He smiled and said, “Yeah,” as if it were no big deal. I admit, it made me a little mad.
Today we were only eight miles out of the village and I was having these scary am-I-about-to-lose-my-fingers-and-toes thoughts. We still had a couple of hundred miles to go to the hot springs. Once Dean caught up and heard the news, he took off my boots and socks and put my feet up his jacket, under his shirt, and in his armpit. Whatever works, I thought. No problem. It was a different sort of romantic, my feet in some guy’s armpit. Toni and Matt were trying to warm my hands with their hands, and Eric was standing there smoking a cigarette. We stayed like that for a while with my toes inside Dean’s shirt until Eric convinced Dean that I shouldn’t take the trip to Koyuk because I didn’t have the right gear. Eric said I would be miserable if I tried to go, and I agreed—besides, I wasn’t about to put myself in jeopardy. I understood that I knew nothing about this land other than how cold and dangerous it was. I was disappointed. Dean was disappointed. But I got over the disappointment rather quickly because not going meant Eric and I would have a long weekend together. No Stella. No Dean. We said our good-byes, told them to have fun, and off we went.
My favorite moments were riding on the back of Eric’s Polaris, bumping over the hard, cold tundra, when my fingers and toes were warm, my body presented to the big blue sky and the still sea. Behind Eric, who, by the way, likes to drive his Polaris really fast—you could almost say irresponsibly—I smiled underneath my red and beige fleece scarf and gleamed happily because no one could see me: not the Eskimo kids who were playing in the snow, not the occasional passing snow machine, no one. No one knew my happiness, my feelings of pure joy. In just this one day, I knew the emotions of a lifetime. Everything about this village is beautiful: the frozen sea, the rolling tundra, the lack of trees and endless white horizon, the darker-skinned people. I am in awe. It is simple—I thought I had found heaven.
I felt overwhelmingly at home flying into Deering, experiencing the exhilaration that the Arctic Circle brings, that the frozen sea brings. I believe my calico curls have found themselves a home here among the isolation, the below-freezing blow, and among the men who have fled so far from their own homes to find solace and themselves here.
Should I be surprised that after only forty-eight hours I concluded that I could marry one of these men (it doesn’t matter which) and build a life here surrounded by these silent, feisty Eskimos? I could be a wife, have nowhere to walk or drive to, other than this one, one-mile road. I could be happy inside, through the dark, depressing, aurora-graced winter, reading all those books planted on the school’s classroom shelves. But after I’d been there a while longer, I realized that what Deering actually showed me was my own strength, my own desire to go, to see, to travel and experience other places like this, again and again.
NO MORE HONEY BUCKETS
Rebekah loved her spring break in Deering, and love is not too strong a word. Now it was my turn to fly over the still-frozen Kotzebue Sound, part of the Chukchi Sea, in possibly the same little plane. From this height it was hard to differentiate between the frozen ice and the frozen tundra, although it appeared that’s all there was for hundreds of miles. When I finally saw Deering’s maybe forty or fifty houses and a couple public buildings, it looked to me like a colony on a frozen planet. In a couple minutes we’d land in this town, built on a sand spit formed by the draining of the Inmachuk River. As we lost altitude for landing, I could see where the wind had sculpted the snow into frozen white waves. Someone at the Kotzebue airport had told me that thousands of caribou were right at the edge of Deering. They’d heard they were part of the gigantic Western Arctic Herd which numbered over four hundred thousand animals. Maybe I’d seen them from the air.
The Deering cemetery sits on a hill overlooking the town and the frozen ocean. PHOTO BY REBEKAH JENKINS
Dean, in the spirit of A Walk Across America, which he’d been reading to his fifth- and sixth-graders, walked with them to the “airport,” which was just a strip, a bit more than a half mile out of town. Two of the girls, Mary and Diane, both on Dean’s wrestling team, asked me a hundred questions and said they were my bodyguards. One of them called me Stone Cold. Dean told me Stone Cold was their favorite WWF wrestler. Dean was tall, well built, energetic, and handsome. Rebekah had never mentioned what either of them looked like, come to think of it.
