nippy

The White Cloud continues to hang over me. I turned my pager off last night for the first time all week, and there were two calls - major hemorrhage & an MVA - within two hours. I could have walked to the MVA before the ambulance arrived. Paranoia only grows.

I made a milk run to Freddie's tonight and caught Steve Wariner on Prairie Home Companion playing a guitar piece that tore my heart in a way I haven't felt in a long time. I sat in the parking lot until he was done, although I left the engine running since the temps had dropped from a balmy -25 to -35. This morning, when I drove by on my way to proctor an EMT-I test, the temperature reading was nothing short of brutal at -41. I hope things warm up like they are predicting for Turkey Day.

My LPN supervisor shocked me on Friday by sitting down and telling me that if I left the clinic for an EMS job, she wouldn't hold it against me. After my interview last September, which I characterized afterward as hostile, I didn't think they were going to hire me at all. Apparently those with an EMS background have a proclivity to get "bored" with clinical work. Clinical work is not boring. I hardly know where the days go. My primary complaint is that it is not what I have been trained (and want to) do. I am still learning a lot, and I'm glad for a full-time gig, but it is a huge relief to know I won't be burning bridges if something more in line with my training surfaces. Unlikely, but hope springs eternal.

In the mean time, the dark is bothering me but the cold is not. The Subaru's engine block heater shorted out, and her check engine light has been on since the first cold snap in October, so we're biting the bullet (after a huge repair job on the Ford two months ago) and taking her into the dealership Monday. I think the cold is bothering her a lot more. I just hope she starts in the morning.

Peter made tacos for me tonight, as well as mixing some amazing new Vodka & Lemon drink he's created which is perfectly slushy after sitting out on the porch for fifteen minutes at thirty five below.
In light of the vodka, the pager is off. Goldstream, you are on your own tonight.

counting

Discontent is growing. As I've settled into my job, I've realized that 80% of it consists of making phone calls. And even though they are a minority, the Crazy People make up a very loud and demanding percentage of that task. Week days are so busy that I don't notice too much, but as soon as I report to the fire station for training - especially EMS training - or watch an ambulance fly by as I'm leaving work, it gets a little harder to go back and take auto-cuff blood pressures and refill Lisinopril scripts for another day.

Fire station hours are not helping. I have been pulling my required 60 hours worth of shifts a month, not to mention having my pager on whenever I am home. However since earning my Paramedic License, I have run on Zero calls. If I'm at the station, the tones are dead all night. If I'm at home, anything that we get paged out for is on the other side of the district. This weekend, I had my radio on from Friday night through Monday morning. The only tone-out we got was for a chimney fire on Sunday night. The tone came out five minutes after I left the house, without my pager, to buy some printer paper in town. By the time I got back to the cabin 45 minutes later, all units were pulling back into the station. My white cloud status followed me all through Paramedic Academy & my internship, but this is getting a little ridiculous. If I ever had an edge, I can feel it slipping away now.

I love prehospital medicine, and I have a knack for the book-learning part of it at least. I got 100% on my recent advanced medic standing orders test at the station, and didn't do too badly on the scenario testing (besides some major and yet-un-resolved ACLS conflict-of-opinion with my proctor.) But without the dirt under my fingernails, the nagging feeling that a year of my life and thousands of dollars was flushed away keeps growing. I'm frustrated and even a little angry, all the while telling myself that this job, this life in a black hole of EMS, will pass. Most days, though, it doesn't feel like I will ever get to where I want to be.

As if I ever knew where that was.

In the mean time, I grit my teeth for eight hours and count my blessings for the rest. Three of them are in bed with me now:

nose

Despite my lifelong obsession with animals and my genetic predilection for random trivia I have found a piece of dog minutia that had somehow escaped my radar. Although this is my fifth year in Alaska and my obsession with northern working breeds has only grown with our time here, the addition of Pico and a peculiar change he has undergone in the last month had Peter and I puzzled. Some quick google research brought us up to speed.

Northern breeds (and to some extent, Labradors as well) undergo a depigmentation of the nose in the winter, colloquially referred to as snow-nose. Nobody knows why. As the dog ages the pink nose becomes permanent, but during early adulthood a husky's nose will change between black and pink from summer to winter.

