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Outside Magazine February 2004
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Crude Reality (cont.)

NOBODY SEES THE GRAY
The Arctic is a hard place to shake. On my last flight over the 1002, I rode in a Cessna 206 that dipped and banked over twisting strands of the Jago River, curling toward the lone marker of the KIC well, now nothing more than a rusted standpipe, six feet tall and held in place by a round base of concrete. From the air it was thin and easy to miss, a lone pin in an immense pincushion, the tundra stretching to the south like a green-brown pillow, backdropped by the snowed escarpments of the Sadlerochits and the Brooks Range. I could still see the faded outline where the rig once stood on temporary wooden blocks now 17 years gone. Seventeen years and the evidence was still there, an angular outline on the tundra.

The plane leveled off and turned back west, and I looked in all directions, still thirsty for the place, the symbol and fact of the coastal plain, where, despite the rhetoric of debate, the truth is, there's no white but the ice and no black but the oil. All else comes in shades of gray, sweeping wide and flat for a hundred miles.


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