An Alaska News Day
I really do think that Alaska is different from anywhere else. Two front page articles in today’s paper demonstrate our uniqueness.
First up, Gordon Wright was found dead on Wednesday. Gordon was a long time giant on Alaska’s classical music scene. He was both a conductor and composer. Back in my trumpet playing Anchorage Symphony Days, he was a guest conductor more than once. He was also the guest conductor one year for the High School All State Orchestra. I was second trumpet and we played Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks - an absolute brass lip buster. You could tell that Gordon was a string player - he had the entire orchestra rehearse one particularly grueling section over and over - the brass had their part down but he was working out a string issue. Well, by the time he finished, the brass section was dead. And we were still dead for that night’s concert - we sucked royally. Anything above a D was impossible.
Anyhoo, today’s front page article by Mike Dunham on Gordon is wonderful. Gordon lived in a “one room cabin off the power grid and inaccessible by road.” On Wednesday, his friends became concerned because they hadn’t heard from him and he’d missed several appointments. So, they headed out to his cabin and discovered his body outside the cabin - it looked as if he was either heading out or coming back from hike - he died of natural causes. Getting his body out was a classic Alaskan experience:
With assistance from an Alaska state trooper, Adams and other friends and neighbors placed the body in a pine casket that Wright used as a bench. Years ago, he had ordered it built to fit his lanky 6-foot-6 frame, and he was once carried on stage in it for a Halloween concert. But he apparently did not anticipate ending his life in such an Alaska fashion, in the middle of the forest, wearing thick-soled snow boots, not dress shoes.
After concerted efforts, his friends managed to fit him in as he had planned and, setting the box with its owner on a small plastic sled, they alternately carried and slid it about one-quarter mile in the dark over a narrow, snowy footpath to the parking area.
Moving by flashlight under the cold, starry sky, the party had to reload the coffin several times after the sled tilted on the twisting trail, losing its cargo. It finally got away from them at the end, gliding 10 feet or so onto the relatively flat road as the pallbearers helplessly slid down with it, clinging to the coffin handles and ropes. Adams called it “Gordon’s last sled ride.”
In the parking area, the body was loaded onto a pickup, then taken down a steep, icy switchback to the Seward Highway where personnel from Kehl’s Mortuary received it early Thursday.
This so reminds me of a section of Robert Service’s classic poem of the Yukon, The Cremation of Sam McGee
…There wasn’t a breath in that land of death, and I hurried, horror-driven,
With a corpse half hid that I couldn’t get rid, because of a promise given;
It was lashed to the sleigh, and it seemed to say: “You may tax your brawn and brains,
But you promised true, and it’s up to you to cremate those last remains.”
Now a promise made is a debt unpaid, and the trail has its own stern code.
In the days to come, though my lips were dumb, in my heart how I cursed that load.
In the long, long night, by the lone firelight, while the huskies, round in a ring,
Howled out their woes to the homeless snows—O God! how I loathed the thing.
And every day that quiet clay seemed to heavy and heavier grow;
And on I went, though the dogs were spent and the grub was getting low;
The trail was bad, and I felt half mad, but I swore I would not give in;
And I’d often sing to the hateful thing, and it hearkened with a grin….
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The other front page story, Barrow Women Prepare for the Hunt describes how Native women in Barrow sew Beared Seal Skins to together to make the outside coverings for the whale boats.
Hello. I am 
When it is my time, I most sincerely hope to get one last sled ride. Great read and thanks.
immagine san valentino…
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