525,600 what?

A couple of weeks ago, I arrived back in Pennsylvania to attend the wedding of a couple of friends. A year ago, almost to the day, I was called here for the same reason. A year ago, I left my job and home in Massachusetts to embark on this trip that hasn’t stopped after celebrating the beginning of my friends’ new lives together. That wedding was the omen I was waiting for to help me determine when I should start my adventure, and this one seemed like an omen, too. It marked the end of my internship on Lopez Island and brought me back to my family and home state to sort through the wonders and experiences I gathered like souvenirs.

I thought I owed myself a minute to stop and absorb what I’d seen and done. I wanted to take a slow moment to think about which goals I had met and what aspirations I may have yet to achieve. I’d lived in a foreign country. I tried my hand at farming, new languages, and lived out of a sleeping bag for the better part of twelve months. I drove 7000 miles with a friend to some of the last wild places on this continent. I learned to build houses with straw and mud. I lived in a tent for seven weeks and slept in a new place nearly every night. I figured it was a good idea to give a serious thought to my future.

So I sat and stared my future down, demanding a revelation—some great end-all-be-all moment of clarity. And my future stared right back, just as closed-lipped as ever. Not a clue, not an inkling did the murky days ahead surrender to me. “C’mon,” I wheedled, “just a teensy hint?” And the future said nothing.

Before leaving all stability behind, I figured I’d give myself a year if I could last that long. I left my plans open to finding a new niche to settle into, a new person, place, or skill to fall in love with. Perhaps I’d love the road too much to commit to anything before the end of it, but I wasn’t giving myself that much credit. I figured after three months—six months tops—I’d come loping back with my tail between my legs, afraid of all the possibilities the wide wonderful world had to offer. I counted on having to hold my own feet to the fire to stay out there.

Well, now here I am at the end of that short year. I find myself laying my adventures out like treasures before me and marveling over how... few there seem to be. I suppose this isn’t the time for short-changing myself, but I can’t help but think that I just haven’t covered that much ground in 365 days.

So that’s it then. I’m not done, I guess. The road winds ever onward and I find myself compelled to keep following it. Now, if only I had any idea what it is I actually wanted to do next... The suggestion box is open!

juggle fest

It’s hard for me to believe that three weeks have passed since the end of a fantastic weekend of weirdos. The folks who have given me a room for the summer host an enormous juggling party every year. What began as a small gathering of family, friends, and a handful of strangers from Seattle eighteen years ago has become an island tradition that brings hundreds of performers and spectators alike to the front yard of Carol and Al. The story goes that on their sons’ return from a profitable fishing season in Alaska, they decided to have a party to celebrate. All the kids enjoyed juggling, the boys had sent piles of salmon ahead of themselves to the Island, and decided to see if they could get other jugglers to hang out for the equinox. So they went to Seattle and began handing out flyers to whatever street performers they could find. A few weeks later, a rag-tag bunch showed up at the gate and Juggle Fest was born. There were around thirty in that party. Nowadays, meals and accommodations are planned for upwards of a hundred people for the whole weekend.


For such a “private” party, lots of planning and community involvement happen and everything goes surprisingly smoothly. Jugglers ranging in age from the teens to seniors arrive between Thursday and Friday of the weekend of the fall equinox, and the yard becomes a buzz of clubs, balls, and antics. Tents are tucked away all over the ten acres of the property, and outhouses are set up. Everybody volunteers to help with meals, drinks, clean-up, and housekeeping. Very little actually needs to be done by each person as long as everybody participates, leaving more time for juggling!


And there was plenty of that. Despite the rain, it was hard to walk from the house to the garden without getting clubbed, hula-hooped, or drawn into a circle of flying objects. I learned quickly to juggle clubs and was passing with a fellow novice before the weekend was half-over.
Contact jugglers, the introverts of the group, shared their secrets with me, and soon enough I was balancing a ball on my elbow and passing it from my palm to the back of my hand.

The food was fantastic. Three times a day we were treated to the delicious efforts of volunteers. Giant meals of soups, fresh baked bread (I helped with a giant bake a day before the whole shebang), salmon, and homegrown vegetables kept everybody full and happy.

