A note from Northern Journal publisher and KYUK collaborator Nathaniel Herz:
Last week, I stood outside a National Guard hangar in the Western Alaska hub town of Bethel, talking with residents of the region’s villages who’d evacuated after raging floodwaters overran their homes — in some cases, floating them off their foundations and depositing them miles away.
The flooding, stemming from the remnant of Typhoon Halong, has displaced more than 1,000 people, many of whom suffered intense emotional trauma during the storm and may never return to their Indigenous homelands. For more context, you can find ongoing coverage at KYUK, the regional public media station I’ve been collaborating with, and I published my own overview piece last week.
One of the survivors I spoke with was Jeron Joseph, a resident of Kwigillingok. Kwig, as it’s known, was among the hardest-hit villages, which also include nearby Kipnuk. Some 35% of buildings in Kwig were destroyed, while that number is 90% in Kipnuk, and at least 15 villages in total sustained substantial damage, according to regional authorities.
Jeron had a story to tell, which he did over the course of 40 minutes, as helicopters flew overhead and National Guard service members bustled past us. It’s presented here with minimal edits for clarity. He asks that those who know him who share this account on social media or elsewhere please omit the names of the family members he mentions, out of respect for their privacy.
Expect to hear more from Jeron in the days ahead as he and other evacuees get settled in their new environment.
A ‘knee-high’ storm turns serious
Jeron Joseph: My name is Jeron Joseph. I am turning 31 on Halloween. I’m an Alaska Native, and I’ve lived in Kwigillingok all my life. Just a quick aside, in my culture, we don't have men or women. We have masculine and feminine roles, and I was seen as much more like a cleaner of game than a hunter.
My first memory of the typhoon — my assumption was that it was going to be like any other fall-time storm, like knee-high depth of water, which is something that I've come to expect.
But my aunt, as a cautious person, decided to go to the school that doubles as a community center and shelter, at the first opportunity. I, of course, waited until the water looked concerning — it looked like whitewater rapids, which I'd never seen before. I'd never seen wind hitting the water to the point that there's a froth of white above. In that moment, around midnight, I made the decision to start packing a backpack. I called my best friend so that I could string my thoughts together, get the most crucial things. A change of clothes, my legal documents and some painkillers, my toothbrush, head out the door. I had also put a harness on my dog, my little prima donna Jack Russell terrier mix. I got a harness on her, put a leash on, put my backpack on, and I took one step out the door.
The wind hit my back and pushed me onto each stair of my little deck, until I hit the driveway and I fell on my hands and my body, and my dog fell to my right side, but she was okay. I started walking in knee-depth water, with my boots getting filled. And on my way down to the school, I felt a log — a firewood log that Native people stack, like, next to their houses — it hit my left knee. It began pushing me, making me slide on the wooden boardwalk that we walk on in our villages to stay above the soggy tundra. I reacted just in time to push it away. I was just a few inches away from the ground. And I'm certain that, if I hit the ground, I would have fallen and ended up horizontal and gotten swept away, and would have been unable to pick myself back up. Because the water was at that speed.
An ‘orchestra from hell’ at the neighbors’ house
My neighbor, three doors down from me, looked at me with his headlamp. He yelled at me to get inside his house. I got inside with the family there. They were kind enough to host me and my dog, which I'm very grateful for — and the matriarch of that house, you know, she is much more a Native than I am, and she gets nervous around dogs. One of her daughters gave me a pair of pants after my own got soaked, and we stayed there for the entire morning. Unable to sleep, we sat in the dark with candles, without power. They were commiserating amongst themselves, all of them with social media on their phones, tuned to existentially terrifying sights of their fellow Natives in the village and in Kipnuk. They had all racked their brains over how they might end up. But the way that my brain works, I clamp everything down, and I put myself on autopilot. I make my own feet move; I'll think about my thoughts later.
The water kept rising and rising, and I would guess that it hit the crux of its height at 5 a.m. and it stayed that way until just after daylight broke, at which point it seemingly started to recede. Just after the crux, we could hear their larger wooden logs dancing against the floor of their elevated house, which has an iron foundation. It was a combination of whooshing winds, rushing water, and these hellish, very low drums against the floor — sort of an orchestra from hell. Eventually, they drifted away, log by log, and now it was just the water and the wind, and sometimes the house would shake. I'm certain I was not the only one who was scared that some part of the foundation would give, and either water would get in from the door or the windows, or the house would begin to drift. Neither of those things happened, but it happened to other houses — to a lot of the houses that were developed much earlier than those that were specifically made with this kind of situation in mind, including my own parents’ house. My childhood home.
