There are many ways to die in Alaska, and I recently discovered one of the more absurd means. Driving alone from Anchorage to Fairbanks on a Thursday afternoon, I was almost to Cantwell, robustly singing to Rickie Lee Jones while eating an apple. Not a good idea. I choked. I kept thinking it would dislodge. This is ridiculous. Come on! Seconds ticked past, and still no luck. I wasn’t getting air. I leaned forward toward the steering wheel. Come on! Come on! My eyes began to bulge. I thought of my friend’s father, who choked to death at Thanksgiving dinner. It’ll be fine in a sec! It has to be! I took my foot off the gas. No way! No way is this happening! Soon a frenzy took hold of me. I began to punch the space just under my ribcage. All at once, I understood that I really was choking and that it was too late for help. There was just no time. I thought of my husband, my three daughters, how my youngest hadn’t even started high school yet. A sadness rose parallel with the panic. This is it!
I was lucky, though. A painful shift, a choking swallow, and I gasped a breath, then another. Relief filled me, but something was still wrong. The apple felt lodged in my throat. Breathing seemed temporary and fragile. Were things getting tighter in there? Was my throat swelling? I made it to a trooper station in Cantwell, and though it was deserted, there was a phone box outside. Within ten minutes, an ambulance pulled into the lot. Is there any better feeling in this world than seeing emergency help arrive? Thank God! Thank God! A woman quickly assessed me, checking my oxygen, and asking questions. Could I breathe? What did I choke on? When did it happen? What was the problem? Talking hurt, but I rasped out the answers. It was only when we were moving down the road that I took a closer look of the crew. They weren’t the twenty-something-year-olds one might expect. They were older people. Like, much older.
Later, I would find out that this team was Cantwell’s volunteer ambulance crew. Marge, a paramedic and the ambulance supervisor, was seventy-eight years old. Her husband Dale, the ambulance driver, was also seventy-eight. Lee, an EMT and the youngster among them, was a man of fifty-five. All of them qualified for AARP membership. We didn’t talk much on the two-hour trip to the Fairbanks hospital, but I was able to get to know them better that weekend on a walkathon that Marge had organized for an ill friend. At the start of the ten-mile hike, Lee joked, “I guess you got saved by a geriatric rescue crew.”
Marge and her team of volunteers are on-call twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The closest paid ambulance service is in Healy, a good forty miles away. Cantwell is a town of a couple hundred people, located roughly 200 miles north of Anchorage and 150 miles south of Fairbanks. The train doesn’t stop in Cantwell, but the town sees a lot of travelers, many of them elderly, heading to one of the cities or, in summer, Denali National Park. The colder months bring plenty of hunters and outdoor enthusiasts to the area. What this means is that year-round, people find themselves in trouble in Cantwell. Marge’s crew receives about thirty emergency calls a year.
Decades ago, Marge saw a need for a trainer to come to Cantwell to certify more EMTs. She and her husband Dale, both commercial pilots, worked for a flightseeing company in the area. Marge had become an EMT in 1979, joining the ambulance crew in 1981. She has remained in service for forty years. She explained that for a trainer to visit Cantwell, the community needed five students. They only had two. So in 1987, Marge decided to become credentialed as a trainer, which cost her 7,000 dollars and a move to Los Angeles for six months.
“Did you like living in Los Angeles, Marge?” I asked.
I got used to these clipped replies, right to the point, no elaboration. Marge was not the frivolous talker that I was. Sometimes she replied to a question by simply shooting a look at me from the side of her eye. She was all business, the type who didn’t suffer fools well. But when she chose to indulge me, she proved a skilled storyteller with a great sense of timing and humor. We had even joked a bit in the ambulance on the way to Fairbanks, that I was Snow White with the poison apple.
Marge returned to Cantwell to train her two students, and she remains the supervisor of the ambulance service. She is the only paramedic. The crew’s most common calls are from victims of traffic accidents; elderly passengers on the many trains and buses passing through town; and Cantwell residents who experience health events or injure themselves at home. There are also calls from the backcountry in the surrounding mountains. Winter in Cantwell is long and brutal, snowstorms common. Some years ago, they received six inches in July. It’s not a rare thing for hunters and snowmachiners to run into trouble, and because of Cantwell’s rough weather, rescue planes and helicopters can’t always get in. Who saves these people? Marge and her crew.
“And you go out on your snowmachines?” I asked.
“Tell her about the arm,” Lee, the EMT, said. He was helpful in coaxing stories out of Marge. A big, strong guy, a charmer, Lee was full of enthusiasm. “The fella with the broken arm.”
Marge thought for a minute. “It was twenty below. Dale and I went out on the fire department snowmachine with a rescue sled, and Lee followed on his own machine. Thirty miles out. We bundled the patient into a sled with heat packs, and I gave him a shot of morphine. But the weather had made things pretty slippery. Dale had the easy part driving, while I had to stand on back of the sled as we skidded all over the place. Kept thinking I was gonna fall off and become the next victim.”
