Life is a bowl

Leviathan Carved

2009-10-10T20:49:00.000-07:00

I just spent the last few days up on the North Slope, in Barrow and Atqasuk. In Barrow, there was a very successful fall whale hunt. Three whales were harvested from off the Point while I was there. They were towed back to the Naval Arctic Research Lab runway and the whole town had a big party. It was great fun to watch all of the people coming and going during this incredible event. Biologists were sampling the stomach; kids were crawling all over the carcasses, fascinated by the rubbery texture of the flesh; and the proud captains stood by and watched the men and women from the community slowly peel back the thick layers of blubber.

Atqasuk was also fascinating to me. It looked and felt much like the Prairies down south, with the wind trying to blow the soul from your body. People were busy ice fishing and building a collection of caribou meat that hung just outside their doors. A woman…a single mother of six young kids…disappeared for five days out caribou hunting alone. Finally, just as our tiny Cessna Caravan was leaving, she was found alive with a helleva story to tell. I look forward to returning and hearing whatever stories people are willing to share with a stranger.

More pictures here.

Solo in the Far North

2009-06-21T01:32:00.000-07:00

It's been several months without a post; here's why. I'm trying to finish my private pilot's license. Last summer's rainy weather and house renovations slowed my progress. Now, I can see the end in view. With this in mind, I had the opportunity to fly my club's Cessna 172 up to the North Slope this week to install one of my snow sensors. I invited my flight instructor along and he foolishly accepted. We worked through the flight planning, packed the plane, and set off last Sunday to the work camp of Umiat, on the Colville River, with a re-fueling stop in Bettles. Umiat has a modern history dating back to the 1940's when gas was discovered there. Now, there are plans to develop the gas fields and build another pipeline, keeping the camp busy with geologists and hydrologists. The weather record at Umiat also dates back to the 1940's, making it an attractive place to install additional weather sensors. Bettles is a small community on the South Side of the Brooks Range, a starting point for hiking in the mountains, and a perfect re-fueling point for arctic flights.

In Bettles, I got my first mechanical training. We couldn't start the plane after parking it. So we pulled out the spark plugs out and my instructor, F., showed me how to clean them. That worked, we gassed up, and were off. Shortly thereafter, we ascended into the Brooks Range and promptly entered thick clouds, i.e. IFR conditions. We kept a close eye on the carburetor and ice building on the wings and ascended out of the freezing conditions when we needed to. But at one point it was actually snowing in the cabin.

Finding Umiat was no small task as well. We knew from the GPS that we were close and decended through a hole in the clouds. Then we stayed 100 feet off the ground or so, looking for a runway. When we lost visual contact with the ground, we ascended and started over again. Finally, we saw a sodium light in the distance. Soon, a brown strip appeared. We entered the pattern and put the plane down. Phew. So much for my first cross country flight!

For the next day and a half F. and I worked busily to install my sensor. We must have lost 2 quarts of blood to the mosquitoes. Finally, when it was all done, our BLM collaborator arrived on an ATV and announced that we would have to move the whole installation half a mile to the other side of camp. We decided to take a break and go flying. We took off and toured the Colville basin. It was a beautiful day with hardly a cloud in the sky and no wind. The river cut through big bluffs that must have been heavy with fossils. Smaller tributaries formed thousands of ponds when they lost the momentum to move forward. Finally, I told F. that I was ready for some touch and goes. We headed back to Umiat. Three good landings and F. asked me to come to a full stop and let him out. Finally, my day had come. I was too tired to be very nervous about it and I'd just had a lot of hours in the plane. I back taxied to the end of the runway and off I went. My first solo was in Umiat, more than three degrees north of the Arctic Circle. I could not have had more fun in the process. My collaborator at BLM celebrated with us and agreed to move the sensor himself, so we could fly home the next day in clear sky conditions. It was certainly a trip to remember. More pictures here.

Back from the Very North

2009-03-01T21:48:00.000-08:00

This February brought another trip to Barrow to install a new snow sensor. We had a couple of beautiful days with not much wind that made the trip more pleasant. My colleagues assigned a local teenager to guide me to the site via snow machine. J was very helpful but flipped over his own snow machine, much to his embarrassment. Scolding from his father ensued. I did manage to capture part of the trip back on video. If you don't mind feeling a little seasick, take a look.

The Poo Chronicles

2009-01-31T00:29:00.000-08:00

Alaskans have unique relationship to their waste stream. And sewage in particular. I was recently at an all women's dinner party where the topic of sewage captivated the crowd for a good 20 minutes; one woman, an engineer in designer jeans claimed 'I LOVE inspecting people's septic tanks.' Really. Keeping one's systems 'a go' during the long winter is a huge challenge. Like several other homes on our block, we have a personal sized, above ground 'Extreme Sewage Treatment Plant' (ExtremeSTP). This is pretty much what it sounds like. Bad stuff goes in, good stuff goes out. The ground is simply too frozen for a septic tank.

Well, we didn't quite get around to checking all of our plumbing heat trace over the summer and we're paying the price now. A few weeks ago we replaced the ~40feet of output pipe from the STP because it was entirely blocked with ice. All of this at -40 in the dark. The bathroom sink hot water invariably freezes every night and must be thawed every morning. Finally, this last week, the entire toilet line froze. So it was a matter of thawing the contents, tearing out the old insulation, adding a functional heat trace, and replacing the insulation. Pretty awful. But we learned a lot about our house in the process!

Crawling Toward the Finish Line

2009-01-26T09:40:00.000-08:00

Well, there are still a few details left, but we are very close to having finished our kitchen renovation. Hence no posts for many months. In an earlier post you can see what was a dark, cold, ugly cabin.

Some in-between pictures show us laboriously replacing the electricity, framing in the walls, adding insulation, a vapor barrier, and drywall. New doors went in. A solid oak floor took nearly a week of our labor. We painted the cabinets and put on new handles. A local hardwood specialist made us an ash countertop.

Bob washed 30 years of grime off the wood ceiling. That was pretty gross. We took out the old propane lights and added new track lighting and a chandelier.

Finishing touches included curtains and some additional chairs from Ikea. The rug is a Navajo antique that belonged to my grandmother.

We kept all of the old appliances for now, but added a dish washer...that was possibly the best part of all.

Where We've Been

2009-01-26T09:25:00.000-08:00

Everyone loves a great 'before' and 'after' picture. Bob was the official documentary photographer on our cabin renovation. I'll let his pictures speak for themselves. The top picture was taken in June and the bottom one in early November.

Early Progress Report

2008-07-29T22:45:00.000-07:00

Well, this post ain't no modern novel, but here are some pictures from B. of some of the renovation we're doing...the 'before' picture and the 'in progress' pictures. What you are seeing is our 1970s log cabin being framed from the inside. Insulation and drywall yet to come. The kitchen was removed. Counters are being painted. Probably another two months before you see the 'after' pictures. I know they're only 2 x 6's, but I feel warmer already...

Adventures in Home Ownership

2008-07-01T23:48:00.000-07:00

Well, the reason you haven't heard much out of B and I for a while is that we bought a house! It's a log cabin-style place with a lot of potential, but also needs a lot of work. Here you can see that we jacked up the house to level it and remove an old foundation. I'll let these pictures do the talking. Check out that GIANT wrench.

Jumbo Squid Strikes Again

2008-04-27T13:09:00.001-07:00

The news that "jumbo squids move north, voracious predators may pose threat to Pacific salmon stocks" is wonderful for those of us who are fans of everything calamari. Jumbos are still smaller than the Giants, but I'd love to have a lightly battered lemony ring the size of my fist. BRING IT ON SQUIDY!

Alpine: A Woman Behind Every Tree

2008-04-27T02:04:00.000-07:00

Whomever named this place certainly had a sense of humor. There can't be a tree for several hundred miles. We're on the North Slope, just to the East of the Colville River delta, near the Arctic Ocean. Our camp is the Conoco-Phillips western base up here on the Slope. The native village of Nuiqsut is several miles up the Colville. Aside from that community of a couple hundred there's nothing but flat plains, drilling pads and wells as far as the eye can see.

The CP drilling and exploration base is a modest compound of pre-fab quarters and physical plant facilities. Water is pumped from nearby lakes to hydrate the base and power is generated on site. We drove here over an ice road from the Kuparuk oil fields near Prudhoe Bay. The only sign of life was a flock of ptarmigans, barely visible over the snow and a few isolated caribou. The sky and ground were nearly indistinguishable, making it difficult to chart our progress along the drive. Only the appearance and disappearance of glowing skyscraper-sized drilling pads along the tundra delineated the 40 or so frozen miles.

The CP compound here is bustling with shift workers. Some live as far away as Arizona and Arkansas. 2 weeks on, 2 weeks off. And dozens of hours of flying in between. Inside are hallways of small double-capacity dorm rooms with signs posted "Quiet, day-sleepers." There's a dining room with a fake fireplace and no other even ironically charming features. There are "reading corners" in some hallways with pulp fiction and a full spectrum light. Three times a day hot meat and remarkably fresh salad are served up to glazed-eye workers on 12-hour shifts.

Our first day in the field was pretty miserable: 30 mph winds make -5 F feel like -35 F and with blowing snow visibility was down to a few meters. I was sampling snow depth and density and several of my density cores simply blew away.

Our second day was spent over the the National Petroleum Reserve and the weather was far more pleasant. Colder, but less wind. Ice roads had been built to both the lakes we sampled in the Western Operations Area (WOA). This meant we didn't need to bump along the tundra in a painfully slow track vehicle.

Each morning that we were based out of the Alpine oilfield, we were required to attend a 6:00 am "Toolbox" meeting, a.k.a. safety briefing. Since normally we rely on the survey contractors to give us a ride to our field site in the track vehicles, we attend the surveyor's safely meeting. After a discussion of safety hazards specific to the day's tasks or weather and a round-the-room sharing session of personal concerns, we go through a required series of stretches. Imagine eight people in a cramped field office dressed in Arctic weather gear doing toe touches. Though it seems absurd, the emphasis on safety is important. The work here is dangerous (~6 trucks a day were sliding off the ice roads) and medical evacuation could take most of a day.

We left the WOA late Thursday night. It's good that it's already light most of the night here because we got stuck behind a 10-story tall drilling rig. Being back at British Petroleum's Prudhoe Bay Operations Center on the Eastern side felt like being in a classy European hotel after a few days at Alpine. I guess in some sense it is.

Today was my day to leave so our team dropped me off at the Deadhorse airport. I checked in and walked through a cloud of diesel ice smog over to the Prudhoe Bay Hotel. There I could hold court in the galley for the six hours before my flight. In the end, listening to CNN at top volume for six hours was a pretty high price for internet access. The highlights at the hotel included a coed bathroom and intermittent harassment from the workers. There was a funny old geologist who came over to talk to me a couple times. "Excuse me, is the plural for musk ox musk oxen?" And later, "I'm writing a poem about seeing the musk oxen and I want to describe the tundra vegetation. Can you tell me the scientific names for all the tundra plants? I can only remember Betula."

The time passed eventually and I boarded the 737 combi (cargo/passenger) plane back to Anchorage en route to Fairbanks. I'm one of only two women on the entire plane, aside from the flight attendants and by 20 minutes after take off, most of the passengers are drunk. I'm happy the Slope is dry; I don't see how women could work here otherwise. A couple of months ago Alaska Business Monthly's cover story was "Women of the Kuparuk Oil Fields." I think I discovered one of the incentive packages: free feminine products in EVERY bathroom. Who needs stock options when the boss buys your maxis!

