Children of Crisis

by Robert Coles

  “My mother would tell us, in front of him, to leave the whiskey alone. My grandfather said that my father had fallen under the power of the white people, and that one day he would ‘break out and be free.’ My father smiled when my mother told us that. My father was drunk, but he said she was right! When he did break out, he said he was sure that he’d never have another drink. My mother wasn’t so sure, but my grandfather told her not to worry. He had gone with my father to get firewood, and my father told him that he would never drink again. My father hadn’t said that before; he refused to promise because he didn’t want to break his promise. He’s never made a promise that he couldn’t keep. Now he talks to men who still drink; they smuggle in bottles, and you can walk by their houses in the summertime, and you can hear by the way they’re talking that they’re drinking a lot. My father tells me to go home, and he walks right into the house of a man who is drinking and he starts talking about how sick he used to be, and how sick he gets now, just thinking of the past. Then he’ll tell the man not to stop until he is really ready to stop.

  “The man’s wife will get very upset; one wife told my mother that my father must be getting five dollars from the owners of the store where the men get their whiskey. My mother was very upset, but the woman was only teasing her. The wives wish my father would be a better preacher. I asked the minister why he doesn’t help my father become a better preacher! The minister said that preachers don’t stop people from drinking. I told my mother what he’d said, and she shook her head and said that you can’t let a man drink and drink. But I think she knows now that the minister is right. She tells the wives of men drinking that you should try to stop a man from drinking, but if he won’t stop, no matter what you say or try to do, then you should sit down and even lift the bottle for him, if his hands and arms are shaky. Then pray the day will come that he learns to say no. If you get him to promise every day to stop and he doesn’t, then he’ll be a man who can’t keep his promise, and he’ll drink because he’ll want to forget that he made promises and couldn’t live up to them.

  “When my father and I went to catch salmon, and he talked with me about the drinking he used to do, he told me that when he was very sick, and when he thought he wouldn’t live very long, he promised himself that he wouldn’t say he’d stop until he was ready to stop. He told me that when you promise someone you’ll do something — yourself or another person — then you are saying the most important two words in the world: I will. He said never begin with those two words unless you know you’ll be able to do what you say. When he decided to promise my grandfather and my mother and all of us that he’d stop drinking, he took the bottle off the floor — it was half-full — and put it on the table and said he’d never again take a drink. And he hasn’t. Then my mother picked up the bottle, and she was going to empty it and throw it away, but he said no, she must never touch the bottle. He wanted it to stay near him! A few days later, he emptied the bottle, but he’s never going to throw it out. He says it reminds him of the promise he made. My mother doesn’t understand why he needs to be reminded, but she never argues with him. I think I understand. He told me; he said that the bottle on the table is the bottle he beat. He said he fought with the whiskey in the bottle, and he won over it. He said it’s like going out with a gun, and there are a hundred white men, and they have their guns, and they have their fast planes, but he is the only Eskimo, and he just tells them that they can kill him, but they can’t take him a prisoner and put him in their jails, so he’ll just stand there, and let them go ahead and do what they want, but if they try to touch him, he’ll shoot himself. They don’t know what to do. They just stand still. The white men only know how to fight, not how to stay away from fights.”

  John isn’t so certain, it turns out, that he would want to be faced with the challenge his father described. He is a tough, combative boy — or so his teachers describe him. They consider him unusually assertive, as Eskimo children go. As teachers, of course, they welcome such a trend; they have come to the village — whites from the lower forty-eight — to be themselves an “outside influence,” to bring change. The boy agrees with them; he refers to them as “white people” and is sure that they will one day leave — having taught Eskimo children a lot about places they have never heard of and will never see. He disputes the emphasis they place on themselves, the high regard they have for their “influence.” He considers his forcefulness to be a quite traditional trait, acquired from his grandfather, who is one of the most respected men in the village and, for that matter, other villages.

  The grandfather is well known to many Eskimos, as the boy makes clear — and not only to boast about a man he is proud of: “The teachers ask me why everyone looks up to my grandfather. I tell them I don’t know. My grandfather said I give the right answer! One teacher said he had an explanation. He is an Indian, and he wants to stay here for a long time. He told the other teachers that my grandfather is a leader and that’s why everyone pays attention to him. The teachers asked why my grandfather is a leader; the Indian answered: why is anyone a leader? I told my grandfather and he laughed. He said he’d be glad to talk with the Indian teacher I like, but they haven’t talked much. They say hello when they meet, but my grandfather has not been feeling too good, and he does not want to talk with strangers. He believes that he’s alive for a reason; each day he tries to do what he believes he’s here to do. He says he’ll die when there’s no longer any reason for him to be here. He helps my father get wood. He helps my mother with the fish; she says he’s better at cooking than she ever was. He takes me out for a walk and teaches me how to find wild birds’ eggs and how to collect moss. He knows how to keep warm, and he tells me and my sister and my brother how to keep warm. He makes sure I know how to put the moss in my boots when it is very cold. He told me that he hopes he stays alive until he has taught my youngest brother how to take care of himself. Then my grandfather will leave us.

