It lies about equidistant between the state capital of Juneau and the North Pole. From the air, Barrow looks vulnerable and impossibly small. In summer, the tundra extends in endless smiles of brown and green, the ground broken into polygonal shapes outlined by silvery flashes of reflected water. The water comes from a brief annual melting of the surface permafrost. In late fall, the ocean freezes and the first snows make land and sea nearly indistinguishable.
Barrow then looks like a small smudge on a vast paper plate.
Its airport is one of those in which passengers leave a jet aircraft and walk through snow, ice, slush, or mud to the terminal. There are tales of new arrivals who took their first close look at the smudge and got right back on the plane. At the moment, the population of Barrow is about 4,000. About 60 percent of the people are I upiat, and their occupation of this site dates back at least 4,000 years. About a tenth of the population is, incongruously, Filipino.