bits

What p. said. Except I've only read one of those books. But everything else, yeah. Right on.

ps. pete is thrilled.
A new friend asked me last weekend what it is I write. I stuttered out some incoherence or other, but didn't - and don't - know. Is that because what I write doesn't fit a genre, an easy convention? Or because I don't write enough anymore to create the critical mass that would be an answer. I've been trying not to think too hard about that all week, because the critical mass behind the real answer is heavy enough to hurt.

You can see Chena Pump Road from the parking lot near the ski hut, and it looks too big to be a road on the edge of an Alaskan town. It looks like someone transplanted it from Houston, dropped it into the woods. Probably the fancy-pants highway exits, light posts and ostentatious new building strip have something to do with that.

Finally, this thing p. found!
That is all. Goodnight.

eleventh

Six years ago, I was sitting on stiff sheets in a sweltering room, listening to the distant traffic and trying not to let sweat drip onto my field journal. My three coworker-roommates were watching a soap opera at full volume, perched on the other side of the one staff bed. I was sort-of paying attention, knowing that once I could follow the convoluted plot I'd have the language mastered. I was more annoyed that the television had been requisitioned for sappy drama. In the next room, the street-boys I'd come halfway around the world to work with were sprawled out on the cool tiles of the bare living area sleeping or listening to a garbled radio program of ghost stories. They were happy for a dry, safe place to crash and utterly disdainful of the mattresses someone had requisitioned for the program. I didn't blame them. The mattresses already smelled of mold after just a few weeks of rainy-season humidity.

In the eternal dusk of urban night, the last call to prayer sounded over local loudspeakers. A dog's bark echoed down our small alley. A car swept its headlights through the front window. I weighed trying to go to sleep over the screeching television against looking up the translation for 'volume' and attempting a diplomatic request for less of it.
The phone rang. Ari, one of the older street boys who'd been in the program nearly three months tapped the door and stuck his head in.

"Bu Maria!"

"Aku?" Nobody called me here. I didn't even know if more than two people had the number. I shuffled out and shut the door against the now-wailing, recently-bereaved soap-star. I saw the whites of wide-eyed five and six year olds in the gloom after lights-out, terrified by the ghost story and egged on in their fear by the older boys. Ari handed me the phone and stood by curiously. I squatted on the floor next to the phone. A familiar voice was urgent on the other line. It was Mrs. Karsi, my host-mother from the first half of my internship. I had to ask her three times to slow down so my brain had time to translate.

"Are you alright?"

"Um, yes. I'm fine."

"Have you spoken to your parents?"

"My parents? No. Did they try to call me there?"

"No. Are they alright?"

"I haven't spoken to them. Did they call you?"

"You should call them."

I was trying to piece it together. Had my parents called me at her house? I had moved into the street boys home several weeks before, and they had my cell phone number. Was something wrong? Was someone sick, and in the rush they had called the old number? I felt my breath growing short. Ari asked what was wrong. I shrugged my shoulders and asked him to make the little boys turn down their ghost story. A sharp command later, and a sea of dark faces were looking up at me. Apin grabbed my hand. I waved them silent.

"Did you talk to them? Did they call you there?"

"No! No! Is the television on?"

"Yes. The girls are watching a soap opera. What's wrong?"

"There was an airplane crash in America."

I laughed with relief. "They are not flying today. America is a big place, like here. Where was the plane crash?"

"Near the big house!"

"Near the big house? There are lots of big houses."

"The big house! The biggest one." I racked my brain. Big house? Hollywood?

"They don't live near any big houses."

"No! No! The biggest house. The house painted white. Yes! The house that is white!"

"Oh! The House that is White. No, they don't live near there. I'm sure my family is safe."

"You should call them to be sure. Ok? They would want you call them. Right away."

"Ok. Thank you. I will call them." I hung up and told the boys it was nothing, sent them back to their ghost story. They wandered back into the darkness, and the garbled radio-voice fired up again. How sweet that my host-mother was worried enough about an airplane crash in my home country to call me. What a relief that there was nothing actually wrong, nothing to worry about. I slipped back into the staff room, where Norma asked, "Who was it?"

"There was an airplane crash in America's Capitol. Mama Karsi was worried about my parents."

Karima looked at me, grudgingly. "Do you want us to turn on the news?" I could see the soap coming back on over her shoulder.

"Nah. No big deal. My family isn't near there. I'll call them tomorrow."

