Getting There by Air, or Not in Bush Alaska

Last week, we arrived at the Anchorage airport at 7:45 for a 9am flight to Phoenix that left on time and place us in the Arizona desert by 3pm Anchorage time.  That’s the way most people expect air travel to work.   Make a reservation show up, fly, and arrive very close to the scheduled arrival time.    In bush Alaska however, travel takes on a very different look. 

            For you folks not from Alaska, “the bush” is any place off the road system.  

            Flying to the bush usually means boarding a small plane which is much more limited by weather your average 737.   Wind, fog, snow, and ice can stop or delay a flight and so can things like a pilot not showing up for work or a plane being delayed or weathered on the other end or a passenger throwing up in a plane.   Because of these potentials for delay, travel in bush Alaska is more like this: 

            Arrive at the flight service office an hour before the scheduled fight.  Check in, which means surrendering any bag bigger than ten pounds, declaring your weight, loud and clear, and making that you are dressed for bad weather and add those heavy clothes to your weight.  Then you wait.  Usually there are comfortable chairs, coffee, WIFI, snack machines, and people to visit with.  Often a TV is playing and some places have extra amenities special to that location.    

             No fudging on this; having an accurate weight of everything and everybody on the plane is critical to safety. 

            Take Bethel, a hub in western Alaska for example.  The Grant Aviation waiting room has a little coffee shop upstairs with espresso and hot sandwiches.  Above Yute Air you’ll find Brothers Pizza and an eclectic gift shop with some native arts and other interesting items for sale.  The RAVN station often has a lunch wagon parked outside with burgers and Chinese food available.   Alaska Air Bethel is the worst of the lot.  No Wi-Fi, no coffee, just TV, snack machines and a change machine that’s usually out of order, so don’t show up hungry with only a ten dollar bill — I did once and was saved by a colleague who shared her Chinese meal.   The nice thing about waiting in Bethel is there that cabs are cheap five to seven dollars to get most anywhere and you can order take out food from a variety of place and they will deliver.  

            So you wonder, why all these tips about waiting?  Well, bush travel is about waiting you will spend more time waiting than traveling.  Sure the flights all have schedule departures, but as one traveler put it, these are just guidelines.  Your flight may leave 30 minutes early or 2 hours late.  You just never know.  Sometimes the flight is delayed and put on “weather hold”. That means a thirty-minute wait for another weather check weather legally safe for flying.  Weather might be fine where you are but not where you are going.   You might spend several hours on weather hold before the flight is actually cancelled, and the traveler rebooks and starts the process over again, often the next day.  Weather hold can last for days.  Especially when a blizzard blows in because when it’s all over then runways have to be cleared and declared safe.  

            People unfamiliar with this sort of travel don’t function well with weather hold.  Once when a flight service office was packed with people, suitcases, plastic tubs, and cardboard cartons on one typical wintery morning in Bethel.  A couple hundred people including me had blown in with the storm even though the chance was poor fpr flying anywhere on a day like this.  All flights were on weather hold and apt to stay that way for a while.  It didn’t take a pilot or meteorologist to tell most of that.   There was one woman dressed more for Seattle than Bethel who was grilling ticket agent.  I have to fly the Akiachak and back today because I have a flight to New York this evening.  Everyone laughed.  “I’m sorry, Ma’am said the ticket agent, we are on weather hold.” 

            “Weather hold?  How long does that last?” ask the frustrated traveler.  Everyone laughed again.  We have to laugh because travel in the bush will drive us nuts otherwise.

            Once your flight is called your pilot calls the passengers, checks the manifest and escorts the passengers to the plane.   Newcomers will be surprised to find they are sharing the passenger compartment with cargo, cases of soda, diapers, spam, toilet paper, and you the passenger are all going together.  I have boarded planes so packed with cargo that we had to squeeze and wiggle our way to forward to get into our seats.  Lucky you gave up that backpack for there is no place for it.  Some passengers will have carryon though, take-out pizza or Chinese from Bethel restaurants or even Cinnabuns or McDonalds from the Anchorage airport.  My favorite is when I see some one traveling with a elaborately decorated birthday cake on their lap.  That is love.   Finally, the pilot gives the travel briefing and the routing — that when you find out how many villages you get to see on the way to your destination. 

            When the plane finally arrives at the remote village there is usually and gravel apron where the plane parks and unloads surrounded in winter by snowmobiles and trucks and in the summer by atvs and trucks.   You hope your ride is there to pick you up for there is no warm terminal building to wait in and don’t expect a shuttle bus.   Over the last few years air strips have been moved away from villages so it is often a couple miles to the village unlike the old days when the airstrip was literally in the village.  Some places like Chignik Lagoon, and Hughes are still that way. 

