When I was young, my brother and I listened for snowtravelers—what folks named the early snowmobiles. If we heard a drone we raced down the snowdrift to the ice, looked upriver and down for a black dot or yellow headlight. Travelers! People: they were rare, and exciting.

Sometimes the humming was simply our ears making up sound in the silence of huge mid-winter wilderness, and a moving dot in the distance turned out to be a fox or a wolverine crossing the ice. Disappointed, we’d wander back to the dog yard or our snow tunnels.

Snowgos, as we’ve come to call them, brought change fast. Before them, everyone used dogs. Food for the dogs came the same way it did for us—by fishing and hunting, constantly. Snowgos needed a new kind of feed—constantly—and it didn’t grow on the land. In a few short years, jobs became more important than hunting, a previously inconceivable and upside-down notion.

My friend Alvin acquired a used snowgo before I did, and then he bought a new one, an Arctic Cat Panther. It would go eighty miles per hour. Man, he went up the river like a comet. I can still picture his mom, Mary, worried at the window, watching him disappear in a streak of snow, icefog, and exhaust. “Adii!” she uttered. “Aachikaang!”

Now thirty, almost forty years have passed. I own three old snowgos and one old dog. And it’s easier to name acquaintances who fly to Anchorage twenty times a year than to name even one person that uses working dogs anymore. TV and iPods have come, strip mines have brought high-paying jobs. Snowgo racing and basketball have made local stars that outshine the hunters.

A few days ago my daughter, China, met me at the door when I came in from snowmobiling. I’d been out all day helping a friend set beaver traps. I was frosty, iced, bundled up and stinking of two-cycle exhaust. “I thought you were Bailey,” she said. “Can I have a friend over?”

It was cold, getting dark, overhead the sky bruised blue, and orange in the west over the ice. “Sure,” I said. It was past the point in the evening when I allow her to walk alone across town. It is too dangerous with kids roaring around, lawless on snowgos and Honda four-wheelers—some so little they can hardly see over the handlebars, and some in their forties now.

An hour later Bailey’s mom, Tracey, dropped her off. Tracey was heading into the night to take a visiting doctor out on her racing dog-team. She asked briefly about overflow (water on top of the ice and under the snow), and I reassured her that I hadn’t seen any out on the trail.

At ten p.m. we started noticing the time. Before eleven the hospital called. Out on the ice a snowgo probably traveling a hundred miles per hour had hit the dog team from behind. The doctor had been brought in without a pulse; Tracey was alive, although soon to be medivaced.

Over the course of the evening and morning details leaked in: the driver and passenger on the snowgo were from the village closest to where my brother and I grew up; for one reason or another, they left the scene. The doctor’s leg had been severed, and he bled to death on the ice while Tracey, with all her ribs on one side broken and internal injuries including a ruptured aorta, at fifteen below zero in the dark had tried to fashion a tourniquet.

Travelers the next day reported blood all over the trail. The newspaper reported that alcohol was involved on the part of the twenty-year-old driver. Friends reported a six-hour surgery in Anchorage and Tracey in critical condition and on a ventilator. Gossip said the snowgo was wrecked and the dogs uninjured.

I’m reporting that this accident, and others, has been coming toward us for decades. That may sound too symbolic and pat, but it’s true. Technology has flooded up from the Lower Forty-Eight, washed over Alaska all the way to the Arctic shore and beyond. Here on the once-frontier, technology is colliding with the environment, the animals, and the old ways, outpacing its own limited illumination like a snowmobile roaring up behind a dog team in the dark.

Days are getting short here, and the hangover from Tuesday’s party is fading. Caribou tracks on the ice are windblown, and dots in the distance mark far-flung gut piles and the black ravens hunched around them, pecking in the snow and sharing their own important news.

Strangely, it feels as if we are moving in two opposite directions: as an Alaskan I recognize this coming cold and dark, while as a citizen of America this spring-like feeling is unfamiliar.

I thank you, Barack Obama, for coming out of nowhere, a stranger from across the ice, and bringing this mood of springtime in November. It is revitalizing to hear high intellect again; your calm smile and positive attitude is encouraging and feels true; your common upbringing and young daughters—it feels like we are all Americans again. It’s a good thing to be reminded.

