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Bowhead whale skull outside the mayor's office. |
| Photos by Sarah Alban |
I’m a huge Moby Dick fan, so when I flew up to Barrow this weekend I had one agenda: find whales. Whale bones, baleen, whale meat, live whales, whalers, whaling boats. All of it. I wanted to immerse myself in the culture of Melville’s world and, for the better part of two days, I did. (That’s almost all you can do in Barrow.)
You get off the plane and the first thing that strikes you is that there seems to be nothing to do. In the middle of July, the town is covered in a brown, puddly mud from the melting tundra and temperatures linger at a balmy 30-something degrees. A body from the Lower 48—or even Anchorage—is probably going to want a winter coat. (Local preschoolers still play outside in shorts at night, so you’re bound to feel slightly shown-up.)
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My father—a 50-something-year-old with a low cold tolerance and an expectation I’d dragged him up here in order to experience the glorious Alaska Vacation—became bored out of his skull after a few hours. “What are we going to do here?” he said. I tried to explain the attraction of the sea, the pull of being in a town where you didn’t have to do anything besides put yourself outside of your comfort zone and let a culture nearly untouched scoop you up, but I’m not sure he bought my pitch. The locals didn’t help, in that respect. He’d ask the waitress at Osaka’s, a sushi joint, what there was to do for two days, and she’d say, contemplatively, “Nothing.” The same happened with the hotel manager, the taxi driver and nearly everyone, really. The town agreed it had nothing to offer, but I think they’re just habituated. I was having a blast.
The village seems virtually unmonitored. Of course, Barrow has a police station, but I saw officers in action only when they were dealing with domestic affairs. As tourists, we walked around unbothered. (I expect the whole town knew exactly who and where we were during our entire stay, but they let us remain under an illusion of total remoteness.) We walked the shoreline and climbed on mounds where an Eskimo family had once lived, and died. We played inside a giant bowhead skull at the mayor’s office and crossed over to a muddy street where villagers had set out a slab of blubber to freeze. I ran a finger across a smelly, retired seal-skin boat and read tombstones in a cemetery whose most striking indication a coffin had been buried was not a tombstone but rather the melted, sunken tundra around the tombstone. (By the way, a creepy effect of a melted-tundra cemetery is that you have to treat the mounds as stepping stones to one another in order to avoid treading in puddles.) The cemetery is also the only place in the village where flowers grow in any noticeable quantity.
By the end of the first day, the horizon had generated a thin, white line from east to west, separating the silvery blue ocean from the gray sky. Since trees don’t grow in the tundra, nothing obstructed our view. The line ran seemingly forever, circling us, and even though the North Pole was about 1,100 miles away, I still felt as if I was at the top of the world.
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This retired whaler from Barrow carves bones and baleen. |
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The upshot of visiting a place where villagers have nothing to do is that everyone is willing to stop and talk to you, and perhaps even drive you around for free if you make a friend. They will condense their life stories into 10 minutes for you, as you will for them. In some cases, as in ours, you’re astonished to find someone who has lived in your hometown in the Lower 48, and equally astonished to meet a birdwatcher from faraway Kenya with a British accent. The top of the world is a place that draws a particular crew, and with nothing to do you get to retreat back to the basic questions. Who are you? Where do you come from? What brought you here? There is, in Barrow, indeed nothing to do, except indulge in the primitiveness of ourselves.
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| Barrow's night sky. |
Sarah Alban is an editorial intern at Alaska magazine.