Migration

Birds are arriving. Their songs are liquid music; water and the promise of spring. The sparrows, black and red capped, perch and rustle in the willows. They call and chirp and flit and float, from silver tipped shrub branch to orange,lichen covered boulder.
On my way home from an evening walk in the hills, I flushed two mallard ducks, a male and female. On top of a nearby promontory we surprised a Willow ptarmigan still in winter plumage. A small flcok of Cananda geese flew over, honking in a well formed "V"
In the early morning, on a flat basalt rock, worn smooth by time, ice, sand, wind and water, now exposed to the warmth of the dry air, I go to stretch and great the day. It is no further from our bedroom door than 500 feet and faces directly into the rising sun. It is wonderful to look first down into the stone then up into the awakening sky, enveloped in yellow glow.
Deep breaths of air enter into my lungs, scented with dry grasses and freshening life. Sometimes,I hear the flapping work of avian effort; a raven beats the wind just over my hair.
Yesterday, Steve and I were invented aboard one of the training missions to Raven. Originally the site of DYE II, an early warning detection radar site, built during the cold war, Raven, now serves as as a soft snow landing site for ski equipped Hercules aircraft. Though the radar station still stands, and has not drifted in, it is completely sequestered from the little camp called, Raven.
Camp Raven, is a temporary camp that is put in every spring then taken down and moved back to the warehouse in Kangerlussuaq every fall. The radar site is a Star Wars type hulk built up on pods with a geodesic dome mounted on top. It is inside this dome, that the satellite dish sits.
Camp Raven is occupied and maintained by two people whose principal objective is surival. After tending to all of their own camp chores, they are also in charge of grooming the ski way, providing surface definitions and weather to various parties as well as maintaining an almost constant communciations link between the aircraft, themselves and Kangerlussuaq.
Raven is also a GPS coordinate site for many ice cap travelers. Skiers crossing from east to west or from south to north stop in for a rest day. Dog sled teams do the same, as do occasional snow machine parties. While we were there, we met 2 men from Germany who were looking forward to snorkeling in the Bahamas. They had been working there way across the ice cap for almost a month, with just 2 or 3 days left to go before reaching the Russel glacier, 25 km from my desk.
one of the men had broken his ski. His only choice was to saw it down with his knife and refit the binding. He was overjoyed by doing this, as the traditional Finnish ski set up was just like his: one long ski (for glide), one short (for guide).
The best part of our 3 hour lark, was getting to meet Dennis, a native east Greenlander, who was sledging across the ice cap with his 13 dogs and 2 German tourists. Dennis was very very happy and his skin was very very dark. The later was from the high intensity solar exposure without the admistration of sun block. He wore no sunglasses either, but very trendy European eye glasses. He was not wearing fur. He was one of the happiest people I have ever met. He told me allot about his life in 15 minutes, including, "I don't drink and I don't smoke". Then he introduced me to some of his dogs.
Of course their names are Greenlandic, and I cannot remember them, but the names of the two in the picture translate to, "oil" (because as a pup she had found a bag of waste oil rags and rolled in it) and "failure". Dennis said,
"you are supposed to name them after what they are, or what they do".
"This one is always messing up. He cant do anything correctly".
After this statement he rubbed "failures" head very very lovingly and laughed like the Dali Lami.
While Steve decided we should finally make a serious commitment to planning our own ski trip across the ice, I decided we most certainly must go sledging someday too.
By the way, the dogs all say hello.