Surfacing Read online

  ‘You the new teacher?’ one of them asked me, a soft-spoken Yup’ik woman with a shopping bag. ‘No? We’re expecting a new teacher.’

  The other was a white man, an electrician going out to do a little work on a new school, and, he said, a lot of fishing.

  The pilot had long red hair tied in a loose bun with a biro stuck through it. In the plane she readied herself, then half turned in her seat.

  ‘You guys definitely going Quinhagak? Just checking! Okay. There’s emergency supplies in the back.’

  The plane shuddered into life, rolled along, took off and immediately we were soaring over miles of emerald green and moss green, yellowish patches with coppery tints, here and there a smudge of purple, which was fireweed. Below the shuddering wing I saw narrow rivers with gravel banks lined by willows, melt-pools and creeks. At seven hundred feet we were low enough to see a line of moose tracks traversing a mudbank. Two white dabs were tundra swans. We flew over expanses of grey moss. When the plane tilted, and the horizon reared at the window, I saw the most flat and uninhabited landscape I had ever beheld.

  The delta was barely a landscape at all; more like a waterscape into which some land had been released. Or land, through which water has been introduced, enough to make the land appear to float. It was both at once, a visual pun. A cold draught, worryingly cold, found its way in through the door at my elbow; the whole plane seemed to shiver. I looked down past the wing, hoping there might be animals down there. Caribou. Wolves.

  After forty minutes the light ahead brightened as we neared the sea, and the village appeared as a prickle of telegraph poles, a telecoms mast, three wind turbines. Then we were descending, then bumping along a gravel-topped airstrip that appeared to be in the middle of nowhere.

  When the propeller had whined down, the pilot jumped out to open our door. I clambered down onto the gravel, only slightly queasy. It was mid-afternoon, and silent. There seemed to be nothing and no one around but a lonely shed, and a sign which read ‘Quinhagak – elevation 35 feet.’ The light cascaded down from the whole sky. A ravishing, energising light.

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  For some time before this, years actually, whenever the chance arose, I’d been poking around museums on the east coast of the UK, looking at Inuit articles. If I found myself in Whitby, Dundee, Aberdeen, Peterhead, Stromness – wherever the nineteenth-century whaling ships sailed from, heading for the northern ice – I’d look in the local museum. Often enough, for good or ill, the whalers made contact with Inuit people, and bartered for curiosities to bring home. Not only objects – more than one live polar bear travelled south, and even Inuit people, persuaded or in some cases abducted. In Stromness there are snow goggles, and amulets in the shape of seals. In Aberdeen there are actual sealskin kayaks, slender and responsive. So much wit and knowing in the materials, and all the materials are natural, of course. I like them because they suggest a powerful relationship with the non-human world.

  In Aberdeen University’s museum I met a young curator called Jenny Downes and she went one step further. She said, if you’re interested in Arctic or sub-Arctic artefacts, you ought to meet Rick Knecht. He’s an archaeologist. He’s working on a Yup’ik site in Alaska.

  I had never heard the name ‘Yup’ik’ before. ‘Inuit,’ yes. ‘Iñupiat,’ almost. But not ‘Yup’ik.’ All are indigenous peoples of the circumpolar north.

  Yes, said Jenny. You should meet Rick.

  It was a sort of blind date. When I returned to Aberdeen, there was no mistaking Dr Knecht in the university foyer. Spot the Alaskan. Rick was sixty, burly, bearish, with a bushy grey beard; he wore baggy pants and a thick-checked shirt with a fisherman’s waistcoat. When he spoke I had to listen hard, not least because of the place names, strange to me, but also because he’s a bit shy at first and tends to mumble into his beard. It was Rick who told me about Quinhagak, the village and its river, and its extraordinary archaeological site. The site is called Nunallaq. (‘Huh?’ its people would chide me later. ‘Try again.’ The double ‘ll’ is in the Welsh manner, or a Scots ‘ch.’ The ‘q’ resembles the cluck of a contented hen.) ‘Nunallaq’ simply means ‘Old Village.’ It teeters at the edge of the tundra a couple of miles down the beach from the modern village.

