Our 1952 family trip to the north coast of Alaska—Niglik Point at the delta of the Colville River—was made possible by bush planes, flown by bush pilots. As we’d driven up the Alaska Highway toward Fairbanks, we’d heard stories of Diesel tractors (used in its 1942 construction) too stiff with cold to be turned by electric starters. Instead, a small gasoline engine and clutch were used. Start the gas engine, warm it up, then clutch in to the Diesel’s crank and turn it for thirty or more minutes, warming the lube oil and cylinders. Only then could the main engine be started and work begin. Later, when the DEW line radars faced the problem of quickly starting stand-by Diesels in the cold, there would be strong motivation for the development of high-viscosity-index poly alpha olefin oils with very low pour points.

The mouth of the Colville River, where we lived that summer, was rich with human detritus. Where the wind-delivered black soil of the tundra tumbled down into the river, I saw something and reached for it. It was a .45-70 brass cartridge case. I later learned it first came on the market in 1873, and remained popular for a couple of decades. Elsewhere we saw bits of whalebone sled runner, a tip section from an originally sinew-wrapped compound bow, a slender black flint arrow-point. Technologies.

Out on the tundra, far from the river, I found the fallen-down remnants of a platform burial. This made sense because a foot or 18 inches down in the tundra is the permafrost. Care to dig down six feet through hard ice? Old ice, frozen for at least 10,000 years and maybe ten times that. The permafrost was our fridge.

The tundra is a flat mix of water and soil – a zillion shallow pools in every size provided hatcheries for the mosquitoes of the warm months (I saw the screening of my head-net, black with them). The rest was loess (soil brought by wind) hosting a stubble of 6-inch willows.

How did we cook with no wood? How could we net for anaklik (arctic whitefish) without wood for floats, stone for weights?

This problem faced “the old people,” who would come to Niglik to meet inland people coming north on the river, bringing whatever was scarce here, to trade for sealskin, whalebone, seal oil, walrus ivory.

Our answer was liquid fuel (“white” gas, containing no lead anti-knock) for the big Coleman stove, flown in. For stone and wood, a short flight upriver, burning av-gas.

The outboard motor, like the bush plane, was central to modern life in the arctic, for before the snowmobile, water was the easiest route to other places. Partially-disassembled outboard motors, many of their parts weathered-out, littered the ground in one area of camp. Nothing is thrown away – where could you throw it? There was a Navy fuel drum for a work stand. The Navy in 1948 had carried out a petroleum survey (everybody and every thing delivered by piston-engined aircraft) that would become a Navy reserve. Many years later a pipeline would be constructed to a Prudhoe Bay pumping station, to enable this oil to be extracted.

One day I heard a faint hum. I thought I did. Adults, summoned to witness, weren’t sure. Presently the evidence arrived – a cheerful bearded archaeologist and helper in a red Folbot. The usual green-headed five-horse Johnson providing power. Our guest’s name was Bill, and conversation made it clear that he was exploring routes possibly taken by ancient Asians, coming across Bering Strait to who-knows-where. How long ago?

Present opinion hovers around 15,000 years, subject to change each time a venerated department chair retires, allowing more recent information to prevail.

We took him up-river to where another habitation area had existed, but when a bit of wood with a loose ring of iron around it appeared under his trowel he stood up and dusted his knees. Post-contact.

100 Miles to our west was Barrow, supplied by the annual voyage of the Diesel motorship ‘Northstar II’.

We saw no contrails of aircraft overhead. On the river we might hear the rapid patter of a loon’s feet as it ran on the water, wings buzzing to become airborne. Looking around us for 360 degrees we could see only the natural world. No TV, no mail, no phone, no social media.

Stretching a string on a globe from Boston to Tokyo revealed the great circle route of my 2020 trip to see the new Honda Fireblade: very close to where my family and I had been in 1952. Alas, I was in a non-window seat on the north side of a Boeing 787. A big difference from our flight north in a Cessna 170, through the Anaktuvuk Pass, lacking the ceiling to overfly the mountains on either side of us.

All made possible by liquid fuels.