"Enigma of Arrival"

During my last day in Fairbanks I decided at the last minute to pick up some fresh vegetables. I packed them in my carry-on and for a split second had this worry that customs may not let me have them. Of course, there was no need to worry about customs; Barrow is in the United States. It’s just that, in my mind, Barrow has always seemed like a faraway, distant land, foreign almost.

Although I did not have to show a passport to get into Barrow, last night I did feel like I was arriving in a different country. A highly respected Barrow elder recently passed away and his funeral is tomorrow, so there were a lot of people coming in for it. The airport was filled with Inupiat people, which makes sense as Barrow is an Inupiat village. People in Barrow wear these fur-lined parkas and one woman was carrying her baby in the hood of it, on her back. The layout of the Barrow airport is, for lack of a better word, retarded. The luggage comes out of these rectangular holes in the wall, not unlike Wrangell, and the space that the luggage falls onto is maybe 15 feet in length, again not unlike Wrangell. But the area surrounding it is very small. Everyone crowds in this very tight space waiting for luggage and it’s just so congested. The luggage (which includes plastic totes and buckets and cardboard boxes) piles up and up; it’s so disorganized. The situation, which Doreen had warned me about, reminded me of a third world country, the chaos of it. Scott from BASC was waiting to pick me up. He drove Edith and I to the Inupiat Heritage Center to drop off the StoryCorps equipments. On the way there, the two of them spoke in Yup’ik, a totally foreign language to me. And it really felt, at that moment, surrounded by all the foreign sights and sounds that I had entered into a different country.