  Rick showed me photographs. The beach is a straight, mile-long strip of dark sand. Facing the sea is a wall of tundra just two or three metres high. Because sea levels are rising fast, this tundra is eroding quickly; every day clods of earth and vegetation fall to the sand to be washed away. And, because the permafrost is melting, the land is losing its grip on itself, the more ready to surrender to the sea.

  It was the sea, pawing at this wall of tundra, which exposed the buried village. The Quinhagak people had learned that, if they came to this part of the beach, they’d likely find artefacts freshly tumbled out of the earth: line weights, harpoon heads, jewellery, wooden arrow-shafts, fishing weights, darts, models of animals, even ceremonial dance-masks, ritually broken after use. All made by knowing hands from caribou antler, wood, stone, walrus ivory, grass. For generations the frozen earth had held these objects fast, like charms in a Christmas cake, but now the objects were falling to the seashore to be washed away for good.

  The people knew what they were finding. They were Yup’ik things, their own ancestors’ tools and adornments from pre-contact times, before Europeans arrived, before Christian missionaries came sailing upriver. Although the Nunallaq village site is only five hundred years old, it represents a time when the Yup’ik were hunter-gatherers and fended for themselves, when they did just fine.

  So much was being lost that heartfelt, difficult conversations ensued among elders and community leaders. Some folk refused point blank to interfere with the dead and the possessions of the dead. Others implored. Please, they said. It’s for the young. The young know nothing about their Yup’ik culture, their own inheritance. Please let us call in archaeologists, before it’s too late. We know an archaeologist who will help.

  Before he came to Scotland, Rick had lived in Alaska for thirty years. He was the founding director of the Alutiiq Museum and Repository in Kodiak, and founding director of the Museum of the Aleutians in Unalaska. And now he was teaching in Scotland. By the time we met, the dig was in its fifth season, and all the finds that had come out of the site were stored in Aberdeen. Everything, even the mud, airfreighted halfway round the world.

  In a room at the end of a university corridor, Rick began opening fridges, cupboards and drawers. He showed me labrets, huge plugs that men wore in their lips or cheeks, and a multitude of ‘dolls’ – flat sticks with faces carved on, just three lines that could express everything from merriment to agony.

  Rick said, ‘Sometimes you’re cleaning a stick and you turn it over and whoa! there’s a face looking at you. Real subtle, like someone hiding in the woods.’

  Not that they had woods there on the delta. Only driftwood, washed ashore or borne downriver from the interior. And no metal. Although the new site was only five hundred years old, it revealed a hunter-gatherer culture, a survival of the Paleolithic.

  He told me that the dig was revitalising traditional skills which had been lost, that local people were so interested in the rediscovered artefacts that they were making replicas, and that meant relearning old techniques – ivory carving, for example. That was the point. Although the dig had turned out to be rich beyond imagining, it wasn’t a treasure hunt; it was rebuilding a whole culture lost to colonialism, to missionary zeal.

  Excavation could only take place across the short, bug-ridden weeks of high summer, when the land thawed. It had a few more years left to run before the funding expired. For now, the finds were here in Aberdeen, to be cleaned, preserved and catalogued. Some were being researched by PhD students.

  At the end of the excavation, however, there would be a great return. All the thousands of artefacts would go home to the Yup’ik land wh
ere they belonged, legally and morally. They must and would go home. But, before that could happen, there had to be a place there to receive them, a museum or repository. That was a challenge. Quinhagak was a Yup’ik village, and not blessed with museum-quality buildings.

  I saw more photos, this time of rain-soaked archaeologists, both white and Yup’ik, smiling as they held out the latest finds in muddy hands. They were all volunteers, students mostly, who had been promised ‘an archaeological adventure by the Bering Sea’. The students saved their money and made the trip, about a dozen or fifteen of them at a time. The photographs showed the sea shining in the background. Or tundra – miles of it. Miles on miles.

