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.

Rolling Tundra Review, Episode 2 Life is so full I hardly know where to begin! I’ve really only seen a few patients, but have had time to work on policy and procedures, collaborating with the other full time provider, Katie, and others on learning and trying to implement the advanced features of the medical records program, and trying to get ready to begin taking call 24/7 for 3 weeks starting tomorrow. This particular electronic medical record (EMR for short, although we have other names for it too) is much simpler than the one I’ve been using for the last 2 years, but as with all of them, it has flaws and frustrations, reduces clinician’s productivity, and shifts an awful lot of administrative stuff to the providers (physicians, PAs, Nurse practitioners). But the atmosphere and management at Camai are such a breath of fresh air for me! It’s small enough, and we have the right kind of manager, that everyone participates in many of the decisions and are encouraged to take ownership and figure out the best ways to take good care of people. The clinic director, Steve, is not a medical person and he told me that if I needed managing, this probably wasn’t the right job for me! Right on—I’m more than willing to take responsibility in exchange for having some autonomy and not being micromanaged. Bush (not George) Alaska is like that anyway; stay down to earth, use what you have, and don’t stand too much on ceremony. Here's a cool old building downtown that people are trying to buy for a museum.

In rural Idaho you often see a bunch of cars and trucks parked around people's places, but here you see a bunch of boats.

Both Katie and Linda, our medical assistant, are going on vacation tomorrow leaving the clinic in my somewhat shaky hands, but I have a great bunch of people to work with. There is Nattie, who is a local and has been a PA for around 30 years. And there is Challane, who has been learning the ropes from Linda. There is a new paramedic right next door in the bunkhouse, Bart, who is more than willing to lend a hand in emergencies. Jill is an RN who works one week a month in the pediatric oncology department in Anchorage, and is helping with EMR and also will lend a hand in emergencies. And then there are the front desk, billing, and general all-around Jills of all trades, Samantha, Amanda, Kelsey, Rebecca, and office manager Sharon. Who also owns a gift shop in King Salmon that I visited last weekend and spent too much money at! Next door was the Katmai National Park Visitor’s Center, where I spent a good hour and a half looking at all the exhibits, browsing through the brochures, talking with Debbie who has been out here for around 30 years, and spending MORE money on books! I didn’t know until having dinner with Kelsey, who worked all this past season at Katmai, that this is the place that Timothy Treadwell got eaten at! You may have seen the documentary “Grizzly Man.” Kelsey knows many of the people who knew him and were part of the sad aftermath of shooting the two bears involved and recovering what they could of Timothy’s and his girlfriend’s bodies. You can fly into Brooks Camp from King Salmon and stay in a lodge there, and watch the brown bears at the falls and in the rivers catching salmon. Brown bears and grizzlies are the same species, but they are called grizzlies inland and brown bears out here on the coast. Apparently there is a subspecies on Kodiak Island. Right now the bears are all sleeping in dens, and hopefully the warm weather and lack of snow won’t wake them up too early! On the way home from King Salmon I stopped and walked around the small cemetery. Some of the wooden crosses are hand painted with people’s names and dates. It’s obviously a well-tended place. The graves were as unique and individual as the people are here. The high point of my week was today after work when Steve’s son in law, Troy Hamon, took me out flying in his small Piper something or other airplane and gave me a tour of the Naknek area!

I have never been in a plane THAT small, and it was a blast! My pictures aren’t that great, but we flew over some abandoned canneries, up the Kvichak river a ways, over Naknek and then over South Naknek.

We also flew up the Naknek river, and saw some beluga whales, which I didn’t get a picture of. But I did get a picture of one on Saturday afternoon from the Port docks, and watched them feeding in the river until it got too cold (for me—they kept on feeding.)

Those white spots in the water are genuine beluga whales coming up for air. Yes they are! I also tried to take pictures of the seals, but they kept playing hide and seek, so I got a lot of pictures of empty water. Here’s a picture of my little cabin from the front door.

Grocery shopping is heart stopping here! It’s really making me try to make wise choices—a regular size bag of chips is $10.00. Nope, don’t like chips that much! Half gallon of milk for my lattes is $6.99, which I MUST have. Broccoli, $5.99 per pound. Eggs, $7.00 a dozen, but at least those are Linda’s good homegrown eggs, because they aren’t any cheaper at the store. This week I get my first delivery of my Full Circle Farms produce box, and I can’t wait! $57 a week for fresh vegetables is pretty darn good. My boss, Steve, also generously gave me about 4 sockeye salmon steaks, a big package of smoked salmon, and some mooseburger. What a difference the freshness makes! The fish was vacuum packed and frozen about 4 hours after it was picked out of the set net. He says I can come help during the fishing season and have some of the fish. I have to double check to see if the regulations say that non-permitted people just can’t touch the NET, or can’t touch the fish at all until it’s gutted and taken care of. After I’ve been here a year and am a bonafide Alaska resident, I can get my own subsistence permit. I already have a permit from the village tribal government to camp and pick berries on their land. Next Saturday is Winterfest, which apparently consists of various activities that will be more difficult without the river being iced over, but will also have a bazaar with craft items, etc. I will be at the Camai booth part of the time, maybe taking a blood pressure or two. Later, after fishing season I think, we’ll have Fishtival. Kelsey says there’s a festival every time you turn around. I miss all my friends and family and my dogs, but I’m really enjoying being up here! Stay tuned for more.