Monthly Archives: March 2012

Spring Break

26 Monday Mar 2012

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Spring solstice, looking north to the Alaska Range

Sunny days, sunglasses and sunscreen: it must be spring break! Snow and sun combine to make the world bright white and blue; even the green of the trees fades into the background. Days stretch to evening, long as mid-summer days in San Francisco. I never need a flashlight when the snows are lit with the reflection of the moon and stars; if I did, it would blind me to the green glow of auroras that followed the recent spate of solar flares. No wonder Alaskans find this the perfect place for spring break.  Just as a torrent of snowmachiners rushed down our highway, over our river and through our woods, we took our own spring break and headed north to Fairbanks.

The impetus for our trip was a three-day conference on sustainable agriculture in Alaska. But it was also a chance to buy groceries and do laundry after nearly three months in the backwoods. We stayed with Gary’s sister Tina and her family in North Pole; I even got my first haircut in eight months, thanks to Gary’s niece Selena!

See how the dogs jump with excitement as they wait to start the race!

North Pole is the town that gets and answers all the letters sent to “Santa Claus, North Pole.” It’s a place where keeping Christmas decorations up year-round is encouraged, especially around Santa Claus Lane (which intersects with St. Nicolas Drive). It earns its name in part by having weather that is easily 15 degrees colder than nearby Fairbanks, which is itself as cold as or colder than we are in winter. But we got lucky—it never got below -30° when we were there.

The Fairbanks ice sculpture contest brings in artists from around the world.

A flashy fur parka in the Fairbanks Parka Parade.

And there’s lots going on in Fairbanks this time of year: we saw the third and final day of the Open North American Championship sled dog race, noisy dogs bouncing with excitement, a parka parade showing off traditional parkas (and, with nine entrants, reminding us that Fairbanks is still a small town), an ice sculpture park, and the Museum of the North at the University of Alaska.

It’s always hard to leave home, in part because it robs us of so many good days here. It takes the better part of two days to get ready for the trip, two days of travel round trip, and a day to unpack and resettle. Getting ready includes gathering laundry, packing and cleaning, but we also have to prepare for the cabin to freeze. Gary makes large batches of kindling, enough to start and keep a quick, hot fire burning for the several hours it takes to warm the cabin and everything in it when we return. I take charge of dealing with food and water. It’s getting easier: this time we didn’t have any fresh food left, eliminating the chore of blanching it or otherwise preparing it so it would survive freezing. Last time we went away I made ice in small batches in pans to thaw quickly when we returned, so we wouldn’t have to get water from the river after a long day’s travel. It was tedious, since only a tiny bit of water could be left in each pan or bucket; allowing water to freeze in any volume will cause the containers to bulge and buckle. This time I harvested ice and icicles from my water hole and stored them in buckets. At first I chiseled ice, which I needed to do anyway to re-open the iced-over water hole. When most of the ice dropped into the current as it broke free, I hit on the idea of filling my buckets with icicles. I hated to do it—I love seeing the icicles in my beautiful ice room—but by taking them from the least visible spots I was able to keep the beauty of the place intact. (See http://www.indeep-alaska.com/2011/12/03/Riverdance/)

We went to the conference to hear what’s going on in agriculture in Alaska, which ships in 95% of its food supply. We learned about mushroom cultivation; flour milling; cold-hardy hogs that eat grass and don’t root; beekeeping in top-bar hives; geothermal farming done near hot springs; why peony farming is such a specialty here; how to get the government to pay for your greenhouse; biochar, an environmentally constructive charred-wood product used for long-term soil improvement; and how to sell at farmers markets and to restaurants and buyers for Princess, the big hotel and cruise line.

Living here is amazing, but it’s hard to generate much income. We’d like to have land where we can grow our own food and keep horses and livestock for work, play, meat, and maybe dairy. Our growing season is short here and the land won’t support much more than one or two goats or sheep (or reindeer or yaks) and six weeks of garden vegetables. We’ll need more land in a less remote, more temperate place. That doesn’t rule out Alaska, but it almost certainly rules out our home here, which sees snow early and late, and is likely to have a freeze every month of the year.

