The season ends with Lego Batman and lots of lox

In a normal year the lodge becomes The Cottonwood Club: for one night as many of the company staff as possible crowd into camp to dance, drink, and play ping pong.  Cocktail attire and eccentric outfits are strongly encouraged, and dedicated attendees coordinate multiple costume changes.  Because of covid, the remaining ten or so of us turned the evening into a tent-pub crawl: in festive garments, our happy mob traipsed from tent to tent for a beverage and a surprise.  We drank grape-juice mimosas and watched anime; sipped Dark & Stormys while learning our love languages; fired off postcards to our future selves with hard spicy kombucha; scribbled poetry with watermelon gin; played Pass the Face, contorting our expressions 'round the room with rummy ice cream; performed an impromptu talent show with red wine + Coke; and stuffed our mouths with marshmallows after hot chocolate with whiskey.  And after all that, tipsy ping pong to keep up tradition.

The next day we moved out of our tents, cleaned up a bit, and read and dozed in the woodfire-warm lodge.  A feeling of slack tide prevailed -- sated from a full summer, we paused before a long exhale, then departure, flowing outward in disparate directions.  Clean up, put away, talk over the season now passed, last hike, last kayak, last dinner, goodbye.

September is a transitional month.  Already the Chugash mountaintops had frosted over.  Back in Michigan it has been beach-summery and chill-rainy and in between.  I'm glad that when I get to Coldfoot it will be definitively winter, the drear death of autumn already mercifully cloaked by snow.

great wig on a great boss

I still like you even if you barely work, Stove.

TWO 'bows

Courtesy of Trevor and Kait's loan of a perfectly equipped VW Westfalia camper van, and the friendly Berkeley family that adopted me for a weekend, inviting me to hike, kayak, cook and eat with them on Tutka Bay.

lake girl

By the shores of woodsy lakes: I grew up.  I learned to swim.  I learned to paddle and row.  I learned to fish (a bit).  I sang and talked to myself.  I played with frogs and toads and pollywogs and minnows and shells and rocks.  I splashed and dove with friends and theorized about people and the future.  I made out with boyfriends.  I read, and walk, and watch sunsets and fireworks.  I said yes, and I honeymooned.  I visited the Transcendentalist's cabin.  I thought there was still a way; I knew all was lost.  I enjoy the sun-sparkles reflecting off the water.  I try to absorb good engineers' advice.  I washed off the sweat from tramping.  I got a long-awaited hug.  I stare at the light, the dark, the stars, the moon, the shadowy branches and boughs that fringe the sky and the lake, connecting the liquid realm below with the boundless blue above.

Skilak Lake on a shifty morning.

Is it another kind of biscuit?

The zombie fish arrived about two weeks ago.  These are salmon on their last legs, exhausted and physically deteriorating, with white leprous patches and milky eyes.  They swim lazily near the surface, often with dorsal fins cutting above the water like sharks.  Their resounding smack! as they catch a final snack in our silty water punctuates all hours, day and night.  Occasionally, one will porpoise, leaping repeatedly for a hundred feet, as though the frantic spasms will propel them up an imaginary waterfall.  Eventually some wash up on shore, an easy meal for the eagles, ravens, seagulls, and bears.

Us humans gleefully tucked into the spoils of a successful day in the kitchen for me, with buttermilk biscuits, super fudgy brownies, and frozen custard.  We don't have electricity to spare for an ice cream machine, but a memory percolated through my brain of, I think, my 25th birthday, recreating at home the then-novelty of Shake Shack's "concrete" dessert.  This batch was quite nice, and true to its name required slicing with a knife.

And to round out the week, I finally accomplished my solo bear-country backcountry camp out.  Happily, nothing attacked me or went amiss, but I did writhe around, heart pounding, when coyotes called to each other and particularly loud fish-plops made me fear a curious moose was approaching my tent.  Perched on a gravel bar where the glacial outwash meets the lake, I felt as vulnerable and resigned as when I had to pass the night in a rural Italian train station my first time alone in a foreign country.  This time, my transport was ready early, and the toilet paper was free.

Past his prime.

Gray but calm; my trusty paddler at rest in the muck.

Fun Time Days

Summer is chugging along, with autumn nipping at its heels.  We had Christmas in July, with almost all of us in the staff lounge opening thoughtful, artistic, funny homemade presents.  Another developing tradition, a couple of us have been quietly stoking the sauna some evenings to enjoy post-dinner roasting, accompanied by lake relief dips on now-awkwardly slimy rocks, as the lake level and sunshine are optimized for algae.

Last weekend, some extra days off (aka fun time days, aka adventure opportunity days) aligned with a friend visiting, and we drove north a few hours to an absurdly scenic hike.  Gold Mint Hut at Hatcher Pass transported us to New Zealand: classic u-shaped glacial valley, countless clear creeks to quench your thirst, craggy alpine peaks with giant granite boulders at their feet...!  We walked miles alongside a river, hillsides slathered with wildflowers -- violet monk's hood, magenta fireweed, tall nodding grasses.  Who knew all that fresh air could make five-day-old grilled hot dogs taste so good?