Figure I : Pico Puppy Nose, May 2009











Figure II: Pico Adolescent Nose, August trip to Deadhorse.











Figure III: Pico Adolescent Nose, early October. Just prior to first sticking snow.















Figures IV & V: Pico Adolescent Nose, November, three weeks after first sticking snow.





















Figure VI: (Experiment Control) Nyssa, 6 1/2 years old. No northern bloodlines. No changes in nose pigment noted despite years of cruelly enforced winter-weathering.














The investigation continues ... in the mean time, we went over to the Goldstream Store on Friday night for some last minute eggs (farm-fresh! horrah!) When we pulled up in the parking lot, there was a dog-team tethered in the snow between the store & Ivory Jack's. As we got out of the car, the musher loaded his purchases, kicked the snow hook out and took off towards woods & trails behind the buildings. I love it here.

costs

[update below]

With all the health care reform debate going on, I feel a little apprehensive about throwing my largely uninformed two cents in. But here they are anyway.

I have been paying for "disaster insurance" for the last four years. This insurance initially cost me $130 a month, and would cover my ass if my yearly medical bills were over $2000. As of this summer, this insurance costs me $250 a month and will cover medical bills over $5000 a year. I am fully responsible to pay out of pocket for all annual exams, incidental doctor's visits, emergency costs & medications up to that limit. Despite the apparent absurdity of paying $3000 a year in case I am hit by a car or perhaps by lighting, stories of people having freak accidents and ending up hundreds of thousands in debt had me scared enough to keep paying up.

This is a story in two parts, with no conclusion. Just so you know.

Part One: Ankle
In July, I was attempting to bikejor with Pico when he went after a whitetail deer and the bike rolled over my ankle. I did the usual Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevation for the first 48 hours, but still could barely bear weight by day three. On day eight I decided to eat the cost of an Urgent Care clinic and an X-ray, since the stability of the injured limb seemed to be deteriorating. I was told it wasn't broken and sent on my merry way, with a bill for $300 showing up in the mail in Alaska a month later followed by another for something like $80 in unexplained administrative fees. Two months later, it was still slightly swollen, painful & unstable. Because I was trying to complete the Firefighter I class at the time, I went to an Orthopedic PA clinic and ate the cost of another X-ray and exam hoping for a definitive answer and maybe some physical therapy exercises to do at home. Instead I was told that there was an old break and calcification which was probably impeding the healing, and that the Firefighter class would have to wait. That was it. That was two months ago. It is still a little swollen, still a little too sensitive to lateral movement, and I am now over $700 in the hole.

Part II: Fever
I started a job at a community health clinic a month ago. Inevitably, all the germy air caught up with my immune system and I came down with a nasty sore throat & fever on Wednesday night. Certain I'd gotten a flu of some kind, I was bracing myself for a week or more of feeling like a bug on a windshield. My supervisor told me to come in and be seen by one of the clinic docs, primarily because she doesn't yet know that I only skip work when I can literally barely walk. I called the human resources department, only to find out that my insurance at work doesn't kick in for 60 more days. SOL is the appropriate acronym here, I think. This morning I checked myself in and screened myself before anyone else arrived, to avoid spreading my gunk even further. The internist I work for came in and decided I had bronchitis, not the flu, due to an already broken fever & junky lungs, and prescribed me a Z-pack and a second day not further infecting his patients by staying in bed. I went home sick from my full time with benefits job at a sliding scale health clinic, and by 10AM my little cough had eaten up $200 more dollars in medical fees and pharmacy costs as well as all of the sick-time and vacation-time I have managed to accrue over the last six weeks.

I know that compared to most of the health-care stories, mine is a minor one. I am a healthy young person without any chronic medical conditions, and full-and-part time jobs that cover my tail for all the little medical issues & expenses I've sunk into over the last few years.
At the same time, I have paid nearly a grand for a sprained ankle and a one-day fever over the last six months. (I somehow neglected to mention my $700 visit to the Urgent Care clinic two winters ago, for six stitches and fifteen minutes of the good doctor's time. Or when Peter was told to go to the ER by a triage nurse because of body-fluids exposure [see previous post] and was charged over $1000 for the doctor to tell him not to worry about it.)

