DENALI PARK, AK - - I can usually find an abandoned copy The Anchorage Daily News nearly every day, left by bored tourists looking for USA Today, The New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. The ADN, which is the state's main newspaper, tries to be a bit of everything to everyone. The paper includes a small feature five days a week entitled Alaska Digest. It's the first thing I go to. The feature highlights community profiles of all communities in Alaska like the item below which I condensed. FYI: If you have a population over 50 you are 'big time.'
SHAKTOOLIK: 2006 population 214; located on the west shore of Norton Sound, 125 miles east of Nome. A Malemiut Eskimo village with a fishing and subsistence lifestyle. Development of a fish processing facility has been a village priority. Reindeer herding also provides income and meat.
Translation: The place is in the middle of nowhere (although there are similar small places like it relatively close by so "nowhere" does have a few "somewheres") with no roads and is basically accessible only by plane and (probably) not by any vessel big enough to bring lots of supplies. There are no Wal-Marts, McDonalds or anything else in the 125 miles to Nome and not a heck of a lot of things in Nome either. Subsistence means living off the land, growing your own, baking your own and hunting to stock up for the winter.
However, Wal-Mart, Fred Meyer (a classy version of WM), and other stores through-out Alaska offer "bush mail" which is sort of like what some of us used to do when we ordered things from the Sears-Roebuck catalog. Only here we're also talking food and just about anything else...and delivered by bush plane with a brave pilot, no tower control and a bumpy gravel air strip probably too short and bordered by trees a bit too close.
Check out the profile of communities like Flat, Atka, Naknek, Gulkana and Mekoryuk, a small Cup'ik Eskimo village on Nunivak Island in the Bering Sea which maintains reindeer and musk ox herds, at: www.commerce.state.ak.us/dca/commdb/CF_CIS.htm
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