The Sun Sets over the Tundra--in the South!

November 23, 2014

One of my dear friends told me a couple of months ago that she liked reading my blog posts and seeing my pictures, but that she wanted to know how I personally am doing.  So I guess I’ll give that a few paragraphs; I haven’t taken a whole lot of pictures lately anyway!

It’s not a simple thing to describe, really.  I miss my family and my friends, and when I was backpacking with Blake and Kristin in the Selkirk Mountains in September I realized that I miss the trees and the Idaho woods.  But at the same time, I can’t explain why I feel so at home in Alaska and why I love it so much. 

 I can say a few reasons:  this is a very warm, active, friendly community that has accepted me ad taken me in very quickly.  It’s a nice size, although I find myself wanting to live in one of the smaller villages for a while to see what that’s like.  Priest River, much as I love it, has been feeling increasingly too big and too contentious.  I’m not so naïve as to think that there aren’t the same problems here—there are certainly drug and alcohol problems, theft, family problems and some poverty, but honestly—not as much as in Priest River and Newport.  I have only had one or two drug seekers in the clinic and those were cannery workers from outside.  All the kids go to one school and the whole community cares for and about them; the kids are really the center of this community.  I don’t hear any wrangling that uses the school to push any political point of view or stance.  Maybe it’s that the schools are better funded, but it’s also a cultural difference in attitude I think.  Everyone is related in a dozen ways to everyone else (except for us newcomers), if not by blood then by history and proximity.  

I was really struck when I first got here and went to some high school basketball games by how polite and well-mannered everyone was; there was no yelling at the refs, there was no protesting calls, there was only rooting for all the kids, and the kids always helped up anyone who fell down, even the other team, and congratulated them on good plays and commiserated with them on errors made.  I think that kind of attitude and behavior is largely due to the native culture that is still woven through everything.  It seems like the fewer people there are in a place and the more the environment makes you need each other, the better people tend to get along, in general.  And there is still generally respect for elders.

I also like the way this is, in a lot of ways, still the frontier despite airplanes and cell phones and the internet.  Like everywhere, there is the relentless intrusion of bureaucracy, rules, checklists of checklists, etc., but in a very real way we have to do what has to be done regardless of whether we have the exact right tools or credentials to do it with.  Don’t get me wrong—I believe in the wisdom of guidelines, but not when it gets to the point that they make it impossible to do the RIGHT thing.  For the most part, we are still allowed (and expected) to use common sense and do the right thing, and if you are dumb enough to get hurt by doing something stupid, we’ll help you out but don’t even for one minute entertain the idea of suing someone.

This is a big place, Alaska, and until you’ve flown over some of it it’s impossible to really begin to comprehend the incredible size and scale of it.  I love the openness, the wildness, the freedom, the solitude here.  I don’t feel crowded or claustrophobic.  I love it that most everybody here lives a subsistence life, at least to some degree, even though we also can order just about anything on Amazon Prime.  Most people still fish and hunt and gather berries to feed their families and dogs.  It’s really given me a different point of view about those things; an older native man, when the well-healed tourist industry based on catch-and-release fishing was explained to him, said scornfully, “We don’t play with our food!”  For the locals, fishing is not a sport, its part of feeding yourself and the family and for many is also a large part of their income.

So there is an undefinable but undeniable feeling of belonging here and coming home since I first visited Alaska in 2004 with my fire team.  I was notified in Sept. that I have been accepted into the student loan program, which is unfortunately not retroactive to the date I was hired here, but still will be a very welcome respite from some of my astronomic student loan debt.  I plan to be here at least 3 years from the end of Sept. (unless something completely unforeseen happens), and then I’ll reevaluate.  I’m very happy here, and I feel very fulfilled.  I love my job, finally, as well as my work.  And I’m pretty busy most of the time, but much less of that is time working and much more is a social life and doing the things I love; very different from the last two years in Priest River.

So I guess I just went on and on about me and didn’t write anything else this time—this is for you, Maria!  I will leave you with some pictures and the always-entertaining Unalaska police report (which is for you, Cassie).

