breakup

sometime around may each year the deep winter cold begins to lose its grip on the land.


the innumerable lakes start melting. the mighty yukon and kuskokwim rivers, their potency frozen and locked away in the cryogenic ice, strain and heave in protest. slowly, steadily, without fail, the solar flares begin to overcome all those hydrogen bonds and bring the glittering white diamonds back to a liquid state.

when the ice reaches its critical stress limits it ruptures, cracks up, and begins to flow out. huge chunks grind their way downriver, eroding banks and flooding towns in a surge. standing nearby, you can hear painful and intense creaking from the ice. it's like giant crystalized kidney stones being passed out of alaska's enormous urethra. the natives celebrate this time and it is referred to as breakup.

it is now the beginning of summer, the rivers will soon be navigable in boats, and the fish will be making their runs upstream for that intensely instinctive and eternally immortal urge to spawn and die.


today i am flying multiple supply trips to a town called alakanuk. a-lucka-nuck is a yupic word that means wrong turn.

my passenger is a middle-aged eskimo lady who has spent the past 2 years living in anchorage. she hasn't been home the entire time, and now she's afraid of what she'll find. she isn't sure if she is making the right call to go back to her village. she doesn't know what they will think of her, or worse; what she will think of them.


i look out over the slow thaw and feel an ironic sadness wringing my guts. these rivers always know the way to the sea, and it's not fair. i see them relaxed and snaking, and i want to be that elemental and simple. to always feel i am moving forward. downriver, with an assurance as intense as the steady pull of gravity.

i understand the apprehension this woman is feeling. she is worried about how to relate to her family who have never left alakanuk; who were born here and who will die here and never ventured down a different river in their lives.

it's true that travel changes you in ways those closest to you may not understand. you have trouble relating to others without similar experiences, and it's a paradoxical twist to any adventure: feeling isolated and alienated in your own homeland when you return.

i turn around, and she is sobbing as we descend. her hand is wiping the tears away as she looks out over the tundra; onto the increasingly familiar river bends that weave her up tighter in her cocoon. those nostalgic curves that signal we are getting closer to what she fears the most.


i am overcome with empathy for my passenger. i want her to know i understand. i want to tell her about the camels in morocco, or have her feel the melancholy of the raven-haired flamenco dancers in spain. i want her to see the inexplicable sight of dusty jet-black chadian women walking barefoot, each wrapped in dazzlingly brilliant dresses whipping in the broiling sahelian blasts. maybe she would understand about these smoking-hot sahara breezes that whisper sweet delirium into your ears.

but i cannot relay any of these to her. we are isolated by something much greater than space. she is locked up in her reverie, and all i can do is try to reassure her that it will be ok.

i run through the before landing checks, extend the flaps, bring the propeller full forward. rote, necessary, mindless tasks. dip a wing over the melting yukon to line up my bird with the strip. i ease the power out and paint her onto the gravel with a smooth single brushstroke.


old ideas you grew up with were once as frozen in place and solidly immovable as ice. suddenly they have become cracked, flushed out, and are swept away, lost out to sea...

irreplaceably gone forever.