Sometimes, Kotzebue is the center of the universe.

Top of the morning gents,

I hate to admit it, but on rare occasions Kotzebue is the center of the universe. I was walking out of Walmart's in Kenai and an old guy that looked like Burl Ives turned towards me and bun and stated, "Hey, I know you guys." I couldn't place him, but he persisted and stated that he was friends with Eugene Monroe, Albert's uncle. This old white guy continued by explaining that he knew we were from Kotzebue and he sure missed that really good smoked salmon. I couldn't place him and assumed he was just another doofus-nobody scoring points and attention by accosting us. As a well-mannered gentleman, I asked him if he was referring to LaVonne Hendrix who ran that weird fish camp and sold smoked salmon down by Sadie Creek. He lit up and stated that he's never had better smoked salmon.

I refrained from telling him that her camp was on KIC land and that yer local native village-based corporation moved all those shacks off the beach bluff, and LaVonne Hendrix received an eviction notice. KIC also cleared out all the un-permitted shanties that used to litter South Tent City, better known as Little Kivilina and those shit camps all the way down the beach under the old Air Force Base.

Pissed off and full of righteous indignation, LaVonne Hendrix came into the Arctic Sounder office to submit a letter to the Editors claiming she had squatter's rights to continue her fish nets, fish smoking and selling her smoked salmon to citizens of Kotzebue and tourists in the summer: regardless of non-payment of rent and no legal permit. She further stated in her letter that she had the same rights to cater her wares to visitors aboard the Arctic Tour buses and vans.

I was tempted to bounce her ass downstairs and outa KOTZ Broadcasting where I'd moved and set up the Sounder. I held back, didn't give her the heave-ho, butt-kick and cunt-punch, but instead gave her a fax KIC sent me listing all the trespassers that set up camp illegally, without permits, without fishing licenses and lacking shareholder status. I also pointed across the road and indicated Danny Burnor's ghetto-mod castle-nigger-grovel KIC just hauled in pieces from South Tent City to the empty lot down 2nd avenue. She steamed and stated that was illegal, so I gave her the complete list of shacks, camps and squats, the laws KIC were enforcing, the consequences and fines. LaVonne folded up her letter, stomped downstairs and left town for good. What's tragic is that I never pried the recipe from her for turning dog-shit chum salmon into pretty darn good Eskimo candy. With her recipe I could've flavored and smoked all the dogs and FAS after-birth-defective Manillaq monsters you coppers blasted every year, then sold these nutritious delicacies to all the gooks. Yummy.

After Mrs. Hendrix left the Sounder office, I continued carrying tables and chairs upstairs and plugged in the Sounder's cool Mac computer: a fossil by today's standards. The local paper was originally located in Mick and Laurie Melton's house they were renting from John and Bessie Cross's: Milton Cross's parents. I moved the newspaper into the KOTZ building add-on extension and Mick and Laurie left town heading to Yakima, Washington: with creditors in pursuit. You boys remember Mick was the brother of Jeff Melton whom you coppers repeatedly intercepted his Noorvik-bound bootleg booze and even pinched Mike Carr enroute to Jeff's unnuk-shack to deal Ziploc sandwich bags packed full of shitty crank. I always wondered how you coppers had such good intel.

Back to my Kotzebue-centric assertions. On my weekly trips to the Soldotna library to access the Internet and post foul scribblings to dying cops, I found a cool book that you'll fucking dig. I've prattled on far too much about the Klondike Gold Rush and the following Nome Gold Rush. One gold rush I've overlooked is the Kotzebue Gold Rush. Yup, you heard me, there was a gold rush that piled upon the shores of Kotzebue with steamers and river boats hauling miners and mining supplies up all the rivers of the NANA Region. This massive invasion must've been an overwhelming calamity and steamroller for a small coastal village best described as a scant dozen fish camps and seasonal fur trading and rondy.

