KIVALINA, Alaska — Our journey above the Arctic Circle ended much as it began, on an icy runway pounded by wind and what felt like a dangerous kind of bone-deep cold.
My fiancé Tom and I stamped tingling feet and watched the sun rise as we waited for the small airplane to take us back to Fairbanks via Kotzebue. We had risen early and lugged our heavy gear on our shoulders from one end of the village to a dark warehouse next to the runway. Flight details were sketchy. There was no roster displayed anywhere, no homeland security checkpoint, no person to tell us we were in the right place and when to board. This time, there were no villagers on ATVs or snowmobiles to show us the way. There were only a couple bulldozers scraping drifting snow around the building.
We weren’t sure how long we would need to wait outside in weather with a windchill factor that felt well below zero. After 15 or 20 minutes exposed to the wind, I’d lost feeling in my feet and hands. My legs felt numb. I had wrapped my cameras and computer in sweaters to help keep them warm. We didn’t want to miss the plane, but there was also the creeping suspicion that we might freeze to death out here if we didn’t take shelter.
Five more minutes, I kept thinking.
We fell into silence, processing the trip and the people we’d met. We did not really know what we were going to encounter when we arrived in Kivalina. There had been a humble, earnest quality to the all-night singing and testifying beneath the fluorescent lights at the Episcopal church. The singing style had been different than religious music I’d heard in other parts of the country. There were four-part harmonies and call and response I’d heard before, but there was also a unique vocal quality that reminded me of throat singing. I’d noticed many native singers here moved their lips very little when they sang.
Those who testified seemed genuinely grateful for what God had given them. We were struck by their generosity, both in their public testimony of faith but also in their hospitality toward us. The Rev. Bessie Titus, who often flies between villages to perform ceremonies, had filled me in on the generosity of native people, about how even if they had nothing else they would try to feed you. And she had been right.
In the Rev. Anna Frank, Andrew Koenig, and Lucy S. Adams, we met people whose Episcopal faith was tinged with their native values. They were all, in a way, liminal -- between worlds. There was Anna, a native and a leader in the Episcopal church, but also a woman working in what is in many areas still a very male environment, where God has a gender and the faithful have specific ideas of who should deliver God’s message. There was Andrew, a hunter who sees himself as a Job-like figure and whose native stories didn’t seem all that different to me from those in the Bible. And, finally, there was Lucy, the keeper of disappearing traditions, knowledge, and language, straddling the modern and the traditional worlds. All were people of faith, struggling as the rest of the world is with questions of identity and how one relates across time to the concrete and mysterious world around them.
People, for the most part, had seemed as curious about us as we were about them. Where did we live? What were we doing? Where had we been? One young girl was amazed that I owned a horse. There were no horses in Kivalina, no horses that far north.
Early one morning, after filming an all-night church service, we walked up the school steps to find a tall teenage boy standing next to the door on a window ledge in the freezing weather, fingering what looked like a computer game. He was picking up the school’s open wireless connection, so he could talk on instant message with his friends.
There was no getting away from the tension between native traditions and modern innovations and problems, even here so far away from the large cities. It had been present in the dress – Nikes and mukluks and fur-lined Eskimo parkas next to L.L. Bean-style coats. Many families, Lucy S. Adams said, had single women raising children. There was substance abuse and physical abuse, despite also a vibrant spiritual sense. Technologically seemed to have given some homes satellite TV on big screen TVs but not running water. There was intermittent wireless in the school but none of our cellular phones worked. There was poverty and a different sensibility about asking for help. Some villagers sought us out, wanting to sell us crafts. It wasn’t uncommon for kids to appear by our sides, asking for candy or cash.
Kivalina seemed like a place of great faith but also a place of great need. I was reminded that cultures and religions never exist in a vacuum. It was set against an exotic backdrop, but the people here struggled with many of the same questions and factors as other places I’ve visited.
Eventually, the plane landed and taxied to a stop in front of us. Our bags were thrown in the back, and we climbed aboard. This time, the ride was smooth and perfect. The plane lifted easily, climbed sharply, then swung around toward the village of Kotzebue. Beneath a thin haze, Kivalina was a fat tear-drop of buildings amid the vast ice. I thought of all the people down there, of children filling up the classroom we’d slept in, of CBs crackling with morning greetings, of a child I’d seen carrying a book bag on her way to school on the back of a snowmobile. About this time, the men and women who had been in church were getting up, starting the day. They were going about their lives. And so were we.
I pressed my face to the glass and watched the village grow smaller and smaller, until it finally disappeared.
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