In the lone community of small houses that now shelter fewer than 200 people on the north shore of the 1,600-square-mile island 30 miles out in the ice-jammed, windswept Bering Sea, the sweat lodge is almost a necessity of life.
"You see,'' said villager Vincent Amos, "this is one of the ways we clean ourselves.''
Water is a precious commodity in Mekoryuk. Most homes now have plumbing, but not in the way Americans think of such things. There are no underground pipes bringing unlimited supplies, or sewer lines to carry away the waste, or buried gas lines to carry the fuel to heat the water for a shower.
No, in Mekoryuk, there is a flush-haul system, which pretty much explains how things work. People have storage tanks outside their houses for water and sewage. The water is hauled to each home with an all-terrain vehicle. The sewage is hauled away in the same manner.
When water is hauled to your house 100 gallons at a time with a cost of more than $20 per delivery, standing in a shower watching 20 gallons drain away in five minutes is a luxury most people can't afford. Especially in a community with a median family income of only $33,750 and a cost of living that is off the charts. A gallon of home heating oil costs about $5 in Mekoryuk. A gallon of milk costs almost twice as much.
You can live without the milk.The fuel oil, however, is vital. The temperature in Mekoryuk this week was ranging between 5 degrees above zero and 5 degrees below zero. It will be this way, or colder, for months yet.
In this climate, the sweat lodge is more than just a place to bathe; it is a pleasant retreat. And for the Yupik Eskimos who call the island home, it has been so for at least 2,000 years. The sweat lodge is a tradition that goes back far beyond the arrival of Western civilization, which is pretty recent.
The modern world only really began to affect Mekoryuk after World War II when the Bureau of Indian Affairs built a slaughterhouse to process reindeer that had been turned free to roam the island in 1920. Still, the village didn't get an airstrip to connect it to the outside world until 1957. And in the early 1970s, anthropologists were still visiting to study the people who lived on the island and write about them as if they were some sort of lost tribe of the Amazon.
Not that they were.
The people of Nunivak might have hung onto the sweat lodge tradition dating back 2,000 years, but they embraced technological improvements as rapidly and as with as much enthusiasm as anyone in the Alaska Bush. Life there is hard, even now, and technology helps to make it easier.
Kiokun, 63, understood this well. His father, Edward, was among the first Mekoryuk hunters to fit an outboard motor to a wooden skiff in the 1950s. The outboard made it easier, though not much less dangerous, to go out among the ice floes to hunt the seals that to this day are a dietary mainstay in the village.
The tribal administrator for the village of Mekoryuk, Hultman was a smart man, like his father, who took advantage of all the technology he could to make life better. He had a computer and a Facebook account. He supported construction of a wind-powered generator that is hoped to soon bring more economical electric power to the island. He used a snowmachine to haul driftwood found along the beaches of the treeless island, and not long after GPS -- the global positioning satellite system first designed to help the U.S. military track people and targets on the ground -- went public, he got a GPS tracker to guide him around the largely untracked island. GPS is a good thing on Nunivak, where there are few marked trails to guide one's travels.
"Most of the guys, we memorize (the terrain),'' Amos said.
That works fine when one can see. When the fog comes in off the sea ice, however, as it often does, the GPS comes in handy. Forty-two-year-old village resident Dan Olrun Jr. could certainly have used one in February 2007 when he set off by snowmachine on what was to be a quick run to gather firewood for his fish camp. The weather, however, closed in during Olrun's 30-mile snowmachine ride south across the island. He got lost. His snowmachine ran out of gas. What followed was a three-day survival ordeal, but eventually Olrun was found alive. He knew how to live off the land, and "he's a really tough guy," said Mekoryuk tribal police officer Edward Kiokun, son of Hultman.
"He's very lucky,'' Edward added back then in 2007 after he and other searchers found Olrun.
Sadly, though, luck runs two ways. And 26-year-old Edward, as it turns out, was destined to be with his father when it went bad. The technology that had made their lives better would turn out to be the technology that killed Hultman.
The father and son, like Olrun, had gone out to get firewood only to have the weather close in on them. But unlike Olrun, they had a guide to help them home. They had that GPS.
"The visibility conditions were pretty much zero,'' Amos said.
But Hultman, trusting to the GPS as he had before, set a course for home and began to follow it. The modern GPS tracking device can be accurate to within feet, but it isn't always so. This time, it was off by just enough to lead Hultman off a cliff above the Mekoryuk River.
"His son followed him off the cliff,'' Amos said, "and fortunately his son was lucky to be alive.''
Hultman was fatally injured beneath the tumble of snowmachines, sleds and driftwood that piled up on the river ice. Edward tried to get help, but there wasn't much he could do.
"He radioed in on a handheld radio,'' Amos said, "but he didn't know exactly where he was.''
The already bad visibility was only getting worse with night falling. It took rescuers hours to find the Kiokuns 13 miles out from the village. By then, Hultman was dead.
The village has taken the death hard, said Adam Whitman, a village finance specialist.
"It's pretty tough,'' he said, "but he's in a better place now.''
That is often the rationalization when someone dies by tragic accident in rural Alaska.
"It's a lot different out here,''' Amos said.
Few who live in urban America can begin to understand. Technology has made life undeniably easier in the Alaska Bush, but there are a lot of things that haven't changed much. And sometimes, in the process of making life easier and safer, technology has also made it more dangerous.
Contact Craig Medred at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .
