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A surprise phone call the other day from my old friend, Bill, in Alaska, kindly pointed out a discrepancy or two in my recounting of the events presented thus far. But I digress! More on that later.

For now, suffice to say Bill helped me to sharpen up my memory a bit.

Of the short list of observations Bill offered, Pilgrim Hot Springs, he reminded me, had at one time been an orphanage.

First named Kruszgamepa Hot Springs, in the early 1900s the place had served, according to a State of Alaska-hosted website, as a “recreation center for miners attracted by its spa baths, saloon, dance hall and roadhouse.” After a fire in 1908 burned down the roadhouse and saloon, the site was acquired by the Catholic Church: Under the church’s ownership, it was transformed into a Catholic mission and orphanage, which is how it got its current name.

A series of epidemics in the first decade of the 20^th century struck Alaska’s native populations harder than it did people in other places, resulting in many orphaned children. The orphanage served as a refuge for these children, as well as those who followed them, until its closure in 1941.

The lessons learned from the 1918 flu pandemic, Bill said, have served many native Alaskan communities well during the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. By shutting their villages off from outside contact, these villages have thus far managed to remain virus-free.

If only our legislators possessed a portion of the wisdom of these people, or indeed even cared about such things, we might not be in the position in which we now find ourselves, made to endure senseless repetitions of the cycle of shut-down/open-up, with their attendant body counts and broken families.

If and when Covid is out-maneuvered into submission, it will be in spite of many of the public officials who did their damnedest to obstruct, in one way or another, the struggle to contain this virus. What possible inducements could persuade a person to perform acts that essentially aid the spread of a known, deadly pathogen, one can only imagine . . . maybe.

Personally, I cannot!  

Dawn Over the Sawtooth Mts.  ©1987-Tim Konrad Photo

***

On Memories and their Fallibility

Lately, I’ve been going through batches of old black & white 120 mm negatives—images of relatives and friends of my parents, travel photos and other memorabilia from their lives, many of them taken prior to my birth. From some of those taken after I came along, the ability to view graphic depictions of scenes that for decades have been available to me only through recall has been at once nostalgic and striking in how fuzzy some of my recollections appear when seen through the sharper focus of the camera’s lens.

Memory is a funny thing!  It’s defining criteria, like opinions, vary from individual to individual. Some people possess near photographic clarity  of recall, yet others remember little of their experiences. While many of us swear by our recall of events, we also require signed contracts to preserve the details of business arrangements, and for good reason! Simply said, regardless of the causative factors involved, memory serves some people better than it does others.

Having now lived in eight decades, two centuries and two Millenia, I possess an interesting lifetime’s worth of memories. For my entire life, I, like most people, have relied on my recall of events to guide my decision-making—what is commonly called “learning by experience.” While this exercising of memory may have served me well, the retrieval of long-term memory—recollections from the past—may not, it seems, be a similarly reliable enterprise.

Between the revelations afforded by my descent into family photo archaeology and the equally enlightening telephone conversation I had with my Alaskan friend, Bill, the other day, I am forced to concede that my long-term memory must be engaged, at least part of the time, serving someone besides me.

Recalling the tale I recently spun concerning my Alaskan friend and his close call with the melting ice that threatened  his Cessna, Bill informed me, with a polite nod to fuzzy recall, that I’d gotten it wrong.

Bill and his Cessna 130        ©1981-Tim Konrad Photo

I’m rightly suspicious of ‘revisionist histories,’ especially now that I’ve become the unwitting author of one myself. Truth be known, I’d gotten the salient points right. There had been an aircraft, and breaking ice had been involved. Much of the rest, however, had become muddled into a mess of misremembered mush: It bore little resemblance to Bill’s recollections, and, as he was the key figure in the story, he, above anyone else, should know the true tale of what transpired.

As told by Bill, the incident began in Elim, not Golovin. Elim, Bill explained, was situated on Norton Sound, where the sea ice was more liable to fracturing and breaking off during stormy weather.

Bill’s plane had been parked for the night on the ice adjacent to the shore. He had just recently swapped his plane’s tires for skids so he could land on iced-over bodies of water. In the wee hours, he was awakened by the sound of several neighbors banging on his door and warning him that the ice was cracking and he needed to move his plane immediately.

