Friday, January 14, 2011

Walking Home

Fumbling through the bookshelves in my mom's office, I came across tthis essay that I wrote for the Passage (Kalamazoo College's study abroad publication) and found it oddly comforting, two years later.

Walking Home

After weeks of rising at the mercy of local roosters, I awoke one morning and found a world reverberating with a rare silence.  Sliding out of my bunk, my eyes met a friend’s and together we tiptoed out of the room of sleeping women into the damp world of rice fields. 

In a trance-like state, we traced our way through the jungle plants we were learning to identify, embracing the familiar banana trees and avoiding the menacing thorny rattan that sliced at our bare limbs.  The emerging sun bathed the forest floor in its restorative light.  We walked for walking’s sake, with no determined course or destination.

Walking was my form of meditation in Thailand, a way to process a foreign world in my own terms.  As we moved forward, I let me mind wander across my first few months abroad and sink into my building sense of guilt.  Everywhere I went, wonderful people had unquestioningly incorporated me into their lives.  Homes were offered, papaya sliced, beds laid out, but I had not felt at home.  In this intricate dance of sharing, I lacked the vital force that made the movement a genuine expression. 

A sorghum leaf swept across my shoulder, transitioning my attention to the jungle path before me.  The path was beat low, scarred by motorcycle tracks.  Farmers, I mused, bringing their fruit to market in Fang.  Or perhaps teenagers out on a joy ride.  Dense trees covered both sides of the trail, their sun-centered shoots creating a shaded tunnel. 

Walking through this metamorphic passage, I was overwhelmed by the feeling that I could be anywhere in the world.  The path recalled the simplicity of the woodchip-blanketed Michigan trails of my childhood, the intricacy of Japanese gardens, the rich mystery of an Israeli grove.   Inhaling, I felt these disparate threads of my life twisting together into an elegant knot.  For the first time, I felt at home.
Kelly walking

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Frozen Frames (Alaska 3)

December 2010

Dear friends and family,

If you read no other part of this message read this: I AM COMING TO THE MIDWEST FOR THE FIRST THREE WEEKS OF JANUARY.  During this time, I would love to see as many of you as I can possibly fit.  As a shameless plug, I am currently accepting reservations for dinners, walks, and drinks of all caliber!  And now for that question I know you want answers to: 

So How’s That Alaska Winter Treatin’ Ya?


Winter
is the time when Alaska really hits its essence.
The land looks silhouetted like
A silvertip drawing.
As if someone took construction paper
And cut out shapes:
Barns and smoke stacks,
Rising ---
All too tangibly,
Dyed orange by a glowing sun.
The Alaska Range and Denali stand out.
Like paper cut-outs in a pop-up card.
No longer mistakable for clouds.
The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner calls this
the “thirty below glow.”
                                                                                               
"the Thirty Below Glow" from the Daily News Miner

Dark.

(sun worshiping)
First off, I feel obligated to clear ups some rumors.  Alaskans do not live in darkness all winter.  The farther north you go, the less sunlight, but at minimum there are at least 2 hours of daylight just about anywhere in the state.  Fairbanks is the farthest north “large” (65,000) city and right now the run rises around 11:00 and sets around 3:00.  I like to think of this as a more democratic schedule for the sun to take: the magic of the sunrise is no longer reserved for early-risers.  Rumor number two: day and night does not mean black and white, the remaining 20 hours are filled with shades of gray.  The snow has an odd way of retaining the light, its ice crystals lock in up for safe keeping.  Hours after the sun “sets” in stages of sherbert sky, the world retains a purple sheen.  When the moon is small, I use a headlamp to light my trips to the outhouse.  Even the dullest of lamps illuminates about 3,000 sparkles, as if everything is constantly being blown with pixie dust.  With the aid of this little light, I watch as my breath crystallizes before my eyes. 

