Wasted Years?

KAH-NAK-TOO’S long legs swung tirelessly. His broad feet seemed scarcely to touch the snow as he skimmed forward, head low beneath the weight of the branching antlers that it bore. Clouds of steam jetted from his nostrils. His mouth gaped wide. At frequent intervals, without breaking his stride, he turned his head sideways to snatch a cooling bite of snow. He seemed oblivious of the low, flat sled on which I sat, of the guiding line of sealskin leading from his halter to my hand. Not a sound broke the silence save the rhythmic click-click of his flying hoofs and the noisy panting of his breath as he wound swiftly in and out among the azure ice piles of the frozen Arctic.

I closed my eyes. The rush of icy air drove the breath back into my lungs, went tingling through my veins. Bits of snow, flung back by flying hoofs, stung my face. I had the sensation of being hurled alone through space, of being encompassed by infinite isolation.

This isolation expressed itself in a complete absence of color. In the Eskimo village of Wainwright, huddled upon the tundra’s rim above the Arctic Ocean, for nine months of the year whiteness was all we saw — a vast, level expanse of white stretching to the north, to the east, and to the south. On the west lay the Arctic. There icebergs upreared their bulk; pinnacles of ice, like scintillating church spires, pierced the sky; pressure ridges, crushed fifty feet in air by the momentum of meeting ice fields, crisscrossed the pack in all directions, rose, a jagged silhouette, against the western sky.

Out from the shore into that chaos wound the trail leading to the Eskimos’ larder, the ice fields where hours beside a seal hole might furnish sustenance for another day. From the village the trail was clearly visible, a discolored, twisting thread, hard-packed by the feet of many dogs and men and reindeer, the weight of many loaded sleds. A fresh snowfall alone blotted it out.

In the village itself the same monotone prevailed; from the government schoolhouse, which was my home, to the low mounds huddling about it, all was w’hiteness. Snow lay everywhere: over the igloos of sod and driftwood; over the tipsy-looking caches, their open platforms piled high with all the household treasures for which there was no space within the crowded quarters of the igloo — snowshoes and sleds, bolts of bright gingham, heaps of deerskins, pelt of polar bear and fox and lynx. Snow lay, too, over the translucent golden oomiaks, upreared on stilts out of the reach of hungry malemutes, awaiting the open water of July and August; over the dogs themselves, huddled thickly upon the snow beside each igloo, dark balls curled caterpillar-wise, sifted over with white.

During three years that white landscape was our world. To the north our nearest ‘white’ neighbors lived at Point Barrow, one hundred miles across tundra and ice pack. To the south, three hundred trackless miles lay between us and our next-door neighbor. Three times each year an Eskimo mail carrier fought his way northward across hundreds of wind-swept miles, bringing us letters. Each August a revenue cutter ploughed through Arctic ice floes to bring us fleeting contact with the world outside. In thirty months we conversed with five men in our own language, saw no white woman. Sled deer and dog team were our only modes of travel. Newspapers reached us three-months stale. Every drop of water used for cooking, bathing, and laundry was ice, laboriously melted. The drift of snow before the schoolhouse had not yet vanished that first summer before September re-covered the tundra with a fresh sheet of white, the ocean thickened to a whispering mush.

Three years of that, you say. Wasted years! Buried alive! For what? Finances to return to college? Love of adventure satisfied? Yes, both of those. But that was not all. Buried alive, you say. And I ask you, What is your measuring rod for gauging the worth of passing years? For we were cut off from none of the great, fundamental things of life. There were, first of all, the two of us. That meant companionship, duties and pleasures shared, harmony of thought. And beauty was all around us, beauty of primitive nature.

Step out with me under the northern lights. Luminous white serpents are writhing all across the vault of the heavens, ceaselessly coiling, twisting — never for an instant motionless. Suddenly a shimmering iridescence whips across the sky, spanning its arch, a fringe of color, sea green and delicate rose, rippling continuously from right to left as though a Master Hand swept across vibrant strings. Step out again into the silvered moonlight of a December midday— diamond sparkle of crusted snow;chill glitter of broken ice; shimmering reaches, infinitely cold and pure and measureless. Surely you cannot call one bereft of beauty who has the azure glitter of the ice fields, the unearthly splendor of the aurora borealis, the silver glory of December middays.

But perhaps happiness, not beauty, is to you the ultimate goal in life. You picture us lonely and unhappy, watching the slow days drag past. If so, your picture is all wrong. For life was full of happiness, the satisfactions found in work and service. Along the road of progress which our forefathers followed through the ages, we endeavored to hurry a primitive people, prodding their slow steps to greater speed.

We struggled to lighten the inevitable hardships of the Eskimos’ lives. We urged the filling of the ice cellars with whale and seal and walrus meat during the flush summer months to tide the people over the leanhunting seasons of the year. We taught the improvement of the reindeer herds by retaining the best deer for breeding purposes rather than killing the tiny fawns, a few weeks old, because their skins were prettiest then for parkas. We encouraged the mining of coal when weather conditions were favorable, the keeping of a supply on hand against the days of blizzard. Incessantly we toiled to teach these people to rise superior to their environment, to put behind them the old hand-to-mouth existence.

We knew the satisfaction that comes with the relief of suffering. A tiny girl, creeping on the igloo floor, was terribly scalded by a kettle of boiling walrus. ‘Maybe he die,’ the despairing parents told us. ‘Many times before, baby burn like that, he die.’ But the baby did not die. It was a long, hard pull, but her life was saved; she was not even badly scarred. That is but one of many eases.

