What better way to start than with our arrival into Savoonga...
We flew from Nome, Alaska early morning and set west, south-west. We were already at the ocean-mainland border in Nome, so it was necessary for the senile pilot to mention a few safety reminders about the inflatable raft.
"Don't forget to blow this thing up on the outside, and not the inside, of the plane. Also, you can tie it to the plane once it's outside so it doesn't blow away."
It was hard to believe that anything like that could happen in such a beautiful spot over the ocean. The cloud cover masked everything except for a minor break over St. Lawrence Island. Beneath this opening, the ocean displayed the strangest deep royal blue color that I'd ever seen. Along with the royal blue were darker streaks from strong winds. We had originally aimed for Gambell which, as U.S. territory, is actually closer to Russia than the mainland U.S., but the cloud cover was too low and terrain too high for the senile pilot's liking. We shot for Savoonga, smaller in population and more in the middle of St. Lawrence Island, instead.
An airliner (very small) had landed just before our arrival and gave us the heads up that half of the gravel runway was closed. We heard this at the 500-foot warning while battling a strong cross-wind.
Minus some frazzled nerves, we had landed! Right next to the airstrip was a cemetery so aptly placed. A reoccurring theme in airstrips around northern Alaska were the cemeteries; these communities like to place them side-by-side.
We hadn't even opened the plane door when a handful of people came out to greet us. They were friendly and very surprised to see a group of people visiting with no real reason. Some of them wanted to sell us ivory and we politely declined. We had to get a permit in order to visit the town. If we wanted to go outside of town, we'd have to pay 50 USD per person for a land permit. We decided to stay within town and make the most of what we could in our limited whirlwind tour.
It was very windy here. And dusty. Two in our party accepted a ride on the only car (truck) into town to pay for our town permits, the scruffy kiwi and I opted for bicycles as our mode of transportation on the dirt roads. Everyone got around via four-wheelers. Town was composed of a few streets crisscrossed together and houses lined with silver tubes - it had just received its first sewage system.
After perusing the grocery store (the chauffeur had to track down a man so that we could buy our town permits) and taking mental notes of prices - 6 USD for a small box of cereal, we were let loose! More people tried to sell us ivory, either walrus, whale, or mammoth, and we again, politely declined. This happened everywhere we went through town.
The senile pilot and I decided to go on a very windy, very dusty bike ride to the beach. We weren't allowed to pick up anything and take it off the island, so says land permit, this included any rocks on the beach (unfortunate for me). We passed two windmills along the way - one completely lifeless in the howling wind, the other spinning so furiously out-of-control that it caused the entire structure to shudder. We came back to our bikes (after setting them aside with their kickstands) to find them blown over by the wind.
We found the beach near the cemetery and next to the sewage discharge area. It had bones, pumice, and large, smooth boulders with tiny pieces of pumice eroded away by wave action. It stunk a little, probably carried over from the wind.
The entrance of the cemetery was guarded by two whale bones.
The cemetery itself seemed very bleak as many do. Coffins were strewn about between the crosses; permafrost defies the traditional ground burial here.
Returning back from the beach, we stopped by a type of bone-and-machine yard. Rusty graters and whale bones, both looked very pretty in the sunlight. It was still really windy and our bikes had blown over again.
After more run-ins with the locals trying to sell us ivory and subsequent polite declines, we decided not to buy a land permit and to fly on to another destination. It was windy, dusty, and slightly scary flying out of Savoonga. It seemed like the wind had picked up even more as we were loading the plane. We made our bumpy way off the gravel runway and into the turbulent air.
And that was Savoonga.
------
The senile pilot found a very good article on Savoonga a couple of weeks after our trip. This describes Savoonga better than I ever could: Washington Post's Savoonga
0 comments:
Post a Comment