Originally published in The Nome Nugget, Summer 1995
When you read this, I’ll be gone. My family will be in Southern California for the winter. We didn’t plan it this way. I had hoped to be here for the Talent Show and Halloween. My friend Kaye and I were thinking of flying in to Council for Thanksgiving until we found out the airstrip wouldn’t be maintained. I was going to order an L. L. Bean spruce wreath for our front door for Christmas and add it to the Bering National Forest afterwards. I was also kind of excited about adding one more state to my list of celebration venues for my January birthday. But this frosty weather doesn’t allow digging up the rusty struts of Quonset huts and other wartime materials that my husband’s supposed to be digging up so we needed to go someplace else until next spring.
I’m anticipating lots of questions about Nome. Friends and relatives in the lower 48 will ask about igloos and dog mushing and northern lights so I’ll sprinkle about a few facts into my answers. And I may bashfully pull out a few copies of my newspaper columns that happen to be in my suitcase. I ‘lI display some big sweatshirts with Barbara Lavallee graphics, my jade loons, the ivory birds, a fur-wrapped Eskimo doll, and a rendering of a nursing Inuit mother and child. I may even whip up some sourdough starter for the hostess’s baking projects. But I’d rather have something big and bold that really tells the Nome story. Something as big as a recliner and weighing about 500 pounds. I’d really like to take back my very own dredge bucket.
The string of 41 dredge buckets around Centennial Park on Bering Street and the buckets on Front Street and near the Visitors’ Center were originally used for scooping up gravel on a gold dredge. Like the wooden pockets on a waterwheel at a mill, these steel scoops were riveted onto a looped conveyer that lifted dirt, sand, and gravel and dropped it into a bin where miners washed it looking for gold. You can drive along the beach toward Cape Rodney and see teams of people sucking gravel out of the sea into their sluice operations even as late as October. For most of us, though, these dredge buckets are as much of gold mining as we’ll ever see or touch.
Dredge buckets are big. You can fit a large city councilman into one. The buckets also have a “wear plate” that is bolted onto each bucket at the point of initial contact with the gravel bed. When the wear plate gets chewed down and thin, it’s replaced with a new one. I could use one of those. I’ve got a few points of contact with the management of kids, food, a husband, cleaning, and packing for moving that regularly wear pretty thin.
We Nomeites don’t always take as good a care of our dredge buckets as we should. You’ll sometimes see them around town with standing water and trash. I’d like to put a dredge bucket in the front yard of my next house, wherever that is. Nome was about gold and a dredge bucket says that. I’d plant my bucket with petunias and pansies or zinnias like they did in front of City Hall. It would remind me of where I had friends, read good books, watched the surf, and ate great amounts of salmon in a little town on the Bering Sea.
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