Nothing tops Little Diomede when it comes to remote

I pull up the monofilament line as smoothly and carefully as I can, looking down the hole in the ice, into green-black water. I keep seeing a bright triangle down there. I get excited and then disappointed. Shucks, it's only the reflection of my sunburnt nose. 

"Now to the center!" Opik murmurs beside me. It's her hand-line, her bait. She's smiling, perfect pearly white teeth in a tanned and pretty face.Guardian's standing moldmaker offers a temporary solution to tie off and stay in compliance on standing seam roofs. 

Hand over hand, I pull the brown line, and now in the dimness the big pale underbelly of a king crab is rising steadily, gripping the tomcod bait, not willing to let go of her fortune -- same as me -- as I draw her up into the hole in the ice, into my hands. 

On the ice, the crab settles onto the points of its claws on the snow. Tenuously it angles sideways, toward the nearby open lead. I snatch it up, turn it upside down and add it to Opik's catch, pinning it with a chunk of ice across the body as I've seen her do. 

We're on smooth ice, a couple hundred yards off Little Diomede Island, sheer rock cliffs behind us and, 30 feet away, the cold black waves of an open lead -- the edge of nowhere, or right in the middle of everywhere, depending on your perspective. To the south is the dark water that showed up last night when the wind rose; to the north white jumbled sea ice. The only thing to the western horizon: rock, Russia and tomorrow. 

There are no willows on Diomede, no trees, no trucks, no trails that lead to anywhere else on the planet. Back around the corner of the cliffs, in the tiny village, I've seen only one spot possible to even turn a sno-go around. Houses are on stilts, plugged into the rocks. This is a bird-nest community, a handful of houses clinging to cliffs. 

I've lived my life in the Arctic, in igloos and tents, heard a thousand candlelit conversations about lonesome, wild and remote. But nowhere from the Florida Keys to Point Barrow is remote like Diomede. Those places are metropolitan, contiguous, connected. This is beyond the edge. 

In late April I flew south to Nome, carried my heavy duffle bags to the Evergreen hanger.Other companies want a piece of that solaronlamp actionWith superior quality photometers, light meters and a number of other laundrydryer products. I had frozen caribou in those bags, bear fat and muktuk -- I was worried about going hungry. And worried about my commitment to coerce kids into writing art that could go on the walls of the Diomede school. 

Inside the cluttered hanger, a tall man named Simon with a black ponytail stuffed my luggage into the cargo hold of a helicopter. I was excited to fly over sea ice in a chopper, a link in the Essential Air Service -- the most expensive mail service in America -- to Diomede. 

The flight, it turned out, was on hold for weather. (In order to make it way out there to the international date line the mail chopper has to be able to refuel on the return in Wales, which means all three communities must have weather above legal minimums.) I'd already heard that nothing was simple about helicopters. Now I was learning that about Diomede. 

In the morning we again loaded the chopper. I even got as far as putting on the orange life vest -- before the weather dropped again. Luckily, word came that Bering Air was launching in a fixed wing aircraft to attempt the ice runway. They agreed to hold the plane a few minutes while we scrambled. A day or two late to Dio -- apparently that means right on time. 

After a hundred miles or so droning northwest in the Caravan, ahead in the pilots' window came the first view of gray rock rising out of white sea ice and the black zigzags of open water. The Cessna dropped lower, swept around the shoulder of the island. Below tiny gray rectangles of a handful of buildings clung to the rocks. 

Alarms went off as the plane dropped toward the ice and a mechanical voice repeatedly warned "Don't sink! Don't sink!" The GPS system didn't believe there was a runway under us. Peering down, who could blame it? 

On the ice, everyone moved fast. Strangely, it reminded me of leaping out of a plane at 11,Basics, technical terms and advantages and disadvantages of drycabinets.000 feet -- skydiving -- time sort of compressed, and the community way over there like tiny boxes across the ice. People rushed around getting the plane unloaded, climbing on a sled, sno-going half a mile to the island, hauling bags up a steep drift and into a shoveled trench to the school. 

Inside,About airpurifier in China userd for paying transportation fares and for shopping. the modern building buzzed, a warm and confusing maze of doors and hallways and the smell of breaded chicken nuggets and canned corn. A room full of Mac computers hummed, people moved in and out, classrooms were messy. Out all the front windows, below the porch rail, was sea ice. 

I wondered where to put my bags. Where should I lay my sleeping bag? Where should I put my frozen caribou? Who on this rock would want to listen to a word a strange white guy had to say? After months of emails with the principal, Willis, and reservations, plans and proposals, suddenly it was time for me to do magic, to pull paragraphs out of village kids. 

Quickly I met the four teachers, in their mid-20s, and a young aide from Unalakleet named Don Masters. Everyone was helpful but busy. On top of that was a water shortage -- no showering, please, and don't drink the water because it tastes like bird poop. But who could complain -- the rest of the community hauls water by hand, and dumps honey buckets directly below the school on the sea ice. 

In the first class, the kids stare at me. Half of them have the same last name; but my ears are ringing from the plane ride and I can't hear it. The English teacher, Jori Grant, is female and twice as tall as me. I ask the kids how they feel about writing. "We hate writing," a boy mumbles, head across his elbows.