It's no secret that the north side of the Seward Peninsula was popular for panners, dredgers and sluice boxers who centered on Candle. Just a mere half-century ago, Wilford Lane and the Fields clan bulldozed pretty good color, nuggets and gold dust. When you fly from Nome to Kotzebue aboard small craft airplanes like Ravn, Bering or Baker, you'll see lots of roads from Nome, all the way north to the top side of the peninsula. Tin City is a long abandoned ghost town that was picked clean, and if you open Google Maps, telescope way deep down into the satellite imaging function, you'll see all the dirt roads like the Dexter Highway, plus Cape Blossom and Elephant Point, long dead villages and townsites just south of Kotzebue, at the bottom of the sound.

Besides Candle offering pretty good pay dirt, some strikes were discovered upriver near Ambler, Kobuk and Shungnak. Of course this was decades before the Army Corps of Engineers and United States Geological Survey created what we now know as the Ambler Mining District. If you pull DNA from all them upriver villagers, you'll find a majority DNA reflecting the deceased miners that worked and perished on those gold claims. It was common practice and popular legend for pretty native woman to warm the shelters of visiting miners and trappers. I remember hearing this delightful myth of sexy bed-warming Eskimo women, but arrived a century too late. Besides, bun will predictably "knock me down and hit me in the head with a rock." I could post my own obituary and headline in the Sounder: "Dumb white motherfucker killed with a nigger knocker."

A century later, and on ANCSA land, the NANA Regional Corporation has been pursuing permits with AIDEA (Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority) to build a road from near Manley Hot Springs, just north of Fairbanks, all the way to the gold, silver and rare metal seams and ore veins near Ambler. NANA has created a joint venture with mining concerns to develop the sub-surface metal ores and haul them back East for refining, similar to the 52 mile Haul Road from the Red Dog Mine Site to the Port Site. This ore haul road will be more than 200 miles long and the permits are in-hand to start construction. With forecasts of a gold deposit larger than any in Africa, Kotzebue may become the center of the world. Again. And according to prophetic Manillaq's predictions, Ambler will become Alaska's largest city.

Here comes all them white motherfuckers. There goes the neighborhood. Gold Rushes invariably attract bullies, thugs and mobsters. You all know that Wyatt Earp was the mayor of Nome from 1890 to 1905 and Soapy Smith was the mob boss of Skagway. Both these murderous characters were shrewd, smart and ruthless brothel keepers, claims jumpers and both the Klondike and Nome Gold Rushes had 5-6 unsolved homicides every week. The residents of Ambler better grab their dicks, cuz with booze, drugs, gambling, extortion and prostitution, the mobs will rain hell on that entire region.

Speaking of unsolved murders, Kotzebue suffered one such homicide of note: Putumi Norton, who is Ingalook's husband, James, Lena, Frank and Cyrus Norton's father, was found roped to a tree, beat to shit, and left frozen solid. He'd been working a gold strike up the Noatak River and was ambushed, tortured and beaten out of his pouch of gold. His surviving family found no evidence of trespass, tampering or mining by adverse parties at his secret honey hole. It seems he was robbed of his gold pouch enroute to town and didn't reveal the whereabouts of his gold strike. Testimony from family and descendants state that he panned the river near his family's fish-camp and did some digging in the hills nearby. Imagine the Reality TV show "Bering Sea Gold" showing the real prostitution and violence that comes with gold rushes, gold claims and the deadly hazards enroute to the assay office. Gold rushes, like blood diamonds, guarantee delivery of serious fucking body counts and the colored folks always lose.

On our year-long stay in Anchorage, me and the Mrs. visited her aunt and she regaled us with tales of watching her father panning for gold and shooting a boat-load of caribou and moose. Bun's aunt, Elizabeth Foster, wanted us to travel with her upstream out of Selawik to pick around her father's (Harry Foster) family camp and gold strike. He never got rich, but he'd taken his family out to camp, did a bit of panning and sluice boxing while Elizabeth, her mom and sisters picked berries, trapped rabbits and squirrels, caught bags of birds and collected any and all subsistence foods necessary to eat in the 1920's. Alaska was a way different fucking place back then: zero welfare and subsistence was more than an enjoyable hobby and vacation. A century ago, Alaska was a zero cash territory, so a pouch of gold was money for all the extra household items not attainable through subsistence hunting and gathering, trade and barter. Needful things like guns, bullets, knives, hatchets, shovels, gold pans, sluice boxes and boats top the list.

