September 20, 2010

Patience

Written by: Adam Knight, Language Arts Teacher, West High School

I gently lugged the 72-pound toolbox onto the scale and draped my arm over the 5’x5’ box at my side to steady it. The ticket agent tapped away at her keyboard, four bags, all over weight. I shoved another toolbox, a pack, and a duffel bag toward the scale. This is my carry-on. I rocked the box at my side, a 4-foot satellite dish and mounting arms. The agent looked up from the monitor and over glasses she wasn’t wearing. She was not amused.

Nor was I amused, sweaty and disheveled within an hour of showering, my ball cap not to be straight again for at least a week, first in line before even the first tour bus at 5:00 in the morning. My only semi-reliable traveling partner had not arrived at the airport yet, and I had found the tools he had stowed at the warehouse scattered, unpacked and lacking consumables that had all been used the prior week. It would have been fine by me if Dexter missed the flight. He had a way of offending people with disparaging comments about their community and culture within seconds of stepping off the plane, and I would have been just as happy to not have that as a dynamic of this trip, our fifteenth in a circuit of thirty-plus trips we would take that summer to rural Alaska communities.

The agent handed me my boarding pass, and I wandered to the gate. Dexter arrived as the plane was half boarded, looking lost as his platinum blond mullet flapped twenty years out of date down the concourse behind him. When the plane arrived in Bethel our dish was carried in by the ramp agents, and our toolboxes and duffles carouseled in with other like baggage: toolboxes, coolers, fish totes, and the occasional suitcase.

“Well what are we gonna do now?” Dexter demanded. The day before when it had occurred to everyone at the office that even unpacked we wouldn’t be able to get the dish into the door of a Cessna, we had called an arranged for a local employee in Kwethluk to come ferry us by boat from Bethel. That still left us a cab ride from the town dock, none with adequate roof area for us to go screaming down the Eddie Hoffman Highway without losing the dish to the frost heaves.

I walked down the taxi stand to a light blue Suburban with Kusko Cab stenciled awkwardly on the door. “Say, how wide do those ambulance doors in back open?” The driver stepped out. Not wide enough by a long shot, but we cobbled together a webbing of frayed tow straps and bungee cords and went bounding down the rippled asphalt, driver and each passenger with a hand out the window to steady the load.

I paid the driver, and he left our gear on the boat ramp, an unpaved, dusty slope leading into the Kuskokwim River. Empty soda bottles swirled in the eddy. There was surprisingly little traffic for such a fair, warm summer morning. I opened my duffel bag and produced my life jacket. Dexter’s eyes widened, “Were we supposed to bring life jackets?”

I shrugged and tossed it into the dirt at my feet. I arranged the other gear out of my way and sat down. I folded the panels of the jacket over each other and arranged it behind me. Next I pulled my parka out and draped it over my shoulders and torso. Dexter’s eyes widened more. “What are you doing?”

“Getting comfortable. I was up at 4 to sort the tools you didn’t put away when we got back Friday. I called from the airport. He’ll be an hour or better.” I flopped the hood over my head to keep the sun out of my eyes.

Some time later, I heard shuffling about my head and cracked one eye to see Dexter, life jacket a size too small hiked up into his armpits, loading the last of the gear into a skiff pulled up in the dirt. I rolled over to see Yogi towering over me in all of his four feet and eleven inches. He spoke almost no English, but his face was wide with a grin, and his belly shook a little as he chuckled at the “gussuck” asleep in the dirt. He helped me up and pointed to the boat. I made my way to one of the aluminum benches and sat, leaning forward on my knees and rubbing the longest nap I’d take for a out of my eyes. Yogi handed me a chunk of dry fish and his thermos cup full of coffee, slid the boat back into the river and motored away. As we turned the corner away from Bethel, I watched two swans patrolling back and forth in front of the bank and leaned slightly as Yogi steered to the side of the channel. The day was finally truly under way, more smoothly and a little more rested than I had envisioned when we left Anchorage. I leaned back with another piece of fish and enjoyed breakfast as we motored away up to Kwethluk.

This is a story about patience with circumstances as I experienced it in the YK in the summer of 2001.