The bowl of milk

No picture is needed today, only an image conjured up in your mind; you are stuck inside a bowl of milk. This is no ordinary bowl, otherwise, you could not fit into it, nor is it really the liquid milk. Perhaps you are muffled in so many layers of clothing that despite the heat of the American South, you feel no temperature extremes at all, you have become a neutral environment, like the insides of a cooler. You are standing in a cotton field during a Storm, but are anchored down firmly. All is white. Maybe you are stuck inside a flour mill during a tornado. This is what it is like here during 40 knots of wind.
The good thing about wind storms here is that the temperature rises. Instead og being flat calm and -20F, it is windy and 20 above.
We can still walk around outside, though from what the wind sounds like, some 30 feet above the surface in a building raised on iron legs, you wouldn't think it would be possible.
I pull my hood up and secure the goggles to my face; a windshield for human beings. I put my head down and find some delineating feature on the snow to follow, be it an old Caterpillar track from the tractor, or a ski runnel, now a raised relief, or the platforms of my earlier boot prints embossed along the surface.
I mark the force of the wind against my body and the direction I wish to travel, roughly 500 feet distant. By this dead reckoning I begin my course, glancing up occasionally to check for the dim gray blur of the garage that will soon appear ahead, looming; a moth in the dark illuminated by some brief moon glow.
This weather is exciting, though it prevents us from doing the chores we need to tend to outside, it allows for the human element to feel, in just 500 short feet, the likes of having crossed the north Atlantic on foot.
Well, OK that may be dramatic, still, I presume it gets the point across; life here is never dull. I wear a whistle on my parka, I carry a radio, we all keep track of each other's where abouts. I reflect upon the experience, standing still within its own being only long enough to try and understand it's gyrating mood. Long enough to feel the spindrift needling its way through my clothes. Enough to decide that there must be an awfully large kitten coming soon to lap up this milk from its ice cap sized bowl.
Reaching the safe harbor of the garage and kicking aside the powder fine drift that has formed so delicatly before the door, I enter into what seems to be the mouth of a whale. Dimly lit, membranous walls heaving and shaking as though alive, snow sliding down along the arches, like water over the back of a leviathan, I stomp off the snow and smile.

The Returning to Planet ice

My absence from writing has dissolved into a need to write again. My thoughts, which have not been absent, have slowly risen to the top of the vessel they have been stored in. But where to begin?
This blog, originated as a means to include my family in the weekly events of our work in Greenland, has evolved into what it was designed to be, a journal. And so, though our thoughts tend to suggest privacy, I am growing more and more comfortable with this medium of thought sharing. My musings and observations are no longer Greenland specific. I recognize that the two weeks Steve and I spent with my Mother and Father in Jefferson, Maine had an indelible affect upon my intellectual reasoning with this going away work and a new found respect for the living world; the world made up fruits and vegetables pollinated by bees, woods wet with fresh animal tracks and emerging late summer fungi. While swimming in the ocean through a forest of rigging tinkling like chimes, or doing my morning laps in the spring fed pond, lent to me by frogs and fish, and while gently walking over the land ,winged by birds and butterflies, now climbing into a particular old tree, with a name, now bending to eat more berries, I felt a pensive restoration of my soul.
Visiting with very dear friends whom I haven't seen for many years, gave fresh insight and perspective; we can all still agree, there lies an humble ideology constantly worthy of our attention on what purposes one may serve in this short life and how to do it without harming others or ourselves.
The returning to Greenland went without any difficulties. We arrived up at Summit Station on the Greenland ice cap, at 10,500 feet above sea level, last Monday afternoon. The air was thin, the sky obscured, we all went to work immediately forming a human train, in order to move all the boxes of fresh vegetables up the two stories of out door stairs, into the warmth of the Big House.
This past week consisted mostly of re-orienting our selves to the camp and it's daily tasks and chores which it demands of each person living here. There were forums each afternoon discussing the future plans for construction and expansion, snow management, going "green" (renewable energy plans) research and the potential for alternative cargo delivery, such as traverses (due to the rising fuel costs associated with airlifts).
The weather has been hovering around zero F with mild winds and solar phenomena. I went out for a ski and as I gazed around, thinking about the conversation Steve and I had had earlier that day, about hanging up our hats and finding work back home, I found myself absolutely alone in a vast sparkling ocean of diamond prisms and phosphorescent snow looking out towards an unbound infinity of quiet.
This morning, as i rattled over the snow in the track loader going for a bucket of snow to dump into the snow melter, I wondered about my being here, at its oddity, not that I am a mechanic in charge of the power, water and life support of this camp, not that I am operating a piece of heavy equipment, or that I'm even here in the first place, but at the general relativity of time and its ability, if we are capable of learning how to become truly aware, of constantly changing our matter.
For though there is certainly a very noble importance and peace to staying at home and growing one's own food, there is also, this. This never ending presence of change, and here, in this unique place, where the sun dips lower each day and the frost stands up like rose petals, I feel as though I am placed underneath some grand cosmic microscope, and so turn to within with a greater understanding of why I am being and where, in the being,I am.

