ANWR Christmas

Posted on January 10, 2016 by Keely

I think I’m going to be in Alaska for a long time.

Jake has always said “Keely, the look on your face when you walked out of that classroom on the first day… I knew you’d be in Alaska a while”

This wasn’t the look on my face, yet, but it’s a pretty darn good look.

It’s a year later now, almost to the day, and we talked about it again a few days back. He could see it right away, I guess, and I guess on some level I’ve known almost as long.

Last week, in Ohio, Jesse gave me a crash course in chainsaws. My hoodie pockets are full of tiny wood shavings and I feel like a badass. Or at least someone who is approaching badass and isn’t scared completely shitless of chainsaws anymore. I’m working on building the skills to take care of myself out here, and I have miles and miles to go. Even just washing dishes at Geoff’s over break (he doesn’t have running water) was a learning experience.

Geoff took me camping in ANWR for Christmas. We hung around Arctic village for a few days, hoping the temperature would pop up over -30. When it finally did, we jumped (-25 wasn’t much of an improvement, but you take what you can get). Just as we managed to get the tent up at the site he’d chosen, the temperature started dropping. It settled in the forties that night and didn’t shift for days. It dropped to -45 at the coldest, and I thought my buttcheeks might freeze solid when I went out to pee, but it was outrageously beautiful.

When it’s cold like that, smoke from the woodstove settles in the still air.

We boiled snow for drinking water, and kept the bottles close to the stove so they wouldn’t freeze solid. We kept the frozen fruit by the door, and moved it closer before snacking so that it wouldn’t be -40 when we tried to eat it.

The sun never kissed our side of the horizon while we were out. We had a few hours of long, soft daylight each day, and endless hours of clear, starry night.

When it’s that cold, engines freeze up. With the chainsaw, you can just bring it into the tent to warm up, but you have to get up every few hours to start the snowmachine (otherwise it might get too cold to start, and then you’re in trouble unless you’ve got some handy, safe way to put fire under the cowling). Geoff literally brought the kitchen sink (it’s a big, handy, enamel bowl, in his case, and fits nicely in an ActionPacker) but drew the line at the generator. Every night we were out, his sleep was broken when the fire would die and the temperature in the tent would plummet. He’d stoke it up, then head out to run the sno-go for a while.

On one morning’s ride, we stopped here just to stare at the beautiful sky and the light on the snow.

On the last night of our adventure, we rode out and found a bit of high land with a view of the mountains and had ourselves a picnic dinner.

We built our fire on a hill very much like this one and waited for the moon to rise and fill the valley with light.

I knocked low, dead limbs off the trees with an axe, and Geoff used the sno-go to pack down the snow in our campfire area for easy walking. He unloaded the wood we’d hauled with us (sizable logs from an earlier stop) and started handing me kindling. It was -20 or so, and the wind was blowing a little. I was grateful for the fire, once we got it going.

The stars came out of the murky, day-gray sky first, and we compared knowledge of constellations. Then the moon spilled its light against our backs and the trees, and the smoke from our fire covered its face and made it turn colors. I have come to love the shifting smoke-shadow that the moon casts on snow. It’s every bit as mesmerizing as fire, but so much more cold and ethereal. Eventually, the valley was brimming with moonlight. There was no sound but the chattering fire, no light but the light of our camp and the moon. We were thirty trail-miles from the village. I have never been so far north or so far from other humans.

Geoff wrapped some caribou in bacon and packed it in foil, then threw it right on the fire. I warmed tortillas gingerly on the edge of the blaze. We ate hungrily and fast as the fire consumed the last of our wood, then packed up quickly and unceremoniously while the northern lights started to spool out over the treetops and rode back to camp, with a hurried, chilly stop to load wood that Geoff had cut on the way out.

The tent warmed up fast, and the temperature outside dropped. It was in the thirties again by the time we headed back to town the next morning.

It was nearly noon when I took this picture. We were on our hurried way back to the village so that I could make my 2:00 flight. It’s hard to get moving before sunrise.

I need to learn to do this for myself. Geoff is awesome, but I’m independent by nature and fierce about it from experience. And I think I’m going to be in Alaska for a long time.

Inevitably Skiing

Posted on November 28, 2015 by Keely

My love for skiing and distaste for organized sports has led inevitably to daily P.E. excursions on skis.

My kids seem to enjoy it, and I love the quiet and space and daylight.

Ben and I skied the ten miles around big lake two weeks ago. Even though we had to break a few miles of trail, skiing was hours faster than walking.

Sean’s here, which has led inevitably to…

…this! He’s doing awesome, and digging it, which warms the cockles of my heart. They’re even more warmed by the fact that, despite his longer legs, I’m still faster. Ha!

Skiing, snowshoeing, getting a little frosty, a little eccentric

Posted on November 10, 2015 by Keely

It’s been all about the skiing with me lately. I’ve been out every day for a while now, excluding travel days and Fairbanks days. It’s like flying, when you hit your rhythm, and it’s a quiet way to move over the snow. I love it.

This is from last week, when Angel kept Ben, Terri and me company on an afternoon turn around the village. I miss that sunshine: it’s been cloudy here for ages now, and with the tipping of the earth, we’re only getting a few hours of daylight: I come to school in the dark and head home in the twilight. I ski every evening in blue half-light under the heavy clouds. Before too long, the sun won’t break the trees anymore, and the shadows will disappear into the deeper shadows until spring. I’m hoping for clear skies soon soon soon.

I went snowshoeing outside of Fairbanks this weekend with a new friend. I flew to town to see some kids at boarding school in Nenana, but the weather was crap and I didn’t make it out to them. I ran a few errands (bought a sled, a bunch of ice cream for the school, and some parsnips) and had some food that I didn’t have too cook, but the best part of the weekend was easily the part where I was miles from Fairbanks, playing in the woods.

