This weekend Brian and I decided that we wanted to go clamming (yes, they have a specific verb that means "to dig for clams") down at Clam Gulch. Clams are delicious and the limit is 60 clams, per person, per day, so one trip can bring in a lot of clam chowder for the fall. It's actually pretty impressive that you can take 60 clams with you each day because, even though you can only clam when the low tide is really low, with a name like "Clam Gulch" it's the most populated clamming spot in this part of Alaska. When we went there were probably 40 or 50 other people clamming as well, so you'd think that if each person were allowed 60, the whole beach would be pretty much depleted in a few days. But they replenish their numbers very quickly (that's why they say "Happy as a clam?"). Digging for razor clams (which are different than most of the clams on the east coast) is fairly simple. You find a hole, which looks like an indentation the size of a shallow spoonful. You prepare-- you know, take a few deep breaths and get yourself mentally ready to go. Then you dig. Fast. Because as soon as you start digging, they start propelling themselves downward. You can use a shovel or a clam gun to do the initial first few deep digs. But then you see a speck of white and you dive on the ground and start digging with your hands. When you touch it, you have to get it very softly, or you'll crack the shell. We cracked a lot of shells. But that's okay for eating purposes, it just makes them harder to clean. You have to wear big rubber gloves though, so the shells don't cut you.
Although it is fairly simple, it is very difficult. It took us a while to get the hang of it. But then it's like a revelation and you can do it and you get so excited and get tons of clams and then realize you're completely exhausted and you can hardly move your arms any more. And then the tide starts coming in. But you only have 52 clams each. So you keep going. As fast as you can even though you're exhausted until you are so tired that you can hardly move at all. And then you realize just how fast the tide is coming in, so you start to hurry up the beach. But you're completely exhausted and can barely pick up your legs. And then you start to walk on a part of the beach that's not sand at all, but really very fine glacial silt. And it's getting deeper and harder to move in. And you're sinking really quickly. And then, before you realize what's happening you are in past your knees and getting deeper. You ditch your clamming tools and try to get out but you can't. You're in quicksand. Scooby-Doo style. Only, there's no jungle vine for your friends to throw to you so that they can team up to heave-ho you out. So you yell to your boyfriend that you're sinking and that you can't move at all and you're almost crying. And he has to run back and pull you out. And then go run back for the shovel and the clam gun. Because he is kind of Superman. And then you both lay on the rocks where the tide hasn't reached yet and try and fathom the strength to move. Or at least that's what happened to us.
The next day we signed up to go white water rafting on Six Mile Creek. I was so excited-- I had been waiting all summer to do this. Broke, one of our managers, dates the guy who manages the company, so our employees all get to take free trips. It was great. They gear you up in dry suits (that look like techno-colored space suits) and plop you on giant teal rafts. Everybody learns to paddle together and then you're flying through class five rapids. The rapids all have intimidating names, like "Jaws" and "Suckhole." Even words that were probably neutrally or positively valenced, like "Staircase" and "Merry-Go-Round" suddenly seem terrifying when they are referring to the name of a crazy rapid. But it was great.
Post-weekend, things were pretty slow around the cache. But I thought I'd amputate my finger on the meat-slicer so spice things up a little. Dear family, please don't worry. I really do still have all ten of my fingers. I hardly even lost that much in terms of total volume. A fair bit of surface area, though. But it's been fine. A new challenge, really, to learn to make sandwiches and type and things when you can't feel with one of your fingers because of all the bandaging. Try it. You'd be surprised.
Tonight is the Logging Road party. The theme is "duct tape spirit animal." According to the online quiz I took, my spirit animal is a spider ("Artsy and intuitive. Sometimes you get so wrapped up in your endeavors that you forget about the outside world and everyone in it."). So I need to use the rest of my break to go finish my costume. I will make sure to take pictures!
HP, Paragliding, Homer, and Fishing Again
To those who are concerned: Sorry that I have not blogged lately. I have been super busy and the internet here has been shoddy. The reason that I have not blogged lately is not because I have gotten a tattoo of a bear or a salmon, as I understand is the current belief of some members of my family. I have an extreme fear of needles. I am not going to get a tattoo. And if I was, a bear or a salmon? Really? Yeah, on my lower back, tramp-stamp style. I’d like to think that I have expressed better taste than that. But whatever.
