And it's not just climate scientists like him. Others living near areas where the changes are happening most dramatically seem to be experiencing such symptoms as well. "You wouldn't believe what it was like to be in Anchorage last summer," my friend Matt Rafferty told me when we met in that city on the morning I returned from Homer. "We saw 90 degrees on July 4th and then, later in the summer, the wildfire smoke was so thick on some days you literally could not see across the street downtown."
An environmentalist who has long been working to protect Alaska from the extraction vultures, Matt is, like me, in love with the natural beauty of the place. I've traveled with him to the remote Alaskan backcountry and think of him as upbeat and indefatigable when it comes to his work, whatever the odds of success. But listening to him describe the climate convulsions wracking his home state recently, I couldn't help but think of interviews I had done with family members in Iraq who had lost loved ones to U.S. military attacks. People with PTSD -- and I know this from my own personal experience with it -- tend to repetitively tell stories about the trauma they've experienced. It's our way of trying to process it.
And this was exactly what Matt, normally not a guy given to overemphasis, was doing that morning, which shocked me. "We had rivers in south-central Alaska that were so warm the salmon were dying of heart attacks," he continued, barely stopping to take a breath. "The river water reached 80 degrees in some of them! The water was 80 degrees! Can you believe that? There were literally tens of thousands of dead salmon floating belly up in many of the rivers. I did a pack-raft trip in the Talkeetna Mountains wearing nothing but a t-shirt and shorts! That is absurd! You know how cold the water usually is in the rivers here. It literally got so hot in the sun we had to pull out and sit underneath a tree in the shade!"
He recounted much that I already knew, including that Arctic sea ice had melted away at record speed and that, by the fall, permafrost was thawing at rates not predicted for another 70 years. On the coast of the Arctic Ocean in northern Alaska, whaling towns that traditionally used permafrost cellars to store, age, and keep their subsistence food cool throughout the year -- the Inupiat use them for tons of whale and walrus meat -- now find them pooling with water and sprouting mold thanks to the thawing permafrost.
By that September, Matt told me, he was struggling with depression. "I lost all hope, as it truly felt apocalyptic here," he continued more slowly and quietly now, rubbing one of his arms in what I imagined was a sort of self-consoling gesture. Spending more time meditating, doing yoga, and finding helpful spiritual podcasts has, he added, become mandatory for him -- and he's far from alone in that among Alaskans as southern weather is visibly migrating north.
That day in Anchorage, I stopped at my favorite bookstore to check out the latest volumes on the state. One of them, Alone at the Top: Climbing Denali in the Dead of Winter, caught my eye. Arctic explorer Lonnie Dupre had made history in 2015 by summiting Denali in January... solo. It was an incredible feat that he writes about in his book, but the moment I won't forget was when he described being trapped in his tent on that mountain at 11,200 feet during a storm that raged for days. At one point, he heard what sounded like small rocks pelting the tent, unzipped the door, poked his head out, and was shocked to find that, on December 31st, it was sleeting, not snowing. We're talking about a moment when the average temperature for that elevation should have been something like 35 degrees below zero.
It hurt my heart to know that such weather paroxysms were afflicting even Denali, a mountain, standing so high and so near the Arctic Circle, that changed my life by drawing me to Alaska when I was in my twenties. Despite everything I now know, it still stunned me.
And here I am, like my close friends in that state, telling this story to anyone who will listen. I know this will sound over the top to non-Alaskan readers, but even writing this brings tears to my eyes. It's simply not supposed to be this way. Just about nothing that's happening there, climatologically speaking, today is what we once would have thought of as "natural," even though it's now the new norm.
Hearing so many of these stories while visiting proved too much to take in, as did knowing what's now starting to happen to salmon, bears, moose, and other wildlife of all sorts. Thanks to chaotic climatic shifts, such creatures are beginning to migrate from what once were their home territories due to lack of familiar food. And all of it is, in its own way, traumatizing.
During a recent lecture at the University of Alaska, Anchorage, Rick Thoman, a climate specialist at the Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Policy, presented a grim overview of radically changed conditions across our northernmost state. In his 30 years with the National Weather Service in Alaska, Thoman has watched as the climate in his home state was disrupted by the anthropogenic climate crisis. Originally from Pennsylvania, he told the audience how reading about such a different world in works that ranged from Jack London's turn-of-the-twentieth-century short story "To Build a Fire" to Barry Lopez's book Arctic Dreams had led him to Alaska. London, for instance, had written about a place in which minus 70 degree temperatures were part of everyday life. "But the fact of the matter is," he told us grimly, "the environment described in these books doesn't exist anymore." He added, "That's really hard. But it's what we've got, it's what we live in."
Thoman spoke of how, thanks to radically warming waters, the Bering Sea is literally experiencing a mass exodus of marine life, while the state itself is, like a beloved friend, in the midst of a health crisis that no one in power is truly trying to treat.
No wonder all of this leaves me with a feeling of utter impotence. Each new weather shock feels like another body blow. Or yet further evidence of how I'm losing a loved one. Alaska, in other words, is suffering climate death by a thousand cuts, while I struggle daily to accept the new reality: that the state is already irreparably changed.
Rainbow Peak
Deep waves of love and sadness had already begun coursing through me as my flight descended into Anchorage when this trip began. And such feelings only continued during the time I spent there. Time with old climbing buddies proved bittersweet, as it was never long before we couldn't help but speak of the changes already occurring, even as we planned future forays into Alaska's mountains.
The last full day, I knew I needed to be alone in those mountains. I'd brought the necessary gear with me for late-November hiking temperatures, or at least for the way I remembered them from the years when I lived there: crampons, an ice axe, extra layers of warm clothing for deep snow and mountain temperatures that should have been in the teens (even without taking the wind-chill factor into account).
Before sunrise that day, I headed south from Anchorage on the Seward highway as it dropped down beside the waters of Turnagain Arm. I was heading for a trail that would take me into the Chugach Mountains, one of my old stomping grounds.
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