A Typical Day

by Brian Burk

I decide to walk to work this morning, stepping out from my apartment building about ten minutes after seven. I have to walk quickly as most of the trip is uphill and it takes me the better part of an hour. I pass houses still sleeping, some stirring, some with cars idling out front. Days of rain from the month before—September—pitted the dirt and gravel streets with potholes and washboard patterns, but now the ground is hard in sub-freezing temperatures. I am walking a back road to the main highway, a path that takes me past the city power station. It is a light blue metal-sided shed, and inside whirs a large turbine, audible from blocks away. My breath makes vapor clouds illuminated by the plant’s flood lights. I walk through a junkyard, in which a tugboat rests on blocks. I pass the Post Office, a new grey metal building, and climb its steel staircase to check my mailbox, number 3391. Nothing there.

Back outside now, I cross the highway so I can walk on the same side of the road as oncoming traffic. I try to walk on the pavement itself to get better traction, but whenever the headlights of an oncoming car approach, I sidestep to the shoulder to avoid being hit. Most of the cars that pass me are commuters coming out of the Larsen subdivision on BIA Road, as well as the occasional taxicab shuttling passengers to and from the early Alaska Airlines jet out of Anchorage. A school bus motors up the hill toward Larsen and Kasayuli subs, white strobe light flashing on top, tire chains dangling from the chassis. The chains jangle and send sparks flying from under the bus as they drag along the concrete.

To my disappointment, the sky is cloudy so the Northern Lights are not out this morning. When I saw them before they were breathtaking, emerging like ghosts, ephemeral, ethereal, emerald green. They swayed in wavy lines like a theater curtain, appearing and disappearing with slow, phantom grace. Today only the orange glow from the city lights is visible against the base of the clouds.

At work I am assigned the Cessna 207, a new airplane for me; larger, faster, heavier, carrying up to six passengers. Each time I look over my shoulder I see the faces of four or five passengers staring back, some holding babies in their laps. The responsibility weighs on me more than it does when I fly the small airplane, the four-seater. On my first flight I land in Nunapitchuk, a village west of Bethel. I am here to pick up five jurors called in by the court in town. Since Nunapitchuk is on the other side of the Johnson River from the airport, and since the river is now half-frozen and requires a ginger snow machine ride around the large holes in the ice, it takes forty-five minutes for my passengers to arrive. Later that day, two snow machines would crash through the ice and sink to the bottom between the village and the airport, but fortunately the riders escape sinking as well. While I wait on the ramp, two Hageland Aviation 207s arrive. Joe, the village sub-agent for Hageland, pulls up to the airplanes on an ancient snow machine. Joe and I met a few weeks before. That day, Joe gave my passenger and me a motor boat ride from the airport across the Johnson to Nunapitchuk and Kasigluk and back. Joe is a black haired man with a thin mustache. His age is hard to guess. I think he’s in his late fifties, though it wouldn’t surprise me if he was as young as forty-seven or as old as sixty-six. This morning, Joe is especially friendly. The diminutive Eskimo removes his right glove, as is the custom here, shakes my hand warmly and then hugs me, several times. “This guy here is going to teach me to fly!” he says jovially in his guttural Yup’ik accent, announcing this notion to one of the Hageland pilots—who is also Yup’ik—and his passengers gathered underneath a wing. His hand does not leave my shoulder for a while.

Finally my passengers arrive and we are off for Bethel. As we pick up speed for takeoff, I can feel the gravel on the runway through vibrations in my rudder pedals, which I work furiously trying to stay on the narrow strip. My right hand holds the throttle and propeller control fully forward while my left grips the yoke, maintaining some back pressure. As the orange highway cones marking the runway’s edges speed faster past my window, I pull harder with my left arm and the Cessna accelerates off the gravel. Climbing and banking away from the village, I point the nose at the giant radar dish we call White Alice, a relic of the Cold War, which sits abandoned on a rise to the southwest of the Bethel airport. It resembles a drive-in movie theater screen and can be seen from tens of miles away. When it was in use it watched for Soviet bombers sneaking over from nearby Siberia. Now it’s a shell, a grey steel modern art piece, the city’s lone skyscraper.