I was raised a white boy among Eskimos, and still live in an Eskimo town in an Eskimo region of Alaska. And I’m male, like the man you’re replacing, but whatever he did or didn’t do, he has never felt like my President. He belonged to a gang that didn’t and wouldn’t ever include my kind. To me it felt as if he were his family and friends’ President. Exxon-Mobil’s President. I felt endangered by him, not encouraged, certainly not led.

It’s an upside down thing, but I feel like this country just voted for my people.

My daughter, China, is eleven now. It’s been during the last eight of those years that she has asked the majority of her million questions: about caribou and caterpillars, moose and salmon, pollution and polls and democracy. With us she’s traveled on ice, rivers, overseas; with us she’s skinned bears and picked berries and discussed everything from the Dewey Decimal System to FDR (her favorite President.) It has been a privilege to be in her presence—every step of the way—but it has been hardest to explain our nation to her. Hardest to keep hopeful and to make twenty-first-century America sound like even a distant relative to the bright young America in her books.

Here at home, as far as caring for the tundra and mountains and rivers, I won’t say that I was near despair or near giving up because I don’t seem to know how to give up, but I will say we non-flag-waving patriots (hikers, hunters, land-lovers) sorely needed some sun, a break from the heavy brush. Bushes, that is.

Now, out on the ice, a few small bands of caribou still trickle through. Tiny black specks, almost imaginary, crossing the white and climbing the willowy bluffs up onto the tundra. They’ve had a tough go of it, migrating past this community. They came on into wind, gunfire, and gas-powered predation. They left their dead and wounded on the trail, and are marching now on toward their wintering grounds.

I’m sitting in Bob and Carrie Uhl’s apartment, trying to educe stories about fox hunters in the 1920s, when the subject of caribou gets in the way. From a soup pot, we’re eating caribou tongue and ribs from an animal I shot the previous day.

Carrie is watching TV. She’s 84 or so and Inupiaq; when McCain raises his fingers on the screen she leaps out of her chair and recoils. “Adii! Monkey!” In her old hands she grips a pencil and paper, marking a line each time he says, ‘My friends’. Bob pauses, smiles, struggles to remember what he was saying. He’d been explaining how the land was less vegetated with willows in the early part of the century, and the fox hunters used that to their advantage.

Now he deviates to caribou, how in 1951 or ‘52 the coast saw the first caribou to return here in that century. He stops, asks me about the caribou I saw yesterday, and where had I crossed the new ice? He raises his eyebrows but doesn’t chide me. A surge of animals, he says, often comes through around October twelfth or fourteenth, large numbers, and in a hurry because of the disturbance of the rut.

In my mind I disagree with the exactness of his dates. But suddenly I see a truth in his words that I hadn’t thought of before—how during the rut the largest concentrations of caribou I’ve seen have swept through and disappeared, often in less than a week, leaving the tundra empty again.

“Have more soup,” he encourages. But I’m standing, apologizing for visiting only an hour. I pull on my gloves and beaver hat. “I have to go. I want to see what the caribou are doing.”

It’s after four p.m. when I lash my survival bag and camera equipment on my snowgo. It’s a few degrees above zero, blowing twenty. I race across a short stretch of lagoon ice, bounce over the tidal flats, skirt open water at the channel by Travis Nelson’s tent, and then head northeast on new ice. I glance back—the sun is falling into the west and a cloud bank.

Five miles out, the ice is pocked with tracks that were not here yesterday. At Lockard Point I stop and glass the white expanse ahead. Caribou! I swing the binoculars right, and then left. As far as I can see in both directions, dots fade into distance, caribou.

In the bay between Lockard and Pipe Spit, I shut off my machine and frantically strap on my camera pack. Two Honda four-wheelers speed past and chase a herd east. I clamber up a seventy-foot bluff. The willows and tundra are tracked and lined with trails.

Up on the bluff I’m sweating and toss off my beaver hat. I change lenses, f-stops, memory cards. My ears begin to sear in the bitter wind, my hands are freezing and still I’m trying to get a photo to show what’s out on the ice.  Too much telephoto and I just get a portion of the herd; too wide angle and the animals look like specks of dirt on white.

Out toward the horizon the procession stretches in lazy undulations, marching on toward me. The end swings like a loose hose, spraying caribou to the north and then to the south of my position. I pack up and run south, and then half a mile in the other direction. An hour passes, two, three.

Finally, it’s getting dark and still animals pour around me, unceasing. The wonder of it swells my chest. In the cold and falling light there’s a huge feeling here on the ice, like an army is retreating, or refugees, or simply something so big coming, and so not human.

