the Exxon PR machine was ready. The Russian solution to accidents was to nuke the evidence. The American way was to spin the message. But the net result was the same: environmental disaster. Exxon beamed images round the world of flotillas of omnisweepers and maxi-barges sucking up spilled oil, and of 15,000 workers scrubbing rocks. (After the first few days PR gurus decided the scrubbers weren’t cleaning, they were treating.) One could imagine oilmen Laurel and Hardy joining in, Hardy scrubbing industriously and Laurel subverting his efforts. Exxon released footage of 250 sea otters being flown to rehabilitation centres where they dined on crab; to the joy of the world, all 250 survived. It cost Exxon $90,000 per animal. The rest of the otters died. If the PR men were smirking, the joke was on us. At least 67 per cent of the spilled oil was never recovered. Private contractors working on the clean-up became known as spillionaires.1 Still, to this day many Alaskans back the oil companies when they make claims for more development, among them representatives of the Inupiat-owned Arctic Slope Regional Corporation. The dawning awareness that the fanatical combustion of fossil fuels might have a deleterious effect on the network of earth systems is little in evidence in Alaska.2
Beginning 70 miles above Fairbanks, the 414-mile Dalton Highway crosses both the Yukon River and the Arctic Circle, finally running out of ground on a coast nearer Chukotka than anywhere else. The only land route to the Arctic Ocean, and built exclusively to service oil transportation, the Dalton ravages one of the last true wildernesses on the planet, an Arctic Serengeti teeming with wildlife. The truckers, who think of it tenderly as their own, call it the Haul Road.
The Dalton begins just outside Fairbanks, Alaska’s second city. The Arctic Science Division of the University of Alaska Fairbanks had extended an invitation to its research facility at 68°N, and even offered a seat in a truck on a delivery run from Fairbanks. As the vagaries of weather called for a flexible departure date, I got to Fairbanks and waited for a telephone message. With a population nudging 31,000, the place is flat and boring, featuring a proliferation of strip malls and clapboard houses and a generalised tang of neglect. Urbanisation, you get the feeling, is skin deep: a moose, six feet to the collarbone, was rooting on the side of the freeway at the end of the slip road to the Northern Nugget, the motel where I was beached until I could ride the Haul Road. On one really bright day I could see the outline of Denali on the skyline, the tallest peak in the Americas, but mostly a dank and oystery cloud front sat on the horizon until the reprieve of darkness. Alaska was still a lonely place. On my way to the shop at the end of the slip road, I found myself nodding a greeting to the moose. His was the only familiar face in Fairbanks. Quietly desperate for company, I spent one afternoon on the steps of the Northern Nugget with a group of sourdoughs just in from the back country. They were sucking on a quart of Jack Daniels which they passed round between them, a farting terrier at their feet. A ‘sourdough’ signifies a true Alaskan, after the frontiersmen who took sourdough starter on the trail.3 It was the most ancient method of bread making: keep a piece of raw dough back before baking a loaf, and use it to start the next loaf. And so on, for years. This lot had been panning without success around the creeks of the Koyukuk River, a major tributary of the Yukon in the region of the Arctic Divide. It was a horrible day, the grey sky gelatinous as frogspawn. An undercurrent of truculence occasionally broke the surface within the group, like a whale’s fin. Costive conversation listed, for my benefit, towards the definition of the contemporary sourdough. Bread was no longer involved. According to a ham-faced lummox in a plaid jacket, ‘Y’ave to have piddled in the Yukon River.’ This met with general agreement, and the Jack Daniels went round again. ‘You,’ chipped in a man with a hat resembling a doughnut, pointing at me, ‘you’re a Cheechako.’ Fortunately I knew this word as Alaskan vernacular for a tenderfoot or greenhorn – someone from Outside who was new to Alaska. So I wasn’t tempted to punch doughnut-head. Cheechako originated from Chinook jargon, a pidgin trade language of the Pacific Northwest. (l later learned that the word is often used to signify homosexual, but that wasn’t what the man meant.) Someone else droned on about the quantities of gold he had panned on a previous visit; all hat and no cattle, as they say in Texas. ‘Why dint’you take us back to the same creek?’ asked another, reasonably enough. The oracle was Delphic on this point. The man in the plaid jacket dropped the bottle (ham-fisted too). It smashed on the bottom step. Nobody said anything, because they had already drained the whiskey. The failed prospectors were departing for Anchorage, 358 miles to the south, early the next morning, leaving the moose and me to battle it out. Doughnut-head stood up, swaying gently. His face was smooth, without any of those small wrinkles produced by thought. ‘Want to come to my room?’ he asked me with a winsome squint.
Two days later, I left. I was riding the Haul Road. It was the only route through Arctic Alaska, and therefore the only land passage to the splendours of the North Slope. It was also the ultimate cipher for what Americans had achieved in the Arctic. I was in the passenger seat, and next to me, behind the wheel of a truck marked with the logo of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, sat Jeannie. She was an Idaho-born outdoorswoman, once an oil worker on the rigs, now an employee of the university maintenance crew. Travelling in a pickup of a size never seen in Europe, Jeannie was heading all the way to Deadhorse, where she would collect a consignment of hauling equipment, then travel back down the Dalton Highway to my destination, the university science camp at Toolik Lake. Toolik was a long way from anywhere and Jeannie, whom the university had posted at the camp for the summer, worked two weeks on, two weeks off. Meaty as a wrestler, with cropped hair the colour of hay, she was an old hand on the Haul Road, and a steadying presence when eighteen-wheelers hurtled past, catapulting rocks at our windscreen.
We had pulled out of Fairbanks in the morning, jouncing through boreal birch forest, already gilt-edged, stands of aspen, evergreen spruce, and alder. And hundreds and thousands of willow bushes. The shallow valley floors were golden with cottonwood and flecked white with tassels of sedge, and on the low ridges, against a background of glowing green, the rich cream of reindeer moss reflected the rays of the sun. We stopped at a prospector’s cabin on the Chatanika River, its angular, chipped logs knocked up with axe and augur by some amateur panner moiling for gold. The capital that followed the old-timers brought derricks and suction dredges that ingested and spat out the earth, heaping the land with pyramids of tailings. Two 55-gallon steel fuel drums lay on their sides under the cabin’s single window. ‘Alaskan state flower,’ said Jeannie. Initially nervy and reticent, she had thawed as the population dropped away, and besides chattering about the wonders of the Alaskan wilderness, she sometimes turned towards me just to flash a wide smile. I was pleased to be heading into the Arctic Divide with such an amenable companion.
