The Snow Bunting

I go out like the contents of a glass
into water, into wind.
Diluting, freezing, becoming vapor.
No, I do not go out like this, but in wool and synthetics,
worm -spun-silk, cotton stuffed with eider down.
My feet are in socks
then socks again.
I push them into smoothly smudged rubber boots.
Warm, old, arctic boots ,once white, now have the look of a news paper, worn.
What happened to the small bunting flown so far off his course?
Flying over, then dipping his body low enough to chirp.
He belongs in the turning of the willows near where the sled dogs live,
rattling on towards the fjord.
Not here, up on the void-less ice cap going out, like the contents of a glass.
Into water, into wind, into snow..............


Sometimes birds are blown off of their course or loose their migratory way. Though small flocks of geese have been seen, arctic sand pipers and snow buntings are more common. They appear in the air low and flitting, an obvious anomaly to the summit of the Ice cap where nothing has ever lived or would ever choose to live, except for a few strange people bundled in clothes melting snow for water.
The other day one such snow bunting graced us with his tiny presence. We always put out a bowl of hot water, which will last a few hours in its liquid state. Sometimes the birds take shelter in the lees then fly away. other times they die here and their frozen bodies are placed in special perching places safe from any further harm until they are completely buried in the accumulating or drifting snows.
This little one simply disappeared. We all like to hope that he made it back home to the sea's more temperate shore.

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.