A road trip to the Alaskan Arctic. Original story at The Statesider.
Two tourists had gotten their Ford Explorer mired about 20 meters north of a patch of mud — frozen, even in August. I parked on the mud and walked on the sand, which sloughed up to my ankles, and came up on two men in their mid-twenties. One was wearing a winter jacket. One was wearing a windbreaker and shorts. They were from China, graduate students at Indiana University Bloomington. The sand had climbed halfway up their tires. It was past midnight and 38 degrees, although it wasn’t dark, because this was summer in Utqiagvik, and during that season in the far north, the sun doesn’t set but shifts into a nightly greyscale that deepens what feels like an already perpetual gloom.
For an hour, we tried to get them unstuck. We lodged pieces of driftwood under their tires, but the rubber barely gripped the wood. We dug at the sand, only to watch it fill in as fast as we could scoop it away. Several times, trucks filled with locals would roll by. Sometimes, they laughed. Mostly, they ignored us.
One truck did pull over. An Iñupiat lady stepped out wearing heels, makeup, earrings, and an alcohol flush on her cheeks. Utqiagvik is a ‘damp’ town — you can’t buy booze there, but a limited amount can be be kept for personal consumption. This woman had been personally consuming.
“What are you guys doing?” she asked.
“Enjoying a day at the beach,” I said.
One of the tourists looked at me. Their English wasn’t great, and the lady’s accent was thick. “What did she say?” he asked.
“Can I join you?” she said.
“Actually, can you help these guys get their truck out of the sand? Maybe there’s a tow company around?”
The other tourist asked, “What is happening?”
She looked at their SUV and raised her eyebrows. “Why’d they do that?” she asked, and the that seemed to indicate not just the stranded truck or our attempts to free it, but whatever choices had led us here, a few miles south of the northernmost point in the USA, Utqiagvik, Alaska, the Arctic, a place that is not just a cardinal direction but so far away from everything that it is defined by its liminality, its edge-ness, like reality had a border where the night is the day and the road is the beach and the bears. Well. They’ll eat you.