Barrow Whalers football season opener, part 2 of 5: First half - the flag flies, one touchdown is made, no extra points

I, as I am certain is true for just about every Alaskan and for many others in our nation as well, am rather distracted right now by the tragic news out of the Tikchik Lakes, just north of Dillingham, where Senator Ted Stevens and several others have been killed in a plane crash. My condolences to all those who now most deeply mourn this loss inflicted upon us all by this crash.

As you can see, the warm weather had disappeared and Barrow had become Barrow once again. It was a 30 - 30 day: wind in the 30's, temperature in the 30's. "This is our home," says Coach Voss, "It's what we have to play in all the time. Nobody else faces it like we do."

Except, of course, for the visiting teams, who may find it even tougher.

"It certainly isn't a disadvantage to us," Voss agrees. 

And this could well be the warmest home game of this eight week season. The final home game will be September 22, a date by which one used to know with certainty that snow would cover the tundra and ice would coat the lakes and lagoons. This is no longer certain, but odds are it will be a very chilly game.

But never forget that those who live here at the Top of the World also live in the United States and on this day, Barrow's cheerleading squad stood bravely in the chill wind, gripped the flag and joined in the singing of the national anthem.

Those cheerleaders clearly visible in the picture include Joanne Akootchook, Nicole Hope, Khayla Vigo and Camille Dacanay.

With the wind behind the whalers, quarterback Eddie Benson kicked off to start the game.

The ball was down inside the 20 yard line. South Anchorage tried hard to fight there way toward Whaler territory, but the Whalers opened with a wall-like defense that the Wolverines found hard to penetrate.

Whaler Jacob Harris gets in on the tackle.

Soon, the Whalers have the ball. 

Eddie Benson sprints past defenders toward he hopes will be an opening.

Benson looks for a receiver. With the wind at over thirty, it would prove to be not a good passing day, but as a junior, Benson has many games ahead of him and Coach Voss expresses confidence that he will be a strong force to be reckoned with, both this year and next.

Running back Adrian Panigeo sprints toward the goal line and gains several yards, putting his team close to a scoring position.

Fullback Joe Burke takes advantage of his blockers and punches his way over the goal line for the first touchdown of the day. The coaches did not feel that this was the day they wanted to initiate a kicking game, either for extra points or field goals, and chose to go for two. The effort failed, leaving the score at Barrow Whalers 6, South Anchorage Wolverines, 0.

Clancy Itta cheers happily. His oldest granddaughter, Anissa, one of the three children of Clancy's daughter, Natasha, who is married to Nehemiah Houston, son of coach Houston, is not quite so pleased. Anissa's grandmother, Marie Itta, explained that she had been in the car with Anissa with the big, furry, wolverine mascot from South Anchorage suddenly appeared at the window, peeked in at her and frightened her terribly.

The game continues. As Coach Voss looks on from the sidelines, Benson dashes into the wind and looks for a receiver.

Benson finds that in football as in life there is opposition in all things.

Soon, the ball is back in the posession of the Wolverines. As before, they keep encountering a solid wall of Whalers and fail to threaten.

But, once the ball return to the Whalers, they, too, are stopped before they can return to scoring position. 

Soon, the Wolverines again had the ball but again were stopped by the Whalers. Trace Hudson made this tackle.

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Barrow Whalers football season opener part 1 of 5: Pregame - the whalers suit up, discuss strategy, pysch themselves up then venture out into a cold, stiff, Arctic wind

After suiting up on the morning of the first game of the season, the Barrow Whalers football team walks to the far end of the building to gather for a pre-game meeting.

They listen as coach Brian Houston, a member of the coaching staff headed by Mark Voss, discusses strategy and attitude.

Coach Bob Cambell demonstrates blocking technique.

Afterward, Jessie Sanchez, who is also a long-time member of the Barrow Eskimo Dancers, gets a little one-on-one time from Campbell.