Conversations with jugglers I met all weekend revealed people who had been coming for years. Word of mouth alone has grown this festival and street performers come from the Northwest, as well as all over (one man was from South Africa this year), to hang out, trade secrets, and have a reunion of sorts. Some of these folk have performed in groups together over the years, and some meet up for the first time, planning to put on shows when they overlap in cities along their tours.

Even after three days, many were reluctant to leave. But soon, the place had cleared out and no longer looked like a carnival. It was just our house, our yard, our garden, with lingering promises of next year’s event hanging in the air like juggling clubs.

autumn wind

The wind is howling outside my window and an inky blackness has settled already at 7:30. A chill has settled into the bones of this place and the autumn is now completely manifest.

Two days ago I helped a friend’s family put up food from their garden for the winter. We processed pounds of cucumbers and piles of green tomatoes into pickles and chutney. By the end, a few dozen glass jars covered the kitchen counter, a testament to our hours of chopping and cooking.

As the rain fell outside, Mik and I diced tomatoes, onions, and garlic while Diana marveled over the bounty the earth provided. The caustic scent of pickle brine permeated the house for more than five hours as we tackled the relentless piles of produce, Mik with an ulu and I with a chef knife. With four sets of hands attending to the several tasks of chopping, brining, and dehydrating apples, the canning went faster than we expected and we had time to sit and share stories. Mik and David compared their lives in Alaska. I chimed in with highlights from my recent trip there. Climate change and its effect on the glaciers, fishing, and landscape was a major topic and with their combined years there, we pieced together a picture of drastic change. The glaciers that they recalled couldn’t even be seen from the centers built for that purpose anymore. Salmon numbers and fishing limits have dropped. But the stories weren’t all bleak—there were plenty of anecdotes about Alaskan winters, the bus drivers that braved the snow, and cheap fun to be had in the dark days. Diana and I chatted about cheese making, an interest I want to pursue as soon as I have a spare minute and a pastime she enjoys as a way to provide wholesome food for her family. We all told tales of the places we’d each called home. Diana and David recalled Texas, Mik told of her family in Minnesota, and I drew comparisons between Lopez and the Farm in Massachusetts. The reminiscences over my childhood on my family’s dairy farm and the woods around my house in Pennsylvania impressed the back-to-the-landers.

David, Mik, and I lingered in the orchard after gathering our payment of potatoes and apples from the season’s harvest. The sun was peeking out on the horizon as it set below the thinning clouds. The slanted autumn light warmed us despite the persistent wind, and soon I was returning home to hot roasted vegetable borscht. The wind wailed like furies on the ride as my housemates reported on their day’s adventures over dinner in our warm little burrow.

pictures from the roadtrip

I finally got my photos from the roadtrip on my Picasa page! Check them out!

(When you have the time. Seriously, pace yourselves. There are six...)

Super, Natural, British Columbia
The Yukon Territory
Alaska
Denali (which is REALLY BIG)
From Denali to the Kenai Peninsula
The Southeast Islands

houses for nobody

The walls are up. The first coat of plaster was smeared on with little ceremony. Now we must learn again. The second coat is sandier, trickier. We work with trowels now, no longer trusting the rough precision of our hands. Pamela tells us this is where we must be more exact, our building-out must be more subtle, the plane of the wall must be more deliberate. Although we’re still doomed to follow the flow of the straw bale waves, we must produce the illusion that the wall is flat with a smooth and firm stroke of the trowels on the second coat of plaster. But it’s still mud nonetheless.

Not many of us, if any, have ever done work like this and the hawks and trowels are foreign in our grips. The first coat was more organic and made more sense even to us novices—all we needed was a firm hand to slather the mud into the straw and build out a rough coat to approximate the look of a flat wall. Even the plaster mixers must be more careful: is there enough sand in the mix, has too much clay been added? We are in near- constant communication about how well the mud goes on the wall but we won’t know the ultimate truth of our application until it has dried and (hopefully not) cracked. That’s why we begin with the house that nobody will live in.

A few of the houses we’re building do not have owners right now. Some folk have backed out long ago when the project was still being planned, others more recently as financial concerns became more looming. So we practice and perfect on these houses for nobody. The experimentation that we all, even the supervisors, are a part of is played out on these walls. We note the dryness of the base layer and look forward to how that will affect the application and curing of this second coat. We consider the proportions in this mix and wait for the cracks to appear or not.