The Sitka spruce, elsewhere so mighty, shrank as the latitude – monitored on the GPS on the dash – crept towards 66. A keen and proficient cabin-builder, Jeannie always looked out for short or leaning trees if she was considering buying a piece of land. ‘Lean’s a sign of permafrost,’ she said authoritatively, ‘and you can’t build on that type of land. Take a shovel to it, feels like you’ve hit concrete. If you drill through, whatever you build will droop as the frost softens.’ Permafrost underlies a quarter of the earth’s surface.4 Prudhoe Bay oil workers once drilled a shaft through 2,000 feet of it, and in Siberia, in Yakutia near the Upper Markha, salt miners have tunnelled through four-fifths of a mile of permafrost. Most of it is very old. In Alaska and the Yukon, it might be in excess of two million years. (Unlike most of the Canadian High Arctic, during the last glaciation Alaska had no ice sheet lid to keep out cold air.) Who knows what is locked in those cubic miles of earth? When a cliff collapses in Siberia, a woolly mammoth regularly emerges, a beast not seen alive for ten thousand years.
‘Howdy buddy,’ a male voice crackled over the CB radio, waking me from a pleasant reverie. ‘I’m right behind you, and I’m not gonna be able to stop as I slide down the hill over the ridge ahead.’ I looked up from the passenger seat to see the rear-view mirror filled to its frame with a monster fender powering towards us in a cloud of coffee-coloured dust. ‘I’d be grateful’, continued the voice, ‘if you could pull over to let me pass.’ That would be a yes, then. The Dalton Highway was a macho stereotype: the biggest got priority, just for being big. If you disagreed, you got flattened.
The road was built with private money in the 1970s to carry goods to the oil rigs at Prudhoe Bay and the adjacent service town of Deadhorse. In winter, members of the Alaska transport department flood the entire highway with water mixed with gravel to create a smooth, hard surface with good traction; when water freezes in the culverts that run under the road, they squirt steam down special chimneys sticking up at one end. In summer, they pack the surface with calcium. But it’s tough, lonely going, whatever the season. CB radio, according to Jeannie, is ‘a matter of life or death’, as are at least two spare tyres, and the permanent illumination of headlights.
A glint of the Yukon flashed through the birch trunks and my spirits soared. A vital link in the history of the American far north, the 2,000-mile Yukon still lives up to its legend, at least at the Dalton crossing. An Everest of a river, it surges through a 3,000-foot-wide gorge in an opaque riverine highway of its own. Once it was the focus of life in the Alaskan interior, and gave access to the Shangri-La of the Klondike. But to indigenous peoples, it signified much more: a lifeline to fresh hunting grounds when the weather changed or the caribou altered their route. In the 1970s the plan to ford the Yukon presented civil engineers with one of their most taxing challenges. To start with, air temperature ranging between 32º above Celsius and 50º below required a differential of two feet to allow a bridge to contract and expand. The steel box-girder construction that now links both sides of the Dalton Highway has the pipeline strapped to its side. As you approach, you can see the slope. Since 9/11, the combined presence of bridge, pipeline and riparian Pump Station Number Six have necessitated a heavy security programme – imagine the value, to a terrorist, of cutting off both the oil supply and vehicular access to Prudhoe Bay. Security personnel keep a twenty-four-hour vigil close by the north shore stanchion; when we passed, a guard from the day shift was eating a sub sandwich in his van. So far, spillages have been either the result of drunken pranks, or accidental. An Athabascan teenager had recently shot at the pipe with a high-powered weapon, continuing to fire until he made a hole. He went to prison, and 200,000 gallons of crude went into the tundra.
We had set out from Fairbanks in warmish autumn conditions, but around the Yukon the temperature dropped, an Arctic zing supplanting currents of mild heat. Something in me unclenched. Heading at last north of the Yukon, the pipeline, saviour of Alaska, led the way in a majestic zigzag. We stopped to wait for a young grizzly to get up from the middle of the road. He was licking his front paws. The Dalton cuts through good hunting land, but if you want to use firearms rather than a bow, the law dictates that you walk off the highway for at least five miles and hunt the backcountry. Then you have to walk out again, shouldering your caribou . . . it was a joke at the white man’s expense in Chukotka, but a reality in Arctic Alaska.
The pipe had been part of Jeannie’s life for a long time. ‘Greatest engineering feat of the twentieth century,’ she said, ‘and the largest private construction job in history.’ Superlatives all round. ‘See the zigzag?’ She pointed at the silver Zs on the hillside ahead. ‘Protects against earthquake damage. Had a 7.9 Richter scale quake here in ’02, and neither the pipe nor the big Yukon Bridge so much as bent an inch. I was here! And see that pump station? One of a dozen built on refrigerated foundations. Each has a Rolls Royce jet engine inside.’ I felt obliged to take an interest in the complexities of pipage. What, I enquired, was the function of the foot-long white bars sticking up from the sides of the pipe? ‘Conduct away heat created by the friction from waxy crude,’ Jeannie explained. ‘Operators can alter the flow via a series of 151 valves remotely controlled in Valdez. The big fear with turning valves off, though, is oil stopping, as it congeals then. Big disaster!’ I could see the Yukon Flats in the distance, hedged to the east by dim grey hills.
Construction began in November 1973, with 21,000 workers camped on the job. As a concession to environmentalists, engineers had incorporated more than 500 animal stations into the route. The solution to permafrost was to elevate the pipe on stilts for 420 out of the total 800 miles. The stilts were fine – noble even – but the hillsides covering the buried portions resembled artificially cut ski slopes, revegetated in lurid green. The pipe itself had a certain sleek, technical beauty. Overall, it wasn’t ugly. It was unobtrusive.
‘Two miles to the Arctic Circle!’ announced Jeannie, quietly triumphant at having made it to 66 degrees of latitude without even a flat tyre. I too felt more than a pang of excitement: the invisible frontier ahead was the gateway to a mysteriously silent America. Ice now skimmed the hillsides, and beaver lodges damned the creeks. At the Circle itself, marked with a sign, we stopped to eat the Alaskan picnic Jeannie had taken some trouble to prepare for my benefit: sockeye salmon jerky smoked in her back yard (she called it ‘squaw candy’), home-baked bread, wild cranberry muffins and a flask of dark coffee. Jeannie could kill, skin, gut and quarter a caribou without assistance, and often did. Solitude and the backcountry had proved more reliable than human company, and she played a man’s game on the Haul Road. She had even made herself look like a man. But she didn’t really care about beating the other guy. She didn’t long to drive a bigger truck. It was just a way of surviving. As we finished the meal, a formless silver unity of drifting fog moved across the mountains ahead of us, and for a few minutes we let a creek do the talking. Then, evidently moved by some mysterious working of memory, some deep-sea fish stirring in the murky depths of her unconscious, Jeannie began telling the story of the death of her Labrador Susie.
