Midnight Road toBeringia

These notes continue from the Columbia River and are part of the Owyhee River series.

I am moving across the tundra quickly, because about a mile out a gyrfalcon is beating its wings above a cliff, and I want to see it close up before it soars beyond the bald mountains.  With my eyes to the sky, I barely realize I’ve just breached an abandoned quarry. Things just start to happen so fast — the surprised giant wakes and stands in defiance.  His brown, shaggy coat droops to his knees, and those giant horns face me. 

My friends say I am jumpy around wild animals — this may be true, but can you blame me?  He’s about thirty feet away — do I run?  Moose, yes.  Bear, no.  But a muskox?  The jeep is about a half-mile away.  He’ll win the charge to the Jeep, I’ll win a bolt directly to the gravel road, which is much closer than the Jeep.   

Seconds pass, he’s not charging.  I give him a second look; is he more nervous than me? 

I give him a wide berth, and keep moving.  When I reach the open cliffs, the gyrfalcon is long gone, but below, in a broad, empty valley, a herd of muskoxen amble.  The animal I saw back at the quarry was a lone male; the former leader of this herd.  When his age showed in his leadership, he was driven off by a younger bull, as often happens among muskoxen during the rut. He may wander alone for months — the price of power.  The realization of my encounter shames me: Muskox bulls can be extremely aggressive, and may charge with a force that belies their sad, grizzled faces. 

I have come to the Seward Peninsula of Alaska — the threshold of the western hemisphere — to pursue the origins of a stone tool my brother and I found in the Southeastern desert of Oregon three years ago.  Instead of asking the experts or reading books, I decided to learn about the tool, and thus the history of my adopted state, the hard way — by traveling, chatting and listening.

The tundra — tiny plants, mosses and lichens, is like a thousand million spilled bell jar gardens.  Rarely do these plants reach over a few inches in height — the effect accentuates the endless quality of these broad valleys and mountains. 

A Barge in Grandmother’s Living Room

I am on my way to Nome, the largest town on the Peninsula.  I say town, but in Alaska, 3,600 heads means something different: Nome is the metropolis, the center, the bottom line for hundreds of miles.

In town, I run into Norbert, a 57 year old Eskimo who I had met earlier in the week.  “The seas rose everywhere,” he says, describing the violent storm that hit Nome in 1974.  The city sits directly over the water — if you spit from the second story of a seaside house, it will land in the Bering Sea.  “You know those barges you see over there?” Norbert says.  “During the storm, one of those landed in my grandmother’s living room.”

Major sea and fire disasters have struck Nome at least six times in the past 110 years, and Nome wears the scars.  Homes sit aslant, and many wear the bruises of big waves.  In 1925, diphtheria broke out here, spreading by the hour.  The town's serum had expired, and the few open-cockpit planes in Alaska couldn't fly new supplies in through the winter. 

To save the town, an unusual plan had to be devised: 300,000 units of serum were rushed by train up the state and to the end of the line, where a team of dog mushers awaited, nearly 700 miles from Nome.  In the coldest days of winter, a relay of twenty dog mushers raced from the last train stop to Nome: the event that inspired the modern thousand-mile Iditarod.

Some residents skip out on homes altogether.  Norbert lives in a small blue tent on the beach between two gold miners.  “I’m retired now, but I donate my time helping the street people at the soup line.”

“The street people, in Nome, where do they live?” I ask.  During winter, days are dim, skies are gray, temperatures often reach negative twenty-five degrees.

“You know, when you have no other way, you find a way.  They find places.  They live under the sea rocks right out here.” 

“And in the winter?”

“Old cars, abandoned homes.  I used to live on the street too.  I drank just like the rest of them.  But I was just about out of oxygen, and I gave it up for good.”

Talking to Norbert is a joy, but I have already found that the disposition of the town is as cheery as Norbert himself.  Several people stop to ask me questions, making me feel welcome.  Hospitality is the great solace of solitary travel.

But I’m not hanging around long, I’m heading out along the coast, to find what I came for. 

Southeast from Nome on Council Road are hundreds of fish camps.  These seasonal homes and workshops — painted in bright colors are adorned with caribou antlers and driftwood.  They are mostly closed up now.  Basketball hoops hang from many of the roofs. 

In town, a man told me that during the Iditarod in March, “Nome swells to double the size.  But half the people are here to watch the basketball games.”  Tribes come from across Alaska to the largest basketball event in the world, where over sixty teams compete at a single location.  When I asked a woman what people do during the winter in Nome, she said, “In Northern Alaska, there’s no football.  Very little baseball.  It’s all basketball.  People come to Nome by bush plane, dog sled and snowmobile to play!”

Evidence from the Paisley Caves

I drive slowly along the coast; the Bering Sea is silvery and only tiny waves lap at the sand.  I pass a great stretch of inland water over a narrow bridge, and three locomotives from another age are left to rust in the swaying coastal grasses.

It’s these grasses I’ve come for.  Well, I came to see these grasses because of a poo from Oregon.  Not just any poo, a very, very old poo.

This spring, scientists announced they had discovered extraordinary human feces in the Paisley Caves, near Summer Lake in south-central Oregon.  The poo was carbon-dated to 14,300 years, and DNA analysis provides a link to East Asia and Siberia.  The discovery is stunning — it is the oldest confirmed human genetic evidence in the New World. Since then, digs published in 2012 found Western Stemmed spear points in the same caves, as old as Clovis but a completely different technology.