Scott broke trail the whole way as we climbed a steep hill and then hiked along a windy ridge. Stretching my legs and actually climbing for the first time in months felt awesome. By dusk, we’d only made it about four miles, and, with the wind whipping our tracks off the ridgeline and the flagging tape that marked the path buried in a rock-candy snow-crust, we opted to turn around rather than risk getting lost in the dark. The windward sides of both our faces prickled white with frost as the sun went down and we crunched back along the ridge. Later, sheltered in the trees, we all but skied down the mountain using the snowshoes to control the tumbling, galloping roll that gravity gave us. I loved it. That feeling of falling and the soft snow spraying all around made me giddy. The rest of the weekend I could take or leave, but that part was awesome.

I haven’t wanted to stop moving since I got home. I went for a walk with some of my middle schoolers today, and skied to the post office after school to look for letters.

It really felt like coming home. When Pat dropped me off at Wright’s on Sunday, I felt a huge sigh burst out of my chest. I hadn’t realized I was holding my breath, but I guess I was. While I waited for my plane, a former student pulled me aside and asked me to bring her son home to Venetie and his grandparents. I boarded the plane with her kid on my hip and he fell asleep in my lap as soon as we lifted off the ground, a bush baby for sure, lulled by the engine’s drone and the smooth ride. I felt so comfortable, sitting with that warm little kid in his batman hat in my arms and watching the roads and the parking lots and the nasty brown slush peculiar to roads and parking lots wink out of existence below us. I was relieved to see Fairbanks disappear, ready to resume my real life, to be back in the bush.

Real life. A year ago, this week, I quit my job in Arkansas. I’d never been to Alaska. I’d never heard of Venetie. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing.

I have arrived. In so many ways, I have arrived. This independence and remoteness is my natural habitat.

I’m getting eccentric, though, I think. All I can think about when I think about going back to town is how much I hate parking lots.

Blaze Orange Hat

Posted on October 28, 2015 by Keely

A year ago, November
I bought a blaze orange hat for backpacking in the Ozarks.
It was opening weekend: Deer season in Arkansas.
I thought better safe than sorry.

My friends slept through sunrise
While I started a fire, made a cup of tea, walked to the ridge to touch the morning.
The sky, rose and pearly, broke against the trees and I felt the weight of the world
Spinning me into the sun

I looked over my shoulder
at all the lidded eyes and quiet faces asleep in the grass, then turned back
to the mad, pink panic of sunrise and felt like I’d stepped for a moment out of a box
Where I was living safe and sorry.

I thought, I never want to be sorry.

A year ago, November
I emptied my backpack and started a fire. I quit my job and burned
the broken parts of my romance. I packed warm clothes: long underwear
wool socks, my blaze orange hat

This morning, in Alaska
I packed my things in a hurry. I put on my long underwear and wool socks,
But couldn’t find my hat. My friend, no stranger to a sunrise, lent me one to wear.
It’s cold, Alaska, in October.

What a wonder.
I lost my blaze orange hat in an eight-by-eight tent in a field of white. Strange.
how that white smells of smoke in a pearly, frozen country the size of the sky.
My skin, too, smells of smoke.

I know I will never be sorry.

We made snow angels until we were black and blue

Posted on October 19, 2015 by Keely

Yesterday morning, I knocked on Ben’s door at about 9:00. I heard a muffled shuffling noise and a faint, despairing “oh no!” before he opened the door and let me in. He knew I was planning on coming, and was hoping I wouldn’t. The agenda: a ten-mile hike around Big Lake.

New snow had fallen in the night, but it wasn’t enough to break out the skis again. Those have been retired since the first heavy snow melted into a sheet of treacherous ice. Gingerly was a fan-favorite vocabulary word last week. P does an awesome impression of someone slipping on the ice for vocab-charades. We put on long johns, packed snacks and water, borrowed a GPS and a tagalong dog from Jake and Shannon, and set out, leaving a trail of boot prints in the fresh powder.The snow masked the mountain in the distance, but it softened everything, muffling the sound of our steps in a heavy white scarf, and it covered the world with a fresh canvas for the little squirrels and hares and mice to fingerpaint on. It also hid a sheet of ice, left over from the last snow, under a slippery layer of deceptively crisp-looking new snow. I fell in an ever-more-balletic progression of styles. Once, I fell flat on my ass like a four year old. Another time, I wiped out, stood up, and wiped out again (Ben was laughing so hard he nearly keeled over too). Another time my right leg slipped out from under me and my left leg lifted in an elegant high kick as I went down. Ben was falling too, though not as extravagantly as I was, and even Angel (the dog) faceplanted a couple of times. I’ve got black and blue bruises all over my body, but I had a blast.We met a fella from the village at this crossroads, and he sent us down the middle road, which, after a time, brought us to the shore of the lake. We didn’t dare try the ice, but there’s enough out there to support the snow, and the sky and the ground and the whole world looked like a blank page.

We walked on, exploring old four-wheeler trails along the shore until we came to a scrubby, marshy area at the north end of the lake. Here, it was safest to skate, plowing up an inch or two of snow in front of our boots with each step. We walked on ice dotted with grass clumps for at least an hour, picking our way through the low brush and scrubby trees, before we came to a trail on mostly high, dry ground again.

After about five hours, we made it to the landing at Big Lake. At some point since the last time we were there, some knucklehead took a shotgun and blew a hole clear through the outhouse. When he saw it, Ben exclaimed “well now it’s useless!” which made me laugh so hard I fell one more time.