Some time after sunrise, maybe 10 a.m., the water receded to a few feet behind the house, and we could see the impression in the tundra where the boardwalk used to be — it had floated about eight feet over. I really didn’t want to think it, but I hated how pretty the sunrise was that morning. It seemed as if beauty and our footing had been stolen from us.
Looking for my family
My brother and my stepdad, who were in my childhood home at the beginning — they must’ve had my attitude about what they thought this was at first, just another fall-time knee-high storm. They decided to stay at the house, which was closer to the coast than my aunt's house where I stay.
Water started coming in through their door. I know my brother had been taking five-minute, intermittent naps sitting on a freezer that was shoved against the front door. He had wrapped his most important things in plastic. My stepdad, I would have to guess, was going around the house, doing all of the other things as the patriarch of the house would do: looking at all the windows, looking at the places where the wall meets the floor to see if there's any water coming in. They said that initially, they didn't realize they were moving. My brother told me that at some point there was another house with an internet satellite on it, and that satellite hit one of their windows, and it actually closed the window after it hit theirs, and they were hooked together that way. That's how they moved along together. After that whole ordeal, their house settled on a piece of land, where there was water around it.
I heard that they were physically okay, but roughed up — someone said they’d been rowing back in an aluminum fishing dinghy after the storm, with bags of their stuff. After the wind had subsided, and without telling anyone, I walked to the north bridge of the village, past all of the debris, and I looked around the horizon. I asked a person there if they’d seen my family. They said no. I looked at the horizon for some minutes, where some of these floating houses had come to rest — of course, anyone would recognize their childhood house, and I didn't see mine. Somebody told me that it probably drifted in another direction, because the storm winds blew toward a little more east than just directly north.
So, I went back to the school, I washed my hands, I had a little meal. After the meal, I could not sit still. I walked out to the east side of the village. There’s two rows of elevated housing developments where their foundations have aluminum sheets all around them. These are older than the one I sheltered in, but younger than my parents’ house. That’s where my best friend who lives in Kwig was for the night, and when I asked him, he told me that at his place, the water got to just two feet high. When I heard that, I had the intense urge to make him go skydiving so that he'd be as scared as I was.
On my way to that east housing development, I asked every person or group I saw if they’d seen my stepdad, my brother, or my house. They all said no. And when that many people say no, you get that little bit of hope chipped away and chipped away until your heart just gets really heavy.
I made it to the housing development, and after a very quick, relieved hug and exchange with my friend, I began walking back to the school. I’d taken 10 or 15 steps out of the development when somebody yelled my name, ‘Jeron!’ They told me that my stepdad and my brother made it to the school.
Processing my family’s survival
I didn't let it all out at that moment. I opened the jar of fear, anxiety, hope, despair, grief, and displacement in that moment for, like, a second. Tears started welling up. I closed the jar back up again, started focusing on myself again, and started walking towards the school. After I made it inside, there were some neighbors seated against the wall and away from staff scrambling about. Some were waving at me hastily, loudly whispering to me. They said my name, and they pointed to where my brother and stepdad were.
They were locked in a makeshift exam room. My stepdad, along with a health aide, was tending to my brother, who was having, like, the only panic attack I've ever seen in my entire life. I went up to the window of the exam room, and that was the moment that I couldn't control opening the jar of all those feelings.
And in that moment, I felt every feeling I should have up to that point, combined with hopeless concern and longing for their safety. I thought every thought I should have thought up to that point, like: There's at least four or five reasons I shouldn't be here, alive, and weeping. I spent at least 20 minutes at that window just crying my eyes out and feeling needles and knives in my heart. And my thought was, they're alive, but I can't see them. They're alive. I can't see them.
I went back to one of the classrooms where we had basically set up camp, cheeks still wet. I sat down in the corner and I just shut down mentally. The room was vacant. Distant hums of the school generator, occasional hurried jogging in the hall, and overseers yelling about some developments were all that was in the air. I sat there for what felt like 20 minutes, until somebody came by the door and noticed me staring into space. They asked me why I was sitting with the blankest stare they ever saw for over an hour. There was just nothing occupying my mind.
When that person came and asked me, I snapped out of it. I got up quickly and jogged past them, and I went back to the window where I could see my stepdad and my brother were, and my brother was lying down, face down. Silent. But breathing softly. My stepdad was having some kind of quiet conversation with that health aide. That was that moment where I asked myself, ‘Will I ever be able to see my brother again like the way he was before?’ That, of course, brought another wave of anxious tears.
