Wendy napping among tundra flowers on the coastal plain .
Malkolm’s Connection
We canoed down the Porcupine River to the remote Gwich’in community of Old Crow when Malkolm was six. Gwich’in elders told us that they have lived with the Porcupine caribou herd for more than 12,000 years. They have struggled for decades to protect the caribou calving grounds in the Arctic Refuge.
In 1999 our family traveled across the US giving presentations about the Arctic Refuge. We bought Malkolm a field guide. He studied birds as we drove from slide-show to slide-show. He saw Purple Gallinules in the Everglades and Pileated Woodpeckers in Georgia – he was hooked.
When Malkolm was twelve we flew to the Arctic Refuge because Malkolm wanted to search for a Bluethroat – a tiny thrush that migrates from Asia. Ten days and 100 hiking miles later we finally found a Bluethroat. We made our adventure into a film: Malkolm the Birder Boy – Quest for the Bluethroat. In the film, Malkolm explains the importance of the Arctic Refuge from a young person’s point of view.
Your Connection
Birds fly to the Arctic Refuge from five continents and through every US state. Yellow Warblers fluttering north through New Mexico could be flying towards the Canning River. A Tundra Swan lifting off from Chesapeake Bay might soon land on a tundra pond near the Beaufort Sea. We are all connected when we see one of the 194 bird species known to visit the Arctic Refuge.
Jimmy Carter, the 39th US President understands: . . . whenever I see a beautiful bird heading north in the spring, it’s reassuring to know there are protected areas such as the Arctic Refuge where these winged creatures can safely nest to create future generations. May their northern birthplace remain truly wild and free (from the book Arctic Wings).
Ken's Connection
My first trip to the Arctic Refuge was the beginning of a 1000-mile wilderness trip that took almost four months. I started in the calving grounds on the coastal plain and ended up in Old Crow. Part of the time I traveled alone. Periodically I met up with friends including a herd of whacky musicians who created a beautiful music to go with the photos I was taking. It was the beginning of our slide-show and video tours that eventually went to more than 30 states (and isn't finished yet!).
The following passage is from my book Under the Arctic Sun. I'm in the calving grounds with Glen Davis, a prominent Canadian funder who has helped many Canadian conservationists with their work.
Glen and I haul our gear towards a flat camping area near the river. As I drop my first load I’m distracted by movement on the tundra, two dozen female caribou with a couple of babies. Two dozen cows and calves. I don’t know which biologist thought that it was an honor to name wild caribou (and moose and elk) after dull-witted cattle. These wild creatures have a glint in their eyes and a spring in their stride that haven’t been seen in white-faced prairie maggots since before they were domesticated and bred to be wider than they are tall.
These caribou have been drifting towards the calving grounds since April. Biologists call this the “spring migration,” although their journey isn’t triggered by blooming cherry blossoms. Blizzards lash the northern Yukon and Alaska through April and May and temperatures can drop to minus forty. Despite the weather, something, perhaps the lengthening of daylight hours or changes in the snow cover, whispers to the caribou that it is time. The pregnant females are the first to move. They struggle through deep, crusty snow. They swim rivers thick with drifting ice. They cross mountain passes and run from wolf packs and hunker down while storms turn them into lumpy snowdrifts.
Barrenground caribou migrate farther than any other land mammal. Each year the caribou in the Porcupine Herd wander nearly three thousand miles from the coastal plain to the far reaches of their winter range and back again. The females near our camp are coasting now. They’ve reached their goal, the place of their own birth. A few lay down to rest, but soon they are back on their feet, too restless to linger in one spot.
I walk through the willows to watch the caribou cross the river. The water is swollen with snowmelt but clear, with just a hint of glacial green. While I’m waiting, I kneel down, lower my lips to the water and drink. The water is numbingly cold, but I can deal with that as long as there is no worry about hepatitis or giardia or PCBs. A land with drinkable water is a land worth fighting for. I hear the clatter of hooves on gravel. The lead caribou steps into the river. She doesn’t realize that most of the world’s fresh water is undrinkable industrial soup. She doesn’t realize that the soup is boiling over and the toxic froth is creeping northwards. I’m not going to be the one who tells her.
She walks into the water until she is chest deep and the swift current sweeps her off her hooves. She is naturally buoyant. Every one of her hairs is hollow and acts as a slender life jacket. She swims strongly, propelled by her hoofed “toes” that splay out like paddles. The remainder of the caribou splash into the river behind her. One of the calves is tiny, only hours old and facing its first swim. It plunges in after its mother without hesitation, but the current washes it downstream like a big brown cork. Its mother races along the far bank, grunting and bobbing her head up and down. Finally the calf touches bottom and clambers onto the tundra with a flurry of spray. I take a last drink of water (that has a faint aftertaste of caribou) and walk back to camp.
“You ready for dinner yet? I’m starving.” I upend a duffel bag and pour a jumble of zip-lock food bags on the gravel bar.
