Seth Kantner's Changing Alaska

November 23, 2008

Photo: Seth Kantner

When I was young, my brother and I listened for snowtravelers—what folks named the early snowmobiles. If we heard a drone we raced down the snowdrift to the ice, looked upriver and down for a black dot or yellow headlight. Travelers! People: they were rare, and exciting.

Sometimes the humming was simply our ears making up sound in the silence of huge mid-winter wilderness, and a moving dot in the distance turned out to be a fox or a wolverine crossing the ice. Disappointed, we’d wander back to the dog yard or our snow tunnels.

Snowgos, as we’ve come to call them, brought change fast. Before them, everyone used dogs. Food for the dogs came the same way it did for us—by fishing and hunting, constantly. Snowgos needed a new kind of feed—constantly—and it didn’t grow on the land. In a few short years, jobs became more important than hunting, a previously inconceivable and upside-down notion.

My friend Alvin acquired a used snowgo before I did, and then he bought a new one, an Arctic Cat Panther. It would go eighty miles per hour. Man, he went up the river like a comet. I can still picture his mom, Mary, worried at the window, watching him disappear in a streak of snow, icefog, and exhaust. “Adii!” she uttered. “Aachikaang!”

Now thirty, almost forty years have passed. I own three old snowgos and one old dog. And it’s easier to name acquaintances who fly to Anchorage twenty times a year than to name even one person that uses working dogs anymore. TV and iPods have come, strip mines have brought high-paying jobs. Snowgo racing and basketball have made local stars that outshine the hunters.

A few days ago my daughter, China, met me at the door when I came in from snowmobiling. I’d been out all day helping a friend set beaver traps. I was frosty, iced, bundled up and stinking of two-cycle exhaust. “I thought you were Bailey,” she said. “Can I have a friend over?”

It was cold, getting dark, overhead the sky bruised blue, and orange in the west over the ice. “Sure,” I said. It was past the point in the evening when I allow her to walk alone across town. It is too dangerous with kids roaring around, lawless on snowgos and Honda four-wheelers—some so little they can hardly see over the handlebars, and some in their forties now.

An hour later Bailey’s mom, Tracey, dropped her off. Tracey was heading into the night to take a visiting doctor out on her racing dog-team. She asked briefly about overflow (water on top of the ice and under the snow), and I reassured her that I hadn’t seen any out on the trail.

At ten p.m. we started noticing the time. Before eleven the hospital called. Out on the ice a snowgo probably traveling a hundred miles per hour had hit the dog team from behind. The doctor had been brought in without a pulse; Tracey was alive, although soon to be medivaced.

Over the course of the evening and morning details leaked in: the driver and passenger on the snowgo were from the village closest to where my brother and I grew up; for one reason or another, they left the scene. The doctor’s leg had been severed, and he bled to death on the ice while Tracey, with all her ribs on one side broken and internal injuries including a ruptured aorta, at fifteen below zero in the dark had tried to fashion a tourniquet.

Travelers the next day reported blood all over the trail. The newspaper reported that alcohol was involved on the part of the twenty-year-old driver. Friends reported a six-hour surgery in Anchorage and Tracey in critical condition and on a ventilator. Gossip said the snowgo was wrecked and the dogs uninjured.

I’m reporting that this accident, and others, has been coming toward us for decades. That may sound too symbolic and pat, but it’s true. Technology has flooded up from the Lower Forty-Eight, washed over Alaska all the way to the Arctic shore and beyond. Here on the once-frontier, technology is colliding with the environment, the animals, and the old ways, outpacing its own limited illumination like a snowmobile roaring up behind a dog team in the dark.