I am on my way to Nome, the largest town on the Peninsula.  I say town, but in Alaska, 3,600 heads means something different: Nome is the metropolis, the center, the bottom line for hundreds of miles.

In town, I run into Norbert, a 57 year old Eskimo who I had met earlier in the week.  “The seas rose everywhere,” he says, describing the violent storm that hit Nome in 1974.  The city sits directly over the water – if you spit from the second story of a seaside house, it will land in the Bering Sea.  “You know those barges you see over there?” Norbert says.  “During the storm, one of those landed in my grandmother’s living room.”

Major sea and fire disasters have struck Nome at least six times in the past 110 years, and Nome wears the scars.  Homes sit aslant, and many wear the bruises of big waves.  In 1925, diphtheria broke out here, spreading by the hour.  Serum vanished, and new supplies couldn’t get flown up fast enough. 

To save the town, an unusual plan had to be devised: 300,000 units of serum were rushed by train up the state and to the end of the line, where a team of dog mushers awaited, nearly 700 miles from Nome.  In the coldest days of winter, a team of dog mushers raced from the last train stop to Nome: the event that inspired the modern 1,100 mile Iditarod.