What Looks Like Bravery by Laurel Braitman
Author:Laurel Braitman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2023-03-14T00:00:00+00:00
Part III
Inside the word âemergencyâ is âemergeâ; from an emergency new things come forth.
Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark
One Aleutian Islands, Alaska, 2017
One month later, it was February in Dutch Harbor, a time of year when many of the most hard-core residents often prefer to be out of state. It took me four flights to reach the tiny town in the outer reaches of the Aleutian Island chain, roughly nine hundred miles from Anchorage, at the edge of the Bering Sea. Iâd flown a lot in the Alaskan bushâdoing research on grizzly bear behavior back in college, reporting stories, or on fishing trips with Mom and Jake. But flying into Dutch is special, especially in winter. And by âspecialâ I mean dangerous. Pilots are forced to land in a narrow slot between two large mountains, on a short runway bookended by frigid bodies of water. High winds can knock a plane into a mountain sideways, and if a pilot overshoots or undershoots the tarmac, theyâre landing in the Bering Sea, where without dry suits, people die of hypothermia in minutes. There are no flights in or out at night and only experienced pilots are cleared to fly there. It took my friend Corey, the National Geographic photographer I was on assignment with, three tries to get to Dutch earlier that week. Every day the plane made it all the way to the island and then couldnât land because of high winds and low visibility. So they flew back to Anchorage, six hours round trip. Once Iâd had to fly in with a medevac team when commercial flights were grounded, and the pilot had looked over at me and said âPut your spurs onâ right before all the terrain alarms started going off and we bucked and jerked close enough to the surrounding mountainsides that I could make out game trails.
I got into town on a freezing February afternoon; Corey was out on a crab boat taking photos, but I wanted to start interviewing. We were doing a story about the townâs surprisingly large population of bald eagles, who flocked like seagulls, especially in winter, and took peopleâs groceries in the Safeway parking lot. Once, one flew off with a hikerâs cell phone.
My first morning in town I went on KUCB, the local public TV and radio station, to ask folks to reach out to me with their eagle stories. Weâd barely signed off before I started getting texts. One man drove over in his snowplow to catch me before I left the parking lot, to tell me about an eagle that liked to sit on his porch railing and watch him eat dinner. Other people called and left me messages about eagles slamming into their windshields or swooping down on their dogs. One woman was attacked at the post office, and then came to the clinic to be stitched up, but before she could get inside, she was attacked again after parking her car.
More than one person told me to speak to a woman named Suzi Golodoff, who knew a lot about local birds.
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