Alaska! Up North and to the Left

by Steven Swaks

  The hugs and kisses erased the doubts, for now. I walked into my new home, looked around and saw my furniture in somebody else’s house; I was a stranger in my own home. Everything was foreign and different. They say newer is always better, bigger, brighter, the fresh scent of a new life in the making. It was not. It was not greener on the other side, it was white, a frozen white devoid of life.

  The adaptation came in waves. First, like any other move, I had to get used to the house and learn where Lydia had hidden everything from the saucers to the toilet boil cleaner. Then, it went a notch further with the maintenance of the property. Because I was the man; I supposedly had that inner sense of what to do with any breakdown, including the boiler. At the first hiccup (no hot water), I opened the closet where the unit was located and stared at the maze of piping for a while to justify my man-of-the-house status, and pretended to know what I was doing. When I finally realized I was way over my plumbing knowledge, I closed the door and applied the full extent of my mechanical expertise: calling for a plumber. To my great despair, it did not take much to fix, a flick of a switch, recycle the pump, and voilà, my expert Ph.D. in plumbing science fixed the boiler in thirty seconds flat. His wallet was thicker, my ego was battered.

  My job was next on the ever extending adjustments list. For the first time of my life I was paid to fly. I’d crossed the fence and I was no longer pumping money into the plane’s gas tank to learn to fly and build up time, somebody else did it for me. The counter had reversed and income came along with flight time to fatten my anorexic log book. The experience was gratifying. My boss, Doug Brown, was patient and knowledgeable. The students, mostly Yupik Eskimos, were friendly and eager to learn in a mostly paid once in a lifetime opportunity. The bush plane had always been in their life, from the flight back to the village after the first time they laid their wrinkly eyes on their mother, to the commute to Bethel to visit a relative or go grocery shopping. Flying was the way out of small jobs and the hope for a lifelong career serving their community for a significant salary. The students came from the streets with a high school diploma, a spotless criminal record, and an unquenchable thirst to learn. Many walked in full of hope and motivation, few walked out with a Commercial Pilot Certificate, sole survivors of a demanding training.

  The flight lessons were sweet and gentle. If the weather did not cooperate, or proved to be less than ideal, the plane stayed cozily in the hangar to await better conditions while the students found refuge in the classroom for a challenging lesson from the height of a desk chair. In a bold move, the pupils ventured on the simulator to risk their life on a virtual scenario. There was no safety net and no pity. Overwhelmed by radio calls, navigation set up, charts, and basic hands on flying, three of them would kill me on stalls turned spins, unable to multitask and recover from perilous conditions or exponential mistakes. The exercise turning deadly was no laughing matter, as the newspapers came back with true accounts of tragedies for a needless reminder that it was a real world out there. The scheduled flights taxied by the flight school with passengers, women, children, friends, and entire families; it was not a cyber sky beyond the class room window where mistakes cost real lives. Some pilots evaluated their experience by counting how many deceased pilots they knew, the highest I heard of was seventeen. Seventeen men and women killed on the job, some of them with passengers. I was at zero, and hoped to stay there.

  New Year’s Eve!

  December

  Our first holiday season in Bethel was planned as a careful transposition of our Californian traditions with a white coating of snow. If Christmas had the same magic, if not more, New Year’s Eve remained one of those bland celebrations which came and went by without fuss. Deep down, I truly suspected this first New Year’s Eve would not be any different than our L.A. version, maybe a tad colder. After all, the white Christmas got all the credit, with the falling snow, sitting on the blanket by the tree, a cup of eggnog, and the scheduled tender gaze. Whoever mentioned a white New Year’s Eve? There was really nothing about the celebration, overeating, overdrinking, waiting for midnight, scream happy new year, quick hug, kiss-kiss, cup of cheap Champagne (or much worse, sparkly), and good night.

  With a self-protecting credulity working on overdrive to recover from my recent move, I was at home, enjoying a lone day off, doing nothing slouched on the couch and scanning through TV shows showing warmer climates. The phone rang and disturbed my torpor staring at the dull TV screen. I picked up.