Bun's mom and aunties all were separated and adopted out after the 1918 Avian (H1N1) influenza outbreak and the 1930 scourge of tuberculosis (TB). Influenza was originally blamed on the invading godless missionaries, but after exhuming a 100 year old grave containing a frozen native lady in Nulato and doing a DNA analysis, virologists found H1N1 Avian Virus on board. The sores and flu-like symptomatic damage on this long buried woman from 1918 further validated this medical diagnosis. The massive outbreak of Influenza has been determined to be a result of exposure to subsistence bird harvests such as geese, ducks, ptarmigan and seagull eggs.

All these harvests covered entire families with bird dander, bird koomuks (lice) and a shit load of feathers, facilitating the species-to-species viral leap from birds to lice and then Eskimos. This viral species leap is similar to the original source of the HIV/AIDS virus, estimated in the 1920's, that was originally a Simian (monkey) Immune Virus and COVD which was a MERS/SARS bat virus transmitted from harvest and consumption. I eat lots of birds, but haven't acquired the cultural taste eating bush (monkey) meats popular in Africa and bat buffet common in authentic Chinese restaurants. The bubonic plague leapt from fleas on mice, rats, otters, marmots and valuable fur species in Siberia and Central Asia, then hitched a ride and latched upon us 2-legged hominids hiking the Silk Road to Europe. I'm feeling itchy now, scratching sores from money pox on my dick.

TB in Alaska likely came from visiting ocean-going explorers chasing the Finland (Vinland) Map of the mythical Northwest Passage and sea-faring traders. TB then exploded amongst Native Alaskans due to super tight living quarters, poor indoor air quality, soot compromised lungs and immune systems from indoor heating by burning seal oil lamps. Breaks a man's heart to read about native children a hunnert years ago with teeth like ours and lungs looking and sounding like life-long smokers. After the flu and TB outbreak, most rural Alaska villages lost all their elders and small infants and toddlers, leaving only teenagers and young adults alive. Now you understand what's called the Big Sleep amongst Alaskan Native elders and the complete loss of languages and family histories. Parallel to the Black (bubonic) Plague of the Europe in 1332, Alaska suffered nearly a 50% death-rate killing all the small children and mature adults.

Upon discovering thousands of nearly empty villages inhabited by only youngsters, territorial sheriffs, marshals and constables notified the appropriate lower 48 governmental agencies and a huge relocation was undertaken and young native teens and children were sent to orphanages and boarding schools. The Federal Government hired and sent untold thousands of dorm, orphanage and school staff, construction crews to build numerous facilities statewide and the requisite building materials to achieve this Herculean undertaking. Besides Velma Wallis (author of Two Old Women), my wife believes this medical intervention, relocation and schooling saved Alaska Natives from extinction. A sad footnote of this massive relocation and billeting of native youngsters is thousands of villages have been abandoned, grown over and forgotten from Native collective memories and Alaska's history books.

One point in Alaska's history that I've been ignorant of is the Kotzebue Air Force Base and it's importance to our effort in containing the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The United States led the world in secret fly-over photography of the Soviet Union with the SR-71 Blackhawk and the U2 spy planes. Both designed at Area 51 in Nevada and both ultra-high speed and high-altitude aircraft had zero military defensive equipment. No shit, our super-secret spy planes were completely un-armed, naked and possessed no guns, missiles nor decoy discharge mechanisms like flack and flares. These planes, in all practicality, were flying cameras with the undersides loaded with dozens of lens of varying telescopic magnification backed by dozens of single frame and moving picture cameras.

Do your history, these fly-overs occurred during daylight hours because we hadn't achieved infrared night-vision capabilities. All flights were scheduled on clear days to track the sun and also attain clear images free of cloud cover. This allowed us to see miles downward, but also allowed the enemy to see upwards. And on rare occassions, try to shoot at us.

