Packing It In

The sun is back with a vengeance, the moon is full, the aurora is streaming across the sky.  The landscape is transfigured by light.  Though the snow and ice have barely begun to melt, the alders have taken on an orange sheen and the spruces are photosynthesizing a dark luxuriant green.  Broad swaths of creek, still solidly frozen beneath, are topped by slush and overflow, which inundates the trees on the banks and, overnight, forms a blue veneer somehow both spongy and brittle.

The parking lot has been plowed down to the gravel, thereby starting mud season.  The first few winter coworkers are leaving (and us next week), and summer returners arriving.  It hits just above freezing in the afternoon, and I can ski without gloves.  We're all shocked to step outside and feel the warmth of the sun, and have been obliged to prop open the kitchen door and run the window fan.  If this sounds premature, consider that from my coldest day in January at -48F, we've warmed up 80 degrees.

Along with truly superb skiing and snowshoeing, camp life is going strong with puzzles and crafts, poker, and movie nights.  Months ago, we had agreed that as our wedding will be pretty small and informal, and friends and family already know the details, actual invitations weren't really necessary.  But last week I thought it would be fun to ask everyone to collage postcards, just to send fun little momentos.  A few nights later I baked quiche and brownies and lemon bars for an (early) going away party.  After mutely clinking our paper cups of champagne, Jean-François shared a slideshow extolling the natural beauty, special sense of community, and select English words he picked up here.  I had to leave early for work and sported my faded t-shirt and bleach-stained chef pants, but he wore a blue button-down -- decidedly "spiffy," and not "kinky."

 easing onto the creaking ice at Brock Creek

Layton takes a load off after breaking trail for us

aurora too hot for my phone to handle

(water-)skiing on Minnie Creek

atop Big Sepp, a nub just south of Mt. Sukakpak

Burning sun with golden gleam

Two remarkable changes this year are the increase in our numbers, and that of the caribou.  Never before has the staff dormitory been full in winter.  And the past week we've had several parents and friends visiting, prompting all sorts of delicacies cooked, game nights organized, and sojourns excursioned.  One benefit of a bigger crew is more day-off buddies, and a greater quantity of outdoorsy people.  There's always a significant proportion of "indoor cat" coworkers -- unsurprising given the temperatures -- but this year I actually bump into people on the trails regularly.

Thanks to Jean-François's gregariousness, we've expanded our social circle north ten miles to the village of Wiseman (pop. 12).  Coldfoot guides take tourists there to watch the aurora and chat with one of the longtime residents, a hunter/trapper/biologist/jack-of-all-trades.  We also deliver their mail once a week, in the form of a social call with coffee and the latest local gossip and lynx sightings.  Jean-François seems to have won over the handful of villagers with his appreciation of the beauty of the landscape and his Spanish shortbread cookies.

We've also been making friends with caribou(!) who for the first time in a long while are basically in camp.  There's at least one group of twenty that have pranced back and forth dozens of times between the hills and creek to the southeast.  I've seen them leap across the trail as I approach, fresh snow muting my skis, and encountered them pawing up lichen on a low broad hill.  They wandered right up to the sled dogs the other night, about a hundred yards from the café.

making our way up the Nolan mining road

We stopped at iconic Mt. Sukakpak, noticed waterfalls of snow pouring down, and then an avalanche on the right

ptarmigan on the Chandalar Shelf

Wiseman also boasts a yoga geodesic dome

Hard to zoom with the phone, but look at those cute 'bous!

Fill 'er Up

Impossibly hardy little spruces giving way to tundra; ridge paths ever enticingly winding; golden slant-sun splaying around tree trunks; fresh snow falling: such circumstances delight and stoke vitality.  There's a hint of nirvana, a sense of going onward to remain there.

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We arrived a few days before the reappearance of the sun, and so are on the upswing of winter.  I've never had a problem with the cold or dark, or gray skies, but I know the uncanny feeling of being at a remove from the world as well as out of sync with seasonal markers.  Here, freezing temperatures last from September to May, not everybody has regular hours or days off, and without some significant date -- end of work=>vacation or big shake-up event -- you can hit a psychological wall.  A friend told me today he just unwittingly stalled out.

Most vehicles here are either running or plugged in.  When we go up the road to ski somewhere different or stay overnight at the company cabin, the van stays pulled off to the side with keys in, idling, so there's no fuss about it (not) starting.  (Also not a lot of car thieves around.)  This takes extra gas, whether from the tank or the generator in camp.  We all burn extra gas in winter, just staying warm, and lighting the way to springtime.

