Fall, Sail, & Fly...Road to Cold Bay (part 1)

A few weeks ago I was walking along, blacked out, and keeled over. I broke the fall with my face. When I came round, there was a small crowd gathered, my nose was bleeding, and I looked like I had a golf ball implanted in my forehead. It was really embarrassing—not to mention painful.

Since it happened at the school during basketball practice, the coach and some of the players got me across the street to the clinic. (My husband was in Anchorage at a conference, so he missed the whole thing.) I was still kind of dazed and had no idea how it had happened. The P.A. (physician’s assistant) took over—we don’t have such luxuries as doctors here. Seven I.V. attempts later, it was determined that I was really dehydrated. It was also determined that because of the hard hit to my head and some other medical nonsense going on, that I needed to get a CAT-Scan (to start with). A simple CAT-scan meant a trip into Anchorage. The $1400 for the round-trip ticket wasn’t the only stressful part of this venture. The biggest problem lay in getting me out of King Cove.

To get to Anchorage, ideally, we take a bush plane from King Cove to Cold Bay where we catch a much larger plane that holds about 18 people and is shaped like a torpedo inside. This takes us the rest of the way into Anchorage. You see, King Cove is surrounded by mountains so we have a very short runway. The only aircraft that can make it in are bush planes or helicopters. Cold Bay, however, has a runway that can take any kind of plane, so the big ones land there. That airstrip was even an alternative landing site for the Space Shuttle.

At the time of my fall, there was a storm going on. We were having winds of 60+ mph—a normal state of affairs around here—so the bush planes couldn’t fly in, which mean I couldn’t fly out. The only way for me to get out was by boat, so we started phoning around. We called the Harbor House and the Cannery (where they process fish), and found out there was the Island Trader heading out in the morning. So early the next morning in the midst of wind and rainstorm, I somehow, with a lot of help, got aboard the Island Trader.

There are no luxuries such as gangplanks on these fishing boats. Instead, the guys just leap across open ocean onto the deck. They are used to it—I’m not. When they built the dock, they sunk a bunch of pylons (telephone-pole-type things that go into the ocean) and those are the supports that the dock is built on. So I balanced on the top of one of those pylons with one guy holding on from the dock side and another ready to catch me on the boat. I timed the rhythm of the boat going up and down with the swells, said a prayer, and jumped across open ocean where the other guy grabbed me and kept me upright. I’m sure it sounds worse than it was…wait…nope, it sounds exactly the way it was. And the experience terrified me. After a two and a half hour boat trip, we got to Cold Bay. The captain wasn’t even sure he could tie up, because the day before they had tried but the ocean was too rough and he couldn’t have gotten in without ripping the dock apart, so they’d returned to King Cove without dropping their load. But this time, we were lucky—the ocean was still rough, but they were able to tie up at the dock. Getting out of the boat was even scarier than getting in. This time I had to reach out across open ocean and grab onto an icy metal ladder and hope that my feet found a rung to stand on below me. Again, I timed it with the rising and falling of the boat on the swells. Again, I was terrified. With my arms wrapped around the rung and my feet searching for the next rung, I climbed the frozen ladder one rung at a time. Someone was waiting at the top to help pull me up onto the dock.

I went through all of this for the simple reason that I had to get to Cold Bay airport and our bush planes couldn’t fly.

This story is too long for a single entry, so it will continue in Part 2.