Last summer, I went on a 3-day work trip to assess the sanitary issues of a tiny rural village in interior Alaska. It was a team of four – me (intern), Klara (intern), Elena (project manager), and baby (Elena’s baby; he stayed strapped to her back while Elena peered at maps and stomped around underbrush – it made me feel like Lewis and Clark and Sacagawea). Our goal was to document issues and meet with village leadership about potential paths forward.
The village was not large – maybe a couple miles across – but we intended to visit every home for water samples, so we rented one of the two cars that existed there. Not for the first time, I (intern, 5 feet tall, skittish around large vehicles) was unofficially assigned driver. It was a huge white pickup truck. I moved the front seat as close to the steering wheel as it would go, but still I had to perch on the edge to reach the pedals. All of the lights on the dashboard were broken, so I eased tentatively off the brake each time, unsure if the gear was in reverse or drive. Best of all, the truck had a bright yellow beacon light on the roof. The most common form of transport there was 4-wheeler in the summer and snow machine in the winter, and all the roads were accordingly narrow (I got to operate a 4-wheeler once, with Klara, Elena, and baby clinging to the back. I started us sideways on an incline and everyone started screaming for me to gas it when we felt gravity start to tug us lopsided). The village was full of narrow dead-ends, and at the end of each one I was forced to perform an 11-point turn while the truck’s beacon whirled and an alarm chirped and people stepped outside to see what was happening. I introduced myself to a man I’d never met – “I know you,” he said. “I saw you driving.” Yes, sir…you and each other of the 80 townspeople. Luckily, I only reversed into a ditch once. I asked Klara if she wanted a turn driving – she shook her head resolutely no.
Some of the houses had dogs in front. They waited for me to start up the driveway, playing docile or hiding in their plywood boxes, then violently lunged when I got near, only to be yanked back by a chain. Thank god for the chain. They threw themselves at me over and over. I worried for structural integrity. I’m not usually afraid of dogs, but these ones were insatiable. Some, I’m sure, were part wolf.
Maybe worse than the vicious dogs were the vicious children. The woman guiding us around warned about the “child gang.” It was really just a bunch of eight-year-olds that she didn’t want her daughter hanging around with. For giggles, they tailed our truck’s slow crawl from house to house and tried to barricade us from entering driveways. At one home, Klara, Elena, and baby went in while I waited outside. The children prowled around me like sharks and threatened to shoot me with Nerf guns. I tried my best not to show fear, convinced they could smell it.
There were no hotels or anything. In the school, there was one little room with a bunk bed, where Elena and baby stayed. Klara and I rolled out sleeping bags on the floor of the school library. We made meals in the industrial-size kitchen off the gymnasium. There was a giant fridge full of frozen meat – “Iditarod Food :)” it said on the front. The sinks were stained orange and smelled metallic; all the water in town was heavy with iron, evidenced around every drain. There was no store, so we packed all our provisions with us. I ate a lot of flavored tuna packets spooned out on tortillas.
One morning we were told that the lift station was overflowing. The lift station was a small yellow building that housed a giant pump well. Its purpose was to pump used water from the village out to the sewage lagoon for treatment. But it was broken, and so the giant cavity was filled with brown sewage that spilled out to cover the floor and create an evil moat around the building. Someone had propped a two-by-four over the moat like a bridge. Inside was a network of wooden pallets for navigating the lift station without stepping in human waste – this malfunction was clearly a frequent occurrence. Elena, braver than the rest of us even with the baby strapped to her front, went inside to take photos for our report. It smelled terrible.
One of the townspeople drove up in a Cat front-loader hauling a trailer with a storage tank. The trailer had at least one bum wheel – he asked us to include a picture of it in our report. He pumped sludge from the lift station into the storage tank, then drove it away to the sewage lagoon. We followed on foot. The ground was sucking mud – I hoped that was all. A sewage lagoon is a low-maintenance water treatment system, essentially just a very neat pond that allows natural elements to treat the water. The gate of the surrounding chain-link fence was already open, and the Cat driver reversed the storage tank to the edge of the lagoon and opened the valve. A fat stream of influent ran out into the water. When the stream stopped, he drove back to the lift station to fill the tank again. He did that all morning.
