Floating the Arctic tundra

ABOVE THE ARCTIC CIRCLE — Though it could be a summer morning in a beach house anywhere, we were in fact sitting at a kitchen table in an Inuvialuit household looking out on the Arctic Ocean. We had arrived in Tuktoyaktuk in Canada's Northwest Territories during the beluga whale hunt.

Inuit tribes across the Arctic, including the Inuvialuit, continue subsistence hunting practices, including the beluga hunt. Maureen Gruben had invited us into her house before she even knew our names, and on a hot morning that would have been more appropriate to Phoenix, she offered us a breakfast of whale and ketchup.

Home to 979 people, Tuktoyaktuk, or more commonly Tuk, is the northernmost mainland town in Canada. It is 2,500 miles north of Seattle, 1,100 miles northeast of Anchorage, 350 miles east of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR).

Water surrounds the cape Tuk occupies. To the east, west and south, untouched tundra spreads beyond sight. It is a town where the summer sun sits above the northern horizon at 3 a.m. The sun doesn't set, but neither does it rise to a noticeable zenith. It simply carves a low ring around the sky.

We ended up in Tuk because my partner offered to drive to Anchorage to meet me if I planned an adventure to celebrate our reunion. From January through June we had been on different continents. Molly was doing research in Cameroon while I was leading wilderness expeditions first in Patagonia then Alaska.

As I did some investigating, I realized getting to the Arctic isn't mysterious or arduous; it is extraordinarily easy. Just get in the car and drive. Drive for a very long time.

Days in the car with Molly sounded great after six months of battling bad phones, shaky Internet and unpredictable mail.

In North America above the Arctic Circle there are two roads.

Northwest Territories

Where

The trip from Inuvik to Tuk requires significant open-coast sea-kayaking experience.

Western Arctic Adventures and Equipment (www.inuvik.net/canoenwt/) is able to offer advice and basic outfitting for canoe and kayak expeditions.

Travel Canada's Northwest Territories Web site (www.explorenwt.com/) is a useful starting point for any trip to the region. It offers resources for winter or summer travel as well as links to companies offering wilderness, cultural or natural-history tours.

Getting there

For information on driving the Dempster Highway, consult www.yukoninfo.com.

Several regional airlines offer service from Edmonton or Calgary to Inuvik. Aklak Air provides air service between Inuvik and Tuk. See their Web site at www.aklakair.ca/.

When to go

July offers 24 hours of daylight and a 10-day Great Northern Arts Festival in Inuvik. Paddlers should still call to be sure the pack ice has moved out of Tuk's harbor. Winter offers the aurora borealis, the ice highway and few other visitors.

One is the Dalton Highway that ends at Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. The other is the Dempster Highway, a 457-mile gravel road, which begins outside the relative metropolis of Dawson City in the Yukon and ends in the Northwest Territories town of Inuvik.

That is, the land-based portion of the highway ends in Inuvik; on the map, a dotted line extends 120 miles past Inuvik. The line runs down the middle of the East Channel of the Mackenzie River for 93 miles before swinging east for 27 miles across the Arctic Ocean.

The dotted portion is marked "Winter Access Only." Every year, when winter settles in, plows move out over the water creating an ice highway that ends at Tuk.

In summer, the highway makes great sea kayaking.

Eight-day paddle

In Inuvik, a regional center of 3,435 people located on the banks of the Mackenzie River, we were able to rent sea kayaks and buy supplies for an eight-day paddle to Tuk.

The Northwest Territories is not heavily populated. There are more caribou than there are people. It is the eastern edge of the Porcupine caribou-migration route. The herd calves in ANWR and has more than 120,000 members. In contrast, there are only 40,000 people living in the entire Northwest Territories, an area more than seven times the size of Washington. The Northwest Territories as a whole has an aboriginal population of 50 percent. Tuk is 94 percent aboriginal, according to the 2001 territorial census.

