Between Yesterday and Tomorrow

The Ice Curtain Separating Little Diomede and Big Diomede

On my recent journey to Alaska’s far west frontier, I found myself in Unalakleet, a small Inupiat village nestled against the Bering Sea. There, among the frozen shorelines and stories carved from ice, I listened and learned—one of those stories I shared earlier in a Substack called: The Frozen Kings of Unalakleet.

But there was another tale—one not of myth, but of geography, history, and time itself.

Just 150 miles northwest of Unalakleet lie two rocky sentinels in the Bering Strait: Little Diomede (U.S.) and Big Diomede (Russia). Only 2.5 miles of frigid water separate them, yet they live nearly a full day apart. The invisible International Date Line cuts between the islands, giving rise to their poetic nicknames: “Yesterday Island” and “Tomorrow Island.” From the American shore, you can literally look across the water and see tomorrow.

For thousands of years, the Inupiat and Yupik peoples crossed freely between the islands. By dogsled over winter ice or by boat in the brief Arctic summers, they shared kinship, culture, and trade. The Bering Strait wasn’t a barrier, but a pathway.

That changed after World War II. In 1948, the Soviet Union forcibly removed the Inuit people from Big Diomede and turned the island into a military outpost. Families who once visited across the ice were suddenly divided by what came to be called the “Ice Curtain.” Relatives became unreachable, separated not only by water and politics, but by time itself.

Elders on Little Diomede remember how suddenly the visits ended. One year, cousins came over with walrus meat and seal oil; the next, they were gone. Weddings, too, had once crossed the strait. A young woman from Big Diomede might marry a man from Little Diomede, and the entire community would sled across the ice to feast together. “It wasn’t two islands,” one elder explained, “it was one family with water in between.”

Children, too, felt the loss. Before the separation, cousins would race dogs across the frozen strait, build snow shelters together, and share the simple joy of sliding down the rocky slopes on seal skins. “We played until our cheeks froze,” one elder recalled of his boyhood. “Then, one winter, they just never came back.” The games stopped, and the silence left behind was harder to understand than any border.

After 1948, binoculars revealed only soldiers, dogs, and watchtowers where family homes had once stood. No more news of marriages, births, or deaths traveled across the ice. “We knew our kin were out there,” one elder said, “but the soldiers had taken their place. The strait was still narrow, but the distance had become impossible.”

Today, about 80–100 people still live on Little Diomede, clinging to a rocky slope where mail comes by helicopter and supplies by barge—when the sea allows. Across the strait, Russian border troops maintain their presence on Big Diomede. The two islands remain neighbors, yet worlds apart.

To stand on Little Diomede and look across to Big Diomede is to feel the strangeness of history pressing against the present. It is to stand on the edge of yesterday and stare into tomorrow—reminded that even the simplest lines on a map can carve wounds in families, in cultures, in memory.

For me, these islands are not just curiosities of timekeeping or relics of the Cold War.

They are symbols of the stories I seek out—the places where myth and history, land and soul, brush against one another. Whether in Unalakleet, in the villages of the Kenai, or on these two islands divided by a calendar day, I find echoes of the same truth: that borders, whether drawn on maps or in our hearts, can separate us only if we forget to remember the ties that once bound us.

That is why I have begun to consider these islands as the setting for a future novel. Their strange duality—neighbors in sight yet separated by time, family bonds once close but torn apart by politics—offers a narrative landscape as rich and haunting as any I’ve encountered. I can imagine characters caught between Yesterday and Tomorrow, forced to reckon with both history’s weight and the fragile thread of human connection across the ice.

And so, in writing these stories, I am also tracing my own path—searching for the moments where the past leans forward, whispering across the ice, reminding us that yesterday and tomorrow are never so far apart as they seem.

Launching a boat from Little Diomede Island in 1928