Alaskan Anecdotes: Subsistence Living

Living in extremely remote areas has a variety of perks and challenges. While food is extremely expensive in stores and ordering online is also quite costly (especially if you want fresh produce), it is also quite common (and even necessary) to use the natural environment to provide for oneself. It's really a simple concept. You use what's available. This week, I got to see it in two very different ways.

We turned our truck around to catch this!

First of all, my school owns a net for fishing. On Sunday, we started putting it out and pulling it in every evening. Our goal: to catch and fillet as many salmon as our freezers can hold. In our first four days of netting fish, we caught 100 salmon! Most of them were silvers which are excellent for eating. A number of them were chum. The chum are easily the worst salmon out there. They are commonly referred to as "dog salmon" because people use them to feed their dogs. Our typical evening this week consisted of pulling the net in around 5:00 p.m., disentangling the fish from the net, rinsing them off, taking them up to our complex to be filleted, rinsing the fillets, and vacuum sealing them. The whole process does not take very long when everyone is involved. I think it took an hour when we pulled in 33 which was our biggest catch of the day this week. On a related note, we went berry-picking this morning. It took a while for us to find them. It's probable that the reindeer ate a significant portion of them. Regardless, I now have some blueberries!

Stebbins is visible in the background.

Two of the cabinets are visible here.

But subsistence living goes beyond the typical foraging for food in some situations. Take first-year teaching in Bush Alaska for example. You come into it with practically no supplies or resources to speak of. Once again, you use what is available to you. Fortunately, I had both in my new classroom. Unfortunately, I had way to much of them! When I entered, I found three rather large movable cabinets. All three were spilling over with, well, everything! Wednesday afternoon was spent removing everything from each cabinet. I was able to spend Thursday putting things away that I wanted to keep and throwing out everything else. Friday (yesterday) I was able to put on some of the finishing touches. It is finally starting to look like a classroom! I am rather excited to get things underway. Quite a bit of planning is left to do before I am really ready for the first week of school, but I have a decent idea about what is going to happen.

Here are some more classroom pictures: