Two girls, a puppy, and red pickup truck on a windy day in Fort Yukon - from my time of hiatus

The date was August 15, and I was on my way to Arctic Village, via Fairbanks and Fort Yukon, where I spent about half-an-hour on the ground. As I waited to reboard the airplane, these *girls and this puppy showed up on the gravel tarmac.

As you can see, it was windy in Fort Yukon. Later, after I arrived in Arctic Village, I heard a rumor that right after we left, a gust of wind picked that puppy up right out of that red truck and sent it sailing all the way to Birch Creek, where it landed safely in a hammock.

Then a kindly eagle came along, picked that puppy up and flew it right back to the two girls, both of whom were very happy to see it.

I am not sure if I believe that rumor. But what kind of person would ever make up such a story?

Maybe it's true.

It MUST be true!

Otherwise, I would not have written it at all.

*Eliza, a reader who has also taught school in Fort Yukon, has identified the two girls as Melinda and Mary. They are cousins.

Those with whom I did not crash; I glimpse Lynx asleep; sharing breakfast apart

I am not a person who fears flying at all. Whenever I board a plane, I am solidly confident it will carry me to my destination safely. When we are in the air and suddenly find ourselves getting smacked around by turbulence that gives some passengers a big scare, to me it is just like being on a bumpy road - a bit uncomfortable but no big deal.

Yet, after I boarded the completely full Alaska Airlines flight that would carry me from Barrow to Anchorage and the jet took off, I suddenly found myself thinking that if by chance this proved to be one of those extremely rare flights that didn't make it and it crashed with 100 percent fatalities, all the people riding in this plane and I would die together.

It struck that we would then all share a very intimate experience. What would it be like? Would we be aware of it? Do we have spirits that would float about the site for awhile, those of us who are strangers to each other introducing ourselves for the first time, those of us who already know each other visiting and musing about what just happened? Would we be in mourning for those living that we had left behind? Rejoicing to meet those dead who had left us before?

I don't know. But it was kind of fun to think about, so I raised my camera over my head, pointed it behind me in such a way that I knew it would catch me too and took this picture of myself with my fellow passengers, so that, if we all died together, this moment could be remembered.

But we didn't die. We landed safely. Margie picked me up at the airport and then drove us to Jacob and Lavina's. Lynxton was now just over three weeks old and this was only the third day that I had seen him. Just like when I returned from New York, he was asleep.

The day of his birth is the only day that I have so far seen him awake.

I expect to see him Saturday.

Maybe he will be awake then.

Margie had been staying with Jacob and Lavina to help out, but now she came home with me and we brought Jobe with us. As usual, on my first morning home, we went out to breakfast, at Abby's Home Cooking.

Abby had the radio on, tuned to a local country station. She had the volume turned very low, so that one barely noticed the music as it played in the background. Basically, one song blended into the next, each almost indistinguishable from the other.

Then, I heard the opening notes to a familiar guitar riff - it was Johnny Cash, going into "I walk the Line." The volume remained low, but suddenly the song filled the restaurant. It grabbed me and held me. I was locked into every note, every word.

When Johnny, who I once spent an afternoon with, quit singing, the music once again fell into the background, hardly noticeable, one song indistinguishable from the next.

That's because Johnny Cash was genius - great - the other performers merely good.

When Margie and I have any of the boys with us, we iPhone pictures back and forth with Lavina and Jake, so they will know how whatever child is staying with us is doing at that moment.

So I took this iPhone pic of Jobe to send to them. 

"Cuteness!" Lavina texted back. Then she followed with a text informing me that Kalib was missing his grandma and wanted to see her.

So I had her wave at him and then sent this picture.

"He smiled," Lavina texted back.

Then she took a picture of baby Lynx with her own phone and texted it to us.

We looked at it.

We smiled.

We then finished eating breakfast, 50 miles apart together.