The Face of AK

2008-03-03T07:56:00.001-08:00

Could someone please get Lance Mackey some full-spectrum light? And maybe some vitamins?

The Dirtiest Job

2008-02-09T18:12:00.000-08:00

The informal Urban Dictionary lists three separate definitions for shit storm, believe it or not:

1. n. Figuratively, a huge downpour of shit; not to be confused with an actual dump as experienced by a headshitter

Dude, I fucked up large. Now I'm gonna face a gale force shit storm!

2. When all the shit hits you at once. A whole bunch of criticism, or problems all at once. when in the shit storm you are being shit hammered.

ex: "Man my wife left me, a cop pulled me over and gave me a ticket for no insurance, and no registration, and when I came home my house had been broken into, and burned to the ground, it was a real shit storm."

[NOTE: This entry is from Alaska where all of these events often do coincide]

3. A euphemism qualifying a noun with a greater sense of intensity rather than as plainly stated.

After this past census, there's been an ongoing debate over gerrymandering by elected officials. This underlies the shit storm of controversy over who stands to gain by redrawing the new district lines.

---------------

So this is all I can think of as I'm sitting in a cloud of methane in our living room right now. Hopefully the cloud won't burst and nothing in this storm will rain down any more than it already has. The 25 year-old septic tank finally filled, froze in the pipes, and flooded the house last night. Real bummer. The people you call to get you out of this mess showed up at around 3 this afternoon and looked like they walked straight off the set of a Cohen brothers film.

Not everyone in town will pump your septic on a Saturday when it's -40 F: these guys were true professionals with about 4 or 5 teeth between them. When they discovered they were unable to thaw the pipes from under the house, they moved the whole operation into the house. When I asked if I should throw away the towels barricading the crap water in the bathroom, one of the guys replyed, "Oh no mam', it's going to get worse before it gets better." Great. Well, I supervised as best I could without vomiting while Bob kept the dogs under control upstairs.

As they were leaving I asked them if they ever watched the show "The Dirtiest Job." They said the videographic team was up here two weeks ago filming them but hadn't yet decided whether to run the footage on the "Dirtiest Job" or the "Coldest Job" show. I can totally believe it. Well, we've got some work ahead of us.

Fun in Barrow Sun

2008-02-09T15:44:00.000-08:00

This past week I spent some quality time in Barrow working on a snow sensor. What better time to go than when it's -35 F. Actually, Fairbanks was -45 F, so Barrow felt warm in comparison. The sun only made it above the horizon on January 22nd or so, but it was already up for four hours a day while I was there. I'm going to let the pictures below speak for themselves. They include a skinned Polar bear that was shot while I was there, our site operators helping me install the sensor, and photos from around Barrow. Enjoy!

EXCUSE me, is this the line for Paradise?

2008-01-26T19:03:00.000-08:00

We've been boring many of you for months with talk of our pending trip to Hawaii. Now we can bore you with tales of how wonderful it was. It really was paradise. Alaska Airlines knew what it was doing when it started offering direct flights from Anchorage. Purportedly, 5% of the state of Alaska goes to Hawaii every year. Go a couple of years without your circadian rhythms and you'll understand. Waking up to the sunrise in your tent feels a lot better than watching the sunrise during your lunch break.

How did we do it, you ask ? We spent a couple of nights on Oahu, staying with friends A. and A. who research 1) whales and 2) reef microbes respectively. These two had some foresight when choosing their scientific passions. Their work has taken them all over the Pacific islands and still allows time for triathlons, surfing, and spear fishing. Not bad. A. and I lived together many years ago in Woods Hole, MA where she would jog to the beach every morning and swim a mile in the ocean. Pretty ambitious lady. She took Bob and I for a drive around the island which culminated in watching the pro surfers catch the 25' waves on the North Shore, some of the worlds best. I'm happy to stay a spectator on this one. Watching the little bobbing men get completely thrashed around by the ocean looked tiring and like it probably removes brain cells.

Next we flew to the Big Island and spent the duration of the trip there. We camped all over the island on beaches like this one (Laupahoehoe) and tried to generate another couple of months worth of vitamin D. We did some amazing snorkeling at the site of Captain Cook's demise and in the Keauhou tide pools. I'll have to post separately on those adventures when we get the underwater film developed.

Another highlight of going to the tropical Pacific in January is that plants are alive. And alive they were. We headed to the botanical garden north of Hilo and found these beauties. For more, check out my album on Flicker. Of course, these aren't like the pros. We saw a number of very serious plant photographers and their giant tripods hobbling up and down the trails. And what would Hawaii be without waterfalls. And volcanoes. I'm trying to provide a sampler here. A pupu platter, if you will, of Paradise's offerings.

The volcanoes were a major highlight, even though the National Park and it's cute little cabins were FREEZING (like 50 F!!). Meanwhile, Fairbanks was suffering -35 F. Ha Ha. So as some of you know, the Hawaiian chain of islands are mid-plate hot spots which are formed by magma shooting through the plate like a geyser. The plate kept moving as this happened, which is how the chain was formed. So the Big Island is the most active, being the current geyser. Maui still has some fire in the belly. The others are like old pimples...scars, but no gooey stuff.

So here's a giant caldera in Volcano National Park with sulfur vapors and steam coming out. Very cool. And stinky. Many old tourists seemed to cluster around the caldera, despite all of the signage telling anyone with respiratory problems to keep their distance. This glamorous lady was one of their handlers.

There was quite of bit of hiking to do all over the park and the island in general. We found these gorgeous pink flowers growing right out of the lava on a hike down to a remote beach. Actually, it was on a foray across someone's ranch. We were totally lost. But found some old ruins where probably someone or another was roasted over a spit. The old ways. Change isn't always bad.

Well, it was a great trip, but eventually we had to come home. The dogs had a GREAT time at doggie camp while we were gone and ended up with these souvenirs. Lucky them. To overcome the 12 new inches of snow in our driveway, we bought a shovel on our way home. Sigh. Time to start planning next year's winter break!

Wickersham Dome, -5F

2007-12-30T21:30:00.000-08:00

After our Christmas gorge here in Fairbanks, we were quasi-inspired or at least not utterly uninspired by our semi-pro athlete friends H. and J. to drag ourselves into the out-of-doors. More than just a leisurely ski around campus, that is. Our friends A. and P. are game for almost anything, so all four of us had our first backcountry ski experience. I'm totally sold! Not only because it was a blast but because it gives us an excuse to gorge more! We headed out at day break to the White Mountains north of Fairbanks and skied the aptly named Ski Loop part of the Wickersham Dome trail. Bob votes for the summer hike here instead, but the lack of other people and mosquitoes lead me to prefer the winter trek.
We dragged Midge along with us (behind me) who was having a great time so long as we kept moving. Even sled dogs get cold. All five us hit the Hilltop Cafe truckstop on our way home for some burgers. Well, Midge stayed in the car, but she still got her fill. I think somehow the waitress figured it out. "One hamburger-to-go for table 6, Jeanie. I THINK IT'S FOR A DOG." If you don't mind your burger charred and elongated, I recommend you order from the Hilltop this way: I think there was twice as much meat as in our people burgers.

There's a new book available out from UAF press that has a ton of great info about adventures around the AK interior. I highly recommend it so far. We're putting together a check list of all the trips we want to do.

Le Flat Place

2007-12-30T21:11:00.000-08:00

Before Christmas proper, I headed down to Nebraska to check in with friends and family. I took a Great Lakes flight from Denver to North Platte aboard a little Beechcraft 1900. This is an awesome little plane. Unlike AK, the sun still shines (occasionally) in Nebraska this time of year. Here are some sunflowers at A.'s place holding up the weight of the snow. But it's no Caribbean. Or is it?

These palm trees at the local hot tub shop suggest otherwise. Unfortunately there were no pina coladas growing on them.

North Platte is known for a few things. Trains being most of them. Some sources claim the local Baily Yard is the largest in the world. That's a little hard for me to imagine. The same sources claim that "North Platte is an extremely boring railroad town" so perhaps neither fact is entirely objective.

A. claims there is actually a huge market for railroad tourism on which North Platte is a "real whistle stop" if you know what I mean. Again, this is difficult for me to me to wrap my mind around. There is a Golden Spike visitor center despite the golden spike having been laid (driven?) in Utah. Check your commemorative quarters, people.

NP had some other things going for it, namely a couple of cozy restaurants, some good photo-taking opportunities, and of course the company of an old friend.

Arctic Bowl

2007-12-30T21:01:00.000-08:00

Boy, you might wonder how we pass the time during these long winter nights. Us too. I have never been overly fascinated with bowling, but I have found myself at the Arctic Bowl twice already this winter. In a couple of years you'll probably see me getting lessons from this Ned Flanders look-alike as is this lady here. We went again Friday night with friends and it was hoppin'. There were several separate clans there which I might describe as "future enlistees and their future wives," hipsters sporting beards who look like the guys in Brooklyn who are trying to look like Alaskans, and a strange M/F couple I'll call the Graceful Bowlarina dancers (Pas de deux).

Amazingly, there are actually at least three bowling alleys in town: one on campus, one on the Army base, and Arctic Bowl. Other proposed indoor activities include curling and women's hockey. I'll let you know how those go. Arctic Bowl is the best because 1) they serve Fairbanks lager 2) they are adjacent to the best (& also the sleaziest) Korean restaurant in town, which is 3) also adjacent to an Asian grocery store. So really it's three exciting destinations in one. And if I wanted to learn Tai Kwon Do there would be four.

The Worst is Over?

2007-12-24T22:45:00.000-08:00

Well, we made it through the winter solstice, which is a big deal here. Shortest day of the year. Civil twilight began at 9:32 am. The sun crept above the horizon at 10:58 am. Sunset was at 2:40 pm and civil twilight ended at 4:06 pm. 3:38 of sun above the horizon is pretty rough. The moon was a waxing gibbous at 93% which made it almost tolerable. Right before the solstice we had a cold snap of -40s. Yish. I missed most of that while on travel. Climatology has us at +5 high and -9 low for December; not half bad. According to our friend at Swingley Development, the current running average is probably pretty close to climatology. The cold snap made up for warm anomalies early in the month. The sunlight minimum has passed but the average temperature minimum is typically in January, thanks to thermal inertia in the climate system. We here in the 'banks are all generally weather obsessed for obvious reasons.

What are some of the impacts of -40 on our way of life? Good and bad. Our tires are square in the morning. They tha-thunk down the road until they warm up. On the other hand, freezing food is free. We like to cook a lot and squirrel away the extra in the chest freezer. The cold helps us save on energy costs. With the cost of oil and the cold temperatures, we fuss a lot about energy consumption. Bob's good about installing timers and unplugging stuff when we don't need it...I don't know if it's the engineer training or just common sense.

We recently purchased an "energy efficient" counter top dishwasher from Edgestar. It's slightly bigger than a microwave and supposedly holds 4 place settings worth of dishes, silverware, and glasses. Uses only 3 gallons of water and has an internal heater, so the input is cold water. Perhaps the verdict is still out, but after one load all signs point to "piece of crap". Like all other consumer products these days. And because Compact Appliances wouldn't ship to AK, I shipped it from Nebraska at great expense. Oh well. I don't think our expectations were too high, but like many Alaskans, custom made cabinetry meant no chance of a regular dishwasher. Bourgeois problems.

