Bush, Alaska, and NCLB: The Week Ahead

Normally, people refer to where I live as bush Alaska. It is remote; there isn't a road in or out. It is isolated; the flights to Anchorage cost nearly $500, and have to go through Bethel. And there are bushes. Well, at least here that's all there is. You have to go nearly 30 miles inland to find trees and those are spindly willows that only grow along the riverbanks.

My title, on the other hand, is referring instead to our president. NCLB is Bush's signature education reform bill from his first term, No Child Left Behind. Stuck in the middle is Alaska and my school.

This week will see a visit from officials at both state and district level. You see, we are a level 4 school. Basically, we are failing. Our kids are failing their standardized tests and they are failing to graduate. Essentially, each year you school fails to meet the requirements (which also change every year, though the basic politico-speak is "proficiency in reading , writing, and math") you move further up the NORAD inspired defcon system of levels. Level 5 is the worst and I'm afraid the visit will only confirm we are heading that way despite my best efforts.

As I ran the team this afternoon, my departure from the village was punctuated by the metallic clacking of the monstrous crane pile driving 12-inch wide steel I-beams into the frozen tundra to support a string of new power lines. Our kids might not be able to graduate from high school, but at least by graduation our village will have broadband access and a cell phone tower. Now that's progress.

Anchorage Daily News Article 1.22.06

Here's the link to my newest article for the Anchorage Daily News:

ADN Article 1.22.06

-22 F; Windchill -50

The perfect white drifts build behind my dog houses and rise in the windy shadows of houses. Though the sun has risen in the southeast, it is smeared behind the ground cloud of snow lifted from the earth and carried across its surface by the unrelenting wind. And it is a struggle to stay warm. The poorly built prefab house barged in here 6 years ago has crooked doors that allow slanting rays of sunshine through. Snow works its way into the crevices like some arctic sand storm. The windows whistle a cold tune as the caulking gives way and the sluggish glycol refuses to liquefy and move freely through the radiators and the ancient oil drip coughs and sputters as the Siberian breeze puffs down the stove pipe.

The Kuskokwim 300 Dog Sled Race has been delayed for the second day.

The severe wind advisory has been extended till tomorrow. And we hunker down with coffee and hope the house doesn't spin off it's flimsy wooden stilt foundation, Dorothy style, into perfect arctic blue sky.

Stay tuned for my newest Anchorage Daily News Article being published tomorrow. I'll post the link here.

You Don't Want to Read This Post: The Honeybucket Theory

I think most people have little consideration for their own bodily waste. In fact, I'm sure of it. In today's modern world most people rarely think about crap. And why would you? For most, it's just get up, flush, and it's gone, out of sight out of mind. Hell, if you blink you don't even have to see it. Oh sure there are those rare occasions when you have to get out the plunger, but for most people most of the time, shit is something that rarely crosses our mind. However, when you live in a village where 98% of the homes lack running water and none have flush toilets, anaq (the Yup'ik word for it) takes on new importance.

This morning saw an extra big dip in the mercury as our ambient temperature dropped to nearly twenty degrees below zero. In addition, 10 mph winds make it feel like -40. So it was no surprise when I went to the bathroom this morning at school (one of only two buildings in the village with toilets) to see this (check out the pics.) No matter how much insulation, pipes invariably manage to freeze.

I should complain. I should rail against the stench of a 150 kids' excrement collected in a trash bucket. I should, but I won't because while I don't like using the honeybucket as it is paradoxically called, I think there is a certain humility involved with having to see your own crap.

Frankly, as I was pissing into the bucket this afternoon I realized and of course solved the quintessential existential dilemma inherently built into the architecture of the modern western civilization: the invention of
indoor plumbing. Ever since the first water closet whisked away the first turd, our humility and our appropriate place in the universe has gone right with it. Our decadence and arrogance has put us on par with Rome and I see a similar decline in our future. It's only a matter of time before the anaq hits the fan.

My solution? Simple. People need to be forced to deal with their own shit. A honeybucket for every house in America. When I run for President that will be my campaign slogan. I see a slewage of them. No Crap Left Behind. Continued continence for the country! Well, you get the picture. Just remember: vote crap in 2008.

