Musings about Winter Solstice

 Flat light. Gray skies. Shapeless. Shadowless. Yet, not lifeless. Mother Nature still breathes, exhaling slowly as the night never quite leaves this place, preparing for her insatiable six-month inhale. It’s as if her own breath controls the seasons, everything growing dark and cold as she empties her primordial lungs and closes her eyes from the emptiness. Yet, just before life itself leaves her, instinct forces her last respire to turn inward, becoming the beginning of a new season as she draws in the very life force she expelled only moments earlier. Her very inhalation causes her eyes to open with fresh fervor. The wider they open, the more the daylight streams back into our lives.

Winter has always been my favorite season. With it comes the comforting layers of clothing and blankets that make me feel safe and protected. I understand the new fad of weighted blankets. I’ve known all my life that there is security in blankets. They cause a sense of wellbeing that is unmatched. It is the same way with heavy sweaters, fuzzy socks, and warm hats.

Darkness is also the same way. Not the kind of darkness that is forceful and feared, but the soft absence of light – that kind of darkness is tranquil and soothing. The noise that sunlight brings is absent, replaced with a sort of restful quiet. The need to go-go-go that summer presses upon me dissipates into the blanket on my lap as I curl up with my little, brown lab on the couch that camouflages her completely except for her glow-in-the-dark pink collar.

There is time. Time for thoughts that lead to written words. Time for music that fills the cabin and makes me sing along. Time for planning rather than doing. It seems strange to me, but I seem to have more time when there is less daylight. Maybe I just get more done in a shorter amount of time because of the feeling that the days are shorter. That is a definite misnomer, “The days are shorter.” There is less daylight, yes, but the days are, in fact, still 24 hours long. The nights are not longer; there is simply more darkness.

People on the outside (that’s what Alaskans call folks in the lower 48) often ask me how I can handle the long hours of darkness. My response is always, “The long hours of daylight are much worse.” I can put on a headlamp, light a kerosene lantern, or even fire up the generator for light, but there is no escaping the daylight of summer. Sure, there are blackout curtains in the bedroom, but have you ever tried to go to sleep when you were in the sunlight just five minutes prior? Human circadian rhythms don’t work that way, and the most important cue for these is daylight.

Outside. Now, there’s an interesting term. In Alaska, it generally refers to everything outside of Alaska. It sounds like prison terminology to me, and perhaps Alaska is a form of self-imposed imprisonment. Inversely, the term inside is seldom, if ever, used. One isn’t inside when they are in Alaska, but they are most certainly outside when they are not, thus the old Alaskan aphorism, “Where do Alaskans go in the winter? – Outside!”

Which leads me back to Mother Nature and the changes she has in store right outside of the window beside which I sit at this very moment watching a ground blizzard on the flats between the river and the mountains to the south of our cabin. There is no sun today, just the gray of the remaining winter solstice daylight coming from somewhere beyond those peaks in the distance. At the end of her exhale, she will begin fresh in the morning. It is fitting that this turning point every year happens just ten days before a new year begins. New life. New chances. A new breath.

Saturday Market

Unalakleet. “Where the East wind blows.” And blows. And blows. And blows. We are located on an isolated stretch of western Alaska coastline along the Norton Sound, the waters of the Bering Sea. Population 750, roughly. It changes more than one might think. Babies are everywhere, but funerals come too often. It is largely a native Alaskan community, but there are a number of Norwegians here as well as a few other ethnicities. Primarily a fishing village, subsistence is a way of life. However, modern civilization displays it’s hold here through smart phones, laptops, satellite TV and internet. Teens can often be seen sitting on the steps of the school after hours with their phones and laptops, making use of the free internet, their jet black hair blowing in the wind, huddled close in their parkas.