Well, we've been busy dirtying dishes as well, since our friends A. & P. gave us this incredible cookbook. We love Deborah Madison's Veg Cooking for Everyone, but a lot of these soup recipes are really new and interesting. I made the lentil walnut cream soup yesterday, which was delicious, even with my substitute of hazelnuts. Bob's been doing mad baking all month which is nearly killing me. I finally got out for a ski today and look forward to working off the latest chocolate cake. Yes, I think the worst is over.

Goose vs. Tofurkey

2007-11-28T22:59:00.000-08:00

We had a great thanksgiving this year. Two of them, actually. Thursday night we cooked this 9 pound goose. Or rather is started at 9 pounds and cooked down to about 7 after I followed this recipe for Scandinavian-style roasted goose from 1964. It turned out dee-lish. We're planning to roast some potatoes with some of the goose fat next week. I think we should have enough to fulfill our goose fat needs for the next couple of years, in fact. We didn't have any apples or plums to stuff it, so I just used whatever I could find to plug it up: a lemon, an onion, and a potato finally filled the inside.

Bob made his usual crazy assortment of pies. This time it was pumpkin and eggnog cranberry. Wow. Where did I find this guy?

I also made a stuffing from scratch that was multigrain bread, sage pork sausage, sauteed leeks, fresh sage, and craisins. I promised Bob that I'd make it again for Christmas; it was that good!

We had our friends P., J., & M. over and they brought sweet potatoes and bean casserole. It was a sight to behold. As if that wasn't enough, Friday we had a second motherlode of good eats when more friends G., I., M., S., J., & P came over. This time the menu was vegan. I made cabbage roles filled with barley, veggies, and tempeh, which got covered in tomato sauce and baked. I also made a phyllo strudel with yukon gold potatoes, artichokes, onion, tofu, and lots of fresh tarragon. And that went with mushroom gravy, if you can believe it. Bob made a plum chocolate cake which was pretty good, especially after I rescued it from the oven and put in all of the ingredients he forgot including the leavening. G. & I. brought a tofurkey, which was pretty darn good, as well as pie, salad, and half a dozen other things. It's hard to even feel guilty after you eat this stuff.

Sour Cream Cranberry Rye Bread

2007-10-27T22:48:00.000-07:00

This turned out pretty yum! We put some of R.'s pluot jam on the bread and ate it with the last of the king crab Bob brought back from Nome in July. The rye-cranberry combo is very similar to a lingonberry bread we found at Ikea this summer. The ground cranberries are subtle and only add a perfumey taste to the rye. The recipe says make two loaves. I made three and let it rise on our soapstone wood stove while we were out skiing.

1 c. warm water
2 pkgs. (2 scant tbsp.) dry yeast
1 c. sour cream
1 tbsp. salt (!!! I used 1 teaspoon)
1/2 c. molasses
1/4 c. sugar
1/4 tsp. allspice
1/4 tsp. cloves
2 c. fresh cranberries, ground
3 c. rye flour
4 1/2 to 5 c. unbleached flour

In a large mixer bowl dissolve yeast in warm water. Add sour cream, salt, molasses, sugar, allspice, cloves, cranberries and rye flour. Blend together on low speed, then beat at medium speed for 5 minutes. Add enough bread flour to make a soft dough.

Knead for 5 minutes. Place in greased bowl; cover; let rise until double in bulk. Punch down. Divide into 2 equal parts and let rest, covered, for 10 minutes. Grease 2 (9 x 5 inch) loaf pans. Shape each piece of dough into a loaf and place in pan; cover and let rise until double in size.

Bake at 375 degrees for 35 to 40 minutes until deep golden brown. If loaves become too brown, cover loosely with foil during last 10 minutes of baking. Remove from pans immediately and cool on wire racks. Brush with butter while still warm, if desired. Makes 2 loaves.

Galliformes!

2007-10-27T22:04:00.000-07:00

Well this Bonasa umbellus of the Galliformes order came traipsing across our yard today. Bob's first impulse was to shoot her, as he went hunting unsuccessfully for these little birds earlier this fall. I did a split second calculation about not wanting to figure out how to clean it and decided to shoot it with my Nikon instead. These grouse are related to ptarmigan and prairie chickens. Big, low flying, and slow.

For future reference I found (of course) an Alaskan website on grouse cleaning. This is NFV (not for vegans) but shows some good AK color.

Lady Chainsaws

2007-10-27T17:40:00.000-07:00

Me and some girls from work had a ladies' night out a couple of weeks ago. This was pretty fun. The cast of characters included A. from Mexico via Chicago and California notable for her *licensed* Noguchi lamp collection, O. from Hawaii/Nebraska who spent her teen years living in her parents RV and now rides a badass motorcycle, M. who is also a former Nebraskan and the alternate state climatologist (there is a longtime debate about the official one living in Anchorage and some kind of illegitimate usurpation of that crown), and O. who is a German linguist who studies dying Athabaskan languages on the upper Tanana River. Great bunch of gals.

You really know you are in Alaska when the topic turns to chopping fallen trees for firewood and your lady friends offer you their lady chainsaws. Uhhh, I had no idea there was such a thing as a lady chainsaw. When one searches the internet for "women's chainsaw" one finds the following convo:

From: Brushcuttingirl

"Hi all. Does anyone have any suggestions for a good chainsaw for a woman to use? We have several different makes and models and I can run the smaller to medium ones but my biggest problem is getting them started! I just can't seem to yank hard enough. I've been thinking about buying an electric but have heard that they don't have that much power. I read the discussion on electrics on board and it only reinforced my decision to go electric. Mostly what I'll be using it for would be to clean up the woods around the house. Not the back 40 mind you, just around the yard!

Thanks in advance for any advice (appreciated) and comments."

Response from: Phorester

"Sounds like you will be using the saw well away from an electrical outlet, and don't want to drag around a couple hundred feet of extension cord?

On the high end gas saws you can get one with a decompression switch. This reduces the amount of strength needed to pull the starter cord by quite a lot. Your local dealer will know about this.

Also, how are you attempting to start the saw? Setting it on the ground and putting your foot through the back handle while holding down on the front handle with your other hand should anchor it pretty well to pull the cord.

But my wife had the same problem. We could only solve it by letting me use the saw, she used the splitting maul."

Uhhh. Yeah.

P.S. Here's Jill's solution to the problem.

Anchorage Underworld

2007-10-15T22:58:00.000-07:00

Well, this post is coming to you from Alaska's seedy center, Anchorage USA. Since I seem to only have time for reading on airplanes, let me tell you about this gem I found at the airport. Kim Rich wrote this memoir about her rearing by a gangster and a stripper in high-flying 1960s Anchorage. Pretty sordid stories, but it's a really captivating book that breaks out of the Alaska literary mold. That's Jello not fungi.

These days the underworld pretty much mingles with the overworld. One need only to stand at the central bus station for a few minutes to witness this. Last year Bob and I watched a station attendant roll a sleeping man over long enough to wipe up the small pool of blood under him, then he just rolled the guy back. Downtown is a regular lineup of cheap ivory shops, drunks, and hookers. And a stolid 6-foot tall blond woman selling reindeer sausage out of her minivan.

I had breakfast at the adorable Snow City Cafe. A real bright spot on the downtown landscape. As some of you know, most of downtown Anchorage was destroyed in the 1964 Good Friday Earthquake, the largest recorded in North American History at 9.2 on the Moment scale. My impression from Rich's book of Anchorage before the earthquake is a mix of northern slum and glitzy nightlife. Well it was rebuilt so that every building looks like the Mutual of Omaha headquarters, which is to say not pretty. Tragic considering the gorgeous ocean inlet and neighboring snow-covered mountains. Now a canyon of brown tinted glass and stained stucco.

Of course, Anchorage people don't see it that way and they have plenty of criticism for Fairbanks. Though I'm spending most of the week with oil barons, I did get to meet up with R., with whom I went to college. She hosts one of my favorite Alaska-based radio shows. And she lived in Iowa City and is hitched to a Nebraskan. So we've lived in many of the same places, just in a different order. R. brought along a friend, H. who is a pilot for a well-known aerial photography company and has seen many corners of the state. We all had a fun time comparing our AK experiences. After a beer under a deafening broadcast of Law and Order, we paused in the hotel lobby to soak up an 50 person strong ukulele jam-and-sing. There is a convention for Hawaiian diaspora here this week and the consensus is that folks in the 49th state could learn a lot from those in the 50th. These people were having a blast.

Enjoying the Last Gasp of Sunshine

2007-10-08T00:28:00.001-07:00

Our tomatoes are really turning out scrumptious. Considering we started them in March, that's 7 months in the making for these little babies. Think cherry- and strawberry-sized. But they taste pretty darn good. Certainly better than what rolls off the truck at the grocery store this time of year.

The carrots were unbelievably sweet. Also, only about two inches long, but these we planted directly in the garden, so they only represent 5 months of work.

Bob and I have also been experimenting with Greek cuisine. The Greek restaurant in Fairbanks burned down a couple of years ago, but recently we noticed a replacement has risen like a Phoenix in the ashes downtown. It's just not open yet. So for the time being, here's a giant spanikopita I made from the last of the garden's kale and collards. I boiled the winter greens for a couple of minutes, then mixed them with diced zucchini, feta, dill, olives, and onion. Mmm. Then put everything into this filo duvet. Deeee-lish.

Winter is here

2007-10-08T00:15:00.000-07:00

Well, it seemed to happen pretty fast. Despite what the normal climatology says--snow is likely as early as mid-September--I wasn't mentally prepared. One day it got chilly. Then, there was a clear night and heat simply radiated away. The next day it was cooler. It snowed. It was clear again that night. More heat radiated away. And now the white surface reflects the incoming sun rays. That's it. Autumn is toast. Here Bob is busy putting on our snow tires and breaking the jack.

I realize that some of you still have your AC cranked high...strange weather all over the lower 48 this fall. Meanwhile the snow may be covering our canoe, but we have plans for a little tropical paradise come January. I'm not sure we'll survive otherwise. Here are the climate normals from Weather Underground.

Top of the World

2007-09-30T23:01:00.000-07:00

Bob and I both headed north to Barrow last week for separate fieldwork projects. Barrow is the northern-most point in Alaska and serves as a hub for several of the North Slope coastal villages, as well as a whole host of science research.

We've just passed the equinox, so there are still almost 12 hours of light, even up in Barrow. However, the angle of the light is low and the amount of incoming solar radiation is dropping fast.

What used to be the Navy Arctic Research Lab, established in 1947, is now the Barrow Arctic Science Consortium. The naval architecture remains in the quonset huts and other utilitarian buildings.

I'm not sure what these giant radio dishes are for...they litter the coastal skyline. Bowhead whale skulls are also prominent fixtures; these juvenile skulls are mounted next to the community college.

Bob and his Swedish colleague Anna were installing soil moisture and temperature probes in a permafrost polygon. It was great to see some familiar faces up there. Even if those faces were burned by the steady 40 mph wind. It snowed the last couple of days I was there, but little accumulation.

Other nature highlights included seabirds, snowy owls, and this feisty fox.

A few days after we left, the autumn whaling season was set to begin. I don't know if this little boat is used for whaling, but it seemed as ready as any of the others I saw lying around. Which is to say rotten and hardly seaworthy. But that is in the spirit of these arctic towns.

The biggest story around town these days is the new football field for the Barrow Whalers. This is a bright blue and yellow astroturf field on a little sand spit on the north side of town. If you want a real field good story, check out the ESPN coverage. I'm guessing there will be a PG film in the near future. It's easy to see how it captured the imagination of the media: pretty positive story in a town where there aren't many.