And since it was my birthday, later we had some grocery store cheesecake in the Hope Point trailhead parking lot.  Later, when we finally came back home to the lodge, it was windy and cool, I was dirty and damp, there was a pleasant surprise.  Years ago, dozens of times, Matt and I returned from long days sailing to his mom's pasta sauce and meatballs.  It's distinctly satisfying and comforting to come in from the glorious and exhausting ocean salt and sand and sit down to a giant pot of food made by a loving Italian woman.  So I was really pleased that upon my return a nice little staff dinner was waiting, of spaghetti and meatballs with homemade sauce.

Maybe the cutest hut in this hemisphere.

Krista contemplates

The Food

Some, uh, interesting plates have gone out on my dinner nights.  If you ever wanted to be transported to a mid-90s Better Homes & Gardens dinner party that is either Brought to You By the Color Mauve or subtly revealing of a personality disorder, welcome, sit right down.  It will all taste good (really!) -- even if I awkwardly describe the salad as being tossed with homemade pickle-liquid dressing.  Somehow, duck night is so very purple: cherry-red-wine sauce, cabbage or roasted cauliflower, fingerling potatoes...some force swallows light frequencies throughout the visible spectrum, leaving only shades of violet.  "Middleterranean" night is vibrant yet dingy (perhaps an irrepressible manifestation of the region's sociopolitics?) with chalky tapenade and flecks of spice all over.  Italian night is a brilliant frenzy of color, culminating in a dessert composed with fine-dining precision.

Are things too brown, too beige?  Sprinkle some paprika.  Yes, even on chocolate cake.  All the eggplant mushy and discolored?  Roast or grill the shit out of it, saving the skin to chop into tiny squares you can caramelize and sprinkle like confetti.  Some stuff looks pretty nice.  Thinly-sliced radish makes the salads elegant, and grilled pork tenderloin is just classic.

And then there's breakfast.  Ahhh, my chance to have total order and replicability.  The symmetry of rows of pancakes on platters, the grace and harmony of simple things done well.  Because no garnish or sauce or special treatment can improve upon a pile of crispy bacon.  And for a while, on clear days, that's when the sun shines in the kitchen windows.

I derive an inordinate amount of happiness from this lemon tart + shortbread cookie + lemon curd + brie.

EAT YOUR COLORS

It's a good thing.

The Wind in the Alders

I'm not usually one for "doing the voices" -- maybe a bit higher or lower tone depending on age and sex, clipped and precise or drawling.  I'm sure my nephew would enjoy goofier interpretations when I read to him, and luckily the characters were vivid enough on their own when Matt and I read to each other.  But of late I've been inspired by two of my day-off buddies to amp things up a bit.  Their creative accents and tones so bring to life "The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place" and "Skunk and Badger" that I'm following suit. From within a tent we put on quite a performance for anyone in the vicinity of Kayak Beach on Kachemak Bay the other night.

We started reading aloud a couple weeks ago when, after dinner dishes and work was done but it was a bit early for bed, several of us gathered of an evening.  This past weekend we had extra days off, and three of us journeyed in storybook fashion to a storybook land: a boat ride, a short drive, a long drive, another boat ride, to Grace Ridge trailhead at the far end of a fjord, in misty, densely wooded mountains.  Past towering stands of devil's club and cow's parsnip; along a steep and muddy path; traversing a land now lush with ferns, now low mossy tundra; filling the air with varied cries to warn bears of our presence as we encountered alarmingly frequent and fresh piles of poop; we ascended to a hollow just shy of the summit and set up camp among the clouds.

It was very beautiful.  Some patches of snow provided drinking water, and intermittent rain didn't stop my stove kicking out good meals.  The next morning began with heavy fog down below which rolled up to sock us in with uncanny gauze.  It wasn't quite to the level of imminent danger, but our perspective and sense of time were utterly suspended as we wound our way down, seeing only a hundred feet or so ahead.

And like Rat and Mole after an Edwardian adventure, I'm back in my cozy den, washed up and well fed, curling under heavy blankets to be rested for the next chapter with my fellow creatures.

Dramatic foreshadowing...

Not quite its thickest, but you get the idea.

view upon arrival

On Hats

One of my earliest memories is being 3 or 4, riding in mom's Datsun in winter, with my knit hat on.  It was scratchy against my forehead and pressed my ears against my head, muffling my hearing.  As snow melted in the car's warmth, little spheres of water beaded along the hat's edge and tiny rainbows fringed my view.  I enjoyed this effect; but I did not like hats.  As a perspire-acious person, a warm person, an itchy person, a self-conscious and not naturally fashionable person, hats have always been a source of compound discomfort.

Ok, I guess the pictures are going here this time.  The wild roses are still going strong.

Yep.

A wonderful little beach to pull off on.

Among the many joys of my current job is not wearing a hat in the kitchen.  Our mixer might not always get full power, I might pause with floury hands to clap the life out of a dozen mosquitoes, but I'm not getting forehead rash from a sweaty cap.

But I have to concede there is one activity for which I willingly don a brim.  Kayaking along our shore, east and west in the near-endless afternoon, I more thoroughly enjoy the craggy curving coast and boundless forests when I can minimize squinting.  I was also pleased to find during yesterday's rain that my hat bill protrudes enough to keep my hood up and my glasses mostly dry.  I felt like a huge dork, and the loons were surprised enough by my sartorial choices to stare back at me for some minutes before diving, perhaps to chortle over the awkwardly maneuvering paddle-creature.