Tide, Feather, Snow_ A Life in Alaska - Miranda Weiss [72]
We landed in late morning. Bethel’s one-gate airport was crowded with Yup’ik families—reuniting happily, kissing, and calming babies. Some twenty-five thousand people, mostly Yup’ik, live in this community and the more than fifty small villages scattered along the region’s many rivers. No roads lead here from the rest of the state. The service center for the region, Bethel is by far the largest community for hundreds of miles around, and has a runway that accommodates daily jets to and from Anchorage and a dock for cargo-bearing barges coming up the Kuskokwim from the Bering Sea. Uniformed white federal employees who worked for the vast national wildlife refuge surrounding Bethel moved decisively to gather gear and head out the door. Half a dozen men in clean camouflage getups milled about carrying fishing rod cases. They were on vacation and had spent a fortune to fly here and be taken to remote fishing camps. Many villagers didn’t have cars—bringing them out by barge was prohibitively expensive—and taxis crowded the airport’s curb.
As people milled by, moving duffels, plastic totes, and boxes, I stood at the edge of the curb and looked straight out ahead of me. From my vantage across this far edge of Bethel, the only signs of permanence were the power lines strung across the community and a few low houses that sat like paperweights on the tundra. I remembered how the land had looked on the maps at home—about as solid as cheese cloth. Except for unbroken, pale green strips on either sides of the rivers wide enough for the uppercase labels of “Yukon” and “Kuskokwim,” the terrain had looked mysteriously gauzy, as if you could punch your fingers through the land and into the sea. And there was nothing beyond Bethel but small villages widely scattered across the tundra. Chakwaktolik, Nanvarnarluk, Tuluksak: the village names sang the stunted melodies of the Yup’ik language.
This was my first time off the road system in Alaska, and I was giddy. I was getting into a landscape with no limits and no easy passage to anywhere else. And the strange assemblage of people at the airport—the feds, the Natives, the tourists—meant there were many things about this place I didn’t yet know. I stood in my stiff, new workpants; in six weeks they would be supple, even threadbare in places.
We were picked up by a man from a local floatplane company that would fly us the rest of the way to camp. He drove a diesel pickup with two rows of seats. Sixteen miles of gravel roads webbed through the flat, drab town, which was littered with the refuse of a windswept life. As we drove across Bethel to the company headquarters, we passed a hodgepodge of low-slung restaurants that revealed the remote community’s surprising diversity: Mexican, Chinese, Albanian, Italian.
We loaded our gear into the back of a single-engine floatplane and took off from a wide eddy in the Kuskokwim River at the edge of town. While the pilot hummed to Jimmy Buffett singing through our headsets, one hundred miles of tundra rolled by beneath us, brown with a blush of early green and scattered scabs of snow. Rivers wound across the land inefficiently and between them, thousands of small, shallow lakes glinted like half-buried dimes. Below us, a few Native villages clumped messily on the land, radiating scars of four-wheeler and snowmachine tracks.
A lucky break in the traffic of truck-sized chunks of ice flushing out of the Manokinak River provided an opening for us to land on its wide, gray surface. The pilot watched for ice that could crumple his pontoons, and we quickly unloaded onto the