Early (metaphorical) Frost and Pictures from Tustumena Lake

Posted on August 15, 2016 by Keely

I went for a hike with Geoff last night out to the east of the village. There’s a gravel road that runs that way for a few miles, past countless little ponds and a caribou fence and through clouds of mosquitos. I am enchanted by this inviting, velvety-beautiful landscape. I didn’t want to turn around and come back to town, so I dreamed up a short backpacking trip in that direction for labor day weekend to explore the ridge that shelters the valley and to try to reach Old John Lake. That might be one of the last nice weekends before it gets truly cold. The leaves are already red on the blueberries, and the fireweed is hazing sunny hillsides with its rich fall mahogany and white.

I’m in Arctic Village right now because my boat is not finished.

All summer, I dreamed about those long, honey-slow August days meandering in unfamiliar sloughs, the late mornings breaking camp on sunny sandbars, and the long twilit evenings by a pinprick fire in the vast, dark blanket of the wilderness. It’s too late now to make the trip at all, and I find my summer gone unexpectedly in an early killing frost.

When the builder called as we were driving the trailer down to Delta to pick up the boat last week, I felt my heart split and I cried, off and on, for the better part of several hours.

I think I have a name for her, this freight canoe, but I haven’t said it aloud yet. It’s astronomical and arctic, musical and literary and brave. We’ll see. Hopefully, she’ll be completed for fall hunting before the river closes in October.

A few weeks ago, back on the Kenai, we spent a weekend on Caribou Island. We loaded Geoff’s boat and made two trips up the river and then across milky Tustumena Lake to the cabin.

The cabin was windswept and sunlit and cozy, just right.

That first night, we pulled the boat ashore at the narrow channel between the island and the mainland, and while we stood there, picking up loose driftwood for the fire, a bull moose crossed from the island right behind the boat and came ashore not two-hundred feet from us, belly dripping.

Geoff reenacted the spectacle.

For the first few days, it was windy. The boat dragged anchor and washed up on the rocky beach in front of the cabin multiple times before we got the hook set far enough from shore. We stayed on the island until Saturday, when the wind laid itself down enough for us to get out in the boat to explore the east end of the lake, where the glacier feeds it.

That end of the lake is chilled by a glacial breeze and fed by multiple clear creeks where sockeye salmon spawn. We poled up into these creeks, wary in case of bears, whose wide trails split the green grass banks. They were sunlit and sparkling, fish-smelling and dank, rich and green and electric with living things feasting and breeding in the bacchanalian excess of the salmon run.

I found an enormous eagle feather on the beach at the mouth of one such creek, which I left on the wildlife camera some other visitor had strapped to a driftwood limb.

We were sorry to leave that place. I hope to go back someday, maybe next time to stay a little longer.

Did you know

Posted on July 28, 2016 by Keely

Did you know that salmon hearts, sizzled with butter and garlic, taste just like mussels? I learned to clean fish yesterday, and we set aside the hearts for a treat.

Feeeeeeesh!

I’m in Soldotna right now, recovering from long nights of dipnetting. Geoff and I got a hotel room for tonight, and tonight will mark the second or third time I’ve slept in a real bed since the beginning of July, the first time since leaving Maine. I’m looking forward to sleep, but this might be my last chance to use the internet for a while, so I’d better make the most of it.

I arrived in Fairbanks two weeks ago after visiting friends in Washington. Geoff was still working, so I had some time to relax. Those days were hot and sweaty, and I spent one whole day in the Museum of the North (where they have some awesome Alaskan art, air conditioning, and some truly weird furniture made of taxidermied animal parts) and another whole day alternating between sizzling on a towel with a good book and plunging into the icy Chena River while ducks laughed at me.

Friday came. The plan was to drive down the Richardson Highway and head for the Kenai to go fishing, which is more or less what we did, though there were some snags. In absolutely typical fashion, Geoff was a little late out of the starting gate. My stuff accounts for about a tenth of the mess, and it still looked like this when I crawled into my sleeping bag at midnight.

See Geoff. See Geoff pack. See Geoff still packing. Take a nap.