Unalaska Police Report (Unalaska is the town at Dutch Harbor down the Aleutian chain)

Oct. 16  Suspicious Person/Activity

A man with a swollen toe told the officer who stopped him as he was trundling along the roadway that he and his erstwhile companions had liberated a wheelchair from the hotel, to  more comfortably enable his return to his vessel.  The thief whose license was suspended, was dispossessed of his stolen wheels and made to walk to his boat.  The hotel did not care to press charges.

Oct. 17 Robbery

The wheelchair thief, accompanied by his two erstwhile companions, stole a wallet fom a taxi driver's purse and then refused to pay the fare when the driver demanded that he exit the vehicle and return her wallet.  The driver had no interest in pursuing charges and wished only to have the cab fare recovered.

Oct. 24 Harrassment

Taxi Driver B complained that Taxi Driver A is harassing her by approachig her taxi and taking photos of her.  An officer explained to the various involved parties that continuing this pattern of behavior could result in the suspension of their taxi permits.

Nov. 3 Animal

Caller asked for assistance removing what he believed to be a fox in his attic.  He later determined it was perhaps not a fox after all, though its true identity remained a mystery.

Nov. 5 Criminal Mischief

An inmate who was hanging on to the bars of his cell and screaming that he was dead and had no pulse was able to find the energy to throw a remote control down the corridor, breaking it into several pieces.

Nov. 8 Civil

Caller spoke with an officer about the legality of his wife having turned his dog in to an Anchorage-based shelter after it bit her dog.

Guess the holidays bring out the best in all of us!

One of the thousands of jelly fish that washed up this fall.  These are the non-stinging kind.

Summer fishing shacks on the beach

Sunset over Red Salmon Lake

Gulls drawing a line in the sand

Beach at the mouth of the Naknek River where it enters Bristol Bay

 

 

Fall grass

 

May to October--time warp??!!!?

Last time I looked, fishing season was just about to start and now, like someone who just had a colonoscopy, I look up and the leaves are turning and falling and the wind is biting and cold.  How does that happen?  At least when you have a colonoscopy you know it's the Versed in your veins that causes the time warp.

Sam is puzzled about that too

So how to sum up the last 4 months in one blog post??  Fishing season was everything I expected and more.

into the water

Just a few of the boats waiting to go out to the bay

Sunrise after a long night at the clinic

  I got a lot of experience in emergency medicine, especially trauma.  Naknek has all the canneries with each of the seven employing 300-600 people, the fisherman who number usually three to a boat and around 400 boats coming and going, along with the set netters who only come in the summer to fish with families who still live here.  King Salmon has all the tourist traffic coming to Katmai National Park, the seasonal Park Service people, the lodges and fishing guides and generally well-heeled fisher folk.  Add to that the extra employees needed for all the businesses in the two communities, the extra flights on Pen Air and the summer schedule when Alaska has several flights daily, and there are a lot of people who have a lot of interesting ways to get hurt.  The injuries I saw ranged from the relatively humorous fishing guide who came in with a large fly embedded in his nose (he had just said to his client, "Remember I'm back here!")

 to the really tragic: a lodge worker who was ferrying supplies up a remote river and was struck in the back of the head by the float of a plane taking off near him.  I now know the medical billing code for finger laceration by heart, and am thinking I might as well take up quilting since I've had so much practice sewing now.  I have a few pictures with all identifying information removed so that privacy laws aren't violated, and the one of the fishing guide is included with his permission.

This is a finger

This is a forearm that got caught in a hydraulic net reel

This is what the forearm looks like on the inside

This is an elbow that hit a rock in the tundra while it's owner was avoiding a bear

It was long hours day and night, many medevacs out to Anchorage, and never a dull moment.  We had a good team here, with three providers working days and one who just did night call from 5 PM to 9 AM, and we rotated each week.  We also employed extra medical assistants, billers, and front desk people for fishing season.



We had people from all over the world--Ethiopia, the Phillipines, Mexico, India, even the lower 48.  Language was sometimes a challenge!  I also met two people who live in the little town on the Mexican border that I grew up in, and two brothers from my Idaho home town that are cousins to a guy I used to date.  And the uncle of my elder son's girlfriend from near my town in Idaho.  Someone once said there are only 500 people in the world.  They must have all made several appearances here this summer.

It's hard to say whether we got more business when the fishing was going hot and heavy or when it wasn't and everyone was in the bars and then doing stupid things.  Sadly, I also had three instances of psychotic breaks in people for whom I had to get a court order to send to the mental hospital in Anchorage against their will.

