out of house and home (idiom). evicted; no longer having a place to live.
Where the Alaskan village of Newtok meets the Ningliq River, the erosion line looks less like a riverbank and more like a cliff edge, like something sliced apart in an earthquake. On top of the cliff is tundra, knitted together with grass. Scramble down about eight or ten feet to the bottom: here you reach the deconstructed muck, where water and land have merged into a viscous material with a texture something like quicksand. You can walk on this surface if you don’t linger long enough for your boots to sink. In some places, a trapped lens of liquid makes the muck undulate underfoot like a waterbed. From this vantage point, you can see the dangling roots of grass above you and the exposed subsurfaces of the soil, including a cross section of permafrost, the former icy bedrock of this land now thawing and dripping and decaying. Bits of trash and lost belongings fall into the muck here—broken boat hulls, wiring, bedsprings, forgotten furniture. Look hard and you can also see the detritus of millennia past, such as bones from a mammoth—small finds like vertebrae or teeth, and sometimes whole tusks worth substantial cash if you can get ahold of a fossil hunter or manage to haul the bones to Anchorage. But the muck is no longer land in any real sense—it is the erasure of a place.
On two days in late September 2018, Andrew John, nephew of the late tribal administrator, Tom John, walked to the edge of the erosion line in Newtok. He unspooled a yellow and white measuring tape and recorded the distance between it and the nearest houses in anticipation of a brewing storm. Andrew John was preparing a report for Patrick LeMay, an Anchorage engineer who had been helping the village negotiate with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which will sometimes offer financial assistance, in the form of a buyout, for homeowners in the path of flooding.
The next day, Andrew walked again through the yellow-green grass and the ever-sodden ground and staked wooden posts every ten feet from the corner of the house nearest to the erosion. The village needed to know: How much time did these families have left?
He started from the house where Lisa Charles had spent her childhood summers and her teen and young adult years, her late grandmother’s place—cranberry red with white trim and mounted on wooden pilings, the facade faded and mottled where the rain and wind had stripped the paint from the graying wood. By then, Nathan Tom, her uncle, lived there with other relatives, while Lisa, her husband, Jeff, and their kids were still in the blue-gray house farther from the river. On September 26, just fifty-eight feet of land stood between that house and the cliff edge.
As the storm passed through the community, Andrew John collected detailed notes: The storm began late in the evening of October 3rd.… The winds were from the southwest 25 to 30 mph and gusting as high as 45 mph … we lost 20 feet of shoreline from Nathan Tom’s home. Even after the storm had departed, high winds kept pummeling the landscape, blowing 20–30 mph and gusting anywhere between 40–50 mph depending on the current location of the storms passing out in the Bering Sea.
On October 12, he brought his findings to the residents of the old red house and asked them to start thinking about packing important documents, family heirlooms, photos, and things that cannot be replaced. The next day, the twenty-foot marker beside the house fell into the river. The erosion line was just a few paces away, and another storm of similar ferocity could easily devour the remaining earth and topple the house. The day after, he helped the family move into a place beside the school normally reserved for teachers but presently vacant. Four days later, on October 16, the village cut off the electricity to the old home.
Andrew John is the double cousin of Lisa Charles—they are the grandchildren of two siblings from one family who married two siblings from another family. He had grown up in Newtok, graduated high school in 1999, and eventually signed up for the Marine Corps. This experience may be how he picked up a slight drawl and a formal manner, responding Yes, ma’am or sir when asked a question. When I eventually met him, I noticed he also had something of a military aesthetic, often wearing army green and camouflage rain boots, though this was also a common rural Alaskan habit. He told me he had done tours in Afghanistan and one in Iraq, had studied for a time at the University of Alaska, in both Fairbanks and Anchorage, first focusing on mechanical engineering and eventually pursuing a degree in process technology, a course of study that can lead to oil industry jobs.
Shortly after his uncle’s death in 2017, Andrew had accepted Tom John’s former role as tribal administrator. The job brought him full circle, back to his home village.
His new post was at a desk in a rectangular metal-roofed building on a high steel frame, known to everyone as “the brown building.” His office was on one side of a large, dingy conference room.
In a small office on the other side sat a colleague of his late uncle named Romy Cadiente. A small-framed man with a black walrus mustache and well-defined furrows in his forehead and laugh lines at the corners of his eyes, Romy worked dogged hours under the fluorescent lights of this building, on long conference calls and in meetings, trying to get help for the village through any available means. On the wall near his desk, he had hung a piece of paper printed in large font with an inspirational quote from Tom John: As you go through your day, be sure to guard against negative thinking, whether about your life or about other people. The rest of the quote evoked Tom John’s devout Catholicism, Instead fill your mind with good, noble, and holy thoughts, and his love of the land, contemplate the beauty of the natural world and let your heart be lifted up as you do. In this spirit, Romy was a purveyor of optimism, as if it were not merely an attitude but a thing you could produce in prodigious quantities, enough especially to offer extra to anyone who might need inspiration to imagine that the village had a rosy future waiting on the opposite side of the Ningliq River. On phone calls and in emails, his speech was peppered with superlatives, awesome, neat, lucky, grateful, blessed.
