Sturm - Finding the Arctic: History and Culture Along a 2,500-mile Snowmobile Journey From Alaska to Hudsons Bay

I started looking for the Arctic from the moment I arrived there. I first crossed the Arctic Circle in 1973 while serving on the United States Coast Guard icebreaker Northwind. The year before I had crossed the Antarctic Circle during a cruise to McMurdo Sound. My journey toward the poles started at age seventeen, when, thoroughly bored with high school, I enlisted in the Coast Guard. My first posting was on the 255-foot cutter Klamath. It turned out to be even more boring than school. The Klamath's job was to sail to Ocean Station Papa (50N, 145W) halfway between Seattle and Hawaii, and then to float there for a month, a manned navigational aid for jets flying to and from Hawaii. For days on end we turned the engines off and drifted, wallowing between the swells. My job was navigating, which is pretty easy when you are hardly moving.

Compared to that assignment, serving on an icebreaker sounded like an adrenaline rush, so I transferred to the Northwind. At the time I didn't know she was one of a select group of ships that had traversed the Northwest Passage (and done so twice in one season). Indeed, I was woefully ignorant of all arctic history. After breaking ice in Antarctica, we sailed north to Nome, Alaska, then up to the Diomede Islands in the Bering Strait. We eventually worked our way into the pack ice of the Chukchi Sea and even briefly steamed into Russian territory, running a risk of being detained.

North to Alaska! This stirred something in my teenage soul. From the ship's bridge I could see the arctic tundra stretching away into a distant blue haze. I knew there was adventure out there, and I wanted it.

I was hardly the first. At least six hundred years earlier, intrepid Europeans such as Leif Eriksson, John Cabot, Martin Frobisher, John Davis, Henry Hudson, and Jens Munk had begun to push west and north into the icy seas around Greenland in frail little sailing ships. They were looking for fame, furs, precious metals, and a shorter route to the Orient, andjust my hunchthey may also have been seeking adventure, which they got in spades. Of course, people were already living in the Arctic when Westerners got there. During the last ice age, unknown and unsung hunter-travelers had pushed across Siberia and entered what is now Alaska via the Bering Land Bridge, a continental link now submerged under the Bering Sea. They were probably looking for better hunting, but I fancy that curiosity about this new world may have been mixed in with more practical motives.

It wasn't just the land that got to me. The people who worked and chose to live in this harsh and difficult place intrigued me as well. My first encounters with arctic residents took place somewhere north of St. Lawrence Island. The Northwind was working its way through thick pack ice in misty weather when we came upon an umiak with four hunters in it. The skin boat seemed to materialize from between two ice floes. It ghosted alongside our white-painted steel hull, a tiny thing floating a good fifteen feet below our taffrail. We had a brief parley, then the hunters ghosted away, disappearing into the maze of icewhence they had come. The umiak was of traditional design and construction: walrus hide laced with gut thongs, but the hunters had mounted a 25-horse-power Evinrude motor on the back. Modern plastic orange floats lay in the bottom of the boat, alongside brass harpoons, modern rifles, and unruly coils of rope. For days the incongruous juxtaposition of steel and hide, harpoon and Evinrude, remained in my head.

A few days later at Nome we got a brief shore leave. I wandered out on the tundra where I was attacked by so many mosquitoes that I had to put my jacket over my face to be able to breathe. I twisted my ankle while trying to hike across a swampy field of tundra tussocks, getting soaked in the process. I climbed on a gold dredge built around 1910 and felt the polish that thousands of hands had imparted to the wooden stair railings. I participated in the annual Fourth of July raft racea drunken melee that finished near midnightmarveling that the sun was still streaming down on us so late at night. I wandered into a Front Street bar and drank with the locals. The weather, the waves, and the powerful land had already begun imperceptibly seeping into my soul until I knew that I needed to stay and learn more about this place. My initial attraction may have been a young man's desire for adventure but I sensed there was clearly more to be found in the Arctic if one could learn to look and listen.

I have spent most of the intervening years trying to do just that. Too often the histories and the novels I have read, the TV documentaries and movies I have seen, served up clich and myth, with two basic story lines dominating. One is the harsh-but-exquisite-wilderness story, wherein visitors are challenged by distance, blizzard, and mosquitoes, but are ultimately rewarded with beauty and solitude. The other is the bad-place-to-live story, in which arctic life is tough and darkness and isolation lead to madness, alcoholism, drug abuse, and violence. Neither story is wrong, but each misses what is to me a more compelling story: the interplay between a beautiful, frigid, and inhospitable land and its spirited people.