‘Eleven years we went everywhere together, before she had a stroke. She was lying on the bed next to me and she lost control of her bladder. She was embarrassed. A month later she died in my arms wrapped in a bedspread on the edge of the vet’s parking lot. I kept her body in the freezer for four years. When the power died in an electrical storm and the freezer went off, she got doused in salmon juice, and I had to bury Susie then.’ She stood briskly to clear the debris of the picnic, bowing her head to concentrate on the empty Ziploc bags. Was it the polar emptiness that had prompted her to unfold her emotional landscape and lay it on her gingham picnic cloth? While I fussed around pretending to help, a man’s tread brought the Arctic Circle back, and a thin, raggedy figure in his twenties appeared wearing oily Carhartt dungarees and a baseball cap stitched with the logo of a flying saucer.
‘Wonder if you ladies could help me?’ the figure asked in softly modulated tones. ‘I’m set to do a little gold-dredging up north, and my vehicle’s broken-down half a mile up the road. Would you ladies be kind enough to take me on to Coldfoot, where I can telephone my nephew in Fairbanks and have him come up with a spare part?’ It was against university regulations to take hitchhikers, and I could see that Jeannie was uneasy. Years of employment on the lower rungs of the oil industry ladder had taught her the importance of obeying rules. The wilderness was all well and good, but a pay cheque was better.
‘We’ll talk to you when we’re done,’ she told the supplicant, who nodded and stole away. I was deeply anxious. It would be tantamount to murder to leave a man on his own without supplies in temperatures that at night fell well below freezing. The rules had not been made for the Arctic.
‘He might write the university a thank-you letter,’ Jeannie said as we stuffed the remnants of the picnic into a pack. This seemed unlikely.
‘Couldn’t you’, I ventured, though it seemed as if I were stating the bleeding obvious, ‘ask him never to mention the ride to anyone?’ I could see she knew she had to take him, but she didn’t like it.
The fellow, ‘Alaskan native and native Alaskan’, had staked a claim. He had learned the trade, he informed us from the back seat, during a stint working as a driller for a large commercial company. After an industrial lifting accident in which he had injured his back, he had been officially designated Disabled, and was presently operating as an independent prospector, camping out at the diggings like an old-timer. He had already found small quantities of gold, which he had sold to the Fairbanks refinery. ‘Just gone up to $700 dollars an ounce,’ he said confidently, ‘and there’s much more out there. There’s gonna be gold in every creek in this state with gravel in it.’ He claimed to have equipment worth in excess of $50,000, but I rather doubted it. His car, which we passed, wouldn’t have fetched twenty (dollars, not thousands). His manners remained impeccable, even when Jeannie was less than forthcoming. You got the impression that he was inured to unfriendliness, pressing on regardless.
‘What are you ladies up to so far north?’ he asked politely.
‘Oh, just out taking some photographs,’ said Jeannie breezily. This seemed about as plausible as the flying saucer buzzing away from the man’s cap and out of the truck window into space. I shrank into my seat, saying nothing.
‘Look at that,’ I said, as we hurtled forward into the Arctic.
‘What?’ said Jeannie at the wheel.
‘There was a sign,’ I said, ‘to a place called Gobbler’s Knob.’
‘So what?’ she said. Fortunately the conversation was brought to a premature close by flooding over a portion of road, requiring Jeannie to slow to a crawl and stop talking. By the time that hazard was behind us, we were almost at Coldfoot, a destination touted as the major settlement on the entire Haul Road. Located on Slate Creek, the camp was named after prospectors who got cold feet and turned back. During the mini-boom of 1902 Coldfoot Camp had seven saloons with wind-up phonographs, a post office, a jail and ten whores, the latter referred to as ‘sporting girls’. That’s how it was with the rushes. Each one pulled in a campload of hangers-on. One sourdough said, ‘If Stefansson [a controversial early twentieth-century Arctic adventurer] could get to the North Pole and discover gold, there’d be 500 Alaskan whores there inside three months.’ We drove into a car park surrounded by six low buildings made from abandoned construction containers. This turned out to be Coldfoot. The hiker went off to telephone his nephew from a booth at the back of the truckers’ cafe. We followed him inside. Particles of cooking grease filmed every surface of the steamy interior. A plaque on the wall recorded a temperature of 97ºF (36ºC) in 1988, and below it a sign noted that the following year Coldfoot had experienced -60ºF (-50ºC) for seventeen days in a row. Jeannie and I both ordered the Special, pork-belly soup, which was excellent. A third sign indicated that we were at the last gas station for 239 miles. So after paying for our soup, we filled up. The gas pump was faulty, and kept cutting out, so Jeannie had to put in a cupful at a time. A passing trucker recognised her Idaho Vandals cap (she was a fanatical supporter) and conversation about the team’s woeful recent performance took us up to a full tank. I slipped back inside to mouth goodbye to our hitchhiker, who was yelling into the receiver, evidently not finding his nephew receptive to the 250-mile round-trip rescue plan. He seemed somehow helpless – which was how I felt, as I so wanted him to find a chunky nugget. When I returned down the Dalton to Fairbanks a week later, his broken-down car was still marooned on the Arctic Circle. I expect it is still there today, embraced by permafrost and mammoth carcasses.
Before we settled back into the Dalton’s mesmeric rhythm, the metropolis of Wiseman (population twenty-one) loomed out of the tundra. A layer of porridge ice rustled on a river abutted by vegetable gardens and cabins sprouting solar panels. But the mountainous silhouette in the background brought back the pages of Bob Marshall. One of the few frontiersmen who left a record, Marshall settled in Wiseman and wrote about the Arctic Divide in prose that will last until the glaciers return to the North Slope.
Born in 1901 in New York City, Marshall spent childhood summers roaming the Adirondacks before going on to train as a plant physiologist and forester, rising to the position of Chief of Recreation and Lands in the US Forest Service. He made four trips to Arctic Alaska in the thirties, studying tree growth at the northern timber line. Deeply engaged with the conflict between wilderness subjugation and wilderness preservation, Marshall wrote of ‘the emotional values of the frontier’ and urged conservation, not development. Some places should remain unknown: as Will Ladislaw had already declared in Middlemarch, they must be ‘preserved as hunting grounds for the poetic imagination’. The 1930s is more foreign than the Arctic now but Marshall’s plea to conserve polar wilderness resonates as clearly as it did when he was crawling over spring ice to wrap a tape measure round a spruce trunk.
