Dave in Nome

Overheard on NPR

2008-11-09T15:12:00.002-09:00

I'll confess: I often listen to the radio, but it's not always the one for which I work.

Yesterday morning I was brushing my teeth to the non-threatening presence of KUAC (the National-Public-Radio affiliate broadcast from Fairbanks) when I heard this quote:

Don't make the same mistakes I did. Make your own mistakes; mine are all taken.

Prediction: Obama 364

2008-11-04T00:10:00.001-09:00

It's the big day! I can't pass up the opportunity to make a prediction, so here's mine:

Undecided?

2008-11-01T18:15:00.005-08:00

I haven't written on this blog in a few months now.

I'd like to think it's not because of a lack of things to say, but rather because of an overabundance: a lot of my free time has been consumed with following the presidential elections, and it's only gotten worse as the clock has ticked closer to November 4th.

Every week I feel eager to write something about the election, but then suddenly, the news cycle turns over, and my chosen subject has become old-hat. Sarah Palin trips on a rock, suggests the rock has been palling around with terrorists, and I'm back to square-one.

Keeping up with the delirious pace of the news media is often more trouble than it's worth. It's taken a lot of my time and energy that might have been better applied to, say, building a ship-in-a-bottle, reading the complete works of Leo Tolstoy, learning the cello, or painting my bedroom. Or sleeping.

But sometimes, being a political- and media-junkie yields something insightful - or, better yet, provides some much-needed humor.

Here's an except of David Sedaris' take on undecided voters, from a recent issue of The New Yorker:

To put them (undecided voters) in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. "Can I interest you in the chicken?" she asks. "Or would you prefer the platter of s*** with bits of broken glass in it?"

To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.

Now, what Sedaris never says (in the October 27th issue) is which candidate is the chicken, and which is the platter of you-know-what.

But either way, his point is well-taken: what remaining avenues are there to be undecided?

After almost two years of non-stop campaigning from both parties, the choices we have for President have been exhaustively explored. No detail has proven too minor, too incendiary, or too absurd for our consideration. (Obama's flag pin, anyone? How about Palin's wardrobe?)

At this point - just "hours from the first polls closing," MSNBC said today - we have had an endless feast of policy debates, editorials and talking points from which to distill our own opinions. On both sides, many voters have so staunchly entrenched their decision that the mere thought of the alternative is practically scandalous. (And I should probably count myself in this group.)

For me, I'd liken the 2008 campaign to a sports championship, writ large. From the pre-primary season to now, the eve of the big election, my feelings have ranged from frustration to impatience to near-euphoria. I've only deepened my hope to see my team win in the final round, but at some point, it all has to be over.

No matter how the exit polls, electoral votes, and dangling chads fall, I'm looking forward to living in a post-election nation. It'll be fun to think about something else.

I'll probably give myself at least a few days vacation from the ups-and-downs of the political world - maybe a whole week! - before I cave in to the relentless siren song of news-magazines, the blogosphere, and cable news.

Because you know, 2012 will be here sooner than you think.

The New Palin

2008-09-09T02:04:00.000-08:00

What to make of Sarah Palin? I can tell you that in my current home state of Alaska, this is very much the question du jour.

Granted, our junior governor is nothing new. Or at least, she wasn't anything new, until John McCain picked her to run with him on this fall's GOP ticket.

But Palin-as-Vice-President, or even Palin-as-President? Now, that's new. And it's not just that the situation has changed; it's that Palin herself - as a candidate, and as a persona - has changed overnight. Her expanded aspirations cast her personality and her story in a different light, and expose her past to a heightened degree of scrutiny. A mere fortnight ago, Sarah Palin in the White House would have been a ridiculous hypothetical. Today it's a very real possibility, and even the residents of the 49th state need to redraw their conceptions of the "hockey mom" who might, one day, sit behind an Oval Office desk.

Thus, we Alaskans stand astride with the rest of the world in making evaluations. Some of us are swelling with state pride and posting McCain-Palin signs in the yard; others are taking a second look at her checkered past, and not liking what we're seeing.

It is two months before the election, and a pall of discord and disbelief broods over the Great Land.

Exciting, surreal, controversial, flabbergasting: Palin's anointing defies any single descriptor or response. It's set off a buzz of chatter and debate in the cooling September air. My Alaskan friends are finding it difficult to maintain a conversation for long before talk veers back to the VP nod. There's a lot to discuss: Palin's qualifications (or lack thereof) for the job, her potential role in the White House, her history in Wasilla and Juneau, and what her selection might mean for the state.

