Word: nomes
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Floyd H. Wheeler Nome, Alaska...
...accumulate. He records demythologized Alaska more obnoxious and squalid than it is majestic and forbidding. Along with the peaks, glaciers, freedom and big bucks, he gives us the alcoholic cabin fever of the Arctic winter, the grimy linoleum floors of numberless joints like the Northern Saloon in Nome where half the boozers sling .357 Magnums as equipment for late night poker, and the glazy-eyed dissolution of the Eskimos who can only watch the white conquest from the alleys while hanging around getting tight and quietly hysterical...
...more than a few seconds away," and describes a group of a "new strain of flower child...these were flower children who wanted to get rich. Hippies with Rotarian hearts." He asks, "Wasn't uncouthness--or at least the option of being uncouth--the whole point of living in Nome...
...Alaska, by contrast, public drunkenness among adults is the big and growing problem, especially in remote communities. In Nome (pop. 2,585), a Methodist minister led a drive to close the town's seven bars and three liquor stores, pointing to the fact that two other similar-size Alaskan towns had chosen to go dry. Nome's voters rejected the idea 3 to 1, but the town council passed an ordinance closing liquor stores early, which in Nome means midnight. Bars, however, can still serve customers until 5 a.m. on Friday and Saturday...
...super-reporter is at his best describing locales and the means travelers use to get from one to another. His chronicle of a voyage in an umiak, an open skin-covered Eskimo craft, from Nome to a fragment of rock called King Island, is a masterpiece of terse narrative and clinical observation. Without wasting a diphthong, Roueche captures the look and feeling of the gray ice-choked sea, the pleasant bite of whisky and the new taste of muktuk, or whale fat: "The blubber looked like a block of cheese-pale pink cheese with a thick black rind...