Tag Archives: Alaska

Meanwhile…

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So, I’m back in Texas for three weeks or so, and then I’m going to Wyoming.  (Note to anybody keeping track: I said in the last post that I’m going to Wyoming, and that was how my mother learned about my next trip.  This is not a good thing to do to your mother.  Everyone, call your mother and talk to her personally if you’re planning to go to Wyoming.  Don’t rely on your dad or sister to tell her for you.  Don’t blog, Facebook, or tweet about it until your mother has heard the news coming from your own dear voice.)

The very short version of why Wyoming is that I met some new friends from there who were also visiting Kotzebue this summer, and they have a raspberry farm.  They invited me to come visit them and help with the raspberry harvest, which is going on, well, now.  Since my original plan was to still be in Alaska until the end of September, I have the time to go, so why not?

I’ll stay at a friend’s house in Fort Worth until the middle of September, do some more dog-sitting, and write like mad.  I have set a pretty high word count goal for the novel for before I leave the state again, and I have a couple of articles I would like to write and submit before then as well.  It makes sense to put the blog on hold for a couple of weeks and spend my writing energy solely in those areas.  So, this is the last post until mid-September.  I’ll check back in before driving north.

In the meantime, I’ll post a few links here to some of my previous blog posts that have received the most traffic, and you can check them out for the first or second time.

The three posts that have received by far the most views are all from my time in Alaska:  “Acclimated,” “In the Kobuk Valley, Pt 2” (go ahead and look at Pt 1, too), and “Housesitting.”

All of my posts from Alaska have received quite a bit more traffic than non-Alaska posts.  The highest non-Alaska post by far is “For Patience, on her birthday.”  The next two are “The Convenience and the Crutch” and “Thinking and Such.”

My all-time favorite series of posts is the one I did after returning from a trip to Burma last year.  You can start reading the 13-part series “Burmese Days” here, and click through to the final post “Why I Travel.”

See you mid-September, hopefully with lots of good writing behind me.

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Alaska to Texas

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Summer ends quickly in the arctic. By early August clouds obscured the sun, and rainy days brought a close to my time spent on the tundra or the beach. For the last three weeks I got more writing done than I ever have in my life.

One desire for this year off work has been to learn more about myself as a writer, to push myself and grow and give myself a chance to complete major projects that I’ve just never had the time to work on in more than small spurts. I wrote about that in my “Texas to Alaska” post before coming up here.

The weeks in Alaska have been wonderful in seeing that desire fulfilled. I came here with the vague goals of “nail down the main storyline” and “start writing the book.” I’m leaving with over 30,000 words of the first draft—about half of what I anticipate the total length to be—and a solid outline of what the second half will look like.

The process of getting to this point hasn’t been what I expected. I didn’t sit down and write a complete, detailed outline before fleshing out the setting and dialogue and beautifully sketched characters. The process was much more fluid. I brainstormed a very basic outline. I wrote a couple thousand words. I outlined more. I wrote a couple dozen more pages. I scratched out half the outline. I wrote a new opening scene. I added a bit more to the outline and tried to write the next couple of scenes. I gave myself a headache for five days straight because my own book was boring me to tears and I couldn’t imagine anyone else ever wanting to read it. I moved from the couch to my bed to the downstairs couch to the couch of the lady I was housesitting for. I stared at the wall or the back of my eyelids for hours, begging my poor creative self to come up with a way to make this thing more interesting, have a little tension, be building towards a climax with even a smidgen of excitement. I decided to forget it, just write the next scene, let the ideas flow and trust that the storyline would eventually come together—well, that’s what I told myself, but I didn’t fully believe it would actually happen that way.

But it did. It wasn’t easy, it’s still not finished, but the ideas are there. The potential for a climactic scene that resolves the tension of the previous 150 pages definitely exists now, where it did not exist in days and weeks previous.

That’s all I wanted out of this time in Alaska. To get to this point, to understand more what it will take for me to write this book and possibly others. I’m happy to see what it’s going to take and to have a sense that I can do this, can actually make it work.

I’m leaving for Texas today, a month early. Plans change, especially when you’ve set out to spend a year flying by the seat of your pants. In many ways my time in Kotzebue has been all I could have dreamed of for a summer in Alaska. Took a flight up the Kobuk River in a bush plane. Helped pull in salmon nets.  Saw an arctic tern.  Picked blueberries on the tundra. Ate Alaskan king crab fresh from the sea. Camped on the beach to watch the sun set after midnight. Drove a Honda 4-wheeler around town. And made memories with great friends who have included me in their family this past two months.

