Before the Water Comes

Each night when I walk home or to the school, I breath in the icy breeze of the Ninglick River and smell that signature campfire scent from the steam baths* being prepared all over the village.

Sometimes I stand on the front porch of the school or at the house and look out at the rippling river and at the tundra, its tall grasses waving and reflecting light just like the water, and as I gaze at the village I feel a sense of comfort and sentimentality in knowing that this place is pretty much my whole world right now.

But as difficult as it might be to conceive and accept, this little piece of the world will disappear in just a few years. It’ll exist only as pieces of land and remnants of buildings resting silently under the surface of the salty sea.

At the shocking rate of sixty feet per year, the water inches closer to the village each day. Erosion and (do I dare say it?) global warming causing the permafrost to melt are reasons behind why the land is falling off into the river in massive chunks. I’ve never seen anything like it before, but it’s quite obvious to anyone living here that the village of Newtok is literally sinking.

One of the many downsides to this is that the natives don’t respect the environment in and on the outskirts of the village as much as they normally would. Because everything will be submerged in a matter of years and will be left behind in the big move, most people don’t care if there is trash lying around or if there are horribly broken boardwalks or if they dump their honey buckets* in the wrong places. Because they know they’ll soon never see this place again, keeping it clean is viewed as a waste of time.

A couple weeks ago, a neighbor and teacher friend of ours named Heidi, a gusuq* who’s married to a Native, mentioned her husband’s childhood memories of when the river wasn’t even visible from his home. So just about twenty years ago, I’d be looking out my kitchen window to the grassy tundra instead of to the river. The other day some teachers joked about hosting cross-country meets in Newtok before the water comes: “If we wait too long, we’ll have to pass out floaties to everyone as they get off the plane.” Although that would be an adventure, the village (all the people and as many homes that can be moved) will be transplanted to a spot on Nelson Island called Mertarvik, which is the promised land of rural Alaska compared to Newtok now. Kim will be here to witness and help in that slow and difficult process, but I’ll only be here long enough to soak in the end times of this piece of earth before it’s swept out to sea.

Last week a group of gusuqs came in from Anchorage to hold community meetings about “the move,” as everyone refers to it. There are booklets in the common areas at the school including honey bucket and water supply information for the new site, and there are posters on the walls with overall layouts of the moving plan. The Anchorage group met with some Newtok students and took notes on what the students would like to see in their new village, some of which included a Wal-Mart and a coffee shop. :). Mertarvik is already being prepared for everyone to make the move. So just like Laura Ingalls Wilder and hundreds of other pioneers hopped into their Conestoga wagons and found their way onto new pieces of land years ago, today in Alaska natives and teachers alike will soon hop into boats with all of their belongings and voyage across the river to a new piece of land they’ll call home.

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*Steam baths- the Yupiks use this traditional way of bathing instead of a normal shower or bath. Because of the lack of a plumbing system and plentiful clean water, they’ve discovered the best way to keep decent hygiene is to light wood or charcoal right in a room of the tiny building and bathe in the steam that collects in another room. It’s like a tiny yet very powerful sauna.

 *Gusuq – the Yupik name for white people. There’s no demeaning undertone to it; it’s just a title that the Eskimos have for us, and in turn, we call ourselves gusuq as well. There are 9 gusuq in the village right now.

*Honey buckets – Since there’s no real plumbing around here except for at the school, the homes either use electric incinolets or old fashioned bedpan type receptacles. The sewage is supposed to be dumped in a specific place to keep it away from the natural water sources and the ground that we could walk on, but because of the unhealthy habit of dumping them in the wrong places, some areas of the village are infested with E-Coli.

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Moose!

As I write this, out my kitchen window a couple of girls are pushing a wheelbarrow with a giant moose leg in it, the hoof stiffly sticking out like a third handle. They’re probably taking it home to butcher and share with their family and neighbors.

For Native hunters, it’s tradition and somewhat of a superstition to give away your first moose catch of the season. This act of generosity is supposedly good luck for the rest of the hunter’s hunting season, and of course there is only so much room in one family’s freezer for their own meat, so sometimes sharing is a necessity.