What ensued resembled a comedy-of-errors scene from an old Mack Sennet film as Bill re-told how he had needed to use a small boat to reach his plane, which by the time he’d dressed and gone outside was sitting atop an ice floe drifting 8 feet from shore.

Tense minutes followed as he’d uncovered the plane’s cowl and fired up its engine. Bill’s plane had no instrument lights but did have a landing light and a headlamp. He chose not to use the lights on takeoff because, he said,  he hadn’t wanted to mess with his night vision. As a consequence, the only gauge he could see was the rpm gauge, which, as it had been coated with radium, glowed in the dark. The snow on the ground, he judged, provided good enough visibility to allow VFR flight, and his plane had navigation lights on its wingtips and a rotating beacon plus what Bill termed a “pretty good” landing light on the wing.

Bill had intended to fly across the peninsula to Golovin, where a girlfriend of his resided, but the storm made flying there impossible, so he returned to Elim. The village runways all had good reflectors lining them and the maintenance man at the airstrip in Golovin, a fellow named Dan, was out plowing the snow off the landing strip at 3:30 am when Bill returned. He made a low pass to signal his intent to land and Dan pulled his snowplow off the runway so Bill could touch down.

By lining up his plane with the reflectors lining the airstrip, Bill said, his landing light “define(d) the runway well.” With the help of his plane’s rpm gauge to judge his air speed, coupled with his skill in interpreting the sounds produced by the plane’s stall warning, he was able to land the plane safely. Flying with minimal instruments was familiar to him, Bill said. His airspeed indicator had the habit of freezing up every winter. As a result, he said, he had grown more reliant on the “aural moan from the stall warning” to alert him when he needed to adjust the plane’s speed.

Bill displayed his characteristic modesty in the manner in which he downplayed the stressfulness of the incident by adding that he had become accustomed to night flying during his 700 or so hours spent piloting C-130s in Vietnam.

***

Another matter of faulty recall on my part was corrected when Bill reminded me that muktuk is actually the Inuktitut word for whale blubber and not seal blubber. The Inuktitut word for seal blubber,  which he said he found much less palatable than whale blubber, is uqhuq, or uqsuq. Blubber, according to Wikipedia, is “an important part of the traditional diet of the Inuits and other northern peoples because of its high energy value and availability.”

To whatever degree my reputation as an accurate reporter has been been damaged by these revelations, that damage is more than offset, in my view, by the importance of honesty above all other considerations save, perhaps, that of artistic license. Which is to say, an error is only perceived as such once it becomes noticed by someone. Until then, it’s just a part of the story!

I hope you will agree.

Tim Konrad

(To be continued . . )

Dave took great care concerning the things he wanted to show me about his adopted home. One day, he said he wanted to show me what it felt like to be 80 miles from the nearest person.

To accomplish this, we hopped in his Cessna and he flew us to a place called Cottonwood, miles inland from Nome. Cottonwood was a collection of hunting cabins that lined a dirt road around 80 miles out from where the route originated in Nome. The cabins were used by hunters out searching for deer and elk to bring home to their larders. Used also in summer months by people wanting to get away from the daily grind of their jobs back in Nome, the cabins were boarded up for the winter when, using the roadway as a landing strip, we touched down to take a closer look.

The cabins, no more than a dozen or so, lined one side of the road. The surrounding area was mostly flat and devoid of any vegetation save the low-growing bushes and ground-cover ubiquitous to the area. The late-afternoon Arctic sun hung low in the southern sky, suffusing everything it touched in soft, amber-shaded tones.

The quiet of the place, once the plane’s engine had come to rest, was only disturbed by the sound of a slight breeze coursing through the bush. The mood was tranquil, as if the bustle of Nome had been instantly transfixed into something approaching a  meditative state. The sense of anticipation created by Dave’s enticing sales pitch, if not fulfilled completely by the momentary calm, remained redeemed, nonetheless, until, after we’d been there no longer than 15 minutes, it was disturbed by the sight of a vanload of hunters headed down the road in our direction.  

“That’s surprising,” Dave had said, or something to that effect, as he’d taken in the sight of 3 or 4 men piling out of the van to greet us. My thoughts ran more like “Well, so much for being 80 miles from the nearest person!” Dave recognized a couple of the van’s occupants from prior dealings he’d had with them.

