Travels in Siberia (26 page)

After unloading and loading in Kotzebue, the plane continued on, over endless bare white hills, until we were approaching Nome. Before, I had seen Nome only in its muddy phase. Now the town and its surroundings were mostly white with blue shadows. On the sea before the town, chunks of ice threw shadows as long as jet trails in the flat light from the horizon-hugging sun. The pilot said the local temperature was one degree below zero, with a forty-mile-an-hour wind making it feel like fifty below. As I stepped from the plane door, the wind hit like a cutting torch that cuts with cold.

On the phone in my old room at the Nome Nugget Motel, I began inquiring about flights to the Diomedes. I had two choices. A small Nome airline, Cape Smythe Air, flies to Little Diomede in winter when ice conditions permit. Unfortunately, so far this year the ice hadn’t been thick enough to make a good runway, the person at Cape Smythe told me. She said she didn’t think they’d be flying to Little Diomede this winter at all. The other choice, Evergreen Helicopter, also in Nome, provides service to Little Diomede whether there’s an ice runway or not. Evergreen Helicopter is a two-person operation consisting of the pilot, Eric Penttila, and his mechanic.

Eric answers the phone himself. I had gotten to know him a little from previous planned-but-then-canceled trips to Little Diomede. I had gone out to the hangar where his shiny machines sat, rotors folded, between walls hung with flight suits, charts, and tools. Eric Penttila is a Vietnam War veteran. He had told me about his luck there when a helicopter he was piloting survived an attack while picking up troops on a battlefield. Several people in the helicopter were hit, and when he got back to base he found that the main control rod, a hardened aluminum tube, had taken an AK-47 round through its middle without snapping.

Eric seemed a peevish, worried, mournful fellow, knowledgeable about the world’s wickedness and striving thanklessly against it. He also told me that a while back he had received a call saying that a small aircraft carrying evangelist missionaries who were returning from Chukotka had gone down in the Bering Sea. With his mechanic and a Nome volunteer firefighter, Eric had flown immediately to the site of the crash and located the missionaries and the pilot hanging on to five-gallon gas cans. Maneuvering carefully, he had taken the chopper down into the swells, keeping his tail rotor just above the water, while his companions straddled the
floats and pulled the people aboard. Nome-ites had previously reported this story to me as a tale of heroism; Eric described it as just another of the vexing things he was expected to do.

Now when I reached him on the phone he allowed that he would probably be flying to Little Diomede on Wednesday, a couple of days away. He didn’t sound at all happy about the idea. A front was supposed to move in later in the week, so maybe it would cloud up by Wednesday; he added this last with the gloomy optimism of one holding out a faint hope. He would be making half a dozen shuttles back and forth between Wales and Little Diomede carrying passengers, mail, and supplies. On one of those shuttles he would have room for me, but on the Nome-to-Wales leg of the flight he was full, he said, so I would have to get up to Wales on my own. I called Cape Smythe Air, and luckily they had a seat left on their flight to Wales on Wednesday morning.

During my many previous visits to Nome, the weather had never been remotely this clear. Now on the walks I took I saw geographic features up and down the coast that had always been obscured by clouds before. The only problem was the cold. It froze my pen tip when I tried to sketch or make notes, and if the wind caught me square in the face it almost flash-froze my eyes. Wednesday dawned completely cloudless and ten below. I called Eric Penttila at nine o’clock and he was still waiting for a weather report. In fifteen minutes he called back and said the weather would be clear all day, so he guessed he was going. This development annoyed him in the extreme. “Nobody should even be living out on that rock,” he said. “We maintain those idiots out there. They ought to abandon that ridiculous place and move back to the mainland. They always need help and we’re always ferrying people out there to help them. Today I’m taking a nun and a social worker and a physical therapist and I don’t know who else, all to help those idiots out there.”

A flight of about forty-five minutes in a Cape Smythe prop plane deposited me at the Wales airport. This establishment consisted of two wind socks, a snow runway, and a steel shipping container in which passengers could wait out of the cold. A halfhearted gas heater kept the container’s interior above frostbite level, but its ridged steel floor, and the brown liquid—root beer?—frozen between the ridges, and the spoiled food smell, and the packing peanuts scattered around made it a place to go only as a last resort. I sheltered on its lee side and waited with the other passengers.

Little Sister Mary Jo was the nun Eric had mentioned. She stood less than five feet tall. At first I thought “Little Sister” must be part of her name, but she told me that the Little Sisters are a Catholic order. She came from Belgium and spoke with a French accent and had formerly lived on Little Diomede full-time for nineteen years. This visit would be only a short one. Every Native person who saw her, in Wales as well as in the Cape Smythe waiting room in Nome, embraced her. She was quite old and walked on the snow and ice with practiced care.

Passenger two, the physical therapist, was a young man named John who worked for the hospital in Nome. He had very red eyelids. He told me that a friend of his from the hospital had gone to Little Diomede earlier that winter just before a weather change and had ended up stuck there for thirteen days. The third passenger, a Native man named Erik, was the head of the tribal government on Little Diomede. He informed me I would have to pay a $100 arrival fee in cash at the tribal office when we landed. I was glad I’d brought that much with me. Under his coat he carried his son of about two years old. The little boy’s nose was running copiously and he looked sad. “We lost his mother here just last year and now I take him everywhere with me,” his father explained.

Suddenly, with a percussive wind, the helicopter arrived. Eric Penttila hopped out, flight-suited and goggled beyond recognizability. The other three passengers climbed into the helicopter’s backseat, where they barely fit, and Eric opened the door on the helicopter’s left side and gestured to me. I got in, then awkwardly climbed over some controls and into the seat on the right side. I had never been in a helicopter before and assumed the right was the passenger side. Eric came around and opened the right side door and said, through goggles and mask, “I was wondering why you climbed over here, unless you are going to fly this sucker yourself.” Under the gaze of the others just inches behind me, I clambered back over to the left side. After a few minutes Eric got in on the right side and we took off.

