The Tundra is Burning

The Kobuk Valley and mountains to the north shrouded in smoke.

Kotzebue - There are drops of rain on the window of my shack, the first I’ve seen in so long I almost forgot what rain is. It’s been dry and windy here on the coast, hot at times, and early in July lightning started a swath of fires up the Kobuk River, a few of them alarmingly close to my sod house.

I didn’t expect fire when Aakatchaq and I left after breakup, headed to the coast to work and commercial fish. The tundra and mountains had miles of deep snow. Late in May, I was still using my snowgo, caribou were making good time migrating north (where the fire’s burning now), and the adult mosquitoes were trapped under drifts — a tough spring for them. It wasn’t until the solstice that the rivers finally flooded, and not from rain but from heat melting all that snow.

A week ago, when the west wind let up briefly, smoke shrouded our horizons and tinted the sun, what plenty of Alaskans have been dealing with. I tried to get information about the fires. Apparently, smoke jumpers had contained the Jade Fire, a few miles from my place. I was thankful, because the north wind likes to howl there, and was presently doing so.

The next day, Finnian Sweeney at the National Park Service forwarded an update. I asked Eric Sieh, a pilot who flies constantly, to let me know what he saw along the Kobuk. He texted a photo of the Nuna Fire, very much not contained, burning between the Jade Mountains and Silver Dollar Lake. Another update came in. A decision had been made “to disengage full suppression tactics and fall back to point protection.” Those words were strange, but painfully clear, and not what I wanted to hear. It was hard not to feel a wall of uncertainty rising as fast as those smoke clouds.

All my summers — 61 of them, I guess — my family has migrated in some direction to work in July and August. Starting in 1974, that meant our family boating to the coast to commercial fish. While gone, we worried about fire, the federal government, vandals, bears and even our gardens drying up or getting eaten by rabbits. Summer was a buggy and boring time when I was a kid; we ate fish and rice, animals were skinny, furs unprime, berries not ripe, and walking the tundra arduous and unrewarding. For me, it’s always been the season to try to make a little cash.

After the Fourth of July, after the fires started, fishing was set to open on July 10. I wasn’t ready. My old wooden boat needed repairs, and reality loomed large. It cost $600 to fly to Ambler and back — if there was an open seat on Bering Air — and five times that to charter a small plane. And what did I think I was going to do, haul buckets of water up the hill? I’ve been cutting firebreaks for 25 years, but didn’t believe they’d do much good in this dry weather and wind.

On Saturday, I made more calls, found more numbers that didn’t work, and finally got ahold of a woman in Ambler, Kim Hemenway, with a Wyoming fire crew. I tried to give her coordinates. Her phone kept cutting out. She said to call back that evening. By then, it was 5 p.m., my iPhone was making me ill, draining my attention, and I hadn’t accomplished a thing. I called a kid who I met while commercial fishing. He’s already a capable mechanic, and I vaguely remembered that he and his dad and brother share an old plane. He didn’t say hi. “I can get gas. Want to go now?” He’s not a wordy guy.

I felt a jolt of surprise at his generosity and glanced around for my boots and bug shirt. I tried to remember where I’d hidden my pistol. “Hold on,” I said. “I need to get more information. Hopefully in an hour or so.”

There were other problems, too, starting with the fact that I couldn’t remember the kid’s name. I have face recognition blindness, and am ridiculously bad with names — although in my defense, he does have an identical twin brother (whose name I couldn’t recall either). So, actually, I didn’t know who I was calling and didn’t have a plan — pretty much the story of my life. I just knew I wanted to be home, protecting my home.

I gassed up my chain saw, packed an ax, paddle and a tiny packraft. I tried not to be impulsive, and took time to cut greens and make a salad and coffee. I heard myself mutter, “Complicated world we live in.” I say that randomly, half the time mocking myself over simple setbacks, like when I run out of coffee beans, or can’t find my socks.

The next instant, I was texting Ambler again. To try to get Tristen Pattee’s number; rumor was he’d been boating fire crews along the Kobuk.

Tristen had information. He said he’d be boating downriver in the morning to Paungnaktagruk — the bluff where I was born and raised — to haul crews to set up sprinkler systems. I knew I wanted to be there.

Early the next morning was sunny, with light wind as the kid and I gassed up his yellow Piper. I had my saw and backpack, he had a thermos and a couple cans of Mountain Dew. I’d found his name by sleuthing through past texts: Taylor.

Taylor Hansen and his family's plane.

The plane was old, rough-looking, peeling paint and patch jobs, but the wing fabric looked perfect. Taylor said it was built in 1941, a World War II trainer craft that predated the legendary Super Cub — with half the horsepower. He stuffed our gear behind my seat. I climbed in. He circled the craft doing a careful preflight inspection. The overhead window was starred and opaque, the sliding side window a bit better. The floor was plywood, narrow, hardly room for my boots. Taylor stood on the tire, leaned in and pumped a primer. “Put your feet under my seat and press the brakes. No starter on this.” He stepped beside the engine cowling and propped the engine. It roared to life. I had to smile; if I’d had a plane when I was 22, it would have been pretty much this. Like an old snowgo, with wings.