In the morning we finished packing the truck and loading the boat and stopped for the four Fs: Food (breakfast/brunch), Fuel (for the truck), Freddy’s (Fred Meyer for camp groceries) and Fill (water containers, because running water isn’t an everywhere kind of thing) and finally left Fairbanks around two in the afternoon, bound for a good camp spot south of Delta where we would meet friends bound for Dawson on a motorcycle.

I always forget until I’m in it how vast and magnificent Alaska can be. The Richardson Highway is beautiful. It traces the pipeline from Fairbanks to Valdez, running beside the broad and braided mud of the Tanana and through wide valleys furred with spruce trees, set with jewel-blue lakes. It’s big enough to get comfortably lost on purpose, to build a campfire so far from anyone else that no one sees the smoke. We camped with friends in a quarry that first night. Their dog dragged a whole caribou leg out of the woods while we cooked a midnight dinner.

Geoff and I spent the next night camped in the rain at Quartz lake, then visited Michael, the guy who’s building the canoe, in the morning. He had the hull ready for us to look at, a flexible, lightweight form, ragged at the top. He’s making something wonderful, there. It felt good, pressing my hands to what will be my boat. August seventh is our tentative pickup date. Soon after, we’ll head for the Yukon.

After a stop for showers and laundry (it’s common, here, to see places advertising the two. Since lots of folks are traveling through and many do without running water, these are useful services), we drove out of the rain and slept at Paxson Lake under a clear sky. I walked to the shore in the blue and gold morning and sat on a bench overlooking the water. There is so little summer, here, but everything in summer so so lush and lively. I watched the clouds, the minnows, the waving fireweed. I could almost hear the blueberries bulging, the spruce needles spooling out. I speculated about what percent of Alaska is, at any given time, covered with moose poop. I thought about the coming school year. I felt guilty for sitting still in the middle of so much activity and walked back to camp to get ready to head out, singing Beatles tunes to ward off bears (I’d forgotten my bear spray like a dodo and you never know).

Farther south, we took the Glenn highway through the mountains to Wasilla, stopping so that I could get my first long look at a glacier. Matanuska Glacier impressed me profoundly. It has a presence, something very grand and stately and dangerous and fragile that got a grip on me as I perched on the ice chests in the truck, staring from an overlook. I didn’t expect to be moved so deeply, but what should one expect of a glacier? I dried a tear or two and climbed back into the cab, Wasilla-bound.

The confluence of a blue creek with the muddy Matanuska.

“Hey Geoff, if you got the chance would you go to the moon?”
“Nope. I don’t think I would.”
“Why not?”
“It’s a wasteland! All cold and dark. And the food would be terrible.”
“Kinda like living in the arctic, huh? So isolated…”
“It’s completely different!”

It’s hard to believe we made that whole trip in a day, but we did. We picked up fishing licenses in Wasilla and learned that a fire was burning right beside the Seward highway, south of Anchorage, and that the road could close at any minute. It was nine at night but we decided to press on south.

We drove through the burning area and watched a helicopter dip water out of the ocean. Flames were visible on the cliffs above the road and smoke nearly obscured the rising moon. Still, we stopped for water at a pullout where a pipe pours clean water directly out of a rock face. “You watch for fireballs falling down the cliff while I fill the jugs, Keely.”

We were both tired and cranky by the time we made it to the campground at nearly two in the morning, but we found a campsite and got the tent up in the end.

After that, it was a waiting game. Gillnetters fish all day at the mouth of the river, essentially blocking it off. It’s not worth the launch fee to go out when no fish are getting through, so we had to wait for the dipnet fishery to be opened for twenty-four hour access. Our moment came and we set our alarms for 1:30 am. By 3:30 we were fishing an incoming tide in the not-quite dark of a drizzly night.

There are two ways to dipnet: some folks stand in the water up to their ribs holding long-handled nets.

Here’s the crowd at the river’s mouth, dipnetting from shore.

Others putt along holding nets out beside their boats. When a fish hits the net, you feel a bang and haul it in. We fished from Geoff’s boat, cruising down the banks of the river all night and into the morning.

