Nigu-Nuiqsut Trip Tales
An overtly whimsical account of a month spent in a place that can only be processed as poetry.
“There is much to set the imagination working when men feel their own littleness.”- Helge Ingstad
The Western Arctic is a place full of magic. It is a land where the summer sun shines at midnight, compass hands grind on their axis, and caribou trails rake across the landscape like ancient veins. It is one of the few places left on this earth where you can drift for weeks along wild rivers without seeing another human footprint.
In late June of 2011, the Nuniamut month Erniwik, meaning “young are born,” I set off to do just that: to drift. When people asked me why I was going on this trip I replied simply “to see what is there.” Part of it was for work- the Western Arctic is an area that I work to protect from a triage of threats from increased access (roads), large industry (oil, gas, mining), and climate change. I wanted to gain the stiff knees of one who had experienced a place and ground-truthed it for themselves. Part of it was for play—the chance to hike, explore, and live outside for a month.
I expected the bugs, the bears, the wind, the flowers. What I didn’t expect was the profoundly interactional nature of my experience of all of these things. The more I adjusted to the place, the more absurd and anthropocentric the idea of “seeing a place” became. As my body adjusted to life on the river, my senses blurred and became inseparable. I tasted wind, saw scents, and felt rough-legged hawk calls in my shoulders.
I was not observing, but participating. I went on a walk late at night and the next morning wolf prints accompanied my boot prints on the sand. The other animals were watching us just as we were watching them. I came to believe that the real root of that which we call “magic” is the spine-tingling experience of living in a world made up of multiple intelligences.
This is the story of my first real arctic trip. It is told through short paragraphs and poems. It is about being a fledgling. In the arctic, fledgling birds often crawl, hop, and slither before they fly--
Things we carried:
Two pots and one pan
Layers for rain, wind, bugs, and sun
Ziploc baggies of dehydrated mandarins
Rolled red tents
Books full of birds
Bug dope, varying percentages of poison
Wet hiking boots
Thumb-callus lighters
Fog-filled binoculars
Back-up dessert
Enough collected rocks to sink our boats
A GPS with a habit of reporting that we were floating on land
All folded,
Compressed,
Stuffed
Into colorful sacks
And tied into green canvas
Folding canoes
But most important of all,
A deep and grateful sense of wonder
For the rivers that carried it all.
Life like a River
Our journey was above all a river trip. The rivers gave us transport, nourishment, metaphors, and delight. Rivers are the coursing veins of the arctic tundra. It is indescribably pleasurable to travel the age-old path of nutrients. In two pack canoes, our party of four traveled 360 miles on a path worn by glaciers, rivers, and caribou. Our path began at the headwaters of the Nigu River, tucked inside the Gates of the Arctic National Park. The Nigu flowed through the Brooks Range Mountains and joined the Etiviluk. The Etiviluk took us through the foothills and united with the Colville, the great west-east holding river that drains the Western Arctic and has been the traffic route of people, plants, and animals for millennia. The Colville took us to the Coastal Plain, to the top of the world. It was adventure on a horizon-hopping scale.
Floating
We are shimmying down the river
Slowing down,
Adjusting out angle
Choosing lines
Twisting hips
Our crescent vessel slides
Down shoots of water and rock
Chasing v’s of perpetual motion
Catching small waves
Lean away from the water
Lean into the rocks
Our logic protests
But the river prevails
The water is endless motion
Surface ripples swirl around patches of drowned tundra
Small brilliant-colored arctic grayling breach the surface
Their sail-like fins mirror wings
Of the birds that swoop above.
Mixing Metaphors
The trip was a break from many of the constructs that I accept in my daily life. The theory of linguistic relativity states that we see, hear, and experience as we do because the language habits of our community predispose us to certain interpretations. In the arctic, many of these habits were broken. The constant pursuit of a faster, more efficient way of working was replaced by the pace of the river. The constant drumming of beeps, thumps, and electronically reproduced jingles was replaced by bird songs and river rapids. My metaphors became mixed. Cars become streams, planes became bumblebees, and the songs stuck in my head belonged to the tree sparrow.
Far from the bustling traffic, gleaming mirrors, and buzzing communication devices that frame our modern lives, in the Western Arctic, I had the increasingly rare pleasure of getting to know a piece of earth as it was made.
You Know You’ve Arrived When…
Your metaphors shift from artificial
to natural
cars become streams
the song stuck in your head belongs
to the tree sparrow.
Luxury becomes stuff sacks properly arranged
into a pillow.
Planes become bumblebees
You stop picking up caribou antlers.
Ways of Being- Feathers in my hair
One day I picked up a feather. Resting on a spongy moss throne, it called to me. As after my fingers lingered over the tundra balancing the treasure in my grasp, my gaze was called upward, by a Rough-Legged Hawk. The bird circled above me and issued a piercing call, its beak forming a perfect “o”. It felt like a nod. I tucked the airy striped feather under my bandana, so it hung in my peripheral vision, to the right of my eyes, like a strand of my own hair. As I paddled that day, I reveled in the tickling sensation of the feather’s strands playing across my cheek. I felt the perfect way it cut through the wind. A feat of evolutionary engineering attributable only to that which is divine.