  “Yeah?” I was unable to hide my lack of enthusiasm for this disturbance.

  “Steven, it’s me, there’s a party for New Year’s Eve, do you want to go? They say it’s the place to be on New Year’s Eve in Bethel! They said, they do it all the time, it’s fun!”

  “Sure,” I monotonously replied, my eyes half shut in a perfect Garfield attitude.

  “See you tonight, love you!” Lydia hung up.

  That was the extent of our conversation. They say they do it every year. What was “it”? The party? There was something suspicious about this, an unsettling warning that could not be ignored. As usual, Lydia wanted to ransack my well-organized projects of a perfectly boring celebration.

  It’s THE place to be on New Year’s Eve in Bethel. She made it sound like it was the red carpet on Oscar night. My well thought out projects, my candle lit dinner was rapidly sinking into an ocean of incomprehension. I guessed I would have to settle for THE place, whatever it meant. I pictured a larger than usual gathering, maybe even a semi decent D-J, a disco ball spinning for the dizziness of all, flashing lights in a local gym, and maybe even -O royal luxury-real Champagne. I was still green on the Bethel scene and this event would probably be a good opportunity to meet some people in a comfortable setting and socialize with the locals.

  A few hours later, Lydia came home. I had been brewing for a while and I was wondering about the significance of that it, and what was THE place to be? I was still in front of the television indulging on CNN world news. A patrol composed of a few GIs was walking down the dusty streets of a neighborhood in Ramadi, Iraq.

  Lydia was coming back from the hospital. She walked through the front door threshold kicking the excess of snow on the outside wooden deck. “Hi! I’m home!”

  I can hear that, I thought with a smirk. “Lydia, honey, what are we exactly supposed to do for New Year’s Eve?”

  Lydia was removing her coat and other gloves. “Nothing much. It’s not very fancy. They’re just doing a bonfire on a small lake.”

  There are things that do not register, they simply do not match. Most of the time, you can’t put “drinking” and “gasoline” in the same sentence, or put “swimming” and “shark infested waters,” together either. It just does not add up. Well, “bonfire” and “on the lake,” came along the same line of misfitted terms.

  “You mean, on the beach, by the lake?” I inquired. After all, poor sweet pea, her English had never been that good.

  I was still gazing on our boys commenting on the danger present at every street corner, everybody could be friendly or hostile. One of them, Sergeant Donnelly, was giving a personal testimony about their routine; the sand encrusted on his sun crackled skin only highlighted the continuous stress and fatigue they were going through.

  “No, they do the bonfire in the middle of a frozen lake,” Lydia said so far away from any worldly concern.

  I stayed stoic. Besides a primitive urge to stay alive, and accessorily be comfortable and warm, I could not fathom the need to celebrate the oncoming eve outside, especially in such an exotic location. Of course, at this point, I should not fail to mention the extreme climate and temperatures one could expect in December, in the middle of the night, lost in the sub-arctic region. Truly, an indoor celebration was, at least in my opinion, a much better way to start the New Year. I was confident my muse would come to her senses and realize the absurdity of the proposal. I would truly consider the option, mainly to be polite, but at the end of the day, we would celebrate the event under
much more reasonable, warmer, and safer circumstances. As head of the household, I had decided, and my word was final.

  A few days later, Lydia and I were together among another fifty or so lunatics celebrating the pending New Year on the infamous small frozen lake, bundled up, and ready to sustain a toasty 10°F below. Even if the sub-zero temperature made sure we would not go on an arctic midnight swim, my survival instincts still told me there was something truly odd about the scene, but by some freakish act of nature, the roaring fire was doing just fine on the thick layer of ice. It was an ongoing conflict between water and fire, heat and ice, so close to each other without mangling. The hot ashes stayed on top of the fallen, the one swallowed by gravity onto the other side, the cold and wet, so close to their sibling but yet unreachable. The ashes had fallen into the unfixable, the permanent; there was no coming back up into the fire, their destiny locked into the ice or drowning in the frigid waters. The glowing inferno was a source of life, our own little sun nobody dared to venture away from, amidst the shadows dancing around us in unison with the flames for an oddly romantic celebration. We were part of the silent show in the heart of an Alaskan night.