Some very well-fed seals at dawn

On a good day, in a good year, I hear the boats are shoulder to shoulder.

We pulled the boat out at eleven the next morning and went back to camp to sleep. That night, we put in again, this time in more serious rain. As the extra hands, I had lots of downtime through that night. I figured out I can sleep in the rain and cold tucked in among the ice chests and actionpackers if I’m in full foulies with handwarmers in my boots and a ball cap to shed the water. It was a rough night, but the morning was beautiful.

In all, we put the boat in four times and came home with not nearly enough fish. The run peaked early this year and the dipnetters never had a good opening. Still, I’m amazed that there’s a place in the world where you can just stick a net like that in the water, wait, and pull out a fish. We don’t do that in Maine – there just aren’t fish anymore. Anyone I know at home would be over the moon to come home with just one of the fish we brought in, even a flounder we’d have casually thrown back.

Good company.

Pee break.

Camp

We’re off to Tustumena Lake for a long weekend, well-deserved. I’ll try to remember to take breaks from relaxing and soaking up the wonderful to take a few pictures.

I can’t seem to use a phone in the summer

Posted on June 22, 2016 by Keely

I’ve been all over the place this summer, from Anchorage to Boston to Brattleboro to Midcoast Maine to Fox Hollow Farm, and if you’ve tried to get in touch with me, I’m so sorry. I’ve been awful at phone calls and emails and every other kind of contact. I miss the routine solitude of my life in the village.

Nicole, I am so bummed I missed you in Anchorage. My old phone was very dead around that time and by the time I replaced it and figured out how to check my voicemail on the new machine, you were long gone. Cathy, I’ll give you a call this week and we’ll set up a visit in Maine.

My struggle with communication is just one way I’ve been having trouble adjusting to summer. I was on the T the other day in Boston and I just couldn’t shake the thought: People do this every day. I can’t believe people do this every day.

I know I’m spoiled. In the village, I almost never have to sit on my butt just to get from place to place. I absolutely never have to sit on my butt in a dank-smelling, grubby metal tube full of strangers.

I know the city has its perks: Sean has been taking sailing lessons, going to the art museum, and hosting ice cream socials (Margarita sorbet? Wasabi maple ice cream anyone?). There are restaurants, theaters, intriguing strangers and old friends.

Old friends are the best.

Boston is full of folks from college and from Arkansas. It’s so strange and wonderful to be surrounded by people I’ve known for such a long time.

Bethan gave an incredibly powerful and personal performance in Brattleboro after a year of circus training with NECCA. None of us remained dry-eyed.

I woke up a few days ago with Bre’s son crawling across my bed in the guest room. He has a great smile and sweet curls and a friendly nature, and he seems to be a fan of nori rolls (at least of smooshing them up and getting them all over people and things). Bre is the first of my close friends to have kids: I’ve never known a baby that I’m sure I’ll know forever. This is really something.

Tim inspired a really successful birthday gift. He and I are going backpacking before I head back to Alaska. Look out, wilderness, we’re back!

Now I’m in Ohio, and Jesse and Chelsea have filled their home with wonderful people, as usual. It’s busy and cheerful and warm and tasty and creative. I have my hammock in the woods for quiet space among the fireflies, and otherwise it’s all games and cooking and farm stuff and talk with important, beloved people.

Still, I miss the simplicity of life in the village.

Camped on the spit in Homer.

Dinner!

Mom in her garden, the climbing roses in bloom.

Rock On Spruce Spring Seat

Lobster!

The view from my hammock on the farm in Ohio.

I did it again

Posted on May 23, 2016 by Keely

I bought another boat. What is it about the early days of summer that just does this to me?

This one is an eighteen foot square-stern canoe, and it’ll be built this summer by a small company (a dude named Michael) here in Alaska called Yukon Freightworks Canoe Company. I wanted something to take on serious adventures up interior rivers, and this felt right. With a small engine, Geoff and I will use it to make the trip from Circle up to Arctic in August, down the Yukon and then up the Chandalar, even in the shallow places where heavier, deeper drawing boats bottom out, and it’ll maybe be good for caribou in the fall, which would be a pretty cool adventure.