Of course, I do hope they get the pipes thawed cause after the pots marinate overnight the stench truly does become worthy of complaint.

Tuesday 10:16pm Skies Clearing

The wind is still whipping down from the north, picking up the snow that has recently landed and swirling it in tiny tornadoes behind buildings. Each structure creates this miniscule vortex which twists the blowing snow and deposits it long tendril drifts that stretch for many feet. In my dog yard, an old plywood sled I use to collect dog crap provided just such a wind break and the snow piled into a drift nearly fifty feet long perfectly tapered from the height of the sled to the ground. And as I ready for sleep I know that overnight this landscape will change and rewrite itself with the wind.

Sundogs Update

As the day has progressed the sundogs have grown more pronounced. In this close up it is even possible to see some of the colorings I was referring to in my earlier post.

Sundogs in Kongiganak, Alaska

Here is a pair of photos from this afternoon, roughly 2pm AK standard time. While two o'clock is not noon, the sun reaches its zenith around this time here in Kongiganak because Alaska only has two time zone despite being wide enough to have four. Since we are so much further west than say Juneau our solar time is shifted from our clocks.

Anyway, sundogs form as a result of diamond shaped crystals in the atmosphere. The pictures can give you a hint but they really don't do justice to the phenomenon. The dogs themselves often have slight striations of color reminiscent of the rainbow but in soft pastels instead of the bright roygbiv of their atmospheric cousins. For more info on Sundogs check out the graphics and images on this sight:
http://www.sundog.clara.co.uk/halo/parhelia.htm

Remembering Autumn

I don't generally share poetry and lord knows most of what I read spread out around the web reeks of cliche and teen angst and misspelling and Odd Capitalization meant to display great meaning in the larger type. Still, humbly, I feel compelled tonight in the midst of winter, ten below and blowing, to remember how this season got itself started one day back in September. (The hulking shadow is actually our village's fuel supply known lovingly as "The Tank Farm.")

First Frost

in the first light of day:
sounds travel farther,
a dog chain rattles,
blades of grass rub against each other,
and dew drips into the waiting rainbarrel.

through the gathering clouds in the east
a shard of light, the slender moon rocked
onto its side, like
someone turned over in sleep.

Into the Silent World

Wednesday evening was one of those rare days here without wind. I hooked eight of the dogs and headed out on the trail just as the sun was setting. I headed north out of town, into the deepening purple of the earth's shadow rising from the north as the sun set at my back.

The dogs quickly found their rhythm in the -8 temperature and the sled slid quickly along the snowmachine trail. People ask me sometimes why I bother with dogs. This is especially true when so many people here in town grew up with dog teams only to trade them in for snowmachines in the 1970s and early 1980s. Certainly, for time and effort, snowmachines come out on top. Last year I covered 250 miles solo hauling a sled in order to hunt caribou. I left at 7:30 in the morning and returned with a small bull at 1:30am. 250 miles, 18 hours, 2 bullets, 1 caribou. Still, were I given the option, I would much rather have spent 18 hours with the dogs.

One of the Yup'ik names given to the first white people to settle in this land was translated as "Children of Thunder." White missionaries and traders brought with them all the essentials of modern living, and that often meant noise. Airplanes, snowmachines, and chainsaws brought advantages, but they also brought an end to the quiet life.

Today, despite the fact that I live 500 miles from a road that goes anywhere, I am surrounded by noise. At times it is deafening. Airplanes landing and taking off; snowmachines and four-wheelers perpetually on the move, roaring across the tundra; and behind it all the constant drone of the village's diesel generators.

It is from this that I escape on the sled. Bundled against the cold, I stand on the runners in silence. All around me the darkening world is still, sleeping in shadow. As the southwestern horizon darkens the large gibbous moon rises, brightening the world as only the moon can. My dogs forms spread out in shadow against the snow and my own ethereal incarnation stretches out there too. I call to my dogs, my voice miniscule and fleeting. Together, our perpendicular forms glide across the night, chasing the moon, fleeing the mechanical din, and leaving in our wake only the padding of paws on powder and the crunching of the runners as they flatten crystals of snow and ice.

