Letter from Barrow, Alaska

People keep asking me how cold it is, so here's the deal: temperatures fluctuate. I just looked and supposedly right now it is eight degrees below zero Fahrenheit, with a low of around fifteen below expected later tonight. Those numbers don't take windchill into account, and it's always windy here since the nearest hill or tree is more than three hundred miles to the south and it's a straight shot up and over the Arctic Ocean to the North Pole.

One local said the other day, and with a straight face, "we're lucky we have the Arctic Ocean right here. It keeps us warm." I know what he means, but come on. While temperatures here are slightly higher on average than in the vast interior of Alaska, as far as I can tell, "warm" is not part of the equation.

If you dress properly for extreme cold weather, temperatures below negative thirty degrees Fahrenheit are actually quite tolerable, though one area you've got to be extra careful about is your face. Don't leave any of that tender facial skin exposed. Your face will tell you pretty quickly that it's unhappy--I believe the word for this is "pain".

Just before I left New York for Barrow, my father wrote me with this bit of, um, advice: Kit, Just read a brief review of Ian McEwan's latest book, Solar, a satirical novel focusing on global warming. He apparently went where you're going and an anecdote drifted in from the review about the Arctic danger of having your penis freeze to your fly zipper! By the way, the remedy was to pour brandy over it. (Sorry waste of good brandy, but...there you are.) Hope things go well with you, Luv, D.
The most time I have spent outdoors in a given stretch is about one hour, and that was only once. When we start shooting, about three weeks from now, I will be outside for ten or twelve hours at a time. I am not dreading it, but I would be lying if I said I wasn't thinking about it an awful lot.

I mail ordered a polyurethane hood and some goggles on my second day here. They should arrive by the end of next week.

Today I walked about a quarter mile out onto the frozen Arctic Ocean and when I got back to town the local producer warned me that I should never do that without a gun. "Because of the polar bears," she said. All I could think of to say was "but I don't have a gun," followed by my sheepish pledge, "I promise not to be eaten by a polar bear."

A rudimentary Internet search will give you a more accurate picture of the people, culture, and climate here than I am able to after only four days, but here are some factoids and chewy bits you might enjoy:

• The North Slope Borough of Alaska, of which Barrow is the borough seat, is the largest county-level municipality in the United States, and maybe even the world, covering an area roughly the size of Utah.
• Each building in Barrow has a unique number for an address, so you don't even have to include the name of the street in your mailed correspondence. Brilliant!
  
• Barrow has more than four thousand residents, and most of them tend to stay indoors. I've been here almost a week now, staying in one of the four small hotels on the "center" of town. During my walks at various times of day I've seen about fifteen other human beings.
  
• Try and wrap your head around this: the North Slope of Alaska is both a desert and a wetlands. Here's how: the amount of overall precipitation is low enough to classify the region as a desert, while the permafrost (ground that never thaws) prevents drainage after what little snow there is finally melts, so as to make it a wetlands.
• Barrow is a "damp" town, but not a "dry" town. In a damp town, an individual Alaska resident may procure a license to purchase alcoholic beverages from an out of town vendor. The sale of alcoholic beverages in Barrow is prohibited. In many neighboring "dry" communities, it is illegal to import or possess alcohol. Both native and non-native locals are quite frank about why this control is needed. As one guy put it to me rather bluntly, "Alcohol makes Indians crazy."
  

The movie I am working on is called On the Ice. The short film version, "Sikumi", won the Jury Prize for Short Filmmaking at Sundance in 2008. The writer-director, Andrew Okpeaha MacLean, has developed his short into a feature film, which tells a similar story about morality and freedom and choice, but includes more characters, and basically incorporates the entire town. About half the movie will be shot "on the ice" and the other half in the town of Barrow.

Here is a link to the short film.

The highlights so far were an after midnight road trip up to Point Barrow to look at the Aurora Borealis (Northern Lights), and spending much of an evening watching a group of a dozen local women sew the hides of several seals together to make the outer hull of a boat. When they finished sewing around ten-thirty at night, the men came by and stretched the newly sewn hides over the twelve-foot wooden frame of the whale boat. As soon as the Arctic ice melts, several whalers will hunt from this tiny vessel.

(And,

two months later...)

