A Secret

Posted on November 20, 2020 by Keely

When it gets cold, here in Fairbanks, I can feel little jets of air shooting in through little gaps at floor level in the yurt. Like a hot tub, but not at all like a hot tub.

To keep dogs from running off, call them in every once in a while and tell them a juicy secret.

A secret: every fall, when the temperature bottoms out and I find myself stepping outside at night for the first time since the drop, I panic a little. Maybe it’s the sudden immersion in an illusion of the vacuum of space; that darkness in the stars, the empty, icy, weightlessness that threatens to suck the hot breath right out of my lungs and pull me apart. Maybe it’s all that heavy, icy air suddenly settling on me so that for a moment I feel like I can’t breathe under the lead of it, like the night air might force itself into my lungs and harden there. Can it be both at once? The terror of a crushing weight and the terror of weightlessness?

But then, every year, I pull on my Carhartt extremes and slip on my bunny boots. If you’ve never worn bunny boots, you might not know that they make for awkward walking. Each foot suddenly gets a lot heavier, and each step gets a swing to it, so that, like it or not, you’re walking around like an arrogant young cowboy with a brand new shootin’ iron. They say smiling sends happiness signals to your brain, so you can fake joy to make joy. Maybe it’s the same with confidence. Eventually, walking like that makes me feel at home in the dry, cold snow. Eventually, every year, the night and the ice and the starlight become my habitat.

The aurora blew up last night, eerie and beautiful over the pasture at LARS.

Indoors, though, I wear fuzzy slippers almost all winter. No need to let the ice-jets sneaking in under the wall-cover tickle my toes.

Silna and Crozier are also on Team Fuzzy-Slippers.

Having a nice cord of kiln dried birch doesn’t hurt either.

All-Alaskan Dinner

Posted on August 31, 2020 by Keely

Last night, after an afternoon at the shooting range and a run with Jane on Murphy Dome, I made cranberry chutney with the last of my frozen berries. I thawed some caribou steaks from our adventure with the Fortymile herd, and Alan picked some kale from the garden we planted this spring at his place. I had baked a loaf of sourdough bread earlier in the day, and I sliced a little of that up, too. A perfect dinner, all-Alaskan.

Local ingredients:
Wild lingonberries from UAF’s trail system
Fortymile caribou from an adventure in the White Mountains
Kale grown in the Goldstream
Wild Alaskan air yeast

Glassing for those sweet Fortymile caribou

The fireweed flowers are long gone, and the leaves have gone red. The birch leaves are fading, too. We got our last round of blueberries a week ago, and it’ll be cranberries and moose this weekend.

School started a week ago, and I’m struggling to transition to the very different work of studying. I want to be outside, doing my human hyperphagia, coming home and looking into my freezer with satisfaction at the neatly stacked vacuum bags of meat and fish and the jars of frozen berries. Instead, I’m inside doing winter’s work – reading, writing – and looking out the window at the last bits of summer dissolving.

Maybe it will get easier when the snow falls.

Trick or Treat

Posted on November 1, 2018 by Keely

My thermometer read -8 yesterday evening, but it felt colder. Fog rolled in through the door every time we opened it for trick-or-treaters, and we had frost building up on the screws around the doorknob. We couldn’t shovel wood into the stove fast enough, and going out to pee (between visits from kids) was a dread chore. Looking at it now, online, I see that the airport recorded -29 degrees, so I guess I need a new thermometer for the house.

Halloween is a little different around here.

There’s a knock on the door, and you open it. Maybe you’re expecting a witch or a zombie, but instead there’s a cloud of freezing fog and child in winter gear, fully covered from head to toe to keep out the frostbite ducks under your arm. In most places, trick-or-treaters come in costume. Here, they just can’t. You close the door behind them.

In Arctic Village, instead of handing over the treats and sending the trick-or-treaters on their way, Geoff and I greet them by name and invite them in to warm up. Kids whip off their gloves and gravitate to the wood-stove, where the pink gradually recedes from their cheeks. Warm, they start looking around.

Somewhere in there, I’ve passed out home-made chocolate chip cookies (which I probably wouldn’t even try in a different community) so when the kids start wandering, they shed crumbs everywhere they go. They poke around and ask questions (is that your garden? What’s in there? Can I taste it? Whose bed is that? What’s making that big cloud behind your house? Can I have some cookie dough?).

