I spoke with a man in Unalakleet. The name’s not important to remember, he said, except that it’s his grandfather’s name. We sat at a library table in the school, 9:30 at night. He was explaining to me what this one Inupiaq word meant—at least, explaining to the best of my understanding—my limited, English-language-only understanding of the world. An understanding that I know is so limited, especially here. Since I arrived in Alaska, I’ve felt incapable of using my language to accurately explain what I’m seeing, thinking, feeling, understanding. It just…doesn’t translate.
And this brings me back to Unalakleet. The library table. The words, but more, the understanding. He explained through stories, through at least 15 minutes of stories and comparisons and inverses, what this one word meant. And after all that, I think I started to understand, though I could never explain it again myself.
I asked him (I asked myself, maybe, and likely the universe) how I could ever do my job the right way. Just as there is no easy translation of a word (a belief, a truth) from Inupiaq into English, there is no way to convey through my medium—the news—all that I have been able to experience through living, temporarily, amid the stories I’m trying to tell. I was in Unalakleet for two days: a place I never knew existed four months ago, and is now a piece of my reality, a tiny piece of my understanding that will always live in me, deep down, shifting perhaps half a degree my perception of the world in a way I’ll probably never do it justice by explaining.
Or last night, midnight, at the kitchen table in the volunteer house. Rolling over in our minds and shaking off the dust through conversation: what is this year going to mean? Who are we going to be next year when the days start to grow longer again—when 10 a.m. is cast back into sunlight? When the icy, liquid-metal sea melts back to blue. When we remember again how hard it was to fillet a fish, how hard it is to fall asleep in the light, the aurora borealis like a dream that danced over our porch. When we depart, maybe, from the only people who will understand what all that felt like—while we sit here now at the kitchen table, fingers wrapped around warm ceramic mugs, seeing reflected in each other’s tired eyes the question of how we’ll even experience it the first time.
I think there is a sacredness in certain moments that cannot be conveyed without direct experience. That the closest I can come to telling a good story is through being immersed in the story myself, and that most days, I gain so much more than I am capable of giving, and learn so much more than I am capable of communicating. All I can be, now, is grateful for the people who are sharing all of the living with me.