No sooner had the van arrived when a second plane appeared, circling in the sky before it, too, landed on the roadway just as we had done. As that plane pulled up to join the party, a second carload of hunters arrived, this time coming from the opposite direction. The hunters all seemed to know one another. 

The occupants of the second plane, it turned out, recognized Dave. They had come from a Catholic-managed retreat called Pilgrim Hot Springs that lay half a dozen air miles southwest of Cottonwood. These folks invited Dave and me to join them for a dinner at the Hot Springs—a meal of freshly-caught ling cod—so we bid farewell to the hunters and climbed in Dave’s Cessna to follow them to the retreat.

Pilgrim Hot Springs                                           ©1981-Tim Konrad Photo

A muddy field served as the landing strip at the Hot Springs, the only way the placed could be reached, as no roads led to it. The sight of this muddy track, looking more like a cow pasture than an airfield, evoked memories of prior experiences I’d had attempting to maneuver cars over mud-slick surfaces. Dave reassured me the landing would be incident-free, which, to my relief, turned out to be true.

The retreat was situated within a grove of cottonwood trees whose presence was allowed by the absence of permafrost occasioned by the thermal activity of the area. This condition also favored the cultivation of potatoes, several of which had been exhumed to accompany our meal. Fresh produce in this part of the world, due to its scarcity, was a delicacy not to be under-appreciated.

The meal, which was wonderful and made me a life-long fan of ling cod, was prepared quickly, as the day had grown long and night-time wasn’t far off. Dave’s plane was not equipped with instruments to allow flying at night, so it was imperative we allowed sufficient time to arrive home safely, or else, as Dave had said in his characteristically off-handed manner, “We might crash and die.”

The flight back home included flying over the Sawtooth Mountains, so named due to the jagged skylines jutting skyward that defined them. The trip through the gathering darkness took no more than 45 hair-raising, fist-clenching minutes. We touched down in Nome just as the last light was fading in the south.

Nome, Alaska                                                    ©1987-Tim Konrad Photo

I was well-fed during my stay in Nome. Terry had a bunch of hungry mouths to feed, counting herself, Dave, her son Donald and daughter Suzie, all of whom were enthusiastic eaters endlessly enjoying her excellent cooking. I counted myself fortunate to be included among them, especially at the dinner table.

Excellent though it was, dining in Alaska was delightful in ways beyond Terry’s cooking. Maintaining adequate body heat in the face of the ambient Alaskan temperatures meant a person’s body needed more fuel than it would have in milder, more forgiving climes. The implications were that, in practical terms, it took additional helpings at mealtime to fully satiate one’s appetite.

I will never forget the Thanksgiving dinner I was lucky enough to be able to share with Dave, Terry and their kids that year. Returning for second, and even third heaping helpings was something I never could have managed under normal circumstances. The added helpings gave me multiple opportunities to savor each bite. This was one oddity of living at the leading edge of human endurance that I heartily endorsed.

Thinking back, I imagine that anyone attempting to follow the Jenny Craig diet under similar conditions would have been hard-pressed to obtain any appreciable positive results. 

Tim Konrad

(To be continued . . )

The nexus of land meeting water along the coastlines and riverbanks of the Seward Peninsula created just enough thermal instability in those places to prevent an accumulation of snow from obscuring them. Fliers relied on this phenomenon for navigation under snowy, or “white-out” conditions.

Flying Northwest of Nome      ©1981-Tim Konrad Photo

When flying in such circumstances, sky and ground would often lose definition, making it difficult for pilots to discern the difference between them. The instinctive outlines created by riverbanks and coastlines provided visual reference points with which flyers could navigate with more confidence.  

***

The Arctic weather created other kinds of difficulties for Alaska pilots not normally encountered by flyers in less frigid parts of the world. My friend, Bill, told of how close he came to disaster once during an incident involving an uncooperative frozen lake.

Bill had been mid-way into a multi-day trip when he’d stopped for the night to shelter at a friend’s cabin. The cabin sat beside a frozen lake. It was early spring, and the ice covering the lake still appeared thick enough to allow a plane safe landing. Bill landed his plane on the ice and, sleeping gear in hand, made his way to the cabin.