Marshall’s bestselling Arctic Village told of fifteen months based in a cabin in Wiseman. It took two weeks then to get from New York to Fairbanks, and from there Marshall flew the last leg. When he returned to Wiseman for a second visit, the hundred residents, a mix of whites, Inupiat and Athabascans, held a dance at the roadhouse in his honour. In Wiseman Marshall found beauty, tolerance and freedom that compensated for the many things lacking at the roadhouse store. He was attracted, he said, by ‘the glamorous mystery of unknown worlds’. Marshall writes of hooking grayling 20 inches long, of siwashing (bivouacking without a tent), of dining on grizzly steaks and moose tongue, knocking off first ascents, unpacking his dendrograph after wading through 9 feet of last winter’s snow in August, naming mountains and gulches and marvelling at his luck in finding paradise. He describes diving head first into his sleeping bag to change a film in the dark, cooking biscuits in the midnight twilight, hauling his raft across Squaw Rapids, then hiking back to Wiseman to read about the Depression in a four-month-old copy of Time. When it rained, he lay in his tent reading Meredith’s Diana of the Crossways, enough to send a normal man into a coma on Fifth Avenue, let alone at the headwaters of the Koyukuk. In the winter he went mushing, starting out from Wiseman in the starlight, cooking cornmeal for the dogs, trampling soft snow down with snowshoes to make camp, cutting spruce boughs on which to set his stove. The maps he made, some published by the USGS, are works of art. There weren’t any roads to draw, but a delicate network of streams and rivers that resemble, on the page, the microscopic vessels in a pair of lungs in an anatomy book. When Marshall first arrived, Wiseman was dominated by gold-diggers from ’98 who had stayed on. Some were snipers, men who reworked old mining ground. It was always the failures who stayed.
A modest man immeasurably moved by what he called ‘the humility of grandeur’, Marshall died of a heart attack on a train from Washington to New York when he was thirty-nine. ‘Exploration’, he had written, ‘is perhaps the greatest aesthetic experience a human being can know.’ The Arctic had attracted so much shoe-eating that one could lose sight of the spiritual exhilaration of exploration. Of the heavyweights, only Fridtjof Nansen communicated a sense of the true subjugation of the ego that discovery can bring. ‘If we perish,’ he wrote, ‘what will it matter in the endless cycle of eternity?’ Nansen is the presiding spirit of my Arctic story. A long-faced Norseman with a touch of the Sphinx, he was born near Christiania (the former name of Oslo) in 1861, and in the course of a tumultuous life became an outstanding scientist, diplomat and humanitarian as well as a record-breaking explorer who led the first crossing of Greenland. A Nobel Peace Prize was among many laurels bestowed for his work as a League of Nations High Commissioner, in the course of which he had originated the Nansen Passport for refugees. Following independence in 1905, he became his country’s first ambassador to the Court of St James’s, and at one point almost rose to the position of Norwegian prime minister. Perhaps that is why he was a better explorer (and writer) than the rest: he did other things, a man for all seasons. Nansen sensed at a profound level the ‘yearning after light and knowledge’, and, almost uniquely, was able to marry that understanding to physical capability and snowcraft.
Shortly after Wiseman, the valleys deepened and the forest capitulated to semi-iced North Slope tundra. Northern harriers and rough-legged hawks circled above a flock of wild Dall sheep on the steepest hillside. Linked now to a stranger by the intimacy of Susie’s death, Jeannie gunned the truck into the foothills of the Brooks Range, the 700-mile limestone uplift which arcs across Alaska, the end of a spine that starts with the Andes and surges north as the Mexican cordilleras and the Rockies. Here its mountains mark the border between the Arctic North Slope and the Yukon River Drainage – what some call the Arctic Divide. It was Marshall’s country, the land he had skewered so lyrically in words. And I saw what he had seen. Behind the first row of low hills, blunt 8,000-footers rose in waves, deeply incised by broad, U-shaped glacial valleys. White birch skirted the lower slopes, while patches of snow remained in sheltered spots just above. As we crested the first pass, the Koyukuk curling ahead, a Japanese cyclist whizzed by, head down and upturned eyes murderous with misery. You have to admire a man who has pedalled through the Brooks Range. But I wished he had looked as if he were enjoying himself.
The Brooks’ limestone needles shot into cirrus cloud, proportion subordinated to the height imperative, as in an El Greco painting. Jeannie had become more voluble as we approached journey’s end. She had started to shout out the name on each sign. The road builders were keen on signage, and the forks of the rivers were capable of infinite subdivision, facilitating a maximum number of marker posts. ‘The West Fork of the North Fork of the Chandalar River!’ Jeannie yelled. As an act of preparation for the descent waiting on the other side of the highest pass, she got out to lock our hubcaps. For the first time, full slopes of ice foreshadowed the Big Freeze. The highway dropped away steeply on either side. Jeannie climbed back into the cab. The sun was setting, and the sky painted rosy pink. When the valley was in shadow, level sunbeams continued to pour onto the white higher slopes in an effect of ravishing beauty, and the ice reflected and refracted purple light like cut crystal. Then all except the tips became dead white, and we experienced the transfiguration of alpenglow. When the shadows crept higher and submerged both slopes and ridges, alpenglow still lingered on the highest peaks, until eventually these too were quenched, glowing points going out like stars. We had crossed the Arctic Divide.
Half an hour later we trundled into polar flatlands. Jeannie bantered about road conditions over the radio with a passing trucker. She suggested that wheel chains would be required in a few days. ‘Yep,’ agreed her interlocutor. ‘Reckon it’s the last time we’ll go barefoot this year.’ Then we passed no one for fifty miles, and we both fell silent, woozy with the heady emptiness of the Dalton and the fug of the cab. Jeannie’s loyalty to the concept of progress enshrined in the Haul Road was touching. She was as certain as the missionary Hudson Stuck that the American way was best. Perhaps a conviction of rectitude characterises all significant endeavour. The Stalinist collectivisers had been sure they were right to nail down nomads who had roamed the Russian Arctic for many centuries.