Romy was one of the few outsiders to take up permanent residence in Newtok. A Native Hawaiian, he had accompanied a friend on a fishing trip to this region, the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, two decades previously, when he met and fell for a woman named Charlene Carl, a former high school classmate of Lisa Charles and the daughter of George Carl, one of the founders of the newer Newtok Village Council. After the pair corresponded for a couple of years, Charlene eventually went to Oklahoma to live with him. They moved back to Newtok in 2010 to help with the relocation. In the beginning, Romy was out of his element here. He joked that the first time he saw a moose, I’m like, that’s a weird-looking horse, and the first time he came to Newtok, I was like, I don’t see any roads. The winter weather was also a shock. I have never seen snow going horizontal. Snowdrifts would cover the homes. You walk outside; I swear your body just goes numb even with all of these fifteen million layers. But certain things about the community resonated with his Hawaiian Catholic upbringing. We both believe in the same God. We live from the sea. Our values are consistent, taking care of the ocean that gives us life. The rhythmic patterns of the Yup’ik language sounded like a song to him. He eventually took the role of relocation coordinator and was often the face of Newtok in discussions with government agencies and funders.
In 2018, the community was finally able to string together several million dollars in grant money. They hired the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium, a nonprofit organization with experience running development projects and health clinics all over rural Alaska, to oversee the first stage of the move. Four more houses went up. The Mertarvik Evacuation Center (known as the MEC and pronounced meck) was finally finished and could now function not just as an emergency shelter during a severe storm but also as a temporary launchpad for the move. They built a construction camp with twenty-four beds, a mess hall, a shower, and a laundry facility. Still, there were no phone lines, no power, no reliable heat, no sanitation. Mertarvik still wasn’t ready to serve a fully functioning community.
But after the storm arrived in early October that year, it was clear that the community would need to leave as soon as possible. The sky and the river had dictated the terms.
Newtok remains one of the most famous climate-migrant communities in North America. But by the time the river reached the village, the community was hardly alone, and over the years, the global ranks of climate migrants have continued to swell. Just in Alaska, dozens of other remote rural communities face major risks from flooding, erosion, or permafrost collapse—problems all made worse by climate change.
All over the United States, people have been quietly packing up and moving away from coastlines and shorelines. Over the last three decades, in more than a thousand counties in forty-nine states, homeowners have accepted buyouts from FEMA so they can remove themselves from the paths of recurring floods. Increasingly, these kinds of relocations are driven by climate change—as the sea level rises, the land erodes and, in some regions, far more rain pours onto river floodplains. FEMA’s program is sometimes controversial: no one wants to feel like the federal government is pressuring them to leave a beloved home. But according to an analysis published by the National Institute of Building Sciences, the American public would save money if FEMA issued far more buyouts, instead of allowing people to rebuild under the National Flood Insurance Program—especially in areas that suffer repeated and increasingly severe flooding.
Where a relocation has threatened the integrity of a culture or a way of life, some communities have tried to stick together—as Newtok has. In Louisiana, an Indigenous community on a rapidly shrinking island named Isle de Jean Charles (in the region that formed the basis for the fictional movie Beasts of the Southern Wild) has worked for years to organize a relocation to higher land. On the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State, the Quileute Tribe secured a land exchange from Congress in 2012 so it can flee risks from both tsunamis and sea level rise.
Elsewhere in the world, the Republic of Maldives—a nation situated on a group of islands in the Indian Ocean—has tried to prepare for the moment when rising seas inevitably swamp most of its low-lying land base. Between 2008 and 2012, then president of the Maldives Mohamed Nasheed sought an organized way for his fellow citizens to relocate collectively to another country such as Sri Lanka, India, or Australia, so that they would not, in his words, be “living in tents for decades.” But Nasheed was ousted in a military coup in 2012, and tragically, the question of what will happen to his compatriots remains unresolved.
And then there are the hidden ranks of the displaced within and beyond American borders. According to some estimates, the diaspora that permanently departed New Orleans, after Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005, numbers in the tens of thousands. In 2020, the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, a research organization established by the Norwegian Refugee Council, estimates that 30.7 million people worldwide, including 1.7 million Americans, had to flee their homes because of weather-related disasters. Not all of these are related to climate change, but the organization predicts that the number of people around the world forced out of their homes by flooding will rise by 50 percent with each extra degree Celsius the planet warms.
Climate migration is especially challenging to track: often more than one factor drives someone from their home, such as when a drought or a flood worsens an existing economic crisis. “There are no reliable estimates of climate-change induced migration,” writes the International Organization for Migration. But some experts have tried to project what may come: globally, in a worst-case scenario, the population of climate-change refugees could rise from twenty million or so to as high as one billion people. Already, a portion of the vast population of migrants that has been detained at the U.S.-Mexico border in recent years is fleeing the disasters of climate change—such as the increasingly severe droughts, hurricanes, and floods that have plagued countries like Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Globally, there are millions more stories of people who have tried to find a new home after the old one vanished or became untenable. Most of these stories go unheard.
In some ways, Newtok has to stand for all of them.
