A man out standing in his field.

This morning we ate our oatmeal. With flax seeds and walnuts and yogurt and prunes and for Steve, maple syrup. Real ample syrup. Some people from Vermont brought some up this past summer. I prepared the bread dough for its final raising before the oven and we talked about our plans for the day. I volunteered to take out the trash. Our trash consists mostly of food scraps and cans and plastic bags and cardboard boxes. Unfortunately recycling is not yet an option as Greenland is still burning all of their trash. It is cost prohibitive for the NSF to charter the NY Air National Guard to fly an annual estimation of 4 tons of waste back to the States. However, the NYANG does agree to fly it back to Kangerlussuaq from Summit Summit. I have just tried to give you a hyper link to Summit's own web page, complete with daily weather updates, by writing code. We shall see if it works. But I digress, the trash that Summit generates gets packed into a rectangular box built up on top of an air force pallet. The rectangular box has a lid. So on trash day you go around camp with a sled and collect all the garbage and then tug the sled over to the trash pallet where you try your best to cram it into all of the empty spaces inside the box. Once the trash pallet is full, we go through a process of removing the outer plywood form, drawing up the mess with cargo netting that has already been sleeved inside the box long before any trash was put in.
This may sound confusing so I will make a short film of the transformation when we do it , which we will be doing soon as I can no longer fit down inside of the box to compact the existing trash.
The hardest thing about taking out the garbage is ignoring any whims to pilfer things. If you think it is expensive for the NYANG to fly trash home, think about how much it would cost us! Of course, we do recycle the things none of us could live with ourselves for NOT recycling like ink cartridges, batteries, aluminum and copper.
After taking care of all of my municipal duties, (power, water and waste) Steve and I went back into one of the three, 20 foot long, insulated, heated container vans to count widgets and bits.
It was a most remarkable day.

Culling

While I am riding one of the stationary spinning bikes, Steve is sorting through the walk in cooler. He decides that the pineapples need to be cut up. They are perfect, remarkably so. Eating a slice of this tropical fruit reminds me of the places I have been to, where you can go outside bare footed and not have to worry about your naked flesh sticking to the metal grating and peeling off. Lately I think allot about swimming. I have all of this "ocean" around me but its surface is impenetrable. I go "sailing" off on my skis staring down the horizon. I imagine seeing birds come skimming along the waves. I look into the sun set and the deepness of the cold smells like salt. One of the science technicians tells me that salt particles have actually been detected in some of the airborne particular filters, so this is possible. I fill my lungs twice more despite the sub zero medium. The solitude is too easy to take for granted. The cold too easy to wish against. Other life styles trot across the mind like clouds in the sky. One minute this, another minute that. But the magnitude of simplicity and stillness and peace so gently reminds me that, despite the altitude and the flatness and the eye- lash- gluing freeze from my breath, the challenge here can also represents something so similar to that saline spirit of sailing; by allowing one the room needed to day dream about clouds in an atmosphere so clear, one can lay in bed and watch Sirius blink and flash and twinkle through binoculars, I sense the soul of the universe and my heart is content with just that.

Comments

I have been reading up about blogging in my, Blogging for Dummies manual. I have an announcement; it should now be OK for you to leave your comments. I had the comment format radio button ticked that would only allow subscribed readers to leave a comment. Sorry for that! That is why some of you have had trouble with this before. Why I did not appreciate your troubles earlier, can only be blamed upon my own ignorance of the formatting capabilities left in my control as an amateur blogger. Now let's see if "commenting" works. I do not expect you to comment if you are not so inspired, but if you are enticed at all by something or have a question or want to point out mistakes or wax philosophical, please do so. The true beauty of a blog is that it is not intended to be all about the author. At least this one isn't.....But is about the author, me, sharing my thoughts with you, and you should assume a clear freedom in sharing your thoughts with me.
Naturally, if you don't have any thoughts you feel you want to share, then I will not begin to wonder about you by singling out the whomever it is that hasn't left a comment by writing about the person or persons who haven't left comments, thoughts or random baloney.
Speaking of random baloney, it is -41 F right now and the waning moon can be seen standing out amongst Cassiopeia, Ursa major and Orion. The snow is squeaky hard like a Styrofoam drum. Before all this, at about 6:30 PM, the setting sun painted the snow pink and shadows stretched out for what seemed to be one eighth of a mile. Last night there was a pallor of green in the northern sky, the first hint of Aurora Borealis.
I am on to reading Aristotle now. His interpreter is much more difficult to digest than was Plato's. It is like being able to be reading, while being inside of a tornado of fascinating ideas while being, just being.

Swashbuckler

The blur of whiteness coddles the cold. Though the sun shines, and will soon enough set, I must walk with my face looking down. I study the carvings of wind over snow. The relief of crystals, drawn violently across drifts extending, has the grain pattern of wood. We walk out one mile. The light is turning ocher. My wrist grows numb from the wind working its way in between cuff and sleeve and skin and bone. All morning we discussed vacuum presses and glue lams; we want very badly to build our own furniture. This conversation continues now as we walk into the wind. It sounds to me as though I am talking into a tin can packed with goose down but somehow, Steve responds to me. Maybe it is the big, fur hat over the small, wool beanie muffled by the neck gaiter and hood that causes words to sound so flat and long.
The building, that is the most aesthetic here, is the sauna. I don't really mean that, but in a a way, it is. It is modular. It is built of scrap plywood. It is small and tidy. It has a wooden interior with a small window and river rocks that sit in a stainless steel tray on top of the oil burning stove. There is a pleasing scent of oils: eucalyptus, lavender, and tea tree. The place is kind to the soul; warm and quiet and soft. Even the fueling of the day, tanks and drums, reminds me of a home- style farm chore. My work feels separate from the rest of camp's scientific duties. My tasks are both necessary and voluntary and that alone makes me happy. When I sit in the sauna I think about our friends and I think of home. I think about ways to save the world from ignorant, wasteful, car -dependent sprawl . I imagine building  large, geometric solids-- perhaps out of wood--if not, at least, from toothpicks and gumdrops. Do we have any gumdrops?
This energy is strange. I am tinged with the melancholy that comes from being steeped in the constant hum of a generator, working out maybe a little too much, planning projects for home, and reading philosophy. I wish for the green grass of home and the wormy earth. I am pulled away, as if a leaning tree in strong winds, towards being home, far away from this see saw sphere of an arctic space station. But following what we know to be good advice isn't always as fun, or as interesting, as it is to go pounding through the challenges of life. Enduring the suffering makes good books.
The strongest medicine about this place is the reality of its isolation. Accepting this, working with this, casts an odd illumination over my being, welding together the euphoria of the ice cap's splendid uniqueness with the temperament of it's cold cold song, sung from so lonely a pair of frozen lungs that ever breathed on this earth, builds character.
Somehow, we are not of its world and we will not stay.
I go now to sit and listen to the colors of the sinking sun.