Two stores supply a variety of groceries, furniture, toys, and an odd assortment of clothing. There is one gas pump in the village. The one, gravel road leading out of town heads past a few homes before climbing into the hills and out across the tundra where, after 12 miles, it narrows to a snowmachine trail and continues on into the vast wilderness of western Alaska. Even so, there are cars and trucks everywhere, despite the hundreds or even thousands of dollars it takes to ship them here via barge or cargo plane. One cannot drive to Unalakleet from anywhere, except Unalakleet. Gregg and I do just fine with our assortment of snowmachines, 4-wheelers, and a boat. However, it is a real treat on that rare occasion when we get use of someone else’s vehicle while they are out of town.

Two restaurants… yes, restaurants… and I use that term loosely as there is no waitstaff and very limited seating… provide a place for an occasional meal out. The Igloo is your typical not-so-fast-food café, serving up burgers, burritos, fish and chips, and the like. Peace on Earth is mainly a pizza place that also serves hot and cold sandwiches and fresh salads. For a town with such a small population, having two restaurants is quite an indulgence.

Several churches, a small clinic and even smaller hotel, a fish processing plant and a state patrol outpost, and the school and post office pretty much round out the town. However, Unalakleet has a regular Saturday Market – regular meaning it happens ever other Saturday, most of the time – at the Community Hall that really makes village life special. Anyone is welcome to come set up a table (or three) and sell their wares, usually homemade and always different. It’s a wonderful way to see what folks’ talents are, get to know people, chat about the latest goings on around town, grab a cup of coffee and a bowl of moose chili, shop for a birthday present, or grab a fresh loaf of bread and some cookies to take home.

I have had a regular table (or three) at the Market for a couple of years now. Starting with cupcakes and sourdough bread loaves, my offerings have expanded over time to the point where I now pull three tables together to display my freshly baked goods along with custom designed potholders, placemats, jellies, and candles in addition to bath and body products from Perfectly Posh and pet supplies from pawTree.

Living at the cabin, eight miles upriver, Saturday Market is my only reason to come to town, and it’s a good one. It also gives me a reason to shop, online of course. After spending a few hours shopping for fabric, notions, beeswax, and baking ingredients that will not show up for as long as six weeks, I dive into my latest deliveries and spend a week and a half matching fabrics, sewing, pouring mason jar candles spiked with assorted essential oils, and collecting new recipes for sweet breads, cakes and cookies, all while keeping up with daily cabin cleaning, cooking, and hauling water, as well as carving out time for my love of reading and writing. Then, on Thursday, two days before Market, my focus shifts, the big bake begins and I turn out loaves, rolls, and baguettes of savory breads made with homeground wheat berries with flavors like Rosemary Garlic, Tarragon Olive, and Jalapeno Cheese in addition to pans of sweet breads and coffee cakes including Cinnamon Swirl, Lemon Poppyseed, and Apple Spice, not to mention the dozens of giant (I portion the dough with an ice cream scoop.) chocolate chip cookies – always a favorite.

Friday night, after everything has been carefully wrapped and labeled, I pack it all carefully and snugly into large plastic totes that are finally zip-tied shut and loaded into the bright blue sled towed behind Gregg’s snowmachine on Saturday morning, while it’s still dark out. Then, we head to town.

Winter life at the cabin definitely brings challenges with it, one of those being the luxury of a shower. Thankfully, we have a good relationship with the folks who own the Unalakleet River Lodge, and even though they are only here for a couple of months in the summer, their workshop in town is next door to Gregg’s shop and he keeps a key year round to check on it. In the back, there is a small bathroom with a shower stall. Hot and cold running water have never felt so good as they do on a zero-degree day when I haven’t bathed in five days. I truly enjoy our outside shower on the porch at the cabin, but that is unavailable in the throws of winter, and six months of bird baths in a two-gallon washtub on the kitchen floor just don’t do the trick. That is one of the things I most look forward to every Market day; I know I’ll get to shower in town, don fresh clothes, and wear makeup. This cabin-woman does like to show her girlie-girl side once in a while.

