This was my first article published in The Nome Nugget, Summer 1994.
I’m trying to figure things out in Nome. So, before I arrived, I watched a special on television on the Iditarod to help me figure things out. I noticed that everybody at the Nome finish line had on lots of clothes: boots as big as tree trunks, parkas with huge fur ruffs that obscured their faces, gloves and mittens that dwarfed their arms. I turned to my children and announced glumly, “It’s going to be cold.”
And I was right. It was cold when we first arrived in mid-April. We bundled up. I wore my Raichle Vibram sole hiking boots and my husband pulled on his L. L. Bean hunting shoes. Boy, were we feeling Alaskan!
Then it warmed up. The cross-country, hiking, and stiff glacier boots I’d brought all the way from muggy Houston aren’t getting anywhere near the kind of use now that I thought they would after I watched that special. It’s probably time to get out some other shoes.
So, now that the mud is drying out and I haven’t found any tv specials on Arctic summers to help me, I thought I’d better look around at what Nomeites have on their feet. So at the post office, AC, Hanson’s, the swimming pool, I’m looking at shoes. I saw lots of white tennis shoes. Now, my cousin in Minneapolis warned me about this. She said “tennis shoe weather” is a very short season in the north country. You wear them when you can.
I have a pair of white tennis shoes. It’s just that boots on my feet are more a picture I had of myself living in Alaska. Sturdy. Fearlessly striding across the tundra. I wore the white tennis shoes almost everyday in Texas. After all, I’m an Alaskan now. I think I’ll wear the boots.
Post a Comment