Mitt liv som Tobin

It's always amazing to me how, just by writing things here, sometimes I meet or reconnect with people I thought I'd never hear from. This comment brought me an especially big smile:

http://nibot.livejournal.com/353345.html

In the summer of 1999, I worked at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. For part of my time there I was assigned to a field group that was installing seismometers in the area around Denali national park. It was awesome.

squarkz, this one is for you:



Out on one of our seismometer-installation missions--well, we were real professionals, so we weren't going to let a little rain get in the way of our job. Still, Doug was at least nervous enough to stop at the roadhouse where the (Petersville) road meets the (Parks) highway to ask the condition of the road.. the grizzled old alaskan --huge white beard, jolly fellow-- proprietor of the place lent Doug his cell phone. "If you git in any trouble--call me with this. I'll come and git you with the tractor! But be careful out there--I don't want you to fall off the road."

We got out to our installation site, and it was real miserable. Out in the rain, in a thicket of some plant that the two geology grad students with us insisted on calling "alders" or something like that, on top of the tundra, so tramping through it and digging in it was very annoying. I don't think we ever declared success, but we had some kind of a hole dug, and decided to get out of there.

So it was on the way out of there that we drove off the road. It had turned to pure mush and the beaten down old suburban just slid into the embankment, and over it. We all climbed out on the driver's side and admired the situation. Check out Doug's sheepish expression.

I don't know if you can tell Liz's facial expression without seeing her face, but it has to do with the car being held up by these alder branches. This is the side of a rather steep hill, dense with brush.

Doug called the roadhouse guy. "Okay, I'll warm up the tractor!"

Eventually some miners driving up the road passed us and saw our plight. They hooked up a chain, and with lots of slipping and sliding and mud everywhere the suburban was pulled back onto the road and out of the mud.



Back at the roadhouse, the old alaskan was relieved to see our return. "I didn't want to have to take that tractor out there," he said. The tractor only drove at a few miles an hour. The old alaskan invited us in to the roadhouse, a big old wooden building, one of those storied taverns that takes in weary travellers every couple hundred miles along Alaska's highways.


[Doug contemplates the tractor (actually a different one, but parked outside of the roadhouse) and, I think, his own mortality.]

"You say you're with the gov'ment?" he confirmed, and was quite satisfied with our answer, that we were with the State Geological Survey or somesuch truth.

"Just as long as yur not terr'ists. Hate them terrists," the old proprietor welcomed us. "You're on a mission, you're welcome here." To him tourists and terrorists were one in the same. Alaskans have a love-hate relationship with tourists--sure, they're utterly dependent on the money they bring in, but otherwise the tourists are loathed. We were with the state government--we were friends.


[Postcard from the roadhouse. The text on the other side says: Located Mile 19 Peteresville Road, off the Parks Highway. Original part built 1931 by Belle McDonald and used by early day miners, trappers, hunters, and mountain climbers. Owned and operated since January 1968 by Joe and Vera Dul. Turn West off Milepost 114.7 Parks highway.]

The hospitality we received at this old roadhouse on the Petersville Road is the stuff of legend. We were welcomed in and the proprietor gave us new, pre-warmed-in-the-dryer clothes to wear, threw our old wet clothes into the dryer, whipped up some very welcome hot chocolate to warm our souls, fired up the grill and made us burgers for dinner. Doug had to beg him to at least accept payment for the burgers.

Tuckered out from our day's adventures, we made our way back to Cantwell.