Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most

Flowers are joining the new green shoots

Our local peak, Cecil, in the background

Not only has there been a silent dance party, we’ve also had a blowout costume-dance party contest featuring a Julia Stiles-esque former ballet cum hip hop dancer (think handsprings + pirouettes + cutoffs).  There is a woman with a big container of craft supplies.  We have lots of acronyms and speak in a shorthand slang/vernacular barely comprehensible to outsiders.  News and gossip spread lightning-quick.  A cough is making the rounds.  No one actually lives anywhere in the off-season, they just have stuff in various relatives’ basements and storage units.  After work, we mostly all eat dinner together and then debate which of the three other places we should hang out.  It’s uncanny—Camp is pretty much a smaller version of McMurdo.

Happily, the food situation could not be more different.  Not only do the cooks get to do pretty much whatever they want, they do it with ample amounts of fresh veggies, butter, and cream.  Staff dinner is always a pleasure, and everyone is full of compliments. I will pat myself on the back for making a good molten chocolate-pecan cake thing, and pleasantly balanced rosemary-lemon ice cream.  It’s fun wielding a full-size propane torch to crunchify the cremes brûlée, and my bread shaping is pretty ok.  But...damn...I hoped against hope not to horrifically fail—twice—at caramel sauce.  (Almost as bad as when I couldn’t get the hang of instant mashed potatoes at McMurdo, but for different reasons.)  I don’t really want to talk about it, but if you ever need a replacement for the burnt tar stuff they use in asphalt, I can pass along my special recipe.  I suppose it’s only the beginning of the season, and getting back into a kitchen.

Alaska!

Kenai Lake from Slaughter Ridge

a cold cold lake near south Denali that Sam and I perhaps ill-advisedly walked around, bushwhacking in knee-deep snow and guessing at the trail.

*Apologies — trying to blog on my phone with mediocre WiFi means the layout is going to suck.

Hey, I’m in Alaska!  My friend Sam and I said this aloud about 27 times the first day.  You look out at some snowy mountains, a pleasingly diverse arrangement of mosses and lichens, fill your lungs with green-smelling air, and can’t help but be wowed all over again.  It’s pretty.  It’s cold.  It’s light out 20 hrs a day.  Kind of makes you think of Antarctica, but with scarier and more mobile megafauna.

Also, hey, I’m a cook again! Got my ill-fitting pants and am measuring eggs and sugar by grams.  I get to listen to Ween and scrub pans and taste-test cheesecake.  And the cookies...let’s just say hundreds will pass my personal quality check each week.

So it’s kind of springtime — there are green things growing, mooses are dropping calves left and right, and the sun is warm on your back.  But we live in canvas-walled tents and it’s close to freezing at night.  There are nightly campfires and unlimited tea, and I scored an extra blanket so I didn’t even have to wear socks all night last night.