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Ethan's Trip to Rural Alaska!    3/9/12

By Ethan Jones    206-707-6973    eajones@uw.edu

We were told not to go outside at night. The Allakaket locals had spotted a lone black wolf wandering through town the night before, and the last thing they needed was for the tax guys to have an 'accident'. As day turned to night I became anxious. My partner and I had spent the whole day sitting in plastic chairs. In fact, we had spent the whole week sitting. Sitting in airport terminals. Sitting on small puddle jumpers. Sitting at our tax stations, preparing taxes from dawn until late into the night. I needed to get outside and move!

 I bundled up in my winter gear and stepped into the night. The -30 degree temperature stung my cheeks and froze my breath. My flashlight scanned the distance for the shine of eyes... Nothing. I wandered up the road from the airport to Allakaket. A flood had wiped out the village in the 1990's, and the residents had relocated the village to higher ground. I worked my way up the snow packed road, stopping periodically to shine the treeline for the 'lone black wolf'. A young man waved in the distance.

"Are you armed?" he yelled. 

"No" I replied.

"Well you should be!" he replied, laughing as he walked back into his house.

The walk through Allakaket took all of 5 minutes, but took a toll on me. My neckwarmer was pulled up over my mouth, directing my breath over my glasses where the moisture froze. I couldn't see. I wiped my glasses off, and started down the hill when it happened again. I squinted through my frozen lenses at a pair of shining eyes in the distance that stopped me in my tracks. My heart rate skyrocketed. It was the lone black wolf.

The shine of his eyes was at least four feet off of the ground. It was bigger than I could have ever imagined. My mind was screaming at me to run, but my snow boots remained frozen in place. We stared at each other for what felt like an eternity before my heart rate began to slow. Surely the 'lone black wolf' would have moved by now. I took off my frost covered glasses and cleaned them again. It turns out that my 'lone black wolf' was only a roadside marker.

I made it back to the Tribal offices safe and sound. I lived to prepare taxes for another day!

The Rural Alaska Tax Assistance Program provides students with an opportunity to travel, all expenses paid, into rural Alaska to provide much needed tax preparation services to Native Alaskan populations. On my trip I travelled north of the Arctic Circle to Fort Yukon, Allakaket, Alatna, and Anaktuvuk Pass. I prepared more than 100 tax returns which in total provided roughly more than $250,000 in tax refunds for these communities.

 

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