Tundra misconceptions - Pt 3/3

The last thought on the tundra is how little I know about the tundra. This should be apparent from the previous two observations, but this short story should cement my lack of knowledge. Over Labor Day weekend there was the annual Blackberry Festival in Toksook Bay, one of our neighboring villages. Toksook is the closest village to us, a little more than six miles away, across the tundra and up over a hill. We planned on leaving Saturday morning and were getting all packed and suited up for the journey. Our hiking party consisted of my two neighbors, Ben and Sarah, Heidi and her husband George, and me. Ben and Sarah are teachers from New Yorkegon (umm…they taught in both New York and then Oregon before moving up to Alaska). Heidi is a teacher from Michigan who married the fourth member of our team, George, who is Yup’ik and grew up in Newtok, another village on the delta. As Ben, Sarah, and myself were putting on our hiking boots George came by to check on our progress. “You guys aren’t wearing rubber boots?” Sarah and Ben didn’t have any, while I did but hiking in them is literally a pain. Needless to say, our minds were pretty much already made up. We politely responded, feeling maybe a little nervous now, but still pretty set on our previous decision. “Why, should we?” George’s response only supported our lack of concern and unwillingness (in my case) in our footwear situation. “Well, you don’t need to wear rubber boots.” We left it at that.

Our hike began walking through uptown. Tununak, being the size it is, has both an uptown and a downtown, and entered the tundra. From here we had about a two mile hike to the “bridge” then up and over the hill into Toksook. Everything started fine, but about ten minutes into the tundra we began seeing reasons why both Heidi and George were wearing rubber boots. We had been following the four-wheeler tracks across the tundra. Tundra is similar to grass; the more you drive on it, the less of it there is. And like grass, underneath is mud. Now mud is not a huge problem. We were used to mud. Walking the dirt streets (yes, I can say streets because there are two) of Tununak is a weaving, dodging, at times leaping activity, but rarely a wet activity. What we were beginning to experience out in the tundra was that while it was possible to go around the mud puddles in the four-wheeler road, the surrounding tundra had the consistency of a wet sponge. Wetness was quickly becoming an issue. Lessons were being learned the hard way – when someone native to the area questions your decision not to wear rubber boots, you should also question that decision. And when a person native to the area is himself wearing rubber boots, you should not only question your decision, but change your plans. Too late though. A mile from Tununak, ankle deep in muck (which, by the way, is the Yup’ik word for water – how’s that for double entendre), we were on our way.

Having George with us proved to be a great benefit that became increasingly apparent on the walk home, but more on that later. With George in the lead, he used his experience walking through the tundra to guide us from if not dry, drier, spot to drier spot. By the time we got to the “bridge”, which turned out to be little more than a plank over the stream, we were wet, but not miserable.

Our hike back home, however, was a different story. Without our guide, we needed to apply our new knowledge of tundra navigation. Everything was going fine. I was leading when suddenly I looked up, and we seemed to be at a dead end. The trail kind of disappeared into a muddy, rutted out quagmire. I thought I saw some supportive spots and made my move. Nope, wrong. About a foot deep. Cold tundra water rushed into my non-knee high hiking boots. The nice thing about waterproof boots is that they keep water out. The bad thing about waterproof boots is that they keep water in. I could feel with every step the half-cup of water sloshing around in my boots, but we made it through the first challenge.

Ben took up the lead now and was doing a fine job. We were beginning to get pretty confident navigating dry spot to dry spot, correctly identifying which spots of tundra were stable and dry, and which were neither. All was going well, I was watching my feet to make sure I didn’t slip in the mud, when I heard Ben up ahead. “Oh! Oh! Oh no!” then Sara “Get the camera! Get the camera!” I stopped walking and looked up expecting to see the thing that she wanted Ben to take a picture of. By this time in our journey we had discussed that you can only get so wet. Well this is true, but I guess we were only referring to our feet. Ben, knowing that his feet were already soaked, was doing what we had decided was the most expedient way to cross the tundra: charging it through the puddles. It was faster this way, and again, you can only get so wet. But what none of use were expecting was a three foot deep puddle. Ben had unknowingly stepped off solid ground and his foot found ground three lower. Sara’s yell meant to save the camera, not the moment. In the moments immediately following I am grateful that the puddle was not deeper because we were laughing so hard a rescue would have been impossible. Ben’s step into the sinkhole quickly redefined our idea that you can only get so wet. Watching Ben wade out of the puddle he had found Sara and I, not wanting to follow Ben, found a, while longer, significantly less wet. The next twenty minutes over the tundra passed quickly without incident and I was celebrated our return to Tununak with an emptying of the boots of tundra water and a warm shower. Here’s to paying more notice to the subtle nuances of a new culture. Cheers.