At the end of July we had the annual celebration of the end (or almost) of fishing season, "Fishtival."  It consists of all kinds of activities including a parade, a craft bazaar (probably more aptly called a bizarre), contests of all sorts, raffles, music, art competitions and a whole lot of other delightful tomfoolery.

Ann Shankel and her sled dog team in the parade

A community church float with assorted band-like instruments

Hmmm...never was sure about the origin of this float

Matt, Katmai Natnl Park employee and member of the Queen Salmon band at the bazaar

Camai's entry in the "put your face here" contest

So, what about that midnight sun you always hear about in summertime Alaska?  Well, this far south it actually does get DARK, but only for a couple of hours.  It's not hard for me to sleep with all that light, but it is hard to get yourself to go to bed!  I mean, it's daytime!  I could just do a little weeding in my raised bed before I go in (never mind that it's 10:30 PM).  Here are a couple of pictures of the dogs at midnight on our walk:

In late July my niece, Samantha, came up to visit for a couple of weeks, but I will leave that for the next installment. 

Here are a few gems from the Unalaska police report and some miscellaneous pictures after that:

June 26--Officers responded to the residence of two drunken brothers, wherein the two siblings were having a dispute about various minor issues.  One brother asked officers to remove his SIM card from his sibling's phone, and take his sibling to his room.  Officers told the brother to collect his own SIM card and that the sibling could go to bed when he wished.

August 25--Intoxicated adult male whined to police that his brother took his liquor bottle and wouldn't give it back.  An officer, after speaking with the drunken caller surmised really, no police intervention was necessary.

August 10--Caller reported two "fishermen" clubbing salmon with rocks.  Officers responded but did not locate the salmonid-slaying barbarians.

Midnight sunset

Maybe

A little state bird humor

Stay tuned for the next installment of the Rolling Tundra Review...

Naknek paddy wheck, the time has really flown!

I hope none of you were foolish enough to use my blog as a calendar, because if you were you apparently lost all of April. Although this implies that I wasn’t actually here for a month, I was indeed here in Alaska except for an unexpected trip to Idaho mid-April for about 10 days. It was not exactly a vacation; I spent most of the time cleaning out my stuff from my house and dispersing it various places including the chicken coop and other sheds on my property, a rented storage unit, packed in Rubbermaid tubs to send to Naknek, the thrift store and THE DUMP! I didn’t get everything sorted and packed, but knocked some money off the rent for my new renters for finishing up the packing and doing the cleaning. I also (with help both paid and volunteer) ripped out carpet and linoleum and had the wood floors in the kitchen and small bedroom refinished, scrubbed walls and ceiling in the small bedroom, had an electrician fix the porch light, fix the downed power line that ran to the old well, and rewire the chicken coop (actually a very large concrete-floored former commercial laying hen coop) so that it can safely be used as a teepee workshop by my teepee-maker friend. Whew! Also spent a pittance of time visiting my mom and my niece and cleaning up the yard and garden. I brought the two dogs back to Alaska with me (they didn’t get first class, they got baggage compartment seating), which was a real educational experience when I had to spend the night in the airport in Anchorage with them. I learned that I never never want to fly with two dogs again, especially if one of them is my golden retriever Sam, who chewed through the other dog’s leash while I “slept” on the bench they were tied to. My bag that had their dog food in it got checked all the way through so I fed them frozen yogurt for dinner and a turkey and Swiss sandwich for breakfast. We all survived. April in Alaska was spent planting a group garden in a friend’s enormous greenhouse, being on call, seeing patients, and taking an excellent refresher in Advanced Cardiac Life Saving, which I may actually get to use out here. It’s what you see on TV when someone calls “code blue”. Sort of. Hopefully not nearly as dramatic as on Grey’s Anatomy, but more effective. I also got to taste whale meat for the first time. The other health care provider, Katie, is married to Sonny who is native and so has the right to hunt whale. He got this one with a harpoon and bow and arrow. All of us (and more) who were in the ACLS class had dinner at Katie and Sonny’s house and whale was the main entre. It was very good! Although it smelled a little bit like fish, it didn’t taste like it. It really tasted kind of like elk, and had a very dense, fine-grained texture. I asked Sonny what was the best way to eat blubber and he said, “At your house!” I still want to taste it, but might have to wait until next year. These pictures are of the gathering at Katie’s house.