Dean told me I was going to stay at his house. He lived next door to the best ivory carver in Deering and across the street from Eric. The ivory carver also collected mastodon ivory in the summer, which could sometimes be found lying on the bottom of local rivers and creeks. He also searched for dead walrus skulls, which sometimes washed up on the beaches, to carve on. Pieces of these beaches might not have had a human footprint on them for fifty years, or ever. As we got to town, I saw that some of the tiny homes, most of which had been built by the government, were practically covered by snowbanks. People liked to keep them there as an insulative windbreak.
As I walked down the narrow gravel road that held everything that was Deering, a couple homes had freshly killed caribou lying on their snowbank. They may have been killed and skinned by a nephew for his auntie who cannot hunt, or by a son for his widowed mother and she hadn’t cut it up yet. Eric had a large Alaskan malamute chained to the house he rented; he had painted the house barn-red. His was one of the only freshly painted houses in this section of Deering, which the guys called Downtown. Eric’s dog, named Cody, was the size of a small bear and was every kid’s favorite in the village.
The school was the center of this community. In a few days school would end for the summer, and the one member of the Deering senior class of 2000 would graduate. There are four full-time teachers in Deering; one of them, Pat Richardson, has been there for sixteen years. Her husband is a member of the National Space Society. Every year the NSS has the International Space Development Conference. Most members of this organization are not space cadets but serious people interested in the colonization of the moon and Mars, in space tourism, in outer-space B&Bs. You could immediately see that Deering was similar to a space colony, totally self-contained, thriving in a hostile environment.
Dean took me down to his house and showed me my bed, an old sofa. He let slip that Rebekah had used it. I had thought she was staying with Stella, the fifty-something Sunday-school teacher. My first reaction was this tiny home was empty and the sofa was in such tough shape that the Goodwill truck wouldn’t take it. Then I thought about how one gets a sofa to outer space, I mean Deering. Obviously, you can’t fly it in as extra luggage. It wouldn’t even fit in the plane that comes to Deering. Was it hauled from Kotzebue across the frozen ocean on a sled? The freight bill alone to get it here must have been large. I had a new appreciation for the sofa. I began to look at everything in Deering larger than a suitcase the same way you’d look at stuff in space. How’d they ever get that four-wheeler here, that big-screen TV, that freezer, that generator? The difference between Deering and the moon, though, is that when the ice is gone, maybe some essentials, such as diesel fuel, sofas, big-screen TVs, and the one little pickup I saw, can float in on a barge. This is also one reason why when big things in a Native village like Deering break and can’t be fixed, they tend to stay wherever they broke down. There’s an old water truck right at Eric’s house that has been there for several years.
It’s not only a substantial challenge to bring stuff to outer-space colonies and villages like Deering, it’s tough to get rid of what is not needed. Take human waste. (At least in Deering the stuff is not weightless, a whole separate challenge.) Getting rid of human sewage in Deering required some sophisticated engineering solutions and was a real challenge for whatever firm accepted it. It may have been an engineer trained at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, as they have one of the finest engineering schools in the country dealing in the specific problems of arctic conditions.
Until recently, waste was deposited in a “honey bucket,” not something that required an engi
neer. When full, the honey bucket, normally a five-gallon plastic pail, had to be hand-carried out onto the sea ice and emptied. They say that sometimes the stuff was frozen even before it hit the ice. Imagine, it’s forty-two below zero and the honey bucket has to be emptied. You’ve waited long enough; there’s no more room.
When Pat Richardson’s husband goes to the International Space Development Conference in 2001 in Albuquerque, surely they will have a lecture by a space sewage expert. After all they have speakers on “space pharmacy,” “space tourism,” “economically self-sufficient space settlement on the moon,” and “taking advantage of Martian chemistry.” How well attended could the panel on “space sewage and its challenges” be? Probably pretty well, considering the seriousness of the problem. Some of the cosponsors this year were Boeing, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, the Air Force Research Laboratory, and the U.S. Department of Energy. Deering would be an excellent location for the U.S. government to put a training center for people going to live in space. It would also help in case there is alien life somewhere, because for some the adaptation to Deering’s culture and way of life is difficult and challenging. Dean and Eric would receive outstanding grades for their adaptation; other teachers have not done well at all. Sometimes a teacher from the Outside wants to do it just the way he did in Las Vegas. What alien do you know who would want to do it the way they do it in Las Vegas?
