Drunkenness in public and sexual assaults behind closed doors. Workers staying home and children missing school. Elders pleading for troopers to stay in town. Perhaps most amazing, residents said, is that no one froze to death.

Both villages -- one on the lower Yukon River, one on the North Slope -- voted last October to liberalize their alcohol laws. Both had been dry for years. But the experiments proved to be sobering wake-up calls, community leaders said, and now both villages have gone dry again.

Pilot Station voters banned the sale and importation of booze in March; Atqasuk overturned its wet status Tuesday.

"The people here have shown how irresponsible they can be," said Atqasuk Mayor Elizabeth Hollingsworth. "No matter how bad it was, it was good that people got to see it. We still don't know how to drink here."

Atqasuk is not alone. All of Alaska suffers from above-average rates of alcohol use and abuse, according to the state Division of Alcohol and Drug Abuse. Recent studies have shown Alaska first in the nation for alcohol-related deaths and near the top for drunken driving and booze-related vehicle fatalities.

The problems are compounded in rural Alaska, where the percentage of problem drinkers is higher than the statewide average, experts say. A 1999 study noted that Alaska Natives are 50 percent more likely to have lifetime alcohol dependency problems as non-Native Alaskans. Alcohol is frequently listed as a contributing factor in the state's high rates of suicide and domestic abuse.

To combat the destructive effects of alcohol, more than 100 Alaska communities have adopted some level of alcohol restriction through the state's local option laws. Seventy-six are dry, banning sale and importation. Another 19 villages are damp, allowing alcohol to be imported but not sold. A few villages control the flow of booze through city-owned liquor stores or by allowing package store licenses only -- no bars.

Pilot Station, a village of 550 people, had been dry since 1985. Last summer, a group of residents asked for another referendum, and in October voters overwhelmingly favored going damp.

Former city administrator Martin Kelly said at the time that Pilot Station supported the change for a variety of reasons, among them eliminating business for bootleggers and the desire by some residents to legally obtain alcohol. The village went damp Nov. 1.

But that new freedom had a high cost, said Abe Kelly, the Pilot Station postmaster and a member of the City Council. Some parents were drinking up the family's food budget, he said, and teenagers went to community functions drunk. The village public safety officer quit because so many people were calling for help. Two tribal village police officers were fired for drinking on the job.

"There were just too many problems," Abe Kelly said. And they weren't confined to Pilot Station. The village is one of five in a 30-mile radius on the lower Yukon, and residents of those communities, most of them dry, flocked to Pilot Station for booze, he said.

State trooper Brian Miller, who is posted in nearby St. Marys, said Pilot Station's winter was just about what he expected.

"It definitely went pretty bad there for a while," he said. "A lot of good people ended up in jail."

The number of sexual assault cases rose four- or fivefold, Miller said, from "maybe one or less a month to sometimes three in a week." No one died, but fights and beatings increased. Troopers often spend a day or two in a village, he said, getting to know the residents and participating in community life. This winter in Pilot Station, elders and mothers begged him to stay permanently, Miller said.

"They were dying to have serious law enforcement because alcohol had pretty much taken over the town," he said.

As the winter wore on, however, Pilot Station residents, and the elders in particular, Abe Kelly said, demanded a community meeting to talk about "the problem." One meeting led to another, and another, until the City Council agreed to a special election on returning to dry status.

On March 4, the ballot measure was approved. The ban took effect April 1, but already things have calmed down, Abe Kelly said.

Some communities bounce back and forth between wet or damp and dry. But Abe Kelly said he doubts Pilot Station will revert soon.

"A lot of people thought drinking was the answer. But I guess seeing is believing," he said.

The story in Atqasuk is similar, Hollingsworth said. The village of 250 had been dry since 1994, but booze has been available. Barrow, 60 miles north, controls liquor importation through a community dispensary, but it's legal to possess. Some inevitably gets to Atqasuk.

But when the village went wet last November, a change was evident immediately, Hollingsworth said. Some workers showed up late or skipped their jobs altogether. At Meade River School, attendance slipped. Students were kept up late by partying parents or were exhausted from taking care of younger siblings, she said.

What stirred other Atqasuk residents was the radio chatter. Throughout rural Alaska, villagers constantly monitor their CB or VHF radios. It's how word spreads in the event of a fire, accident or rescue attempt, city administrator Harold Ivanoff said.

A handful of people got drunk and spouted ugly things on the radio, he said.

"It's the ones who used the radio, that was about the main problem," Ivanoff said.

Lt. Lori Potashnick of the North Slope Borough Police Department said it was surprising that no one died during the long winter.

"I think it was just a matter of time that somebody would wander outdoors and end up freezing," she said.

"When we first heard they were going to go wet, it scared us," Potashnick said, because the workload was destined to rise and the village had only a single officer. "His big push was to keep track of people and get them off the street. Anything he could do to keep people safe he would do."

As in Pilot Station, the elders of Atqasuk led the drive to go dry, City Council member Gail Wong said. At meetings this winter, elders asked the council "to do something, because it can't continue like it's going," Wong said. "We don't know how to drink. It's true what the elders said."

Atqasuk voted Tuesday but doesn't officially go dry until May 1.

"It's going to be a long two weeks," Hollingsworth said.

Barrow has had at least seven alcohol elections in the past 10 years. But Hollingsworth thinks Atqasuk will remain dry.

Which is unfortunate, she said, because people who can handle alcohol are being penalized by those who can't.

"The nonresponsible drinkers make the whole community suffer because we're so small," she said. "Even if some of us like to have a drink now and then, we have to sacrifice a little to make it a safer community."