Herbert

I wrote this for my step-father, Herbert Roberts when he received his first cancer diagnosis in 1982. Almost ten years earlier he'd been crushed in a car accident and had to undergo several years of agonizing surgeries and rehabilitation and a life time of pain.


Herbert

Death I comprehend
it happens to us all,
but this suffering
it makes no sense,
has no justice,
I do not understand.
You were too strong,
too full of life
to become so broken.
And when finally
living once again
betrayal struck within,
no reason for or why,
simply striking.
You've hurt so long,
been so brave,
I've never seen your tears;
so with love and prayers
I give you mine,
still not understanding.

Billings, Montana - January 1982

Bush Medicine

            I vaguely remember waking from the surgery. Valium and Demerol do make it hard to remember much. The surgeon was saying something about a hole in my esophagus and Barium leaking into my chest cavity, setting up a nasty infection. He said I had twelve to twenty-four hours to live unless he operated immediately. I hazily signed a consent for surgery, suggested the hospital staff call my wife, who was six hundred miles away in a small Inupiaq village north of Nome, then I went back to sleep.

        A month earlier Pat and I had moved to the village of Teller, a small hamlet of about 300 souls located on a spit of land between Port Clarence of the Bering Sea and Grantley Harbor, where the river which drained Imuruk Basin backed up before entering the port. Teller sat in a wind swept, isolated, starkly gorgeous place, with thousands of square miles of rolling tundra and jagged mountains in every direction separating it from the rest of the world. There was a gravel road, open five to six months of the year, leading south seventy-five miles to Nome. Fourteen miles to the west was a lonely US Coast Guard LORAN station, manned by thirty sailors. Across the river channel along the other side of the spit was Brevig Mission, an even smaller village. Outside of Teller, Brevig, and the Coast Guard station you could travel a long way by snow machine, foot or boat and not find any other people.

        After the second day of school that August of 1990, I was eating some stew in our tiny apartment and looking out the window at the amazing view of the harbor. Suddenly I realized I couldn't swallow. I could breathe, but there was a piece of food in my throat that wouldn't go down. I tried drinking some water and it came right back up. I went to the bathroom, stuck my finger down my throat and retched over and over, but the blockage wouldn't budge. I was worried. Pat was out visiting friends and of course in the pre cell phone era I didn't have a way to call her. I walked to the large padded chair in our living room and threw my torso across the back of it, hoping to perform a self induced Heimlich maneuver. It didn't work. I tried again, then again.

        By now it was mid-evening and I was spitting constantly, as I couldn't swallow my own saliva, but I was breathing fine. Pat was still out and I didn't know how to reach her. I decided to call the village health clinic on the chance that someone might be there after hours. The health aide answered. When I explained the situation she said there was an EMT at the clinic. He had come in on a medivac plane to pick up a village elder who was ill and she said that I could talk with the EMT.

        I walked the couple of hundred yards to the clinic and talked with the EMT. He suggested I fly to Nome with them and let a doc take a look at me. I agreed.

        The twin engine Beechcraft made quick work of the short flight to Nome and I rode in the ambulance with the EMTs and the sick old man to the small regional hospital in town. I waited several hours in the ER and finally, near midnight a young doctor came in. He explained that he had finished medical school a couple of months earlier and was paying off student loans by working in rural Alaska.

        The doctor checked me over, decided to try to push the blockage out with a nasal-gastric tube. Now, if you've never had a small plastic tube passed up your nose and down the back of your throat you'll just have to trust my word that it's an odd sensation. The tube got to the blockage and despite a couple of attempts it wouldn't push the chunk of stew meat out of my throat. Next the doctor had me try a Barium swallow while making an X-ray of the blockage. Barium is quite thick and heavy; so it seemed that maybe this would push the lump on down into my stomach. It didn't. I threw up pink Barium allover myself, and the X-ray machine. So all we got was a picture of a lump in my esophagus.

        The hospital folks said they couldn't do anything more for me; so they offered to book me on a commuter flight the next morning to Anchorage and to let me sleep on a spare bed until it was time to go to the airstrip.

        I arrived at Providence Hospital in Anchorage feeling pretty dehydrated and looking forward to having the upper endoscopy preformed to push out the blockage, I figured after the procedure I'd get a hotel room for the night and fly back to Nome and Teller the next day.

        After waking from the endoscopy and being told that my life was in jeopardy things got pretty fuzzy. That Valium and Demerol mixture does make you relax. The next thing I recall from the first few days at Providence was the intensive care unit. My mom was there and Pat was there. After several days when it seemed that I would live, I was moved to a room on the surgical recovery floor. I had tubes coming out of six parts of my body and was told to push a button whenever I felt the need for pain relief. That first week is still lost to the haze of morphine and pain.