A bitter north wind has cleared the fresh snow off the ice, and my ten-year-old daughter China has her chin down in her coat collar, thawing her face. She’s carrying an ax with a third of the handle broken off. The sun is cool yellow in the west, and we’re doing one of our favorite things: checking the ice. Like me, she loves ice. Thin ice, of course, is all the more interesting.

It’s early October and it is holding us up. Here the lagoon is brackish, and because of that the ice bends under us, rubbery, the way saltwater freezes. Where we’ve chopped holes to measure the thickness (two to three inches) water sloshes out as we walk nearby. The removed chunks have vertical lines, unlike freshwater ice with its glass-like quality.

So far Freezeup seems right on schedule, not like these past falls with strange rains until Halloween. Not yet, anyway. In these modern fast-times, people lose faith so quick—they forget that global climate change doesn’t mean every month and every day is warmer. Likewise, Outsiders don’t realize that every elder, Native or non-native, doesn’t necessarily have a handle on weather change in the Arctic. Sadly, more and more residents here are busy getting their daily forecasts off the internet, and their wilderness knowledge off Discovery and other cable channels.

And sure enough, a man on shore begins shouting at us. This is standard treatment for kids. Also, most everyone assumes it dangerous for a white guy to be the first one on the ice. I whack my double bit ax down, to demonstrate that we’re not out for a thoughtless stroll. China halts. “He’s hollering at us.” I refrain from shouting back, telling the man where to go; I’m here, after all, to teach my daughter. “Ignore him. We’re checking the ice. This is the way to do it, not just drive full throttle on a snowgo.”

China and I nearly cross the lagoon. We turn back at the channel, sixty yards from the far shore. Here the water is swift and deep, and the ice froze in waves and more recently than what we’ve been walking on. Now the light has gone hazy, and I point to our right, at ripples where the current is still open and dangerous.

Living out, my family always had to check the ice. We had to make trails up the river and across lakes to trapping sites and to the village. The Arctic, always, has been a place of erratic weather, and weather matters more when your frozen winter caribou are rethawing, your barrels of blueberries are going sour, and your highways (trails) are collapsing. Our weather, scientists have predicted, will become more unpredictable. That’s already happening, although, somewhere in the midst of erratic, normal is bound to come up. This year it’s right on schedule. But, me—this last decade has made me a doubter; I’m predicting weeks of slush to come raining down on us as soon as we get comfortable on our good-traveling ice.

In late August my family headed upriver, heading home to our sod house along the river. This was a cold gray summer, but now it has opened to blue skies. Unseasonably hot—days in the 70’s and nights above freezing. Already caribou were crossing the lower Noatak and Kobuk rivers, people were getting meat.

Along the shore willow leaves glowed brilliant yellow. Dark caribou in their late summer coats raced along the sandbars and plunged into the shallow river. The tundra was burgundy; lines of yellow birches lead north to mountains.

Finally, after all the summer work, commercial fishing, visitors, and book tours, I was home. And it was perfect.

But one thing came along, a bug in my head every day as I walked the ridges and riverbanks—Sarah Palin.

Over the summer, in addition to all my other endeavors, I’d politicked. I’d worked on the YES side of Alaska ballot Measure 4, the so-called Clean Water initiative. And in the polls it was as clean water ought to be: we were ahead.

A few days before the August primary, when the multinational mining conglomerates were throwing millions of dollars into the pre-election fray, Sarah announced: “Let me take my governor’s hat off just for a minute here and tell you, personally, Prop 4—I vote no on that.”

In that, Sarah sweetly disregarded Alaska law that says it’s unlawful for a governor to advocate for or against a ballot measure.  Eventually, she did withdraw her statement but still allowed mining companies to swamp the state with giant ads of her smiling face and statement “Prop 4—I vote no.”

In those ads she gave us commercial fishers a last slap in the face; below her photo was an inset of another photo—her holding a salmon.

Palin’s pretty, Palin’s popular; Clean Water went down the drain.

Governor Palin’s lack of respect for the democratic process made me mad. It reminded me of George Bush, of course. Losing saddened me. There’s a monster strip-mine in the works for this river I dip my buckets into, this clean wild river now full of salmon, this river I’ve lived my life along.

But a few days later McCain made it all exponentially more nonsensical, surreal, a segment out of the movie Idiocrazy.