Her nascent candidacy has offered, politically, many immediate positives and negatives, as well as a study in contradictions. Palin as McCain's counterpart seems simultaneously brilliant and absurd, shrewd and foolish, fascinating and horrifying. Every news cycle seems to bring a different wrinkle to Palin's meteoric political narrative, and I keep finding new ways to make sense of it all.

On the one hand, McCain and his advisers may have hit political pay dirt, if last week's Republican National Convention was any indication. Palin's stinging oratory on Wednesday night electrified the delegates. There was plenty of camera time for her family, ample jabs at the Democrats, the normal drumbeats of national security and lower taxes, and the reassurance that she would carry her working-class street-cred into the White House. Only a speech from Ronald Reagan's ghost could have rallied the Republican base more.

At the end of the day - although her initial pick seemed a bizarre surprise - Palin makes sense for John McCain. Her youth and credibility as a working mother, her faith, and her staunch, money-where-your-mouth-is position against abortion have drawn together a conservative electorate that hadn't quite made up its mind about the silver-haired Arizonan. Palin is a game-changer. She brings the base to the table with a smile, and she might even drag a few independents and swing voters along for the ride.

But on the other hand, Palin's political history raises many, many red flags. And while there's a lot of smoke, there could be some fire, too.

In Wasilla, Alaska, where Palin was mayor, she made enemies by using evangelical Christianity as a wedge issue. She was a born-again Christian, and promoted herself as the "first Christian candidate" when she was running for the job, even though her opponent was himself a Lutheran. (See this article in The New York Times.)

The degree of her religiosity - and how it might affect her politics - continues to be an issue. A recent Associated Press story (via the Chicago Tribune) relayed how her own Wasilla Bible Church was encouraging a conference that would "turn" gay men and lesbians straight. (The ultra-conservative group Focus on the Family supports this "pray the gay away" movement.) If Obama's private church-going is political fair game - with Reverend Jeremiah Wright and all - then so it goes for Palin, too. The pendulum swings both ways: just what does she believe?

More recently, she's been embroiled in the scandal that she fired the state's public safety commissioner, Walt Monegan, possibly for personal reasons: Monegan refused to dismiss Mike Wooten, an Alaska State Trooper who also happened to be the ex-husband of Palin's sister. A chain of phone calls and emails may suggest that the Governor's office overstepped its bounds in pressing for Wooten's dismissal. (The Anchorage Daily News is chronicling the ongoing story, at this page.)

Amid the flak, Palin has painted herself as a bare-knuckles Alaskan reformer and a tireless champion of political ethics. The "hockey mom" reputation dovetails well into this portrayal: one imagines Palin floor-checking dirty politicians who cross her path. A new ad from the McCain campaign shows the two of them as "mavericks" of the same stripe: unbound from party cronyism, marching off to do glorious battle against corruption and earmarks.

But here's the irony: thanks to the Monegan firing, the Alaska legislation has launched a bipartisan investigation into Palin's own ethics.

And for all Sarah Palin's self-promotion as an opponent of federal aid, she is hardly the foe of earmarks that she says she is. While mayor of Wasilla she took an interest in the earmark process and requested huge sums of federal money: so much so, in fact, that McCain himself criticized her pork projects. This year alone, she appealed to Senator Ted Stevens for earmarks totaling nearly $200 million; that would be the most federal money, per-capita, of any state in the union. (Check out the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and the Seattle Times for more.)

This Monegan/Wooten/"Troopergate" story - which Alaska state senator Hollis French (D) recently said could be an "October surprise" for the McCain campaign - may reveal a broader insight into how Palin likes to govern. A number of government employees who have worked with her say that Sarah Palin simply likes to get her way. When she doesn't, there's trouble.

Putting aside the obvious comparisons - does a stubborn, evangelical Christian with a propensity for wedge issues and big spending remind you of anyone? - one wonders just what kind of Vice President Sarah Palin would make. Have Wasilla and Juneau already seasoned her enough to tackle Washington, D.C., and, with it, the world? Or, do we have another Dan Quayle on our hands - except this time, one who could be "a heartbeat away" from Commander-in-Chief? One conservative critic, Rick Brookhiser, put it concisely in his column for the National Review:

Either McCain thinks the war on terror isn't serious, or he thinks the vice-presidency isn't... McCain, bless him, intends to do everything himself. Good luck! Palin will go to funerals.