        Dr. Fredrick Hood, the talented chief of surgery at Providence explained that the nasal gastric tube had torn a hole in my esophagus and unknown to anyone in Nome, some of the Barium I'd tried to swallow had leaked through the hole, surrounded the organs in my chest and set up an infection. Repairing the tear had been simple. Just a single stitch was needed to close the hole and let the esophagus start to heal. Flushing out the Barium, however, had required the surgeon to open my chest up. He cut out one rib and broke a couple of others. The team had to flush my chest with water for more than four hours to get all of the Barium out. Then they pumped me full of antibiotics and waited to see if I'd make it. I had two large tubes coming out of my lower back, which allowed fluids to drain from my chest into two gallon size jugs under my bed. I had a drain tube from my stomach protruding from my abdomen, another one low on the front of my abdomen and a feeding line running under my collarbone into my stomach. Of course there was also an IV or two leading into my arms for fluids and medication.

        The second week at the hospital saw me improving. When I began to go for walks around the halls I had to have someone pushing my IV tree and carrying the drain jugs. I must have looked like something from a horror movie.

        After a couple of weeks the feeding line was removed and I got to eat some real food. I was starting to feel restless and there was snow on the peaks outside the hospital window. Fall was coming and I wanted to get home. I began wearing blue jeans under my hospital gown, keeping my tennis shoes on all the time and going for longer and longer walks. I was determined that I was going to get better and get out of that hospital. The staff had been great. The nurses had cooked some of my favorite foods and brought them to me. A couple of them had entertained my mother, while she’d been in Anchorage. I'd been given wonderful care. Friends from Georgia sent cards, money, books and crossword puzzles, but my birthday was coming up and I wanted to celebrate it back in the village.

        When the doctors told me the impact of the surgery on my body was like being thrown through the windshield of a car at sixty-five miles per hour and that it would be a year before I felt ok again, I nodded and said fine. Secretly, I thought since I was young and strong I'd be back to normal in a few weeks, maybe a couple of months. The docs were right of course. The flight back to Nome and the bumpy small plane flight to Teller were exhausting. Before the injury I'd been able to lift more than 360 pounds over my head. When I got home I couldn't raise my left arm over my head nor reach out and pick up a cup with that hand. But twenty days after flying to Nome and four days before my birthday I'd made it home.

        Slowly, over months, I regained strength, but it was a year or more before I felt somewhat normal again. I would never be as strong, or as healthy, again. 

I’d quickly realized that to survive in Bush Alaska you needed to be well prepared and self-reliant. I beefed up our first aid kit, adding a dental kit, IV needles and lines, saline and a set of army field surgery tools. I added pain meds and antibiotics to the kit and a couple of manuals on emergency medicine. Thankfully we never needed most of the stuff. Today I still keep a pretty good first aid kit, minus the meds and dental supplies. However, as I wish the young doc in Nome had known, I'll always keep some meat tenderizer ready to mix with water and gargle - just in case.

Grown Ups

Grown Ups


Where do we go from here?
The kids are growing up.
The jobs are stressful, but well paying.
The pace of modern life never lets up.

The road still calls, maybe more than ever.
The lure to see around the next bend,
To stand atop the next summit promises to fill that call.
And we dream, knowing that freedom isn't real,
But if we keep moving the illusion lives on.

The frantic lust for each others' body,
Explored each night beneath a new sky,
Still burns, competing with all the
Have-tos of grown up life, but it lives,
Providing fuel for hope that one day...

The clock ticks, ever forward,
With growing speed the days whiz by.
Dreams fade, but haunt us always,
Calling, Will you follow us, before it's too late?
What binds you to existence,
Chains you to the drudgery?

The road is out there, but
Gas costs nearly four bucks a gallon now.


Bob Hadaway
June 11, 2014

The Wrestling Mat

December 30, 1993, The Bering Sea, Norton Bay, Western Alaska Coast, somewhere between Shaktoolik and Koyuk on the sea ice, thirty degrees below zero, Fahrenheit, wind chill -80°. 