On the final day, after we finished collecting water samples, we went to inspect a plumbing clog between an elder’s home and the pipe main that ran beneath the road. We drove up in the truck and unloaded gear, most notable of which was a pipe camera mounted on the end of a long, heavy spool of hose. The camera connected to an ancient laptop in a neon orange plastic case, where we could watch the live footage. We’d tested it out a few days prior, kneeling on the floor of Elena’s office. After navigating through a series of ambiguously labeled menus, we found a cache of saved videos. Slimy pipes, mysterious darkness, a rare shot of a man in slacks seen only from shins-down, probably also testing out this equipment in an office. The shaky, low-quality video made my skin crawl. It reminded me of found-footage in a horror movie. I became convinced that at least one of the files must contain something horrific, more horrific than a pipe clogged with FOGs (fats, oils, grease – seriously, don’t put those down the drain).
It was drizzling, but not enough to keep the bugs down. They brushed my face and ears. While I lugged the pipe camera to the side of the house, a mosquito large enough to help me carry it stung me on the eyelid. I went to the truck side-view mirror and watched my eyelid swell up so large I could hardly open it. “Is this bad?” I asked, but no one really knew how to respond. The baby wailed. It added a sense of urgency to the situation, even more so than my eyelid.
On the side of the house, through brush up to our chests, was an arctic box. An arctic looks like a miniature house pinned onto the larger one, and it’s used to protect external plumbing connections from the below-zero winters. A huge pipe, fat with insulated layers, extruded from the bottom and disappeared into the ground. We pried the roof off the box; inside was a nest of fuzzy insulation and foam sheets. The pipe from the house connected to the pipe from the ground. There was also a vertical cleanout port. We removed the cap and peered inside. It was too dark to see anything. A bad smell wafted up.
I operated the laptop while Klara donned latex gloves and pushed the camera down the cleanout. The footage showed greasy darkness as the camera hose unspooled and drove deeper. Elena hushed and bounced the baby, but he was inconsolable. She retreated to the truck to breast feed just as the rain began to fall harder. The camera pushed past fossilized cooking oil stalactites, disintegrating diapers, and unidentified hills and valleys. Klara gagged. I felt bad for the old woman inside the house – this felt like a privacy violation. Bugs and raindrops felt the same when they nudged my shoulders. The camera kept getting caught on pipe turns or mysterious buildups. Klara shook it around, pulling it back and shoving it down again. There was no up or down to the footage, just lurching interior. My eyelid itched, but I couldn’t touch it with my shit hands. When I got the job, I told the doctor in Employee Services don’t worry, I would not come into contact with any shit. I don’t know if either of us knew better.
I looked to the truck, anxious for a cue that we could be done now. Elena’s face was small, watching us safe and warm from the back seat. The troops had been abandoned. The baby’s hand appeared in frame, waving merrily.
When all the work was done, we waited on the gravel runway for the telltale hum of our plane, coming to take us to Anchorage. “You’ll come back, won’t you? We’ve got some nice young men here,” a man said to me and Klara. When the plane landed and the pilot began to throw luggage onboard, he hesitated over our gallon water sample. “This combustible?” he asked, because it was orange. “No,” I said. “Just water.”
One of the wolf-dogs made it onto the plane, shoved unceremoniously onboard at the last minute – I’m don’t think the pilot noticed until it was too late. The dog stood in the aisle with its tail between its legs, stumbling in the turbulence. It was cowed by flight and allowed the baby to pet its ears.
We flew away, over remote green hills and valleys, and the silver ribbon of the Kuskokwim River.
This is genuinely so well-written, such an enjoyable and vivid read!
mosquito bite on the eyelid is diabolical