Strange Mathematics

In math class we learn that you can't add apples and oranges.  They are two different things, thus unlike terms.  Alaska would like to challenge this mathematical theory.  Here fish = bears.  Since the fish are beginning to die in pretty big numbers, the bears are coming down to the creek to feast on their finned friends.  Mike has set his game camera out and checks it regularly.  He's trying to stay on a weekly schedule, but has found himself battling with the desire to check after only a couple of days.

The bears have brought with them a few "only in Alaska" moments.  I have the bears to thank for the best tardy excuse I will probably hear in my career.  We had a parent call to say their kids would be late for school because a bear was in the yard so they couldn't leave the house.  We have also had to have an announcement at the end of the day to warn the kids to be careful on the way home because they had seen a bear on the north end of town.  We seem to have a mamma bear who has gotten lost.  Instead of hanging out by the creek to eat fish, she is hanging out by the dump to eat trash.  She has two cubs with her so the community doesn't want to put her down if they can avoid it.  We are hoping when they hibernate this winter, they will forget their source of tasty tidbits.

Hey!  What's this think doing on my tree?

"Who's a pretty bird?  I'm a pretty bird!  Oh, I'm sorry.
Were you expecting a bear picture?"
The seagulls have replaced the squirrels from back home for
triggering the game camera.

Fishy, Fishy!

Mike with a Silver salmon at First Hole

Every year, the salmon begin making their way back to the streams of their birth.  They will fight the good fight to get up that stream, regardless of the obstacles, so that they can spawn and bring new little salmon into the world.  As this process begins, their bodies also begin to change.  Their bodies will start to change color with the meat getting softer with the color progression.  When they have spawned, they die.  It's not a quick death, though.  They really start to decay before they die.  I've seen salmon that were completely white with flesh soft enough it looks ready to start falling off the bone and still very slowly swimming around.  It seems like a very sad, cruel circle of life.

Me holding one fillet from that salmon

The salmon typically begin coming up the creek in June and will continue through October.  The creeks have been very full of salmon for a while and they are now starting to die in pretty big numbers.  Their smell makes trips up the valley a little less pleasant this time of year, but the bears seem to like it anyway.  With there only being the two if us, it didn't take a lot of fishing to get our winter's worth of fish for the freezer.  The fact that they will die pretty quickly anyway does make me feel a little better about taking them out of that cruel circle of life, but not enough to keep me from making an idiot out of myself.  We were down at the lagoon on low tide when I saw a beautiful male red salmon struggling to get upstream in water that was only a couple inches deep.  He didn't appreciate my efforts to help and fought me the entire way, but I scooped him up and carried him across a good sized stretch of dry land to get to a deeper fork in the stream.  I then held him upright in the water until he regained the energy to keep himself straight in the stream.  I'm sure the local guys fishing out of their canoes in the lagoon were shaking their heads at what they saw, but that's okay.  That fish may only have a few days left in him, but I did what I could to make them the best they could be.  Mike is still trying to decide whether or not he should claim me.

Salmon swimming upstream

They just keep coming

Stepping Out

All work and no play makes for . . . a very tired person.  We've both been so busy with work that we haven't had much time to do anything else.  Eventually, though, every girl has got to get out.  I'm not a normal girl, though, so you're not going to see me begging for a fancy dinner or movie.  If I'm stepping out, I want to go out, like literally - outside.  We were finally able to find a little time to run up to First Hole and up to Christopher's cabin.  We haven't been able to spend a whole lot of time up there, but it's been nice to get outside and enjoy the beauty God has created for us.  I was able to snap a few pictures and we were able to put a little food in the freezer with our trips.  Mike caught some salmon and I picked some blueberries.  The bears are being little pigs, though, so they didn't leave a lot of berries behind.  It's like they're trying to put on weight or something.  It won't be long, though, and they'll be heading down to the creek to get some dying salmon.  So, before we were done, we also put out a game camera.  Hopefully we'll have some pictures of bears to show soon!

One tasty tidbit missed by the bears!

My bowlful of berries - it's not much but I can make
some muffins and pancakes.

Moss in the sunshine.

Watermelon berries!  They don't really taste like watermelon.

Various seaweeds and kelp washed up on the beach.

The lagoon at high tide.

We've had beautiful weather for the past
several weeks!!

First Day Blessing

Being from the south, I'm very accustomed to religious beliefs finding their way in the school one way or the other.  Up until a few years ago, our school year officially began with prayer before the back to school staff breakfast.  We've also always had a group of strong Christian leaders in our student body to share their faith in the school.  I am very much missing the daily morning announcement "FCA would like to invite everyone to join them for prayer in the Senior hallway." I don't miss feeling the need hurry to get in and out of the staff bathroom before they prayed (I always felt like I was disrespecting their prayer time), but I do miss that being a part of my school's daily routine.

The community here would fit well in the Bible Belt with their own faith practices.  Attendance is typically lowest for the school during the week before and the week after Easter because so many students are in church.  I think that's a pretty nice problem to have.  So, of course, they are going to start the school year out ensuring they have God's blessing, figuratively and literally.  A community member prayed with our students before the school day began.  Then Father surprised us with a visit to bless the school building itself, one room at a time.  Then students and teachers who wished to be blessed lined up so that he could sprinkle holy water on them and bless them each individually.  With that start, I'm pretty sure it's going to be a good year.

Barging In

A smaller barge that lives in Nanwalek.  It's owners also
own one of the stores so it makes a lot of grocery runs. 