I spend the day strapping in toddlers, securing boxes of groceries, dodging freezing rain showers, refueling the airplane and napping in one of our lobby’s recliners between flights. In the late afternoon the clouds disappear and the sun reflects brightly off the fresh snow. I am flying Don Lemieux, a teacher, a woman named Bessie and her son upriver. Bessie is Yup’ik, a Yupiit School District employee. They’ve just been to town to shop, where Bessie’s son—a boy of thirteen—purchased a small rifle. I drop Don off first in Akiak, following the pink line on the moving map connected to my Global Positioning System. Entering a wide left downwind for Runway 21, I look down at lily pads of ice floating in the Kuskokwim. They are circular, white on the edges and dark grey in the middle, each about the size of a washing machine. Against a blue sky and descending sun, the bergs are like out of a surrealist painting. I suddenly wish my father was here, for he is an amateur photographer and has a deep appreciation of aesthetics. After Don gets out of the airplane Bessie moves to the front seat next to mine and asks, unashamed, “Is Don married? He’s cute!” I turn and glance at her son, who doesn’t flinch or look up from his copy of Tiger Beat.

“Yes,” I reply apologetically, “I’m afraid he has a wife.” Bessie looks disappointed but amused. We depart for Tuluksak, her village, a few miles further up the Kuskokwim. The sun is at my back now, and my eyes relax a bit from squinting. Fish camps, deserted for the winter, dot the river bank. Only a month earlier, the camps were mini processing plants, with racks of fresh silver salmon hanging outside to dry. Now the motorboats and drift nets are in storage on shore, and people ready their snow machines for winter. On 122.9 MHz, the most common air traffic advisory frequency in the area, airplanes from various companies chatter their intentions: “Atmautluak traffic, seven-delta-fox five east, landing Atmautluak.” “Base to final one-seven, Kasigluk.” “Six-niner-mike taxiing out for departure Napaskiak, any inbounds please advise.” On my marine radio, tuned to channel nine, airplanes from my company radio our dispatch desk to inform of arrivals and departures. Though Craig Air uses channel nine for intra-company communication, these are public frequencies that anyone can and does use. For many people living in the villages, the VHF radio is the equivalent of the telephone. Occasionally a burst of Yup’ik flashes over the frequency, followed by a reply. English words are sprinkled liberally into the baffling conversations, but do not succeed in making the conversations any less baffling.

It’s the last flight of the day. The sun sets in the southwestern sky, earlier and further south each day. I’m flying with all my lights on, which I love doing although the boss hates it. External aircraft lights are expensive and difficult to change. As it is going on dusk the tower has turned on the runway lights, a mixture of whites and greens and reds and blues. Cleared to land now, I set up the airplane: mixture full forward, power back, trim, check airspeed, lower flaps gradually, trim, more power back, listen for the propeller governor to disengage, now bring prop full forward and flaps full down. The red and white VASI lights, meant to guide me to a landing on a safe glide path, show that I am too low. Perfect. Rather than roll past intersection bravo and all the way to delta, I can make that first turnoff with ease. Over the threshold I bring the power back to idle and coax the nose up, slowly. Touchdown is slightly firm, but with good form, and I taxi off at the exit. “Tango one-seven-zero, contact Ground off the runway,” instructs Will, a former Marine now working the control tower. He’s a tall, muscular Minnesotan, younger than me but with a child and a military career already behind him. “G’night,” I reply, and switch frequencies.

“Bethel Ground, tango one-seven-zero clear of one-eight at bravo,” I mumble, the same post-landing radio call I’ve been making all day. “Tango Cessna niner-one-one-seven-zero, Bethel Ground, taxi to parking,” says Dave, the tower manager. I acknowledge and roll the thirty feet or so to the Craig Air ramp entrance. “Taxiing in,” I inform the dispatcher—who is also Craig’s wife, Emily—over the marine radio. “Okay, copy you’re back, Brian.” says Emily quietly, “Nothing else tonight; just park her on top and tie her down.” I pull in between a set of two ropes chained to the ground, shut down and hop out, first writing my landing time down on my manifest. I tie the ropes through the eyelets underneath the wing lift struts, and Tex, our mechanic, comes out from the hangar with a large red nylon engine blanket, which we wrap over the cowl with Velcro and bungee cords. Normally we put wing covers on as well as plug in the oil sump heater to run all night so that the oil doesn’t freeze, but one-seven-zero isn’t scheduled to fly in the morning so tonight we don’t bother. Tony offers me a ride home since I walked up this morning, and I accept. Grabbing my bag containing a book, some gloves and a day planner, I file out the office door with the rest of the crew. As the last one out, I take the padlock off the shelf and hook it to the door after I shut it. Walking across the ramp and out the front gate, I climb into the dilapidated blue minivan Tony drives. An electric pink sky chases the sunken sun over the southwest horizon. We pick up the highway and leave the airport behind, driving down the hill and in to town as night falls.