Tununak more remote than the Amazon

My good friend Christoph just sent me an article on a study done on the remoteness of regions in the world. The scientists studied how long it would take to travel by road, rail, or water from an area to the nearest city of 50,000 people. So if you live in a rural Minnesota it would be a calculation of drive time to that nearest city, let’s say Minneapolis. Things get interesting when either (1) you are very far away from a city of 50,000, or (2) you lack roads, or a combination of the two.
* picture taken from
According to this study a number of things jumped out at me. The first is that a vast majority (90%) of the world is no more than two days from a city of 50,000. That goes for the Amazon and the Sahara and every other part of the world (not including Antarctica). The next thing is that the most remote place on the planet, a spot on the Tibetan Plateau, is three weeks from a city of 50,000. Three weeks! The study says one day by car, the rest, all twenty of them, on foot. The last thing to stick out to me is that Tununak, where I live, is in that ten percent; we are more than two days travel to the nearest town of 50,000. That is crazy. We are more isolated than nearly all of Africa, including much of the Sahara. Than nearly all of the Amazon.

I haven’t really figured out what this all means. At the moment we are able to travel in and out Tununak of by plane. Really that is the only way. There are no roads linking us to any other town, not even Toksook Bay which is only six miles away. I am told that the true isolation, the true remoteness will kick in during the winter as snow and weather close our runway down for days on end. Last year they went nearly three weeks without a plane landing in Tununak. Food, mail, packages – everything stops, gets backed up in Bethel.

I don’t have a whole lot more on this topic at the moment, but I will follow up in a few weeks. I came to the realization today that I won’t be leaving Tununak until Christmas unless I travel chaperoning sports (which I may still get talked into). That would be about three months not leaving an area not much bigger than one square mile.

Read the article though – the graphics are amazing.
Where's the remotest place on Earth?

Tundra misconceptions - Pt 2/3

The second misconception that I am in the process of revising is that tundra is a solitary, monochromatic lifeform. What I have come to see is that the tundra is a solitary, monochrome lifeform only from the air; a solitary, but colorful lifeform from about six feet up (me standing); and an incredibly dense, diverse multitude of life and color when you are only inches from it. This conceptual revision came to me the first time we walked up the hill right outside of Tununak. We were heading up to the rock people. I had mentioned wanting to know where the berries were - I had heard they were everywhere and yet I had seen none. What I learned was that I was looking for something that does not exist - bushes. There is very little on the tundra that grows higher than a few inches, the berries included. I had not realized that I had been walking over berries for the last hundred feet. Upon closer inspection I saw that the berries truly were everywhere. Small blackberries, looking and tasting nothing like blackberries back home, were growing nearly everywhere I looked. I also noticed for the first time how incredibly varied the tundra was. I can't make a good estimate about the number of different plants growing in a patch of ground, but it has to be dozens of species in dozens of colors spanning the spectrum from deep reds and purples to all shades of green. The flowers come in bright blues and purples, yellows and whites, and then there are berries coming in red, white, orange, black, and blue. Hardly a monotonous place.

On food

I wanted to cover a topic rather close to my heart: food. Simply put I love food. All aspects of food, and it seems that with each year I become more in love with food. And maybe about now I should switch the word love to obsessed, but I must remember that I am trying to keep up the front of sanity.