Last week I was afforded an awesome opportunity to go PARAGLIDING. It was so great. So Brandon (the cook) sweet-talked Wolf Eyes into letting me have the morning off so I could go with Emma and him and his
sister. Because prior to my trip I did not know,
paragliding is like hang-gliding, but you are sitting in a seat, not hanging on to a bar (like parasailing, but off of a mountain, not behind a boat). First you have to take a ski lift to the top of a mountain. Then you ride tandem with an experienced (and probably licensed or something) glider and they do all of the steering (which is done with a system of ropes and pulleys, not by shifting weight like in hang-gliding). They get the parachute all set up behind you, strap you in, and then tell you to run as fast as you can down the mountain (yes, slightly terrifying).
You feel like the parachute has opened and caught you, but it hasn’t so you keep running. Until they s
ay jump, and then you just jump off of the mountain and it catches you. So my guy shows up, he’s just finished a jump, and he is literally covered in opened wounds, still bleeding. Confidence inspiring, right? But he said I’d be fine, and so I went. And I was. Apparently he tripped and fell walking up the stairs to the ski lift. Go figure. It was completely amazing. It was a gorgeous sunny day and you could just see everything. Probably the closest to legit flying that we can get.
So after paragliding I head back to work. I went to the midnight premiere of Harry Potter the night before (It was epic. Amazing. I dressed up, the only one in the theatre to do so, which was disappointing. A young boy mocked my cloak. The jerk. But the movie was amazing. So intense. I cried through about 75% of it. Just sat ther
e behind my 3-D glasses (
I hate 3-D, but it was the only option; wasn’t that bad though) and sobbed.) and then woke up super early the next day for the paragliding, so I was completely whipped. But Wolf Eyes came in and helped me make sandwiches and then let me leave early. She’s actually been awesome lately. Except for I am pretty sure she thinks that I have autism, because I have started to time myself making sandwiches (1.76 minutes per sandwich today, new record!). “I just came in to ask Megan a question and she wouldn’t even look up at me until she had finished wrapping and bagging her sandwich and then wrote down the time! It’s adorable.” Uhh. That is totally not how that interaction actually happened. Pretty sure I don’t remember that at all, actually. Anyways.
So for our last weekend, Brian and I went to Homer. Homer is a small sea-side, artsy town, about 3 hours south of Cooper Landing. It was probably the best weekend we’d had so far this summer. We stayed in a cabin at Sea View Farms that looked right out onto the ocean. It was tiny and didn’t have running water, but it was so pretty and had a little wood-burning stove to heat it up. But it was so sunny and gorgeous that we didn’t need it. It was a pretty lazy weekend. Lots of eating (delicious pizza, seafood, and then Thai!), lots of lazing around, reading on the beach and going for walks. We walked around town, too and checked out a lot of the local art galleries. I found this one woman’s greeting cards with prints of her paintings of these crazy distorted people with bizarre “pondering” quotes. They are amazing. I bought nine. I was only going to buy eight, but I just couldn’t choose. I would have bought one of each, but that would be a little out of hand. I am going to cut out the print
s and frame them. So excited. Amazing weekend.
Fishing update: The second sockeye salmon run has started. And it’s big. First they travel through the Lower Kenai, then the Middle, then through Skilak Lake, and then to the Upper (where camp is). They were expecting between 700,000 and 1,250,000 fish. But the counts for the Lower and Middle (where they are now) are around 2,300,000. So they raised the limit on the Middle and the Lower from 3 fish per person, per day, to 6. And now they are allowing dip-netting on the Lower (which normally only natives are allowed to do). They should be flooding the Upper in the next few days. Brian, Andrew, and I went out the other night and had some success, even though it was getting pretty dark (which means the fish mostly stop moving). Our fillet count for the winter is up to 34 lbs, which is very exciting. Fish for friends!
Mount Marathon and King Salmon Fail
I have been seriously slacking in the blogging department. Mostly because we’ve had a lot of sunny
days these last two weeks and I usually want to spend my breaks outside instead of inside where I can connect to the internet.
