Traveling in the north country, the open-skied Arctic of North America, you can’t help thinking of the first people and their journey across the Bering Land Bridge to this side of the world. They would have arrived in what is now Alaska and the adjoining Yukon Territory.
The landscape has not changed much in the estimated 23,000-40,000 years, since the first faintest sign of people appears.
In my 20s, I spent a summer floating rivers in that region, mostly the broad, swift, chalky-colored Yukon, which flowed right through the heart of a Paleolithic human landscape. After about 650 miles in a blue canoe on the Yukon, my partner Todd and I paddled out of the mountains into the flat Alaskan interior.
North of the Arctic Circle, the Yukon River looks like a jug of water spilled across a table. It runs 20 miles wide in places, an anastomosing mess of braids and channels looping around countless marshy islands spindled with black spruce.
This far north, the sun made circles around our heads, hard to tell one day from the next. Like a tilted hula hoop, the sun’s course barely touched beneath the horizon before climbing into the next dizzying day. I preferred the bow as we entered the flats. My partner, Todd, took stern behind me. Being in front, I could not see our strapped-in jigsaw puzzle of gear filling the canoe, or the back of Todd’s baseball ball cap. Instead, I saw only the river spreading in all directions, maybe a few fist-shaped cumulus clouds, and the dark skim of forests on faraway shores. Sending out my paddle and drawing it back, I felt like I was leaning into a creation story, the world forming as we passed into it.
You’d see a glimmer, and pull binoculars to spot a Native fish-wheel turning slowly like an underwater windmill. There were villages. Some you saw, some you didn’t. We never saw the people who would come by boat every several days to check the fish wheel.
The landscape is considered an Ice Age relic, a mosaic of scrawny spruce woods and open steppes, the same sort of place frequented by mammoths and scimitar cats and, at some point, humans.
Old Crow Basin, not far north of the Yukon River, may be as close as can be found to the first people. Exposed riverbanks and tundra have revealed layers of mammoth long-bones that appear to have been broken by stone tools around 40,000 years ago. Before that date, mammoth bones are buried unbroken. After 40,000 years ago, many are found shattered with what looks like single-point impacts from what may have been people wielding large rocks.
Todd picked up his binoculars and said, “Somebody’s over there.”
I sat up, he handed me the binoculars. Over the ripple of sunlight on water, I could make out a figure standing alone and shirtless where he’d pulled his canoe onto a bare, cobble beach. There were no trees anywhere near him, causing him to throw the entire landscape out of whack, nothing for scale but a man.
He was waving with both arms, not frantically, but hoping to catch our eye. We picked up paddles and turned across the broad current to reach him.
He stopped waving and put his hands on his hips, watching us. I could see his black crop of hair grown in all directions, no beard though. His skin was darker than ours. He wasn’t Athabaskan or Inupiat, though. You wouldn’t see one of them waving at you from a beached canoe. He was a traveler, a tourist. Coming closer, we could see he was Japanese. He waved with one hand, calling out, hello!
As we glided up to his island, the man stepped into the water in laceless sneakers and grabbed our bow, pulling us up to shore. I jumped out in river sandals and helped him, as Todd climbed over gear from the stern.
He said his name. I tried to repeat it, and he laughed. Todd, tried it next, and the man laughed again. I never learned what his name actually. Todd pulled out our folded maps, opening them to the snake ball of the Yukon Flats, blue-river geography wending all over the place. Gesturing with a compass, we pointed the man toward the middle of the river miles away. The man looked around, scoping the circular horizon for some way to remember which way was which. He didn’t even have a compass.
It had been days since we’d seen anybody else. There had been some women on the river above here, back in the mountains before the flats. Sun-tanned and gritty, hair knotted up, rifle butt sticking up from their gear, they said they were heading for the sea, too.
The Japanese man said he’d been lost for two weeks and he’d robbed a couple fish wheels for food, which I advised him against, though at least he was ingenious enough to pull it off.
We undid straps from our canoe and opened our stores to him, moving half a brick of Velveeta Cheese and a leathery stack of homemade jerky into his supply. He ate with a smile, tearing off jerky with his teeth.
I wonder if this was what it was like, strangers encountering each other in a vast and unpeopled country, so much unchanged after tens of thousands of years. In the Old Crow Basin, evidence that points toward human presence around 23,000 years ago in the form of animal bones that appear to have stone-tool butchering marks. Lacking any DNA, it’s not clear if these might have been travelers from the mammoth steppe in nearby Eurasia, or if they were coast-farers who came a long way inland from the land-bridged Japanese Archipelago or Kamchatka.
Many archaeologists consider the Bluefish Cave samples tainted, improperly collected, and are waiting for better data before the 23,000-year-old date stands.
From our gear, we pulled sheets of dried paper-thin seaweed we’d been eating as a source of iodine and A and C vitamins. The Japanese man’s eyes widened as he laughed saying, “Ah, nori, nori!” It seemed unbelievable to him that we had nori, something from Japan. Even the packaging was partly in kanjis.
Laughter encircled us, like it must have among strangers so long ago, perhaps little shared language, mostly gestures and sharing food. In this kind of big, hungry country any other human might have been friend.