Saturday, July 4, 2015

Here fishy, fishy, fishy!




Where are the fish?  That’s the question on everyone’s mind here in Bristol Bay right now.  It was predicted to be another record run of sockeye salmon, but they have only trickled in so far and it’s getting quite late.  Commercial fishermen and women are only allowed to put out their nets, whether set nets from shore or drift nets from boats, when enough fish have gone up the major river drainages to ensure a viable spawning population.  So far there have only been a few 6 to 8-hour periods open for fishing, and the canneries are just starting to really operate. 
That has led to a whole lot of fishermen and cannery workers in town with nothing to do, which often leads to getting into trouble, which often leads directly to the clinic.  Added to the usual lacerations, people being run over by forklifts, back strains, MRSA abscesses and foreign bodies in eyes, are drunks who fall off boats while they’re still on dry land, muscle spasms and stress-induced pains that resemble heart attacks, and 4-wheeler crashes onto rocks on the beach.  My favorite call so far is actually not related to the fishless follies, but was an 80-something elder from one of the small villages who fell off the back of his 4-wheeler while it was parked and bonked his head.  When he was asked why he wasn’t wearing a helmet he said, “There’s only one helmet in Kokhanok!  I’m hoping to get one for my birthday.”  We have extra help at the clinic for the fishing season and have been rotating the night call so that whoever is on call from 5 PM to 9 AM doesn’t have to work the days in the clinic, therefore they can theoretically sleep.

This past week we had a night where I was still at the clinic trying to catch up on all the paperwork I’m behind on, and in the space of two hours we had two people come in with digit amputations, one arriving in the back parking lot by helicopter with his thumb in a plastic bag, a man with severe kidney stones, and a guy from one of the small villages who had burned himself badly three days ago and finally got to town.  It didn’t stop there, though—the burn guy had gotten into an altercation at one of the local bars and then hit the police officer who responded in the head with his cell phone, so by the time he came over from the jail he had a big knot on his head, was covered in blood, and then proceeded to go into alcoholic withdrawal seizures while we were taking care of the burns and the head injury.  We managed to get the guy with the kidney stones and the guy with the amputated thumb (caught in a boat anchor winch) on the same medevac plane to two different hospitals, bandaged up the other guy who had only really lost the very tip of a finger so could go out on a commercial flight the next day, and sent the obstreperous burn guy back to jail.



It’s really been kind of a carnival atmosphere around here, starting in late May and building as fishermen get into town and start getting their boats ready to go in the water, families come back, not unlike the salmon, to fish their family subsistence and commercial sites, and the cannery workers and tourists pack the incoming flights and crowd the local grocery store and eating (and drinking!) establishments.  It kind of rocks our world when our community of about 800 or so swells to 10,000 in just a few short weeks!

It would be an interesting documentary to follow the whole cycle around here.  There is quite a bit of diversity, in the cannery workers especially.  They are from all over the world:  Somalia, Sudan, Cote d’Ivore, the Philippines, Mexico, and even the US.  The US people seem to be divided into two major groups—the college kids here to make a bunch of money for school and have an adventure, and the other folks who are for the most part, shall we say, down on their luck.  I always wonder, as I see them walking up and down the highway from the canneries to town in groups of 3-6, what their stories are.  I get to find out from the ones that come to the clinic with illness or injury, and they are usually very interesting.

This year I have been an Alaska resident for over a full year, so I now have a permit for subsistence fishing, which means I can catch and keep up to 300 sockeye, 10 Kings, 10 silvers, 75 pinks and 75 chum for myself and my household.  Which is me.   I sure hope I don’t get that many!  Subsistence fishing is done using a 10 fathom (60 foot) gill net strung out from above the high tide line into the river or ocean and anchored at both ends with a buoy on the water end.  You put the net out at low tide and come back at the next high tide, and hopefully you have a bunch of fish to pick out of the net.
low tide set

The well-hung net
This spring I took a net hanging class that really impressed me with how complex and detailed the whole thing is!  So nets are not factory made—the webbing is, the line is, the twine and corks and needles are—but the functional net itself is constructed (hung) by hand.  There are all different kinds of mesh for different size fish, different fishing conditions, etc., but they all consist of a line with floats, called corks, strung on it which you attach to the mesh at the top and a line filled with lead pieces that you attach to the bottom.  You have to figure out what kind of a net you need to hang and then do the math to figure out the spacing between knots, which is different at the top than at the bottom.  Then you have to learn how to do several different kinds of knots for different things.  Most people use a bench that is set up so that you straddle it and have a metal bar with a sort of claw-hammer-looking piece on the end that you use to anchor the line to as you tie the mesh onto it with twine.  It is really both an art and a science!  I wore several blisters on my fingers hanging my net, despite the electrical tape I used to cover them with, but I eventually ended up with a serviceable (I hope!) sockeye salmon net of my very own.  I still need to get some line to set up a pulley system and a couple of anchors, but I have my brand new shiny buoy and I am making my permit sign.  I’m pretty excited to be able to actually do this with my own gear!  Stand by for the score in the next installment.

