To Live and Die in Wales, Alaska

For years Mike Weyapuk sat on his bunk, cradling his sunburst Gibson guitar. He stared out at the frozen Bering Strait and dreamed of the day he would leave his village to start a metal band. He thought about moving to Seattle or Chicago, but nowhere too far south; he’d heard about an Eskimo who went to Arizona and almost melted. When he arrived in the big city and stepped onstage, he would play fast and hard and angry and sad, the history of his people aching in every power chord.

Mike was tall, with the build of a long-distance runner, his arms thick from seasonal construction work. He had a faint moustache and shiny black hair that fell to his shoulders. He wore the same clothes for days at a time; sometimes it was a Kentucky Wildcats T-shirt and blue sweats, or black jeans and a black T-shirt that read “Life is full of important choices.” He lived in Wales, Alaska, about as far away from DC as you can get and still call yourself an American. Zip code 99783. Population 139. Frigid and forbidding like an ice cavern, where the wind blows endlessly and everybody’s related. The westernmost tip of the North American continent, the swath of western Alaska stretching out to Siberia. The western front of the Cold War, the enemy bearing down eighty-five kilometres away. The place where humans are believed to have crossed the Bering Sea land bridge into North America 12,000 years ago. The Pacific and Arctic oceans converge at the Bering Strait, the Diomede Islands rising in the centre, and the International Date Line slices between them — so close to the line that you can watch today’s and tomorrow’s sunset sink over the purple mountains of Siberia.

One day in late May of 2005, Mike put down his guitar and slipped out of his crumbling house. He walked north on the sandy road, the wind clawing at his back. He passed the water tank he’d once worked at and the community centre he helped build. The airstrip was on his left, the launching pad to a land of choices. Mike carried a 9mm-pistol in his black Carhartt jacket. He had a place in mind, up on Paavik Mountain, just outside the village, so he hiked over the spongy tundra and started up the mountainside. In the distance, it was all laid out before him: the gabled roofs and the oddly shaped buildings; the tiny crosses sprouting like weeds in sand; dust trailing four-wheelers on the beach; the Bering Strait’s rough waters roaring ashore; the Diomede Islands, their smooth plateaus like floating docks; Siberia looming on the horizon; the village as peaceful as a dead man at his wake.

Mike clutched the trigger. Twenty-six years he’d lived in the village, just long enough to watch his life flash before his eyes.

I met Mike five years before he went up the mountain. He was standing on the steps of his father’s windswept house, smoking a cigarette and gazing at the strait, trying to guess which way the wind was going to blow next. It was one of those rare evenings in Wales when the midnight sun shines in all its glory, the sea aglow in blues and greens and purples, the sky flaming yellow and orange. The wind was like a pendulum just beginning to swing east, barely a breeze. I asked Mike what the wind was doing. If the wind kicked up in earnest tonight, he told me, it meant a storm was brewing over Siberia and it would be raining sideways in Wales in a day.

Mike invited me into his house for coffee. We walked up the front steps and through an Arctic entryway, a shed attached to most village homes where families store hunting gear and freezers filled with game. You can tell how much somebody hunts by the pungent, marine mammal scent of their shed. It wasn’t very strong in Mike’s, but inside the house it felt like a hunting cabin. Dishrags and towels dangled from clotheslines criss-crossing the kitchen. The counters were cluttered with flashlights, dirty dishes, a maple syrup bottle, Styrofoam plates, pickle jars, and a box of oatmeal. A metal trash can held drinking water collected from creeks. Mike’s younger brother Brian was watching the X Games on espn while his father, Walter, and three men played cribbage at the table. On the door was a Brandon Lee poster, on the wall a tribute to Mike’s grandfather: “The Twentieth Alaska Legislature honors the lifetime achievements of Winton Weyapuk Sr., Alaska Native leader, artist and cultural bearer, who died March 7, 1997. Winton was born November 16, 1907, in Wales . . . He grew up dependent on the traditional subsistence lifestyle. When Winton’s parents died in an influenza epidemic, he became the main provider for his family by hunting and trapping.”

Mike handed me a mug and motioned me to his bedroom. It was not much bigger than a walk-in closet, with a hanging bedsheet as a door. It overflowed with Mountain Dew bottles, twisted guitar strings, music magazines, and crumpled paper. The walls were plastered with posters of Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, and Pantera. Mike’s stereo played Hendrix’s Axis: Bold As Love. A pile of electric guitars were stacked behind his bunk bed, and an amplifier sat below a narrow window facing the strait. We studied his window as if it was an aquarium: the sun shooting over the sea, kids darting in and out of view, hues of blue and green and gold shining everywhere.

I‘d come to Wales because of a story I chanced upon in an anthropology course during my last semester of college. The tale was of a strange virus travelling aboard dogsleds across Alaska’s hinterlands, leaving thousands of bodies in its wake. When it reached Wales, the virus killed almost 200 people, more than half the population, and orphaned several dozen children. The disease was the 1918 influenza, a virus that killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide. It killed at a higher rate in western Alaska than anywhere else in the United States.

What most interested me about Wales was what happened in the months after the epidemic. A government superintendent came to the village to resolve the orphan crisis that had ensued. He brought along a sheaf of marriage licences, called the adult survivors to the schoolhouse, and told them that the government was planning to take the orphans away. He did not want to see this happen, so he offered the people an alternative: the survivors could remarry and raise the children. The official then instructed the men to line up on one side of the room, the women on the other. The men were told to select wives. Those who didn’t were paired up. The superintendent conducted a mass wedding, and the orphans were doled out to the new couples.

The 1918 flu explains much about the village today. The population never recovered, sitting between 120 and 170 people. The flu killed so many elders — the walking encyclopedias of the Old World — that it shattered the village’s sense of its history. And it killed so many hunters that the ancient art of whaling all but ceased for the next half-century. White teachers and missionaries returned to Wales after the epidemic, encouraging the people to abandon their language and shamanistic beliefs. In the 1940s, a pastor told villagers to stop dancing like devils, and they did for the next half-century. Modern technology flooded the village — radios, airplanes, snowmobiles, and televisions. Much of the culture died off. Then a new epidemic hit western Alaska. People started to kill themselves at a rate seven times the US average. One suicide led to another, spreading from village to village. To this day, the epidemic rages on.