Last week Shelby came back from a five day safari trip that she was driving. I like Shelby a lot; she is probably one of my favorite people here. She is tall and always loud and full of energy. She knows
a lot about cars and welding and she can beat most of the boys at pool. She has probably fifteen tattoos. If she and Brian got into a fight, I think I’d put my money on Shelby. Just saying. So she gets back, runs into the cache, steals the snacks I was refilling, and tells me that this weekend (last weekend) we are going to go to Sunrise (the only bar i
n town) on our Friday night, the Girdwood Forest fair on our Saturday, and then to Seward for Mount Marathon on Independence Day. Oh, you didn’t have plans yet, did you?
So we did. Forest Fair was fun.
It was kind of like a hippie-arts-and-crafts festival. Plus a beer garden. A lot of our staff members volunteer to do “Earth Maintenance” (i.e., trash pick-up) because that basically gets you unlimited free beer. They had a lot of really cool ceramics (Brian and Shelby both got mugs) and a lot of the artists did interesting prints. Although there was a lot of pictures of bears and moose and traditional Alaskan things that I thought were kind of cheesy though. And also a lot of state-fair-type food. Disgusting, yet delicious.
The next day we went out to Seward for their Independence Day street fair. Every year they have “Mount Marathon” which
is a race 3022 feet up and then down a mountain. The athletes
that run in this are just amazing. The first and second place winners for the women were both Olympic skiers, and the woman who won first place did it in 52 minutes. The manager of our company does it every year in about an hour and a half and the owner’s wife (who is fifty-four years old) did it this year in 57 minutes. The oldest person to finish this year was eighty-two. It was pretty amazing to watch. They have EMT stations staggered throughout the trail. On the way down the runners just leap. They are barely touching the mountain; every time they touch down they leap down probably fifteen feet. Some of the people who cross the finish line are just covered in blood from just tumbling the
whole way down. It’s pretty insane.
It was a fun weekend, but it was super busy. We were constantly travelling and on the move.
So this weekend we decided to just take it easy. We went King Salmon fishing (which required basically no work because it’s not fly fishing, so you’re literally just sitting there and because we didn’t catch any King Salmon). Brian and I went with Fish Guide Brian and Fish Guide Brian’s friend, Brian, and his son, Briar. No joke. Three Brians, a Briar, and me. It made me understand why we pack the fish guides twenty-five pounds of food every day. Because it’s so boring that all you do is e
at. Between the five of us,
we ate an entire block of provolone cheese. Not because you’re hungry, just because when you’re not catching fish, there is nothing else to do.
Time to go back to work. Promise to post again in a few days!
I talked to Ali the other day. We were talking about work and I told her that my manager was intimidating because she made very intense eye contact. Ali’s dubbed her “Wolf Eyes.” Which is hilarious. And the nickname stuck. Now half of camp is calling Rece “Wolf Eyes.” Things are generally improving in the cache. My sandwich making is basically perfected. And Lauren likes baking (although she is not superb at it), which is good because I never want to see another cookie again in my life. And we now use ciabatta bread instead of hoagie rolls, which is a dramatic improvement in both taste and pack-ability. Except for yesterday we had hummus disaster, which involved adding
farrrrr too much raw garlic and Nicole breaking the new hand blender. By the end of wrestling with it all of our stomachs were cursing us.
Last week, we had the Logging Road Party. Except for people were camping on the logging road,
so we moved it and made it the Next To The Cooper Creek Party. The theme was Predator and Prey, so I went as a dark wizard (preying on Katie, who went as a unicorn [for her sliver blood that I drink to sustain my life, duh, see book 1]). This is mostly because the HP final movie premieres July 15, so I had my costume on the ready. Nonetheless, I make a great wizard (JMHO). Other notable costumes included The Environment and an Oil Spill, a cat, a mouse, and cheese, and a bear victim. Our cook went as a wife beater and Wolf Eyes went as his 17-year-old pregnant wife. She went around holding her other baby (a brown stuffed pig) and saying that “the last one came out black.” Poor taste, much?
For our weekend Brian, Andrew and I went to Anchorage to run some errands. Anchorage is a
terrible city populated by dirty strip malls, liquor stores, and Fred Meyers. But we did go see X-Men, which was interesting (I had never seen any of them), and eat Indian food. I ate so much. It was delicious. Indian food is the #1 thing that I miss in Alaska. (Thai food is the #2.)