When we heard for the second time that a Native family had moose meat to give away, we grabbed a trash bag and ran down the boardwalk in our clunky rain boots to ask for a slab of whatever they could spare. Since our freezer went out in the summer and all the meat that Kim had in it was ruined, we were really hungry for some filling red meat. We climbed the stairs to the house, and they gladly invited us inside; on our walk in, I noticed dried fish* in the entryway and akutaq* in the arctic room.

This was in my first couple of weeks here, and I took in every detail of the living room piled full of Eskimos—grandparents, parents, kids, grandkids, adopted kids—sitting at the table, playing on the floor, laying on the couch, standing in the kitchen. They had many mouths to feed, yet they offered us some of the moose soup they had boiling on the stove. We took a small bowl and ate the Yupik staple, which was garnished with the proof of its freshness: a few brown moose hairs. We sat and talked for a few minutes as we ate, then we thanked them and left. We toted the moose meat home like a real treasure, feeling giddy as if we’d just won the lottery.

Maybe it’s just me, but the whole experience of cutting, cleaning and separating the huge hunks of meat (with a traditional Alaskan ulu knife, nonetheless!) makes the moose taste better in the end. The toil makes the meal a reward. My very first taste of moose meat was of a piece cut straight off a hairy hunk of moose that was shot that very morning and thrown onto a hot cast-iron skillet that afternoon. Once I got over the idea that I was eating Bullwinkle, I discovered that fresh moose is one of the most savory and delicious meats I’ve ever tasted. It is so fresh here that, no matter how you cook it, it stays juicy and tender. Its vague yet pleasant taste of liver mixed with the flavor and heartiness of red meat is just unbeatable. Our favorite ways to cook the moose are to make moose steak, moose casserole, moose sandwiches, moose roast, or moose fajitas. Some people grind the meat and make moose meatloaf, moose burgers, and even moose meatballs for spaghetti, but the most common way that the Natives prepare moose is moose soup (basically meat and water) because it’s cheap, it goes a long way, and it feeds a lot of people. The generosity of the Yupiks astounds me, and, like a piece of pilot bread* in moose soup, I’m soaking up more Eskimo culture every day.

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*Dried fish – this is a popular way to prepare/preserve fish. It’s eaten either as a snack or as a meal, and all the natives love it.

*Akutaq (pronounced like “aguda”) – Eskimo ice cream. It’s not frozen—it’s not even cold. It’s Crisco mixed with sugar, berries, and sometimes even raw fish. Yes, I’m serious.

*Pilot bread – Giant round cracker that’s dense and dry – they have a long shelf life, and they’re the Natives’ main source of carbohydrates.

Other foods that the Eskimos here eat are seal and seal oil, all kinds of fish (I tried halibut for the first time and fell in love), walrus, whale, bear, birds, muscox, caribou, and any berries that grow naturally in the tundra. Oh, and Crisco sandwiches (bread or pilot bread caked an inch high with Crisco).

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Fishing & Berry Picking

Even though I haven’t thrown caution to the wind and trekked deep, deep into the wild tundra like Kim is prone to do, I have been out a couple times, and I like the adventure of it and getting to see some real rural Alaska.

I remember thinking when I first got to Newtok that I might break my ankle or trip in a hole on the boardwalk, but that’s before I had experienced the other option: walking in water. My first day in the village I naively asked Kim after seeing the tall grass in the yards and off the boardwalks, “Do y’all ever mow?” I look back and laugh, now, seeing how uninformed I was about this place and this environment. But those first weeks were a time of transition and education, with lots of questions and curiosities. To my question about mowing, Kim smiled, “I doubt they’ve ever even seen a lawn mower,” and not only have they never seen a mower, but the ground is too wet and lumpy for it to work right, and even if it worked right, it would really be quite pointless. I looked out at the grassy “fields” those first couple days, and I imagined myself walking out on the beautiful meadow-like tundra, hair flowing in the wind like in a movie.

