McGrath at the midway point

 Greetings from sunny McGrath!  Below is the forecast for most of the rest of my time here.

Some of you asked for more photos of my little village, so yesterday I went on a major expedition, starting with the dump.  I waited until the weather app said it was going to reach maximum heat for the day, around 3 PM when it was forecast to be around minus 9 degrees F.  Compared to the minus 26 that I had when I woke up, it seemed like a heatwave.  Sadly, I didn't get any pictures because there was a very nice man there who helped me unload my trash from my vehicle and I didn't want him to think I was a complete cheechako taking pictures of an enlarged, rectangular, roofed burn barrel currently smoldering.  I haven't seen a dump quite like this before.  There are some containers for batteries and aerosol cans, so it's not completely primitive.  Turns out the dump is only about 1/4 mile beyond my cabin so it wasn't much of an adventure, so I decided to tour more of McGrath and take some pictures.  At that temperature my phone quickly lost it's battery, so in spite of cuddling it inside my coat, I didn't get a lot of pictures, so I'm including a few that I got last week.  First stop the tidy little cemetery.

By the time I took this picture my phone was refusing to focus and then just quit altogether, so the beautiful carved wooden prop and pilot's picture was actually the last one I took.  There is something very moving about these small village cemeteries; so many of the headstones or markers are so personal and almost intimate.  Many of them are quite old, and many of the names on the wooden Russian Orthodox crosses can't be read anymore.  I didn't take a picture of it, but there is a nice little roofed kiosk at the front of the cemetery that has a map of graves and names .  The marker below is an ordinary heavy iron plate stood on end.  I think the small marker with the name and dates was probably added later.

 

 

Apparently some of the interior tribes still do the customary burial house for the dead.  I'm not sure if that's what this is, but it looks a lot like the ones we saw last summer in a cemetery in a small village on the way to Talkeetna.  The Russian Orthodox man who takes care of the little church and the cemetery was an incredible wealth of history, especially of the Russian Othodox religion and it's history there.  He is the one who told us about the custom of making a house for the deceased, and there were quite a few in his cemetery, although most of them were smaller.

 

 

Right across the road is the McGrath school.  Right now they have about 40 kids.  There is a very nice full fenced playground behind the school.  The museum is just in front of the school.  I have been there a couple of times, and I will go back.  It's an amazing museum; it's only open Wednesdays and Fridays from noon to 3, so I have to go on my lunch hour so it may take me every Wednesday and Friday that I'm here to see it all.  Stand by for those pictures.

Across the road from the museum is a wonderful display of lawn art.  So much more interesting and creative than gnomes or flamingos!  I wish I could get a better picture because all the caribou and moose antlers all up that leaning pole just don't show up very well.  The fence in front is also adorned all the way across with racks.

This is the side of the shed adjacent to the lovely fence. 

Here's the post office--in case you want to send me a care package--PO Box 10.

 

Here's the view from my cozy one room cabin:

 

Here's something that tells you that you are in interior Alaska:

It's a stanchion to plug in vehicles out in front of the clinic.  I think we may see more of this kind of thing in other places for electric vehicles, but up here it's pretty hard to get a vehicle to start without plugging them in.  I'm pretty sure that my co-workers looked askance at me taking pictures of these.

 

In northern Idaho you see old pictures of draft horses pulling huge loads of huge logs; in Alaska it's dog teams.

 

Here's our local radio station, KSKO, which has been in business for a lot of years and is a public radio station.

 

I took a walk along the Kuskokwim river and came across this lonely bench with this sign just across the road:

 

I don't know the story behind this or even if the two are connected, but I think it likely.

 

Here's the frozen Kuskokwim with a creek coming into it.

It was kind of strange to happen upon these two Blackhawk helicopters parked at the small air strip next to the river where the small Alaska Air Transport planes come and go.  Apparently the military does maneuvers around here.  I flew in on Reeve Air, which uses 9-seater King aircraft and has a small terminal at the larger airport on the other side of town (not far away, believe me).

This assignment has shown me a couple of things about myself.  I need my solitude like I need the air I breathe and the water I drink, but even I have had more solitude than I really want.  There is satellite TV here and all I can say about that is that I have never seen SO MANY channels before; and very little to nothing that I care to watch.  Public TV is the best, not in small part because it doesn't have so many commercials, but for the first time in my life I have turned the TV on just for the sound of a human voice.  I have discovered that I just can't watch TV anymore.  Not having had TV reception most of my adult life, I just can't get used to having to sit through 10 minutes of commercials for every 5 minutes of a show.  I also can't relate to much I see on there.  I don't feel in any way a part of the culture anymore.  I never really did feel at home in the mainstream but now I don't see anything that I recognize.  Alaska has changed me, and there is no going back.  It's not just about TV, it's so many things.  I should have been born here because Alaska feels more like home to me than anywhere else, but my heart is even more with my family, so there I will be based from here on out.  But a large part of my heart will always be here in the villages of Alaska, and I hope I can continue to work up here at least a few months a year.  That being said I am looking forward to Christmas with the whole family this year for the first time in several years!

Just call me Lazarus...

 

Greetings from Interior Alaska, not too far east of Denali, the Great One!