The stakes are high. The knowledge that resides in Newtok—the insight and skill its people have collected over generations—could also erode away if village residents become scattered in urban areas such as Anchorage or Fairbanks. Newtok’s success or failure could determine the willingness of sympathetic parties, like funders and government agencies, to lend a hand to any other community in a similar plight. And to allow Alaskan communities to disappear would mean the partial erasure of cultures that have, for centuries, beat back the forces that tried to extinguish or assimilate their lifeways. “What we were really scared about was dislocation, because these people were here for generations,” Romy Cadiente said. “This Mother Nature is their medicine, is their guidance. And if you lose any of that stuff, you essentially kill these people that have been here for thousands of years.”
The people of Newtok needed to find their way home—intact and together.
The spring and summer seasons of 2019 on the Y-K Delta were disorienting for a variety of reasons. For one, the weather was profoundly askew. High temperatures in February and March broke records, and two men died on the Kuskokwim River after falling through thin ice. In midsummer, a mass of warm air arrived and squatted over Alaska, carrying with it an ominous heat wave and generating some of the warmest temperatures on record in the state. On the average summer day in the Y-K Delta, temperatures reach the mid-50s. But that July, about one hundred miles from Newtok, Bethel logged 91 degrees (although equipment problems at the weather station made this an unconfirmed record). In Chevak, about fifty miles northwest, the thermometer reached the low 80s.
Such unusual warmth boded poorly for the many Alaskans who had built their entire lives on hunting, fishing, and living from the land—and for the other humans sharing the planet with them. It meant that the Far North was continuing to heat up far too quickly, and this development would further distort weather patterns at other latitudes. (The warming of the Arctic and the resulting wrinkles in the jet stream would be partly to blame for the freak 2020 cold-weather disaster in Texas, for instance.)
Despite the unsettling weather, Newtok pushed forward with its plans. First, the community had to begin disassembling the old houses—which was simultaneously a FEMA requirement and a necessary safety precaution (a collapsing house is dangerous).
In the spring of 2019, the house that had belonged to Lisa’s grandmother came down. The village had no heavy equipment—which couldn’t feasibly be dragged across the already unstable ground—so a demolition crew, nicknamed the demo team, disassembled it by hand. Board by board, shingle by shingle, they pulled the house apart and stacked the pieces on the tundra. Though she had prepared for this moment for years, finally seeing the deconstruction of her childhood home was a shock for Lisa. I almost started crying. I was like, oh, my God, they’re doing this.
She was not the only person to mourn the loss. A couple months later, Romy’s partner, Charlene, began packing up her Uncle Pete’s place, a seafoam-blue house that had belonged previously to her own grandmother. All those precious teacups and glass teakettles that belonged to my late grandma, Elsie. I packed them in newspaper, all that time remembering Grandma, how she used to sit on the couch and just listen to everyone, her drinking tea with her beautiful teacups and telling us stories about when she was little with her older sister. I tried very hard to hear her voice, how she used to sound. That house came down in May.
Then three more in the summer. Katie Ayuluk—a twenty-five-year-old who had been raising two small daughters in a house near Pete’s—watched her family place come down. That house had been so close to the edge that the family’s steam bath, an unpainted square hut, had been teetering on collapse, and they had hauled it back from the erosion edge. When the storm hit, our house would start shaking, depending on which way the wind was blowing. And every time the waves hit the land, the water would splash our window. She had been tormented by recurring nightmares in which our land fell in water, and the only place we could go to was our boats. Katie knew it was necessary to dismantle the house, but she was still grief-stricken. I walked out of that house crying. I get more anxiety now. She disliked her new, temporary accommodations in a building behind the school.
By August, it was Charlene and Romy’s turn—a crowded red three-bedroom house that they shared with fourteen other people, including her parents, siblings, and nieces and nephews. Charlene’s mother and father had to leave the village for a medical appointment, and Romy was busy organizing the relocation. So Charlene and her sister did most of the packing. While she collected shoes, a small television, some electrical wiring, the yarn with which she crocheted, and various papers and books, Charlene queued up pop songs on her iPod and turned up the volume—Kelly Clarkson’s “Stronger” and Alessia Cara’s “Scars to Your Beautiful.” Intermittently, she cried.
She wanted to be happy about the idea of moving but instead felt ambivalent. Later that fall, when the birds began to leave, she felt sad. The birds make it not so lonesome, she said. But she had loved it here, even in the harshest moments. In winter, it’s so quiet you can feel the presence of God.
The question that haunted the residents of Newtok was, would the new village be ready in time? And the answer had to be yes; any other scenario was nearly unthinkable. You just try, try, try, and you hope and pray, said Romy.
But there were still numerous complications to reckon with. For one thing, any arctic or subarctic construction process must surmount extra design obstacles that don’t exist at warmer latitudes. Many basic architecture and infrastructure designs, from a house blueprint to the setup of a septic system, are based on a set of assumptions about the conditions of the world—including predictable weather patterns, temperature ranges, cycles of freeze and thaw, and stability of land—that have never really applied to Alaska and may no longer be realistic in any locale in the stormier twenty-first century. And there are simple practical issues that must be handled differently in the Far North. For instance, sewage systems are exorbitant to build in a place as remote as Newtok, and even after the investment is made, conditions make them prone to cracking and leaking. In the absence of other solutions, many Alaskan villages, Newtok included, have had to use “honey buckets,” as in hauling a bucket of human waste out of the house and dumping it in the only place available, the river. In a storm, the waste sometimes washed back into the village. It was a public health disaster in the making, but there had been no other real options. “There have been two choices for Alaska,” said Aaron Cooke, the architect with the Fairbanks-based Cold Climate Housing Research Center who had camped out and led the crew that built Mertarvik’s prototype house in 2016. “You get a multimillion-dollar [water and sewer] system that no one, once it’s built, can afford to maintain. Or you get a bucket to poop in. What is the holy grail? Everybody’s looking for something in between.”