We wrapped last Friday after the most exhausting month of shooting I've ever experienced. About half the movie was shot out on the frozen Arctic Ocean. On those "ice days" we traveled to set each day on snowmobiles which in turn towed sleds with equipment and our rather banged up looking crew. The commute alone took hours sometimes: packing, loading, traveling over land, unloading, unpacking, setting up. Repeat at end of day. Snowmobiles break down a lot, and wooden sleds get all banged up after hours of travel over chunky ice formations. Our unit took a real beating on an hourly basis, but we shot everything we wanted to--or just about.

By the time we wrapped the movie, the sun was in the sky more than twenty-one hours a day. Over the final two weeks the darkest it ever got was what I would call broad daylight on a cloudy day.

Every minute during the prepping and shooting of a film is important. Hypersensitivity to time is a fundamental part of filmmaking. The locals in Barrow actually have a word for our southern ways; without a hint of irony, they call it "on-time culture".

Climate change is occurring, and not just according to this recent New York Times design piece. The locals here talk about the new calendar of seasons, and claim to have been talking about it for some time. It's affecting our shoot. The ice "looks like June", not March. Saint Patrick's Day is the new Memorial Day. The caribou run a month later in the fall now. A couple years ago a whole bunch of whalers floated away on some ice that broke off. The ice breaks off a lot closer to shore these days.

There's a website which details Aurora Borealis activity. Our chef couldn't get enough of these nights out observing and photographing--until the around-the-clock daylight made it impossible, he was out there just about every other night with his lenses and tripod taking amazing photographs.

Save for a fair amount of hydroponic marijuana production, there is no agriculture in Barrow, no matter what the season.

I have eaten the meat, blubber, and skin of whale, caribou stew, and elk--I think it was elk. Just about everything is expensive here, food most of all. A guy across the hall from me in the Top of the World Hotel ordered Chinese takeout for himself the other night and he was just as shocked as I was when the total for his dinner came to a fair seventy-seven bucks.

There are several restaurants in town, which run the gamut from inedible to way too expensive. There are two pizza places--both deliver, but only one has tables. And there's a Mexican joint, a local cafe, and even sushi. Three of us went for coffee the other day. Total cost of three delicious beverages: $17. (Full disclosure: we didn't have any cash on us, but the owner knew we were part of the film crew and agreed to let us come back and pay later.)

I saw whales in water, I saw whales out of the water. I saw whales butchered and ate their meat, blubber, and skin. Maktak has a fishy smell that is like a fishy smell on steroids.

All of the homes and businesses I have been in here are heated to the point of being way too hot. Since the windows and doors are not drafty, people tend to wear t-shirts and shorts inside their hot homes in which they burn gas, oil, or kerosene.

I was surprised to find out that people don't have woodstoves or fireplaces here until I looked around and reminded myself that there are no trees for hundreds of miles. There is one, literally, one, guy in town who goes to great expense to barge in firewood from Seattle once a year. He's known as "woodstove guy" and locals consider it a privilege to live in his neighborhood where you can smell the smoke.

The high school is the most expensive in the nation; eighty million dollars to ship materials & build it.

Lots of people have kids here, and in turn a lot of the kids have kids. One twenty-three year-old woman involved with our production is about to have her third child. I have met several teenage parents here.

On the plane from Anchorage to Fairbanks, I sat between a weapons manufacturer and a methamphetamine addict. Meth is a problem in Barrow, though like so much else in Barrow the side effects stay indoors most of the time. I remember witnessing the effects of alcoholism during two months I spent lower Alaska twenty years ago. The state newspapers refer to some of these folks as "chronic inebriates".

It pays to be a Native Alaskan. Indians in the lower forty-eight chose land over resources (we all know how that worked out), but the Alaskans chose to keep control over natural resources. As a result there is a Fortune 500 corporation from which every Eskimo receives a hefty annual stipend.

Postcard from Everywhere

Yesterday I visited Wales, a country I claim as one of my three ancestral homes, and the twelfth country I have seen in the past eleven months. In just a couple of days I return to the United States of America, where my first film assignment on home turf will be in Barrow, Alaska (a mere seven-hundred-fifty miles north of Anchorage).

