15.0°

I have spent the last 17 days of October working in the gas fields on the west side of Cook Inlet. It was perhaps the most beautiful fall I have ever spent working in Alaska, and as beautiful as any I have ever enjoyed. The leaves were colorful and falling, as the beautiful cool, but sunny, days reminded me of my childhood growing up in Wisconsin. In those years, each fall meant corn picking, harvesting the last of the summer garden, and digging potatoes.

As you well know, we don't have any corn fields to harvest here on the Kenai Peninsula, but hopefully you had some potatoes to dig here in Alaska. Each fall in Wisconsin also meant small game hunting, which is something I truly looked forward to each year. I used to walk for miles hunting partridge, pheasant, squirrel, rabbit, and even raccoon. I harvested a lot of small game in Wisconsin and each fall I could sell my squirrel tails to the Mepps Spinner Company in Antigo Wisconsin or trade them for spinner baits.

Despite all the wild game that I hauled home, it really wasn't that tasty on the table because my mom did not like cooking wild game. I often told here if you spent as much time on cooking wild game as you do other kinds of meat or fish, we would like it a whole lot better. Her culinary version of preparing my haul would be to put the wild game in the pressure cooker and boil it. That was it. There it was, boiled meat for you to eat. No frying or seasoning to add any flavor, or any potatoes, carrots or anything else to add with it - just boiled meat.

I tried to tell her that even chicken or beef would not taste any better prepared like that to no avail. She had her way of doing things, and she wasn't going to change because that would only prove she was wrong in the first place. If I still lived in Wisconsin, I would not have told any of you about this. But since mom is 4000 miles away, I will take my chances. Besides, at 54 I can still out-run my 73 year old mother!

As I got older, I took most of my game to my Uncle's place where I generally cooked it myself, either by frying it or making a huge pot of soup out of it. My Uncle and I often times ate soup three meals a day for more than a week straight, out of the same batch. Sometimes it was a mixture of meat depending on what I found while hunting, and sometimes it even included snapping turtle. Although our preferred method was frying the fried snapping turtle after rolling it in pancake batter.

But that was then and this is now, and here in Alaska, some things are a little different than they were in Wisconsin. We don't have the big grey squirrels or the fox squirrels here to hunt, but we do have excellent bird hunting here. In some regions of the state, I have discovered that the duck and goose hunting is perhaps some of the finest in the world.

While traveling the roads on the west side of the inlet, I've noticed an abundance of small game on the roads there. I have spotted spruce hens pecking at the gravel on an almost daily basis, and some days I have seen as many as a dozen. I've spotted several porcupines out waddling around as well. (Which if you read last week's story, you will know why. This is October and porcupines.. I decided not to tell you. Go and read last week's story, then call my boss at the paper and tell them "Boy, John sure did a nice job telling us about porcupines!")

While across the inlet working, as I passed each bird or felt each ray of sunshine, I longed to get my boys over there hunting and fishing. What a neat experience it would be for us to fish a couple lakes with our small boats, and hunt a little each day too. Perhaps we could rent the log cabin from the Caraway family and really enjoy the wilderness of Alaska one last time before winter officially sets in.

My job consisted of working with a crew of about ten guys, cleaning up a huge reserve pit where drilling fluids and cuttings had been stored for several years. We also had 5 large storage tanks to clean out too. The drilling fluids are separated from the solids and disposed into an injection well. Needless to say, once everything froze up, our work would stop almost immediately.

The bottom of the reserve pit contained the bulk of the solids and required a lot of shoveling to remove it from the pit. I shoveled more on this job, than I have in the past twenty years combined! But with every shovel full of solids I scooped out, I knew I was one was one step closer to getting my boys there once the job ended. Perhaps that was the motivation I needed to keep me going day after day. The crew was tired and weary from shoveling day after day, and yes at times tempers flared, but the weather was cooperating with this project very well.

We were working on our last tank, when I called home and told the boys to start getting the camping, fishing and hunting equipment ready. I thought we would have that tank done in two days and be able to take full advantage of the unusually warm weather for possibly our last big outing of the year. Unfortunately, the last tank took us five days instead of two, and on the second to last day, I noticed about an inch of ice on the swamp near our work site, and the wind was blowing horribly. The next day, the ice was a little thicker and the windy conditions continued. I knew at that point that our big trip was over before it began, as we simply ran out of time and good weather. I was very disappointed as were the boys, but at the same time I was thankful that I did not have to work in those horrible conditions either. And, there is also next year. See you next week!