Gary has some experience working with cattle and sheep. I am bereft of experience even vaguely relevant to ranching. Some days I think about finding some docile, high-butterfat sort of animal for a varietal butter or artisanal ice cream endeavor. Having just left the regulation-intensive industry of money management, I question the wisdom of getting into anything as highly regulated as dairy. When I think about the ice cream itself, the regulations don’t loom so large. Then I remember I know nothing about milking animals, except that it must be done every day twice a day, except in winter when I could let the poor gals dry up. So my thoughts turn to sheep or mushrooms or biochar or ecotourism. But eventually I return to dreams of butter, cheese and ice cream: if I can’t sell it, at least I can eat it!

Pooling our resources, Gary and I hope to find land—land in need of improvement, perhaps, but enough for a few grazing animals—land enough to embark on our experiment without taking on debt or spending all our savings. We want natural beauty, live water, room to roam. If the land is fenced for cattle, with a house and maybe a barn, that would save precious time, but we could live in a tent or a yurt at first if we had to. We love a sense of seclusion, but community is important too, and not just to have a market for our products. Where we might do this—in Alaska or in the lower 48—is, like everything else about our plan, very much unsettled.

I’m in no rush. I should be, I suppose, as we are rather well above a prudent age for embarking on such a different and demanding venture. I’m just not ready to leave. I don’t want to think I’ll never have another winter and spring here. April, Gary tells me, is perhaps the most beautiful month of all. I suppose everything will come together in its own time. We’ll find land that seems right, and it may tell us what to do. Then we’ll start our new adventure. Meanwhile I’ll revel in this one, knowing it won’t last forever.

Sunrise: 7:36 a.m.
Sunset:  8:27 p.m.
Weather: High 17°, low -23°, calm, mixed sun and clouds.

Having fun at the Fairbanks Ice Park!

Yes, We Have No Bananas

13 Tuesday Mar 2012

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We have no bananas today. No apples either, though we do have blueberries and cranberries we canned last summer and some canned pineapple. We still have frozen mixed vegetables and spinach, as well as canned tomatoes, beets and olives, dried onions and potatoes. For some reason we have lots of corn, frozen, canned and dried. We were sad to see the last of the peanut butter go; we try to make enough buckwheat pancakes on Sundays to have leftovers for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I had a large can of peanuts, but just as I was getting good at making peanut brittle I opened it to find only one solitary goober, sitting forlornly in a bed of salt.

I haven’t had a glass of wine for weeks. I would miss it more except that we’re limited to boxed wines; they freeze without breaking and we can burn most of the packaging. Some boxed wine is OK; some tastes so bad it has to be really cold to be drinkable. Fortunately, that’s not a problem here.

Last week we ran out of butter, so I’ve been using rendered goose fat, kept frozen in a pint jar on the porch since Christmas. The other night I made licorice chews with goose fat and canned cream. (They tasted better than they sound.) Am I the only one who never heard of canned cream before?  It’s caramel colored — I’m being polite here — with the texture of watery yogurt, and comes in 7.4-ounce cans. If I need cream so badly that I’m buying it in a can, don’t you think they could give me a full cup so I don’t have to adjust every recipe? I’m guessing canned cream is only sold in places where even ultra-pasteurized cream won’t last between trips to the grocery store. We haven’t been shopping since December 23rd, so that would be us. I’ve tried freezing cream, but it never does return to its liquid state.

The bananas lasted five weeks, so we’ve been without since the end of January. When we first brought the bananas home, Gary cut off the tops and we stored them in a cool, dark place. After a few weeks the skin was a disgusting mix of brown, black and yellow, but the fruit was not at all overripe. We ate half a banana each on our daily oatmeal, together with half an apple, raisins and walnuts. After the bananas ran out we used banana chips while they lasted.  I did find some dried apples to simmer with our morning oatmeal and the last of the raisins, and had the presence of mind to order some walnuts from amazon.com, which we picked up when we went to the Post Office in mid-February.

