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Snow has been coming down all day, but it doesn’t want to stick. I keep looking out the window at thick, heavy flakes pouring out of the sky. But the yard is still green. It doesn’t want to let go of summer, not quite so soon.

I start my new job on Monday. It is the first time since 2003 I will have worked a real full-time schedule at a real place of employment with W-2s & pay-stubs & no lay-offs when the tourists head south with the geese. It is making me antsy. I keep eyeing the truck, wondering how much it would cost to get running & outfitted with an old cabover. I did have a couple of decent road trips this summer. The last and most superb was up the haul road to the north coast of the continent. It whetted my appetite to live mobile again.

It was a perfect trip despite our late start and midnight arrival at the dusky arctic circle. The next morning Pico and I went on a long ramble along the pipeline while Pete & Jon slept in, and we arrived in Coldfoot in time for a late lunch and gas. As we drove north, the colors changed from green to yellow and red and orange. Trees disappeared just before Atigun pass. I was reminded by the constant snapping of Jon’s camera just how lucky we are to live in this place. We plunged into Atigun valley with snow chasing us down from the pass. Heading out onto the coastal plain, we ran into caribou by the hundreds & two herds of muskoxen wandering across the one road in their vast northern territory. I was spellbound by these prehistoric beasts, wandering endlessly over the northern foothills of the Brooks Range, utterly unconcerned by our roads, trucks, pipelines and passage through their ancestral land.

We slid into Deadhorse well after dark, the sun setting an hour before midnight at this late point in the season. With the few maps I had seen, I was expecting a small gravel pad plunked down on the tundra with two motels, a gas station & a dump station for RVs. In my mind’s eye, vast oil development would lay far beyond the locked gate at the end of the highway. Even in the dark, I could see how wrong my assumptions had been. We drove into a complex of gravel pads that went on endlessly in the dark. Giant trucks, mining equipment, tanks, storage containers & warehouses loomed up in the gloom. Fire-light flickered above oil wells across the marshy wilderness in all directions. We drove in circles, trying to pinpoint the motel, trying to find a place to pull over and sleep. There was nothing. Parking lots were full of dumptrucks and semis, driveways were roped off. Ominous photographs of grizzlies ripping open dumpsters papered the doorway of the hotel we finally found. Grizzlies, I thought angrily, that would not even be here in such threatening numbers were it not for this installation of humans and their waste. Grizzlies or no, we had to sleep. It was two AM. We pulled into what we hoped was an inconspicuous spot in their lot and curled up in our seats to wait for dawn and our promised guided tour past locked gates to the Arctic Ocean.

I was in a foul mood when I woke. The vast wild beauty of the arctic coastal plain in her best fall colors at sunset had been replaced by a gray, greasy industrial wasteland. The ocean was out of sight beyond miles of towering oil installations, housing & recreational complexes and mile on mile of road built up high and slicing the tundra marsh and ponds into neat quadrants of well-contained green. We rolled out of the car, stiff and sore, and made our way into the tour office for our morning ride past the guarded gate to the ocean. We sat through a dated piece of propaganda reminding us of the glorious uses of indispensable oil and the spectacular care taken to protect the arctic wildlife in and around the oil fields. Smiling biologists took soil and water samples, happy caribou babies frolicked with no gravel or oil field in sight. We walked out to the bus, and were shuttled through even more dregs of discarded detritus of our biggest and grandest industry, and stored equipment waiting to go out on the frozen tundra in a few months and find more to drill and take. We were warned not to take pictures of the security area (or IDs had been run, to ensure clean backgrounds before entering this national security risk.) We passed a few tundra swans and a fox, slinking through one of the gridded green areas. We drove up to the ocean and saw it stretching grey and white-capped and cold north to the top of the world.


Heartened, we hopped out into the cold wind and walked to the point of the headland. As we reached the shore, we saw half-buried barrels rusting in the cold salt spray, scraps of metal jutting from the beach, steel poles at crazy angles in the water, Styrofoam chunks in various stages of eternal decay tangled in the driftwood. The whole shoreline was choked with trucks and buildings and pipes and powerlines. I wanted to scream. We took off our shoes and waded knee deep in the icy water, daggers of cold ripping through flesh with every second. The cold was so relentless that it would not numb my skin, only increase the pain with every wave and splash.

We waded back, dried our feet and legs, and shuffled to the waiting bus. The driver assured us of the happy wildlife coexisting with development all through the National Petroleum Reserve across the northern coast of the state. I gritted my teeth and hoped he would drive faster than my anger could rise.

