Pre-season - June 7, Day 8

I arrived a week ago today. The beach is really soft this year. Last night a friend came to visit and we went for a walk in the agate-finding light. A truck was stuck close enough to the water on an incoming tide to loosen the bowels of any driver who didn’t know what to expect of the tide. With the off shore wind and only having another hour to go, only the tires were going to get wet, if that. But he didn’t know that, so he was feverishly and alternately digging and spinning. And staying in place. We tried to push him, without effect. He said the four wheel drive had gone out and he had been looking for a place to turn around and go back to the cannery. When we told him the truck wasn’t really at risk of being swamped, he decided to head back to the cannery to get help. It wasn’t there this morning, so I guess he got help, but I think it was a really good thing that the tide wasn’t going to be much higher.

This morning I needed to go into town to borrow a phone for some Seattle-project calls and I found another stuck truck – with the captain verbally abusing his crewman, Bristol Bay style. They were in deep. They had a crane that lifts 8 tons – and the captain said it also weighs 8 tons. And they had two big wooden crates on the back of the truck – so it was loaded. I couldn’t tow it out forward, but shifting down into low range, I was able to tow it out backwards. It probably wasn’t a prudent way to treat our precious truck.

I received an email back from Frigidaire, the maker of the defective freezer I bought. I had written several times, most recently asking them to send a new thermostat. They wrote back saying that that model doesn’t have a thermostat, that I needed to get a certified service person to diagnose the problem, and if anyone else did, it would void the warranty. I sent them a message asking them to be reasonable, explaining that we are in a remote location and the closest certified service person was more than $500 away, a cost I didn’t want to bear and their warranty statement said they wouldn’t bear. So just send the dial that controls the temperature, whatever it is called. Grrrr.

After a day of unsuccessful calls, I went to King Salmon to get a year’s worth of service on the cell phone and to check on the frozen freight. Without a working freezer, I wasn’t in any hurry to pick it up. But I imagine there is a limit to their patience. I learned two important things when talking to them at Pen Air – 1) the freight hadn’t come in yet (whew! Followed by, “Hey, where the heck is it?”), and 2) their freezer hadn’t been working until today (whew!). They did locate it in Anchorage. As I was just driving onto the beach, the new cell phone rang and it was Pen Air saying that two of the coolers had come in and they would store it in their as-of-today working freezer. Whew.

Back down to the beach with a miracle of technology – I now have both Internet access and telephone access at the same location. This is something we take for granted in a city like Seattle, but it is an amazing convenience and I come to rely on quickly.

So far, this is definitely a season of “Just In Time.” We had very little propane left over at the end of last season. I had a couple of bottles at my cabin with a little bit in each one. And it’s been cold so I’ve been using the heater, if judiciously. The bottle I started with ran out yesterday. So I put the other bottle on which seemed not one bit heavier than the one I had just emptied. The completely empty one went back to town last night with my visitor and the almost empty one kept me warm last night and boiled my eggs and took the chill off this morning. I brought the full bottle back from town and up the cliff this afternoon, ready to change out soon. And “soon” turned out to be as soon as I wanted a cup of tea and noticed that there was no flame, and that I’d left the heater on when I ran out this morning. Sigh. I always appreciate it when good luck and the help of friends protect me from the consequences of my own carelessness.

Found a dead but not desiccated lemming at the bottom of the kitchen garbage can today. I changed the liner and just had to notice the smell, which led to looking under the liner (must have climbed or fallen in and then chewed through), which led to wondering what would happen if I just ignored it, which led to imagining, followed by the lemming removal procedure.

Liz