The Long Haul Revisited

This time I'm posting a short video clip I took while hanging onto the sled with one hand and filming with the other. This was the full team, all ten dogs on the way home from our 37 mile trip last week. If you want to read more about that trip you can check out my previous post entitled, The Long Haul

The Sled in Action Part 2

As promised here's another clip of the new sled in action. This was at the start of the trip yesterday. It's a bit longer, but you can get a good look at the dogs and the sled as they pass. Luckily, you can't really see me... I'm just the Johnny Cash figure along for the ride. We were at the end of the airstrip so you can hear a Cessna 207 taking off in the background. Again, clicking the photo will bring up the movie. Enjoy, and leave a comment!

Brett's Sled In Action

OK, it's been a long time in the making, but here it is: My homemade dog sled in action for the first time. I built this sled from a huge hunk of hickory. My only tools were a table saw and drill press. Everything else was done by hand. The sled itself is very light: total weight less than 25 pounds. I took just four dogs out for a short 3.5 mile run to test the sled. My GPS registered 21.9 mph! If you click on the photo it should take you to the video. It's small, but it will give you an idea of how things went. Tomorrow I'll try to post another short clip.

Politics Alaska Style

I wrote earlier about Alaska's ornery Senator Ted Stevens and his continuing efforts to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling. Now there is a terrific piece in the Seattle Weekly which highlights exactly some of the issues that make this Senator such an embarrassment to some of us Alaskans.

His theatrics and Senate floor displays would be ridiculous and laughable if it weren't for the bizarre way in which the Senate works. As elucidated by that perennial political commentator John Stewart of The Daily Show Ted Stevens is a senator "who wields power due to his seniority, because unlike in the real world, in the Senate, the older you get, the more people have to listen to your crazy ramblings."

There are a couple of things to understand about Alaska before you can truly grasp what Alaska politics is like. First, despite being the largest state in the union Alaska is a very small place. I rarely travel to the Anchorage airport without running into someone I know. And I've only been here eight years. Second, for whatever reason (perhaps the long dark nights in winter) people seem to have large families. Senator Stevens himself has 6 children. Third, for yet another inexplicable reason, the expression "keepin' it in the family" has particular relevance in Alaska. See for example "Papa Pilgrim" and his brood of wilderness dwelling bible thumpers. Or for that matter look to our other Senator (Lisa Murkowski) who somehow managed to get herself reelected, no doubt thanks to her fathers campaigning funding help.

Lastly, and perhaps most important of all people Outside (the terms we Alaskans use to talk about the rest of you down there) need to understand is a historical mentality that Stevens and Murkowski embody. The history of Alaska is defined by booms and busts. It started with the Russians killing every fur bearing animal they good. It continued with the Yankee whalers who decimated the bowhead and walrus populations. Then came the salmon fisheries where entire rivers were simply blocked off and every fish captured. So many that thousands rotted before they could be processed. Then came more than fifty years of gold digging and mining followed by the "black gold" of Prudhoe. Each of these riches was stripped, killed, mined, dug, canned, skinned, drilled and sold without forethought or planning and each time the resources collapsed. Some, like the salmon, are still struggling to return.

While the Outside moves (slowly) toward more responsible resource development, Alaska is still looking for the next boom. This mentality is something the multimillionaire Stevens understands well. It might be ANWR or it might be the natural gas pipeline, either way, you can bet that Stevens will have his hands elbow deep in the cash that is bound to flow through his Senate.

Alaska November 1938

At the left here are the first two pages of my great Uncle Bill Mowry's Alaska Diary. The diary itself is a small green book no more than 3.5 inches by 2.5 inches with spaces for each day a printed date. Each day was given roughly a paragraph of space. Uncle Bill filled exactly those lines and no more or less on virtually every entry.

Since the journal had printed dates which started in January, he started his notes near the end of the journal (November 1938) and then once 1939 began the ever thriftful man started writing at the beginning of the book. No sense wasting money to buy another journal.

