Alaska Saga

We're gaining over six minutes of daylight every day; our total is nearing seven hours in Fairbanks today. The sun is shining brightly, the sunrises and sunsets are gorgeous and have a noticeable beginning and end. In other words, they no longer blend together into a day-long phenomenon, which sounds amazing but means that the sun never rises fully above the horizon. As the sun rises and shines down on my cabin, I watch my thermometer creep up a couple of degrees. Soon the sun will be strong enough to warm life on the surface of this earth, here in Fairbanks. It's that time of year when we all start to feel spring fever. We have to remind each other that it's only nearly February, that cold snaps are likely right around the corner yet, that coats are still a necessity when walking farther than the outhouse. Still, it feels good, sun breathing life back into everything.

This past spring I moved into a cabin, in the sense of the term as it is used in Fairbanks. In other words, I moved into a house without running water and joined the community of cabin dwellers scattered throughout the larger Fairbanks populace. Being that this is my first winter in a dry cabin, I'm still largely getting my feet under me when it comes to the niceties that make daily life more efficient and more pleasant. I've been in my current dwelling for a little over a month, so I am also getting my feet under me in this locale during a time of year when everything is that much more difficult because of the extreme cold and the limited hours of daylight. Life in a dry cabin is so far from the suburban and urban life in which I grew up, the life I led before moving to Alaska. And it is so far from the lives of my friends Outside (and even some here in Alaska), I've been feeling inspired to document the interesting, the mundane, the difficult, and the surprisingly not-so-difficult aspects of my days.

I fired up my sauna for the first time two weeks ago, when a friend came over for some wine and a steam. At -10 Fahrenheit, it takes about two hours for the sauna to reach 130 degrees, perfect for a mid-length steam. The sauna is good sized, and the people who built this house and the sauna knew what they were doing. There is a drain in the floor, right next to the wood stove, and a bucket up above. A hose hangs down from the bucket, with a valve that turns the flow of water on and off, allowing for a gravity-fed shower of sorts. The heat from the stove is enough to keep one from feeling the chill of the winter air, despite the cool water trickling down from above. After my friend left, my first steam in my new sauna turned into my first sauna shower. I managed to wash and condition my hair and thoroughly soap up and wash off, using perhaps two gallons of water. It is surprising how clean I felt after the sauna shower, and I was impressed with how little water I had used. I have since fired up the sauna several times. It feels so cleansing to sweat out all of the toxins of the week; and combined with the good conversation of friends, a sauna during the Fairbanks winter can't be beat. I've steamed with friends to bring in Solstice and the New Year and enjoyed a rejuvenating sleep both nights.

I am finding that dry cabin life makes one part of a community to which locals living with running water don't have access. My gravity-fed sauna shower is a big perk of the cabin I live in, but sometimes I don't have two hours to stoke and tend the woodstove and get the sauna warm enough to stand wet and naked while I wash my hair and body. And sometimes, I desire the slightly higher water pressure that plumbing affords. I have joined the gym at the University, which gives me access to two locker rooms and the hot showers that go along with them. My morning routine, perhaps twice a week, includes getting ready for work in the company of perhaps a half-dozen other women. Is this what the great bath houses of ancient Greece and Rome must have been like? Like women in gym locker rooms anywhere, I am sure, we are careful to allow one another a sense of privacy. However one can still get a sense of the collective energy and attitude of the day, before people drink their coffee and put on their public face (and I don't mean in the sense of putting on make up). I've been realising with great interest that there is indeed a collective mood in this town. I wonder is it dictated by how cold the day is and whether the sun is out, whether it is slightly cloudy or Monday?

It is interesting to observe other women's morning routines. On particularly cold days, and perhaps some not-so-particularly-cold days, you can bet that several of the women you see running errands around town or sitting behind computers in their professional office buildings are wearing long underwear beneath their smart (and not-so-smart) business attire. There is something comforting in knowing that I am not the only one who feels like my pants are a little tighter when the thermometer reads -30F in town, that I am not the only one wearing lingerie that makes me feel extra feminine under my distinctly un-sexy woolies.

It's been a relatively mild winter in Fairbanks so far; but the day of the Fairbanks Christmas Bird Count was one of the coldest of the year at -38F. It seems that the coldest day almost always falls on the appointed CBC weekend. It takes dedication or a certain level of hardiness- both I think- to drag oneself out of bed on such a cold dark morning; dress in enough layers that you start to, at least mentally, resemble Randy Parker from A Christmas Story; and trundle out into air so frigid that exposed skin feels plasticized and breathing is painful. That or the promise of a thermos full of delicious hot toddy-like beverage and some very good company during the survey hours.

I cannot claim that dedication and hardiness were my main motivators, since I believe it was the warming company and rum mixed with ginger, nutmeg, honey, and lemon juice that drew me out of my warm cabin for the 49th Fairbanks CBC. I joined Brook and River for a very slow car-based survey of all of the side roads on Goldhill Road. It was a chilly drive indeed; this is one of the colder spots in town, and we had our windows rolled down for most of the drive so as to better see and hear our feathered friends. We started the count out with a hairy woodpecker, quickly followed by a small group of pine grosbeaks. We saw ravens and redpolls, and forty-five minutes into the count our first black-capped chickadees (one of the most common birds in Fairbanks). We totaled five species in the Goldhill area, and the reception that followed count day revealed twenty-four (I believe) for the Fairbanks area overall. Bird numbers in general were slightly down this year; the birds, perhaps displaying more sense than the counters, were laying low this chilly day.

