Iditarod mushers and Nikolai residents know struggle

The village of Nikolai faces a little less economic adversity when racers pass through.

Never before has the little Iditarod Trail village of Nikolai on the cold banks of the South Fork Kuskokwim River, more than 200 miles north of Anchorage, known anyone like Jacqueline Esai. Few of the Athabascans living here in one of the more remote parts of the already remote 49th state could afford to even think about attending college in cities far away.

Yet Esai found a way. The first college graduate in her family, she will this spring walk across the Law School Courtyard in New Haven, Conn., to accept a degree from Yale Law School. It is the ticket to a bright future. "She's going to come back (to the state) and start clerking for the Alaska Supreme Court in December," her brother, Dan, said by telephone from their village. He is proud of his sister "from the tiny community of Nikolai."

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Jacqueline spent her youngest years living a traditional Alaska Native lifestyle in Nikolai. She often fell behind in school due to long stays at her mother's fish camp and her father's hunting camp dozens of miles outside the village in the Alaska Range. But in the wilds of Alaska, far from electronics and television, Jacqueline's mother took steps to ensure her daughter's course in life.

"She would spend hours reading to me from Sesame Street books that she had ordered and would lug around to our camps," Esai said by e-mail from New Haven. "Developing a love of reading and curiosity about the larger world were central to my academic success."

Although her parents miss her -- "Look how long she's been away from us," her father said during an interview at the family's log home -- they are also proud of their youngest child, for whom life couldn't be going much better.

As for the village of her birth, though, it is a different story. Nikolai is one among many fading villages along the historic Iditarod Trail. People can't quite bring themselves to say these villages are dying, but they clearly are struggling.

Of Nikolai, John Runkle, Esai's brother-in-law, said, "I imagine it will hang on somehow." Nikolai's former school board head and a big-game guide known for area bison hunts, Runkle is not in Nikolai anymore. He is one mountain range and a whole world away. He and his family this year moved to Anchorage to be near a good job building hangars for new F-22 fighter jets at Elmendorf Air Force Base.

The Runkles are what the Rural Alaska Community Action Program, or RurALCAP, would call "outmigrants." The advocacy group wrote a paper in 2008 dedicated to "Outmigration along the Iditarod Trail." Nikolai was one of the villages highlighted.

"Over the last 25 years," the paper noted, "Nikolai's population has slowly dwindled from 150 to 75 people."

It is not because Nikolai is a bad place to live. The people are friendly. The Alaska Range, walking across the horizon to the south, is spectacular. Four-time Iditarod champ Martin Buser of Big Lake fell so much in love with the village long ago that he named one of his sons Nikolai in honor of it.

Nikolai Buser's future has promise. If things go well, he'll finish a degree at the University of Washington soon. The future of Nikolai the village is far less certain, however.

"The economics are so bad," Dan Esai said. "A lot of people are starting to migrate to Anchorage. Tourism is the only hope."

Tourism, unfortunately, is a hard thing to jump start in the harsh Alaska Interior. Runkle, for a time, had a decent business guiding bison hunts in the huge Farewell Burn south of the community. But the bison population declined. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game accordingly reduced the number of bison permits. Runkle doesn't even plan to open his landmark Farewell "Bison Camp" this winter.