  The holiday spirit was there, along with the unavoidable hot dogs and roasting marshmallows, hamburgers and s’mores. Little groups of neighbors and friends gathered like atoms attracted to each other, occasionally switching to a group nearby, all within short distance from the raging fire. The experience was indeed unique. Hungry souls frequently visited the collapsible camping tables in quest of well needed calories. The atmosphere was enjoyable, the reassuring smell of the wood fire, the light smoke and embers ascending to a star-littered night sky. Voices filled the air, an occasional laughter, stories being told and ensuing laughter; shadows and shapes of bundled up friends glad to be together in the simplicity of a bonfire.

  Lydia and I walked through the small crowd. Breaths steamed like chimneys over an old English town on a winter night.

  “Hey! This is my Californian boy!” A jovial holler came from my right. I looked. Tom Bailey, my medevac pilot, was holding a beer along with another man. Lydia sensed the exponential increase of testosterone and fled to a nearby group of hospital coworkers. Tom vigorously shook my hand.

  “You got yourself a real jacket!” He tapped on my thick arctic jacket.

  “Yeah, somebody advised me well!”

  “So, she took the job?” It was a rhetorical question. The glitter in his eyes could not hide his obvious satisfaction.

  “Yes, she did,” I smirked. “How’re you? I hope you’re not on duty!” I pointed at the beer joking.

  “No, no, no! I’m off this whole weekend, you can’t mess with that!”

  “Hey by the way, this is Peter. He flies for Coastal.” We introduced each other. Peter fit the bush pilot mold, mid-thirties, medium build, slightly nerdy but toughened up after staying in the bush for a while.

  “You teach at the flight school right?” Tom asked.

  “Yeah, I’ve been there for a month or so.”

  “How do you like it?” Peter wondered.

  “It’s good. The students are great. They’re eager to learn.”

  “Are you getting used to the area?” Tom asked.

  “Getting there, it’s different from L.A.” I laughed.

  “Are you from L.A? I’m sorry.” Peter cringed.

  “I knew it was you the other day on the radio!” Tom said.

  “Me? That’s possible. Where was it?”

  “You were talking to Center,” Tom turned to Peter laughing. “That was the funniest thing, Steven was on his puddle jumper 172 copying a clearance from Anchorage Center*,” his hand was highlighting the high points of his speech, “next thing you know, you have six F22 fighters and a KC-10 heavy tanker coming on the radio.” His voice plummeted to a low pitch to imitate the stealth fighter group leader. “Anchorage Center, Wooden Two Five, flight of six F22, one KC-10.” His voice resumed to a normal tone. “Then, you have his student who has no clue about what he’s doing, just out of mommies’ skirt, who’s trying to say something. How old is the kid? Sixteen?”

  “He’s nineteen.”

  “Oh, nineteen, that’s much older…” Tom laughed again. “I’m making fun, but that’s good, who knows what they would do without the flight school. All those kids are going to stay in Bethel, they are used to the weather. Heck, I’ve seen so many guys coming to fly here and running away with their tail between their legs!”

  A snow machine roared nearby.

  “How are you doing with the weather?” Peter asked.

  “It’s really not that bad, we’re taking it easy, it’s only flying with students so we can’t take chances. That would have been a lot harder if I had to jump directly into commercial flying.”

  Tom looked at me with a grave stare. “You got to watch out, it’s good to fly IFR* with your kids, but don’t get in the soup, you’re gonna get ice in no time and your plane can’t handle it.”

  “There’s no way we would do that, it’s only for the procedures and to be more comfortable talking to Center, that’s it,” I said.

  We continued talking for a while. Alaskan aviation stories flew across the board among tips and advice from old timers. I was still the newcomer thirsty to learn and familiarize myself with the delta.

  Lydia walked up to us and leaned against my arm while eating a hot dog. “It’s almost midnight!”

  I toiled to consult my watch under my thick clothing, peeling the layers one by one. First the gloves, then the jacket sleeve, followed by a sweater to finally reach my wrist and watch. The cold assaulted the bare skin. “You’re right.” It was 11:56.

