Just Living

Seth Kantner lives and works in a world where few of us would want to exchange places. He and his wife, Stacey, live in the Northwest Arctic, along with their and daughter, China. Temperatures can range from forty or fifty below zero in winter to eighty or ninety degrees above zero in the summer. He was born and raised in a sod igloo on a two-mile-long bluff called Paungaqtaugruk on the Kobuk River. Although Seth is a white man, his neighbors are mostly Alaskan Natives, the Inupiaq and Athabaskan tribes. In his hard-to-put-down book Swallowed by the Great Land, he tells story after story of what life is like in a land where bears, wolves, moose, caribou, lynx, and musk ox are more common than humans.

As a child his parents taught him to hunt, skin animals, run dog teams and survive where villages and people are scarce and errors of judgement can be instantly fatal. With his family, Seth lives in a sod house that is buried in the ground. During the winter season, the only door of his house is often blocked by snow, and he has to cut a hole through the snow in order to crawl out. The harsh climate takes a toll on the wood door, and he often has to spend hours repairing the frame so that it will open and shut. He writes that keeping the door in good repair is important, not to keep people out, but to discourage bears from getting in!

Reading Kantner’s book opened my eyes to a world that is totally foreign to me. In Florida, where I live, a cold day is whenever the temperature drops below sixty degrees. In the Northwest Arctic, on the other hand, Seth and his neighbors celebrate whenever the temperature plunges to minus thirty degrees. The colder weather freezes the rivers, making travel easier because their snowgos (a kind of snowmobile) can race across the thick ice and snow.

Seth and his family are incredibly connected to nature. Money has limited value as they survive by hunting, fishing, cutting wood, and scraping hides. His daughter learned to gut and clean a caribou when she was only around five years of age. It is not at all surprising to go outside their home and see wild animals, such as bears, moose, wolves and other game foraging for food just yards from the house.

By reading his book I picked up some new vocabulary words—grebe, a diving waterbird, ugruk, a bearded seal hide, maktuk, the skin and blubber of a whale, and tinnik berries. The tinnik berries must be something to die for. On occasion Seth walks five miles or more to pick maybe a dozen or two of these delicious berries that he soaks in seal oil before eating (There are no roads in Seth’s world!)

Seth was educated in Alaska and later graduated from Montana University with a degree in journalism. He writes about life in the Northwest Arctic and has won many awards as an acclaimed expert on wildlife in Alaska. He has spoken in many places around the world about his hunting, hiking adventures and sometimes hair-raising escapes from death in one of the last wildernesses in the world.

I found his book to be spellbinding and enlightening. His writing is conversational and easy to read, and his vivid words paint incredibly beautiful pictures of a wilderness land both enchanting and dangerous. He even includes a few black and white photos that help the reader to capture a sense of life in the arctic.

Occasionally people from the lower 48 states venture into Seth’s habitat to hunt or fish. Seth notes that people from the south are referred to as “white people,” even though they may be of African or Asian descent. In his part of the world, anyone who comes from the south is called a “white” person. Although Seth is not an Eskimo, and technically a white person, the fact that he was born and raised in that part of the world makes him a quasi-native.

When people from the lower states meet Seth, they often ask him what he does for a living. The question is something Seth never thought about until people started visiting his region. Most people go to jobs in the morning, fight traffic, work at desks, and earn a paycheck. Seth does none of that—although he claims that his royalties from the books he has written earned him $112.54 one year—he just lives. He stresses that “life shouldn’t be rushed.” That may sound like paradisiacal living, but Seth must provide for his family in the most severe weather imaginable and the most unforgiving land. Everyday Seth and his family must hunt and fish to survive, as does everyone who lives in that part of the world. There are no vacations, no supermarkets, and no days off.

Still, Seth loves his life but is fearful of the future. What concerns Seth, what really frightens him, are two things beyond his control: climate change and the encroachment of the land by mega-conglomerates and industries. Over the last forty years Seth has witnessed how climate change has adversely affected the area where he lives. As late as December, instead of snow the land is now often drenched in rain, which affects the migration of the animals, especially the caribou, that Seth and many of the natives depend on for food. The entire ecological system is dramatically changing. The weather is far more unpredictable than it once was, making life more uncertain for the inhabitants.

In addition to climate change, large corporations and industries are working with politicians to buy land in the arctic region to mine copper and other minerals. If their proposals are approved, they will build roads that will carry heavy machinery and trucks, destroying the natural habitat of animals and decimating the indigenous tribes that have lived there for centuries. Seth mourns the possible loss of his way of life as these industries will destroy the fragile eco-system and shatter the lives of the people who live there. Our traditions and way of life will not “survive a train of trucks thundering across” our ancestral homeland, Seth writes.

When I finished reading Seth Kantner’s mesmerizing book, I thought a long time about our modern world. Somewhere along the way we have lost touch with nature. We no longer marvel at a bird in flight or the speed or agility of a wild animal or the beauty of pristine forests. We see ourselves as distinct and superior to everything not human. I cringe whenever I see bulldozers completely clearing woodlands in my own city, oblivious to the animals they have dislocated. Have we forgotten that we, too, have been created from the dust of the earth? In Genesis God calls us to be caretakers of the world, guardians of all that he has created; instead, we too often behave like insidious parasites, destroying all that comes within our reach.

Perhaps we should be reminded of Paul’s words in the letter to the Galatians—whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. Nature, indeed, may have the last word.

God is BIG!

Scripture and Science