January 30, 2009 - Walk on the Wild Side

WALK ON THE WILD SIDE

I resolutely leave my second floor apartment each morning wearing several layers of clothes and insulated boots, telling myself I'm ready for anything. I've intentionally cultivated an Alaskan stoicism in regard to the weather. I pass the small general store with its cursive neon sign,"Uutikuh", and the orphanage, Pukyuk, making a right on Bison Street, Kotzebue's busiest east-west thoroughfare. I cut behind the Alaska Commercial Store and a barebones apartment building which everyone refers to as "the 29 unit" in order to avoid the snow machines and 4-wheelers on busy Bison Street. This may be the only place in the US where there are no posted speed limits, and snowmachines, people, ATV's and cars all share the roads.

My ER physician roommate, Sharon, told me about the Native woman in her 50's who was walking on Bison in front of the 29 unit and was hit by a snow machine a few months ago. When the ambulance reached her from the Emergency Services Building just across the street, they found her with her ankle touching the back of her head in a grotesque arabesque. The fractures of her femur and both lower leg bones were like china shards from a smashed vase. Busted her up so bad that gangrene set in, and she had to have an above-the-knee amputation.

Along the back "alley" behind the buildings on Bison lies the peeling wooden crosses of the cemetery where the Baptists and Catholics are buried - separately. A large swath of land next to the cemetery is a snow machine playground where young people tear around at 40 MPH.

One clear still night I was walking home about 9:30 PM and saw beautiful fireworks in the sky over the shore of the Chukchi Sea. The pyrotechnics looked professional. I walked mesmerized looking up over the cemetery. So strange not to be sitting on some blanket in a park, hot and mosquito-bitten. It was pure visual delight until I heard and then saw 20 yards in front of me two snowmachines traveling across the alley at least 35 miles an hour onto the big field nearby where they race. If I had been a minute or two faster on my journey home, I might not have made it.

Last week I experienced my first Arctic blizzard. Some of the medical people residing in my apartment complex called the B and D cab and got a ride for five bucks plus tip for the 4 block ride. I wouldn't spend the money. I'm just as stubborn about paying for parking in Minneapolis. I figure small economies add up.

I could hear the wind through the night from my bed. When I stepped out, visibility was about 10 yards. A few days before I had lost my goggles somewhere between the hospital entrance and my office after using them the first time. Now my unprotected glasses kept icing up from my moist exhalations trapped by the heavy Donegal-made Irish scarf that covers my face. I couldn't see well enough so I took my glasses off. But I coudn't see the uneven surface of the snow. So I decided I had to walk on well-ploughed Bison Street exactly where the woman had lost her leg. The wind was roaring, and it was hard to hear oncoming snowmachines. So I rotated around 180 degrees left and right like a periscope at sea, hoping to have time to jump away should a snowmachine suddenly bear down on me.

When I turned at Bison and 5th Avenue, Maniilaq Hospital, the biggest building in town, was gone. The wind was furious in the open intersection, so I bent into it like a biker racing down a steep hill. I could hear the wild flapping of the Alaskan and US flags in front of the entrance before I could see them.

What if the wind just knocked one of those metal poles over at the very moment I chanced by? I remembered the story of a friend of Mike's whose daughter was crushed by a falling cottonwood in an Oregon state forest. She had to hike two miles to be standing at that spot, at the precise moment the tree chose to fall. What were the odds for that? Or for anything like that happening to me in this wild frontier town?

I entered the warm hospital foyer, grateful to start my day's work.