But the 4-wheeler gets old when it rains for days on end, and I miss my car and so many other conveniences that just can’t be found here in the arctic. You’d think that after 10 years in rural Asia I’d not have a problem going without convenience—but I guess I just wasn’t prepared to jump back into that lifestyle so soon after returning to America. That’s not the reason I’m going back to Texas early, but it’s the reason that going back early is perfectly fine with me.

So, I’ll be in Fort Worth for a few weeks. Next stop after that: Wyoming.

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Half-Marathon Volunteers

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Quite a few cold and rainy days back, I said here on the blog that I wanted to run the half-marathon in Kotzebue.  Well, that race was last Saturday, and I participated but did not run it.

My excuse for not running it is that I didn’t have enough time to train properly and didn’t want to push myself too hard.  Honestly, this just wasn’t a good time for making myself run.  If it were sunny and delightful outdoors, running would be a good way to let off steam after being cooped up indoors in front of the computer.  And there were a few days like that over the past few weeks, but there were more days of rain and wind and chill.  I ran one day for 50 minutes in the rain at 46 degrees, but that was truly the most I had in me.  I couldn’t muster the discipline to continue something so unpleasant right now.

And I’m totally OK with that.  I’ve been very disciplined with my writing, which was my main goal for these weeks in Alaska.  I’m in very good shape to reach 30,000 words on the first draft of my work-in-progress by the time I head back to Texas next week, and I’ve also revised and submitted a couple of articles to online magazines while here.  I feel good about this progress and don’t at all feel like I missed out by giving up so quickly on the race.

I especially don’t feel like I missed out because of the gale force winds the day of the race.  A couple of friends and I volunteered to help at the race—all for the sake of getting a windbreaker jacket that says Mosquito Haven Half-Marathon—so we got to experience the freak weather conditions without the extra joy of trying to run against that wind.  It was hard enough trying to stand upright in it—I can’t imagine trying to run against it.

Our job was to take photos of the event, and we spent the day cruising around on a 4-wheeler stalking the runners and walkers and bikers at various points along the route.  I started out with a scarf tied over my hair to keep it from blowing out of control, but that only lasted an hour or so.  The rest of the day I looked like Medusa, and that evening I had to use half a bottle of conditioner to work my hair out of the one huge knot it had tied itself into.

I will say, though, that being the event photographer was way more fun than working at a water station, which was our original plan for getting a race jacket without running the race.  We borrowed a fancy expensive camera which we could barely figure out how to use—but no one knows that when you’re walking around with it hanging on your neck.  One guy came up to me before the race and said, “Hey, that’s a really nice camera, what kind is it?”

I looked down at the brand name on the neck strap to check.  “Umm, it appears to be a Nikon of some sort.”

A few minutes into the race I jumped in front of a group of walkers to snap their photo, as per the instructions of the race coordinator who wanted shots of all age groups, all modes of transportation.  One of the guys in that group asked me, “Am I going to be in USA Today?”

We rode back to the finish line on the 4-wheeler to document the order the runners finished in.  It turns out there were only two female runners, so I would have been guaranteed a third place finish if I’d run—but would that be as impressive as my first place finish as the only female runner in the half-marathon in Jinghong a couple of years back?

One of the slower male runners lit up a cigarette within a couple of minutes of crossing the finish line.  At a half-marathon in conjunction with a health fair.

Ah, arctic Alaska.

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Berry Picking and Life

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Picking berries on the tundra is like life.  Draw your own conclusions…

If I picked as many berries as I could all day for the rest of the summer, I would still barely make a dent in this one little corner of the tundra.  The berries are, essentially, limitless.

***

I have to walk past patches of thousands of berries to get to the spot where I can pick while looking out at the sea.  It’s hard to resist stopping to pick the berries closer to the road, but those just aren’t the berries I want.

***

Berry picking is best when I go with a group of friends and talk while we pick and combine our efforts in one pail at the end of the afternoon.  Berry picking is also best when I go by myself and soak in the silence.  It is best when we take a pail-full home and have blueberry cake with coffee the next morning.  It is also best to eat as I pick.

