The Arctic I.Cc.E. Project

The Fifth Stage of Grief

The doctors removed my chest implant on Friday. (If you expected to read about climate change, hang on. I'm getting to that.) Five years worth of reconstruction attempts after breast cancer ended in painful capsular contracture.  I finally decided to throw in the towel and give up on even the pretense of a breast.  My surgeon removed the implant that had hardened under my pectoral muscle and sewed me back up.  On the left side of my chest where there used to be a speed bump, now there is a pot hole. 

I've spent the past few weeks grieving, mourning the loss of what whas left of my breast, my old identity, the shit-kicking way I used to look.  But here's the weird thing.  Now that it's over, now that I'm concave where I used to be D-cup convex, I'm okay with it.  I looked at myself in the mirror yesterday.  One the right I have a real breast, still full and firm, just like the old days.  And on the left there's this Frankensteinish crater covered with scarred skin.  Yet instead of breaking the mirror, crying, throwing the soap dish at the tiled walls or collapsing against the towel rack, I just thought, hmm, that's me.  I guess I've already reached the fifth stage of grief, acceptance, because I'm able to look at my Jekyl and Hyde chest and go, "Yeah. So?."   In my mind's eye, it's already part of my identity.

So what -- you may be wondering -- what does this have to do with climate change?  Maybe I'm stretching the whole metaphor thing, but to me it says something about human adaptability.  We -- humans -- really do have  tremendous ability to transform, bend, stretch and adapt. 

By saying this, I'm not implying that climate change is okay.  I'm not suggesting that it's alright for the Northwest Passage to become a year-round cruise route.  It's wrong that Newfoundland, previously one of the most inhospital places on earth, will become a golfer's paradise.  The environmental, cultural and economic losses that climate change is producing are unspeakable.  I've called it environmental pornography in the past.  I continue to feel that way.

But I also feel something else.  I guess the word is hopeful.  Like, if I can learn to accept my loss and build a new identity, then maybe we as a society can do the same thing.  In fact, I think the process of adaptation is already underway.

Two weeks ago I attended a conference in London on the finance of climate change.  I learned that some countries (the U.S. is so NOT be one of them ) have accepted reality and are thinking about how to mitigate future damage, as well as how to live in greater partnership with the planet.  They are thinking about how to keep the engines of business chugging away even as some industries, like oil, begin to cough, sputter and smoke. 

My point is that it's all in the way you look at things. I can view myself as lopsided.  Or I can slap on a small prothesis and try wearing ruffley styles of clothing that would have made me look like a fluzzy when I was a D-cup. I can try doing things differently. Likewise, we can see climate change as the end of the world.  Or we can accept it, learn from this grievous mistake and envision a new relationship with this orbiting rock we call home.

Environmental Pornography

Most of the time I use this blog to convey news related to Arctic climate change, like last week's announcement that Lukoil, Russia's petroleum behemoth, intends to lay oil and gas pipelines across the southern Barents Sea, the last unspoiled stretch of water in Europe. 

The trouble is that working on environmental issues that don't improve is like being Terry Schiavo's physician. It can get to you. So to boosts my spirits from time to time, I try to remember why I do this.  By "this" I mean toiling in obscurity at home at night after putting in a full day's work at my paying job. 

One of the reasons I do it appeared in yesterday's USA Today.  It was a photo of a Greenland iceberg backlit against a September sunset, an iceberg that had calved off the Jacobshavn glacier. The photo captian said that because of global warming, Jacobshavn has receeded three kilometers in the past two years alone.

What makes that grim statistic particularly poignant is that I've been to Disko Bay and stood on the same rocky hillside overlooking the glacier just as that photographer.  I've watched the Jacobshavn calve.  In 2003 I saw a skyscraper-sized shard sheer off of it and crash into the bay, throwing up 30 foot waves that rippled outward, like an atomic mushroom cloud, in expanding concentric circles. The boom was deafening, with a concussion that shook the ground where I stood more than a mile away.  In fact, the closest experience I've had to watching a glacier calve was watching a launch of the space shuttle Columbia at the Kennedy Space Center. I stood in the media section, two miles from the launch pad, yet even that far away the concussion almost knocked me backward.

The Jacobshavn is the grand-daddy of all glaciers.  Together with the Humbolt, it is the source of 90% of north Atlantic icebergs.  In fact, it's believe that the iceberg that sunk the Titanic was once part of the Jacobshavn. 

