Barrow, Alaska, January 23, 2017: Small-framed Kim walked down Okpik Street half past noon swaddled in her thick blue down coat, peering east though a tunnel of fur on the inside of her hood. She anxiously moved towards where she might witness the sun for the first time in three months. Drunken electrical poles and a crisscross of wires in the foreground broke up the frosty, tangerine sky above the lavender tundra beyond Isatkoak Lagoon. Famous, Barrow was. Pretty, it was not. A collection of corrugated metal and prefabs sitting on pillions formed the edges of the snow-packed road. Everything here seemed so temporary, so disconnected to the tundra on which it sat. The tundra was clean, white, minimal; Barrow was a heap of metal clutter spilled over it, like dumping a bag of garbage on a marble museum floor. Yet, Kim loved her life here at the top of the world tracking climate change data for the NOAA. Everything in this one square mile cut off from the rest of world took on significance. At 12:55 p.m. she might actually see the sun. Never in her life had a sunrise seemed so vital. And that was the beauty of this place. The brutality of raw nature made life real. She no longer drifted through her days; she lived each one fully--even the hours and hours she spent graphing and interpreting data--because outside her frosty office window was a constant impending reminder of deep, saturating cold and darkness. And the skies on those rare nights when cloud cover didn't creep along that final curve of the continent as the north slope of Alaska slowly slid off into the Arctic ocean--on those rare clear nights (whether at midnight or 4 p.m.), it seemed the entire universe opened before her and some god somewhere declared, Hear me, see me, this is my work; this is my glory.
Kim also worried a lot--not for herself, not for the people around her. She worried for humanity. She was pretty sure we were a lot closer to extinction than most were aware of, so she desperately desired that the god she felt declare himself on those rare oh-so-clear nights at the top of the world was indeed real and not just a creation of her terrified mind trying to hold onto existence. Somehow all these lives in these temporary tin cans mattered; somehow she mattered; she did not want the lights to ever go out--not for herself personally, and certainly not for humanity as a whole. All she could do was hope that the little bit of knowledge she added to that great picture called climate change would do its part in waking up the world to the impending calamity.
But anticipating the first sunrise of the year, none of that was on Kim's mind. Nothing was on her mind other than anticipation. She was a transparent eyeball taking it all in. The frosty, tangerine sky. Those wacky, drunk electrical poles. Corrugated metal buildings slightly lit up along the eastern edges from the approaching sun and in deep blue shadow everywhere else. A dog across the street yapped at her, great clouds of steam pouring out with every angry outcry. A big white truck with Potable Water Only in big black letters on the side of the tank rolled slowly by, making a crunching sound on the frozen road. Finally, she came to the open spot where D-street took a hard left north. There she stood, waiting for the sun. It was cloudy, so chances were not good that she would actually see it. But the marmalade sky was enough. This was it. This was life. As she looked across the frozen flat of Isatkoak Lagoon from this town where not even the buildings had foundations, where wires dangled precariously overhead or ran through large metal tubes suspended above the frozen ground, she felt grounded as she never had before.
This was life. The frost forming at the end of the furry tunnel of her hood said, you exist--even if it is only for now. That's all she had ever really wanted--to know life wasn't just a dream, to feel reality penetrate deep within her bones.
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