[ed. The irresistible joys of roughing it in the Alaska bush. When you're breathing mosquitoes (or trying to shit in a black cloud of fast, biting bugs), you really do ask yourself, what the hell am I doing here?]
It's not always easy to talk to Outsiders about mosquitoes. They nod knowingly and mention Maine or Minnesota. I usually stop and talk about something else. I've been to those places, and Central America, and Africa. I remember the dark, warm nights, the rain, the bandits with machetes and machine guns. But not so much the mosquitoes.
These last two springs, the young, aggressive bugs have hatched late. Recently, my coworker Linnea Wik and I flew to Ambler. Even though it was early June, we saw only two or three mosquitoes all weekend. It was cold, yet strangely pleasant with no bugs. I liked the reprieve, but worried the swallows and other species might be starving while we humans gloated.
Sure enough, as soon as the cool weather eased slightly, hungry young mosquitoes swarmed. I knew it was bad when Don Williams and his son Alvin both texted me from Ambler about the bugs. They don't usually mention them.
About that time, a French archaeology student, Angelique, emailed me, asking if I might hike with her into the mountains north of the Kobuk to look for various sources of jade used by the old Inupiaq to make weapons and tools. All I knew about this woman was that she'd first contacted me a year ago, was half Polish and was very persistent. I wrote back, saying I was busy, she should hire villagers for any transport and the only thing I knew about archaeology was that she needed to get explicit permission from landowners. I also warned her about the brush -- thick nowadays back in the hills -- and the mosquitoes.
Unfortunately, talking about bugs in the Arctic right away makes a person sound like they're exaggerating. “It's hard to breathe,” I tell people. “Don't worry about bears. Going to the bathroom is going to seem like a life-threatening experience.” (...)
By midnight the first day, sweating and scratched after 11 hours thrashing through mindlessly thick brush, we slumped in damp moss, not quite desperate but getting there. We were too tired to eat and nearly out of water, again. Somehow the bugs seemed to worsen, hour after hour. Clouds pelted us and rode along on our packs; the buzzing was ceaseless and every 15 minutes we had to re-spray our bug shirts. I'd never seen dwarf birch like these in the Arctic -- over our heads and as thick around as my wrist, blocking all view, tangling our feet and tearing at our skin and clothes. Our progress for the last four hours had been about 900 yards an hour. My arm was numb from swinging the machete and my elbow bruised from hitting the butt of my pistol. My shoulder holster under my pack chafed through to the meat.
Angelique's boots had worn holes and her feet were soaked and blistered. With a pack on her back and another on her front, half-blinded by her bug shield, she'd fallen countless times in the brush and into creeks and swamps we crossed. Throughout the day I'd heard her call out, “Set? Set?” as she tried to locate me a few yards ahead in the brush. I hadn't heard a complaint, though. (...)
“Whose idea was this?” I muttered -- my perennial mantra.
“He usually says that when something was his idea,” Linnea reassured Angelique.
We laughed and shared the last of our water and a granola bar, doing what we'd been doing all day: suffering, sharing and laughing. In that way I guess this really was Angelique's idea -- because I imagine the old people did a lot of that: suffering, sharing, and laughing. (...)
The following day we broke camp, our packs heavy with rocks, and headed downstream, along the thickly vegetated banks of the creek. Travel was hideous. My jeans were frayed fuzzy and torn, and black flies swarmed, crawling everywhere under our clothes, biting and joining the frenzy of the mosquitoes.
Angelique's feet, after days wet, were a puffy mess. The plan had been to inflate our packrafts here and drift, maybe barefoot in the boats, resting, occasionally paddling while pleasantly dreaming of cold beers.
Unfortunately, the thickets along the banks were crisscrossed with overgrown dead-fall spruce, mired with sinkholes and wet side-channels. The pretty blue line on my USGS map translated into a narrow, turbulent chute with boulder teeth. Every hundred yards or so, a log lay across the creek, limbs combing the water.
Angelique informed me again that she couldn't swim. I assured her that it would be fine -- I couldn't either. We weren't getting in that creek anyway; we were stuck behind my machete, slashing a path, staying beside the stream so she could collect more samples.
That night, in addition to mosquitoes, our tent filled with tiny, crawling black flies. We sprayed the netting with bug dope until they fell, covering the floor and our clothes and sleeping bags with writhing half-dead bugs. Outside, the tent was being pelted. During the night I awoke, convinced that now it really was raining, a soft steady downpour. “It is rain?” Angelique asked. But it was only more and more insects striking the tent.