            Flying to Hughes my first time, I called the school and asked them to meet my plane.  “Sure,” the man said at other end of the phone, ‘I’ll be there.  Sure enough, when the plan landed he walked the hundred feet from the schoolhouse to meet me.  We had a good laugh over that. 

            As tricky as it might be to reach a remote Alaskan village, leaving requires nuance attention to detail and sometimes dumb luck.   Needless to say, people aren’t sitting around at the village airstrip for hours waiting for the plane.  When the plane is fifteen or twenty minutes from the airstrip, the pilot calls on the vhf radio which anyone with a radio can here, “The is Grant Aviation 20 minutes, Hooper Bethel.” Usually he will repeat it.  The local agent has probably received call from Bethel or whatever hub when the plane leaves there.   Earlier in the day, the departing passenger has called the flight service hub and the local agent to get on “the list”.  Failure to do this can mean not having a seat.  It also helps the pilot plot his routing if flying village to village.   As your flight time approaches because you have to read to roll when that radio call comes through.   Sometimes that means waiting and waiting all packed and ready, or being drug out of a meeting because the flight is coming early.

            If you have read this carefully you know what you need to know about successful flying in bush Alaska.  But you would be wrong.  It has been my experience that if you think you have it all figured out, you are delusional. 

            For example, I was in in one village and scheduled to fly from that village to another rather than back to the hub.  My reservation was paid, confirmed and I checked in with the agent after ten years of bus travel I knew what I was doing,  That’s why with one foot on the step to board the plane I double-checked the routing with the pilot.  “Oh, I’m not flying there today.  We are direct to Bethel.”  Following up with the main office I found, “Oh village to village is dependent on cargo and routing.”  Luckily, I could catch one of the other flight services in time to catch their plane that was going where I wanted to go.   That’s just how it works.

            The few of us that have the opportunity to use the many small flight services in bush Alaska get to visit remote and wonderful place that are inaccessible to most people.   Flying to places like Toksook Bay or Arctic Village requires knowledge, flexibility and a willingness to embrace the moment and savor the experience even if  sometimes you are gritting teeth while doing it.

Poems and Other Short Pieces Looking for a Home

Wood Lot

I count the cobbles on the beach

while we wait for the breakers to rise from the swell of the sea

and race up the steep cobble shoulder of the shore

with one final delivery of cedar

on back order from some river in Canada.

Lost lumber tumbles onto the greywacke shingle

Where sawmill planks rub their edges

round on the cobbles

and scour their tattoos with sand.

Blue spruces tumble from the bluff

to roll in the sand with their boughs

around a birch of another river

all hoarded by the storm

in this bite of shore left open to the sea.

  

Things I Hate

I’m offended by inspirational Facebook posts

by women telling men how they should act. 

I’m irritated by drivers who speed up in passing zones

after driving slow for the last fifty miles.

I dread that endless split-second one spends anticipating pain between falling . . .

and landing on ice.

        Two Young Women in the Rain

I watched two young women walking 

the roadside in the rain 

with a dog that I didn’t notice.  

They appeared through the windshield, fresh and fertile like newly furrowed fields, dampened by the rain and ready for seed, looking up as I passed, faces smiling 

at me.  

And, 

for a moment 

driving to the post office in the rain,

the open pedals of their moist red lips made me warm. 

Eating

              We ate beans, 

beans with cornbread, beans with homemade cottage cheese off the back of the woodstove. 

Red beans, white beans, pintos, a lot of beans. 

              We ate potatoes,

potatoes with gravy, potatoes we dug from the cold wet fall ground. 

Fresh potatoes, boiled potatoes, swede potatoes. 

              We ate salmon,

salmon out of the river, salmon out of jars from the musty root cellar. 

Pink salmon, red salmon, king salmon, smoked. 

            We ate moose,

moose in stew, moose burger sandwiches on homemade bread. 

Tough moose, tender moose, poached moose, moose track stew.    

We ate food so good that I didn’t know we were poor, 

food so good I didn’t know people with money didn’t eat like that.

          

 

Too Many Liars for my Comfort

My Dad used to say that some people would sooner walk across the street to tell a lie rather than stand here and tell the true.

Since Christmas I have been at home a lot and have time to read and listen to news and commentary about guns and violence, isis and immigrants, and even bogus Alaskans.  In the middle of it all I see a common theme.  The liars have the upper hand.  We are truly surrounded by them.   Oh, you can talk about taking a different "view", or claim hyperbole, but we are exposed to so much falsehood that the the words are even getting twisted.  Words like reality, which used to be a synonym for truth, but now with "reality TV" it means "presented as the truth when it isn't really".

