Point Barrow, Alaska

We arrived here in Barrow, AK September 4^th and have spent the past few days catching up on email, picking up a part that was shipped to us (and again, a very special thanks to Judge Karen Hegyi for allowing us to have it shipped to her office), restocking the fridge and walking around town learning as much about it as we could.  With its dirt streets, Barrow is an amazingly self-contained town which at first glance seems rough and tumble but on further investigation offers up just about everything towns twice its size would.  A fully stocked supermarket is just up the road from a well known commercial bank, The Barrow Arctic Science Consortium can be found on the edge of town, and yes, the even world renowned “Pepe’s North of The Border” Mexican restaurant is here as well.

Yesterday Chaunce, Sefton and I went out to film Point Barrow which was quite an eye opener to say the least. I’m sure I’ll get some facts wrong as well as inadvertently offend someone but will tell you what we came across nonetheless. From August 15 to October 31, Alaskan Natives still engage in what’s referred to as “subsistence whaling” here in the Beaufort Sea. In fact when we were about thirty miles north of Barrow, we were warned-out of the area over the VHF radio.  It seems there was a possibility of our interfering with the hunting of the Bowhead whales; it was felt that our engine noise would scare the whales off. 

The hunting of the whales is not only a time-honored but a culturally honored event which, when we got out to Point Barrow, were reminded of all too readily.  We had been told that the Point was a bit of a whale burying-ground as that is where the whales, once killed, are brought ashore with small boats.  It’s here that they are cut up and dispersed.  I have to say I didn’t know what to expect until I got there and once there was stopped in my tracks by what I saw.  As promised the area was strewn with an incredible amount of whale bone in every shape and form, yet not the clean, antiseptic, bleached-out bone that I semi-expected, but the relatively, freshly-stripped carcasses which, by this time, were going through the long processes of becoming that which I did expect. 

To be perfectly blunt, it was not a pleasant sight nor smell.  The bones, many still with sinew and fat on them, were dark with decay. I have to admit that for the first ten or fifteen minutes I was pretty much taken aback at what lay in front of me and in the air around me, equating it with that of nothing more than left-to-rot, road kill.  Slowly though, this dismay started to turn and I soon began to realize how foolish if not culturally chauvinistic I was being.  All around me was not the litter of rot but in fact was one of the more tangible examples of a cultural act which has been time-honored and rightly respected for untold years.  Granted, from my vantage point it was not a pretty sight, but from the vantage point of a person whose ancestors have been hunting and feeding themselves in this manner since time immemorial it is a way of life which rightly should know no judgment.  As with just about all the meat taken from the whale, the bones too get put to hundreds of uses; whalebone sod houses, whalebone art, baleen baskets, even a baleen Palm Tree.

Barrow is a remarkable place, lessons and treasures lay just around every corner, perhaps even below the surface.  Make the effort; come here and experience it. Weather depending, either tonight or tomorrow morning we leave for Nome where we may actually tie up to a dock… at a marina… something we haven’t done in almost three months.