Now I work in a clinic where the majority of patients we see are either uninsured and paying out of pocket or on medicare/medicaid. Some work part-time, some are self-employed, and others can't or don't work. All of them are dealing with much higher bills and much more dire consequences if they don't seek and get the medical care and medication they need. Sometimes they get it, sometimes they don't, and the difference between the two is almost universally measured in money.

update: as of 11/06, add another $104 to the ortho bill. apparently they forgot to bill me for the 10 minute follow up appointment two weeks after the x-ray.

watershed

Two years ago today, everything changed for me.

Two years ago this week, I had just dropped out of graduate school. I had spent the first weeks of fall cooped up in a classroom with twenty eight fifth graders and an increasing sense of panic. I had spent the last year and a half taking graduate courses in education, but was realizing with growing certainty that the US educational system was not where I wanted to spend my life.

The first Saturday of October, Peter arrived home from a shift at the mental health group home where he worked. We went for a walk around our little neighborhood of cabins, relishing the fresh snow - first of the season - and crisp mid-20's weather. There were two puppies at the pound we were considering adopting - two little husky-mutt sisters that I was fantasizing about turning into pulling dogs and the start of a small recreational team. Instead of heading indoors at the end of our walk, we stood in the driveway chatting about fencing and pacing out a possible layout for an outdoor dog run.

A blue truck drove by at top speed, and a few seconds later I heard yelling.

"Somebody call 911. There's a car flipped over in the pond."

I ran out to the road and looked in the direction of the truck. There was a children's party going on two doors down, with cars parked all up and down the street and people milling the yard and porch. Two men were walking quickly towards the driver of the truck, one whipping out a cell phone.

I thought, "If the car is in the water, there isn't much time."

I was pretty sure I knew where the car was. There is a little drainage pond about a hundred yards down the road from our cabin, right where another street Ts into ours. It was frozen over when we had walked past it just a few minutes before.

I yelled for Peter to call 911 and then bring the car, not thinking in that moment that he hadn't heard anything and had no idea why I was suddenly running down the road. As I was running, my mind was spinning through the Wilderness First Responder course I had taken in 2005, and the refresher I'd finished in June. Scene Safety. BSI. Airway, Breathing, Circulation. Spinal Precautions. In that first course, we did a simulation of a Jeep rollover in a creek. All the fake victims had been thrown, one ending up in a tree, one in the shallow water, the other two in the deep grass on the bank. It had been deep winter in Texas, sixty degrees and sunny with green grass and college students playing Frisbee on the other side of the road. I had dealt with a few minor emergencies working for Wilderness Quest in Utah, but most of my in-the-woods training had been in blister care and forced hydration. I was thinking, "This is it. Now I'll find out how I handle something serious."

I heard screaming before I got to the little drainage pond. Although it had snowed, the weeds and brush growth from the summer obscured my view. The screaming continued, followed by a hollow banging. I finally cleared the weeds. In the pond was the underbelly of a large sedan, sunk to its axles. Serving-plate sized chunks of ice bobbed on the wakes of black tannin water. A girl was on the other side of the car, screaming and slamming the undercarriage with her fists. She was up to her shoulders, soaking wet and clearly hysterical.

When she took a breath, I heard pounding from the inside of the car, more muffled screaming and the sound of water pouring into the space. I looked around. The street was empty, and the sun had dipped below the trees.

Scene Safety. Keep yourself safe, first. This is the first lesson of every CPR, first aid & EMT class. I tried to ignore the screaming from the car and coax the girl in the water towards me. At first she wouldn't even look at me. I looked around. The street was still empty. I was not about to get in the water, or get close enough to the girl to get pulled in, at this point. I told the girl that help was on the way and she needed to get away from the car and onto the road. Still screaming, she started to wade towards me, chunks of ice bumping away from her as she made her way around the exposed tail pipe. I coaxed her on as she repeatedly turned back towards the screaming victims still in the car. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Peter pull up in our little Ford wagon. He got out and helped me pull the girl up the steep bank. In the process, I slid down past my knees into the water. Peter bundled the soaking, crying girl into the back seat of our car with the heaters on full blast. I asked how many people were in the car.