After one last check to make sure everything has a price on it and my cashbox has change, we load everything – usually four totes and a box or two – into a borrowed trailer hooked to the back of Gregg’s four-wheeler and make the short, about a mile, trek to the other side of town where the Community Hall is beginning to hum with activity as people carry totes in, holding the door for one another, and begin setting up their table displays. Beautiful kuspuks and school-team t-shirts. Beaded earrings and sea glass zipper pulls. Postcards and calendars featuring local photography. Seal skin slippers and pin cushions. Moose chili and Agutak (Eskimo ice cream).  Fresh bread and cookies. Crochetted and knitted hats and mittens. Some Saturdays, other local direct sales folks even set up tables with LulaRoe, LipSense, Young Living essential oils, and more. It’s truly amazing what you can find in this small, seaside village.

There is a flurry of activity as folks start arriving to shop at noon while vendors are still setting up their wares. Familiar hugs and greetings abound as cash is exchanged and smiles are everywhere. Small children who can barely see over the tables chase each other in a frantic game of tag, in and out, around and around, occasionally stumbling and falling hard on the tile floor only to pick themselves up and begin the game again, their falls softened because of the snow pants they haven’t had time to slow down and take off.

As the two-hour market ensues, small, elderly ladies, with their round, dark, wrinkled faces and bright eyes, cluster together in chairs behind tables and in the corners of the room, dressed in their colorful, homemade kuspuk parkas trimmed with wolverine, wolf, and beaver furs, chatting about ice fishing and family members while teenage boys collect at the basketball t-shirt table sharing stories of water-skipping with their snowmachines and selling t-shirts to make money for an upcoming tournament in Anchorage; travel expenses for sports teams in rural Alaska are magnanimous because every trip requires plane fare. Their fathers stand near the door discussing the safety of the river ice and upriver travel conditions as well as the lack of sea ice causing a poor seal harvest this year.

“How you like it upriver?” asks a sweet-faced elderly woman whose name I can’t recall.

“It’s great!” is always my response. “Nice and quiet.”

“You make all this up there?”

“Yep. Right at the cabin. I turn the generator on to sew.”

“Wow! You keep busy!” she exclaims as she takes a long look down my three tables all pulled together and overflowing with goods. “You make this bread?”

“Sure did. Yesterday. They’re even made with fresh-ground wheat berries. I grind them myself just before I make the bread. It makes a real difference when you make bread with warm, freshly ground, flour.”

“My J.R. and I used to live up Little North when we first married. No water. No power. Those were simple times. Good times,” she remembers, “You there all winter?”

“Yes ma’am. Year round.”

“Wow. You tough woman. Busy woman. Good for you,” she compliments me as she reaches for two loaves, one cinnamon swirl and one rosemary garlic, and hands me a ten dollar bill.

This conversation repeats itself several times at every Market. To have the esteem of the elders in the community is an unmatched stamp of approval. I treasure it as she hobbles away, the years of kneeling in tundra berry patches having taken their toll.

Two o’clock nears and the Market begins to thin out. I won’t need the two cardboard boxes packing up, because I’ve sold so much, so I break them down and lean them against the wall behind the trash barrel, putting everything else back in the totes, with room to spare. It was a good Market. I sold all of the baked goods except for one coffee cake, which I’ll take home, and a few cookies, which will keep in the freezer at Gregg’s shop, next to the one pound freezer bags of ground moose, until the next Market. Gregg arrives right at two and we load the trailer back up and scoot across town to unload at the shop, pack up the snowmachines and head back upriver to the cabin, hoping to get home before dark, which comes early this time of the year, around three-thirty.

The drive home gives me time to reflect.

“Good for you,” echoes in my head, bouncing around like those kids chasing each other around the tables.

Yes, good for me.

Do You Get Out Very Often?

Trail in early fall.

This is the eighth in a series of posts I’m writing in answer to the questions I get asked the most.

"Do you get out very often?"

My reflex answer to this is, “Too often.”