By the summer of 2019, Newtok and its various advisors, after years of research and trial and, especially, error had finally come up with the means to overcome both sanitation troubles and housing design issues. Eleven houses stood at Mertarvik (though the first three with their mold troubles were unlivable). When the 2016 prototype proved to be sturdy and mold-free, the Newtok Village Council contracted the Cold Climate Housing Research Center to design thirteen more hyperefficient houses and serve as housing gurus on technical matters. Cold Climate and the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium together came up with a simple waterless toilet and a gravity-fed water-treatment tank that could go inside each house.
With the blueprints on hand, the construction of Mertarvik finally shifted into high speed that summer—like a time-lapse film of the settlement of a frontier town, shrunk from centuries or decades into months. First, the military returned in much larger numbers than previous seasons. Nearly two hundred men and women from the Air Force Reserve, the Army National Guard, the Air National Guard, and the Marine Forces Reserve came through between June and late August. They arrived on charter planes and Black Hawk helicopters and shuttled people and supplies back and forth. Lumber, steel, glass, and other heavy materials came by barge. The people of Newtok welcomed them by hosting multiple receptions with traditional foods like dried fish and akutaq—a dish made of wild berries and sometimes nicknamed “Eskimo* ice cream”—and attempting to teach the military crews Yup’ik dances. This produced a strange tableau in the cavernous main hall of the MEC, with men and women in combat fatigues awkwardly wiggling their arms beside Yup’ik people who tried to illustrate how to gracefully wave dance fans. But all involved were moved by the exchange. At one of the dances, Romy took a video from the indoor balcony and watched them in awe and genuine gratitude. I was thinking to myself, these people came from all over Alaska, just to help this little tiny community. It was really overwhelming. And then the sun was going down. I get goose bumps every time I see that video, because, you know, in spite of everything that’s going on in America, all divided, here all these people came together just for one reason.
The military crews agreed to build four houses. On top of this, Newtok hired the Ukpeaġvik Iñupiat Corporation, an Alaska Native company based in the North Slope, to put up nine more (which would raise the total number of habitable houses to twenty-one by the end of the season). Everyone had to work with precision, since materials were not easily replaceable; the nearest lumberyard was hundreds of miles away. “We can’t have very many mistakes,” Senior Master Sergeant Denver Long said in one of a series of promotional videos the military produced about the work there.
Mertarvik turned into an active construction site, with crews running bulldozers, loaders, and excavators, hauling gravel and lumber, hammering roofs together, mounting doors and windows. Many Newtok residents worked on the new site. Lisa Charles’s oldest daughter, Ashley, got a job in housekeeping at the construction camp.
A cousin of Jeff’s worked on the road crew. And at first, it was just a paycheck for hard work such as loading rock and gravel into trucks.But eventually, I started to realize I’m making a village for my people, he thought. I can tell my future grandchildren that I was there to build the place that they’re living in.
The plan was for a third of Newtok (about 140 people) to move over to Mertarvik in the fall of 2019, where there would also be a school and health clinic, a new diesel power plant and electrical distribution system, and a simple village water treatment system. For safety reasons, no one could visit the construction site without permission. On a clear day, you could often see Mertarvik from Newtok. Romy would sometimes watch the construction work through binoculars, so he could know what was happening without always making the journey. But it could also sometimes seem like a mirage, a dream far away, one that might or might not be realized.
In late September 2019, toward the end of the construction season, the Newtok Village Council allowed me to return and stay in the school, as I had a few years before. I planned to spend nearly two weeks there this time, and I readied myself for another unpredictable journey in storm season.
I left for the airport before sunrise, and on my stop in Anchorage, Romy Cadiente called to warn me about inclement weather over the Y-K Delta. But when I tried to reschedule my flight, the airline agents seemed to know nothing about the conditions over the remote tundra region—as if the place existed in some alternate world—and I had to give up and take my chances. While it was raining and gray when I arrived in Bethel, the little propeller plane still took off with me and about a half-dozen other passengers. From the window, I gazed down at the matrix of ponds and river channels and the deep green and brown land suspended between them. The landscape looked more delicate than I had remembered. It’s like the land is incidental or merely the boundary of river, I wrote in my notebook.
On arrival, the agent who worked for the regional airline hauled me and my bags on the back of an ATV to the school. Romy and Charlene met me at the entrance and helped me carry my belongings into a storage room full of cabinets and stacks of chairs, where I would sleep on the floor again.
“Notice anything different?” Romy said, moments after setting down my bags. And I realized I had been too travel-weary to make sense of what I was seeing. “Look out the front door,” he instructed.
And there it was, the river less than the length of a soccer field away, and in front of us bare, muddy ground. “The water is closer,” I said. “Yeah, where are all the houses?” said Charlene, and for a moment I laughed awkwardly and stared at the scene in front of me as if it were a hallucination. Then I realized they had lost their own house, and I was not the only person living in the school.