It's not always easy to talk to Outsiders about mosquitoes. They nod knowingly and mention Maine or Minnesota. I usually stop and talk about something else. I've been to those places, and Central America, and Africa. I remember the dark, warm nights, the rain, the bandits with machetes and machine guns. But not so much the mosquitoes.
These last two springs, the young, aggressive bugs have hatched late. Recently, my coworker Linnea Wik and I flew to Ambler. Even though it was early June, we saw only two or three mosquitoes all weekend. It was cold, yet strangely pleasant with no bugs. I liked the reprieve, but worried the swallows and other species might be starving while we humans gloated.Sure enough, as soon as the cool weather eased slightly, hungry young mosquitoes swarmed. I knew it was bad when Don Williams and his son Alvin both texted me from Ambler about the bugs. They don't usually mention them.
About that time, a French archaeology student, Angelique, emailed me, asking if I might hike with her into the mountains north of the Kobuk to look for various sources of jade used by the old Inupiaq to make weapons and tools. All I knew about this woman was that she'd first contacted me a year ago, was half Polish and was very persistent. I wrote back, saying I was busy, she should hire villagers for any transport and the only thing I knew about archaeology was that she needed to get explicit permission from landowners. I also warned her about the brush -- thick nowadays back in the hills -- and the mosquitoes.
Unfortunately, talking about bugs in the Arctic right away makes a person sound like they're exaggerating. “It's hard to breathe,” I tell people. “Don't worry about bears. Going to the bathroom is going to seem like a life-threatening experience.” (...)
By midnight the first day, sweating and scratched after 11 hours thrashing through mindlessly thick brush, we slumped in damp moss, not quite desperate but getting there. We were too tired to eat and nearly out of water, again. Somehow the bugs seemed to worsen, hour after hour. Clouds pelted us and rode along on our packs; the buzzing was ceaseless and every 15 minutes we had to re-spray our bug shirts. I'd never seen dwarf birch like these in the Arctic -- over our heads and as thick around as my wrist, blocking all view, tangling our feet and tearing at our skin and clothes. Our progress for the last four hours had been about 900 yards an hour. My arm was numb from swinging the machete and my elbow bruised from hitting the butt of my pistol. My shoulder holster under my pack chafed through to the meat.
Angelique's boots had worn holes and her feet were soaked and blistered. With a pack on her back and another on her front, half-blinded by her bug shield, she'd fallen countless times in the brush and into creeks and swamps we crossed. Throughout the day I'd heard her call out, “Set? Set?” as she tried to locate me a few yards ahead in the brush. I hadn't heard a complaint, though. (...)
“Whose idea was this?” I muttered -- my perennial mantra.
“He usually says that when something was his idea,” Linnea reassured Angelique.
We laughed and shared the last of our water and a granola bar, doing what we'd been doing all day: suffering, sharing and laughing. In that way I guess this really was Angelique's idea -- because I imagine the old people did a lot of that: suffering, sharing, and laughing. (...)
The following day we broke camp, our packs heavy with rocks, and headed downstream, along the thickly vegetated banks of the creek. Travel was hideous. My jeans were frayed fuzzy and torn, and black flies swarmed, crawling everywhere under our clothes, biting and joining the frenzy of the mosquitoes.
Angelique's feet, after days wet, were a puffy mess. The plan had been to inflate our packrafts here and drift, maybe barefoot in the boats, resting, occasionally paddling while pleasantly dreaming of cold beers.
Unfortunately, the thickets along the banks were crisscrossed with overgrown dead-fall spruce, mired with sinkholes and wet side-channels. The pretty blue line on my USGS map translated into a narrow, turbulent chute with boulder teeth. Every hundred yards or so, a log lay across the creek, limbs combing the water.
Angelique informed me again that she couldn't swim. I assured her that it would be fine -- I couldn't either. We weren't getting in that creek anyway; we were stuck behind my machete, slashing a path, staying beside the stream so she could collect more samples.
That night, in addition to mosquitoes, our tent filled with tiny, crawling black flies. We sprayed the netting with bug dope until they fell, covering the floor and our clothes and sleeping bags with writhing half-dead bugs. Outside, the tent was being pelted. During the night I awoke, convinced that now it really was raining, a soft steady downpour. “It is rain?” Angelique asked. But it was only more and more insects striking the tent.
by Seth Kantner, Alaska Dispatch | Read more:
Image: Stephen Nowers
