and is ocean-bound. Here, flesh and spirit are conjoined and on the move. The river is nest, morgue, water hole, pathway. It is what one native resident called simply “a good place to live.” At camp, the conversation returns to the proposed 200-mile industrial mega-road that will cost half a billion dollars to build over thawing tundra and wild rivers: more than 100 crossings of wetlands and rivers in all, some with culverts, others with bridges, in a part of the world where there have never been any roads at all. Acidic water runoff from the mines will pollute the waterways. The road may be built with asbestos-laden soil taken from the colorfully named Helpmejack Hills. In that case, plumes of asbestos dust would rise over the national park and would fly hundreds of miles, affecting the health of all who work on, live near, or travel the road. The governor has already signed a law that forbids anyone from suing the state or the mining companies for health problems—mainly mesothelioma—arising from the road constructed out of a hazardous material. We stoke the fire and wonder how such a plan could have gotten this far. The state of Alaska has already spent $20 million surveying the area. Companies using the road will pay $9.7 million a year to cover maintenance costs. Investment brochures claim that the mines will give out much more than that in copper, though their lifespan is relatively short, about 12 years.
nearly gone, and the threads that bind traditional culture together are broken. “We had everything we needed here,” a native friend told me, “before alien people came telling us we didn’t have enough.” Cold night. Ice on the water bucket. My dreams have been moving me through riffles, rapids, road-building, and whole cities teetering on stilts above shadow-dappled water. By midmorning the waning moon has ebbed away with the mist. A single raven flies low, wings creaking, and two seagulls make a laughing sound. We shake ice off our tents, roll them up wet, and keep going. Last night, listening for bear, we heard a distant wolf call. Before leaving I see his track by our tents, the place where he crossed next to the smoldering fire. The slaughter of wolves has been weighing heavily on national park visitors and employees. There’s an all-out culling effort by the state’s Department of Fish and Game to keep the declining caribou population up so that sport hunters can kill their quota, though officials can’t say with certainty why the caribou are in decline. As in all western states, money from hunting licenses keeps the department afloat—a conflict of interest, it would seem, with its mission to protect the wildlife. Last winter the agency killed 44 percent of the wolf pack that dens in the Yukon-Charlie Preserve from helicopters. Are they “park wolves” or “state wolves”? Who “owns” the wildlife?
the narrow tops of black spruce puncture night air.
The poet Derek Walcott wrote: “Motion is loss.” A few fat flakes flap down. Taking the place of jagged mountain peaks are high-rise clotted snow clouds. Downriver the water is glass and we keep breaking it. Humans have been changing the “natural world” for thousands of years, but playing God in a world deeply disrupted by politics, economics, territorial disputes, and climate instability rarely works out well. People have always used this river and continue to do so. The Kuuvanmiut (the people who live on the Kobuk) still have fish camps in the summer months that are overseen by women. The younger men walk to the first tributary north through mountain passes to the Noatak drainage to hunt caribou and Dall sheep. As soon as snow falls, they return and help the women at the camps, where fish are being dried and smoked and berry picking is ongoing. The men hunt nearby until winter comes on strong; then the whole population of a village returns to its winter camp. In earlier times, a taboo against living in the same house for more than one winter required the Kuuvanmiut to
map by mike reagan
Fifteen degrees Fahrenheit. We load our raft in light snow.
The beginnings of the aurora borealis show in the northern sky. One might ask, what is the value of wilderness, or a river, of tundra, or a boreal forest? The nuts-and-bolts answer is this: worldwide, boreal forests store more carbon than any other terrestrial ecosystem— almost twice as much as tropical forests. Here, carbon is stored not only in living trees and plants but also in the peat and permafrost soils. The forest functions as a huge carbon vault, one of the earth’s “air conditioners,” where 47 percent of the songbird population of North America, 303 species altogether, breeds, nests, and fledges. It’s not so much that we are trying to save the beauty and efficacy of the natural world; rather, it saves us. Opinions about the road in the three villages of Ambler, Shungnak, and Kobuk are split. Many younger people endorse the road and the mines because they want and need jobs and money. Twelve thousand years of subsistence living no longer holds them. Their language is
THIS ARTICLE WAS MADE POSSIBLE BY THE JONATHAN AND MAXINE MARSHALL FUND FOR ENVIRONMENTAL JOURNALISM winter 2013/2014
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