Everything seemed fine until the middle of the night, when Bill was awakened by the sound of his friend excitedly shouting something to him about having to move his plane fast, followed by the words, “The ice is breaking up!”

Throwing on his clothes and running out to the plane as quickly as he could, Bill found the ice had, indeed, started to melt. He hopped onboard, fired up the plane’s engine, and lifted off just as the ice cracked and split into pieces. Had he waited a minute or two longer, his plane would have become transformed into a submersible vehicle.

Bill next to Dave’s plane           ©1981-Tim Konrad Photo

***

Normally possessed of a keen sense of direction, there was something about having the sun set in the south that raised absolute hell with my ability to orient myself. The practical import of this was I continually found myself having to stop and work out directions in my head for the duration of the time I spent in Nome.

Apparently, I wasn’t the only one flummoxed by having had to contend with a south-facing sunset. Johnny Horton, the guy who wrote the song “North to “Alaska” evidently shared my confusion when he wrote the lyrics to his song. In his line, “Below that old white mountain, just a little south-east of Nome,” his geography was a bit off, as White Mountain actually sat a little north-east of Nome.

White Mountain, NE of Nome  ©1981-Tim Konrad Photo

Paradoxically, despite the fact that White Mountain sat north of Nome, it wasn’t far enough north to discourage tree growth. Despite the latitude, the terrain where White Mountain was situated provided sufficient shelter from the elements to permit scattered groves of Sitka Spruce to thrive in place of the ubiquitous arctic tundra found around Nome and its environs.

Also, unlike Nome, White Mountain provided the shelter from the elements essential for the area’s original inhabitants to establish a presence there long before the arrival of Europeans to the area.

Tim Konrad

(To be continued . . )

Paradoxically, cutting firewood was a popular activity in Nome, even though, thanks to the permafrost, there were no trees growing anywhere nearby. The area’s beaches, however, were littered with prodigious quantities of driftwood sourced from trees growing along the watershed of the mighty Yukon River. The river’s force carried the collateral damage done by decades of downpours downstream, where it was deposited into the sea as the river’s waters intermixed with the salty brine of Norton Sound. From there, the ocean currents swept the detritus directly across the sound, depositing it along the swaths of shore-land surrounding Nome.

Driftwood lining beach              ©1981-Tim Konrad Photo

Many locals heated their homes with driftwood they harvested from the beaches, Dave among them, using chain saws to cut big sections of logs into pieces small enough to accommodate their wood stoves. The work was hard on the sawblades, as the wood was sometimes impacted by spikes, nails and other pieces of metal that would dull or otherwise damage them. The notion of cutting firewood where none grew struck me as ironic and only added to my excitement at finding myself embedded in this land of exotic contradictions.

***

Terry was working as a public health nurse during my visit with her and Dave. Her work took her around to many of the villages and settlements scattered about the Seward Peninsula. As a result, she’d been able to make the acquaintance of many of the area’s indigenous residents.

One day she took me to meet some Inupiaq families at a fishing camp located near a beach a few miles east of Nome. (With a south-facing coastline, I always had to work out directions in my head while I was there. Being accustomed to the sun setting in the west, where I’d always lived, my brain told me that anything located ‘down coast,’  should have been south, not east).

Similar to a nut chopper, the ulu was deployed in a pushing motion to separate the blubber into manageable-sized portions. The blubber, called ‘muktuk’ in the local language, was an integral part of the Inupiaq diet. Packed with nutrients, muktuk, was a source of energy and was also said to help those who ate it to keep warm. Some say it tasted like fried eggs, while others compared it to fresh coconut. Advised by my friends that muktuk was not for the faint of heart, I chose to forego the delicacy.

Muktuk was also available for purchase at the local grocery/department store, where it sat in a freezer case  alongside numerous species of fish and other frozen goods. Unlike similar places of business back home, this store also featured large-caliber hunting rifles, bullet-reloading supplies, extreme cold weather equipment, a dizzying array of fishing gear and steel-jawed bear traps in graduated sizes.

