Rock and a hard place: Little Diomede sees future in boat harbor

LITTLE DIOMEDE -- When you live on a steep pile of rocks in the middle of the Bering Strait, traveling to the next town over is a major ordeal. Villagers on the Alaska island of Little Diomede -- where, unlike Sarah Palin's hometown of Wasilla, you really can see Russia from your porch -- have paid with their lives trying to reach mainland Alaska. Other times, they've been cut off from the world because of the dangers and logistical challenges of providing reliable air service to the community.

Now a plan is under way to develop a boat harbor -- estimated to cost up to $30 million -- next to the village of 140 people. About $2.4 million has been awarded to study and assess what benefits it might bring. The question is how much of a difference the boat harbor will make, and at what cost.

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The only remedy for inevitable winds, waves and lingering fog is patience -- waiting out bad weather for clearer skies and calmer seas. That's the nature of living on an island 50 miles south of the Arctic Circle, 25 miles from mainland Alaska, and 2.5 miles from the shores of Russia. And that is also why there is virtually no local economy. The people of Little Diomede are Inupiat living on their ancestral lands -- a rock rising from the Bering Strait, their homes huddled tightly on the western shore, with Russia's Big Diomede Island in full view. They have a small school, health clinic and some other basic services. Most villagers struggle to make ends meet and rely on hunting and fishing.

Little Diomede may be the farthest flung modern remnant of the American West -- a place where there are millions more birds than people, where polar bear stew is served for dinner and hopes are high for a stake in the oil and gas riches of the outer continental shelf; an outpost without plumbing that only got cell phone service last year. In the last century villagers have watched state, national and international borders crop up around them , and Little Diomede's children of today are raised in a world that is as insulated from as it is influenced by the western world, where young people are as apt to listen to heavy metal or Johnny Cash as they are to the traditional songs of their people, who long to "ice surf" on the frozen sea (using a sail-equipped snowboard) in winter while chores like hunting and repairing walrus skin boats beckon.

Little Diomede is not an easy place to live, and in the last decade villagers have contemplated relocating their village to the mainland. Yet over time they have persevered, and home is where they wish to stay. That resilience has villagers looking at ways to make life on the island safer, less expensive and more profitable.

Villagers believe a harbor, with protection from the waves, is a good place to start. It could help entice barge service to the community and perhaps an economic future, serving as a pit stop for vessels and workers supporting future offshore oil exploration to the north of the Bering Strait, supporters say. As as tourism increases in the Arctic, the community, too, could become a unique arctic attraction -- a stopping point for small cruise liners.

But as public policy goes, a harbor costing up to $30 million -- coupled with Diomede's small population and struggling economy -- strikes at the question of a community's right to exist and what role government should play in supporting it.

"The question is not ‘Why should they get it?' -- it's ‘Why should they be put in a position where they can't get anything?'" said Dave Williams, a project manager at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, one of the agencies studying the harbor proposal.

In search of safe passage

Along with the Army Corps, Kawarek (a nonprofit serving the Bering Straits region) and the Denali Commission (a federal-state agency that oversees transportation and economic development in rural communities) are working to determine what it will take to construct a harbor in the harsh arctic environment, and whether the federal government should have a hand in it.