VI: IN WHICH GEORGE CONFRONTS HIS OWN
MORTALITY
Cooper Island, June 18, 2 o'clock in the afternoon. In
the huge amphitheater of the sky, several weather
systems are playing simultaneously -- rain to the south,
cumulus clouds to the north -- but for the moment the
feature attraction is directly overhead: azure skies, not a
cloud above, and the sun warming the air to an
astonishing 35 degrees. With no wind for the first time in
over two weeks (and no trees to rustle in a breeze), the
island's birds have complete dominance of the sound
stage: honk of geese, warble of snow buntings and -- the
soundtrack of the Arctic -- the upward yodeling of
long-tailed ducks as they fly in perfect V-formation above
our heads. My, what a beautiful day!
The good weather is of more than passing interest to us
right now. Four days ago, just minutes before he was
scheduled to airlift me off the island and resupply George
and Tamara with food, Gary Quarles radioed that he
wouldn't be coming out after all. With the sky thick with
fog, visibility was dangerously low, he said. And besides,
Barrow Search and Rescue was short two pilots and had
put him on 24-hour call. He'd get out to Cooper as soon as
possible, he promised, weather permitting. But that was
four days ago, and though we keep gazing up, looking for
signs of our deliverance, there has been no indication of a
chopper in the sky. For George, this is how it always goes.
One year, he ran out of food on Cooper and radioed to
Barrow, arranging for resupply, but the dispatcher went
on vacation without forwarding George's message, and two
weeks passed before someone happened to walk by the
radio and heard his plaintive voice: ''This is Cooper Island,
can you read me?'' Now, sitting outside the weatherport in
the uncommon sunshine, he shrugs and says, ''Nothing
to do but hope the weather stays clear and look forward to
some very positive news. I'd say you're getting the full
Cooper now.''
In the course of his 27-year study, George has not missed
a single summer on Cooper Island, but there was a time
in the mid-90's when he thought of giving it up. Back in
Seattle, in what he refers to as ''the dark years,'' his
marriage was coming apart, he needed to spend more
time with his school-age son, Karl, and he began to doubt
the value of all this work. ''Like it or not,'' he says, ''I've
had a number of relationships go to hell because I always
leave on June 1, saying, 'I'm going to the moon --
goodbye.' And the financial commitment is not
insignificant. And so, up to 1995, there was a feeling of --
Wait a minute. What's going on here? Is this just another
study with utility to only a subset of ornithologists? What
have I done with my life?' '' But when, rather suddenly,
his bird study began to intersect with the larger story of
climate change, George recommitted to Cooper Island and
his colony of guillemots in ways he'd never imagined.
Among his colleagues in Barrow, George is a local hero for
the tenacity he has shown out on Cooper Island. And his
graph displaying the advancement of egg-laying among
his colony of guillemots has been given a special place of
honor on the wall of the Climate Monitoring and
Diagnostics Laboratory in Barrow, next to the graphs of
several multimillion-dollar government studies. But aside
from completing his dissertation in 1998 and having an
article accepted by the academic journal Arctic, he hasn't
published his results or sought a wider audience. And
when I ask him why that is, he looks down, he removes
and cleans his glasses with his shirt, and when he looks
up again, he speaks in a slow, deliberate voice. ''It makes
me feel really bad that I haven't gotten this out earlier,''
he begins. ''And so it's hard for me to talk about. I think
that whatever characteristics cause people to do long-term
studies are somehow linked to their not wanting or
needing to be published. But I don't want to make
excuses. I'm 55. My father died when he was 54. I don't
want to say that I outlived my dad and then fritter away
the next 20 years. Or die and have someone say of me,
'He had a data set that could have really added to the
debate.' Now,'' he goes on, ''there's almost an obligation.
Especially with George Bush in office, and people saying,
'Is climate change real?' You still get these people who
say, 'Do you really think it's happening?' and I'm, like,
'What is it you don't understand?!' It needs to get out, and
it needs to get out soon. People say that it's happening
naturally, and why should we worry? But the world may
not have the stability we think it has. This,'' he says,
gesturing around the island, ''is evidence that stasis isn't
operating.''