Elections in Alaska generate almost as many unusual political debates and promises as they would in a space colony. Politicians make many promises. In Alaska someone running for office might say, “If elected, I promise to try to get some of the government-owned land for the people.” Only 1 percent of Alaska’s land is privately owned. “I promise to do something about the wolves.” Some Alaskans are concerned because an overpopulation of wolves has brought these mighty, brilliant predators into villages looking for easy meals, like dogs. Some worry will children be next? “I promise to fight for subsistence.” Subsistence, the hunting and gathering of food to survive, is one of the most hotly debated, controversial issues in Alaska.
In the eighties, while Wally Hickel was running for governor of Alaska as an independent, some politicians were for keeping marijuana legal, some were for making it illegal. Although marijuana lost and Wally Hickel won, many Alaskans put this bumper sticker on their vehicles advertising the election results: “Pot got more votes than Hickel.” It’s true.
Honey bucket is one of Alaska’s sweet words for not so sweet. It was and still is the receptacle for no. 1 and no. 2 in hundreds of Alaskan villages. It could be a five-gallon plastic bucket with a custom-cut wood seat. If the person is too heavy for plastic, then the honey bucket could be metal.
When I arrived in Deering to hang out with these two teachers, Dean and Eric, I didn’t even know what a honey bucket was. In Barrow they’d put in a sewer, burying their sewer lines deep and even heating them. I found out what these lines had replaced in the first couple hours I was in Deering, sitting in Dean’s little house along the road that was Main Street, the only one people lived along. The houses were all little wood boxes. Dean’s house was tiny, one small bedroom, a small living room–kitchen, one room that was shut off. Dean, Eric, and I sat around talking, hearing the villagers pass by on their four-wheelers on the way to the only store. Only one person seemed to have a car, a small pickup. The rest traveled on four-wheelers or snow machines.
Deering is blessed to be a recipient from a major campaign plank of the present two-term governor, Tony Knowles. When he first ran for governor, he courted Alaska’s Native community. Often in Alaska, politicians get elected by tiny margins. Somebody in Knowles’s campaign came up with this political promise, which was repeated over and over anywhere in the bush where the honey bucket was filled and emptied: if elected, Knowles promised to do his best to put the honey bucket in the museum.
What museum would display honey buckets? Would they be honey buckets that famous people had sat on, or the most unusually designed honey buckets curators could find, say one painted with peace signs from the sixties or one that had been clawed by a brown bear and survived to be used again?
That promise may not sound like much to you. But if you’d been emptying a honey bucket all your life, in the winter at thirty below and in the summer when the mosquitoes are swarming, getting rid of it might just be enough to get your vote. Tony Knowles was first elected by a small margin, with a big assist from Native Alaskans. Now that political promise has actually been kept in Deering and many other villages. In Deering there are no more honey buckets—instead there is the human-waste blaster. This technology hasn’t been around long enough to have a name; it should be called the honey rocket. With every invention there are bugs, if that’s the right word, to be worked out, or pushed or flushed out. In this case they are blasted out. Putting in a sewage disposal system in a place that has permafrost and sometimes gets to fifty below zero is no easy task. This new high-tech honey rocket was the first thing I noticed when I walked into Dean’s house. It was all over the walls, so to speak. In fact, when the new high-tech honey bucket was first installed in uptown Deering, in a couple houses instead of sucking it all out of the house, it shot it all up into the house like a mini-geyser. A couple people told Dean and Eric the suction was so great they worried about their small children playing near it. What if one adventurous little girl had her hand down in the toilet when the blaster went off, when it was flushed?
