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Hey y’all! It’s Emily here with this week’s newsletter.

Amazingly, my thirteenth season of gold mining in Nome, Alaska, is about to come to an end. Our plan is to pull the boat out Oct 1st, barring an unexpectedly beautiful and calm dredging window around that time. (We can’t pull the boat out if there’s great dredging conditions. We’d never get over the shame.)

The tundra has adopted a new wardrobe, and the morning frost is thick. It’s time to think about post-season tasks, such as building onto our compound in Nome, planning future pre-season projects and rebuilds, and exploring innovations that will help us stay competitive in this business. (Nerdy underwater conventions in New Orleans? Yes, please!)

I hope most of you are catching up with this year’s Ice Mining season. It’s strange, they delayed the release for so long, what you’re seeing is events that took place before our daughter, Evelyn was born in the spring of 2021. My friend Jane Kilcher did me a huge favor and took my place in Nome, both for the purposes of helping to keep the dredging business going while I was in my eighth month of pregnancy, and to make television as well, as she is a beloved character on one of Discovery Channel’s most popular shows, Last Frontier.

The online reaction to Jane’s presence on the show has been…Less than kind? I’ve been slow to react to it thus far, because I learned long ago that the only way to survive being a character on reality television is to read as little of the online commentary as possible.

Unfortunately, Jane is not as studied in this coping mechanism, because people who love her show are generally much nicer on the internet. To be fair, what could you possibly get angry about on a show about homesteading? What egregious provocations could episodes about sourdough starters, milking cows, and outhouse construction contain?

I personally would invite online creatures to insult me on the way I keep my sourdough starter. I only feed it when the need is dire, and I rarely wash out the container. Come at me!

It still makes excellent waffles.

BSG inspires a unique amount of contempt from the viewers. (And love also, many thanks for that!) If I had to guess why, I would say it probably has a lot to do with the amateur-ish nature of most characters on the show. A lot of the captains are depicted as near-do-wells who wandered into gold digging, and barely make a real attempt at it. (That’s not inaccurate, in some cases.)

Sometimes, we even inspire viewers to make their own go at it! In 2012, some guys came up on a boat called the “All In.” They told people that “If idiots like Emily and Zeke could do this and make gold, we will really kick ass!”

I didn’t see them again after that year.

In light of Jane’s recent troubles with mean internet people, I’ve been thinking a lot about my early days on the show, when I was at the height of reality television naïveté. The first season was, as of recently, the only season of BSG I ever watched in its entirety. I was so hurt and angry about the way I was portrayed, and what people said about me on the internet, I decided to ignore it as much as possible. I didn’t watch it at all for years.

I’ll never forget the feeling of helplessness that comes from watching people lie about your online, or draw conclusions about you that you can do nothing about. Responding just makes things worse.

This doesn’t mean the story they told about me in the early seasons of BSG was wholly unfair, or inaccurate. It just means that when someone else tells your story, they have a vision, and that might exclude some of your brighter moments, and include, or enhance your pitfalls. I feel that the makers of BSG did that rather excessively in the early years. Once again, that’s not altogether unfair. I was naive, I was quite emotional at times, and in many ways, unprepared for the demands of running a boat and a team of divers. I didn’t always lead well, or handle stressful situations with grace. I was very young, immature, and evolved slowly in the gold mining business.

I’m not trying to be excessively negative about television, here. The people that make BSG, soup to nuts, are extremely bright, creative, and intelligent, and I’ve worked with some wonderful souls over the years, including a few who are very dear, lifelong friends. It’s unfortunate that my early experiences impacted the way I participated in the show for all those years after, but I’m grateful, and happy to have had this opportunity for so long. I’m amazed that I’m allowed to be a gold miner, it’s one of the best businesses in the world, and TV is just along for the ride.

Have a great weekend!

Emily

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That's it for this week's newsletter. Drop me a line at Alex@BeringSeaPaydirt.com if there's anything you think we should cover.

Until next week!