Fog kept our plane grounded from Kotzebue to Selewik. Things are pretty informal at the airport so the pilot just came in and informed us of the delay. There are only two flights all day to Selawik so not too intensive of a schedule to keep. We boarded the plane and taxied before again being sent back due to fog in Selawik. For the third time, we boarded the plane which forced me to fold in half over the seats and cargo to make it to my seat. I sat directly behind the pilot for the flight and notice him taking an iPad from his bag and using a navigational app to supplement the planes instrumentation. They may do this on larger planes but was kinda funny to see the mustachioed pilot velcro his to the controls.
The airport in Selawik was non-existent, with the pilot setting down the American Flag painted plane on a thin spit of gravel out into the bay. Locals dressed in street clothes on four wheelers with each of them having a cigarette from their lip, unloaded our bags from the plane. They lifted them from the belly to about 5 feet from the plane where we then loaded them into a trailer hooked to a four wheeler. Frank, Sonny as everyone calls him, was there to great us at the airport. He is a local from the area but works part time for the Fish and Wildlife Service. He took most of the bags, along with Bob and Gwen while I waited for him to come back. A woman, Dellia pulled up on a 4X4 and there was another man on riding on the back over the left tire with a cig hanging out of his mouth too. She informed me that I was staying by their house and took me along riding over the right tire with my bag on my back and some instruments on my lap. There are zero roads in Selawik, rather a network of wooden catwalks connect building due to permafrost. Four bys fly around these and there is no apparent minimum age for driving one. Pretty sure I saw a group of twelve year olds flying around corners.
We stayed in a plywood bunk house with a large storage area, hotplate, one bedroom with a questionable mattress and small office. Strange enough, it had internet. Slow, but more connected there than in Kotzebue. All the gear was crammed in, leaving minimal space to move around. Sonny came back around a short time later and we donned our thick survival type suits (not the gumby esk kind) and hopped on the boat for the first taste of field work. Perfectly sunny, a bit cold, but nice to be out of the village and on the maze of rivers. Without Sonny, there is no chance we would be able to find the sites or make it back to the village. Everything looks like everything else and there are minimal, if any landmarks to keep you oriented.
I managed to find a little nook between all our stacked gear to fit my sleeping pad catch a little fitful sleep. The floor was so dusty that my eyes were watery red balls in the morning when I went to brush my teeth. Still better than the bed in my opinion. Loaded up the gear after an oatmeal breakfast to hit the one of the two upriver stations and make basecamp at the cabin to conduct experiments and travel to the furthest upriver station. Each station usually consists of taking light profiles, installation and downloading data from monitoring probes, dissolved oxygen, conductivity, and a plethera of other measures. Even with the sun out, I got off the skiff at the cabin shivering uncontrollably. This with the thick space suit and practically all my clothing on. Sitting in an open skiff when it is 30 degrees out for two and a half hours gets you pretty cold.
The cabin is much more posh than I was expecting, with the compound located on a small lagoon including a few outbuildings containing research equipment, a tool shed, and even a sauna. Too bad the sauna has become a storage area. Swallows are abundant in the area, with most of the buildings having two or three birdhouses on them. The dip and weave, catching mosquitoes out of the air. I found a small decked area to sit for a while and stare at the far off mountains and the swallows dove ever closer to me to pick bugs out of the air near my head.
Most of the time at the cabin was taken up filtering samples and performing primary production studies. Water samples are collected from a depth of one meter and then placed in bottles to incubate in the lagoon. To the left is a photo courtesy of Sonny showing Gwen and I grabbing the bottles out of the water and getting ready to start a new set.
Following our fourth day at the cabin, Sonny took us back to Selawik. The river wa unusually rough due to wind and currents, producing whitecaps on a river about 500 ft wide. Gwen and I sat at the front of the boat and were bounced and thrown about for three hours. My body was really sore the next day from the constant jarring. Spending another night on the storage floor in Selawik didn't help much either.
I walked around before heading to bed to see the small city and maybe meet some people. Selawik is an interesting place. Dogs are everywhere and always barking, garbage and broken down snowmobiles, or snowgos as they are called, litter "yards", and the entire community is under an unofficial, "you should boil water cause our sewage system doesn't really work," stipulation. A very different way of life that was not what I was necessarily expecting to see in a subsistence tundra village. Instead of a proper landfill, it seems that locals take their trash out to certain spots in the river and dump it. Old stoves, tv's, bags of garbage and other items littered certain parts of Fish River close to town. But, the people of Selawik are some of the nicest you would ever want to meet. When I was walking around, one kid ran up to me to walk with me and show me his action figure. Then, seeing a bike in a puddle, fished it out and wanted me to carry it home for him. We got to his house, he grabbed the bike and ran inside. On the other side of town, another kid, named Peite (not sure on the spelling but that's how it sounded) wanted me to walk him to church. I followed him down winding paths through the brush, over a bridge that stops halfway in the middle over the river and then you have to balance on a 4 x 4 the rest of the way, and on catwalks before we got to his church. He just ran inside and waved at me through the window. A very interesting place for sure.
Got out onto the river around 6:00 am the following day to hit the lower river stations and tundra pond before the river got too nasty to make work impossible. Returning from sampling, we scrambled to get the gear together to make the 10:00 am flight but no one was round to four wheel us to the airpor. Fortunately, Sonny noticed another plane come in about an hour later, zoomed over to tell the pilot to hold for us, and we got out on the later flight to avoid spending another night in Selawik. The plane back to Kotzebue was even smaller, with most of the samples and gear taking up a majority of space. On the way back, one of the kids on the plane was blasting rap so loud in his headphones that it could be heard over the engine drone. 50 cent is alive and well in Selawik apparently.
I walked around before heading to bed to see the small city and maybe meet some people. Selawik is an interesting place. Dogs are everywhere and always barking, garbage and broken down snowmobiles, or snowgos as they are called, litter "yards", and the entire community is under an unofficial, "you should boil water cause our sewage system doesn't really work," stipulation. A very different way of life that was not what I was necessarily expecting to see in a subsistence tundra village. Instead of a proper landfill, it seems that locals take their trash out to certain spots in the river and dump it. Old stoves, tv's, bags of garbage and other items littered certain parts of Fish River close to town. But, the people of Selawik are some of the nicest you would ever want to meet. When I was walking around, one kid ran up to me to walk with me and show me his action figure. Then, seeing a bike in a puddle, fished it out and wanted me to carry it home for him. We got to his house, he grabbed the bike and ran inside. On the other side of town, another kid, named Peite (not sure on the spelling but that's how it sounded) wanted me to walk him to church. I followed him down winding paths through the brush, over a bridge that stops halfway in the middle over the river and then you have to balance on a 4 x 4 the rest of the way, and on catwalks before we got to his church. He just ran inside and waved at me through the window. A very interesting place for sure.
Got out onto the river around 6:00 am the following day to hit the lower river stations and tundra pond before the river got too nasty to make work impossible. Returning from sampling, we scrambled to get the gear together to make the 10:00 am flight but no one was round to four wheel us to the airpor. Fortunately, Sonny noticed another plane come in about an hour later, zoomed over to tell the pilot to hold for us, and we got out on the later flight to avoid spending another night in Selawik. The plane back to Kotzebue was even smaller, with most of the samples and gear taking up a majority of space. On the way back, one of the kids on the plane was blasting rap so loud in his headphones that it could be heard over the engine drone. 50 cent is alive and well in Selawik apparently.
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