Life was too full to be monotonous. I challenge you to match the thrill that sweeps through one at the first glimpse of the sun after months of lamplit days. It is noon. I climb the twenty-foot drift behind the schoolhouse. In the southeast the sky burns a dull red. It has been red for several days, but to-day it is a deeper, warmer crimson. Breathless I wait, as the crimson deepens and deepens. Then, abruptly there flames on the sky line a leaping fire, dazzling the eyes, warming the heart — the barest segment of a rim of gold. The glorious sun is back again!

As to one shut away in a quiet room the minutest sounds are magnified, so to us, shut away in that isolation, every emotion was intensified. Those days and nights of waiting for the coming of the first ship each summer are like nothing else. Someone on watch day and night in the unending sunlight, sitting astride the ridgepole of the schoolhouse, telescope trained on the southern ice pack. Days of taut nerves, of hearing preternaturally keen, of jumping at each malemute’s scream, at each shout in the village. Then at last, upon a morning late in July, the triumphant shout rings out: ‘Oomiakpuk! Oomiakpuk!’ Pandemonium breaks loose. Men, women, and children run, shout, leap into the air; everyone gone mad — and we no saner than the rest.

Three times each winter the dog-team mail arrived. An excited messenger rushed in, face beaming, shouting, ‘Mailman come!’ We snatched our parkas from their hooks, pulling them on over our heads as we raced down the hallway, through the outer vestibule, on out through the great outer tunnel of snow blocks. The mail team, thirteen sturdy malemutes, lay stretched upon the snow before the schoolhouse. Ivotook had already spread back the stiffly crackling sled cover, was dragging forth bulky, frosted sacks of mail. Eager hands seized them, carried them indoors. We shook hands with Kotook, then hurried after. The natives followed. They expected no mail themselves, but they liked to watch their ‘oomaliks’ reading theirs. They crowded the doorway while we emptied sack after sack in the centre of the carpet, then dropped beside the heap to sit hour after hour, tearing open a letter, scanning its contents, reaching for another — the latest four months old.

Buried alive, you say. But the dead do not feel. Say, rather, that for three years we dwelt upon a hilltop, life all around us, naked, close at hand; yet vistas, too, spread out before our eyes, humanity seen as a whole, struggling — towards what? It is good to withdraw for a time from the rush and noise and competition of modern civilization, to the eddy beyond the crash of the cataract. One finds quiet there for introspection. Religion becomes an elemental thing. To the Eskimos it is very real. They have a childlike faith in God.

Three seal hunters were caught out upon the ice pack by an offshore wind, carried to sea to almost certain death. The village gathered at the schoolhouse. One after another knelt, prayed earnestly that the wind would change, the men drift safely back to shore. Out on the ice pan the hunters, too, knelt in prayer. And the wind changed. Miraculously it veered, carried the men back to their waiting families. You smile skeptically. Is your doubt more admirable than their faith?

I have seen bared heads bowed above a cup of tea, out upon the frozen ocean, beside the tundra trail while sled deer pawed for moss beneath the snow; and I have felt humbled in spirit. For it might well be that the tea was made with leaves which had been boiled repeatedly for weeks; it might be that salt was added to the kettle in lieu of the precious vanished sugar; it might be that this steaming liquid was the only nourishment these men would know for hours. Yet not a swallow was taken before heads were reverently bowed, thanks returned to ‘the Giver of all good things.’

As religion is an elemental thing, stripped to essentials, so with the code of ethics in the Arctic. An Eskimo rises in the morning to an empty larder. He emerges into the village, casts his eye about, and then philosophically directs his mukluks toward that dwelling from which the bluest twist of smoke is winding. For smoke means food in process of preparation, food which he feels free to share. ‘Thou shall not steal.’ Month after month the caches stand heaped under the open sky. Nothing ever disappears. Laws are few, essential to the well-being of the community, unwritten — and obeyed. Murder is practically unknown. Death is faced daily, it is true, but it is faced of grim necessity on tundra and on ice pack in the bitter struggle for existence.

Drama is in this struggle, and drama was all about us. Not the drama of cinema and stage, I grant you. But on every hand was the stuff from which novel and drama are woven. The childless wife came begging permission to adopt her neighbor’s newborn baby, to carry, a joyous burden, upon her back inside her parka, in emulation of her more fortunate sisters. A young girl passionately devoted to a youth of her own age was married out of hand to a rheumy-eyed old widower, possessor of a commodious igloo and numerous head of reindeer. A mother, making the rounds of her trap lines in the desperate effort to provide food for her children, was caught in a blizzard, found frozen on the tundra.

All around us was material that might have been crystallized into play and story. Must it be written down, interpreted for us, before we are able to appreciate it? Must it, like our prepared foods, be predigested, enclosed in attractive wrappings, before it will make an appeal to our jaded appetites? Should not the raw drama of life — the hungry-hearted mother, young love selfishly bartered, a mother’s sacrifice — have the same power to make us thrill and weep when we see these tragedies enacted in the dim and congested igloo as upon the spacious, brilliantly lit stage? If it has not, if we cannot see past the sordidness and dirt, past the unlovely husk to the sweet white kernel of the nut, then our civilization has given us either too much or too little.

ELIZABETH CHABOT FORREST
University of California, Los Angeles
Margaret S. Carhart, Instructor