***

Sometimes I see the blue patches of berries right away, clinging to a clump of spongy tundra grass.  Other times I scan the area, looking for a new patch, when my eyes suddenly come to focus on the berries right in front of my own two feet.  One step further and I would have crushed them under my boot.

***

Sometimes I think of how I’m gathering berries from the tundra the same way countless hunter-gatherer Eskimos have  done before me.  “I feel like I’m becoming a good little gatherer,” I say from my berry patch.

“I feel itchy,” Kiana says from a cloud of mosquitos.

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In the Kobuk Valley, Pt 2

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(Continued from yesterday’s post…)

After taking a bunch of pictures of young Kiana in front of various signs around the town that is her namesake, we packed ourselves back into the plane and headed out for a little sightseeing.  It was windy at this point, and the pilot asked if we were up for a bumpy ride or if we wanted to go back.  As long as he thought it was safe, I wanted to see more of that area, so we took off with the intention of either going along the nearby mountains or heading toward the sand dunes at Kobuk Valley National Park, whichever seemed more feasible once we got into the air.

It turned out to be quite choppy once we’d flown a few minutes out of Kiana, so our pilot decided not to head to the mountains.  We stayed in the river valley in the national park, looking for animals along the water—we saw quite a few moose, three swans, and what we think was a black bear.  The pilot circled the plane back around to get a closer look at the possible bear, but it had gone into the willows and we couldn’t find it again.

We landed twice on gravel bars along the side of the river, just to stretch our legs and take a break from the turbulence.  Just before we landed the second time, we saw two moose on the other side of some trees from the gravel bar, and the pilot decided to go get a closer look once we were on the ground.  He started climbing through tall grass, then thick willows and trees, all buzzing with hordes of mosquitos.  Kiana and I went with him to the edge of the willows before she and I decided that we didn’t really want to see a moose up close—I had read a while back that moose are actually more dangerous to encounter than bears, and I just wasn’t up for the mosquitos, either.

After the pilot had satisfied his curiosity, we started to take a few pictures by the plane before taking off again, and I realized that we were about to start a two hour flight home and I really needed to pee.  No problem—those willows offered way more cover than a lot of places I’ve gone in southeast Asia.  The main difference was that my overactive imagination pictured that moose crashing through the willows and trampling me while I was squatting.  I went fast.  And I found out after I got home that night, I went so fast and pulled my pants back on so fast that I trapped and killed four mosquitos in my underwear.  What a way for them to die.

The return flight was bumpy, and I felt pretty sick the whole way home.  But it was worth the sickness to be able to experience the remoteness of an arctic village, to fly in a bush plane, to go to the least visited national park in the U.S.  To see the Brooks Range, a few hundred miles in the distance, yet crystal clear.

It was a dreamlike break from writing for an afternoon.  This is why I came to Alaska.

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In the Kobuk Valley, Pt 1

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When I came to Kotzebue to spend time working on my novel about Lydia, I came in the hopes that I would see grand Alaskan scenery while also having a quiet place to focus on writing.  The land right around Kotzebue, I found, isn’t as grand and majestic as the images usually conjured up when you think of Alaska—I quoted a passage from a Nick Jans essay in my “Other People’s Thoughts” post after I arrived here because his words conveyed so well how I felt.

I’m mostly over my disappointment now.  I enjoy going down to the rocky beach to look out over the water, seeing the changes in light and color reflected in the ocean throughout the day as the sun moves across the summer sky.  The mountains are further in the distance than I had imagined before coming, but I can still see them across the water from this peninsula when the fog clears.  And the tundra does have its own beauty.  It’s not as flat and desolate as I first thought—I’ve gone running on the dirt road just outside of town enough times now to know, the tundra is definitely not flat.  Gentle up and down hills, covered with the green willows of summer, wildflowers in white, yellow, and purple surprising me in the arctic.  Everyone says the greatest beauty of the tundra is still to come, when the berries and fireweed change the colors of the landscape completely in one last blaze before everything is submerged in the darkness of arctic winter.

The friends I’m staying with arranged for me to go with their 11-year-old daughter Kiana on a trip into the bush last week, so that we could see an Eskimo village and have an afternoon away from town.  We flew in a tiny, tiny plane to the village of Kiana, more than 70 air-miles up the Kobuk River from Kotzebue.  Throughout the afternoon, I felt like I was in a dream, like I was living someone else’s life.