I went up to Arctic last week to visit and relax after school got out. On Saturday, when I got off the plane, the river was cluttered and hissing with ice. By Tuesday, it was clear, high water full of muskrats and ducks. I hiked along the river on Wednesday afternoon and took a few pictures. A willow in bloom hummed with bees and made my heart fizz. When I came across a four-wheeler and spotted some folks out hunting ducks a little ways along the bank, I turned and slogged through the marsh to get back to Geoff’s place, stopping for raven feathers and tiny purple flowers in bloom. When I got to the house, I napped in my hammock, strung between two stringy spruce trees, until the sun dragged over the mountains. The next morning, it snowed.

I can’t quite believe that this staggeringly beautiful, remote place is my new home. I have a P.O Box there (PO Box 22045, Arctic Village, AK 99722) and now that I’ve turned in all my school keys from Venetie, the keys to that box and the key to the Sassy White Bravo are my only keys in this universe. I like the things I can unlock, very much.

This week, I’m taking classes in Anchorage to maintain my teaching license. To get here, I took the train from Fairbanks to Wasilla with Geoff, a trip I highly recommend to anyone who is thinking of visiting Alaska. The views are magnificent, the food is good, and the staff are informed and friendly. I have always liked taking the train because the landscape moves by at such a graceful pace. It’s not headlong and hurried like in a 12-passenger van full of kids. We saw some cool old home sites, several moose, trumpeter swans on their nests, and a single lost caribou, way out of his territory and all alone. Over lunch, we dreamed up a backpacking trip that would make use of the flag stop service that some routes still offer.

Yesterday was the best though. Geoff brought me up to Hatcher pass and we hiked several miles in along the Gold Mint trail through this beautiful river valley. I’m an idiot for not bringing my camera. There were a lot of people for the first few miles (forgive me, I’ve been in the bush, there were probably twenty), but as we slowly climbed up the valley alongside the clear-running river, the trail got swampier and snowier, the footprints grew less and less dense, and the cottonwood trees, aspens and alders thinned away to willows. We passed beaver pond after beaver pond, right beside the river, and spotted what I think must have been a wolverine in the rocks across the water. Lupines were blooming on the south side of the valley, and I was so glad to see them that I got a little misty-eyed.

After a while, we came to a place where the river was shallower and braided and the sun was shining on a sandbar in the middle. We took our shoes off, rolled up our pants and waded across the knee-deep, frigid moat, swearing and shrieking at the cold. My feet went completely numb and then burned with the cold, but the sand was warm on the other side, despite the patches of snow still clinging to it. Geoff and I both fell asleep, barefoot in the mountain sun, for a blissful half hour in the afternoon.

My Auntie Sheila (sender of bomb-ass care packages – THANK YOU – the kids [and I] loved the trail mix) tells me that my father said, after visiting me this spring, that if he had come to Alaska at my age, he’d have never come back. There’s something in that, Pops.

Inservice

Posted on March 13, 2016 by Keely

My district doesn’t have a spring break, but between third and fourth quarter we have one week of inservice. Inservice, this year, was held in Fort Yukon, which was a major disappointment. In the past, inservice has been in Fairbanks, where we had hotel rooms and the opportunity to go shopping (I’m talking grocery shopping here, not recreational shopping – this is a big deal for bush teachers) and eat out at restaurants. For most people, this inservice meant sleeping on classroom floors and eating cafeteria food. For Geoff and me, it meant camping out.

Last Friday, I made cookies and raspberry bars and dozens of morning glory muffins. I froze it all, along with some beef stew, to get ready for the trip. Fall inservice was in Fort Yukon, too, and the only reason I didn’t die of starvation that week (I’m not big on cafeteria food) was beer (Fort Yukon is not a dry village, like Venetie and Arctic). Geoff showed up late on Friday night with a broken swing arm on his snowmachine. We spent Saturday getting ready and fixing his machine (the replacement swing arm he procured from someone in the village didn’t fit quite right, and rubbed against the steering rod dealie, which made left turns awkward). We took off on Sunday.