I also took a skin sewing class this winter and made part of one half of a set of beaver skin mittens.  It really hurt my hands to push the glover’s needle through the leather, and so the woman who taught the class has graciously consented to let me pay her to finish the mittens for me. 
They will go well with my beaver skin hat!  Here’s hoping we get a real winter next year; the last two have been pretty mild and VERY dry.  I haven’t been able to cross country ski or skijor with the dogs at all.
I discovered last month that turning 60 hardly hurt at all, and although other people my age look really old to me, I sure don’t feel that old!  I just keep avoiding the mirror and never have to have the shock of realizing that I look just as old, or older, than those other people do.  I had a wonderful trip to Katmai National Park with my friend Diane Chung who is the park superintendent and who also turned 60 last month.  I was privileged to stay the night in her cabin and saw quite a few bears and made a trip out to the scene of the Novarupta eruption known as the Valley of 10,000 Smokes.  We sang happy birthday to ourselves and each other and agreed that 60 is a mighty fine age except for the body starting to fall apart, starting with arthritis in the well-used hands.
Courtship at Brooks Falls

Yes, it was this close!  From one of the viewing platforms

Mamma and adopted cub plus her own



The birthday girls

That's a lot of ash!

I don’t know what I was thinking, but I agreed to become a foster mother to another dog whose family had to move into Anchorage and can’t have her currently at the place they have rented.  She is a female northern breed village dog, all white with blue eyes named Maggie.  At the moment she just slipped away from me again and is off doing a walk about that will probably end up at her former residence about 2 miles away.  At least that’s where she ended up last time she gave me the slip.  Sigh…  Late breaking news—Maggie showed up back here about an hour after she took off, so I guess we’re making progress after all.

I was pleased to be able to go to California in April to attend my nephew Justin Ernest’s wedding in Camarillo.  It had been a very long time since I saw my sister Sharon and her family and we had a great time!
Sisters

One of the great perks of 22 hours or so of daylight every day is how fast my garden is growing!  It’s been interesting seeing what I can grow here and what I can’t.  So far all the greens are doing quite well, as are the potatoes and peas.  Carrots are intermediate, and the peppers are struggling a bit.  But I have a tree-like jalapeno pepper plant indoors in my hydroponic aero garden, so I plan to just grow peppers indoors out of the wind.  The days have been gorgeous, unseasonably hot (into the 90’s!), and mostly sunny, but always cooling off at night. 


It’s hard to describe how life here shifts so far to the evening in the summer; because it stays light for so long people work and play until quite late.  It’s not uncommon to be mowing your lawn or weeding the garden or picking your subsistence net at 11:30 PM.  It makes it that much harder for me to stay in touch by phone or text with the lower 48, since we are already an hour earlier than Pacific Time.  I usually don’t get home from work until at least 8:30 or so my time, which is already past most of my working friend’s bedtimes down there.

My love affair with Alaska just deepens with every day I spend here.  I know my kids would like to have me closer when grandkids start coming along, and of course I would like to be able to spend as much time with them as possible.  And I do miss my friends and family down in America.  My commitment is to be here at minimum until October 2017 and then reevaluate.  I would like to find a way to have the best of both worlds, and may be able to pull that off in time.  Until then, my invitation to all of you is to come on up—I have room to spare to put people up as long as this house I’m renting doesn’t get sold out from under me, and I’d love to show you why I love this place so much.


Saturday, January 31, 2015

The View From Below Zero

Nothing warmer (or more stylish) than a sheared beaver Elmer Fudd hat!

Since I posted last Christmas and New Year's have come and gone and nary a Christmas card was sent by me!  I have no excuse--I just didn't get it done.  I was here in Naknek through Christmas holding down the medical fort until the one-nurse-practitioner cavalry (Gayle Claus) arrived on the 28th to allow me to leave for the outside on the 29th.  I did sing with a somewhat impromptu choir performance of Christmas music to a packed house on December 23.  It was a very different kind of music than I have ever sung before--it was all parts, and everyone but me could read music.  There are some amazing musicians out here and I was pretty intimidated.  I learned my parts by listening to recordings of the alto parts, and then had to listen closely to the other altos next to me so as to not stray into the soprano or bass parts!  It was a lot of fun, and I think we really sounded pretty good.


 I sorely missed my family at Christmas time, but we all got together at Blake and Kristin's house for a late Christmas and had a wonderful time! 

Daughter in law extraordinaire Kristin, granddog Sadie Lynn, son Blake, dad Jay, Mom Rusty at Blake and Kristin's house

I was able to have Sammy for the whole weekend after New Year's, and for a couple of visits other days while I was there. 

