Disconnect

Currently, I'm sitting in the middle of the family room.  It's 12:46 a.m., and the entirety of my closet is strewn around the bottom floor of the house.  My bags are packed for the most part, and I've double checked the flight times for tomorrow (2:35 p.m., because I know you want to know).

And yet, I really don't feel like I'm leaving.

Maybe it's because I'm wearing a llama sweater and $6 leg warmers, and how can a girl like me be traveling to what seems like the fashion capital of the universe tomorrow?  Or maybe it's because two feet away from where I'm sitting are the Carhartts I found in the Crew Quarters this summer, and a little further over are my muddy hiking boots, and there's just a little bit of a disconnect between Coldfoot and what's to come.

Right now I'm a million different things: tired, anxious, slightly terrified, incredibly excited.  And here I go, here I go, here I go.

Happiest girl in the world

Last night, Teresa and I biked out to Marion Creek, and hiked up to the waterfalls.   We trudged through brush for a while, until we found a rock next to the top of the falls.  And we stopped and ate our dinner of PB&J sandwiches and carrot sticks.   My jeans were covered in mud up to my knees, my hair full of pine needles, my fingers stained purple from picking the last of the summer’s blueberries.  And then it started to pour on us.

And there we were, two girls in the middle of the mountains. Soaked through to the bone, shivering in the cold autumn air.  But laughing.   Yelling, “Look at Emma Dome!  It's beautiful!”  Rain pouring down around us, water tumbling over the falls.

Being out here, getting to do this stuff?  It makes me the happiest girl in the world.

And yes, I am so ready to leave.  But a part of me really isn’t ready at all.

Living in a tent for three months has been an incredibly humbling experience, and it’s really put a lot of things into perspective.  I've grown up more this summer than I have in last nineteen years.  And I don’t want to go home and get wrapped up in things that don’t matter again.

I like the person that I am out here in the mountains, and I don’t want to see her disappear.

Let's conjugate the verb "to be" and follow with "really cold"

Can we just take a moment to talk about how cold I am?

I guess first of all, summers in Alaska are not that warm.  In Anchorage, summer days like to hang out in the 50’s and 60’s and be drizzly and grey.  Which usually I can handle, because if the thermometer gets above 65 degrees then I melt into a puddle of overheated Elika on the floor.

In the Arctic, the season of summer is basically June and July.  The wildflowers bloom, the sun comes out, and it still doesn't get all that warm.  But now that it's August the nights have been dipping down below freezing, and the rain hasn’t stopped for about a month.

And have we discussed the fact that I haven’t slept inside in three months yet?  Tent life is damp and cold and unpleasant.

If it weren’t bad enough that I sleep outside in 25 degrees, sometimes the hot water heater just gives up. And I’ll be stuck in an icy shower with my hair full of shampoo and one leg shaved.*

I am cold. You are cold. He is cold. She is cold. It is cold.  They are cold.

We are really, really cold.



*Just kidding, I haven’t shaved my legs since June SINCE IT’S TOO COLD TO WEAR SHORTS.

And summer is almost over

I have one week of work left.

I'm having a really hard time grasping that concept.  I sort of feel like I'm going to be sleeping in Tent 4 forever, waking up every morning at the beautiful hour of 7:57, talking podcasts with Stephanie throughout the day, playing Would You Rather* with Cleo, and climbing mountains on my days off.

I'm really good at pumping myself up for things.  I obnoxiously spout off countdowns to the second, I literally jump up and down in excitement, and I make lengthy lists about everything I have to look forward to.  So the fact that I'm so blasé about being home in a week?  Really, really weird.

I'm chalking this up to that same feeling you have in the middle of winter when you can't remember what summer is like because the concept of sun and warmth is just so foreign.  Because at this point, I really can't imagine life outside of Coldfoot anymore.


*Today's WYR, courtesy of all the baby questions we come up with in the North Inn: Would you rather find out you were pregnant (or you had just knocked up some girl) right now, or never be able to have kids?