“Four."

“Shit.”

I saw three men come around the bend in the road towards us, one of them carrying a crow bar. Already sliding down the steep side into the pond, I decided with Pete & a warm car in the road, three more big men headed our way and 911 called, it was as safe as it was going to get. I slid the rest of the way in and struggled past chunks of ice towards the far side of the car. The screaming and banging was louder, and I could still hear water pouring in. Yelling when the screaming stopped for breath, I asked if they could open or unlock the doors. The screaming continued, and I groped under water with quickly numbing fingers to find the handle. It clicked back easily, clearly locked from the inside. Suddenly Pete and the three men from the party were next to me in the water. We tried to break the windows, but deep under water the crowbar and the hammer Pete dug out of the back of our car couldn’t get enough momentum to crack the glass. We tried to rock the car onto its side, feet groping for purchase on the slippery sludge at the bottom of the pond, but the vehicle was wedged into the bank on the road side and heavy with water and wouldn’t budge more than a foot or so.

The sound of water pouring into the car had long since stopped, and the banging from the inside was weaker although the screaming continued. We were all getting cold, and didn’t know what else to do. I remember slamming my fists on the undercarriage in frustration, screaming “Jesus” as a curse and not a prayer for the first time. I knew if we could get the windows broken, we might be able to go from there. Things were getting fuzzy with cold. I looked up and there was a crowd on the street, some holding blankets, watching us flounder, listening to the now faint cries from the car.

We went for the windows again, and suddenly a back side window gave. I had gotten Pete to bring a heavy winter glove with the hammer, thinking of glass, and it was still sitting dry and warm on the frame of the car. I reached for it, but my hands were too stiff and cold to slide it on. I threw it into the water and took a breath, sinking under and groping through the window for the lock. I couldn’t find the back lock, so I went further until I felt the front door and threw the catch. I never felt the glass slicing my fingers.

The five of us rolled the car back up a few inches and popped the front door open. When the car rolled back down to rest on the open door, I reached in and pulled out a little boy, probably ten or eleven, blue with cold and eyes wide with terror but breathing and looking at me. I passed him to the man behind me, and he was handed off to the shore.

I reached back into the black recess of the car as a McDonald’s cup and French fries floated out through the now-open front door. I saw a pale arm in the gloom. I pulled it and met no resistance at first. Then the body it was attached to wedged between the two front seats and stayed there. Back passenger. I struggled to free her and yelled to nobody and everybody on the street, “this one’s unconscious” hoping for direction. From someone. With a little gentle prodding, she floated free and came face down through the door. I rolled her gently onto her back. Blue. Not breathing. I said this out loud, hoping for some help. There was still no ambulance in sight. I slid my arms under hers and started walking backwards towards the road. Somehow we got her up the steep edge and onto the gravel. I looked up, and Peter was kneeling on her other side. I looked down and saw her tennis shoes, the wet laces forming ice crystals. I tilted her head, looked in her mouth. Black water and dirt. Still no breath. I felt for a pulse, but my hands were totally numb and now, alarmingly, I saw that they were also bleeding. I think I remember screaming for someone with warm hands to feel for a pulse. Nobody came forward. I wasn’t prepared for this eventuality. What do you do when you can’t assess for a pulse because your hands are too cold? They didn’t go over this in class. I looked up and saw the crowd watching us, saw Peter looking at me, saw the other rescuers coming out of the water into the waiting blankets of those on the shore. I tried to rip her shirt, to get to her skin. CPR has to be skin-to-skin, I remembered. I looked up at Peter.

“Are you sure you’re OK with doing breaths?”

“Yes.”

“I love you.”

And we started doing CPR on a real person for the first time in our lives. I felt her ribs cracking like sticks under my frozen hands, felt her chest destabilize as I pushed down. I had read that this meant you were doing good compressions, but what skin I could still feel was crawling with the feeling of it. After several cycles of compressions, I looked up while Peter gave her breaths, and realized that there was still yelling and banging coming from the inside of the car. I looked up, and saw a trooper and another bystanders struggling to break open the door wedged into the mud on the road-side of the pond. I looked behind me at the group of people watching. The other rescuers from the water were gone.

