In the Empire of Ice Read Online Free PDF Page A

flying in the opposite direction in 1951 when his father decided to move the family from their subsistence hunting life in Wales to the gold rush town of Nome. “I was ten years old,” Joe says. “There was no school beyond eighth grade in Wales. My father gave up his traditional hunting life, everything he knew about subsistence living and had to pass on to us, in order to give us five kids an education. Dad thought education was the future, not subsistence hunting. I’m still not sure.”
    Here and there threads of rotting ice are thrown between white-capped wind swells. The Seward Peninsula, stretching at an angle from just below the Arctic Circle, is shaped like the blade of an ax and forms the eastern core of the Pleistocene submerged continent of Beringia. In colder times the now immersed, 1,500-mile-wide land bridge linked Alaska to Siberia. Windswept barrier islands line the coast like linked arms. The beaches are treeless and gravelly, underlain by an apron of permafrost and shallow thaw ponds. The whole tundra-covered slab of continent faces the coast of northeastern Chukotka (Siberia) only 55 miles away.
    Below us and off to the left of the airplane, Norton Sound and the Bering Sea are all open water. “It should be frozen,” Joe says dolefully, remembering that his family often traveled to Teller by dogsled from Wales on the frozen sea. In some bays a cuticle of shore-fast ice is being battered loose by storm waves.
     
    IT WAS SEPTEMBER 1951 when Joe’s father called a local bush pilot to pick up the Senungetuk family and all their belongings and take them to Nome. Their tiny house in Wales brought $200. “When Dad finished paying for the bush plane, he had a thousand dollars left with which to start a completely new life for himself, his wife, and five children,” Joe tells me.
    In Nome Joe and his siblings joined the other “modern outcasts” from King Island who had been forced to relocate. “We were Eskimo hicks,” he says. Life in Nome was difficult. The children, still wearing skins and mukluks, were discriminated against. Joe’s father, Willy Senungetuk, a prominent hunter at home, took the only job available to him in Nome as a janitor at the local high school.
    Later, Joe’s older brother Ron, also now an artist, was sent to a residential school in Edgecumbe, where he and the others were forced to learn and speak English. “To defer to a second language is to reorder one’s mind. The internal links between topography, weather, way-finding, and spirit become lost horizons,” Joe tells me.
    Out the plane window we can see the small villages at Port Clarence and Brevig Mission. King Island and St. Lawrence Island are to the south and lost in “sea smoke” and clouds. A tentlike white cloud shrouds a pointed mountain, a sign of strong winds. Wind has been one of the indicators of climate change in the Arctic: “It blows every which way and we can’t tell where it’s coming from next,” an elder shouts over the engine roar into my ear.
    Around another headland, new ice has taken hold: Now the ocean is white and the land is powder blue, but the next bay is all open water stubbed with whitecaps. Open water turns the sea into a heat sink. That warmer water, in turn, heats the air, and the temperature rises, in turn, allowing for more open sea in what scientists call a positive feedback loop, which functions like a vicious circle, amplifying rather than balancing the heat.
    We land in a hard crosswind. Our short snowmobile ride to the multiuse community center where we’ll sleep is all white. Joe says that nothing looks familiar, but I say that’s because we can’t see. We crouch outside the locked door of the building in a howling chaos of snow until another snowmobile roars up.
    Ronnie dismounts and lets us in. She’s short and squared off, fast and fit. “You’re here about global warming?” she asks in a matter-of-fact voice. “We’ve got it. Had polar bears coming into the