Noatak National Preserve Residency Interview with Andrea Spofford (July 15th-August 15th, 2014)

Floatplane return, backcountry trip two.

Bio: Andrea Spofford's essays and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Vela Magazine, Revolver, the Kudzu Review, the Oklahoma Review, Red Paint Hill, Town Creek Poetry, Sugar House Review, and The GulfStream: Poems of the Gulf Coast, among others. Her chapbook, EverythingCombustible, is available from Dancing Girl Press and her chapbook Qikiqtagruk: Almost an Island is forthcoming from Red Bird Chapbooks. A native Californian transplanted to the South, Andrea is Poetry Editor for Zone 3 Press.

It is the intersection of person and physical place that characterizes Andrea’s writing overall and the collaboration between science and art—the point where conservation meets poetry—that most interests her. Andrea participated in the Noatak National Preserve residency in northwestern Alaska from July 15th to August 15th, 2014.

Q: Why were you interested in participating at the Noatak National Refuge residency?

A.S. All of my work deals with nature and conservation issues, place specifically. Recently my focus has been on conservation and wilderness, but also how humans find their place in wilderness and how we define wilderness.

Alaska was particularly appealing because it is stereotypically known as this last frontier. Alaska is a wilderness area that I had never been to, and had wanted visit for a very long time.

I planned some Alaska trips, and they kept falling through, so I applied to this program thinking, “Wow, this is right up my alley.”  This is funny because Tama, Jess, and I were all recommended by friends to apply to this program. I read through the listing, and I thought that the Alaska biome sounded really perfect. It sounded like the goals of the residency—celebrating the Wilderness Act while exploring how we define wilderness and how we experience wilderness—seemed to be exactly what I was doing in my poems and essays. I am always trying to find my place in the natural world and reconcile my impact and influence upon it. That’s why I applied and was specifically interested in Alaska. I was very excited when I found out the location because there’s so much historical human interaction within the landscape of the Noatak National Preserve. Getting to see how people interacted with their landscape thousands of years ago was specifically appealing to me.

Q: Why is the intersection of Art and Science so important to you and your work?

Tundra and the onset of fall.

A.S.  Well, first I think scientific language is really interesting and I think there’s a lot of overlap between scientific thought processes and creative thought processes. I like to compare writing a formal poem like a sestina or a sonnet to something that has a very specific format—much like an equation. You want to get to a final product in as few steps as possible, but there’s an element of creativity and thinking outside the box that’s necessary as well.  There’s satisfaction with writing a sestina  that not only successfully follows the pattern but is also very creative.  I think there’s a similar thought process that happens in the sciences and I think there’s a specific part of the brain that both the sciences and the arts explore.

My writing reflects my interests. I read a lot of scientific articles and I like to steal from that language because it is foreign and exciting to me as a writer. I like to take these articles or issues and try to work through them in my poems and essays; at the same time, I like to dissect the language and make it something that I understand and that a layperson reader would understand as well. In that way I feel like a translator, beholden to the original as well as the new product.

I think there is a necessary collaboration between science and art when it comes to wilderness in that there is an element of subliminity experienced by both scientists and artists who devote their lives to wilderness issues. The overlap is great and it just makes sense that there would be collaboration.

 I write so much about environment and place that I see part of my made-up job description as being a translator for that. It seems it’s the same part of the brain that goes into vivid descriptions, and a lot of my writing is very vivid. The most exciting thing for me is to combine my personal experiences of abstractions like place and environment with very physical and concrete sciences.  

An essay I wrote about Alaska can be found in Vela Magazine; it addresses fishing but also ideas like, what is wilderness and how do we interact with wilderness? There are hard facts in the essay but it is also more thoughtful, philosophical, and tends to wander off into tangents—that’s one of the best parts about writing, the ability to wander.

I like learning, and that’s why combining science and art is especially interesting. It’s this opportunity to learn something I’m not familiar with; I mean I’m not a scientist but sometimes I wish I was. This has become a chance for me to explore something different and learn something new.

Q: What are some of your first reactions to the Noatak Wilderness?

A.S.  It is really large, and it is really, really quiet. Mike and I were the first floatplane trip out.  At camp it was just Mike, me, and the group’s gear. Tama, Jess, and Hannah were meeting us on the second flight. It was so absolutely quite out there.  When Tama, Jess, and Hannah arrived we could hear the plane from miles and miles away because there was literally no other air traffic.