There is a smallish lake out in the tundra at the end of the road where I’m living now that the dogs and I walk to at least once or twice a day. I heard an unfamiliar bird call out there, and found out that it was Sandhill Cranes. I didn’t get to see them since I forgot to bring my binoculars with me, but you could sure hear them. The Red Salmon cannery which is across the highway from me pipes water from the lake into the cannery when it’s operating. There is a sketchy boardwalk that we walk out on along the pipe where it goes across all the shallows to the open water. You can see a big beaver lodge out on one of the little islands, and the gulls are nesting out there too.

The sun is up now by about 5:30 (and I know this because I had to go down to the clinic on Thursday at 4:30 AM to meet a fisherman off a tender who had fallen and broken ribs) and doesn’t set until after 10 PM. This is a picture taken at about 10:30 PM last week.

I just ordered mosquito/noseeum mesh head net and jacket, and a supply of repellent. The black flies are already showing up (they call them white socks out here), and there is a goodly supply of mosquitoes down at the lake already. I think I will learn to love the wind this summer! Herring fishing has begun, although the allowable catch is pretty small, so there isn’t really a big influx yet, but the town has definitely got a hum and a buzz and a hustle that it didn’t have a month ago. The canneries are gearing up and bringing in people, the barges are coming in from Seattle and Anchorage, and the fishermen are getting their boats ready for salmon season. Yesterday (a Saturday) I had a call from dispatch at the very polite hour of 8 AM after a full night’s sleep to take care of a fisherman with a dislocated shoulder. About half an hour after he came in, I got a guy with a lacerated and crushed finger. I was unable to put the shoulder back in place—the kid weighed 265 pounds and was mostly sheer muscle, so even after injections of morphine and fentanyl, oral doses of Valium and hydrocodone, his muscle spasms and my inability to provide enough traction prevented me from getting it back in. He wasn’t even very loopy even after all that. So we arranged for a commercial flight to Anchorage for him. The kid with the crushed finger opted to go out to Anchorage for treatment too. He could probably see the eager gleam in my eye when I discussed the possibility of amputating the end of his pinky finger. I explained that he really would never even miss that tip and I could just suture the skin over the stump and get him back to work pretty quickly, but he decided he was pretty attached to that piece of flesh. So he went out to Anchorage too. Then about the time I got those two almost taken care of I had a woman with severe abdominal pain come in, and we had to Medi-vac her out to Anchorage post haste. Meanwhile I missed both the piano recital (all 6 kids) and the “Color Me Bristol Bay” fun run. So fishing season begins! I went off call at 0900 this morning and it sure felt good to not be dreading that ringtone all day. I finally got to meet my new landlord and look at the place I’m going to rent and sign a lease today. It turns out that it was not the house I thought it was, but is actually the house across the street from the one I thought it was. I thought he said “last house on the road”, but he actually said “last house on the right.” Which is great because it’s a much nicer house! It’s on 2 acres, has a smoke house for fish, a wonderful sauna (we call them sweat houses out here) 3 bedrooms and a big loft, and 2 bathrooms, storage sheds. It even comes with two nice dog houses! So I’ll get to start moving in tomorrow. I’m pretty excited about it. I’ll include some pictures next time. Meanwhile I will leave you, as promised last time, with a few entries from the Unalaska Police Report: Assistance Rendered—A severely intoxicated patient refused treatment at the clinic and departed the area with a catheter still in place. Officers contacted the man walking along the roadway and advised him it would be prudent to remove the catheter. He did. Assistance Rendered—Caller reported her neighbor was dumping cat litter in the caller’s yard. Officers contacted the neighbor, who does not own a cat and has no need of cat litter, and learned that a number other people in the nearby area have cats. MVA Damage—Officer documented damage to a motor vehicle, caused by an unidentified vehicle, at an unidentified time, in an unidentified place. (I am not making this up!) Drunk Disturbance—Officers responded to a boarding house regarding threats of violence. An intoxicated tenant, upset over the volume of music played by an apparently sober tenant, called the sober tenant bad names and implied that nobody liked him. Domestic Disturbance—Officers responded to the home of two drunken brothers who were unable to play well with another and required police tell them to just get along. Why didn’t I think of calling the police when my boys were fighting??? Stay tuned for more of the rolling tundra review, published at random intervals.