“Does anyone know CPR?”

A raven haired high-school girl looked left and right, and then stepped forward. “I do.”

“Can you do this?” She came and knelt beside me and I placed her hands where they needed to go.

“Right here, OK?” Her hands were warm.

I walked back to the pond, and slid into the water. “There’s a door open already,” I yelled to the trooper.

“He won’t come out that way.”

I waded back into the water and yelled into the open door.

“Hey, what’s your name?”

He told me.

“Can you get the door unlocked on that side.”

“No.”

“Can you come towards my voice?”

“... no.”

“Are you trapped? Tangle up in something in there?”

“I don’t ... know...” His voice trailed off.

“Can you reach towards me? Just reach towards my voice so I can get ahold of you.” I groped in the dark water bracing against the side of the car in case he made a grab for me. I didn’t want my head to go under again. Finally I felt, through my numb clubs of hands, the seam of his jacket. I grabbed it tight and pulled. I felt him brace against me.

“You need to come out of the car.”

He didn’t answer.

“Are you still with me?”

“Yeah. I’m cold.”

“I know you’re cold. We’re trying to get you out. The ambulance is on the way. I’m just going to hold your jacket for now, OK?”

I struggled to keep my grip and keep him talking. His voice was fading, leaving the ends of sentences off. I looked up and suddenly there was an ambulance and a fire truck and a swarm of people in uniforms hovering around the unconscious woman on the road and a woman in a red dive-suit looking thing jumping into the water and moving in next to me.

I introduced the person in the car, and told her he wouldn’t come out but I didn’t think he was trapped – just cold and scared. She reached along my arm and gripped his jacket. I let go and backed away. Suddenly I was very, very cold. She coaxed him through ducking into the water to get to our side of the car, and then suddenly he was free and she was guiding him towards the shore. There was a blanket waiting, and he was bundled off to another ambulance. I stumbled out of the water, and there were hands pulling me up the slope onto the road. Now I could barely move. I knew I needed to get my wet clothes off, but my arms and elbows wouldn’t bend. Someone passed me towards an empty ambulance, and I struggled to step up and inside and nearly fell when I dropped to sit on the cot. I heard someone say “we need this for the code” and after a few long seconds my mind processed that I needed to get out. I started to get up, but found my legs weren’t responding. I looked at the medic in the rig and said “I’m really sorry, but my legs won’t work. Can you help me get up?” She hauled me to a standing position and I waddled back out onto the nearly-dark street. I was hustled towards another ambulance, but when I stuck my head inside there was the little boy being passed into the back, and the older boy on the cot and three firefighters filling up the extra space and I backed out.

Then I saw Peter in our car, backing towards me. I stumbled to the other side and carefully folded my stiff limbs into the seat. The heater was on full-blast. I could barely feel it. I lifted my hand up. It was still bleeding. We drove around the block and into our driveway, shuffled up the stairs and into the house, stripped off our stiff, wet clothes and turned on the heater as high as it would go. We huddled there, shivering violently, for an hour, wrapped in sleeping bags and blankets, unable to think of anything except how cold we were and how the heat wasn’t blowing out hot enough or fast enough to make up the difference.

But eventually, it did. Later that night we went across the street to return the coat someone had thrown over my shoulders between the ambulances. It was a neighbor I had only met once before. She invited us in and drew a steaming bath that I lay in while Peter drank hot tea and chatted with her.

We found out later that the unconscious woman had died on impact, and the two boys and girl had gotten away with only a few scratches. Nobody knows how the girl got out of the car, or if anyone would have noticed the dark undercarriage in the tannin-black water of a drainage pond after dark on a quite rural road on a Saturday night in October if it weren’t for her being there in the water screaming loud enough for a passing truck to hear and look.

Peter took a beer down and split it with Georgina’s spirit at the pond a week after the accident. I went to her pot-latch, held at a local bar down the road, and stood against the back wall as adults cried and children played and slipped out after half an hour. I did not stop to look at the pictures of her life, posted on a table by the door. My neighbor made a cross of flowers and hung it in the branches of the willow tree on the other side of the pond once it froze back over.

