"Death is the mother of beauty"
Kotzebue, Alaska
August, 2003
[From July, 1972, through June, 1975, my wife and I lived and worked in Kotzebue, Alaska, a “large” (about 2,500 people) Inuit community on the northwest coast of Alaska, I as a physician, she as a high school teacher. We were, I hope I recall, active in the community and unpretentious, at least as active as an outside white (gussik) couple could be. We arrived childless and left with two children, the first having been adopted locally. We returned in 2003 when I was offered the opportunity to do some consulting work. This recollection was pieced together from my notes/diary.]
In mid-October, Kotzebue draws quiet cerements of white securely around her ribs, enshrouding the squalor of her life. Darkness, cold, and immobility encase her grime. But in summer her fetid carcass is stripped naked for all to see, stark on an ancient bed of blue berried tundra and glacial gravel.
The cost of keeping alive this corpse, gasping to remember her strangled traditions, is staggering, revolting, inevitable. Kotzebue exists, has existed for centuries, and by the grace of our endless tax bounties and everlasting guilt, shall exist until the money runs out.
This has not changed in the thirty years since we first arrived here, bumping across the Arctic Circle in a Wein 737, its forward compartments jammed with freight and spirits. In 1972 we were fresh and saw this place with enthusiastic eyes, not yet chilled by the mordant realities of the years to come. We left three years later, our time done, our expectations disenchanted. It was time to move on. Altruism was wearing thin, or its veneer simply rubbed off. It was a time out of hand and never the eutopia we'd dreamed. We took with us one of her children and one of our own, equally cherished, overlooked its filth, and vanished like all the other gussiks who'd ever walked her muddy streets; disappeared to the Outside, leaving too precious little of us as memory.
And now a quarter century later we are back. As guests. Honored guests and some remember us, because many people are decent no matter what goes on round about them, no matter how deep the mire. The skies, wet and sodden, then clearing to a sparkling Arctic blue, lingering late and warm into a noisy August evening, were as they ever were. The steady buzzzwhine of four-wheelers has replaced the steady buzz-whine of motorcycles, but otherwise the ev’nsound remains the same. Her still-lit midnight drunkenness continues unadulterated either by time or insight.
The pall of death hangs heavy over the dark and soggy verdure of her graveyard, its wooden markers tipsy in the burial earth. Alcohol, Disease, Violence, Trauma all play out their ceaseless masques. Where once these death plots were beyond the far edge of the village, near a peaceful lagoon, reminders of where the living would be well-advised not to go, now it carves through her like a scoliotic backbone, an awful and ever-present souvenir of her and our legacy.
Still, people cheat death in Kotzebue. Just last week John St. Germain and his Cessna 206 plucked Charles Foster from his ATV to which he'd had the foresight to lash himself with bungee cords as he and it were being washed down a flood-swollen creek and out into a four-foot sea. A mastodon-ivory scavenging trip with a friend which could have ended as just another freshly dug grave-there were eight last week-was averted only through the single-minded pluck of a lone and daring float pilot. Charon will have to wait another day to offer Foster passage.
But alcohol still claims its chosen, even though the village is no longer wet. Officially it's damp, alcohol eligible to be imported only for personal use. Bootlegging flourishes. Violence, Disharmony, Estrangement are its handmaidens, as they ever were. The police blotter rings a drunken toll of reckless drivers, comatose sleepers, lost toddlers outside homes moribund with drink; petty theft; public intoxication; breaking and entering; violation of curfew; violation of restraining orders. It was and will ever be.
The kind and sober still visit and laugh long into the evening, sharing stories and news and memories. Teachers and medical staff keep to their own kind, mostly, though not all. Young love still blossoms. Is there progress in the overlarge hospital bought by Senator Stevens with obscene amounts of outside earmarked money? Is there progress with the eleven doctors of uncertain longevity when once there were but one or two or three, each committed for years of service? Is there progress with a well-appointed hotel which charges more for one night's room than most can scrounge in a month from the sea and the hills, affordable only by the tourists and the expense-accounted? The ramshackle Wein Hotel is boarded up now and derelict. Is there progress with the three mostly Korean-operated restaurants, where there was once not a single one? Is there progress in the Machiavellian maneuverings of the native-run school boards, enforcing their unrealistic mandates and closely held agendas? The DEW Line complex on the bluffs south of town, unnecessary for years, has long been dismantled and hauled away. This is the age of the Air Force babies, as they call them, now 30-somethings, running the city, or living off it, depending. Is any of this progress? It's hard to know.
But over and under and all throughout, all of it, all remains the same. The money, ah the money. They even sell their land allotments now, earthly parcels whose sacred stewardship had once been entrusted to The People. The construction, the zoning-free housing projects, the abandoned shacks left to weather unconcernedly, the roads now paved, the well-appointed schools, the bursting graveyard, the cable-connected computer terminals in the houses, the yards littered with rusting scraps and broken snowmachines and souring, barely bagged garbage, the professionally managed museum, the three daily jet flights to Anchorage operating down a 24-hour-strobe-lighted runway have not yet and can never erase what remains of Kotzebue's savage squalor.
She awaits impatiently the equinoctial change from rain to snow to invest her in the annual funereal shroud of winter, hoping finally for the fulfilment to her dreams/And her desires.
[The title and the concluding words are from Wallace Stevens' poem, Sunday Morning, 1915, ll. 63-65.]
Jay Caldwell
5 February 2009
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