  “How can you eat a hot dog with ski gloves on?” I asked.

  “Are you kidding? It’s freezing! There’s no way I’m removing my gloves!”

  “Look, you have mustard and ketchup all over your gloves!” I shook my head.

  “Ah, leave me alone, let me eat my food,” Lydia barked back with a grin.

  “Who did you talk to?”

  “A few girls from the clinic, Saamiya and Shirley are here.” Lydia glanced behind her and quieted down. “Saamiya’s husband would love to go on a demo flight with you, but she won’t let him,” Lydia said giggling. “She’s supposed to leave for a month this summer and she’s afraid he is going to sneak around behind her back and ask you to take him.”

  “Sure, I’d love to.”

  “If she finds out, she is going to kill him!” Lydia was looking over her shoulder afraid to get caught conspiring.

  “Ah, it’s only a plane, what’s the worst that could happen?” I smirked. Lydia looked back at me with a lethal look, the don’t-you-dare-joke-about-that-or-else look.

  “WHAT TIME IS IT?” somebody hollered from a small group nearby.

  “I don’t know, that’s a good question!” I dug once again through the layers between my jacket and my arctic gloves to find my watch.

  “HAPPY NEW YEAR!” The same man yelled over the growing interest for the accurate time.

  Tom raised his beer in salute. “Happy New Year to you fine people!”

  I turned to Lydia, kissed her, and skimmed through the mushy lovey dovey new yearly rituals. Tom hugged her and shook my hand. Peter followed him and hugged her.

  The festivities went on for another hour. Guests walked from group to group looking for neighbors and friends, coworkers and even strangers to give their best wishes for the birth of this New Year. The mood was light and cheerful, filled with hugs and laughter, taps on the back and handshakes. We forgot the cold, sequestered and muzzled in a back room of our conscience, while love and joy danced in the ballroom.

  So this was Bethel? This was the place we’d signed up for? We had an extra four years to stay, four years in an isolated corner of Alaska. It did not seem so bad anymore. Tonight, I did not miss my falling balloons and confetti at the stroke of midnight, the cheap Champagne and the anonymity. I did not miss the overpriced restaurants filled with strangers I did not
know and care about. Perhaps I would have shaken a few hands, perhaps not. We would have pretended not to be alone in a sea of people, avoiding everybody else’s look to cherish a suffocating private life in a metropolitan fashion. This evening my guard went down for the first time. The Tom and Peter, Shirley and Saamiya gang removed it the instant we walked in. Another Bethel was coming to life. The isolation was still there, along with the high prices, the potential frozen pipes, and this endless winter, but for the first time, we saw something else, the other side of the coin, the unwritten story on the glossy brochure. Bethel was opening up with a sweet taste.

  The First Year

  January

  “Are you awake?” Lydia asked piercing the pitch morning darkness of the bedroom.

  “Hum…” I grunted, still enjoying the last few minutes of rest before starting another day of labor.

  “Can I turn on the light therapy lamp?” Lydia was whispering as if I was still sleeping.

  “The what?”

  “The winter light Shirley lent me yesterday. It helps for SAD.”

  “Are you sad? Why?” I mumbled still in the dusk of my sleep.

  “I’m not sad, it’s S-A-D, Seasonal Affective Disorder.”

  “Oh, yeah… sure… whatever you want… let me rest for a few minutes…” I groaned. Lydia turned on the midnight sun, the search light, “what in the world is THAT thing?!” The powerful lamp blasted a sun-like source of light in the bedroom.

  “It’s supposed to help increase your vitamin D, and improve the mood during the dark winter months,” Lydia said facing a pending failure.

  “Improve the mood? Are you serious? If you don’t turn off that thing it’s going to fly through the window! That’ll improve my mood!” I grumbled.

  Lydia switched off the light. “How’s the weather?”

  “Take California, subtract eighty degrees, you have Bethel. It’s probably hovering around ten, fifteen below, I don’t know.” I still had my head comfortably nudged on the pillow under the comforter.