At the End of the World

by Lawrence Millman

  “What are Facebook and Google but giant corporations?” wrote Nicholas Carr in The Shallows.

  At one point, my roommate said (without looking up from his PalmPilot), “Sorry about what happened to New York.”

  As for what happened during the winter of 1941, the Canadian government decided to hold the trial in the Belchers. For they wanted to show all of the Qiqiqtarmiut, not just the accused killers, that murder is not kindly regarded in Canada.

  “White people don’t believe in killing other human beings,” a Mountie informed an Inuk who’d killed several of his fellow Inuit in the early 1920s. The Inuk had heard about the Great War, so he told the Mountie: “I think you believe in killing other human beings much more than we Inuit do.”

  On August 18, 1941, the judicial party, led by the Honorable Justice C. P. Plaxton and accompanied by several journalists, arrived in the Belchers after a two-week schooner journey from southern Hudson Bay. They would have come earlier, but no airplane could be found to transport them.

  “I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of a Judge Plaxton,” I asked my roommate. Strange to say, he now looked up from his PalmPilot. “I know a Plaxton, but the guy’s a sanitary engineer, not a judge,” he said.

  Later I googled “Judge Plaxton” and learned that a man by that name had been a judge in the Barbados in the 1730s.

  “Almost 50 Eskimoes smilingly greeted the party on its arrival,” reported James McCook of the Canadian Press.

  McCook also noted that “Adlaytok, one of the accused men, greeted Constable George Dexter affectionately, throwing his arms around the RCMP officer.”

  A large RCMP tent became the courtroom, with the bewigged Judge Plaxton seated at a table draped with the Union Jack. Behind the judge was a large photograph of the Royal Family.

  Nobody in the Belchers would have known why the judge was wearing a thick wig. Maybe it was to keep a polar bear’s jaws from crunching his skull?

  Facing the judge, the jury, and the suspects were the Qiqiqtarmiut, most of whom were seated on sealskin mats and dressed in eider duck skins.

  At the time, eider duck skins were the most common item of wearing apparel in the Belchers. This prompted one of the reporters to write that he felt like he was seated among “a group of man-birds.”

  Eider duck garb, observed Robert Flaherty, is “to white man’s nose … most obnoxious.”

  Most obnoxious to the Qiqiqtarmiut were white man’s diseases. Soon after the arrival of the judicial party, they began suffering from influenza, and at least one person—Keytowieack’s widow—died from it.

  The six-person jury included a mining executive, a mining prospector, two newspaper reporters, a ship’s engineer, and Ernie Riddell, but it did not include any of the Qiqiqtarmiut.

  There were seven accused: Aleck Apawkok and Akeenik, jointly charged with the murder of Sara Apawkok; Peter Sala and Adlaytok, jointly charged with the murder of Keytowieack; Ouyerack and Qarak, each charged with the murder of Ikpak; and Mina, charged with multiple murders.

  Mina had been diagnosed as insane, which made her unfit to stand trial, but not unfit to attend the trial, so she was carried into the tent strapped to a stretcher. Her periodic screams would provide a high-pitched counterpoint to the legal proceedings.

  “The fellow who should be punished is the one who gave those Eskimoes a book which white men have been quarreling over for 2,000 years,” observed a trapper in Great Whale River at the time of the trial.

  On August 19, 1941, Judge Plaxton slammed down his gavel, and the trial began.

  29

  My roommate and his beloved PalmPilot have returned to Ottawa. A great relief, for he had threatened to have the TV fixed.…

  Just as (in the words of Russian poet Alexander Pushkin) “a dead man can’t live without a coffin,” so a twenty-first-century man/woman/child can’t live without a screen.

  Even as his lift was waiting to transport him to the airport, Mr. PalmPilot was fingering his device. Possible message fingered into that device: “Thank God I’m returning to a place where broken TVs are fixed.”

  In Sanikiluaq’s Northern Store, I was drinking a cup of coffee when a teenage boy wandered over to me and said, “How’s it goin’, Rambo?” then gave me a poorly executed high five. “The name’s Big Belly,” I informed him.

