This morning Bering Air resumed its flight schedules from Nome out to the dozens of tiny, remote, isolated villages it serves in northwestern Alaska.

The planes took off in perfectly clear, crystalline weather, with only the wind and the spindrift around to toy with the pilots in flight.

On arrival, the planes unloaded groceries, medical supplies, nurse practitioners, community health aides, parts for snow machines, packages mailed from “America,” and any other of the innumerable things that keep these small communities alive during the winter.

But as they landed in the villages, the residents came out from their homes, met them at the frozen airstrips, standing in gratitude, in solidarity, in grief, one group singing to them in St. Lawrence Island Yupik, a language that fewer than 1,000 people can speak fluently today.

* * *

The Coast Guard helicopters continued to fly in and out of Nome today, rattling the windows of the hospital housing here as they passed overhead.

I stepped out the front door of our building at 10:15am as the sun began to rise behind the hospital. And I went and picked up groceries, and thought about that terrible moment in the ED late on Thursday night when they finally told us all to go home and go to bed, that we were no longer standing by to render aid and try to save lives.

And some of the staff began to cry, and they held on to one another because everyone knew someone who knew someone on the flight, and they knew they weren’t coming home.

* * *

Generally speaking, buying groceries in not a moment in time that engenders profundity, but there was something about it today. Maybe it was because I did it, and others in this community no longer could.

Maybe it was just the fact that I *was.*

Maybe I needed to be here to remember that.