The sun stays low in Creamer's field (taken during a lunch break run)
I came across a quote on my tea bag the other day: “those who realize that all is light are enlightened.”  Along with reaffirming my faith in the writers of tea wisdom, this quote made me realize that I have become a pagan.  The sun seems to be the thing most worthy of worship.  It’s not just me. With such a limited and then overabundant supply, there is a reason why “Solstice” and “Aurura” are among the most popular Alaskan names.  I read that the sun is the daily bread for the eyes.  But “daily bread” seems too worn-down, too religious, too much about sustenance and necessity.  I prefer to savor the sun by drinking it.  And when you’ve only got four hours of day, you had better make time to sip.  My original Alaska-guide, Stacey, described winter as a time when everyone leaves during lunch break to poke their heads out of windows like little groundhogs and bask for a moment in their daily dose of sun.   I haven’t quite hit that stage yet, but I’ve certainly changed my schedule around it.  Since skijoring to work in the dark when its – 26 degrees is just short of miserable, I’ve been hitching rides and going for runs in the middle of the day.  While some people tote sun lamps, pills, and tanning, I prefer to harness my true power as a redhead (we can store vitamin D!) and just enjoy being outside.  Just like anywhere else, you adjust. 

You can almost feel the warm light
Cold.
(Ways of Warming)
            There really is no sunny way of getting around the fact that I now consider ten degrees below zero “balmy.”  Going outside generally involves hunching my shoulders and bracing, and approaching door knobs with caution, like a pan straight out of the oven (they bite!).  Northern animals have had years of evolution to come up with awesome adaptations.  Wood frogs spend winter frozen in suspended animation, arctic ground squirrels can get their core body temperatures as low as 27 degrees before freezing, and chicadees expand their hippocampus (the part of your brain that controls spatial memory) by 30% to help them find thousands of food caches.  Humans, on the other hand, with our opposable thumbs and all their glory, have come up with some awesome and hilarious ways of coping. 

The first I would like to flag is a contraption called “bunny boots.”  Think what clowns wear but large, white, and on the feet of everyone from Salvation Army bell-ringers to my “suave” date at a fancy restaurant.  Bunny boots work their magic by harnessing the excellent insulating power of air (think platform shoes).  Second, there are dogs- it turns out that they are good for more than pulling you around!  You’ve heard of a three dog night, right?  The band I went to see with my parents.  Well in Fairbanks it’s a standard of measure, as in: “ah, I slept with all three of my dogs tucked in last night, must’ve been negative forty.” 

Our pup for the winter, Chandalar
Finally,  I offer for your consideration: cookies.  The perfect combination of sugar and fat.  Sara and I spent a Sunday baking lots and lots of these fat satchels.  In the spirit of being good northern neighbors and distributing the survival goods, we then drove around Fairbanks for an hour and a half (in a car with no heat) delivering bags of them to our friends along with goofy, anonymous notes like: "keep your goals away from trolls."   We approached each cabin slowly (out of caution and slow car), cut the lights, hopped out, and did the best ninja moves possible for two people clad in full-body down and squeaky boots.  Time and time and again, we were foiled by those damn motion-sensor lights.  Blinded by the sudden light-shower, we panicked, hurriedly dropped the bag of goodies by the door, and ran.  Blindly, giggling and shivering ferociously, over the ice back to the car.  Its harder to be sneaky when its -30.  Everything goes a bit slower than you plan.  .
As you know, there is nothing like being home for the holidays.  But if that means a $1,000 ticket and enough greenhouse gas emissions to completely negate all the biking, running, and skiing you have been doing for the past six months, then having a castaway thanksgiving dinner with 13 of your closest friends is a good alternative.  Being young, silly, and a bit poor, we arranged our day around the idea that we needed to eat twice, and exercise in between to revitalize our appetites.  The “exercise” of sledding on fragments of plastic over pure ice (this was right after ICEPOCALYPSE!!!) was pretty much negated by the fact that we made six different types of pie for dessert.  In order to get the full family experience, we came dressed as stereotypical family members and kept up the roles.  Since this was more of a party than thanksgiving, we did it again the next day, with Sara’s family.  Here I discovered the joys of Sog (soy egg nog) and helped to put up their Christmas tree.
As for my own holiday it actually dovetailed nicely with my newfound paganism.  Channuakh is, at root, a celebration of light.  It is an especially fitting holiday for Alaskans in December.  Seizing this opportunity, I put on a Chanukkah themed gourmet club night.  We made 3 loaves of my mom’s recipe challah, incredible gluten and dairy-free apricot noodle kugle, matzo ball soup, salad, homemade applesauce, latkes galore, and a “snora” (menorah made by putting snow in a bowl and inserting candles). 