They walked me down the hall and into the classroom where they had taken up residence, which was also where Charlene taught grades three to six by day. The walls were papered with phrases in both Yup’ik and English. The shelves were full of science and geography textbooks. On a table by the window, the couple had stashed a pink electric teakettle and a microwave. They had hid the rest of their stuff. “I don’t want anyone to know I’m living here,” Charlene told me, especially her students. She offered to show me where to find the athletic mats in the school gymnasium, which we could pull out and sleep on every night. “I cannot stand sleeping on this hard floor. Golly! Kill your back,” exclaimed Romy.
They made me cups of tea. Romy seemed to alternate between enthusiasm and exhaustion. He leaned over a school desk in an olive T-shirt, his hair slightly mussed, a silver cross dangling around his neck. “You actually came at a pivotal time because we’re going to start moving people over to Mertarvik.”
It was a Saturday night, but he told me he might take a boat to the new village site in the morning, depending on the tides and winds. “Wanna go?” he asked.
But Romy did not take me to Mertarvik the next day. He had too much to do to supervise a journalist at an active construction site and departed quickly in the middle of the day on his own.
In his absence, I picked wild cranberries, collecting a bag of the jewel-like tart red fruits under the afternoon sun with Charlene and her sister. Charlene pointed out the pond from which Newtok pumped its water. Until recently, the community had used another pond just south of this one. But frequent floods were dirtying the water supply, so they had moved the pump.
The next day, Romy left in the morning without me again. Meanwhile, Andrew John brought Newtok’s Catholic priest—a tall, angular, garrulous man from Poland—across the water to say a prayer inside each of the houses and sprinkle them with holy water. I saw Andrew in the brown building on their return. He gazed at me blankly. “Who are you with again?” he said. There had been parades of reporters through the village all summer and a documentary crew on location for weeks, and the community was tired of outsiders.
I began a waiting game, much like the people who lived here (only the stakes for me were far lower). The following day, the weather turned, and the wide Ningliq River was too dangerous to cross in high winds.
I stopped by the house of Bernice John, Tom John’s widow, at the center of the village, about a quarter mile from the erosion line and near a pond edged with grass and willows. She had taken in a pair of puppies—fuzzy, droop eared, and only a foot long from nose to tail—who climbed onto my boots when I approached the door. I spotted a musk ox skull in her backyard, though it wasn’t clear where it had come from. Inside, the house was much the same as it had been four years previously. A profusion of leafy houseplants and clothes hung from the ceiling. A jumble of storage tubs was stacked against the wall. Beds with foam mattresses ran from one end of the one-room dwelling to the other. Nine people still lived here. But now there was a picture of her late husband, Tom John, hanging above her bed beside a small cross.
Bernice no longer held a post on the village council and was now spending much of her time taking care of a grandson, an infant with large, dark eyes who was named after Tom John. Bernice, the baby, and her adult daughter (the baby’s aunt) all sprawled across the same bed, and I asked if Bernice would miss her house, the one her husband had built two and a half decades ago.
“No, it’s too small and moldy,” she replied matter-of-factly. “Plus my foundation’s getting bad.” The permafrost decay was causing houses to sink and shift, even those that stood some distance from the erosion edge. In a recent storm, an entire house had slid off its foundations, though its occupants had still not abandoned it—the village was too crowded. “When it’s windy, my house is like a loose tooth,” Bernice quipped. But she was optimistic about Mertarvik. She hoped the first generation to grow up there, little Tom John’s generation, would be smart and technologically savvy and well educated—and also still practice the old traditions of living on this land.
On other days, I visited Jeff and Lisa Charles’s house. Once for a dinner of traditional food—both dried and boiled pieces of salmon, dried herring, frozen whitefish eaten uncooked like sashimi, seal oil, boiled cabbage and turnips, fatty strips of beluga whale skin, akutaq for dessert, some wild-cranberry pancakes, and an infusion of Labrador tea, which grows wild on the Y-K Delta. I sat next to her uncle George, the one who had moved out of her grandmother’s house, and across from two of their friends with a small infant. The house was unchanged, but Lisa had adopted three silly, fluffy, toy-size dogs, one who had just delivered a litter of puppies, and had a fourth pooch who lived outside. One of her daughters had also tamed a seagull, whom she fed by hand outside the window. The house brimmed with activity, and it was hard for me to imagine that they would leave it so soon. But Lisa and Jeff were scheduled to move to the other side of the water in less than a month.
The next night I came by Jeff and Lisa’s again for tea and a long conversation about the history of the relocation, about Newtok, about fishing and other miscellany.
The television was tuned to the news on both visits, and in New York City, the United Nations was holding a series of meetings on climate change. The Anchorage news station was running both national and Alaskan stories about climate change.
That night the news turned our conversation to global environmental issues. That summer, dead animals had washed up on Alaskan shores and riverbanks—whales, birds, seals, and salmon. Scientists called it a “multispecies mortality event” (almost like a term used in military combat to drain the emotion from tragedy). They couldn’t attribute the exact cause of death but pointed to overheated ocean waters as a likely culprit. “It makes me worry,” Lisa said slowly. “Like the elders used to say, famine will come again,” repeating the story I had heard from Tom John’s mother on my previous visit. “The elders used to say it will get really warm here. They’re like, one day there will be no more winters. So you could say it’s started to come true. The elders used to say the weather follows the people.”
