There's a chapter in my AK flying book called "We Flew Dead People" about the dead body contract. In the sometimes bizarre world that is AK commercial aviation, the bush commuter I worked for was the low bidder, and thus winner, of the Interior AK contract for hauling dead people in from the bush so they could be autopsied by the state. It is law up there that if you die of unnatural causes outside of a city (Anchorage, Fairbanks, Juneau) then you must be autopsied by the state medical examiner. We got the job of bringing in all the murder victims, accident victims, crib deaths, suicides, drownings and whatever else that might kill someone for a range of thousands of miles of territory. They gave us a couple of body bags and that was it.

The owner was so pleased when he told us about this. I'm sure you can imagine that the rest of us - who actually had to deal with this contract - were not.

Here's the thing - there is a lot of violent death in Alaska. When I lived there (and this may still be true) we were the per capita rape capitol of the country. People kill themselves all the time up there or they get drunk and kill someone else. It might be the dark or the cold or the alcoholism or a combination of all those factors but we saw lots of dead people; we saw them all the time.

And after awhile, we just didn't care anymore.

When handling death as freight is part of your job, you get used to it. You have to get a plane and a pilot to a certain village to pick up the cargo - in this case a body - and get it back to Fairbanks where you then have to transfer it to the backend of the Company Dodge van and drive over to Alaska Airlines who has the contract for dead bodies between Fairbanks and Anchorage. (I often wondered what would happen if one of our guys got pulled over while transporting a body - here's a dented dirty van with a guy whose covered in dust, wearing dirty jeans and a t-shirt and he has a body in a ripped and messy black body bag in the back and only one piece of wrinkled handwritten paper that qualifies as the transfer instructions. Do you think someone would believe he was just the cargo guy doing his job?)

In all that ways that mattered to my job, bodies were the same kind of logistics for me as cases of pop, bales of hay or the Kaltag boy's basketball team. All of it, living or dead, had to be moved from one place to another and fast. So I didn't think about this being someone's beloved family member, not often. None of us did. And when I wrote that chapter in the book that was the way I wrote it. But now, writing the memoir, I'm starting to wonder just how we all so easily transferred our natural feelings for empathy or pity into some cold-hearted "get the job done" attitude.

How did we get so tough so quick?

It's partly this article on teen suicides in Indian Country that has me remembering all of this again. The article is primarily about the Sioux but it mentions that the problem extends to Alaska Native teens as well. We did have one dead boy I remember clearly who had made a suicide pact with his four friends - I don't think any of them were in high school yet - and they sat around a campfire and got wasted and then he took the shotgun and blew himself away. We said later that he scared them back into living because the death was so violent - so awful - that none of the other boys followed through. We flew what was left of that kid into town and also flew the school counselor (who had been on a much needed vacation) back out to try and help the suvivors. I have no idea what ultimately happened to those boys but the counselor - a great guy who we flew between several villages all the time - left a year or so later. He had to go away because it was just getting too hard.

He was just feeling it too much and all the time. But then again - he really knew these kids; we just flew them, living or dead, in and out of the village. And I wonder if that was why we didn't mourn them like he did. Or maybe, as much suffering as he saw, we saw it dozens of times over because there were so many other villages we dealt with on that contract; so many dead kids, dead men, dead women, we carried.

After awhile, I just wrote down the name, told the pilot and gave AK Airlines a heads-up that we would be coming in soon. Even when that name was someone I had seen alive just a few days before (and this happened more than once), I never got shocked anymore.

That contract took all my shock at living and dying away.

So now I'm just trying to find a way to write about all this in a way that doesn't make us sound like heartless bastards; that just makes us sound as sorry as we really and truly were. I'm trying to understand what it meant to have the Dead Body Contract, and if really, sadly, it ever meant enough.