Im really enjoying seeing Tanana, Alaska again in the Yukon Men TV show. The first couple minutes of this short video show the town. When I was there in 1980 they had about 600 residents, mostly Athabascan Indians. Now they are down to 250. Some of my memories from my three wintry months there: 1) A bunch of us went up a hill and built a bonfire atop the snow for a hot dog roast. By the end of our get-together the fire was about 6 feet below us, as the snow melted away. 2) Every Saturday there was a dog sled race on the frozen Yukon River. The last race of the year was a tenderfoot race, where they put inexperienced people like me behind a team as sort of a comedy event. I could not remember whether to saw Gee or Haw to turn left, so I always seemed to turn the wrong way. 3) Spending a week in another village sleeping on the floor of a log cabin. One day while I was there, a 18 year old native girl looked at my blue eyes in astonishment, saying Ive never seen blue eyes before! The snow was so high in that village that the children chased each other over the roofs of the houses. I walked past a basketball hoop that was at knee level. 4) Going for a jog one day when it was 35 below zero. Every 5 minutes I had to remove my hand from my glove and thaw my eyelashes in order to open my eyes. The nice thing was that we could jog in tennis shoes at that temperature, because the snow was too cold to melt and give us wet feet. 5) I got to meet 3 or 4 of the gentleman who were on the original vaccine run that is now commemorated every year with the Iditarod dogsled race. Fascinating people! One was a patient in our hospital for a week or so, and Id sit and chat with him for hours. Another lived in our village and had gone blind. 6) Flying from town to town on bush planes, and having the pilot tell me Always dress on the assumption that were going to make an emergency landing. If you dont, youll die soon after we land and I hope you dont mind. Were going to take an extra hour or so to wander around on todays flight to see if we can spot a plane that went missing yesterday. Another time we were on a tiny plane with bright red peeling paint, slowly rolling away from the airport, and someone ran out of the building to tell the pilot You cant take that plane. Its got a broken gauge!, only to have the pilot say Oh, it will be all right and taxi away and take off. 7) Being met at an airport a few miles outside of town by townspeople with sleds behind their snowmobiles. We strapped our gear onto sleds and climbed on the snowmobiles behind the townspeople. 8. Eating bear meat at a potlatch funeral meal, and then have a patient admitted to our hospital the next week with a bad case of worms that hed gotten from eating bear meat. The doctor explained that bear meat often has parasites because bears are at the top of the food chain. 9) Having a cook at the hospital, in a town where bears walk down the main street in summer, tell me I could never live in Ohio. Id be terrified of tornadoes! 10) Flying north from Anchorage to Fairbanks, and seeing the sun rise, go back down as we flew north, and then come up again, all within 2 hours. 11) Having a patient admitted with a nasty tongue wound. Hed got drunk one night when it was 40 below zero and licked a metal light pole.His tongue stuck to the pole. 12) Having the sun rise for about 2 hours each day in January. The sun barely topped the horizon, so it was essentially a gorgeous 2 hour sunrise/sunset. While the sun was up, on a clear day we could see Mt McKinley, even though it was more than 100 miles away. With snow everywhere, the countryside was bright on those 22 hour long moonlit nights, and the northern lights appeared about 1/3 of the nights I was there.
Posted on: Tue, 29 Oct 2013 03:43:30 +0000
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