A few days before, Swedish teen activist Greta Thunberg had marched with tens of thousands of protesters in Manhattan as part of the worldwide September climate strikes. “This is an emergency. Our house is on fire,” Thunberg had said. “And it’s not just the young people’s house. We all live here. It affects all of us.”
Lisa said she liked what Thunberg had to say. “She’s so young, and she’s so smart,” she reflected. I would hear the same from others. The kids who were marching in the streets made Newtok somehow less remote, part of something larger.
I stayed at the Charleses’ house until well after dark that night. There was a storm brewing. But I hadn’t realized how quickly the weather had turned until I began walking back to the school. The wind was so strong that I felt as if I had plunged into a fierce current of water and struggled just to move forward. A few times, the wind snatched my breath away, and I gulped and gasped, trying to gather more air into my lungs. The wind bellowed and sang.
When I finally returned to the school and settled into my sleeping bag, I could feel the entire edifice shudder and tremble, bullied by the wind. Later that night, the building began to rock slightly back and forth. All night I heard the sound of metal clanging against metal, as if someone were trying to break in.
The next day (four days after my arrival in Newtok), another teacher who had been living temporarily in a trailer near the erosion line moved her family into the classroom next door. Every night through the rest of my stay, she sang or played music or videos for her grandchildren, and sometimes I heard Yup’ik songs, sometimes old country melodies.
“The erosion used to be four steps from my door,” she told another teacher, illustrating the distance by walking across the floor. “Now it’s two steps.”
I continued waiting for a chance to visit Mertarvik, but the conditions weren’t right. I asked Romy every day, until the question started to seem petulant. But the tide had to be high enough for anyone to get out of Newtok easily—otherwise the boats could get stuck in the eroded silt. The wind had to be calm. And most importantly, Romy had to be ready. No one could distract from the process of preparing the new village for its first inhabitants.
Meanwhile, visitors came in and out of the room I stayed in—a U.S. census worker, a group of people from the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium who were training locals about how to maintain the waterless toilets in the new houses, a pair of communications workers who would shore up Newtok’s satellite dishes and try to set up a connection in Mertarvik.
On Friday, nearly a full week after my arrival, some Newtok residents, including a couple of teachers, held a farewell dance at the school for the first group of people who would soon move to the new village site. A small band played guitar, bass, and drums and sang decades-old country songs, while an audience gathered on the bleachers and little girls spun around the dance floor, giggling.
On Saturday, I visited Charlene’s parents, Lucy and George Carl, who were living in teacher housing. George, a self-trained carpenter, had built many of the houses in the village and helped found the Newtok Village Council. He had grown up in a sod house, then a log cabin, then eventually his uncle had enough money to buy lumber for a stick-frame house, after getting a job in the fishing industry in Bristol Bay. He said he had never been too excited about Mertarvik, because it had no easy access to small, quiet streams and backwaters, only the wide, untamable Ningliq, which took longer to freeze in the winter. “But I don’t mind getting away from this old village now because it’s not too safe anymore,” he reflected.
On Sunday morning, I watched a family return from a hunting trip and unload armloads of moose meat, already cut and skinned. They looked celebratory, grinning at the world at large. But the rest of the village was so quiet it seemed like it was holding its breath. It felt like we were all waiting.
It was Monday morning, the last day of September, when Romy finally announced he could bring a boatful of visitors to Mertarvik—a group of filmmakers, me, and an Alaskan photographer who had arrived over the weekend to shoot some images with me.
In the afternoon, we followed him out the school door and along the muddy boardwalks, past another red house that was being demolished, to a metal outboard motorboat the size of a small truck that had parked at the water’s edge. Romy walked quickly and with energy, in blue jeans and a brown zipper vest, a bright orange construction vest on top of that, a hat stitched with an image of the Hawaiian islands, bits of grass clinging to his neoprene boots, his shoulders hunched slightly forward like someone carrying a heavy load. A rare, vividly blue sky hung over us, and we stood while the demo team loaded heavy stacks of wood panels onto the boat, some bare, some painted, the bones of Newtok’s dismantled houses. The wood could be repurposed for storage sheds, fish-drying racks, and huts for steam baths. The community was sending everything that could be salvaged across the water, and no boat trip could be wasted on just a few journalists. We sat on top of the panels, Romy in the middle, a driver at the back with a group of Newtok construction workers. The boat engine roared to life, and brown water sloshed in our wake. We passed an area of tidal mudflats and followed the shoreline. Gulls sat atop the choppy water, so fat they looked like sailboats. An arctic fox perched on the side of a muddy bluff, watching us.
Then Mertarvik came into focus—blue and hazy, then sunlit and solid. Romy summoned me to the middle of the boat, leaned in, and explained what I was seeing in the distance. Twenty-one houses lined the bluff, in bright shades of garnet, sky blue, sage green, and tawny brown. Beside them, a teal building, the Mertarvik Evacuation Center. Above this were a landfill and a silver-gray rock quarry; next to those, a wide gravel runway. In the sunshine, Romy’s eyes became crescent-shaped, a half-squint, half-smile. “There’s a lighting system over there where the planes can land at night also,” he shouted over the engine. Above it all was the unbroken tundra, the expanses where musk oxen gathered in the winter, the fields of wild berries. “That’s our little village,” he said, a broad grin spreading across his face.