“Whatever,” says Glen. “I’ll set up the tent. Hey, guess what time it is in the land of the midnight sun?”
“Don’t tell me! I don’t want to know. One of the great things about being in the wilderness is not having to watch the clock.”
“It’s one in the morning.”
“Thanks,” I say sarcastically. “Now I know why I’m hungry.”
“I knew that deep down you wanted to know the time.”
Since the nearest tree is hundreds of miles to the south, a cooking fire is not an option. I pull the stove from its bag, spit on the metal plug at the end of the fuel line and wriggle it into the pump assembly on the fuel bottle. The saliva, which acts as a lubricant, is the only thing natural about this operation. I pump the stove, open the valve and watch as white gas dribbles into a metal ring. I flick a lighter and flames engulf the stove. After a minute of fiery priming, the stove splutters and hisses with wheezy fossil fuel respirations. The noise and smell of technology makes the wilderness feeling retreat, like darkness disappearing when you flick on flashlight. I can no longer hear the white-crowned sparrow singing in the willows or the shrill chatter of the ground squirrel down by the river.
Heat waves distort the air above the pot, like mirage lines rising from sun-baked pavement. It’s my latest contribution to climate change. I’m out here in the middle of somewhere, in the heart of the calving grounds of the Porcupine Caribou Herd, because I’m convinced that Big Oil should keep its toxic footprints out of the Arctic Refuge. Meanwhile I’m cooking over a gas stove.
I wish I could anesthetize my brain and forget life’s contradictions. Others manage to. Even at some wilderness conferences nowadays they pin plastic name tags on their shirts, drink coffee from styrofoam cups and eat pasta salad on throw-away plates with plastic forks. I’m a rebel who brings my own mug, but then again, I don’t consider myself a real environmentalist.
Environmentalists work more than I do. They understand the deep inner life of GIS mapping, endangered species legislation and conservation biology. They organize meetings in Toronto, Seattle and Rio de Janeiro. They amass thousands of air miles points so they can go to more meetings. They write proposals when they should be sleeping. They write proposals when they should be canoeing. They spend so much time under artificial lights they look like mushrooms. Maybe I’ll be one when I grow up, but not right now.
Right now I’m too busy rationalizing. Too busy compromising. I turn the thermostat so low in the winter that I have to wear several sweaters and a wool hat to keep the blood circulating – but oil heats the house. I bicycle to the Yukon River dragging my kayak behind on a makeshift trailer – but it’s a plastic kayak. I write books about protecting wilderness – while they clear-cut the boreal forest for pulp and paper. Some days I wish I could forget the rest of the world and concentrate on the only person I know I can influence. Me. I see myself in a little cabin somewhere. Hauling my own water, shitting in an outhouse, reading by candlelight.
But if we all tramp down that idyllic little trail to the cabin in the woods, who will be left to speak for the caribou and spotted owls and newts? It sure won’t be the CEOs of Big Oil. Their heads are filled with hydraulic pumps and titanium wheels. They believe that international trade and industrial wealthiness is next to Godliness.
Fortunately I know that my flights of fancy are “collateral damage” from the collision between a fast-moving civilized object (me) and a wilderness that moves at its own pace. Speed distorts my perceptions and my brain is still whirling at airplane speed. My thoughts will become earthbound after I use my legs for a few days. I’ll slow down. I’ll concentrate on things that matter: whether I’m hungry, whether the first poppies have blossomed yet, whether the movement out on the tundra is a caribou. Or a grizzly.
There’s a sudden commotion near the river and my nerves jangle in full-twitch alert. Nothing to worry about. Just a couple of male ptarmigan. Just ptarmigan? These are not just ptarmigan. These are birds who live a life of no compromise. Birds who disdain migration and are superbly adapted to year-round arctic life. In the winter they turn white and they grow feathers on their toes. They eat freeze-dried willow buds and fly into snowbanks to hide from Gyrfalcons. Now that spring is here they are full of hormones. They burst out of the willows, wings beating furiously. They fly high above our tent, thrust out their chests and glide across the river, each screaming that he has the fittest genes to pass to the next generation.
“Yes, dear,” says Glen. “I’m listening Alice.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The ptarmigan sound like they’re saying, mo-tel, mo-tel, mo-tel. They sound just like Alice. Whenever I want to camp she says, No-way! Mo-tel! Mo-tel!”
I pour a can of beer into a pot and add chopped garlic, dried mustard and half a pound of cheese. I set the pot on the stove. I mix cornstarch with a couple of tablespoons of the Jago River, pour it in and stir as the concoction bubbles.
“Is this our traditional first meal of fondue?” asks Glen.
“Yep, but we can’t eat until after I take a picture of that grizzly.”
“Grizzly? Are you serious?” he looks around. “Where is it?”
“It’s across the river, just upstream . . .”
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