We spent the night in a Deadhorse blockhouse. Disintegrating volumes of soft porn stood in chronological order on a shelf in my room, a bathetic end to the greatest road trip on earth. In the morning, I took a walk before breakfast. Deadhorse was a ratty ex-mining settlement of the central casting variety just fifteen miles from the holy springs of Prudhoe Bay, Pump Station Number One and the high security ‘Pad’ housing 1,400 BP workers. You could faintly see industrial smoke trails in the sky over the horizon, emanating, according to Jeannie, from stacks burning off not oil but gas. For three decades people had been talking about plans for an ambitious but as yet non-existent gas pipeline all the way down to Chicago. As for Deadhorse, it was a dead loss. ‘Best thing about it,’ Jeannie had told me in advance, ‘is the cat at the general store.’ At the store, where the cat was not in evidence, we drank weak coffee to fortify us for another stint on the Dalton. An odour of frankfurters leaked from behind the clapperboard partition separating the public part of the store from its private recesses. The natural light beyond the windowpanes was bright, but the gloomy room required the illumination of a weak and shadeless overhead bulb that dangled at eye level, threatening to clout the careless customer. A notice pinned on a board alerted the Inupiat workforce to a forthcoming general meeting in Barrow 200 miles away to discuss proposals to raise hunting quotas. Barrow Inupiat eat bowhead – picking them off from floes, as I had learnt from envious Chukchi – and the ritual hunt remains an important social and cultural landmark. ‘We as Inupiat have been the guardians of the Arctic for thousands of years,’ subsistence bowhead hunter Charlie Hopson from Barrow recently told an environmental journalist. His daughter had joined him on his whaling boat, but his son was working as a mechanical engineer at Prudhoe Bay.
‘What keeps you here?’ I asked Jeannie as we drained our coffee and prepared to leave. ‘It’s not what’s here,’ she said. ‘It’s what’s not here.’
Back on the road, we headed south to Toolik Field Station in the foothills of the Brooks. You could see the camp from way off, crouched a mile from the Dalton on the south-east shore of Lake Toolik. A half-arc of prefabricated trailers jacked three feet off the tundra; a berm of cargo crates; a couple of Caterpillar forklifts with their buckets in the air. At noon Jeannie swung into a gravel yard and pulled up outside one of the prefabs. We got out. A thermometer on the outside wall revealed that it was -5ºC. Jeannie opened the fridge-style door and we went through a lobby heaped with boots and parkas, entering a galley in which a bearded man was doing a jigsaw at one of a dozen tables and simultaneously eyeing an open laptop next to the scattered pieces. This was Ford, the Toolik maintenance manager. It turned out that he was constructing an image of the Sahara and monitoring the health of his generators, which were linked to the laptop.
Now owned and managed by the Institute of Arctic Biology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Toolik Field Station was founded in 1970 as a camp for the labourers hacking the Dalton Highway out of the permafrost. As it was the end of September, the scientists had left, installed once more in the laboratories of their home institutions. In order to absorb the landscape of the Arctic Divide, I had arranged with the university to spend a week with eight Toolik support staff while the station was quiet. On the gravel tracks outside the galley, the occasional golf cart trundled equipment and stores between modular labs and science Jamesways, but otherwise little was going on beyond a general battening down for winter. That suited me fine. Behind the galley, miles of boardwalk criss-crossed the tundra. Most of it facilitated a twenty-year ecology study looking at the breakdown of soil carbon. For many years the station has been operating as a monitoring and testing ground for investigations into the Arctic’s role in global climate change: researchers measure – for example – fluxes in the levels of greenhouse gases released as the active layer above the permafrost softens in spring sunshine.
Ford showed me to a guest dorm with eight rooms. As I was the only guest, I got to choose. It was hard, as they were all the same. Ford went through the ropes. Grey water, including sewage, got trucked out to Prudhoe Bay at a cost of 75 cents a litre. So we were limited to two two-minute showers a week during which we were required to turn the water off while lathering. This explained the cardboard plates and bowls in the galley. It was more environmentally friendly to burn cardboard than to truck out dirty washing-up water.
I padded the labs. Technicians maintained one of the freezers at -80º. In the Antarctic I had once looked after a gas-powered freezer used to prevent things getting too cold. Sometimes at Toolik I kept the others company. One afternoon I motored out to the middle of the lake with Sherri, a science technician from California with Baywatch looks to complement a Masters in marine biology. She had to haul in a floating meteorological station before freeze-up. After sucking the season’s data from the device onto a laptop, we pulled up the anchors, which were plastic crates full of rocks. Mostly, I hiked the hills and valleys, watching the highway snake north in a rolling cumulonimbus of brown cloud. A series of smaller satellite lakes clustered round Lake Toolik, itself not yet frozen, though the streams decanting from it were filmed with ice, and the banks crackled under my boots. Alluvial rock filled the valley floor between camp and Jade Mountain, and outcrop merged into block-fields of glacial till, a vegetation known as barrens. Going up Jade, the low bushes thinned out, and I found myself walking over disintegrated schist and volcanic tuff before following a ridge to the summit. The high mosslands to the east dropped off in 1,000-foot gorges, and on the other side a permanent icefield bunged the head of a basin, its greenish lower slopes tinted with blueberry leaves. The sun came out, and I lay down in the deep silence, conscious of what Marshall called ‘the unreality of a freshness beyond experience’. I pondered the open vastness of an Alaskan landscape far from the choked marine freeways of the Inside Passage, the cloud forests of the Alexander Archipelago, the alpine bowls of the Mat-Su Valley, or the gothic rainforests of the south dense with western hemlock and Sitka spruce 8 feet in diameter. The Arctic existed in a different dimension to the rest of Alaska: simultaneously stunted and soaring. I had come to glean something of the American polar experience, but here I had found something universal. I suddenly understood Marshall’s ‘humility of grandeur’: that overwhelming yet deeply comforting sense of one’s smallness and unimportance in the thunderous hugeness of the Arctic Divide. I must have fallen asleep while I was thinking, and when I opened my eyes a wild sheep was looking at me. I could feel the warmth of its breath on my cheek.