My love with food began with eating it. As I grew, my experience in food expanded, and I found that I really like eating food and trying new kinds of food. I have been striving toward authenticity in my eating for a while now – getting experiences that most resemble what they are advertising. For example think of Taco Bell’s image of Mexican food and a legitimate taco at a small taco shop owned and operated by Mexicans. Authenticity. More recently my search for authenticity has evolved to search for ways to actually eat food. Too many of the things claiming to be food is really anything but, and as a result has begun to terrify me. I recently heard of a dessert made at a fancy restaurant that has for ingredients not a single actual food – it is all artificial ingredients (ie chemicals). Interesting science fair project – horrifying gastronomic project.

Then came my love for preparing food. This is tightly linked to the first love: eating food. People, for some reason, are surprised that I like to cook. But my response has been the same for a while. “I cook because I love to eat.” It’s a means to an end at times, but the more I do it, the more I am taking pleasure in the process. To combine the ingredients and to end with a mouthwatering, eyeball watering masterpiece is magical.

Most recently came my love of creating food. I recently began a garden back home in Minnesota with my mom. It was a modest 20’x40’ plot that we rented from the local garden center. It started out as a brown rectangle with considerable chunks of dirt and an intimidating amount of clay. I was convinced nothing I wanted would grow and the weeds would reclaim my rectangle. But, to my infinite surprise, food came. Slooowly at first. And then, out of nowhere I had zucchini the size of, to steal a comparison, baby seals. And beets, and beans, and beans, and beans, and tomatoes, that I heard are too prolific, and potatoes, and strawberries, and hot peppers, sweet peppers, peas, watermelon, cantaloupe, squash, and lettuces, and lastly (I think) carrots. All these edible items erupting from a previously cracked, clumped, clay riddled patch of dirt.

And so with all of these aspects of food present in my life, my move to Alaska involved a high sacrificing all three of these loves for an unknown amount of time. At our new-teacher inservice before school started they asked us to write a fear down that we had for the upcoming year. I am not lying: I wrote about eating good food. The thing is, Tununak is 125 miles from Bethel, accessible only by air (or boat), and Bethel is another 400 miles from Anchorage, also accessible only by air. Our food options are incredibly limited. Limited and extremely expensive. You have never really experienced sticker shock until you walk into Swanson’s in Bethel. Ten dollar bags of Doritos…seven dollar Oreos…good thing I don’t eat much of either of those. But nine dollar gallons of milk, eight dollars for five pounds of flour. Add that to the fact that the native culture doesn’t value fresh fruit and vegetables limiting further access to such in the two stores here in Tununak. I was a bit worried.

Saving graces began trickling in, thankfully. Most of the teachers out here order bulk through distribution companies specializing in shipping to bush Alaska. My neighbors tipped me off to a company in Oregon, Azure Standard, that specializes in organic and natural foods. Here is where I got my 50lb bags of beans, nearly 100bls of flours, and pounds of dried fruit in addition to a lot of other real food items. We also heard about a CSA (community supported agriculture) farm based out of Washington that ships to bush country Alaska. Kind of contrary to the typical CSA philosophy, but the Full Circle Farms has brought fresh, organic produce into my life again, and for that fully forgive any corruption of the ideal they may be causing. Love number one is safe – I have access to real, authentic food.

The second love – preparing food, was totally dependent on clearing the first hurdle. With that done, I could prepare world-class food. True, I am still terribly limited. Back home I could run (literally) to the store and pick up a missing ingredient, but here that is not an option. The reality is that it takes about two and a half weeks from placing a food order to receiving the food. Which means I have to plan my meals out at least that far in advance. This has required a total shift in thinking for me, one that is full of frustrating disappointments when my mind, still stuck in MN thinking, comes up with a great meal idea (Indian) only to remember that I don’t have any rice – or cumin, or cilantro, or lime, etc. The final result, though, is a positive one. When I plan accordingly, my life is awesome. A recent dinner consisted of roasted fall vegetables (potatoes and squash mailed from my MN garden, beets and zucchini from our CSA); chicken breast (that I acquired on a recent trip to Bethel); salad with red peppers, cherry tomatoes, and carrots (all from our CSA), and bread that I made. Life is okay thus far.