Before moving to Alaska, I was a bit of a grasshopper in the summer: too busy enjoying the sun in mostly lazy ways to prepare for fall and winter. I think there were probably two reasons for this, both weather related. First, it was really too hot and humid to enjoy the summer in any way but a lazy way. And just as the summer on the East Coast is perhaps more severe than here in Fairbanks, the winters are more mild. What kind of preparation did a suburban/metropolitan girl really need to do? My winter preparation consisted generally of putting away the hammock, pulling out the hiking boots (as opposed to sandals), unpacking the sweaters, and finding a not-too-crowded leaf viewing spot.



Grasshopper I am not, here in Interior Alaska.



It is only July; and the temperatures have been so hot, I remember why I was so skinny before moving up here. In this kind of heat, who wants to eat? It's hot enough that I am hesitant to bike ride except in the evening, hot enough that I consider leaving my cardigan behind for outdoor shows at the Blue Loon, hot enough that stir fries and salads are the cuisine du jour rather than cheese-slathered casseroles... Yet I have begun to think of the imminent onset of darker days and cooler (understating it) temperatures.



It's nearly berry season, and perhaps this has prompted my slowly changing mind set. Summer solstice has long since passed, and this has certainly heightened my sense of the changing season. I find that in addition to enjoying a fresh pak choi and young onion stir fry, I am blanching extra turnip greens to freeze them for winter. I know I will appreciate the fresh, Vitamin C-packed, dark greens in a soup later on. I have scheduled an afternoon of canning with friends of an earlier generation, to learn a long-time Alaskan zucchini relish recipe that will be fabulous months after the last zucchini has been plucked from its vine. I am stockpiling recipes for good winter soups that will take advantage of my Calypso Farm share; and I am planning a soup-making weekend with my friend Katie, so that we can enjoy the bounty of the harvest on dark nights, when we only want to curl up on our couches and read with furry companions lounging nearby. Even as I buy fans to move around the hot air that is thick with wildfire smoke, I am thinking about lamps and lights for a new cabin, in a season when I rarely turn on a light even in the wee hours of the night.



Summer is on display in all her glory on my walks in the woods and the bogs nearby, and I have not given up on her. The blueberries are pale blue and soon-to-be-ripe, the cloudberries are just peaking, and orchids are peering shyly from beneath moss and shrubs. Low bush cranberries are just barely a thought. There are berry picking adventures yet to be planned, much local produce yet to enjoy, summer trips full of adventure yet to be taken, and my flowers are still blooming on the porch. Although this is a land of extremes- I find that I am always either recovering from winter or busily preparing for winter, like the fabeled ant- I am just as busy having fun as working hard.



Now I'm off to finish baking my cinnamon basil cookies, full of flavor from the cinnamon basil harvested from my porch. And I fully plan to enjoy them hot, rather than frozen.



Perhaps grasshopper, I still am.

I had lunch with Melissa today. We met on the corner by the bridge, as we often do spur-of-the-moment now that we both work downtown. After our standard greetings and pleasantries, Melissa said, "Did you cut your hair again?" I replied in the negative, and Melissa noted that it had a lot of body, more flounce than usual. It's the humidity. My usually fine, straight hair takes on a life of its own in the humidity. I'd forgotten.



Photos of me from the summer my family moved to Northern Virginia sport a distinctly different 'do than previous or later photos. I had long chalked it up to my hair being quite a bit shorter than normal and having quite a bit more volume to go with the loss of length. But my hair was still below my shoulders; and the truth of the matter is that having newly encountered NoVa humidity in the range of 80 percent, my hair reacted in a BIG WAY. After a month or so, my hair adjusted. Such hair volume without the help of curlers and hair spray (for strictly theatrical purposes) I did not again encounter until Lauren's wedding in Montgomery, Alabama. Dealing with super-saturated air for over a week, my hair took on a life of its own. Each successive picture from the week I spent down there shows more hair, less Megan.



This week in Fairbanks, our temperatures have been hovering around 85 degrees Fahrenheit, give or take a few degrees. Humidity has been climbing as high pressure and wildlfire smoke seem to have combined forces to keep moisture trapped low. Humidity currently sits around 33 percent. I feel like I am melting or wilting or some combination of both. I think most Fairbanksans feel much the same way. Temperatures right now are a full 135 degrees (F) higher than they were for chunks of the winter. As a former East Coaster, I tend to scoff at calling anything less than 80 percent humid; but as a Fairbanksan, my hair is betraying me! We're used to percentages closer to 3 or 7 most of the year.



I do declare that it's humid and hot; and since there isn't air conditioning to be found in the majority of Fairbanks, I'm using this as an excuse to drink gin and tonic or mint juleps or some other ice-cold summertime drink. Cheers!



5:00 update... 91 degrees. I think this may be the first time we broke 90 in Fairbanks since I moved here...