I had nightmares for a year, seeing her face or the face of the little boy gasping for breath next to my bed in the half-way place between dreams and waking. Within a month, I was enrolled in an EMT course at the volunteer fire department for the area where we live. By January I was riding the ambulance, learning to take blood pressures and pulses and cut people out of cars with the jaws of life. By the first anniversary of the accident, I was enrolled in the local Paramedic Academy with not nearly enough experience but more sure than I’ve ever been that I was finally on the right path.

It has been two years since that cold October dusk, and I still never drive past that little drainage pond without thinking of Georgina and the three kids whose names I never learned.

job

A week down, and work looks to be palatable and possibly something to look forward to. My coworkers are down-to-earth and happy, but not in the high-pitched sappy way I was worried I would find with so many women occupying not much desk space. The actual tasks are going to be a little repetitive ("Hello, your prescription is ready ... hello, you can't have more vicoden, atavan, percocet, methadone, _fillinnarcotichere__ you just refilled a month's worth two days ago ... hello, you missed your appointment ... hello, I can't diagnose over the phone you'll have to come in and see one of our clinicians") although checking in patients should break it up nicely. They, at least, are a varied and interesting crowd.

There are several providers, as different from one another as the patients, from the fast-moving-fast-talking PA who finishes charting on the way to the next room to the slow-talking southern Physician who is an hour behind by ten am, to the thorough Internist who arrives two hours before anyone else to review the day's charts, scribbling handwritten notes to himself and his assistant to make sure no test or question or possibility falls through the cracks of a busy city clinic serving the un-and-under-insured.

I am home now. Peter is cooking tacos and the dogs have gathered at his heels hoping for scraps. We are going to watch Toy Story, a welcome relief after this season of endless John Carpenter movies on Friday and Saturday nights. Two days in a weekend, and there is a lot of laundry to find time for.

sticking

Snow has been coming down all day, but it doesn't want to stick. I keep looking out the window at thick, heavy flakes pouring out of the sky. But the yard is still green. It doesn't want to let go of summer, not quite so soon.

I start my new job on Monday. It is the first time since 2003 I will have worked a real full-time schedule at a real place of employment with W-2s & pay-stubs & no lay-offs when the tourists head south with the geese. It is making me antsy. I keep eyeing the truck, wondering how much it would cost to get running & outfitted with an old cabover. I did have a couple of decent road trips this summer. The last and most superb was up the haul road to the north coast of the continent. It whetted my appetite to live mobile again.


It was a perfect trip despite our late start and midnight arrival at the dusky arctic circle. The next morning Pico and I went on a long ramble along the pipeline while Pete & Jon slept in, and we arrived in Coldfoot in time for a late lunch and gas. As we drove north, the colors changed from green to yellow and red and orange. Trees disappeared just before Atigun pass. I was reminded by the constant snapping of Jon's camera just how lucky we are to live in this place. We plunged into Atigun valley with snow chasing us down from the pass. Heading out onto the coastal plain, we ran into caribou by the hundreds & two herds of muskoxen wandering across the one road in their vast northern territory. I was spellbound by these prehistoric beasts, wandering endlessly over the northern foothills of the Brooks Range, utterly unconcerned by our roads, trucks, pipelines and passage through their ancestral land.




We slid into Deadhorse well after dark, the sun setting an hour before midnight at this late point in the season. With the few maps I had seen, I was expecting a small gravel pad plunked down on the tundra with two motels, a gas station & a dump station for RVs. In my mind's eye, vast oil development would lay far beyond the locked gate at the end of the highway. Even in the dark, I could see how wrong my assumptions had been. We drove into a complex of gravel pads that went on endlessly in the dark. Giant trucks, mining equipment, tanks, storage containers & warehouses loomed up in the gloom. Fire-light flickered above oil wells across the marshy wilderness in all directions. We drove in circles, trying to pinpoint the motel, trying to find a place to pull over and sleep. There was nothing. Parking lots were full of dumptrucks and semis, driveways were roped off. Ominous photographs of grizzlies ripping open dumpsters papered the doorway of the hotel we finally found. Grizzlies, I thought angrily, that would not even be here in such threatening numbers were it not for this installation of humans and their waste. Grizzlies or no, we had to sleep. It was two AM. We pulled into what we hoped was an inconspicuous spot in their lot and curled up in our seats to wait for dawn and our promised guided tour past locked gates to the Arctic Ocean.

