Life at the top - the very far north that is

Gene Weingarten travels to Savoonga, Alaska and writes about live in the arctic. Check out this Washington Post article: Snowbound

Let's say you were looking for a vacation destination in winter. And also, that you were out of your mind. You might pull out a map of Alaska, locate Anchorage, and then let your eyes roam north and west, across mountain ranges, through millions of acres of wilderness, until you ran out of dirt. You would be in Nome. Nome: the last outpost, Babylon on the Bering, famously dissolute, said to be home to the desperate, the disillusioned, the hollow-eyed, the surrendered, the exiles, the castaways, the cutthroats, the half dead and the fully juiced. Nome, the end of the Earth.

Only it isn't the end of the Earth. You can see that, right on the map. To get to the end of the Earth from Nome you would have to hop a small plane and head 130 miles out into the Bering Sea, where you would land on an island so remote that it is closer to Russia than the U.S. mainland. To the people of Siberia, this island is the middle of nowhere. On it, according to the map, is a village named Savoonga.

Savoonga. Va-voom. Bunga bunga. Funny, no?

I thought so, too, when I first saw it. It gave me an idea for a funny story. In the dead of winter, I would pack up and blindly head to Savoonga, unannounced and unprepared. No research at all, no planning beyond the booking of a room, if there was one to be had.

The whole thing was an inside joke, one with a swagger. It is a journalist's conceit that a good reporter can find a great story anywhere--in any life, however humble, and in any place, however unwelcoming.

That is how photographer Michael Williamson and I came to be in a small commuter plane in late February, squinting out onto a landscape as forbidding, and as starkly beautiful, as anything we'd ever seen. Land was indistinguishable from sea--the white subarctic vista, lit to iridescence by a midafternoon sun, was flat and frozen straight to the horizon. The first clue that we were over an island was when the village materialized below us. It looked as negligible as a boot print in the snow, the grimy, nubby tread left by galoshes. The nubs were one-story buildings, a few dozen of them, and that was it.

I'm back now, trying to make sense of what we saw, trying to figure out how to tell it. It's all still with me, except for the swagger.

A fascinating account of life in the far north. Problems with food, alcoholism, child suicides. The isolation is so strong that whenever someone leaves to the lower 48, many times they can't deal with what passes for modern civilization and move back.