Welcome to Naknek

Naknek Week 1 I traveled uneventfully through Spokane, Seattle, and Anchorage airports, arriving at King Salmon around 7 PM on Wednesday the 22nd of January. I was met by the gracious and thoughtful Kat, our executive assistant at the clinic, who had also cleaned my cabin, washed bedding and towels and put fresh sheets on the bed, and bought me some breakfast makings for the morning. My guitar and dulcimer and my giant suitcase all arrived unscathed, and I pretty much went right to bed by the time we got to my new home in Naknek. Now picture a solid, homey little log cabin in a remote clearing, surrounded by trees. Now wipe that out of your head, because my cabin doesn’t look anything like that. It’s in a group of rental cabins owned by the local tribal corporation, right off the Alaska Peninsula Highway that runs between King Salmon and Naknek. It is very clean and quite comfortable, and as the director of the clinic, Steve, describes it is “a little lower quality than Motel 6.” But really it’s fine, nice and warm and only 2 miles from the clinic. The walls in most of the place are painted an interesting color, somewhere between salmon, coral, orange and pumpkin, depending on the light. It has most of the things I need, and will be just fine as soon as the 6 more boxes of my stuff arrive.

The vehicle I am driving is a 1998 Nissan pickup with a canopy on the back. It’s interesting to see as many really nice rigs here as I’ve seen, since most rigs get the stuffing beat out of them on these roads in a short time. If I decide to purchase a vehicle, I’ll be looking for a beater. It costs about $2500 to barge a vehicle here in the summer from Seattle or Anchorage, so everything is worth at least $2500. I am already in love with this place! I can’t describe why or how much I already feel at home, except for maybe it has a lot to do with how welcoming and friendly everyone has been so far. I met the mayor at the high school basketball tournament this weekend and got the skinny on all kinds of things. On Saturday I drove out to the cliffs just above the Bering Sea (about 1.5 miles from town) and noticed another pickup there with a guy sitting in it who waved me over. Turns out he was the Fish and Game wildlife biologist here for about 40 years, and he invited me to use his binoculars and spotting scope to look at the Beluga whales that were feeding out in Kvichak (kwee-jack) Bay. All I could see was the occasional brief flash of back as they fed on the smelt that were being pulled by the tide out toward them. Apparently the whales actually come quite a way up the Naknek river, which is about the size of the Pend Oreille. Then he gave me a copy of Sibley’s Birds of North America, saying that he gives away 10 or 15 of them every year! The beach was littered with chunks of ice, most of which were covered with sand and pebbles and were in some pretty unusual shapes. The weather has been ridiculously warm for January—in the ‘40s, and the snow is pretty much gone. Hopefully there will be more snow so that the sled dog races can still proceed this year.

Later that day Ann Shankel picked me up to go to her house and go for a walk with 3 of her 4 sled dogs out in the tundra. Ann is the local Rolfer and apparently the only one who still has sled dogs in the area. She is also a very successful cold weather gardener and fills many other roles in the community, including swim team coach (yes, Naknek has an indoor swimming pool!). Her dogs are mostly Inuit Huskies, who are the aboriginal sled dogs, still found in Greenland as well. They are HUGE, and amazingly friendly and playful.

Today I was invited out to Linda’s house that she shares with our director’s daughter and her husband and kids for lattes. Linda is one of our two Medical Assistants, and according to the other providers I’ve talked to, makes us all look good in her quiet way. They have chickens and will be my much-appreciated source of fresh, homegrown eggs. It is so beautiful here, even in the winter with tundra brown and gold!

I will have to figure out how to make peace with the wind; I have never liked wind and it’s windy pretty much all the time, I think. At least that ought to help keep the mosquitoes off in the summer! Stay tuned for more of the Rolling Tundra Review (you probably have to be a certain age to get that)!

Just to catch up any of my readers who have been out of touch for the last 3.5 years: I graduated, passed my boards and immediately went to work for a 3-clinic non-profit community health care organization, assigned to the clinic in my home town of Priest River, Idaho. It's been a huge learning experience, and I'm happy to say that I had a great mentor in the physician there, JB Fowler, and the best nursing and front office staff around. I wish I could say the same about the corporation's management...so here I am off to work in Alaska, where I've longed to return since I left in 2010. I fly to King Salmon on January 22 and then will be driven the 15 miles to Naknek, which is just about all the road there is. Unless you fly or come by boat in the summer, you can't get here. Well, you could theoretically come by snow machine or dog sled, but most people travel by air. I was planning to take my golden retriever and my malamute with me this first trip in, but then started thinking a little more seriously about schlepping two big shipping kennels, two big dogs, a big suitcase, my skis, and a guitar and decided that I should probably get settled in and get set up before I bring in the dogs. So I'm busy deciding what I really must have up there right away, packing those things into large plastic totes, drilling holes in the edges and securing the lids with wire tires and sending them via the US Postal Service. Not cheap, but the only way. UPS and Fed Ex don't seem to deliver up there. It's kind of hard to leave my patients here, most of whom are also friends, and it's hard to leave my mom who is in assisted living up here, and it's hard to leave my niece. But it's time for me to do this! I will be there at least two years, and who knows? Maybe forever. Everyone I've talked to who has worked and lived there has only good things to say. Stay tuned!