Flying in a bush plane was an adventure in itself.  I’ve always been afraid of heights, though in recent years I’ve pushed myself further and further to try things that once scared me, and this trip was my first time in a small plane.  Having an equally nervous 11-year-old with me helped—I was so busy trying to say calming things to her as we got buckled in and started to roll onto the runway that I almost forgot my own fear.  Within ten minutes of being in the air, all fear was gone.  The sensation of flying in such a small plane, the quick take-off, the feeling of floating and gliding with the landscape unfurling before us for miles and miles, it was all so amazing that I regret now not having tried it before.

Our first landing was at the airstrip at the Eskimo village of Kiana.  Deja vu, showing up in a village where I’d never been, wandering around looking at the local school, the clinic, the post office, the store, getting stared at for being the white strangers in such a remote place.  If the houses had been made of bamboo instead of pre-fab and there were tractors and motorcycles instead of 4-wheelers and snowmobiles, I could have been in Yunnan or Laos.

(To be continued tomorrow…)

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One on the Sun

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The first night I was in the arctic, I turned the light out when I was ready for bed and was genuinely surprised that it didn’t get dark in the room.  My mind is still adjusting to it.

My friend hung a fuzzy brown blanket on two nails over my bedroom window so that the room would be dark at night.  A couple of times the youngest daughter has taken the blanket down during the day to wear as a cape while playing, and I forgot to get it back from her room before she went to bed.

If you’re tired enough, you can sleep eight hours in daylight.

I was looking for something in my backpack and ran across my flashlight—and just chuckled to myself.  Why did I bother packing it?

I see the screensaver on my friend’s computer—lovely sunset pictures on the rocky beach—and I think to myself, oh I need to go out for a sunset picture soon.  Then I remember.

Last night, I woke up around 1:30 a.m. and went to the kitchen for a drink of water and noticed the sky outside had a faint pink glow.  The first pink sky I’ve seen since leaving Texas two weeks ago.  I don’t know if it was sunset or sunrise.  Soon we’ll start losing a few minutes of daylight per day.

My friend said to me, “You know the verse in the Bible that says not to let the sun go down on your anger, right?”  People in the arctic have a long time to stew in their anger.

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July 4th in the Arctic Circle

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If the sun doesn’t go down at all during the summer months in the arctic, making July 4th fireworks an impossibility, and it’s too cold for swimming at the lake, how do the Inupiat Eskimos celebrate the holiday?

My friends in Kotzebue had told me that July 4th is the biggest holiday of the year up here, with tons of community-wide events, so I planned my arrival accordingly.  Three days after I got here, the July 4th weekend festivities began with a parade along two of the main roads, then moved to the fairgrounds where vendors set up food and game booths in connex shipping containers.  Fog had settled in over the area, disrupting several outdoor events.  The fog also prevented the Alaska Airlines jet and other smaller planes from landing in Kotzebue that day, which meant the muktuk (whale skin and blubber) for the muktuk eating contest didn’t arrive on time from Barrow, and the event was cancelled.  Bummer.  I was really looking forward to seeing that contest.  Really, who wouldn’t want to watch a contest that includes a prize for “first person to puke”?

The weather didn’t stop the Miss Arctic Circle Pageant, which was held in the Senior Citizens Cultural Center so that the resident Eskimo elders could be in the audience.  Seven young ladies competed in the pageant, with impromptu question, talent, and traditional regalia competitions. Each contestant wore a long parka with a sunshine ruff, mittens, and mukluks (soft boots), and the emcee went through a whole list of details of each lady’s regalia: who made each piece of the parka and the trim, who loaned it to the contestant, and what type of fur each section is made from.  The list of animals that contributed to these outfits included wolf, moose, caribou, otter, wolverine, beaver, squirrel, fox, muskrat, and seal.  Several of the girls had mittens that were made out of wolf heads, with ears and eyeholes easily identifiable on the backs of their hands.  Beadwork and ivory jewelry, rickrack trim, wolverine tassels all added to the decoration of these impressive (and I’m sure quite heavy) fur outfits.

