The Sunlight Clasps the Earth

Near the top of Hope Point trail with lovely humans (not pictured)

Best evening lit rose ever

There is a lot of light emanating from the sun.  It barely dips below the tree-limb horizon, so sometimes we forget when to go to bed.  And it is relentlessly sunny — the forest fires burn on, the moss is dusty and the woods bare of mushrooms, and my hair is almost blond.

Peak zenith should be celebrated.  About thirty of us trooped singlefile alongside the highway to a bridge over a creek to enact the rites of Troll-stice.  We puzzled ye riddles three; we guzzled libations and feasted on fat buttery things; we ornamented each other with glitter to symbolize the sun’s glinting rays; and at midnight we submerged our limbs in the creek to commemorate the cyclical passage of seasons and time and meaningful stuff.

The dandelions know how to make the most of their time, stretching their stalks a foot high, proudly above the feathery horsetail, to nod their at first gloriously golden and now (so swiftly!) wizened gray heads.  The salmon, too, make haste through these elastic days and nights of light.  Furiously swimming, leaping improbably high and far out of the water, their instinct drives them to their impossibly Sisyphian task to climb treacherous rocky falls.  Not infrequently, the foaming white water churns up a ragged orange-pink meat chunk, one of their fellows filleted by the pounding river.

It’s interesting that the salmon exhaust their own lives to spawn subsequent salmon.  Not only their upstream exertion but also the nutrients from their carcasses sustain their hatchlings and the biome of the river.  The process is simultaneously productive and destructive.  I sang a song a few months ago about the inevitable changing of seasons (“Gatekeeper,” by Feist).  The buildup (preceding the breakdown) goes: 

June, July, and August said,

“It’s probably hard to plan ahead.”

June, July, and August said,

“It’s better to bask in each other.”

Buds, Bugs, and Baguettes

kayaking in Aialik Bay

fairytale moss charm-carpeting staff housing

When I was little, mosquito bites dotted my limbs in summer.  At one point I counted 37 on my right leg.  Northern Michigan is in the troubling insect big leagues for sure, and the swampy terrain surrounding my grandparents’ cabin could compete with the Deet-proof skeeters of Southeast Asia and the sand fly-ridden South Island of New Zealand.  When I canoed yesterday through veritable clouds of bitey fly-y things, I thought, “This is legit.”  Congratulations, Fjordlands National Park — you too are insanely beautiful and pestilent!

That’s about the only negative thing to say, though, about my little weekend getaway to our sister lodge.  If you can tolerate some bugs (and rain), your heart will thus with joy at several-hundred-foot-high granite cliffs spiderwebbed with cascading waterfalls, tucked into boulder-strewn coves reachable only at high tide.

That was kayaking.  Canoeing took us across a lagoon dotted with various species of loon, some playful harbor seals, a chirpy bald eagle, and a wilderness of dense spruce.  We walked through willow and alder, admiring flowering lupine and wild rhubarb, and emerged on the shores of a second lagoon.  This one was fed at its far end by a calving glacier.  Distant thunder rumbled, and massive chunks hurtled down into the water.  Bobbing and melting, they transform over time, gracefully carved swanlike curves floating placidly by.  Miles up the surrounding peaks, a few mountain goats cavorted, presumably unaware of a black bear lumbering across a ledge a hundred feet below.

I could go on and on.  The moss!  The lichen!  The rich dark brown chocolate lilies that smell bad!  And the kind, interesting people that live and work out there, relying on supplies by boat and semi-functional radios.  To cap it all, I slept in my own cabin, with actual walls, for ten hours a night.

Lest this laudatory account of my time in Aialik Bay cast shade on my fantastic regular camp life, let me report that this week also included:

- an impromptu after-dinner hike to a panoramic lake overlook
- pretty successful baguettes (with the exception that I omitted salt)
- rather successful baguettes (this time still nicely proofed, golden, and with salt)
- campfire visit with Ice friends
- foot-stomping country/bluegrass tunes by a good local band
- innovative pickle mixers with gin

Sorry for a formally uninspiring list, my baking muscles are crowding out my editing muscles.

Tent City

It’s my room!

It’s my island for a night!

So I live in a tent, but I should elaborate.  It consists of a plywood floor and roof, 2x4 framing, and waterproof canvas walls.  Previous residents built a few basic shelves and bedside table.  There’s even a rack and hangers for clothes.  My bed is a giant piece of foam on a raised wooden frame, with plenty of space underneath for camping gear and extra boots and a case of beer.  I brought with me an actual Turkish rug I got in Turkey, and a few other decorative touches.  My roommate is great, friendly and tidy.  I love the wind rustling the leaves and the play of their shadows on the canvas in the afternoon.  The only downside to my tent is that at any time there are upwards of thirty other people nearby, walking, talking, picking banjo, snoring—really just existing.  Any and  all sounds are perfectly audible.  