My favorite spot, a little lake accessible from the trails in our backyard.  Note: the lake has chairs, our cabin does not.


Misery.
(Life on top of the world)
This heading seems to be a good place to insert a sentence about my trip to Hawaii.  I went there for a tournament called Hopu Ka Lewa, which means “catch the sky.”  A more literal translation would be: an incredible display of an organized dedication to the pursuit of silliness.  Highlights included eating Indian food off of Frisbees, parties with smoke machines and Taiko drummers, an actual pirate ship to conduct boat races on, daily costumes, and body surfing between games.  I spent almost a week before and after the tourney exploring the island and paid a grand total of $8.50 for one night of a campsite the entire time.  The rest of the time I resided in tents, Honalulu houses, a north shore surfer dude’s backyard, and a penthouse.  It was enough to renew my wanderlust. 

I returned from my magnificent tropical fruit binge on O’ahu to find Fairbanks in a state of ICEPOCALYPSE!   In a freak weather pattern unheard of by the sourdoughs (old-timers), it rained for four days straight at the end of November.  Schools, businesses, and even the Northern Center (where I work), shut down for the week and it was possible to ice skate on the streets!  This did a number on what appeared to be a very promising ski season.  As the temperatures dropped again to a sane -20, ice set in and made a very hard base under the trails and on the roads.  

Sara cleans the snow off her trusty car, Telulah

But then the snow came back.  And I’ve never been so happy to see snow.  The Inupiaq have (this is heavily debated by linguists at the Alaska Native Lanuage center) between 12-24 words for snow.  My favorite so far is the large rectangular flakes that look exactly like the Christmas display snow in malls.  Snow flakes are fractals- geometric patters that are repeated at every scale and defy being represented by classical geometry.  This repetition seems to be the key to their magic.
The snow is like a giant layer of padding.  It makes driving an adventure, getting up into our outhouse easier, countless marshy paths accessible, and falling a lot more fun.  Thirty some inches of the stuff has made the valleys and domes of Fairbanks into my personal winter wonderland.  When I first came here I understood the omnipresence of thermometers to be a way that Alaskans showed off the spectacle of their legendary cold.   Now I realize that the thermometer is a necessary tool in every day life.  It determines where you can go, what you can do, what you must wear, and how long you have to plug your car in or how much to feed your dog.  To run in the 20 below zone, I have to wear a gaiter that makes me look like a star-wars character.  Our executive director showed me how to drill screws into my running shoes and Jon found me a pair of brand new skis in the dumpster.  Still, no amount of star wars gear prevents you from looking like the abominable snow monster after more than 15 minutes outside.  At about five minutes in, my eyelashes frost in the most extraordinary manner.  Both top and bottom lashes collect small ice chunks and slowly, they freeze together. 

Mushing with Adele and Sara, those are my snowy mucklucks.
Aren’t you supposed to be working or something?
Ah yes, and on that front there is much going on  Our annual fund-raising auction that I spent much of October working on was a smashing, chaotic, success.  I made a cheesecake that sold for $120!  On December 6, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge turned 50 years old and we gave it a party, a movie (America’s Wildest Refuge), a play (Wild Legacy), and an art opening (Jeff Jones Photography).   I am doing a bunch of grassrootsy organizing for an upcoming comment period and putting together a panel on environmental justice in the arctic for April’s powershift conference in DC.  We have two new faces at the office including the former head of the Fairbanks Chamber of Commerce, and a guy.  Pete is a bold man for agreeing to a position fighting mines in a mining town and working with seven women.  He is taking to the task in typical mountaineer fashion and livening things up a bit.  Last week he challenged me to a push up competition between staff meetings.  What is most exciting is that I am beginning a self-pioneered community history project to celebrate the 40th anniversary of NAEC.  So far this means that I get to do what I love most- listen to stories and find a way to communicate them to a broader audience. 

Hannah, me, and Stacey as Caribou in the Golden Days Parade this summer.
So how’s that Alaska winter treatin’ ya?
Good.  Its teaching me to see things in all sorts of light.


Frost lashes.


Dynamic Whirling (Alaska 2)

October/November 2010

Greetings family and friends!