In all seriousness, I do enjoy going into the village every couple of weeks, and could go as often as I like, but I have no reason, no need to go. In the summertime, mid-May through mid-October, it’s a quick 20-minute boat ride or 45 minutes by 4-wheeler, and in the winter, it’s 15 minutes by snowmachine, all of which stay parked right outside of our cabin. However, the shoulder seasons, which we are in the middle of right now, of spring and fall make travel a good deal more difficult.

Fall Down. Go Boom.

We live near the base of a huge hill (I shall heretofor refer to it as “the mountain.”) and there is a steep trail that climbs 600 vertical feet in one mile via hairpin switchbacks, a sketchy trail in the best of circumstances. Cover that trail with wet leaves, mud, ice, snow, or any combination of these and you have a recipe for disaster, which means it must be hiked on foot, often with the use of ski poles for support. We leave our 4-wheelers and snowmachines at the top of the mountain, ready and waiting for the 12 mile drive to town. Our nearest neighbor is (you guessed it) 12 miles away.

Living on the river has its definite advantages. However, shoulder seasons don’t make the pro-list. Gregg put the boat away three weeks ago, when the river started to freeze up… for the first time. It froze all the way across, as did its tributaries, only to break up and float out to sea with an extended warm front bringing upper 30’s and rain. Much of the small harbor in the village stayed frozen, so there was no way to put the boat back in the water… that was… until a few days ago. Strong winds and high tides washed away most of the harbor ice, but

Slushy river

the temps immediately began to drop which created slush and ice floating down the river again, making it impossible to navigate with a jet-propelled motor, which is what we have. However, there have been a couple of boats motoring through the ice in front of the cabin over the past few days with their prop motors. Still, that’s got to be one – cold – ride!

All that leads me to my point that travel has been difficult for us for almost a month, now, what with no boat access and a mile hike before a 45-minute ride. Most days, Gregg does just that to go to work at his small engine shop in the village. I made that trip last Friday and Saturday to prepare for and participate in the Saturday Market. It was exhausting! And, I don’t plan to do it again until I absolutely have to. Before that, it had been two weeks since I had been to town.

I made it to the top of the Mountain!

Today, we’re getting a winter storm. Snow and wind. Gregg stayed home today to get out of the weather. In a few days, the temperature is supposed to drop into the teens for highs and single digits overnight. We are keeping our fingers crossed that in another couple of weeks the river will be frozen enough to drive on, freeing us from the grip of the fall shoulder season.

Sometimes it’s odd to think that I go weeks at a time without having a person-to-person conversation with anyone other than Gregg, but I don’t miss it.

As far as leaving the village, that requires a plane ticket. We only go to Anchorage when we absolutely have to. I go at least once every six months for my glaucoma checkup, but Gregg hasn’t been out of the village in almost a year, when we went to the Lower 48 to spend Christmas with family. That doesn’t seem odd to us either. It’s our normal.

I do 95% of my shopping online, most of that with Target and Amazon. Gregg brings things home with him as they come in the mail. Likewise, if we need eggs or bread from the store or meat from our freezer in town, he brings that home with him. There is no reason for me to go to town.

So, “Do I get out very often?”

“I get out quite enough, thank you.”

Water Day - Summer

On a Summer Water Day, which comes around every couple of weeks, it’s time to get the water from the river up the hill to the cabin. Thanks to a portable, electric water pump, we no longer have to haul it up 40-some steps in 5-gallon buckets weighing 40 pounds a piece. It’s surprising how two garden hoses, a 100-foot length of extension cord, and a small, $100 pump can feel like such a luxury.

Cleaning buckets

Everything's ready to go!

The first task is to gather all of the buckets, pots, and water jugs, wipe out the river sediment from the inside bottoms so that they’re clean to start with again, and turn on the generator, which entails the “on” switch, engaging the choke, pulling the cord a couple of times, and letting it warm up before turning the choke back off. We have a small, portable, 2,000 watt Honda generator that’s been serving the cabin well for over 12 years. However, it is starting to sputter on occasion, so we’ve just ordered a new one – not bad for a $1,000 investment. I’d really hate for the old generator to just peter out one day while I’m in the middle of a sewing marathon. No worries. Hopefully, the new one will arrive via NAC (Northern Air Cargo) by next week from Anchorage. Everything is a process out here.

