The Planet of Utqiagvik

This is a dark place. I came here on a mission of exploration, to shed some light on it, which is pretty funny when I think about it.

This strange world's night continues unabated, as unrelenting as the low temperatures freeze any hope of daylight. A man can go mad here, cursing the darkness which is only remedied--poorly, at that--by incandescents. Such devices, insufficient at best and flickering themselves from vascillations in amperage, are still better than the candles which cannot keep aflame in the winds, even those indoors; for no shelter here is without gaps and breaches which--despite consistent repair, filling, and sealing--seem to reopen soon thereafter.

Like scabs ripped off before healing can find purchase.

Something gnaws at my begrudged domain during this perennial night. I've never looked, but I've heard the scratching and tooth-scraping, which is unnerving. Better it be on my walls then on my bones!

Now, much too late, I realize I wasn't made for this. For this strange world. Exploration be damned!

I was made to garner the ultraviolet. To feel warmth on my skin. I hunger for photons, for which I pray, even as the calendar "days" tear away. How long has it been since I've seen another Earthman? Or Earthwoman? Or anything green that is the color of the world I left behind.

I listen at night, which is always, so I am always listening, en garde. I listen for the strange sounds of voracious fauna, howling in their unrequited hunger. Picking at the veneer of my tenuous abode until it remains, impotently, I imagine, as a calico patina of alien clawings and tooth markings.

Yes, I am indeed the alien here. And I am in peril. From both without...

And within.

For I have fallen into a severe state of lethargy. Why shouldn't I? What's there to do but eat the dirty ice, discolored so mysteriously? I dare not venture out, which is always venturing into the terrifying night here, lest those strange sounds of hunger come from carnivores who come for me. They are desperate sounds. They are hunting sounds. Predator sounds.

One must mind the apex predators when one is not apex himself. That's a pithy statement and sage advice, so I write it down by carving it into the floor with a knife.

For whoever comes after. Or, the very least, for whoever comes next.

After me.

After me--that's an unpleasant couple of words.

My joints ache and my muscles are weak. It's "day" 24 for me, into this unworldly, unending night, and pain begins in my backbone and both my hips. My legs are tender to the touch. What is happening to me?

Day 32 into the ethereal music of my eternal, everlasting nocturne, I am irritable with even myself, reviewing my angry catalog of regrets. My irascible affect is only surpassed by my sadness over things that might have been:

Had I not volunteered.

Had I not come here.

Had I not left her.

Had I prepared better.

What was I thinking? I should never have come, having acquiesced to the sexy lure of adventure. I should never have left her for such a lengthy mission. Time can claw away a love as much as teeth can chip away at a habitat's facade. I should have prepared better for such a severe eclipse that never seems to end.

An eclipse like this can eclipse your entire life. I use my knfe again, to add this to my floor's diary.

One might think sadness counteracts anger, but they are complementary, like the darkness and the cold. You can hunker down from neither, because you don't count here. Body temperature is laughable.

On day 44 of my might I break my right leg, up high--the femur, the biggest bone in the body. It was a simple stumble in the dark during one of the brown-outs from an iffy generator. The fracture creates an extending skeletal dysfunction that extends into my right hip, which I'm sure shares in the splintering.

I am crawling now.

My stores are almost extinguished, but my difficulty reaching the shelves hampers my reach, which will help me stretch out how long my consumables will last. Disability is a slow phenomenon. In any event, it doesn't matter because I find I am no longer hungry. My appetite hasn't stirred to remind me to eat any time since day 45 of my long night here.

When I'm thirsty, I crawl to the threshold of the door and force it ajar, but only enough to reach for some ice mixed with the frost, half of which I place on my swollen right triceps.

I suck on that ice for dear life.

No one should have to suck on anything for dear life. You can quote me on that, too, like respecting the hierarchy of predator life. I add that to my diary.

How does hope taste? Because I suck on the wish that one day I'll see the sunrise again, from where I'm from. No one should have to suck on the promise of daylight to stay alive.

I suck on the wish I'll see my love again, but I can no longer taste her.

On day 47 I use my arms and hands to sweep away the hair on the floor, and looking into the bulge of a shiny spoon I see that it is my own. I begin a productive cough on day 49 of my night. My immunity must be down.

I knew how this place would be. I knew it when my only chance of return to my world had crashed beyond repair. Still, I'm an explorer. That always involves the unknown. But knowing what I know now...well...

On day 52, the muscle cramps of my right leg began to spread to my left and up into my abdomen. My diaphragm must have been in spasm, because I could only take urgent, stunted inhalations, separated by long releases as I turned blue--and then indigo--in between.

By day 61, the tidal volume of my breathing matches the tides of this planet, as I find now I have become one with it.

On day 64, my world skims a horizon that untilts back to another epoch, where apogee meets perigee, and a sliver of light appears for 90 seconds!

I muster the strength to draw the curtains made of some unknown animal skin, of an animal I can't remember that I had slain.

But it this world's cruel joke, because by the 91st second, I am laughed at again by another, a next, night, which comes right after that minute-and-a-half of hope.

Of light. Of a fleeting dawn that flickered as ominously as my candles that are useless to me.

On day 65, however, that hope grows--this time for more than two minutes. I open my last canned provision and wolf its contents down. During those two minutes, I extend my arm into the momentary light and could feel the vitamin D frosting on my skin.

My hair might grow again! My bones may yet heal!

Then I hear the beast, which reaches in through one of the periodic openings that come and go between the chompings and repairs. I pour a pot of boiling water upon its appendage and it retracts away hurriedly coincident with a howl of pain and anger.

How long will the next daylight interval be for me? Long enough to keep the nocturnal creatures at bay?

An eclipse is when another body comes between you and the Sun. It can be a moon or even another planet.

It can even be the very planet upon which you stand, eclipsing itself once your latitude is North enough, where all vertical parallel lines converge in madness.

The world I'm from has both ante- and postmeridian. This world wobbles in a comedy that carries on life from joke to joke. All life--of Utqiagvik--has evolved to surf a circadian rhythm that waxes and wanes by months instead of diurnally. And no one in Utqiagvik laughs harder than the Iñupiat who witnesses the diurnal creatures from the latitudes below them seeking the adventure of interplanetary travel on the same world they share.

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AUTHOR'S NOTE: Utqiagvik (formerly Barrow, Alaska), on the Arctic Ocean, is an Iñupiaq settlement and the northernmost community in the United States. Its extreme north latitude means Utqiaġvik receives 24 hours of daylight from May 10 - August 2 and 24 hours darkness from November 18 – January 23 of each year. The period of darkness typically lasts from mid-November to mid-January, or roughly 64 days.

There are polar bears which hunt humans opportunistically; but the most likely risk is a severe vitamin D deficiency which can result in lethargy, brittle bones, and psychological problems.