We were out of contact—except a wire stretched between spruce poles to pick up AM radio in Kotzebue. When I did hook up our solar panels, and the old radio, and dial in to All Things Considered, I was rewarded with another slap in the face just like the fish photo. “Drill, Baby, Drill.”

I went back out on the land, crept up to caribou in crazy blazing hot sun. I thought about this person being President, this person who filed suit against the polar bears, tried to put a bounty on wolves, this Alaskan who doesn’t believe in Global Climate Change. I bent aside beautifully painted dwarf birches, wandered with my camera behind the herds on the tundra. A lovely land, under the footsteps of such true and hopeful creatures. While somewhere south, Sarah Palin shrieks through the sky, and here in my head like a hornet in a jar.

Photo by Seth Kantner: river evening.

The net is alive with splashing fish. Andrew Greene and his dad, Frank, are in the boat with me. Behind the boat, in the sunlit water, salmon swirl and their long dark backs show for an instant.

We’re standing in fish, pulling in netted fish, picking them out of the webbing as fast as we can. We’re working hard but have spare energy to tease each other. Andrew jokes about how well he’s done fishing since he got a greedy white guy for a partner. Seals surface near the net. Their sleek heads glint in the sun. They are stealing bites of fish, then resurfacing out in the channel. I joke that they don’t trust him, know he’s Eskimo and may shoot at them. 

Hanging from the windscreen on my homemade plywood boat is my tiny red shortwave radio. It’s tuned to KOTZ AM radio, broadcasting from Kotzebue, just a few miles across the water—broadcasting a contentious live debate concerning strip mining, salmon streams, and water pollution.

The debate has to do with Measure 4, on the ballot in Tuesday’s primary election. The ballot initiative hopes to raise protections of Alaskan streams from effluent releases into rivers by large mines. It would return those protections to what they were before our previous and well-hated Republican governor, Frank Murkowski, gutted the Alaska Department of Natural Resources.

On the YES side are the Clean Water folks, largely Bristol Bay salmon fishermen, hunters, and residents who don’t want the Pebble Mine—a proposed mega gold mine with a huge cyanide leach-field at the headwaters of the rivers that drain into Bristol Bay’s richest-in-the-world salmon fishery.

The NO side is a consortium—these days, international mining conglomerates and Alaska Native corporations, including the Northwest Alaska Native Association (NANA), who want to mine where, when, and as they see fit.

Is it surprising that the NO’s have out-spent the YES’s by millions?

These days none of us can check mail, read a newspaper or sign onto Yahoo without flashy ads telling us to vote no, to vote against the “anti-mining outsiders.” Many of the ads say to vote for tradition—suggesting ironically that this control on mega strip mines is a threat to native rights.

On the water, the sun glints off small ripples. The salmon run is strong this year, the fish fat and silvery and great-tasting. The numbers are not tapering off as they traditionally do this late into August. Nor is the quality. Most years, fish this late are toothy and “colored”—marked on their sides by colored bands indicating deterioration from contact with fresh water.

We fishermen are surprised by such a return of salmon. With all the talk of global warming, all the problems with recent returns to the Yukon River, I think we’d actually be less surprised with a feeble run.

These salmon are heading up the Noatak and Kobuk rivers. Up the Kobuk, near where I was born and raised, and further—where NANA and NovaGold (a partner with Barrick Gold Corporation) hope to build a massive mine for gold, silver, lead, and copper.

On the radio, reps from NANA and the Red Dog Mine—the largest lead and zinc mine in the world, just up the coast now—badger a lone man from the Clean Water side, who is connected by telephone.

He is Dr. Bruce Switzer, a veteran mining engineer with experience across the globe. He repeatedly asks the Red Dog PR man why they claim so vehemently that this initiative will shut down all mining in Alaska when Red Dog was developed under similar environmental restrictions.  Repeatedly the PR man deflects the question. The NANA rep steps in, telling villagers once again how to vote.

It’s an ugly battle. The day is clean and sunlit. Andrew and Frank tell me to turn the radio off.

I see the multinational mining conglomerates as a camouflaged version of the Great White Father. Instead of beads and junk glass, this time villagers are being offered snowmobiles, four-wheelers, and truck-driving jobs in trade for the gold in what land remains theirs. The value of clean water, clean salmon, clean land for caribou is relegated to rhetoric.

I see this as just the tip of the iceberg—not melting this one, but growing—and gliding straight toward Alaska.

