After the game tears were shed

click to enlarge.

This is not the trophy that the Barrow Whalers football team had hoped to take home to Barrow. This is the State Runner-Up 2011-2012 trophy. They wanted to take home the State Championship trophy. I wanted them to, too. Badly.

Instead, Nikiski, a team that the Whalers had previously beaten, took that trophy home.

Still, the Whalers accomplished something that had never been accomplished before. They are the first Barrow Whaler Football team ever to go to state - and they won their division championship.

That's North Slope Borough Mayor Edward Itta, who presented the trophy to them, standing with them and he told them the same thing. On the left is assistant coach Brian Houston.

I took quite a few pictures at the game, but other than to grab this, I haven't looked at them yet. I suspect my very best picture(s) will not be of the action - although I hope I got a couple of decent ones there - but of the emotion and tears at the end.

If I should publish one or more pictures of these tears on the printed page, and I suspect I will, do not be embarassed, Whalers. The tears you shed today did not come from weakness. If you had been weak, you would not have fought on this field in the first place. If you had been weak, you would not have cared enough to have shed tears. These were tears brought on by strong desire, passion, hard effort, hard work and struggle.

As painful as they were, it is good that you could shed such tears.

And one day, those who follow you in future seasons will take that championship trophy home to Barrow.

I hope I am there to photograph it.

Those with whom I did not crash; I glimpse Lynx asleep; sharing breakfast apart

I am not a person who fears flying at all. Whenever I board a plane, I am solidly confident it will carry me to my destination safely. When we are in the air and suddenly find ourselves getting smacked around by turbulence that gives some passengers a big scare, to me it is just like being on a bumpy road - a bit uncomfortable but no big deal.

Yet, after I boarded the completely full Alaska Airlines flight that would carry me from Barrow to Anchorage and the jet took off, I suddenly found myself thinking that if by chance this proved to be one of those extremely rare flights that didn't make it and it crashed with 100 percent fatalities, all the people riding in this plane and I would die together.

It struck that we would then all share a very intimate experience. What would it be like? Would we be aware of it? Do we have spirits that would float about the site for awhile, those of us who are strangers to each other introducing ourselves for the first time, those of us who already know each other visiting and musing about what just happened? Would we be in mourning for those living that we had left behind? Rejoicing to meet those dead who had left us before?

I don't know. But it was kind of fun to think about, so I raised my camera over my head, pointed it behind me in such a way that I knew it would catch me too and took this picture of myself with my fellow passengers, so that, if we all died together, this moment could be remembered.

But we didn't die. We landed safely. Margie picked me up at the airport and then drove us to Jacob and Lavina's. Lynxton was now just over three weeks old and this was only the third day that I had seen him. Just like when I returned from New York, he was asleep.

The day of his birth is the only day that I have so far seen him awake.

I expect to see him Saturday.

Maybe he will be awake then.

Margie had been staying with Jacob and Lavina to help out, but now she came home with me and we brought Jobe with us. As usual, on my first morning home, we went out to breakfast, at Abby's Home Cooking.

Abby had the radio on, tuned to a local country station. She had the volume turned very low, so that one barely noticed the music as it played in the background. Basically, one song blended into the next, each almost indistinguishable from the other.

Then, I heard the opening notes to a familiar guitar riff - it was Johnny Cash, going into "I walk the Line." The volume remained low, but suddenly the song filled the restaurant. It grabbed me and held me. I was locked into every note, every word.

When Johnny, who I once spent an afternoon with, quit singing, the music once again fell into the background, hardly noticeable, one song indistinguishable from the next.

That's because Johnny Cash was genius - great - the other performers merely good.

When Margie and I have any of the boys with us, we iPhone pictures back and forth with Lavina and Jake, so they will know how whatever child is staying with us is doing at that moment.

So I took this iPhone pic of Jobe to send to them. 

"Cuteness!" Lavina texted back. Then she followed with a text informing me that Kalib was missing his grandma and wanted to see her.

So I had her wave at him and then sent this picture.

"He smiled," Lavina texted back.

Then she took a picture of baby Lynx with her own phone and texted it to us.

We looked at it.

We smiled.

We then finished eating breakfast, 50 miles apart together.

View images as slides

Random pics from yesterday's trip to Atqasuk: the baby, the frozen fish, the frozen river; the unfrozen sea

This is Patti Kanayurak of Atqasuk and her baby Levi. They will be in my next Uiñiq, along with more of the family, including Patti's parents and some of her siblings, too.

I will save the writing for Uiñiq, but, essentially, the story deals with a family that has chosen to live a healthy life free from the burdens of alcohol and drugs.

Down on the Meade River, I found people ice fishing. It felt much colder in Atqasuk than it had felt in Barrow and the wind was strong. I do not know what the temperatue was, but from experience I would say a bit above zero F. but with a windchill of -20 or so.

It was cold enough that there was no need or point in bonking a fresh-caught fish on the head - just pull it out, take it off the hook, toss it onto the ice and it is flash-frozen.