Our last two bananas at the end of January. They are five weeks old and look it, but the fruit is fine.

Thanks to some friends, we also picked up eggs, yogurt and apples at the Post Office. If Brenda and Harold happen to be going to Anchorage and there’s a chance we might be coming to town, they offer to get us anything we need by way of food, hardware or other supplies. It wouldn’t be decent to give them my entire list, so I ask only for the most dearly missed items, and eggs if Brenda has some to spare from her chickens. But since Brenda and Harold weren’t around the morning we came in, they dropped the groceries off with the Postmaster. Jed handed them over with a smile as he piled the counter high with nearly two months of mail and packages. The apples brightened our breakfast for a couple of weeks, and we used the yogurt as a starter to make more yogurt. I was particularly thrilled to get eggs, since I was down to my last one, frozen in its shell. I’ve been cooking with previously-frozen eggs, but the yolk remains oddly firm even at room temperature.

I've stopped baking bread on the wood stove now that temperatures are higher. It requires such a hot stove, it turns the cabin into a sauna!

Despite all this, we eat well. Blueberries more than make up for whatever else is missing from our oatmeal. Canned pineapple is ambrosia to us, and it takes all our best instincts not to fight over the juice. I’ve learned to like canned beets, well enough anyway. I made quite a decent minestrone with a caribou neck bone, canned tomatoes, the last of the frozen green beans, macaroni, millet, kidney beans, frozen corn, garlic paste, dried onions and chunks of Parmesan rind. I’ve frozen lasagna made with Italian sausage, frozen spinach and reconstituted mushrooms; I don’t know how it would stand up in San Francisco, but it’s delicious here when we come home tired from logging or skiing and find it warming on the wood stove. With Brenda’s eggs I make a wonderful milk eggnog with snow; it’s like liquid ice cream. And I’ve already bragged about my newly acquired woodstove bread-baking skills. I’m using grains I never cooked with at home: dried corn in the caribou chili, barley risotto, millet, and amaranth in soups and stews. Oats, groats, kamut, and kasha sit in glass canisters on the countertop, in full view so I’ll remember to try them when I’m in an experimental mood. Cornbread baked atop the wood stove with goose fat and frozen corn is as good as it gets; if we top it with honey we hardly miss the butter. A Cornish game hen is perfect for two, with a curried stir-fry of rice and frozen mixed vegetables. And I’ve saved one lonely can of Alaskan salmon to go with my last bag of frozen spinach for a favorite pasta dish. Now, if only I had a really good wine to go with that…

Recent under-river view at my water hole.

Sunrise:  8:21 a.m.
Sunset:  7:50 p.m.
Weather: Mostly sunny and calm, high 10°, low -15°.

Taking a Leap

07 Wednesday Mar 2012

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February 29th was as good a day as any; I was bound to fall into the river sometime. I was getting water at my usual spot, about five feet down from river’s uppermost surface of snow-covered ice, a space formed months ago when the ice collapsed down to the water’s low winter level. (See www.indeep-alaska.com/2011/12/03/riverdance/.) Only the location of my water hole remains static; I never know what I’ll find when I get there. The flux of water and weather constantly reconfigures and redecorates what I’ve come to think of as my ice room.

Gary chiseled through thick ice in early December to create our water hole, after the first one froze over.

Not long after Thanksgiving, Gary had chiseled through two feet of ice at no small effort to create a hole large enough to dip a bucket, and up until mid-January I was still using it. The ice grew until it was several inches thicker than my buckets are tall. I had to kneel and lean in deeply to force the bucket’s lip under the surface of the rushing water. A five-gallon bucket of water weighs over forty pounds, and a bucket open to a fast current seems to weigh a good deal more. Either way, bringing a full bucket up from that awkward position is almost more than I can manage.

The ice bridge, reinforced by sticks and snow.