The Helenka B fully loaded.  There's another small propane
truck hiding on the other side of the large truck.  You can also
see a semi-trailer behind the big propane truck (they used the
same truck to pull them both off).  And someone somewhere
just got a nice new minivan!

Anyone who followed our trip to Alaska several years ago is familiar with the Helenka B.  She's the former World War II minesweeper, turned commercial barging vessel I talked about in "De Barge, de Barge."  She's not, however, the only barge to service the community.  Being a community on the water, Nanwalek is very familiar with barges.  In fact, there are a couple who call Nanwalek home. They are much smaller than the Helenka B, but definitely have some advantages.  If you're bringing stuff over on the smaller barges, you pretty much only have to wait on the weather.  The drivers are pretty flexible and will usually make things work around your schedule when the weather allows them to.  The large barge (that's fun to say) doesn't have to wait on the weather, but it comes when it's ready.  If it doesn't have enough of a load for the owners to consider it worth the time and energy, it doesn't come, regardless of your sense of urgency.

They have to help the big trucks get up off of the beach.

The smaller barges can also be a little pricier, typically starting at $600 a trip and going up from there.  The same load may cost $1000 on the smaller barge and be as little as $200 on the large barge, but you have to be willing to work with its schedule.  Besides your sense of urgency, the size of your load will also determine which barge you choose.  If you're bringing over three propane trucks to fill up the propane farm, obviously you'll use the Helenka B.  She can hold all three propane trucks, another semi-truck trailer loaded down, the equipment necessary to pull those trucks off the boat and up the beach, and have room to spare for pallets of other miscellaneous freight.  She usually comes to the village about 3 or 4 times a year with the propane trucks and whatever else anyone has managed to add to the load.  Regardless of what it's bringing, it's always fun to watch.  

Kitty!!!

As you read in my previous post, I went 44 days without my kitty.  That . . . was . . . terrible.  Jesus only went 40 days without food.  I had hoped to have her flown up so that we could pick her up in Anchorage on our way from Missouri.  Shipping pets in the summer is easier said than done, though, so we weren't able to make that happen.  I just had to suffer through eternity without her.

Selfies in the hotel!  Can you tell I'm happy?

Getting her became an adventure in itself.  I tried to pack as light as possible because I would have the cat in a carry bag and the carrier she was shipped in to bring back with me.  I managed to get everything in my little Snoopy backpack except for the litter box and my little bag of kitty litter for the hotel.  Needless to say I had a few strange looks on my flight from Kenai to Anchorage.  I had about 5 hours to kill in the airport between my flight and her arrival.  Most of that time I spent working on more duckies and getting more strange looks as I carried around my kitty litter box and my Snoopy backpack.

After getting lost with the cab driver looking for the cargo facility, I had to explain that I had just taken my driver's test so I didn't actually have a valid ID with my address.  When I started pulling out my paperwork, they decided they were satisfied with my identification as it was.  We then went to the hotel to get settled in for the night, but Sunny was too stressed from the trip and I was too worried she wouldn't use the litter box to get much rest.  We might have been tempted to sleep on the plane but our flights were bumpy enough to keep us wide awake all the way home.  I spent a lot of time saying "Jesus, keep me safe." and I'm sure Sunny spent a lot of time thinking, "Mommy, I hate you."  All was forgiven as soon as we got home, though.  I don't know if she actually remembers being here before or not, but it was definitely familiar because she settled in almost immediately.  By the next day she was expecting salmon on demand and she has again resumed the never ending battle with her tail.  She is home.

Sea Lion Study

A couple weeks ago (I know I'm terribly behind) we got to watch as they did a sea lion study on the beach.  Alaska Fish and Game has created the Steller Sea Lion Research Project to collect data to aid to help the recovery of sea lion populations in Alaska.  Since sea lions are protected animals and typically cannot be hunted this can be difficult to do.  Alaska Natives, though, can hunt sea lions and other protected animals for a couple reasons.  First, there are many areas in Alaska that are so remote survival can depend on the hunting of protected animals.  It is also an important part of maintaining their cultural traditions.  Since members of the community can hunt sea lions, they work with the Research Project which enables the organization to gather information it otherwise wouldn't be able to get.  A couple weeks ago, a researcher from the Research Project was in the community, so one of the community members brought in a sea lion for her to collect data.  For each sea lion they take basic body measurements and then tissue samples to examine for evidence of environmental contaminants that could affect the animal's health.

Numbers

I've seen in magazines where they'll have a section titled numbers.  The section is exactly what it sounds like, numbers related to the main subject of the issue or numbers from the news of the week.  I thought it might be fun to have a numbers list for our trip from Missouri to Alaska.

4437.1-  miles driven to Anchorage
2 -  lakes of death
2 - cliffs of death
420 - gallons of gas to get to Anchorage
10.56 - average fuel mileage
27 - stops for fuel (we are deliberately not adding up the cost of those fuel stops)
$7.42 - highest fuel cost per gallon
12 - nights in a hotel
1 - night slept in the back of the truck
11 - pillows in our bunk in the back of the truck
5 - duckies embroidered along the trip
2 - trips taken by both the plane and the barge to get our stuff to Nanwalek

And the most important number of all . . .
44 - days without my kitty!!

I didn't think I could describe the duckies very well,
so I thought it best to include a few pictures.  Working
on these little guys kept me from falling asleep on
Mike too much while he drove.