Thank you for your attempt to read yet another long letter.  I tried to help with headlines, which together create the sentence: “The birds are leaving, The world is spinning-fast, Finding the lucky charms, Growing somewhere, Dancing with the crazies, Dynamic Whirling (aka: slipping with style).”  That pretty much sums it up.  If you want more, read on.

The Birds are leaving
I can finally sign my letters “with love from the great WHITE north.”  That’s right, its winter.  Well, more appropriately we call this dance of dwindling light and increasing slipperiness “flex fall”.  It started with the cranes.  In August thousands of Sandhill Cranes gather in Creamer’s Field Waterfowl Refuge to rest, feed, and dance before beginning their long migration south.  Birds are agents of connection between the high arctic and the rest of the world.  I can trace the Sandhill Crane’s path from Creamer’s field to my parent’s farm in Milford, Michigan.  Over 180 species of birds use the Arctic Refuge to feed, rest, and hatch their young before traveling to all fifty states and six continents (they boycott Australia).  Some like the Arctic Tern breeds on the Arctic tundra and flies 44,000 miles to the other pole to winter in Antarctica. 


Denali, the day before my birthday
The world is spinning- FAST!
This year, as the sandhill cranes prepared to fly south, I hiked Ester dome with a boy named Kyle.  By hike he intended date and I intended hike.  So I tromped through the woods to meet him in fleece pants and Xtra-Tuff boots.  This is what I ended up wearing to get Kahlua cake at the fanciest bistro in Fairbanks.  Kyle is a lot of things- an ornithology grad student, a wilderness guide in the Arctic Refuge, a board member of Creamer’s field, a hunter (which makes my locavore ways much easier), a photographer that’s teaching me to notice light- I am still negotiating these many shoes he wears as I get to know him barefoot. 

Kyle taking pictures of a forest fire that we passed on the way to Denali
What started with the cranes, changed with the boy, and solidified with the weather.  With the dropping temperatures came the departure of our much-adored summer interns, the closure of my favorite summer grub spots, and the realization that my dream cabin’s screen walls wouldn’t keep my pillow from freezing to the wall in late September.  Which brings us to new things.  A new cabin on Sarty lane (no street sign, but at least this one has a road!), new winter gear including mucklucks and custom-studded (as in I sat with on the floor and drilled 175 3/8” panhead screws into snow tires) bike tires, and a new job title as a program and event assistant at the Northern Alaska Environmental Center.  My beloved “landlords,” Jen and Larry, departed for Suriname (an act that Sara and I, along with 30 others, protested with signs along their route to the airport) and left behind a new responsibility- keeping up with their husky, Chandalar.

Sara model's her carhardt beat suit and our new cabin
Finding the Lucky Charm(s)
The “flex-fall” shift has also brought about new parts of me.  I feel most alive when I am discovering things, so the month of September was plain exhausting.  The best way I can think to describe it is to borrow Paolo Coehlo’s words from The Alchemist: “when a person really desires something, all the universe conspires to help that person to realize his dream.”  Lately my luck has been such that I feel like the whole world must be working its ways in my favor. 