That said, it wasn’t completely silent; we heard some loons and foxes and the sounds of grass and wind. It was quiet compared to the busy sound of Tennessee, almost painfully so.

Q: What do you believe to be a highlight to your time spent in the Noatak Wilderness?

A.S.  I think the three of us got really lucky in terms of the people we worked with in the Park Service. The Park Service employees in the Western Arctic National Parklands are some of the most generous, kind, intelligent, and wonderful people I have ever met. They went above and beyond to make sure we had an excellent experience so my trips to the backcountry became this magical time.

 In terms of the backcountry, going into the Noatak the first day, that rush of silence and how big Alaska actually is was amazing.

On the Nigu River, we got to participate in archaeological surveys. The day we dug exploratory 50 x 50 centimeter squares was such a great opportunity. In the pit Hannah and I dug, Hannah found an almost perfect atl-atl spearhead that was dated to about 4000 years old. The next day they found datable charcoal in the same pit. That time, at that place, felt like we were doing real archaeology. We were getting to learn so much about the people that worked with and lived upon the landscape thousands and thousands of years ago.

Prepping fireweed blossoms for syrup.

In town there was a day when we made fireweed syrup. We got up early, and Tama and I went with Norma Booth and Frank Hays to collect blossoms. Together we spent all day just making fireweed syrup and taste-testing it. Later, Mike and Ann and Levi came over for lunch.  It turned into this all day, hanging out in Kotzebue experience.

That night everyone came over to our house and I made the salmon I caught the day before. I caught my salmon off the seawall and it weighed about fifteen pounds after it was cleaned—it was a huge salmon and my fishing pole was broken after! It was just this enormous fish, and it didn't even fit on the cookie sheet we put it on; it was bent over in the oven.

All the kids in Kotzebue were so excited when I caught that fish. I think partially because I’m a girl and I caught a really big fish, but also because I was a visitor and I caught a really big fish.  They were giving me directions on how to reel it in because I had never used a snagger before and I didn’t even bring a knife. I mean, we weren’t planning on going fishing. It was just a group of us walking home and we decided to throw a line in and see. Once I had the fish pulled up the boat ramp, one of the boys killed the fish for me and cleaned it too.  The kid’s father said, “So next time you’ll bring a knife.”

There was also a day at the first backcountry location when we sort of took the day off to explore, read poetry, and fish. That day we caught trout. We had six trout when all was said and done. We caught them on a homemade fly. I had a lure and the fish weren’t biting so Hannah made a fly from materials from the surrounding environment. We all started catching fish with the fly that Hannah made—we were fly fishing with a spinning reel, which is pretty funny.  

This was totally the perfect residency and I kept thinking, can it get anymore perfect?

Q: Did the residency make any impact on the way you view the natural world, or facilitate ideas for future work?

 A.S. In terms of focus, my writing the past couple of years has really taken more of environmental direction. I just finished my Ph.D. in the beginning of the summer and my major areas of study were American literature and Environmental Poetics. I’m really interested in early American literature and contemporary writing about environment. I think there is a certain bigness to wilderness, and certain people are drawn to wilderness because of that. I think I’m really drawn to wilderness and gravitate toward people who are drawn to wilderness for that same reason.

Backcountry camp.

Writing about wilderness is just one of those things that is so large it is hard to put into words. I think this residency really influenced my writing. It helped me focus my ideas even more than they have been in the past. It gave me a subject that is really unique—wild in a lot of ways—but also a place people have been interacting with for a long time. There is not a separation from people and wilderness in Alaska; there are people interacting with their landscape. Ideas of ownership are really different in Alaska and I think that made me reconsider how I think about wilderness.  

Q: As an artist do you feel like you influenced the scientist that you worked with?

A.S. When we were in the backcountry we worked with Michael Holt who is the lead archaeologist and head of cultural resources as well as his assistant, Hannah Atkinson.  Having us around—the three of us who are not archaeologists—asked Mike and Hannah to explain things they may not have explained if they had been with a team of other archaeologists. I noticed the small details of things, but the types of rocks and the stories those rocks told were not as apparent to me as they are to Mike. I think the artists’ presence really asked Mike and Hannah to express these things. I think the thing they really had in common with the three of us is that we are all storytellers.  Jess tells stories through visual art, Tama tells stories though her photography, and I tell stories with my writing. Mike especially is a storyteller—a huge part of his job is telling stories about the way people interacted and experienced their landscape. I think Mike was excited to have us there; he’s so earnest and so invested in his resource and so willing to share. I think that quality can be rare.

Stone tools.

