there used to be,’ Mr Dews told me. ‘Now you’re getting more rain and wind for sure. In my opinion there definitely seems to be more rain now.’
‘And less snow,’ added Mrs Dews from the sofa.
‘Yes, there used to be more snow, but you don’t get snow any more. You don’t get frost much either.’
Laurie Dews could remember the Great Flood of 1947, whose effects had been worse than the recent event – but only because in November 2000 army Chinook helicopters had been employed round the clock to ferry sandbags to vulnerable points around the town. ‘That saved a lot of Selby.’
He had got to know almost every aspect of the river in his long career: its shallow and deep areas, and how tides could have an effect on flooding. That’s where global warming also came in. ‘If seas and oceans are higher, your rivers aren’t going to go out as well. Global warming has an effect there. It’s got to have, hasn’t it?’
‘We’re all doomed!’ Mrs Dews interjected again from the sofa, giving me a wink.
‘Global warming is bothering everybody now – but what can you do?’ Mr Dews went on. ‘With the floods, storms and sea level rise everyone’s getting more concerned.’
Mrs Dews smiled over at us both. Outside the rain had begun again, and I was in no particular hurry to leave.
‘How about another cup of tea?’ she asked.
In the early summer of 1901 the steamship Lavelle Young – having travelled 1500 kilometres up the Yukon and Tanana rivers into the wild interior of Alaska – hit shallow water and began to scrape the riverbed. On board was an ambitious trader, E. T. Barnette, who hoped to establish the ‘Chicago of Alaska’ three hundred kilometres further upriver, from where rumours of rich gold and copper strikes were quickly spreading.
But Barnette never got to his destination. Having failed (in a loud shouting match) to persuade the Lavelle Young’s captain to press on further, the young trader found himself dumped unceremoniously on the riverbank. As his wife sat crying, and the steamship pulled away from the shore, Barnette had little choice but to pick up his axe and begin building a stockade.
He had initially been aiming to leave as soon as another ship passed by, perhaps in as little as a year. But his luck was about to change. A few months later a ragged and hungry mining prospector, having seen the smoke from Barnette’s cabin, pounded on the door and announced that he’d just found gold.
Barnette decided to stay put and operate a trading post. And within two years his accidental settlement had become the largest log-cabin town in the world, with four hotels, two stores, a newspaper, a row of waterfront saloon bars and a thriving red-light district. Fairbanks had been born.1
Today the city still retains a frontier feel. Although the old log cabins now rub shoulders with shopping malls and fast-food outlets, moose still graze beside the busy dual carriageways, and bears roam the lowland spruce forests that surround the city for hundreds of kilometres. On the southern horizon stands the snow-covered Alaska Range, and on a good day you can see Mount McKinley itself, North America’s highest mountain, gleaming in the far distance.
Fairbanks has always been a boom-and-bust town. In 1920, following the end of the gold rush, the town’s population had dwindled to a thousand – after a high of nearly twenty thousand a decade before. Another boom came during World War II, when several large military bases were established to counter the Japanese threat. The army and airforce stayed on during the Cold War, and Fairbanks began to prosper as a military town.
But the biggest boom of all has proved to be oil. The Trans-Alaska Pipeline runs right past Fairbanks, and the town was the centre of the pipeline-construction effort in the mid-1970s. Much of the entire state’s economy, not to mention its politics, revolves around the oil industry.
However, Alaska’s current prosperity has come at a high price. Although few in the state care to recognise it, Alaskan oil – of which more than a million barrels a day are exported to the mainland US – has rebounded heavily on the state through global climate change. And whatever their views on global warming, almost every resident will admit one thing: Alaska’s weather has gone crazy.
I arrived in Fairbanks late one evening after a twelve-hour train journey north from Anchorage. Most of it had been through the Alaska Range mountains, which were brilliant white against the blue sky, their tree-clad lower slopes speckled and green as the snows gave way to forest.
Travelling with me were Franny Armstrong, a filmmaker, and photographer Karen Robinson. Franny filmed out of the doorway as the train rattled over deep gorges and through metre-high snowdrifts, whilst Karen snapped shots of snow-bound shacks buried in remote backwoods territory. Everyone gathered at the window as we passed Mount McKinley, but we were disappointed: the great mountain was hidden from view by grey cloud.
Once in Fairbanks we bundled our gear into a taxi and found a cheap backstreet hostel in a part of town where the front gardens were full of junk, and savage-looking dogs barked from behind chain-link fences. The hostel, which had several semi-permanent unemployed residents, was once a brothel, its proprietor confided soon after we arrived. This gave the otherwise unremarkable two-storey wooden building an air of seedy glamour, especially since the taxi driver had known exactly where it was, even calling it by its former name – ‘Ruthie’s’.
The proprietor, a young hunting enthusiast called Dale Curtis, watched us unpack.
‘You guys tourists or something?’ He adjusted his baseball cap uneasily, leaning against the doorframe. (The doors were concertina cardboard, another brothel legacy.)
‘No, we’re journalists. We’re investigating climate change.’
He looked blank.
‘Global warming,’ I continued. ‘Asking people how the weather has changed and that sort of thing.’
He looked intrigued. ‘Well, the weather sure has got strange. It don’t get cold enough fast like it used to, and then it warms up real quick.’
This sounded interesting. I sat up and listened, encouraging him to continue.
‘What really struck me was watching ducks swimming on the river all winter. It was Christmas time, January even, and they were still swimming around. They’re not supposed to be here at that time, they’re supposed to be south already.’
He shook his head in amazement, warming to the theme. ‘And the bears come out too early. They don’t know whether to go into hibernation or to wake up. Folks round here are real worried about it. A couple of years ago at Christmas it rained and melted all the snow away. That just ain’t right, you know?’
As Dale Curtis was suggesting, Fairbanks is supposed to get cold in winter – really cold. Just a hundred and fifty kilometres shy of the Arctic Circle, in mid-December the town receives only three hours of sunlight. As any resident will tell you, the sun doesn’t really come up at all – it just skirts along the horizon, as if entangled in the icy peaks
