Beyond fancy.

I took this picture in Nuiqsut, a North Slope village resettled by the Inupiat after the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act was passed in the early 1970s.  If you click on the photo, it should enlarge.  Before the permanent structures of the village were built, the residents lived in a tent-camp huddled alongside the riverbank for a year (see picture below).  I think the pictures here speak for themselves.    The people here are warmer than any I have ever met.

  

Post Office Sorrow.

Well,

   Apparently my excitement with the post office's "community center" feel was not such a great thing for one particularly important person in town: the postmaster.

   He quit on Monday, and now we can't get any packages.  Who knew that you have to have a postmaster in order to have the windows of the post office available for package pickup and delivery?  

   Given how much activity is normally occurring at the post office, I can only imagine how many thousands of packages must be building up inside that building.  But I know this . . . when the postmaster quit, he was genuinely fed up.  Jenny happened to run into him as he was walking out the door, and that's about exactly what he said, "I've had it and I'm outta here!"

   So, we will cling to the happiness of the packages we received last week so we do not descend into despair at having lost our link to the fruits of the Outside.   

   Sigh . . .

   But there is a funny thing that happened too.  On the same day the postmaster bailed on Barrow, I had to fly to a small coastal village known as Wainwright.  After I landed, I realized I did not have anyone there to pick me up.  You would think "no big deal, he could just hang out in the airport."  Well, that would have been great if there was an airport!  In many of the villages, the planes land drops you off on the runway, end of story.

   Well, I was luckily able avoid a half mile walk when I hitched a ride with another guy from the flight who was clearly more organized (he had a friend there to pick him up).  They drove me to the one small man-camp/hotel in the village.  These places are generally built for workers who come in on rotating and temporary shifts to work in the Arctic, then leave.  Unfortunately, however, and despite calling in to hold a room for me, there was none left!

   Given that there were no other hotels available, the manager of the camp (who was also the lead cook), Scott, began to call around to find a place for me to sleep.   Guess where he ended up finding a bed?  Wrong.  The jail!

   So, I ate my last meal, some very gravy-laden roast beef and powdered mash potatoes, put on my parka, said good night and "thank you" to the manager for lining me up a room in the pokey, and walked out the door.   Without getting into it, the manager was a great guy, who actually had lived in Utah for 12 years, and we had a great time laughing about Utah and Alaska.

   As I exited into the night (a paltry 20 degrees, the warmest its been in months), I made my way to the police department.  As I trudged through the snowy street, a large white Dodge truck pulled up along-side me and the passenger window rolled down.

   A large Inupiat man was inside.

   "Hey, Jonny!"

   I looked inside and wouldn't you know it, the one person I knew in the entire village, a fellow I had met in my own village of Barrow, was in the truck.

   "Hi, Boo!"  I said.  His nickname, the only name I knew for him, was Boo-Boo.

   "I heard you were going to stay in the jail, so I came to see if you wanted to sleep at my place," he said.  I sometimes forget that, in a village of 400 people surrounded by 2000 square miles of tundra, word travels fast when a skinny white guy is on his way to jail.

   "Oh Boo, I sure do!"  I said without an ounce of hesitation.  I am proud to say that I've never had to voluntarily or involuntarily stay in jail.  

   "Well, hop in."

   And there it is.  The next thing I knew, I was watching "Gladiator" on my first Eskimo friend's couch.   I slept like a baby and he took me back to work the next morning.   I've attached his picture here for all to see.  By the way, his real name is Jimmy.  That's my brother's name, too.  I know this isn't the only place where this could happen, but geese, it sure was cool.

   

The Less Selfish Life.

So, can we unlearn selfishness? I honestly don't know, but I think that's why living here is such a challenge. Quite simply, it is very difficult to live in this Arctic region if you are selfish. We thus have a choice: change or leave.

And yet here we cling. Me, representing this Inupiat Eskimo community and my dedicated family.

I am rightfully an outsider to the people here. This is not my place, as I am constantly reminded, but for some reason, I have already won some measure of respect (Thank God). Perhaps its because I am very self-deprecating and folks know that I love my home just like they love the North Slope and its Arctic Ocean garden.

Some things about the Inupiat that everyone should know.

1) The Federal Government once proposed to detonate a series of nuclear bombs outside of an Inupiat coastal village (about 200 miles from our village) in order to test the safe use of nuclear weapons. (See "Project Chariot" on Google and you'll see what I'm referring to).

2) When the Inupiat Eskimos successfully rallied opposition to the detonations, the government abandoned the project, but went ahead and dumped nuclear waste from the Nevada nuclear test site there instead.

3) In the late 1950's, Inupiat children here were taken from schools without their parents permission and injected with nuclear materials to test their thyroid's ability to regulate heat.

But the story doesn't end with these atrocities. They go on and on and on . . . And now, their pristine Ocean is on the verge of becoming an industrial oil and gas development . . . well, over 73.4 million acres of it, but who's counting?

This place and its native Inupiat people is so deeply sad in so many, many ways, I often don't want to be here. Its not easy to handle if you're fundamentally selfish. Can I change? The Inupiat people I've met, deep down in their core, do not seem to derive from selfish origins. Sure, that's romanticized (I've only been here for 4 months), but it makes sense when you consider that the subsistence lifestyle, to which the Inupiat still cling, is about sharing (for instance, when the whales come in, they are shared with the entire community). How could you come from a place as tough as this and not know how to share?

Teddy is struggling; we are all struggling - except Forrest (who is now known as Nasuk I believe and picks up new Inupiaq words everyday).

I've only been in Barrow since the beginning of October, and I will certainly never be the same again.