Our first serious injury of the trip occurred today. People often ask me about the risks associated with working in the remote field, and my contention has always been that it is safer there than in civilization. In the field, the situation is simple – we need to be concerned about weather, animals and glacier travel, plus a few things associated with camp life like tent stability and stove safety. But in civilization, there are countless potential risks – things associated with vehicles, buildings, fuels, people, etc etc. In this case, we spent the late afternoon helping Walt shuttle passengers to the airport. The weather was marginal and not good enough to land, so we stayed down at the strip encouraging the Frontier pilot circling overhead to hang out to the last possible minute as it seemed to be improving. On his last pass, the automated FAA instruments on the runway finally read above minimums, and the plane landed and scooped up the hikers eager to get back to their homes. On the way back, driving the school bus about 5 mph, we hit a pothole which launched Turner out of his seat. He landed on the wheel well, which sliced the back of his head open. It was just Kristin, Turner and I on the bus. Kristin scooped him up and realized immediately that he was bleeding profusely. As we were already on Walt’s driveway, I ran into the hotel long enough to get some dish towels and tell them to call the clinic and let them know we were headed over there to get Turner some stitches.

It was already 6PM, but the clinic crew and rescue squad showed up within a few minutes to open the clinic and help us out. By this time Turner was calm and quiet, but our dish towels and Kristin were soaked with blood. We had a look at this head, and there was a deep gash there about 2 inches long. The bleeding had nearly stopped by now, and we spent the next hour or so just flushing it with water. We dug up some toys for Turner, and soon he was running around again playing with them as we took care of some paperwork and let his anesthesia kicked in. Putting the stitches in went reasonably well. He didn’t feel the needle, but didn’t like being held still. To keep the bandages attached, we had to shave a circle around the cut, but his long hair mostly covered the gap. But the bald spot still looked a little like Frankenstein, but the local help was great and we were really glad of the help.


Turner was pretty quiet at first, never really having an owwie this large before.


We called these “red owwies” after this. Note that he put on a white shirt this morning. Head wounds, as I learned, gush blood at first.


Soon enough we were on the chase though.


Animals!


Animals!


He’s apparently a tough little monkey, and was soon playing with toys as the anesthesia kicked in.


It wasn’t getting the stitches that bothered him, but us keeping his head still and preventing him from playing with the animals.


Turner: “The best thing to do after falling off a school bus is to climb back on…”

Injuries do happen, but I’ll be glad to get back into the field were I’m even more convinced that the risks are lower. What’s really different about the field is that there are no clinics or hospitals or rescue crews – to get such help requires a comparatively enormously larger logistical mobilization. But is this a risk? I don’t see it that way. The risks are the things that can hurt us, and in the field these are things we can largely identify and prepare for. What we cannot prepare for are humans – the two leading causes of death for children are auto accidents and murder, for example. Fifty thousand people per year die from car accident, most with no fault assigned during commutes to work, yet somehow these kind of statistics somehow just become part of the background noise our society considered acceptable. Comparatively deaths and injuries in ANWR are rare, even on a percentage basis. There is simply much less opportunity for the risks that we take for granted in civilization, things essentially random as the goings-on for humans are essentially unpredictable. Things like Turner’s red owwie are predictable, and had any of us got a gash like this in the field, we likely would have stitched it up ourselves using the medical supplies we brought for this, but much worse than this and we likely would have called in the calalry using the arsenal of comms equipment we have with us. Being safe in the wild of course puts the burden on us to avert problems rather than counting on others to obey the laws set up for community safety, but in my mind this a worthwhile tradeoff, and our small and statistically invalid data set of the past few months confirms this.