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.