This is a condensed version of a longer piece by photographer/author Bill Hess about the recent passing of Kenneth Toovak of Barrow, and the extraordinary Alaska life he lived. Read the full story, with many more pictures, on Hess' blog.
Today, my mind goes back 23 years to a Thanksgiving dinner that I shared with Kenneth Toovak, Iñupiat Ph.D., who died last week at the age of 86. Actually, I shared the dinner with a few hundred people, but when I stepped out of the deeply sub-zero air into the Utqiagvik Presbyterian Church of Barrow, it was Toovak who called me over and invited me to sit with him.
Soon, beginning with caribou and duck soup and then progressing through frozen fish, to the meat, innards and maktak of the bowhead whale, with plenty of seal oil to dip in, we were served the food of the Arctic.
It was Toovak's intimate knowledge of the animals that made up this Thanksgiving dinner and of the land and sea that produced them that led the Naval Arctic Research Laboratory to hire him in 1957 to support the many scientists who would come to do research in the Arctic. Not only would he keep them safe and alive, but they would rely on his powers of observation to enhance his own skills, for he could look at the ice and sea and see things that neither they nor their instruments could detect. Kenneth was there from the very beginning of the modern Arctic Science movement in Alaska.
When they built the Naval Arctic Science Laboratory, just north of the city of Barrow, they relied on Kenneth's knowledge of the permafrost, carpentry skills and Arctic constructions to help them design a building that would stand up to the harsh conditions that would batter it.
And stand up it did. Over 50 years later, NARL, now the main campus of Ilisagvik College, remains one of the most solid and useful buildings ever built in the Arctic.
In May of 2003, in recognition of his unique body of knowledge and his contributions to Arctic Science, the University of Alaska, Fairbanks bestowed an honorary doctorate upon Toovak - an honor he shares with the late Inupiat scholars Sadie Neakok, Harry Brower Sr. and Harold Kaveolook.
'LUCKY TO BE ALIVE'
Much of the science was done from research sites established on ice floes that drifted about in the ocean. Once, in the month of May, a DC-3 landing on the ice island called Arliss Two was blown off the runway into a pool of melt-water, but survived the mishap with only a broken propeller. Toovak was sent out to recover the plane.
"There was nothing to pull up the DC-3," he recalled in an interview with me in 1996. "I thought maybe we could pull it up like a whale."
Toovak secured two sets of block and tackle and anchored them in the ice -- just the way hunters about to pull up a whale would do. He and another dozen workers tried to pull up the DC-3, but could not.
Toovak then decided to attach the block and tackle to one landing gear at a time, and then to pull one gear up a bit, chop a hole at the wheel to prevent it from sliding back, then do the same to the other gear to zig-zag the airplane out of the water and onto the landing strip.
Four hours after Toovak thought of this, the DC-3 was sitting on the landing strip.
On a dark, cold, winter day, Toovak sat strapped into a seat on a Lockheed C-130 Hercules. Strapped in the fuselage behind him, the pilot and co-pilot, was about 100 drums of fuel. The pilot missed his initial approach to the ice runway.
"I notice the plane didn't land, it goes back up in the air," Toovak recalled. "Then I notice we approach the runway from the other direction. Then the C-130 touches the ice. As soon as it touches, he reverses his engines. We rise up high, bounce, then come down, hit hard. I notice there is a crack in the ceiling.
"We slide a bit, bounce up again, hit hard. Boy, that's the time we got real problems! The three of us are seated right in front of those drums. I notice the ceiling is really cracking; there is smoke in the ceiling. Then we hit a third time. I see through the window, the engine is on fire. The propeller is missing. I see the wing collapsed down. We slide for a bit and boy, we make a hard hit! We slide to the berm of the runway. We come to a stop.
"One of the crew opened the escape door. Boy! I was the first one to get off the aircraft, full blast! I have to run from the aircraft. I know the other two are right behind me. We hear it burning, we fear it might explode."
Using fire extinguishers, the crew managed to snuff the fire, but the three men were stranded on the island for days. Finally, a Twin Otter flew in from Resolute, in Canada's High Arctic. Toovak was flown to Resolute, then to Inuvik, NWT, and from there home to Barrow.
"It was nine hours flying. I felt good when I got to Barrow. I felt that I was lucky to be alive."
11 CHILDREN, MANY FRIENDS
Toovak was born in Barrow, April 19, 1923, to Timothy (Quilluq) and Ethel (Agnik) Toovak.
"The earliest that I can remember we didn't have too much American food, for one thing," he remembered. "A bit of sugar, tea, coffee and flour, that's all. We had the kerosene for the lantern and fuel. I remember we used to have lots of snowdrifts right in between the houses and the whole town is always kind of black, because of the smoke due to the heating of homes."
Prior to going to work for NARL, Toovak worked for contractors exploring for oil on behalf of the Navy and in the construction of the Distant Early Warning station built by the Air Force to detect incoming Soviet missiles and aircraft. He was an original founder of the Barrow Volunteer and the North Slope Borough Search and Rescue operation. He often volunteered his time to meet with students in the Barrow schools.
Toovak married Thelma Stine in 1940 and they had 11 children, seven of which still live. He lost his wife just one year before I interviewed him in 1996. "It's kind of hard, you know," he told me. "It's a good thing I have made a lot of friends who are good people. I felt great for them, deep in my heart -- I appreciate what they did for me when I lost my wife. I didn't know I made that many friends."
He had friends because he was a friend. His house was always open for coffee and a visit, and he was quick with the dinner or breakfast invitation. On that Thanksgiving Day, 23 years ago, when I cut maktak with him, I at first tried to eat everything that was brought to me, but the servings kept coming and coming until I had eaten three or four days worth of food. Toovak gave me some large freezer bags so that I could take the left-over maktak and frozen whale meat home to eat on later days.
He invited me to come by later for turkey dinner.
By BILL HESS
Special to the Daily News