Reporting from Tuluksak, Alaska — As the temperature plunged to minus-40 degrees last month, Nastasia Wassilie waited.
The 61-year-old widow had run out of wood and fuel oil, and had no money to buy more. Nor was there much food in the house. But people here in rural Alaska try to take care of themselves. Her sister would come to help. Surely she would.
Nearly three days later, when neighbors learned of Wassilie's plight, the Tribal Council put out a call on the VHF radio that is the lifeline for most of the far-flung Yupik Eskimo villages along this remote stretch of the Kuskokwim River.
People who had enough gas for their snowmobiles immediately set off across miles of tundra, hauling firewood back to Wassilie's small house. A few offered helpings of dry fish, which most families keep in the larder for winter.
There was little more they could do. Nearly every one of Tuluksak's roughly 500 residents is performing a perilous balancing act between food and fuel -- the building blocks of survival in a frigid winter that still has months to go.
Life in rural Alaska always has been treacherous. But last year's dramatic escalation in fuel prices, combined with a disastrous fishing season, plunged the ramshackle villages of America's frontier into one of the worst crises in decades, prompting calls for humanitarian aid and demands for pricing reform.
"Holy Jiminy Christmas, what we're going through," said Dora Napoka, 49, the librarian at the village school. "It's like we have to choose between six gallons of stove oil or six gallons of gas to go out and get the firewood -- or does my baby need infant milk? Which one is more important?"
The public alarm first sounded from Emmonak, a town of about 800 people near the mouth of the Yukon River, when Nicholas Tucker polled fellow villagers and found many in a state of desperation: They were running out of food after paying up to $200 a week for fuel oil to heat their homes.
"Help is needed and cannot be delayed," Tucker wrote in an open letter to state authorities that was published in several rural newspapers this month, requesting a "massive airlift" of food.
"What is mind-boggling about the whole situation is that they have remained silent, anonymous, suffered, and cried," he said.
Tucker included a terse case list of 25 households he had contacted. It read like a report from a Third World country.
