The Book of Music and Nature: An Anthology of Sounds, Words, Thoughts

Toothwalkers

Toothwalkers Arrival at Twin Hills The plane climbed and whined away toward the fish cannery for the next leg of the Togiak run out of Dillingham, Alaska, and we were left with our gear on the runway at Twin Hills. A ship and scattered flotilla of small craft were marooned in the marshy tundra and tidal swamp that stretches from Twin Hills to Togiak. A group of girls raced by on a four-wheeled all-terrain vehicle, squealing and giggling as they spun and churned up dirt. The eldest of the three was no more than ten—a Yup’ik smile stuVed into a purple and pink parka. From a rise in the opposite direction an old woman came motoring along on her four-wheeler laden with dry goods from the cannery store at Togiak Fisheries. Her engine sputtered as she dipped into town: a hamlet of homes, satellite dishes, antennae, propane tanks, and vehicles in various degrees of service in the shadow of the Twin Hills. Most of the houses rested on blocks and low scaffolding, periodically adjusted to accommodate the yaw and spasm of the frozen ground. The beach was an igneous black and ashy sand that deepened to a turbid pitch in the water. Bear tracks meandered along the beach and through town along with those of people, dogs, and caribou. Two caribou, one sporting a worn blue halter, wandered amid the houses, foraging on tufts of grass. They noted our movements with a feral edge and went on grazing. An outboard motor shop overflowed with propellers and parts. Rigs dangled, dismembered on sawhorses; motor oil colored the mud with fluorescent streaks. Everywhere, debris sank into the earth around homes: household appliances , cars, snowmobiles, and cast-iron shapes whose purpose was a russet enigma. The immediacy of survival and seasonal opportunity has inured most to the unsightliness of this refuse. To the unaccustomed eye of someone from the Lower Forty-Eight, the detritus speaks of abandoned aspirations and surrender to the exigencies of diYcult circumstance. A new stainless steel and molded plastic conveyor belt unit for the fish cannery lay in a cocoon of shrinkwrapping next to a ship’s anchor sloughing oxide layers of purple and red. A mackerel sky spawned from the west and clouds streaked orange fanned [ 153 ] douglas quin ⢇ above Togiak as the six of us arranged and rearranged our bags and got acquainted . Ken Whitten and his wife, Mary Zalar, had traveled from Fairbanks. He is a caribou specialist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game—tall, whitehaired with a neatly trimmed beard, and somewhat taciturn. She has reddish hair, freckles, and a gregarious disposition. Margie Campbell, a recently widowed bush nurse out of Dillingham, had come with Wendy Couch and Vi Norbo. Vi was born and raised in Alaska and had seen it change from frontier to statehood, and you could tell Wendy had done a lot of camping and trekking over the years. These women, all in their mid-sixties, were out to have an adventure. What brought us together was a common excitement: to witness the spectacle of thousands of walruses hauled out on an island scarcely the size of Central Park. We were waiting for Don Winkelman, our host and boat pilot, who would come to pick us up sometime in the afternoon when he returned from Round Island, part of the Walrus Islands State Game Sanctuary in Bristol Bay. Every backpack bulged with photographic equipment, except for mine, which was stuVed with microphones and recording equipment. Much of my interest for this trip centered on the acoustic ecology of Odobenus rosmarus divergens. I had come to record the sounds of Pacific walruses on this island sanctuary. My purpose was to listen, to gather material for use in musical compositions, and to assist with collecting baseline data on acoustic disturbance and walrus behavior for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. Our anticipation was fueled by walrus imaginings—literary, graphic, fanciful , and scientific. For me, the mythic presence of these creatures was informed in childhood by storybook images. When I heard John Lennon’s enigmatic evocation in “I Am the Walrus” at the age of eleven, the walrus became indelibly associated with music. The Beatles brought me back to Lewis Carroll’s fable of “The Walrus and the Carpenter” in Through the Looking Glass: “The time has come,” the Walrus said, “To...