II: IN WHICH GEORGE RIDES ON BOATS, PLANES AND
SNOWMOBILES
If this story is, truly, about a flock of seabirds in the
midst of worldwide climate change, then a reader may
be moved to ask: Where are the birds? What's with all the
snow and ice? And why does George seem less concerned
about the tangible threat of polar bears today than he
does with a few intangible degrees of global warming
tomorrow? To begin to answer those questions, it may
help to review the scientific argument about
human-driven climate change: that our endless
consumption of fossil fuels is pumping vast amounts of
carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases into the
atmosphere, causing global temperatures to rise. It may
also help to brush up on some geography regarding the
very top of the world.
Whether the glaciers of Greenland will continue to melt
and the southern oceans rise up to flood Bangladesh,
whether Cape Cod will erode to a sand spit and the
American prairie dry out like the Mojave, whether
thunderstorms will one day reach Antarctica and sparrows
the North Pole -- whether all the disasters predicted by
climatologists and their computer models eventually come
to pass, one piece of the puzzle is already in place: the
earth's climate will change first -- and change most
substantially -- in the Arctic, that enigmatic expanse of
snow and ice, of ancient peoples and unspeakably hostile
temperatures that spans the top of the world.
Despite its crucial role in managing the earth's climate,
however, scientists know surprisingly little about the
Arctic compared with the world's other oceans. Covered by
ice, nearly impassable by ship, the Arctic is still earth's
least-explored frontier. On a planet that has been
thoroughly mapped, ship captains in the Arctic still make
up their charts as they go along; two years ago, a Navy
submarine carrying a crew of scientists passed over a
drowned, mile-high mountain no one knew was there.
Now that Russian science has gone bankrupt, Canadian
research is suffering extreme budget cuts and most U.S.
money for polar research gets funneled to the McMurdo
research station in Antarctica, some of the best work to fill
in the blank spots of the Arctic is being done by a small
but hardy group of scientists associated with the Barrow
Arctic Science Consortium, which uses this thriving,
mostly Inupiat whaling community as its base.
Like most bush communities in northern Alaska, Barrow
is accessible only by air, and on June 1, George and I met
up in the Fairbanks airport for the 90-minute flight. We
had clear skies as we left the wooded foothills around
Fairbanks and climbed steadily toward the Brooks Range.
Watching the last of the boreal forest finger its way into
protected valleys, we flew over the snow-and-glacier
country of the Brooks -- ridge after ridge of granite peaks
and frozen valleys so remote that they still exist largely
without name. Cresting the mountains and passing the
imaginary Arctic Circle, we saw the peaks turn to foothills,
the foothills level off to the North Slope's frozen coastal
plain. In north-central Alaska, the coastal plain stretches
for more than 150 miles, and our plane followed the
course of wild, braided rivers over a snow-covered,
wind-swept landscape desolate as the moon. On this day,
the Arctic pack ice was still jammed up against shore, and
from the plane it was impossible to tell exactly where land
ended and sea began. But eventually a hodgepodge of
dusty streets and low-slung buildings came into view, and
we touched down in Barrow, perhaps the only town in the
United States that would be lost in a sea of whiteness on
the 1st of June.
Cooper Island is just 25 miles beyond Barrow, with the ice
of the Arctic Ocean against its north shore and the ice of
Elson Lagoon to the south, but the fact that those 25
miles include -- at various times throughout the summer
-- solid ice, junked-up ice, choppy 33-degree water,
driving snow, sleet, dense fog and 40-mile-an-hour gusts
makes travel to and from the island about as predictable
as the behavior of Cooper's occasional bears.