I think there is a question, especially in archaeology, about what we present to the public and what we hide away. I think when we present something to the public a lot of times the public wants to destroy it. But if we don’t present it to the public they don’t know that they should care about it; it’s a catch-22. Because they were so willing to share, I think Mike and Hannah took on the role of teacher more than they would have otherwise. I like to think that maybe they experienced the backcountry a little differently, not just from the lens of an anthropologist, but also from the lens of a writer, photographer, and visual artist.

I think we realized we were telling similar stories in different ways. We don’t do exactly the same thing but there is a lot of overlap in our goals and in what we value. 

Q: What were some of the beneficial outcomes of your experience?

A.S. I think the amount of work I produced is a hugely beneficial outcome. There’s so much more to say! I think experiencing this place, a place most people don’t get the opportunity to experience, was hugely beneficial to my creative process as well.  I also think that getting to work with Tama and Jess was fantastic. I don’t get to work with people who are visual artists very frequently, which is a shame. I think there should definitely be more collaboration across mediums and I really admire what both of them do. Just seeing and getting to hear about things from their perspective and observing what they noticed compared to what I noticed became very eye-opening. Tama is a writer (in addition to being a photographer) so I feel like she and I really bonded; we will always have this shared experience.

I also think getting to work with the Park Service was great.  Like I said earlier, everyone we encountered was dedicated, generous, and excited to share—that is really refreshing. The level of care for these parks demonstrated was admirable. 

Fieldwork: The Noatak National Preserve

 

Text and Images by Tama Baldwin

 

We flew low all the way back to Kotzebue.  Dodging the clouds, our pilot said.  We were flying under the weather this day, at an altitude where the material world was still visible--for the most part.  More or less.  Somewhere around 1,500 feet.  Rain sheeted the windscreen, the wings, the window next to my head where I sat, my hand on the plastic handle I was to never let go of were we to land upside down and underwater (one hand is your anchor while the other liberates you from the tangle of belts and latches and handles and headset cords and knobs until somehow against the pressure of all that black water pressing in on your crippled plane you manage to open the door.)  I kept rehearsing the lesson in my mind--choose one hand for a hand-hold and do not let go until you have a way out of the plane, until you know which way is up, until you know where the surface is and how you are going to get there.  This quick lesson in underwater egress was based in someone else's very real misfortune--a frightening tale we were told in detail and which we very much took to heart. I appreciated the care with which our pilot instructed us in this matter every single time we boarded his float plane.  I accepted it--I welcomed it as part of the risk  I knew you have to  take when you are going where there are no roads, where there are no easy ways in, no easy way out, where your pilot lands and takes off only on water or tundra or gravel bars.  These are the  kinds of places I absolutely adore for the way in which they remind me of what it really means to have a body that inhabits this world.  The kind of places where you have to suffer a little  for your travel and where the reward of rest and a cup of tea at the end of a long day are all the more sweet.  Where you have to plan long and hard as you calculate about how you going to get where you are going, who you are going to trust to take the journey with you, the kinds of places where you have to be your best self, as strong as you can be and evermore smart.

When the rain eased we could see more of the Noatak National Preserve unfurling beneath the plane, the drenched tundra still holding on to the last little bit of its summery yellow green. As one of four parks in the 11 million acres of wilderness that make up the Western Arctic Parklands, the  Noatak lies in its entirety above the Arctic Circle and is still considered to be so pristine it has been included in the International Biosphere Reserve--which is to say it constitutes one of our planets' most precious and rapidly diminishing resources:  a true wilderness and by wilderness in this case I mean only a place that occasionally rewards the prepared and punishes fools who sadly can sometimes  in blink of an eye become one and the same.   Its namesake river crosses over from the Gates of the Arctic in the east and empties hundreds of miles to the west  through Kotzebue Sound and on into the Chukchi Sea.  It is roadless and utterly undomesticated in our current sense of that word even though we were all amazed by the significant evidence of the long history of human habitation we had just born witness to in our second archeological survey.  Those ruins evoked a lost era when the wall between human beings and nature did not really exist, a wall we now call civilization.  Etymologically "wilderness" means nothing more than "a place where the deer are."   I would imagine that if you were to live in a skin tent, if you were to move with the seasons--following fish and game as they follow their own ancient migrations--you might know the word wilderness in its older merely descriptive sense, a word that means little more than  the world beyond the walls of whatever shelter it is you have built around yourself--the place where the deer--or the caribou--or the bears--or the wolves--or the muskoxen--are not.  Maybe we should measure the purity of a wilderness by this idea of the distance between your body and its vulnerability to that part of the world that has nothing to do with being human. Maybe we should rank our National Parks in order of importance starting with the least visited and ending with the most paved.  I say this because once again I was allowed such a privilege, the privilege of feeling that old vulnerability--a good vulnerability I might add, the kind of awareness of my smallness which is merely a matter of being reminded once again of the fundamental interdependency of all things.  

