A Story of My Own

Podcast Published by the Dirtbag Diaries. Text Below, Audio Available to Listen Online Here.

For most of my adult life, I’ve fought to stop, or at least slow down, climate change. It started in University, then through a series of questionable decisions turned into a haphazard career. 

Fast forward a decade, and now I can say that I’ve helped organized some of the largest, most iconic campaigns and protests around climate change and fossil fuels in North America. Like the People’s Climate March that brought nearly 400,000 people to New York City. And the campaign that pushed President Obama to reject the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline. I’ve put on a suit and sat down with elected officials to call for strong climate change legislation. I’ve been thrown out of a United Nations climate change conference for being a little too vigorous in demanding our governments take more urgent action on climate change. And, more than a couple times I’ve been arrested for both opposing massive fossil fuel projects and supporting bold climate legislation. I’ve down it all with an aim to bend the course of history away from the superstorms, mass displacement, food shortages and wildfires scientists warn are becoming the new normal on our road to a dystopian, climate changed future. 

Funny thing, for most of that time, I couldn’t tell you why. Sure, I could recite, and often wrote, the talking points: to stop sea level rise, stand with small island nations and Indigenous peoples, keep fossil fuels in the ground and save the Arctic. But I heard the story of a young woman whose family sold the farm they had run for generations because of a persistent drought. And my friends from the South Pacific told stories about how coastal erosion and climate charged storms had razed the villages they called home. And anytime I heard someone tell a deeply personal story, I felt embarrassed that I didn’t have a story of my own. 

In all my years of climate activism, I’ve written dozens of articles and hundreds of tweets about the Arctic. I lamented the steady retreat of the sea ice and harkened the now open Northwest Passage to a doomsday beacon. When companies like Shell and BP looked to at the ice-free Arctic Ocean as an opportunity to drill rather than an alarm bell, I took them to task. I attached a photo of an emaciated polar bear to most of my op-eds to drive the point home. 

But, my experience with the Arctic was mostly that of commentator. My time above the Arctic Circle, was limited to a single trip where I hiked, climbed and surfed my way across Norway’s Lofoten Islands. And, while I had spent a good amount of time in Canada’s Northwest Territories, none of that was what I considered the “proper Arctic” – a land of barren tundra, hulking muskox, herds of lithe caribou and, of course, emaciated polar bears. 

This past summer I decided to cash in all my vacation days and head north to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. My friend Malcolm had spent many of his formative years on Arctic expeditions with his parents, kayaking the Arctic Ocean to some of the most remote places on our planet. 

Now an adult, he wanted to return North to retrace a trip through the Arctic Refuge he had taken as a teenager. I jumped at the chance to join him. 

We left my house in Vancouver in early June. Nearly 3,000 miles of blacktop and gravel roads later, we arrived at the the northernmost road-accessible point in the state, a remote, desolate oil camp called Deadhorse, Alaska.  

We arrived in Deadhorse on June 8th, in the middle of a blizzard. After a fitful night camped out behind one of the dozens of prefabricated trailers that make up the town’s buildings, we packed five weeks worth of food and gear into duffle bags and hopped on a small, twin engine plane bound for Kaktovik, a tiny Inupiat village on the shore of the Arctic Ocean, and the only permanent settlement within the Arctic Refuge.

We had a simple plan. Arrive in Kaktovik and assemble a folding double kayak, then paddle east to Demarcation Bay, a wide inlet near the Alaska-Yukon border. From there, we would light out overland into the foothills of the eastern Brooks Range mountains, our goal was the Clarence and Turner River valleys, home to the Porcupine Caribou herd, the last mega-herd of its kind anywhere in North America. 

We reasoned that an early June departure would land us smack dab in the middle of the herd’s annual migration, when tens of thousands of caribou make their way down to Alaska’s North Slope to calve. Then, after a few weeks in an out-on-the-land, John McPhee-esque idyl, I’d return, with revelations about climate change, renewed in my purpose to fight the good fight. 

This plan, like most good plans, fell apart the minute we stepped off the plane.

The first problem was Nanook. 

As we hauled our overstuffed baggage off the plane on the Kaktovik airstrip, a young Inuit woman made an off hand comment that Nanook was in town the night before. 

The word triggered something deep in my memory. It’s a word I had heard as a child in one of the many picture books about the north my parents had brought from their time in Canada’s Northwest Territories. I couldn’t place the memory, but something told me to worry. Before I could put the pieces together, our pilot clarified things. 

“Polar bear patrol still out?” he asked the woman. 

My heart leapt into my throat. 

Nanook is the the Inuit word for polar bear. But, unlike the cute drawing of a polar bears in my childhood picture books, this very real, very large young male polar bear had, of late, taken to the streets of Kaktovik in search of its next meal which, given our plan to sleep in lightweight backpacking tents, could definitely be us. Especially since we were armed with nothing more than two cans of bear spray – something the locals had told us over and over would do little more than “season us for the bears”. 

A polar bear in town also bore serious trouble for our expedition. It meant that the sea ice hadn’t broken up yet since polar bears typically follow the ice break up out on to the pack ice to hunt seals. This presented a problem since our folding kayak was decidedly not “ice-worthy”. 

The irony was palpable. After nearly a decade of lamenting the loss of sea ice, the seasonal break up was later than usual, and I was trapped by it. And, after penning so many articles crowned by the image of a starving polar bear, I was one of the easiest meals around for the thousand pound white ursine who had made this corner of the Arctic his home. 

