Men's Journal

Photographs by Colin Clark

If you want to see our planet’s most graceful, most tragically doomed creature in its natural habitat, you go to Kaktovik, Alaska. But if you want to really feel their plight, you let naturalist and radio host Richard Nelson do all the talking.

by Jacques Leslie
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Richard Nelson was worried that we wouldn’t find enough polar bears. We were waiting for the turboprop that would take us to the Arctic village of Kaktovik, and Alaska’s best-known naturalist-cum-radio personality was weighing his options. He’d heard that the polar bears near Kaktovik looked dirty and were acting sullen, showing up only at night when he’d be forced to try to record their roars without being able to see them or know where all of them were. Nelson is no daredevil, but his curiosity about the natural world is generally bigger than his fear. “It’s very dangerous not to be in a vehicle out there at night,” he said, pausing before adding “I might still get out.” Then he laughed.

If Alaska had an official state naturalist, Nelson— Nels to all who know him— would be an obvious candidate. The distinction would probably please him, but not nearly as much as nature itself; with typical self-effacement, he says he’s a “nature junkie,“ not a naturalist. More than four decades ago, the U.S. Air Force hired him to record Inuit knowledge of Arctic sea ice for a pilot survival manual. At the age of 23, he was deposited in the far northern Alaska village of Wainwright, nearly all of whose 300 residents were Iñupiat Eskimo subsistence hunters. He had never before crossed the Arctic Circle, hunted, or even lived away from his Wisconsin home for longer than a summer, and suddenly his survival depended largely on killing and eating caribou, whales, walruses, and seals. Under Iñupiat tutelage, he assembled his own dog team, built its sled, sewed the dogs’ harnesses, and became the most active hunter in the village. He ended up spending five years with Alaskan native people, and has lived in the state permanently since 1974. He is 67.

Nels’ mission in Kaktovik was to record a monologue on polar bears and climate change while standing more or less among the bears. He is the creator, writer, soundman, co-editor, and star performer of a half-hour radio show called Encounters, which is carried weekly on eight National Public Radio stations in Alaska and a growing number in the lower 48 states. Nels has enjoyed a much-honored career as author and university lecturer, but over the last six years he has found a greatly enlarged, highly enthusiastic audience through Encounters. For each program, he typically immerses himself in some natural phenomenon— he has kayaked over a herd of sea lions, described a 60-mile-per-hour windstorm while clinging to the top of a tree, and even placed himself inside a cloud of thousands of buzzing mosquitoes. (He tried out various DEET-free mosquito repellants, and reported that using one “was like putting salsa on a taco.”) He usually records an hour-long discourse that combines native lore, scientific observations, and accounts of the action around him. Back home in his rudimentary studio in Sitka, he pares the recording down to a broadcast-ready 28 minutes. His voice still possesses a hint of boyish Wisconsin twang, which blends nicely with his nearly perpetual enthusiasm for the natural world. For all the environmental depredations Alaska has suffered, it still contains an inordinate proportion of the world’s remaining beautiful places, and Nels’ descriptions enable his listeners to forget at least momentarily that most of the rest of the planet does not look as good. As Nels puts it, “There are still a lot of places in Alaska that are the way they are supposed to be.”

To be sure, Kaktovik is not one of those places. Overlooking the Beaufort Sea, it is a flat, windswept outpost of trailers and other low-slung installations some 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle and a mere 1,400 miles from the North Pole. A traditional Iñupiat fishing area, it lacked permanent residents until the construction there of a Distant Early Warning Line radar station in the 1950s. The scruffy Waldo Arms, one of two Kaktovik hotels, is typical: it was cobbled together out of remnants from an oil pipeline construction camp that were transported 110 miles to the village on a wide, high-tired vehicle called a Rolligon. Every autumn beginning two or three decades ago, Kaktovik’s indigenous hunters began leaving stripped bowhead whale carcasses at a spot a mile down the shore, just beyond the village airstrip. They may have chosen that option only because it was easier than towing the carcasses out to sea, but polar bears were the immediate beneficiaries: they are now so accustomed to the offering that they gather at the bone pile each fall before the fresh carcasses arrive. A decade ago, as many as 80 bears showed up at Kaktovik, but in recent years their number has dropped into the 20s, perhaps as a result of climate change.

Our first day at the whalebone site seemed to confirm the notion that polar bears were scarce. Accompanied by Men’s Journal photographer Colin Clark and our driver/guide, a moonlighting photographer named Steven Kazlowski, we drove to the site on a treacherous, half-frozen road, as Kazlowski spun the wheel of our Chevy Suburban like a sea captain to avoid getting stuck in slushy ruts. Tousle-haired and often unshaven, Kazlowski has displayed a passion for polar bears that could be construed as obsession: in pursuit of polar bear images, he has visited Kaktovik every October for the last ten years. Nels hardly needed a guide, but the village required all polar bear viewers to hire one, partly to increase local employment. Never mind that Kazlowski was not a full-time resident: stints as a guide paid off his bill at the Waldo Arms.