Much of the time I was on the ground out in the Noatak I revisited the idea that time is not as linear as we have been given to believe--that it is in fact a mosaic in which these convenient categories like "prehistoric" and "modernity" utterly overlap.  There was, for example, the miracle of flight and the technological precision of the pilot who ushered me into that wild place navigating with an iPad strapped to his thigh coexisting with the fabulous technology of the past--the stone blade of the atlatl  that Hannah found in the pit next to mine--the tip of what proved to be a nearly perfect artifact jutting from the wall she had carefully carved with her trowel. If any of us had had any sense of how to use it we could have for it was as strong today as it was the day it was made 6,000 years ago.  I will never for as long as I live forget the silken lightness of aeolian loess as I helped sift a screen for what the park service archeologist Mike Holt referred to as "datable material."  We had found so many stone tools beyond Hannah's blade that we set ourselves to  sifting for evidence of a hearth--a fleck of charcoal from a campfire that kept someone warm and drove away mosquitoes from that very spot five or six or seven or eight or ten or twelve or fourteen thousand years ago.  The soil in my hands had been made by the wind working the earth for hundreds of thousands of years  Mike said.  That earth might well have been made of feathers for all I knew--it was so light it was like a dream of soil, it was earth as it is weightless in the expanse of the universe.  Somewhere in the clouds above us I heard the sound of an engine--a plane making its way through the nearby pass somewhere very close to our work site and out over the North Slope--and in that sound my dream of what the wilderness had been to the person who had made and used that blade was zipped up tight and I was back in my time again, this time of digitized being.   Before departing for the Noatak we had been asked to tweet from the field--a request we all had a good laugh about for the tweeting would have required we charge the satellite phone with a solar charger in order to make the extra call itself to some willing soul on the grid probably back down in the lower 48 who would make the tweet for us by which point the essence of our isolation--the force of the distance we had traveled to get away from the tweeting world and all it signifies--would have been utterly lost.  We joked fake tweets to one another over our cups of tea and felt much the closer for our shared refusal.  We were beyond the twitersphere for those few blessed days of our life, and I know that I for one am much the richer for that brief separation from the wired world, the very isolation that is one of the great gifts our protected wilderness areas continue to give us.  I'm the last person to resist new technologies--but if this summer has taught me anything it is that we have always been intensely technological--sometimes for good and sometimes not.  The people who lived here along the Noatak before the advent of the Holocene had to have been strategic geniuses if only in the ways they learned to work well within the boundaries of the weather and the seasons and the latittude--forces that in the far north still deter visitors.

If I had the time to walk the Noatak from end to end as others have done many times and for many reasons during the last 14,000 years I would do it.  As much as I loved flying I longed to be on the ground almost all the way and flying closer and closer to it only made me yearn more to turn back, to land on some quiet misty lake where I could reflect on all the issues my time in the Aldo Leonardo Wilderness Residency has raised.  There's something about the speed of a human being moving according the the mechanics of his/her own body that allows a kind of sanity that itself seems to be a diminishing resource.  Near the end of our flight  our pilot steered the plane through a narrow pass just as the storms we had been dodging began to assert themselves again.  I stared at the rock face that seemed much too close to the wings of the plane--this to take my mind off the fact that  I couldn't see very much through the rain veiling the windscreen--an observation that spiraled into imaginary catastrophe, the worst kind of panic, panic based in the kinds of facts I've gathered over the years, facts like the average survival time of pilots who find themselves suddenly without an adequate view of the horizon:  those not trained in instrument flying last about 90 seconds before the brain says up is down and down is gone.  I cursed myself for having spent all those hours in air traffic control towers interviewing controllers for a book I've been researching for as a lot they love nothing more than to share flight disaster stories all of which I listened to much too closely.  I must have crashed our plane a dozen times in my mind  before I noticed the stone shouldering the plane had begun to shift in color from slate to lavender, as sure a signal as any that  the sun was somewhere near and would return shortly, the color prompting a long ago stored memory in which  I am on one of a dozen or so of my childhood vacation pilgrimages to  our nation's parklands.  Trapped in the back of that station wagon with three siblings singing the song my parents were singing along with us--"America the Beautiful."   My cynical self would like to say that song is little more than the anthem of the mid century middle class who set about worshipping nature even as they violated it at an unprecedented rate and with a kind of abject totality.  And it may well be about manifest destiny and merely a pretty propagandistic veneer for all the horror that comes with that, but those mountains  beside me truly were purple and they were  majestic and I right then and there decided  to never apologize for thinking that  we've lost something good in the fact that it is no longer as common for parents to bring their children to the wilderness as it used to be--and worse yet no longer teach them a song  to sing  praises to our nation's physical beauty, a song to be committed to memory just like the pledge of allegiance and any number of essential poems and prayers that can be used to carry a body forward in this life.  

