Along the Alaskan coastline, it’s about a hundred and ten miles from Nome to Wales, the continent’s westernmost point. From Wales, it’s twenty-five miles to the Russian island of Big Diomede, and fifty-two miles to the coast of Chukotka, as that easternmost district of Russia is called.
Starting in 1999, I used to come to Nome to do research on a book I was writing about Siberia. I wanted to go from Nome to Russia, a goal that involved complications and extra trips on this side. One morning, in a Nome café called Fat Freddie’s, I met Jim Stimpfle, Nome’s most famous citizen, a man of grand ideas. The card he gave me listed him as a director of the Interhemispheric Bering Strait Tunnel & Railroad Group, whose intention was to dig a tunnel from near Wales to the “Chukotka Nose,” the very tip of Russia and of Asia, and to build a railroad that would go up the coast of North America, pass through the tunnel (“Just forty-one miles longer than the Chunnel!” Stimpfle said), and connect to another yet-to-be-constructed railroad, in Russia.
Stimpfle became famous in this way: His father was a dentist in Washington, D.C., with patients and friends in the diplomatic corps. Stimpfle wanted to be a diplomat himself, but after he graduated from George Mason University, in 1970, he ended up in Alaska, where eventually he married a Native woman, Yaayuk Bernadette Alvanna, whose family came from King Island, which is off the coast north of Nome. He became a real-estate agent; he says he has been inside almost every building in Nome. Through his wife, he learned that Natives on this side—the Yupik and the Inupiat—remembered relatives on the Russian side whom they hadn’t seen since J. Edgar Hoover and the Soviet government shut down cross-border travel and communication, in 1948, creating what became known as the Ice Curtain.
In the nineteen-eighties, Stimpfle decided to devote his spare time and energies to breaching that curtain, reëstablishing Russian-American connections, and reuniting Native relatives. By September, 1987, his efforts to restart travel back and forth had got the attention of Alaska Airlines and Exploration Cruise Lines. The Wall Street Journal did a front-page article about this lesser-known border, and quoted Stimpfle. After that piece, more reporters wrote about him. They said that Jim Stimpfle, a local real-estate agent and a private citizen in Nome, was working to end the Cold War.
At the Alaska Aviation Museum, near the airport in Anchorage, a Boeing 737 with the logo of Alaska Airlines on its sides and the company’s emblem of a smiling, parka-wearing Native man on its tail sits with other mothballed airplanes outside a hangar. A plaque beside it reads “Historic Flights to Russian Far East: Friendship Flight, Nome-Provideniya; June 13, 1988.” On that day, Stimpfle and seventy-nine other officials, reporters, and ordinary Alaskans, including thirty Native people, flew in this plane for an inaugural visit.
Photos of the delegation show Stimpfle on board among other smiling folks leaning over the seat backs and talking and standing in the aisle. He had coined the term “Friendship Flight,” and as the president of the Nome Chamber of Commerce had been agitating for the idea tirelessly. Mead Treadwell, at the time a young Yale graduate who had already been involved in Alaskan politics for a decade, remembers Frank Murkowski, then a U.S. senator, saying to him, “Mead, I’ve been getting Stimpfle’s faxes every day for a year and a half.” Murkowski was just one of dozens of officials whom Stimpfle besieged.