Fall Sets In

2007-09-30T21:51:00.000-07:00

Well, it's the time in Fairbanks when the sun starts to drop a little lower in the sky, shadows get long and the aspen and birch leaves turn yellow. It's started freezing at night and puddles form little ice caps. Almost time to fire up our soapstone fireplace here. Matilda and the other pups have taken on a bit of melancholy, as our days of camping and canoeing draw to a close.

Still, there's plenty to celebrate. Bob had his 31st birthday and I baked him our traditional family "toothpaste" cake. This is a peppermint chiffon cake from the 1950s that my grandmother used to bake for my mother when she was a kid and I consequently learned to appreciate at a young age.

This recipe looks pretty close, though our family uses an egg-white/sugar/peppermint/cream of tartar frosting, made in a double-broiler. Bob suggests doubling the frosting load.

While our tomatoes never ripened outdoors, we pulled them out of the soil and Bob hung them in the house, upside down. We were skeptical, but about three weeks later, the toms have started to turn red. They are incomparable to the Nebraska tomatoes I grew up with, but they are homegrown and taste pretty good. A heck-of-a lot of work for these little red nuggets, though.

Despite the onset of fall, the mushrooms seem to be going strong. In addition to the beauts growing all over the yard, we recently noticed some very large dried mushrooms that the squirrels have been stashing in the space where the walls meet the roof of the house. According to a researcher at UAF, these are likely to be hallucinogenic mushrooms which Alaska squirrels reportedly cache for the long winter. Hmmmm. Makes a lot of sense. Hunker down for winter in a nest of our roof insulation with a good stash of Shrooms.

September on the Seward Peninsula

2007-09-25T21:05:00.000-07:00

In mid-September, Bob and I headed out to the Seward Peninsula in northwestern Alaska. The SP makes up the US side of the Bering Strait and you can see a map here. It's totally out there. There are not a lot of photos of us doing field work because we were too exhausted. Our four-wheeler broke down and we ended up walking to all of our sites...over 25 miles on tussock tundra! It sure was beautiful, though. The photos can't adequately capture the colors.

In addition to working on the sites in the Kougarok area, we headed out the Council road, along the beach, past the fishing huts of Soloman, and finally inland to the community of Council. Just as we pulled up, the last handful of folks had pulled their boats out of the river there; a big Bering Sea storm was on its way. These storm surges can and do completely eliminate the road, situated delicately on a sand bar. If someone gets stuck on the other side they can be there for a long long time...until it snows (creating skidoo access) or the road gets rebuilt. It's a tough life out here. We weren't able to hitch a ride across the river, unfortunately, so we didn't get to one of our sites.

The arctic light was beautiful as we came back to Nome from Council. Lots of twisted driftwood from the Yukon River ends up in this lagoon area. Huge old trees from the boreal forests.

Some old railroad junk from the gold rush days rots away on the sand. In the background an old gold dredge stands waiting in the marsh. These things are the size of buildings.

Finally, this old collapsed water tank reminded me of Serra's Torqued Ellipses.

Summer of Love

2007-09-25T20:10:00.000-07:00

Like many folks in their 30s, Bob and I had the opportunity to share several ceremonies of unity this summer. Or whatever they're called. It was a lot of fun. Alaska weddings tend to be pretty relaxed. Our friends Margaret and Hagen started the blitzkrieg in May before moving South and South-er for work.

Then came Mary and John and while we didn't make it to San Antonio, we celebrated in spirit. Emily and Luke provided not only stunning views and whitewater canoeing, but also fresh caught fish and blueberries. Bob brought fresh crab from Nome and it was a sentimental feast.

In August, we headed down to Seattle to celebrate the wedding of my sister in law's sister and her partner. We met up with my brother and his wife, caught up with Margaret down there, and only shutdown metro traffic once with our hobo-mobile. See previous posts on hobos. Same as usual.

At the end of August, I headed to Atlanta for the traditional Southern Spanish-American-British Physics wedding of Cristina and Andrew. Mmm mmm. Pretty fun. Erik, I'm completely heartbroken that I will miss your and Solana's nuptials in the NYC Zipper Factory. I hope you forgive me someday. If the Concorde still flew and they had flights from AK, I swear I would be there. I miss you all!

Peter and Anya giggling during Robin and Dani's ceremony.

Emily, Luke, Jeff the officiant, and a beautiful ridge. Check out that hat hair Luke is sporting!

Jessie and Todd get down and boogie at the physics wedding.

Bob and Hagen await arrival of the lovely bride, Margaret, in front of the Chena River in downtown Fairbanks.

Preserving the bounty

2007-09-23T02:24:00.000-07:00

I tried my hand at canning for the first time this summer. We had raspberries and blueberries coming out our ears, so it seemed like a reasonable solution. It took me a couple of tries to get it right, but I had some help from a couple of awesome websites:

Paul Noll's World of Canning

USDA Canning Guide

Getting out and about

2007-09-23T02:09:00.001-07:00

We decided to head for the Chena Dome Trail on Labor Day weekend. We were taking a chance on not finding water on the trail. This time of year, smaller streams and ponds tend to dry up in the AK interior. We were optimistic for the 29 mile hike, though, packing a full loaf of sandwiches and 9 liters of water. Unfortunately, it was dry as a bone and we didn't make it very far. Still had a great time. The views were beautiful, the company good, and the blueberries fat and heavy.

Summer Harvest

2007-09-23T01:33:00.000-07:00

Gardening was a big part of our short summer here in the 'banks. We started seeds indoors in early March and Bob nursed them along until early June transplant time. We had some mixed success. The greenhouse proved to be more or less useless, or at least not helpful with tomatoes. We did well with lettuce, carrots, cabbage, winter greens, and some herbs. Everything else never quite graduated from kinderkare. The leeks still look like grasslings and the squashes produced a hundred blossoms and no fruit. I mean, who can't grow zuccini? Pretty bad. Well, we don't get much light in our garden and there's not much we can do about that.

Girls of Summer

2007-09-23T01:21:00.000-07:00

The cuteness herein needs no explanation.

Rocking Fourth in Central, AK

2007-09-23T00:04:00.000-07:00

My folks came to visit this summer, as did Bob's. We had a lot of fun showing them around the Fairbanks area. Bob had the great idea of heading up to the hamlet of Central for the Fourth of July. This is a tiny community that really puts on a good show, come Independence Day. We brought my parents, a couple of friends, and the dogs, piled into two cars and drove a couple hours up the Steese Highway, just short of the Yukon River. We stayed in the local roadhouse, which is a couple of trailers welded together. Mom was really insistent on getting a room with a door, which took a few tries. If we'd all been so picky, we probably would have been out of luck. The roadhouse was a great staging ground for all of our detailed plans that day: watching the parade (8 minutes) and siting in lawnchairs drinking beer/walking dogs/smoking/eating chips (14 hours). A good time was had by all. Highlights below include Mom, Dad, man with large cucumbers, man wearing Native mask driving WWII motorcycle covered in Crown Royal felt bags, wiener dog.

Summer review: let's start with fireweed

2007-09-22T23:22:00.001-07:00

Fireweed is a ubiquitous plant in Alaska. That doesn't make it any less gorgeous. I mean, WOW. The flowers are kind of like popsicles in the lower 48; they perfectly embody summertime.

Here are some pictures that I took in early July on the Steese Highway, about 50 miles north of Fairbanks.

The plant digs disturbed areas, particularly burned ones which is how it got its name. Though the blossoms are so bright, they can make a hillside look alight. A large part of this area suffered forest fires about four years ago.

Here is a picture of Bob taking a nap in the sun. I think this is at Eagle Summit on the Steese. Kinda evokes the Sound of Music. Maybe a couple days after they started walking out of Austria. I seem to remember Eagle-sized mosquitoes on that afternoon, but they don't seem to bother him.

Summer is No Time to Be Blogging in AK

2007-09-03T23:34:00.001-07:00

Really, it's just too darn nice out to stay indoors. This might have been a best-ever summer. Beautiful warm days in Fairbanks, not too much rain and no fire. There's a lot to catch up on, so I guess I'll start in our own backyard. There is state-owned land next to our yard and an extensive trail system. This is where we ski in the winter and walk the dogs in the summer. The forest is beautiful, as you can see. The horsetail grows about 18 inches tall and the birch leaves fall and get caught in it like a spiderweb.

It's been a bumper crop of mushrooms this year, too. They went crazy during early August when we had a couple of weeks of rain. No one could convince Bob to go mushroom hunting, though. He steered clear of the wild 'shroom casserole at the company picnic; that's one of those things which could go really well, or really poorly. No reports of poisoning, so the cook must have known what she was doing. I'm sorry I missed taking a picture of the fluorescent orange slime mold we had on a couple of tree stumps near the house; it was a sight to behold.

In other exciting AK news, I shot my first squirrel about thirty feet up in a tree. These little guys have been eating all of the insulation in our roof. I figured the bullet wouldn't put out someone's window if I shot the squirrel from below. Sure enough I hit the bugger and it fell from the tree and hit the ground with a thug. I looked down to reload the airgun and that dangnabit squirrel limped away into a spider hole! I spent half an hour looking for him, hoping to put him out of his misery. Unfortunately, he probably died of lead poisoning sometime thereafter. You'll be glad that I'm posting a picture of horsetail here instead of dead squirrel. Bob shot another one today, which still had insulation in its mouth. We're not hateful people, but insulation is serious business here in AK.

End of winter project season

2007-04-28T19:44:00.000-07:00

Okay, I only really finished one project this winter. But it was a major coup. I sewed a slip cover for Bob's couch. I bought seven yards of red duck canvas. I used about 6.90 of it. The only remaining scraps are on the coffee table to the left of the couch. I didn't use a pattern, so this was a pretty good guess.

And let me tell you, this couch gets some serious mileage! So far the cover has held up famously. Here are the regular customers. They seem fairly pleased with the product.

Getting an Alaska Suntan

2007-04-28T18:33:00.000-07:00

Well, I headed up to Toolik Lake last week for the annual spring snow surveys. Lots of fun! This was my first experience with snow machines...and hopefully my last experience with snow for the year. Fairbanks has already been catapulted into spring. Even the mud is drying up around our house and we are anticipating an early fire season.

Here is a picture of me in the Kuparuk basin on the North Slope of AK. Probably near Imnavait creek, as this is where we spent much of the week.

Here's Sveta taking a break in a snow pit. This is how we take density samples. We cut a core with a sharp cutter at the bottom of a plastic tube and then put it in a ziplock. Then we take it back to the lab to weigh it and calculate the density.
This is also in the Kuparuk basin, with the Brooks Range in the distance.

Next, Amy is posing with her bear repellent. I'm pretty happy with pepper spray so far, but Annie Oakley here prefers the 44 magnum. We didn't mess with Amy. Though a veteran Alaskan, this was some of her first field work. I think she's got a knack for it though and that we'll be seeing more of her out in the trenches.

We saw plenty of caribou walking around. They would walk in lines like migrating birds: it probably saves them energy moving through the crusty snow. They would lie down and melt big holes in the snow that might be four feet across and a couple feet deep. These patches were to be avoided with the snowmachine, I learned quickly.

These clucking ptarmigans were taking a stroll next to Toolik Lake just as the evening fog was rolling in. They are very elegant looking but sound like chickens with hiccups. I was making a heckofa lot of noise stalking them in my snowshoes, but they only strolled a little bit faster and looked for shelter under this shrub. In about three weeks the snow will have melted away here and they will loose their white feathers in favor of brown tundra-colored ones. Pretty smart for a slow bird!