Water and sky

From the start, the people along the way greeted our trip with a casualness that was refreshing, if unnerving. Molly and I were experienced in the wilderness, but we were awed to be so far north, paddling still farther north, yet in Inuvik it was treated as if we were taking a rowboat out on the pond behind the house.

In fact, when we asked where to put-in, the outfitter, who also happened to be the mayor of Inuvik, literally pointed us to the pond behind his house.

For the next few days we paddled the Mackenzie River delta and camped on the riverbank amid mud and alder. In the mornings there were tracks of moose, sometimes grizzly bear. We saw a surprising variety of birds at the far end of their summer migration, including trumpeter swans.

The Mackenzie is the Mississippi's north-flowing twin. The headwaters of the two river systems originate just a few hundred miles apart, and each flows several thousand miles, yet instead of flowing past New Orleans and emptying into the Gulf of Mexico, the Mackenzie hardly notices Inuvik, tucked away on a secondary branch, before it spills into the Arctic Ocean.

The river seemed wide and sluggish, a slow silty tan, but some of its power could be seen in the huge driftwood logs along the shore. The detritus of logging operations was remarkable because there wasn't a tree in sight, and nothing substantial for hundreds of miles. It had carried some of those trees 1,000 miles.

Every day we praised the 12-year-old stock clerk at the grocery store for suggesting the Raid mosquito coils. We would each light one, keep it immediately upwind and in a few minutes our kitchen site became bearable. Again and again we were lulled into believing we might be safe.

Then one of the two of us would go for water, or to grab a bag from the boats, and upon leaving the chemical cloud would be covered with mosquitoes, to such an extent that I understood how caribou summering in the area periodically go mad from the bugs.

While still on the river, we occasionally paddled past lonely industrial buildings — oil- and gas-exploration complexes that have been around long enough to be marked on the charts.

A river in the ocean

Even after we left the river delta and moved onto the ocean, the river's residual presence was felt. We collected water straight from the ocean, 20 miles down the coast from the river's mouth, and it wasn't the least bit brackish.

The way people related to the land changed, though. The sporadic industrial structures of the river became, on the sea shore, the makeshift wall tents and wind battered shacks of seasonal fishing camps. They seemed to be the epitome of outermost houses — unending views in all directions, faced by water until the Pole, on the line between idyllic and dangerously exposed.

The exposure stood out but so did the flatness. There is a flatness to the whole place. Most of the land is only a few feet above sea level, about eye level when sitting in a kayak, so though we always stayed within a few hundred yards of the coastline, at times, in the flat hazy light, the land appeared to blend with the water.

There were moments when everything in sight was either water or sky, and it seemed that somewhere they must come together. Like top and bottom lips meeting at the corner of the mouth, that the two joined was obvious — somewhere very far away.

The relief in the land's flatness comes from pingos. Pingos are essentially giant frost heaves made of tundra and ice — hills form along the otherwise flat tundra when fresh groundwater is pushed up as it freezes in the winter. They persist because they are insulated on top by a layer of dirt and vegetation and by permafrost from below.

From the sea, pingos in the distance seem enormous. But they loomed only in comparison and would shrink as we paddled closer. The biggest are a couple hundred feet tall. Still, their distinctive shapes and visibility are keys to navigating in the region. Twin pingos marked our arrival in Tuk.

Hospitality, whale meat

We paddled along the shoreline of Tuk knowing only we were looking for someone named Maureen in order to return our rented kayaks. A woman sat on her porch sorting sea glass on a driftwood table; she greeted us as we paddled past. She said she was Maureen.

Not the Maureen we needed, but she said she sat on the municipal council with our Maureen. She invited us in before we hit land. She settled us at the kitchen table, offered tea and a place to store the kayaks before we had even properly introduced ourselves.

"We were out 18 hours yesterday with the hunt. Not out on the boats, but everyone is busy here. Helping out," she told us.