But as interesting as all that is, it has nothing to do with why I spend my evenings researching Russian oil development instead of, say, watching American Idol. I tilt at this particular windmill because the Arctic has given me more than any other place on earth. Hell, it's given more than most people have. 

But even that doesn't fully explain my obsession.  In fact, I doubt that a statistic, adjective or word exists that adequately describes my feelings for the far north. The closest I can come is that overused term, love.

The Jacobshavn glacier is one reason why.  The very thought of it makes me feel like a love-sick teenager.  The last time I was there, in April of 2004, I sat on the ridge over-looking Disko Bay, inhaling the grinding, undulating iceberg-filled seascape and exhaling joy.  The air tasted good, like those ads for wintergreen chewing gum that promise an icy blast of freshness.  Only real.

So the idea that the Jacobshavn glacier could become the Jacobshavn fjord fills me alternately with grief and rage. It's environmental pornography.  It hurts. It transforms global warming from an abstract phenomenon into something very real.  And very personal.

 

Alaska's Finest

In the course of researching grants for The Aujaqsuittuq Project, I stumbled upon something that made my heart stop: The Housberg Photography and Videography Award, administered by the Alaska Conservation Foundation.  The award is named after Dan Housberg, one of the best shooters ever to set foot in Alaska. And we aren't talking about guns here. Certainly, he was the best photographer I've ever worked with.

Dan the Cameraman

Dan moved to Alaska in the early 80's from suburban New York.  He'd studied at NYU film school and then responded to a longing to get the hell out of the city.  He stuffed everything he owned into a backpack, moved to Anchorage and got a job as a news cameraman at KTUU-TV, the NBC affiliate in Anchorage.  I was a reporter and anchor there at the time.  Dan drove to work in a mud-colored two-door sedan that he must have bought at a scrap metal auction.  Or maybe it was a demolition derby.  In any case, if this had been any state other than Alaska, it wouldn't have been legal. It was even stretching Alaska's dangerously liberal laws.

Dan was a compactly built guy with a dark beard, dark hair and an animated gait. He shared an apartment with a friend.  They had three pieces of furniture: a cheap dinette set, a beat up Barca-Lounger and a bruised TV.  Otherwise they lived out of their backpacks, slept in sleeping bags on the floor and filled their fridge with beer and rolls of unexposed film.  Their apartment throbbed as a beat-up cassette player on the living room floor pumped out Grateful Dead tunes.

It's hard to believe that Housberg grew up in suburban New York because he was quintessentially Alaskan.  The first thing he did upon getting the job at KTUU was to start saving for a cabin. Not a bed. Not furniture or a decent car.  He wanted a cabin as a far away from town as possible. 

A Cabin in the Friggin Wilderness

Within a couple of years he bought one.  I'm sure it still stands today.  Here's how to get there: Drive two hours north of Anchorage to Talkeetna, base camp for a lot of Denali climbers. Then catch the Alaska Railroad going south. Ride about 30 minutes until you come to a small clearing with an old school bus rusting beside the tracks.  The train doesn't stop there, but it will slow down so you can jump off with your gear.  X-country ski or hike in 9 miles.  And there it is, Dan's two-story, essentially two room, log cabin, complete with a propane lighting system and broken wood stove. 

We went there as often as possible.  Once, in winter, we invited friends out to spend the weekend.  We had a neighbor meet them at the train with his dog team and sled so they wouldn't have to schlep their packs all the way in.  Dan, who thought this was all great fun, was oblivious to the few guests who, by the time they reached the cabin two hours later, were almost in tears from cold, hunger and fatigue.  By then, with the weak winter sun setting early, it was dark. So he wore a headlamp while he gingerly unpacked their gear from the sled.  Everyone shuffled inside where I had the fire going and a pot of moose stew on the stove.  They pulled off ski pants and boots, frozen stiff from the cold. They peeled frost encrusted scarves and neck-gaiters off their faces, while their mittens, hung on the wood stove's dish towel rod, sounded like metronomes, rhythmically dripping melting snow onto the rough-hewn wooden floor.

Dan unscrewed the caps off a couple of bottles of cheap schnapps and brandy and did his best to create a spirit of merriment.  It didn't work. Our friends hunched at the homemade dinner table over tin plates of stew, pushing chunks of moose around with their spoons and jerking their heads up occassionally when they fell asleep in mid-bite. There wasn't an ounce, a flake, a molecule of party in them. After dinner, Dan and I cleaned up while they crawled straight into their sleeping bags. They got the hell out of there as fast as possible the next morning.  Dan stood in the cabin doorway, waving with one hand, a pot of untouched coffee in the other as our friends and the dog team disappeared homeward through the woods.

