Groundhog day is over. Done. Finished. Kaput. Ended. Put to bed. Squashed. I must have finally gotten it right, whatever right is. This morning I woke up in the Hawaii Hotel, actually, I never went to sleep. I got up at 6:55 a.m. I tried to go back to sleep but instead lay in bed until 7:00 p.m. I figure that relaxation is a good thing too.

I knocked on the opaque window on the counter and the hotel clerk appeared. I asked him if he’d call me a cab and he did. The cabbie took me to the airport. All the while I watched the wind blow the falling snow and thought oh oh, I will be flying out of Bethel in a blizzard. Not good.

Isn’t this the way it goes? Checked in and found out that my flight to Anchorage had been delayed. How come, I wondered, wasn’t it that the evening flight to Anchorage had been delayed?

I was starting to read Gary Paulson’s Winter Dance when a native fellow came over to me and handed me a Styrofoam container that contained bacon, scrambled eggs, and potato cubes. I had not had breakfast, and I was hungry. I gave his wife, who was pregnant, the bacon. The fellow, who was very talkative, repeatedly told me and anyone else who would listen, “my wife and I got married in the Catholic Church.” Each time he said this, I said, “good for you!”

The wife seemed pretty content. I think she was happy to be pregnant. I tried to put the thought of the two of them getting it on out of my thoughts, but it kept coming back to me. This is what happens when you have a lengthy airport wait.

On my right was a 40ish, very soft-looking fellow with limp yellow hair. I never did get his name. He told me he was a surveyor and on a work trip. We talked for an hour and a half, just to pass the time. If I had been seated next to him in an airplane, I doubt we would have talked at all. I wanted to be reading Winter Dance, but the conversation was such that I refrained from opening my book.

And he was a kindred spirit, me agreeing with him that the Texans who came up to Alaska when the pipeline was being put in did irreparable damage to the state.

Finally, we were TSAed and on board the plane. Took a while before it left because it had to be manually de-iced. It was still snowing and blowing out. I got the rear seat, the one I call the lobster tail seat. Everyone assured me that it was the safest seat. Now, if a lobster loses its tail, does it die or suffer a long slow death?

The pilot said the flight was smooth, but that it would be bumpy coming into Anchorage. And the flight attendant, who was right behind me, verified this. And so I was anxious even though it was fairly smooth. And it turned out to be less bumpy than I thought it would be. Maybe this was because I had the Old Harbor flight as a basis for comparison.

Pete picked me up at the at the curb and we went to the Dena'ina Center, where the RTI conference was taking place. And I was then immediately in the thick of it, chatting with conference attendees about our books to villages program and my stay in Mountain Village. Yes, hardship continues to sell.

Next: 26. 1/26/25: Home Again, Home Again