Coincidence and Providence

An ANWR adventure

It’s 5am Alaska time — and about as long as I could coax myself to stay in bed. My body thinks it’s 9am, and even after a long day of travel yesterday (and the day before) I’m ready to go. In a couple of hours we’ll board our chartered 10-seater at Fairbanks Airport and head further north, to where there is no internet. I thought I’d send one last recapping of the events of the last 48 hours, and wonder out loud with you about the nature of things (as I often do).

The commute so far has been a doozy. On Thursday late morning, I drove my car from Goshen to South Bend, where it’s having some work done while I’m gone (a big limb fell on it during one of the storms last week and scratched it pretty good). There my friend Chad met me and we went to lunch in his car, and then he dropped me at the train station. I took the South Shore train to downtown Chicago. There the first of the coincidences/providences happened, which tend to happen more often when I’m a trip like this.

I was on the upper deck of the train, back in a corner. When we arrived at Millennium Station I got up, put my backpack on, and walked the length of the car to grab my suitcase, and started down the steps. Something stronger than a fleeting thought compelled me to stop and turn around to see if I had left anything behind. And there sitting on my seat at the other end of the car was my iPad mini, which was purchased specifically for this trip, both for writing and recording. Yikes. How would I process the trip without writing about it!?

With all my possessions now firmly in hand, I walked the underground path from Millennium to the Blue CTA line, which I rode for an hour toward O’Hare. I got off at Rosemont and waited 15 minutes for a hotel shuttle. I had the evening to watch some soccer, eat some deep dish pizza, and finish one of the books they gave us for pre-reading: Being Caribou by Karsten Heuer.

He tells the account of following the migration of caribou in the arctic for 5 months, skiing, hiking, and camping along with them. He was a scientist and was skeptical about the native claims of how the caribou might talk and communicate with people who genuinely care about them and their world. But after several months being with them in difficult circumstances, he too heard the “thrumming” of the caribou, who seemed to communicate with more intention than a fleeting thought and gave results that were more than coincidences. Hmm.

Another shuttle yesterday morning left the Hilton Garden Inn at 5am and got me to Terminal 5, where I breezed through security (tip: don’t fly United out of O’Hare early in the morning, where the security lines at Terminal 1 were very long). A flight to Seattle was easy. Then I boarded for Fairbanks. On the way out, I caught a glimpse from my window seat of the USA World Cup match that was just getting ready to start down below me. My airplane WiFi held up long enough to see our first goal, and then was spotty for the rest of the match flying over the incredibly rugged western coast of Canada.

I landed, and walking out of the gate bumped into someone I know from Michigan. I think that was a coincidence (I’m not lapsing into a fatalistic or theologically deterministic view where everything that happens is orchestrated by God or the spirit of the caribou). I was met by Natalie, who took me in the big rental car for our team to the hotel (if you’re counting, I think that’s the ninth different vehicle I’ve been in so far on this commute, with at least two more to come today). We picked up the others on our team a little later and then headed to dinner with the main funder of this trip and friends at a nice restaurant in Fairbanks.

I had the elk medallions for dinner, thinking I don’t often have that kind of option. They tasted fine, but were a little tough, as though their life up here is a little tougher than cows have it down in the lower 48, though I expect the elk wouldn’t trade that for their free existence up here, even if that comes with the risk of a hunter’s bullet.

At our dinner was Princess, who is part of the Gwich’in indigenous people. We talked some about the tension I brought up in my previous post regarding drilling rights and the economic consequences thereof. But more interesting for this post was when the other people in the group shared about their week in Denali Park and the wildlife they saw. Even though we were a mostly religious-minded group, they acted a little embarrassed that after a couple of days of seeing nothing, they stopped and prayed that they’d see some wolves. The next day, a wolf came to their camp and led them for a couple of miles, turning around frequently to make sure they were following.

That kind of language and interpretation is not unfamiliar to me, though I’m often skeptical of drawing too tight a line between cause and effect. They tried to kind of laugh it off as a coincidence, but Princess jumped in and said that is no coincidence. Her people are much more comfortable with the explanation that the spirit of the animals can sense us and our intentions — even when the hunters need meat, there are caribou (or maybe elk) who come to them and offer themselves.

Make of that what you will. I’m content for now follow Hamlet:

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,

Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

I’m praying now that the 10-seater plane, and then the 4-seater plane will stay up in the heavens as they should, and then get us to earth where we’re supposed to. I wouldn’t object to your praying that too… or even asking the spirit of the caribou to watch out for us too.

Try looking up Sunset Pass in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge on your internet. If things go according to plan, we’ll be there until Wednesday, and won’t be using any internet until then.

Stay well.