  I investigated the store’s DVD bin and noticed that The Towering Inferno was no longer there. A purchase inspired by 9/11?

  On films: According to one of Sanikiluaq’s grandsons, Flaherty’s lost Belcher footage had a scene where his grandfather easily outruns a team of fast-running sled dogs.

  “My mother told me that my granddad liked to do somersaults in the snow,” the grandson said. “Nuannarpoq—that describes him.”

  Nuannarpoq is an Inuit word that means “to take extraordinary pleasure in being alive.” There is no equivalent in English.

  At the end of his life, Sanikiluaq suffered from narcolepsy and was forced to hold his eyelids open with his fingers—a sad fate for a person who felt such esteem for the physical world.

  I recently googled “Sanikiluaq the man,” and one of my first hits was “Book your Man to Sanikiluaq flights with Expedia and find great deals.…” (“Man” is an abbreviation for Manchester, England.)

  From my notebook: Snow, wind, and frigid temperatures, but I see more smiling faces than I saw in relatively balmy weather. Does seemingly undesirable weather make life in the North more desirable?

  Or do the Qiqiqtarmiut make no distinction between good and bad weather? After all, Arthur Twomey called them “an out of door people.”

  “I’m surprised that you still have your nose,” Taliriktuk grinned. For it’s a joke among the Inuit that the noses of qallunaat fall off as soon as the temperature goes below freezing.

  During one snowstorm, I watched the wind blow the snow upward from the ground—seemingly impossible behavior for snow.

  During another snowstorm, a man approached me, removed a soapstone carving of Donald Duck from inside his parka, and showed it to me. “That’s not traditional,” I said. “Yes, it is,” the man replied, “I saw it on TV.”

  Since the sale of carvings is a primary source of income for many of the Qiqiqtarmiut (“No carvings, no smokes,” as one man succinctly put it), I bought the Donald Duck carving. I’ll give it to some Disney-loving kid, I told myself.

  Several days after I purchased it, I looked more closely at the Donald Duck carving and noticed that it had a remarkably realistic eider duck’s body attached to its cartoonish head. Sometimes tradition, like beauty, confuses the eyes of the beholder.

  30

  As I would soon be going home, I offered the old woman several large bills for all the help she had given me. Pushing the bills away, she told me that memories, whether good or bad, have nothing to do with money.

  I gave Simeonie my pocket knife. “I must pay for it,” he told me. No! I exclaimed. “There are two things that a person must pay for—a knife and a dog,” he said, “or the knife will be lost, and the dog will die.”

  Simeonie’s payment to me: a pair of warm mittens that he’d made from a dehaired walrus skin.

  I checked my emails a final time. I felt warm walking to the school but cold sitting in front of a computer. That’s because muscle activity is our body’s most important source of heat, and if you’re butt-stapled to a screen, you barely move, and your temperature goes down, down, down.…

  “We’re having an anthrax scare,” a friend emailed me, “so make sure you don’t bring any spores back from Hudson Bay.”

  Our nervous systems reputedly receive an endorphin reward cue (the adrenaline surge that so pleased my Cyberian friend) every time we receive an email, but I did not receive a reward cue, endorphin or otherwise, upon being told not to bring back spores from Hudson Bay.

  Nor did I receive any sort of reward from my lady friend’s email informing me that her mother had just been diagnosed with severe arthritis and was now on several types of
medication.

  I said good-bye to all the elders who had been my informants, no, “informant” is an ugly word that suggests giving privileged information to the police, so I said good-bye to the elders who had become my friends.

  I slipped an envelope with cash in it under the old woman’s door. I did not identify myself as the source of that cash, but only wrote the word nakurmiik, which means “thanks,” on the envelope.

  One last exchange of words with Jacky: “That attack on New York—you will soon find out that it was a movie,” he told me. “But I heard the fires are still burning in New York,” I said. “That’s what they want you to think, those movie people,” he replied.

  Taliriktuk could always be counted upon to inject a note of humor into any conversation I had with him, but in saying good-bye to me he now gave me a silent, wordless hug.

  At last I decided to say good-bye to Peter Sala.

