Alaska Dispatches
# 15  —  31 March 2001

Snowmachine Riding

Here are some things you will need to know if you ever find yourself lost or stranded on flat, frozen tundra:

•	Stay calm.
•	If there is fog, wait for the weather to change.
•	Don’t trust wind direction because the wind changes.
•	Look for higher ground. You can usually find a trail home from high ground.
•	Always know which way your destination is in relation to the sun, and know where the sun is. If you lose the sun in foggy or gray skies, tap your upturned palm with a thin object and try to discern a shadow.
•	If you are at all uncertain of your location or the way home, stay put. You will exhaust yourself moving in circles. Even if you realize that you are lost, your mind will tell you to keep moving, but you should fight your mind and stay in place.
•	If you need to move, move slowly, so that you don’t break a sweat. If you perspire, the moisture can freeze next to your skin, causing hypothermia.
•	If necessary you can use the snow for shelter by digging a snow cave. For this reason, you should always travel with a shovel and a tarp.
•	Never, ever eat snow. If you do, you will become disoriented and eventually die. It takes more energy to melt snow in your mouth than you receive from the water. If you are thirsty, you can drink your own urine.
•	If you are about to succumb to the cold, an old lady will appear offering you a parka and a bowl of soup. Do not take the parka. Do not eat the soup. If you do, you will die.

