Flying in Alaska

I'll admit, I have a lot of time to think up here.

One of the things that I've been thinking about lately, and something that fascinates me about living and teaching in the Alaskan bush, is just how much people rely on planes up here. Everyday I hear planes. Everyday I see planes. The only way in and out of the village is by plane. They're like expensive taxis. Whenever I have training at the district office, the district pays for me to take a bush plane 40 miles east into Bethel. Forty miles is less than the distance between Providence to Boston to put things in perspective. It's hard to imagine taking a plane from Providence to Randolph, Massachusetts, but that's essentially what I'm doing out here.

When I receive amazingly untarnished postcards in the mail, I think about the incredibly long journey they take from Providence, Rhode Island to Tuntutuliak, Alaska. I imagine they start off in Boeing 747s and hop into planes progressively declining in size. It's like one of those Russian dolls that keeps getting smaller and smaller when you pull it apart. Eventually that postcard arrives in Tunt in a four-seat plane slightly bigger than a mini-van. Maybe it's a simple thing (often taken for granted), but only paying 42 cents for a card to go that far impresses me.

Another aspect of air travel in Alaska is the bush pilots. I've seen clips from the show Flying Wild Alaska, but now I've been in those planes with those pilots. Whenever I get on board, I like to make conversation with the pilots. They all seem to be very unique people. I was chatting with a pilot who had a beard like Giants closer Brian Wilson. He told me the job is hectic and dangerous. He was saying that there is a lot of stress put on them to get mail and essential goods to all these villages several times a day, often in gnarly weather. More importantly, when people get seriously ill or seriously injured they must get to a hospital. There are no hospitals in villages. There is rarely ever a doctor. Bush pilots go on medevac missions in Alaska when someone needs serious medical attention. You almost have to have a cowboy mentality to be a bush pilot in my opinion. Dealing with snow and extreme winds is something that makes flying challenging and often not possible. He mentioned that when the weather is too adverse for flying, the airport basically turns into a fire station, with pilots hanging around just waiting for some action.

One of my most memorable experiences in Alaska (so far) came on a bush plane with one of these unique bush pilots. It was a day with rough winds and I was flying from Bethel to Tunt. My pilot was a guy in his early 20s with ripped jeans, a light weight zip-up hoodie, and a backwards baseball hat. He looked strangely out of place, like the kind of guy that would be surfing in southern California if he wasn't flying planes in Alaska. I chatted with the guy before the plane took off. He asked me how the school year was going, assuming correctly that I was a teacher. When the plane took off, I could feel the powerful winds outside. The plane was swaying back and forth the entire time. It was a scary flight. I looked at the pilot, trying to pick up on his body language. He had his right arm flanked over the passenger seat, like he was taking a joy ride on an empty street in a new Cadillac. He reached into his backpack in the middle of the flight, pulled out a Mountain Dew, and downed the entire can of soda in one long swig. The pilot's behavior was so bizarre to me that it actually distracted me from the wind rocking the plane. The same flight that made me nervous was clearly nothing for this pilot. A memory that is vividly engrained in my head was just a daily caffeine break for the bush pilot. A thousand thoughts were going through my head at that moment and this pilot was just focused on his soda.

Plane taking off from Tunt

A village (not sure which one) from above

A bush pilot