Meanwhile the pipeline glinting into the distance continued pumping its millions of barrels to the hungry multitudes. There was something inevitable about its presence even here, in one of the last true wildernesses. Oil, on one reckoning, has been the single most important factor in shaping environmental history over the past fifty years, not just in Alaska, but everywhere. Cheap energy became a distinguishing feature of the twentieth century, and the harnessing of fossil fuels, along with population growth and technical innovation, constituted its determining characteristics. I lay lazily in the cool sunshine and wondered what John Muir would have made of it. A vigorous environmentalist who founded the Sierra Club, and widely regarded as the father of US National Parks, Muir said Alaska was among his great loves. His 1915 classic Travels in Alaska is a work of uplifting enthusiasm: like Marshall, he proselytised the values of conservation and, like Nansen, he recognised the enlightenment discovery can engender – and he shared Nansen’s poetic touch. ‘The setting sun fired the clouds,’ Muir wrote. ‘All the world seemed new born. Every thing, even the commonest, was seen in a new light and was looked at with new interest as if never seen before. The plant people seemed glad, as if rejoicing with me, the little ones as well as the trees, while every feature of the peak and its travelled boulders seemed to know what I had been about and the depth of my joy, as if they could read faces.’
Muir emigrated to America from Scotland when he was eleven, but never lost his Dunbar accent. A sinewy Celt with dark curly hair, he enjoyed preternatural stamina, and thought nothing of walking for twenty-four hours at a stretch. He was a self-taught glaciologist, and one of the very few white men in nineteenth-century Alaska not hell-bent on gold. He wrote a lot, but words came, he said, ‘slow as a glacier’, and anyway he thought that ‘one day’s exposure to mountains is better than a cartload of books’. Like many writers who have celebrated the transfiguring power of landscape, Muir sought in his travels a medium with which to engage with wilderness. He found it in Alaska. He spent a lot of time on the trail zoned out with joy. ‘I was too happy to sleep,’ he writes more than once. Muir’s grateful nature is especially moving when one learns he had been deployed as a slave by his father, a tyrannical religious zealot and characteristically dour Lowland Scot. Clearing a homestead in the Wisconsin backwoods, Muir senior worked the child John for sixteen or seventeen hours a day. When John was sent to chisel a well through eighty feet of sandstone, he was poisoned by carbon dioxide and pulled out unconscious. But the old man sent him down again the next day. Muir grew into living proof of the fortitude of the human spirit; of the cup perceived half full; of the importance of killing self-pity. One chink in the armour lies in his often repeated observation that the indigenous groups with whom he stayed ‘are fond and indulgent parents . . . In all my travels I never heard a cross, fault-finding word, or anything like scolding inflicted on an Indian child, or ever witnessed a single case of spanking, so common in civilised communities.’ And his father had not knocked the faith out of him: Muir turned the old man’s harsh Protestantism into benign pantheism, though he still saw God’s hand everywhere in the Alaskan glaciers. Green rhetoric is debased currency now but at the time civilised Americans hailed Muir as a seer. A shaggy-bearded writer-activist promoting a distinctive mix of science and spirituality, Muir considered himself a conservation lobbyist who encouraged people to value a world in which human beings were not dominant. His brand of what he referred to as enlightened utilitarianism would have a place today.
We had a light cycle, just as I had experienced in Chukotka. September was the true Arctic cusp, the brief period in which days are light and nights are dark. But there was something else at Toolik: auroras. Even before the sky darkened, faint flickers smeared the sky. At eleven or twelve, an unseen hand switched on the Northern Lights – or rather, drew them, as they were like a rippling and fluorescent curtain that swished to and fro until dawn. Night after night I stood outside my dorm watching an evanescence of strands emerge from the drapes to curve inwards and outwards. One time the curtains vanished and the end of a primrose bow twisted in on itself before bellying rapidly from east to west. I waited. Globules of bright light materialised in another part of the sky, pulsed, then stretched into ribbon streamers and thrashed in quick, jerking movements, like whips cracking. The end of the ribbons frayed when they curved, a prismatic fringe altering from fat baby fingers to lace filaments, elastic threads of light shifting from greens to yellows and purples. At other times bars of light marched in close-packed succession, transforming themselves at a set point into solid white lances. Then suddenly the shimmering decayed, leaving only the powdery course of the Milky Way.5 As Gertrude Stein said, ‘Paradise – if you can stand it.’
In the evening, at ten or eleven, Ford lit a fire in an old metal drum and stood close, nursing a bottle of beer. The points of the flames flared white as they leapt in the Arctic air, and the unmediated heat burned the cold off exposed skin. Ford chose to live not in a dorm but in a windowless shipping container with a fridge door. He had made it cosy over the course of several seasons by building a wooden bunk and a set of shelves crowded with bookmarked books, unfinished volumes that lay around like partly eaten sandwiches. Like everyone else he worked a fortnight on, a fortnight off; and when he was at Toolik he revelled in as much solitude as he could find. Ford enjoyed a busy family life in Fairbanks, and the Arctic represented the Other. It was easy to see it like that: a pristine oasis far from the rain-splattered streets of home. After a few more beers, Ford grew very lyrical on the subject. But I was beginning to see that the Arctic is more than just a sanctuary. It is not a symbol. It is a living reality, with all the problems and horrors and joys reality brings.
The landscape inched towards freeze-up. A flock of ptarmigan nesting in willow bushes on the eastern flank of the lake grew whiter, shedding tortoiseshell summer feathers as they hopped towards a tasty morsel. Each day, the far reaches of the lake had frozen further inwards, the slushy, granular snow-ice on top – what Thoreau said looked like frozen yeast – collecting in ridges that traced contours on the white rind. There was everywhere a sense of hardening, of battening down. The earth seemed to be hurrying forward into the next phase of its cycle. Each day another of the tarns had frozen to an opaque whiteness. One sensed them snapping shut in the night. Ground squirrels were maniacally caching before the big sleep, and over to the west, three or four caribou hoofed around, temporarily separated from their herd as it migrated south.6 A pair of yellow-billed loons that nested on the lake were preparing for their own long winter journey. Toolik is the Inuktituk word for the common or yellow-billed loon, a bird with many uses among the Inuit. The parents of an infant son may touch the baby’s lips with a loon beak, to give the boy a strong, clear voice for the drum dance. The Toolik toolik had produced two chicks. One died almost immediately, and the survivor was unfledged. The loons were together on a different part of the lake every day. I hoped to see them go before I myself headed south.
‘If it’s succour with nature you want, everyone thinks Alaska’s it,’ Paul said.