Without a beat, we were in the flow of the town. She was Maureen Gruben. She was native Inuvialuit. One of eight sisters. You see Gruben on trucks in the area since their father runs a transport business. "The hunt is only a couple weeks, but the oil and the muktuk will last all year."

Muktuk is whale meat. "This is boiled. You cut the skin off and then ... " Like parents anywhere, many of her sentences were finished only by actions. She chopped some small strips, put them on a piece of cardboard with a squirt of ketchup and called her 4-year-old away from the TV to have breakfast.

We were offered a taste. Neither of us eats meat, but we were polite, each taking a tiny piece. It tasted like wet turkey — sort of fishy-rubbery.

A one-room airport with an unpaved runway marks one end of town and the North West Co.'s grocery store the other. The sole motel and attached restaurant showed no signs of being open.

Walking the dirt streets, we noticed that every building was raised in some way to avoid melting the permafrost below, but they still had a hunkered, permanently battened look. Few buildings are more than one story, the walls look extra thick and overwhelm the sparse windows.

A main road follows the winding spine of the town. Smaller streets branch off when the cape extends a finger of land. Houses are clumped in wide spots on those fingers. Nearly every house has a water view. The involutions of the coastline mean that spits of land separated by a hundred yards of water might be a mile's drive from each other.

People get around by motorboat in the summer. When the water turns to ice, snow machines zip around town, and the cars that have been confined to Tuk's cramped tree of roads all summer are freed to make the three-hour run across the ocean and up the river on the ice road to Inuvik.

An outpost of geopolitics

Tuk is marked by the patchwork employment of towns on the margin. The transportation industry provides most of the jobs. Oil and gas projects employ a few more, but lots of work is seasonal. Many First Nation people continue traditional practices including fishing, whale and caribou hunts.

Tourism employs a handful of people, though not full time. We saw half a dozen older white tourists flown in for the day, getting ice cream at the one store on a lunch break from their natural- and cultural-history tour.

While we stumbled on a great home, as with anywhere, it isn't all that way. Unemployment, domestic violence and alcoholism are significant issues. The power dynamics between First Nation residents and white residents can't be balanced — the Mounties and the store manager are white, the cashiers and stock clerks almost all indigenous.

There have been people in the region for 10,000 years, but as a town Tuk didn't exist 100 years ago. The original nomadic inhabitants were decimated by disease when European whalers arrived. The Hudson Bay Co. and indigenous peoples from other parts of the region established a permanent base in 1928.

It is one of those tiny remote towns scattered around the planet that foretold both the troubles and possibilities of globalization.

Made up basically by people from somewhere else, it was created to do work on a scale and in a way that was only relevant to a world economy. For good and bad, as a town Tuk has never existed in a way that is self-sufficient and responsive to the local environment.

In some ways Tuk has more in common with other outpost ports around the world than it does with other parts of the Arctic. Later a Distant Early Warning (DEW) line radar post brought another source of income to the town and again linked it to geopolitics rather than to the local region. And it seems that oil and gas may be next in line.

We spent only a day in Tuk, yet in a trip that had its beginnings in Cameroon and Patagonia and included thousands of miles of North American roads, Tuk was perhaps the most remarkable place we visited.

Sure our kayaks would be picked up by the Maureen we had never met, Maureen Gruben and one of her sisters dropped us at the airport in plenty of time.

The agent at the single service counter announced astounding overweight charges for our paddling gear. After seeing our reaction he said, "Tell you what, for fellow river travelers, let's waive the fee. Just give me a hand getting the bags to the plane."

From 10,000 feet, we looked down on an absolute intertwining of land and water. The water doesn't stop when the ocean ends; that part of the Northwest Territories is Swiss-cheesed by lakes, ponds and puddles. In such a patchwork, it seemed that if the winter didn't come regularly to freeze everything, the water would long ago have won out over the land.

And having taken it all in from the water seemed like the right perspective. During summer in the Arctic, unless you can fly, you should be touching water.

Ted O'Callahan is a freelance writer living in New York City.