My snow machine was screaming along at 65 miles per hour as full dark settled over the ice and the alpenglow faded from the hills to the east. Behind me a rickety, mostly rotten, cargo sled, held together with twine and duct tape, and overloaded with a one third section of Resilite wrestling mat was bouncing along over the ice and quickly disintegrating. Twenty miles behind me across frozen ocean and a snow and ice covered marsh lay the small Inupiaq village of Shaktoolik. To the west was the seemingly endless expanse of the winter pack ice of the Bering Sea. Up ahead was the rapidly vanishing taillight of another snowmobile driven by Boya Kavairlook, the Koyuk school custodian, my friend, and guide in this nutty expedition to provide a wrestling mat for my wrestlers in Koyuk. Boya had gotten hungry and decided to get home in a hurry. I, with my bouncing cargo, was quickly falling behind. Trying to see Boya’s snow machine tracks in the blowing snow, which skittered across the frozen sea, was becoming more and more difficult due to the fierce wind. I began to wonder just how it was I came to be in this situation.

Many small villages in Alaska have fewer than three hundred residents. The schools are small and their gymnasiums are too. Most wouldn’t hold a full size wrestling mat, even if the school had one. The wrestlers in Koyuk had always worked out on rough, foldable gymnastic mats that often left them with bruises, mat burns and a poor feel for competition on a regulation wrestling mat. When I found out the summer before that my coaching colleague in Shaktoolik had a wrestling mat but could only fit two sections of it in their small gym I asked him what they’d done with the other section. He said it had been stored under their gym for years.

The other coach and I made a deal. If he gave us the unused section of mat I’d come get it and at some point during the season my wrestlers and I would fly the fifty miles down to Shaktoolik and have a dual match with his wrestlers. So here we were between Christmas and the New Year hauling this beast of a mat across the frozen sea.

Suddenly I heard a loud whirring noise from the engine of my snow go. A snapping sound led to an immediate loss of power and my machine began to slow. I guessed that the drive belt had snapped and I braked the machine, while flashing my headlight several times in hopes that Boya might see it.

I left the machine running, got off the saddle, flipped on the headlamp strapped around my beaver hat, opened the hood and saw the remnants of the drive belt at the bottom of the engine housing. As I closed the hood in fear of the wind ripping it off, my curses were lost in the ever blowing maelstrom of snow and air. I tromped around to the cargo compartment in back of the snow machine and trying not to fumble with my heavy mitts on, pulled out my tool kit and spare drive belt. I thought about the sheer craziness of the situation. Here I was a Georgia boy, bundled up like an Eskimo, standing miles out on the Bering Sea ice beside my broken down snow go. I shut off the machine and figured Boya would see the glow of my headlamp, if he turned back.  As I began to thread the drive belt onto the engine I gratefully heard Boya’s snow machine drawing close.

His face broke out in a wide grin as he pulled up into the glow of my headlamp. I nodded and he asked, “Drive belt?”

“Yep,” I replied. “Got a spare, here.”

“Heard it in Shaktoolik,” muttered Boya.

I nodded and went back to attaching the belt.

“Good you got spare,” said Boya.

I chuckled and said, “You won’t have to tow me back.”

“Too far,” he grinned.

With the engine repaired I began to look over the sled. The old rotten wood was cracked pretty badly and Boya said, “Sled won’t last, maybe.”

I pulled some heavy-duty parachute cord out of the backpack tied to the rear of my snow go seat and cut off a couple of lengths. Boya and I began to lash the front of the sled runners to the frame. When we finished we looked at the job and I chuckled.

“Will it hold,” I asked?

“Maybe,” Boya shrugged.

“Go a little slower,” I suggested.

Boya grunted and said he was hungry.

As I remounted my snow go I noticed that the wind had died down to a stiff breeze and the blowing snow had settled a bit. The stars of the Milky Way seemed closer than I’d ever seen them. “What a place,” I thought!

Boya blasted off on his snow go, rocketing away toward dinner. I accelerated, hoping the sled would hold together and I could get the giant piece of rubber bouncing along a few feet behind me back to the village. Within a few moments I’d gotten up to fifty miles per hour. The wind out of the west had increased again and I doubted that Boya’s tracks would last long enough for me to follow them, which was not so good as his tail light was almost out of sight.

To the east I noticed an unusually bright light behind the mountains. There was no village or human settlement of any kind over that way, just the Ungalik River and some decrepit equipment from a turn of the century gold mining camp. As the light grew brighter a gigantic yellow moon slowly rose over the peaks and the icy world was bathed in the most beautiful, magical light.

Behind the balaclava covering my face I began to laugh. I laughed long and loud. Here I was whizzing along over the frozen ocean, on what some would say was a fool’s errand, yet I was at peace with life and was happy to be where I was, surrounded by the beauty of the sub arctic night. I lived in Alaska and life was good.