The altitude we flew our spy planes is still classified, but estimates put them at the outer edges of the atmosphere in air that was so thin it was free of moisture to fog our lenses and also greatly reduced wind resistance. The speeds the U2 and SR-71 Blackhawk flew was many multiples of the speed of sound and made trajectory and tracking with missiles impossible. Okay, almost impossible. One flight in the 1960's was nearly struck with a Soviet missile and suffered minor damage and fuel loss.

Kotzebue Air Base scrambled numerous fighter jets, bombers and re-fueling tankers to either escort our spy plane back home, or destroy it. Here's the scary part. Fairbanks author Dermot Cole detailed that our bombers and fighter jets, parked and hangared at Galena, Barrow, Kotzebue and Bethel Air Bases, were scrambled fully loaded with air-to-air and air-to-ground ultra-high payload nuclear missiles. Some missiles were "aim and fire" and some were pre-targeted to "clear a hole" and destroy a swath of Soviet military bases all the way from contact with our spy plane to safe landing on Alaska's numerous airstrips.

Our boys were ordered to clear a path all the way back home and the US had no less than 50 fighter jets, bombers and re-fueling tankers airborn. Imagine that vicious pack of hornets flying over the horizon at supersonic speeds nearly overloaded with atomic weapons of kick-ass mass destruction. The Soviets weren't blind, their simpler over the horizon radar detection and imaging sites watched the entire escort and retrieval and reluctantly kept their fingers off their launch triggers.

The Air Force intercepted our spy plane and followed it back to Alaska, but with the near-miss missile damage, the plane could hardly limp to the Kotzebue Air Base. One engine down, damage to flaps and fuel loss forced our spy plane to land on a much shorter runway, on a hazardous air field, surrounded by hills we call boot hill and Squirrel Canyon. The Air Force station personnel in Kotzebue scrambled a series of capture nets and cables across the landing strip and with the guidance of our bombers, fighter jets and fuel tankers, the spy plane descended from almost low earth orbit, crash landing in Kotzebue.

The escort planes performed a confusing random flight path all around the west coast to prevent the Soviets from tracking which plane landed at which base. The already heavily nuclear armed statofortress bombers returned to their normal DEW Line flight patterns along the International Date Line, the re-fueling tankers did crazy-eights and random altitude flights all over the Alaska's coastal waters, the fighter jets kept close eye on the spy plane but last minute, veered off and jammed the throttles to the fire-walls screaming back towards Russia to burn off fuel, alert and scare the Soviet Defense Systems and divert attention away from the crippled spy plane landing in Kotzebue.

The spy plane came in way too fast, collapsed its landing gear and failed to dump all remaining fuel on approach. The black secret weapon airplane was almost shot down until foam was discharged and more heavy equipment was deployed as a way to stop an out of control, skidding aircraft at the end of it's doomed arrival. The pilot ejected moments before touch down and the plane skidded the entire length of the runway snagging cables and nets, but stopped before crashing into tractors and trucks parked at the end of the runway and stop this multi-billion dollar camera and rocket. This was the last flight for our black spy plane, Kotzebue Air Base's runway was far to short for another take-off.

The spy plane was quickly unloaded of its cameras, film packs and super secret guidance systems, then the hulk of the plane was dragged into a hangar and cut into sections and loaded aboard Air Force freighters and quickly flown on varietal and confusing routes back to Area 51 in Nevada. Everything about our spy planes was super-secret. The engines, materials and external coatings and maneuvering equipment had to be quickly shuttled out of town.

In subsequent years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and reviewing secret Russian cables, we've discovered that their military was evaluating a raid on Kotzebue to seize the crippled spy plane for its technological treasures and destroy the Kotzebue Air Base and entire surrounding village with 100-megaton nuclear weapons. Our scatter pattern and flight obfuscation didn't fool them, but the threat of a nuclear war with so many heavily armed bombers and fighter jets was sufficient discouragement.

Following the rapid dis-assembly and removal of the spy plane the city of Kotzebue was was allowed to move freely about. The citizens hunkered down, blacked out their windows, turned off their radios and any machinery. The civilian drills for city-wide black outs went perfect and Kotzebue was totally "dark" preventing most of the prying Russian eyes from observing activities at Kotzebue Air Base.