He told me he had ambitious dreams of what it could become—full-size planes landing here, a hotel, bigger barges—a transportation hub like Bethel. But for now this would be enough. “All of the transformers are already up; power lines are up. Look at that; they already have the porches and stuff on some of the houses. Beautiful, eh?”
The boat landed. I could tell even from the first footsteps how much more solid this place felt. A place coming together instead of falling apart. The roads were dry and free of mud, even though it had rained the previous day.
We walked the length of the first street of houses, each perched on a gravel pad with wide wooden porches facing the water and Newtok in the far distance. We entered a brown house at the end—George Carl’s house, the new home of Charlene’s family. Inside, the house was simple. The water tank perched demurely near the front door. The walls were about fourteen inches thick, full of high-value insulation, the windows triple-paned to keep out the cold and the storms. It was empty but clean and warm, full of light and fresh air. (The house looked nunaniq, a Newtok resident told me later that evening, when I showed her pictures of the place on my smartphone; she said the word meant a combination of “happy” and “wow” in Yup’ik.)
After leaving the house, we crossed a meadow full of Labrador tea, smelling a little like citrus and cedar, and toured the high-ceilinged, airy halls of the evacuation center. The main hall, where they had taught the military construction crew how to dance, was so bright and open that it looked like a concert venue. This would also be the temporary school, Romy said, where Charlene would teach after they moved here.
From there, we walked up the hill. Romy pointed out the utility poles, straight and sturdy and recently strung with electrical wires. He paused in the road and turned his face toward the vista of houses and water.
“Stop,” he said suddenly. “Isn’t it pretty?”
I wanted to believe the story that Newtok would have a blessed future. I wanted to believe the community could chart a path out of the disasters of the twenty-first century. I wanted to believe they could find answers that would help the rest of us, and we could all hang on to the histories and identities that made us who we are, even as the planet grew stormier and more precarious.
I had begun to think that the optimism Romy produced wasn’t just for others but for himself as well, something he needed to keep going. Late that night after the Mertarvik tour, I sat with the photographer in a classroom, and Romy came in to talk with us. He asked what we had thought. In previous conversations, I had tried to congratulate him on the years of work he had put into this effort. The success, the fact that Mertarvik was a real place, belonged partly to him. And he had demurred. “I’m just the paper boy,” he had said, and scoffed.
But this evening, something shifted in his eyes. His face flushed with emotion, and his voice became hoarse. “I just hope I’m doing the right thing,” he said quietly. “I care about these people so much. I see so much.” Then a tear rolled down his cheek, and he turned away. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he whispered.
I left two days later on another partly stormy afternoon.
Over the next month, George and Lucy Carl, Charlene Carl, Romy Cadiente, Bernice John, Lisa and Jeff Charles, and eighteen other households arrived in Mertarvik not as visitors but, for the first time, as residents.
When I called George Carl in November, he spoke of Mertarvik as if it were a set of brand-new shoes—well-made but not yet broken in. Cell phones worked only sporadically, and the store hadn’t opened yet. George complained that there was little to do; the place was too quiet.
Lisa and Jeff and their kids had brought most of their stuff over with their own boat. Four freezers had also been hauled across the river for them—for storing food the family gathered, fished, and hunted. Lisa said her kids missed their cousins, and one of her daughters kept lobbying to visit Newtok so they wouldn’t forget her.
Romy and Charlene remained itinerant, taking a room temporarily in the MEC, then moving a few months later to a trailer on-site. But all of it was better than living on a classroom floor.
Cold weather set in, and the snow fell. Storms gathered day after day, but the houses at Mertarvik stayed warm and the land steady. In November, the Y-K Delta entered the season of freeze-up, when boats can no longer travel the waterways but the ice isn’t yet thick enough for snow machines.
The two villages sat apart from each other, old and new, temporarily separated, waiting for the ice to bridge them and for the year to end and another to begin, with its cycles of cold and thaw.
A good story—a love story between people and the land they live on—should have ended there, with the heroes sailing across the water to their newer, happier lives. But the twenty-first century offers messier plotlines.
When the pandemic began in early 2020, I was haunted by something a group of nurses had told me in Newtok. The village held screenings for tuberculosis while I was there—a disease rare in the Lower 48 but common in rural Alaska. The crowded, poorly ventilated, multigenerational houses in Newtok had created conditions for respiratory bacteria and viruses to spread more easily. I imagined how the coronavirus could quickly invade and raise havoc in a tiny, close-knit place like this.
However, that is not what happened. Communities in rural Alaska have not forgotten how outsiders brought devastating illnesses before—including the deadly influenza pandemic (the Spanish flu) between 1918 and 1920. Many parts of rural Alaska enacted some of the strictest pandemic lockdowns and travel restrictions in the nation. Over the next year, Newtok had only one case of Covid, a teacher who quarantined and didn’t spread the disease to anyone else.†
Because of these precautions, to some degree life in Newtok and Mertarvik proceeded as normal. Even so, a year of isolation is stressful, especially in a community already facing crisis. Many of the outside helpers of Newtok—advisors, workers, and experts from various government agencies and nonprofits—simply couldn’t make the long journey. And Newtok slipped out of the national headlines while other troubles occupied America’s attention.