  “My mother says he almost died a few years ago — and many times he’s been sick, and people have given up, and told themselves that he’s soon not going to be here. But he stays with us, and it’s because he wants to make sure we hear every story he knows! Everyone believes that he knows more about the village than anyone else. Even faraway people will say that if you want to know anything about our village, go ask my grandfather. He will sit down and explain how the village was built, and why his grandparents built our house here, and not further up the river. He should have been a teacher — that’s what my favorite teacher, the Indian, said. My father said: your grandfather is a teacher. But when I told my grandfather what the teacher said, he didn’t get annoyed. He said he can remember when the government built the school, and when they brought in the first teachers from outside, and how hard it was to persuade the people to send their children there every day.”

  The boy admires the old man’s pride, his tact, his unwillingness to take any statement or controversy personally. He remembers once when younger going for a walk with his grandfather, hearing him talk about the snow, the ice, the long sunless winters. The boy wanted to know why — why are other parts of the world warmer, easier to live in? The old man had no answer for a long time; he told the boy he would like to think about the question. Finally he told the boy that there was no point asking whys, only a need to get through that day, then the next, and all those that follow, until the end comes. The boy was not at all satisfied; he wanted to know whether his grandfather had ever thought of trying to live elsewhere. The grandfather said no. The boy asked another why — why not? The grandfather suddenly turned the tables on his grandson: why was he asking all those whys? The boy didn’t know how to answer. He said he didn’t know; he was, quite simply, curious. The grandfather replied that he didn’t know, either, why he couldn’t come up with satisfactory explanations; perhaps it was because, quite simply, he wasn’t curious. But the boy knew how eager his grandfather was to search out eggs, find geese, hunt seals, go fishing, scan the skies, spot the first crack
in the ice, watch the sun rise or set, discover some good thick moss that he could cut, dry, and use to pad shoes, and thereby keep his grandchildren warm. Why did such a vigorous, independent, thoughtful man refuse to allow himself the ruminative, speculative moments the boy felt prone to?

  The old man never would answer such a question, but John had his own way of finding out what he wanted to know: “I asked my mother and she said I was being foolish, because when you are born in a place, you have to live there, and no one knows why one place is different from another, so I’d better stop wasting my time asking. My father said he’d wondered, too; but he said he was told by his mother that it was once hot here all winter, then it got cold, and one day it might get hot again. My grandmother told my father that there was a big fight long ago between a white bear and a brown bear, and the white bear won, and that was when the snow came to our land. She heard stories like that when she was a girl, but she didn’t really believe them, and she was happy to see that my father didn’t either. She told him that the winds bring bad weather, but they can change and bring good weather. I asked my grandfather if he’d let me tell him what I believed; and he said yes, he’d much rather listen to me than talk. So, I told him about the winds — that I’d heard they cause the snow and ice, and if they changed, there would be different weather here. And he said I was right, and that was the secret he hadn’t told me — about the winds.”

  Not that the grandfather went any further. John remembers asking about the winds: where do they come from, and why are they so harsh, and when will they let up, go elsewhere, try hurling their force on other regions of the earth? Whereupon the old man told the boy something he has never forgotten: “He told me that I had better stop asking him questions like that, because no one knows the answers to them — even the white man, and he thinks he knows the answer to every question.” The boy has heard words to that effect over and over again; he has, upon occasion, repeated them to the one teacher (the Indian) he trusts. The teacher listens respectfully but disagrees; he tells the boy that there are causes, effects, reasons, explanations. The boy smiles, nods his head, says nothing. As he compares in his mind his grandfather’s way of regarding the world and his teacher’s, he decides to make a drawing. A blast of wind has reminded him of what he has heard at home about Arctic weather; he decides to show the tundra under siege — a fierce, snow-bearing wind sweeping across the land. He announces that the first snow is the one that he finds most exciting, so he will attempt to show how it appears to him, as he thinks about the early autumn months when suddenly, overnight it seems, summer turns into winter.

  He draws the tundra with great care and obvious affection. He works hard on the grass. With a mischievous look, he sketches a nest, full of eggs. He tells his mother that he has drawn some eggs, and they are not far from the village. She laughs. It is an old source of tension as well as humor between them. The boy is supposed to keep an eye out for eggs, and sometimes he comes home, after an extensive search, claiming that none are to be found. His mother then goes out and, invariably, stumbles upon a nest of eggs even before undertaking the pursuit formally. As the boy tells of his mother’s sharp vision, her successes, in contrast to his failures, he decides to put aside the larger drawing and do another one: more eggs. He makes them big, spotted; he puts them in a bed of grass, then works at the tundra — flat and without trees or shrubs. He loves to go find eggs, loves to bring them home, loves to eat them. He had learned at school that children elsewhere merely have to open a door to find a dozen or so eggs before them. But he has also been told that they are chickens’ eggs — and far less attractive to look at, and of a different taste.

