Sno-go on the Tundra

I'm in the tundra villages this week. Yesterday I was in Bethel heading for Nunapitchuk, but the flight was holding for weather. The Yute pilot came out with his clipboard and announced Atmautluak. I was writing emails on my computer and saving them as drafts and said, "Not Nunap?" That was correct, so I asked him if he'd take me to Atmautluak. He was disgusted with me, but with a roomful of people, what could he do, so he agreed. I ended up in Atmau working with Jerry long into the night after a yummy dinner of Papa Murphy's stuffed 5 meat pizza, grapes and turtle cookies imported from Fairbanks.

Today, Jerry borrowed the school sno-go and brought me across the 8 miles to Nunapitchuk. The weather was beautiful and the trail was marked with heavily traveled tracks and branches sticking up every 100 ft or so. We passed or were passed by about 6 other travelers in our 25 minute trip, so its a very popular trip. Thanks Jerry and Larry!

The snow machine ride was exhilarating! It's definitely comparable to riding on a motorcycle, but of course, there is no hope of the temperature being moderate. In 1971, I went on a motorcycle trip with my ex-husband from Gary, Indiana up to Alaska. I was a worldly 19 years old and ready for adventure. We had a Honda 750, 4 cylinder with a sidecar. Our dog, Newtie was in the sidecar. When we went through a wooded area, Newtie got stung by a bee that fell into his seat in a very personal spot. He tried to jump out and almost crashed the motorcycle since he was on a leash looped on the handlebars. We had to send him back to the in-laws in the middle of Washington state because the heat was too much for him and he couldn't get into any shade.

We were decked out in brown leather pants and jackets with fishnet underwear underneath. We wore helmets of course, and had respirators for the considerable amount of dust on the unpaved Alaska highway. When one of the respirators lost its plug, I had to wear it because whenever we were passed by a truck, I had to put my finger in the hole to avoid breathing in the cloud of thick, brown dust. The vibrations were so bad that the Tupperware containers in our supplies rubbed holes in the bottoms. We had to stop often to "visit Mrs. Murphy" because the vibrations just shook everything up. In those days, there was constant grading on the highway, so the road was split 1/3-2/3 with a sizable hump between the partitions of graded rocks and roadbed. Not so bad for a truck, but a formidable hill for a motorcycle.

We didn't make it to Alaska- the spring arm (and shock absorber) on the sidecar snapped just outside of Ft. Nelson, so we stumbled into there for repairs. The best they could do was weld the piece together so we headed back across Canada without any spring in the spring arm. The trip was a total of maybe 5,000 miles of camping in fields and campgrounds, seeing some beautiful rugged country and of course, was foreshading for moving North. We had the motorcycle for a few more years and Newtie loved riding in the sidecar but his penchant for killing other dogs, a throwback from his early years in Vietnam, made riding through the neighborhood problematic.

Here in Nunap, I had a very similar dinner to the one in Atmau with the Bratkas. We did some reminiscing about the old days, child rearing and our own upbringing. When I was in grade school, our class sizes were large, but there were no special education programs. Also, if a child misbehaved, they would receive a paddling. If our parents got a call from the school, we were in big trouble at home. If a child was really bad, they left our class and I'm not sure what happened to them. We also had to wear skirts- no culottes allowed and they had to reach the middle of our knees or longer as determined by the principal. Our middle school Beatles club (unofficial of course) was quite daring by wearing one red knee sock and one white knee sock every Thursday.

As soon as I can, I'll post some pictures- Jerry on the school sno-go on the tundra between villages and a typical mentor sleeping arrangement, a warm floor and sleeping bag in a quiet corner. No, that's not a TV, it's a Polycom system.