My own political opinions are likely clear by now; the Obama '08 sign propped against our living-room window will not be coming down anytime soon. But, at least for this post, that's beside the point. Sarah Palin may be a reformer saint or a rotten surrogate, but either way, it's made for a fascinating two weeks of conversation. The surreal spotlight on Alaska and our governor has only begun.

Gas Prices Redux

2008-06-06T11:11:00.004-08:00

Here comes trouble.

The price of fuel in rural Alaska is going up... again. As the summer approaches, communities throughout our region are anticipating huge - and sudden - bumps in per-gallon costs. Rumors of drastic increases in fuel rates have been going around Nome for a few weeks now.

In the meantime, we've received the latest gas prices from Bethel. (It's a city in southwestern Alaska - the Kuskokwim Delta - just on the fringes of our radio station's AM range.) Here are the figures:

Regular gas: $5.64 per gallon (up $1)

Heating oil: $5.91 per gallon (up $1.86)

Diesel: $6.45 per gallon (up $1.81)

Yikes.

What Goes Around...

2008-06-04T22:07:00.000-08:00

It's been too long since my last post, so perhaps a little bit of humor will break the ice. I'd like to recount an encounter I had about two weeks ago at our local grocery store.

It was a Thursday, during my lunch break, and I was on the checkout line at Hanson's (a.k.a. Carrs, a.k.a. Safeway). I had a simple ensemble of items in tow: a vanilla root beer, a York's Peppermint Patty, and a copy of our local weekly newspaper, The Nome Nugget, which had just hit the shelves.

There was only one person on line in front of me: a young Native boy, I'd say between 7 and 10 years old. (The older I get, the worse I've become in pinpointing the ages of those outside my peer group.)

The boy had amassed a small order of some standard household foods: eggs, milk, bacon, and a few other things. He had done an admirable job lugging each of these items (disproportionately large for his small hands) from his cart and onto the black conveyer belt (disproportionately high for his small stature).

One by one, the cashier rang through his items. I don't remember the final total, but let's say for the sake of this post that it was $16.40.

The child then reached into his pocket, and awkwardly removed a wad of $1 bills, gradually unfolding the wad of singles and counting them. When he had finished, he sheepishly revealed to the cashier, "I'm 40 cents short."

An awkward silence ensued. The child looked at the cashier, the cashier at the child. The cashier, I believe, may have muttered out a tentative "OK": not a reassurance that the debt would be overlooked, but rather just an acknowledgement of the problem. What to do?

In the pregnant pause, I mentally pictured the amount of money inside my wallet, and decided that I must surely have at least one dollar bill that I could donate to the moment.

I took out my wallet and was right: there were some $1 bills inside. I gave one to the child, he finished the transaction, quickly thanked me, and then left with his groceries - taking my $0.60 with him.

That's fine, I thought at the time. Surely he needs the change more than I do!

As it turns out, I was wrong.

It was now my turn in the checkout line. My newspaper went through, my candy, and then my bottle of root beer. My total: $3.47.

I took out my wallet again, still feeling a little self-congratulatory from my recent goodwill. I surveyed the remaining money inside.

There were three $1 bills left, and not a scrap more. With the child already long gone, I was now forty-seven cents short.

I sheepishly looked back at the cashier, handed him my credit card for the measly purchase, and smiled.

The March Hangover

2008-03-26T20:24:00.001-08:00

God created the month of March to show people who don't drink what a hangover feels like.
- Garrison Keillor

Well, Iditarod's over. And there is perhaps no better time than now to quote the above, which I heard on a recent Saturday afternoon on KUAC (our Fairbanks NPR affiliate). If the month of March is a hangover, then Alaska feels it in a very special way.

In the Great Land, mind you, the weather may not exhibit what Keillor would seem to call the "hangover" effect. I am picturing in my mind the March of many northeastern states: gray skies and slush in the gutters, rain and snow and then rain and then more slush, ice in the driveway followed by mud. That, surely, is a hangover: the headache and soft light that Mother Nature feels after the bender of winter, before getting hydrated with April showers and renewed in May flowers.

For the 49th state, March is less of a mess. In many ways, it's actually refreshing. In Nome, we're currently gaining over six minutes of daylight per day. At Christmas the sun rose at lunch and had set by 4pm; now, it's still twilight at quarter-to-ten. January blizzards and February frostbite gave way, albeit temporarily, to a glorious, sunny period without new snow. (New snow is an Alaskan thing: of course we still have tons of the white stuff already on the ground -- 9-foot-high drifts in parking lots -- but no precipitation in the skies is a welcome state.) With the clouds gone you can see the Northern Lights at night, if you're lucky enough. And recent temperatures have drawn thoughts towards spring. As I mentioned in my last post, 15 above may not be particularly high, but with an afternoon sun to warm your skin, it's enough to enjoy a cold beer outdoors.

