Seth Kantner's Changing Alaska

October 10, 2008

Photo by Seth Kantner: Thin Ice

A bitter north wind has cleared the fresh snow off the ice, and my ten-year-old daughter China has her chin down in her coat collar, thawing her face. She’s carrying an ax with a third of the handle broken off. The sun is cool yellow in the west, and we’re doing one of our favorite things: checking the ice. Like me, she loves ice. Thin ice, of course, is all the more interesting.

It’s early October and it is holding us up. Here the lagoon is brackish, and because of that the ice bends under us, rubbery, the way saltwater freezes. Where we’ve chopped holes to measure the thickness (two to three inches) water sloshes out as we walk nearby. The removed chunks have vertical lines, unlike freshwater ice with its glass-like quality.

So far Freezeup seems right on schedule, not like these past falls with strange rains until Halloween. Not yet, anyway. In these modern fast-times, people lose faith so quick—they forget that global climate change doesn’t mean every month and every day is warmer. Likewise, Outsiders don’t realize that every elder, Native or non-native, doesn’t necessarily have a handle on weather change in the Arctic. Sadly, more and more residents here are busy getting their daily forecasts off the internet, and their wilderness knowledge off Discovery and other cable channels.

And sure enough, a man on shore begins shouting at us. This is standard treatment for kids. Also, most everyone assumes it dangerous for a white guy to be the first one on the ice. I whack my double bit ax down, to demonstrate that we’re not out for a thoughtless stroll. China halts. “He’s hollering at us.” I refrain from shouting back, telling the man where to go; I’m here, after all, to teach my daughter. “Ignore him. We’re checking the ice. This is the way to do it, not just drive full throttle on a snowgo.”

China and I nearly cross the lagoon. We turn back at the channel, sixty yards from the far shore. Here the water is swift and deep, and the ice froze in waves and more recently than what we’ve been walking on. Now the light has gone hazy, and I point to our right, at ripples where the current is still open and dangerous.

Living out, my family always had to check the ice. We had to make trails up the river and across lakes to trapping sites and to the village. The Arctic, always, has been a place of erratic weather, and weather matters more when your frozen winter caribou are rethawing, your barrels of blueberries are going sour, and your highways (trails) are collapsing. Our weather, scientists have predicted, will become more unpredictable. That’s already happening, although, somewhere in the midst of erratic, normal is bound to come up. This year it’s right on schedule. But, me—this last decade has made me a doubter; I’m predicting weeks of slush to come raining down on us as soon as we get comfortable on our good-traveling ice.