Exiting the pass we flew even lower over the Kobuk River.  I could just make out the glow of the Kobuk Sand Dunes a couple of miles to the south, their white folds gloaming and ghostly in the dark rain-wrapped light.  I have read so much about them I dreamed all summer of setting foot on them--but that was a dream that will have to be deferred until another summer. The glimpse in the rain was a tease, just exotically beautiful enough to lure me back--again, again undoubtedly by hook or by crook and hopefully by way of Kotzebue.   As the rain intensified we dropped  lower still over the river.    I heard Jim through my headphones on the radio announcing to the village of Ambler our altitude and course and soon we could hear other pilots somewhere in the air nearby respond, each giving their location and altitude, outlining in speech their respective flightpaths so we could avoid a collision on what had become nothing less than a wilderness highway. Above the village of Kiana Jim radioed again to give our location, but this time no one answered.  The sky had  began to open up a little and by the time we reached Kotzebue Sound we could see the kind of weather the sea had in store for our return:  the wind was busy doing its millennial work, worrying rock into till, shoveling the clouds out off the coast and on in to the interior.

Noatak National Preserve 

Camp Two,  Noatak National Preserve

At the day's end we make one final survey.  Noatak National Preserve

the jaw of a caribou--another means of keeping time--such reminders were everywhere

for those few short months of summer the arctic tundra contains a feast

making our way back to camp on caribou trails through muskeg--an honest mode of travel;  Pictured:  Mike Holt, Hannah Atkinson,  Andrea Spofford, Robin Gibbs

bad weather moving inland over Cape Krusenstern

Wilderness Inventory

By Tama Baldwin

“A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”

--The Wilderness Act, 1964

"isolated figure, looking north"

Such a laudable thought--this image of landscape without evidence of people--and such a dream, truly.  If there is such a place as described in the Wilderness Act it is in the future when the earth is rid of us finally, which will come to pass, eventually, for this is how it is with life. Booms are followed by busts which are followed by boons which are followed by catastrophes.  I've been to the Burgess Shale and held those dinner plate-sized fossils in my lap and contemplated the randomness that has allowed my kind and not some other now extinct mammal to survive any number of population bottlenecks, the last of which I understand reduced the planet's population of my kind to fewer than two to ten thousand breeding pairs. (What interesting social dynamics those numbers must have generated!)  This was roughly 70,000 years ago of course, a drop in the bucket geologically speaking, but my goodness what progress we have made since the Toba Catastrophe.  There is not one single place currently under federal protection that had been truly "untrammeled"--not in 1964 and not now--and though I understand and appreciate and support the protective intention embedded in the language of The Wilderness Act I am not so sure that it helps to perpetuate such a euro-centric fantasy. We've already all but wrecked the atmosphere  of the entire planet and there's no getting away from that, not here in the arctic, not even in antarctica which has the sole distinction of never having been truly fully inhabited by "Man."  I fear our current crisis  has come to pass in part because we've divvied up nature into that which we shall use and that which we shall protect as if somehow by fencing in some currently uninhabited places with legislation we might be thereby freed to trammel the rest with relative abandon.  And trammel it we have--and still we are fighting about the protection of the rest, making deals, wheedling and pleading and bargaining with the kinds of people who should be beneath contempt, the ladies and lords of industry and their various agents who would suck and drill and bomb every last dollar out of every last mountain no matter the consequences--if they can get away with it--and they will if they hurry up and coerce and bribe and blackmail and threaten  and murder and jail those in charge of protection while there is still air fit for life.