10 people I kind of fell in love with this summer

a list

1. Jad Abumrad from Radiolab. He is my public radio crush, and I am seriously smitten.
2. Gloria-the-Baha’i-from-Florence who sent me the world’s nicest email. It was actually so sweet that I burst into tears when I read it.
3. The hot expeditor. He’s the only hot guy I’ve seen in three months. Oh, the things my life has been reduced to.
4. The trucker that drives the pink truck. The first time I hitchhiked, when I got picked up by a guy with a flat tire, the pink truck trucker stopped to help us. He got out of his pink truck, wearing a cut off t-shirt that said “You’re not worthy,” strode over to the group of truckers milling around, and got the tire changed. Super manly. Just sayin.
5. And on that note, I love every single person that’s picked me up when I was hitchhiking this summer. Even some of the more creepy guys.
6. Cami, who caught the mice that were running around the Inn, skinned them, and tacked their hides to the bulletin board.
7. The guy that left us a pie as a tip. Seriously, he left us a whole pie. And I don’t know who he is, or where he went, or anything about him at all. But he won my heart.
8. Laura-the-tour-guide who always strips her own bed and leaves a $10 tip. This is a woman after the hearts of housekeepers everywhere.
9. The crew guy that came to one of our bonfires, and brought Capri Suns. And when he offered one to me, and I delightedly asked, “you were the one that brought these?” He responded, “do you see any other 8-year-olds here?”
10. The girl that works at Taco Bell and has a crush on Jonathan. This is reason number four hundred and eighty-seven that I’m going to seriously miss Fairbanks next year.

3 months in a tent, and I kind of, you know, enjoyed it

At some point this summer I stopped keeping track of how many days I’d been here, how much I missed home, how much it rained, how cold it got at night and started to love Coldfoot.

I don’t know when it happened. But now that I have two weeks of mountains and Dalton Highway and muddy puddles and Koyukuk river left, I’m realizing I’m going to be really sad to leave.

The last three months have not been the easiest three months of my life. A lot of things frustrate me about living here, and I can go on and on about what they are. That’s easy.

It’s a lot harder to explain the things I do like about Dalton Highway, mile 175. The sound of rain on the tent in the middle of the night, the girls I work with, hiking in the hail, eating an apple on the top of a mountain, the midnight summer sun, the mice hunts, sitting at the picnic tables outside and wasting the evening away like we have nothing else in the world to worry about.

But there’s something else intangible. Some kind of big, beautiful thing about Alaska that’s so present in everything here. Something I can’t really explain. It’s beautiful and genuine and wild.

On more than one occasion, I’ve caught myself calling Coldfoot home. This truck stop, this tent, this stretch of highway has become home to me in less than three months.

I’m still excited to go back home to Anchorage. Beyond excited to go to Italy. But for the next two weeks, I’m just really happy I’m here.

Irrelevant appearance

Yesterday I was assessing the state of my hair in the bathroom mirror when Cleo said “Man, imagine what it’ll be like to go back home and actually worry about what your reflection looks like.”

Living in Coldfoot is a little bit like living in a land with no mirrors.  In the dark.  There's no reason to brush your hair, no reason to worry about the 14 bleach spots on your work shirt, no reason to feel self conscious about walking into the cafe with your pajamas on.

When I went back to Fairbanks, a guy I knew took one look at me and asked rather incredulously “Are those cargo pants?"

Every single article of clothing I have up here can fit into one load of wash.  And it's all tshirts, cargo pants, and wool socks.

Stephanie and I have daily conversations about the irregularity at which we wash our hair (weekly for her, biweekly for me) and how when we put on mascara (which has been about four times between the two of us all summer) we don’t recognize our reflections.

To be honest, I'm at the point where I find the uniform black rainboots in the shed kind of-at least a little bit-cute.

Arctic love despite everything

I like Coldfoot. But sometimes it’s just too much. It’s too removed, too small, too rainy, too cold. So I left on Sunday, and went to Fairbanks for the day.

And while I was in Fairbanks, I realized that my summer?  Well, it's been different than your summer.

I mean, I knew that my disconnected summer of living in a tent, climbing mountains, and limited amenities would be different. But I didn’t quite realize how different until I went back to Fairbanks and saw for myself.

It was sort of a weird feeling actually.  Like even if I explained exactly what living here for nearly three months has been like, the person I was telling wouldn't really get it.

Because in the last few months I've done a lot of backcountry hiking and backpacking.  I've hitchhiked with truckers.  I've chased down mice, killed approximately 9 million mosquitoes (and gotten bitten by 10 million), and gone several months using a calling card to connect to the rest of the world.  I've lived in a tent for nearly three months.

Even some of the crew guys that work three week shifts for the oil companies up here don't quite get what working for Coldfoot is like.  Today, a couple of guys asked me how to turn up the heat in their rooms.  "It's so cold in here!" they told me.  I tried really hard not to roll my eyes.

And even though I get so frustrated with life here sometimes, even though it's been below freezing at night and I sleep outside, even though I'm so far away from everyone and everything that's been familiar, I'm really glad I'm here.  At least for three months.