  That night I took the train home again. They filled my mind, these Yup’ik objects. The dig was revitalising a damaged culture, Rick had said. Developing resilience and confidence, he’d said.

  At home I pulled out the atlas, found the sixty degree line, followed it a long way west. Then I emailed. Could I go? If I paid my way, like the students? Maybe write something about it, this place I’ve never heard of, this archaeological adventure by the Bering Sea?

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  * * *

  The ravishing light. I shielded my jet-lagged eyes and saw a grey beat-up minibus driving onto the runway. Soon, we three passengers were ushered into it. The driver of the minibus was called Darren. Darren’s accent was American, but not quite, there was a slowness to it. He said, yes he’d always lived here, and would never move.

  ‘It’s peaceful. We got everything we need.’

  On the left from the bus windows, I saw faraway mountains. On the right we passed a lopsided shed with a broken-down lorry outside. Darren drove around potholes, then came the first pitched-roofed cabins, up on stilts. Everything in the village looked like it had been built in the last twenty-five years. Tatty, untidy, but newish.

  ‘How long has the village been here, Darren?’

  ‘Well,’ said Darren, ‘we don’t know much about our ancestors. But the elders say there’s been a settlement here for thousands of years. Why go anywhere else?’

  ‘I remember,’ he went on, ‘when I was young, an elder saying – Why go anyplace? We got what we need here. Living off the land. We’ve got the river, salmon, trout. Fresh water ... but winter was bad.’

  ‘Bad, meaning...?’

  ‘No snow. We were travelling in boats and four-wheelers all winter. Same last year too. And then April, May, June were too hot.’

  The woman agreed.

  ‘There were fires out on the tundra,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah, the tundra was so dry. Then lightning! We had a lot of lightning. The lightning set the tundra on fire.’

  ‘That’s not common?’ I asked.

  ‘Not common. The smoke, the fumes was getting bad.’

  We made one turn into a grey gravel road lined by tilting telegraph poles that cast wires forward and back. Towards us came four-wheelers, driven at speed by dark-haired, windswept drivers. The road passed cabins raised on stilts, and soon we stopped to set down my fellow passenger, the woman who had flown across the tundra with nothing more than a shy smile and a shopping bag. Her house was one of these weather-blasted cabins, raised up with stairs to the entrance. Every cabin seemed scoured and broken-paned, which shows what winter does. Were it not for the glorious light, it would have been dismal.

  At a big school that was part building site, the electrician got out and said goodbye.

  ‘You with the archaeologists?’ asked Darren. ‘I’ll take you to the red building.’

  He stopped in front of a big metal-clad hangar. It too was jacked up on wooden stilts. A ramp and stairs led up to its doors. The building was indeed rust red, except for a blue sign high on its wall which read ‘Qanirtuuq Incorporated, Quinhagak, Alaska’ with a logo which showed a circle quartered by crossed harpoons. Each quarter showed a different creature: seal, salmon, caribou, bear.

  A huge, red, windowless shed.

  ‘Is this it?’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, you just go right on up.’

  I made to cross the road but stopped quick because a four-wheeler was racing along with a whole family aboard: mum, several kids and granny. Granny was being towed in a trailer, reclining on a sort of chaise longue. She was wearing a purple anorak, a purple knitted hat and shades. Everyone clasped a plastic tub, and a dog ran panting along behind. It was summer, berry-picking time, so Rick had said. Hence the tubs. The driver waved, and I waved back.

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  * * *

  Soon I learned that this ‘red building,’ where Darren had left me, had been the supermarket before a newer, even bigger one was built nearby. I don’t know if I expected the village to have a supermarket, but I was making an effort not to expect anything. The red building was now the village hall, but for the high summer weeks of the dig the Quinhagak people, via the village council, hand it over to the archaeologists for use as a base camp, refectory, social hub, laboratory. The building was white inside, and because there were no windows electric strip lights were always switched on. In there, you could almost forget about the sky and sunlight and tundra outside.

