There are some people I will never understand. Why would one move to live in the tundra, selling a house in a small town which is far enough from everything as it is? Well, that is what Bill Vassendag, a pilot with a local airline, has done. Being a migrating creature, he had two houses: one in Anchorage and another one, which he had built himself, in Nome. He sold the latter for 50 000 dollars and started a new one, 10 kilometers away from Nome, on a piece of land inherited by his wife Goldy. Her old folks used to live there, and their original house can still be seen, sort of a cabin falling apart, a shame spoiling the beauty of surrounding landscapes
MAVERICKS
From the windows of his new house Bill can watch the tundra, a river, some busy wild reindeer, an occasional moose. In the house, there are no books, no TV, no telephone, he has no use for all this nonsense. His greatest moments are when he is playing with his two kids, Reve and Kaidan, and his big passion is do-it-yourself. Overzealous, he has already added to the house a small cabin to store tools and stuff, and a sauna is coming next. Bill's place is independently powered by a tiny wind generator of 0.5 kW and solar batteries of 150 W. The house has huge windows and no fireplace, but Bill is confident that 650 W will be enough to keep it warm through the winter. I don't think so...
Bill's strategy for winter is to insulate the large panoramic windows with thick plastic foam covers. Forget the ugliness, a real cowboy's only care is to be in the middle of nowhere, far from civilization... To add to the lack of comfort, there is no washing machine, no real stairs to the upper floor, only a ladder. One wonders how did Bill manage to talk his wife into joining him in this primitive lair.
Apparently, more and more people succumb to this back to nature craze. They buy a piece of land deep in Alaskan wilderness and settle there, far from their fellow Americans. Immigrants are no exception either. A friend of mine, Nikolai Darasseliya, originally from sunny Georgia in the Caucasus mountains and a graduate of the Moscow University, dreams of saving enough money to leave the sunny California where he is living now, and to settle permanently in Alaska, where he can fish salmon.
Don't ask me about their reasons. I don't know...
Ivan SIDOROV
Photo(s) by Aleхander BASALAYEV, Yury FEKLISTOV