Sam in her new Christmas cowboy boots

I didn't get to Priest River for very long, and ended up having to deal with the well pump being out at my house, which is rented out.  Thank goddess for friends!  Bob Elliott stepped in and saved the day (as usual).  I really wasn't ready quite to come back to Alaska, but by the time I got here after a 12 hour day of airports, I was ready to be here.

I experienced my first fatality a few weeks ago when a man was hit by a car that hit black ice on the highway and slid into him as he rode his 4-wheeler on the trail alongside the highway.  It was a heroic effort by our volunteer ambulance crew, who stayed at the clinic with Gayle and me as we worked desperately to keep him alive long enough for the medevac plane to take him to Anchorage.  Unfortunately, he was hurt too badly to hang on, and despite all of us taking turns doing CPR after his heart stopped, we were not able to save him.  The medevac plane landed about 10 minutes after he died.  It's particularly hard in a small community like this, where most of the EMT crew knew him well and some were related to him.  His 80+ year old mom buried him and then died a couple of weeks later.  A tough couple of months for the community.  It was heart warming to see how the community took care of the families, both the family of the man who was killed, and also the man who, through no fault of his own, hit him.  I think we all know and accept the risks of living out here, and it doesn't make death any easier, but the life here is worth the risks for most of us.



I have been doing water aerobics (yes, we have an Olympic sized indoor salt water pool) on a pretty sporadic basis, same with yoga, but I am going to try my best to be able to run a 5K by my birthday in June.  I didn't think the lack of light was bothering me since I have my happy light and my Aero Gardens and it's frequently sunny here.  But I have gained a lot of weight and  lost a lot of my fitness, so it's way past time for me to make my health a bigger priority.  It's hard to get outside and exercise when the wind chill makes it minus 24 degrees, but I can't make that an excuse since there are plenty of other ways to get exercise.  And the weather is certainly not the cause of my overeating!  I'm making a new start.  Please send good vibes my way, as I need all the divine intervention and help I can get!

January 22 marked one year since I came to Alaska to make my home.  I am still completely smitten with this place!  I am hoping to take a skin-sewing class to make some mittens in February, and also a net-making class to make a subsistence net for salmon, since I will be able to get a subsistence permit this year.  Tomorrow I'm going to try out my new smoker and smoke some of the salmon I have in the freezer from last summer.  There is always so much going on that I have a hard time choosing among all the things I could do!  Today I could have gone to a Longaberger party with a chocolate tasting afterward, yoga class, music jam at the Park Service visitor center, over to a friend's for dinner....and the list goes on.  Next week is the big winter festival--Winterfest!

This is how you mush when there isn't enough snow for a sled


Two of Ann Shankle's Greenland Huskies

Co-worker and friend Brenda King and Ann Shankle with part of her team
I will be going to Park City Utah the beginning of March for an emergency medicine conference, and then I hope to be able to spend the majority of April with my family in Idaho and going to my nephew's wedding in California.  Then it will be nose to the grindstone getting ready for fishing season and then fishing season itself.

I have to show you some pictures of my beloved beautiful rocks, coated with freezing rain.  I have found some of the most beautiful rocks I've ever seen up here.  Sammy has always been my rock hound companion, and one day when I asked if she wanted to go to the gravel pit and look for rocks, she said, "My dad says I have enough rocks already."  We both laughed heartily at such a silly statement and went out searching for keepers.





When Gayle gets here February 4th, I will finally get a break from being on call 24/7.  I haven't really had too many night and weekend calls, but after 24 days straight I'm ready to take a break from being glued to my phone.

Here's a few gems from the Unalaska police report:

Disorderly Conduct:  Officers contacted a customer who had created a disturbance inside the bank when his fishing license was not accepted as a form of identification.

Assault:  An intoxicated young adult man reported that his mother, who as officers discovered was quite annoyed with her son's drunken antics, had thrown a bottle of lotion at him, striking him in the genitals and causing a rather considerable amount of pain.  The young man, who wished for neither medical care nor charges to be pressed, asked simply that his mother be told not to throw things at him anymore.

Suspicious Person/Activity:  Drunken brother reported being concerned because his drunken sibling had grabbed five beers and departed their house in a taxi.  The responding officer found nothing unusual about this incident.

Suspicious Person/Activity:  Officer advised an inebriate urinating between two cars that restrooms were the facility of choice for said activity.

Are you seeing a theme here?

I will close with a few pictures from the frozen north, right here from my neighborhood.

Boat waiting for spring on the bank of the frozen Naknek River

Frozen Eskimo Creek in King Salmon where it runs into the Naknek River

My goofy Sam dog walking on water on one of the ponds by my house

The frozen Naknek River looking south/southwest at the volcanoes of the Aleutian Range