  In the body of the room were set out two long plastic-topped trestle tables. On every horizontal surface, a laptop was being charged. There was Wi-Fi, Facebook. Wooden trays of bones and sticks lay on the floor to dry.

  A grocery store. Wi-Fi. I was beginning to hear Rick’s droll humour in his phrase ‘Alaskan wilderness.’ There was even a cook, thank god, the calm and cheerful Cheryl, whose domain was a stove and some worktops, and couple of huge fridge-freezers. Her job was to turn out breakfast and evening meals for the two dozen archaeologists and hangers-on like myself. Every morning I’d hear her on her cell phone, calling heaven knows where to have supplies flown in.

  Because I’d arrived mid-afternoon, and everyone else was down on site and wouldn’t be back for hours, it was Cheryl who greeted me and showed me where I’d sleep. A dash back across the road from the red building stood a grey Quonset hut, which is an American Nissen hut. It had been fitted out with rooms off a corridor, each with bunk beds roughly knocked together out of two-by-fours. It got filthy with mud from the site and the sanitation was limited – the village was in the midst of installing a piped water and sewerage system. But Rick told me later the Quonset hut was far better than the tents the diggers had had to use for the first couple of seasons, at the edge of town, what with the bugs and bears.

  Again, electric lights burned all day. But in the corridor of the Quonset hut was a wolf-skin, draped over a sack barrow. Its fur was thick, pale honey-coloured. The moment Cheryl left me, I thrust my hand into the wolf-fur and my hand immediately began to warm. I lifted the pelt and smelled it. The wolf’s muzzle was intact, pointed like a mask. One could wear it, and look out at the world through a wolf’s eyes. That was tempting. A sign of the surrounding wild.

  The diggers work long days, taking advantage of the midsummer light. It was past seven o’clock before a beat-up yellow station wagon and a couple of four-wheelers brought the crew home. Two dozen muddy youngsters discharged themselves up the stairs and into the red building, bringing chatter and mud and bucketsful of earth and wood and all the day’s finds. An excited puppy gambolled amongst them but was soon ejected, for fear he’d chew the old bones.

  I’d met Rick several times since that first winter afternoon in Aberdeen and here he was, in his element. Melia his wife was here too. Melia is herself a museum curator in Aberdeen but she was taking a busman’s holiday, joining Rick on site and assisting with the finds. No one had imagined how many finds there would be at Nunallaq, how much cataloguing and preserving would be required. I was glad to see Melia. She is a few years younger than her husband, and a good naturalist. Another Alaskan, when they met she was working in a fish canning factory, but they discovered a shared love for archaeology. It was she who had taken me under her wing when I had determined to
come to Quinhagak. She was small and bustling, happy in the backwoods.

  Melia had brought her telescope, and on my first evening she offered to walk with me through the village and down to the river to look for birds. I wondered at first if it was alright for us, strangers and non-Yu’pik, to ramble about the village like this, but everyone knew the archaeologists were in town. People smiled and the umpteen dogs all seemed friendly enough.

  We walked the few gravel-topped streets. Between the cabins were sheds, wrecked snowmobiles, driftwood, sometimes garbage, sometimes whalebones, empty lots with stagnant water and trash, grasses and wildflowers. As we went, Melia explained about the stilts, which made the buildings look skittish, and all the junk: it was because of permafrost. Nothing could be buried. Even the shiny new sewage pipes were propped above ground, and insulated to keep their heat in. If a warm structure lay in direct contact with the ground, the ground would soon melt and heave, causing the structure to collapse.

  As for the junk, there was nowhere for anything to go. ‘Landfill’ is impossible. The wrecked snowmachines and oil drums, discarded bikes and satellite dishes stay just where they are. If they get buried at all, it’s by snow.

  A man in a singlet was sitting up on his doorstep, smoking a cigarette. As we passed, he pointed to the telescope and called, ‘You bird-lovers? Huh, I’m a bird-killer! A hunter, yeah. But d’you know the best thing in my life? My grandchildren, yeah.’

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