August 12, 2008

Fifteen miles off Cape Blossom, out in the middle of calm ocean, we hit floating logs. I swerve around twigs, stumps, and trees. “Deering National Forest,” I shout to Tim Cunningham, my companion. The village of Deering, on the north coast of the Seward Peninsula, has no trees.

A few miles further, the sunny morning vanishes into a tall wall of fog. The gray thickens until I can’t see through my misty glasses, my face is wet, and puffs of gray wisp over the bow. I snap some quick photos, then bury my camera, and fiddle with a map that was an easy one to make—it’s mostly blue. Tim presses buttons on a GPS that I borrowed from my neighbor but couldn’t figure out how to use. I don’t like big water; this crossing makes me nervous and I’ll stay that way until my old wooden boat is safely home.

For twenty-five miles—an hour—I keep the compass on S and peer into the gray for logs, seaweed islands, and diving seabirds. Finally we drive into sunshine and blue sky and I get my cameras back out. Directly off the starboard bow rise the chalky bird-nesting cliffs of Cape Deceit.

Deering has a hundred or so residents and lies low in a north-facing cove between two rocky points. Bundled up and chilled, I throw a bow anchor and snub it off in the shallows offshore. My friend Jim Moto scurries down the gravel beach and leads us up to his house.

His HUD house is sparsely furnished, with swept white linoleum and thick-framed Alaska-style windows. His toilet doesn’t work; there’s just a blue bucket with cardboard covering it, not successfully keeping the stink in. The oil stove is off, saving heating oil. The propane stove is out of commission, the burners now just a heaped shelf, and he heats rainwater for coffee on a tiny hotplate.

Jim’s main joys are guns and walking, searching along the coasts and rivers for Pleistocene ivory and other treasures melting out of the permafrost cliffs. He’s Eskimo and part Japanese, just under fifty, just over five feet, wiry, tough—and he never stops moving. Today he has no money to buy gas. He asks if we’re going east, where he’s heard reports of a few reindeer. He wakes up his five-year-old boy, Gauge, and we motor east along the coast and into bays. Tim keeps his video camera handy.

We find green rolling hills, V’s of Canada geese shimmering in heat waves in the blue sky, sunshine, and a lone bull reindeer—caribou—which Jim drops on a ridge top from a standing shot in the boat. “All right!” he says. “I need meat. Everyone needs meat. The town’s out of meat. No caribou since spring.”

While Jim cleans the animal, I walk a few yards up the ridge, plant myself among the high tussocks, and glass the huge landscape. Mosquitoes swarm. The sun is hot on my back for the first time in a month. My nose and lips feel fried.

After we drag the animal down the hill and load it in the boat, we head west, around the cliffs of Deceit. Tim has never seen these beautiful formations before and has his camera running. Jim points out where he spotted a sea lion last week—an animal that I’ve never heard accounts of here before. Ropes hang over the rocks where villagers in the spring climb for eggs. Murre and gulls plummet off the cliffs in waves; kittiwakes and occasional puffins fly overhead. Everywhere birds dot the sea, and the cry of thousands of voices fills the strangely calm air.

5 a.m.: We wait—too windy to head out to set net. My thermometer reads thirty-seven degrees. It’s going to be cold out there on the water, picking salmon out of the webbing.

At 6:15 my dad and I climb into stiff waders and heavy Helly Hansen raingear, wristlets and gloves. I dig through a box of winter gear for knit hats and winter neck warmers. Northwest wind chases catpaws in the lagoon. We clamber into my boat and motor out of the lagoon. In front of Kotzebue the channel dances with standing waves where the ocean chop collides with currents from the Noatak and Kobuk rivers.

At South Tent City we bury an anchor on shore in the beach gravel. We rush around, shoulders up and cold, hands wet, stiff. We tie lines, preparing to set nine hundred feet of net straight into the wind. Oran Knox motors up on a dark green Honda four-wheeler. Oran is an umialik, a whaling captain, from the village of Kivalina a hundred miles up the coast. When he sees my dad he stops the machine and bellows over the wind and waves.

Oran is thick and powerful, jovial but nobody to mess with. My dad strides up through the beach grass to shake his hand and grip his shoulder. My dad is 73, Oran in his late sixties; they have been friends for half a century.

Shaking hands with Oran is like grabbing onto a two-by-four. His palms are like the sea mammals he hunts, his huge fingers are random lengths, half of them missing pieces.