Alaska, however, has its own reasons to claim the March hangover.

March is the denouement of a racing season that starts right after New Year's: a season that winds its way through January and February with races of sled-dog and snowmachine teams. (In Bush Alaska, we don't say "snowmobiles"; we say snowmachines.)

Each race of the season is impressive. The "Iron Dog," for example, is the longest snowmachine race in the world; over the course of a week, racers speed their way from Anchorage to Nome, and then from Nome to Fairbanks. For those unfamiliar with the geography of Alaska, that's an incredibly long trail. The Iron Dog is 1,971 miles long: just about exactly the same as a drive from New York City to Aspen, Colorado. The teams that finish this race run that distance in less than a week, even after plenty of mandatory layover (rest) time.

But Iditarod remains "The Last Great Race," and there's some reason for the hype. The race has endured for over a generation - 2008 was its 36th incarnation - and it runs all the way from Anchorage to Nome: just over 1,100 miles. This year nearly one hundred teams started, and an all-time record of 78 finished. For each musher - from first place to last - the experience demands endurance and determination, and, if you hope to be competitive, a lot of strategy, too.

To give you the proper idea, imagine driving all the way from New York City to Des Moines in a slow golf cart. Your cart can go about 10-11 mph in spurts, but most of the time, 6-8 mph is about your top speed. You need to rest strategically. Too little rest, and you'll burn out; too much, and you'll lose momentum and get passed. There are 95 other carts racing with you, and you're all sharing a trail that is not a manicured highway, but rather a winding, sometimes precarious route, one that can become impassible with poor weather. And oh yeah, it's routinely snowing and 30 below, before the wind chill. The Iditarod is hard.

The science of breeding and training dog teams has been honed extensively since the race began in the 1970s, and finishing times have become significantly faster. Still, though, the fastest anyone has ever done the trip was in 2002: multiple-time champion Martin Buser arrived in Nome in just shy of nine days.

So the Iditarod is not just hard; it is long and hard.

The race is a big deal for all of Alaska, and for Western Alaska in particular, since it passes through many of the otherwise isolated villages of our region. Places like White Mountain, Unalakleet, Koyuk, and Shaktoolik have a flurry of race excitement during the first half of each March.

Nome is the finish line, and the city welcomes hundreds or even thousands of tourists who come to see the first or second place mushers finish. (This year, that would be Lance Mackey and Jeff King, respectively. Both have been champions before.)

By the time the top ten mushers have finished and gone off to eat and sleep, most tourists have already gone home. Most of the outside media has trickled away by then, too.

But for those who actually live and work here, the Iditarod is not here-and-gone overnight, confined to 48 hours of excitement. It is a massive project that demands the resources and community involvement of thousands of people, over more than two weeks. At each checkpoint, volunteers are needed to feed the mushers, to give them housing, and to guide them, if needed, back onto the trail. These volunteers work at all hours of the day and the night, often in weather conditions that beguile even the hardiest.

For the small handful of employees at our station -- which converts from its normal business hours into a round-the-clock, 24-hour race schedule -- the Iditarod becomes a labor of love. Our interest does not peter out with the top ten; we are in it for the long haul.

Although this year is an exception -- we have just begun to cover the centennial running of another sled-dog race, the All-Alaska Sweepstakes -- the Iditarod is typically the last hurrah of the winter races. For months, this race season dominates the attention of all the Alaskan Bush, and the Iditarod is its concluding flourish. These months are the most difficult in terms of winter weather: they are the most precarious for personal safety, the most prone to blizzards, and the least hospitable for the transport of the necessities -- such as mail and food -- that can only come by airplane. And yet, it is at this time that the spirit of Western Alaska shines. It is at this time that our station kicks its coverage into high gear.

In this context, even if a few, smaller races trickle in afterwards, Iditarod is a grand finale for us all: radio and non-radio folks alike. After the last Iditarod finisher -- called the "Red Lantern" -- passes through the finish arch in Nome, we all exhale a little bit.

And suddenly, it doesn't seem like too far away until spring. Easter is soon to come, and within weeks after that, the big thaw that Alaskans call "break-up": the time when the snow and ice gradually melt away from the land, while the ice of the sea recedes back North.