I was in a foul mood when I woke. The vast wild beauty of the arctic coastal plain in her best fall colors at sunset had been replaced by a gray, greasy industrial wasteland. The ocean was out of sight beyond miles of towering oil installations, housing & recreational complexes and mile on mile of road built up high and slicing the tundra marsh and ponds into neat quadrants of well-contained green. We rolled out of the car, stiff and sore, and made our way into the tour office for our morning ride past the guarded gate to the ocean. We sat through a dated piece of propaganda reminding us of the glorious uses of indispensable oil and the spectacular care taken to protect the arctic wildlife in and around the oil fields. Smiling biologists took soil and water samples, happy caribou babies frolicked with no gravel or oil field in sight. We walked out to the bus, and were shuttled through even more dregs of discarded detritus of our biggest and grandest industry, and stored equipment waiting to go out on the frozen tundra in a few months and find more to drill and take. We were warned not to take pictures of the security area (or IDs had been run, to ensure clean backgrounds before entering this national security risk.) We passed a few tundra swans and a fox, slinking through one of the gridded green areas. We drove up to the ocean and saw it stretching grey and white-capped and cold north to the top of the world.


Heartened, we hopped out into the cold wind and walked to the point of the headland. As we reached the shore, we saw half-buried barrels rusting in the cold salt spray, scraps of metal jutting from the beach, steel poles at crazy angles in the water, Styrofoam chunks in various stages of eternal decay tangled in the driftwood. The whole shoreline was choked with trucks and buildings and pipes and powerlines. I wanted to scream. We took off our shoes and waded knee deep in the icy water, daggers of cold ripping through flesh with every second. The cold was so relentless that it would not numb my skin, only increase the pain with every wave and splash.


We waded back, dried our feet and legs, and shuffled to the waiting bus. The driver assured us of the happy wildlife coexisting with development all through the National Petroleum Reserve across the northern coast of the state. I gritted my teeth and hoped he would drive faster than my anger could rise.

I have been against opening ANWAR to oil development from the beginning (the rest of the northern Alaska coast is already open to drilling, both on land and out at sea ... why open a critical wildlife habitat in the corner of the state for a trickle of oil that won't touch our needs, or last as long as it took to develop?) but I wanted to believe that Prudhoe Bay would prove just a little spot of destruction on an otherwise untouched coast. It may be just a spot in the grand scheme of things, but as far as I could see the country was decimated. And according to the maps, what has been done to the land goes far beyond what my eyes could pry into across the horizon.

The drive back was fast, eating up all five hundred miles in one shot, most of it in the rain.The drive home was made longer when we passed a wreck south of the Yukon River, still hours gravel-and-fog driving north of town. A man rolled his truck off an embankment and into the woods. We don't know how long he lay unconscious in the cold rain, but when we found him he was a hundred yards off the road and making steady progress putting as much distance as he could between himself and civilization in a haze of ethanol and hypothermia. With four hundred miles of wilderness ahead of him and colder rain coming fast with the dark, that direction didn't seem prudent, so we turned him around. Soaked to the bone with no shoes, it took twenty minutes to guide him back up to the road. We stripped him down and shoved him into layers of sleeping bags, made a tent out of a tarp on the gravel berm and heated it with a propane furnace - all provided by the hunter & his two young sons (with fresh caribou and racks stacked in the back of their truck) who had first noticed the headlights in the trees well below the road. If karma is real, that man has a trophy bear and a couple of big moose coming his way. After several attempts to communicate with dispatch in Fairbanks via satellite phone, we gave up and hoped they had heard most of what we said. An hour later an Ambulance appeared from the Pipeline Pump Station up the road and, relieved of our duties, we kept driving south into the fog. I gave up driving when we hit pavement at Livengood, and slept til we rolled into the driveway at four am.

Winter and work are blowing in even if I don't want to let them stick quite yet. But temperatures will settle down below freezing and routine will settle on my bones like a heavy pack a few days into a long slog up to a spectacular view. I certainly won't miss the mud.