If you come to Alaska, you will more than likely be told a story of someone dying of exposure. I have heard several. A guy traveling next to me on an airplane told me about a friend who had frozen to death near Fairbanks. His friend was found in his underwear, sitting next to his parka and all of his clothes, which he had folded into a neat pile. Here in Piniq, a dozen years ago, a man froze to death 3 miles from the village after his snowmachine broke down in 30 below weather.
A Search and Rescue organization was begun after the death here. The squad is well run and extremely successful; no one from this village has died of exposure since the local program was established. 6 volunteer teams with 6 men on each team comprise the Search and Rescue unit, and the teams have already been called upon several times this season to rescue stranded men, both from Piniq and from surrounding villages.
Last year two young men left by snowmachine for Bethel from a nearby village and didn’t make it. One body was found right away, but the other wasn’t. Soon sightings of a ‘hairy man’ - half man, half wild beast - were occurring all over the delta. Dozens of articles about the hairy man appeared in the local papers. Eventually village elders were called in to consult with the Bethel police force on what to do if the hairy man was spotted. There were several sightings outside of Piniq, and an official tribal council bulletin outlined what to do if one came across the creature while out on the tundra.
According to the Piniq bulletin, if you see the hairy man you are to try to touch him so that he may return to his human form. If you can’t get close enough to touch him, try to spit on him. Once he begins to revert to his human form, offer him water incrementally, starting with a single drop.
I have paid close attention to all of this since we bought our own snowmachine. I always knew them as snowmobiles, but I had never driven one before coming to Piniq. Here no one says “snowmobile”; they are referred to as “Ski-Doo’s” or “Sno-Go’s”, but most of all snowmachines. Snowmachines are used for getting around town; hauling ice; commuting; traveling back and forth to other villages for song fests, basketball tournaments and visiting; transporting steam wood from upriver and boxes from the post office; and cruising chicks by the high school boys. The snowmachine is the workhorse of the Alaskan bush, the family wagon, the modern equivalent of the dog team of old, the Harley and the hot rod all rolled into one.
The snowmachine is also a matter of life and death out here. Because you can get so far so fast, it is easy to get lost or disoriented on a snowmachine. Also, because their range is so great, one can find oneself far from shelter when the machine breaks down or runs out of gas. In the old days, people could rely on their dog teams to find the way home. Nowadays people rely on technology: portable GPS units and two-way marine radios. But these devices require batteries and know-how, and thus are fallible.
Almost everyone here has a snowmachine that is at most a year or two old  – new ski-dos are the preferred way to spend the yearly Alaska Permanent Fund checks. Ours is a jalopy. It’s a ’93 Bombardier Tundra II, a one-cylinder contraption with a relatively new engine, that I affectionately call The Beast. Besides using The Beast for shuttling Jules around town, getting ice and taking our trash to the dump, I have gotten the chance to spend some time with it out on the tundra. Mostly I have ridden to the next village and back a half dozen times for basketball tournaments. The trips are different each time, depending on the weather and time of day, and always gorgeous. I have seen red and arctic foxes, ptarmigan, snowy owls and mink. The qualities of light against the vast expanses of snow and sky seem to be infinite.
Snowmachines are a ubiquitous and constant presence here. Kids drive them to school, where they are parked in a gaggle outside the steps. Folks start them up for the 100-yard trip to the store. The roar of snowmachines fills the air late into the night as steamers criss-cross the village to bathe with their friends and relatives. Despite skiing miles from the village, it has been impossible to escape their constant din since the first snow stuck to the ground.
This past week I took a snowmachine trip to Bethel and back. It was a grueling 2-day, 200-mile journey. I was not on The Beast. My neighbor had to pick up one of his snowmachines being worked on in Bethel, so I was towed up in a sled and drove my neighbor’s other machine home.
	Gear wise, I pulled out all of the stops for the sled ride to Bethel. Tossing fashion as well as any attempt to appear macho and tough to the wind, I wrapped myself in expedition weight underwear, flannel-lined jeans, a turtleneck, a heavy wool sweater, a scarf, a pile jacket and my Carhartt arctic extreme full body suit under rain gear bib overalls and a huge Marmot down coat up top. My head was cosseted by a facemask under a sealskin hat lined with beaver fur topped off with goggles and earmuffs. Bunny boots – big, ugly white jobbers the military issues to arctic units – over liners and thick wool socks protected my feet. On my hands I wore gore-tex gloves under sealskin mittens. 
After donning the final layers I waddled over to my neighbor’s and climbed aboard the sled, a homemade number constructed out of plywood sheets and two-by-fours with plastic runners. I squeezed in between the sidewall and a cardboard box of seal meat, crawled under a tarp, and we were off. As soon as we left town the trail turned rough and my troubles began.
I think I could have slept outside comfortably in my get-up. However one doesn’t amplify wind chill by sleeping, as one does by driving a snowmachine into the wind. Despite 40-odd pounds of cold weather gear, I got cold. My hands bothered me the most. Once circulation fails in the extremities, it is a slippery slope. At first my hands were simply cold, but the cold soon turned into a throbbing pain. I knew I was safe with the sealskin, but it was uncomfortable nevertheless.
It turns out that my hands were not what I should have been worried about. The facemask captured my breath, causing condensation to accumulate on the lower frame of my goggles. This gathered moisture froze, creating a growing block of ice pressing against my nose. As the trip wore on, my nose began to sting, but I assumed it was due to pressure from the goggles, thought nothing of it and eventually became numb to the pain. When we arrived I looked into a mirror. The bridge of my nose was puffy and red. It looked like someone had socked me in the middle of my face. Frostbite.
And then there was the ride. At times I discovered myself screaming at the bumps of the trail. While it accomplished nothing, it seemed to help my state of mind. I was tempted to wave my arms to get my neighbor’s attention and ask if I could ride behind him on his snowmachine rather than in the sled. I didn’t think I could make it the whole way, and I had no idea what the whole way was. I didn’t know how far we had come, or how far we had to go. I just knew that I needed a break.
The trail would even out for a while, and I would remind myself that lots of people, even kids, travel this way all of the time, and that my friend wouldn’t put me in a dangerous situation. I resisted the urges to signal him to stop. I wanted to be tough and to not be a hindrance, so I invented strategies for dealing with the situation.