Cutting up seal blubber was not without its risks, Terry told me. In addition to the obvious danger the slip of a knife entailed, the blubber contained a particular type of microorganism that, if allowed to enter one’s body through cuts and scratches, often resulted in an infection that was exceedingly difficult to treat.  Ever the optimist, Terry was quick to note that, on the plus side, Nome’s forbidding winter temperatures were inhospitable to the rhinoviruses and influenzas that were the bane of those residing in more temperate zones.

After visiting the fishing camp, Terry drove us a few miles farther ‘east’ to an area she said had once been home to people hundreds to thousands of years ago. The place at first looked much the same as everywhere else in the surrounding area, nothing but sand, beach grass and low-growing shrubs.

A closer look, however, revealed signs of earlier habitation scattered about, namely trade beads, likely acquired from Russian traders who began infiltrating the region in the mid-1700s. The beads were very similar to ones I’d found in California poking about old MiWok sites—small in diameter and colored a bright shade of red-ochre. The objects appeared unremarkable until I picked one up, held it to the light and was able to peer through it. Looking at it through its side, where the hole went through, revealed the bead was actually made of translucent green glass that had been coated with ochre on its outer edge.

As I pondered the wonder of that discovery, I found myself also wondering what those Russian traders had obtained in exchange for their shiny trinkets those several centuries ago and if, like the Dutch had done when they’d ‘purchased’ Manhattan from the Lenape for a miserly $24 worth of trinkets, the Russians had taken unfair advantage of the Eskimos.

Tim Konrad

(To be continued . . )

The mood aboard our aircraft was somber as our plane re-traced its route back across the dullish-gray glaze of late afternoon arctic cloud-cover to more familiar surroundings. Our hopes for a happy ending was now tempered by the realization that the time necessary for the rescue party to reach the site greatly lessened the odds of the young man’s survival.

The crash site turned out to be in a remote location, far from any settlement. Reaching it required 4 to 5  treacherous hours’ travel via snowmobile under adverse weather conditions. This meant the soonest rescuers would be able to reach the site would be hours after nightfall.

Early the following morning, we learned it was almost midnight before the rescue party had finally reached the site of the wreckage. As it turned out, our worst fears were realized—the young man had perished in the crash. A popular member of a prominent Nome family, his loss was felt by the  entire community.

***

©1981-Tim Konrad Photo

When we had been circling St Lawrence Island, we’d flown by a small islet sitting just off its coast. A long stretch of beach sand extended from the isle, arching gracefully out into the surrounding waters. As we drew nearer, a large brownish mass came into view, appearing like an appendage, on the spit’s distal end, quite out of place with its surroundings.

©1981-Tim Konrad Photo

Curiously, steam appeared to be emanating from the mass, curling into the sky above it in a manner resembling the way convection waves shimmer in the distance over long stretches of desert road on a hot summer’s day.

As we flew even closer and the darkened shape came into sharper relief, it became apparent the mass was comprised of hundreds of walruses, all huddled together tightly in a manner reminiscent of aphids on a stalk of brussels sprouts.

©1981-Tim Konrad Photo

I had seen the occasional lone walrus while flying around with Dave, but never imagined I’d see them clustered in such numbers.

The animals I’d seen before had all  been left lying on beaches, dead, their bodies mutilated by Native hunters whose only interest had been the money they could make by selling the ivory harvested from the walruses’ tusks.

According to Dave, only the native people were allowed by law to possess or sell walrus ivory. Unfortunately, the lure of money too often spoke with more authority than any prohibitions against illegal harvesting practices might have.

This demonstration of misplaces priorities, like the scourge of alcohol, was yet another of the ways the sins of the White man’s world had been visited upon the indigenous people of the region.

The deleterious ways of western culture were first introduced to, or inflicted upon, the people of the far north by missionaries, just as they had been in many other areas across the globe following the “discovery” of the new world.

The at times bizarre ideas of Christian teaching slowly became intertwined in the culture of the area’s original inhabitants, who were wholly unprepared to assimilate the contradictions of a society whose cosmological world-view was far inferior to their own understanding of their intimate connection with the natural world.

The aforementioned price paid by Shooting Star’s grandfather so he could be “saved” well illustrates the tragic toll taken on a people when the experience of untold generations is cast out in favor of the embrace of fledging notions whose answers to the exigencies of daily living are found wanting in comparison to those that were discarded.

