The beach was once a bridge. This was long ago. It is an old story.
Thirty-six thousand years before human memory, the Earth’s water froze into attics of ice. It was a period of glaciation. The seas shrank. And a vast ramp of rock emerged from the receding surf, cementing Eurasia to the Americas. Grasslands sprouted atop the new land—Beringia. Imagine a cool Serengeti. Proto-horses drummed over it. So did gigantic horned bison. Panthera spalaea, cave lions larger than grizzlies, stalked myopic rhinos. Hairy elephants lumbered across. Some of these creatures perished along a maze of game trails. Their mineralized bones jut today from the Alaskan permafrost. This is where Tyler Weyiouanna finds them. He turns them into jewelry.
“We find mammoth tusks eroding from the beach,” said Weyiouanna, an Iñupiaq artist in the coastal village of Shishmaref, whose small grid of mud streets and boxy homes face the steel-colored waves of the Bering Strait, beyond which, barely a hundred miles away, Russia hunkers invisibly. “They look like pieces of brown logs or sticks.”
Shyly, Weyiouanna held up a ring he’d carved from a fossil tusk. He placed the small, bewitching disk in my palm. Warm to the touch. Polished like glass. The petrified bone as milky as campfire smoke in moonlight. The last time a human being saw a living mammoth was perhaps 10,000 years ago, shortly after the global climate warmed once again, swelling the oceans, and re-drowning the steppes between Siberia and Alaska. Was Weyiouanna’s ring, I wondered, whittled from some shaggy colossus speared by the very people I had been following for a dozen years? Did I just walk 27,000 kilometers to cup this nomad echo in my hand?
Sitting at Weyiouanna’s dinner table, I suddenly felt the whisk-whisk-whisk of Lyme grasses against hide leggings. I could hear the hunters’ remote cries lopped off by razored winds. And then the final trumpet of a toppled behemoth. It made a faint rattling among the chipped coffee cups, before passing away and beyond.
I have been walking continuously out of Africa since 2013, making for Tierra del Fuego.
I’m retracing the epic wanderings of our Stone Age ancestors, the early Homo sapiens who first paced off the worlds’ horizons. Mr. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine blocked my way into Siberia. Which is why, when Weyiouanna’s spry, 83-year-old grandfather, Clifford, a retired caribou herder, rummaged about his cramped house in Shishmaref to show me a family heirloom, an animal-skin belt stitched for his grandmother by Inupiat relatives in Chukotka, I stared down at the worn blue, white, and red beadwork with longing. With regret.
“People still crossed the strait freely by boat” between Siberia and Alaska as late as the 1940s, said Inupiat elder Clifford Weyiouanna, an Iñupiaq elder from Shishmaref, Alaska.
Photograph by Paul Salopek
“I don’t remember when we got it,” said Clifford, who was born inside a tent on the buggy summer tundra day of June 6, 1942. He puckered his wrinkled face in concentration. “Maybe the 30s? Or the 40s? People still crossed the strait freely by boat back then.”
I too had washed up, another relic out of time, onto the icy grey beaches of Shishmaref from Asia.
My conveyance wasn’t a plank skiff or a Pleistocene land bridge, however, but a bunk aboard a container ship crossing the Pacific from Japan. At Anchorage, I had booked a commercial flight to Nome. And from there I squeezed into a bush plane. I’m still not certain why.
I wanted, I suppose, to plant a symbolic boot print at the freezing doorsill of the new continent. The Bering Strait represented, to me, more than just a geographical fulcrum point—a divide that tipped me finally into the Americas phase in my life afoot. It marked a deeper border of time, a portal back into the landscape of memory. Into a dim idea of home. I had been away rambling for more than a dozen years. And wind-stripped Shishmaref, as it turned out, proved a perfect stepping-stone for reentry. The Indigenous community straddled my long journey’s twinned obsessions: rootedness and restlessness. Inhabited for at least 400 years, the village of modern hunter-gatherers was in its last days. Shishmaref was falling into the Chukchi Sea.
“It’s what every journalist who comes here writes about,” said Darlene Olanna, a retired government worker in the village. “We’re kind of a poster child for climate change.”
At the first beach in the Americas, an Indigenous Alaskan community holds out tenuously against rising seas.
Out of Eden Walk
Melting permafrost, rising sea levels, growing storm intensities—all hitched to the motor of global warming—doom the small barrier islands that undergird outposts like Shishmaref. The resident Inupiat have built a seawall around their vital airstrip. It isn’t working. Houses are tumbling into the surf. Within 30 years, experts say, the island will be largely gone, underwater.
Talking above a household throb of playing grandkids, of the maniacal cackling of cartoons on a big screen TV, in a living room piled high in the corners like a hunting camp with fishing tackle, toys, pots and pans, boxes of Marlboro cigarettes, and Sailor Boy pilot bread—Olanna wondered when the inevitable evacuation would come. The topic was wearily debated. In village councils, the votes to abandon the site were close and bitter. Eventual relocation, should the community even hook the government funding to do it, would take years. Many preferred staying with their buried dead. With a high school renovated only in 2022. With known shores.