A little later on, I had resigned myself to pacing some ways away from the cafeteria. They had dispatched rescue helicopters to pick up some of the other people who needed to be lifted up and brought to the school. One of my aunt's best friends had to be brought in, either with a helicopter or a boat. When she came in through the front door, she was wailing, and it was probably because she herself was at a floating house all night, and this was probably the first time she was on solid ground since the entirety of the dark. A few people went up to hug her, but when she saw my aunt, they had embraced each other tightly, and neither of them could let go for a solid six or seven minutes. This still makes me emotional, just thinking about it.
Another hour or two had passed. Some people had asked me to check some books in the library so I would stop tensing; the library was right next to the makeshift exam room. On my way into the library, the exam room door opened, and I saw my brother standing up. He noticed me, then started walking towards me, arms outstretched. I stopped in my tracks. I couldn't move anymore. I was beginning to burst into tears. He walked towards me and embraced me. He was back to his normal self. He was just smiling when he came up to me. That was the moment I experienced immeasurable joy and relief, after an entire night and day of tension. I was streaming tears, and I whispered into his ear, ‘I was walking all day. I was looking for you. Nobody said they saw you.’
A couple of ‘days of delusion,’ then reality hits
From that moment, we had what I can only describe as a comfortable couple of days of delusion. There's aid coming in. We are so, so grateful for the aid, and the donations that came in in the days after. Those donations got our heads above water. We had all of our persons. We had our mental faculties. Me and my aunt had our things, or at least as much as we could salvage. I’m a little more attached than she is to my avocation — I have eight years-worth of my sheet music I composed on a computer that I managed to get out.
We all had this thought in our heads that we were going to be able to get back to our lives the way they were. But then more and more, little bits of news from the National Guard, and from the search and rescue members, kept coming out. ‘The south side of town, so much of it smells like stove oil or gas.’ There were a couple of National Guard members, I heard that the fumes were giving them headaches, just being over there. A fellow Native said that those spills are probably going to pollute the fish and game. As that news was passed around, we all said to ourselves, ‘We are facing winter right now.’
I would describe it as when somebody drops a bag of flour on the floor, and there’s particles everywhere. That second day, it felt like the particles had settled down, and we could all see clearly. Only, what we could see clearly was not a future for us on this coastal tundra. Our ancestral home.
I spoke to a number of young people. I said to them: It feels like you only have one direction you can go to right now. You have blinders on. But I promise, when it's all said and done, when all of the i's are dotted and the t's are crossed, you have all of your stuff and you get out — when all that's done, you’ll have every other direction you can look toward.
I told them: Do not give in to hopelessness about something like this. Cry when it's time to say goodbye to our home. I said to them, cry as much as you need to. Because if you don't cry now, it's going to manifest in other ways if you don’t get those tears out. When those tears have dried, on that holy ground where our ancestors had taken hold, you're going to have smiles when you're settled somewhere else.
Leaving the village feels ‘permanent’
They loaded us onto a helicopter. The state trooper said one to two bags per person. I was a little nervous that I wasn't going to be able to bring my stuff. I insisted on two things. One, that our dog flies to a kennel in the Bethel animal shelter, and we see where we go from there. And I really wanted to keep my sheet music that was on my computer, because there's eight years worth of it. I still don’t know if we're going to be able to go back to salvage stuff, which may be out of our own pockets. So, I got my dog and my computer out.
A situation can be many things. It can be horrible, it can be displacing. It can make you doubt whether you'll see your next meal or your family. But I also told my family: This is a chance for everyone, even those unaffected, to prove what they're capable of. If you're going to place a hashtag on this, the ones that come to mind are #AlaskaStrong, #KwigStrong, and #KipnukStrong. That's what I believe we should be able to get out of all of this. And that’s something that no typhoon in the world can take away.
I myself, I’m going to a family member’s house, further inland. It feels permanent. But my discussions are not done. My aunt mentioned that since the house only shifted a few inches, there's a possibility she's considering that we could have it as a summer home, when it's greenest. It’s so lovely out there. You have no idea. Our house had the best views of any house on the north side of the village, and I loved those views, especially in the morning. I took some nature photographs, some pretty crazy shots, including one in the early morning where there was a layer of fog that was obstructing the sun. I think only photographers will get this, but that fog created a 100% natural, diffuse light on all the plants.
I’m going to miss that coastal air. Smells like nothing else I've ever come across. I'm going to miss the rain water, for drinking. And, of course, I like to think that the bonds we have with our neighbors all around Alaska, and everywhere, are stronger than displacement. And just that purity of the environment, and our way of life that we've rooted ourselves in for so long — our subsistence and our gathering.
Those that are lucky enough to move to similar villages to friends or relatives, or Native-adjacent small towns, I'm very envious of them. But I and my aunt, we're going further inland. And I am very grateful. I'm here with my life. She's here with her life. We're here with our stories. We’re here, and we have what we need, and we're going to find our footing again.