George does not involve himself with the various strategies
-- conservation, reducing fossil-fuel emissions,
reforestation programs -- that may if not reverse then at
least mitigate what the vast majority of scientists now
believe to be a worldwide warming trend driven in part by
human activity. As George sees it, his job is to question
and observe until he fully understands the workings of his
own particular planet -- this strip of sand and gravel 25
miles off the coast of North America. But to witness all the
changes that have come to Cooper Island and its birds
over the past 30 years is to wonder when those changes
will work their way up the food chain to us, despite
civilization's capacity to buffer us from the day-to-day
pressures of natural selection that formed the species as
we know it. To be stranded on Cooper Island is to be
reminded of the larger sphere on which we are all
confined, along with all the changes we may have
wrought. George shakes his head and looks off. ''Aside
from the nuclear threat,'' he says, ''there hasn't been
much in science that has the potential to affect a larger
percentage of the population's everyday life.''
And so, George is stepping up the pace. Having all but
abandoned his original ornithological inquiry in favor of
an all-out assault on Arctic warming, he plans to put a
portable weather station on Cooper to get more precise
correlations between the climate and his birds. He has
talked to a scientist with a robotic airplane about flying
out to Cooper to photograph the island from a bird's-eye
view. He plans to begin sampling fat in chicks and adult
guillemots to see if their nutrition can be related to ice
conditions. And he has applied for a berth on a
government icebreaker cruise next year to study the
guillemots' winter habitat out on the ice.
Finally, at long last, Dave Ramey's voice comes over the
radio, informing us that Quarles is on his way. And within
half an hour, we can see his helicopter cruising toward us
over the ice of Elson Lagoon. After two and a half weeks
spent on Cooper Island time, my departure seems to occur
in fast-forward. The helicopter touches down by the
weatherport in a swirl of dust and gravel. With Quarles
waving me in, I bid a hasty farewell to George and Tamara.
And after I throw in my packs and jump on board, we lift
off in the deafening roar of the rotar-chop.
As we climb into the sky, Cooper Island begins to recede
and lose detail. Out on the ocean, a line of pressure ridges
-- huge, colliding slabs of blue-green sea ice -- rises up
like the skyline of a distant city. Above them, a thin dark
line of cloud -- what the Inupiat call ''water sky'' -- reveals
the invisible presence of an ice crack out on the horizon.
Give or take a passing icebreaker, or a native hunter
looking for seals from an ice floe, the next group of human
beings is probably in Svalbard, Norway, on the other side
of the globe.
By the time we reach our cruising altitude of 1,000 feet,
Cooper Island is just a patch of gravel in the vastness of
the frozen ocean. From up here there's a temptation to
employ the tropes of a hundred nature writers, to think of
Cooper -- of the Arctic in its entirety -- as some distant,
untouched environment, following only the rhythms of
nature that the Alaskan poet John Haines once wrote of:
''A place where the clocks are stilled and the sun still
holds some of its ancient power; another kind of rhythm
dominates existence: When the ice goes out, when the fish
come, when the geese and ducks begin to gather.'' But
already those rhythms have been disrupted. The birds
come back to the island earlier and earlier each year, the
ice pulls offshore and the birds starve. And if the seas do
rise, even Cooper Island, at nine feet above sea level, will
go under. It may take years -- it may not happen in his
lifetime -- but George plans to get himself a raft, just in
case.
When I look below me, I can barely find the weatherport
and the three yellow domes. But then I spot George out
by the north beach, knees bent, telephoto scope up to his
eye. Clinging to the frozen rim of the inhabited world,
with his levitating tents and his wavering radio antenna,
his shotgun and his limp polar-bear fence, he looks to the
skies and waits.
Darcy Frey is the author of ''The Last Shot: City Streets,
Basketball Dreams.''
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