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Aviation was, in many ways, the lifeblood of places like Nome.  

Flying Cessnas and Piper Cubs was as common in rural Alaska as driving station wagons was in the lower ’48. Teenagers anticipated learning to fly the way kids back home looked forward to getting their learners’ permits.

Learning to fly under unconventional circumstances redefined what was considered conventional. While safety was always paramount, conditions sometimes warranted a certain degree of thinking-outside-the-box. Accordingly, certain practices regarded there as acceptable under the right circumstances might have been viewed very differently if employed in other parts of the world.

The owner of one of the local flying services flew his bush plane to Southern California when he was barely out of his teens. While flying along the string of beaches lining the coast near Los Angeles one day, he decided to set down on one of them so he could buy a beer at a nearby watering hole. Accustomed to making beach landings in Alaska, he thought nothing of it until, upon touching down, he quickly realized that wasn’t the way things were done in those parts.

In the ensuing uproar, the  young man was cited and his plane was impounded until a determination could be made concerning what to do about him and his unorthodox flying habits. He was eventually cleared and his plane released, but not before being issued a stern warning  against committing any more “reckless” acts during his visit. 

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Air travel was essential to commerce in areas like Nome, especially since, after the ocean froze each winter, supplies arriving by barge became unavailable until spring thaw.

Arctic tarn                              ©1981-Tim Konrad Photo

Flying was, in winter, the only means, besides dogsleds or snowmobiles, to go anywhere beyond the several dead-end roads that branched out from Nome. People flew routinely from village-to-village onboard flights provided by the handful of local aviation companies that serviced the region.

Even the Native people were seasoned flyers. I once met an elderly Inupiaq woman on a flight from one of the villages who told me of having flown to Paris and New York. When I’d told her where I’d come from, she’d recounted having once visited Angels’ Camp, California, a community just over the river from where I was raised in the central Sierras foothills.

Perhaps more revealing of my degree of naivete back then than of any insights into the role of coincidence in the unfoldment of events, I was surprised to find that a person from somewhere as remote as her village would count an obscure hamlet like Angels’ Camp among the locations she’d visited in her travels.

Between flying with Dave and also with another friend, Bill, whom I’d known since high school and who’d  emigrated to Nome earlier than Dave, I was provided ample opportunities to fly to villages and other outlying locations during my stay.

I hadn’t realized the true extent of my good fortune until when, one evening, after I’d been there around a month, I found myself relaxing in one of the town’s many drinking establishments, chatting with a local woman about my various travels around the area. She’d surprised me when she’d remarked, “How’d you get so lucky? I’ve lived here eight and a half years and I’ve never been to a lot of those places!”

Hearing a local person respond in such a manner helped me to realize how fortunate I was to be blessed with friends willing to take me to those places and to share their enthusiasm and the joy they felt over having chosen this awesome and forbidding land in which to set new roots, permafrost notwithstanding, and to thrive.  

Tim Konrad

(To be continued . . )