My tent affords just about the only solitude short of hiking up a less-popular mountain (which is a dicey prospect, what with bears and increasingly ravenous insects).  So I try to soak it in when I find the lounge momentarily unoccupied, and my tent in the mid-afternoon when my roomie is still at work.

Last night it was a treat to sleep in a tent-tent, the usual kind, my own little pod of nylon, out on Porcupine Island in Kenai Lake.  Four of us that share weekends motored a raft out across the tears-of-joy-beautiful aquamarine water to a pine-covered chunk of rock surrounded by steep mountains.  We made a driftwood fire, had cookies and beer, and watched as, instead of getting dark, the sky just grew misty and pink.  I know I slept well because I drooled a lot.

Our return this morning included the opportunity to row the raft (the lake narrows down to the river we live next to, which is “drift” only).  My stint at the helm took us over some minor rapids, which was fun, and illuminating to realize the raft will handle almost anything, with or without much steering.  It’s tempting to become a raft guide, but for now I’m satisfied fussing with bread dough and casting dubious glances at various sugary concoctions while whisking.

Sugar High

Some for real Alaska stuff

Aialik Glacier (sooo many vowels)

It really shouldn’t have taken so many attempts, but I’m pleased to announce that I finally made a perfect (well, damn near perfect) apple strudel.  Important lessons learned:
- you want a less-sticky dough
- a cloth is essential for rolling
- heat the apple pieces through and cool before filling the dough and they won’t collapse
- brush dough with clarified butter and a sprinkling of powdered sugar to get better layers
- your coworkers love anything with sugar, no matter how short of your own expectations it may have turned out

Also in baking success this week was the ideal blueberry crumble: the filling cooked down just right, the notes of lemon and almond and cinnamon superbly balanced.  I made enough for 34 instead of 14, but can you have too much of a good thing?

Something awful and fun about a cooking job is that you’ve never done stuff before.  On one hand, I’ve made various crumbles hundreds of times and have a good idea of how much I can mess with ingredients — but I’ve never made ten pounds of it at once with industrial equipment.  And on the other hand, I’d never made strudel before.  So that’s cool that I get to learn and try it out, and even when it sucks the fifth time, I can think “Well, this is only the fifth strudel I’ve ever made.”

Fun fact: I’ve been going through about 75 pounds of flour per week.  That’s not that crazy, especially considering the volume of cookies we churn out.  My collection of egg whites was getting pretty unwieldy, so I made a couple hundred meringue cookies that we plan to artfully crumble atop...something.

As I write this I’m struggling not to fall asleep at 7pm after an action-packed weekend.  Unprecedented levels of sunshine and blue skies correlated with being in an 8.5 hour fjord sealife boat tour.  It takes s surprising amount of energy to sit and watch otters paddling, orcas feeding, humpbacks breaching, sea lions sunning, puffins diving, glaciers calving, rock formations gleaming, and other tourists scampering around the boat.  Then this morning an overeager friend tapped in my door and motivated me to go on a “strenuous” hike with willpower-testing ascent and rewarding views.  It was sooooo beautiful.  I’m not surprised, but I am quite sleepy.

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.

Homeward Bound

If I had to create a slogan for this country, it might be: New Zealand -- cultivator of our better selves.  The colors are vibrant, the mountains steep, the rivers clean, and the poached eggs and hollandaise plentiful.  Just as important, though, the people are friendly, helpful, and moderate, in the best sense of the word.  It's adorable that even punk teenagers call out "thank you" to drivers when exiting buses; it's inspiring to see people hiking with strapped-on babies and little kids, or well into their 70s.  And I know it's a self-selecting group, but everyone that gave me a ride hitch hiking was interesting and open-hearted.

New Zealand is the metaphorical train station between Antarctica and the real world.  You leave one behind and have to wait a bit before materializing in the other, because they can't possibly both exist simultaneously.  NZ *feels* like the normal world, it has cars and restaurants and grass and kittens -- but it's far, far from home.  And NZ *feels* like an extension of Antarctica, because Ice friends are around and we don't have normal-life responsibilities and can still live in our somewhat utopian-communal/cycle-of-virtue fashion.

Anyway, I did a lot of great hiking, camping, gardening, and eating.  I saw crazy amazing night skies, ate so very much peanut butter, and surprised myself by being quite gregarious.  I could tell you about it in greater detail but a picture is worth 10^3 words.  So I’ll save you pages of reading:

walking along the ridge, Lake Angelus

hitching & camping extraordinaire, Farewell Spit

baybee seeel, Kaikoura