The next day Brian and I hiked to the Harding Ice Field. I liked the idea of this hike because of the word “field.” Fields are big and flat. As my spatial skills are negligible, I didn’t really understand what “four miles in and 3,500 feet up”
meant. Apparently it meant “not flat.” Also, that is the last time I trust someone with a BMI of one and a half (Wolf Eyes) to tell me
when I am going to be “freezing!” (I should have known that our body temperatures are vastly different, seeing as any day that the temperature drops below 50, she has to stand in front of the open oven.) I had to change into Brian’s shorts in the woods and then I had to carry about a million pounds of warm clothes in my pack. But the hike was well worth it because the views were amazing. Views of ice fields don’t come easy. Which is legit. The ice field was cool, but the best part of the hike was the marmot that I saw.
Marmots are very cute and very gregarious animals. It let me get very close to it so I could take 34 pictures of it (yep, 34, I just counted when I uploaded them.)
Tonight is the Girdwood Forrest Fair. In the day they have local craft-vendors come and sell the things that they’ve made and at night it is just a huge party. The weather is kind of gross, but I’m excited—it should be fun!
Solstice!
This past week has been very busy. Things seemed to be better at work last week; less micro-managing and Rece was really nice to me, especially Sunday morning. I think that I’vegotten better too, making fewer mistakes and such.
Except for then, that afternoon, Rece and Darla called me in to tell me that Nicole, the other packer, was being switched to hospitality (the cleaning crew) and that a girl from hospo was being made the new lead packer. Now Lauren is the new lead packer. I have a strong feeling that I might have been switched instead if I had taken the alcohol-training course and could serve alcohol to guests at dinner. But I haven’t. So now it’s me and Lauren. She’s pretty nice. But very flirty with the boys and a little condescending. But overall, not bad. And Rece is very excited that Lauren wants to step in and be a leader and create new systems for doing things and such, so her improved move towards the lunch-packing scene has been pleasant. Unfortunately, the move has lowered morale among the staff though. But we’ll see how things go in the next few weeks.
On Monday Brian and I went out the company’s backcountry lodge for our weekend. You can’t access the lodge by land, so we had to have Trina take us over on the luggage shuttle boat. There were only four guests books, two of whom were Trina’s parents, so they put us up in a swanky guest cabin (with p
ropane heat!). It was a great weekend. The backcountry lodge is beautiful and since the staff
there is so small, it has become a very tight-knit group. They all eat lunch and dinner together every night and then
all of the dishes. Stephanie, the cook, makes amazing food. I ate so much—it was incredible. We
did lots of napping, reading, and playing Bananagrams. Also on Monday night we played Apples to Apples with the staff. On Tuesday after lunch we wen
t kayaking for an hour or two around Skilak Lake. The lake is gorgeous. Years ago there was a big fire that burnt down a lot of the surrounding forest. The charcoal ashes now filter the water as it comes into the lake (like a Brita filter). So the water is really clear and amazing to drink. Also, in some places the lake is between 800 and 1000 feet deep; you can’t see the bottom but in the deeper parts the water is bright teal.
That night it was solstice, so we went fishing to celebrate on the river. I borrowed Brian’s rod (not “fishing pole!")
fished for the first time. I landed two sockeye salmon! It turns out that I am very good at catching fish, but they are very strong and
I am not very good at pulling them in, so a lot of times they get away. I caught at least 10 that got away before I could pull them in. This drove the other fishermen on the lake crazy, because I was literally the only one to catch anything for an hour and a
half, but I couldn’t pull them in. Brian ended up catching two, and Andrew got one (you’re only allowed to catch three per person per night), so it was a pretty good trip. Each salmon gives you two fillets and each fillet gives you three serving of salmon. So one salmon feeds six people.
