Fish Ears & Frog Legs

August 12, 1974
When I was stationed at the US Navy weather station at Point Barrow, Alaska, a once in a lifetime experience happened to me, a rare jewel of weather phenomenon. It was summer and warm, but but the day found one of my station-mates reading and re-reading the instruments, finally concluding a kawillowa was bearing down on us and about to occur.

Now, for the weather-unwise, a kawillowa is an extremely rare occurrence. It's a sort of storm, very short in duration, with the main characteristic being a free fall plunge in temperatures. Temperatures during one of these freak storms have been known to plummet from 78 degrees Fahrenheit to -65 degrees in the span of a second or two. When I asked station-mate Joe how long we had before it hit, he consulted the radar and other instruments and announced, "An hour and 14 minutes".

I had an idea! I gathered all my warmest clothing, all the tin cans I could find, & 200 yards of parachute cord. I strung the cans together on both sides of a neighboring creek, donned every piece of warm clothing I could carry, hid myself & settled in to wait. Joe had predicted the arrival of the kawillowa to the very second, and just as it was about to strike, I pulled the cords with all my might, rattling the cans and setting up a terrible racket along the stream. It scared the frogs half to death, so they jumped for the safety of the water. At the same time, all the fish in the creek lifted their ears clear of the water in a listening attempt to determine the cause of the commotion. THAT'S when the kawillowa struck. It froze the water instantly, trapping the frogs half way in, and the fish with their ears sticking out. Fortunately the temperature moderated somewhat as I returned to the store room to fetch our rear bagger mower. I set it on "low" and ran it down the ice, handily collecting the fish ears and frog legs. We had a fine feast of a local delicacy that day, with enough left over for another meal for our 7 man detail.

That was in 1974, and to illustrate just how rare a kawillowa is: I keep in touch with some of my buddies still in the navy, and to their knowledge, the weather station has not recorded a kawillowa since that day.

Al Fassezke (grammar and spelling errors only, copyrighted)