How to Bridge the Human Gulch
By Manuel A. Melendez
The students of UAF are hungry.
In the communion of this year’s Starvation Gulch, just one pyre-night shy of its centennial, the burgeoning atmosphere among the clustering crowds is tenuous yet voracious, one of tentative rapture, with a cloud of uncertainty hanging above underclassmen, grad students, event staff, campus firefighters, and the present Fairbanks community alike. After two Covid-laden years, forcing people across the world to mask themselves in an attempt to stave off a new sickness that seems poised to persist, is it any wonder that there remains doubt in the slowly-frosting air?
And Charles E. Bunnell’s inspiration isn’t going anywhere. Indeed, Starvation Gulch was not deterred by the emergence of Covid-19, and regulations outside of the new pandemic protocols have remained essentially intact for at least the last two years. The resilience of this event is not surprising, as humans have been drawn to fire celebrations since the very discovery of the flame that twitched between two sticks and let in the light. Even so, and despite its continuation through both 2020 and 2021, this night seems different somehow.
The students of UAF are hungry.
Among the tents of merchandise, loaded fries, hot cocoa, and plastic cups swishing with root beer, there are eager bodies queueing up for impromptu Mario Kart tournaments in the gaming tent; eager bodies joining the growing throngs of dancing limbs on the glowing dance floor; eager bodies merging to hear each other talk about club memberships, sports teams, and, above it all, to witness the fire. There is no better sense of togetherness at Starvation Gulch than in the human wall gazing out at the wood-pyres, a couple of these fires as small as those meant for base camps, but some immense enough to suggest a druidic ritual, the pull of ancient gatherings. As these wooden offerings are set aflame by flamethrower wielding hands –suggestive in its own right of the near apocalypse the world seems to totter on depending on the direction of the daily wind– the crowd cheers madly, whistling into the sky a choral huzzah until it, too, is set alight.
The students of UAF are hungry.
As the pyres crackle and undulate with sparking embers, a row of students in the adoring crowd whisper, “The fire seems farther away every year.”
The rumor hangs above the thrum of the others, unanswered. Perhaps it’s not that the flames are more distant, but that outstretched hands have not felt the rustle and bustle of others in too long, and the appetite for being together again has been so long deprived that it now seems poised to devour. As everyone mingles in imperfect lines, circles, squares, and trapezoids across the fire-fence, it becomes apparent in the raucousness within their huddles, in the emergence from one another as they wade and weave to and fro, in the stopping to simply greet one another and move on, in the others standing to be part of the body mass, letting the ankles and elbows carry them along, that it is the people that shape the gulch. The people here have come to feed on the closeness and the tactility of one another, of even just the collective: one, delighting in selfie-safe proximity at last. The gulch, for two hours, is filled to its brim with hope.
The students of UAF are hungry.
The belligerent rain that comes halfway into the night only serves to let the ashes shimmer before gently landing on the ground, on students’ shoulders, on the palms of staff and of firefighters, and of Fairbanks locals intertwining in what has become an evening to quell the hunger all the distance of the past two years has nurtured. The remnants of Covid protocols linger here: in the alien shapes of hugs after going so long without receiving one, in the foreigner’s tongue when finally able to greet another, mask-less, with nowhere to hide, in the ecstasy of remembering how to be communal, how to be one unit, how to exist inside of a festival and remember that all festivals, everywhere, belong to the same sea of people that seeks itself, that seeks another.
In this way, Starvation Gulch is a simple reaffirmation of the ceaseless spirit that coming together offers to humanity, whether in the ebullience of watching wood burn long and high, in the laughter ringing high above the rainclouds, or in the yellow shine of Fairbanks as midnight approaches, the trees shaking to agree even as they signal to winter—
The students of UAF are hungry, and they are eager to feast.
Photos by Manuel A. Melendez