”Alapaa (cold)!” He laughs against the sheets of driven drizzle. “Real windy four o’clock.” He and his family are living in a wall tent, with a stove. He turns to me. “You bring me pallets.” In Kotzebue, hardwood pallets come in on the freight planes; they don’t go back out; people burn them for firewood.

We set our net. Fish start hitting right away, the white splashes rising out of the gray waves. No other fishermen appear on this side of town. We work through the net, one of us fighting to hold the boat against the wind while the other untangles salmon.

We motor to the outer end, repeat the process. I drop my dad on the beach; he strides around, waving his arms in his yellow raincoat while I give my outboard gas and head to the fish buyer. I return; we run through the net. Over and over. By afternoon the wind falls, and a rainbow dips into the ocean. We have to pull out, get the webbing out of the water for the period closure at two p.m. Our hands are curved like claws, we’ve caught 1,150 salmon, broken a record for coldest July 21, and joined the rest of Alaska in one of the coldest summers on record.

It’s midnight, windy, spitting rain. Far across gray ocean, bands of sun reach orange fingers under the clouds. Andrew Greene’s boat leaps, plunging and pounding into a quartering chop and sideways swell. We grip the console, shouting seasick stories to each other and joking about the cost of crabs with this seven-dollar-per-gallon gasoline.

“Your picture better not show me puking.”

“Don’t worry. I can’t use a photo of a green Eskimo.”

This king crab fishing started with sunburns. The day before the Fourth of July celebrations, we motored thirty miles across the sound and set Andrew’s pots in mirror-smooth water. Cumulus clouds were rising in the blue sky, icebergs all around the boat, fierce sun off the ice and sea cooking our faces and shoulders.

That day, the first thing we did was search for my two crab pots. My wife and daughter and I had set them while camping, a couple days previous. But they were gone, taken by ice that had moved in—even though the water temperature was 50 degrees. The ice wasn’t a surprise in July, but the water had seemed so warm, and with recent newspapers telling that the North Pole might melt loose this summer, I’d foolishly taken a chance.

Andrew had made brand new pots, five-feet square. He had new teal-blue ropes rigged in an untried and covert fashion; his gear would be without buoys for ice to snag or other crabbers to spot.

He found a larger opening between icebergs. We strung the three pots out in a line a mile offshore. The last rope disappeared into the depths. “Okay, right next to that big ice pan,” I joked. The ice was moving out on a brisk current; seals surfaced near the boat, seabirds called and all around us massive melting chunks boomed and thundered into the glassy ocean.

Weather moved in after the fourth. Andrew went back to work for the week.

Southerly winds and high water eroded away the last grasses of our backyard. I set a short net for bait—caught three salmon and a tote of huge sheefish. Filleting a salmon for dinner, I thought about how rich this land and ocean are, and wondered as I have before about the ridiculous nutritional inequality of catching hundreds of pounds of fine-eating fish for bait—and burning drums of gas—in hopes of catching a few crabs.

The old Inupiaq Eskimos that I knew when I was a kid didn’t mention crabs. Likely there were even fewer king crab this far north at that time, and traditionally people here had little time or reason to fool with such a marginal food supply. My family certainly would not have.

Tonight, Andrew pulled up a rusted broken axe with his anchor. Gunning the motor, he steered north. Fifteen miles out, the first thing we ran into was a bloated floating dead walrus. Shot, possibly by ivory hunters, and lost. We idled up to it. An oil slick stretched away into the windy distance. The stink was powerful enough you could feel it with your face. We assumed the head would be cut off, but it wasn’t, and down in the water we saw the white of tusks.

We joked about rolling the animal over, to check if the bottom was fresh enough to eat. “That’s the best eating,” he said, “If they’ve only sunk for a couple days. It ages it.”

This one had the loose-flopping floating movements of a walrus long past that point. Andrew held the head up with a gaff. The tusks were small, both broken off—one from natural causes, the other from gunshot. I bent over the gunwale and cut as fast as I could at the putrid whiskered face. Andrew made gagging sounds and kept turning away into the wind. It took some chopping with the hunk of rust that used to be an axe. The chopping caused spattering—black ooze and splashing oily water.

We got the face bone free and traveled on, but of course that kind of stink comes along with you. The wind was rising. By the time we idled in circles for a while, the rocking boat and us staring down trying to figure out our GPS, by the time we finally found and hooked a line and pulled in the three pots and pulled out starfish and crabs—by that time Andrew told me he wasn’t feeling his best.