Teaser shots from the Arctic Refuge caribou hunt
It began with a hunting trip to the Arctic Refuge.  I have dreamed of this place for years, and one day a board member called the Center and invited me to come on a caribou hunt with him. The hunt itself was rich with luck- we saw everything from a muskox to a lynx, had incredibly warm weather, slept with the tent door completely unzipped, and filled our freezers with five caribou.  The experience was far too large to fit here, but I promise to send the whole story soon!    
Watching the Northern Lights with Terry Tempest Williams
Everything just flowed from there.  A day after I returned from the refuge, I testified at my first public hearing- a scoping hearing for the BLM’s upcoming comprehensive plan on the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska.  A day later I found myself again watching the northern lights from the top of Ester dome with Kyle AND my favorite author, Terry Tempest Williams.  Two days later was my birthday, and we happened to drive into Denali National park on the clearest day I’ve ever seen.  It also happened to be one of the two days a year that they let people drive down the road through the wilderness area.  To do this, you have to enter and win a lottery. We did neither.  But thanks to some kind of luck, the ranger who stopped us responded to my joking request for a ticket by handing us one behind his clipboard.  So on my twenty-second birthday, I ate with Denali to my right and a family of grizzly bears to my left.  A week later I found myself in Washington D.C. choking back tears while trying to explain it all to a Senator.  
We brought the arctic to DC!
 Growing Somewhere
      If September was a month of discovery, October was a month of processing that one of my friends described as “growing up.”  As a loyal fan of Peter Pan, I have always been highly suspicious of this phrase.  It seems too teleological, too simple.  A bean plant grows toward the sun; its shape is influenced by the world around it, the other plants, angles of light, the amount of rain, the worms in the soil.  As any good Alaskan knows, the sun isn’t always “up.”  I aim to grow outward like a tree’s branches; to expand and contract in many directions at one time.  I do not wish to follow a single path, but prefer to mimic the best of what surrounds me.  At this moment, I am surrounded by a lot of things worth emulating.  People may come to Alaska for the wilderness, but I think they mostly end up staying for the people.  As an intern at the only environmental non-profit in town, I was almost instantly inducted into the “greenie” circles last summer.  While my job doesn’t pay me much in the way of cash, it comes with its own brand of life-enriching incentives such as a free bike and skis, endless doses of “sourdough” knowledge, and an invitation to six thanksgiving dinners. 
The Northern Center knows how to celebrate a birthday!
Dancing with the Crazies
Nothing grows independently. I am lucky to have a crew of people as crazy as I am to keep life interesting.  It was easy, for example, to secure a relay team to run the equinox marathon (consistently ranked as one of top three hardest marathons in the US) three days in advance.  Our team, known as “Team Burly” adopted the motto “seek truth” and trained by getting together the night before to make costumes.  My friends here have been known to pack four boxes of wine and about ten pounds of moose meat and cheese along twenty miles of trail to hot springs.  We have weekly themed “gourmet club” dinners, most of which degenerate into dance parties and Sunday brunch potlucks, which degenerate into napping.  My cabin in dance party central because of our lack of furniture and abundance of slippery floor.  And because I just really like dance parties.

The best way I can think of to illustrate these people is to tell the story of my first Fairbanks wedding.  Sean and Sharon planned a Quaker-style wedding in a beautiful clearing beside their B&B, the Cloudberry.  Unfortunately, they held an outdoor wedding during the rainy month of August.  To counter the pouring rain, tuxedo-clad friends rigged a series of twelve large tarps suspended some twenty feet in the air.  Despite their great engineering, there was one spot in the canopy that periodically emptied its soggy contents into the audience.  Instead of disappointment, the Fairbanks gang chose to treat this oddity as a delight.  We wore rubber boots with silk skirts and screamed like guests at a water park as we got drenched.

Loren enjoys a day of soaking and singing at Tolovana
Dynamic Whirling (aka: slipping with style)
Just like I reflected on study abroad, I learn something new and novel nearly every day here.  Whether its how to raise $1,000 with a slideshow and fake ties, how to walk on ice, or what kind of bird seed my boreal chickadees like best- its all learning.  All around me, I see evidence of life changing forms.  The dahlias that bloomed so joyously in Sara’s garden all summer are now potted and antsy in our little cabin.  The fish persist under layers of frozen ice, and Arctic Ground squirrels literally freeze over winter.  Life is constantly created and destroyed, but energy is cycled.  Its all growth, which is to say its all change and movement, all a dynamic whirling.   What to do with all of this growing and slipping and learning?  I shoot small fractals of myself into the world: letter, smiles, scones.  The world always seems to give me back far more than I can possibly deserve.

Chandalar and I check out the trail ahead of us on the Tolovana trip
Lots and lots of love from the great white north,

Jenna

PS: Being in Alaska has one more perk- the most ridiculous political scene on the planet.  (see: the article on Sarah Palin in Vanity Fair).  For your viewing pleasure, I have attached a few of the more hilarious ads that have graced the Daily News Miner in the past few weeks.  Does that work for an explanation of November so far?
The moon over Denali

How to Explain an Alaskan Summer (Alaska 1)