  As I was walking toward Peter’s current residence, the cold air gave me goose bumps, an attempt by my body to raise a protective hair cover that it no longer possesses.

  The previous time I visited Peter, he was covered by Cladonia lichens. He was still covered by Cladonia lichens, but now those lichens were covered with several inches of snow.

  At the base of Peter’s simple white cross was a plaque with these words: “Peter Sala Born Feb 1900 died Jan 26, 1988. Rest in Peace.” On the grave was a wind-damaged wreath of artificial flowers.

  A blur of white a hundred or so feet away—a snowy owl had swooped down and grabbed a lemming.

  The owl’s sonar-like ears would have heard the lemming scritching around under the snow from a hundred or more feet away.

  Peter’s body would have given grease to Flaherty Island’s nutrient-deprived soil, which would have responded by producing a local bounty of plants, whose roots would have been eaten by lemmings, which would have been gobbled up by snowy owls.

  Snowy owl with lemming

  An owl’s stomach acids aren’t strong enough to digest bones, feathers, teeth, claws, or hair, so it vomits them up in the form of cylindrical pellets.

  Those pellets would have offered a substrate for a keratin-inhabiting fungus called Onygena corvina, which would be eaten by various small insects and mites, which in turn might be eaten by the predatory mite Stratiolaelaps scimitus, all thanks to Peter.

  “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,” wrote John Muir.

  Concerning the broken laptop on Camsell Island: Centuries may pass, but not even the most culinarily versatile mite will ever touch it.

  Nor will anything else touch it. For the local ecosystem will ask, What’s its molecular structure? No answer. For—unlike Peter Sala—it doesn’t have a molecular structure, so it can’t be broken down.

  “Oh no! Not another laptop!” exclaims a visitor to Camsell Island in the year 2285.

  And then I said good-bye to the stones, rocks, gravel, and lichen-covered boulders that had provided me with such good company during my sojourn in the Belcher Islands.

  31

  From the Belcher Islands, I flew to Kuujuarapik, where bad weather, not a terrorist attack, grounded all flights for the better part of a day, so I sat in the small airport and chatted with a local Inuit elder, who called Harold Udgarten “one of the best fiddle players in the Arctic.”

  Then I flew from Kuujuarapik to Montreal and from Montreal to Boston, where I was greeted by America’s remarkably indeterminate post-9/11 warning: “If you see something, say something.”

  Because of this warning, I expected people to stop each other on the street and say, for example, “Your zipper’s down,” or “Hey, look at that—there’s a contrail in the sky.…”

  After I got home, I began writing up the first draft of these notes with a pencil (Ticonderoga Tri-Write No. 2).

  My friends call me a Luddite, usually with somewhat condescending smiles on their faces, but Luddites were hand-loom weavers, and my abilities as a hand-loom weaver are nonexistent.

  Actually, I’m more akin to a Neo-Luddite. In a manifesto drawn up at a 1996 Luddite Conference in Barnesville, Ohio, Neo-Luddism is defined as “a leaderless movement of passive resistance to consumerism and the bizarre and frightening technologies of the Computer Age.”

  Personal admission: No matter how much effort I put into it, I went nowhere in my attempt to write up my findings on the Belcher murders.

  Too much about lichen taxonomy, paper wadded up. Too much about Nanook of the North’s inaccuracies, more paper wadded up. Too much bad-mouthing of the Rev. Peck, still more paper wadded up.

  I thought about including 9/11, or my experience of it in the Belchers, in the narrative, but discounted the idea.

  Why did I insist on writing a detailed account of Camsell Island’s geology?

  Some writers have reclaimed their inspiration from a change in scenery. For example, Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck rented an abandoned monastery in France and danced around its empty cloisters on roller skates, the better to energize his lethargic Muse.

  I checked into a Vermont friend’s log cabin, where I soon became engaged in an overlong psychological analysis of both Mina’s religious frenzy and Ouyerack’s Jesus fixation. Yet more paper wadded up.

  The more I wrote, the less I wrote.

  “Give it a rest,” my lady friend suggested. And so I did, for almost a year.

  When I returned to the story, I devoted several not particularly relevant pages to the life of Wetalltuk, the Inuk who drew the map of the Belcher Islands for Robert Flaherty.