I slipped my field journal under the bed, pulled my sarong over my arms and head against mosquitoes and settled down to get some sleep.

observer

I spent this summer working for Little Tour Company, a small independent outfit here with a few small buses and a few small airplanes that gets folks into the Arctic during the summer tour season and beyond. (Beyond the tour season, that is. There's not much beyond the Arctic.) Little Tour Company deals mostly with the RV and otherwise Independent Traveler set, especially folks who want to cross the Arctic Circle without tearing up their own vehicles on the notorious Dalton Highway in the process. On a regular day, I would drive between 250 and 400 miles, and spend between twelve and sixteen hours with no more than twenty four (and often quite a few less) guests. That's a lot of time to hang out with and get to know to a small group of people. Over the course of the Season, I noticed a few things:

• On any trip with over eighteen people, there is always at least one man with missing fingers.
  

• If a man over 60 teases you when boarding the bus, he will try to anticipate your every need for the rest of the trip. After attempting to do your job for you all day, he will tip twice as much as everyone else.

• Every second trip, on the last stop before returning to Fairbanks, an older man will call you aside to tell you how he was diagnosed with prostate cancer X months ago, and is so glad he was able to make this trip and was relieved that there is a toilet on the bus so that he hasn't had to worry about his now-small waste-capacity, which is really not what it used to be.
  

• People who wear Christian T-shirts or slip in comments about their church ministry before the first stop always become visually agitated when you mention the last ice age and mankind's 11,000+ yr. presence in what-is-now-Alaska. They will shake your hand warmly at the end of the trip while wondering aloud what God has in store for you. They will never, ever tip.

• There will always be at least one man with a commercial driver's license on board, watching your speed, lane placement and braking method. If you sidle up to him early on and mention the type of chassis, engine and retarder on board and throw in that you're on a first-name basis with the company mechanics, he will sleep like a baby through the rest of the trip.
  

• Single women travelers have the best questions.

• Cranky people are easily cheered by attention and interest. (Granted, that's pretty universal.) But moods are contagious, and cranky people do not good all-day bus-riders make.
  

• Retired, Full-Time RVer couples have the best relationships.
  

• Middle-aged married couples on a 2 week vacation have the worst.

• If an aggressive, middle-aged man manages to find you before the tour starts and pressures you to put his family in the best seats on the bus, become best friends with the man and tell him you'll 'take special care' of his family even though the treatment you are giving them is exactly what you do for everyone, every time. Tell them why the seats they end up in are the best seats. He's probably not going to tip any more than anyone else, but if you don't you have a Very Long Day ahead of you.
  

• ADHD kids bouncing off the ceiling are way more engaged and interested in the trip, the landscape and the story of the north than the quiet, perfectly-behaved bookish kids who sit in the back with their nose in LOTR.

[guide training in may ... i'm squished up next to the rock, far right, top row.]

It was a great summer in the sunny North Country, getting to know Coldfoot and Wiseman and learning every pothole and washboard on the first two hundred odd miles of the Haul Road. Guiding is, after all, a perfect outlet for my consummate nerdiness. A captive audience that's paying to hear about all the obscure northern books and studies I've spent the winter tearing through! And in one of the most remote and unexplored regions accessible by road! What bliss!

Now that I'm in the classroom all day (audience and subject not quite as engaged or engaging) and the prospects of getting out of town, even for a weekend, are slim (and now that I've officially lived in the same place for an entire year for the first time in seven) I'm getting a little antsy for that sweet open road. Peter's having a hard time reigning in my impulse to buy an old cargo-van, throw a mattress and some blankets in the back and get the hell out of dodge. After today's Fifth Grade Math Fiasco, I was ready to pack up and go, go, go.

After all, they always need cooks at the truckstop in Coldfoot.

autumn

I was afraid there wouldn't be color, this year. The stars came back out a few weeks ago. Peter coaxed me out of bed to watch a full moon eclipse in the middle of a star-and-aurora flecked darkness. The dark took my breath away before I even saw the black disc of earth's shadow blocking the moon. It was harvest-moon red, wet and thick and slowly disappearing into the glorious northern night sky. I still sigh with relief going to sleep without sunlight, evenings.

Mornings are cold. The porch crusted in ice and my breath a fog on the path to the outhouse. I've been shivering my way downstairs, blundering through coffee, lunch packing, pulling on still-uncomfortable dress clothes for my new and unexpected iteration as a student teacher. After which, if all goes to plan, I will take on long term substitute. Given the last three weeks, this is not the relief one might think. The certification, I can manage. The career still fills me with a turmoil of ambivalence. But that is not news.