To start his field season, George usually snowmobiles to
Cooper over the frozen lagoon, as we planned to do two
days after our arrival in Barrow. By mid-June, however,
the lagoon ice starts to break up and Cooper begins to
resemble an island with water lapping at its shores. For
the remainder of the summer George is dependent on
some kind of air transport for travel and resupply. The
phrase ''air transport,'' with its connotations of scheduled
departures and uniformed pilots, is misleading. George
has built what he proudly refers to as a landing strip on
Cooper, intended for small propeller planes equipped with
tundra tires. In point of fact, it's a clearing in the gravel
with two automobile tires to indicate the start and two
crossed, wooden boards marking the end. And unless the
plane is a ''tail dragger,'' the soft gravel will make it land
nose first into the ground. ''Every time I walk back to
camp, I drag my boots over my landing strip,'' George
says. ''Do that for 20 years, and you have a nice place to
land a plane.''
The first time George flew by small plane to Alaska, in
1972, he was traveling with three other biologists; within
four years all had died in separate plane accidents. Of the
25 bush pilots who have flown him to and from Cooper
over the years, five are no longer alive. Nonetheless,
George remains sanguine about the perils of flying, often
with some odd pilots at the controls. He has flown with
the foolish (a pilot who took off with a chipped propeller
after trying to fix it with a nail file), and he has flown with
the idiotic (a pilot who refused to turn back when propane
started leaking into the cabin). And once he planned to fly
back to Barrow with a pilot who couldn't find the island
beneath a 50-foot cloud bank and zoomed back and forth
while George, on the ground, used his radio to guide him.
(''You're to the north. . . . Now you're too far south. . . .
O.K., now you're right above me!'') The only way George
refuses to travel is by boat, ever since he was coming back
from Cooper on a windy day and his 12-foot Boston
whaler took in volumes of spray over the bow. While
George bailed furiously, he and the captain watched the
outboard motor slip right off the stern and sink to the
bottom of the lagoon. Eventually they were towed to shore
by Barrow Search and Rescue. ''I'm ready to have X
number of minutes of terror if a plane goes down,'' George
says, ''but just the thought of going in that water -- it's 33
degrees. It's a toxic substance. It might as well be an acid
bath.''
My appreciation for George's fortitude only grew as I tried,
while still in Barrow, to arrange a return flight from
Cooper in two weeks' time. I called the local air-charter
service that used to perform beach landings with a Cessna
185, but a pilot there told me they had suspended
off-runway landings ''after we rolled that plane up into an
itty-bitty ball.'' When I reached another pilot with his own
light, fixed-wing aircraft, he asked in a challenging tone
where on the island I expected him to land. I explained
about the landing strip, the tires, the X marking the spot.
''Sure, sure,'' he replied and turned down the job as well.
With so many recent small-plane crashes on the North
Slope keeping pilots quivering on the ground, I eventually
found myself with one last option: a search-and-rescue
pilot named Gary Quarles, who owned a small vintage
helicopter with a rebuilt engine, though he seemed as
reluctant as all the rest to take on the potential
complications of the job.
At this point, George stepped in on my behalf, and I saw
for myself how he has managed to conduct a 27-year,
poorly financed study in remote Alaska largely by sheer
force of personality alone. Quarles has the pilot's requisite
drop-dead sobriety, but George invited him over for coffee
and a chat. He told Quarles about his birds. (''They're sort
of like pigeons, but their black feathers have a subtle
green iridescence -- it's very impressive.'') And he
described all the methods he has devised over the years to
survive on Cooper. (''It's like we're inventing a whole new
culture out there.'') And with a nifty bit of
anthropomorphism, he explained what brings the birds
back to Cooper Island each year. (''Frankly, I know what
they're going through. I once drove from East Lansing,
Mich., to Sunapee, N. H., to visit my girlfriend, and I
actually blew out the engine of my car thinking, I've got to
get there! I've got to get there!'') By the time Quarles
reached the bottom of his coffee cup, he was laughing and
on board, promising not only to pick me up, but also to
run resupply for George throughout the summer.
''Well, I guess it's optimistic to think Gary will actually
come through for us,'' George said after Quarles left. ''But
then evolution selected humans for optimism, didn't it? If
Gary can't do the job,'' he went on, ''I bet the folks at
Search and Rescue will come get you. To be honest, this is
how it always goes. Every year I fly to Barrow never
knowing how I'm going to get out to the island and back.