He was working in Fairbanks at the time hanging electrical wires (and maybe phone lines) and putting in telephone poles for the expanding city. Here's a transcription of his first two entries (I tried to keep his capitalization and punctuation or lack thereof throughout):

STARTED Thu. 1938
DIARY Acc $210 November 10th
AC, CASH. Fri.
Strung Wire Far as Isabell Creek.
Went Back and worked Creamers
Line till 3 oclock and then put
Crossarms on College Line till Dark.
Snowed in Afternoon. Temp 8
above zero. Was 22 below
zero yesterday. Fell halfway
down pole yesterday. Hurt my leg

November 11th
Put Up Poles For Alaska
Aeronautical Station then
Hung Cross Arms on
College Line Till Dark.
Temp. 22 above. Few
Snow Flurries. Armistice
Day But We Worked
Anyway.

The Long Haul

Even as I sat waiting in the Bethel airport for what was hours on Multiple days, I comforted myself with the thought that at least when I returned there would be snow for the mushing.

So Thursday I hooked up all ten dogs and set out on a 37 mile run. While the few inches was a welcome addition to the nonexistent snow prior to my trip, we were still faced with a rough trail and lots of areas of deep drifted snow and a punchy trail.

However, as we returned just after sunset, the dogs took the home stretch in stride and shook off the rather difficult early part of the ride. Especially difficult were the nearly thirty foot vertical drops onto the river. The brackish rivers in the area have widely varying tides which puts the flat ice well below the land causing a downward slide in order to cross rivers. It will be several days before we run again though since several of the dogs (and me) were very stiff and sore this morning.

Weather Permitting

Dateline Bethel: We hadn't seen snow in Kongiganak for nearly a month. So I decided to take advantage of new airfares and travel to Bethel to check on a dog found at the pound which was reputed to be my dog. Most any of the last 20 days I could have made it to Bethel and back on the same day. Unfortunately today, the one day I decided to fly, it decided to snow. Of course the National Weather Service proved my tagline. They had "scattered snow showers" in the forecast which was not what actually happened. Two inches of snow, zero visibility and a low ceiling which means I'm stuck in Bethel tonight. It wasn't even my dog! One of those phrases we learn when flying in small planes in bush Alaska: you plans? Weather permitting.

Alaska: A Family Tradition

In 1938 my great uncle Bill Mowry traveled across the country to Seattle and eventually by boat to Alaska. He worked and lived in and around Fairbanks and Cleary, Alaska. Cleary itself doesn't exist anymore save for some broken down shacks, a small cemetery hidden in the woods and old rusted steam equipment.

These two pictures are both marked on the back. The one on the right reads Bill Mowry - 38 in the same felt pen and shaky cursive that also marks the Daily Journal he kept during his time in Alaska. The second picture is marked in a blue ball point pen. The cursive is much more fluid and neater. It is most deinitely my aunt Rosie's hand, I recognize it from years of birthday and Christmas cards we used to receive from them.

Thanks to my cousin Linda who was gracious enough to send me my Uncle's journal. And to my aunt Marian who passed along these photos. Now that I have scanned them in I'm going to try to find out more about the photos from the Fairbanks archives.

Blogging is about the present. It is in many ways a James Joyce-ian attempt at capturing the internal monologue that is constantly going on inside of all of us. I'm going to try to avoid that. However, as people continue to push forward in technology I think some people need to utilize the technology to hold on to the past. UAF's Alaska and Polar Regions Collection is trying to do just that. And so I will be offering up some pieces of my great uncle's journal in the future as a way of honoring and preserving that past too. Stay tuned.

New Year's Kongiganak Style

Some go to New York and watch a ball drop. Others watch it on TV and drink champagne and kiss people and sing ridiculous songs when the New Year begins. Here in Kongiganak, we do things a bit different (well, at least this year since the cable is out and the village is dry).

After the impromptu 11pm church service, people file out onto a long lake at the base of the village. From here the annual fireworks display is launched. A bunch of guys stand on the ice and launch a bunch of store bought fireworks into the air. At the same time, two other village traditions are either happening or getting started. The first is firing rifles and shotguns into the air. I admit, my first year here when I was told this was the tradition, I figured I was better off spending New Year's indoors.

The second is a game of follow the leader... by snowmachine. There can be as many as thirty snowmachines screaming around the village in a long snake, everyone trying to keep up. After an hour or so when the gas tanks have run dry and the cartrideges are all spent, the village breathes a giant sigh of relief and heads to bed, their energy spent.

At least we will have Russian Orthodox Slaviq celebration to keep us occupied for another week before everyone has to return to school.