The March Edition: Rolling Tundra Review

March is almost gone and the snow is melting here and turning the roads into streams of mud and potholes into ponds. It has been sunny nearly every day, even the days that begin with thick fog or progress into snow flurries in the afternoon. The days are increasing in length quickly, especially in the evenings when the sun is still relatively high in the sky at 9 PM already. The sun is still not up by 8 AM yet, but coming soon. One of the things I’m looking forward to is the sudden explosion of every green growing thing into the short, intense burst of summer we have here.

We actually had a tundra fire here about 3 weeks ago! I was listening to the dispatch on the EMS radio at home and trying not to laugh. I think every volunteer firefighter , engine, ambulance and pumper truck from both Naknek and King Salmon showed up. At one point I heard, “Dispatch this is engine two with three buckets and two flappers.” Flappers, I think, are sticks with, well, flaps of some material on the end that are used to beat out flames. I’ve seen them, but never used one. I figured that I would be called to the clinic shortly to treat twisted knees and broken ankles on people who hiked in the dark across tundra carrying buckets and flappers. But the wind blew the fire to the edge of a little lake and it went out all by itself. No one figured out how it got started, but no one got hurt and it was a great training exercise.

Speaking of tundra, if you have never tried to hike across it, let me try to describe it to you. Picture bowling balls of widely varying sizes randomly strewn across a sloping floor. The balls must have a flat side because they don’t roll down the mild slope. Then, cover the bowling balls all up with a layer of soft foam rubber that varies in thickness from ½ inch to 4 feet in no particular pattern. Get the foam rubber wet. Then cover the whole thing evenly with very low-growing ground cover plants and the occasional shrub, making sure to camouflage the sometimes-precipitous difference in height between the bowling balls and the floor. Try hiking briskly across this, while also leaning into a 30 mph wind that is blowing your hair into your eyes and mouth and two VERY large Inuit huskies slam into you from the side or behind every so often. OK, so the Inuit huskies weren’t out during the fire, but I did experience this scenario twice daily when I took care of my friend’s sled dogs and chickens while she was out of town for 10 days. You can only walk two dogs at a time otherwise they turn into a pack and are likely to chase caribou. Not that I’ve seen any caribou yet, but people assure me that they are not infrequently seen down by the grass flats and even on the beach.

My friend’s house is really an amazing thing! She built it herself, with some help from friends, from a lot of salvaged material as well as lumber and supplies that all have to come by barge in the summer. It has solar power and the water system consists of captured rain and snow melt that feeds into a 1,000 gallon tank located in the second floor of the house. She also has a back-up generator, a propane heater, a wood stove and a wood cook stove, so she’s pretty well set even without being on the grid or having a well. I have located a bigger place to rent starting in May, and if nothing goes wrong I’ll be in a 3 bedroom, 1.5 bath house on 2 acres off the highway with a sauna and a smokehouse and lots of tundra for the dogs to run in. It’s a little farther from the clinic but not much, and is just down the road from my boss. So now I’m trying to accumulate some furniture, since the place isn’t furnished. The place everybody turns to for buying and selling, as well as announcing and commenting on whatever is going on, is a Facebook page called the Bristol Bay Exchange. It’s kind of a digital newspaper, or at least fills some of the functions of one. And speaking of newspapers, one of the funniest reads I have encountered is the Dillingham police report that comes out in the weekly paper that serves Bristol Bay and the entire Aleutian chain. There are also police reports from other towns and villages, but the guy that writes the Dillingham one is obviously a frustrated journalist who is having to start at the bottom and work his way up. I will share some of the best ones in the next blog entry. Laying in your supplies for the winter when you live off the road system includes making a barge order in the spring to come from Anchorage when the ice is off the oceans and rivers. There is a catalog with just about everything you can think of in the way of foodstuffs (not fresh, but canned or boxed or jarred), household supplies, dog food, even straw bales, steer manure and fertilizer, all of which I ordered for gardening this summer. You have to buy at least 25 cases total (a bag of fertilizer counts as a case) and it costs 23 cents per pound for shipping. I went in with a friend on an order since neither of us had 25 cases by ourselves. It’s interesting how we comparison shop here—we check the barge catalog, then we check Amazon.com and see if they have the item cheaper or for the same price but free shipping on Amazon Prime. I do splurge on a weekly Full Circle Farms CSA box of fresh, organic produce flown up from Seattle. I am continuing to really enjoy the Camai clinic and all my coworkers. Katie Copps-Wilson is my PA counterpart and we are not only seeing patients but teaching sex ed and puberty at the school, painting and remodeling the provider office, and working on forming a Wellness group along with the Park Service and other community members. I think we will work well together! Here is Katie with some of her educational models:

