Nome an unlikely spot for birthday celebration
My oldest daughter, Heather, will celebrate her 30th birthday next week in a far-flung place — Nome, Alaska — where she’ll be doing some feature stories for the CBS affiliate in Anchorage.
It’s no surprise to any of us that after three years in The Last Frontier, she’s embraced Alaska with open arms and has flourished personally and professionally. Much to a mother’s chagrin, she never wants to leave Alaska.
For a seasoned television reporter, Alaska has everything she’d hoped for, namely adventure. When Cordova was buried with 20 feet of snow, she was there. When an avalanche cut off Valdez from the rest of the world last winter, Heather was on her way there in a helicopter within an hour, the first journalist on the scene.
She knows many of the Ididarod mushers by name and has covered extreme snowboarding (the chopper literally dropped her off on a mountaintop). She has camped at the base of Denali to interview climbers, drives a snow machine like a champ and has tried her hand at halibut fishing. She’s always flying in puddle-jumpers to remote villages where fascinating stories await.
Heather found plenty to cover at the Arctic Winter Games in Fairbanks in March, and in July reported on from the World Eskimo-Indian Olympics where the competition included all kinds of unusual tests of strength, such as ear pulling, during which competitors wrap simulated sinew around their ears and try to tug it away from their opponents.
The cultural significance of the ear pull, she learned, is that it simulates being in the cold, preparing for frost bite.
No where else in the country would she have these kinds of opportunities.
I don’t remember the details of many of my own birthdays, but I do remember what I was doing when I was 30. I’d taken the summer off from newspaper work to help my husband get his meat-processing plant up and running in Sidney, and I was tending the small retail meat shop at the plant. I was peddling porkchops.
I remember one of my good friends bringing me flowers at the shop that day. We were both young mothers, with our best years yet to come, yet we mused about how “old” we were getting.
Thankfully my life at the meat shop was short-lived, and I was back at the paper as the editor by that fall. (Let’s just say working full time with your husband isn’t for everyone).
I can tell you that covering the news in Sidney in the post-oil boom years of the mid-1980s paled in comparison to what my daughter is doing in Alaska. We’re very proud of Heather and her tenacity in covering the news there.
She called Thursday after a 6.2 magnitude earthquake to say she was OK. She was in a staff meeting and the producer had just asked what the lead story of the day was going to be. Then things started shaking, and began rumbling so badly they were advised to take cover under their desks.
“Mom, you just can’t make this stuff up,” she said almost gleefully. And she was off to report on the earthquake damage.
I always knew she’d find a place to spread her wings and the wildness of Alaska truly suits her spirit. We’ll call her on her birthday, and if there’s cellphone coverage in the wilds of Nome, or out on the Bering Sea, or wherever she’s holed up, I’ll give her my love and remind her how spectacular her life is.
Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by email at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com.