Walking down the beach outside of Kotzebue today I came across a spotted seal that had been shot in the head and left to rot.  No one had bothered to remove the skin or harvest the flesh, which suggested to me the killing was for the sake of killing and nothing more.  Farther down shore, in the rusting heap of a barge out by where there are the vestiges of a garbage dump I found seagulls that that had been shot and stuffed in the crevices of the boat--and I had the strange sensation that I was in a museum devoted to the worst kind of degradation:  that of self hate.  It's a museum I have visited before, unfortunately, not just here in Alaska but almost every where I have lived.  I don't know of another kind of species that kills just to kill and not to eat.   It's been such a short span of time since the people who have lived in far northwest Alaska for such a long time have been forced into contact with all things European, but in that time a way of life--one in which the word wilderness did not exist because nature was not something seen as separate from the self--has come terribly undone.  Upon the 50th anniversary of the Wilderness Act perhaps a revision is in order, one which eschews the sentimentality of the earlier draft.  The era of concessions, of wheedling and pleading and dealing,  needs to be put to rest once and for all. There is a lot to be learned from the people of late prehistory--a lot to be taken away from the record they left behind--such as those cairns and tools and cache pits we surveyed last week.  I don't for a second sentimentalize the past.  I know that what I saw there in the Brooks Range were the seeds of all industry--anxiety about famine and raids and thieves and plagues--but along with the evidence of "man's" trammeling there was also  evidence that once upon a time we had a sense of proportion, a view of ourselves as one among many species sharing a landscape.  

We sat one afternoon last week in the open air of an ancient meeting house whose sod roof had long ago melted away, the blue dome of the stratosphere above our heads,  and listened to Hannah reading from the ethnographic record of that so called "wilderness settlement."  Each story she shared seemed to have been infused with an ecological sensibility, an ethic rooted in respect for both the self as well as for all things as if all things were animate.  Something came over us after that, an energetic sense of community that drove us to put our GPS units and backpacks and cameras away.  We wandered to the end of the lake and stood staring at the outflow creek that was rippling black with fish.  Without discussion or planning of any kind we set ourselves in motion, one of us gathering blueberries from the tundra, another fashioning a weir with willow and a mosquito headnet, yet another a nearly perfect fly from one small feather from the tundra  which was then woven atop a hook.  An arctic fox, whose job it had been to keep tabs on us every day, emerged out of the willows and watched from a distance as  we caught no more than we needed.   What we had we shared with each other, and for the entirety of the experience we gave and continue to give thanks.  We were just five people and that was just one afternoon in an otherwise tremendously busy week, but I felt a glimmer of hope in that experience.  I believe there is still a good deal that can be accomplished when people work together closely in small groups and out of a sense of a common cause.  Despair is not--nor should it ever be--an option.



"3 AM, Late July"

Light Chop off of Kotzebue

Noatak Wilderness Science and Art Collaboration

By Peggy Lawless

The Aldo & Leonardo art-science collaboration at Noatak National Preserve began July 15. Three artists (Tama Baldwin, Jessica Segall, and Andrea Spofford) will assist archaeologist Michael Holt in surveying an important prehistoric site.



Nan Christianson, Hannah Atkinson, Frank Hays, Willie Goodwin,
Andrea Spofford, Jessica Segall, Tama Baldwin, Mike Holt

Empiricism & Its Discontents

By Tama Baldwin


--“The proofs fatigue the truth.”  Georges Braque

dogs of kotzebue, # 1

These days leading up to our departure for the Brooks Range are deliciously long, the sun lassoing our heads most of the hours of the clock until our sense of ourselves in time is mostly lost.  I have to force myself to wind down and turn in because something in the body seems to love the light so much it rises and rises into it with no sense of an ending.  We are all feeling a little like those flowers you see every where down south in the big cities of Anchorage and Fairbanks:  all those  buckets and busted up canoes packed bow to stern with snap dragons and lobelia and dahlias and petunias blowing themselves up in little color bombs.  It would be interesting to know how the hormonal processes of those flowers are altered by the absence of darkness—it’s a desperate race to be sure, to flourish as fast as possible before the onset of winter.  In Kotzebue the horticultural predilections of people of European descent give way to the aesthetics of the hunter-gatherer.  Though I’ve seen more than one citizen with a weed whacker over their shoulders heading to some location I’ve yet to uncover the standard practice here is laissez faire when it comes to things like landscaping and lawns, which is an aesthetic I very much prefer.  I would never get away with it in Iowa City, but I’d love to let the yard surrounding my house retreat to its prairie origins just as here the tundra continues to assert itself despite the assaults of graders and pavers and four wheelers and pickup trucks.  I like the tangle of fireweed and bluebells and bear grass and the clusters of daisies that are nothing less than prolific in springing from the most distressed scabs of earth.  I love the dogs that guard the front of so many of the houses, the lot of them incredibly noble in demeanor:  they are lords each over their domains—just as the ravens outside our little red house choked in shrub willows completely own the piles of pipe and Northland storage containers stacked in a lot across the road.