The trees started turning brown two weeks ago, and I was worried that a summer of warm-and-dry weather had sapped them of their ability to explode into winter with the pomp that marks the season. Then Friday, driving home into a weekend that suddenly carries new meaning and relief, there were the colors. Or a color. The birch have turned and they have blanketed the valley. The aspen, as far as I can tell, have given up the ghost. They are losing their leaves without comment or hue. All summer, I fell in love with the aspen. Their blue-green dance, their shimmering leaves, their powder bark dusting my hands with ancient medicine at a touch. And now I feel like them, dropping from a summer of glorious north-country travel, of wolves and mountains and trucker-banter on the CB into stiff, blistering shoes and pants that require ironing and the hounding of lesson plans to be written.

months

It has been awhile. Two months, exactly. Two very long-seeming months in which many things have passed on under the bridge, all of them without note, at least on this forum. Some, I'm just not ready to comment on. Some, I probably won't. Mostly, I've been feeling alternately too exhausted or too inarticulate to get things down, much less with some minor level of readability.

Some of the highlights:
- Peter and I celebrated our 1st wedding anniversary.
- Entelechy passed through the second year since my first post.
- It got warm. (65!)
- It got light. (nearly 20 hrs of it!)
- I started another interminable Graduate Quarter.
- I started training for a job as a Bus Driver & Guide To The Arctic.
- I started volunteering at Calypso again - under the guy who took the job I really wanted. (Talk About Character Building.)
- The birch trees finally budded!

I'm going to spend my upcoming birthday on the road again - this year without Peter. I have to go down to Palmer to get my Wilderness First Responder certification renewed, and we decided that Peter should save his days off for a fun trip - not a trip in which I'll be cramming all night, trying to remember which abdominal-quadrant-pains signify emergency and which signify too much bean soup.

But I will rhapsodize about my ambivalence on those travels closer in. This Sunday will mark my first (of many, this summer) crossing of the Arctic Circle as I head up to Coldfoot with the cohort of new guides at Little Tour Company (not, for now, it's real name.) I am squealing school-girl excited about this, less about the Circle than to finally (FINALLY!) see the Brooks Range and Gates of the Arctic and Wiseman and maybe (oh, cross your fingers!) just maybe there will be seats on the puddle-jumper and I will get to visit Anaktuvuk Pass for a few hours before we head back to Fairbanks. Either way, I promise you pictures!

In the interim, I've been procrastinating like a grand champion and stressing myself out in the process, thinking a lot about writing and blogging, direction, dreams and practicalities. About being married, about being in Fairbanks, about being in a graduate program that I am less than enthusiastic about. In the mean time, we are still plugging away at life. I am still ignoring my inbox, and this blog. And the sunlight is growing ... and growing ...

gloom

Peter worked a double today. He left the house while I was still groggy at seven am, and I'm not expecting him home until after midnight. He'll be gone again (if he can drag himself out of bed) at seven, never mind the time change. I've been hovering in a dark mood, and wading through the packed last two weeks of Drexel's graduate quarter has not helped in the least. This evening I went into town for a break from the stuffy silence of a long day alone in the cabin to shower and pick up a case of soymilk at the grocery store. (A special-order from January. Thanks for the fast service, Freddies.) On the way home, gloomy and shivering with frozen hair standing at odd angles to my face and Twiki's heater not really up to the job, I flipped on NPR. Although expecting my usual disappointment in the after-hours selection, I was desperate for something to fill the icy ride home.

In piped the grainy, warbling first line of Dylan's 115th Dream. It was perfect, a tiny miracle over the static, a stumble into music that slid seamlessly alongside a perilous state of mind and lifted it ever so slightly, without a hint of saccharine to mar the gentle nudge away from danger.

pond

A Cautionary Tale

Today, with several papers turned in and the next set of deadlines a few days away, I watched the thermometer rise from -28 (9am) to -16 (12pm) to -9 (2pm) to -2 as Peter left for work at three. Ecstatic, I packed up my new cross country skis (!!) and and a very sceptical Ridgeback and drove out the the trail head on Ballaine, a couple of minutes away. At the pull-out Nyssa jumped out of the car, turned and tried to jump back in. Two below is still too cold for her. She glared at me (as only this Ridgeback can) while I booted her up and wrestled her into doggie long-johns and a coat. She stood rigid, ears flat against her head, occasionally breaking her lock-kneed stance to paw desperately at the car door.