The bone pile looked like a post-modernist jungle gym, with huge snow-encrusted rib bones arcing high into the sky. The view beyond the bones was all horizontals: a flat snow-covered expanse ending at the gravelly shoreline; a blue lagoon a few hundred yards wide, “greasy” with ice flecks; a barrier island where most of the polar bears were hanging out; and suspended over the island, a strip of dark clouds. The bears were waiting for the autumn expansion of the Arctic ice pack, from where they could hunt seals into the next summer. I could barely make out two or three bears on the distant spit: the snow and their coats blended so perfectly that the only way to spot them was to wait for them to move; in the distance, they looked like stately frigates. Only one bear was on the beach, where we could get close. It was nestled into a snowdrift near a mound of rocks, probably asleep, at the very least unconcerned by our presence a hundred feet away— when Kazlowski honked the horn, the bear didn’t bother to lift his head. Kazlowski had watched the bear for several days, and assumed it was weak, probably as a result of being forced to swim a long, long distance from diminished sea ice to land. “He’s in bad condition,” Kazlowski said. “He’s tired, he may be old, and he’s had a hell of a summer. If he were healthy, he’d be off with the other bears on the spit.” His coat was a tarnished yellow-brown, not a sleek ivory-white like the other bears’, and he looked gravely underweight. We named him “Brutus.”

Nels had just four days to record his program, and prospects weren’t good: one bear, never mind a sick one, wouldn’t provide enough action. Not that he seemed worried. We were standing in the middle of a biting blizzard, temperatures hovering in the 20s and the wind blowing at close to forty miles per hour. He strolled across the ice with an easy, accustomed gait, and seemed to smile. On his head, he wore only a baseball cap, but he wore the Alaskan pride in enduring hard circumstances like an extra layer of insulation. His blond hair is whitening, and he speaks of being a “fossil,” but he is still as trim as a gymnast and exudes Nordic competence. As an experiment, he leaned unreservedly into the wind, arms outstretched, and the wind held him up. “It’s just beautiful out here,” he said. “This blowing snow and stuff, the sun is shining.…” He trailed off into contemplation.

A little later, he said, “I figure if we spend fifteen hours a day here, something good will happen.”

We sat in the truck, waiting for bears. “You know what’s really neat right now, that you can see so beautifully illustrated?” Nels said. “Look at the clouds over the lagoon. In the wintertime when the land is covered with ice and snow, if the sky is overcast, it reflects the snow below, so the clouds are all white. And then there will be a dark line running through the clouds. It’s a reflection, a map of the terrestrial surface, that enables you to trace in the cloud where there’s an open lead”— a break in the ice below. “Iñupiat people find open water that way.” Nels was too humble to add that during his stint in Wainwright, he did, too.

In time, a mother polar bear and her cub showed up to gnaw on the bones— a promising omen. Part of Nels’ appeal as a radio host is that his on-air and day-to-day personae are identical: though he researches his monologues, they are all informed by his experience and reverence for nature. “Whenever I look at these animals, I think about what they’ve seen and what they’ve done,“ he said. “Look at that bear”— it was tossing a strip of whale sinew into the air. “That bear has lived for years by killing seals and traversing thousands of miles of sea ice— things that are absolutely beyond our comprehension. What is it like to be able to smell a seal beneath the sea ice through a breathing hole? You think of this bear finding a seal and launching up and grabbing it— you are looking at a flat-out miracle…. The Iñupiat people know they’re surrounded by miracles— it’s no wonder they treat the world as a supernatural thing. Indigenous people often describe white people as overgrown little boys, because Iñupiat people think they know more than children. How could they not think that, because we don’t understand the most basic things?”

Before we left, we drove over to the rocks where Brutus still lay curled. Behind him we could see the long sweep of the snow-covered Brooks Range, as pleasingly regular as a picket fence, bathed in the pink of the day’s last sunlight.

