Assorted Alaska Memories...

This was our bus stop in Dillingham, Alaska, population 2500.

Gotta love those red snowpants! So embarrasing... As you can see they don't cancel school unless there is literally a blizzad, the kind where you can't see past ten feet in front of you. Or you just can't get out of your house because of the mounds of snow. I remember my hair used to freeze if I woke up late and took a shower before I left. Some days in the winter, we'd leave for school, and it would be pitch dark outside, and when we came home at 4pm, it would be pitch dark again. But on the upside for kids, summers were endless light. Seriously, it would stay lit til midnight, then it would be twilight for four or five hours, then light again.

My parents are very adventurous, among so many other things. My father moved out to Alaska after accepting a leading job in the Information Systems dept. at the local hospital, which was also perfect for my mom, who is a nurse. He went ahead, leaving my mom to pack up our house in Seattle in a mere 10 days. I was the oldest at 9 and Connie, the youngest, was 4 yrs old. Pure craziness, but I wouldn't trade our experiences for the world! For me and my sisters, our childhood was really magical, full of snow tunnels and forts, salmon, tundra, camping and picking berries for our pancakes. My father often shovelled a sledding "luge" behind our home making use of the huge banks of snow created from the snow plows.

Other random memories... We used to go "bear-watching" at the local dump. We used to have to fly in little 12 seater planes to nearby towns for sports and academic events every other weekend. During one of those trips, our pilot actually started nodding off! Good thing I thought I was invincible when I was young. During a jog, Vickie and I actually ran into not only a moose and her calf, but once we turned around we saw the bear that was stalking them. I wasn't wearing my contacts so I thought it was a fat dog in the distance... Luckily Vickie was with me and there were homes nearby. True, my sisters Liz and Connie were petite, but these fish weigh probably 30+ pounds, Sometimes we'd catch 150 or more salmon of varying sizes and types, in just one night, using our subsistence net. We'd "set" the net or lay it out on the beach, tied to a couple of stakes. The other side was lined with bouys so when the tide came in it would trap the fish going up stream the Nushigak river. We lived in a part of town called "Kanakanak". Really. : )In this picture, my mom is holding Blackie, our collie-german shephard. She came to us with her name. In the second row is Victoria and Constance, and then Elizabeth and I are on the top row. This was our Christmas card one year, capturing a kind of a golden time for us. Very happy years, before we learned about the big problems of the small town... substance abuse by the old and young and pervasive promiscuity. Despite that, our lives were rich with experiences and colorful people.