If winter and its racing festivity are all one long party, then the remainder of March, after Iditarod, is indeed a time for a hangover of sorts. It is a time for fatigue and rest; lots of race-season exertion take their inevitable toll. But these weeks are also a time for taking stock of winter's last gasps, and a time for anticipating new warmth, new daylight, new transformations.

As March becomes April, Alaskans may rub their eyes and reach for their coffeepots, but they also take heart that -- however long and hard it may have been -- winter is almost over.

And I'll drink to that.

It's All Relative

2008-03-08T16:03:00.002-09:00

Bush Alaska, in early March, is a far cry from what anyone in the lower 48 would call "spring." And yet, it sure feels like it today. It's Saturday afternoon, sunny, clear, and about 12-13 above, with little to no winds.

The snow will not melt for another 6-8 weeks, perhaps longer. But earlier today, as I was walking into Airport Pizza - our local coffeeshop/sports-bar/restaurant - I saw a handful of people sitting outside already with their frosty beers, happily soaking up the Alaskan sun at 20 degrees below freezing.

In a season when frostbite is still a legitimate concern, and when the Bering Sea is frozen solid as far as the eye can see, this was a refreshing sight. Tomorrow it may sink back to -20, there still may be a handful of blizzards in store for the coming weeks. But today, it's spring.

Priorities

2008-01-01T17:39:00.000-09:00

As part of my daily radio shift (the morning show, 6-10 am, Monday to Friday), I often read announcements for events and meetings happening in Nome and elsewhere in Western Alaska. This affords a nice glimpse at what's happening in the communities we serve: what activities and projects resonate with our listeners, what gatherings are bringing people together, what topics and opportunities are attracting attention, etc. These announcements range from lost-and-found notices to registration details for dog-sled races, from funeral or marriage notices to concerts or parades.

Sometimes, beyond the fairly ordinary - city council and school board meetings, or senior-center lunch schedules - the stacks of printed information in Studio A yield something that speaks to the unique character of this region. Here's one example that stood out in particular, over the past few weeks. I paraphrase, since I don't have the original in front of me:

The Nome Swimming Pool will be closed on Thursday night. The lifeguards will be attending the Nome (Elementary School) Christmas Pageant.

KNOM'ers

2007-12-20T19:05:00.001-09:00

IMG_7010.JPG
Originally uploaded by david.dodman

A group shot of the KNOM staff!

Coming full circle

2007-12-20T16:37:00.000-09:00

I often get reflective, introspective, or even downright existential on long trips. One might call that the product of boredom, but I prefer to think of it as the luxury of unstructured time. Sitting, thinking, and staring out the window can be surprisingly relaxing when there's no guilt that you're not being productive.

Over the past month I've had numerous instances for this kind of mental wandering, and I'm writing this blog entry (to be uploaded later) from the window seat of an Alaska jet from Newark to Seattle. The weather outside my window is grey, cloudy, featureless: just about as interesting as a blank page at the end of a novel. Perfect. Here we go.

Well, I haven't written on this blog in quite, quite some time. Sorry about that. The summer and fall slipped away in a long rash of busy weekends, busy days at work, and catching up on sleep in between. I'm finally coming back to Nome from a month vacation (Nov. 13-Dec. 13), spent mostly around New Jersey, where I grew up, but also in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, and along the hurried stretches of highway and rail lines that connect these densely-populated states.

It's been fantastic. On Thanksgiving weekend I was lucky enough to meet with many high school friends, some of whom I haven't seen since we were last in cap and gown, and eager to get out of Dodge. Everyone seems to be doing well. The marching band to which I once devoted so much time has gotten bigger and better; former classmates are on their way to becoming doctors, lawyers, and teachers; people are getting married, having children, or approaching higher degrees; and our post-college lives are laying down roots on all corners of the world, from Japan to Jersey. Under the amber canopies of an unseasonably warm November, everything old was new again.

My family also had many reasons to give thanks this past Nov. 22, whether it was enduring health, birthdays, the bizarrely temperate climate, or just the preponderance of stuffing and pecan pie. We drank wine, talked about Eric Clapton and delinquent phone companies, and wiled away the afternoon.

De-facto homecomings also brought me up to New Haven, Connecticut and Cambridge, Massachusetts, allowing me to bracket my month off with reminiscences of college. Harvard trounced Yale at "The Game" (football), the Harvard Glee Club imbued several concerts with "unity and joy," and it seems like my fellow Crimson alumni are enjoying life outside of the Yard.