A squall enveloped us and rain pelted down. I lashed a last few sheefish in next to leaking mesh bags of old bait. I couldn’t remember a time when I wasn’t the first one seasick. What a great trip! I remembered my camera. “Wait a minute, Andrew.” I clambered over pots and lines and crabs loose on the floor. By the time I found it in my soggy daypack, the boat was pitching sideways, my subject wasn’t photogenic at all, and my stomach had started that reeling feeling.

Sunlight floods in the window from the north. At eleven p.m. it has a piercing brilliance. It had the same glare all day; the same at five a.m. too, when it came around to my bedroom window and woke me. Now I’m thinking without much interest that I should get some sleep. Sometime. Suddenly I remember my thousand vegetable starter plants are out there, parching in cold west wind and relentless photosynthesis. I gather buckets and head out to water them.

On Sunday night when I arrived home from my book tour it was rain and thirty-nine degrees. Not atypical mid-June weather on the northwest coast. I stashed my clean traveling jeans, strapped on my sheath knife. For a couple days I sorted seeds and supplies, and then climbed on a Cessna, hauling fertilizer, potatoes, baby cabbage starts, and turnip seeds to Inupiaq villages. My job: to encourage hunter-gathers to grow gardens.

Maniilaq Association, the local Native nonprofit social services provider, runs a $30 million hospital here and a bunch of other programs. The remains of the old Garden Project is one of those. Running it is one of my many careers, or more accurately, one of my many attempts to avoid a real job.

Inland, upriver in Shungnak, Wesley Woods was one of the best gardeners around. But he passed away a few years back. The gold miners taught him how to grow plants—mostly turnips. He had a big garden down by the river, where the river floods every spring. He showed me how to store turnips all winter in the ground. Over in Deering, Flora Karmun taught me how to salt the greens in a wooden barrel, for winter.

Before all this crap-food started coming off the airplanes, turnips were practically niqipiaq—Eskimo food. I grew up eating them sliced and dipped in seal oil. My parents composted everything: caribou hides and horns, egg shells, fish guts. Moose left our gardens alone, mice we trapped in coffee cans.

Wesley’s uncle and dad took part in the great reindeer drive in the 1930s, from here to the MacKenzie River delta in Canada. It was supposed to take a year but took five. (Why the story never made it to Hollywood I don’t know; that drive in Arctic storms and summer bugs made those cattle drives across the West look like camping in a hotel room.)

Waiting on the gravel airstrip in Ambler I say hello to Nelson Greist. “You Kobuk River boy!” he says. I’m honored to be recognized by this elder.

In the late 1930s Nelson walked with his family from the North Slope, finding food along the way. Now he’s 85 or so; he can’t hear, and his knees bother him. He’s building a huge wooden boat in his yard. “Gonna too late hunt ugruk,” he says acceptingly.

Giggling girls roar past us on Honda four-wheelers, escaping mosquitoes and boredom. I glance after them, fairly certain I could teach them gardening—if I was allowed to grow marijuana.

A woman waiting beside a dirty Honda turns to me. “My plant is funny. Leaves coming off.”

“Is it a house plant?”

“I think.”

“If you can’t eat it, I don’t know anything about it.” I smile. Over the years that I’ve done this summer job I’ve had my work cut out to stay positive. My mind jokes with me: Try to keep the Brussels sprouts under $500 apiece. If only we were hunting turnips, everyone would be interested.

When the twin engine Cessna lands, I’m happy to see Abe is the pilot. He’s one of few Native commercial pilots in the region. We fly west, low. The tundra is green down there, a million billion mosquitoes making life hell for every living thing with blood. We swoop along the river. Traveling at two hundred knots. I can’t help looking over at Abe—young, cool, handsome—and thinking: this is the modern Eskimo.

Off to the north I can see the dark bluff I was born on. As kids, my brother and I walked barefoot there, bugs driving us to water or sandbars or into the sod igloo. Our sled dogs went crazy in the willows. My mom wore a head net in the garden to keep the bugs from choking her.

Traveling now, for a time, we’re above it. In a bubble of continuous sound. Down below I know exactly the sound the animals hear. You hear a drone. You stop, raise your head. The drone grows to a growl that fills the hillsides. And then a spaceship roars overhead, going somewhere impossibly fast, and it all feels as if it might tear your head skin. As quickly, it’s gone. Silence fills and falls back down to humming.

I remember being one of those mosquito-bitten creatures along the river.