Ridin that Train...

Another time, also in winter (which, in pre-climate change times was most of the year in Alaska), we took the Polka Train out of Anchorage.  It got that name for two reasons: the blindingly vibrant, two and three foot diameter dots painted on the walls of a special, seatless car and the dancing being performed there. At one point, in Dan's honor, the accordionist played a polka version of Grateful Dead's "Sugar Magnolia".  Dozens of sweating people careened into one another on the swerving train, sloshing beer while Polka dancing to the Grateful Dead as they chugged down the Kenai Peninsula. 

The train eventually stopped at some non-descript clearing and disgorged us, nearly one hundred staggering drunk dancers in ski boots, in the middle of no where.  The conductor waived as the train pulled away, promising to pick us up on their return trip later that day.

Dan and I could barely lace up our ski boots.  He fell over several times trying to help me with my bindings and the open beer in his pocket spilled down my leg.  We managed to ski a quarter mile before collapsing in the snow on top of a waterproof tarp we'd brought and passed out under the warm, late-winter sun.  Hours later I dreamt that I was boiling water in a kettle on the stove and no matter how many times I turned the stove off, the kettle kept whistling. Then, in one of those am-I-dreaming-or-is-this-real? moments, I realized the whistling wasn't coming from a teapot at all.  It was coming from the train which was waiting for us a quarter mile away, filled with several hundred travelers. In spite of our stiffness from the cold and the beer, we tore off for the train like a couple of Norwegian Olympians.  The train began inching away just as we threw our skis into the luggage car.  We ran to pull ourselves up and in.  The other skiers, who had been watching our frantic return from the warmth of the Polka Car, cheered and then proceeded to get drunk all over again. 

Behind the Camera

But the best times I had with Dan -- and what he is remembered for today --were when he was taking pictures, both still and video. 

Once we covered a union riot on the outskirts of Anchorage.  I was the reporter and there were two cameramen, Dan and another guy we'll call Bob, who went on to win the U.S. Videographer of the Year Award three years in a row.  Bob scoped out the yelling, shoving, swearing crowd of angry unionists surrounding a small cluster of strike breakers before putting his camera on a tripod a safe distance away.  Dan, on the other hand, threw his video camera on his shoulder and muscled his way into the increasingly violent crowd.  Bob got really pretty pictures but Dan shot the riot.  His pictures were unstable, they jerked back and to the right, propelled this way and that by shoving unionists and scabs.  The air was thick with the grunts, obscenities and hard breathing of fighting men. And when we put it on the news that night, edited tight and hard, you could feel the unrestrained resentment of the strikers and the palpable fear of the scabs.  I wrote almost no narration. There wasn't any need.  Dan's pictures said it all.  And in the end, I think his video told a much more powerful story than the artful pictures of the award-winning cameraman.

Another time we shot the start of the Iditarod Sled Dog race, which begins on 4th Avenue in Anchorage.  It's a big party.  The street is covered with snow and lined with dog teams, sleds, dog trucks (with all the little individual dog compartments on the back), cheering crowds and the deep-throated voice of an announcer booming over the loud speaker.  Dan shot that event to death. He ran along side the dogs, recording dozens of paws crunching over the hard snow.  He shot from atop one guy's sled to provide the musher's point of view.  He shot teams coming at him and teams disappearing into the distance. Onlookers, individual dogs, mushers kissing their loved ones good-bye and dogs peeing on the slush. He even crawled into a cramped dog box on one musher's truck and shot out, giving you a dog's eye perspective of the event. Then he edited it into one fluid, sun-soaked, cold-foot-stomping, dog-bark-filled, applause-smattered, ghee-haw dabbled story condensed into two short, edge-of-the-seat minutes.

We ran the piece without any narration; words would have been redundant. I didn't contribute much to that report, but of the hundreds I've been involved with, that's one of my favorites.

The End of An Era

Dan stayed in Alaska after I left in the mid-80's. He eventually married and moved to Kotzebue where he honed his already dazzling photographic skills to a Samurai-sharp edge.  And to supplement his income as a videographer, he became a bush pilot, carrying mail to small communities and remote villages.

