From the time I was a 10 year old kid, I have loved flight. It has been a dream come true that my work involves so much time in airports and on airplanes. Notwithstanding the rethinking I am doing about the carbon cost of my vocation, I’m in love with being in the air.
So I was delighted today to discover this blog: Flight Level 390. It is written by an experienced American pilot at a major airline (my guess is US Air) and the writing is as beautiful and clear as the skies he travels through. Lose yourself in it for a few hours.
At the end of a week in california with the family, capped off by some short hikes and a rock balancing session in Joshua Tree National Park. Beautiful, but disturbing. This photo is of a rock balanced at 4800 feet overlooking the Coachella Valley which is filled with smog that blows in from the Los Angeles basin. A little bit of balance restored.
I’m in the waiting area of the Dutch Harbor/Unalaska airport in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska. I’ve been here for less than 24 hours accompanying some colleagues on some consultations with Alaskan fishing communities. This place is all about fish, and that is all: pollack, halibut, salmon, cod and of course the world famous crab fleet which plies its trade in the Bering Sea on the World’s Deadliest Catch. The motto on the wall here at the airport is “The highest degree of opportunity” and that is indeed what this town is all about. Opportunity abounds to make money for sure but also in many other less savoury ways. This town has been cobbled together from old Russian church missions, native communities, from army and navy bases, from decades of fishing the richest waters on the planet. Everything here is opportunity, roughshod and utilitarian, sometimes brutal and vicious, but set in a landscape that is stunning.
Everything here is lifted and dropped. The mountains have been lifted from the sea and the fish and crabs are lifted from there too and dropped on deck, offloaded at the plants. People are lifted and dropped too – rocketing to wealth and falling to ill health and misfortune. Everything on these islands has been lifted onto a boat or a plane and dropped off here: years of industrial materials, commercial material, food, building supplies. The beaches in some areas are littered with disused and discarded equipment, nets, machinery and gear.
The land is incredible. Not a tree stands on these islands, so they are covered in thickets of cover bushes and everything is in flower now in the late summer. The glaciers and snowpacks in the mountains are at their dirtiest, but the summer here is short, if not non-existent. The water is never more than 10 or 12 degrees Centigrade and fog, rain and wind besets the place at any time. Flying in here is an adventure, with the runway carved out of a cliff face and running a mere 3900 feet to the apron. You are never sure if you will get in or out or, as happened to me, you will arrive but your bag will not. In this landscape, on this ocean you can only be humble. There is no illusion of control. You roll with flow and get where you’re going whenever you get there.
It’s a shame that I’m only here for a short time. I would love to explore these mountains more, to see the seabirds and the humpback whales that are breaching gleefully just around the corner from the harbour. As it was I was able to watch pink salmon run in the Iluliuk River today swimming in a channel between a processing plant and a senior’s centre, and I managed to get to beach by the airport and stand up a rock or two. But it’s ahrd to believe that I would ever be back here, so I leave with a little regret that I couldn’t stay longer. A warm bed awaits in Anchorage, and from there a medium haul home tomorrow.
My summer is drawing to a close, although the weather is still lovely and I’m only easing back into work. Coming off ten days in Ontario where I was at my sister’s wedding, enjoying some extended time with an extended family that lives all over the world. We only come together for weddings and funerals and this is the far better reason of the two.
The wedding was in Thornbury Ontario, where my parents live, in the heart of Ontario’s apple growing country. From there we went down to Peterborough where my new brother in law Steve Weir is from. It was delightful cruising around a town I lived in for five glorious years, from the age of 18 to 23. It was in Peterborough that I met my wife Caitlin, and it was really fun to take our kids to the exact spot where we first met one another, in the exhibit space of the Peterborough Art Gallery.
Last night we stayed in Toronto and visited a little more with my brother’s family. We went downtown to Yonge and Dundas Square to see a movie. I was shocked by the changes there. I used to hang around Yonge and Dundas back in my high school days and it looks more like what my brother calls “a poor man’s Times Square” now. With the buckets of warm rain coming down it reminded me starkly of Bladerunner. The city I grew up in is gone.
Heading west this morning first to Vancouver and then on to Anchorage. I’ll be there for a couple of days and then a couple out in the Aleutians in Unalaska aka Dutch Harbor. I’ve never been out there before, on a thin island between the Gulf of Alaska and the Bering Sea. It’s my first of two far north trips this month, with another going to Kuujjuaq in Nunavik, northern Quebec later in September.
