It’s a living — driving circles on the tundra

Bethel, Alaska, has become the unlikely taxi capital of the United States.

LOS ANGELES TIMES

BETHEL, Alaska — A tiny, round-faced woman stands in a field of ice, a solitary figure in the tundra, waiting for a ride. From one hand dangles several plastic grocery bags. With her free hand she flicks a finger as if inscribing a single scratch in the air, an almost imperceptible gesture.

A taxicab appears from a cloud of mist. It is an old, white Chevy, so splattered with mud there’s hardly any white to see. On the roof glows a green sign that reads KUSKO.

“Hello dear,” the driver says.

“I’d like to go home,” says Lucy Daniel, folding herself into the back seat among her bags.

Daniel, 65, a Yupik Eskimo who grew up riding sled dogs and seal-skin kayaks along the Bering coast, now takes a cab everywhere she goes: To work or church or, like this afternoon, to the general store to pick up supplies, and then back to her house.

It’s because of residents like Daniel that this village in Alaska’s remote southwest has become the unlikely taxicab capital of the United States. Bethel (pop. 5,800), buzzes with 93 taxi drivers, or roughly one cabbie for every 62 residents.

That’s far more taxi drivers per capita than anywhere else in the United States, according to Alfred LaGasse, executive vice president of the Taxicab, Limousine & Paratransit Association, the nation’s largest cab organization.

Furthermore, Bethel has only about 10 miles of paved road, which means there are nine cabdrivers per paved mile. Dirt roads, branching off the main arterials, add another 20 miles. These side streets, pockmarked by pond-size depressions, are sometimes negotiable, sometimes not.

The taxi drivers spend most of their time on the paved roads, which form a loop connecting the most popular destinations: two general stores, the post office, the hospital and the airport.

“That’s what I do: go in circles,” says Bilal Selmani, the cabdriver who has picked up Daniel. Everyone calls him Lincoln. “Every hour, every day, every month. Round and round. Thirty years.”

Bethel, 40 miles inland from the Bering Sea and 400 miles east of Anchorage, is the hub for 56 Yupik villages that sprinkle the tundra like flakes of dried seaweed. A traditionally nomadic people, Yupiks began living in fixed villages such as Bethel only in the past 50 to 100 years.

They come to Bethel to work. It’s also the only reason outsiders come here. Bethel, the governmental and commercial center of the region, is a no-frills working town, where people draw wages in construction, freight, government administration and air travel. Then there are the taxis.

For Lincoln, the path to the American Dream led from a farming town in eastern Albania, where he was born, to Connecticut and finally here.

“I ask friend, ‘Where can I make money fast?’ He tells me Alaska. I drive eight days to Anchorage.” A friend in Anchorage told him he could make a killing driving a cab in the bush.

Lincoln, 53, has been a taxi driver in Bethel since 1977. He is short and stocky, with deep-set eyes and a prominent Roman nose. When he first arrived in the bush, he had a long, black beard. One of his earliest customers, a native, marveled at his facial hair. “You look like Abraham Lincoln,” the man said.

Six years ago Lincoln brought his wife and two sons here. One son, Perparim, 24, drives graveyard. When Lincoln finishes his shift at 5:30 p.m., Perparim takes over for the next 12 hours. When the car breaks down, his other son, Lumni, 27, an auto mechanic, fixes it.

Toward the end of his shift, Lincoln parks in front of the AC (Alaska Commercial) store, the same one where he picked up Daniel earlier in the day. It was quiet when he picked her up. Now the parking lot buzzes with people and cars. Most of the cars are taxis, and most of the drivers are Korean.

He gestures toward a couple of Koreans sharing a smoke between their cabs.

“Sixteen, seventeen years ago, one or two Koreans,” Lincoln says. “Now. Look. They take over.”

There are 16 female cabdrivers in town, most of them Koreans with limited English skills. Which is just as well, says Alla Tinker, because they don’t want to understand much of what their male customers say.

“The men, when they’ve been drinking, will come on to you,” says Tinker, 35. “I’ve had guys pay me to drive them around town all night just so they could hang out with me. What can I say? They’re men.”

The Koreans and Albanians tolerate each other. Still, the Albanians envy the Koreans for their success and their seeming aloofness. The Koreans tend to stay among themselves. The Albanians can be clannish, too. The Yupiks, who publicly have welcomed each group, privately grumble about both: the Koreans for being curt, the Albanians, blustery.

Tinker hears it from all sides. She is one of the few Yupik taxi drivers in the village. She’s friends with all the Albanian drivers, but the company she drives for is owned by a Korean.

“They cut each other up, but they’re not openly hostile,” Tinker says one afternoon as snow falls. Bethel is never prettier than after fresh snow. Tinker plows through town in her taxi, cruising for fares.

“It doesn’t look like the rest of America, but it’s America here,” she says. “Everybody’s just trying to make money.”