That's how he died. He was on a mail run down the Kenai Peninsula when his small plane crashed. He was survived by his widow, his parents and his two brothers.  The funeral service in Anchorage was standing room only, filled with family, friends and colleagues.  At the end we were given a few moments to quietly reflect. That's when someone hit "play" on Dan's old, beat-up cassette machine, attempting to fill, with the Grateful Dead's version of the "Beer Barrel Polka", the huge, silent space that Dan left.

Photos of Dan

If you'd like to see a picture of Dan, I've got one posted in the photo album of this blog.

Qujanamiik

The Oscars are just a few weeks away and with them, the requisite thank you speeches from gowned and tuxedoed winners, leaning into the microphone, breathless with disbelief, stammering to express their humble gratitude to everyone.  Mother, father, spouse, kids, colleagues, producers, directors, hometown landscaping firm, local car wash.

The only Oscar in my life has the last name Meyer and is in my refrigerator.  Still, I feel like a winner this week.  The Aujaqsuittuq Project and I won the endorsement of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference on Monday.  The conference, which was started in 1979, represents all the indigenous people of the Arctic -- the Yup'ik and Inupiat, Inuktitut, Greenlanders and the Saami.  It's the creation of a remarkable whaler from Barrow, Alaska named Eben Hopson.  Hopson saw the world differently than most people.  To him the Arctic wasn't the northern fringe of the planet, it was the crown and the Arctic people were the crown jewels.  Everywhere else was south or as they say in Alaska, outside.  The institution he built to reflect that world-view is still humming along nicely today and over 25 years later, fighting an aggressive battle to slow global warming and its effects on the far north.

My other win came from the Conservation Science Institute, a think tank and research organization focused on environmental and ecological problems.  They made me a fellow!  Go on their web site. Check it out. www.conservationscienceinstitute.org.  Being a fellow will allow me to apply for grants that require an affiliation with a 501(c)3 non-profit.  Which is just about every grant out there.  Thanks to Executive Director Bruce Wright and Science Director Tom Okey, The Aujaqsuittuq Project is legit.

So a huge, Roberto Benigni-esque hug and a thank you of Alaskan proportions to CSI and the ICC for their help and support this week.

But to fully appreciate how I got to this point, to the lofty position I occupy and thin air I breathe today, we must go back, back in time to December 2004. That's when I encountered the -- how shall I say? -- sperm that allowed me to concieve The Aujaqsuittuq Project.  It happened when the friend-I-have-never-met, Kurt Reineking, sent me a link to his blog. Kurt is what used to be known as a pen pal.  We met through an online writing class and have corresponded ever since.  He does the impossible.  He takes the most trivial and mundane details of mall-strewn, gum-chewing, turnpike-hugging suburban New Jersey life, whips them together in the Waring blender of his mind, and pours them out onto the page as funny, familiar and familial stories. 

I got Kurt's blog link the day after National Geographic rejected my application for an expedition grant.  I'm sitting at the computer, taking every "L" on the screen personally.  I figure, what the hell, losers like me have nothing better to do. I click on his link.  And what to my wondering eyes should appear than a really cool blog with eight entries last year!

There it was for all the world to see, details of the faceless, bloodless music chain whose store Kurt managed, entries about the spin classes he teaches and how his whole family is engaged in competitive dieting. It was at that moment that realized I really could become one with the Internet if only I had a blog.

So I started one. About ten minutes later. Patience is not one of my virtues.  Anyway, one thing led to another and here I am today, clutching the winner's envelope rapturously to my bosom, staring out past the podium, the microphone and the footlights, out over the orchestra pit to the audience filling the auditorium and saying, "Thank you, thank you all so very, very much."

Or as we say in Inuktitut, qujanamiik. I really mean it.

Now What?

The funny thing about this project (God, has it already progressed to the project stage?) is that doing something, anything, even a pro-bono, no benefits, narcissistic anything (which is what a blog is, afterall) feels better than doing nothing.  The planet may not be any cooler, but I am.

Seque to New Years Day. I spent it on Ocracoke Island, in a rental house with an unobstructed view of the water.  Pamlico Sound and the sky above were the same hue, the same tone and, through the lens of my digital camera, the same inseparable color. That blue Outer Banks' emptiness and the silence that surrounded it was almost -- emphasis on the word almost -- as soothing and priceless to me as the Arctic. So maybe it's not just the northern climes that attract me. Maybe it's the blue and white nothingness, the silence so complete you can hear the white noise in your own ears, the earth-merging-with-sky void.

