The Blizzzzard

This past weekend, a blizzard blew into Nome, and we got our first real taste of Alaskan winter.

We'd already had several weeks of snow on the ground - snow that would blow around like sand when it became cold and windy - but this definitely took things "up a notch." (Bam!)

The whole Western Alaska region got socked with a solid dose of winter weather, with strong winds in excess of 45 mph, yet more inches of new snow accumulation, and wind chills easily dipping below zero. (Many villages are already seeing routine daily temperatures fall below zero - without the wind chill.)

Something that immediately struck me this past weekend was just how much snow was getting inside the entries of the (radio) station, despite all of the windows and doors being shut. The heavy winds were pushing in a good amount of snow through all of the miniscule spaces between the doors and their doorframes, and the white stuff was collecting inside both the front and back doors - forming mounds more than deep enough to accommodate a deep bootprint, or to make at least a dozen robust snowballs.

It may be just the inexperience of an outsider, but the snow really seems "different" here than in the East Coast. Back in Jersey or Massachusetts, snow always seems a transient thing: even in the depths of the coldest winter, you can never count on it lasting too long, because a single unseasonably warm night or rainfall could melt it all away, leaving you with a pile of slush. The snow of the northeast thins out when thousands of cars drive over it, when bag after bag of de-icing salt is thrown down, and when it becomes "dirty snow," mixed in with sand and pebbles and dirt.

Snow at home always seems as fickle as rain: it might dominate today, but it's gone tomorrow. As a result, I think it's more of a curiosity in Jersey.

In Nome, all of that is gone. There is nowhere near the traffic in Nome that we have back home, so - guess what? - there isn't nearly as much "dirty" snow. And unless we have an unusual period of warmth, the snow we have now is pretty much here to stay for 5-6 months. So it'll just keep building up and building up, forming our snow "base," blowing around and forming snow drifts that can change with the winds, and, in general, acting like just as much a permanent part of the landscape as the ground, the rocks, or the ocean.

So in short, it's winter until May. And I'm pretty excited.

T. Hanksgiving

One of the other KNOM volunteers and my housemate, Ross, has become known among our circles of Nome friends as a self-described inventor of new and unorthodox holidays.

One of these holidays is coming up this week, right after Thanksgiving, much in the same way that Boxing Day (in Canada and the UK) follows after Christmas.

It's entitled "T. Hanksgiving," a holiday in which, on one of the weekend days following Thanksgiving (Fri, Sat or Sun), celebrators gather to eat leftovers and watch movies starring Tom Hanks.

According to Ross, with whom I've just conferred on the subject, T. Hanksgiving is, at most, two years old. While the first Thanksgiving, at least in American storytelling, was celebrated in 1621 in Plymouth by religious pilgrims and indigenous peoples, the first T. Hanksgiving was celebrated in 2004 in Pittsburgh by a few college students.

In staging the third installment of the holiday this year, the search has begun to round up as many Tom Hanks movies in the greater Nome area as possible. We already have Saving Private Ryan (1998) and Cast Away (2003) on hand, but we may also be able to borrow or rent others, such as Apollo 13 (1995), The DaVinci Code (2006) or even Sleepless in Seattle (1993).

Will other, even better Tom Hanks options present themselves? We'll have to wait and see what the winds of fate blow our way. With a little luck and a little faith, plus also ample amounts of Stove Top, we may yet discover what T. Hanksgiving miracles are in store for us.

Any fond memories of T. Hanksgivings past, or big plans to celebrate this year? Please feel free to add a comment.

A sleepy Sunday

The Sunday before Thanksgiving, and hanging around the house during the afternoon.

Lots going on lately in Nome:

Last weekend, on Saturday night, we had the Open Mic Night at the Mini-Convention center, sponsored by the Nome Arts Council. The other two volunteers (Ross and Jesse) and I decided to do an act, which we started cobbling together as the weekend began and actually had worked out mostly well by the time Saturday rolled around.