I use a similar tactic in the steam sometimes. My skin is burning and I want to head out to the porch, but I also want to stay in there, to learn to take it, to toughen up. I remember convincing myself as a kid that roller coasters were safe by watching the scores of people leaving the ride while we waited in line. If so many people were doing it, it had to be safe. If my buddies can take the sensation of burning skin as the pumice stones are doused with can after can of boiling water, I should be able to take it too. Sometimes it works.
So there I was talking myself into being tough when boom, we’d hit another huge bump that threw me into the air and brought me crashing back down into the side of the sled. I had no way to know what lay ahead. Sometimes I would see the machine that was dragging my sled go over a large bump and brace myself for the same, and nothing major would come of it. Other times, seemingly out of nowhere, I would feel a jerk and be lifted up out of the sled until bam I’d crash back into the plywood.
I tried to relax, to sit on my hands, or to brace myself against the cardboard box of meat. Nothing made a difference. Even if I found a more comfortable position, the bigger jolts would rearrange me into the sled willy-nilly. At one point I wondered if I was having a heart attack. I knew this was crazy, but I was being thrown around, I was cold, I could feel everything getting sore and tense, and I suddenly felt a throbbing pain in my left upper arm and chest. 
Finally I spotted a cabin on the horizon. This turned out to be the halfway point to Tuntutuliak, and we stopped there for a break. At this point I misunderstood Tunt to be less than halfway to Bethel. Our traveling partners, who had been behind us, arrived and remarked that the trail was “poison.” They hadn’t recognized me, which was a strange vote of confidence; the first time I have ever passed as a native. I related to my neighbor that the ride was pretty rough in the sled, and that I wasn’t sure I could make it all the way. He assured me that the trail would smooth out once we got to Tunt, and that he thought the worst was behind us.
	After thawing my hands on an exposed snowmachine muffler and scarfing down some hot tea, dried salmon, chocolate and Denty-More stew (frozen, right out of the can), we were back on the trail. My companion would point towards the horizon every now and again, and if my goggles weren’t too fogged up I could make out an arctic fox or a mink scurrying along. Despite my discomfort, it was indeed a beautiful ride.
As we traveled the scenery changed. Around Piniq the tundra is completely flat and nothing breaks up the horizon except for our “mountains” – two 300-yard high hills about 15 miles southeast of the village. We were traveling northwest and had been riding for hours with nothing but white, rolling tundra stretching out in every direction. Eventually some shapes rose out of the tundra in the distance. Were those buildings ahead, Tuntutuliak at last? No, those were trees, which were even more unexpected. We eventually dipped down and crossed a river.
When we finally arrived in Tunt, we pulled up to a house, delivered the seal meat, and had some vegetable soup for lunch. It felt good to get out of the sled and to warm up a bit, although we were off again before my feet really got warm. Things were looking up, though, as I learned that Tunt was actually more than halfway to Bethel.
The trail did indeed improve, making the ride much more comfortable. An hour out of Tunt we pulled down onto the Kuskokwim river and increased our pace. We traveled up the frozen river for miles and miles, zipping in between small hills, past forests and villages. At one point I looked up and thought my mind was playing tricks on me. But no, that was indeed a Ford pickup truck in the distance. Soon a Jeep and a then a handful of other trucks came into view. People had driven from a village down the river to ice fish for Pike. I had heard that Bethel and the surrounding villages use the frozen Kuskokwin like a highway during the winter months. Yet actually seeing trucks and then taxi cabs cruising up and down the river after everything else reminded me of the bizarre juxtaposition of episodes as the soldiers travel up the river in “Apocalypse Now.”
Eventually we left the river and climbed back onto the tundra, and when we started seeing power lines I knew (or at least hoped) that we were getting close to town. All of the sudden there were buildings and docks and then ships frozen into the river and we pulled up out of a slough and were at Bethel Boat, the repair shop where Peter’s snowmachine was being worked on. He paid for the repairs, and then I was out of the sled and onto a snowmachine. Oh what a feeling! With working hand warmers, more than enough power and a very comfortable seat I quickly saw the appeal of an expensive new snowmachine.
After coaching me to be mindful of cars, Peter accelerated into the street and cut off a taxi. We made it across to a gas station, filled our tanks and gas containers, and headed down a small side road where our buddies were picking out their logs. Had we arranged to meet them there? I had the feeling that I often have here; the sense of having no idea what the plan is or what is coming next. Everything was discussed in Yup’ik, and fighting hard against my urge to ask a zillion questions, I kept telling myself that I was just along for the ride.
It is a strange way to spend time, with no control and no idea of what is coming next. Normally I don’t mind so much, although I was so cold and hungry that I was hoping plans included dinner before we got back on our snowmachines to head back to Tunt, where somewhere along the l line I had picked up that we were planning to spend the night.
A car pulled up with a couple of other guys from Piniq. It was odd to see one of the young men from the village behind the wheel of a car. Someone else showed up, who I assumed was the guy selling the wood. It turned out that he was our companions’ brother, who lives in Bethel. We eventually piled into his van, and he dropped us off at a typical Bethel restaurant, which offered pizza, Chinese, Korean and American food.
As we sat down and started looking over the menu, it struck me that in Bethel I was somehow more in my element than my partners, even though they grew up nearby and spend a fair amount of time there. For me, figuring out what to order in a new restaurant in a new place is something I have done hundreds of times, in dozens of countries and dozens of languages. Despite running into several people they knew, being in the restaurant was noticeably uncomfortable for my companions. They stuck out as villagers in the big city.
The ride home from Bethel was fantastic. With each bump I was thankful to be on a snowmachine and not in the sled. We traveled fast on our way back to Tunt, watching the sun slowly sink over the flat horizon. The sunset seemed to last forever; the evening light lingered as the sky turned a deeper and deeper orange. I spent a restless night in Tunt and we left for home the next morning.
Seeing Piniq off in the distance after a long snowmachine trip fills me with elation and relief. Whenever I am out on the tundra, fear of getting lost or stranded is never absent from the back of my mind. With Piniq in view, I know I am soon to be home, safe and warm. We pulled into town and I turned toward our house, frostbitten and exhausted, but above all exhilarated.

©2001, Michael Thornton Wyman