I am still working on the third aspect – creating food. It is possible, and in fact, our principal has a grow room in his house where he gets fresh greens and herbs. I am still trying to iron out the details. I first need to procure soil. I had plans of getting a worm bin (using a couple thousand earthworms to compost food wastes) to create compost, and it still may happen, but our weather is cooling off fast and I worry about having worms shipped and arriving alive. Any advice here would be appreciated.

Even without the last being fulfilled, I am incredibly happy about the first two parts of my obsession. Being able to attain and eat good food is a comforting fact. Seeing our box of fruit and veggies arrive in Tununak is such an oddly pleasing sight, but I should have expected as much. I love food.

Tundra misconceptions - Pt 1/3

The tundra holds a mythological appeal for me. It has always been something of a surreal landscape, something that I know exists but is so exotic that it can’t really exist. It ranks with the rainforests and the corral reefs of the world. Glaciers rank up there, too. These geographic features define an area above and beyond the landscapes I am used to seeing. These geographic features also hold an ecology so foreign to me that anything I read in books or see on television cannot possibly prepare me for what those features actually are. As of this moment in life I have now had contact with three out of the four I listed - corral reefs, glaciers, and now the tundra so I know that they do exist. But with each a similar feeling overwhelms me as I observe them.

After describing how much I read and how much I watch, nothing can educate me as much as how much I experience, I feel that some things need to be shared so that you can get just a slight feeling for the tundra. And I feel obligated to share a few things that people need to know about tundra that was lacking in my conception of tundra before experiencing it firsthand. My conception of tundra was that of a cold, foreboding environment, dry and brittle, light green to brown, invoking if not death, at least despair. This, I now know, is wrong on all accounts. After a few trips around Tununak across the tundra my initial reactions were centered around number one - how soft it is, number two - how many different plants they are growing in any square feet, and three - how little I truly know about the tundra.

Let me expound on these thoughts. First of all, walking in the tundra is like walking on a mattress, albeit a chunky mattress. Each step involves the constant monitoring and calculating of where to best place your foot next, a process similar to hiking a mountain trail. Then you modify your calculations with a certain margin of error due to the uncertainty of how much your foot will sink. This is one part of walking in the tundra that is unlike walking on anything else. One step may be on relatively sturdy ground when the next will involve sinking close to a foot. There are also rocks that speckle the landscape that themselves are speckled in lichens and mosses giving the rocks a type of tundra camouflage adding a very sturdy step to the mix.

Random thoughts on solar sanity

Today, September 22, at 5:18 pm, marks the autumnal equinox. At this point in time the Earth is at one of the four key points in its orbit around the sun. At the two ends of the orbit are the summer and winter solstices marking the points in our orbit where the our hemisphere, due to the Earth’s slant, is closest and furthest away respectively from the sun. The equinoxes, however, mark a tipping point. At the equinox, each hemisphere is equidistant to the sun. After that moment, we in the Northern Hemisphere will no longer be slanting toward to sun, but rather, away from it, each day being more pronounced than the last. What this means is that everyday between now and the winter solstice we begin to get less and less sunlight day to day. Its significance to me is that it is also the tipping point between my relative daily sunlight and that of everyone else I know. You see, the further north you are located in your hemisphere, the more severe the difference in sunlight becomes. At 5:18 I will switch from having more sunlight per day than everyone back home to the more depressing less sunlight per day. Here ends the astronomy lesson.

To mark this milestone, this beginning in a way, I wanted to set some baseline measurements with which you will be able to measure my sanity as I enter winter. I am doing this in an attempt, half facetiously, to make sure that if anyone notices a slip in my sanity, they immediately direct me to my sunlight imposter lamp sitting unplugged in the corner of my house. The way that I want to establish these baselines is to make a few statements indicating what I have come to see as normal living in Alaska. I feel I should also make a few statements indicative of the random thoughts already floating about in my head. Shall we begin?

I do not have a TV, DVD player, radio, and at the moment internet in my home. In addition, alcohol, from cooking wine to vodka, is prohibited by village ordinance in Tununak.