This was a month, however, not just for updates and reunions, but also for lifestyle comparisons and hypotheticals. Living in sparse, rural, sub-Arctic Alaska for fourteen months - and then coming back to one of the most densely populated places in America - has been an incredible opportunity to weigh the advantages and disadvantages of two very different ways of living, and to ask myself what I want after my current employment contract in Nome expires (August 2008).

Nome vs. New Jersey, Nome vs. Boston - the differences in many ways couldn't be more striking; the disparity between frontier simplicity and urban overabundance could not be laid more bare.

But on these train rides between college and the Garden State, and now as I glide at 30,000 feet above the Upper Midwest, I find again and again that there is much that these two regions could learn from each other. And in both, I am convinced there are some of the best places in the world.

As an Alaskan (albeit a new one) I admire the zippy internet speeds and plentiful shopping possibilities of the Northeast; I love its patronage of the arts, its acceptance of a wide diversity of peoples, its political progressivism, and its street-smart, cosmopolitan, sophisticated sensibilities.

This month I have been delighted to rediscover small, wonderful corners of the East Coast. The Harvard Book Store immediately comes to mind. Its aisles brim with bright, fascinating volumes that would escape the bestseller shelves of a Barnes & Noble. Photographic retrospectives of Ansel Adams cohabit the discount shelves with Umberto Eco and Albert Einstein and Bill Bryson. While the subway rumbles by underground, bookish patrons browse, buy, and pay homage to learning and new ideas. Somehow these new books - and the air of academic excitement that embraces them - always seem to mean something intangibly good, something that you can't put your finger on, but that is nonetheless redeeming for humanity. I may exaggerate, but as I walk back out onto Massachusetts Avenue and flank the gates of Harvard Yard, life seems all the more worth living.

(Oh, for a good bookstore in Nome!)

But as one who came of age in Union County, New Jersey - within whose borders there are an average of some 4,000+ people per square mile - I've also come to appreciate what a small town can offer. I love the genuineness of Nome's community; the earnestness and unabashed happiness of its people; its calm rejection of pretension; its comfort with simplicity.

The residents of this region live in one of the most inhospitable and challenging places on Earth, and yet their hospitality and easy-going adaptability easily exceeds many of the far more comfortable (and wealthy) places of the lower 48. Blizzards blow through, the ocean freezes over for months at a stretch, wind chills fall below -50, and gas prices keep going higher ($4.30/gallon for unleaded, as I write). But Western Alaskans, I've found, tend to make it through; they bundle up, watch their budgets, and don't waste much precious hot air on complaint.

Nome is the first small town in which I have ever spent more than a weekend, and after over a year here, I've found so much that I could have never discovered in any corner of the urbanized, affluent East.

New York may be the city that never sleeps, but Nome is a place that treasures restfulness and calm. And there's something to be said for both.

A Starbucks on every corner and a New York Times in every mailbox, or salmon in every river and Arctic entryways in every home? I realize, as I fly westward, that this next life choice looms over my return voyage.

What to do next? Well, I don't know for sure. But it's been a fun month off.

Telling the gas story

2007-05-22T00:26:00.000-08:00

Bias is an accusation frequently hurled at the press, usually combined with some sort of charged political descriptor such as "conservative" or "liberal." While it almost seems cliched by now to lob this kind of criticism at our news media - not least because they sometimes, actually, deserve it - there are still plenty of untapped reserves of media blunders to keep things fresh for news naysayers. Lately, I have been reminded of another kind of bias: lower-48.

The Associated Press ran a story on Sunday (May 20) that trumpets the new gasoline prices that are currently ravaging consumers and that, even when adjusting for inflation, are without precedent in the United States. (Our national-average, regular gas price is now $3.18/gallon, which beats out the second-highest, inflation-adjusted rate of $3.15 from 1981.)

Considering the particularly strong American reliance upon automobiles and thus upon gasoline - and our cripplingly close ties to the Middle East nations that produce this gas - it is certainly understandable that many news organizations would be eager to report this as headline news. Forbes Magazine, for instance, picked up the story. So, too, did ABC News, which not only posted it on their website, but also continued to run it as the lead story in the 2-minute national-news feeds we receive from them at our radio station. (To give this a sense of perspective: high gas prices beat out Israel retaliating against Hamas, the increasing probability of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' resignation, the departure of Paul Wolfowitz from the World Bank, and the acidic press-release battle between former President Carter and current President Bush.)

In other words, this rise in gas prices has implications and importance far beyond the immediate effects to the average daily consumer, and the national news folks (at AP) were on the ball when it came to recognizing this significance. In their eagerness, however, AP displayed a kind of bias that I think would escape the attention of most folks back home. It's not that the facts are wrong, per se; it's just that the story lacks the perspective needed for truly national news.

