The climate crisis receives much coverage these days, mostly focused on extreme weather, sea level rise, and dislocation of people by climate-related stresses like drought and wildfire. Declining polar ice and its impact on polar bears gets some coverage, bringing the Arctic into the story, but few of us understand the scope of the impact climate change is having above the Arctic Circle or why we should be concerned about what is happening up there.
Jon Waterman is an adventurer, writer, and environmentalist. As an environmentalist he is concerned about damaging impacts of anthropogenic climate change on natural and human communities, and in this book he sets out to examine how climate change is affecting the American and Canadian Arctic and its people using his exceptional adventurer skills to experience it firsthand. He loves the Arctic, and deeply regrets what is happening there.
Waterman decided, back in 1983, after serving as a climbing ranger in Denali National Park and intensively studying and writing about the mountain and its history, to seek understanding of the world further north in the Arctic. He did so, learning the skills needed to survive long expeditions into this wild region. He divides Into the Thaw into two parts, the first of which is titled “Schooled Prehistoric Times – Present Day,” and the second is “The Final Journey 2023.”
I presume “Schooled” here means the learning process he went through on expeditions in 1983, 1984, 1997-9 (four journeys), 2006, and 2021, and his extensive digging into the “histories” (prehistory, history, natural history), geology and anthropology of the region. Often traveling alone in some of the wildest country in the world on foot, ski, and by kayak, and interacting with the Indigenous people living up there, he gained understanding and feeling for the region and its people that could only be acquired by being there.
His first trip in 1983 was to the Noatak River, and when he returned to the river in 2022 he was shocked to encounter the changes wrought by climate change. He admits that he hadn’t thought about such change nor observed it on his many earlier expeditions, but things were so different on the Noatak that he decided to study what was happening there and elsewhere in the North American Arctic. It was not, he realized, the place he thought he knew and come to love. He launched “The Final Journey” in 2022 to document the changes and understand their effects on the land and its people, and out of that journey and accounts of earlier expeditions he created Into the Thaw.
The first Noatak River trip was short and lasted a week. Fifteen years later, Waterman returned with his son, Alistair, a raft, and an inflatable canoe. The river was in flood. On his 1983 trip, Waterman and his ranger companion had seen caribou everywhere, but on this trip, he and Alistair saw just one.
Floating the flooded river, the list of changes grew and he shared what he found different with Alistair.
“Amid all the changes we discussed — permafrost thaw, the lack of caribou, new shrubbery, warm temperatures, and diminished sea ice — Alistair expressed sadness for the state of the world. I replied that a good cure would be to learn more about the extent of the damage and then to take action,” he writes.
Waterman would return the next year to follow the river from the headwaters to Kotzebue and villages in Cape Krusenstern National Monument, examining the thaw and its effects. This trip would start at Walker Lake, the origin of the Noatak in Gates of the Arctic National Park and float through Noatak National Preserve to Alaska’s west coast. Initially it would involve some tough hiking and bushwhacking, pack rafting on the upper river, then canoeing as the river grew on its descent across western Alaska. He would also reflect on his earlier trips, thinking of what he had experienced and how different it might now be.
Like most books published by Patagonia, this one is generously illustrated with photos by Waterman and especially his accomplished photographer companion on the 2022 expedition, Chris Korbulic, whose terrific photos complement the text throughout. Major trips are traced on marvelous maps allowing the reader to visualize and appreciate the scope of Waterman’s explorations over the years. Notes in the margins throughout the book allow the reader to absorb information relevant to the story without interrupting the flow of the narrative.
Waterman begins with a couple of disclaimers. First, “Thirty-nine years ago, I decided to learn all I could about life above the Arctic Circle. As a climber, I traded my worship of high mountains for the High Arctic. I substituted bears and mosquitoes for crevasses and avalanches, but more importantly – like the study of crevasse extrication and avalanche avoidance – you couldn’t just read about the Arctic or sign up for classroom courses. You have to go on immersive journeys and figure out how the immersive parts of the natural world fit together.”
His second disclaimer is, “The more I learn, it sometimes feels like the less I know about the Arctic.”
The deeper he dug into the literature about this place, and the more he experienced it, the more he realized how much more there was to know about it and he was humbled.
Waterman writes with humor, often making fun of himself, the “old” veteran adventurer struggling to keep up with his younger companion on the 2022 Noatak trip. Bushwhacking to the headwaters he snags his bear spray canister and gives himself a big dose of capsicum. Modern-day adventurers, he notes, classify wilderness trips as picnics (Type 1 Fun), trips that “won’t seem like fun until much later when we’re back home” having suffered and struggled, (Type 2 Fun), and Type 3 Fun, “a wreckage of accidents, injuries near-starvation, or rescue.”
This last is of course to be avoided, but the encounter with the bear spray on the first few days of the trip worries him that he and Chris might be in for Type 3 Fun, perhaps not in as much control as their experience led them to believe they would be. But it turns out to be a Type 2, and Waterman provides a very engaging account of all stages of the journey. As the “old man” of the pair, his struggles give him a chance to laugh at himself and his growing limitations.
