Arctic Ignorance and Bliss

“How dare you stand up and talk about something when you’ve never been there. Shame on you.”

--Alaska Rep. Don Young, speaking on the floor of Congress Wednesday in favor of Arctic oil drilling.

Well, I’ve been there. For two summers, short, soaring, bittersweet summers, I worked there.

Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is about the size of Ireland. But it is entirely unlike Ireland or anywhere else. It is a charmed place, because we have been selfless enough to let it live. We deemed it important. One corner of our vast but crowded continent remains wild, no qualifiers.

I was a boatman for Alaska wilderness guide Macgill Adams. We took tourists in groups of half a dozen or so down the rivers of this refuge, floating in rafts north out of the Brooks Range mountains into the epic flatness of the coastal plain and onward toward the Beaufort Sea.

Cold Julys. Funnel clouds of mosquitoes. Two grizzly bears on a hilltop in the throes of ursine passion. A caribou calf on wobbly legs lacking the courage to cross a river and being left behind by the relentless migration. A forlorn musk ox prancing toward a mate to discover he had found only a tent.

I remember the sound. The sound of a bush plane growling down a sandbar and vanishing over a ridgeline, the gasoline noise giving way to the tremble of wind on the eardrums in this land where there are no trees to rustle the breeze and no one to hear your cries for help. The sound of wild.

To enter this land is to intrude. It is as fragile as a snowflake. Prehistoric fire rings are so fresh you might be tempted to touch the tundra and feel for the fading heat of 1,000-year-old campfire.

I felt the remorse of a trespasser, but I entered anyway. Maybe if I could help others experience it, they would add to the constituency to hang on to it. That’s what I told myself.

I remember the animals. A foggy day when I awoke and looked out the mesh of my tent into the eyes of a white wolf. Our gazes locked and the white vapors of our breaths touched. Then he bolted and tripped. I felt embarrassed for his momentary loss of pride. There will never be virtual reality to evoke the sensation of being surrounded by grizzlies: two in front, one to our left, one to our right, one behind us. What do we do when this happens? Shrink down into the mushy tundra and rejoice in our grand good fortune. But rejoice quietly, for the grizzlies are feeding.

I remember the vista. From the 1,000-foot summit of the last foothill of this continent: a shocking landscape. Plains, uninterrupted from horizon to horizon. Hundreds of miles and 180 degrees of Nothing.

There is nothing like Nothing when there is almost none of it left. There is nothing like Nothing for imagining everything. There is nothing so profoundly humbling as beholding the last of Nothing.

Now the House of Representatives has voted to kill it. No, not the animals. The caribou will survive. The wolves and the grizzly bears will too for a while, although the industrialization will open the way for more hunters, more preemptive “predator control,” a faster race to the end. But the first to die, what they will kill in a single summer, is the wild.

The screech of machinery, the dust trails of trucks, the glint of midnight sun off acres of aluminum buildings, this will be our giant fire ring to signal the end.

My friend who drives an SUV tells me she has her reasons and won’t give it up. Her choice will bequeath her daughter, and mine, a diminished future.

Memories will replace reality, and memories are only chump change. At least I have a few pennies of it.

If this administration gets its way in the Senate, my daughter will climb into my lap in a couple of years and ask me what is jingling in my pocket. I’ll draw out the pennies. I will tell her about the home of the snarling wolverine and the den of the foxes and the pond nests of the loons and the sky dance of the jaegers and the flitting song of a rare bluethroat thrush. I will tell her that George Bush and Dick Cheney and Don Young took that from her for pennies of their own.

“It is the least hospitable area left in America,” explained Don Young recently. He was too stupid to understand what he said.