Page 3
Daryl Moistner Reporting from The MLA Outpost in the Yukon Delta
We might be Gone....But were Forgotten
June 15 or 16, 2003
Fish camps...Let me tell you about fish camps and what
I'm doing. You see the land I'm surveying in belongs to the Bethel Native
Council...a district council of the Chu'pik. A native fella...male or
female....may lease a site on which to maintain a fish camp for the processing
and drying/smoking, preserving of caught fish, mostly salmon for subsistence
purposes....food to carry them through the winter. A white guy can also lease a Fish camp
site as well...only he pays $350 where as a native fella, male or female, pays
$25.
My Job is to go out locate all the Fish Camp sites, set a permit sign and a couple of rebar in the ground, so we/they can build a map.
Most of the Fish camps consist of a small tent or house, a fish drying rack, and a smoke house. Some are almost like a small second home....some are camps made of nothing more than a blue tarp, yet others are abandoned and have rubbish lying about.
One site is marked by what appears to be a shrunken head nailed to a post. Another site is guarded by a wooden likeness of Kaw-Liga.
If one wanted to get away and hide from the world this
would be one way to do it up right.
Most of the time I survey these sites, it's empty, nobody is there, we go about our survey business and move along. Sometimes the people are there cleaning and hanging there fish and after we tell them we are just surveying fish camps, they then let down there guard and it's walrus meat and seal oil for all. Rarely, but sometimes the guy shows up when your already there, Your standing next to his fish on his Campsite or sitting in his chair by his fire writing your survey notes. Which is what happened to me today.
While surveying this one camp a boat came racing in wildly and hit the beach. ...A very agitated man leaped out and ran up to me in a very provocative and threatening manner. He had wildly gnarled and greasy hair that hadn't been washed in weeks, and an even wilder longer beard all ratted and matted together, his clothes were a cross between dirty military camouflage and the skins of an 1830 mountain man. when he yelled "Who the Hell are You!" I could see the yellow and caked teeth as well as the spray of spittle heading towards my direction. He had one eye bobbing around looking above my head towards the sky and the other eye, black and dilated staring right at me and expecting my answer to his question to be forthcoming in the next 1/2 a second or he was gonna whip out his black powder flintlocks and blow my head off.
My first thought was Jeremiah Johnson on PCP
My initial impulse was to jump up into a Matrix karate
posture and finish him off with a swift chop to the blocks in an act of
pure self preservation...but my inner voice of reasoning overcame this instinct.
I merely looked at his piercing one eye and said "I am with the Bethel Native Council and me and my colleagues are surveying the BNC fish camps of which your camp falls under the councils jurisdiction and because of the prompt payment of your permit renewal fee the council saw fit that your camp should be one of the first ones to be surveyed to show their appreciation" His stare grew colder and sharper as his forehead lines scrunched together digesting my words...
It was then that I realized he looked more like the Uni-Bomber Ted Kaczynski with tobacco dribbling from his mouth and down his chin. "It's so they can make a map" I Say. His agitated posture wavered slightly as I made a connection.
"How long are you gonna be here!" came his second question all wrapped up in a cloud of rotten fish breath
"We were just finishing up sir" ...I had to bite down on my tongue painfully hard to stifle the rising laughter at the notion of this person ever being a sir.
So we gathered up our things and left due promptly with no bowie knives sticking out of our backs...leaving the man to count his fish on his rack so as to satisfy himself that we did not pilfer any.
June 17 or 18, 2003
I saw this drink called Whoop Ass in the store here and thought it would help me survey faster....It's got Taurine and Royal Bee Jelly in it. I drank it down in one gulp and waited a couple minutes for the effects to happen....They never did so I went back to sleep.
I'm 2000 points into a topographic survey and I've just
discovered I blundered the initial vertical control for the job. If this was
1933 and this had happened and I had to handwrite and compute each shot....then
I probably would have considered suicide....But fortunately, I live in the
future....we have techno gizmos that 1933 people would not know how to
use....with
our computers, software, and Networking interconnectivity we can afford to make
errors...because everything is self correcting.....take my little surveying
problem....all I have to do is press this one little button here that says
"Translate Coordinates" and Voila...the probleemo is no more o.....see
there ...my elevation check is now equal too............what the?............no.............No......NO!
.....dammit!...there's still something fucked up with the numbers......
....now what did I just do?....damn it...I should have backed it up first!
...okay..okay..okay...calm down...okay...My ele check was off by a negative 35.74 feet and now it's off by a negative 78.26 feet....then how can it?........what was the?...oh...The rod height!...but....but...no..that would only account for 5.7 feet...in the positive.....positive?...
...so...so?...If you lift the Rods height in the Data Collector and not on the Rod itself then the ground should move upwards....no..no downwards...
........upwards?
Oh Man...this sucks......
middle to end of June, 2003
Critters and friendly companions:
This little guy kept me company for a whole day...following me around the tundra, sitting in a nearby bush.
Then again maybe it was 100 of his cousins...all singing noisily at me because I was near their nests. There sure is a lot of bird nests out there.....a lot of birds too....actually I would say there's probably about two birds for every nest.
We even got jack rabbits up here....Arctic Hare ...big ones...the size of a dog......well.....maybe a smaller dog. They might even be carnivorous....wouldn't be surprised...the stuffed one I saw at Fish and Wildlife looked like it could take out a human.
here's some egg pictures...the ones on the left are Ptarmigan and the ones on the right I'm not sure about.
Boy...did we get stuck good today or what? We were trying to get too a couple of the fish camps and plowed into a sand bar full throttle...The Yukon Delta is tidal influenced and it was definitely low tide. We were still 200 feet from shore and stuck like a cork in a wine bottle. I say it was a sand bar but it was really a mud bar....Heavy Mud... thick heavy Goo Mud....We thought about jumping out and pushing ourselves back, but we first used our one oar and a couple survey lathe to try to push ourselves back out of it but the lathe went all the way down through the mud 4 or 5 feet....
Flash ~
Never get out of the boat!...
Absolutely goddamn right....unless you were going all
the way....
Martin Sheen, Apocalypse Now
Our one oar did hit bottom though, and through sheer finagling, back and forth..and forth and back, we were able to engage a backing maneuver to back ourselves back out backwards until we were back into a floating situation and then we decided to initiate a plan to work the high tides from then on and not the low tides.
You know when you look up in the sky and you see a contrail?....it's cool that there's a beer cart somewhere in front of it.
This is Brown Slough where I begin My days
Hey...Another cool nest...just a couple hours ago as I write this.....another unknown....but it was so well put together that I wanted to crawl into it myself.
Meant to bring the Alaska Bird book but grabbed Reptiles of the Desert Southwest by mistake.....
Looks like they got me on the village hopping scenario. Tuesday off to Chuathbaluk through Aniak, then up to Mountain Village and hopefully back to Bethel within a week to finish up my Fish camp project here. Dragging 600 lbs of surveying equipment with me...I wont always be dragging it though...sometimes I'll be pushing it....I might even end up hauling it too....but that's if I'm not toting it. Hmmm...I could carry it...or transfer it....or even convey it...but I'll probably just pass it on....
I'll be off the wire for a a few days...
who am I writing too?
does it matter? maybe your just writing to yourself.....maybe you are. No, I don't think I'm writing to myself.....you might not think so, But I think I'm writing to myself.
Snap Out Off
It!..Stop!...Stop!
Ho hum...pictures on this page are boring...I'll bring more action shots on next go round.