On the way to Twin Lakes

crystalline eyebrows above Wiseman

I suspect part of the reason my friend hit a wall was staying up all night drawing this poster for our party

Caloric Wonder

There's so much here to be awed by, in such different ways.  I suppose the food is just another expression of the wild and beautiful contrasts that define the Arctic, like the dramatic swings in daylight and temperature, or the massive industrial infrastructure paired with the majestic landscape.  In just the last few days the kitchen has seen:

-homemade s'mores (shmallow, chocolate, and graham all from scratch)

-eggs hard boiled for 45 minutes

-moose marrowbone and dutch oven sourdough with historic old starter

-slop pile of aging leftover meat (for dogs)

-double chocolate cake, Boston cream pie, mantecados (Spanish cookies), lemon tart, walnut blondies -- all the same *day*

-mummified cranberries and potatoes lurking on the back shelves

-"You can leave that grease on there, I'm gonna use it." -Line cook Jeremy

I like being night cook because my day is so nice -- sleep in, read, ski, chat with friends, watch beautiful sunsets.  Aside from occasional busy periods during which I forget which burger gets which cheese, the only real downside is cleaning the fryer.  Hot, dangerous, and disgusting, every third night is a little tragicomedy that involves trotting with a giant pot of boiling oil through the frigid night to a little shack, climbing a ladder while clutching said pot, pouring it into a begrimed funnel to slurp down into the Great Grease Cube, then scooping, essentially, the remaining liposuction material from the fryer.  There is no feeling quite like unwittingly planting your foot in two-inch thick semi-soft lard because the shack door is frozen shut and you've only partially successfully squeezed past the rubber berm/"skirt" of the Great Cube.

Photo by Justin of our fabulous igloo, s'mores fire at left

proud baking papa

We got to go dog sledding!

Trucker table skeleton

Trucker table featured artwork

We saw caribou at the far end of the lake 

The Student Becomes the Teacher

Like a salmon returning upstream, suddenly I am the local expert, the one fluidly making headway through linguistic currents of regionalisms and code switching with a flash of my tail.  Bathed again in English, my accent spreads my A's broader than ever, and my tonal color palette is richly restored.  And there are so many inexplicable things to explain (the heater in the fridge; the one cook who avoids all eye contact and speech; the wolf hide being laundered in the washing machine; the popularity of sausage gravy and chicken strips; the Halloween skeleton now permanently seated at the trucker's table...).

Thankfully, Jean-François has swooned over Coldfoot's charms just as much as I hoped he would.  Our old warped door that caught every time it opened was an opportunity to meet the shop guys and borrow a planer.  Hours of industrial dishwashing are tempered by the indecipherable sassy flirtations of our Atlanta-belle hostess.  And breath already caught by the cold catches again at the snowy mountains illuminated by the first beseeching rays of returning sunlight.

Salon Night is new to me but an intermittent tradition here.  People read aloud, show a video or art project, and we share our responses.  Last night we had a fair bit of poetry, a brief film with Carl Sagan, and a ghost story.  There is no better day off than a long ski on fresh snow, unlimited free clam chowder, and debating the inherent limitations of signifiers while curled up on a giant bean bag in the dim glow of Christmas lights.

We scored seats on a (little) plane; here passing the Yukon.

Some solid aurora right off the bat!

We also ride in a van past Atigun Pass, to where the Brooks Range dissipates into the slope/tundra.

Some minor instances of culture shock

To close out a year of near-wall-to-wall France, here are some important lessons I've gleaned as a student of life here:

-a university degree with honors is marked "assez bien," which means "good enough"

-one browses the ornaments and local honey of a small-town Christmas market to the classic holiday melodies "Wake Me Up Before You Go-go," "Take On Me," and "Maneater"

-proposing the addition of mustard to a ham sandwich elicits disbelieving laughter 

-mimes are not automatically considered ridiculous

-flossing is not a thing

I saw a beautifully produced play about a plucky lad turned WWI pilot, who returns wounded and depressed but is joyously embraced and inspired to remake his life by his fiancé, mimed.

When they say they're going camping, they mean they rent a tiny cabin next to seventy other tiny cabins, next to a restaurant.

Termination/Germination

My student life ended somehow more anxious and less dramatic than anticipated.  Only five of us were there the last day, each person drifting away quietly as they finished writing about a famous French ecologist.  There was no little lunch party with dishes from our home countries; a few of us drank vending machine coffee in the hallway, and that was that.

After two rounds of exams it's a pleasure to wheel-barrow around a ton of horse poop, paint dozens of wooden slats for the foyer, and devote entire afternoons to making ravioli and cake and carnitas.  After so much mental concentration and the sure but slow linguistic results of studying, I'm happy to shift to more tangible tasks -- like bricking the grill and cleaning the fryer and heaving bags of trash!  And more interestingly, skiing and snowshoeing.  In just a few weeks, I'll be back in Coldfoot, sharing with Jean-François the wonders of the northern lights, a million acres of snowy moose-filled forest, and 24/7-free-all-you-can-eat bacon.

I had looked forward to titling this "Arctic Working Honeymoon," but then my residency card finally came through and we weren't in a rush to get married by January.  Maybe "Boreal Betrothal Bake-cation"?  What's in a name: the Trucker's Cafe by any other word would smell as diesel-y.

There are several horse farms nearby.  We met a nice guy who brought over truckloads of manure for the garden.

prosciutto and caramelized onion on the left, spinach and lemon ricotta on the right, with kalamata-tomato and mushroom-walnut-cream sauces

We combined visiting a friend over the weekend with the Lascaux cave museum.  I tried to tell JF how much more mystical it is in the film with Werner Herzog's narration.