Maybe I am giving the light  more credit than it deserves.  Perhaps the inspiration that keeps me up past my normal bedtime stems from the incredible welcome we’ve received.  Every one involved in this project, from the representatives of the National Park Service and the U.S. Forest Service and the Colorado Art Ranch believe utterly in this collaboration we are about to undertake in what the park service swears has been scientifically proven to be—botanically speaking—a “pristine wilderness.”  The conversations around the dinner table have been dense and vibrant, as packed with laughter as debate.  It occurs to me that despite the presence of the twin sirens of the wired world—internet and TV--  the art of conversation is still alive and well in Kotzebue.  Tonight the focus swerved toward one of my favorite topics—how we know what we think we know about the world—and more importantly a debate about the merits of so-called “anecdotal evidence” versus  “empirical proof.”  

The push-pull between the anecdotal and the empirical plays out all the time here.  When the road to the Red Dog Mine 90 miles north of Kotzebue was finished and trucks began to roll their loads of zinc to the Chukchi Sea the caribou who migrate along the coast were affected by the overt presence of human industry.  Those in favor of the mine argued, anecdotally, that there was little to no impact, but the scientists who radio collared and tracked the caribou noted that many of the animals shied away from crossing the road, delaying their southward passage for almost 40 days--a disruption that was nearly catastrophic both for the animals and  hunters alike.  True subsistence existence is already all but impossible now with the changes wrought by climate change and the incursion of mining and drilling, and the Red Dog Mine clearly has only made things worse in this regard.  The caribou who failed to cross  the road would not survive the winter, and those who finally dared to cross after over a month of delay had to burn down their winter fat hurrying to catch up with the rest of the migration.  Those in favor of the mine now say the trucks stop when the drivers see the caribou—thus problem solved—but anecdotes like that sound just a little cartoonishly too easy, and so  I am eager to know what the scientists still studying the issue will have to say when they finish tabulating this year’s migration patterns and numbers. 

The part of the Brooks Range where we are heading next week is rich with cultural history, and each day as we survey looking for new archeological sites  and assessing the condition of existing digs we will be confronted with how we know what we know about the people who left evidence of their lives behind.  No life can be perfectly reconstructed and interpreted from the fragments, and the longer the delay between the social reality of the artifact and the social reality of its interpreter the likelier it is that the story of the object and the person who made it will be lost to time.  The sad truth is that the most durable of things are often the most mundane—bones and stone, mostly, and these tell a story of gut level survival which while important says little to nothing about the interior life of the people who once lived here.  Their descendants, though, have plenty of insight to offer, almost all of it by way of story.  The traditions are oral, of course, and thus  when the empiricist arrives demanding something tangible--proof that what the elder claims was actually how things were--our ability to fill in the gaps or  to flesh out the whole story tends to suffer.   I love the empiricists and their need for their kinds of truths--though maybe it would be better if we could figure out a way for the quantifier to meet the dreamer halfway.   There is always a bead of truth in every story, no matter how speculative, no matter how freewheeling in relation to material reality.  Even lies open a window, albeit obliquely, into a shared reality.  In the mid 19th Century the Inupiat prophet Maniilaq foretold the arrival of Europeans  in far northwestern Alaska and of boats powered by fire and boats that could fly.  The last of his prophecies have not yet come to pass, but in this age of climate change they are starting to feel less and less like fantasy.  The village of Ambler is not yet a teeming metropolis--though with the on-going invasion of Canadian mining interests in this part of the United States it now seems plausible.  I don't want to be there though the day the whale he prophesied arrives that far up the Kobuk River--be it by tsunami or by flooding. 

