THEY say that you can tell someone who has just returned from polar lands by
the faraway look in their eyes. Maybe it’s just snow blindness. Or maybe it’s
that the farther you get from civilisation, the more bizarre the rules of
behaviour become.
I’ve just been camping in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. You’d
think they wouldn’t need to worry about etiquette there. The refuge is the size
of Wales, has a permanent population of some 2000 and gets 1500 visitors a year.
Plenty of room for everyone to do their thing.
Not so fast, said my guide Pam. Don’t get soap in the river when you wash. If
you must shit, dig a hole (plastic trowel provided) and burn the toilet paper
afterwards (matches supplied). Don’t chase the caribou and don’t frighten the
grizzlies.
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Pam’s thinking was that, even though every person in the refuge has a patch
of land almost the size of Manhattan to use as a toilet, we should leave no
trace: not a faecal bacterium or a non-biodegradable soapsud. I’d come across
people as house-proud as that before—but normally only in houses.
I got out my trowel, only to wonder slightly at this “wilderness ethic” as
the twelfth bushplane of the day flew in overhead. But this was the US, and
Americans have a thing about wilderness. They still half-believe that North
America was empty before they showed up. Many of them wish it still was.
Back in Fairbanks, the nearest decent-sized town, we met Roger Kaye. He works
for the US government’s Fish and Wildlife Service and has written a PhD on “the
meanings embodied in America’s last great wilderness”. Americans, he writes, are
big on “cognitive freedom” and “self-transcendence”. The Arctic reserve is a
place to “connect to the natural world” and to “experience humility”. And Kaye
reported plenty of cuddly, feel-good American hubris. “The fact that we leave
this place alone, even though we know there is oil there, is a reminder of what
our society can do right,” he said. (Though the current national hysteria about
foreigners hiking up oil prices might force a rethink on that one.)
The refuge also “provides a connection to American cultural heritage”. He
meant the Wild West rather than native Americans. I asked about this omission. I
had had a great time in the refuge meeting the seal hunters of Kaktovik riding
their all-terrain vehicles and the town’s Eskimo mayor lusting after oil money,
and stuffing my face at a caribou cook-out in Arctic Village. “Nobody mentions
them,” he said. I found this odd—especially when I discovered later that
Kaye’s wife is an Eskimo.
Perhaps it was wilderness fever, but I kept remembering how the Nazis
romanticised their own Aryan past in the forest glades of the Fatherland. Was
the wilderness experience, expunged of humans, just Lebensraum for beginners?
And how did it connect to our modern desire to stop the real inhabitants of
wilderness from whaling and seal hunting?
I can enjoy solitude. But for me, separating the wilderness from its
inhabitants seems slightly sinister. I liked the mountain scenery and the
caribou. But I liked even more the hunters and hustlers and, dammit, even Pam
and her trowels.