Hell is cold

2007-02-19T22:38:00.000-08:00

Well, last week I had a pretty strange adventure taking snow samples up on the Alaska Prudhoe bay oilfields. I think the pictures tell the story best. The temps on our work days were in the -30s F, with the windchill. Not too bad for up there in February.

This picture is the Deadhorse airfield with blowing snow and temps of -50s F, with windchill. Our operations would have ceased if temps dropped below -60F. In the range of -40 to -60, work can go on outside, so long as workers get frequent breaks.

In the picture I'm wearing four pairs of socks, five hats, and six layers over my upstairs. The coveralls stayed up better when I put on the belt. The boots are a military surplus called "bunny boots"; good to -40F or colder...

Here my coworkers are drilling into a lake used for water supply. The ice is about a meter thick and we took water chemistry measurements to make sure the fish could live happily at the bottom.

Here's a frozen North Slope river on the plane ride home. So good to get home to Fairbanks safe and sound!

Many, many pictures from this trip can be found here:

A little more Xmas

2007-01-18T23:51:00.000-08:00

Here are another couple of Christmas picts. Bob looking inquisitively at a boot on a fencepost and Bob's parently relaxing in the kitchen after a long day of present-opening. I'll admit shamefully that I have very few pictures from the xmas bonanza. I'll do better next year, I hope.

Winter in Fbx

2007-01-18T23:49:00.000-08:00

Well, here are some highlights during a lot of cold, dark days. Mooses. Cool frost. Decking Matilda out in polarfleece.

Fall Field work

2007-01-18T23:17:00.000-08:00

Given my recent New York Times coverage, I thought I'd post some picts from my fall fieldwork back in New York. Here's a shot my collaborator Allan took as we were scoping out a potential second site. I'm up on Stormking Mountain, overlooking the Hudson River and Connecticut. We didn't end up using this ridgetop station, but the view was fab. Notice the fashionable use of fluorescent clothing. It was hunging season in the forest while I was there. Not wanting to look uncool while I was working, I'm sporting an American Appearal scoopneck and some fingerless gloves by my hipster friend Dancing Anne.

And here's Bambi's daddy. Not clear what was going on here, but he's taking a breather at the old Stone House. The deer hunt helps the forest grow big and strong--it's still recovering from it's 19th century deforestation.

This is some of the new equipment I installed at the new site. The giant steel plates measure the weight of snow in the (imagine) snow pack.

The moon rising over my Stone House station was a common site the week I was there. I did much of my work after dark with a headlamp, Fairbanks style.

Hello 2007

2007-01-10T12:14:00.000-08:00

Well, it's just been darn cold this week. But still a magical winterland. I guess. I think -15 might be my cutoff for skiing. It's just unpleasant below that. And the dogs start to get cold skijoring below -20 or so. Because we've been down in the -40s and -30s all week, that means some quality time inside. As you can see, Matilda is surrendering to winter, too. Five or six months of hibernation sound good.

Old stomping grounds

2007-01-10T12:03:00.000-08:00

Following San Fran, Bob and I flew to Denver and drove to WY and NE to visit family. A wonderful time was had by all, I think. And it sure was great to breathe some fresh Prairie air. I miss the ol' place. Here are a couple of photos from western Nebraska: one of a soddie rebuilt in the 1960s and one of us near Chimney Rock. Last time I was here the tower was taller. Mom relayed a story that some kids shot the top off with a rifle. Figures.

Bob's mom got installed as the new minister out in Guernsey and Ft. Laramie. We got our church in for the year and were completely bathed in sweets and baked goods by the congregation. I felt like my mom must have felt growing up as the minister's kid in Scottsbluff, a few miles down the road. Highlights included a couple banjo performances by Bob's father, Mary Ellen and I propping up the choir, Uncle Bill's Christmas suit, and his dog Princess' jingle bells. Next, we headed to Lincoln and enjoyed a couple days with my family. The highlight there was seeing Grandpa and my brother battle it out with a robotic dinosaur and remote-controlled helicopter, respectively.

end of 2006

2007-01-10T11:46:00.000-08:00

Well, it's been a while since I updated, but stop blowin' yo horns. This lady is busy. December brought a whirlwind of moving and travel. Bob and I and the three puppies moved into a new house with running water and an inside toilet. You'll have the check Bob's blog for photos of the new place. I was back in NY doing field work in November, so Bob started the move without me. Both of our cabins had serious mold problems so it was time to take the plunge. Of course the pipes froze before we even moved in, but that's par for the course here in Fbx.

In mid-December, we headed to San Fran for the American Geophysical Union meeting, the annual pow-wow for all earth scientists. The atmosphere was particularly gloomy, I thought. Lots of rain and lots of depressed scientists with proposal rejections. Times are tight in the science budgets these days. Still, the highlight was seeing friends and eating burritos, as our Abby can attest to.

Ciao summer

2006-10-07T01:02:00.000-07:00

I'm finally home from my crazy month of traveling. These are actual pictures that I took in Fairbanks in September. SEPTEMBER. They weren't kidding about the short summers. At least a friendly face greets me in the window here. All three dogs are playing every day until they drop from exhaustion. Bob is out doing field work on the Seward Peninsula again, but I'm sure he will post more dog pictures when he's back. I've posted links to his and my other friends' blogs.

This is my first week with my new studded tires. I don't know how I got this far in life without studded tires, but Fairbanksians assure me that I can't live without them here. Though I have to wonder about those people driving 20 year old Novas or little Caprices...I mean, surely those aren't just their summer cars? Maybe they take the bus in winter. Or get by somehow, as many people seem to do here.

The aurora have been amazing this fall. Bob and watched them tear through the sky a few nights ago. Strong green waves flowing quickly across the black sky. I don't have a camera that can capture them, and Bob didn't have his with him...so we were stuck just watching the light, awestruck.

Capturing life's science

2006-10-07T00:28:00.000-07:00

After returning from British rambling, I headed to NYC to build some new sensors for my field station north of town. My collaborator Allan was kind enough to give me some workspace at CUNY on the Upper Eastside, near good coffee and expensive food. And the worlds poshest Home Depot, let me tell you.

I didn't envision my visit to NYC would be spent locked in a small room on the roof of a highrise, soldering 120 thermistors onto telephone wires, but such is the adventurous life of science.

I did manage to see many friends and then head to Boston to give a couple more talks. The weather was pleasantly warm and it was great to see my brother and his wife in Boston.

Merry Ol'

2006-10-07T00:07:00.000-07:00

In late August, I headed to England to give a talk at a meeting in Cambridge. It was a real triumph, as the ol' beans would say. After a week of feeling very old skool at the Scott Polar Research Inst and seeing friends (Alex, Misha, Katia, Todd) in town, I headed down to Reading for the weekend. There I visited my friends Andrew, Cristina, and Judith, who showed me around London and the countryside. So great to see everyone! Great to see England! I heart tea!!

The weather was a delightful change from the snow we'd had at Toolik the week before. My favorite thing we did was go for a couple of rambles across the countryside. Walking through fields and past churches and vast estates. And when got tired, we just stopped for tea, of course!

Toolik, Take 2

2006-08-18T16:46:00.000-07:00

Late August finds me up on the North Slope again, at Toolik Field Station. This trip is part of my institute’s annual graduate summer climate science workshop. The weather has been unseasonably cold here, but the students have kept a positive attitude and we’ve had some fun times. Since we are studying snow and ecology, it is nice that we could arrange for a snow event up here. It really illustrates some of the concepts we’ve been discussing. Still, with so many people in camp in the cold, we are at full power generating capacity and have to schedule electricity outages. The poor students have been wearing their gloves and hats during the lectures in the dark classroom tent. I don’t think anyone will be sad to say goodbye to the snow when we leave, but the wood-fired sauna has assuaged our suffering considerably.

A couple of days ago, we drove up to Prudhoe Bay to get a tour of the oilfields and swim in the Arctic Ocean. Brrr. I don’t need to do that again. Prudhoe Bay was an interesting place to see, given the current partial shutdown of the pumping there. The oil fields look like a sight from Mad Max; big, color-coded camps for each company, isolated by swampy tundra. BP, Exxon, ConocoPhillips, and Haliburton are all there. We saw a grizzly bear near the road, jumping on a squirrel burrow. The flat coastal plain looks a lot like the Nebraska prairie, and in fact we saw a flock of Sandhill cranes, making their way south. 10,000 year-old Athabaskan ruins have been found here, where hunters watched for herds of caribou. It’s a beautiful place where the landscape has changed both slowly and quickly. The caribou have wandered this slope for thousands of years, but now the pipeline snakes quietly through the river valley. More development is likely to come.

Yesterday we took a break from the classroom to head into the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) for a great hike in the Brooks Range. This has been a perfect way to cap the summer season. Tomorrow we head back to Fairbanks and I fly off to a meeting in England. Bob is also out in the field, a couple hundred miles to the west from here in a place called Ivotuk. He’s uninstalling some meteorological towers with a Russian friend of ours who eats raw bacon. I hope you guys are staying warm! Thanks to modern technology, we’ve been able to keep in touch via wireless internet, even in these remote places. Thank you Al Gore.

Adventures with Superbob

2006-08-18T16:26:00.000-07:00

So who’s this Bob guy? Well, he appeared in an earlier blog as the leader of the adventure to Nome and environs. He seems to have stuck around ever since. Bob is a hydrology field engineer and researcher, photographer, chef, dog lover, and blogger (rbusey.org/junk) extraordinare. From Sitka in Southeast Alaska. He lives in a cabin down the road from me with his girls, Midge and Bergey. Bob’s been in Fairbanks for the last ten years and current goals include getting indoor plumbing shortly after (?) his outhouse frost-jacks completely out of the ground. Bob is also the nexus for a cast of great local characters: strong ladies and goofy men, is how I would describe them. That seems to be the way they grow ‘em up here!

Summer in Alaska

2006-08-18T16:08:00.000-07:00

There was a season on visitors this summer in Fairbanks. In early May, Tim and Rachel came up to see me and on the way back stopped in Seattle to see Rachel’s sister Danielle. Though Fairbanksians are already enthusiastically sporting short sleeves and rollerskis by this time, there was still quite a bit of snow on the ground. We all went to Denali Park before it was officially open. We biked in a few miles and saw a Ptarmigan and a momma bear with cubs. Biked through a couple snow squalls…it was still pretty cold. Tim and Rachel took it easy around Fairbanks then, while I worked. They helped me finish unpacking and headed to the nearby hotsprings. It was a fun visit, but you two should come back when it’s warm!

Next came my pal Jeff from Lamont. He flew into Anchorage, which gave me an excuse to go check out South Central Alaska. We hiked and camped near Hope, Seward (lovely Primrose Campground on Kenai Lake), and Whittier. We drove back to Fairbanks and Jeff, Bob and I went hiking at Angel Rocks before Jeff headed out on a four-day solo trek on the Chena dome trail. Luckily he didn’t run into the bears that were wandering around out there. Then he headed back to Anchorage on the train. Matilda came along on most of the adventures, but she was still having a lot of behavior problems. She could seem to be let out of my sight without whining and crying. Poor Jeff! They became buddies by the end though.

