Do you ever feel nostalgic about the 90s song Barbie Girl? If you listened to the one and only radio station Tyler and I can tune into for half the year you’d hear it about once a month. They still have a soft spot for it out in Fort Yukon. When I hear a song like this come on I often ask myself, why don’t you shut it off? Sometimes I don’t feel like utter silence. Sometimes the silence of the woods is holy and beautiful and sometimes its hell. I’m incredible grateful that we have our radio station. We get a little news, we get a little sense of community with the village in a way. Though they launched a bunch of broadband satellites over the state of Alaska this past spring, which is a whole other topic entirely, we like to be unplugged for a while. 6 months every year is enough time to reboot and halt any bad habits or tech addictions. Keeps a person mindful.
Its not any radio that will work out in the bush. CCrane radios seem to be the best. In the past we have always strung an antennae of basic stereo wire out to through some cabin chinking and then strung it around some tall poles posted at the corners of our cabin. The first year we moved out to the trapline we had a really cheap old radio and the guy who built the cabin had made a sort of booster wrapping yards of wire around a plastic water pitcher. The radio rested against the wall with its back resting on the booster. This booster method did help wonders but the radio wasn’t very good and you’d struggle to tune in. KJNP is the station that airs Trapline Chatter and that channel is hard to hear clearly at best. Even with the CCrane we can’t always transmit that show every night. It always stinks when your listening in on Thanksgiving or Christmas for heartfelt messages from people you love and care about and you can’t hear through the fuzz.
The first year we had Sydney out in the woods we went out in August when she was three months old. At the end of September when all of the fall filming was over I flew back to town with the film crew in order to do a doctors visit and get Sydneys 4 month vaccinations. On the way back to the river with Sydney I had the pleasure of flying out to Fort Yukon with none other than two people set out to work on the Fort Yukon tower that repeats KJNP(King Jesus North Pole) I checked into my flight an hour early and had some time to chat with these folk. We talked about how it was so nice to put faces to names when it comes to familiar radio voices. I mentioned how I have always wanted to meat Hans, the regular morning announcer at KZPA (Gwandak Public Broadcasting, Inc.) in Fort Yukon. They seemed aghast that I primarily listened to KZPA over their radio station. I had to sooth their hurt feelings by telling them that they were difficult to tune in up North. The technician, who resembled and astonishing likeness to a mole, was more than happy to give me some pointers for magnifying our signal, in order to better hear the heavenly voice, a circular antennae works best….a halo if you will.
KJNP is fairly strict about trapline chatter messages by the way. I once had a friend try to tell me that she went bra shopping on black Friday and they wouldn’t give us the message because it mentioned brassiere! We had some friends that played a trick on the KJNP personnel once. They had one message for us, they spelled out in the pilots alphabet, Papa,-Echo-November-India-Sierra. PENIS if you will. They didn’t catch it. Immature yes, but a funny innocent prank.
When I got back to the river we decided to try giving a radio halo a go. We made a large circular ring out of some number 9 wire about 2 a half feet in diameter. The thick wire made for a sturdy support to wrap the stereo wire around. We fastened the halo onto a pole and screwed the pole onto the top wall log of our new cabin. We were excited to run into the cabin and hear the results….with crystal clear signal tuning in KZPA our halo zapped its first song down to us, a song called Angel Baby, coming in loud and clear. KJNP also tunes in much better after the introduction of the halo.
Just imagine if your only media was basically one radio station. Sometimes you get obsessed with it. We talk about the radio personalities like most people talk about the people they run into over the course of a day. We have no one else to talk about, haha. The radio voices are the only other human voices we hear besides our own. We tend to extract what little clips of personality we observe over the sound waves and try to fill in the blanks drawing sometimes humorous pictures of their lives and circumstances. We sit and wonder what they look like all the while having our own imaginations draw pictures of them leaned back in their studio chairs, coffees close by in snug little village shanties while the long Alaskan winters pass slowly along. If there’s a man and a woman working in the studio together on air I have a good time pretending, passing judgement on the possible nature of their relationship. Their isn’t any scandalous behavior to gossip about in the bush so I use my imagination to create some gossipy stories about our innocent radio personalities to entertain myself while I muck through yet again another bowl of oatmeal. or chew through thick moose steak. The poor radio personel have no idea how much entertainment I get out of them in my sometimes lonely cabin in the middle of the Arctic.
When no one is in the studio at the radio station in Fort Yukon they switch the repeater over and air McGraths KSKO station. The McGrath staion has had 4 changes in management in the 12 years we have spent in the woods. Sometimes the management was like no management at all. One winter we were switched over to KSKO for the evenings and they played the same weekly programming for 3 months in a row. Monday would come same jazz show as the last week. Tuesday would come, same AARP talk from the previous week. Wednesday would come, same as the last week. This went on and after memorizing the programs in about 3 weeks we did have to break down and shut the radio off for good. There was just no point and it made us wonder if we were the only people listening to the radio anymore to notice this.
The local announcements in Fort Yukon can be extremely entertaining to us. Every year the week before New Year there are plenty of warnings on the radio addressing the villagers to please not shoot out the street lights at midnight. Apparently this has been a tradition in the past. There is a man that sometimes comes in as a volunteer DJ in the mornings midwinter, probably when he gets bored, to put on a show for us. He is very fun and tends to get on tangents about the good old days. One morning this past February he started his show by complaining about the drag racing people were doing on the runway at night. He speaks a lot about the times when plastic food packaging didn’t exist and dogsleds were the only transportation. He made a joke about how no one travels out of the village limits anymore. He said that as soon as they get out of cell phone range they turn around and go home. The tracks in the snow end right there he reports. He was ranting about the perils of technology and since it happened to be ground hog day that particular week he even told us that even the “damned big Gopher” is now a robot.
There is definitely a certain type of music that comes from the Fort Yukon radio station. They have their own flavor and most of it I do like. Heimo once spent some time as a KZPA volunteer DJ. Heimo is a classic rock kind of guy. We tend to hear a lot of Johnny Horton. Sydney knew how to identify any Johnny Horton song by the time she was 2 years old, hah. North to Alaska comes on and that toddler is yelling “It’s Johnny Horton” like he’s our friend come to visit. The newest manager in Mcgrath, Dave, is great, he’s really turned that radio station into something respectable and I hope he never gets “bushy” and leaves. On Fridays Dave does a name that song game for a prize. He plays just a little clip from the beginning of a song and waits for the calls. It’s hilarious to play this game with villagers, If he tries playing the game with anything besides one of their favorites, CCR, Michael Jackson or Johnny they just get stumped. One day no one could guess his song and Dave got audibly frustrated on the air stating “Fine, here you go!” Then he played just the w sound that begins North to Alaska…Way up North…. is starts. They just needed that wh sound and the phones lit up.
I love my radio station and I hope it never goes away. Every time the Governor talks about defunding public radio it turns me white as a ghost. Village radio isn’t about politics, it’s truly about community. I love my radio people, they keep me semi connected in a really fun way.
1st thinning of the carrots last weekend
Tyler and I have so much going on this time of year it’s like trying to drink water from a fire hose. I’m always happy to accept more work though so if any of you are tempted to get someone something from our store for Christmas please do it now because I will be shutting down the store when we leave by mid September. Thanks for reading!
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