We performed as the "Talent Brothers," in which our names each spelled out N.O. Talent:

Nash Ogden Talent (Ross)
Norman Oskar Talent (Jesse)
Nathan Orville Talent (myself)

Ross and Jesse played guitars and I just sang. We did:

"Mrs. Brown" (You've Got a Lovely Daughter)
"Old Joe's Place" (from A Mighty Wind)
and
"Black Water" (by the Doobie Brothers)

It was a lot of fun, and hopefully we'll be able to reprise our stage roles for another performance at some time.

Meanwhile, I'm strongly considering applying to teach a class at Northwest campus, and am starting to amass syllabus ideas. I'm thinking maybe of teaching an overview/survey of Western art music, a kind of "highlights reel" of the past thousand years. It couldn't be anything too in-depth, since at most we'd only have 15 hours of class time with which to work.

Finally, I've also been commissioned to write the 15-minute, annual Christmas play for KNOM. I'm excited about it but now really need to tease out the few ideas I have thus far...

Going over to a friend's house for Indian food tonight! It should be fun; haven't had good Indian probably since Harvard.

A new month, a new title

Hooo, boy, I haven't written in a while. Halloween has come and gone, and all of a sudden it's November, there's snow on the ground, it's in the single-digits at night, and Thanksgiving is right around the corner.

Just to mix things up, I decided to go ahead and change the title of my blog, from "Travels in Anvil City" to "Finis Terrae." The former referred to the original name of Nome (at its founding in the last few years of the 19th century), while the latter, new name comes from the Latin phrase for "end of the world" or "end of the earth."

When I look out of our second-floor windows in the volunteer house, towards the Norton Sound and the Bering Sea, knowing that Siberian Russia and the Alaskan Arctic aren't far out there somewhere, it sometimes can feel that it really is the end of the world - not in a negative way, but rather just in a way that, from time to time, makes you lean back in your chair and say "Wow."

So thus the new title.

More soon, hopefully!

Here it comes...

Sunday afternoon and there's a storm coming to western AK - probably
the biggest I will have seen since arriving in August.

Our weather broadcasts at the station have doubled in length (to at
least 10 minutes), with all of the extra advisories for the villages
that stand to see damage and/or flooding. ("Be sure to tie up your
boat," etc.)

The worst is supposedly going to arrive overnight and continue through
Monday. Right now it's just windy, rainy, wet and grey in Nome.
Everything has this grey flatness to it. These will be a couple of
days good for just staying inside and reading...

Meanwhile, I'm starting to germinate ideas for my next themed music
show, which airs this coming Friday. Maybe "Bands from New Jersey?"
I feel like that could work.

Third time actually is the charm

It's October 8 and Nome has had its first noticeable snow
accumulation. Literally as I write it's melting away into slush in a
warmer evening's light rain, but last night we saw our third snow of
the season actually fall in air cold enough to allow it to stick to
the ground.

Kids were out playing and throwing snowballs at each other through the
night, which became problematic for them when the police showed up on
Front Street in Nome PD SUV's to enforce the (midnight) curfew.

Anyway, it's getting cold, but not even close to as cold as it'll be
by the time winter actually gets here. As an Alaska rookie, it's
still strange for me to see the snow falling, and thus bringing to
mind all of my own associations with winter and Christmastime, while
also realizing that Halloween isn't even here yet.

Friday Night = Movie Night

This Friday night has turned into movie night. All three of us in the
volunteer house (Jesse, Ross, and I) watched Jesse's Netflix pic,
"Thank You For Smoking," which I generally thought was well-done,
although certainly far from perfect: sometimes a little loose in its
plot, or maybe a little stretched thin in the message or idea it was
trying to convey. But still, not a bad movie.

And then, just a little while ago, Ross and I sat down and watched
"Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," which was the first time for
me. I really enjoyed it - it's such an imaginative, creative,
delightful film, and very thought-provoking.

Anyway, the past few days have been wonderfully sunny, brisk and crisp
in a way that definitely signals winter coming: chilly, but beautiful.
Here's hoping tomorrow is like that, too...

