The End of America: Barrow
This is Utqiagvik, the northernmost city in the United States, also called Barrow. The flight from Anchorage takes an hour and a half, and only one plane comes in each day. Most people would think it is a lot of trouble to fly all this way just to check a place off a list. It is. After going, though, I found it a strange experience — it depends on whether you want to walk to the end of the world with someone.
The moment I got off the plane I was stunned by how broken-down and raw it was. I could not help asking, “Where have I arrived? Is this really America?” We stayed at the Top of the World Hotel. A shuttle came for us. The windshield was stippled with marks, as if the van had driven through gunfire. Outside, dust blew over a landscape of abandoned buildings and cars. I said, “Doesn’t this look exactly like Syria?” Everyone thought so. The place was basically a little Syria in North America. Someone even asked, “Are you insulting Syria?” We finally reached the hotel. Luckily it was decent — the best in town. A friend said it felt like checking into a Syrian palace. We even filmed a video of everyone saying, “Welcome to North American Syria.” Abstract, in the extreme.
We booked the seven-to-nine evening tour and drove north. Past the town, the land looked like the world after the end of everything: only dead branches, bones, white ice, black sand. At Barrow Point, in that silence, a gunshot suddenly went off. A hunter’s shape came and went in the fog. After a brief shock, people went back to taking photos by the van and skipping stones. I left the group and walked toward a dead tree standing by itself, until the van and the people had become very small, like a shot in a film. There was no more talking or laughing, only the hard wind and the Arctic Ocean. Under the tree a gunstock stood in the black sand. I touched it; it fell. I planted it carefully back in the sand. In this place far from the noise, I was atoning for a naïve kind of lightness. Maybe the sting of putting a hand in the Arctic Ocean could wash a soul clean. Could it?
I prefer the local name, Barrow, to Utqiagvik. Barrow sounds like a town that would appear in a movie. Each time I say it, the name seems to slide past gently, like hair through the fingers. I thought: one day, if all of human civilization is gone, perhaps this tree at the end of the world will still be here. If we met under it then, perhaps you would have a little sincerity for me, and I a little for you.