Last time I posted on this blog appears to be 2015—the year a lot of things changed.  Chief among those things was my niece Samantha coming to live with me.  Puppies were acquired, old dogs died, my mom died, my grandchildren were born, and last May Sam graduated from Bristol Bay High School.  I sold most of my belongings, shipped 700 pounds of things I apparently couldn’t live without down to Idaho, and reestablished my home base back in Priest River this past July.  I sold my house on Hoop Loop and bought 20 acres of land between Priest River and Priest Lake with meadows, timber, creeks and bordered along the whole backside by Forest Service.  I’m working on getting a house built next summer, and in the meantime living at my old friend Betsy Stansell’s place. 

I resigned my job as lead provider at the Camai Community Health Center in Naknek the end of June, and will now work for them several months a year as a locum (traveling provider).  I am also now working for the South Central Foundation, which is the biggest tribal organization for health care in Alaska.  I am an intermittent employee who will work several months a year at various small villages that are served by SCF, and I can work when I want to, for as long or short as I want to, at whatever clinic needs someone.  There are 52 villages that the Rural Anchorage Service Unit (fondly known as RASU) provides health care providers for.

I am on my first assignment with RASU, in a village of about 300 people that is the hub of aircraft for the Upper Kuskokwim river area.  We are almost due west of Denali, which is about 120 air miles away.  We are off the road system, as are most villages in Alaska.  I will be here for all of November.  The McGrath clinic has two satellite clinics in two even smaller villages, Takotna and Nikolai, that usually are staffed with community health aids who are overseen by the physician assistant or nurse practitioner at McGrath.  There are usually 10 or 11 people that work at the clinic in McGrath, but it’s been very difficult to get providers all over Alaska these days, so we are short one right now.  Which means I am going to be on call all month.  At least sometimes I’m on second call, but the stressful thing about being on call is not the times you get called in, it’s all the time that you spend not being able to go anywhere or start anything that can’t be stopped quickly, waiting for that phone to ring.

It’s beautiful here!  Pretty different from Bristol Bay, with a lot of trees, mostly birch and white spruce but there are actually some alpine larch here too (the gold ones in the picture below)! 

 

Here is where I’m staying in McGrath:

Just kidding!  This is actually my cozy little cabin, which is quite nice inside:

Since nothing in McGrath is more than a mile away (except the dump), I only get a vehicle if I’m on first or second call; which is every day so I’m set with wheels.

 

McGrath has been a going concern since long before goldrush days, but may be better known now for being a stop on the Iditarod race (this is actually in the Iditarod School District).  I guess this place is booming during the Iditarod, and I will be back here during the race in early March!  I am really excited about that, being a wannabee musher myself; someday I will volunteer, but there may be things I can do while I’m here next year.

 

The village of Takotna lies somewhere over by those mountains.

 

There is a wonderful museum here that is going to take me many trips to see all of.  It is only open Wednesdays and Fridays from noon to three, so I have to go on my lunch hours.  There is a significant archeaological site here that I will include the link to.  It’s a pretty recent find, and was stumbled on by accident.  It’s a really interesting story!

https://fm.kuac.org/science/2012-11-09/rare-human-remains-may-hold-secret-to-alaskas-ancient-past

And here is a link to some area history if you’re interested:

https://ukpreservation.net/background/

If you look closely at this poster you can see the “you are here” arrow in the middle of the map.

 

 

I will be flying back to Anchorage (weather permitting, which is always the case) December 1 on one of the little 9-seater King airplanes that serves McGrath, and then on to Spokane the next day unless there is yet more of the seemingly endless training I have to take to work for SCF.  It’s pretty interesting to see the differences between the tribal system and the stand-alone Federally Qualified Health Clinic in Naknek!   On the one hand, it’s a nice break for me to not have any responsibility except for seeing patients and documenting my visits.  On the other hand, it’s part of a very large bureaucracy over which I have absolutely no influence!  SCF is giving me some good training though, as now I will be having to do a lot of things that in Naknek were done by our stellar medical assistants, such as taking xrays, doing blood draws, and running labs.

I was unable to get to the grocery store in Anchorage prior to my flight out here, but I had packed a few items in my suitcase like backpacking entrees and oatmeal and some walnuts, and I knew there was a grocery store here, so I wasn’t too worried about food.  However, the afternoon I got here I had no vehicle and no one volunteered to take me to the grocery store, in fact told me that “they don’t have much there.”  It was suggested that I use one of the expediting companies in Anchorage that will shop for you and send it out on the flights that come Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.  I was taken aback at what a visceral reaction I had to being without much food, possibly for a week until I could get a shipment in!  I really felt like I was in danger of starving!  Our case manager took pity on me and gave me some moose meat, and the PA here gave me a package of spaghetti and a jar of sauce.  When I was taken after work the next day to the grocery store I found that, much to my relief, it really does have plenty of food, even some decent fresh produce.  I however found myself going into famine mindset and spending a lot of money on very expensive food, and then still ordering groceries from Anchorage.  I also found out that Full Circle, the organic CSA I used in Naknek, delivers here too, so I also ordered from them.  Now I have spent probably way more than my per diem will add up to, and I probably have more food than I will be able to eat while I’m here, and I KNOW that I have already gained weight, but I sure won’t starve!

Please forgive the clunkiness of the layout--I haven't used this program since 2015 so I have lost some facility with it.  Stand by for more, on a completely irregular basis!