After the meetings, they return to the changing room, where Ben Jones gets his ankles taped.

Darius Samuelu gets his wrists taped.

Ready for grid-iron combat.

Before they head to the bus for the three mile drive to Cathy Parker field, the players join together for a team prayer.

They listen as Coach Voss gives them some final words of encouragement. He tells them that there have been signs that their opponents, the JV team of South Anchorage, a high school with six times the number of students of Barrow High, does not consider them to be a real football team and does not hold them with much respect.

"They will respect you when this game is over," he says.

As the players enter the bus, they shout out their battle cries.

Then, as instructed by Coach Voss, they ride in silence to the field, each going into his own head and soul to pyschologically ready themselves for the game.

Cathy Parker Field, named for the Florida woman who was so impressed when she learned how Barrow Whalers had started a team four years ago but had to play on a hard, gravelly surface atop permafrost, that she raised the money necessary to purchase astro-turf and to build Barrow a real field.

The unusually warm weather that Barrow had enjoyed just two days before was gone now. The temperature was in the mid-30's and the wind blew hard from the north, right off the Chukchi Sea, at over 30 mph. As the team did their warmups, Coach Houston gave Ben Jones a little help to stretch and limber up his muscles.

The cheerleaders arrived. Soon, it would be game time.

I am going to do something a little different with this series of five posts that I pulled the pictures into late last night and early this morning before going to bed. I will post them all this morning, but before I continue I am going to go to Pepe's, eat some breakfast and take care of a few tasks.

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note: the slide show also has images not included in the above narrative.

Slide Show, ten images: the Barrow Whalers football at practice

View the 10 image Barrow Whalers football practice slide show

In my last post, I wrote that today I would post images from yesterday's Barrow Whalers football game, the season opener, but I have changed my mind. I did prepare a selection of images from that game to post, but I was lacking some fundamental information that I can only get by talking to a coach, maybe a player or two and it is Sunday and I do not want to bother anybody by tracking them down at their homes.

Plus, I am feeling kind of lazy myself and don't really want to do any tracking.

So, instead, for today, I am just going to run this 10 image slide show of the Whalers at practice the day before the game. Perhaps tomorrow I will post the game.

It had been my intent to include a photo essay in the Uiñiq magazine that I completed several months back but which, for a succession of odd reasons, took a tremendous amount of time to get printed, mailed and then delivered and so only recently reached most readers. 

Before I had the chance to shoot that essay, I took my bad fall, shattered my shoulder, went through my two surgeries, lost my right shoulder and got a titanium one. So, when the 2008 football season started up less than two months later, I was in no condition to stand on the sidelines and try to shoot football.

By the 2009 season, my shoulder was still quite fragile but I could handle my big cameras again and had been thinking about it, but then my wife broke her knee for the second time in 7 months and I found myself unable to do much of anything but to help care for her.

Football was out. 

I still feel a little badly about that, because last year was the whalers 4th season and the final year that any players from the original team, one that has become a bit of a legend, would be with the team.

This year, the Barrow Whalers football team is in what is commonly called a "rebuilding season" in the sport - this means that the older, experienced players that made the team into the legend that it has become have moved on to be replaced by a largely younger group with less experience.

Yet, I have discovered that there is enthusiasm and fire in these boys and so this year I have set out to finally do my Barrow Whalers football essay - too late to capture any of the first squad of players, but then they were widely documented nationally by ESPN and others and may well be the subject of a future movie, so perhaps there was not much that I could have added to their story, anyway.

While the majority population of Barrow remains Iñupiat and Barrow is definitely an Iñupiat town, it is also a cosmopolitan community with residents whose roots and origins reach around the world. So too, as Coach Mark Voss told me, is the composition of the team and coaching staff cosmopolitan - Iñupiat, Samoan, Tongan, Hawaiian, White, African American, Filipino, Latino...