One of the final paragraphs of yesterday's AP story reads:

Nationwide, the lowest average price for regular fuel was $2.87 in Charleston, S.C., and the highest was in Chicago at $3.59 a gallon.

I live in Nome, Alaska, which, while not the model of urbanity you'd expect from any "city" in most states, is still big enough to have a large population of drivers, and more than one gas station. While on a walk Saturday afternoon, I passed two of the stations, and made a mental note of the gas prices. At the cheaper of the two, unleaded regular attracts customers at $3.93 per gallon.

The situation in many places in Western Alaska (outside of Nome) is even worse. Prices for fuel have reached incredible highs within the past 12 months. This affects not only our driving expenditures but also the overall cost of living - especially for a region that depends upon this pricy fuel for heat during the Arctic winters. Skimping on heat to save money is an option you'd rather not entertain when it's -30 and windy outside.

Ironically, Alaska has received much national attention in recent years because of the ongoing controversy over whether to drill for oil in the state's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The 19 million acres of the refuge are home to the greatest diversity of plant and animal species in the entire Arctic, as well as petroleum reserves.

If Alaska is worth mentioning as a benefactor of oil, but not worth mentioning (alongside, say, Chicago or Charleston) when it receives the blunt end of our oil-addicted culture, does that mean what goes on within the state - as opposed to what flows out of it - is irrelevant on the national stage?

Hardly.

Like in the U.S. as a whole, Alaska's relationship with oil has been a double-edged sword for decades. The drilling and distribution of oil has been a source of economic boom (such as the building of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline in the 1970s) but also environmental bust (Exxon Valdez and many similar incidents, not to mention the continued maintenance and leakage issues with the Pipeline itself). Native American subsistence lifestyles have been repeatedly damaged by often-irresponsible drilling practices, and although oil has brought Alaska billions of dollars, our state dependence upon that same oil has also resulted in an often-unstable economy.

The lessons of Alaska's experience with oil - and the state's evolving history with oil corporations, from gas prices to gas spills - has environmental and economic ramifications far beyond our state borders, and far beyond how much money Nome residents need to fill up their tanks. Our American relationship to oil has "spilled over," both literally and figuratively, into many of the problems faced collectively by all 50 states - from climate change to the Iraq war to corporate and government accountability. Alaska's oil narrative mirrors that of its parent country, and it serves as a cautionary tale against exactly the kind of blind subservience to oil that has now come home to roost in America - whether in eroding glaciers or eroding support for the Iraq occupation.

So you'd think that the problems faced in Alaska - objectively worse, when it comes to gas, than almost anywhere else in America - would merit at least a phrase or two in the AP story that keeps getting such fantastic airplay on ABC News. After all, our state is by far the biggest in the nation; we're as wide as the distance from Tallahassee, Florida to San Francisco, and twice the size of Texas. And plus, we provide a substantial proportion of the national oil; just one region in Alaska (Prudhoe Bay) provides 17% of our domestic production alone. Right?

But I guess AP just couldn't fit us in. Either that, or their conception of "national news" is about the same as they held in December 1958, when the "nation" still meant the 48 contiguous states from Maine to California.

If AP and the national news media do, indeed, display a flawed perspective on what "national news" fully entails - because they mentally truncate the non-contiguous states from the nation in the first place - I would assume that this omission is unintentional. But most examples of bias are just that: unintended failures of objectivity. Whether they're political or regional biases, they share the effect that a particular group or point of view is being overlooked. No matter where we live or on what part of the political spectrum we fall, we have a common aversion to bias because we know that it results in a good story not being told.

Unfortunately for those lucky enough to pay only $3.50 for gas, it's a story that shouldn't be ignored.

And if it takes another Exxon-Valdez-like incident - or another Iraq-War-like foreign entanglement - to awaken the lower 48 to the relevance of Alaska's story, such a revelation may be too little, too late.

Until then, I guess Chicago folks paying $3.59 will have to qualify for front-page news. I mean, could you imagine anything more inconvenient than high gas prices on Memorial Day weekend?

Koyuk

2007-05-19T01:20:00.001-08:00

Now that I'm finally writing again, I'd be remiss not to talk a bit about a recent trip I took for work last month. The regional competitions of the Native Youth Olympics were being held in Koyuk, Alaska - one of the villages on the Yukon River - and I was lucky enough to cover the event for our station.