I have been against opening ANWAR to oil development from the beginning (the rest of the northern Alaska coast is already open to drilling, both on land and out at sea … why open a critical wildlife habitat in the corner of the state for a trickle of oil that won’t touch our needs, or last as long as it took to develop?) but I wanted to believe that Prudhoe Bay would prove just a little spot of destruction on an otherwise untouched coast. It may be just a spot in the grand scheme of things, but as far as I could see the country was decimated. And according to the maps, what has been done to the land goes far beyond what my eyes could pry into across the horizon.

The drive back was fast, eating up all five hundred miles in one shot, most of it in the rain.The drive home was made longer when we passed a wreck south of the Yukon River, still hours gravel-and-fog driving north of town. A man rolled his truck off an embankment and into the woods. We don’t know how long he lay unconscious in the cold rain, but when we found him he was a hundred yards off the road and making steady progress putting as much distance as he could between himself and civilization in a haze of ethanol and hypothermia. With four hundred miles of wilderness ahead of him and colder rain coming fast with the dark, that direction didn’t seem prudent, so we turned him around. Soaked to the bone with no shoes, it took twenty minutes to guide him back up to the road. We stripped him down and shoved him into layers of sleeping bags, made a tent out of a tarp on the gravel berm and heated it with a propane furnace – all provided by the hunter & his two young sons (with fresh caribou and racks stacked in the back of their truck) who had first noticed the headlights in the trees well below the road. If karma is real, that man has a trophy bear and a couple of big moose coming his way. After several attempts to communicate with dispatch in Fairbanks via satellite phone, we gave up and hoped they had heard most of what we said. An hour later an Ambulance appeared from the Pipeline Pump Station up the road and, relieved of our duties, we kept driving south into the fog. I gave up driving when we hit pavement at Livengood, and slept til we rolled into the driveway at four am.

Winter and work are blowing in even if I don’t want to let them stick quite yet. But temperatures will settle down below freezing and routine will settle on my bones like a heavy pack a few days into a long slog up to a spectacular view. I certainly won’t miss the mud.

After the warmest September on record in years, it is equinox and it is snowing. The stairs have iced over and the muddy ground is turning white. Welcome, winter. We didn’t expect you quite so soon, but the snowboots are by the door all the same.

It is equinox eve, and they are forecasting snow. I knew fall was over yesterday morning when, with a crisp 33 degrees on the car thermometer, I drove past a dog-team pulling a four-wheeler over the washboarded dirt road to our house. The dogs were hot and panting with the unaccustomed work in the relative heat of a late fall dawn, but they were pulling hard with tails wagging, happy to be at it again after a long summer of smoke and rain and mud, sprawled on top of their dog-houses in the awful sub-arctic summer haze.

Dar Williams is coming to the Blue Loon on Friday, an unexpected and delightful treat to end my little hiatus between interviewing for and starting a job. In August, I saw Tim Easton there with Michelle and it was a perfect show even though I didn’t know his music enough to shout the choruses with the rest of the packed house. I hope Dar gets as good a reception, although Tim gathers what amounts to a hometown crowd after so many years passing through in the near-dead of winter.

With no viable paramedic opportunities on the horizon, I’m going to be working as a medical assistant at a local community clinic. I’m a little weirded out about working a regular five-day-a-week full time job for the first time in a very, very long time but I am glad to have work of any type even if it’s not in an Ambulance. I was entirely surprised by the job offer, since the Nurse Manager who interviewed me seemed rather hostile towards EMS-trained applicants. I guess what it probably came down to is that I can give shots and draw blood and obtain EKGs, and they needed more than a vitals-and-history taker. And I must have managed to come across a lot more confidant than I actually feel.

After facing my fears in Fire class for two weeks, I had to pull out. My ankle, badly sprained this summer but nearly healed, deteriorated rapidly with all the hauling and climbing and jumping and pulling and turning and had me limping as if I was fresh off crutches. An orthopedist took more x-rays last week, and determined that the calcification around an old fracture on the lateral malleolus may be irritating the injury and making the healing slow and a little tricky. Wrapped tight and laced in 10 inch wildland boots, with no tall fire engines to climb around and tons of hose to haul across parking lots, the twinges of pain are fading into a general soreness. I am home tonight and not hauling hose and climbing ladders and there is a great deal of relief, although this only means it will have to go through it all again next fall. The upside to being down for the count, however, is the ability to hold a camera.