July 2010
Greeting family and friends!  Welcome aboard to my attempts to stay in touch with y'all from my cabin without electricity or water.  This is long (as usual) but longER because it covers a lot of time and there is a LOT of time when it doesn't get dark. I tried to divide it into sections so you can skim.  My favorite is probably the last.  
How to explain an Alaskan summer?
This is home
Start with some local live bluegrass, Robin Dale Ford or Sweating Honey.  The rhythm would be the spinning of bike wheels on gravel trails.  The temperature would be “layering weather”- irregular but hopeful.  We started one Frisbee game in pouring rain, played through a double rainbow (yes, I’ve seen the you-tube video), and ended in bright sunshine and a trip to Hot Licks for some homemade ice cream.  There are so many sensations to describe.  The surge of joy that I feel when I round the bend of the mini peninsula and see my prayer-flag decorated little (10 x 12 with a loft, woodstove, and mostly screen walls) cabin on the banks of Goldstream creek after a long bike ride with my “ready for anything” pack.  The warmth of gathering veggies from the garden and sitting on the mossy ground around the fire pit with friends as we cook dinner in our cast-iron skillet.  The excitement of being on the road, feet out the window, equipped with the three b’s (berries, beer, and buddies), seeing the world splayed before me, heading out on a new adventure.  The sensation of the wet tundra between my toes as I pick cloudberries in the spot I am sworn to secrecy about.  Melting them into simple jam and storing it in our “ground fridges” for winter.  The non-stop laughter that comes from dancing a jig with a Gwich’in boy from Old Crow or shirtless cowboy from Healy at the Anderson bluegrass festival.  Perhaps my favorite, “bathing” by swimming circles and floating on my back in my muddy swimming hole, watching the sun’s reflections dance along the tall spruce trees that frame my world like a snow-globe, full of light.
Stacey emerges from the swimming hole
No, really, what have you done?

In the first fifty days since my graduation from college, my life has been anything but ordinary.  After many, many goodbyes in Kalamazoo (including a farewell to my long hair), I went home to Milford and savored a few days riding bikes, walking the goats, and relaxing with my family.  On the twentieth I flew to Alaska, just in time for the longest day of the year.  On my first day, I realized that jet lag does indeed exist, as I attempted to navigate job training, reunions, and a midnight sun baseball game, all on the solstice. 
Larry and Sara cooking dinner
From then until now my pattern has been abstract and hard to define.  I have spent most weekends away from Fairbanks.  The first in Anchorage winning the party of the great Alaska jamboree ultimate tournament by bringing a giant slip n’ slide and dressing like “hand bananas.”  The second in Seward, where we visited friends at fish camp, hiked, beheld the spectacle of the Mt. Marathon race (the 5k course goes up and down the mountain), begged (successfully) for showers, and moved around at the pace you would expect for eight twenty-somethings and a dog in a car.  The third weekend I found myself  kayaking the silty Tanana River from Fairbanks to Nenana (which felt like an uphill journey on the second day, thanks to record winds), with the staff and board of the Cold Climate Housing Research Center and some very disgruntled dogs.

Fisherman processing fish on the docks in Seward
The next week the Arctic team flew to the Biennial Gwich’in Gathering in Fort Yukon.  I found myself lying on the beach crossing arms with Sarah James (famous Gwich’in environmental activist) and 150 others as a helicopter flew over us and took aerial photos of our message to protect caribou and salmon.  As one who loves stories, I hit the jackpot among the gregarious elders and spent the week absorbing bonfire smoke and history and deflecting no-seeums and overenthusiastic men (with a limited degree of success). 
Gwich'in dancers perform the Caribou Skin Hut dance
The next in Anderson at a bluegrass festival, getting sharpie tattoos from little girls and sleeping under the stars with hundreds of others.  This past weekend I drove down to Anchorage to play in the Daze of Disc Tournament on a team called Las Zetas against teams like Oil Spill (had BP hats and shirts that said “we kill stuff”).  On Saturday I met up with a friend and we found our way to an art benefit featuring chocolate body casting and a medieval catapult that shot glittery watermelons.  We spent Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday hiking, watching salmon spawn in a misty river, and chartering a sailboat (I got to drive!) and sailing around Seward’s misty fjords in search of whales.

Siri, Hannah, Daylen and I model our mud art at Anderson

Sailing around Seward

And what are your plans?