“And most of our rescues in the mountains are real big guys,” Lee explained. “Hard to move. Now someone like you,” he nodded at me, “you would have been easy to pluck out of the country. Kinda too bad she called from the roadside, don’t you think, Marge?”
“Thanks.” I felt flattered, though I was glad I hadn’t choked alone in the mountains. “And what about bear attacks? Did you ever get one of those calls?”
Lee turned to her. “Really? When?”
“Must have been before your time.”
“I’ve only been doing this for twelve years,” Lee said.
“I remember one guy had a big tear across his neck,” Marge said. “I dressed the wound and got him to the hospital. Some doctors really do a super job piecing people back together.”
“Well, jeez.” This was one of the rare times I heard Lee’s voice go flat. “Guess I missed all the bear maulings.”
“Could be more,” Marge consoled. “You never know.”
“And you’re still going out on these calls?” I almost said, ‘at your age,’ but I held my tongue. Marge was a small woman, and though her mobility was a bit hampered, especially in the neck and shoulders, I sensed an oversized amount of fight in her. I didn’t think she would appreciate me doubting her capabilities. And I didn’t. Marge exuded such a sense of the can-do, I felt like a tender-footed Cheechako in her presence. “I mean, isn’t it tough in winter?”
“The good news is we’re buying a snow ambulance.” This is a big, enclosed snowmachine that keeps driver, crew, and patient warm. “The troopers donate money from speeding tickets, so thanks to you Anchorage drivers, winter rescues are going to be a heck of a lot easier this year.”
Unlike city ambulances, the Cantwell crew doesn’t exceed the speed limit. “If you need to get there in a hurry, you’re in the air,” she explained on our drive north. And if I’d had my dog with me, they would have taken him along. In the hospital, Marge brought me a warm blanket and then stayed with me until the nurse came in. “I’m not just gonna dump you here.”
She researched shuttle information, promising to meet me at Denali the next day to drive me the thirty miles back to my car.
After the procedure, the doctor said I had damaged my esophagus, and though there was bruising and swelling, he was confident I wouldn’t choke again. “An apple, huh? You know, here in the ER we’ve nicknamed you Eve.”
I was feeling fortunate and grateful, and my thoughts kept going back to the Cantwell crew, to Marge. I texted my daughters about this remarkable woman.
Pretty cool, the middle girl shot back.
Sounds like a girl-boss, said the youngest.
She’s a baller, wrote my eldest. A total baller.
During the fundraiser, I was proud to introduce myself as Marge’s choking victim. Nobody was surprised. “She helps a lot of people around here,” people agreed. Lee was hiking the ten miles with us, and he helped get Marge talking by telling some stories of his own. He had a way of staring down the horizon as he spoke, as if the story was printed way out there in the country. Dale, Marge’s husband, served as safety patrol, driving his truck filled with Gatorade and trail mix along the route. He was a quiet, serious, thoughtful man, the one you want to be with if the plane goes down. I figured he’d have to be plenty tough to be married to Marge. In 2014, the couple received the Denali Borough Mayor’s Community Service Award, which was the first year the award was given. I wondered about the dynamics between the two. Was Dale constantly carrying out her orders? Or were they two independent and clashing alphas? I tried to think of a good question on the topic, one that Marge would answer with more than a side-eye.
“Where did you meet Dale?”
“Was it love at first sight?”
“Dale complains I only married him because I needed a mechanic for my airplane.” She paused, then cracked a grin. “Well, I did need a mechanic.”
We laughed, and I felt emboldened to ask the next question. “Is Dale afraid of you?”
“Nope,” she said with a shake of her head. “Nobody is afraid of me.”
Lee pointed to himself and mouthed, I’m afraid of Marge.
By the time we’d returned to our cars, the sun had come out. Bright white snow glinted from the higher peaks, while brown patches of beetle-killed spruce dotted the otherwise green hillsides. A tangy scent of cow parsnip hung in the air. The three of us stood by Lee’s truck, as I worked up the nerve to ask Marge if I could write this story. I prepared for a side-eye response, but after a moment she said, “It might spark an interest in young people to volunteer.”
“I don’t need money, I need people.”
As we said goodbye, I turned to Lee and was soon enfolded in his warm bear hug. “I’m just Marge’s helper,” he said. “It’s really her show. Here in Cantwell, Marge is in charge.”
I was thinking that Eve had her apple, Snow White, hers. But the apple I bit didn’t lead to a downfall. It brought me these wonderful people. Now I gently wrapped my arms around Marge. It was like hugging a semi-tamed tiger or bear, an animal that might not turn teeth and claw on me but was only just tolerating the experience. I wanted to keep holding that small body containing so much experience, so much giving, so much beauty.
“Hey Marge,” Lee said from his truck. “What about all the mile markers you put out for the walk? Do you have a plan for collecting them?”
“Of course, I have a plan. Don’t I always?”
As Lee waved goodbye, he called, “Marge always has a plan.”