Since we last spoke, let me assure you, I have been everywhere. I am in possession of such a backlog of thoughts, notes, photographs, videos, musings, and ramblings, that I can't begin to fit them all into one letter. If you actually want to hear about it, you'll have to wait for my book to be published.
I finally did procure a camera, and by legal means I'll have you know. My journeys across Morocco, and in Spain, France, and the UK have all been documented in pictures. The camera is one of the reasons I am currently unable to organize my thoughts in words. I seem to think in images for the time being. I am bringing the camera to Alaska, where it will no doubt freeze and stop working and I will go back to being a writer.

I'm pleased to report that my seven weeks at the Four Seasons Hotel in Cairo didn't make me entirely soft. In subsequent travels I have happily shared bunk rooms with strangers, some even more fragrant than me. The cost of the rooms I stayed at in Morocco averaged about sixteen bucks per night. At those prices, I learned not to expect towels, a telephone, breakfast, a TV, or toilet paper.

When I crossed the Straits of Gibraltar from North Africa into Spain by ferry boat, I fulfilled a nearly lifelong desire--the desire not to capsize and die while crossing the Straits of Gibraltar by ferry boat.


Apropos of not much, the director of photography on my Egypt gig, a gregarious Aussie (is there any other kind?), insists that there must exist a connection between a country's GDP and its practice of painting its tree trunks white. He might be on to something. I first noticed this practice in Venezuela, and then later throughout the Mideast. But in Morocco, the tree painters took it one step further, and had actually stripped most of the bark from the lowermost portion of the trees before painting the trunks white. There are long stretches of roadside woods made up of trees with no bark left on the lower part of the trunks, which were then painted white. I have yet to see anything like this in Europe or the UK.

Hey: if you have the means and the wherewithal, I urge you to get out there and see the world. See as much as you can before it all looks the same. The sameness is encroaching everywhere.

See you soon, I hope.

Insha'Allah.

Kit












--
In Memory of Ann Purcell (1917-2010)

Marrakesh, Morrocoo, at Dusk, by Bike

I took this video in Marrakesh, Morrocco.

Letter to Egypt [Vol. 2]

[So this is not actually Volume 2, as I have not written a letter to Egypt yet. But you get the idea.]

Dear Egypt,

Please clean up your act. There are thirty million inhabitants in Cairo but you will not pay anybody to sweep the sidewalks or collect household trash, leaving your citizens no choice but to toss their trash in the seemingly endless irrigation ditches stemming from the Nile--the same channels in which people catch fish to feed their families. Your children bathe in this same water, full of garbage and human waste.

Have you noticed that of the many tourists who come here to visit, very few return for a second trip? This is because you hassle them, hustle them, rip them off, harangue them, and then lie that it ever happened like that. If I had been here on a two week vacation, I would have left after one week. You beg for things you don't necessarily need.

Have you no pride (or shame) in the food you grow, sell, or serve? Vegetables and fruit are served in a condition just short of rotten. A five dollar lemonade, listed as "fresh" on your menus, is nothing but powdered Country Time. Nescafe is your coffee beverage of choice. My friend ordered a milkshake the other day at lunch, and we will never understand how you could have possibly intended to serve it hot.

Where are you hiding the women? They don't wait or bus tables in your restaurants, or work in your hotels, or drive your buses and taxis. They aren't smoking shisha in your cafes or working in your shops. They don't pilot your river boats or sell wares on the street. What are they doing and where are they doing it?

What's with all the yelling? Can you not learn to communicate in softer tones? Every interaction need not be an argument or a chance to display your bravado.

Your infinite archaeological and historical attractions in and around Cairo, Luxor, and elsewhere are spectacular and well worth a trip here--something to be proud of indeed. Yet graft and mismanagement of these sites leaves visitors with more than just the taste of sand in their mouths.

I do not want a camel ride. I do not want a book of postcards. Thank you, I like my shirt too. I like Obama too, thank you. Really, thanks a lot. No, I do not want to buy a hat, sunglasses, or a scarf. No, I just told you I do not want a camel ride. No, not a donkey ride either. Or a horse, thank you. I refuse to be mocked for not riding your camel.

Keep honking your car horns, but please realize that nobody's listening. Sure, we all hear it, but the other drivers simply are not paying attention. May I suggest an alternative? Traffic lanes. (You know me, always thinking outside the box.) I have another suggestion: turn on your headlights after dark. Not only will it help you see the road, but it will help others see you as well.

