Prudhoe Bay: Are We There Yet?

Yesterday I was lucky enough to find myself in a van with 10 journalists headed due north of camp to Prudhoe Bay. The journalists came to Toolik as part of a two-week Polar Science Fellowship administered through the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts. One of the journalists had an interview scheduled at Toolik that day and gave up her seat on the tour, and I happened to be walking by just as she was trying to figure out what to do about the open spot. The next morning I had a seat in the tour van which left camp about 8 am and took the haul road north to the Sagavanirktok ("Sag") River valley and on to the Arctic coastal plain. It was a clear sunny morning, and the colors of the sky and mountains against the bright green tundra was almost hallucinogenic; before long we began to see all kinds of wildlife along the road: herds of caribou, a couple of moose, a short-eared owl, some jaegers and gulls, a snowy owl, several tundra swans and Canada geese, a golden eagle, a few snow buntings, and finally, at our destination, a plastic goose decoy at the checkpoint gate to the Arctic Ocean.

Prudhoe Bay is run by British Petroleum in partnership with ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips. The entire area consists of the oilfields and the adjacent unicorporated town of Deadhorse, which is where the housing and medical facilities for the workers are located, plus a couple of hotels for the tourists: the Caribou Inn and the Prudhoe Bay Hotel. This part of the world very graphically illustrates the dichotomy of the manmade and the natural: onto a vast and primal and poorly understood landscape have been thrust all manner of pipes and wells and buildings and construction rigs, retention ponds and bridges and all the stuff that humans must have in order to lead a life powered by fossil fuels; if you already feel bad about driving your car, the sight of tundra swans and caribou in the shadow of these things will hurt. The irony is that you need a fossil fuel powered vehicle to see it. Even more ironic, a gallon of gas in Deadhorse is $4.00. You would think there would be some kind of Arctic Mafia up here with secret spigots tapping into the mother load all fresh from the well and all but it doesn't work like that. The oil travels the length of Alaska, gets loaded onto barges in Valdez to a refinery, and probably has traveled half the world and seen more and done more in most people's lifetimes before it gushes into the gas tank of your average Alaskan. This rather complicated extraction process more or less was explained in an informational video we were obliged to see at the Caribou Inn at the start of the official tour, where each of us had to present our ID to the driver before we could be allowed to board the tour bus. It is informally known as the "blue valve tour" because halfway through you stop to take pictures of the rigs and a blue Schlumberger valve known as a Christmas Tree. Another stop featured a Halliburton facility where it was allowed that we could take a photograph of the Halliburton sign, complete with gold painted rocks sitting on the pavement below the signpost. I believe Dick Cheney sent those up, our driver commented. Were there any shotgun shells in them? one of us asked.

The tour includes driving through a checkpoint that officially tells you you have left Deadhorse and are now on the oil refinery side of things, right on the Arctic Ocean; in fact, the tour officially encourages visitors to remove their shoes and dip a toe into the ocean, just to be able to tell the folks back home that they did. I rolled up my jeans past my knees and briefly felt the combined painful sting of the cold water and sharp pebbles. A couple of the hardier souls in our group actually stripped to their swimsuits and took a dive. In fact, one of the journalists as I recall stripped off her bathing suit top and dove into the water half naked. I thought to myself: does she do that at every beach she visits or just the Arctic ones? But I have to say it was brave. The driver later presented each of us who wanted one a signed certificate from the Polar Bear Dippers Club. In retrospect I felt a little silly accepting it on my half-hearted effort.

Before heading back to Toolik we decided to stop for coffee at the Prudhoe Bay Hotel. The driver had mistakenly told us there was a Starbucks there, and I was dying for some. Boy were we disappointed. It was the same setup as the Caribou Inn: dingy cafeteria and giftshop, plastic flowers, coffee served in white styrofoam cups. But it was free.

On the return trip we stopped a couple of times along the Franklin Bluffs, a formation of colorful sandstone cliffs that stretches north to south along the Sag River. The later stop was to scope out some distant musk oxen and skip the colorful stones into the water. The earlier stop had a very different purpose. Several of the journalists and scientists had gotten together in camp the day before to form an impromptu dance troupe whose goal was to perform the steps to Michael Jackson's Thriller. The news of his death came just as quickly to Toolik as to every other corner of the world. So this makes me wonder now if there are people in remote Mongolian villages as well practicing claw, claw, step step step clap, shimmy? The goal of the earlier stop was so that the journalists could practice and film what they hoped was the most northerly performance of Thriller ever. I stood on the edge of the Dalton with our designated video cameraman and snapped photos of the performance which wasn't bad considering the audience consisted of four humans and about 100 caribou.

And as tonight is the journalists' last in camp, they and several scientists got together out in front of the dining hall, about two dozen strong, for a full dress performance. The costumes consisted of mosquito veils, bug shirts, and xtra tuff insulated rubber boots. The backdrop consisted of the Brooks Range in late evening sunlight. Even without sound, after a minute or two you could figure out that it was the moves to Thriller. It was quite something to see. I wished I had been there for the first rehearsal to learn the steps. But I tend to find myself sometimes running to keep up with the energy around here. It has taken me until 12:15 am to finish this post. Like Alice, just when I think I've got it something new comes along and leaves me a bit bewildered. Did I ever think I would come to the North Slope to see a performance of Thriller? God no! But as someone here told me not long after I got here, everyone's a bit mad.