But I digress.  Back to New Year's Day.  My best friend Lisa and I walked on empty beaches.  We let the dogs run free.  We were bound together by mismatched dogs (her sleek Black Lab and my appetizer-sized mutt), our ability to criticize one another without offending, and our gossip.  Hallelujah for gossip. Without it I'd be at the bottom of the pecking order.

Lisa and I have known each other since we were eleven. She was the first person outside my family that I ever loved.  And the things I loved about her then are the same things I love about her today.  She's remarkable, not in spite of her imperfections, but because of them.  She enjoys her body with all of its wrinkles and bulges.  She laughs out loud at funerals and doesn't give a damn about politics, even those involving George W. Bush.  She's unfailingly kind to others and even kinder to herself.  And --here's the best part -- she's really good at anger.  Five years ago, when I was diagnosed with cancer, I withheld the news from her for six weeks, peeved that she didn't call me or write to me often enough.  When I finally picked up the phone and punctuated the truth with big, snotty sobs, she said, "Don't you ever withhold your anger from me again!" I don't know many people who prefer a friend's wrath to their reserve.

So what does this have to do with the Arctic?  At  the risk of being sacchrine, maybe it's the purity, the authenticity I find in Lisa and the high north.  And the openness.  Or -- no, wait, this is it -- maybe its because I can hear myself think in the Arctic and around Lisa.  They let me express myself and don't jump in to fill the silence or fix the pain.  They let me be me.  Or, as they say on TV:

Four day rental house on Ocracoke Island -- $1,300.00

Food and gas over New Year holiday -- $350.00

Walk-about cash for the kids -- $40.00

A friend who loves you in spite of adult acne, love handles and yellow teeth -- priceless.

Rejected

It arrived with a ping, just like all my emails.   But this one was different.  Not a spam offer for a $29.95 fat-burning pill or an angry revision from one of my clients or even one of the regular I'm-swamped-at-work notes from my sister.  This was bad news, a polite and apologetic rejection from the National Geographic Expedition Council saying no, they would not fund my around-the-North Pole trip next winter, but good luck, cheerio, win one for the Gipper and all that.

I deleted the email and spent last night in my flannel nightgown, watching back-to-back episodes of Law & Order, feeling sorry for myself, convinced I am an irreperable loser.  Why, after twenty years away from journalism, did I think National Geographic would give me the time of day?  Did I believe that my grasp of five, count 'em, five words in Inuktituk, would send them running for their check books?  Or that the three trips I've taken to the Arctic and sub-Arctic since 2000 would position me as a worthy authority on the frozen crown of the planet?  I'm a poseur, a wanna be, a down-wearing Don Quixote.  And I fell asleep half-way through the Assistant DA's opening statement.

Fortunately, sleep acts on my emotional chalk board like a big eraser, wiping it clean.  Which is why I'm sitting here on this rainy January day, trying to figure out Plan B.

So far, this blog is all I've come up with.  No, it won't generate the $20,000 I need for the trip.   And no, I don't anticipate that anyone will read it.   But a blog about the Arctic -- or at least my attempts to get there -- is something, right?  It's a step.  Maybe a blind step into oblivion, but a step nonetheless. 

I'm thinking, maybe I should create a blog or a bulletin board where people from throughout the Arctic can list examples of how global warming is changing their land.  Or maybe I'll just use this to record my stumbling progress toward the trip which I intend to take with or without National Geographic or anyone else for that matter. 

The plan is for me to visit the five northernmost communities on earth between Janaury and February of 2006.  Those communities, in the order in which I will visit them, are: Murmansk, Russia; Barrow, Alaska; Resolute Bay, Nunavut; Qaanaaq, Greenland; and Longyearbyen, Norway.  I will arrive at each community just before the sun returns from a 2-3 month absence. Then I'll write about how people deal with prolonged darkness, about the prevalence of Seasonal Affective Disorder in the Arctic, and of course, global warming, otherwise known as "The Day that Baked Alaska Became Reality".

Granted, the plan is expensive, it means taking several weeks of leave without pay from my day job and so far, no one (except for a website that publishes obscure papers on Arctic science) has accepted any of my article queries based on the trip. But it's my Moby Dick, my great white whale. I won't let go until I've done it or been done in by it.   

Thar she blows!!!