Below is an overflow on the Meade River as the Era flight takes us to Wainwright, enroute to Barrow. I was a bit stunned yesterday when I bought my round trip ticket from Barrow to Atqasuk and discovered that the fee was $330 plus.

Atqasuk is 55 nautical miles from Barrow. $330. My original roundtrip ticket from Anchorage to New York was $490. It didn't used to be so bad, and some of it is certainly the price of fuel, but there also used to be three or four air carriers serving Barrow and the villages and now there is one.

In May of 2009, I made what I had intended to be a three-village trip: Barrow, Wainwright, and Point Lay, but I had to drop the Point Lay portion because, even though Point Lay is the next village beyond Wainwright, I could not get a Barrow - Wainwright - Point Lay flight, but only a round-trip from Barrow to Wainwright, and then another round trip from Barrow to Point Lay.

I could not afford it.

I was most struck by the fact that, immediately after that trip, I flew to Bangalore, India, and that ticket was less than the Anchorage-Barrow-Wainwright-Point Lay trip that I had originally planned.

I really miss my plane. This trip would have cost maybe $40 in my own plane, figuring in gas, oil and maintenance.

I have this desire to go nuts, to photograph this place that I love that they call the Alaskan Arctic and the people of it like no one has ever photographed it beofre - including me. But how do I go about it? To really do it right, the way I want to, it would take a budget of between $300,000 and $500,000 a year. That kind of money is not available to me and it is never going to be.

I will just keep at it, one way or another, being grateful for the sometimes substantial support that I have so far received, and see how I much I can get done before my life ends or my health fails.

I'm not done yet, folks. I have lots of work to do, right here in the Arctic.

LOTS.

This morning I had breakfast at Pepe's and so did a fellow by the name of Frankie who eats there just about every day. "I should be standing on the ocean today," he told me. He said that because in the not terribly distant past, most years he could have stood on the ocean today, because it would have been frozen over.

Yes, there would be a lead, but there would also be a broad swath of shore-fast ice and beyond that, the pack ice.

This is what it looked like yesterday from the Era flight - no ice in sight; no shore-fast ice, no pack ice.

When I first arrived in Barrow this trip, I asked a whaler how far out the pack ice was.

"What pack ice?" he answered sardonically.

Then he said it was about 250 miles out.

View images as slides

Barrow novelist Debby Dahl Edwardson is named as a finalist for the National Book Award - her husband George

I am proud to join in the praise for my friend of nearly 30 years, Barrow novelist Debby Dahl Edwardson, who has just been named as a finalist for the National Book Award for Young People's Literature.

"Wait a minute!" the indignant reader suddenly shouts in protest. "If Debby is the finalist, then she should be the center of attention! Why is she looking at her husband? Why is he the one doing the talking, not her? This is all wrong!"

No, it is not wrong. It is right. Debby is the first to tell you - she is the writer in the family, but husband George Edwardson is a master story-teller and a continual source of inspiration and raw material for the words that she writes.

When their children were small, Debby would read stories to them. George would tell them stories - wonderful stories, Debby says, stories that never repeated themselves but always went somewhere new - stories based on the life that George knew as an Iñupiaq hunter and scholar in the traditional sense.

She always knew that if told they could hear one but not the other, her children would choose the stories George told from his mind and soul over the ones she read.

Over the years, she heard him tell many stories about his days as a student at the Copper Valley School, the now-closed Native boarding school in Glennallen run by the Catholic Church.

Some of the stories were funny. Some of the stories were inspirational. Some sad - many were downright hard and even tragic. Most were a combination of all these things and more.

Then, about a decade ago, Debby accompanied George to a reunion of the Copper Valley alumni. There, she was deeply moved by the familial connections and shared experiences that bound the students together.

She saw it as a story that needed to be told. George agreed. Debby then crafted a screen play and submitted it to the Sundance Institute. She received a hand-written rejection informing her that it had ranked high, but not quite high enough. In 2003, she began reworking it into her Master's Thesis.

And now it is her third book, My Name is Not Easy, behind Whale Snow and Blessings Bead, and a finalist for the National Book Award. Debby stresses that it is not a book about Copper Valley School per se - it is a work of fiction, inspired by the stories of her husband but relevant to the boarding school experience experienced by so many Alaska Native students.

She also stresses that it is not a book about victimization. Like the real-life graduates of boarding schools, her students did experience many hardships and wrongs, but they also formed bonds, learned about the western world and many went on to work together to advance Native rights.

The book was published by Marshall Cavendish and edited by Melanie Kroupa, who long ago saw talent in Debby and, like an editor of old times, stuck with her and nourished her through five years of rewriting and reworking until the book was just right.

When she was about three, Debby would often stand in her father's den and gaze at the many books that filled his shelves. She could not yet read or write, but she understood that there was power and stories between the covers of these inanimate objects. She knew she wanted to be part of those books - as both reader and creator.