Their was no estimate as to the number and nuclear capabilities the AIr Force positioned at Kotzebue Air Base. Until the Pentagon Papers were leaked to the Russians, then Alaska's massive nuclear missile counts became known, so Nixon unleashed an unprecedented investigation and viciously pursued these traitors. To thwart any possible exploit or military strike by the Soviets, Nixon drastically increased the nuclear ordinance and delivery capabilities at all the air bases in Alaska, especially Kotzebue. The 49th state was the most heavily armed state in the union and bristling with thousands of ultra-high yield nuclear armed fighter jets, long range bombers, stand alone missiles and silos statewide.

A detail unknown about Nixon's predecessor (President Kennedy) was brought to my attention whilst working aside David Craig of KPD. He'd discovered a military history book detailing how President Kennedy directed the Department of Defense to stash small atomic (SADD) demolition devices all over Western Alaska. Including Kotzebue. These man-carry nuclear weapons weighed approximately 100 pounds designed for human transport, and with consent from the few remaining Muktuk Marsten ATG mercenaries, including bun's father, Charlie Tikik Sr. our Eskimo soldiers agreed to lead teams of commandos aboard skin boats and dog teams, and deliver these high-yield backpack nukes to Russia. From Diomede Island and Kotzebue, Alaska Territorial Guardsmen were instructed to carry SADD nuclear weapons 70 miles east to the coastal military observation sites in Russia, hit the 20 minute detonation timers and likely evaporate in the blasts.

I think this is really significant. We have genuine Eskimo heroes in our midst that knew their covert Inupiaq black-ops delivery trip was guaranteed mission suicide. Dog teams and skin boats are completely invisible to Soviet radar and fly-over imaging. Similar to Navajo Code Talkers, these former ice age WWII warriors were old school stealth. Mind you, none of the Alaska Territorial Guard soldiers were ever formally discharged from service, so we had a secret reserve of on-call active-duty ice-cold killers on tap fer these missions.

Tip yer hat and salute the legacy of these aboriginal soldiers, they served their entire life active status and died in service, with their mukluks strapped tight and rifles shouldered. Kotzebue Air Base Alaska, manned with crews of Muktuk Marsten's ATG boys, were prepped to rally boats and sleds filled with small atomic demolition devices. These Inuit bad-asses were nuclear armed Eskimo motherfuckers, and ready to mush and paddle to Russia and die for their country in atomic bomb blasts many thousands of times larger than Hiroshima. I see you boys smiling with tearful eyes.

In pursuit of the traitors that leaked the Pentagon Papers, Nixon (illegally) authorized the FBI, NSA and CIA to spy on thousands of American citizens and elected officials, then assembled a team of trackers and hit-squads code-named S2 composed of G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt, and eventually located and neutralized all the of leakers and conspirators. The break-in at the Watergate Hotel offices housing a psychiatrist's office and patient files culminated in the wrap-up of an extensive spy hunt and liquidation throughout America. And also ended Nixon's presidency.

The outcome of this huge spy hunt and it's unknown number of murdered treasonous rats and traitors will eventually be declassified, but the link from America's Cold War, nuclear detente, Mutually Assured Destruction and Watergate all connect with you dumbasses and Kotzebue. Nixon's spy hunt and cover-up using America's Intelligence Agencies on US soil, the leaked military and nuclear capabilities, the ensuing political theater, was important and necessary to our national security. I'm cool with that.

Decades from now, we'll likely discover that all the books, news coverage and silly movies were completely inaccurate, misleading, sensationalist and inane. Hollywood and popular fiction like "All the President's Men" will become comedic and retarded.

Unleashing so many spy agencies to operate on domestic American soil was truly illegal and unconstitutional, but doesn't bother me a bit. I doubt it bothers any of you coppers either.

Come on fuckers, we've all bent and broke the constitution in pursuit of our targets. Me? Kotzebue Chief of Police Ed Ward claims that on my narc jobs, I "use the constitution as fucking toilet paper."

Funny fucker. He speaks the truth.

Karl.