Like almost all of the villages and towns in Western Alaska, Koyuk is inaccessible by any road system, so getting to this village of some 300 people means taking a small plane from Nome. I've been on small planes before, but never one this small. The maximum passenger capacity was about a half-dozen, allowing for an intimate space from which to view the vast, still-snowy and icy landscape below our wings.

A regular part of daily life in this region, the "milk run" routes of these small planes -- running passengers, mail and cargo from village to village -- play a unique role that aviation does not take almost anywhere else in the world. The bush pilots are a vital lifeline, and this becomes immediately apparent when you see a village, like Koyuk, emerge in the distance from an otherwise uninterrupted landscape of open tundra, sea ice, snow, and scattered trees. Without the planes, each village would be largely on its own.

But I digress - the plane ride was just the first of many amazing experiences on this assignment. The games themselves are fascinating. The Native Youth Olympics involve junior and senior high school students competing against each other in a series of athletic events that relate in a particular way to the traditional subsistence lifestyle of Alaska Natives. The games are incredibly strenuous and demanding; the "Two-Foot High Kick," for example, tasks participants to jump up in the air and use both feet, together, to kick a suspended beanbag whose height off the ground is gradually increased. The winner is the one who can kick the highest. This event, and other variations on the kick, relate to hunting activities, in which different kinds of kicks were used as non-verbal means of communicating between the members of a hunting party.

The games began Friday evening and concluded Saturday night. I tried to keep as close to each successive sport as I could, writing down impressions and results and conferring with the officials overseeing the event. Saturday came the time for live reports, and just before 9am, 12noon, and 5pm, I called into the radio station and gave a brief run-down of the recent event winners. Sunday, I filed one last report in the morning, to be recorded and replayed later that day.

While I waited for my afternoon flight back to Nome, I walked around Koyuk a bit and tried to get a sense of the village. One of the immediate differences is that, lo and behold, there are trees here! Nome is just outside of the tree line (because of the permafrost in our soil), and thus has almost no trees of any kind; but Koyuk's soil is apparently just hospitable enough for some evergreens (although I noticed they never get too tall).

Despite long days (late nights for the conclusions of sporting events, and early mornings to file live reports), it was a great weekend, and a definite highlight of my time thus far in Western AK.

Breaking up

2007-05-19T00:34:00.000-08:00

After a hiatus of nearly six months, this blog is vastly overdue for an update.

It's May, and spring is finally winding its way into Western Alaska. The season is bringing with it melting snow, long days, and temperatures that are finally allowing Nome folks to walk to the post office or Wells Fargo in light jackets, without hats, gloves, or earmuffs.

For a long while now, the snow that we've had since October has been making its long, drawn-out exit, stage right. Around early April the temperatures finally rose above freezing long enough for the mounds of snow to start turning into rivulets and pools on the ground, making for liberal amounts of chocolate-brown mud on virtually all of the streets of the Gold Rush City.

This week, the temperatures finally broke into the 50s and even strayed above 60 on a few brief, glorious moments. As the snow makes its last stand, the mud is drying back into khaki-hued dust, the schools are closing their grade-books on another year, and locals are getting primed for summers spent at fish camps, hiking on the verdant tundra, and fishing in the nearby rivers.

Across Western Alaska, as the snow is going away, so too is the ice on the rivers and seas. The radio is broadcasting a daily report on this gradual process of ice disintegration, which lends to this entire season the label "break-up." One of the signals of spring in Nome, indeed, was seeing the Norton Sound's white ice finally give way to the midnight-blue waters beneath.

Meanwhile, we're still four weeks from the summer solstice, but the days are already exceptionally long. As I write it is just about 1am, but a powder-blue twilight lingers over the eastern sky, and fades into a rouge-colored glow over Russia, to the west.

It's a beautiful time to be in Nome.

The Blizzzzard

2006-11-28T22:35:00.000-09:00

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

2006-11-19T23:54:00.000-09:00

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

2006-11-19T16:28:00.000-09:00

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

2006-11-19T15:53:00.000-09:00

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...

2006-10-15T13:25:00.000-08:00

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

2006-10-08T18:58:00.000-08:00

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

2006-10-07T03:20:00.000-08:00

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

2006-10-07T03:16:00.000-08:00

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

2006-09-29T13:46:00.000-08:00

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?"

2006-09-27T01:10:00.000-08:00

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

2006-07-28T20:47:00.000-08:00

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...

2006-07-28T20:34:00.000-08:00

"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

2006-07-27T20:20:00.000-08:00

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.