What the flooding in Northwest Alaska took and left behind.
Updated: 31 minutes agoA snowmobile track crosses the November ice from Kotzebue to the far shore near the Igichuk Hills. KOTZEBUE — I miss my trees. There’s something reassuring, patient and grounded about a tree growing, year after year.
The closest one is a small cottonwood, just outside my shack window here along the lagoon in Kotzebue. The leaves used to tap on the glass in stronger gusts. Fifteen years ago, I transplanted it, without much foresight, just a little beaver-chewed stump with a sprout starting. The root wad turned out to have two secret companions, a wild rose and a currant. I planted spruce too, and little birches, and raspberries. Nearly all of them are dead now. Killed by salt from floods — this recent one, and the flood the previous October. The yard smells like stove oil, residue from the storm surge. I’ve slopped and mopped out my shack. The woodstove is stuffed and hot, and small fans and the National Guard dehumidifier are humming. A week after those storms caused by Typhoon Halong had passed, Aakatchaq and I lowered my chairs, bed, and other belongings back to the floor. The corners were damp, but it was nice to feel home again. Things felt somewhat back to normal, and far more reparable than what some villages in Western Alaska were dealing with. We felt lucky — to be warm and dry and together — lucky too that we’d boated downriver and back to the coast before the floodwaters came. My greenhouse is standing, battered and ripped, with the door broken and propane tanks hanging from the ridgepole where Elmer Brown helped me weigh it down in the wind, to keep it from lifting off. Inside is a jumbled mess. Behind it, my woodpile is awry, where logs and rounds settled after Aakatchaq and I waded around in the darkness tying timbers in place with every piece of rope and twine we could find. My storage conexes are slick inside, and along the shore, garden boxes are flattened and a fish net tangled with flotsam and trash, twisted and tossed by the waves. That day, as the floodwaters rose, Elmer came back over to check on me. He knew this area is very low, and had also witnessed me falling earlier and thought I’d been knocked out. “You’re like a teenager,” he said. “You should be more careful.” When we heard his four-wheeler, the power had briefly gone out and Aakatchaq and I were having a bite of muktuk, carrots, turnips and dried caribou before evacuating toward the rest of the high and dry town. Elmer and I made fun of each other, and he kept stepping out to check the waves. It was then that the water advanced fast, surrounding my shack in 20 minutes. The power came back on, and they drove the vehicles a few yards to a nearby higher street while I switched from bunny boots to Xtratufs. I poured a cup of coffee and peered around, trying to think what else I should do. I stuffed more things in my daypack and realized water was coming in the outer door. Quickly, I shut off the electricity, changed into waders, forgot my coffee and sloshed out with my Xtratufs under my arm.It felt strange, sitting on a raincoat, driving to my daughter’s house just six blocks north, looking at much of the town dry and untouched, out of sight of the ocean and shielded from the wind. Lights and TVs were bright behind windows. Both roads out of town were closed — the beach road flooded, and the bridge road eroded by waves — and lines of cars and trucks circled town, folks sightseeing the Front Street spray and the lagoon-side submerged areas. I felt battered and blurry from the last two days of moving half the things I own, and a little stunned by that altered reality that happens when you’re suddenly forced to reassess what actually matters in life, and what doesn’t. That experience — by itself — felt valuable to me, a worthwhile thing to try to keep in mind. I thought of the Ukrainians, as I often do, and knew what I was experiencing was a mouse turd in my oatmeal compared to what they’ve been through. The next day, and days after, I think I was still a bit storm-rattled; I couldn’t keep my eyes off elevation. Any high ground looked good, even my neighbors’ yards, only a foot or two higher. I stared at houses on stilts, coveting the high ones, pitying the low ones. I admired sheet piling, sea walls, cement. Later, in Anchorage, I pointed out every rise in the road and ranted about how lucky and unaware the homeowners were. I eyed docks on Lake Hood, and lawns, still green, and free of someone else’s floated-in garbage. When Aakatchaq and I entered the Gumbo House to have lunch, I stood in the doorway, marveling at the clean, beautiful floor. She had to nudge me to a table. And later, far up on the Hillside at my friends Don and Annette Rearden’s house, I envied their bright kitchen, their big fridge — not dorm-size and propped up on chairs — and their bookshelves, with dry books. For the first time in my life, I wished for a house with running water. Not buckets. Not the water that runs through your house during a storm, not even all those coastlines, flowing rivers and streams that have enticed me my entire life. Now there is ice on the ocean, and a few inches of snow. Days are getting short, winter descending in the Arctic, and a second larger tragedy hangs over the town; three hunters on snowgos and a four-wheeler went through the ice. One man survived, two did not. Day after day, crews return to the ice when the sky lightens, refusing to give up searching for the body of Bergman Nelson, and last week was Elmer Brown’s funeral. Their loss is a cold gray fog that has settled over this town.Standing in the snow along the lagoon, I survey the damaged shoreline. I shuffle in the light powder, trying not to slip or fall, or get a nail in my boot. Soon, the drifts will cover this. I haven’t moved all the junk yet or untangled the heaps, again. A lot of my work this past summer was doing just that, and planting more trees. My thoughts swing to Elmer, and quickly veer away. They do that a lot. Memories surface anyway: of times in town, and especially out on the water commercial fishing, and even all the way back to that friendly kid, 30 years ago, who for some reason always remembered my name. And his dad, of course, and the night he too went through the ice. I recall Bergman’s dad and his grandfather, or maybe it was his great uncle, and suddenly have a flash of memory from 1975, of old Pete Nelson, grizzled and gray, in hip boots, holding a Harvey boat against the waves, waiting in line to sell salmon. Eyeing my tracks in the snow, I spot something orange. It’s a frozen carrot, lying on a mound of wave-eroded garden soil. I guess we missed it, harvesting before the storm surge. I look at it, but don’t pick it up. The shore smells like diesel. There’s so much to think about here. Somehow it all feels tied together. July was desperately dry, burning; August a ceaseless downpour that caused severe flooding along the rivers, and then this storm surge forced more water inland. Now late fall has been too warm. The ice is thin. And flowing water makes it thinner. I feel the earth, and feel a sadness for all us creatures, here between a more patient past, where we understood our place — a past packed with life, animals, fish, birds and abundance — and now this future we are plunging into. As the wind picks up, I turn to go back in my shack to feed the fire. I stop to talk to a little 3-foot-tall birch I planted this summer. Dave Griepentrog dug it out for me in Ambler. I spent too much time optimistically building a little windbreak for it, to protect it from icy winter winds. I wasn’t expecting another 100-year flood. Not so soon, anyway. The tree is dormant now, probably salted and dying, but maybe not. Life is so tenacious and so fragile. I’ll have to wait all winter and into summer to see. And even then, those first bright green diamond leaves might suddenly curl and darken. It’s hard for me to predict. This life — especially this getting old — is so full of tiny pieces of information. Who knew it would feel as if the air itself is full of ancient wisdom, and nearly all of it just blowing past.is a commercial fisherman, wildlife photographer, wilderness guide and is the author of the best-selling novel “Ordinary Wolves,” and most recently, the nonfiction book “A Thousand Trails Home: Living With Caribou.” He lives in Northwest Alaska and can be reached atSeth Kantner is a commercial fisherman, wildlife photographer, wilderness guide and is the author of the best-selling novel “Ordinary Wolves,” and most recently, the nonfiction book “A Thousand Trails Home: Living With Caribou.” He lives in Northwest Alaska and can be reached at sethkantner.com.
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