I feel that it is perfectly normal to buy twenty-five pounds each of two different kinds of beans and/or one hundred pounds of flour.

I feel that it is perfectly normal to consider buying twelve packs of Newman Os, and am quite taken with the fact that they are 15% off this month only! on Azure.

I look forward with great anticipation to getting packages in the mail, regardless of the outrageous cost of shipping.

I refer to four wheelers as Hondas regardless of manufacturer in the same way I call all tissues Kleenex.

I am in the process of procuring worms for a worm compost bin for my food scraps with the intention of creating compost then using the compost and my sun imposter to grow fresh vegetables.

Okay, a break, because I am beginning to think that I am already too late. But in the (butchered) words of Joseph Heller, “Those that know they are insane cannot possibly be insane because consciousness of insanity is the definition of sanity.” Perhaps there is still hope. And now I return to the random thought part of my baseline assigning.

We romanticize the Native Americans for their concepts on waste , regarding in high esteem the fact that after killing an animal they leave not a part unused. However, in our culture we regard the modern equivalent, a hot dog, as anything but romantic.

If someone were standing on the North Pole, every direction he or she pointed would be south. How would you give directions to that person?

Two jars of salsa are worth three boxes of cereal.

My knives are sharp. I have now cut myself twice – once slicing beets, once picking the seed out of a melon. I need to stop cutting myself until I am back in an area that has medical facilities I trust to stitch me up.

Eleven days equals twenty-one. Six to seven days equals never. Overnight equals the day after tomorrow. My brain just broke.

And that is that. Baselines set. Stay tuned. Hold on. It begins.

How not to catch a fish

Here in Tununak we have a river that weaves through town. I live on one end of town, and where we fish is near the bridge crossing the river on the other side of town. A week ago now I planned on getting a bit of fishing in with some of the other teachers. We were going to eat dinner and then gather our things and make the ten minute walk to the bridge. Midway through dinner we were interrupted by the knocking of children on the kitchen window.

This has come to be a common occurrence for we, the teachers, apparently, are objects of great interest to the local inhabitants under four feet in height. And we, being teachers, all know that if you give a mouse a cookie they will never go away...but, really, how can you ignore the sweet requests of children when all they want is to know what we are doing? And so we cave and we open the window and we begin talking to these miniature humans. And as we do we let slip that we are going down to the river and they quickly ask if they can come and we already know that this question is not really a question but merely a statement and that we will have a small escort of three children. Okay, we think, no big deal.

So we clean up dinner and our escort is awaiting at the front door. Only it has grown to about six children in the short time we were washing dishes. Alright, five fisherpeople and six local experts under four feet. Still not a big deal.

Our journey to the river begins. But as we walk, children with eyes of eagles and ears of owls, notice our journey and our escort becomes an entourage. Not only have they grown in number, but size as well. We have now acquired the junior and senior high. As our number grows, so does the noise, and as the noise builds more and more children are attracted. I believe we have reached critical mass. It's only a matter of time now. By the time we got to the bridge we are approaching thirty. Let me remind you that the entire school only has 120 students. So here we are with nearly a quarter of the school, none of which happened to bring fishing rods. Now some may be already making predictions as to how our fishing trip panned out. Let me mention a few more things to solidify those predictions.

First is that everyone of these children has more experience fishing in a single finger than our entire teacher party had combined. Second is that when someone, anyone, is near water without a fishing rod but with an ample number of pebbles and rocks, they are prone to throwing those pebbles and rocks into the water. And last is that fish are shy, skittish creatures by nature and don't respond well to loud, splash inducing children.

And so our night of fishing turned into a night of casting poorly to the chagrin of laughing natives only to reel in, repeatedly, an empty hook due in part to our inexperience catching fish and helped along being ensured that none of us got lucky and snagged a fish because all of the fish were far away from us after the onslaught of rocks and pebbles. And so we did not catch any fish (unless you count the the measly devilfish), but the weather was great, the moon was full, the sunset over the Bering beautiful, and the children, while unable to bring us any fish, did bring a night of smiles and laughter. Not too bad for a Friday night in Tununak.