Sixty-seven-year-old George Earviak was doing what any good grandfather would do when he took 10-year-old George Jr. and 8-year-old Teddy along with him on Friday to scout a snowmobile trail to the lakes north of Newtok where the Yukon-Delta villagers catch blackfish through the ice in winter. The blackfish traps were already loaded on the elder Earviak's sled back at his house, said Peter Atchak, president of Bethel Search and Rescue. George and a longtime traveling companion planned to put them out Monday.
They never got to make the trip. George, George Jr. and Teddy were reported missing on their red Polaris Saturday morning. A day-long search in bad weather found no sign of them. But George's snowmachine was found the next morning. It had not gone far. It was submerged in a manmade pond between the village of about 350 and the village airstrip only about a half-mile to the west. The bodies of the Earviaks were later pulled from beneath the ice there.
They were the second, third and fourth victims of thin ice in Western Alaska in about a week. The body of 30-year-old Derek Lynd Sheldon from the village of Kiana to the north has yet to be found. He appears to have been making a liquor run on a four-wheeler along the Kobuk River to Noorvik only 20 miles away when he hit a thin spot in the ice.
All along the western coast of Alaska, Atchak said, the ice is thinner than normal this year. "It's a little later in forming than the standard average,'' he said, and especially late in areas where saltwater infiltrates the brackish ponds and marshes.
"We really haven't had the cold weather,'' Atchak said. The cold in some places is considered something of a curse. In Western Alaska, though, where there are few roads and almost none connecting communities, it is a blessing. Freeze-up means people can travel even more freely than in summer when it is possible to traverse large parts of the Yukon-Kuskokwim River Delta by boat.
Life in this region almost stops in the three weeks to a month when the country is making ice, but then resumes after freeze up. By November, many in the area around the regional hub of Bethel, about 400 miles west of Anchorage, are anxious to get out to hunt caribou or trap blackfish, as did their fathers before them and their ancestors before that.
"People are venturing out there,'' Atchak said. "They have to get out. This is their life.''
The blackfish is a fish not much sought after in most of the 49th state. A big one measures only about 8 inches long. But the fish are a staple in some households in Western Alaska because they are resident year-round and can survive in places inhospitable to other fish. Blackfish can endure in the mud of tundra ponds that go almost dry in the summer, and sneak into muskrat holes in the ice during winter to breath air when nearly all oxygen is gone from the water trapped beneath ice.
When dogs were everywhere in Western Alaska, blackfish served as both dog and human food. Now that snowmachines have largely replaced the dogs, the fish are eaten mainly by people, either raw or boiled. There are appreciated as fresh food in places like Newtok and the other many small villages like without supermarkets, sometimes even without a store.
Life is different here. It is quieter, and it is more dangerous.
People in Western Alaska go through the ice and die in snowmachine accidents the way people perish in automobile collisions in urban Alaska, although the number of people dead in the past week is unusually high. Four deaths in a week among the 50,000 or so people living in Western Alaska would be about the same as 30 people dying on the roads of Anchorage and the Matanuska-Susitna Valley in a week.
Newtok, especially, was reported to be taking the latest deaths hard.
It has not been a good year there. A 17-year-old man committed suicide in May, and now this in a community of a few hundred people.
George Earviak and the kids didn't die because they were doing anything dangerous, Atchak noted. They died because there were living life the way it is lived in rural Alaska.
"He was just checking the trail out,'' said Atchak. "He didn't have any gear with him. He was just going to give the kids a ride.''
Whether George or the kids could have saved themselves, no one knows.
They may have been trapped under the ice after the snowmachine went through. But Atchak said anyone traveling by snowmachine in Alaska needs to be prepared for the possibility of ending up in the water.
"What I tell people is put a pair of spark plugs in your pockets,'' he said. The screw-tips on the tops of the plugs can be used like ice picks to secure a purchase on the ice and pull yourself out of the water. And if you can get out of the water, Atchak said, you have a chance for survival.
"It's scary,'' Atchak said, but it is the way life is and the way it long ago was for everyone. Rural Alaska really hasn't changed in that regard; it's much of the rest of the world -- or at least the comfortable Western world -- that has changed.
Contact Craig Medred at craig(at)alaskadispatch.com.