Seth Kantner's Changing Alaska

June 23, 2008

Seth Kantner feeds the mosquitos

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.