In the summer of 2020, the Newtok Village Council chose to apply federal Covid recovery funds—money that could otherwise have gone to individual households—to construction costs at Mertarvik. But not everyone was pleased with this decision. Rumors and complaints about the council and the relocation process circulated on Newtok’s Facebook forums.
Then, in the still-eroding village site on the other side of the Ningliq River, the old diesel power plant died in late August and couldn’t be repaired for about a month. Some people cranked up their personal generators, but burning fuel day after day was costly. It was hard especially to keep powering the freezers—and eventually much of the fish the Newtok families had caught and frozen, the moose meat they had bagged, the berries they’d handpicked from the tundra and set aside for the winter, turned to rot. This was the food they had put by to make it through the long winter, a nutritional and cultural necessity for survival, especially the months when ice and rain make movement across the region difficult and grocery shipments unreliable. When other Y-K Delta communities heard about their plight, some sent donations of meat by air or barge.
But even after the power plant was repaired, the damage to the social fabric of the community was not mended. A breakdown, disagreements over money, matters of real estate, festering tensions between families, long histories, old wounds—these are the ingredients of a fight.
I never received any satisfying answers about what happened next—simply that mounting stress, bickering, and bitterness seemed to squall through the community and uproot some long-standing relationships. In October, I heard from Charlene that Romy had reached his limit and resigned, and the two of them abruptly left Mertarvik. The following spring, I learned that Andrew John was no longer employed as tribal administrator, and community leaders had told him not to speak with media about the village’s relocation.
But when I called Bernice John, who had taken a post as an “elder advisor” to the relocation, I heard little beyond down-to-earth cheerfulness. “With this pandemic, it’s sort of slowing everything down,” she said in her usual singsong voice. “But then it wouldn’t stop the relocation. It’s a little bumpy road but then we’ve passed through these bumpy roads before, you know,” she insisted.
A day later, I spoke with Patrick LeMay, the Anchorage engineer who had been helping with the FEMA buyout process a couple years before. In 2020, he had moved to Mertarvik to work with Romy, spending six months apart from his family so he could assist with the next round of construction (“It was a longer deployment than probably my shortest Marine Corps deployment,” he told me). He quarantined for two weeks on arrival in May. The village hired a crew of about fifteen people to put up houses and four more to build roads, and hammered away until November. LeMay had taken the principles of Mertarvik’s previous housing designs and slimmed the costs by swapping out Cold Climate’s custom technologies with items that could be purchased from familiar building suppliers—like an off-the-shelf composting toilet and a less expensive air exchanger to ventilate the thickly insulated houses. He estimated that he’d shrunk the price tag of each house to less than half of the previous generation but that they had about the same top-notch efficiency rating. To help make the village more energy efficient, he installed heat exchangers, which would transfer any “recovered heat” emitted by Mertarvik’s diesel power plant to the water pipes, to keep them from freezing in the winter. (He told me the community’s eventual goal would be to free the new village from diesel power as much as possible—with some combination of solar and battery storage.) The only significant problems he encountered were the disruptions that rippled out through economic supply chains—lumber stores that shut down because of the pandemic, a water tank unavailable for weeks. Nine nearly finished new houses stood in Mertarvik, twenty-nine gravel pads ready for more, and another half mile of one-lane road (mostly designed for ATVs to reach the front doors of their owners).
He sent me photographs taken by drone—of a road carved like a stem into the russet-colored tundra vegetation, little squares of houses leafing out from it, each covered in pale-green polymer moisture barrier before the siding was put up. Romy left in October, and Patrick stayed on until November, still under contract with the village. “We had an absolutely amazing year,” he said gleefully. “We got a lot of work done.” (This felt partly genuine and partly an effort to persuade me. Then again, I was fully aware of how essential it was to produce optimism.)
Later in the year, he reported back that the crews had finished a duplex at Mertarvik, and work had begun on a new airstrip.
Assuming what had been built proved to be durable, you could call this effort significant progress. Mertarvik was “a messy-assed success,” Aaron Cooke, the Cold Climate architect, told me. “The reason I feel optimistic is they’ve got a foothold. Mertarvik is a real place. It’s not a plan. It’s a place.”
I also hoped Mertarvik would outlast these crises and skirmishes. I remembered a sign that I had seen posted on the wall of the brown building. CHIEF IS A TITLE NOT GIVEN TO ELDERS IN OUR CULTURE.… CHIEF IS A KASS’AQ [white person’s or outsider’s] TERM FOR LEAD ELDER. ALL WERE EQUAL. In the long memory of Newtok, somewhere there were stories and instructions about how to act together rather than become divided, how to resolve differences, and how to stake out a home and face down a disaster. If the people of Newtok made it over to Mertarvik intact, it would be because they loved their land and their community too much to allow any one setback to overwhelm them.
This is the combination of love and perseverance we will all need to cultivate in this tumultuous moment on Earth.