Generator

100 feet of hose and extension cord

Which leads me back to Water Day. We keep the 100-foot extension cord lying on the hill so that it’s ready to plug in when needed. After getting that plugged into the generator, it’s down the stairs to the green house where the garden hoses are stored under the back bench along with the water pump. We have to screw the two 50-foot hoses together and then carry the end of one down the last set of steps to the boat, along with the pump. Also, the extension cord is left with the last 50 feet curled up on the deck by the greenhouse, so that must be uncurled and the end carried down to the boat where the pump is sitting on the back bench, near the motor.

Water Pump

Water Pump nozzle

At this point, we can screw the hose onto the pump, and then, using a 9/16 wrench, we need to open up the primer hole and fill the pump up with water using the stainless steel coffee cup that we keep in the boat in case we get thirsty when we are out and about (Unalakleet River water is just about the best thing going!). Once the primer hole overflows and the cap has been screwed back on, it’s time to put the pump nozzle over the side of the back of the boat. We put it off the back, because the water is running faster further out toward the middle of the river, making it cleaner. We’re finally ready to plug in the water pump (remember, we already have the generator going, so the extension cord is live when it hooks on to the pump).

After about six seconds, water starts pouring out of the end of the double-length hose and into the 35-gallon trash barrel sitting outside of the greenhouse. That’s the first bucket to fill, being that the initial water can be a bit cloudy from sediment left in the hose from the last time. That trash barrel will provide all of the water that the greenhouse needs for the next couple of weeks.

Then, the end of the hose is carefully carried up the steps to the main deck where the majority of the buckets have been assembled. We fill the 5-gallon buckets for the house, first, so that one of us can be carrying those 40-pound beasts into the house. Two go inside at a time. Stacked, they provide an end table for the couch. Two more are stacked just outside the front door, to be rotated inside as needed. Two large, steel pots are filled and taken inside to provide initial drinking water for our three dogs and wash water for the kitchen. The two-gallon, counter, water dispenser is filled to provide our version of running water for drinking. Finally, the outside dog water tub is filled along with another 35-gallon trashcan to provide ready refills for the cabin.

Rain Bucket

An important side note is that we have one, particular, 5-gallon bucket, which has small holes, the diameter of a pencil, drilled in the lid. This bucket is the first one we use in the house, because it is then placed underneath the porch, at the end of a drainpipe leading down from the metal roof, providing us with rainwater. The holes keep the larger debris, like leaves and sticks out of the bucket, but the rainwater still needs to be strained of pine needles and such before use. We only use rainwater for washing or the dog bowl because it doesn’t taste as good as the river water.

Cleaning rugs

After all of the buckets are filled, we spray down the garden good, if it’s been dry, and wash any rugs or other mats that need it. Fresh river water, a little laundry soap, and a sturdy broom work amazingly well to clean rugs, which are then left to dry on the porch rails.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking the work is done yet! First, we unplug the extension cord from the generator before turning it off, because it’s hard on both the generator and the pump to turn off the generator while the pump is still plugged in. Now, we head back down the 40-some steps to the boat to unplug the pump and empty the excess water out of it, unscrew the hose, and haul the pump, which weighs a good 15 pounds, hose, and extension cord back up to the greenhouse deck where we unscrew the two hoses, roll them up and return them to the greenhouse along with the pump. The lower 50-foot of extension cord is then rolled up and placed neatly next to the greenhouse, ready for the next Water Day.

In all, it only takes about 20 minutes of hard work for two people working together, and there is an amazing sense of accomplishment and teamwork when it is all done.

Water Day is a completely different beast in the throws of winter.