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Back to snow and cold

Today was the first day this season that I spent in snow and cold weather. How did it feel? Normal. One-hundred percent normal, as if this is how the weather has always been and always will be.

Above: Deadhorse airport, enroute to Barrow.

Transition: Wasilla to New York

I am two days behind on this blog and furthermore, I am very tired. So I will keep my words brief. Here I am, on the plane, just leaving Anchorage, sitting next to a very smart guy who is reading the Wall Street Journal. The news is grim.

These don't care if the news is bad or good. Either way, they just keep standing there. These are the Chugach, a bit north of Prince William Sound.

This is Bob, from Colorado, the guy who was reading the Wall Street journal. Now, he is overtaken by the view out the window. Bob works on road slide repair.

Now we are coming in to land at SeaTac, buzzing Seattle as a ferry pulls toward the dock.

The flight out of Seattle had been delayed by five minutes and was now scheduled to leave at 3:10. This was plenty of time for me to wander down to the main food court and order a rockfish sandwich, which I did. It was excellent. 

I then went back the gate but now saw, in big numbers, 4:00 o'clock. "What time do I need to be back by?" I asked the gentleman behind the Alaska Airlines Counter at the gate.

"Not until 4:00 o'clock," he answered in a derisive, sarcastic, tone of voice.

It was then that I looked more closely at the smaller letters posted with the number. "Next update," they read.

"Oh, I see," I said, "I had misinterpreted it to mean 4:00 o'clock."

"No," he sarcastically replied. "It says next update. Check back at 4:00 o'clock." 

So I went back to the dining area and watched airplanes take off for awhile.

About 3:40, I decided I had better go back to the gate anyway.

I returned to the "C" corridor and I had not walked far down it before I heard a voice on the intercom read the names of a number of passengers on my same flight - including my name. "Last and final boarding call," the voice said.

I still had several gates to go, so I started to run as fast as I could with my camera gear and computer.

I saw a couple of other people running as well.

As I approached the gate, the arrogant fellow saw me and turned away.

"You told me to come back at 4:00," I told him as I puffed past. "You almost made me miss my plane."

"I also said to stay in the area," he spoke in the same arrogant tone as before.

"No, you did not say that," I answered.

He didn't either. He was just trying to cover himself.

Had I have lingered in the dining area for one more minute, I would have missed my flight to Newark.

But I didn't. It all turned out good - that's Newark, down below, as our jet comes down on final.

Now I am on the shuttle going from the airport to the hotel I had booked for one night near the airport, becauuse it would be cheaper - MUCH cheaper - than a New York City hotel.

This is John and Maureen. They stayed in the same hotel and were outside when I went out to catch the shuttle back to the airport so that I could catch the train into New York City. They hired a cab to take them to the train station in Newark and invited me to join them.

They insisted upon paying for the whole thing. They are orginally from Burma, but now live in San Francisco, where she works at Macy's and he drives a cab. Burma, they said, is a beautiful place with warm, friendly people - but a horrible government, one of the most repressive on the planet.

They had come so she could attend a Macy's convention. The convention was over and they were going to do some sightseeing.

So we rode the train together into New York.

When I walked out of the train station and onto the sidewalk, I saw that New York is a city where people and balloons freely mingle on the same street.

This gave me new hope for the future.

Last Friday, a sleepy man flew to Kaktovik

Despite multiple attempts, I was unable to put up a single post during my stay in Kaktovik - thanks to Squarespace.* So now I back up to Friday, the day I left, a day that began miserably. This was because I did not get to bed until 1:00 AM, but set my alarm for 3:55 AM.

It was not necessary for me to set the alarm at all, because when I must wake up at such an hour, I really don't sleep at all. I might drop into a semi-doze for five, ten - and if I am very lucky - 15 minutes at a time and then my eyes open and I check the time.

Still, I set the alarm just in case I should somehow actually fall into a deep sleep.

It didn't happen, though.