Alaskan summers are full of choices.  As I glance back at my calendar, many days I was triple booked with options.  An endless stream of potlucks, lectures, $5 yoga, guitar lessons, live music, hikes, berry ventures, oh yes- and work, have filled my days before I have a chance to take a breath.  This past week I saw the moon for the first time since leaving Michigan.  It was a Tuesday night and I was walking out of a Trampled by Turtles concert in Denali.  There it was, looming bright above the Nenana River below me.  I would have jumped for joy if my toes weren’t so numb from the glacial river.  The moon has returned as a reminder of what is to come.  So much of my carefree life- the lack of electricity and water, (or closed walls for that matter), car (I traded berries for a mountain bike!), normal refrigerator (I have a cooler in the ground), and the simple idea that enough blankets will keep me warm, are becoming slowly more complicated with the coming of winter. 

Olin and Aaron relax by the river before Trampled by Turtles concert
As you can probably tell, Alaska is a place of incredible opportunities.  In the North open seating means you can probably fly the plane.  So after much soul-searching and sun basking, I have decided to stay in Fairbanks at least until May.  It was one of the easier decisions I have made, I simply can’t imagine being anywhere else. I look forward to the challenge of winter; the negative fifty weeks, being forced to curl up with the untouched books that I lugged here, rethinking my concept of light and dark and enjoying the aurora borealis.  So far in my winter stock I have a good amount of jam and some firewood. For a job I have been offered to stay on working at the Northern Alaska Environmental Center.  I am currently working with our ED to create the job description, but my position will involve working on the Arctic program to help celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and protect it from some very scary new drilling proposals, and perhaps writing a history of the Northern center!  The former president of our board is letting me take an oral history class that he teaches at the University of Alaska Fairbanks for free, so I’ll get my school fix.  For transport my every generous “landlord,” Larry, (we pay rent in bagels and cabbage) has offered to let me have their very sweet husky named Chandalar for the winter while they travel and set up a permaculture non-profit in the Amazon.  He is perhaps the most relaxed dog I have ever met and I look forward to learning to skijour with him.  For warmth (in addition to the dog) I have a crew of wonderful friends including two potential roommates, Adele and Sara.  Together we will have four dogs.  We’re stalking Craig’s list for a cabin as I write.

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This is our "family shot," me, Chandalar and Sara in Telulah

And what have you learned?

So how can I describe my summer so far in an e-mail?  It can’t be done.  Perhaps its one of those things you can see in my eyes.  I’ll post pictures soon.  My original concept for this e-mail (before I lost my flash drive) was to write about what I have learned since graduating this June.  Here is the abbreviated version:

This is how we get home (beneath me is goldstream creek)

1. Balance is everything.  In life and in my daily crossings of the log bridge (approx 20 feet long and 15 feet up over the river).  I am currently training for the log bridge Olympics which will take place between my friend Kaarle and I.  He claims to be able to walk it backwards with no hands, no vision, and flaming chainsaws.  I am working on a will.

2. Shoes are crap. Life is better without them, see above. 

3.  Beer is the universal currency, it can beat the Euro any day.  So far beer has gotten me a bike tune-up, cabin in Denali, concert tickets, tools, and a nice pair of boots.

4. Its all about the karma.  One day I was riding home and stopped to grab a stray dog that was running by the road.  In the process, my cell phone took leave from my backpack and was found on College road.  Before I even got home and noticed it was gone, someone had found it and returned it to my roommate.

5. Bathrooms with doors are crap.  As are ceramic seats.  The woods trumps all.

Hannah and i hiking angel rocks
6. Life is for sharing.  My friend Sara helped me move my stuff into my cabin.  She really liked the place and I told her she was “welcome to crash here whenever she wanted.”  The next day around 6 she called me and asked when I was coming “home.”  “Home?” I probed.... “Yeah, I moved my stuff in today,” she replied.  I smiled and have been doing so ever since.  She is the ideal Alaskan roomie.

7. The power of saying no.  This may seem like an ironic end to an e-mail full of me saying yes to random adventures, but I really feel that I have gained the most by virtue of my decision to abstain from electricity, running water, a car, and an immediate transition into more schooling.  Saying no to these things makes me appreciate the things that matter- the wonderful and generous people around me, the spontaneous beauty of life without a clock, and the freedom of going with the flow.
Me in the best seat in the house, overlooking Goldstream Creek