Eventually, the adult driving the four-wheeler or sno-go to pull the sled for them makes it clear that it’s time to go, and they suit up, pulling on hats, neckwarmers and gloves and shoveling candy back into their bags from where it’s spilled, inevitably, all over the floor.

“I don’t like green onions, but that spicy stuff [cilantro] is goooooood” said N. “Can we come over and help cut meat again sometime? And make dinner with your garden?”

“Can I have some more cookie dough?” K, looking hopeful, reached for the spoon.
“You’ve been here twice tonight. You can’t double trick-or-treat!”
“Please?”
“Fine.”
She left happy, again.

Freezeup Song

Posted on October 8, 2018 by Keely

It’s a little like whale song, or what I imagine whale song is like. You can hear it all through town, especially at night.

Geoff and I hiked out to first bend yesterday afternoon and sat on the bluff just listening while the river ice pinged and whooshed and yowled and groaned.

“It’s hard for me to justify taking the time to do this, just going for a walk.”

“It’s okay. I’m glad we did it. It was nice to just sit and listen.”

There’s not really much snow, but the cold is getting bitter. We’re going through firewood much faster than we were a week ago, and, as of this morning, we’re waking up in the dark.

Scarcity and… not that

Posted on October 1, 2018 by Keely

346DCE4F-3FE7-4704-A038-1E9F6217DE2C I’ve heard it was a great year for blueberries. Rumor has it someone in Arctic picked thirty gallons. I mostly missed the season, thanks to summer break and teacher inservice, but I put away three quarts before hard frost.

I was stoked for September to roll in so that I could pick cranberries (they’re lingonberries, really, but everyone here calls them cranberries). They’re my favorite: I make cranberry bread and chutney to eat with caribou fry meat, and I’ll eat them plain Jane just for the sweet tart bite and the memory of fall. These past two years they’ve been easy to pick and abundant during my time here, far more so than blueberries which begin to shrivel and sag toward the end of August, so I was prepared to pick and process gallons.

Two years ago, the berries were fat and juicy and everywhere.

It didn’t work out. I have only two quarts of cranberries, and I’m saving those for Thanksgiving and Christmas. I searched and searched, and I stood in banks of the juicy green leaves, stymied. The plants weren’t bearing. The fruit just wasn’t out there. Maybe it’s a pollinator problem. Maybe we had a too-hot or too-cold or too-wet or too-dry summer. I don’t know, but I’m sure glad I’m not relying on berries as a source of winter calories.

Boom and bust is the name of the game. Before I went to town last week, we were in a lean time: there was one very old tub of hummus in the refrigerator, but that was about it; we’d run out of fresh foods and frozen veggies and were eating into our stash of dehydrated camp meals; I didn’t have yeast to make pizza dough or butter and eggs to make cookies.

It wasn’t all bad: the freezer was full of Kenai reds, we were overwhelmed with caribou from our trip upriver over Labor Day weekend, someone gave us some moose ribs, the store had potatoes, so dammit it wasn’t worth doing a Freddy’s order with only a few days to go before a town trip.

Lyra loaded down with three fat caribou after a beautiful weekend in the refuge

Now scarcity is not the problem. It’s really the opposite: Geoff’s gone to town and I’m overwhelmed with plenty. There is too much fresh food: there’s fruit in the fruit bowls and there are boxes of salad in addition to a flat of microgreens I started in the lean weeks. I hardly know what to cook to use it all up before it goes bad.

corner microgarden

FRUITS!! (and stuff): neato neato neato

One of the things I love about Geoff is his confidence in me. This week, he left me home alone with a chainsaw I’d never used (the one I’m familiar with is broken), a pile of full-length logs, and an empty diesel tank. It’s getting colder now, so we’re lighting fires twice a day to keep the house cozy.

It was Saturday afternoon, and Geoff had already hopped on a plane for Fairbanks when I realized I didn’t know how to start the other – bigger – chainsaw. It has a weird choke and switch thing that I hadn’t seen before. I called down to Fairbanks and Geoff and John talked me through it and damn if this big monster chainsaw didn’t feel like sudden-onset superpowers. I had a couple days’ worth of wood chunked in no time flat, so I got down to business and chopped enough to see me through for a few days. Plenty again.

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