  I analyzed Wetalltuk’s oft-repeated benediction “May your life be rich with seals” despite the fact that its meaning was obvious.

  Why did I also write at length about the various fungal species that I’d found in the Belchers? After all, this was supposed an account of a strange religious cult in the Arctic, not a treatise on Arctic mycology.

  Some Inuit believe that if you put a small stone in your mouth and suck on it, you will be able to concentrate as you’ve never concentrated before, so I sucked on a variety of small stones, but with no apparent result.

  I googled “suck on stones” to find out if I might have done my sucking erroneously, and among my first hits was “Kidney Stone Humor on Pinterest.”

  Taliriktuk had recently gotten email, or rather his daughter had gotten him email, and he now sent me this message in English: “America’s okay now, I hear not falling down, good to know.”

  But America was making other countries fall down. Having illuminated the skies over Afghanistan, the rocket’s red glare was now illuminating the skies over Iraq.

  At the same time, public beheadings seemed to have become digital crowd-pleasers. In 2004, the second most popular Internet video—after American Idol—was the beheading of American engineer Nicholas Berg in Iraq.

  The visit to Johnny Inukpuk, Nanook’s cousin, did not succeed in jump-starting my account of the Belcher murders.

  My notebook began gathering dust. Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg had invented Facebook, which permitted someone, anyone, to inform the rest of the world, “Whoo-ee, I’m no longer constipated!”

  Whoo-ee, here comes Twitter, Myspace, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pandora, Friendster, Tumblr, Pinterest, Snapchat, etc.

  My notebook continued to gather dust until the summer of 2012, when an incident with a polar bear blew all the dust away.

  32

  I’ve always been more interested in tupilaks than other supernatural beings like angels, werewolves, the Blessed Trinity, Osiris, Zeus, Bigfoot, or even the Buddha …

  … so when I heard from a kayaker friend that a tupilak attack had caused the East Greenland village of Ikateq to be evacuated, I had no choice but to hop a series of increasingly smaller planes until I arrived in Tasiilaq, East Greenland’s metropolis (pop. 1,800).

  Carved from bone by an angakok or perhaps just a remarkably pissed-off individual, a tupilak usually has gaping mouthparts, grasping a
ppendages, and sometimes a skull with a bird beak or two sticking out of it.

  Tupilaks have a not uncommon habit of appearing at their victims’ windows and smiling sarcastically at them.

  Tupilak peering through a window.

  Regardless of how it looks, a tupilak comes alive by suckling its creator’s breast or, in certain instances, his penis, then launches into attack mode. Its specialty is pulling out and eating its victim’s entrails.

  Another personal admission: In the 1980s, I did ethnographic work in and around Tasiilaq, then called Angmagssalik, and preferred its scruffy hunter-gatherer culture to my own resolutely nest-fouling one.

  Shortly after I arrived in Tasiilaq, I noticed that it had become a mecca for Chinese tourists, especially those Chinese tourists who (prejudice alert!) would rather look at their LED screens than at Greenland.

  “Greenlander?” one of the LED-gazing tourists smilingly asked me, maybe because my disheveled rigging identified me as a local. Before I could answer, the man took my picture.

  Several of the Chinese were wearing surgical masks. “Because of pollution,” one woman informed me, seemingly mistaking Greenland, which is pollution-free, for her homeland, which is sometimes called “Airpocalypse.”

  No, I lie: Greenland isn’t pollution-free. Or rather its waters aren’t. Along with heavy metal particles and organochloride pesticides, toxic compounds from discarded cell phones and computers have entered those waters from the waters to the south.

  A peculiar layer in the geologic record will have future hominids scratching their heads and wondering why humans so thoroughly trashed the environment during what’s now commonly known as the Anthropocene Era.

  Perhaps those future hominids will replace the binomial Homo sapiens with Homo insapiens.

  Now back to the tupilak attack. An elder from whom I’d once collected old stories told me this: “A long time ago, a tupilak shaped like a walrus and wearing womens’ breeches came ashore in Sermiligaq, but I never heard of one in Ikateq.”