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Brutus’ predicament is becoming increasingly common. Polar bears and grizzlies, from which polar bears evolved only 250,000 years ago, are the world’s largest non-aquatic carnivores— but polar bears are far more specialized. Watching them from the shore, we were standing at the edge of their realm, but we weren’t in it. Polar bears are wedded to sea ice, to which they’re exquisitely adapted— they hunt on it, sleep on it, even mate on it. But for the last three decades, the Arctic ice pack has been diminishing as a result of climate change. The ice pack’s retreat is shrinking polar bear habitat, but more subtly and significantly, it is destroying the offshore ecosystem on which polar bears depend. Sea ice edges where polar bears flourish are much richer environments than ice pack interiors: sunlight penetrates the thinner ice, producing algae and plankton in the ocean below, and organic matter drifts downward a few hundred feet to the bottom of the Alaskan continental shelf. Some diving animals, such as walruses, feed off the sea floor, bringing nutrients back to the surface. The enriched ocean water provides sustenance for Arctic cod, which are eaten by ringed seals, polar bears’ main food source. But as the ice pack retreats, its edge less often extends over the continental shelf. More and more frequently, its downwardly drifting organic matter misses the shelf and keeps on falling thousands of feet more, into the abyss of the deep ocean, crippling the shelf’s ecosystem. Polar bears are excellent swimmers, able to maneuver gracefully through sea ice cracks, but they’re not built to swim long distances. Nevertheless, more and more are now forced to swim hundreds of miles in the open ocean, trying to bridge the widening gap between sea ice and shore. Some, like Brutus, reach land, but others, cubs in particular, don’t.

Nels spent most of our second day in Kaktovik sitting on the edge of his bed at the Waldo Arms, organizing his research data into notes he’d refer to during his monologue. We didn’t reach the bone site until mid-afternoon, and the day was so glorious it was hard to keep climate change in mind. It’s common in Kaktovik to go weeks without seeing the sun, but on this day the weather was clear and the light was golden-hued; beyond the bones and the barrier island, the horizon seemed to smolder. “You know that book, At Play in the Fields of the Lord?” Nels asked. “That’s what I think of when I’m in a place like this.”

Five healthy bears were wandering among the bones. One tussled with a strip of whale meat, shaking its head and tossing it into the air, while a few glaucous gulls watched nearby, waiting for scraps. Our truck was stationed 40 or 50 yards from the bones when two bears began walking towards us. With each polar bear step forward, we took one backwards, keeping a hundred feet between the bears and us, until we’d arrived back at the truck, and got in. The bears circled the truck. Polar bears are unjustly considered highly threatening to humans, a point these bears’ behavior bore out: they were curious, not menacing.

It is hard to imagine animals more beautiful than polar bears. For a few minutes, they sauntered around the truck, as if showing off their elegant long necks and flamboyant full-length coats. With their coal-black eyes and noses set against white fur, their faces reminded me of snowmen. They walked slowly, deploying their one-foot-wide paws like snowshoes, legs spread wide to minimize slipping. “Anybody not glad you woke up this morning?” Nels said.

The bears wandered off, then sat down in the snow, while others circulated among the whale bones. Behind us, a school bus pulled up— it contained a flock of amateur photographers, fellow guests at the Waldo Arms, who’d traveled to Kaktovik to shoot polar bears. Soon the bus was joined by an ambulance, the vehicle of choice of a local videographer who’d been working on a polar bear documentary for years. Planes took off and landed on the airstrip. Nels needed silence to record, but Kaktovik wasn’t cooperating. “Man, there’s a lot of human voices here now!” Nels said. “Jeez Louise!”

The bus and the ambulance eventually left— “That was a shutter orgy,” Nels said— and began recording. Colin and I were sitting in the truck, relying on the heater for warmth, but now we turned off the engine. With eight bears arrayed in front of him, Nels started talking. Then a plane landed on the strip and kept its engine running while reloading. Through his earphones, Nels could also hear a noise from town, “somebody running a chain saw or something.” After a few minutes, he gave up for the day.

As we drove back to the village, the sun slipped behind the Brooks Range, briefly resembled a brilliant orange lozenge, and disappeared.

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That night Nels announced that we’d have to get out to the bone pile before sunrise the next morning— not exactly a burdensome request, as the sun wouldn’t come up until twenty after eight. When we arrived, we discovered that during the night the lagoon had frozen— for the winter— and the large puddle in front of the bone site had nearly hardened. Steve got out of the truck and stomped on the ice to see if it would hold the truck, then floored the gas pedal to get across it, and stopped only a hundred feet from the bones. “Steve likes to live on the edge,” Nels said, as if he didn’t.

The day felt auspicious. Around us were ten bears, including a couple of frolicking cubs. They strolled from place to place, occasionally sniffing, stopping to gnaw on a piece of whale. Though the school bus was stationed warily up the road, behind us, three bears paid it a visit, prompting another shutter orgy. One bear lay down in the snow with belly downwards, lifted its hindquarters, and propelled itself with its rear legs, like a sled. Then it rolled over, arched its back, and twisted sensuously, raising one paw, then another, puppy-like.

“When can we go into town and have some fun?” Nels asked facetiously. A minute later he added, “We’re so privileged.”