In recent weeks, profound cold has become a rarity, with daytime highs reaching the twenties and testing the thirties. The ice surrounding my water hole thinned, subtly at first, then enough to make my job noticeably easier. One day in early February as we arrived with my bucket-filled sled, Ella and I peered down to find nothing more than a bridge of ice across open water running between narrow shores of ice on each side of the rushing water. Too cautious to make my way down to test the bridge, I left my sled and fetched Gary, who packed snow to make steps down to the lower surface. He filled my buckets, handed them up to me, and recommended I insulate and reinforce the ice bridge with more snow, together with sticks and branches. Ella thought I was collecting sticks for her; packing them in snow seemed a fine game, and she tried to pull the best ones out. But I prevailed and built up the bridge, hoping it would last awhile.

Gary has cleared an ice shelf and is building steps and a snow-and-ice platform for getting water.

Temperatures stayed high, and the warming friction of the flowing water eroded the ice bridge. In mid-February it disappeared entirely. I looked down from the upper surface, wondering whether to test the narrow ledge of ice built up at the water’s surface. Ella peered down as well. As I squatted to ponder the situation, she kissed me earnestly; she does this when she’s worried — or, as Gary tells me, when she senses that I’m worried. I decided to consult Gary again. To give me a wider surface of ice within reach of the water, he broke off a few feet of the uppermost surface with the ice chisel and let it drop, making a wider shoreline of ice accessible at water level. Up top, Gary shoveled a foot or two of snow down onto the broken ice. Now clear of snow, a patch of surface ice became a sturdy flat shelf, the perfect place to set buckets waiting to be filled. With the jumble of broken ice and snow below, Gary created rough steps down toward the water.

This ice "lily pad" with frost blossoms was destroyed when I fell in the river.

The same flowing water that eroded the ice bridge constantly creates new ice along the edges of existing ice. The young ice is beautiful, but more delicate. The day I fell in, I noticed a lily pad of ice covered with frost blossoms, and paused to take a picture before setting to work collecting water.

I aligned my buckets on the upper shelf, set each lid within reach, and accepted some nervous kisses from Ella before stepping down onto the snow and ice. The new ice had grown to over a foot in width, an awkward reach if I had to lean over it with my bucket. But it was also thicker, so I stepped on it with one foot, then with both. The ice held. I kneeled, pushing my bucket down into the flow. It filled quickly, and as I struggled to free it from the current’s pull, the ice supporting me broke free. The water isn’t deep — anywhere from two inches to two feet — but I had been kneeling and was soaked well above my waist, bucket still in hand.

I emptied the bucket and found a place for it on the ice where it wasn’t likely to topple into the current, then grabbed onto some solid ice to pull myself out. It took a moment for the water to soak through my clothes; by the time I stood up I was covered with ice. The air temperature was around zero. All I could think of was to get home and out of the clothes before I, too, turned to ice, and to see if the camera around my neck had survived. Ella had been sitting on the river at some distance and was happy enough to abandon the sled and turn homeward. If she noticed me turning into an icicle, she didn’t think it sufficient reason to fail to invite me to play ball before we reached the door.  I dried off and warmed up in front of the fire soon enough. Although the camera had barely gotten wet, it took until morning for my synthetic down coat to dry.

I dressed and went back; we still needed water. Gary was filling the buckets.

“I fell in,” I said.

“I figured,” Gary replied, handing me a full bucket to put in the sled.

I've started using the longer sled so I can bring home more water; now I only go to get water every other day.

“Didn’t you go looking for me downstream?” I wanted to know.

“No, I saw your footprints headed home. Anyway, Ella would have been running back and forth like crazy.”

Gary plays it cool, but I know he worries. Ever since, as I head out to get water, he voices his concern:

“Don’t forget to take some soap!”

Sunrise:   7:41 a.m.
Sunset:    6:32 p.m.

Gary's been putting black sunflower seeds on the feeder. The first grosbeak of the season arrived yesterday and stayed to eat his fill, despite the chickadees' best efforts to get rid of him.

Weather: High 17°, low -8°, cloudy, light snow overnight. We hit -30° the night of March 4th, the lowest it’s been for awhile, and woke up to -25° on the 5th. We’ve had some beautiful auroras and we’re expecting one tonight if it clears, but it seems to me they always come when it’s too cold to stay outside to enjoy them!