The more I wore the feather, the more a part of me it became. When the sun circled endlessly, glaring down on my pale skin, the feather shaded my like an extended eyelash. When the headwinds slowed our progress and made our shoulders ache, I listened to the song of the wind through the feather, and felt soothed rather than obstructed. When I became bored, its presence reminded me of the constant spectacle of soaring life that was occurring all around me. It was a gentle teacher, calling my attention to the fine-tuned receptive fields of my own senses. It reminded me of how badly we need what David Abraham describes as “renewed attentiveness to this perceptual dimension that underlies all our logics, through a rejuvenation of our carnal, sensual empathy with the living land that sustains us.” During my time in the arctic, feathers in my hair became a daily ritual.
To Paddle the Colville
If you paddle quietly down the Colville
Your dripping paddles awaken ripples
And a sensory buffet.
Melting banks smell of rich humus.
Solid and fertile
With a hit of mammoth poop
Lupine drapes like grapes of the North
Expelling its fragrance over the mossy bank
Like a trapeze dancer arching its back to the world
Arctic poppies bob on gravel bars
Bouncing lightly to the tune of the wind
Like an old-fashioned film reel, they watch
The drifting fog carries hints of its origin, the sea
And rain brings out the scent of Alder
Yellow-billed loons dance and dive
Punctuating the moist atmosphere with their haunting song
Once you catch a fish
You smell them everywhere
On the rocks
Fossils retain the chalky zing of moments,
Not unlike this one,
Suspended in time.
Cha-cha-cha-cha-changes
The only constant in the Arctic is change. Some of the conditions may seem less than ideal, but by realizing that all is change, I was able to shiver, swat and otherwise float through these challenges in good spirits. I reveled in a sense of excitement each night as I turned my thoughts to sleep, wondering what kind of world I would wake up to the next morning. In this way, the land teaches us to trust in new days, in small miracles. Our prayers become simple: “please make more.”
Mountains, foothills, bluffs, coastal plain. Landscapes, skyscapes.
No animals, more animals than you can point your binoes at.
Wear all of your clothes and shiver, take them all off and swim.
Sun, rain, hail, wind, snow, sun.
1,000 bugs, no bugs.
Low water, high water, slow water, swift water, clear water, silty water.
One fish, two fish, red fish, giant pike fish.
Caribou
Tundra must be at least 30% caribou- their hair, excrement, and bones fortify the soil. Their shed antlers add a touch of majesty as they slowly intertwine with the mosses and lichen that made them grow. Caribou are endlessly giving vessels in the tundra cycle of life. Their hoof prints aerate the soil giving breath to new life. Their paths blaze routes used by many. From the air they look like the marks of a giant rake. They evoke the sensation of running one’s fingers through dark brown humus.
Seeing these keystone animals alive and roaming is an exhilarating experience. “Caribou!” one of us will shout and all tasks are dropped, all binoculars raised. In playful moods, we raise our arms above like antlers, hoping to lure the curious herd-driven animals closer.
My first brush with a caribou came as a surprise. I was on my first hunting trip in the arctic, and absorbed completely by early-September blueberries that appear like deep blue apparitions, dripping seductively from orange-leafed plants. I felt an odd quiver in my upper spine. I looked up and my eyes met a cow, standing carelessly fifteen feet in front of me. She glowed silver, as if from another world. Though I knew in my bones, I was the foreign one here.
The last caribou we saw in the Western arctic was running along the shore about twenty miles from Nuiqsut. Its dark profile galloped along the river like a stallion. He ran as if he was being chased, but our human eyes could find nothing pursuing him.
What did you see?
Our common greeting when returning from lone wanderings. The protocol response was a formula:
“Number, species, behavior, notes.”
For example: “Two semi-palmated plovers, broken leg act, probably with fledglings nearby.
We knew better than to brag, so we indicated the extraordinary—that is to say everything—with our eyes. I often spent the final leg of my adventures preparing my response to this inevitable greeting. “twelve mastodon, tusks still attached, doing ballet.” A smile. “Made use of my bear spray.” A wink. On my final saunter through the wetlands, my response came from the lupine: “two, the last lines from that Joy Harjo Poem.”
“Do it in beauty
Do it in beauty.”
On that day, no one asked.
As time passed, we began to see signs of our species. Cans of beer and Coca-Cola, piles of ashes, flames long since extinguished, large pieces of metal, oil barrels. The flares of the Alpine oil field, and finally a four-wheeler marking the village of Nuiqsut. From there we were an airplane hop to Deadhorse (Prudhoe Bay), a skip to our car, and a jump back to Fairbanks. Where my metaphors again entered a gauntlet, and I searched for a way to reconcile how my way of being in the world had changed.
Re-emergence
My metaphors are all mixed up.
Birch leaves shimmying in the morning breeze appear
Like black squins on a flapper’s dress.
Are those paters in the sand from wind, stone, or tire>
Is that a bird or a bag?
Turbulent water or passing traffic?
What exactly is the center
Of the world—
True north or magnetic north?
My internal compass grinds
Along its bearings.
But my hope beats with the promise
of a new day.
Lessons learned await
Realization.
