Since we are in the hottest days of Summer here in Maryland with what seems like endless temperatures over 90 degrees, I thought it might be time to share a few stories from my time in Alaska, since that might help cool me off, at least in my mind.
Having grown up in warm sunny Miami, when the time came to choose which base I would “like” to be stationed at while serving in the USAF, all 4 of my choices were bases in Florida. To nobodies shock that request was denied and instead I was promptly scheduled to ship out to Lakenheath AFB in the UK. Funny thing though is that a buddy of mine was scheduled to be sent to Eielson AFB in Alaska. Since we were allowed one swap with anyone from our tech school class, and his wife said no way to Alaska, we traded bases and I was on my way to Fairbanks.
Why would I choose AK over UK? Easy, fishing, fishing and fishing. However, I must have missed the part about how fishing only really lasts 6 months of the year at best. When I first arrived in mid-June 1990, the base was buzzing! Everyone was running around at an incredible pace, going from BBQ to hunting expedition to sporting events at a speed that I had never seen. I wondered what all the fuss was about? Well by Halloween I had my answer. I had a short TDY in Georgia the last two weeks of October. When I left, I was still riding my bike to work. By the time I came home, I thought my bike had been stolen. In reality, as I found out the following spring, it had simply snowed so much while I was gone those two weeks that my bike had been completely covered in snow. As everything melted in April, I started to see the handlebars of my bike reappear, and within another week or so I rode off on it like nothing had ever happened.
During that same spring I experienced a couple things I never knew existed. I was not much for water skiing in Florida, with sharks and gators in most bodies of water, I took a hard pass. Somehow a nice young lady I met got me over my fear of water deeper than my knees, and on one particular day I was convinced to go water skiing. The catch is, there was still ice in the lake. Not a little, alot! It was quite challenging as a novice to navigate around 8 feet long mini icebergs that probably would have done some serious damage had I miscalculated my movements. And, yeah, the water was damn cold! If memory serves me correctly I believe this was the first weekend the water had crept over 50 degrees, and it showed on everyone’s nipples!
A couple months later we were all back at the lake for another all day party! Except, by now the sun was up 24 hours a day. At midnight there would be a barely noticeable dusk, and when I say barely, I mean it. Around 5 a few of us noticed that the day had really dragged on, it really seemed like we had been partying for a much longer time than the 8 hours we thought we had. Then it hit us. It was 5 AM! We had partied so hard that we missed the midnight dusk and just kept on going. So now it was 5am Monday morning, and we all had to be to work in 2.5 hours, and the lake was a 2 hour drive from the base. All I can say is good times were had by all!
Back home the cold made for easy entertainment. I could stand in my room on the second floor, open the window, shake up a coke can and open it pointed downwards and it would freeze as a giant cokesicle before it hit the ground. Then the guys in the room below me could open their window and break off pieces of coke, put it in a glass, melt it and drink it like they had just poured it themselves! We tried this with coffee but for some reason it just turned to crystalized coffee rain though that made it a challenge for the guys below to catch some in a cup and drink it. However the memory that sticks with me the most is of a guy who just came into the dining hall after the long walk from the dorms. He had not been wearing his winter hat/mask combo because he was a tough guy. Well his moustache had frozen completely over, and when he walked in and rubbed his hand under his nose to get rid of the condensation now forming on his facial hair, he ripped his own moustache off for the most part because the hairs simply broke like tiny little ice cubes. We all had a huge laugh at his expense as Mr. Tough Guy sat and ate breakfast with ¾ of his moustache gone because he was just too cool to wear protection from the 40 below temperatures. When you live in Alaska you can find out the hard way that mother nature always wins!
