Easy, …..Easy Like Sunday Morning… (on a Saturday)

Good Saturday morning from the Arctic.

The not so gentle buzz buzz buzz, buzz buzz buzz of my cell phone pulled me from the last vestiges of sleep this morning. (Who am I kidding, I would happily have rolled over and gone back to sleep if the message hadn’t been different). It was David, our Bering agent, letting me know we had 172 pounds of food freight coming in on the morning flight.

Freight is a common term up here, it’s just part of life. Initially I thought it was food for the school cafeteria, but no… it was our grocery order. It is very difficult to get certain foods up here with any consistency… fresh fruits and veggies often arrive on the brink of death when we order from the Kotzebue store or when our Native store has them. Overly ripe fruits and lettuce with brown tipped leaves are common. To combat that, we use mostly frozen veggies. The challenge is that the Kotzebue store has a fairly limited selection. As a result we tend to CRAVE fresh veggies. But we have figured out a way to really expand our grocery shopping!

It sounds like a logistical nightmare but it works pretty smoothly actually. I place an order at a specific Anchorage grocery store. They pack it up (they could give Amazon lessons about how to ship so stuff arrives safely), drop it off at Alaska Air Cargo, and it ships to Kotzebue. Alaska Air calls me, I call Bering cargo, give them my card number (because Alaska won’t allow me to pre pay, it must be paid for at the time of pick up), and they go across to pick it up, and load it on one of the planes headed this way (charging shipping of course), and voila! Groceries! Think of it like parking lot pick, except at the airport.

So I threw on some sweats, poured a cup of coffee, grabbed coat and keys and headed outside. When I stepped out I looked out over the tundra and the lakes to the mountains in the distance, the termination dust that signaled the end of summer has morphed into a solid cover of snow that will maintain its hold on the mountains until summer returns, probably sometime in June. At 9:15 a.m. the sun was just starting to come up and the mountains and the sky merged into shades of pink in the distance. Once again, I stood and took in the beauty of this place. The tundra grasses are holding on to the reds and golds of fall, the lake surface is partially covered by an ever expanding layer of ice, and there I stood, essentially in my pajamas, in awe at the view we get to have.

The view from the patio, the lake is starting to freeze, the mountains are covered with snow and white during the day, but this morning they reflected the pink of the late morning sunrise.

I mentioned to Marty that the view was worth the trip to get groceries this morning, he said “it’s the season of sunrises”. That started a conversation. Everything here has a season. Yes, we have the midnight sun, and we have the dark days of winter. But without the dark we don’t have the aurora’s, we don’t have the sunrises or the sunsets that steal your breath. We have berry picking season, stink weed harvesting season, trout season, salmon season, duck season, moose season, caribou season, trapping season… the environment, and the reliance on what it provides, dictates so much of what people do here. So much of the time is spent preparing for survival in the long winter, it is part of the subsistence lifestyle that is still so much a part of the culture. You truly are so much more connected to the land here, even if (like me), you don’t thrive off of it.

Marty is enjoying the opportunity to be outside as often as possible. He has gone fishing (and more importantly CATCHING) quite a bit this fall. One one such trip they were prepared and watching for bears, when they spotted, and got, a moose!

This is “chum” salmon. They harvested her eggs for ice fishing.

Yes, the gun is for protection… because bears!

Moose Head on the way home

Once they spotted Mr. Moose it was over for him. Cool to watch the trees when he runs to see the impact he has. He was huge.

Marty and I both have an app on our phones that tells us when the Aurora are going to be visible. Stupid thing sends alerts year round. Here is a little piece of advice… if you want to see the Northern Lights… Summertime is NOT the time to see them, because ya know… 24 hour daylight. (We have finally moved into the time of year where it not only gets dark, it does so outside the hours of 1:00-4:00 am. We are currently losing daylight at the rate of something like five hours a month. A couple of weeks ago I got a notification about the aurora’s and went out to check. It was about 9:30. What followed was several days of significant aurora activity, You can see how light it is still. The pictures where it was darker had us both out around 11:30 pm taking pictures. (Yes, we were in pajamas).

That is actually the sunset in the background of the picture

I just wanted to share some parts of the more mundane weekend activities we do. Last night we went to watch non school basketball. Teams of women and men were formed in the village and they were gathered to play last night, and will finish up this evening. It is such a neat thing to be a part of, kids running around everywhere, people handing each other babies so they can take care of other things. Everyone is glad to visit, get out among friends, and laugh together. The old adage of “it takes a village” is lived every day here.

The pictures below are from the following night I think. We had a notification early and I went out around 9:00. It was clearly still pretty light outside and we could see them. I tried to put them in order of how they developed over the next two to three hours.