The impromptu questions and talent portion of the competition were similar to other pageants you would see in the U.S., but with a distinct arctic Alaska flair.  Questions ran along the lines of “What is your opinion on the decision by the city of Kotzebue to reintroduce the sale of alcohol?” and “What do you think about non-residents coming to the Northwest Arctic Borough to hunt and fish for sport?”  For the talent section, a couple of girls went the typical pageant route and sang or danced; others showed off their traditional Inupiat skills of beading and sewing.  The girl whose talent was cutting a processed seal skin seriously put that portion of the Miss America pageant to shame.

By early afternoon on July 4, the fog moved out, and we had beautiful sun for the remainder of the holiday.  There were foot races for all ages, from crawlers to adults, bike races for kids, qayaq (kayak) races, and Eskimo games of agility, balance, and strength, including a qayaq rolling demonstration.  Everyone went home full of the same kind of greasy fairground food that you find all over America: hotdogs, burgers, funnel cake, cotton candy, deep fried Twinkies.  The only food vendor that was obviously different from something you might see in Texas was the booth with Korean barbecue run by the local Korean community.

In the evening I went with a group of friends to the beach to roast hotdogs and marshmallows over a bonfire and to learn to drive a 4-wheeler.  The sun moved across the sky over the water, never setting, and we stayed out on the beach wearing sunglasses until after 11pm.  The night sun continues to be surreal to me—I think I have a sunshine high, a caffeine-like buzz that makes it easy to be out half the night after an already full day of outdoor activities.

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First Impressions

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As much as I would like to write something lovely and poetic for my first blog from Alaska, I’m too overwhelmed with the newness of it to be able to form complete thoughts of my impressions and emotions just yet.  This is only my second full day here, and I plan to be here three months—so there’s time for being poetic later.

Right now I just want to shoot out a few of the first thoughts I’ve had about Kotzebue:

It’s small.  I knew it would be small (3000+ people).  But man, it’s small.  Three paved streets.

Kotzebue is very different from the interior of Alaska.  There are no trees here.  None.

The friends I’m staying with have told me about their friends in Kotzebue for years, so in a way it’s like coming to a place where I already know people.  It’s fun to put faces to names.

Tundra is cool.  We drove outside of town yesterday and hopped out on the side of the road for me to take a few pictures, and I got to see what the plants look like up close—and I got to walk on tundra for the first time.  Spongy and squishy.  A little unnerving—literally unstable.  Or at least that’s what my feet thought.

24 hours of sunshine only contributes to the totally laid back atmosphere of Alaska. No need to get up early in the morning—it’s not like you’re working against time to get stuff done before the sun goes down.

A few weeks back I tried to get a library card in my hometown and was told I’d have to pay a fee because I wasn’t living in city limits. Yesterday, I walked into the library in Kotzebue, after being in town less than 24 hours, and not having a phone number, street address, or mailing address of my own, and they gave me a library card.  I checked out a book right then and there.  Again, totally laid back.  I got used to the laid back way of doing things in rural Asia over the past several years, and being back in the village atmosphere is kind of nice.

Villages are villages anywhere in the world.  In a really crazy way, being in Kotzebue reminds me of being in Luang Nam Tha, Laos (except for the part where it’s completely different).  The town itself seems about the same size, the streets are laid out in a similar way, and coming to Kotzebue from Texas gave me the same initial feeling as going from heavily populated and built up China to sparsely populated and less developed Laos—this feeling of “goodness, where did all the people go?”

Time will tell how these initial thoughts will change or intensify.

UPDATE: I’ve been around town a little more since that first quick tour on the first day here, and I need to update the number of paved streets – I don’t know how many there are all together, but I noticed that a couple of the side streets are paved as well as the three main streets.  But most of them are topped with dusty grey gravel.

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North in the Morning

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Tomorrow is the day I head to Kotzebue, Alaska, via Seattle and Anchorage, and I wanted to get one last blog posted before I leave Texas.  I don’t know what to expect as far as my schedule goes once I get there, but I hope to continue posting on the blog a couple of times a week.  I’m also hoping to keep a photo journal of sorts, with a photo for each day of my three months that I will post on Facebook and Twitter, though I don’t expect to actually post the photos each day—again, I’m looking at posting them a couple of times a week.  I know these three months will fly by, so I’m planning to guard my writing time carefully, as well as to make the most of my time outdoors in such beautiful country.  Right now Kotzebue has 24 hours of sunlight, so I’ve got that working in my favor.

Next time from Alaska…

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