Helicopters require more faith than airplanes. If something goes wrong with a plane, you imagine you could glide, but in a helicopter you must put from your mind the thought of how fast the earth will come up to meet you in an emergency. As we moved out over the strait, sea ice in many shades of blue and white alternated with sigmoid-shaped stretches of open water animated by sharp, swift ripples. In places where linen-white
ice expanses met, the lines of crunched-up ice pieces were the exact same blue as Comet Cleanser. Around the ice floes that had been frozen in place the ice took on an unlikely Caribbean Sea hue, and sometimes a pale purple wash with no discernible source flickered over the whole scene.

From the Cape Smythe plane I had caught a glimpse of the Diomedes and of the coast of Asia beyond. Now, as the helicopter moved farther from land, the Diomedes approached on our left, with the much smaller and uninhabited Fairway Rock to the south of them; in the clear distance, just a few ticks to the right of dead ahead, the easternmost cape of Asia rose into view, gray and vast, disappearing around the earth’s bend. Meanwhile, over our right shoulder, the Cape of Wales’s white hills stood out vividly in the sun. Few travelers to the region have seen this sight. The ill-starred Vitus Bering sailed through the strait twice without guessing how close he was to land. Captain Cook’s ships, on the other hand, happened to hit good weather when they came through in July of 1779. A journal of the voyage states: “The weather becoming clear, we had the opportunity of seeing, at the same moment, the remarkable peaked hill, near Cape Prince of Wales, on the coast of America, and the East Cape of Asia, with the two connecting islands of St. Diomede between them.”

That view was before us now. Looking at one continent and then at the other, and encompassing in a glance the space between, gave a grand, globe-bestriding feeling. Of course human beings came from Asia to North America by this route! Of course Alaskan Natives traveled by boat to hunt walrus on the coast of Chukotka! Of course adventurers crossed on skis from one side to the other!
It’s right over there!

Soon Eric was banking around the northern tip of Little Diomede, and the massive front of Big Diomede filled the bubble window of the helicopter—but only for a second, as we swung past. Then we were landing on the helipad. I hopped out and someone showed me the way to the tribal office, where I paid my $100 and filled out some forms. The woman handling the paperwork was about to walk me through a sheet of complicated rules for taking photographs, when I told her I had no camera. I took my sketchbook from my pack and showed it to her and said I preferred to draw. At that she mentally slipped me into the harmless-nut category and sent me on my way.

First I went to the ice runway at the edge of the island. Pieces of it had broken off. Wales had been colder than Nome, and this place was colder than Wales. Sea currents sped by the ice runway’s edge. In the narrow channel, a little over a mile across, ice floes jostled and slid onto one another as they hurried past at maybe seven knots, the wind and current pushing them hard. Above the lines of open water, wraiths of steam fifteen feet high whisked along next to the floes, leaning forward and rushing all in one direction like commuters. Beyond this fierce and wind-scoured zone, the lowering, black-gray rock of Big Diomede reared up immediately without beach or shoreline. This was what I had come to see, and I could barely face in that direction, with the wind belt-sanding the side of my nose and freezing the pen tip as soon as I took it out of my mouth.

Clouds caught on the peaks at the top of Big Diomede, then seemed to come loose and blow by. Somewhere along that ridgeline was a Russian observation post, but I couldn’t pick it out with my eyes tearing so. The idea that any human beings inhabited that rock seemed a stretch, though I knew that a detachment of Russian soldiers, in a small base on the island’s less steep northern side, were on duty year-round. I attempted a couple of drawings before my pen became useless. Then I returned to the village, grateful to turn my back to the wind.

Little Diomede, the village, was a hardscrabble place if I ever saw one. At the time its population was 178. Its public buildings and houses ascended the island’s steep rock in a shallow out-of-the-wind indentation on its northwest side, one small structure mounting above another like the apartments of desert cliff dwellers. The village’s vertical access ways were zigzag staircases carved into the cement-hard snow. I walked and climbed around the village for a couple of hours, stepping into a store or office now and then to get warm. I saw a frozen seal on the floor of the vestibule of the tribal health building, and a polar bear skin hanging on a wooden frame, and two boys shooting a small black dog out by the village dump, and a guy carrying cans of soda pop on his shoulders into the general store when the cans exploded in the cold and sent soda cascading all over him and down the back of his neck. I spent a good while examining a walrus-skin boat on a rack near a launching ramp at the bottom of town. Almost nobody makes skin boats anymore. Splitting the skins and sewing them require skills both physical and spiritual; you have to have
absolute quiet in your soul to sew the skin covering to the willow frame. This twenty-foot boat, a museum-quality object, was obviously still being used.

Eric’s helicopter had been landing and taking off on its shuttle runs all the while. Late in the day I heard it coming back and went down to the helipad. Looking back at the village I saw Little Sister Mary Jo, all four foot eleven of her, shoveling loose snow off the steps to the Catholic church building on the cliff face sixty feet above. I got in on the left, Eric loaded some stuff in the back, and we took off. Again I saw the globe-spanning view of the two continents and the strait in between. Then we turned toward Alaska; it grew gradually larger straight ahead. Soon we could make out the village of Wales, and the hill beyond it, and then some little specks at the hill’s base—Wales’s reindeer herd, Eric said.

I was glad, after so many tries, finally to have reached the Diomedes. In that winter of 2001 I saw Russia at both its westernmost and its easternmost end. In the summer, I would go on a nine-thousand-mile road trip to see what was in between.