The Last Word On Nothing

Arizona winter night, stars over pines, my buddy and I were heading for a hot tub on the outskirts of Flagstaff when a phone rang. It was a mutual friend, Jayme Dittmar, a dog musher on a 1,300-mile expedition by dog sled from Nome, Alaska, to the village of Utqiagvik on Point Barrow. She was calling to check in from Teller, an Inupiat village on a spit of land sticking into the Bering Sea, population 200 plus change. We stopped our advance toward the hot tub to chat with her on speaker.

They’d arrived in Teller just as darkness and a storm settled in. How are the dogs was our first question, knowing how close she gets to them. She said they’re Alaskan huskies, they live for this, curling into a ball, making a snow cave of themselves as they are buried by the storm. I imagined holes in the snow rimed with the steam of their breathing.

Dittmar is part of an all-female mushing team taking photographs of the frozen expanse around them. These will be compared to the historic images of Knud Rasmussen’s expedition following the same route in 1922. They are calling it a study in climate change. The mission statement for their project reads, “In the near future, climate change in the Arctic will drastically change the wild character and livelihood of the Arctic people. Thus, we are once again on the threshold of significant and very concrete social, economic and cultural changes — as was the case when Knud Rasmussen completed the 5th Thule expedition.”

“It’s a one day at a time kind of thing,” Dittmar said over the phone. “Right now we’re totally fucking winging it.” Because snow had been scant, they turned for a coastal route when they’d planned on staying inland. They are off script, plotting a new course. The work is exhausting, even if you know where you’re going. She said most of the time, they are not standing on the sled, but running alongside it, pushing and directing. “You’re essentially working with the dogs,” she said. “You’re off on the snow, making 20 to 25 miles a day in good weather.”

To me, an expedition like this is an eye on the land, a way of relating to a place and gathering knowledge about it. Reflecting on images from the Rasmussen expedition, they are seeing through time, detecting what changes. When added to other voices, this knowledge will tell a more precise story. I anticipate a venn diagram between photography over a century and what is learned in indigenous villages along the way. Collaborating with the councils of 12 villages, they are sharing their parallel photography, giving it not only to science, but back to people on the ground, which is its own form of science.

Their mission is also to travel north of the Arctic Circle in the middle of winter on human and dog power alone. They’ve been seeing 5 hours of daylight every 24 hours. She said a short weather window might open in the morning and she’d call next from Shishmaref, four or five days travel north.

We will be listening.

Image by Jayme Dittmar