And all the while, we as a people congratulate ourselves and remark favorably about our work, calling it “progress,” and “an improvement over things as we found them,” little knowing the true price paid until it’s our turn to ante up.

Tim Konrad

(To be continued . . )

An unfortunate and extremely sad event occurred while I was visiting Nome. The teen-aged son of the owner of one of Nome’s flying companies went missing while piloting a mail flight to an offshore island. The weather had been dangerous that day and, when the lad hadn’t returned as scheduled, a search party had been organized. Many local flyers had offered to “share their eyes” to the search effort, Dave included. I followed along.  

The two of us joined six others in an eight-seater twin engine Piper Navajo piloted by a seasoned flyer named Jim who was the owner of another of the local flying companies that had joined in the search. If Dave’s Cessna 170 was a Volkswagen, Jim’s plane was a Mercedes Benz: Plush by comparison, it hummed along smooth as butter as we headed out into the forbidding sky looming over the Bering Sea, full of trepidation and trying not to imagine the worst.

As the tell-tale beep of the aircraft’s transponder, an emergency signal locater that was required equipment on all planes flying in the region, had not be detected, the work of determining where to focus the search effort was a matter of educated guesswork.

The young man had been on a mission to deliver mail to Savoonga, a village  on St. Lawrence Island, situated far out in the Bering Sea 185 miles west of Nome. The weather had been abysmal that day. The young man would have encountered strong tail winds on his flight to the island. Some among those involved in the search effort speculated the wind might have caused the lad to overshoot the village, even, possibly, sending him as far off course as the Siberian coast lying less than 40 additional miles across the Bering Straits.

While our group was, along with a handful of other plane-loads full of volunteers, closing the distance to the island, others were turning to diplomatic channels to obtain authorization to allow us entry into Russian airspace, had the search led in that direction.

When we reached St Lawrence Island, visibility was favorable along the coastline, but the island’s interior was shrouded in a thick fog. We began circling the island, awaiting the arrival of the Coast Guard radar-equipped C-130 transport plane that had been dispatched from Kodiak Island to join in the search mission.  

The C-130 crew’s job was to use the plane’s specialized equipment to try to locate a transmission from the downed plane’s signal locater in order to establish a reference point from which they could then, through a process called triangulation, pinpoint the exact location of the downed craft.

As we were circling the island, a temporary break in the clouds revealed a huge cliff hundreds of feet in height looming ahead of us on our starboard side. Just as we were flying beside the cliff, the plane hit an air pocket and suddenly dropped like a rock, plunging several hundred feet downward before resuming normal flight. While our rapid descent took no more than a second or two, it seemed far longer. By chance, I’d been looking at our pilot, Jim, when we’d hit the air pocket. Jim was a flyer with years of service on his record. Watching, for a brief instant, his eyes grow rounder and wider than an October moon had given me pause. Witnessing someone like Jim register the kind of fear I’d also felt when we’d hit the air pocket made me wonder how close we, ourselves, had just come to crashing into the ground.

Quickly recovering, Jim then flew us above the clouds where we resumed circling the island, this time under clear skies. Before long, the C-130 became visible off our starboard side. While peering out at the droning, fortress-like hulk circling in the distance, our craft was struck by an air disturbance that sent it helplessly bobbing up and down like a leaf in the wind.

It turned out we’d flown across the wake of the transport plane. Aircraft the size of a C-130, it was explained to me later, created a wake in their paths that then radiated outward in waves of concentric circles similar to the manner in which waves are created in the sea by the passage of large ocean-going vessels.

Circling Coast Guard C-130      ©1981-Tim Konrad Photo

The C-130 hadn’t flown ‘round the island for very long when a voice on the radio announced that a signal had been detected from the downed craft’s transponder. All that then remained for the plane’s crew to do was, with the help of geometry, pinpoint and report the location of the downed craft so the rescue crews could begin their work. The crash site located, our work for the day was essentially done. With nothing left for us to do besides await word from the rescue mission, Jim turned the Navajo and aimed it back toward Nome.

Tim Konrad

(To be continued . . )

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. 