Next came Mom. We had lots of fun. Bob, Mom, and I headed down to Denali for a nice bus tour. It was drizzly, but that merely brought out the nice colors on the rocks. Polychrome was gorgeous. Mom also enjoyed kicking around Fairbanks, heading to the knitting store, watching us BBQ, and seeing the giant cabbage at the botanical garden. Bob had a list of required activities including the hotsprings and North Pole, where we took photos of us with giant, barbed wire-lined Santa next to an RV park. By the end of the week, Mom even got the hang of the outhouse. Yay! Matilda was feeling much better about life by this time. Bob’s been teaching her to meditate when she gets angry and to get along with his dogs. Getting better all the time. But when Grandma Judy brought dried liver chips, she became an instant hit.

After Mom came Abby and Miriam, my friends from graduate school. Along with Bob and the three dogs (Bob’s two and my one) the five of us had a blast. Abby and Miriam took a great backpacking trip to Denali. Then we went to a fun wedding reception for Bob’s photographer/dog musher friends Sam and Jillian. The highlights of that night included Bob taking illicit pictures with the camera of the bride’s father and them becoming best buddies afterwards. The evening culminated with a guy running through the yard with a BBQ rib in his mouth, chased by 8 or 9 dogs ranging from huskies to a small poodle. Abby, Miriam, Bob, Matilda, and I also went berry picking and canoeing on Abby’s last weekend in town. Lots of fun!! Great summer everyone!!

End of an Era

2006-08-18T15:59:00.000-07:00

I’ve finally ended a long run at Columbia University. There’s no other place quite like it. I moved to Manhattan when I was 18 years old and left just after turning 29. Looking back, I couldn’t imagine spending these years of my life anywhere else. What an adventure. It was hard to leave. During the last 8 years New York became a cultural center for my generation. It was THE place to be. Other Nebraskans agreed as they migrated to the city for college, journalism school, law school, and jobs. Nebyorkers: I love you all! And then a war started there. A war which will be the other defining element of our generation. The impact of the war on individual families is stronger in the American South and Midwest, where most of our soldiers are coming from. But when the threat reappears on U.S. soil, I imagine New York City will return to those anxious days of 2001.

The North Slope

2006-06-16T01:16:00.000-07:00

I just returned from another field adventure out on Alaska's North Slope, the area north of the Brooks Range. This was more of a reconnaissance mission than anything. I was working with a group from University of Texas at Austin, who was sampling water on the Sag, Kuparuk, and other rivers in the area, all the way up to Prudhoe bay.

The trip up was pretty cool. I took a van driven by a friend of mine, Alice, who has driven the haul road between Fairbanks and Prudhoe for 11 years. She knows every trucker and every tree on that road. We'd be driving in the middle of nowhere and she'd pull out the CB radio to check to see if Jack or Jerry was home. We stopped in Coldfoot to drop off some folks at the airfield. They were going to be flown into someplace for a week of hiking. Man, some people just can't get far enough away from themselves. Sheesh. This is already 6-hours north of Fairbanks. The coolest thing in Coldfoot was that a couple of kids had a lemonade stand on the airfield. How cute is that?

The Arctic cotton was in full force, since most of the snow is gone. Beautiful! Toolik Field Station was home base, a strange M*A*S*H unit for scientists. I tagged along with Jim, Amy, Breton, and Jorges while they sampled the Sag in five places. Jorges was from Peru, Jim and Amy were working in Texas and Breton was from Hawaii.

We ran into this goofy butterfly guy who was camped out at the river, about 60 miles from Prudhoe Bay. Said he was from Salt Lake City, but he'd been at that campsite for weeks looking for caterpillers. When he found them, he put little tents around them and waited for them to turn into butterfies. The day we were there was the day the first one hatched. This made me miss Matilda who likes to chase butterflies.

Toolik is mostly a biological research station, and the summer interns had just arrived. Including a goofy guy named Eugene who was a computing science bigwig who happened to enjoy lying on his stomach weeding mosses. Go figure.

There was still ice on the lake when I got there and a few days later it was almost gone. The loons are the most famous bird on this little lake, but there were also swans swimming in the open water. Very peaceful.

To Fly or Not to Fly

2006-06-07T01:10:00.000-07:00

The next morning we woke up in a dark cloud. Literally. The cloud base was only a ~100 feet above the air strip. We called back to Nome on our satellite phone and talked to the Bering Air dispatcher. After Bob laboriously transmitted the poor conditions to the dispatcher over the intermittent connection, she replied, “Oh, of course we can’t fly, Nome is all fogged in.” Thanks. After waking up in what my flight safety instructor would call canonical bad flying conditions, however, I was fine with waiting. Bob and I made another cup of coffee while we thought of plan “B” which was a trip back to Nome for, among other things, beer.

That evening we returned to Quartz Creek, packed up more met station instruments and tools, tossed the camp canoe on our truck and drove to the Kougarok landing. Here we canoed and then hiked to several more met stations, gauged the river, and installed some rods to track this season’s thermokarst erosion on a stream called Niagra. It was another late night.

The next morning we went ahead with the helicopter flight to fix the Kigluaiks radio repeater and the Skookum Pass antenna. Skookum was another met station and the Kigluaiks repeater station helps transport the VHF signal into a base station in Nome. It was really chilly at these sites and I was only wearing jeans (designer ones mind you) with no long-underwear in case I caught on fire in a helo crash. Our pilot was a Nome lifer about our age who probably burned more fuel keeping himself warm in the helo than he did transporting us, but gave us complimentary flight narration. He and his buddies were starting an ambitious hunting, flying, and fishing charter business. They were building a cabin to house the guests, but the late pack ice in the harbor was preventing the first summer barge from coming in and they were out of building supplies. Ben would entertain us, though, by flying in close to various cabins and saying “let’s see if the Hansons are out for the weekend or whether it’s too cold for them.”

We did see a bear and her three cubs from the helo. They were playing in one of the mining ditches and just looked like teddies from the air. Back at base camp the National Park Service had flown in two tiny Super Cubs for a week of bear surveys. Two NPS rangers were waiting for the planes to come in when we arrived one evening. They were a couple of goofballs: a giddy middle-aged white stoner who was probably from New Jersey and an old quiet Native guy. They were joking with us that they were waiting for a bunch of “enthusiastic young women to show up in planes to count bears”. Ah yes, everyone loves intern season.

I could go on for pages describing the rest of the trip, but I have to pack for the next one on the North Slope of Alaska. Suffice it to say that Bob and I celebrated back in town with some Japanese pizza and I flew back to Fairbanks. It’s true there is “No place like Nome” and I look forward to coming back soon.

Does “All Terrain” Include Tussock Tundra?

2006-06-07T00:30:00.000-07:00

The next morning Bob and I head out in our truck on one of the old mining roads. About an hour and a half up the road we stop at the Kuzitrin River to gauge it and service the met station. The bridge over this river used to be the Cushman street bridge over the Chena in Fairbanks. When Fairbanks remodeled they shipped it up north and put it here. Probably one of the few Alaska recycling projects that worked out.

I should also mention that Nome is packed this time of year with the subspecies known as Homo Birdwatcherous. They made up most of our flight over here and can be spotted a mile away. Light rain jackets, homemade knit hats, wire glasses, binoculars around their necks at all times, camera tripods, folding chairs, and of course, bird books. Homo Birdwatcherous also travels in pairs, typically in their late 50s-late 60s. Often from Michigan. Anyway, as the birds come north, so to the birdwatchers and these peacenik versions of fishing hobbiests are the source of much fun-making by the locals, probably because they don’t kill anything.

The Kuzitrin River has birds all over it. I don’t know any of their names, but there are small ones which make tweety noises, medium-sized ones which make sorrowful wails, and big geese which honk like taxis. Bob and I measure the speed of the river with an Acoustic Doppler Profiler called a Rivercat. Bob puts on his waders, straps a car battery on his back and wades out to the met station. Like the previous one, this tower is a couple feet underwater and only the instrument box is dry. I hang back and watch for moose and bears. Most of my job on this trip is to make sure bob doesn’t drown or get attacked by an animal. Though I’m familiar with most of the equipment, I have little to offer Bob; he’s a capable technician. I try to provide cheerful company at least.

Next we make our way up the mining road to a base camp called Quartz Creek. This is a small, unheated building next to a bush air strip and a couple of comex/semi-trailers/containers (these seem to be called something different in every part of the world). We unload our gear and supplies into the building. We pull the 4-wheeler out of the container and fill it with fuel. The engine won’t turn over, so we jump it with another battery we have.

Bob shows me how the controls work and sends me out on the air strip to learn how to drive it and charge up the battery. Meanwhile he packs for our trip out to a couple more met stations. Driving the ATV is a lot more fun than I expected. I “tear it” down the gravel runway for a while, then head back to where Bob is waiting. We bungee a Rubbermaid lid to the cargo rack where is says “No passengers” and strap our equipment and bear spray on the front. I hop on the cargo rack and Bob says, “Hold on!”

The road goes another mile or so past this camp, but we turn off earlier onto the tussock tundra. The first few hundred meters are muddy as hell and we get the 4-wheeler stuck a couple of times. Then the mud subsides to tussock that burned recently leaving isolated 10 inch tall mounds of grass separated by little moats of marshy tundra. Each wheel on the ATV must climb each of these little grass islands between squishing through the tiny moats. It’s slow going with the ATV lurching back and forth, occasionally threatening to flip over.

After 20 minutes of this from the vantage point of the cargo rack, I’m fairly sure my spine has dislocated, so I jump off and walk in the direction Bob says the met station should be. Hiking through the burned tussocks is nearly as bad; the mounds are not sturdy enough to support my weight, so my ankle just rolls off of them. The mini-moats between them seem better, but they are too narrow, so my boots get caught and I stumble every few feet. Despite the challenge of the tussocks, crossing 3 foot snow drifts, and wading through willow swamps, Bob only beats me to the station by a few minutes. He downloads the data while I attach a radiometer and we are both dive-bombed by the enormous early season mosquitos.

For the second station I decide the cargo rack on the ATV is the better option and suggest to Bob that NSF acquisition a monster truck for this job. Or a trail pony. I find the most comfortable position I can and concentrate on looking for bears as we negotiate a 2 mile trek, tussock by tussock. The second station we arrive at has been mauled by a bear. The precipitation gauge has been crushed, as if the bear sat on it. The animal then crawled up the tower, took a bite out of the windmill-shaped anemometer and bent over the temperature/humidity gauge. Finally to add insult to injury, the bear crapped all over the station. Sheesh.

We re-assembled and McGuyvered the instruments as best we could. By the time we headed back to our camp, everything was back to working except the half-eaten anemometer and we’d installed a radiometer. It felt great to get out of the cold, make dinner, and crawl into bed. By this time it was 1 am. One problem with Arctic fieldwork in the summer is that you are never constrained by the sun, only your own energy.

It’s a Lot Better than a Dog’s Life

2006-06-06T23:04:00.000-07:00

I am accompanying one of the UAF hydrology technicians into the field here to service about six meteorological stations, install the instruments which they only use in summer, and repair any damage done by bears or harsh weather. My companion here, Bob, is my age, with a mechanical engineering degree from UAF and a life of experience living and working all over Alaska. Bob has a particularly upbeat attitude which makes him well-suited for this harsh job. His attitude ships with a hilarious giggle and some of the loudest snoring I’ve ever heard in my life, for which he thoughtfully provided me several pairs of ear plugs.

The first day in the area we checked into the local hotel, rented a truck, picked up the cargo we’d shipped ahead, stopped by our storage unit for more parts, bought gas and did our grocery shopping. Then we headed out to the Snake River, just outside of town, pull on our waders and gauge the river. We found the meteorological station sitting in several feet of swampy half-frozen water, but it seemed to be working fine. A couple pressure transducers had been abandoned over the winter as they’d frozen in before Bob and one of the grad students had gotten here on the last trip of the past summer.

