Traveling Tales

Some of us are having a “girls’ night” of talking and games, and it is a blast—a much-needed diversion. Well, tonight, we got talking about some of the traveling “adventures” that have happened to us flying around the bush. They are just too good to not pass along.

This past December, I needed to fly home. All I wanted to do was get to Anchorage so I could head off to Utah. Simple, right? Apparently not.

I arranged to get picked up at Alakanuk (I had to get to Emmonak to catch a flight to St. Marys and on to Anchorage). But they didn’t give me a time—they just said the pilot would radio when he was on his way. And he did—about 20 minutes before I was supposed to catch my connecting flight. Some guy came and picked me up with a snow machine and we raced out to the airstrip, which is exactly that—no building, just a strip where planes land. The bush plane had just landed, so I helped unload the postage and a pile of packages, which the snow machine driver was going to deliver in the village.

I then jumped in the copilot seat, and we took off—headed the wrong direction. I hollered to the pilot that I needed to go to Emmonak, and he said, “Ya, I know. But we need to drop some stuff off in Nunam.” “But I need to catch a flight!” “Don’t worry—they’ll wait.” So we headed to Nunam. But not before he practiced his stunt flying—buzzing the tundra to show me a close-up of a moose and her calf, flying low over ice fishermen so I could get an eyeball-to-eyeball view.

Somehow we made it to Nunam. As we were unloading the rest of the boxes, a guy drove up in a snow machine dragging a sled with two old people who must have been pushing a hundred. He yelled, “They need a ride to Emmo. Can you take them?” So the pilot pulled two collapsible chairs out of the tail of the plane; he ran them along metal tracks on the floor and clicked them into place. The old people climbed on in.

When we finally got to Emmonak half an hour late, there was no sign of the plane. Turns out I had plenty of time to sit and visit, because the thing was almost two hours behind schedule. (Emmonak does have a shack on their airstrip, which makes waiting much nicer.) But checking in was dumb. Not because there was anything wrong with my luggage, but everyone flying had to toss their luggage onto the scale, and GET ON WITH IT! I felt like the prize steer at a cattle auction. All I can say is that my luggage has got to lose some weight.

The rest of the flight was uneventful. Of course, I came prepared. I’d learned from experience that the planes aren’t heated. You combine an Alaska winter with high altitude flying, and things get a bit frosty. But not to worry. I was layered. Long johns (top and bottom), sweats and jeans; T-shirt, sweat shirt, and jacket. So I was only cold—not frozen.

All in all, it was a pretty average flight for up here. But of course, there is the condition of the planes.

One teacher was on a small bush plane when it blew a tire on landing. The pilot was yelling, “MAYDAY ON THE RUNWAY! MAYDAY ON THE RUNWAY!” as the plane careened down the landing strip and finally tipped on its side, bending the propeller. Fortunately those things aren’t really going very fast, so no one was hurt.

Another teacher rode a plane with a broken seatbelt. It kept coming undone from the floor.

And then there is the duct tape. A teacher commented on being on a plane where a window was duct taped in. Someone else piped up, “I challenge you to find a bush plane that hasn’t been duct taped together.”

But tonight, the prize for most adventurous flight went to Theresa—hands down.

This poor girl was called and offered a job taking over a class where the teacher had just up and quit. (But that is another story of its own.) She was told that they needed her within a couple of days. So she had precious little time to prepare for the trip. She’d never been to Alaska, wasn’t sure what to expect, and it was her first year of teaching. But she was determined to do it.

Well, her flight schedule was insane! So to facilitate things, she wore flip flops so she wouldn’t have to take her shoes off and on at security checkpoints. She managed to survive the tight transfers and plane changes. She was sitting at the Bethel (Alaska) air shack waiting for the final leg of her flight, when she was approached by a native girl. The girl asked her if she was the new teacher going to Alakanuk. Theresa said she was, so the girl asked her if she could help take her baby to the baby’s father in Alakanuk. Thinking that the girl needed help carrying her stuff, she said, “Sure.” The girl handed her the child, and started to walk off.
Theresa hollered, “Wait! Where are you going?!”
“Oh, it’s OK. Just give her to her father.”
Theresa protested, but the girl insisted that the baby needed to get to Alakanuk. The father was expecting her.
“What’s the father’s name?” Theresa asked.
The girl told her.
“Don’t you want to know my name?” Theresa asked.
“Why?” the girl asked, and she walked off.
So Theresa boarded the plane carrying a stranger’s baby. When she got to Alakanuk, no one was there to pick her up, and the father wasn’t there for the baby. Apparently, no one told the father she was coming.

She eventually got to her house, and she got the baby to the father. (One of the locals saw the guy riding by on an ATV, and flagged him down. He was headed out hunting--but went home with a baby instead.) Unfortunately, what Theresa didn’t get was her luggage. It had been lost. So for three weeks, the poor girl had to walk around in flip flops and the same change of clothes; other teachers helped out best they could. Her luggage eventually showed up. It had been sitting in Emmonak the whole time—about 15 miles up river.