After nineteen days of smoke, anaphylaxis, tribal politics, atrial fibrillation, morning briefings, sinus infections, medivacs & blisters, I returned home to a full house. Peter’s friend Jon was up from Buffalo for ten days of Alaska which thus far had translated into lots of porch-grilled brats and enough beer to wash them down and then some. Immediately on my return, despite the pressing need for me to get a real job with all this newly verified Paramedical Education, we packed the car and the puppy (Nyssa, recovering from an infection and a notoriously bad road-trip companion to boot, stayed at the kennel) and started driving North. Despite the fact that I have “operated” tour “coaches” up to and beyond mile 175 of the newly famous Dalton Highway, I had never been beyond Toolik Lake research station up to the actual oil fields & arctic ocean. The trip was spectacular. More on this later. (More includes lots of drama after a vehicle rolled down a 80 ft ravine about half an hour ahead of us on the mostly deserted highway in a cold fall rain.)

On our return to Fairbanks, after a long shower and a lot of laundry, I started on two new projects; looking for a Paramedic job in a town with no Paramedic job and starting (a week late) the Firefighter I class at the Volunteer Fire Department.

I will tell you, and tell anyone, with no qualms, that I have no interest in fighting fires. I hate structure fires, and I hate burn injuries. Of all the possible ways to die, burning to death is at the very, very bottom on my list. And burning to death seems to be the number one subject of every fire class I have attended. The textbook starts each new, mostly inane chapter with stories of Firefighters who didn’t pay enough attention and got burnt or asphyxiated (not quite as bad a way to go, but still full of terror.) I am taking this fire class, because for better or worse, EMS is still bound up rather hard and fast with fire departments country wide. I may need this basic fire-cert to get a job in the future, when we leave this town and move back to civilization. Also, the VFD that I’ve been affiliated with for the past few years has helped and supported me to no end, and I feel I owe it to them to take the class so that I can help out on fire scenes even if it’s just by driving the Big Shiny Trucks, hauling hose, or changing air tanks. (I will reiterate again, here, my absolute terror at the thought of actually entering a burning building.)

I started out a week behind, but I was heartened when on the first bunker drill I only got a slap on the wrist for not getting my neck flap fastened correctly. On the second evening, however, all my ill-gotten confidence was shot down when we did an actual hose drill. For some reason, I was put in front of my company (two other women taking the class.) We were in full fire gear, including self-contained breathing apparatus (SCBA) which all told weighs in at nearly 50lbs. We were blindfolded, and instructed to follow a hose line strung across the ambulance bay, around tires and equipment and under one of the rigs. I did fine leading the group through several obstacles, hose knots and double-backs until we got to the place where the hose went underneath the rear of the ambulance. I was boiling hot inside my gear, and my adrenaline was pumping from yelling through the SCBA and continually running helmet first into the tanker, the tool-rack, scattered gear. I realized with dread that I had to flatten myself out and belly crawl under the chassis to lead my company through. I got as far as my hips and stopped. I felt my SCBA mask & helmet strap pressing into my throat. Even though I knew, way back in the corner of my mind, that I was in a lighted ambulance bay with several instructors standing around, no live fire anywhere to be seen, plenty of air in my tank & two more experienced team members mere feet behind me, it did no good. I felt my throat closing. I knew I was going to suffocate and die under the axle of the ambulance. I was sure this breath would be the last one I could get past my constricted throat. I took a deep breath and tried to center myself in reality. I closed my eyes under the blindfold and focused on what I new to be true, as I have on so many occasions when events have spun out of control. I could not find that center. I backed out, kicking my company out of the way as I did so. I took a few deep breaths and tried again. I got as far as my belly under the ambulance, and felt my chest and neck crushing in. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think. I had to get out. Before I knew what was going on, an instructor had flipped my purge valve and had pulled back my blindfold and was demanding that I keep breathing through the mask and not rip it off. I realized my hands were on the mask and she was physically restraining me from doing just that. If I did that in a fire, I would be dead with my first breath.

I have never failed so spectacularly at a task. My company went on without me, as I sucked air out of my tank and tried to believe I wasn’t suffocating and watched them finish the course in the happy light of the safe, dry, hazard-free bay. I wanted to rip the whole of the gear off and storm out of the class forever, but instead I followed meekly as they wove around the ambulance and found the end of the hose without me. I would not cry with failure in front of them. I wanted to scream at the condescending looks of the other firefighters and the insincere “it’s OK, it happens to all of us” from the 19 year old “Company Captain” who has been with the VFD for all of two months. I wanted to hit her.