We decided to delay our plans to kayak and head inland to wait out the ice. After two days triple-hauling hundreds of pounds of food, gear and a kayak inland we headed into the refuge on foot. 

For the first time since we crossed north of the Brooks Range, the sun emerged and we could see clear from the coast to the snow-capped peak of Mount Chamberlain. With luck, we thought, we could make it to the foothills beneath the peak in two, maybe three days. 

We were very wrong. 

For two days we trudged through icy, knee deep muskeg swamps and over ankle busting tussocks. When we finally dropped our packs on the gravel shores of the Okipilak River, we had made it less than a third of the way to the mountains. I wrote in my journal that night: Arctic: 2, Cam: 0. 

The next day, we decided to stay put on the river and explore without the burden of our massive packs, but we didn’t get far. Less than a mile out of out camp, we crested a faint tundra ridge. We peered over the top and found that overnight hundreds of caribou, maybe even a thousand, had made their way into the shallow valley surrounding the Okipilak.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but we had wandered into the heart of the 10-02 area of the Arctic Refuge, the geographical centre of the debate over whether or not to drill for oil in this part of Alaska’s North Slope. Here, where a 1998 US Geological Survey study estimated between 5.7 and 16 billion barrels of oil underground, and where, according to a whole swath of politicians, lay nothing but a blank wasteland, I sat, awestruck by the largest single gathering of wildlife I have ever seen. 

For the next two days, a sea of caribou moved around our camp and over the Okipilak. Some calves, only a few days old, struggled to cross the frigid glacier river on wobbly, newborn legs. Others, a little older and more curious, wandered within a dozen feet of us and our camp. They would edge closer and closer until they got spooked and broke into a sprint back under the watchful eyes of the adults. 

The herd moved slowly, in search of the small green shoots that made their first spring appearance from beneath the endless brown of the tundra. We walked slowly and crouched in the high grasses to watch the caribou. When we would inevitably get too close, a single caribou would break into a run. Those nearby would join, and in a second, groups of ten to a hundred would gallop like a living wave, breaking across the tundra. 

On the third day, we awoke to an empty valley. A few caribou lingered downriver, but the bulk of the herd had left almost as quickly as they had arrived and moved on to continue their summer journey across the Refuge.

The weather turned the next day and we made our way back to Kaktovik. We hoped our time inland had given the sea ice a chance to melt. But, after an initial bout of excitement over some open water near the shore, we managed a sum total of forty-five minutes in the kayak before we ran headlong into an endless horizon of unbroken sea ice. 

In that moment, I knew that our plans for five weeks in the Arctic had fallen apart. More than that, I had failed to find the grand renewal I convinced myself lay somewhere in Arctic. 

Before we left Kaktovik, we sat down with a local Inupiat guide and hunter named Robert Thompson. Robert had spent most of his life in the Arctic Refuge, a hunter, a guide and for the past few decades, one of the most dedicated opponents of drilling in the Refuge. 

While we sat in his living room, surrounded by maps, photos, animal skulls and antlers from all corners of the Arctic Refuge, Thompson lamented the impacts of climate change in the Arctic he had seen in his own lifetime. He talked about how Muskox were starving thanks to changes in the melt-freeze cycle, how houses in Kaktovik collapsed when the permafrost melted and he talked about how unpredictable the sea ice was becoming season after season.

When I asked him about the threat of drilling in the Arctic Refuge, he offered a concise and matter of fact answer. 

“I don’t want to be surrounded by an oil field,” he said. 

Simple, but it made so much sense. A lifetime in the Refuge had bred an intimate relationship with land and place. Robert cared about climate change because of what it meant for this place he loved. 

The same truth rang for Malcolm, my expedition partner. He had spent so much of his youth on trips above the Arctic Circle that places like this were etched into his being. The Arctic had become a part of who they were. Protecting it just made sense. After my few days in the Refuge, I wanted to feel that way, but I still felt like an imposter; like a tourist in a place I had, at least on paper, dedicated a large part of my life to help “save.” 

Two days later, posted up on a Fairbanks barstool, deep in self-doubt and lament about my failed arctic adventure, I couldn’t get my conversation with Robert out of my head. His connection to place in the Arctic was so strong. Did I have any connections like that? I let my mind wander to the places I had spent so many of my formative years: the Rocky Mountains, the wild Pacific Coast of Vancouver Island, the northern boreal forest and, even the tiny squat ski hill on the prairies where I made my first turns. 

I started forming a list of the places I loved, the places I knew intimately, the landscape etched the contours of into my psyche through years of exploration. And, the more I thought about them, the more I realized that they too faced serious threats. The image was nowhere near as striking as a photo of an emaciated polar bear, but the fact that my hometown ski hill’s season has grown shorter and more erratic year after year hurt me. The knowledge that, just this past summer, wildfires razed the forests around Timothy Lake, where my grandfather taught me to fish--it felt like a personal attack. 

So it hit me: I do have a story, and a reason why I do this. For me, like so many others, I do this to protect the places I love. Places where I created some of my most lasting and important memories – like Snow Valley Ski Club, a tiny ski hill in Edmonton, Alberta where the lift takes twice as long to get you up as the run takes to get down. Or Tofino, on Canada’s far western coastline where I caught both my first surf break and saw my first Orca in the wild. And the places where I continue to play, explore and make new memories. 

My Arctic expedition turned into a pretty epic failure. The story I brought home is no grand tale of adventure. But, despite the sea ice, the muskeg and tussocks, and more than a couple moments where the Arctic nearly broke me, I fell in love with the place. 

What’s more, I did come away with a revelation, even if it’s not the one I expected.