This truth bending has been nagging me and, as happens sometimes, all these other little flags popup that relate to it.   The State of the Union address was filled with exaggeration and some flaky numbers, which the President Obama haters immediately shined a light on and then followed with their own lies and half-truths during the GOP debate.  People were caught lying on permanent fund
applications.  Other people are accused of lying for the liars.   I notice Craig Medred calling out the lies on Running Wild with Bear Grylls (Craig Medred News) they filmed here in my home town while, down the road in Homer, another show tries to make the Kilchers look like they are living hand to mouth out in the middle of nowhere when they really live right outside a little tourist town like I do.   At the same time, the gun battle over the second amendment has both sides loading their clips with erroneous ammunition, and the Bundy gang out in Oregon is trying to convince us that they are a well-regulated militia.

People write fake news stories, usually to drive a political agenda, and then innocent people believe them and share them on Facebook and the lies spread like ebola.  In this age when we all have access to the public audience, places like Facebook and Twitter are bill-boards for people to post lies about politicians and policies and beliefs that they don't like.  Basically we have access to more information, but less truth.  Isn't anyone obligated to to at least attempt to base their public statements on facts and support their assertions with evidence.

 My mom used to say, "Just because you heard it it doesn't make it true, and you certainly don't need to repeat."  

I am tired of having to fact check everything I hear or read to see if some one is pulling my leg or picking my pocket, and I have plan to fix this problem.  A set of rules for anyone sharing information with the public.

Rule  One:   Reality TV has to be about real people doing real things without scripts, props or lying.  If you make up stuff or have fake people like Alaska Bush People's Browns, you have to have a scrolling message across the bottom of the screen that says, "We made this shit up; it's not true."

Rule Two:  Related to reality TV, If you claim to be educational like National geographic or Discovery Channel, and you show us things like two guys from Homer hunting deer on Admiralty Island and call it SUBSISTENCE hunting you have to have a big flashing sign that lights up and says "THIS IS BULLSHIT".

Rule Three:  Any reporter, journalist or interviewer who asked a questions or receives a statement that they know is false,  they are required to label that state as such, or challenge the source of that lied to prove it.

Rule Four: Political debates and speeches:  Any entity, like CNN or FOX, that hosts and broadcasts such debates and speeches has to also follow that show with another show that fact checks everything the politicians say.

Rule Five:  Facebook, Twitter and their ilk all have "LIKE" buttons that we use to show others that we like what we see.   Now they shall have "BULLSHIT" buttons as well.

Rule Six:  If your favorite blogger, news site, Instagram or Twitter makes a statement, and you want to share that with other people, you have check other sources to see if it us true.  If you post some lie without doing that you have to make your Facebook status, "LIAR".

If this doesn't work I guess I'll just lie about it and give up!

The Solstice Chair and the Quiet End to this Year 2015.

This holiday, Madelyn and I are here on the lake alone, and the kids off with their own starting new family traditions.  Knowing I would be home most of December, I had time to make a gift for Madelyn rather than buy one.  I had been thinking for a time that I want to this, and now I had time, materials and opportunity.  It all began this summer when I was doing some yard clean up and found out that our chainsaw carved eagles had rotted and had to be turned over to the campfire.   That same day my old ski chair started to collapse under my weight, so I knew it was destined for the fire as well.  This chair I had made at least fifteen years ago and the materials are entirely old Nordic, or cross country, skis.   For years this Adirondack style chair sat on the porch in the weather, and when we moved to the lake, it came with us.  Now that it was sitting on a covered porch the chair lasted longer than expected but I did know it would eventually need to be replaced.

Save it for the solstice fire,” Madelyn suggested, and I agreed.  What better fuel for a solstice fire than wood that has served well in two functions.  Each year we have a gathering on winter solstice and celebrate the cosmic event with friends around the fire.  This year we can’t have our solstice celebration so my old chair lie forlorn on the campfire woodpile under the alders waiting.

Of course, I promised to build another chair from the old skis collected in the loft of the woodshed, but I am a hundred percent guy.  Hundred percent in or hundred percent out.  Right then I was out.  The skis were stacked in the woodshed, more than enough to build another chair.  I had the tools — better than I had when I built the first one — and I had a warm dry garage to work in.  All I needed was the motivation.  Instead of working on the replacement chair, I planned.  Madelyn was going to be laid up after knee replacement and would need to be close to the house for while.  She would be cut off from the garage. That would be perfect time to build the new chair and I could make it a Christmas gift.  “Brilliant,” I said.