I made a deal with Minto last week to buy my mother’s birthday present,
I paid part cash and then I owed him part fish. We settled on three
fillets, so he got three of mine and I got one. But I hope to catch more, maybe tonight, and have lots of salmon for me and my friends and family come fall. I am thinking salmon parties. J
Day 16
So apparently GRE scores do not predict lunch packing ability. The end of last week at work was very stressful. It seems that I am not very good at packing lunches (yet?). Although the guides tell me that we have been complimented on our delicious sandw
iches, some of the other pragmatics have been falling through the cracks, and Nicole and I have been reprimanded repeatedly. Now we have to make
to-do lists with little check boxes on them and write every task on those lists to make sure that they get done. I considered suggesting that we move t
o a smiley-face system (smiley faces mean you get fun free time, straight faces are neutral, frowney faces mean you are put in time out to cool off), like the one that I use with Max in Chapel Hill, but I didn’t because I am kind of scared of my manager these days. The micro-managing is getting a little bit out of hand, as are the after-hours text messages or hand-written notes letting me and Nicole know about th
e things we missed or didn’t do correctly that day. On Sunday, Rece called me while I was working in the cache to make me come over to the kitchen and see that I had put the large mixing bo
wl in the industrial dishwasher upside-down, and that when the cycle ended the bowl was filled with water. Oh no! A large bowl is filled with water and sitting above a giant drain. I have not the slightest inkling as to how to remedy this problem. Perhaps we should call a higher up on the walkie-talkie to come and assist us in dealing with this mess.
However, I am confident that I can do a better job this week in not forgetting any details. And hopefully that will translate to less micro-managing on the part of our boss. We will see.
Brian (yes- he is finally here!) and I had Monday and Tuesday off. On Monday we had a lazy day and watched a movie, did some tent-cleanin
g (he still had to move all of his stuff in) and shelf-building, played Bananagrams, and went to bed early. Yesterday, we went hiking on Ptarnigan trail. The first half-mile or so was very ugly because they were d
oing a lot of trail construction, which involves tearing everything up so they can improve it. But the rest of the hike was very pretty. We pretty much hiked into a cloud, so I got very wet, but as long as I was moving I wasn’t cold. Brian p
ointed out lots of interesting plants that would flower and grow blueberries and raspberries and cranberries at end of July or the beginning of August. It will be fun to come
back once the berries grow. The trail en
ded at one of the most gorgeous lakes I have ever seen. It was so pretty.
After our hike we came back and got cleaned up and then went out to dinner in town at a place called The Kingfisher. They have a deck with a very pretty view of the water and lots of delicious food. The portions are gigantic, though. I think that I ate my weight in pasta. I am not going to be hungry for a week. Maybe I’ll just hibernate for a few days.
It’s chilly and rainy today; a good day for a sauna after work. Every time I go into the sauna I think of Jake’s Finland project and the popsicle-stick sauna that my mom made with the pipe-cleaner men inside of it. The sauna
was bigger than any of the mountains in the country. That’s what Finland is known for. Giant saunas.
A final note for friends and family: Mail is a major status symbol up here. People take their mail very seriously as it is proof to the rest of the mailbox-goers that somewhere in the real world people care about you enough to send you something. Thus, my address is 16520 Sterling Hwy,
Cooper Landing, AK 99572. Send me things!
Day 11
Hiking on Sunday was a success. Up here, success is marked by not
being eaten by a bear. Before we went Brooke gave us bear spray, an extensive bear safety talk, and her dog Nuna. We made lots of noise, and we saw no bears, but lots of bear poop.
On Monday, Nick, Katie and I went on the Kenai Fjords adventures tour. It took up to the Ailak Glacier for Old Fox Island for a very large and delicious dinner. We saw so much wildlife, it was incredible. We saw sea otters, seals, sea lions, puffin birds, orcas, and humpback whales. The orcas were the most exciting.
Orcas live with their families forever. Whe
n it comes time to mate, two families come together and the males leave briefly, mate with the females, and then return to their families. Three families saw right next to our boat over about a fifteen-minute period. When we were getting off of the boat at Fox Island for dinner, Katie is randomly like, “Oh, I dated that boy,” pointing at a guy on the Fox Island staff helping people off of the boat. I figured she was kidding since she was from D.C. and she had only briefly visited Alaska once before, but it turns out she wasn’t. So her boy ended up taking the evening off so he could come hang out with us for drinks. First we went to a bar that was decorated to look like an 80’s porno. They had a crazy collection of the annual Jim Bean memorabilia bottles. It was actually really cool. The second place that we went wa
s very Alaskan. Unfortunately, we left just as Karaoke Night was starting up. Also in the last few days I finished two great books. The first was Blue Cotton Gown, which is a memoir that was written by Patricia Harman, a nurse midwife. Brian and I heard her speak at an independent bookshop in Asheville. Her book was a collection of stories about her life and about the stories that of her patients over the years. I definitely recommend it.