***

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 . . )

The Northern Lights, famed in photos celebrating the splendor of the northern latitudes, might have been a feature about which boasts were made in travel brochures, but they didn’t appear much inclined to spend time trying to impress me. Beyond the single display I was treated to shortly after my arrival, the Lights apparently had more pressing business to attend to elsewhere during the duration of my visit.

The Aurora Borealis, as the Northern Lights are properly called, result from the interaction of Earth’s magnetic field with particles from the sun propelled earthward by the sun’s solar wind. Always present, they fluctuate due to atmospheric conditions that sometimes fling them beyond the magnetic poles into more temperate latitudes. During periods when the sun’s solar activity is higher than normal and the occurrence of sunspots grows more frequent, auroras can occur in the northern hemisphere at even lower latitudes. The same process takes place in the southern hemisphere, only in reverse, where the Aurora Australis can at times reach deep into the higher latitudes.

In 1911, a solar burst caused the northern lights to be visible as far south as Memphis and Atlanta. A phenomenon known as the Carrington Event occurred in 1859 in which the aurora extended even further, reportedly reaching down into Jamaica and Cuba. On that occasion, the lights were visible for three nights, bedeviling telegraph operators whose equipment ceased proper functioning due to the effects of the electromagnetic radiation on their equipment.

***

Dave & Terry had an interesting approach to house-painting. A builder by trade, Dave was skilled in the ways of making the best of whatever resources were available. He constructed his first home in Alaska around a shipping container, supporting a portion of the house with its rigid framing while incorporating the hulking mass as yet another room comprising the structure.

Always out for a bargain, Dave took a novel approach to obtaining the paint he and Terry applied to their home’s exterior. To avoid the higher cost of purchasing new paint at the hardware store,  Dave would sort through the store’s stock of bargain-priced paint remnants—gallons whose mis-matched colors had been refused by customers more particular about the shades they sought with which to decorate their homes.

Dave and Terry happily applied the assorted shades one gallon at a time, opening a new can when the current one ran out and proceeding along with that shade until it was used up as well, at which point they would open the following one . . and on and on.

The resulting effect, while not resembling the brightly-colored chaos one might imagine, thanks to or because of, depending on how you view such things, the tendency of paint colors to reduce down to  grayish-greenish-brownish shades when combined indiscriminately.

The color scheme they settled on seemed strangely appropriate, determined as it was by circumstance as much as design. The finished product appeared quite at home situated amidst the odd assortment of other sometimes ad hoc seeming structures spread about the town.

During a subsequent visit to Nome a handful of years later, D&T hired me to apply a supercharged shade of industrial orange to one side of a different home they were living in. But that’s a story for another day.

The shoreline two blocks from Dave & Terry’s house

©1981-Tim Konrad Photo

Tim Konrad

(To be continued . . )

Mt. St Helens was still smoldering 17 months after it’s eruption when I flew over it on my way to Anchorage in the fall of 1981. The fractured peak, its top blown off in a cataclysmic display of force, appeared dark and foreboding as we flew by, a terrible reminder that we live in a world where nature dictates the terms of our occupancy on a basis that, when it comes right down to it, is non-negotiable. We defy it at our peril.

Mount St. Helens   ©1981-Tim Konrad Photo

Possessed, as we are, by relatively short life-spans, our imaginations are limited by our human perspectives. We tend to believe that volcanic eruptions, massive earthquakes and the like occur too seldom to be of much concern. The geologic time-scale on which such events take place is too abstract for us to wrap our minds around: To make sense of them we construct narratives designed to reduce these phenomena to human scale. We tell ourselves “There’s no need to worry. That volcano hasn’t erupted in over eight-hundred years,” or “the last great earthquake in this area occurred in 1791” and so on.   

Framing our understanding of the natural world in this manner makes life a little less foreboding much the same way the little fictions we tell ourselves in our daily lives help us deal with the uncertainties of daily living. If, as in the case of geophysical events, the scale of things exceeds our ability to grasp them, we bring them down to a size that better accommodates our relatively limited capabilities. Doing so also allows people to maintain beliefs that, in instances like that of Harry Truman, the man who

refused to leave his mountain paradise on the slopes of  Mount St. Helens, despite having been warned repeatedly he should do so, have proved to be dead wrong.

