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by Julia Reitan, Sierra Club Director of Outreach
For dinner on our first night above the Arctic Circle we ate sauteed
caribou heart, grilled caribou ribs, stewed caribou and caribou jerky, called "dry
meat" by the Gwich'in native people who were our hosts. And on our last evening we
ate char and grayling that I had fished an hour earlier from the cold, rushing waters of
Alaska's Kongakut River. My trip began and ended with a strangely powerful connection to
the natural world that most of us rarely experience nowadays: eating truly wild food.
What happened in between was an unforgettable five-day camping and rafting
trip shared with eight other Sierra Club staff members and volunteer leaders in the Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge.
Our group for this June journey had been assembled by the Sierra Club's
Arctic Campaign for a reason as old as the Club itself: People who have experienced a
great wild place first-hand are changed forever. John Muir took turn-of-the-century San
Franciscans to the high country of the Sierra Nevada, knowing that those who stood in this
great Range of Light would be the most ardent advocates for its protection. One hundred
years later our destination was different, but the goal was the same. The trip would give
us powerful tools to promote permanent protection for the Arctic: personal experience and
stories about what it meant to be there.
With me was a member of the Sierra Club's National Advisory Council, Allan
Brown; Sierra Club Foundation Trustees Marilyn Brown and Bill Sarnoff; a member of the
national Board of Directors, Kim Mowery; Club Legislative Director Debbie Sease and public
lands lobbyist Dana Wolfe from our Washington, D.C., office; and Sara Callaghan and Jack
Hession from the Northwest/Alaska Field Office.
We all began shaping our thoughts and stories about the Arctic before the
trip ended. As we sat together on the last evening, one by one we talked about our most
memorable impression of the past five days. As each person spoke it evoked memories of our
shared experiences, and yet everyone offered a different perspective on what had been most
memorable.
Bill used a sweeping gesture of his arm to underscore how struck he had
been by the vastness and grandeur of the place. Allan, Marilyn and Bill had hiked the
ridge behind our camp at Caribou Pass, and Allan had been transfixed by the endless
wildflowers. Dana had a chance to glimpse her namesake, a wolf that had yipped at us from
the far side of the river before it quickly disappeared.
For Debbie, the magic of the place was captured in two words: "The
light." A painter, she'd brought along her portable watercolors and a love of light.
We had all watched the hills and mountains around us as, in an endless cycle, they basked
in the low golden light of the Arctic solstice and then slipped into deep purple shadows
as the sun moved to another part of the sky, but never fully set.
And then there was the ever-present movement of caribou. It seems a
contradiction to say that the land constantly changed with the light, and the movement of
thousands of migrating caribou seemed constant. But wave after wave they came. In bands of
50 or so, they'd steadily make their way through the tussock-covered landscape across the
river from our camp at Whale Mountain. It was a great river of caribou, following the
Kongakut on a journey to the coastal plain.
The river, too, was a constant presence. As we ate, slept, talked and
walked, there was the ceaseless sound of water rushing over rocks as the river raced
toward its tryst with the Beaufort Sea. Marilyn, who had never been river rafting before,
named as her most memorable experience the day we spent floating from our camp at Whale
Mountain down to Caribou Pass. There are few ways to experience a river more personally
than to resist its pull against your paddle, or feel its current while dragging a loaded
raft through water too shallow to float.
Unless, of course, it's to stand on the river's edge with the uneven feel
of rocks beneath your hip waders, casting a line into the current so that it drifts past
an eddy of smooth water where fish are likely to lie in wait. As one who has fished only a
few times, I'm still in awe of the pulsing tug of a wild fish on the line, and the
startlingly direct connection that it creates between you and a wild animal. I'm also awed
by what it means to catch, prepare and eat wild creatures with your own hands.
As I struggled with the unfamiliar act of gutting and cleaning the Arctic
char, Kim, a high-school and middle-school science teacher, noticed that the fish's heart
was still beating in the discarded pile of guts on the rocks nearby. She put the
raspberry-sized heart into the palm of her hand, where it continued to pulse for 15
minutes. We worked together to prepare this wild bounty, and the gulls circled impatiently
for their share, and the caribou moved silently onward, and the river rushed noisily by in
the light of the midnight sun.
Ask any of us. We'll tell you our stories.
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