Originally published in The Nome Nugget, Summer 1994
It’s finally happened. We’ve run out of green chile. The 25 cans of this precious commodity that we packed into every available extra space in the 20 bags, trunks, and suitcases we flew in with to Nome are used up. So now we’re in trouble.
Originally published in The Nome Nugget, Summer 1994
My sons have heard the story of the threatened diphtheria epidemic in Nome nearly 70 years ago. I’ve read them the stories of the cylinder packed with the 300,000 units of serum on the train to Nenana, the great hearts of Balto and Togo, and the courage of Leonard Seppala and Gunnar Kaasen and the other eighteen mushers. I’ve tried to paint a picture of the desperation of the situation back then but these boys don’t really understand epidemics. My kids had routine diphtheria-pertussis-tetanus (DPT) shots in the convenience of their pediatrician’s office when they were infants. How could they know what I was talking about? Their version of desperation came on a cold and windy night last April.
Originally published in The Nome Nugget, Summer 1994
When we first arrived in Nome I picked up the “Historical Walking Tour of Nome, Alaska” brochure down at the Carrie McLain Memorial Museum and oriented my sons to the town with some of the historical locations included. From the Sandspit to the Old Federal Building, we walked the streets of our new town. The Detention Hospital for the Insane was one of the brochure’s more colorful descriptions. Mary McBurney wrote, “…originally used as a detention home for individuals arrested on charges of insanity. People held at the detention hospital stayed there until after going to trial. Then they were either set free or sent to a sanitarium in Portland, Oregon.” The “set free” part was a little unsettling to my children as they carefully scrutinized some people walking into the GTE building next door.
Originally published in The Nome Nugget, Summer 1995
Every woman in America has to make some kind of peace with Barbie. The doll with the flaxen blonde hair, anorexic waist, and pink, wrinkle-free plastic skin has become an icon we live and fight with everyday. You don’t have to watch too many TV shows or look at too many magazine advertisements to see that Barbie is the model woman of America: tall, thin, Caucasian, and willing to mess with her hair everyday.
Originally published in The Nome Nugget, Summer 1994
I grew up on a beach in California. I’ve lolled on the pebbles below the cliffs of Dover and watched the Italian Punch and Judy shows on the crowded sands of Salerno. I’ve swum in the Atlantic in Maine and Miami Beach and lived for two years on the Gulf of Mexico. I’ve known some beaches. But none of these places have a special ingredient that Nome’s beaches have. It’s not the gold. It’s not the seawall or the whales or the surf fishing or the salmon. It’s the driftwood.
Originally published in The Nome Nugget, Summer 1995
There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who write poems for gold;
Robert William Service wrote 19 books of verses
then died in Monaco 37 years ago;
Though he wasn’t a Shakespeare, he captured the feel here
And in the ways of the North he was wise;
So on the 11th of September, we pause to remember
the Bard of the Yukon’s demise.
Originally published in The Nome Nugget, Summer 1995
The public relations woman at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History knew why I was calling as soon as I said where I was from. After all, Nome and Cleveland go together like reindeer steak and eggs. She wouldn’t have dreamed of saying, “You’re from Nome, Alaska? So what?” She knew in an instant I’d want to see Balto.
Originally published in The Nome Nugget, Summer 1995
It’s catalogue time in Nome. I carry an empty plastic bag when I go down to our post office this time of year because everyday I find in my box a great paper jellyroll of slick enticements to buy. Today I found ordering information for kids’ toys, wildlife books, museum art, guns and knives, Irish knick-knacks, and computer software. Every day I carefully slide them all out of my box and drop them into my plastic bag. The holiday shopping season is again slouching its way towards Nome via the U.S. Postal Service.
Originally published in The Nome Nugget, Summer 1994
A picture of most Nomeites’ home interiors will reveal stuff stacked all over the place. Maybe it’s because most of our houses and apartments are so small, or we just like to have piles of stuff close by. Or maybe it’s because we don’t just don’t care to bring a lot of furniture up here.
When you arrive at an apartment or rental house here in Nome, you want to start unpacking your stuff. That’s not easy if there aren’t enough shelves, cupboards, closets, drawers, and tables. Oh, if you’re moving into a furnished place, you’ll find a fair amount of that kind of stuff but there are never enough. Furniture is probably the last thing you think about bringing to Nome but the first thing you want when you get here.