We were all huddled in Winter Quarters, a dorm next to mine where the staff staying through till March were preparing to hunker down for the long, dark haul. People were nibbling on freshly plucked cranberries and glugging from the array of end-of-season bottles. It was already late, and we had come inside after viewing a spectacular aurora. Paul was a technician who had notched up seven Alaskan winters. As he came from Minnesota, he didn’t find anywhere cold. Like his colleagues, he had a science degree, and like them he had chosen to come north and work as a technically competent dogsbody in order to experience the Alaskan Arctic. It was another kind of American dream: not the pursuit of riches, but of freedom and communion with nature. (Paul’s Russian peers would have liked the option.) ‘Alaska’s come to occupy this weird place as ultimate wilderness in the collective American psyche,’ he continued. ‘Yet so many of the assholes who come up here haven’t a clue how to survive in the wilderness. I mean, look at Chris McCandless.’ McCandless was a cause célèbre in the Lower 48, and a lost cause in Alaska. John Krakauer immortalised his enigmatic story in a book called Into the Wild, and Sean Penn had made it into a decent Hollywood film. The protagonist was an intellectually gifted elite athlete from an affluent east coast family, and in 1992 he had selected sub-Arctic Alaska as the setting in which to live out a wilderness fantasy. McCandless was the enlightenment seeker, the man who walks to a different drumbeat, the idealist in flight from the trappings of urban America. Having changed his name to Alexander Supertramp, he packed a rucksack with a small gun, salt and a book on berries, and strode out. Four months later, a party of moose hunters found his corpse in the shell of an abandoned bus. He had starved. When the news broke, sourdoughs queued up to criticise, pointing out that the many essential items ‘Supertramp’ failed to take with him included a large-calibre weapon, an axe, a map and a compass. Yet as the story acquired the patina of legend, to thousands of others McCandless came to represent the archetypal Romantic hero, the loner who repudiated the sterility and hypocrisy of conventional society and pursued noble American ideals of freedom to the end. Like everyone else, he was convinced his route was the right one. Sherri was among his many supporters. She was the Californian technician who had taken me out in the boat.
‘I think what he did’, she said, ‘took more courage than getting some crummy banking job and a house in the suburbs.’
‘He was a narcissistic fool living out an ill-considered fantasy,’ retaliated Paul, rising to Sherri’s bait. ‘For food, McCandless took a 10lb bag of long-grain rice! Reckoned he was going to eat berries and shoot game with some crummy little gun!’
Whatever the criticism of McCandless and others like him, the fact remained that having looted Alaska of salmon, logs, gold and oil, Outsiders had now found it another role. It had become a stage for introspection; the place where the brave and the true escaped civilisation and divested themselves of the worthless trappings of society. Either that, or a stage for the machismo of the Iron Man variety, exemplified in the 1,150-mile Anchorage-to-Nome Iditarod, a dog-mushing contest touted as ‘the last great race on earth’. This was Jack London territory; it was he, more than any other writer, who had fostered the image of Alaska. London went to the Klondike from his native California when he was twenty-one. He found not gold but a fecund source of literary inspiration. As he said later, even though he never made a cent from gold, ‘I have been managing to pan out a living ever since on the strength of the [Klondike] trip.’ That’s the spirit. The Call of the Wild was a bestselling sensation in 1903, and London rocketed to celebrity status. Restless, hardworking and addictive, he was so famous that his first divorce made the front pages all over America. McCandless had long been obsessed with London. In his last weeks he had carved ‘Jack London is King’ into a piece of wood.
At the same time as London was finding what he needed in the Arctic, two other Americans were using it to seek fame in another way. One of them, Robert Peary, is still the best known American explorer of all time, if you don’t count Neil Armstrong. Peary was the antithesis of Alaska’s John Muir and Bob Marshall: he perceived the Arctic as a place to be conquered, rather than a peak on Darien with a view that lifted the soul. It was once a widely held position in the USA, for by the start of the twentieth century, Americans had overtaken Britons in pioneering Arctic exploration, as they had done in so many fields. It was therefore not surprising, in 1909, that the two men who announced that they had, independently of each other, reached the goal of centuries and stood at the North Pole hailed from the United States. Peary and his rival Frederick Cook were a strange pair, yoked by history but with little in common. Peary, born in 1856 to a family of New England merchants, was a tall, tireless showman addicted to fame. One polar historian judges him ‘probably the most unpleasant man in the annals of polar exploration’, a hotly contested field. The neurotic and megalomaniacal Peary had staying power, at least: on expedition after expedition he smashed his way through Smith Sound to the top of Greenland, marching on even after eight of his toes snapped off. On 6 April 1909, he and his black manservant Matthew Henson stood on the ice at 90ºN – or so Peary claimed. It was, he wrote in his journal, ‘the finish, the cap and climax, of nearly 400 years of effort, loss of life, and expenditure of fortunes by the civilised nations of the world, and it has been accomplished in a way that is thoroughly American’. Both Peary and Henson left offspring in the Arctic, taking away instead three 37-ton iron meteorites sacred to the Greenlanders, as well as six live Inuit specimens, four of whom quickly picked up alien germs and died in Washington. The meteorites are in the Smithsonian. One of the surviving Inuit, the boy Minik, found out that his father’s bones were on display at the Natural History Museum.7
In any event, Peary learned, before reaching home, that Cook claimed to have forestalled him at the Pole. A Manhattan doctor nine years Peary’s junior with extraordinary piercing eyes, Cook was as affable and charming as Peary was tense and humourless. Like his rival, he was a man of solid polar experience, and in 1898 had acquitted himself well in the Antarctic with Amundsen. When the sensational story of his arrival at the Pole broke, mobs swarmed round him wherever he walked and ‘Dr Cook hats’ sold in their thousands. (Two feet tall, brown and furry, one newspaper said the hat looked as if you could boil it up for soup in an Arctic emergency.) The battle for paramountcy between Peary and Cook received unprecedented coverage, initiating one of the most bitter newspaper wars of all time, the New York Times backing Peary and its rival the Herald batting for Cook. The steady but deadly accumulation of evidence that unmasked Cook began with the revelation that he had faked his photographs of the Pole by cropping a set he had taken in Greenland six years previously. Peary was triumphant – until it emerged that his speeds were dubious and his lack of observations suspicious, and that his records also failed to withstand scrutiny. Informed sources agree that neither man reached the Pole. But the Arctic attracts fiction to its facts until the two are indistinguishable, and the Peary legend lives on, just as he planned.
