PORT TOWNSEND — Socks on the doorknobs prevent your hand from freezing to the metal.
Locking your front door isn’t a good idea.
Raw seal intestines are tastier than whale.
Coping with extreme cold and swallowing seal innards are some of the things that Katie Campbell, a 2006 Port Townsend High School graduate, has learned to take in stride in her first year of teaching special education in Kivalina, Alaska, a coastal village on a barrier reef 127 miles above the Arctic Circle.
She’s also learned that Inupiat people speak with their faces — raising the eyebrows means yes, scrunching up the face means no.
“I don’t think any of my students has said ‘yes’ or ‘no’ out loud since school started,” said Campbell, 23.
Campbell left Port Townsend in August for the isolated village.
When she accepted the job, people said she was crazy, but Campbell has thrived on the Arctic adventure, embracing a different culture and climate with open arms.
“Every day is something new, something I haven’t witnessed before,” she said in an interview in Port Townsend.
When she arrived in Kivalina four months ago, there were 17 hours of daylight each day.
When she left Dec. 17, there were six minutes.
She has experienced temperatures of 40 below zero, scraped snowdrifts off the windows so she could see out of the house and survived a storm with 100-plus-mph winds that blew waves over the narrow reef and the village airstrip.
Kivalina is one of the coast villages whose existence is threatened by global warming, she explained. In the past, an ice wall formed high enough to block waves from engulfing the reef.
Living in a village that clings to survival has taught her what’s important and what you can live without, Campbell said.
“I’ve learned to be humble,” she said.
“We’re so spoiled in the lower 48 states.”
The 80 houses in Kivalina have electricity, but only the teachers’ residences and the school have running water or flush toilets. Waste goes into a bucket.
Water comes from the lagoon and is stored in tanks. What is collected before the lagoon freezes has to last until May, Campbell said.
“You don’t let the water run, and you get used to showering once a week,” she said.
“It’s something I never had to think about before.”
Campbell, who was born in Port Townsend, from the age of 2 months lived aboard a commercial fishing boat in Alaska every summer with her parents until she was 8 years old.
She also crewed on a boat that her parents, Don and Juanita Campbell, a S’Klallam tribe member, fished in local waters this summer.
Wanting to go back to Alaska, Katie applied to Alaska Teachers Placement after graduating from Central Washington University last spring and received an offer from McQueen School in Kivalina, along with several others.
As a special education teacher, she works in small groups of students, kindergarten through 12th grade, who rotate through her classroom.
The school is the largest employer with 19 teachers, seven of whom are non-native.
“You learn what it is like to be the minority,” she said.
The villagers do everything as a community, Campbell said, with the two churches, Episcopal and nondenominational Christian, providing social outlets in addition to the school.
On Thanksgiving, everyone gathered for a community dinner, where she was invited to sample the traditional diet: raw whale — bowhead and beluga — and raw seal meat, which is black.
Raw seal intestine was served in rings.
Carrot-sized sticks of raw beluga whale were served with the thick black outside layer of skin.
“I just put it in my mouth and chewed,” Campbell said.
To the west of Kivalina is the Chukchi Sea and Russia, which is visible on a clear day.
To the east, across the lagoon, is tundra.
Villagers cross the lagoon by boat to go hunting upriver for caribou, Campbell said.
When the ocean freezes, they cut holes in the ice and catch fish or seal.
They also travel up to 10 miles out onto the frozen sea on snowmobiles to hunt whales, setting up tents and camping, with raw caribou fat for sustenance.
There is also a native store that stocks tobacco and snack food.
Eggs are sometimes available, Campbell said, as is ice cream, but bread and other perishables are scarce.
She orders food in bulk from an online company that serves people living in the Alaska bush.
“I live on rice,” she said.
Campbell also has canned soups and vegetables, canned or powdered milk and eats caribou once a month, a hunter’s gift that she helped skin, clean and cut up.
After school, Campbell coaches the school’s co-ed volleyball team, which travels by plane to play other schools.
Watching television and playing video games, Skyping with friends and relatives back home, and reading fill up the dark evenings.
The school is high-tech — all the students are issued laptops, older students and teachers have iPads and use microphones in the classrooms, which have smartboards.
“They don’t have running water, but they have every technology known to man,” she said.
Despite cellphones, satellite television and Internet, village life operates as it has for generations, Campbell said.
Outsiders are welcomed, but villagers are wary of people who come with expectations of what is “normal” somewhere else and want to change things to match those expectations.
“You have to respect their culture,” Campbell said.
When she and another new teacher first arrived in village and went on a walk, they were followed by students who asked where they were from and if they were going to stay.
Teachers who don’t stay are common, Campbell said; Last year, one class had three different teachers.
Campbell not only is staying until the end of this school year, but also plans to sign up for another.
“I’ve become attached to my students,” she said.
“I want to watch my juniors and seniors graduate.”
After graduation, young people rarely leave the village, she said, and do not really have a concept of what the outside world is like nor want to find out.
Campbell understands. After three months, she had gotten so used to the scale of village life that being back in Port Townsend gave her reverse culture shock.
The visit was a surprise to her parents and something of a miracle — she caught the last flight out of Kivalina, the last flight out of Kotzebue and the last flight out of Anchorage before a storm came in.
On Sunday, New Year’s Day, Campbell began the 2,000-mile trip back to the village, a total of 12 hours of travel, but in some ways more than a century in time.
The final leg is by bush plane from Kotzebue, with stops if there are passengers going to villages between Kotzebue and Kivalina.
When the plane touches down on the narrow strip of land, Campbell will be glad.
“I can hardly wait to get back there,” Campbell said.
“It’s my life.”
Campbell posts photos and entries on her blog, www.katie2ak.tumblr.com.
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Jennifer Jackson is a freelance writer and photographer living in Port Townsend.