I did a little exploring around the Red Salmon cannery the other day, which was deserted now but will be bustling 24 hours a day in June. I will close with a few of the pictures I took there.

WOW! Winterfest

Last weekend was Winterfest, a four-day extravaganza involving the entire community of Naknek, South Naknek and King Salmon (who are for the most part all one community, particularly since all the kids go to one school in Naknek). It's a big enough deal that the kids are out of school Thursday and Friday. There were so many things going on that it made my head spin trying to figure out what to go to! The official start was on Thursday night when the Winterfest queen was crowned. I really like the way they do things here--nominees for the queen position must be over 60 years old, and this year's queen was nominated by several youngsters who read their letters to the audience. The queen was too bashful to give an acceptance speech, and in fact had to be fetched from some duty she was performing somewhere to accept the honor. This was followed by a talent show, mostly consisting of kids of various ages doing musical numbers, but also featured a master hula hooper. The kindgergartners did two song and dance numbers to great roars of approval from the crowd. One of them made it to Youtube, so you might look for that performance of the Jackson Five's version of Rockin' Robin. There was an incredible amount of raffling going on (is that a verb? to raffle?)and resulted in a lot of money being raised for the school and a FOUR PAGE small type list of winners, and my name was NOT on any of those pages. There were Texas Hold Em tournaments, dart tournaments, cribbage tournaments, puzzle assembling tournaments, a Mystery Murder potluck, dances, a multi-village basketball tournament, an air drop of candy and ping pong balls redeemable for cash (I bet there will be candy and ping pong balls being excavated from the tundra a thousand years from now). Some of the events that required normal winter weather rather than the record-breaking 40 degree weather we'd been having had to be cancelled, such as the Polar Bear Plunge and the ice skating events. On Saturday I participated in the bazaar which was held in the old gym. Camai clinic had a table with various informational literature and I offered to do blood pressure checks, but no one took me up on it. Maybe because I spent most of my time (and a lot of money, I might add) circulating amongst all the other booths, meeting people, checking out the wares and taking pictures. There was Jill, the RN who works with us part time but who was selling Jillie's Jellys, made from Salmon berry, Nagoon berry, raspberries, and other exotic local berries. There was ivory and baleen carved items of jewelery. There was beading and origami and sushi, and my favorite booths, the tanned hides and skins of local trapper's efforts.

Now before you get all tree hugger and vegan on me, these mammals are in vast abundance here, and people still trap for subsistance and to make a little cash to feed and clothe their families. The workmanship on some of the things they make is incomparable! One of the native ladies had her grandmother's parka which was made entirely of wolf fur. I bought a sheared beaver skin hat which is the softest, warmest thing you have ever felt! I am completely aware that I look ridculous in it, but I don't care--winter weather is back and the temps have not been getting much above zero recently, and this hat is WARM!

I also entered the chili cook-off with my "Green Double Bean Chicken Chili" and won 3rd prize! This competition occurs twice a year, once at Winterfest and once at Fishtival and has very strict judging rules and guidelines. I won $20 cash and a $75 gift certificate to the Chinook gift shop. Guess what you're getting for your 30th birthday, Cole! Surprisingly I had no after hours calls the whole weekend. I'd only had one call so far, and that was when Leeann, the itinerant PA was still here, so it was actually hers but I went in too. This poor lady had slipped on the ice, falling forward, but had grabbed onto some alder branches to try to keep from falling, which jerked her arm right out of the socket. We didn't even need the x-ray we took to see that her shoulder was dislocated. The physician for the native clinic happened to be here for his quarterly visit, so he came over too as we tried futilely to get that arm back in. Even after some pretty healthy doses of narcotics, we couldn't get it reduced, so finally called in the big guns: Max. He is the son of the local native Health Aid, who was the one who brought the patient in, and he is a big guy. Picture that football player they used to call the refrigerator. With him providing 300+ pounds of muscle for the traction on the arm, and the doc's manipulation of the shoulder blade from the top, we finally got that arm back in the shoulder. Whew! Another lesson in doing the best you can with what you've got. Since then I've only had three call, and only two of them in the middle of the night. Neither of them involved Medivacing anyone out. I was home sick last Friday with a miserable cold and missed the Medivac that was sent out by my colleague Nattie and the PA student who is here for a month on his rural/underserved rotation. Here's a picture of Nattie, a little blurry, but that's our Nattie--always in motion!

