Seth Kantner's Changing Alaska

August 12, 2008

Photo by Seth Kantner: Jim and Gauge Moto off Cape Deceit

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.