So where do you get some furniture if you don’t want to invest in a set of put-together shelves at The Country Store or coffee tables from the downtown A.C.? Where will you put your books, clothes, boots, and reams of laser printer paper? Should you gather some driftwood from Ft. Davis and hammer together some cockeyed shelf units? No! You look for discarded boxes!
We’re using clean, discarded boxes at my house for a bed frame, three nightstands, ten sets of shelves, home finance files, a sideboard for art supplies, closet shoe shelves, Lego assembly benches, computer book files, a drawing table, three toy containers, and six wastebaskets.
Organized Nomeites also use caselots of canned and packaged goods for furniture. The barge order arrives in June and with it their new furniture for the year. They stack the canned peas in one corner for an end table or arrange the flats of shrimp-flavored Ramen noodles for a kid’s Nintendo center. Throw a square yard of cotton fabric or a round piece of oil cloth over the top and who’s to know? Visitors from Outside might find it a bit odd that your $4,000 PC sits on $100 worth of Chef Boy-ar-dee ravioli cans but, hey, this is Nome. Of course, there is the disadvantage that these creative tables start shrinking as the family eats the furniture’s components. You have to be flexible with your height requirements!
My heart occasionally yearns for my Amish oak linen keep that’s still in storage and I’d love to get some tall, wood bookcases and hutches and entertainment centers. But Nome is a creative, make-do kind of town. Always has been. Martha Stewart might like to come up here and check this out! Besides, who wants to ship all that real furniture out of here if you move? There’s a reason so many places up here are rented furnished.
Give me furniture from Giant Eagle that I can use to build a table and later fill to ship out my Christmas packages. Steer me to the box piles at A.C. or Gold Rush Video and I’ll take what I need. I’m a recycler and a re-user. I’m energized by the challenge of better living through cardboard.
Originally published in The Nome Nugget, Summer 1994
I had been looking up at the outcrop on top of Anvil Mountain ever since we arrived in Nome. It really does look like an anvil. Somebody must have carved it and set it up there, right? I’ll bet some miners hauled it up there as a gag. Maybe it was Balto’s grave! Was it another relic from the load of stuff brought to Nome for World War II? Maybe I’d better get up there to investigate before those IT guys clear it off or something! All that was going through my mind one drizzly evening as we piled into the truck and turned up Bering Street. I was finally going to see Anvil Rock.
Rocks spit out from our wheels as we climbed Anvil Mountain past humps of tundra and tall, tangled patches of willow. Swaying scarves of cloud trailed down from the huge fog bank like ghosts drifting along the tundra, calling, “Come up! Come up!” It was irresistible. We climbed higher into the gray soup. How different things looked. I was sure we’d see a huge gray bear (the “Spirit Bear of Anvil Creek”?) or at least ghosts of the miners of ’98. I wanted to take photos. My sons pleaded with my husband the Engineer to let them out to run through the fog. And as any doting husband and father of an adoring wife and children will do when he hears the heartfelt requests of his passengers to stop, the Engineer kept driving.
As we pulled up to a rocky crest of Anvil Mountain, huge overhanging rectangular objects suddenly loomed out of the mist like bent cereal boxes at a giant’s breakfast table. Maybe we’d happened upon the graveyard for drive-in movie screens. There should have been scary music as we slowly drove between them. Our sons were very quiet. “What are those things?” my youngest asked. The Engineer explained about the Cold War Soviets and listening to radio signals and why the towers were up there. “It’s the White Alice site,” he said. As we crept up another road, a lone dark mass appeared from out of the gray. It was a house-sized outcrop sitting right on top of the mountain, its rough black horizontal slabs resemble a huge lopsided slate layer cake. It was Anvil Rock.
The boys clambered freely all over the nooks, cliffs, and hollows. Wind pushed them into the leeward crannies but adventure pulled them back out into the cold gusts. The magic of the rock, the quiet, and the fog–held us there for hours. Vulcan could have hammered huge horseshoes up here! The gray cloud surrounded us. Nome had disappeared, Sledge Island was gone, and the sea had vanished. We were alone on the mountain top, marooned on high ground, at play in the workshop of Vulcan’s mighty forge.
As I look up at Anvil Mountain now, I can see that granite outcrop clearly. But when the next big fog rolls in, I’m going to ask to return to Anvil Rock and the giant drive-in movie screens. There’s magic up there.