The find means a lot to my own quest, largely because my search has kept leading me back to the barrage of recent paradigm-shifting science about how Indians came to the new world, and the breadth and scope of their civilizations.

In the evening, I park the Jeep on the side of the road and take to the fields by foot.

The find in Oregon may not be linked to the later flow of people into the new world. The evidence may not tell much.  The evidence may lead me nowhere.  But finding things on your own means collecting scraps; finding things on your own is the slow process of travel.

I walk through a striking meadow of green, yellow and red grasses.  It will soon be midnight, but the meadow’s million blossoms are far from closing.  Fierce black clouds rush in over the mountains to the east, darkening the landscape.  I retreat to the Jeep and the world turns dark and rain comes down and the road turns to mud.

An Eternal Quest for Summer

The storm moves on, black and gray followed by rainbows over the Bering Sea. I retrace my steps in the grass, and in a few miles I come to a beach riddled with the world’s driftwood.  I walk on the beach and perch myself on a dune.  I open my bottle of rum and watch the storm race to Russia.

I am surprised by what I see when I sit.  Above me, a slender black and white bird with a long trailing tail beats its wings in suspended animation, like a floating helicopter.  This bird is a long-tailed jaeger, a predatory seabird, scoping for lemmings along the shore.

The bird will spend a few more days here in Northern Alaska.  But time and climates will send him south on an amazing pelagic journey to the southern oceans, where he will spend the southern summer off the coasts of South America, from Peru around to Argentina, and out over the deep ocean.  On the rocks, I see a northern wheatear too, a small bird dressed in gray and buff.  His migration is even more incredible.  In a few days, he will begin flight to Africa.

Alaska is a land of migration — yesterday, I saw a flock of Aleutian terns — they are assembling for Indonesia.  And a lone arctic tern, on a telephone pole.  He will find his way soon to Antarctica, completing his annual migration of some 44,000 miles.  The longest migration of any animal on Earth is an eternal quest for summer.

For as much as science can tell us about the ways of the world, it is amazing how some of these most spectacular migrations are still filled with mystery.  Sometimes, the animal travelers will show up in one part of the world.  Then they disappear, only to appear halfway around the world sometime later in the year.  For some species, which route they took — how they got there — and how they survived, still eludes us.  I like knowing that science is still so an unwritten book, in many cases, I like knowing that in my lifetime I will see some more pages written.

It’s Got to Be Kayaks

Birds and their migrations may be incredible, but I am interested in how the first humans crossed into the Americas.  This Peninsula, which points towards Siberia, was part of a great land mass, a thousand kilometers from north to south.  During the ice age, water receded and Beringia rose from the shallow Bering Sea.

For most of my life, and even as recently as only months ago, scientists have been suggesting that the Americas were populated by a single source of migrations, roughly 13,000 years ago.  But the Paisley caves find adds further evidence that the human origins in North America may be more diverse, and happened longer ago, than we ever imagined. Since then, the 'longer ago' has been borne out: human footprints at White Sands, New Mexico, date to 21,000-23,000 years ago, confirmed in 2023 by independent methods. Genetics, meanwhile, suggests the first Americans descended from a single founding population that lingered in Beringia for thousands of years before moving south.

The assumption, too, has been that a group of paleoindians called the Clovis people followed great herds of beasts across grassy Beringia.  But scientists are asking — how could these people have survived such treks across the uninhabitable, ice-bound terrain to the south?  The Eskimos, who came to North America much later, are a different story, because they had long adapted technology and skills to survive the Arctic.

We are watching a new theory prevail, that the first Americans came by boat, along the coast of Beringia.  Migration by kayak meant continuous access to meat, as well as the land bounty of the coastal arctic — blueberries, crustaceans, nesting birds, small mammals.  Even in cold winters, patches of green would have existed between the snow and ice; comfortable places for kayakers to camp.

A land migration — a funnel down the eastern front of the Canadian Rockies, between two ice sheets — would seem to have lasted hundreds of years.  Why does human evidence exist even at the very tips of South America? 

It’s got to be kayaks. And by kayak, Oregon is a natural route from Beringia.  There is another detail: the shores of Alaska, British Columbia are ripe with islands, an Inside Passage, quiet protected beaches.  But Oregon is a different geography altogether: it is a bleaker ocean, with few coastal protections and comforts.  Was it actually the Oregon coast which forced the first Americans up river? Since then, a site at Cooper's Ferry, Idaho, on a tributary of the Columbia, has yielded tools some 16,000 years old — older than the opening of the inland ice-free corridor — and its excavator calls the Columbia 'the first off-ramp' of a Pacific coast migration route. 

I think about this as I slowly wander back through the grasses by moonlight.  While I drink my Myers’s spiced rum under a full moon, I think about Kiliii, who has taken the month of August to paddle the outside passage of Vancouver Island in a skin kayak he built by hand.

Three Hundred Miles in a Skin Boat

Kiliii, who was one of the first strangers to offer me help on my Oregon Testament project three years ago, lives, teaches and practices Pacific Northwest native living. After paddling the entire outer passage of Vancouver Island, he explained his trip to me.

For one month, with 18 paddling days and 12 rain and storm days, Kiliii traveled 315 miles from Port Hardy to Tofino.  The coast of Vancouver Island, like almost anywhere along Northwestern coasts, is wet and soggy, and similar to Alaska's coast. "A skin-on-frame boat is very different from paddling a modern kayak. It's more forgiving in rough seas, dampening the impact of waves. But it always will have water leaking. You have to periodically pump water out, about every three hours."