Evening entertainment in an Alaskan Arctic village during the summer of 1972 was scarce; I usually played my guitar or read. So, when the mail plane dropped off a feature film, even though it had been released four years earlier in the Lower Forty-eight, I made sure I got myself to the old Quonset hut that served as the village’s common meeting place and cinema. Here’s a chapter from my upcoming memoir, Hardship Alaska, from Epicenter Press.
Now I stood where time had no meaning, where the sun circled my days and nights, never quite dipping into the sea. I'd leave my room each morning with my guitar slung over my shoulder and cut across the short distance to St. Thomas, the small Episcopal mission on the northern edge of the village. There was a one-sentence blurb in the church's one-page bulletin the Sunday prior to my arrival announcing my purpose for being in the village. There was no further communication about it after that, and, I would learn, no need for posting choir rehearsal or music workshop days and times. I wondered how I would attract followers without additional advertising. "Fifteen minutes before you're ready to begin," said Donald Oktalik, the village patriarch and the St. Thomas's ordained priest, "ring the church bell and see who shows up. They know you're here and want to work with you." "Just like that?” "Have faith," was all he said and went back to carving a replacement part out of whale bone for his snowmobile. I didn't have faith. I was a doubting Thomas working in a remote Arctic church named after the very same questioning apostle. Nevertheless, ringing the bell worked. And yet, the cause and effect, ring the bell and they will come, did little to bolster my faith that it would happen any time I rang that bell. At any rate, people showed up for these sessions—choir rehearsals, guitar lessons and practice with anyone even minimally interested in playing hymns for services on the temperamental electric organ. So, I'd pull the rope that rang the bell outside the church door that brought the people that became my students. I also played the weekly church service, and on my last Sunday in Point Hope we performed the folk mass I composed for St. Mary's. On another Sunday when the power had failed, I pulled out the old asthmatic missionary organ, a simple reed instrument with a shortened keyboard and bellows covered in seal skin, the original leather long since worn out and discarded. The power exerted by the bellows was no match for the single rank of tired reeds and no matter how hard I pumped on its hanging pedals, the organ could only wheeze out a barely sustainable tone. Adding chords to the melody compounded the struggle, causing the poor thing to gasp for its next breath of air each time I pumped the bellows. In a demonstration of sincere empathy, the congregation adjusted their singing out of an unexpected sense of compassion and respect for the ailing instrument. The community went out of its way to make me feel a part of the village, inviting me for suppers of cold canned vegetables and muktuk pulled out of sigulaks, square holes dug down into the permafrost which served as ice cellars. Many houses had personal sigulaks where families stored provisions, but there were larger ones, too. Each whaling crew dug deeper vertical shafts accessible by ladders and fortified with wood planks and posts that led below the tundra and provided additional storage space for large amounts of whale meat caught during the hunt. I was told that the spirits of the caught whales also resided in the sigulaks along with the meat, adding a sacred purpose to the space. The meals I consumed seemed to consist of a combination of metallic mush and rancid blubber. I learned quickly to tilt my head back while chewing the sticks of blubber so that the whale oil could find a path to my stomach while avoiding my taste buds. I may have made a big deal about it at first, using humor to deflect my early discomfort with this new taste experience, but soon I found myself eating and smiling and grateful for being part of their world and having something to eat. Meals became a daily eucharist, sacred and celebratory as we gave thanks to the sacrificed whale whose flesh sustained us. That night I walked along gravel paths in one of the oldest continually inhabited settlements in North America, passing the corrugated metal clad post office, 99766, and parked dog sleds attached to snowmobiles. I soon arrived at the World War II-era Quonset hut which now served as Point Hope's one and only movie theatre. A screen mounted on one wall faced off against rows of backless benches which, after the first few rows, grew incrementally higher on stilt-like legs. A wobbly balcony offered an unobstructed view to the screen. Weakly anchored to the floor but not to each other, the bleachers seemed to float under the half-moon arc of the structure's corrugated roof. Maintaining balance, particularly at the higher levels, was a team effort. One unexpected movement from any one bench mate could topple the entire colony. A 16 mm projector balanced uneasily on a metal shelf bolted to the back wall. To start, stop or change reels required the use of a stepladder. A single cable slid down the wall beneath the projector and across the floor making its way to a single speaker below the screen. Films were delivered at will from some unknown distributor or library in Nome or Fairbanks on the plane that carried the mail. The audience arrived with that certain excitement of a night out with friends who haven't seen each other in some time, even though most of them had spent the entire day together. Someone offered me a hand and I was hoisted up onto one of the medium height bleachers. I immediately surrendered to the group's sense of balance as my legs dangled freely below. The simple gesture, a hand reaching out to welcome me, to be raised up, to join these intimate strangers for a couple of hours of Hollywood diversion meant everything to me at that moment. I had never been so far from home and in need of feeling connected, of being accepted. And yet here I was, at the end of the world, finding that connection, that acceptance. As our row engaged in a perpetual game of give and take in order to maintain balance, we began to know and trust our places on the bench. We seemed to breathe together, adapting to each other’s movements, protecting the whole lest one of us forgets where he was, and we all come tumbling down. The windowless Quonset provided the perfect remedy to the midnight sun outside. Someone climbed the ladder with this evening’s presentation and threaded the first reel of film through the projector. As the film wound its way through the sprockets, the operator motioned for someone in the audience to switch off the lights. Darkness gave way to the film leader’s dyslectic numeric countdown, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4… fade to black and then the single monophonic speaker crackled out a snare drum cadence and brass fanfare as searchlights scanned an iconic art deco monument to Twentieth Century Fox, Charlton Heston in Planet of the Apes. I struggled to hear any dialogue or follow the plot due to the increasing laughter from the audience, who seem to be finding this epic one of the funniest comedies they had seen. There came a point where I was laughing, too, not quite understanding what made the film so funny to them, yet somehow caught in a paroxysm of giggles.