In this way, we all are inhabitants of Shishmaref. Such decisions await hundreds of millions.
About 600 Inupiat fishers, hunters, bulldozer operators, teachers, nurses, and artisans live on Shishmaref’s treeless island, called Sarichef, or Qigiqtaq in the Iñupiaq language.
I slept atop a foam pad in the village school. I didn’t know a soul. This was a source of anxiety at first. Yet walking the narrow streets past the tribally owned grocery store with its lone fresh green pepper housed, like a Fabergé egg , inside a glass case, and the post office with its posted warning against hunting mother polar bears, and the fatty hides of musk oxen flapping on drying racks along the beach—the wild, crashing, silver-toned beach at the edge of the Americas—I was welcomed everywhere with kindness. This was, it must be said, a familiar feature of walking the Earth, especially among the less affluent curators of our planetary home. It was easy to be humbled in Shishmaref.
Sled dogs in the Inupiat village of Shishmaref, Alaska. Replaced by snowmobiles, dogs are rarely used today in the Arctic.
Photograph by Paul Salopek
The Inupiat stalk ugruk, or bearded seals, plus walruses, caribou, rabbits, ducks, geese, and occasional polar bears. (Though these latter predators are disappearing with the sea ice.) They fish for smelt, frostfish, herring, bullheads, flounder, and salmon. They pick wild tundra berries. (Berry patches are fiercely guarded at harvest time.) The peoples’ traditional pithouses were long ago replaced by modular, weather-bleached frame homes that rely on a communal diesel generator for power. Even so, life in the Arctic remains unforgiving. Winter snow piles two meters deep. December days sink into 21 hours of darkness. Like hunter-gatherers everywhere, families stack their domestic debris just outside their doors: broken tools, bloody antlers, abandoned dogsleds, clapped-out snowmobiles. (“To get to Clifford’s place, turn left at the old yellow quad bike . . .”) In olden days, the waste was organic and would decompose. Now it lasts forever.
Gary Sockpick, Iñupiaq artisan from Shishmaref, Alaska.
Photograph by Paul Salopek
Shishmaref’s yard middens will await the trowels of future underwater archaeologists. As have, for at least 14,000 years, the Paleolithic campsites of the original discoverers of Alaska, submerged today under a hundred meters of salt water. Their skin boats coasted down the raw shores of North America, archaeologists now believe, outpacing the first plodders on the land bridge. They were a water people.
They paddled a kelp highway all the way down to California. And this is how, watching the work-scarred fingers of Gary Sockpick, the partner of Darlene Olanna and a laconic Shishmaref artist who carves stupendously beautiful earrings from walrus ivory, I was reminded of the tenacity and endurance of Sedna, the Inupiat goddess of sea creatures.
Gary Sockpick, Iñupiaq artisan from Shishmaref, Alaska.
Photograph by Paul Salopek
Shishmaref’s yard middens will await the trowels of future underwater archaeologists. As have, for at least 14,000 years, the Paleolithic campsites of the original discoverers of Alaska, submerged today under a hundred meters of salt water. Their skin boats coasted down the raw shores of North America, archaeologists now believe, outpacing the first plodders on the land bridge. They were a water people.
They paddled a kelp highway all the way down to California. And this is how, watching the work-scarred fingers of Gary Sockpick, the partner of Darlene Olanna and a laconic Shishmaref artist who carves stupendously beautiful earrings from walrus ivory, I was reminded of the tenacity and endurance of Sedna, the Inupiat goddess of sea creatures.
The lot of Sedna was hard.
Betrothed to a braggart hunter who turned out to be a shorebird in disguise, she begged her father to rescue her from her feathered spouse’s island and an endless diet of scavenged fish. Sedna’s father warily agreed. But the paterfamilias lost heart when the bird-man fanned up a huge storm with his wings, threatening to capsize the kayak. In a wholly convincing denouement, the father tossed Sedna overboard to placate the furious husband. The old man even sliced off his daughter’s fingers as she clung desperately to the boat. Each of her fingers turned into the marine animals the Inupiat now depend on for survival: seals, walruses, fish, and whales. Sedna rules to this day over the menagerie, which is to say she safeguards the universe of the Inupiat, from the bottom of the Bering Strait.
Animal spirits captured in miniature by Gary Sockpick, an Iñupiaq artisan from Shishmaref, Alaska. The earrings are carved from walrus ivory.
Photograph by Paul Salopek
Sockpick the ivory artist was also a lifelong marine hunter. Hunched over a card table in his house in Shishmaref, sipping cans of Coke under a greying moustache, he breathed the divine spirits of these animals into shards of polished bone. He rubbed India ink into the delicate etchings with a toothpick. A form of homage. Hands that fired rifles. Flensed seals. I watched him for hours.
Why did he make art? I finally asked.
“Put food on the table,” Sockpick replied instantly. He allowed himself a brief smile.
And I smiled too, looking out the rain-streaked window above his desk. Lyme grass, crowberry, and pickleweed rolled lumpily down to an inlet of the slatey Bering Strait. The strait was moving. We moved. All action was worship. There never need be anyplace alien on the trails south.
