Originally published in The Nome Nugget, Summer 1995
I miss having toddlers in the house. Active, noisy, obstinate, and sometimes downright destructive, they’re also loving, enthusiastic and delightful. A toddler’s energy level also brings out the active, noisy, obstinate nature of a lot of adults, too. Just ask someone who has just returned from grocery shopping with one. Right now it’s a pretty good deal in Nome to be a kid born in 1991 or 1992. Kids two and three years old can usually get pretty excited about dinosaurs and other powerful forces. Especially powerful forces like large, noisy machines.
Nome is full of large, noisy machines right now. Asphalt spreaders, dump trucks, and rollers bullied their way down Front Street recently. Diesel rollers crushed their way down Fourth Avenue smashing little rocks and somebody’s pink barrette. On an early morning, you might see a street sweeper slowly shushing along Front Street curbs, making a wonderful wet arc at the Polaris Bar, and then moving down the other gutter. You can drive down to Cape Nome and watch quarry bulldozers pushing and lifting granite boulders around. Back hoes, minidozers, and fuel oil trucks enthrall the small fry on a regular basis. And the land graders and earth movers moving up and down First Avenue are an absolute delight.
“Do you want to go down and watch the grader outside?” I asked my six-year-old last Saturday, my eyes shining. “It might be kind of fun.” He looked at me, at the grader, and back to me. “Can I get some gum at A.C. afterwards?” At the airport, my husband pointed out a huge helicopter his company had rented to sling large objects to a remote site. “Do you want to get closer to it?” he said to our boys. “It’s a really big helicopter with special…” “I’m hungry, Dad. Could we go to the Polar Cub for pancakes?”
What happened to the toddler children who could sit for hours watching a cement truck pour our neighbor’s driveway? Where are the boys who wanted to follow the snow plows down our highway in their tennis shoes when it was 10 degrees below zero? Here in Nome there was road work in front of The Country Store, jackhammers and backhoes on the drainage sites along First Avenue, cranes lifting cargo off barges at the jetty, and huge loops of dredge buckets scooping gravel. It’s toddler heaven! But our kids seem to have outgrown the thrills these machines and noises once gave them.
I’ve seen ads for videos of construction machines and fire trucks for the insatiable toddler, eager for more large-equipment experiences. Pop the video into the VCR and you’ll get noise, huge tires, sirens, and back-up beeps. I’ll bet these video merchants never get a single order from Nome, though. Just step outside! We’ve got the real stuff all over town! I do miss having young children in the …. Hey! Let’s go watch that fork lift moving the Iditarod sign down Front Street! Hmmm. Maybe there is still a toddler left at our house.
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