When we woke the next day, a hard frost had transformed the landscape. In the middle of the morning, snow even fell briefly. The tundra was stippled white, with sand-coloured swirls around the ground willow. On the hills rime crusted the brown slopes where not even willow could get a purchase. The lake itself had lightened to a bright silver. It too was stippled when a north-westerly soughed in from the ocean. I hiked east to a smaller lake that was already frozen, its ice thick-ribbed, thinning and smoothing at the centre like supple glass. The knife ridges of the Brooks were of a piece with the rest of the landscape. This was after all the end of September: the whiteing of Alaska. I sat down at the far end of the lake, wishing I could draw. Close up, powdery crystals piled half an inch deep on the fragile, bending stalks of foliage. Around the roots, clusters of black, globular droppings nestled among leaves, twigs, smooth pebbles and rocks textured with lichen. Clumps of moss grew tiny lawn-green trumpets. It was almost windless by three o’clock, and half the sky was a cold, fresh blue – a toothpaste blue – but a layer of cloud had moved over the sun’s half, opaque and grey in the middle, and translucent and white round the edge. Beyond the cloud, a wall of wide rays, faintly golden, fell among the Brooks. Cold began to bite.
A pair of shaggy Russian permafrost scientists arrived in camp, and in the morning I sat on the galley deck talking to them over toast, their consumption of which was unstinting. It was a fine Alaskan morning, mild and mellow, and a raven landed on the deck. A yellowish haze had spread over the east, and the tintinnabulation of a swift-flowing brook animated the landscape in the foreground. The Russians, based at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, had spent the week poking temperature probes deep into permafrost, a task they had repeated all over the western hemisphere. ‘Permafrost’, explained the shaggier of the two as mouthfuls of toast and jelly vanished into the wilderness of his beard, ‘represents a unique record of long-term temperature cycles. It’s a better record than the atmosphere, because we see trends more easily.’ Permafrost offered up an accurate record of the past; the Russians were collecting data with which to predict the future. Like a peat bog or a coal deposit, permafrost acts as a storage unit for accumulated carbon. If it melts, organic material frozen for millennia will begin to break down and give off CO2 or methane. Was that going to happen, that was the thing. ‘As a general trend,’ said the less shaggy one, ‘we have seen temperatures rising. Here at Toolik we know that between 1979 and 1994, the average surface temperature in summer rose by nearly 3ºF. As warmer air aerated the upper soil levels, the tundra did begin to release carbon dioxide. But we are not sure the Siberian permafrost will ever release all its hundreds of thousands of tonnes of methane.’ I found it reassuring when a scientist said he wasn’t sure. ‘It depends,’ continued less shaggy, ‘if there were natural causes for the warming. If there were, the cycle will, eventually and presumably, be reversed. If the temperature rose as a result of anthropogenic activity, on the other hand, yes, methane will pump out, along with tonnes of organic carbons – from dead animals, for example.’ So is the cause of temperature rise anthropogenic? ‘Some of it is. The question is, how much?’ That did indeed seem to be the question. But by then they had eaten all the bread, and they got up and left.
On the day before my last one I drove 50 miles north with Sherri to retrieve a data logger left in the field by a departed science group. The treeless expanse of the North Slope had reddened to an un-Arctic russet. To get to the logger, we left the Dalton on a track heading a short distance into the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. When we arrived, I went off to take photographs while Sherri disconnected the wires. The 19.2-million-acre Refuge constitutes a single protected area encompassing an unbroken continuum of Arctic and sub-Arctic ecosystems, from the boreal forest of the Porcupine River plateau to the barrier islands of the Beaufort Sea. About the size of South Carolina, or Scotland, it remains the only area on the North Slope on which Congress specifically prohibits petroleum development. Whether the ban will remain in place is a contested issue. Somehow, one knows who the winners will be. It’s just a question of when. Sherri came to find me, and we headed home, the sky infused with the valedictory amethyst of sunset. Night had fallen by the time we rolled into camp. Condensation like smoke was floating off the lake in billows. Sherri and I hurried into the galley, and fell upon our dinner. The next morning, I left, back down the Dalton with Jeannie. Before climbing into the truck, I took a last walk around the lake to find the three loons. But they were gone.
1 Repercussions of the spill affected salmon fisheries around Prince William Sound and Cook Inlet for many years. Yet in June 2008 the US Supreme Court slashed the damages awarded against Exxon. Commercial fishermen continue to find oil on the shoreline of Prince William Sound.
2 On average it takes 25 calories of fossil fuel energy to produce one calorie of protein.
3 The practice of carrying a lump of dough from home to start the first camp loaf took off during the California gold rush (and Sourdough Sam remains the mascot of the San Francisco 49ers), and prospectors followed suit when they headed for the Klondike. Sourdough was more reliable than yeast, which tended not to survive the journey – though it had to be kept warm, and the prospectors took it to bed with them.
4 By definition, any material that has remained frozen for two or more summers constitutes permafrost.
5 The Northern Lights (aurora borealis) are caused when electrically charged particles stream from the sun and strike atoms and molecules of oxygen, nitrogen and other gases in the upper atmosphere. Subatomic particles break off and collide, liberating energy in the form of light. Oxygen atoms produce some colours, nitrogen atoms others, and the forces involved are immense. In 1989 an aurora knocked out the lights in the north-east of the USA and Eastern Canada for six hours.
6 The siksik, as Inuit call the ground squirrel, is the only Arctic mammal which hibernates deeply. A polar bear merely becomes dormant; a siksik gets close to suspended animation, its body temperature dropping below freezing. Inuit consider the siksik attractive, and its skin is used to clean newborn girls so that they will be pretty too. They clean a male baby with the forehead skin of the bull caribou – pangniq. Both skins must be present at the confinement, in case. The caribou close to Toolik are Grant’s caribou, from the Western Arctic herd. The word caribou comes from Mi’kmaq (one of the Algonquin languages of Eastern Canada), and literally means ‘snow shoveller’, referring to the way the beast scratches at the snow with its hooves to find food.
7 Peary brought the six Greenlandic Inuit back from his fourth polar expedition in 1897 and put them on show at Brooklyn’s Excursion Wharf. The group included seven-year-old Minik and his father Qisuk. ‘It was like a land’, the boy said later of his first weeks in the USA, ‘that we thought must be heaven.’ Minik went to school in the Bronx, played football and learned to say his prayers. His father died four months after their arrival, but Minik only learned in 1907 that staff at the Natural History Museum had faked his burial and that Qisuk’s bones were on display in a glass case. After twelve years Minik sailed back to north-west Greenland, but he couldn’t speak Inuktituk, or skin a seal. He said he felt like ‘the loneliest person in the world’. In 1916 he returned to New York with another expedition, and appeared briefly in vaudeville theatres as a fur-swathed Eskimo before taking US citizenship and working as a lumberjack. The bones of his father and the other three Inuit who had quickly perished remained in boxes in the museum basement for years. In 1918, Minik died in New Hampshire. In 1993 his father’s bones were returned to Greenland for a proper burial.
