Logbook: Barrow to Nuiqsut, entry 2: we sneak out ahead of Alaska Airlines

I know, I should only post one picture from the tarmac but I am going to post two anyway. Here we are taxiing to the runway. The morning Alaska Airlines jet is boarding passengers they will fly south to Fairbanks and Anchorage. It is just about 11 AM. 

I am in Nuiqsut now, but I was so tired I closed my eyes on the plane and kept them closed. I remain so tired. I have two more logbook entries to make from this trip, but, given the circumstance, it seems appropriate to collapse for a spell and take a nap if I can.

I think I can. Then I will get up and drink some coffee, finish the Logbook and do whatever I do next.

Logbook: Barrow to Nuiqsut, entry 1: She sits in a cold plane on the Barrow tarmac

Still on the tarmac outside Era Aviation in Barrow. Temperature somewhere at what I would guess to be somewhere between -15 and -20 Fahrenheit, wind blowing. Hard. Even in the plane it is cold – but that's usually how it is when you climb into planes up here this time of year. They are cold. But as the engines spin the props they generate heat that is funneled into the fuselage and it slowly gets a little warmer. It was dark in the plane, too, darker than it looks in this picture. It was darker outside as well.

It's kind of amazing how this iPhone 5s works in low light. 

The prayer I neither sought nor expected

Roy Nageak said a prayer for me tonight. That was not why I stopped by to see him. I did not seek a prayer. The thought to seek a prayer would never have occurred to me. I just dropped in to see him and Flossie because whenever I show up at their house they always make me feel at home, I knew my good friend Chie would want to see a picture of them and I wanted to hear whatever stories and history they might relate to me. So I stopped in, they fed me, and then Roy told me some good history from up here and down into the Brooks Range mountains.

I had another commitment and all too soon it was time to leave. I told them I expected to come back in late February, assuming that the surgery I was supposed to get months ago but now absolutely must have no later than early January actually happens and I recover in the three-week time period the doctor says I will. Roy offered to say a prayer for me, so I agreed. He then stood beside me, put his strong arm around me, and he said a prayer for me, one filled with great warmth and love.

I am not a religious man, but there was something special in Roy's prayer, something I felt all the way through my body and into my soul. It felt good. I left feeling all would go well and that as big and physically challenging as is the multi-year task that lies before me here in the Arctic, I will ultimately succeed.

The little one with Roy and Flossie is their grandson Ruben Roy, named both for his father and his grandfather. Dr. Chie Sakabara, originally of Japan, now a young wife and new mother, professor at the University of Oklahoma, adopted by Barrow and the North Slope and by Roy and Flossie Nageak as their daughter - this snapshot is for you.

The Daily School Bus: passing by the store

I shot this earlier, when the midday twilight was still strong, but held onto it to see what else I might come up with. As it turns out, this bus was the only one to drive into photographic range for me today, right after I snapped the jet and the skull. That's Stuaqpaq AC Value in the background, Barrow's main grocery store. Although I am told Barrow is out of milk right now, it is a reasonably well-stocked store, but very expensive - unless you come in from a village. Then Barrow might seem economical by comparison. Just about everything is flown in, that's why.

Jet over whale skull

I stepped out of the Iñupiat Heritage Center about half-an-hour ago and saw this jet, flying above the bowhead whale skull, up where the sun still shines but where it's colder even than it is down here. I wonder where it is coming from? Where is it going? Military or commercial? Headed southwest. Given its trajectory and altitude, one could justifably speculate that is has just come over the Arctic Ocean. As noted in an earlier segment of this blog, in the spring of 2012, I boarded a plane in Dubai, flew directly over the North Pole and then landed in Los Angeles.

On that trip to India, departing and returning from Phoenix, I traveled farther north than I had ever been before in my life.