Driving back into town we passed a dozen or so kennels of sled dogs. Nome is the end point of the Iditarod race and many locals compete. A sled dog kennel isn’t exactly what most people on the Outside picture when they hear the word “kennel”. It’s 10 or 20 or more individual dog houses with a dog chained tightly, so it can’t touch (or destroy) the other dogs. Sometimes these kennels are on a concrete pad so they can easily be cleaned with a hose. More often they are on bare ground and therefore everything—the dogs, their houses, and the surrounding area are dusty. These Nome kennels were particularly dirty and dusty and in many cases just out in a tundra field with no human presence nearby. Come winter, it must be a sight to see these dogs doing what they do best: running like hell. In the meantime, their lives seem pretty-much like hell and I’m skeptical that there’s a humane way to do this sport.

There's No Place Like Nome

2006-06-06T22:22:00.000-07:00

Bob's truck rumbles into my driveway a few mornings after the flight safety class. We head out to the airport and pile ourselves and all of our gear boxes onto the 14-seater Beechcraft 1900 that's headed to Nome. These planes are the way to go. No security, no metal detector, no flight attendant, no W.C. It's just a 2-hr flight to Nome, a small coastal town on the Seward Peninsula that forms the U.S. side of the Bering Strait.

I have fond memories of Nome. I was here a few years ago at the terminus of a research cruise in the Bering and Chukchi seas. Nome is unusual for a small coastal Alaska town in that there are several roads that are maintained deep inland, up into the mountains. Gold was found here by the "three lucky Swedes" over a hundred years ago. Nome became an early engineering feat as hundreds of laborers dug water trenches for miles and miles deep into the mountains, to bring water to the mines. Gold dredges still dot the landscape. Apparently there were even competing companies who dug the water trenches and folks with claims who didn't pay up got their canal blocked off.

Three years ago, I'd piled into a beer-stocked van with my friends from the USCG Healy and driven out in search of the local hot springs. But, like many things in Alaska, this plan didn't quite work out. Twenty miles or so on our way the road had been washed out and offending creek had frozen in place. Despite the drunken jeering from the backseat, my responsible friend Ryan had decided against coaxing the rental van down into and more importantly back out of the icy hole where that section of the road used to be. And the tussock tundra on each side of the hole was impassible.

Despite this failure, we'd spotted some musk oxen up on a hillside and ventured up to see them. My friend Chris is a wildlife photographer. He set up his tripod on the ridge and waited an hour to get all the shots he wanted. Though it was only early October, it was far below zero with the wind blowing and light patches of snow everywhere. Few of us had brought our heavy-weight sea gear and only our drunkenness kept us huddled behind a rock staring down these squat, wooly, paleolithic survivors.

Later, we found a warmer valley with a lake connected to the Bering Sea. Here, misty rain lit up the tundra's brilliant colors and salmon carcasses were washed up everywhere around the lake. They had made their run and fertile eggs were waiting out the winter below what was already a thin layer of ice on the lake.

This trip to Nome has been every bit as enchanting. I really like this place. Spring has come late this year. The port is still frozen in with pack ice. The mountains are still covered in snow. Many of the roads are still closed by snow drifts and there's still river ice here on June 4th. But the light makes up for it. It plays in the maritime clouds and shines for more than all my waking hours; soon the summer solstice will be here. Still it's cold and windy, which stifles the carelessness of summer and leaves the heavy-weight of winter lingering.

Is this the day we might burn up, Bob?

2006-06-06T21:54:00.000-07:00

Within my first few weeks here in AK, I've jumped on a couple opportunities to do fieldwork with some folks who have a lot of experience working out here. Much of the work out in Alaska's bush requires helicopters or small planes because there are few roads. So, one of the first things I was asked to do was to take a small aircraft safety class over at the Fairbanks office of the Bureau of Land Management. Early on a Wednesday morning I pile into a sleepy classroom with a couple dozen folks who are about to start the summer field season for the park service or the university.

Our instructor is a stringy old guy who starts the class by telling us about all of the crashes--he calls them unanticipated landings--he's survived and how. He reminded me of my high school health teacher who showed us videos of don't-drink-and-drive stories like "Blood on the Highway" and "The Last Prom" to scare the crap out of us.

A lot of people have asked me why aircraft crash so often in the Arctic. My basic understanding is that the reasons are a combination of poor weather conditions, sparse weather monitoring, and the aircrafts in question. The lower part of the atmosphere (troposphere) is thin in the Arctic and the result is that clouds are very low and it's difficult to climb the mountinous topography in low clouds. Many Alaskan towns are coastal and subject to a cloudy maritime climate. Few weather stations exist relative to the vast area of the state, so weather prediction has little skill. And finally, people fly around in really old aircraft. If you are trying to summit a 3000 meter snowy mountain with a 2500 m cloud base in a helicopter built during the Korean war, you are in trouble. It's difficult to visually separate the clouds from the snow and easy for a pilot to get disoriented.

The basic advice we got in this class was "don't wear synthetic fiber clothing while flying in small aircraft. If you crash, you will have fuel on you and then you will catch on fire and your clothes will melt onto your skin. So wear all cotton or a Nomax fireproof flight suit. Second wear a plastic impact-proof flight helmet which can sustain even multiple contacts with a spinning rotar on the helo. The class was interesting/terrifying. My soon-to-be fieldwork companion, Bob, asked me if I learned anything. "Oh and by the way, we don't have any of that safety gear...hee hee ha hoo hoo (hysterical laughter)"...

Ms. Matilda

2006-05-22T22:30:00.000-07:00

What can I say? It was just a matter of time. My boss and his wife found this dog and her five pups by the roadside, abandonned. When the pups were weaned, I took mom home. She's a great dog. Greg and Ilana already have 28 dogs, so they didn't need six more. Anyone still need a puppy? Check out www.stinkypup.net.

Back in the USSR

2006-04-25T00:39:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm back home in Alaska; my Moscow-on-the-Tanana. I went on a great canoeing trip with some friends. The float was called the Clearwater, for obvious reasons. While most bodies of water are still frozen, the Clearwater is spring-fed and already ice-free. It was beautiful. Ice shelves along the banks. My friends know how to travel well; when we pulled out for lunch, I unpacked my PB&J and they unpacked their roast chicken and bottle of wine. You guys are great!

I knew that my post-doctoral life had started on Saturday when I drove to the grocery store with a canoe on the roof of my car, and a bike and two pairs of skis inside. Contrary to expectation, summer has actually started here. It may only get into the 40s during the day, but that's warm enough for t-shirts and sandals for Alaskans. Best of all; I was going to change the lightbulb on my front porch tonight when I realized that with twilight until 11 pm, why bother! I'll do it in October and save electricity.

Drs. Hobo, Hobo, and Hobo, how may we direct your call?

2006-04-25T00:16:00.000-07:00

So, as many of you know, I stopped in NY on the way back from Vienna to defend the document I wrote in geekschool. This is a pretty big event in the life of a scientist; maybe the biggest, unless you are lucky enough to get tenure somewhere or win the Nobel Prize.

I have to say this defense process went very well for me. My committee had a really positive attitude and I had an audience full of friends. A couple of you were even kind enough to post an encouraging banner at the back of the auditorium. Perhaps you all could come with me when I start giving job talks?

I thought it would be fun to do something kind of glamorous to mark the occasion, so I rented a room in a boutique design hotel that had a glass pool with a swim up bar. This seemed like an excellent, low-key way to celebrate.

My brother and sister-in-law and I packed up our swimming suits, a change of clothes and headed to Times Square. But apparently glamour is not in my bloodline. The coveted pool was out of commission. So instead of frolicking in a chic hotel pool we were squatting on a stoop in midtown, holding our student-issue backpacks and pondering what to do next.

I said "how come I'm a doctor and Rachel, you are a doctor and Tim, you're almost a doctor and still, we're hobos." Some people know that I have a hobo complex. No matter how hard I try, I always end up in the same old hobo place. It's not a terrible thing to be. I mean, hobos aren't bums; they go places. See the world. By boxcar, carrying all of their possessions in their hobo bag. Remind you of anyone? Yeah, that's what I mean.

I mentioned to Tim and Rachel that I had a bottle of wine in my bag. "Well, did you bring a corkscrew?" "No, but the bottle's open already. Remember you opened it with a big hook last night. "Awesome."

So we sat for a while discussing the hobo ethic. "Hobos are smart, yo." "That's right, dude. A hobo wouldn't accept a high design hotel room without a pool and wet bar." "Hells yeah."

"So, anyone got an idea?" "Nope." "Anyone got a cup for this here wine." "I do." Rachel empties a cup she's holding full of M&Ms into Tim's hand. "Well, food AND drink. Nice job, Hobos."

"Let's go break into the Marriot's pool." "Okay." "What if they don't have a pool?" "Oh, come on, they'll have a pool."

We proceed to the Marriot. After waiting for a "pod" elevator for 10 minutes, we arrive at the reception. "Where's your pool?" I ask. "We don't have one." "WHAT?" "But we have a great gym." "Humph." I'm certainly not going to celebrate doctorhood by breaking into a hotel gym. We get in line to go down the pod elevator. "Man." "Let's go find the hobo train yard," "maybe it's almost dinner time and we can get some beans and boot stew from Cookie." "Yeah, remind me to store beans in my backpack." "Should we drink this wine now?" We conceded to meeting our friends at Under the Volcano, my favorite Earth Science-themed bar. It was a fun, albeit perfectly legal evening. We had beans for dinner, but they were Ethiopian.

Sunday Afternoon Roller Disco, NYC

2006-04-24T23:46:00.000-07:00

It was strange to come back to a city where I lived for a long time and see it as a different person, even 3 weeks later. It's almost too familiar (or strange?) for me to write about, but I'll try.

I think the late 1970s/early 1980s must have been a cultural golden age for the city. At least a few key elements of NY culture arose during this era which people really cling to. One is neo-deco "contemporary" furniture design. Renderings of beds and dining sets in this style, plastic or enameled aluminum, can be found in a ghetto furniture store in just about every neighborhood in Manhattan. Pink and grey are key to the palette. By economic reasoning, it must be the case that demand for this stuff is consistent and ongoing. This blows my mind. It's not that NYC is the only place one can find this furniture; it’s in every town in the U.S. It's that you would expect more from NYC, some kind of natural selection for good taste. Small spaces and high standards of living have enforced style Darwinism all over Europe. But every real New Yorker knows that the city is actually completely filled with ugly crap and undrinkable coffee. There is no explanation for this in classical economic theory.

A second important example of a NY style anachronism is the persistence of the ladies' polyester Sunday suit. These may have a proper name, but this is the only description I can think of. I think you know what I mean.

There are entire swaths of midtown retail devoted to the ladies Sunday suit. This is some of planet Earth's most valuable real estate and it serves what must be hordes of 60-year old women. Except one never really sees them. The shops are always empty and their wares fading in the windows, blue suits faster than red ones. Unless the DVD release of Tomlin & Parton's 9-to-5 has sparked a renewed demand for the oversized polyester suit, this remains another NYC cultural mystery.

Example number three is Cool 101.9. This radio station must have more listeners than any other in the city: it is absolutely ubiquitous in public space. Does anyone like this music? Is everyone under the mistaken impression that someone else must like it and therefore that's what we should listen to in stores and bus stations? Do they broadcast the aural version of crack? How can we break these chains and bring modern music to the big apple?