The other was Dude, You’re a Fag. This one was about how homophobia is
intricately tied to notions of masculinity and how ritualized events in high school (e.g., proms, pep rallies, talent shows, and homecoming) reinforce those connections. It was also a really interesting read.
Yesterday I had a split shift, where I work in the morning, have some time off in the
afternoon, and then am a server at night for dinner. Darla told me that this job usually requires khaki pants. I hate khaki pants. I have flashbacks to fifth grade, The
Matthew Years, when my mother would insist that I needed to wear my khakis to church on Sundays, that my typical sweatpant-and-tee-shirt attire was absolutely acceptable. When I told her that,
no, I did not own khaki pants, she tried to see if I could borrow Lauren’s. Even though I was entirely confident that they were not going to fit, she made me try them on and present myself to pr
ove that they were so big, that it would
actually be much more professional of me to wear my jeans that actually
fit rather than Lauren’s pants which hung around me knees, too big for any belt to fix. But she said I need to “find” khaki pants soon. FML. Khaki pants are the color of snot and will never look anything less than
hideous on me. My plan is to have my mother go to Gap and try on khaki pants and tell me what size fits. I think we are about the same size, so I will hopefully be able to order them online. Ugh. Stupid khakis.
Day 7
Things around camp still aren’t terribly busy. Yesterday the pastry chef and the prep cook had the day off so I got to step in and be the sous chef! It was very exciting. I learned to make gnocchi from scratch, which I now plan on doing pretty much every day when I get back. My hands, however, still stained very bright magenta from cutting up beets. This may be permanent. It was chilly so later a bunch of people jumped in the sauna to warm up. Today and tomorrow are my days off, and I think I am going to go hiking with Nick.
Day 5
Blogging
This has pretty much always been my stance on blogging, narcissistic self-indulgence. But I thought that I might start one this summer anyways so my family and friends could hear about my Alaskan adventures and be comforted in knowing that I have not yet had a bear grind my bones to make his bread.
Day 0 (not yet in Alaska)
In the airport in Phoenix I met two interesting people. Naturally I was at the peak of a gnarly cold and could only croak to communicate with them.
The first was Emilia, who was in my freshman year Polish class at UNC. I remember liking her because she was the only one in class who was worse at Polish then I was. I used to complain all the time about being the worst, but Mike would reassure me, that “No Megan, Emilia is definitely worse than you are. She just does her homework in a group with Julia and Andrea, so she has the right answers then. But really she’s the worst.” Too bad Emilia left after the first semester. So for the next two I was undeniably The Worst. But it was still good to see her. Now that she is no longer attempting to conquer abstruse Eastern European languages, she is waiting tables at Princess Cruises, our arch-enemy company.
The second person was Allison Chatterbox McGill. She was two years old and very cute. She kept running up to me and talking to me in the airport while I waited. She would ask me a question and the laugh and run away because my voice sounded like “a lizard.” I board the plane and settle into my seat in row five when a flight attendant comes to ask me if I would like to swap seats to row twelve for a window seat. *WIN.* Guess who is sitting in row eleven? Immediately after the “Fasten Seat Belts” sign was turned off, Chatterbox popped out of her seat and stood up and turned around to talk to me. For an hour. Just when I am starting to wonder just how much steam this two year old’s got, she launches into a story about the time her parents left her at a shopping mall and her father decides that maybe the nice girl behind her would like to rest.
Flying into Anchorage was beautiful. It was a bit foggy, but you could still make out all of the lakes and the mountains. And even though it was after midnight, it was just kind of dusky. It looked like the sun was perpetually setting. Even though they tell everyone that it’s light for twenty-four hours in Alaska in the summer, you really can’t imagine how bizarre it is to be walking around the airport at 1:00 in the morning and it feels like 7:30.
I took a cab to the company’s house in Anchorage, checked the bedrooms, found myself to be alone, and then passed out on the couch. Long day.