Getting to the weekend

Friday night and just generally relaxing around the house. For the
past couple of weekends I ended up spending Friday doing some errands
and then Saturday traveling (to Pilgrim, to Solomon, to Teller, etc.),
so I'm looking forward to a more laid-back Saturday before going back
to work on Sunday morning.

This has been a pretty busy week. My first round of new spots went
into rotation this past Sunday (Oct. 1), which means it's largely back
to the drawing boards for the next set of spots, scheduled to begin on
Oct. 15. (Sets of spots are on a two-week rotation.) I largely spent
the beginning of this week writing new spots and starting to get them
voiced. But I switched over in the later part of the week to prepare
for two projects that are both now out of the way.

The first (and by far the bigger) was Sounding Board, the station's
Thursday call-in show that features a news and/or public interest
topic relevant to Western Alaska. Each week it's a new topic and a
new host, and this week (Oct. 5) it was my turn.

I'd never done it before, and my subject was the PFD, or "Permanent
Fund Dividend," Alaska's pot of invested oil money surpluses whose
earnings get doled out, every year, to nearly every single Alaska
resident. (If I stick around for more than just a year, I'll start
getting them, too.) The fund dividend was pretty substantial this
year, although not the biggest: just over $1,100.

Anyway, there was a lot to learn about the PFD -- and thus lots of
time spent on the internet at work, reading about its origins, how the
fund is invested (mostly in stocks), the way people use their PFD
checks, various ideas on how to make it better, etc. I lucked out in
that I was able to chat with a few people - the manager of the local
Wells Fargo and even the 3rd party candidate for governor in AK - and
recorded their thoughts on the PFD.

Ultimately, things went pretty well with the show, I think - we had a
good number of calls, many of them from the smaller villages, and
people seemed genuinely interested in the topic. (We even had a call
in from the former mayor of Nome.)

With Sounding Board thankfully finished by Thursday afternoon, the
only thing standing between myself and the weekend was then my
bi-weekly Music Detour show, which just aired tonight.

I had intentionally left almost all of the preparation for this week's
Music Detour - the writing of the script, the recording of my voice
track, the ripping of the music itself, the final production, etc. -
until the last day. But things definitely fell into place, the script
got written and the recording got finished, and now the weekend is
finally here. Phew.

More snow

Woke up this morning to see snow falling outside my window. It's not cold enough yet for much to be sticking on the ground, but this is, I think, technically our second snow of the season. And from what I've heard, there's only lots more of it to come...

:-)

What's perhaps coolest about these "dustings" is that, even though we don't necessarily get any accumulation in town, you can see snow outlining the tops of the mountains that are several miles north of us. There's a great view of them from the second floor of the radio station, where my desk is thankfully located.

Supposedly, once we actually start getting some serious snow in a month or so, it doesn't completely melt away in the spring until around May.

"You're Going Where?"

My trip to Alaska is now exactly one month old - ridiculous how quickly the first 31 days went by. I arrived on August 27 and started work on the 28th.

There's so much to write about from my first month of the experience: getting to Nome, Nome itself, working at the radio station, etc. So I guess I'll just start with the trip out, last month.

Getting out of Newark and then going through two successive airports - first Portland, Oregon and then Anchorage, Alaska - was mostly uneventful, although in retrospect, it was pretty funny how much confusion and complication we ran into at Newark. None of the Continental Airline employees working behind the airline counter seemed to have ever heard of Nome before. ("You're going where?") When my mother went to a nearby "Information Desk" to verify that we were standing in the correct line (we were), the person working behind the counter had the initial reaction of - and I do not exaggerate - "Oh, Alaska. That's international, so you'll want to head upstairs for the international departures desks." Wow.

But sooner or later - and at the time, it definitely seemed like later - all of my bags, and I, somehow made it onto the plane, despite clogged ticketing lines and rude security personnel.

