Barrow, Alaska: Cold Frontier

TIME Correspondent Karsten Prager, based in San Francisco, journeyed to Alaska for a look at the nation's biggest, frostiest state. He stopped in Barrow, the northernmost city in the U.S., 330 miles above the Arctic Circle. He found it in some ways startlingly unusual, in others oddly like any other American town of its size.

IT is dark now and the bitterly cold wind drives waves of snow across the flat, white landscape that is Barrow, Alaska. In mid-November, the sun dipped below the southwestern horizon, bringing winter darkness that will last into January. The city lies wrapped in a frigid cocoon of Arctic night. Beached boats of varying sizes dot the snow-covered ice pack that runs along the shore of the Chukchi Sea. That is the limit of Alaska's North Slope, the last land between America and the North Pole.

Barrow in winter is mainly a scattered group of frame houses covered by layers of frost. Much of the time "20-20" weather prevails--20DEG-below-zero temperature and a bone-rattling 20-knot wind--making the chill factor 70DEG below zero. During winter in Barrow one does not walk more than 1,000 ft. before taking cover. To go farther would invite painful frostbite.

Some 2,300 people live in Barrow, now Alaska's ninth largest city. Once it was a small Eskimo village. Then, in the late 19th century, Charles Brower set up a whaling station; he stayed on for 57 years and became known as "The King of the North." Today about 90% of the people in Barrow are Eskimos. They and the few whites in Barrow form a tightly knit community. There is not much money in the settlement's treasury. But when a new emergency fire vehicle was needed, the residents chipped in to help the town buy a $30,000 fully tracked fire truck that can go anywhere in any weather.

There are no roads linking Barrow to the outside world; ships can get in and out only two months a year. The only year-round connection to the outside is by air, and every day a Wien Consolidated Airlines Boeing 737 jet puts down on an airstrip just outside the settlement. The community's leaders say that the remoteness of Barrow is probably the main reason for one of the area's most perplexing problems--excessive drinking. Of the 700-odd arrests made by Barrow police over the past year, almost all were related to drinking. An important police chore during night hours in Barrow is getting drunken townspeople in from the freezing cold. "They're simply bored," says Mrs. Sadie Neakok, 51, the district magistrate in Barrow. "There's nothing better to do than get drunk." Recreation is limited to basketball at the school gym, unreliable cable television, movies at the Polar Bear Theater (with special weekend showings of X-rated films), bingo and a week of Eskimo sports between Christmas and New Year's.

Another problem is unemployment, which stands at more than 50%. The population has doubled since the end of World War II, but jobs have not kept pace. Some people have moved away, but the close-knit community life in Barrow ties its residents to the city. The Prudhoe Bay oil strike, 200 miles to the east, has so far meant only about two dozen jobs in Barrow. The Government remains the biggest local employer; there is a branch of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, for example, and a Naval Arctic Research Lab just outside town.

The amenities that most Americans take for granted are hard to come by. Pipelines for natural gas, used to heat homes in Barrow, must run above ground, because the earth is permanently frozen from a few inches below the surface to a depth of 1,300 ft. Gas lines snake through the settlement resting on half-sections of 55-gal. oil drums; at intersections, the pipe is framed in wood and runs overhead on gateways that look like crude Japanese torii. The impenetrable ground also makes sanitation a problem. Although the U.S. Public Health Service has promised to help with sewers and a water system some time in the future, Barrow residents usually dump solid wastes --encased in the ubiquitous 55-gal. drums--near the Naval Lab. In the summer, however, the stench of open "honeybuckets" is almost unbearable.

Barrow's Eskimos worry about the influence of cultural and social change. "Our way of living, our mode of dress, our language are going," says Mrs. Neakok. "You hardly see anyone in furs any more; now they have fancy corduroy parkas." There are still a few in Barrow who carve the ivory tusks of walrus into artful figures, but that also is going, and the settlement's 400 snowmobiles have entirely replaced the dog sled. About the only thing that has survived from the old days is the hunt. The men still hunt whales from fragile little boats made from animal skins. They also stalk walrus, seal, polar bear and caribou. But now they use high-powered rifles to bring down their prey.

Barrow's postmaster, Lester Suvlu, 34, says wryly: "Our problems are just about like those in any other community--booze, delinquency and finances." The young are Barrow's main concern. Some teen-agers have resorted to petty thievery from shops and homes, and others once tried to form a teen-age gang. More than half the population is under 16, yet Barrow has no high school. The youngsters must go off to schools elsewhere in Alaska or even in the "Lower 48." They come back only to find nothing to do. One hope is that the U.S. Navy oil reserve surrounding Barrow may some day be opened for private exploitation, thus creating new jobs. Also, Barrow should profit from the $962.5 million Alaska native land claims settlement passed by Congress two weeks ago. "There is no reason why our people should have less of an opportunity for the good life than anyone else," says Jack Chenoweth, 27, a Harvard Law School graduate from New Jersey who became Barrow city manager after serving a stint as a VISTA volunteer. "It can be done, but it will cost money. Maybe somebody needs to help us."

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