As if there were any doubt, Nels explained that he regards the Arctic as one of the world’s most exciting regions, a “rowdy” place. I asked him to elaborate. “One minute it’s placid and calm; the next minute you’re groping through clouds of windblown snow and the wind chill is 90 or 100 below zero. All this is vastly multiplied when you’re on the sea ice, where the entire frozen terrain can start moving, cracks suddenly open, big masses of ice collide and heave up into ridges. In the Arctic, every time you step outside there’s a chance it’ll end up being a survival experience. A beginner’s skills won’t do the job up here— you need some serious expertise.”

He was trying to record animal sounds with a big parabolic microphone, but mechanical noises continually interrupted: planes landed at the air strip; the bus and the ambulance arrived; through his headset he even picked up inexplicable beeping sounds every thirty seconds. Halfway through the morning he pointed to the airstrip and declared, “I guess the generator over there just fucking runs all the time.”

It wasn’t until mid-afternoon, when the place quieted down, that Nels prepared to deliver his monologue. One consequence of Nels’ modesty is that he prefers to record by himself. (I found out what he said only later, after persuading him to give me unedited copies of his recordings.) I stayed near the truck with instructions to keep an eye on Brutus on our right, while Nels walked a few hundred yards to our left, towards a gaggle of bears. He spoke into a microphone attached to a headset, and held his notes in front of him in a weatherproof binder. Two ten-month-old cubs were playing at the lagoon’s edge, while their mothers sat splayed in the snow, keeping guard. “One of the cubs is just happily rolling and bobbing in the lagoon,” Nels reported raptly. “Now they’re running around like puppies! In and out of the water splashing back and forth, one of them on the ice, now off the ice in the water, the other one diving— oop! The one that was up on the ice now makes a big belly flop into the water!”

The bears played for an hour as Nels wove their antics into a larger tale about polar bears’ life cycle, habitat, and bleak future. At last the cubs stopped cavorting and returned to their mothers. Nels’ voice dropped. “Oh gosh! Something extraordinary’s happening just now.… One mother has rolled over on her back, and the little cub has come right up onto her belly, and is laying there. The very, very white cub against the darker fur of its mom, and the mother is holding one of her paws up in the air, and lays it over the back of her cub. And that cub is nursing. You can see the mother holding her head up and very tenderly her head kind of arched up and over the little cub. About the most peaceful scene that you could ever imagine.”

I mistakenly thought Nels would be elated when he got back to the truck. “That’s the hardest recording I’ve ever done,” he said. “Too many interruptions. It’s just a piece of junk and I have to record again.”

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The next morning, it was 15 degrees out and overcast. Steve tried to outflank the ice ruts in the still-not-fully-frozen puddle in front of the bone pile, and instead the Suburban got stuck. He tried the truck’s four-wheel-drive, shoveled out slush, tried the engine again— but the wheels spun uselessly. Steve called the Waldo Arms’ gruff proprietor, also an Alaska bush pilot, asked for a tow, and was told we’d have to wait.

That was Nels’ opening. A half-dozen polar bears were ambling through the bone pile. Nels stationed himself only a few yards from the truck— this time he didn’t mind if I overheard him. Though he said much the same thing as the day before, his stories were more honed— he’d found his narrative line. He again described the bears he surveyed— these “ceaselessly wandering, moving, powerful creatures”— and the grim prospects facing them.

Then he added something new. He looked out at the scavenging bears, “beautiful as they are,” and said they reminded him of refugees— they were separated from their natural habitat, exposing themselves to humans, their traditional hunters, in order to eat. But the hunters, too, had changed. “Now many Kaktovik villagers love to come here, they love to watch the bears as I do. I’m guessing that many of them feel compassion for polar bears as they learn that these animals are facing the loss of their sustaining world. Of course, the native people throughout the Arctic are facing a similar loss.”

Nels is constitutionally incapable of leaving listeners on a down note. He closed by reporting on biologists’ prediction that one group of polar bears— those near the vast Canadian Arctic archipelago— may still be close enough to the ice pack to live for generations more.

Nels looked out at the polar bears. “Somehow I have to trust in the adaptive genius of these bears. As the young cub moves right up alongside its mother, with all the security in the world, and the others are feeding on those whale remains, I have to believe, somehow, not only in the brilliance of these animals to survive but in the growing human resolve to find balance in a relationship to our fellow creatures, so that the miracle of the polar bear can persist and endure.”

He was done. He walked back to the still-disabled truck. “I think that’s the one that will go on the radio,” he said. “For some reason, I just felt like I was making sense.”

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Jacques Leslie’s last book, Deep Water: The Epic Struggle Over Dams, Displaced People, and the Environment, won the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award and was named one of the top science books of the year by Discover magazine.

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To hear Richard Nelson’s polar bear Encounters program, click here.

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