Kathleen, Queen of the Desert

Originally published in The South Bay Daily Reporter, California, Summer 1994

I’ve moved up the coast. Way up. To Nome, Alaska. Now Nome is a place you’ll probably have to look up in a geography book. Even if you’re watching the Weather Channel and the guy’s pointing out highs and lows, you might think you could look over his shoulder at the big map and say, “Okay, so there’s Nome.” But Nome won’t be there. Alaska probably won’t be there.

I used to live in New Mexico and the weather guy always seemed to stand in front of that state, but at least you’d see it once in a while as he reached over to point out a New England storm. At least New Mexico was there. You won’t see Nome even if the weather man walks over to point at southern Florida. We’re way out there, even by Alaskan standards. So, go ahead, get that atlas down from the shelf—that atlas you got free with the encyclopedia. See us up there on the underbelly of the Seward Peninsula? We’re not near Anchorage. We’re across the Bering Straits from Siberia.

Not long after we arrived on Alaska Airlines in April, we walked out on the Bering Sea. Not on a pier or a jetty but just right out on it. Out past the rocks the Army Corps of Engineers stacked up to make the sea wall that holds back the fall storms. The ocean had a grimy, crunchy, ridged mantle: a solid crust out to the hundred-foot long crack, reminding us that break-up wasn’t far away. My boots made that wintery sound, that Styrofoamy, bristly, brittle, scrunching sound that you only hear on real snow and ice. Something like the gritty sound when I’d step on the cup of sugar Agnes had poured on the hot lard spill next to the deep fryer at Taco Bill’s in Hermosa Beach (“Home of the Tacoburrito”) to keep the waitresses from breaking their necks. So I’m scrunching on an ocean in April and thinking about the South Bay’s Pacific.

Sometimes, when you’d walk to the end of the Manhattan pier and there would be all these people fishing with their kids and coolers, bait buckets, and bicycles all tangled up with their lawn chairs, and you’d look out west, past anything to remind you that you were just some middle-class white kid in a Los Angeles suburb. You’d look way out there, and it was just endless ocean. Primal. Basic. No freeways, no Dodger baseball (except maybe for Vin Scully’s voice on somebody’s radio), no volleyball nets. Just ocean. And somebody next to you would start shouting about a fish on his hook and you’d look out there again and realize you shared this bay with animals, too. Basic.

But here I was now on a raw, frozen part of the Bering Sea. Out about 400 yards you could see royal blue ocean with ice floes. Real ice floes like on National Geographic television specials, and here I am looking at them with a naked, peeled eye. The Bering Sea freezes. It thaws. Whales travel along these beaches.

The Native Alaskans here are allowed to chase and hunt these whales. The guy who rents you shoes at the Nome rec center bowling alley told me he’d watched an orca kill another whale from a cape just south of here. “It was amazing how he flung that other whale around,” he said. Probably not like something I’d seen at Marineland. You can buy carvings made from walrus tusks in our gift shops. Nome is the center of walrus ivory art. I know a guy from Palos Verdes who comes here regularly to add to his collection. Walrus hides are used for boats and drums, Natives eat the meat, and they carve bears out of the tusks. Basic. This subsistence concept is new to me. It would have been like my dad getting up every morning, and , instead of steering his Volkswagen toward Inglewood Avenue on-ramp for another day of producing commercials in Hollywood, taking my brothers for a day of snaring fox and rabbits in El Segundo.

Reindeer meet is sold in our grocery stores. You can buy steaks and chops and sausage (reindeer is the second ingredient, after the pork). I should be eating this stuff. I should be eating salmon, walrus, and crabs. But I’m not. I made spaghetti noodles with beef meatballs last night and the nearest cow is probably in southern British Columbia somewhere. I can buy grapes, oranges, and even coconuts here.

Nobody swims in the Bering Sea. Unless you could the lunatics who jump in for the “Polar Bear Swim” on Memorial Day. Otherwise, if you fall into the ocean around here, you probably die. Learn to swim? Nah. Just don’t fall in. So it’s kind of incongruous that we would have such a great swimming pool at the high school. After Sunday evening’s family swim time, we haul on our boots, scarves, hats, and parkas to venture back to the frozen parking lot to four-wheel it home. “Den of the Mighty Nanooks” is painted in five-foot-tall letters on the brick wall outside the pool with a hug polar bear (“nanuq” in the Inupiak language) urging academic excellence, athletic prowess, school spirit. Not unlike another institution thousands of miles south. In another beach town on a different sea.

Part 2. “The land bridge” and Part 3. “The serum run”