15 April 2007

This is just a short message to show you my 4-wheeler and my beaver hat (flaps up). Notice the mud: it's mostly dried up.

Last night Joyce and I went to mass and this morning we attended the community church. In mass last night there were 11 people. The community church had a real crowd this morning with 19. Thirty people worshipping in a town of 387 isn't very good, but maybe that's about the national average.

One of Joyce's friends from Florida asked what she was eating up here, was it mostly fish. Mike recommended that she should have answered, "Mostly whale blubber followed by baked Alaska." Actually, fish is not easy to come by here. The Kuskokwim River is not particularly good for fishing and so fish has to be shipped in. But, this week, we eat with Mike and Laural on Tuesday and has tacos made with fresh vegetables that had just arrived on the day's plane. Wednesday we had pizza at the cafe; really loaded (what I call Chicago style). The restaurant is only open two nights a week, so on Friday we had the grilled steak dinner with baked potato and salad that is their other special. Today Joyce came home with me so we could microwave Banquet chicken and instead Laural invited us to join them for dinner. We ate on the patio and I will admit that by the time we finished eating, about 8:00, it was beginning to get a little chilly. We had baked chicken, with gravy; salad with fresh tomato, red pepper and cilantro, and brussel sprouts which they had blanched and frozen from their garden last summer - wow, were they good. So you see, we eat in Alaska about like you eat anywhere in the country. It's true that there is only one cafe in town (one more than the villages) and it is only open two evenings a week with no choice of menu, but home-cooked meals, especially when Laural is cooking, are wonderful. Pot Lucks or what they call Potlatches put those held elsewhere in the country to shame. You cook with what you have because you can't always go to the store and buy just what you want, but that doesn't limit the variety.

Saturday, we met a co-worker of Joyce's at breakfast who offered to give us a tour in the company van. In little McGrath, we probably took three hours, traveling every road and stopping at each of the three stores. Tiny had shown us just about everything when she asked if we minded picking up her mom, so we did the whole route again. No roads in this part of the state are paved and often the mud looked too threatening and Tiny would turn the van around. There isn't much beyond about 2 miles from the airstrip except the town dump and communications antennas, but there is a road that goes out 16 mile to the stone quarry. I've never gone more than about 5 miles because of the road conditions. The VPO (Village Police Officer) and his wife live out "on the ridge" somewhere out there. They have no running water and no electricity. A few people I know live up the river: during the winter they travel on the river by dogsled, or snowmobile, and in the summer they travel by boat, but right now, they have quit coming to town because the river is too unstable and has standing water on top of the ice. The children will not attend school now until the river breaks.

Department of Natural Resources has a large beautiful campus which operates in the summer training and coordinating fire-fighters around the state. They are beginning to gear up and get buildings operational. A man in church this morning told me that he had arrived in February to make preparations. This summer should be very busy for McGrath with DNR, and also the building of a new runway at the airport.

It is now 10:15 and twilight is waning, so I'll draw my dark curtains and go to bed.