Every evening when we settle into dinner the local men and women show up. They take a seat at the long table where we eat our meals and pull carvings out of their pockets and place them gently on the table. Some are carved of ivory, small and delicate. Some in fossilized sea lion or walrus bones. There's a wonderful range and each time I looked and I rarely bought anything, until a man showed up with a fossilized walrus penis--an Oosik, in Native language--which is two feet long; I simply had to have it.
It's an odd moment, these sales. To see the work of the local people is a treat, but you can't buy everything. So many sit, and sell nothing. One man showed up at dinner every single night with the same ivory bird carving no one wanted. I felt badly for him and the bird.
This land and its people were a puzzle and fascination to me for the length of my stay. Gambell is a subsistence village in that they live off of what they hunt--whale (they are allowed eight strikes a year), birds, fish, walrus, polar bear. While we were in town two polar bear were killed. But all of this is done on ATVs, or boats with outboard engines, with guns, while they are wearing North Face down jackets and a pair of Levis. Any poetic image I had of people in skin kayaks with harpoons is utterly false.
While one carver negotiated a price on his work his cell phone rang. The disjunction between the work of art, which has a long history, and the phone in his hand left me confused. My guess is that these locals in Gambell are also confused, but I wasn't there long enough to ask questions that could give me some insights. But I sure wanted to know:
Who was the first one of these natives to get a four wheeler? who was the first person to bring in a satellite dish and a television set and what on earth do they really think of dancing with the stars?
One carver told me he was 25, had never left Gambell. "But my brother did, he moved to Michigan, married a woman there." I thought about that for a moment.
"How did he meet a woman from Michigan?"
"On the internet." I suppose I could have figured this out but still, I was astonished. His brother wants to return to Gambell. I asked what his wife thought of that.
"She thinks it's too cold here."
I laughed.
He told me about the hunt we had seen that afternoon--hunting for walrus, not whale. "We have enough meat in every freezer until next spring," he explained.
Another man (not a carver) I met told us he left Gambell once, visiting Los Angeles. His cousin had leukemia and the Make a Wish Foundation granted his cousin's wish: that they go to a Lakers game. They did. "The Lakers won," he said with a big smile. We were standing close enough that I could smell alcohol, even though the village is officially dry.
Birders have been coming to Gambell since the 70s (I wish I knew who the first birder was to realize this was a "hotspot"). But the one lodge is all there is for visitors and the range of permits needed to walk and bird the area are daunting (one reason we opted for this tour). There is no place to eat in town and visitors bring all of their food (coolers were regular pieces of luggage on the plane). And you have to walk everywhere, unless you opt for paying someone to take you about on an ATV or manage to "rent" one from someone. The Natives are not making this into a tourist destination--there's not a t-shirt or postcard to be bought--which is one of the reasons it felt so special being there.
Despite the fact white people are nominally present--the birding season is perhaps a month long in spring and the same in fall--the impact of our world is enormous. It begins with oil and guns. It extends to TVs, the internet and cell phones. The local people are worried they are losing their language--Siberian Yupik--as all now speak English. It is a community so small, so vibrant, you can almost feel it wrestling with its own soul. "It's the subsistence hunting that makes this village alive," one man told me. I'm hoping that spirit of the subsistence hunt can weather the onslaught of the outside world. And what I will hold onto are those carvings, and the silent men and women pulling pieces of ivory from their pockets for us to admire.

photos above: carving on fossilized walrus cheek bone; an oosik.