The Island That Humans Can?t Conquer | Hakai Magazine

Listen now, download, or subscribe to “Hakai Magazine Audio Edition” through your favorite podcast app.St. Matthew Island is said to be the most remote place in Alaska. To St. Matthew’s north lies the smaller, more precipitous island of Hall. A lichen-crusted whale jawbone points downhill toward the sea, the rose’s due-north needle.Compared with more sheltered bays and beaches on the island’s eastern side, it would have been a relatively harsh place to settle. But Griffin has found no sign of a hearth, and only a thin layer of artifacts.A lichen-crusted whale jawbone points downhill toward Sarichef Strait from the site of a 400-year-old Thule house site on St. Matthew Island, Alaska.The Unangan, or Aleut, people from the Aleutian and Pribilof Islands to the south tell a story of the son of a chief who discovered the then uninhabited Pribilofs after he was blown off course. The Yup’ik from St. Lawrence Island to the north have a similar story, about hunters who found themselves on a strange island, where they waited for the opportunity to walk home over the sea ice. But I also wanted to see what it felt like to be in a place that so thoroughly rejects human presence.On this, the last full day of our expedition, as the scientists rush to collect data and pack up camps on the other side of the island, the pit house seems a better vantage than most to reflect. The small grouping of uninhabited islands is over 300 kilometers across the Bering Sea from the mainland, making it the most remote location in Alaska.Even after the bears were gone, the archipelago remained a difficult place for people. Had they not been rescued after 18 days, Great Bear owner John Borden later said, this desperation would have been “the first taste of what the winter would have brought.”US servicemen stationed on St. Matthew during the Second World War got a more thorough sampling of the island’s winter extremes. Mostly, the island raged with wind and rain, turning the tundra to a “sea of mud.” It took more than 600 bags of cement just to set foundations for the station’s Quonset huts.The coast guard, worried how the men would fare in such conditions if they were cut off from resupply, introduced a herd of 29 reindeer to St. Matthew as a food stock in 1944. “We’re terrible at tearing them down and cleaning them up.”The beach is slowly reclaiming a disintegrating barrel cache at the abandoned coast guard long-range navigation station on St. Matthew Island.And yet, the tundra seems to be slowly reclaiming most of it. I rub my own hair against it, just to say “hey.”A red fox comes in for closer inspection of human visitors on the south side of St. Matthew Island. “Dock rock,” someone will call this later: the sensation, after you have spent time on a ship, of the sea carried with you onto land, of land assuming the phantom motion of water beneath your feet.It occurs to me that to truly arrive on St. Matthew, you have to lose your bearings enough to feel the line between the two blur.