I didn’t feel ready to take the sassy white Bravo out for such a big adventure (Fort Yukon is fifty miles from here, by trail) so I rode on the back of Geoff’s snowmachine. It was windy, but not too cold. I saw my first lynx running across a slough ahead of us, long-legged and elegant. The trail was narrow and brushy, so we had to dodge sproingy, whippy twigs the whole way, but it wasn’t a difficult ride, and I almost regretted leaving my machine in Venetie until we hit the Christian River.

The Christian River is narrow and steep-sided, so once you get down one bank, there’s nothing for it but to gun it up the opposite side – you’d never get up without that momentum. For us, the problem was a branch that lay right across the trail at head height. Geoff couldn’t stop and I couldn’t see it, and as we roared up the far bank, there was this awful knocking sound that came from inside my skull. We both came away reeling from hitting that same branch head-on.

By then it was getting dark, we’d made about thirty miles of the fifty we needed, and we’d passed the major hurdle of the trip. Our heads were both spinning, and the place was perfect, so we decided to camp beside the trail at the top of the riverbank. The river must have flooded at some point, because there was dead wood everywhere. Geoff started gathering wood for a fire while I untied the sled.

The sled, fully loaded with the bare minimum for a week of inservice fun!

Over the course of a month, Geoff broke well over half the hundred miles of trail he rode to get to Venetie from Arctic. You can’t break trail with a heavily-loaded sled, so on the way down, he left the tent and chainsaw and other useful stuff at a camp he’d set up weeks before, close to his end of the trail. He’d planned to go back for those things at some point, but breaking trail took longer than expected, and when he made it to Venetie, he was limping on a busted swing arm.

All this is to say that when we stopped for the night, we didn’t have the usual amenities: no tent, no cots, no chainsaw, no woodstove to heat the tent we didn’t have. There was plenty of dry wood, and building a fire was no problem without the chainsaw. We collected the soft tips of spruce branches and laid them out on the snow for a mattress, then laid the tarps over that, and wrapped up in the biggest tarp to sleep. Geoff bungeed his rifle to a tree by our heads and kept a flare gun and the bear spray that lives in my backpack close at hand. I had my awesome sleeping bag (thank you, Pat in Tulsa) and I never felt the cold as I laid out on my back that night and watched the aurora dance between the treetops.

In the morning, I used the little white gas stove I typically take backpacking to heat some stew for breakfast and to boil snow for coffee, tea, and the day’s drinking water. Geoff fed the fire and repacked the sled. My sleeping bag hung on a line between two trees, steaming away the night’s accumulated ice and moisture from snowmelt (which finds its way through tarps and spruce boughs effortlessly) and breathing (which ices the top of the bag very much like it ices neckwarmers). We had only twenty miles to go, and we had until 1:00 pm to get there, so we took our time breaking camp.

We’d thought we might find a new campsite on the way into town, but ran too late to stop and look. It’s a good thing we didn’t try to push it, too: we got lost on the river just outside of town, spinning in endless, windy sloughs, looking for a GPS point that claimed to be Fort Yukon, but definitely wasn’t. By the time we got straightened out and found our way to the village and then to the school, we had cut it as close as we could. We walked through the cafeteria doors at exactly 1:00, shedding snow from our outer layers and pink in the face from the biting wind on the river, but on time.

We didn’t get out in daylight that evening to find the best trail out of town. We went looking for it in the dark, but after Geoff nearly drove the snowmachine and sled off a too-steep bank, we called it quits and threw the tarp down in a ditch at the end of the road. It was a nice enough ditch with a great view of the sky, and no one came by that night, but that was a low point, for sure. When he started snoring I almost strapped on my skis and headed back to town, only stopping because I didn’t want to ski alone through an unfamiliar village in the middle of the night.