I will be leaving Egypt in a few weeks. I hope you and I can learn to see eye to eye before then. If not, after I have gone, please keep me posted as to how things improve.

Best,

Kit

Letter from Egypt

And Now... Egypt.
After taking December off to travel in Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan (where I floated in the saline waters of the Dead Sea, and hiked the far reaches within the ancient city of Petra), I flew from Beirut to Cairo on the second to last day of 2009 to begin a new job on a TV show about (what else?) Egyptology.

No amount of Middle East sightseeing and adventure could have prepared me for the experiences I am having in Egypt. I consider myself very fortunate to have the opportunity to explore Egypt for such a substantial length of time--it's a seven week shoot--all the while earning a paycheck.

On my first day in Egypt I tech-scouted the Great Pyramids of Giza and the Sphinx--I will be back there several days in the coming weeks to shoot. My second day had me riding atop a 4x4 shooting B-roll in the vast desert surrounding the Pyramids at Dahshur. And while my work has left me little time to explore Cairo itself, the largest city in North Africa, seeing the archaeological sites in which I spend my days have already made this trip worth a hundred vacations.

Because there are too many to properly manage and manage, the majority of archaeological sites in Egypt are closed to the public. But because we are working for the History Channel (a media entity known to drum up tourism) and because the Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, Dr. Zahi Hawass, is the subject of our show, our production has been granted access to certain tombs, pyramids, and temples most people have not been able to visit for years. We even covered a bona fide discovery this week, one the Council is calling "the best find in years"--and the kind of thing archaeologists drool over.

In addition to shooting in and around Cairo and Giza, our crew will head south to Luxor for a week and north to Alexandria for a quick shoot there. This month I will have the once in a lifetime experience of being four hundred feet beneath the surface of the Earth when we shoot a scene inside a tomb at the Valley of Kings.

It's A Desert Because... It's A Desert
On a good physical map Egypt looks like a beige rhombus with a vertical green line drawn down the right side of it. Inside that green line is an even narrower blue line--that would be the Nile. You've probably heard of it. The rest of Egypt, I can report, is sand broken up by a few oases here and there. It's hot, then it's cold, but mostly it's dry.

Cairo is Huge
Cairo is the first place I have seen homeless people since being in the Middle East. I can only assume they are homeless because they are sleeping on subway grates. The transition to a major city in a new-to-me part of the world was made much easier by my having spent so much time in the region already. If Beirut was like Albuquerque, Damascus like Chicago, and Jordan like Ohio: then Cairo is a dirty Los Angeles. It's vast, crowded, noisy, diverse, and difficult to navigate. The traffic is insane beyond belief. The smog is thick as mud, the buildings are dusty. Sadly, it's tough to find good food here (especially coming from Lebanon and Syria where one must search out a meal that's less than perfect). So far, I have not seen anything I would describe as "quaint" in Egypt.

For anyone planning a trip to the Middle East, I would suggest Egypt for the archaeological wonders, Syria for exotic and exciting Arabic culture, Jordan for rest, relaxation, and sightseeing, and Lebanon for partying like a rockstar, and eating delicious food--though you can hike and ski there too.

Am I Going to Hell?
My job has me holed up in the Four Seasons Hotel, overlooking the Nile on one side and the Great Pyramids of Giza on the other. Wouldn't it be my luck to get stuck with the Pyramid side? Several evenings I have watched the sun go down behind the Great Pyramids of Giza as I kicked back on my private balcony strumming the El Cheapo guitar I purchased months ago in Lebanon.

I am shocked I actually have it in me to complain about the service at the Four Seasons. The main problem is that it's too good. The staff have no qualms about touching my razor and toothbrush, and they continue to fold my dirty laundry even after I have asked them to stop because that confuses me. There are too many options to choose from at breakfast. The workers don't leave me alone and they are far too pleasant. People actually come by at night to save me the trouble of turning down the blankets on my bed, and aligning up my complimentary slippers for easy entry. When I call down to ask for a wake up call, the scripted response is "with pleasure, Mr. Bland," to which the only reply I can think of is "Pleasure? Really?"

So, yes, hello, it's me, a fat North American sitting pretty on the African continent, complaining about the all too eager service in my luxury hotel while miles away entire families subside on whatever piastres they can gather transporting their crops to market by ox or donkey, or raising a few goats for slaughter.