Home Sweet Home

This is our home sweet home. You can get an idea of how they keep the houses level amidst the heaving tundra. As the tundra freezes and thaws each year, the ground heaves and throws off the "foundation" of the houses. So people have pros come out with lasers and stack up just the right amount of wood under each of the supports in order to keep their places level. The cost is about $1200 to $2500 each time - and some people do it once or more per year! If you don't do it often enough, your
windows will break and your doors won't shut.







This is the tube that holds our poo. They come pump it out on a weekly basis and take it to Brown Slough. That's why it's called Brown Slough.

Just kidding about Brown Slough. They take it to another slough. But the clerk who was here before me lived in a place with his septic tank outside, which froze, but had to be reheated overnight so they could pump it out once a week. Those days didn't smell too lovely at his place!

This is our water supply. The city comes by twice a week, on Thursday and Saturday, to make sure it is full. It's in the water heater room, which for some reason maintains a constant temperature of approximately 112 degrees. Genevieve likes to sit there in the morning.

If you run out of water, it burns out your pump and causes a shitload of problems. For example, no toilet flushing, which is never a great party. There's a name they call newcomers who run out of water, but we can't remember it. Plus we don't want to jinx ourselves. However, we haven't even come close yet, so we're pretty efficient with our water.

The setup is kind of amazing. It really makes you aware of the footprint you leave behind, in terms of the extent we use our natural resources. It would probably be a good exercise for everybody to live this way for a bit to raise the consciousness about it. Of course, we just read Jared Diamond's "Collapse", a book about human societies that fail, so that kind of stuff is on our brain right now.

In case you were wondering there is no shortage of water here, like in Southern California. They truck the water around because it took them many years to figure out an affordable method to pipe water throughout town without it freezing solid. They now have some pipeline action going, and we'd say (totally guesssing) that about 1/4 of the people are hooked up to it.



Speaking of precious resources, this is me eating some tasty breakfast salmon in our palacial kitchen. We'll try not to hunt the salmon to extinction. But they are ever so tasty.

the 'hood

These are the houses in our neighborhood. As you can see, some are quite nice and some are less nice. That seems pretty typical of Bethel (except in possibly one rich area of town where all the places are pretty nice). I think it's fairly hard to haul away trash here, and combined with the various other hardships, people tend to have a lot of junk in their yard. Plus the snowmobiles, boats and other various transportation equipment. Our street is fondly known as the "muddy street" and I'm not sure we'll be able to drive the Subaru down our road some days. They put a hazard sign on it when it's too bad (big muddy ruts!).

This mud puddle is behind our house on the shortcut to the grocery store. Old crates are used as impromptu boardwalks to ease the slog.






This is the view from the front of our house. Our place faces Brown Slough, a river/tributary/mud-puddle/bog of the Kuskokwim. It's a decent view, but unfortunately none of the windows in our place face that direction.

We walk down to the main river every day for a better view.

Where the work goes down.

working so hard like a soldier

Monday was work. What can you say about that? Genevieve had to hang around home all day waiting for the slowly rotating wheels of YKHC bureaucracy to get her officially hired. It was a process that would ultimately take all week. Actually I have to admit that my work has been and is great. Interesting stuff goes on out here. I’ll write more about that as I feel inspired. And remember. During lunch I met Genevieve at the credit union and we opened our account. That’s where we met our new friend Rich Wood, fellow Hellgate High grad.

Bethel is Special -- Hardcore

Day one, we arrived, groggy due to our red-eye and Anchorage mission. Judge Devaney was kind enough to meet us at the airport, even though we hadn’t made any plans and we didn’t know what he looked like. Jeremy, the former clerk had described him to me as “the short guy with a beard.” Fortunately, Judge Devaney was able to pick us out from the crowd.

He gave us a quick tour of Bethel, then treated us to breakfast at Brothers, a café at the airport. We were pleasantly surprised to see a view of the mountains in the distance. Sure, they are small when you are 60 miles away from them, but it’s reassuring to see them anyway. The judge helped us find our new landlady and get us delivered to our new home sweet home. The buildings in Bethel are built on stilts, due to the permafrost making a foundation of any kind impossible.

Bethel will never be renowned for its stunning architecture. It’s the ramshackle appearance of many of the places that likely contribute to Bethel’s reputation amongst Alaskans as “the armpit of Alaska.” But beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I say. It’s all in what you focus on. And there is beauty here in Bethel.

Take the dumpsters for example. Each dumpster has been beautified by the locals. My personal favorite is the one that says, under a rainbow:

BETHEL
IS
SPECIAL
HARDCORE

The Dumpsters of Bethel! As you can see, dumpster art is common in Bethel. It makes for an entertaining walk around town (kind of like the art galleries in big cities!)

What??

Getting Serio

We are laying the foundation for some serious blog posting.