When people eschew reality in favor of their personal fictions, disaster is certain to follow. This is true regardless of the nature of the fiction or the numbers of people ascribing to it. And this truth is not limited solely to the natural world.

The same may be said regarding the fictions currently being told by the Republican Party in its desperate attempt to retain power and control amid a political landscape in which its ideas are no longer relevant to the needs of the people it claims to serve.

***

As noted earlier, eccentricity was woven into the fabric of the mindset of Alaskan society, or at least into the parts of it I encountered in my travels there. The sign house was one manifestation of that phenomenon, but others could be encountered in the most unexpected of places. While riding along in the tundra with Dave over one of Nome’s few roads one afternoon, we came upon a partially dismembered child’s doll leaning up against the gnarled root base of an upended tree. The object, glistening in the late afternoon sun, possessed an aura bordering on the macabre, perched as it was between impropriety and the chaos of dissolution.

Tundra Doll     ©1981-Tim Konrad Photo

Mysterious and unsettling, the scene could have equally served as a prop in a Twilight Zone episode or the tundra variant of a Rorschach Test. Either way, I thought to myself, it attested to mans’ ingenuity in combatting the boredom associated with the long nights of winter bordering the Arctic Circle.

Tim Konrad

(To be continued . . )

Such displays of violence were rare in my experience while in Nome. Dave had told me that the Inupiaq people, in contrast to the native peoples in the lower ’48, were not usually prone to violent acts when inebriated. They would just keep drinking until they fell into a stupor, he said, eventually passing out where they sat.

I saw this play out more than once at the Board of Trade, where Inupiaq men and women could be seen at odd hours slumped over tables totally unconscious.

Sometimes, if the unfortunate person happened to be outside, he or she would simply lie down and fall asleep, occasionally ending up between parked cars where, from time to time, they would be run over when the car’s owners, unaware of the person lying asleep behind their vehicle, would back over them. In other cases, passing out in winter-time resulted in people dying due to exposure.

I thought back to something my uncle had told me years before. My first wife and I had been traveling in New Mexico when the engine in our VW bus had thrown a rod. As luck would have it, even though our vehicle quit in the middle of an Apache reservation many miles from the nearest town, a “trading post,” with a public telephone sat just up the road.

This establishment, part rural convenience store, with additional items such as ammunition and other assorted  things one might require to survive in the middle of nowhere, also served as a trading post and pawn shop. Saddles, rifles and other gear could be seen awaiting redemption by their former owners or purchase by new ones for the right price.

The trading post also sold beer. In the two hours we remained there awaiting the tow truck that would tow us back to Farmington and a repair shop, we witnessed one particular group of Native American young men return several times, on each occasion hauling off beer by the caseload.  

One engine re-build later, we resumed our trip, heading over to Los Alamos to visit my aunt and uncle. When I told them about our experience at the trading post, my uncle’s response was sardonic, “That’s just one more way the White man is trying to destroy the Indians.”

Sadly, I realized, the same could be said about the Native inhabitants of this far-flung, frozen land.

***

Describing the Inupiaq reaction to alcohol as docile did not mean, as evidenced by the incident recounted in the previous chapter, that everyone responded to alcohol the way Dave had described. Another incident that also occurred at the Board of Trade, or the BOT, as it was known to the locals, showed the folly of making generalities about peoples’ behavior.  

Dave and I were seated one evening at a small table bordering a long wall that ran the length of the large main room of the saloon.

A couple of young Inupiaq men were sitting at a nearby table sharing drinks together. After they’d sat there a few minutes, I sensed some commotion from their table and glanced over to see what was happening. A disagreement of some sort had broken out between the men.  

Before long, the argument turned into a scuffle as the two men arose from their seats and began pushing and shoving each other. Soon they were exchanging blows.  

I found myself thinking about what Dave had just told me about alcohol’s effect on the natives’ constitutions  when I noticed the two men, each trying to overpower the other, drifting closer to our table.

As they drew nearer, I signaled to Dave that it might be wise to grab our drinks and move out of their path. He picked up on my cue and we both jumped aside just as the pugilists, totally immersed in their struggle, came crashing into our table.

“Just another night in Nome,” I recall having thought to myself as we moved to another table to finish our drinks.

Tim Konrad

(To be continued . . )