For some reason I couldn't bring myself to sleep on the first plane, out to Portland. After all of the preparation and packing that had preceded actually walking out the door, it was nice just to sit and read and listen to my iPod for a few hours. I even got to write a little.

The in-flight movie was "Dr. Doolittle 3," which is one of those movies that you can basically follow perfectly well without listening to its sound, and even with the constant, high-pitched whirring of plane engines saturating your ambient noise. Apparently it never made it to the theaters and was released straight to DVD, and I think I know why.

Airports are strange places in the middle of the night, though, especially when you have long layovers. Portland's airport architecture probably looks open and inviting during the day, but at night the terminal has a strange abandoned quality to it, with almost all of its kiosks closed and with random people sleeping in gates, outstretched on connected bench seats and using their jackets for pillows. With carry-on bags slung tiredly over one shoulder, you suddenly feel like you're a refugee of a war fought over bad airline schedules, and as you're fleeing for safety in the gate of your next departure, there's this strange sense of solidarity with all of the other passengers that you see, napping in their seats. For the time being, you have no home, have nowhere to go, and are all in this together: stuck in a limbo of fluorescent lighting, a no-man's-land of soft muzak piped through tinny overhead speakers, a Twilight-Zone of looped segments from CNN Headline News.

And since all of the food places are closed, too, but since I was pretty hungry, it was a choice between junk food and soda, from the still-open newsstand, or nothing. And so peanut M&Ms and root beer it was.

It was kind of neat to finally arrive in Anchorage, even though I didn't really have enough time to go outside, especially since it was in the middle of the night. You can tell you're in Alaska, though - there's a full-size model of a propellor bush plane hanging in one of the atrium lobbies, and as the sun began to rise (around 5am), you could see the mountains, which surround Anchorage, silhouetted against the blues and purple-reds of the brightening day. And yet they still had a Starbucks and a Chili's - probably the last time I'll see either of those chains in a good long while.

It wasn't a great place to sleep, though. For whatever reason, the Anchorage Airport has a PA system which automatically announces the time every half-hour, and rather loudly, so even though I had a good five hours to sleep before my connecting flight to Nome, it was more like having ten consecutive naps of 25 minutes each.

That last flight, though, was beautiful. For starters, the plane was only half-filled - an advantage, I'm sure, of traveling to a remote Alaskan town - and you could see the sun rise, to our right, over the vast fields of clouds beneath us. Really breathtaking. And to our left, you could see the snow-topped mountains outside of Anchorage.

About an hour later, we finally touched down in Nome, and thankfully, so did all of my luggage. I met the director of the radio station for which I would shortly be working, and the year had begun.

A plague on both your houses! ... or, um, at least on your video rental establishment

In an effort to culturally prepare for the trip next month to Nome, my family and I figured that it'd be fun to watch a handful of DVD episodes of Northern Exposure, which I guess was all the rage back in the early 90s, when I would have been far too young to have appreciated it - and when I was barely old enough to allow me to still remember it now.

Apparently the same can be said for the employees at Blockbuster Video, because they didn't have any of the sets of the show's DVDs.

On the plus side, we picked up a copy of the old 60's movie To Kill a Mockingbird, instead.

To explain the title of my blog...

"Why 'Anvil City'?", you might ask.

The answer:
Nome, Alaska was originally called Anvil City for a short while after its founding, just before the turn of the century.

(Thanks, Wikipedia.)

T-minus 1 month

It's July 27th and I've one month to go until I arrive in Nome.

The paperwork is mostly out of the way, but there's still lots to do to prepare, including making sure my student loan payments get deferred, gearing up with winter-weather clothes, and getting routine medical check-ups.

The loan payments should hopefully be rather simple to take care of, as with the doctor's visits, but the winter-weather stuff is a little more unusual:

Even though Nome is on the coast, and therefore kept somewhat temperate, it still has been known to get down to around -40 degrees in the extremes of the winter, and it will probably have snow on the ground pretty much all the time from October or November all the way until May.

So I'm going to need a jacket... a really good one.