After that, things improved. We found a beautiful camp about six and a half miles out of town on the bank of a slough with plenty of dead wood for fires. I flattened a broad area and made a thick bed of spruce tips. Geoff started a fire and stockpiled wood. We arrived late, windburnt and frosty almost every day, carrying into the cafeteria with us the valuables we couldn’t leave strapped to the sled on Fort Yukon’s main drag, making a total spectacle of ourselves. Geoff borrowed a chainsaw to help with the firewood situation, and we were living pretty comfortably.

Ben skied out with me one night, and I was alone at camp for a few hours while Geoff ran Ben back to town and spent some time visiting folks who were staying with a friend in the village. I had started feeling sick (this happens to me during inservice – I missed a day of last spring’s inservice, too) while Ben and I were skiing, and those few hours I lay in my sleeping bag, feeling weak and woozy, waiting for Geoff to come back, watching it start to snow, and wondering how much time had passed, were some of the scariest and most awesome of my life. I don’t think most people ever get to be that isolated. It’s humbling. I was convinced something was wrong, that Geoff and Ben had fallen through the ice into the river, that I was about to be eaten by wolves, that half the night had gone by. Every choice became heavy: gather more wood and keep the fire going, or stay warm in the sleeping bag? Grab the rifle you don’t know how to use in case you need it, or leave it be because you’re more likely to hurt yourself with it than protect yourself? Stay put and wait for Geoff/rescue/morning, or take off on skis and try to make it to the safety of the school in Fort Yukon?

In reality, I was absolutely fine. Between the fire and the sleeping bag, I was at no risk of getting cold. No animals ever bothered our camp, and I had bear spray handy just in case. It never crossed Geoff’s mind that I’d worry or panic (he’s used to being alone, especially out in the woods). If he thought about it at all, he assumed I felt able to take care of myself (which is flattering, but off-base) so my relief when he finally made it back took him completely by surprise.

Sometimes, he doesn’t realize how new I am at this. He forgets that I’ve been in Alaska only a year. I’m making myself at home here, for sure, but it’s all very new. “How are your wood-chopping skills,” Geoff asked me yesterday as I lounged in the sleeping bag, loathe to get up, even though he’d lit a crackling fire and the sun was sweeping around the corner of the slough, nearly fully lighting the sky.

“Nonexistent,” I replied, and his eyebrows shot up.

“Really?!”

“Really.”

“Well I saved these nice pieces for you. You can try it out. But first, can you pull out your stove and boil some water for coffee?”

I chose clean snow from the slough and filled Geoff’s thermos with coffee while he started working on replacing the swing arm with the correct part he’d ordered from Fairbanks and had sent to Fort Yukon. On breaks, he showed me how to use the axe without cutting off my feet. I made him turn his back (no peeking) when I first tried it out, but I got comfortable enough for an audience by the end of the day.

It was a good day, yesterday. Geoff worked on his machine, calling me over to hold this or find that stupid little thing he’d lost in the snow. I lounged by the fire, cooking porkchops and caribou and boiling snow and reading my book and singing and bantering and laughing. It felt so good to relax and enjoy the beautiful day. Sleeping out is all very well, but living out is the real treat, and inservice hadn’t allowed for daylight hours to enjoy at camp.

We wanted to cross the Christian River before dark, so in the late afternoon, we had to pack up and go. It started snowing around the time we took off, and pretty soon the wind picked up and dark fell. The trip wasn’t too bad; even crossing the Christian River was fine. It was just a long haul. We made it back to Venetie around midnight, cold and exhausted, and more or less collapsed without taking a single thing off the sled.

By this morning, the sled, the snowmachine and the world were blanketed in fresh snow. Geoff didn’t take off until late this afternoon (he’s famously slow out of the gate) and he has to make the hundred miles to Arctic by morning. I rode out across Big Lake with him on my machine and saw him off on the trail north. He’s out there now, plowing through the drifts the new snow and the wind must have kicked over his trail in the past week, loving it because this is what he loves to do.

I’m hoping, for our next adventure, I’ll get to help with caribou. Now that the trail’s broken, it’s not such a huge deal to plan adventures with Geoff, and he’s seen caribou between here and Arctic. Who knows?