"How dare you stand up and talk about something when you've never been there.
Shame on you."
--Alaska Rep. Don Young, speaking on the floor of Congress Wednesday in favor
of Arctic oil drilling.
Well, I've been there. For two summers, short, soaring, bittersweet summers, I
worked there. Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is about the size of
Ireland. But it is entirely unlike Ireland or anywhere else. It is a charmed
place, because we have been selfless enough to let it live. We deemed it
important. One corner of our vast but crowded continent remains wild, no
qualifiers.
I was a boatman for Alaska wilderness guide Macgill Adams. We took tourists in
groups of half a dozen or so down the rivers of this refuge, floating in rafts
north out of the Brooks Range mountains into the epic flatness of the coastal
plain and onward toward the Beaufort Sea.
Cold Julys. Funnel clouds of mosquitoes. Two grizzly bears on a hilltop in the
throes of ursine passion. A caribou calf on wobbly legs lacking the courage to
cross a river and being left behind by the relentless migration. A forlorn musk
ox prancing toward a mate to discover he had found only a tent.
I remember the sound. The sound of a bush plane growling down a sandbar and
vanishing over a ridgeline, the gasoline noise giving way to the tremble of
wind on the eardrums in this land where there are no trees to rustle the breeze
and no one to hear your cries for help. The sound of wild.
To enter this land is to intrude. It is as fragile as a snowflake. Prehistoric
fire rings are so fresh you might be tempted to touch the tundra and feel for
the fading heat of 1,000-year-old campfire.
I felt the remorse of a trespasser, but I entered anyway. Maybe if I could help
others experience it, they would add to the constituency to hang on to it.
That's what I told myself.
I remember the animals. A foggy day when I awoke and looked out the mesh of my
tent into the eyes of a white wolf. Our gazes locked and the white vapors of
our breaths touched. Then he bolted and tripped. I felt embarrassed for his
momentary loss of pride. There will never be virtual reality to evoke the
sensation of being surrounded by grizzlies: two in front, one to our left, one
to our right, one behind us. What do we do when this happens? Shrink down into
the mushy tundra and rejoice in our grand good fortune. But rejoice quietly,
for the grizzlies are feeding.
I remember the vista. From the 1,000-foot summit of the last foothill of this
continent: a shocking landscape. Plains, uninterrupted from horizon to horizon.
Hundreds of miles and 180 degrees of Nothing.
There is nothing like Nothing when there is almost none of it left. There is
nothing like Nothing for imagining everything. There is nothing so profoundly
humbling as beholding the last of Nothing.
Now the House of Representatives has voted to kill it. No, not the animals. The
caribou will survive. The wolves and the grizzly bears will too for a while,
although the industrialization will open the way for more hunters, more
preemptive "predator control," a faster race to the end. But the first to die,
what they will kill in a single summer, is the wild.
The screech of machinery, the dust trails of trucks, the glint of midnight sun
off acres of aluminum buildings, this will be our giant fire ring to signal the
end.
My friend who drives an SUV tells me she has her reasons and won't give it up.
Her choice will bequeath her daughter, and mine, a diminished future.
Memories will replace reality, and memories are only chump change. At least I
have a few pennies of it.
If this administration gets its way in the Senate, my daughter will climb into
my lap in a couple of years and ask me what is jingling in my pocket. I'll draw
out the pennies. I will tell her about the home of the snarling wolverine and
the den of the foxes and the pond nests of the loons and the sky dance of the
jaegers and the flitting song of a rare bluethroat thrush. I will tell her that
George Bush and Dick Cheney and Don Young took that from her for pennies of
their own.
"It is the least hospitable area left in America," explained Don Young
recently. He was too stupid to understand what he said.
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