But I've learned it's just a matter of putting yourself in the
next situation, putting yourself in a position where a
favorable outcome is not only likely, but absolutely
necessary.'' He stopped and smiled. ''See, unless you're
stuck out on Cooper on June 15, no one's going to think
of coming out to rescue you on the 15th.''
On the morning of our departure, after a fitful night of
sleep, I met up with George at the Barrow Arctic Science
Consortium for a final check of equipment, then to load
three long wooden sleds with our gear: food, tents, stoves,
pots, pans, water jugs, shotgun, radio, Global Positioning
System, sleeping bags and mounds of fleece and down.
Dave Ramey, who runs operations for BASC and
moonlights as George's Jewish mother, alternately
worried and scolded him for leaving everything to the last
minute, for not upgrading his field camp after all these
years. ''Really, George, why don't you just build a cabin
out there?'' he said. ''It's crazy to be crawling in and out of
tents all the time. And you really ought to use an Arctic
oven -- that would warm you right up.''
Ramey and two of his colleagues had agreed to take us
out, so we hitched the three loaded sleds to the backs of
three snowmobiles and, after pushing hard from behind,
ran and jumped on back. Within minutes of leaving
Barrow, we hit thick fog and white-out conditions, and as
we plowed across the ice-covered lagoon, we often lost
sight of each other, hearing only the drone of engines in
the mist before a wraithlike, hooded figure and a
headlamp came back into view, as if through a desert
sandstorm. For the next hour and a half, we roared across
the smooth lagoon ice, tunneling through dense sheets of
fog, and riding shotgun on the back of a sled, gazing out
upon the absolute, featureless whiteness, I was hard
pressed to say whether we were moving at 5 or 50 miles
an hour; or whether the black, elongated bodies of ringed
seals resting by their breathing holes were a stone's throw
or a full mile away; or whether we weren't, after all,
floating through a cloud bank at 30,000 feet. One
summer, George came out to Cooper Island and, lacking
landmarks of any kind, mistakenly set up his camp on the
snow-covered lagoon -- and spent five days waiting for
land to appear beneath him before he realized his terra
was no more firma than a slowly melting sheet of ice. He
beat a quick path to shore. On this day we had Dave
Ramey and a G.P.S. to guide us, and after crossing 25
miles of lagoon ice, we reached a slight rise in elevation,
no higher than the back of a breaching whale, and some
bare strips of gravel, which confirmed we had reached the
shores of Cooper Island.
After helping to unload the sleds, Ramey and his
colleagues started up their snowmobiles for the return
trip to Barrow. And after waving them goodbye, George
and I watched the red taillights disappear into the white
fog, then stood and listened to the whine of engines
diminish, then die completely in the wind. Alone with
George, I looked around at the snow-covered island with
its scattering of bones and feathers, the fog hemming in
our sightlines to within 100 feet. Unable to tell where land
ended and sea began, peering through the mist for bears
and up at the sky for birds, I groped for the comforts of
the familiar, or at least the analogous. Go to the Alps and
you'll recognize the Himalayas. Spend time in Malibu and
you'll know what's up on Montauk. But this bleak,
bewildering place, in which wind rippling a pool of melt
water shows up as a sign of life -- what did Cooper Island
echo if you'd not yet been to Mars? George saw me
shivering and said, ''Eat and drink everything in sight,
and you'll start to thermo-regulate.'' So I cinched my hood
a little tighter, adjusted my face mask and, beginning to
comprehend what it meant to be a creature of Earth's
temperate zones, shoveled trail mix into my mouth. But in
truth I'd had the shivers ever since Barrow, when Dave
Ramey took me aside to deliver some forceful words. ''We'll
get you out to Cooper Island today,'' he said. ''But the rest
is up to you. I don't know what George may have promised
you,'' he went on, his tone suggesting a dozen messy
situations George had dragged him into. ''But unless
you've got reliable air transport lined up, you should
expect to be out there till the ice melts out. I'm serious.
Don't expect Search and Rescue, or me, or anyone else to
come get you.'' He looked at me hard. ''If you go out to
Cooper Island today, you're on your own.''
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