I was lying in bed last night, about to go to sleep when I heard a sound that was so much a part of our lives in Alaska, it was the sound of that long zingggggg as the ice cracks. Last night the effect was not as clear throated as in the Hight Arctic along the Kobuk River, but it was there just the same. Let me tell you about the Kobuk.
The Kobuk is the largest clear water river in northern Alaska. It flows for 280 miles along the southern flank of the Brooks Range. The northern arctic caribou herd crosses it twice a year. I witnessed one crossing. It contains arctic char, shee fish, salmon and trout. It’s an ice highway in the winter and a water highway in the summer. Our village was nestled on its bank on the confluence of the Squirrel and Kobuk rivers.
When we were leaving Diomede, our boss Dick Francis, told us we could have our choice of three village schools Elim, Brevic Mission, or Kiana. I guess it was our reward for spending a year on Diomede and earning our stripes. The bush pilot who had brought Dick our to Diomede said “I’d take Kiana, it’s the most beautiful village in Alaska. And it was.
Kiana is about an hour north east of Kotzebue by bush aircraft. And bush aircraft is how we traveled. Our bush pilot was Lee Staheli and he lived about a quarter mile down river with his son Lee-Lee. Lee was quite a rascal. He’d flown PBYs in the Aleutian Islands during WWII, bootlegged, guided polar bear hunters and did whatever else it took to survive. He was a cross between Steve McQueen and MacGyver. He loved the ladies and the ladies loved him.
Back to Kiana, It got seriously cold in Kiana. Normally in the winter it would run from zero to -30. This was the best weather because the air was stable, the river frozen, and life was good. If it got colder than -30, you’d best stay indoors. Equipment failed a little too often when it got below -30. Solid metal landing gears might snap like a piece of licorice slapped against the edge of a counter top.
When the temperature was zero to minus thirty, you could go outdoors. You could cross country ski, and we did, learning all the obscure nuances of ski wax along the way. You could hunt, you could go down river to Noorvik to visit friends. You were mobile. You could take the mile long road up to the garbage dump and turn off your snowmobile and lay back on the seat and watch the northern lights dance heel to toe across the sky.
In comparison, where I grew up in Western Washington was and is, rain country. When the monsoon season sets in around mid October, the rain becomes relentless. It’s not that it rains in biblical proportions at any one time, it just that it never seems to stop.
People stay inside. They look out with faint hope, to see if the sky might be clearing. If it does, they might be able to rush out to accomplish some task and return with soaked socks. In Western Washington, you get wet, often soggy, occasionally soaked.
This was not so in the high Arctic. It was a dry snow. It was a snow that fell in late fall and traveled back and forth until spring break up. The Kobuk Valley is, by definition, a desert. The snow you saw in May was the same snow that fell in October.
Because the winter was long, and the cold was deep, the crystal clear water of the Kobuk froze very solid, dense, and thick. The Kobuk’s entire length was once continuous sheet of ice.
When the sun returned to the north, the tundra would start to warm, the snow and ice would start to melt. The water would swell the river and would lift the ice. Water would flow along the two sides of the river. Then, as new stresses were applied to the ice, it would begin its annual song.
Ice doesn’t snap apart, a crack appears and then it travels along the ice at warp speed in a long zing. Our bedroom was on the riverside and our house was on the bank. Spring night after spring night as the sky was filled with the northern lights, we would drift off to sleep with the river singing its own unique lullaby, we would drift off to sleep with break up not far away.
The ice on Big Lake was neither as loud nor as long, just a single zingggggg. But it took me back, to the frozen North just before break up. And it made me smile.