Day 1
Today I woke up at 5:30 in the morning, because it still feels like 9:30. I lazed on the couch for a while watching the trees and then hopped in the shower. So I’m walking around the house, making tea, in a towel, when this forty-something-year-old man walks down the stairs and introduces himself as Todd. Ah. Bad job checking the bedrooms last night. Apparently not alone. Todd was nice though. He is a safari guide and takes clients on long trips (seven-nine days) up to Denali and Fairbanks.
It was actually really warm and sunny—I think near 85. Apparently it’s been like that the last few days. Climate change hits harder up here. I walked around town a little bit, got lost, and called Brian who directed me around Anchorage from Chapel Hill (which was very impressive). When I got back another girl arrived at the house. She was Stephanie and she was going to be the cook out at the back country lodge.
A van came later that afternoon to take me and Stephanie into camp, about a two hour drive away. The girl who was driving us was the new safari intern, Christina. She was also very nice. The drive was gorgeous. Absolutely amazing. The mountains here are like nothing I’ve ever seen before. And when we were about two miles away from camp, a moose ran out in front of us, many ten yards away. It was so big! At first I thought it was a giant horse because it had shed its antlers, but it was too big and awkward. Moose are very powerful and can run very fast, but they are not graceful creatures. It was very cool.
Camp is cool. Like summer camp. I never got to go to summer camp. (Mom: “Okay, Megan. You just live that out then.” I can practically see her rolling her eyes through the phone.) Kyle introduced me to a lot of people whose names I can’t remember, but they all seemed nice. I moved into my tent-cabin, which I like a lot. Not incredibly warm, but very cozy.
I met my boss, Rece, who is completely adorable and I may already have a slight crush on her. Also, today a bird flew into the kitchen and got itself stuck in the skylight, trying to get out. She stood on the counter and caught it in her hand with a dishrag and threw it out the door so it could escape. She’s great.
I went to bed early because I was still jetlagged and exhausted. But overall, I was pleased to have survived day one.
Day 2
Started work today. (Although I was pretty sure I was supposed to start tomorrow, but apparently Darla thought that I looked a little too comfortable eating my lunch at the table and decided that I could start today.) There was a big group there yesterday that just left and no major trips at camp for the rest of the week, so not much of my actual job needed to be done. So my job for the next two days was Darla’s bitch. I pretty much did whatever chores she told me to do. But that was okay, because (a) I learned where lots of things in camp are (b) I like Darla, she reminds me of Karen Belciglio, and (c) I learned to thatch grass, which is obviously an important life skill. (Thatching grass is a lot like raking, but more arduous and less efficient.)
Later that day I went to watch the company’s softball team play in a tournament in a community league. We played Moose Pass, a group of locals, mostly senior citizens, and let me tell you… these Alaskans did nothing but practice softball all winter (actually, that’s a lie—apparently the same group is also involved in a community pond hockey league). They were so badass. They annihilated us. Twenty-one to nothing in five innings. It was embarrassing.
Day 3: More chores. More thatching. In the rain. But then two boys (who are actually also both from the Carolinas) started a sauna, which was completely amazing. Apparently the tradition is that you get in the sauna until it’s uncomfortably hot (uh, I was still comfortable) and then plunge yourself into the 38 degree river. Then you run back into the sauna to experience a “pleasant burning sensation.” It’s basically a full-body CPT. Supposedly if you do this three times (fuckwhat?!) you will “completely cleanse your soul.” Well, to attest to the power of socially induced placebo analgesia, I did it twice and felt very cleansed. (You feel cleansed, right? Uh, yeah, definitely.)
Later that night we walked to a local restaurant to have a drink and then walked to the other campgrounds, Turquoise, for a campfire. It was pretty fun. But you don’t realized how late it is, since it’s so light outside. By the time I got back it was one in the morning. My bed is nice, but very cold. I am looking forward to some body heat to warm me up at night.
Day 4
First day of real work. Rece was back (yes!) and I learned how to fill food orders to send out to the backcountry lodge, how to pack baskets for the road trips to Denali and the raft trips to KFGL. Also I got to cook lots of tasty food. Good day overall. I am still exhausted though from the last two nights, so I think I’ll skip the softball game in favor of kicking it in early.
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