My final example is the only good one: disco skating. You know you've watched them. Parachute pants, floral jeans, big teased bans, fanny packs. Skating on classic or inline wheels in Central Park. To a DJ that may very well be from Cool 101.9. But these people love themselves. And you have to love them right back. They might have come out here everyday since 1980. White and black, gay and straight. People who want to be watched and those alone in their own world, but all of them are lacking 21st century neurotic self-consciousness.

Something about the late 1970s/early 1980s must have sparked all of these cultural mainstays. Maybe it was the city's bankruptcy, rising crime and flight of the middle class to the suburbs. But the message to New Yorkers is clear. It's okay to be uncool. The city has a booming sector of uncoolness and it's easy to get in on the ground floor.

Wien

2006-04-24T23:29:00.000-07:00

Well, I don't want to disappoint those of you who think I've been camped out in the Bush watching my leg hair grow, but I've been doing some urban traveling lately. A couple weeks ago I was sipping strong coffee in Vienna's museum quarter, watching the sun set slowly behind the buildings and shadows drown cafe patrongs from the ground on up. Wien was a better town than I had imagined; one which has made the most of its opportunities.

Work in Wien was good to me. I saw friends old and new, talked about science, talked about art, saw some opera. Enhaled a couple cartons worth of Gauloise, second hand. Froliced in pagan pre-Easterness.

I'm not sure what else to say about Wien, so I guess I'll let my photos speak for me.

Flickr Photo Link

2006-03-24T00:06:00.000-08:00

This is a link to my photos!

Alaskans

2006-03-21T23:18:00.000-08:00

Alaskans are definitely a unique people. Folks who didn’t fit in down in the lower 48. People who like their hair long and as much personal freedom as the law will allow. Or perhaps more: something like 10 % of the state has a criminal record. As the saying goes: “People come to Alaska on vacation or probation”. Guns are a big part of life here. I live about a mile north of the intersection of NRA lane with Farmer’s Loop road. I’m not kidding. I’ll be happier once have a lock installed on my front door.

I made my first trip to the laundrymat a couple of nights ago. I’ve never seen so much hair. The laundry lady was a gorgeous tattooed punk with red-fro dredlocks down to her waist and only one front tooth. I was a little intimidated to buy laundry tokens from her, given the way she was man-handling the bear-like men who were waiting around for a shower. The laundrymat is a one-stop cleaning shop for cabin-dwellers. But, Pippy-the-Punk Longstocking explained how to use the machines and I plugged in my i-pod to make it clear to the wooly mammoths that I didn’t want to talk to them. It worked.

This weekend I’m cabin-bound, as my new car is in the shop getting a new head gasket, new airbags, and new brakes. I won’t speak of this again, for obvious reasons. Note to self: never buy a car from members of a Ukrainian religious cult who live out in the Bush. Yesterday, the temperature peaked at a balmy 20 F, so I decided to check out my neighborhood. It took me five minutes to make it to the end of my driveway, so I turned back and got my skis. There were 18 inches of snow on the ground yesterday and this morning we got another inch.

I decided to ski up to the Dog Mushers’ Hall at the top of the hill. The Hall is a regional headquarters for the mushing association. There is a big dog race here this weekend, but the start line was downtown and I had no way to get there. My guess is that today’s race is just finishing up because all of the neighborhood dogs are barking like crazy right now. I’m posting a few photos of the dog teams that were over in a field near the Hall. Today, I’ve been perfectly happy to stay home in my silk pajamas and drink coffee.

The cabin

2006-03-21T23:17:00.001-08:00

Excuse me for a minute. Hmmm. I am writing this blog from my kitchen table and some kind of vermin has landed on my roof and proceeded to crawl into my stove vent. It sounds like it is about the size of a badger, but I don’t think there are badgers here. I actually have no idea what this animal might be. So far, I’ve only seen a moose and a giant bird that looks like a chickadee on steroids, which may or may not be a Canada Jay, according to my high school science teacher Ferris (phone diagnosis). Well, the flying badger has stopped tap-dancing in my stove vent and has apparently settled down for a nap.

Let me tell you about my cabin. First, it’s hard for people from the Outside to understand cabin-living. Most young and/or poor people in the Interior live in cabins. Permafrost conditions and extreme cold make plumbing very expensive to build and maintain. So people live in these cabins with no plumbing. I have an outhouse about 40 feet behind my cabin, connected to a shower room which is fed by raising a bucket of water up a tree on a pulley. I can get my water from one of two sources: one is at a pumphouse in Fairbanks that is polluted by mine tailings; the second is at a spring in the nearby settlement of Fox, which is more pristine. I haven’t yet found the time to go to Fox, so I’ve been using the polluted Fairbanks water for washing and purchased drinking water at Fred’s, which was shipped here from Cincinatti. (?)

I would be lying if I told you that running out to the outhouse at -30 F is fun. But apparently it increases my chances of seeing the aurora borealis. And nighttime wildlife. Last night, a midnight run let me hear a couple wolves howling in the spruce bog that is my backyard. The drinking/cooking/washing water is relatively easy to manage. I bought four of these 7 gallon jugs that have spouts on them and it costs only a quarter to fill these up at the pumphouse. This morning I washed my hair in a bucket in my kitchen, but during the week I can easily use the showers at my lab. In the summer, I think the tree-bucket shower will work just fine.

The cabin is brand new and quite nice. The heat is oil-burning and plenty warm enough. There are two bedrooms, so I use one for a study, and a large kitchen/dinning area. Pictures of the outside are posted on my Flicker site. I’ll post some of the inside when I get unpacked and settled. On the side of the cabin is a carport. But when my landlord built the place, he put the power outlet near the front of the house, so to plug in my engine block heater I can’t actually park under the car port until I get a long extension cord. My landlord is quite a character. His name is Greg. In addition to building and managing half a dozen cabins, he’s also a pilot, and a mountaineer. He’s a sweet guy, but I would describe him as having a few bats in the bellfry. And possibly a badger.

UAF

2006-03-21T23:17:00.000-08:00

Up on a ridge in the northwestern part of town is the University. The UAF community is something of a science commune. I work at the International Arctic Research Center, which is half owned by the US NSF/NOAA and half owned by the Japanese national science agency and full of Russian and Chinese researchers. The National Weather Service (NOAA) occupies the second floor of our and connected to the building is the Geophysical Institute and offices of the USGS, the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center (which is sponsoring my post-doc), and a Natural Sciences building including a handful of oceanographers with whom I went to the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas. Other parts of campus relevant to me include several buildings dedicated to Arctic biological research, a cold-regions engineering facility, and a Northern water resources group. The Army’s Cold Regions Research and Engineering Lab (CRREL) is at nearby Fort Wainwright and like the University, also operates facilities up on the North Slope for research and military operations. Eielson Airforce base is also just outside of town, near Ft. Wainwright, so there are a lot of Alaskans in the war right now. In addition to science, the university has a strong Native culture and languages program. But not much else. So it’s all Arctic all the time up here, which is probably how it should be.

Hello FBX

2006-03-21T23:16:00.000-08:00

Well, so I think most of you know where Alaska is. I don’t know the geography like a native, but I can tell you that the area of the state is about 1/3 that of the lower 48. There are several major geographic regions. Anchorage is down in “South Central” which also includes Valdez (where Volodya taught me to fish 3 years ago), the Kenai Peninsula (where Miriam works), and Kodiak Island (where friend Jeff lived as a kid). “Southeast” is the panhandle that is stuck down in British Columbia and includes Juneau (where friend Ellen lives on a boat), Sitka (where more boat friends work), and Ketchikan (where sister-in-law’s sister Danielle will work this summer). The Aleutians are the long skinny strand of Volcanic islands that stretch toward Eurasia and include the fishing capital of Dutch Harbor where I started a research cruise a couple of years ago. North of Dutch, on the coast near the Bering Strait is Nome, where the same cruise ended. In the center of the state, just below the Arctic Circle, is Fairbanks. The Alaska mountain range lies between Anchorage and Fairbanks and contains Denali Park and North America’s tallest mountain. Between Fairbanks and Prudhoe Bay lies the Brooks Range. Single highways along the oil pipeline connect Anchorage and Fairbanks and Fairbanks and Prudhoe Bay. The former is generally well-maintained, but winding roads mean the journey is 8 hours at 50 mph. The later is treacherous and prohibited by the rental car companies. The area north of the Brooks Range is known as the North Slope and includes the National Petroleum Reserve, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and native villages including Barrow.

So Fairbanks is the capital of the Interior, as it’s called. It has one of the most extreme climates on Earth. For the two weeks I’ve been here, nights have dropped to -10 to -35 F and days only creep up to 5 to 15 F. This summer, days can reach into the 90s F. When I was here a few years ago in August, it went from 90 F one day to 40 F the next morning.

Fairbanks isn’t much to look at. The city is in what is called the Tanana Valley. There is a tiny downtown, but nothing of interest is located in downtown, so there’s no reason to go there. Instead of throughfares, the town is crisscrossed by a few expressways that link the few places a person would want to go to (auto repair shops, Sears, Wal-mart, Fred Meyer grocery, local water pump, a couple of Thai restaurants). Along these expressways are a mix of rundown houses, abandonned-looking trailer homes, and random commercial properties (suntanning salons are popular). There are no zoning laws in Fairbanks. This is a poignant statement on the Alaska philosophy of life. Alaskans believe that people should be free to build what they want, where they want, and not be concerned with contributing to a collective welfare of any kind. Similarly, they believe there is no reason to keep your possessions in your house or garage if you can keep them on your front porch or lawn. Maintaining a lively “downtown” would require a value for public space and collective expression. Why bother, when you see everyone you know at the grocery store, anyway?

Goodbye New York

2006-03-21T23:13:00.000-08:00

The mode of my departure from New York was the same as that of my arrival over ten years ago: a taxi ride across the Tri-borough Bridge. The days, on the other hand, were as different as the woman in the backseat. When I arrived in August of 1995, it was a warm summer night and the sun was setting spectacularly behind the Manhattan skyline. When I left in March 2006, it was a gray, slushy afternoon with Easterly winds blowing crisp marine air over the city. The streets were still holding the remnants of New York’s biggest snow storm in history, making it seem more like quiet New England than the mid-Atlantic megapolis. New York in August is an entirely different city; more ethnic, more flamboyant, reminiscent of a steamy Westside Story and the old E-street band.

My roommate, Miriam, helped me carry my suitcases down to the car. The taxi driver on this trip seemed inclined to chat. He told me that I had a beautiful daughter. I told him she was my roommate, only three years younger. That kept him quiet until we arrived at the terminal. A big smile and a Nebraska quasi-drawl at the ticket counter ensured that the airline wouldn’t charge me for my overweight suitcases. Then I got on my flight to Chicago. In Ohare I walked a couple miles to the “K” terminal where Alaska Airlines departs for Anchorage. In Anchorage, I boarded the last leg to Fairbanks at midnight. An hour later my new Russian boss, Volodya, was waiting for me at the baggage claim at Fairbanks International. Most flights arrive and depart in Fairbanks at 1 am, because it’s the either the very end or the very beginning of a person’s journey to what they call the “Outside”. There are a few daytime flights to Anchorage, but it’s common to share these seats with cargo.

The 11-hour trip went surprisingly quickly. I looked over the pictures from my going away party and tried not to cry. Too much. I read Jon Krakauer’s “Into the Wild” and thought about my summer plans for hiking in Denali Park. I hope they don’t involve starving to death or being eaten by a bear. But I am definitely excited by the adventures ahead.