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