Fire and Ice

Ben Seymour moved to Alaska with a burning passion for Native American and Eskimo culture. He found it on the island of Little Diomede.

Little Diomede, Alaska

We were a half-hour's plane ride off the Alaskan coast when our single-engine Cessna abandoned the open sky and began to sink into white clouds that looked like cushions but absorbed us with a series of jolts. We churned lower, and I waited, rigid and mute, for something to reappear below us—be it land, sea, or ice. Finally, the blank screen of the window flickered to life again, and in the distance, off the left wing, I could make out a craggy, trapezoidal shape emerging from the mists. I soon recognized it as our destination: the island of Little Diomede.

A few hundred feet below, the Bering Strait was still a checkerboard of ice and green-water tiles, months from a complete thaw. It was April 17, and our eight-seat aircraft was barreling into the continental seam separating North America from Siberia; I'd gone there to visit an Inupiaq Eskimo village, a 42- student school, and a white, first-year teacher who had chosen to make a speck of land, in this obscure pocket of the subarctic, his home.

After steadying beneath the clouds, the Cessna banked in a wide loop around the perimeter of the rocky landmass, and a second, equally rugged colossus, the Russian island of Big Diomede, pushed its way onto the horizon on the right. We plunged ahead, the plane's nose pointed dead center, between the two chunks of land. My eyes adjusted enough to make out a stretch of white, smoother than the surface around it: an ice runway, perhaps two football fields long and, I hoped, at least a couple feet thick. A few minutes later, the pilot made what appeared to be an effortless touchdown, with a puzzling lack of skidding or sliding, like rubber tires...