The new Solstice Chair

Suddenly it was December, Madelyn had the surgery, and we made it home a week before Christmas.  I suddenly found that the time I was going to “be around the house” was taken up with nursing duties.  In between servicing the ice machine, helping with exercises, changing dressings, tracking and dispensing seven different medicines, making meals, and giving my gal some company, I would sneak out to the garage and tinker on the chair.  Timing was tricky because I worried about sawing and drilling being enough noise to wake Madelyn when she was sleeping.  Those first few days I got her settled on the ice machine or the CPM she would fall asleep.  I was able to strip the hardware from the skis and get my cuts planned.  Eventually time worked out fine, and two days before Christmas the new chair was finished and I was working on a second.  All the time I was working on the first chair I was planning scheming and serving the web for different designs for chairs.  I found one I liked and wanted to try, but I was committed to my own design for Madelyn’s chair.   Now I had the bug, that hundred percent thing had me working mind and body on ski chairs.  I have a goal is to find or develop a simple design that used the least non-ski wood in the construction, simplicity is also important. 

Test chair 2.0

I have made several different chairs in the past and making all the chair parts from skis is challenging because of the shape and curve of a ski they have few straight lines and between skis and brands the curves vary as well.   The current experimental design uses lumber for legs and the chair frame, I can see now how eliminate some of that wood.  This test chair I made from the worst skis I have, and it will be good yard chair.  It is very comfortable and easy to make.  The next one will be of the same design but I will use more ski parts for the framing members.   I am pleased with the results of my flurry of chair building and excited about the more than a dozen beautiful wood skis wait in the woodshed. 

Madelyn is healing fast and we are on our way to a normal routine.  I can see now that it was a prefect timing to have a distracting project like this ski chair to keep me engaged during this different kind of holiday.  Maybe this week I can set my gal in her new chair on the porch and oversee life on the lake in the New Year, 2016 while I burn the solstice fire just a little late. 

The Lightness of the Dark Days of December

8:30 am ten days before solstice and the first hints of dawn are lighting the lake.  First light tells me that the warming trend overnight has transitioned the thin layer of snow into water, ice and something in between.  The lake has been frozen for some time but frequent weather changes keep melting the snow so it doesn't build up to make a good base for skiing.  The heavy rains of Thanksgiving raised the level of the lake about a foot, and even flooded the lowlands along the shore.  When temperatures dropped and the water receded, we were left with a dangerous false floor of half inch ice with nothing beneath it so that even the dogs were breaking through and many times, I found myself kneeling in the wet weeds when the ice shattered under me.

At last we enjoyed four inches of snow that turned the lake bed-sheet white.  On such a tableau we watched coyotes nervously crossing from the southeast corner to the western shore pausing and staring each time I opened the door and walked out on the porch for a look.  Saturday, what I thought was a coyote at first glance turned out to be a land otter porpoising through the snow.  It too was crossing the lake but seemed not interested in the noises I made shuffling around on the porch with my spotting scope.  The otter is not a graceful on land as in the water and  in fact it seemed to be trying to swim through the snow like it was water.  It would bound and lunge then stop and roll so that it was out in open crossing the lake for much longer than a coyote would have.   The white expanse of the lake exposes everything on it including an eagle pair I spotted in the center of the lake, and I could only puzzle at what they were doing there out in the middle of the ice and snow.  Maybe something smaller than an otter was crossing and the eagles were not content to just watch as I was.

With the fresh snow we enjoyed our first ski of the winter on the lake this week.   We were timid about the ice so we stayed close the to south shore where the water is shallow and going through the ice will be cold and scary but not life threatening.   We got a good glide and the dog seemed happy to be in harness skijoring on a crisp day in December.  The were alone with the snow and the mountains as we passed the lighted Christmas tree our neighbor puts on the lake each year, following the tracks skiers had left the day before.  We skiing east past the house and about the time we thought we ought to turn around, the snow along the shore moved.  In fact, a large piece of it lift off and flew away at eye level.  "Ptarmigan," I cheered, and then as my eyes and mind adjusted I saw that several of the white grouse were moving through the willows along the shore.  We were for a time immersed in a Christmas greeting card of a moment, at once aware of our own well being and the true richness of our surroundings.
Now, as the bleak clouds and shadowed ice dampen the holiday spirit in a way that only people of the north winter can fathom, we wait eagerly for colder, snowy days to make the magic of winter appear at Bear Lake.