Ignoring her, I headed down the main trail east into Goldstream Valley. As soon as she realized that 1) my strange foot contraptions meant we moved much faster and 2) we were exploring new territory, she forgot her ridiculous forced-to-walk-in-the-cold behavior and ran ahead, tail wagging, sticking her nose into every yellow spot in the snow and bounding through drifts like a puppy. The sun was out, Nyssa was behaving like a real dog for once, I was outside in the snowy, silent woods, quickly leaving the road behind. I warmed up fast, and soon stopped to take off my gloves and stuff my hat into a pocket.

After a while on the main trail, we came to a fork. I took the left turn and began skiing through a tunnel of bare alder over what in summer is a large, murky swampland at the bottom of the valley. We crossed a couple of frozen potholes where my ski poles made hollow clicks on the ice under the snow. Dropping down a small hill, we left the alders behind and followed the trail onto a pond a little larger than a soccer field. The trail continued north, skirting the edge, but some snow machine tracks turned left around a stand of bushes and headed across the pond. I thought this was a strong indicator of a loop back to the original trail, so I headed off across the thick winter ice.

Halfway to the other side, I realized a couple of things. First, the wind was very, very strong out in the open. Second, the snow machine tracks were older than I'd thought and the path they made across the pond was covered in a new, icy layer of uneven blown snow, making the skiing exhausting and giving my progress a disconcerting wobble. Third, Nyssa was very uncomfortable with this change in direction and sat down in the snow halfway across the pond, refusing to follow me further. Near far side, I stopped and spent some time coaxing her to catch up. When she finally consented, I saw that one of her booties was ripped and her mouth was rimmed in ice. She found the wind cold, too. Then I saw that the snowmobile tracks made a U-turn, and headed back the way we'd come. There was no trail back towards the road. I looked around at our predicament. The trudge across an icy, pocketed trail had tired me out. I sighed, and my glasses immediately fogged up, then froze. All I could see was a hazy glare in the direction of the sun. I started to take them off, and promptly toppled over. My bare hands slid in elbow deep, filling my sleeves with ice. I was suddenly very, very cold.

Let me pause here to say that I am acutely aware of the many dangers Alaska presents to those who wander off her roads. Rapidly changing weather, moose and bear, swarms of giant mosquitoes, stinging plants, icy fast-flowing rivers, powerful tides and rip currents and bone numbing temperatures are all par for the course. My induction as a wilderness guide here was padded with caution. Grocery stores and tourist kitsch shops are full of survival tale and bear attack books, and if you are around an old-timer for more than ten minutes the first-and-second hand accounts of close calls in remote regions begin in earnest. On top of this, I am a certified Wilderness First Responder, and that paranoia-inducing training has made me cognisant of everything that can go wrong in the back country, and how quickly a simple mistake can turn deadly even just a few miles from help, especially in the cold. I have never had an incident go sour either as a guide or on my own, but still take obsessive care when leaving the road, even for short hike of a few hours. (Do we have firestarter? Extra layers? An Epi-Pen? Moleskin? A knife?) This annoys my hiking companions at times, but I bear it knowing some day I will be able to intone 'told you so' while hooking up a traction splint for someones shattered femur with my shoelaces and an old shirt. Then again, I hope not.

But back to my frozen pond. As I struggled to get my numb fingers back into gloves, find my hat and get my glasses cleared of ice, I thought about how isolated this trail was, even just a mile or so from the road and only three crow miles from a major city. Chances of another person coming along, much less today, much less able to see me so far off the trail, were minuscule. I didn't have a single extra layer, firestarter or knife on me. After all, I had only been heading down the street.

Glasses cleared of ice, I looked down to find Nyssa hunkered out of the wind between my skis. I thought of Jack London. Taking a deep breath, I scooted off towards the sheltered alder trail against an icy wind, dog padding in my wake. As my face became numb and my glasses fogged up again, I was suddenly glad for this little reality check on a calm and sunny afternoon a few miles from my front door.

We revel in living so close to such wilderness - and the wilderness, in all its icy indifference, is waiting for us to forget the implications of its proximity, even just for a moment. I love the sun on snowy trees, the tunnel of trail through woods, the wild dark nights full of Aurora and stars, the maze of possible paths winding out across the endless expanse of Alaska's interior. But today's little detour across a pond was a reminder of what enjoying these things demands of us in return.