Running up the walls and across the ceiling in Dean’s house were water and sewer pipes. A powerful pump was attached to the front wall. These pipes were in full view, not in the walls or hidden in any way. The new technology was displayed for everyone to see. It did cut into your ability to hang pictures, but that’s all right. If the pipes were black, it could look techno. What if a pipe burst? It’s bad enough if that happens underneath the house, much less over the kitchen table.
It’s a type of vacuum. The biggest problem adjusting to this marvelous new honey blaster was the blast itself. When someone flushed, it sounded like a small jet taking off. The loud vacuum pump kicks on, then the even louder water pump kicks on; there is a loud sucking noise. Do not try to talk while the honey rocket is going off. Then if you’re like Dean and you don’t like hauling water to keep your tank filled, which is also open and right in your living room, it runs dry and there is an incessant sucking sound as the pump searches the empty tank for water. Visualize having friends over for a card game or a candlelight dinner of fresh caribou and seal oil and salmonberries, and someone flushes. There it is, it goes off, everyone stops talking and waits until the honey rocket has done its very appreciated task. But it’s a small price to pay. Waiting to talk or being awakened or missing a score made by Alaskan Scott Gomez in the NHL play-offs on ESPN is worth it compared to the relative silence of the old honey bucket.
Some light sleepers in Deering have passed new rules since the honey rocket came to town: “No flushing at night while I’m asleep or else!” One of Dean and Eric’s best friends in Deering is pre-school teacher Millie, a Native woman born and raised in Deering. She had an idea, one of those bright and shining moments when civilization is advanced if only someone will listen. She has one of the gentlest voices I’ve ever heard. She said one day as we were laughing about the honey rocket, “If they can make a silencer for a gun, why can’t they make one for this?” What political potential this idea has, and if the solution is worked out by the right engineer, it could be cheap.
MOUSE TRADING
Teachers that come to the Alaskan bush from hometowns in Florida or Idaho, like Dean and Eric, or other places Outside should have certain personality traits to maximize their experience. They should possess the wayward, flexible spirit of the explorer, the ability to be thrilled by the unknown, and the “I don’t care what people think” attitude of the rebel.
In Dean and Eric’s case, these attributes were evident early and often. Dean grew up the son of Texans who’d moved to the small Florida beach town of In
dian Harbour Beach, just south of Cocoa Beach. His dad was an engineer who worked for Harris, a company that did work for nearby NASA. The engineers of Dean’s dad’s era wore the short-sleeve white shirts, blue slacks, and certain type and color necktie that we all know.
Dean was born in 1973. He remembers wanting to be a surfer. His parents gave him the impression that nice kids don’t surf, nice kids have short haircuts. Dean grew his hair long but was in the gifted programs and got good grades. He didn’t have to try hard to get good grades; he probably heard something once and remembered it. He got 1370 on his SATs but hung with the punk crowd, the out crowd.
Dean recalled that his Alaska dream began when he was in second grade. Their Scholastic Reader had a story about land selling in Alaska for $2.50 an acre. He and his friend decided right then they would move to Alaska. In fourth grade, this same friend called Dean and asked if he was ready to go, they could ride their bikes to Alaska. Dean wasn’t prepared then, but one night in fifth grade he did decide to go. He packed his daypack, had $4 in change, and took off at 4 A.M. before his parents were up. The only problem was, he didn’t know which way to go or quite how far it was. He went south on Route A1A and in two hours realized he needed to turn around and head back for school, which started at 8 A.M.
Around this time Dean decided he wanted to build a rope swing. For whatever reason, he didn’t ask his parents, or if he did, they wouldn’t get him what he wanted, the necessary ten-foot piece of nylon rope. He included this desire in his Christmas letter to his grandmothers in Texas; they both sent him a piece of rope. He made a swing, and he remembers that it took him high into the sky.
After graduating from high school, he followed his first major girlfriend, one he had loved from the moment he saw her in tenth grade but didn’t date her until his senior year, to college at the University of Central Florida. That didn’t last long, the girlfriend, but he lost his dreams for Alaska in the world of fraternity life, partying, and drinking, probably a bit too much. He’d gone to major in engineering, but dropped out for a semester and came back wanting to be a teacher.