June 12: Learning curves

It was been a harrowing day and I will type fast here because the Internet has been inaccessible for two days and I'm not sure why it's working now or how long it will work.

Jeff, Evan, and Maeve came in today (well, yesterday) (yay!!), along with a couple more bags of frozen food! I'm so glad to have them. Their flight was delayed by several hours because of a problem with a flight out of Seattle. But they arrived and it wasn't as hard to get to the truck because the tide had some time to go down. Today... maybe another story. Trevor is coming in and the tide is high.

We sent Jeff, Evan, and Maeve down to the cabins in the White Truck to get settled in while Patrick, Chris, and I stayed with the Red Truck to get the new buoys inflated and set up, and to bring down the first load of groceries from the barge. Chris was driving and said he felt it when the brakes gave out. They had been bad and required a lot of pumping, but they just gave out. I wasn't so alarmed because I grew up driving trucks without brakes. But they were manual transmissions and Maeve reminded me that we used to stop them by just shutting them off after shifting down. It turns out that an automatic transmission is a different story.

So we decided to postpone many of the errand ... except we needed eggs. Chris pulled into the Naknek Trading parking lot and started to slow down, but the truck wouldn't slow. Luckily (and it is frightening to rely on luck this way), there was a place he could make a U-turn as we were waiting for the truck to come to a stop. That was scary, but no harm done, except to my stomach. So I drove out of the parking lot and to the beach. It wasn't that I thought I would do better than Chris, but I did feel like the responsibility should be mine.

Since the truck was loaded with stuff, we planned to take it down to the cabin and then just bring it back and get the brakes addressed. But it was too scary because of the bumpy and uncontrollable ramp onto the beach (that's the first photo), so at the last minute, we decided to park there and Chris and Patrick took the four-wheeler down to bring back the White Truck back and transfer the groceries. I like the walk. While walking I tried to call Eddie, but didn't get a response. So I called Marc Watson and he said he could come and tow it up to his shop and give me some front brakes.

But Chris came back to report that the White Truck was pretty badly stuck, so he thought he and Patrick should head into town to get the 1 ton boom truck to come and pull it out. It didn't take them long to get there, even though they stopped to transfer the groceries, and we couldn't pull it forward and only a little bit backward. I just learned that when a truck is severely stuck so that the chassis is resting on the mud, it will create a suction and be really really hard to move. That's one of the reasons not to try to drive out if you get stuck. We were able to move it slightly backward, but then no more. So Chris went around to the front to try to tow from there... and found a soft spot and buried that truck.

I called AGS for help and before long, Guy came down in one of the deuce and a halfs. It was very hard for them as well, but they got both trucks unstuck. That was a relief. Even though we weren't in danger from the tides for a while, my anxiety jumps when we're trapped like that. It must be a little like how deer feel when they are tangled in weeds with a predator nearby.

As soon as the trucks were free, we drove them to the road to park them out of the
tide. I was feeling safe even though the tide was well on its way in, so I took a few minutes to take a photo of this eagle and continued up to park. But Chris wasn't behind me with the boom truck; it had died on the beach, in the way of the tide. Eek! Probably out of fuel. And the tide wasn't far away. We sent Evan back on the four wheeler to get the spare bottle of propane (it runs on propane) and I used the White Truck to tow the boom truck off the beach. I'm not sure how much the White Truck liked towing it up that steep and bumpy access road ramp. Groan.

Then a stranger stopped by to tell us that Evan had stopped the four wheeler in gear and couldn't get it into neutral to start it. Aieee. It had been a long day.

Not much later, Jeff rode up on the four wheeler with the propane bottle which we just stuffed in the cab of the truck and left. That was enough for the day.



Overall though, despite the trials of the day, all came out well (literally), the trucks are well enough or will be repaired and are safe, no one got hurt, most of the crew is here and we have done a lot of learning and remembering already this year. And, at least during the sunset, we had a pink cabin. And on the other side is what made it pink.