Dragon Slayers - American Story with Bob Dotson

11/05/2002, Aniak, AK - The most remote place I’ve been is a forest the size of Maryland with only four miles of road. It circles Aniak, Alaska. Fewer than six hundred people live there, but the youngest among them have set a standard for community service unmatched anywhere in America, so I wedged myself into a narrow-bodied plane the locals called “the flying culvert” and endured three hours bent like a pretzel. We soared from Anchorage to the far side of the Russian Mountains, seeking that little town in ten thousand miles of wilderness. My companions were mostly moose hunters. The pilot told us we were free to move about the cabin, if we could crawl over the rifles that lined the aisle. We were a light-hearted group, perhaps because this was the first flight in forever without a security checkpoint before we boarded. I guess the authorities figured we carried enough weapons to protect us.
My knees were turning numb when the plane made a tight circle beneath the towering mountains and we skimmed over the treetops looking for a landing strip. The forest paused at a mighty river that thundered past the six hundred souls who chose to live out here. We touched down on the banks of that wet highway. Aniak shimmered in the afternoon sun. It has the only Emergency Medical team serving three thousand people in fourteen villages.
Aniak had no full-time team when a car hit one of Pete’s sons, knocked him into a snowdrift, broke the boy’s legs and crushed his hands. He lay in the snow for forty-five minutes before help arrived. The next day Pete, a former Army medic, started teaching teenagers how to save lives. Teacher, Dave LeMaster, wasn’t too happy about letting his students cut class for all those emergency calls, until one day the rescue pager sounded and Pete’s daughter, Mariah, screamed, “Oh, my God, the principal just fell!”
LeMaster shook his head in disbelief, “By the time the ambulance got here, they already had him stabilized.” And now?
“It’s like Ghostbusters,” LeMaster grinned. “Who you gonna call?” The Dragon Slayers. That’s the name the kids decided to call themselves. Within three years, they were chosen the best ambulance service in Alaska, even though they didn’t have an ambulance.
“We’d grab the first pickup truck we could find,” Patty Yaska recalled, “Or first float plane or boat or snowmobile.”
They’ve saved hundreds of lives, including -- themselves.
Dragon Slayer April Kameroff once swallowed two handfuls of Tylenol.
“It was a cry for help!” she told me. Patty found her and quickly gathered other team members. April would soon realize that “people really do care
about me.”
Not only did the Dragon Slayers save her life, they helped her turn it around. That day I visited she was starting a new job in the town clinic, studying to be Aniak’s first nurse.
Bob Dotson is the author of four books, including the New York Times best-selling “American Story: A Lifetime Search for Ordinary People Doing Extraordinary Things.” (Penguin/Random House)
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The latest edition of his classic, “Make It Memorable: Writing and Packaging Visual News with Style” became Amazon’s best-selling journalism book. It is being studied on 26 campuses and in newsrooms around the world. (Roman & Littlefield.)
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