Should I pull this off as I hope, I think it will prove to be an interesting essay. While my take yesterday does do a functional job of covering the game, it is not what I would have hoped it would be. Yesterday, I learned that when it comes to photographing football, a game that I had not shot a single frame on since the fall of '92 when Caleb played his final year at Wasilla High, I am out of practice and need to sharpen my skills.

So I will attend more practice sessions this week to take many pictures. My only real purpose will be to hone my skills for future game times and to better get to know the players and coaching staff, so that hopefully I can produce the kind of essay that I envision.

To see the ten image slide show from the practice the day before the first came, click on the photo or on either of the links above and below this text.

View the 10 image Barrow Whalers practice slide show

Aarigaa - a good place to warm up after a cold football game; Dustinn is now back in Arizona

Not only was the air at the football game very cool and moist with the occasional raindrop flying through it, but the wind was stiff, strong and steady. I wasn't dressed warm enough and was thoroughly chilled pretty by the end of it.

So I went to Aarigaa Java to get a beverage that would warm me.

This isn't that picture, though. This is from yesterday, when Dustinn took me there, where we found Thelma, always ready, at 40 above or 40 below to keep her good customers from Barrow warm and awake.

And this is where I said goodbye to Dustinn - in front of Roy Ahmaogak's bungalow, where I am staying. Dustinn wanted a picture of him with the Ilisagvik College van that he used to drive his Media Camp students around.

Here it is Dustinn.

Here is Thelma again, today, handing me a warmup after the football game. I am not in a vehicle but on foot.

This is all I am going to post today. Perhaps by Sunday morning or hopefully early afternoon at the latest, I can get a post up on today's season opener for the Barrow Whalers football team.

For now, I won't say who won or lost. If you are from Barrow or any Slope village, you already know. If you don't know, I might as well keep you in suspense until I can show you a few scenes from the game.

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I leave my family and cool and rainy weather behind and drop into sweltering, hot, Barrow where I find Dustinn Craig, teaching young people how to make movies

During my very brief stay at home, I took a number of pictures of my family that I intended to post so that I could let readers know a little bit about what we experienced in our short times together. Included among these were my son Rex with his special new friend, an adventurous young woman by the name of Ama from the San Francisco Bay area who has been out hiking, camping, and kayaking around Alaska.

Unfortunately, I forgot to transfer them into my laptop. This one, final, family image that I took was still in my pocket camera, which I put in my pocket before I left and so it came to Barrow with me.

As you can see, it is of Jobe, studying his dad as he shaves.

I often wonder how it is that Jacob ever learned to shave in the first place.

He sure as hell didn't learn it from me.

I haven't shaved in 92 years - well, maybe its been a little less than that, but not much.

Not long after I boarded the jet that would take me from Anchorage to Barrow, I heard someone call my name from a seat just a few rows behind me. I turned. It was Qaaiyan. For those of you who have read Gift of the Whale, Qaaiyan was the boy making coffee with a pick ax from freshwater ice that he had learned to find on the salty, frozen, sea. 

He was with Jamie and their new baby, Aagluaq. The "g" is supposed to have a dot over it but if there is a way to do that in this program, I do not know it.

For those of who have seen my latest Uiñiq magazine, Jamie is the girl taking the accidental dive, braids flying, off the blanket toss during the Point Hope Nalukatak.

As for Aagluaq, dotted "g," this is my first photograph.

Oh, wait - I think I also posted the picture of Jamie in the Point Lay series I put up on this blog in June of last year. Give me just a moment and I will go check for certain and I will find a link. Oh, heck - I am certain. She's there. I don't need to check, I just need to find the link.

So give me just a moment and I will go find it...

I found it, here it is.

Shortly after we departed Anchorage, the pilot spoke on the intercom to tell us what kind of weather conditions awaited us on our journey. He said it was 80 degrees in Fairbanks, which is not at all that unusual in the summer and it can significantly hotter than that, but when he said it was 70 degrees in Barrow, I wondered if I had heard him right.

