See Alaska and Die
In a recent blog, I mentioned in passing sort of an interesting way to die, which involved a small car and a big moose. That is, you collide with a moose on the highway and basically get smushed under a ton or so of bleeding protein on the hoof. There are, of course–this being Alaska and all–many other unusual ways to die, some of which involve our local critters, customs, and/or geographical features. And pretty nearly all of them involve either sheer stupidity or just plain bad luck. Or sometimes, a combination of both.
For instance, every year, a few carefree skiers or snowboarders get avalanched to death, swept up in and buried under tons of snow. Maybe they suffocate, maybe they succumb to hypothermia. In any case, they are history. Some of this is bad luck, but a lot of it is stupidity, since in most of the cases I have read about, the “victims” ignored avalanche warnings.
Next, take snowmachiners. Please. I hate them–they routinely trespass on private property, run their infernal machines illegally on public roadways, hassle wildlife, and inevitably fill the air with noise and poison. According to the National Parks and Recreation Association, a single two-cycle snowmachine puts out as much air pollution as 1,700 California-legal new cars. In the Bush, a snowmachine is often a necessary evil, as there are few other transportation options in winter–here in the relatively populous valley, they are much more evil than necessary. Just the other day I saw a few of these recreational morons, zipping up and down along the highway on their chainsaws with runners, wasting gas, making noise, and bothering local primates and ungulates alike.
Last year, we set a record for snowmachine-related deaths. Some of them were due to breaking through thin ice on lakes. Others crashed into rocks, trees, light poles at service stations, or moose. In many cases–surprise surprise!–the snowmachiners were drunk. We call this “thinning the herd”–and we don’t mean the moose.
Other visitors run afoul of wildlife. About seven years ago, a trio of vacationers–two primates and a small canid–were in Homer, getting their RV gassed up. The canid–a miniature poodle, to be precise–attracted the attention of a local bald eagle, who swooped down and in one fell swoop, snatched up the hapless lap-yapper. The female primate, an elderly one, went into hysterics. The male, a silver-back, snuck around the corner of the RV, pumped his fist into the air repeatedly and exclaimed “Yes! Yes!”
More recently, a visitor from Oz was at the zoo in Anchorage. One of the biggest attractions was Binky, a polar bear who has since gone to that great ice floe in the sky. The visitor wanted a closer look at Binky, so she unwisely climbed over several fences and past barriers. She survived, unfortunately for the collective IQ of the species, but one of the most popular pictures of the year showed Binky with a red sneaker dangling from his mouth.
Digression: I would venture to opine that for most folks, being eaten by a large carnivore is a very unattractive way to go. As far as that goes, being eaten by a host of small carnivores is no picnic either, pun intended. It sort of flies in the face of our illusions of ourselves as the lords of creation, the god-appointed stewards who have dominion over all other living creatures. Maybe this is why the movie Jaws did so well, it hit us where we live.
At any rate, just last year, some incredibly stupid clown and his clueless girlfriend were eaten by brown bears. Not just mauled, mind you–chewed up and swallowed. Now here’s the sad part–the bears who ate them–who were just doing what bears do after all–were murdered and cut open, so curious primates could extract the undigested portions and, presumably, give them a “decent burial.”
Here’s the ironic part. The afore-mentioned moron was a self-proclaimed lover of brown bears. He made a living doing stupid stuff like getting in their face and crooning “I love you” in a high squeaky voice, and giving them cutesy nicknames like Aunt Betty and so on. He would give little talks at elementary schools about how brown bears are an endangered species (they aren’t) and how bears are our friends (they aren’t), and went on TV to spread the same sort of sentimental drivel. Recently, it came out that he was a poser and a fraud. He claimed to be Australian, but was really born somewhere more prosaic–Brooklyn or some place like that. He had faked his accent. And best of all, this expert on bears, this clown, this prince of jerks, this preening, pretentious putz–made his camp smack dab in the middle of a bear trail. I feel sorry for his sweety, but he only got what he so richly deserved.
Okay, so you’re a tourist and you stay away from bears and all, and it’s summer so you don’t have to worry about hypothermia as long as you stay out of glacier-fed streams–and most ALL of our streams are glacier-fed, by the way–are you home free? No way. There is always the chance that another tourist will kill you.
There was this big front-page story this summer, a real tear-jerker. Seems that a bunch of guys got together for their dream vacation, touring Alaska on their motorcycles. This wasn’t a gang or anything, they were regular guys, well-off blue collar types for the most part–salt of the earth. Two of them were firefighters, for pete’s sake. (For all I know, they beat their wives, cheated on their income taxes, and porked their pet pomeranians–this is just how the news story portrayed them.) Anyway, here they are, being 5,000 miles from their families and loving every second, tooling up the Parks Highway on a sunny summer day, getting the occasional glimpse of Denali in the distance. Then all of a sudden, no warning whatever, this on-coming Korean sedan crosses the center line and smashes into the midst of them, killing one and seriously injuring others.
The driver of the car was an elderly tourist travelling with his wife, who had evidently fallen asleep at the wheel. He was unavailable for comment, but I can just imagine the wife’s reaction–”Harold, you stupid old son of a bitch! Didn’t I say you looked tired, didn’t I say stop and take a nap? But nooo, you had to be Mr Macho, fer crissake. I’m fine, you said, just let me drive. Well I let you drive, you asshole, and now that nice young man is dead, you jerk. Are you happy now? Are you gonna let me do some driving now? Do you have your hearing aid turned off, you stinker?” And so on.
But enough about tourists. How about those of us who live here–do we mostly die of old age? No way. As you may have guessed, Alaskans tend to be armed and dangerous. That is one reason why Alaska has the highest per capita fatality rate in the nation from accidental gunshot wounds. What’s more, outside of my family and my local NA group members, almost everyone I know smokes dope, drinks to excess or both. Like our neighbor who got drunk and smashed up his snowmachine, and himself. After a long and presumably painful convalescence, he got a new snowmachine to replace the one he smashed up. He got drunk again and smashed up the new one, and mangled a leg in the process. Okay, he’s still alive, but he walks with a cane now and looks like death warmed over.
We have a fair number of cold-related mishaps as well. Every winter since I have been here, at least one neighbor manages to burn down his cabin. The year before last, it was a teenage girl who stupidly fell asleep (or passed out) with a candle burning on her stereo–the ensuing fire pretty much destroyed the building she was residing in, a deli as it happened. Last year, a family of six in Anchorage died of carbon monoxide poisoning. Talk about felony stupidity–it seems that someone in the family had deliberately blocked a fresh-air intake vent. Oh, and they had a CO detector– but they were getting ready to move and had disabled it, for some reason.
So there you have it–death in Alaska. And to think I haven’t even mentioned all the people who were killed by state troopers or local police officers recently.
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