At 3:54, I was watching the clock. I could have turned it off, but Margie needed to wake up, too, and it was easier for me to let the alarm wake her than to wake her myself.

Margie has been blessed with the gift of sleep. Her head hits the pillow and she's asleep, usually until its time to get up.

I have been cursed with the curse of insomnia.

Worse yet, the less time I have to sleep, the more insomniak I am.

I often wonder how I function at all.

As for Jim, he sleeps at will and also takes many cat naps.

Soon, I was in the car with Margie, driving to Anchorage, to the airport, to hop on my first Era Aviation flight, the one that would take me from Anchorage to Fairbanks.

I desperatedly wanted to sleep on that flight, but I could not.

In Fairbanks, I switched to the plane that would take me to Kaktovik. I was the only passenger, but the plane was full - full of freight.

For those of you who may wonder why everything is so expensive in Rural Alaskan places like Kaktovik, this is why. Except for a barge load or two in the summer, this is how goods travel - including all fresh food, milk and such.

Even with bypass mail, this is not a cheap way to stock the shelves.

Again, I wanted to sleep but again, I could not. Still, I kept my eyes closed. I figured that would help. Accompanied by the roar of the engine and the props beating the air, I held my eyes closed as images, often bordering on dreams, played in my head.

Images of the living, and images of the dead; pictures of places, from Alaska to Arizona, to India and Canada and Greenland and New York City and San Francisco - all sorts of images of people and places, swirling about in my head as the plane carried me over Northern Alaska.

I wanted to hold my eyes closed forever.

I knew I could not do that. So I decided I would hold them closed until I felt the plane stall and the wheels hit the runway in Kaktovik.

But I couldn't do that, either. At a certain point, I knew we had to be drawing near to Kaktovik. We had to be passing over the Brooks Range.

"Eyes!" I ordered. "I have seen the Brooks Range many times! I do not need to see it now! It is better for you to stay closed, so that I might get what little rest I can."

My eyes did not listen.

They popped open.

And there, beneath the plane, stood the Brooks Range.

Very soon, the plane was descending, the Beaufort Sea below.

Then, it was dropping down over the westerns fringes of Barter Island, the northern-most point of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, upon which sits Kaktovik.

Then came the stall, and the bump of the wheels. Now we were rolling down the runway, past the massive hangar built by the Air Force in the early 1950's, when they force-moved the Iñupiat of Kaktovik out of their homes so that they could build this airport where the old village had stood.

More on this later.

I was hungry by now, so, after Crystallee Kaleak and Annie Tikluk found lodging for me in the Assembly of God Church and I got settled in, I walked to Waldo Arms and ordered an omelette.

As I ate, someone came in and peeked through the telescope that points out the Waldo Arms window toward the sea and shore, to see if perhaps there were polar bears out there.

He spotted none.

And then, I was standing on a beach, camera in hand. People were smiling, and waving. I will explain in a subsequent post.

I was about to state that I would explain in tomorrow's post, however, tomorrow is a very special day in someone's life, someone who had a most important role in the happenings that unfolded in Kaktovik, so maybe I will dedicate tomorrow's post to him, instead, and save my larger explanation for the next day.

*Squarespace has an iPad app, but it is a pretty lousy app. I did not have access to wireless where I stayed, so, when I would get a chance, I would go to the school and usually sit on the steel stairway and log on to North Slope Borough School District public wireless.

I built three different posts in the Squarespace app but at the end of each attempt was rewarded only with a rotating, circular, arrow above the word, "publishing." After the failure of my first attempt, which included three photos, I figured maybe Squarespace just could not deal with that tiny amount of information on a slow connection, so I made a new post with just one photo.

After that failed, I made a thrid post that contained only words and no image at all.

Just like before, the publishing arrow just rotated and rotated and rotated - for two days it rotated. yet never published the post. Sometime before the end of fall, I must make the time to research some other web-hosting platforms. When I find the right one, I will move this blog and my future electronic publishing efforts to it.

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