It's not that this never happens in Barrow, but it doesn't happen that often. I know - some of you read "70 degrees" and laugh, but let me assure you that in Barrow, 70 degrees is hotter than it is anywhere else that I have ever been. 

When I arrived in Barrow, I found it simply sweltering. Roy Ahmaogak picked me up and brought me home. There, in his parent's living room, I found a a visitor, young Katilynn, desperately trying to cool herself in front of an electric fan. And if you look closely at the background, you will see a hand-fan in motion as well.

I should note that, as of today, it is much cooler: 43 degrees. It is raining and most people would probably consider it cold.

I hope it isn't raining during tomorrow's afternoon football game - the season opener. I plan to be there, taking pictures and I don't want to get my cameras all wet.

I was most happy that this trip to Barrow coincided with a visit by the Apache-Navajo filmmaker Dustinn Craig, the son of my late and special friend, Vincent Craig. I am also proud to call Dustinn my special friend. We were together at the moment of his dad's death and we share some things.

Dustinn was finishing up a two-week Media Camp where he had been teaching filmmaking to a group of young people from high school to college age who had gathered at Ilisagvik College from various Arctic Slope communities.

I dropped in a little more one hour before the students were to show their movies to the public. Most of the movies were finished and ready to be shown, but Gabe Tegoseak, the tall guy in the back, was still finishing up the editing on his - with Dustinn's help, to be certain that it would barely be ready to show.

Gabe's movie starred Gabe himself and it was a take off on a popular TV show about a guy who goes out into wild places to survive only off of what he can take from nature.

Speaking with a perfect Australian-Iñupiaq accent, Gabe leads viewers on a hilarious Iñupiaq survival adventure that begins in the local grocery store and progresses to the tundra, where he eats caribou poop that looks strangely like candy, drinks what appears to be a wildly-squirting fountain of yellow liquid created by his own kidneys and wrestles a dangerous creature from Iñupiaq lore that strangely looks and acts like a kitty cat with a sock on its head.

At least, there is a sock on its head for a few moments.

Damnit. I hate it when people give away the ending or the good parts of a movie and now I just did it myself.

Also pictured are student filmmakers Chris Ross, sitting next to Dustinn, and Joey Atkins. Chris created a dreamlike horror tribute inspired by the work of Alfred Hitchcock and Joey presented a soul-stealing wraith whose fearsomeness was accentuated by the special effects he worked into his film.

Both films were damned frightening, with some humor thrown in.

At points early in the process, these students had felt overwhelmed by the process they faced, but they got through that, had fun and created some good work which I hope is soon online.

Onscreen is Dominque Rose Nayukok of Atqasuk. She created a movie in which she used stills to tell the story of her home village. Unfortunately, her travel schedule had taken her back to Atqasuk earlier in the day, but we got to meet her onscreen.

Agnes Akokok and Lavisa Ahvakana of Wainwright both love to Eskimo dance and so they made Eskimo dance the subject of their movie. Each took their turns onscreen to narrate the action.

Each time that Lavisa appeared onscreen, offscreen she got to feeling a little shy and bashful. She did a good job, though - one that I would say has earned her the right to hold her head high.

As Gabe stands laughing in the background, the audience laughs at his survival film. This kid ought to be on TV performing his antics every week. I think he would be loved, far and wide.

Afterwards, Gabe asked Dustinn if he would help him record some of his own guitar playing and singing, so Dustinn did. April Phillip, who, among her other filmmaking activities played the main character/victim in Chris's Alfred Hitchcock tribute, helped out.

I shot this through the very dust-coated window of the class van as Dustinn drove April and I back into Barrow from Ilisagvik college, located at the old Naval Arctic Research Labratory three miles north of town. It was a beautiful, warm, night and many people were out on the beach, the Chukchi Sea of the Arctic Ocean behind them.

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