Back to the arts of travelling, hosting, reflecting, and blogging.
On the stepe of the Chugach Mountains north of Anchorage.
I’m still trying to figure out Alaska. When i was here in 2002 I was up in Fairbanks, working largely with non-Native people doing peacemaking work in the school system. Fairbanks struck me as an interesting place, one in which you defintely had to have a deep intention to live in. I enjoyed the people and the land – which is incredible – and I liked the feel of the town, which in all of its glory and ugliness, felt like northern towns everywhere.
Anchorage is a different beast. There is very little beauty in it. It’s a pretty utilitarian place, especially once you leave the small core of downtown, which is actually full of little treasures like restaurants Orso and Ginger. Other than some ice sculptures and snow sculptures in a cool town square, it is mostly a city designed to huddle against the elements and get you from one place to another on four or more wheels. What pieces of interesteing difference there are – the Namaste Shangri-la curry house for example, or Ray’s Vietnamese – lie hidden away in cold suburban plazas surrounded by divided roads, equipment dealerships and super stores. There is community here for sure, and its a darn interesting one, but the physical look of the city leaves much to be desired.
But the land around here, the Chugak Mountains rising up behind us and the moose languidly traipsing across the frozen golf course in front of us, the majestic mud flats of Cook Inlet…all of that is very magical, very wild, very much a landscape that does not tolerate mindless interaction. It is important not to make mistakes here or do things that are out of alignment with what the land wants.
That is an art of course, and that is what we are learning here nrunning an Art of Hosting with 25 emerging Native leaers from all over the state, from the Arctic north slope, to the remote west coast on the Bering Strait, to the storm battered Aluetian Islands in the south, the rainsforests and glaciers of the south east panhandle and the little towns and villages on the braided rivers and folded mountains of the interior. The multiplicity of landscape here is reflected in the people, in the cultures that are in this room, in the questions that are among us and the gifts we are uncovering.
And I’m learning something about the state of Native life in Alaska too. Since 1971 when the Alaska Native Claims Settlement was reached, people have lived not so much as citizens of a community or members of a nation of Tribe, but as shareholders of a corporation. And as shareholders, the wealth of the land is reflected in the economic activity that is generated on that land. This has resulted in a number of swirling dynamics including accelerated prosperity of some Native communities while at the same time, degradation of the land and subsistence lifestyles are changing, and traditional cultural values meet wealth and the easy money of corporate dividends, with the dividends winning out. One of our participants is active in the middle of a massive project between local communities and the proponent of a gold/copper.molybdenum mine called the Pebble Prospect that would combine an open pit and a shaft system in the lake country above Bristol Bay, which is home to one of the most prolific and diverse wild salmon runs left on the planet. People are largely lined up against the proposal which stands to affect the salmon and the water and land to the worse, and already jewlers from the UK, the USA and Europe are pledging not to use gold from that mine, but it is not so easy to be black and white when you are a local person whose communities could benefit for a long time from the wealth created from a mine like that. Being shareholders of corporations brings people into a very different relationship with their land. Better vs. worse, good vs. bad, becomes a slippery polarity. Even when it seems obvious what to do.
I have long been suspicious of the benefits of easy and steady money schemes in Native communities like casinos and, here in Alaska, the corporate structure. There is no denying that they provide money and resources to people who would otherwise be victims and marginal to the massive development taking place around them, but at what price? When your citizenship becomes tied to a dividend paying share, what is the incentive to work for democratic participation? In Alaska the power lies with structures that pay the people. Even the state government does it, with benefits paid to Alaska citizens from the royalties from oil and gas and mineral development. How does a government compete with a corporation when both take on the characteristics of each other? What does it mean to be a citizen? Who guards the culture? Who guards the past and the connection to the land? Does it even matter anymore? To the young emerging leaders I am working with, and to their families and children, it matters a lot.
Big questions alive in this big country. Taking my cue from Africa, where truth is not scarificed at the alter of a happy ending, I notice that finding the truth in all of this is that perhaps what Native people are trying to here is find the best bad ending to deal with, and as the long term evolves, sustain what is needed so that when it all goes away, there is still abundance left.