Here is a paragraph that captures some of what he has learned from all of this.
Now, as the wonders of the Arctic undergo aberrant changes, this knowledge of place has become more important. Even essential. As the global heat-up alters the migrations of fish, mammals, and birds, the Iñupiat are also affected. The sea ice has melted away as storms erode shorelines and flood villages. Forests are slowly on the move north along with animals new to the Arctic. The permafrost has begun to thaw, and lakes have disappeared as riverbanks and mountainsides droop like frozen spinach left out on the counter. Unprecedented lightning storms have brought wildfires that sweep across tundra dried out in weird heat cycles that haven’t existed in the Arctic for hundreds of thousands of years. To call it simply “change” or think that nature or its inhabitants can endure is a naïve estimate of the inevitable crisis.
Waterman writes here of “knowledge of place,” and while his focus is on the Arctic, he is telling us we need to be aware and knowledgeable of all our places because only such awareness will allow us to adapt and address changes that damage us.
Waterman is a veteran writer, and his books tell great stories. Whether he’s writing about mosquitoes, caribou, Inuit elders, or polar bears, his words evoke sharp images and we feel like we are with him in his pack raft or kayak or walking the Arctic tundra keeping a sharp eye on a barren ground grizzly that is in turn keeping an eye on him. One of his adventures was, in stages, to “cross the roof of North America along the Northwest Passage,” and one of his goals was to encounter a polar bear. He did both, and here is account of that encounter which captures how he writes of these amazing adventures.
Iñupiat stories tell of how the all-powerful Raven god created people and then the animals and plants that they could eat. Then Raven created the polar bear to humble people so they wouldn’t destroy everything else Raven had created.
Humility is what I experienced as I rounded a peninsula of land and paddled too close to a bear in repose: a pallid white beauty alongside her blood-red seal kill. Both lay on an iceberg lapped by the waves, forty yards away and six feet above my kayak.
The bear leaped off the berg and splashed into the water after me to defend its seal. I put on a burst of speed with the paddle and for a moment the bear pursued, silent and swift on the water. Then in recognition of what I had to do, to show that I wasn’t prey, I pushed the rudder, braced the paddle, and spun the kayak to face the bear, but without eye contact. I used a careful and respectful peripheral glance to point the camera and fire off several photographs.
I didn’t speak. My gun was hidden.
She circled back to the iceberg. I put my paddle down, gave a long bow, and kept my eyes focused low, to the water. Then I turned the kayak to head back to Taloyoak. Even if my Arctic education was still not complete, I had gotten all that I had come for. The polar bear encounter completed my Northwest Passage.
This passage, for me, captures the essence of Waterman’s approach to his subject, his courage, respect, and humility. A double-page photo spread, the bear slightly out of focus, looking at him over an iceberg, (quite a trick photographing such a creature without looking at it directly) complements Waterman’s telling of this encounter.
He doesn’t hold back in expressing his concerns about what development has done and is proposed to do to the Arctic. After his 400-mile paddle to Prudhoe Bay he is greeted by a flotsam of trash and an officious guard who, hands on his holstered gun, tells him not to get out of his boat, as though he could just paddle on. Waterman’s comment is, “A far cry from the kindness of the real North Men.”
The Indigenous people he had encountered had been welcoming unlike this officious guy. Waterman ignored him. As to his view of Prudhoe Bay, “And while the oil lobby has claimed development doesn’t harm wildlife or wilderness, one only has to spend a day in Prudhoe Bay to see the destruction the industry has caused locally. Never mind the oil field’s contribution to greenhouse gasses that continue to worsen the global climate crisis.”
After Jon and Chris have descended the Noatak, they end their trip at Kivalina, a village threatened with destruction by the Chukchi Sea. It is on a barrier island and as sea ice has retreated, ocean storms have battered the beach and efforts to protect the Iñupiat village have been futile. Waterman spends time with people of the village to seek understanding of how they see their situation and writes that Kivalina’s plight “embodies the Arctic climate crisis” for him. The latest estimate is that it will cost $40 million to move the village to higher ground, and they doubt that will be forthcoming from the government.
Waterman observes that, “Adaptability and acceptance are practically encoded in their genes.” Yet it is a tragedy happening to these people who are victims of a profligate world drunk on oil and other addictions of modern life.
Into the Thaw is an excellent addition to Patagonia Books treatments of the many environmental crises facing the world today. It is rich in information, engaging in its stories of Waterman’s Type 2 Fun expeditions to a fascinating part of the world. Half the book looks back to Waterman’s growing understanding of the Arctic, and the other half treats climate change there and its effects on nature and the human communities. This is a clever way to approach the subject, and it works brilliantly. The book is beautifully designed, and the text is complemented by Korbulic’s and Waterman’s excellent photographs. Anyone wondering why they should be concerned about the impact of climate change on the Arctic will find the answers in this outstanding book.
