Seth Kantner's Changing Alaska

September 20, 2008

Photo by Seth Kantner: caribou crossing the Kobuk River.

In late August my family headed upriver, heading home to our sod house along the river. This was a cold gray summer, but now it has opened to blue skies. Unseasonably hot—days in the 70’s and nights above freezing. Already caribou were crossing the lower Noatak and Kobuk rivers, people were getting meat.

Along the shore willow leaves glowed brilliant yellow. Dark caribou in their late summer coats raced along the sandbars and plunged into the shallow river. The tundra was burgundy; lines of yellow birches lead north to mountains.

Finally, after all the summer work, commercial fishing, visitors, and book tours, I was home. And it was perfect.

But one thing came along, a bug in my head every day as I walked the ridges and riverbanks—Sarah Palin.

Over the summer, in addition to all my other endeavors, I’d politicked. I’d worked on the YES side of Alaska ballot Measure 4, the so-called Clean Water initiative. And in the polls it was as clean water ought to be: we were ahead.

A few days before the August primary, when the multinational mining conglomerates were throwing millions of dollars into the pre-election fray, Sarah announced: “Let me take my governor’s hat off just for a minute here and tell you, personally, Prop 4—I vote no on that.”

In that, Sarah sweetly disregarded Alaska law that says it’s unlawful for a governor to advocate for or against a ballot measure.  Eventually, she did withdraw her statement but still allowed mining companies to swamp the state with giant ads of her smiling face and statement “Prop 4—I vote no.”

In those ads she gave us commercial fishers a last slap in the face; below her photo was an inset of another photo—her holding a salmon.

Palin’s pretty, Palin’s popular; Clean Water went down the drain.

Governor Palin’s lack of respect for the democratic process made me mad. It reminded me of George Bush, of course. Losing saddened me. There’s a monster strip-mine in the works for this river I dip my buckets into, this clean wild river now full of salmon, this river I’ve lived my life along.

But a few days later McCain made it all exponentially more nonsensical, surreal, a segment out of the movie Idiocrazy.

We were out of contact—except a wire stretched between spruce poles to pick up AM radio in Kotzebue. When I did hook up our solar panels, and the old radio, and dial in to All Things Considered, I was rewarded with another slap in the face just like the fish photo. “Drill, Baby, Drill.”

I went back out on the land, crept up to caribou in crazy blazing hot sun. I thought about this person being President, this person who filed suit against the polar bears, tried to put a bounty on wolves, this Alaskan who doesn’t believe in Global Climate Change. I bent aside beautifully painted dwarf birches, wandered with my camera behind the herds on the tundra. A lovely land, under the footsteps of such true and hopeful creatures. While somewhere south, Sarah Palin shrieks through the sky, and here in my head like a hornet in a jar.

Photo by Seth Kantner: river evening.