Nick Jans - A Place Beyond: Finding Home in Arctic Alaska

A PLACE BEYOND

ALSO BY NICK JANS:

The Last Light Breaking (1993)

A Place Beyond (1996)

Tracks of the Unseen (2000)

Alaska (with photographer Art Wolfe) (2000)

The Grizzly Maze:Timothy Treadwells Fatal
Obsession With Alaskan Bears (2005)

Tracy Arm (with photographer Mark Kelley) (2006)

Alaska: A Photographic Excursion
(with photographer Mark Kelley) (2007)

Black Bears of the Mendenhall Glacier
(with photographer Mark Kelley) (2008)

The Glacier Wolf (2009)

Finding Home in Arctic Alaska

NICK JANS

For my parents

Text and photographs copyright 1996 by Nick Jans

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Jans, Nick, 1955

A place beyond: finding home in Arctic Alaska / Nick Jans.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-88240-807-1 (alk. paper)

1. Kobuk River Region (Alaska)Description and travel. 2. EskimosAlaskaKobuk River RegionSocial life and customs. 3. Kobuk River Region (Alaska)Social life and customs. 4. EskimosAlaskaAmblerSocial life and customs. 5. Ambler (Alaska)Social life and customs. 6. Homes and hauntsAlaskaAmbler. I. Title.

F912.K6J37 1996

979.86dc20 96-19763

CIP

Designer: Elizabeth Watson

Map: Vikki Leib and Elizabeth Watson

Cover Design: Vicki Knapton

Photographs: All photos are by the author.

Alaska Northwest Books

An imprint of Graphic Arts Books

P.O. Box 56118

Portland, OR 97238-6118

(503) 254-5591

www.graphicartsbooks.com

I offer heartfelt thanks to the following people: to Lynn and Carol Norstadt, who read everything twice; to Jennifer Maler, good friend and literary advisor nonpareil; to Marlene Blessing and Ellen Wheat, whose tireless work is behind this; to Steve and Venita Pilz, who were always home; to Ken, Tricia, and the gang at ALASKA magazine, who cheered me on. Thanks also to Cindy Horsfall, who helped arrange the manuscript.

Im most deeply indebted to my Eskimo friends Clarence Wood and Minnie Gray, and to all the Ambler people. One word says it all: Taiikuu.

One bright April morning a dozen years ago, Clarence Wood and I stood on the crest of a birch knoll, looking out over the upper Kobuk valley. Before us, thousands of caribou grazed, dark specks trailing off into the blue-white distance. Clarence turned, his weathered Eskimo face split by a wide grin. Lots, he said quietly. Lots.

The longer I live here and write, the more I find myself following Clarences cueturning to simpler words, and fewer of them. My hope, in these twenty-eight brief essays about life in the Alaskan arctic, is to find words not big enough, but small enough for a landscape and a place without end.

Seventeen years ago, I slammed the door of my grandfathers 66 Plymouth Belvedere and headed for Alaska. Hed died the year it was new, before Id gotten a chance to really know him, but the car had stayed in the family and eventually been passed down to me. As I rattled five thousand miles across the continent, pistons wheezing and bearings grumbling, I told myself that Grandpa Paul would have approved. The son of an immigrant, hed have known why Id shoved my last four hundred bucks in my pocket and fled from a future that looked all too certain.

Of course, I was coming back. Everyone waved cheerfully as I drove off, canoe strapped to the roof of what I privately called Grandpas Ghost.

The questions started a year later. When are you coming home? my father asked, his voice echoing over the satellite phone. A retired career diplomat, he could fathom the lure of distant places, but not the idea of his son pricing canned beans in an Eskimo village store. My mother, intuitive and theatrical, came closer to understanding. But she wanted to know when, too.

I dont know. Next year, I said, believing the sound of my own voice. But a year became five, then ten. Even though I was now teaching English, history, and math in the Ambler school, putting my education to good use and getting paid for it, my parents questions never quite stopped. What was I doing up there, hauling water in buckets and peeing in an outhouse? When was I going to get on with my life?

The real question, though, wasnt what or when, but why. I knew they didnt quite understand what held me here. If only they could sit with me and watch the caribou flowing south down the Redstone valley, or smell the tundra after a late spring rain. Come up, I told them, and Ill show you.

Two summers ago, my mother, father, and sister-in-law Kate stood outside my boarded-up cabin as I fumbled with the padlock. The late July day was warm and still; mosquitoes buzzed lazily in the fireweed. Wed been traveling together for three weeks, driving from Oregon to Prince Rupert, then the ferry to Skagway, on to Whitehorse, and up the highway to Anchorage and Fairbankstwo thousand miles and change. Wed done all the usual tourist drill: sea otters and eagles... check; cheap souvenirs... check; Alaska Railroad... check; grizzlies, moose, and mountains... check. The postcard version of Alaska, most of which Id never seen, was all interesting and pretty enough.

Okay, spectacular at times. I was just as excited as anyone when a whale rolled fifty yards off the ferrys bow. Resurrection Bay was good, too. At Denali Park, we spotted more critters out of a bus window than Id be likely to see in a week up north. But all the time I was restless, and my parents felt it. All this scenery, grand as it was, explained nothing about where I lived, or why.