So Kim and I decided to go berry picking and fishing, and we walked out onto the tundra. I use the term “walked” lightly because it’s more like trudged, or sunk with each step on the marshy land. It was so painfully far from frolicking in a meadow that I was in a state of shock when my socks got wet (despite my sturdy rain boots) in the first five minutes. I guess I didn’t realize that when Kim talked about there being boardwalks here that it was absolutely necessary for survival and sanity that they have them. Every inch of the ground is spongy and sopping, and even the grassy areas are like mud pits because the permafrost is melting so the entire ground is supersaturated with water. This windy day, the suction of our rain boots against the ground was the only soundtrack to our adventure.

We stopped along the way to pick some of the berries that grow naturally out there, and we collected some in a container to take home, but we were on a specific mission: to catch fish the Eskimo way for dinner that night. We marched confidently into the unknown, searching for the right spot to set up camp. We plodded along the river’s edge, where Kim jumped from eroded land chunk to eroded land chunk like an energetic Luigi on Super Mario Brothers. I just struggled to keep my feet above ground. Little did I know that by the end of our trip we’d both be soaking wet up to our waists.

We found a good spot and threw down a tarp to lay our backpacks down. We climbed into the dirt bank right by the river’s edge, baited our hooks with some rotten pike fish out of the freezer (it’s all we had), and threw in our lines. Before we’d left home, we’d found a nice stick to use as a pole, carved a line around the circumference of the stick and tied fishing line to it, just like the Yupiks do sometimes. We tossed in our lines and waited patiently, watching the tide roll closer and closer every few minutes. After we saw we were having no luck, Kim waded into the freezing water with high hopes of catching a salmon with her bare hands. My frozen fingers clutched my stick, but my mind was elsewhere—dreaming of baked salmon or halibut for dinner.

But we didn’t catch any fish. We climbed out of the river bank, grabbing a few berries straight off of the ground with our teeth to feed our disappointed appetites before the journey home, where we would NOT be having fish for supper.

On the way home, we tried to take a short cut but ended up running into an unavoidable swamp, where we had no choice but to wade through the cold water. Falling, sinking, losing our boots, and laughing the whole way at our massive mistake, we finally made it near the boardwalk, where we laid exhausted on the ground like dead fish and laughed until we couldn’t breathe anymore.

I had never been happier to see the boardwalk. As I lay there on the ground recuperating from the exertion of walking on the tundra, I imagined myself on those shaky and broken boards—hair flowing in the wind, soft background music playing as I frolicked down the glorious boardwalk on my way home.

 

 

 

 

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Poker Night

Learning the difference between a strait and a flush or two pair and four of a kind can be a real challenge for someone who didn’t grow up playing cards all the time AND isn’t good with numbers. I’m more of a board game person or a truth-or-dare extraordinaire if there ever was one, but put me at a poker table and I will lose every penny I have.

One night each week, a teacher named Paula cooks snacks and invites some teachers over for a night of laughter and light gambling. As a poor college graduate with no career to speak of yet, I kind of refuse to play with my money because I’m so bad at it, but I do love to go for the company (ok you got me, and the snacks.)

What I love most about poker night is sitting back and watching (and sometimes joining in on) the teachers interacting like a family unit. We sit around the kitchen table in our socks and sweatpants, laughing and joking, trading poker chips back and forth with each game. They make up their own versions of poker games, bending rules and creating new ones.

Some of the teachers are from all over the Lower 48—from the odd places where coke becomes POP and where words like candy are pronounced with only two syllables. They all make fun of Kim and me for our southern drawl—our tendency to stretch two-syllable words into three syllable words (ca-un-dy). Some of the people around the table are native Eskimos, so their English has that very specific Yupik sound, and even their senses of humor add a diverse and interesting element to the night. Because the teachers live in such a tiny community and know each other so well, the familial dynamic is fun and comfortable.

It’s not just the accents and the humor; it’s the fact that each person is just so drastically different. We have the girly girl, the mother figure, the talkative one, the sporty one, the principal of the school, the awkward ones (no, not me this time), and then there’s the girl who said she’d never live in Newtok (yes, me). It’s amazing how families like these are born out of circumstance, and, as the newest outsider, I feel honored to be able to observe and experience this special kind of communal camaraderie for a few months. Even though my lack of poker skills will hopefully fade with time, I know the memories of these poker nights will never go away.