Alaska Dispatches
# 10  —  28 November 2000

Nature

Living in the bush means living closer to nature, which, like everything under the sun, has its own assortment of benefits and pitfalls.
Last week we experienced some severe flooding. We went to sleep to the sound of gusting winds and pouring rain. A loud knock on our door woke me up at midnight. It was Peter, our landlord, asking for some help outside. I got into my chest waders and went out to help Peter lift his snowmachines up out of the rising water and collect steam wood and other scattered objects that had floated away. While we worked the water level reached above the floors of his lagyaaqs, wooden food storage sheds, so we had to cut the power to the freezers. The water rose to within a foot of the porch of our house, which stands a good five feet off of the ground.
After arranging the grounds as best we could, Peter and I walked around this part of the village, watching the rising water wash over entire sections of the boardwalk and threatening to carry away 500 gallon oil and gas tanks. We wandered over towards Tom’s place to see if he needed help with his dogs, but he had already moved them to higher ground. The tide finally seemed to begin to recede just after 2:00 AM, so we called it a night. 
I awoke the next morning to find a 36 foot skiff come to rest on the tundra directly in front of our porch. The entire village was a mess. The receding water had strewn all nature of detritus, large and small, from one end of the village to another. Some relatively empty 500 gallon tanks had indeed been carried away, and had come to rest in a random array out on the tundra up to a mile north of the village.
I spent the afternoon helping an impromptu repair crew work on the wide boardwalk leading a mile or so east to the village dump. The heavy wooden structure had been moved about 60 feet off course by the flood. We were cutting and hauling it in sections back onto its path.
It was grueling work in the bitter cold. I was chilled to the bone, astonished to be out there working alongside guys without hats. At one point we lined up on a rope that had been tied to a section of boardwalk, and we pulled the huge piece towards us, tug-of-war style. I took a step back into some deep swamp, instantly filling my knee-high boots with freezing water. What a feeling! My colleagues told me casually that had I done something like that out on the tundra I would be in real trouble, but since we were “in town” it was no problem.
I sat down, took off my boots, wrung out my socks and tried to massage some feeling back into my feet. I felt less stupid as the day wore on and three other people did the same exact thing, although while I had accepted a four wheeler ride home and back to change into fresh socks, they shrugged it off and kept right on working as if nothing had happened.
Tom, the elder with the last remaining dog team in town, commented to me that things like this used to happen all the time, where the village would pull together to accomplish something without thought of compensation, but that it rarely happened anymore. It was inspiring to see so many members of the community out there working together, and I was glad to be able to help.
Organization of our efforts seemed ambiguous at best. Since all of the deliberations were in Yup’ik, I couldn’t really follow what was going on, but I do know that there was a lot of standing around, pointing and talking back and forth before we settled on a path of action. Scott, a school board member and apparent community leader, showed up somewhere in the middle of procedures and began directing traffic. During a break he was delivering a speech of sorts and began taking about Kassaqs, looking in my direction, and making people laugh. He later explained to me that the elders feel that extreme weather happens for a reason, and that he was joking that this flooding was probably the result of the new Kassaqs in town.
As the sun set, we finally reached the point, a quarter mile or so from the dump itself, where the original boardwalk remained in place. Our goal for the day, from what I had understood, was to replace the missing sections up to this point, which we would somehow reconnect at a later date. However, somewhere along the line it had been discovered that along the final quarter mile of boardwalk leading toward the dump, three additional large segments had broken away and had been carried by the flood down into a swamp on lower ground. Since they were bigger pieces, further away from the main track and lower than the other pieces, we could not rope and drag these back into place. We had to flip the pieces end over end, over and over again, up the hill and onto the remaining boardwalk. Unaccustomed to full days of physical labor, I felt muscles burning in my arms and legs.
We finally called it quits at around 7:00. We left for home with the understanding that we were to gather the following day at 1:00, bringing as many other people as possible, to re-attach the pieces. I wondered what would happen if it flooded again overnight. Fortunately it didn’t. I returned the next day at 1:00, and then again at 1:30 and 3:00, but found nobody there. It seems that someone had called the operation off, perhaps due to bad weather. I didn’t get the memo.

Last night was fairly unbelievable, in a typically Piniq fashion. Greg, Jason and David came over to share the last of the leftover Thanksgiving turkey. It was Leisy’s turn for a steam, and my turn for dishes. We had a huge load that took an hour and a half to clean. I finally got through them and put Jules to sleep. I was sulking around, cursing the dishes and inconvenience of no running water, jealous of Leisy having been invited to steam and just generally feeling sorry for myself when the phone rang. It was Greg. He asked what I was doing. I told him not much. He said that I better go outside, that nature was putting on a show for me: The Northern Lights.
I stepped outside to find an ethereal green glow in a wide, low band across a large swath of the northern sky. I have always heard the lights described as dancing, but these were fairly still, otherworldly yet subtle. They shown faintly, due to the ground lights from the village, something understated but unique floating in the sky just over the roofs of the village houses. I stared at the sky for a while, but despite a layer of pile, a down jacket, wool hat and gloves, I was chilly. I had spent most of the day working outside helping Peter build his new steam bath, and I had never really warmed up from so much time in the cold.
When Leisy came home, she was excited to get me outside to check out the sights. Preparing myself this time with a heavy down parka, seal skin hat, neoprene face mask and better gloves, I decided to hike north, out to the end of the boardwalk, to get away from the lights of the town. It was stunning. The aurora borealis grew brighter and began changing and shifting, remaining green but swirling around, gathering in a narrow spot and then spreading out again. The wind was whipping, and with the face mask and thick hat covering my ears, all I could hear through the incessant whistling of the wind was my own breathing and footsteps. It was incredible to be outside of town, by myself, bundled up in the frigid air underneath the dancing lights. Looking out toward the north, with nothing between me and the lights except for flat and dark tundra, it felt like God was painting a picture specifically for me.
A couple of other friends called as the night wore on to tell us about nature’s show outside. After midnight, we looked out of our window and saw pink, red, green and yellow and decided to get dressed and go out to see the lights again. They were really going off, moving and changing wildly and covering huge portions of the sky. We heard people whistling from various quarters across the village. The elders say that if you whistle you can make the lights dance, and it seemed to be working. They also say that if you whistle loudly enough, the Northern Lights will take your soul, so I’ll be curious to see if anyone turns up missing tomorrow. Lots of folks were outside, and I ran into a neighbor who invited me for a late steam. We took a hot, relaxing and long steam until around 3:00 AM, and when we were done, so was the evening’s show.

©2000, Michael Thornton Wyman