When she was in the third grade, her teacher gave her an assignment to make a diary about a family camping trip. She wrote about what it felt like to sit in the front of the boat as it made its own waves while pushing its way through the lake.

After she handed in her paper, she noticed her teacher show her story to another teacher. She could see that her teacher was boasting about her. She knew then that she had the ability to make the power of words her own and with that power could move other people.

Conversely, in high school, she asked her English teacher if she believed she could be a writer. "No," the teacher responded.

"That's the one you want to invite to the awards," George interjects sardonically.

In college, an instructor convinced her that she could write articles for publications.

By the mid-70's, she found herself living in Barrow, where she attended a public hearing on a an environmental impact statement dealing with offshore oil development.

There, a young man stood up and took apart the environmental impact statement piece-by-piece. "When he was done, he had totally destroyed that environmental impact statement," Debby remembers. She wrote the event up and it became her first article published in the mainstream press: We Alaskans, the then Sunday magazine of the Anchorage Daily News.

That young man was George Edwardson, who continues that fight to this day. The two had no idea that they would one day wed and make a family together.

Next, she went to work for KBRW, the Barrow public radio station, reporting, writing, and reading news articles.

One day, Jean Craighead George, the famed Children's author and mother of Craig George, renowned bowhead biologist, came to Barrow and agreed to an interview. Afterward, Debby told George that she had always wanted to write stories for young people.

"She looked at me and said, 'well, do it."

Struck by the simplicity of the answer, Debby did, indeed, do it.

As for George, he says that "of course" he is proud of his wife. "I have always been." He adds that he was not surprised when she was named a finalist, because he has known for decades that such honors would come to his wife. Even Debby's mother, who did the painting on the wall behind him, had always known, George, who puts great stock in the knowledge of mothers, added.

Debby is retired from Ilisagvik College, but still serves as an adjunct professor. She was also just reelected to the board of the North Slope Borough School District. As part of her campaign, she ran an ad on the Eskimo channel that stated that education is the passing of the soul of a culture from one generation to the next.

"That's what your writing is, too," George told her.

The announcemnt of the winner of the National Book Award will be made at a fancy dinner next month in New York City. Naturally, George has been invited to attend alongside his wife. He has consented to go to New York, but not to the dinner. "It's black tie," he explains. "They're not going to put a tie on me!"

Last night, when I visited them, George was busy making ulu knives - some very large, some very small. He will convert a pair of tiny ulus into a set of ear rings for his wife to wear to the dinner where the announcement will be made.

Believe me, I stand by George on the whole black tie thing. I understand perfectly. Even so, I hope that when Debby enters the fancy place that George walks in alongside her, dressed in his classiest Iñupiaq clothing. If so, no man there will be more elegantly dressed than will be George Edwardson of Barrow, Alaska.

Well, there's lots more I could write about my friends, Debby and George Edwardson, but I've got to get up early to catch a plane to Atqasuk. And anyway, in no time at all, there's going to be lots of writers, even from outfits like the New York Times, writing about Debby and George and they will surely cover all the gound that I have skipped over or just didn't think to write about.

View images as slides

I set out to walk, with no destination in mind, and wind up at a gas-filled meteor crater; afterward we eat caribou

Today I stepped out onto the street and started to walk, no destination in mind, curious to see where I might wind up or who I might see.

I had not gone more than 100 feet before Richard and Arlene Glenn pulled up in their truck and invited me to tag along. We went to a few spots, including the landing site where yesterday's whales had been butchered and the boat launching site out towards Point Barrow.

Then we wound up on the Gas Well Road, where we saw this truck coming in the opposite direction. We passed over what looks to the eye to be ordinary, flat Arctic Slope tundra but which is actually the site of a crater where a meteor once blew out a crater about six miles wide. The rubble in the "disturbed" ground left behind in the crater trapped the concentrations of natural gas that now make up a portion of the Barrow Gas Fields, owned by the North Slope Borough, tapped to supply affordable energy to Barrow.

This is Richard, whose Iñupiaq name is Savik, and he is the nephew of Savik, the same Savik whose kitchen table I sit at as I write these words, Savik who opens his house to me as he does to his own blood family. Savik, the nephew, is a geologist and serves as the Vice-President of Lands and Natural Resources for the Arctic Slope Regional Corporation - although right now, his heart is out here, where a new gas development is being produced.

Behind Savik stands the rig drilling the new gas well named Savik #1 and there will also be Savik #2. The well goes down 1000 vertical feet, then turns and is being drilled another 4000 feet horizontally beneath a layer of sandstone that sits atop the field of natural gas it will tap. 

Sandstone crumbles easily and its fragile nature would make it problematic to drill the well straight through to the gas reserves.

Afterwards, Richard and Arlene took me to their house, where we ate rice smothered in caribou gravy, rich with big chunks of meat.

I just now asked Savik the uncle why they named this new well after him.

"I never asked," he answered.

The drilling rig pictured here is owned by Kuukpik, the ANCSA village coporation of Nuiqsut.