Naked in Dangerous Places - Cash Peters [103]
Life in these remote outposts back then was dull and depressing. Even more than it is now, as hard as that is to imagine. There was so little to do half the time that people would resort to booze as an anesthetic to numb themselves against the reality of how wretchedly empty their wilderness existence was.
And I guess it's not changed much.
“If you don't do something here, the boredom, the seclusion will get to you,” our gopher on this show, a sweet little Inupiat native called Morgan, confirms.
“How many days of night d'you get here?”
“Sixty days without sun.”
“So you'd just go insane.”
“You could. The endless dark, the endless cold, it tears a person apart mentally and physically. So you have to do something to override that.”
And I guess the Eskimos chose alcohol. Trouble is, this led in some cases to domestic violence. Certain Inupiat men, when they got drunk, would go nuts and start beating their wives, forcing the government to step in and designate alcohol consumption a public safety issue, limiting its availability. The locals could import a certain quota of liquor from the outside if they wanted to, the authorities said, but the actual sale of alcohol in town would be banned.
Indeed, the rather stiff middle-aged couple running our hotel has even gone one step further than that. They hand us forms to sign when we check in, making us promise—on threat of expulsion—that nobody on the crew will drink alcohol on the premises and none of us is bringing any kind of alcoholic beverage into our room.
Faced with no choice—well, where else are we going to go?—we all sign it, including Fat Kid. Then, while the owner's wife is turning around to get our keys, he pulls open his bag. “Look,” he hisses, nudging my arm.
Nestling at the bottom is a bottle of red wine.
“We can drink it in my room later.”
And a devilish gleam crosses his eye, vanishing the instant the woman turns around again.
Needing someone to tell my inspired new Barrow slogan to, I come up with a great plan, and set off through the snow to the offices of KBRW, the town's best, and only, radio station. It has a ten-thousand-watt transmitter and a staggering reach across eighty-eight thousand square miles. So every square mile gets about nine watts each.
I barge into the studio during a live broadcast, which I assume is what everyone does, because it meets with no resistance at all, and throw myself down next to the startled host, Fran Tate, a tiny woman with blonde bangs, big glasses, and mustard stretch pants.
Fran's a bigwig in town. Came to Barrow from Anchorage in 1970. An electrical engineer by trade, she used to earn her living designing airstrips. Now, in what is a bit of a career leap, she hosts her own afternoon program, Jazz Below Zero, on KBRW—“Your source for news and entertainment across the North Slope.” She also has a successful business selling septic tanks and owns Pepe's North of the Border, the best, and perhaps only, Mexican restaurant in town (“Please don't ask for a margarita”). Better still, she once got to appear on The Tonight Show and, by way of a gift, handed Johnny Carson the bone from a walrus's penis. Naturally, that made her quite the celebrity around here, and I'm a little in awe.
“I've got the greatest slogan for your town,” I tell her off-air.
“What?”
“D'you want to hear it?”
She doesn't really, I can tell. She owns a septic tank business and once gave a penis to Johnny Carson; I'm nothing to her. But what the hell?
“Barrow, Alaska—we put the ‘ice’ in isolated.” And I laugh as much this time as I did the first. “Isn't that the best?”
“Yeah, that's really good.” Fran chuckles.
“In fact,” I say, “quit your show, let's go and have leaflets made. Come on.”
But she can't. The current jazz track she's playing, a series