Kivalina may be washed away by erosion. No one knows when the village will move, or where.

Kivalina lies about 90 miles north of Kotzebue. It is one of the villages so much in the news lately, being as they may be "washed away" by erosion. Kivalina seems to be in a neck-and-neck race with Newtok to be the new hot spot (Shishmaref is so 2008).

Most of the villages I visit see few visitors. Often the only white faces I encounter will be the teachers, or occasionally a work crew doing some construction. So I was a little stunned, when I got to Kivalina recently, to find not one but two film crews in town, from New York and Canada. Also a Swiss guy named Patrick, working on his thesis, and a German artist, Betty Beier. All these people were drawn together by the quixotic struggle of the village against the sea. There were also two surveyors and myself, who were drawn more by a quixotic desire to pay our rent.

It was a pretty full house, since it's usually hard to find places to stay in villages at the best of times. The city administrator, Janet Mitchell, was super in the face of this influx. I ended up sleeping on the floor of the city office with the surveyors. They were taking measurements for the new clinic, to be installed next year (it will be specially constructed so it can be transferred to the new site when they move).

I didn't get to talk to the Canadian filmmakers too much. The New York crew, Gina and Zoe, were cool. Betty Beier, the artist, showed me some of the work she had done in Hitler's bunker in Berlin last year. You can see more about her on her Web site. Most of these people were leaving soon, but Patrick, the Swiss guy, was planning to return and stay for the winter.

To top off all this activity, the next day a team from the Army Corps of Engineers showed up to monitor the progress of the work they are doing on the seawall. It is a pretty big project. There has been so much erosion already that they had to move one building by the school. And of course, it is only a temporary fix. Nobody seemed sure when they would move, or where. There are at least five sites under consideration. Meanwhile, Kivalina waits and hopes.