I spent the next two days in a sea of dread. I considered every possible way of quietly dropping out of the course. I thought of every reasonable, thought-out explanation of why, with job interviews pending and Peter in school and other part-time gigs starting soon and the other demands of the fire station for shifts and training I couldn’t continue with the class. None of them had to do with my under-the-ambulance terror of Day II.

This morning, I woke up after a fitful night of terror dreams. I dragged myself through coffee and breakfast and to the fire station an hour early to study for the paltry multiple-choice quiz and try to focus on things other than my own imminent asphyxiation. The lecture on ways to burn to death due to improperly understood building construction did not last nearly long enough. After lunch, we were hauling ourselves into bunkers and masks and off to perform various tasks under the perfect indian summer sky.

After securing and hoisting various sharp & heavy tools to the roof of the three-story bay, our second task was an entanglement course. We were instructed to blindfold ourselves over our air masks, then follow a twisting hose line through a maze of tight spaces, wires & cords, dead-end & impossible squeezes. They didn’t let me go first, given my paltry track record, so I stood blindfolded, listening to two of my team members struggle through, cursing and kicking as their gear was caught up in a thick spider’s web of garden hose and their air ran out, alarms shrieking. I kept breathing into my foggy mask, sucking dank air from the blindfold over the air space. It was my turn. I found my center, that cold, dark place where I can think. That place too far out of reach on Wednesday night. I knelt down, took hold of the hose, and gripped my determination to keep breathing and keep moving.

And somehow, I did. Granted, I have not attempted to shimmy my way under the ambulance yet. That fear, I will face later. But I did keep on moving, swimming over wires and squeezing through enclosed spaces and breathing and breathing and breathing. I came home exhausted far beyond my shaking legs and sore shoulders. Three beers and three chicken mole tacos later, I can still taste the dread of the last few days in the back of my throat. This was the first time I wasn’t sure I would come through the other side. And I’m still not sure … the ambulance still sits in wait. But I am closer, and I think I may yet make it through that space.

There has been next to no rain in the Texas hill country for two years. I spent three months of my summer walking the dry grass and rocky creek beds around my parent’s home. My new pound mutt was with me, chasing white tail dear at filling his coat with sticker-burrs at every turn. We would walk to the river where I learned to swim and see dry shoreline never exposed to the air in my lifetime. I would nap in the thin air-conditioning of my parent’s home, unable to stop sweating after four years of sub-arctic winters. Dreams of the torrential rainstorms and dancing lighting of my early childhood came and went in the night.

I arrived in May to ride with the Paramedics of Hays County and finish the requirements of my program so I could test and return to Alaska for the wildfire season. I intended to stay for six weeks, eight at the most, but when my grandmother fell and broke her hip for the third and last time everything was put on hold while she slipped from this world into the next. I can still hear her breathing of those last few comatose days, six times a minute, a gasp between pursed, cracked lips. Holding my own breath unwittingly to the scarce rhythm of hers, I held her hand and felt her pulse strong then thready, retreating towards her heart over the course of days and breaths. We turned her, we sang to her. Her children sat vigil at night, counting each ragged grasp for air. A fish with no water.

When I began riding the ambulance again after a month’s hiatus, no rain had come and the heat was breaking records of longevity. The last few shifts were busy with asthma attacks and heart attacks and anxiety attacks and an odd car crash on the hazy tarmac of the interstate. Two tests passed, and I was done after a year of too little sleep and too much rushing and not enough reading or writing or play. A few days ago, I packed my two bags and the mutt and boarded an airplane home. I arrived to a perfect arctic sunset at midnight, the sky lined with blue and grey and red and orange, the air a perfect balance of breeze and warmth. Peter and I sat with the runway to our backs in the eternal dusk, watching the sky and the trees. The husky pup, knowing he was back where he belongs, flopped down in a heap at our feet and watch the sky along with us.

Now I am packed again, off to tend firefighters in the Crazy Mountain Complex where 18,000 acres are burning near a village on the Yukon river. But this time, there is a peace and a feeling of home that I did not take with me into the drought and heat of Texas. I am going just up the road for a few days or weeks to do the thing that I love to do – to bring relief to wounded & tired firefighters and to sleep in a tent under the stubby black spruce and the midnight sun. The smoke from the seventy-odd fires burning around the state is already in the air around our cabin, hazing the trees across the road and soaking into the walls and into our coats so we will breathe it like a campfire into the winter.