And we sculpt. The houses with owners on-site have their own special touches: niches carved here and there at the whim of the occupant, a truth window shaped like a heart rather than a picture frame. In the houses that aren’t spoken for, we interns have the freedom to curve the window space just so, or cut a crisp corner. We can even put shapes on the walls, and soon a couple of artists emerge from our ranks. Sunbursts, grapevines, moons and stars crop up in the future kitchens and bedrooms that as yet look more like empty garages or warehouses. The whimsical forms on the walls mock the dusty, formal concrete floor and naked wooden frames. The houses for nobody seem to be choosing their own personalities now. Perhaps these homes will call their owners into being just as the current residents fashion the image and characters of their own.

the sour toe

As promised, here's the video of my drink, the Sour Toe Cocktail.

This atrocity took place in the Downtown Hotel of Dawson City in the Yukon Territory.

There are strange things done in the midnight sun...


The story of the toe, as taken from www.sourtoecocktail.com, is as follows:

Toe #1 was that of Louie Liken, trapper, placer miner, and in the 1920's, rum runner. Louie and his brother Otto would cross the border to the United States in a blizzard by dog team to deliver their alcoholic cargo. During one such outing, Louie stepped into overflow and got his foot wet.Fearing that the Northwest Mounted Police were on their trail they had to continue their trip. As a result of extended exposure to the cold, Louie's big toe froze.To prevent the onset of gangrene it was necessary to amputate.

Lacking faith in doctors the brothers had no intention of traveling 60 miles to Dawson and paying one to do what they could just as easily accomplish on their own.The first step in the amputation was anaesthesia. Consuming large amounts of their 180% overproof rum, they soon felt that they were sufficiently drunk to continue with the amputation. Louie stuck out his frozen toe as Otto lifted the woodcutting axe. With one swing the toe was removed. As a reminder of the incident the brothers kept the toe, pickled in a jar of alcohol.

Years later, when cleaning the brothers' cabin, the toe was discovered by Captain Dick Stevenson. After conferring, Captain Dick and his friends decided on the rules of the Sourtoe Cocktail and started serving it at the Eldorado Hotel in 1973. In July 1980, a placer miner named Garry Younger was trying for the Sourtoe record. On his thirteenth glass of Sourtoe champagne his chair tipped over backwards and he swallowed the toe. Sadly, Toe #1 was not recovered.

skin

“Here it is.” Chaz unrolled the white and brown goatskin, rock salt clattered to the ground.

“Wow. So what do we do with it?”

“Isn’t it beautiful? Basically, we’re gonna stretch it out in this frame and scrape the fat and meat off of it. I brought a dull hatchet, but claw hammers work well, too. Just be careful not to gouge the skin, though.”

And that’s what we did. We cut holes into the extremities and tied the skin as tightly as we could to the crossbars of the crude wooden frame. It stretched over the open space like a misshapen trampoline with a strong but dubious spring. Here and there along the mostly white skin were stringy chunks of white tissue and easier to spot pink shreds. Chaz explained that this hide was better prepared than the last two he was given.

“Can you believe people are just giving me skins now? I asked for one deer skin and now everybody who kills something on this island is giving me its hide. You should’ve seen the last one. I gouged it up pretty bad; it had a lot of meat left on it and I didn’t know for sure how to get it off.”

We clutched at the white strands and pulled. I took out my pocket knife to coax larger slivers free while Chaz worked with the hatchet. Eventually we met in the middle, having cleared off the fat from the leg and shoulder regions. A thin pinkish band of meat covered the skin where it met the ribs. We found purchase at the edges and pulled with our bare fingers, slick with grease until the flesh came away in one sheet. I remembered doing something like this once, long ago, with a deer. But then, I was helping to remove the skin from the body, not remnants from the hide. A simple slip of the knife blade against the clear membrane was all it took to release the pliable hide from the carcass. This was decidedly more difficult—there was next to nothing for our slimy fingers to grasp and the fat wasn’t giving up without a fight. But after an hour, we cleaned off most of the extraneous tissue just as a light rain began to fall.

I biked home in the drizzle, wondering what Chaz would do with three animal hides. I think he’s still scratching his head over it, too. Hell, we came here to build houses.