Tag Archives: winter

Fog Walk

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It’s foggy tonight, and the air is filled with ice plankton.

It’s hypnotic. I spent a long time out there with my headlamp pointed toward the opalescent smudge in the sky where the moon would be, holding my breath and watching the stream of sparkling night move by my face.

I tried to keep from breathing (this was not so much a case of “I can see my breath” as it was a case of smokestack), but air trickled in a slow stream from behind my teeth and entered the current like milk, pure white, swirling and discombobulating the glittering particles drifting by in the blackness.

When I had to breathe, my vision was obscured completely by the gust.

Once, walking here, I turned back and walked a while in my own footsteps, observing the way my breath clouds hung behind me like forgotten thoughts: cottonballs stapled to a springtime bulletin board, left behind through the summer to bear witness to the silence of the schoolhouse.

I have never felt so strangely intoxicated without being intoxicated. I have never felt so much a tributary in a vast, spherical watershed.

Today marks two years exactly since I first arrived in Alaska. What a brilliant and utterly new gift to receive on the occasion.

In other news,

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Inevitably, yet to my continual surprise, things are changing (as they always are).

I have moved into the cabin with Geoff. It’s a contradiction that I recognize. After all, I love living alone. Somehow, though, this makes sense. This arrangement is temporary, as is almost every aspect of my life in Alaska. That certain knowledge frees me from the burden of expectation. I am happy.

I like the warm, cheerful, cluttered chaos of the house. The cabin has no running water, and it’s small for two people who are used to living alone, but I like it. I like washing dishes with water hauled from school in jugs and five-gallon buckets and heated on a hot plate. I like going outside to pee and check on the northern lights.  I like that I can see my snowmachine parked in the driveway from bed. I like the curios and bric-a-brac hung from the beams and tucked into the logs of the walls. I like that I am free to enjoy it all and not worry about what happens next.

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As of last week, my freight canoe is finally done. Her name will be Lyra. In June Geoff and I will run down the Tanana and up the Yukon. We’ll take a break for dipnetting and in August we’ll run up the Chandalar to Venetie and then on to Arctic. Is it summer yet? I’m ready for the sun and the smell of green things and the hiss of silty water against the hull.

I feel like the universe is making me eat my words this month. I have decided that I am getting a dog. I feel like the world’s biggest hypocrite: I always swore I wouldn’t do this, and here I am looking for a puppy. Going out alone last week got me thinking: Why shouldn’t I have a dog for company when I go on adventures? I’ve been interested in skijoring since I first learned about it. Why shouldn’t I take my skiing up a notch and get a four-legged partner for speed over snow?

I’m in Boston now, getting ready for an awesome weekend with old friends. The important things haven’t changed.

 

 

Solstice

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Yesterday, I went out alone to bring in the tent.

This seems like a small thing, but I rarely go out alone, and when I do I never go very far from the village. I wanted this independence, this next test, but I was hesitant. I would have to go out beyond my comfort zone on the snowmachine (a vehicle I’m still new to) while hauling a sled (for the first time) and do a demanding chore alone in the cold. A chore I’d never done before at all – the tent had been out there since September, when we brought it out by canoe, and I’d only ever helped put it up last year. Geoff always went back to take it down alone.

My heart was in my throat the whole way across Maggie Lake (I broke my own trail through the fluffy new snow). I had to bushwhack up through a slough and onto the hill where the tent was pitched, and I’d never done much bushwhacking on the snowmachine, so it was exhilarating and terrifying. When I got to camp, startled to be there with so little trouble, not having hit a tree or flipped the sled, I shut down the Bravo (bangbang, bang… bang). The silence fell in on my shoulders like the snow.

And it was fine. Lovely, even. I didn’t spend the whole time looking over my shoulder for lions, tigers and bears. I worked. I had to hammer and dig and chip and lever every stake out of the frozen tundra. I stripped out of my coat and let the falling snow melt on my long-johns. It melted on my hands, too, and when I dismantled the stove, my bare fingers stuck to the metal and popped off – puck puck puck. I put my gloves back on, after a moment or two of that.

I rode in at dusk (it’s always dusk when it’s not night, but I mean around 3:00) without too much trouble. I hit a stump and nearly got bucked off, and there was that steep bit in the bushes where I thought the machine might pitchpole, so I walked alongside, but, all things considered, it was a roaring success. I could do it again.

How awesome is that?

Happy Solstice, everybody.

Keely (newly minted junior varsity arctic badass)