wing'd boat

Ten Pound Test

By Tama Baldwin

The package of jasmine rice was what pushed me over the edge.  Ten ounces of aromatic grains grown and harvested in the Thai Highlands and sent by barge and train and plane and truck to my local food co-op.  And there I was in my kitchen in Iowa City boxing them up again along with other dry goods so I could mail them to myself care of General Delivery Kotzebue, Alaska.  The goal was to simplify my travel essentially, to make certain that my days in the Aldo & Leonardo Residency were uncomplicated by  domestic tasks in a new place.  If I were merely traveling this summer I might have just rolled with the local fare, but there is a lot of work to be done in the next month and the creative soul has a literal appetite all its own and my cheap and easy food favorites will help me feed it.  And yet I couldn't keep myself from tabulating the miles those grains will have traveled--in addition to the miles I have just traveled.  I am in Anchorage now, visiting friends for the weekend before heading north on Monday.  We are going to hear Linda Hogan read her poems on Sunday night, yet another thing--like the rice--that feels less like a luxury than a necessity.  There she will be, at the podium, having herself flown thousands of miles to bear witness to her readers, many of whom have also--like me--just accumulated thousands upon thousands of frequent flyer miles.

For all my critique of the Anthropocene I am utterly an agent of it, from the industrialized agricultural products that form the core of my diet to my love of travel.  I know the formula by which we balance our sociological and ecological responsibilities is not that simple.  My modern life gives me creative liberty--the opportunity to pursue a deeper understanding of the wilderness--and still that understanding has caused me to question the means of my inquiry.  Arctic Alaska is one of the last places on earth where people still have the opportunity to pursue a subsistence living--though among the many changes that have occurred in the last hundred years--that way of being has been under assault in large part by the world I currently hail from, which I now tend to see not so much through the lens of ethnicity or nationality, but  by means of what I can only name as an ecological identity.  I am from Iowa, the land of the corporate farm, a place where a true hunter-gatherer would likely starve given the paucity of animal habitat and forage fit for human consumption--if, of course, she could hunt and gather long enough to keep from being gunned down by irate landowners or  arrested by the police force those landowners have purchased with their taxes.  I've been so dialed into the industrial grid for such a long time I fear I've lost sight of my ecological origins--which  I believe has profound implications for our collective future.

It's a sad small gesture I know, but I decided to call my friend Jay at the last minute even as I was packing and ask him if he would give me a fishing lesson.  He is, among many things, a consumate fly fisherman, as well as a person possessed of sufficient savvy to understand exactly what it was I was asking of him.  He knew I wanted  to know at least a little something about subsistence, and he has a deep understanding of the history of the sport he loves so much it could be said his love borders on obsession.  He took me to our local hunting and fishing goods store and helped me pick out a rod and spinner and a pile of lures, a different type for each species of fish he thought I might have a shot at catching.  He taught me how to tie an improved clinch and to set the drag and how to cast as we trolled the farm pond deep in the heart of the Circle 7 Ranch where he has attained the property owner's permission to fish.  It was late on a Friday night at the beginning of July--that exact point in mid-summer when the tomatoes in my kitchen garden start to grow like teenagers, in fits and starts, falling all over themselves in awkward tangles that I will not be able to smooth out by the time I return from my long neglect of them in late August.  The fish were cooling themselves in the deeper pockets of that pond, pockets whose location I couldn't begin to fathom, which secretly relieved me because I was worried about what would have to be done should I actually catch a fish.  I worried that my line, ten pound test,  wouldn't be strong enough to keep hold of what I caught and that the fish might break away with the hook in its mouth, which seems to me a causal yet unforgivable kind of cruelty.  Don't worry, Jay said.  It's strong enough.  Just keep moving.  You've got to find where the fish are. And so I cast--paused-- and reeled, tipping the rod downward and swiping it left and right to simulate prey, but try as I might there was not a fish to be found.  Maybe they are not here I said.  Maybe they died in this horrible heat, but no he assured me they were there.  Look, he said.  There's the nest of a Blue Gill--I saw a broad divot in the sand just off shore, a whorl of grass--but no fish.  I didn't know fish had nests.  I also didn't know fish ate fellow fish of the same species which he soon demonstrated when he took my as of yet untested rod and made a quick cast on my behalf.  The whole pond knotted up around the lure  the instant  it hit the water and the drama was launched, the little fish he had hooked instantly attracting the attention of a much larger member of its own tribe.  He swears he's had fish try to steal fish he's caught as he's reeling them in, and I suppose I believe him.  Hunger is still the rule that trumps all other rules.  I love the familiarity between the two words lore and lure.  It's through  story-telling how we learn how to be both within ourselves and our larger communities, and so I suppose this is how I hope to reconcile the carbon expenditure that is my travel far from home this summer.  May insight come to me by whatever means-through the lens of my camera or the casting of my line or the sharing of ideas, meals, memories.

tools of the trade

detail, tools of the trade