Seventy miles east, past Kiana, the land ahead was covered in smoke. Only the mountaintops showed. On the intercom, we speculated if we’d have to turn back or if there might be a way through the smoke. It all felt surreal, moving slow through the sky, in an ancient craft that didn’t feel part of our modern world, above a land I’d known all my life but that now looked like a damaged future planet.

The Kobuk River with the Jade Mountains and smoke rising in the background.

Approaching the sand dunes, we saw fires burning to the north. South wind pushed smoke off the river. Ahead I spotted the Hunt River and fires billowing smoke below the Jades. I pointed out the rock bar, Kapakavik, where I hoped we’d land.

Taylor quickly lost altitude. We floated in over the river. The bar was below us. He touched down and almost immediately stopped. My ears hurt, as usual, but I was thrilled to be home. Stepping down, I wished he’d done a pass over the bar. I knew these rocks like the bottoms of my feet — I walked here hundreds of times as a barefoot kid — but still, I wished he’d scanned the strip for himself. I’m no pilot. I simply wanted my friend to always take extra care. Plane crashes had certainly tempered my young life.

We inflated my packraft, crossed the channel, and walked a quarter mile to the bluff. The equisetums, grasses and willow leaves were green, though paler than usual. Mosquitoes rose to bite — startlingly few though, compared to the hordes of my youth. I’d seen plenty of smoky summers back then, but that never seemed to slow up the bugs. I saw no frogs. The songs of small birds were nearly absent. I was home, but it felt different from the home of my youth.

In the brush, we got my old Arctic Cat running and drove it behind my log shed, where I hoped the fire crew might place sprinklers. We cut spruce along my firebreak. Taylor is agile and strong, and it was great to not be working alone. After a few hours, we ducked into my dark buried house to cool down. The temperature inside was 46 degrees. In winter, it’s always around 20 when I arrive, a benefit of living in what once was permafrost. On the negative side, the spruce slabs in the corners were moldy, and ants were eating the roof, again.

Another thing about living in the ground: Sounds are muffled. Suddenly, we realized there was a lanky white guy in the doorway. More men appeared, coming up the hill. Tristen was with them, carrying an armload of hoses. They came inside to peer around for a minute, tall, tough, friendly guys from Fairbanks, marveling at my old place, even dark and hard to see. I showed them my home, avoiding giant traps I had set to discourage any rogue bears, and thanked them for coming. “I don’t always trust the government,” I joked. “But this is an amazing example of what they do for us.” I smiled, thinking it ironic, how the tables had turned in the half a century since BLM had my family’s first sod igloo on their list to try to burn. Hmmm, it’s a complicated world.

One of the men said, “We don’t either!” We laughed, and they congratulated me on my firebreak, reassuring me they’d back-burn if necessary and explaining that the sprinklers would be tested, shut off and left in place in case the fire approached. They immediately set to work, focused and fast, lining out intricate mazes of hoses and sprinklers — behind our first sod igloo and cache, around my log wind generator tower, shed and newer sod home. Down at the shore, a man was positioning a pump with a powerful 2-cycle engine.

The fire crew setting up a sprinkler system.

It was an interesting feeling — after a lifetime out there alone or with few family members or friends, to have strangers all over the hill, and to completely trust them. And to be thankful they were there. I stayed out of their way and thanked them repeatedly — for literally dropping out of the sky to lend a hand.

It was afternoon by then. Taylor and I hadn’t said a word about any timeline. I wanted to stay, but greatly appreciated what he’d done for me and knew he works a lot of jobs. It was tough to leave, knowing fires were close, knowing I probably wouldn’t be home again until after the fishing season. I delayed a few moments to check the cranberry flowers, to harvest rhubarb, to look again for frogs, and stare at wolf tracks.

It was a much longer takeoff. Mud spattered the wings and windshield. Taylor banked his plane and came along the bluff. I tried to take a photo of the men and hoses, but couldn’t slide the window open in time. Smoke rose from fires in the hills at the end of the Jades and toward the Nuna. As we flew west, lines of fires were visible to the north. An hour and a half later, we were still traveling, coming over Kobuk Lake. It felt strange to return to Kotzebue, dusty and cramped, trucks moving slowly, heavy equipment beeping. Where exactly had we gone in those few hours?

Fires burn north of the Kobuk River near the Sand Dunes.

In the next two days, the Nuna fire doubled in size, again. It’s burning still, pushed north by strong southerly winds. There has been some rain, not a lot. I remain concerned about my home. Not just my moldy old sod house. I’m worried about the caribou, too, and what brush will revegetate that tundra after these fires. I’m worried about that beautiful big land between the Jades and Onion Portage, the Hunt and Nuna river valleys. Over the years, I’ve walked and traveled, hunted and trapped there, and watched a million caribou pass. My mind doesn’t separate that place from home. It is home. And I wish I knew a way to protect it.