Every genuine Alaska bush story begins: Now this is no Subaru. So, this is no Subaru . . . By January up on the Yukon, my blood would thicken to the point that if I was zipping up my parka, it was always about -35. If the Athabascan kids were playing ball out on the frozen river in shirts, it was 10 above. Now this is no Subaru, there was a search and rescue effort based in our village for a week with temps about -25 or so. Volunteer pilots stayed at the hotel. Land the bush planes in the afternoon, drain the oil from the engine into metal cans, take it to the hotel, get up in the morning and put the can on the stove to warm it, hurry out to the airport, pour it in, circulate with mag off, mag on, yours truly would prop start, (no references to HE WHO MUST NOT BE NAMED, please) batteries were removed for the season and that was just the routine. Now, the fun part was all the planes were on skis, no brakes, so when the motor fires, the plane starts sliding forward. Anyway, they didn't find the lost plane until summer, in a lake. Now this is no Subaru . . . to open a frozen sewer line in winter in one of my villages I brought in a steam cleaner, built a manifold to connect it from the steamer, ran six lines off the manifold to 8 ft lengths of i/2 inch pipe, held them vertically on the dirt road surface until they ate their way down a foot or so, then they bored their own way, spread the six points around and let the thing run over night. In the morning, dug out the mud down to the sewer main, cut a hole, and ran the steam hose attached to a heavy plumbers snake using my "steam drill bit," an attachment that shot steam forward and backward. Voile, it's working, dump 500 gallons from the village fire tanker down the lift station cistern to keep it going while patching the pipe and backfilling, and steam is your friend in the SubArctic. Keep the new-fangled toilets paid for by oil money flushing. Now this is no Subaru . . . oh, I'm getting homesick for a big plate of stinkheads and deep fried King Crab Acuras.
Somewhere in my files I have pictures from Kiska Island, circa 1972. After the island was taken from the Japanese, and after the war ended, everything was just left. 14 Japanese wrecked ships in the harbor, rusting miniature subs on the beach, airplanes all over in the tundra, buildings, bullets, ammo dumps, and I remember standing in one place looking at the hills covered with gun emplacements with the guns intact. Anyway, the native corporation had the government come in and clean it up as a make-work project later. After all, no one ever goes to Kiska. We just stopped in to get out of a storm.