  John would not like that kind of life, he says firmly, as he puts his drawing aside — unfinished. He also seems uninterested in working on the previous, more ambitious, one. The soft, easy life of other Americans interests him; he has heard it remarked upon, criticized by his father and mother, his elderly grandfather: “They have told me that we will no longer be Eskimos if we have all our food here at home, and have forgotten how to go out and find food for ourselves. That is how the white people live, and that is how some of our own people have begun living — in the cities of Alaska. My friend’s uncle lives in Nome. He went to visit his uncle and his aunt and his cousins. He said that they have a television set, a refrigerator, a snowmobile, a motorcycle. They have a stove that is electric. They have a motorboat. They are talking of moving to Fairbanks because they’d like to own a car, and they say in Nome you can’t go too far with a car. My uncle was in the air force, and now he works for the government. He may get a job from an oil company. Then he’d go north by himself and send all the money home. My father says that his brother is ruined. He keeps telling my father to come visit him. He lives in Nome too. He sends us letters. He says it’s too bad we don’t have telephones in our village. My father says that when we have telephones and television, it will be time for us to leave. He won’t go see his brother anymore. And his brother won’t come see us. But they write to each other. My grandfather says that when he dies, the two brothers will stop being brothers. My brothers and I will never let that happen to us.”

  John has immediate second thoughts: maybe, one day, he will travel, and will like a certain country, and will want to stay there, and so will lose contact with his family. He would never want to live elsewhere in Alaska, but the teachers have showed him and his classmates pictures taken from the National Geographic, and he has to admit that some of them have whetted his appetite. He especially responds to the tropics, to stories about and pictures of the Amazon, the African jungle, the Pacific islands. What is it like to live under a hot sun, to be able to dress so lightly, to fight sweat and mosquitoes rather than chills and frostbite? He has a slight idea; summer comes to the Arctic too — however briefly. It is never an unbearable summer — to outsiders, like pilots, teachers, government officials, the white people who visit villages like his. But for him warm weather can be strange, unsettling, even unnerving, and he knows quite clearly some of the reasons why: “The sun never leaves us, and we keep telling ourselves that we should enjoy it while it’s with us, but after a while we get so tired. We are tired because we can’t sleep too well when it’s light all the time, and we are tired because we have been doing too many things and forgetting to go to sleep.”

  He muses out loud about the tropics; he wonders whether he would be especially vulnerable, were he to go there on a visit. He has seen white people come to Alaska and become sick, weary, constantly fearful: can anyone possibly survive a particular storm, never mind an entire season of winter — a half-year of temperatures at or well below zero, and of heavy snows, relentless winds? Just after he observes that he would probably learn how to live with one hundred degrees, day in and day out, he reminds himself that he ought to finish his abandoned, large drawing of a windy, winter storm. White people have learned to survive Alaska’s winters, he comments as he picks up his drawing again. He contemplates it, seems ready to work at it, then puts it firmly aside. He will start all over again, and this time he will finish what he starts. He reaches for the largest piece of paper available, reaches for paints instead of crayons, and works long, hard, silently. The result is an astonishing painting — really something in the abstract expressionist vein: thick white upon thin white, streaks of black, lines of white and black, and nothing else (Figure 39).

  John is apologetic, yet determined as he tries to indicate what he hoped to accomplish: “The wind comes from the mountains or from the sea; we get winds from both directions. We sit here and my grandfather laughs when we ask what it is like outside and go look through the window. He says that we’ll never see anything standing in the house and looking; the only way is to go outside and look — or else close our eyes and stop talking and listen and picture the snow up in the air, speeding across our village like airplanes, millions of them, only even faster than they go. I remember closing my eyes, and besides the wind, that shouts at us, and never loses its voice, I co
uld feel the snow touching my face, and I tried counting the flakes, but I gave up: too many. Once I asked my grandfather what would happen if all the flakes came together, because there were so many of them. He said it is a mystery — how the air can hold so many flakes; but perhaps that is what the wind is for: to keep the flakes away from each other until they fall on the ground. Sometimes when I see a heavy snowstorm coming, I joke; I tell my grandfather that the snowflakes are coming together, and it’s all white out there, it’s falling big pieces of snow. He smiles and says he hopes so! I think he’ll like this picture, even if we haven’t had that much snow. I guess I could have done better, but the picture shows what the wind would do if it was so strong it made snow come down in big lumps.”

  Snow and the wind that carries it are apparently taken for granted by him but are really a continuing source of wonder and awe. John has been taken down the river to the sea over and over again, yet the sight of giant icebergs still captivates him. He would like to go exploring on them. He would like to watch them break up, yield slowly to the spring. But they never yield completely, as he keeps reminding himself, almost with pride: “The teachers tell us that in a lot of places the snow doesn’t last too long. When I was younger, I used to tell my mother, when we came back from a trip to the ocean, that I was worried that the icebergs might melt during the summer, and there would be only the water to see. My mother would laugh and repeat my words: only the water! She loves to walk to the edge of the river. She loves to walk on the shore, near the ocean. She collects stones or shells, and brings them home and keeps them in a box. She says she doesn’t care about the ice; she is glad, I think, when it leaves the harbor and goes further and further back. But I like the ice, and when it is far away, I tell my father that I hope to come back later, when I can see no water, only the ice and snow.”