The river and ocean are not completely frozen over, but have a lot of ice and mini icebergs on them. I was standing on the same dock where I took the Beluga whale pictures and the tide was coming in and it gave me vertigo watching the river run the wrong direction. It felt like when you're sitting in a parked car and the car next to backs out and it feels like you're moving forward. I almost fell in! The weather has been cold but sunny every day, and the last few days there has been almost no wind. I took a photo safari down past the Peter Pan cannery and to the beach and to the old historic Russian Orthodox church and cemetery. Maybe it seems morbid, but I love cemeteries; there is so much history there. This one is being slowly reclaimed by the tundra and the alders. There are so many old Russian Orthodox wooden crosses that have lost the story of who is buried there. I wonder if there are records anywhere? Some of the graves are still tended to, but the church is starting to fall apart.

I have this fascination with the fishing boats. I have never been remotely interested in boats with motors; I like kaykaks, rafts, canoes, but couldn't care less about ski boats, etc. But there is something about the commercial fishing boats that really compels me. Something about being a working boat rather than a pleasure boat I guess. I can't even begin to describe the number of boats in dry dock here! Everywhere I look they corrugate shipyards in rows, bristling with antennas and navigation devices and sometimes hoists and cranes.

The canneries all have bunkhouses for the workers who flood the area during sockeye season, June and July mostly. Virtually all of the sockeye salmon supply in the world comes from Bristol Bay. I had to take a picture of the dorm called the Italian for my Italian son Paolo! There was also a festive survival suit decoration adorning one of the bunkhouses. Those are supposed to keep you from immediately freezing to death if you fall in the water. That one must have a leak.

In the interest of relearning some of my skills that I haven't used for years, the new paramedic here gave an IV clinic yesterday and we all practiced on each other, inserting IVs, drawing blood and giving fluids. Here is a picture of Challane proudly displaying her work. I think she had a different idea of what the picture would look like! She actually did a very quick, competent job and really hardly hurt me at all. So those who know me well know that I have not had any TV reception for a number of years, and in fact have been losing money on my Netflix subscription for the last couple of years because I just haven't felt like watching TV was enough of a priority. Well now that I actually have a little free time, I bought a new DVD player, and couldn't figure out how to hook it to the ancient TV here in the cabin. Sidebar here: I did finally get to see a couple of those reality TV shows about Alaska, and I'm sorry, they are kind of ridiculous, as most reality TV is. Alaskans are universally embarrassed by them. But I digress. So I decided to splurge and get a modern TV, a skinny thing like other people have that looks like a computer monitor. It just so happened that my latest Consumer Report arrived with ratings of plasma and LCD televisions, so I did my research and looked all over online and selected what appeared to be a very good value and ordered it. Did I mention that I'm not so good with spatial analysis things? I really had no idea how TVs were measured, but I knew that 60 inches was sort of the big size and I didn't need anything like that, so I bought a 43" one. It never really occurred to me to think about how big 43 inches really is until the box was delivered to my door. OMG Becky! I had pictured something about 1/3 that size! But when I really stopped and thought about it I realized that 60" is FIVE FEET! I mean, I'm not THAT dumb! I just didn't picture that in my head because, well, I'm just not good at spatial things. So now I have this big ass TV that I could probably sell tickets to watch except that my cabin is only about 350 square feet and this thing takes up most of the living room. And now I don't get any of the TV channels that I got before. But boy is that a great picture on the BAT!

I will close this long, rambling missive and go out to put a downpayment on some groceries. I'm having some of my colleagues over for dinner and a movie on the BAT tonight.