Story Time

It’s only been a couple short weeks, but autumn has advanced quickly on the tundra.  I landed to a nearly instant regret of my jacket choice in the very early hours of the morning and to frozen puddles in the parking lot.  The cabelas were out in full force again.  The airport terminal is tiny to start with and always crowded when jets are coming in and going out.  Maybe I should be thankful they are all combis these days since all the passengers getting off and getting on the jet are crowded into one small room.  This smallness of the terminal also means there is a small place to get your bags.  The cabelas took up station in front of nearly half that area this morning, with their ‘small’ camo backpack carryons and their large loud selves.  The rest of us seem to have worked out a system that works pretty well, but only without them blocking the way.  If I sound harsh and ungrateful you should hear what some people who live here year round say.  Some won’t use charter companies who are willing to fly these guys.  Some get mad at me when I use the charter companies who fly these guys.  When I go to meetings where roads are on the agenda access for cabelas is the first topic discussed. 

No matter what I am here to accomplish there always seems to be time for someone to tell me a story.  Sometimes I get to hear the same story a couple times.  That was the case this time.  I heard a story about a small plane that crashed at the end of the runway many years ago.  This village has their cemetery (I learned this trip that they have more than one) right at the end of the runway.  I heard this story last time from a guy who probably wasn’t old enough to have actually seen it I now know.  I got more details on this telling and so did the story tellers husband.  We were both impressed.  She tells it that she was a little girl at the time and a couple kids a few years older than her knew the pilot.  There was to be a passenger on the flight too, but he put her off at the last minute, concerned about weight.  When the plane crashed after takeoff it caught fire.  The kids who knew the pilot reportedly jumped in some water so they could pull their friend from the wreck.  He reportedly was alive when they got him out but he died later.  The storyteller left the best part for last, very Paul Harvey style.  One of the rescuers was a girl, and she is now the president of a large local corporation.  I haven’t met her often, but have been impressed by her before this story.  Now I want to hear her version.

Tastes Real Good

I often get the chance to learn more about subsistence food when I travel, sometimes from people I see every day in the office.  They are different when they come home.  At dinner in the fancy restaurant tonight I had a view of the Sound.  The tide was high and I kept thinking I could see something bobbing or floating in the water and wishing I had worn my glasses and gotten a table right next to a window.  My first guess was that it was some kind of buoy or net float, but I couldn’t tell if it was disappearing in the waves or dropping below the water surface somehow.  A co-worker from Town sat at the table next to me, joining her Mom and said hi to me as she passed.  **A couple notes here - sometimes I see people who I know I recognize and they see me, but they chose not to acknowledge me.  I have learned it’s really nothing personal, there are just a lot of political strings, kind of like a web, surrounding me.  Also, sometimes relations are not what we expect.  For example, people often have several moms.  I asked about it once and nearly got dizzy in the explanation.  This has generally been the result for everyone I ask.  In this particular case they did look similar so it could have actually been her mom in a sense that is familiar to me.

When I was done stuffing myself stupid I stopped to say hello to my co-worker.  She commented on the view out the window.  Sometimes I am so white.  I had not even noticed the birds.  Or how wide spread the dark things on the surface were.  They were seals.  Lots of seals.  Tons of seals.  Seals everywhere.  Feeding.  Duh.  That explains why I thought it was Tatonka when I first saw it out of the corner of my eye.  They were even going for the birds when they ventured too close.  It was amazing and no picture could do it justice.  I went outside in the nearly freezing wind without a jacket just so I could stand there and see it up close after I talked to her.  Not for the first time when I have been admiring a beautiful animal in the arctic, she told me they taste real good and that they are the black meat in the seal oil.  But that you can only dry the meat in the fall.  I confirmed that she meant air dried.  Some day I will get someone to explain to me how you dry the meat in the fall when you kill the animal in the spring.  Or maybe they will tell me I got that backwards or that you kill these animals in the fall.  Either way, I can’t quite get the logic worked out on my own.