"FORE"

I forgot to mention that I have also learned to golf. How do I explain this learning? How do I explain the course? First of all, golfing here, is free! There are no electric vehicles, no caddies, no green fairways and no other people. The club house is an old single wide trailer painted army green. Inside there are carts full of clubs and buckets of brightly painted balls (so you can find them in the sand). There is also a porta potty, the kind your parents may have put in the back of the station wagon for you when you were a kid in order to avoid having to make pit stops every 47 and a half minutes.

The first time I went golfing, was with a women from Brooklyn NY working on her PHD from Columbia University. She and I rode our bikes out along the river and let ourselves into the club house with the key one picks up from the airport hotel desk. As I was trying to determine what type of clubs to take I learned that she had only golfed once before herself and it was also here at the Kangerlussuaq country club. She didn't know a wedge from a driver; in fact neither of us carried a putter. Never the less, we went out with the course map and did our very best to hit the tiny little balls towards a flag, any flag. We beat at the sand, searched through the willows and swatted at mosquitoes for 2 hours without ever putting a ball into or near a hole.

My second time out golfing, I convinced Steve to play. We accompanied a colleague of ours who was just up from Denver, for a week of remote office work. Jason, actually plays golf. It is because of Jason that I learned to use words like putter, driver and wedge. I also learned to keep my head down, but for all of my slugo -home- run -baseball -type whacks at the little ball, seldom did I ever manage to connect the head of the club with the dimpled orange sphere. The few times that things went right I watched with absolute childhood wonder as my ball went soaring through the air. But where did it go? From, Jason,

"That dog'll hunt..........." Translated means: "Hey! Your ball is actually in a darn fine place {use an incredulous voice} and very close to the putting "green"!

Strewn cryptically around an old river bed, with little boggy water swamps the whole course is one big sand trap. Just for an added challenge. And in case you were to forget that golf was invented in the foggy sheep pastures of highland Scotland, you get to carry around a square patch of astro turf to drive off of. Without it, you are wedging out of sand on every par, unless your ball lands in a willow. At the place where you are to put your ball into the hole, there are prickly stiff patches of inflexible sedges and rushes and the flags will not come out, so anchored in by timeless sand storms, they are impossible to budge. On a par 4 I averaged around a par 16. We played 7 holes in 3 hours and finally gave in to the late afternoon heat. Back at the musty dusty club house, we collected empty soda and beer bottles to take up to the store for some redemption. We tried on a few left behind hats and filled in our names in the guest book. I think all in all, we only lost a few balls, which is nothing given the willow shrub studded desert we were playing in. I decided to like this free admission, wild Greenlandic golf, and am finding myself surprised to want to go out and practice driving. That is, as soon as my arms recover from what felt more like bludgeoning baby seals than having been out enjoying an afternoon's game of civilised golf.

Friends

The elegance of a place takes time to seep into the human element. There are so many minutae; not only in the landscape's largess, the improbability of endless blue skies waving tall summering grasses with full heads of seed against glaciers and flowering tundra, but in the other people you meet and in the closer inspections of the everything that becomes the place.

So much happens here. It is an international airport for Greenland, a cargo receptacle for the fleet of four or five different Hercules aircraft chartered by the national Science Foundation, a way point for dozens of privately chartered, miscellaneous aircraft form Canada, Iceland and the US; a small shipping port, a city, a village, a town. It is a home with playgrounds and trash in the ditches and late night soccer and tourists playing tennis. It is a place with hotels where the long since dead and dismembered heads of reindeer and muskox lay around next to empty JATO (this is the common acronym for Jet Assist Take Off, literally propulsion rockets used by the LC 130s for take off boost from soft snow) bottles. Both are considered to be standard local flare. It is a place where the fresh fruits and vegetables which arrive only once a week, may be forgotten to be put out on the meager shelves in the towns only grocery store due to lack of understanding; most of the Greenlandic people that have come here to work, eat at the airport cafeteria. They haven't to think about preparing home cooked meals. A Danish friend of ours, a meteorologist at the local weather center responsible for forecasting all the islands weather, mostly concerned with flights, told us tonight at dinner that to the local Greenlanders in Kangerlussuaq, the most important "food" to be put out first on the shelves is, " soda, chips and coffee".

I spent two hours picking up garbage from the steppe adjacent to out rented warehouse lot, from the trash I collected, I would say that it is safe to confirm a colloquial hankering for soda and chips and candy.

Farther out in the hills, the blueberries are ripening. Tonight we all were treated to a dessert made by our friend from berries she picked all day. She threw a hand knitted shawl over her bare shoulders when the sun went behind the hills, it was made from the under hairs of the musk oxen. When she left, she put the shawl and some notes she had made, for these dinners are always an exchange of cultural ideas and fancies, into her purse which she had stitched by hand from seal skin. The toggle was a small piece of caribou horn.

In these past few weeks, I have gone on a late night bike ride to find one of the five wild orchids that grow in Greenland. I found one just before midnight in a swarm of mosquitoes by a rock in a bog. Its three flowers were each no bigger than the tip of my pinkie. I have swam across and back across a small blue lake surrounded by green jaded hills with a friend who became more of a friend when i looked back and saw she too was stroking across the liquid jewel. I kept up with Steve on an 8 hour, single speed bike ride up sandy, wash boarded hills to the edge of the very ice cap we will fly over and across and to when we journey this August to Summit Station perched on the summit of the island's inland ice. And I have lain over a stone in a pool of piercingly cold water with a Danish women my Mother's age who spent her youth as a biologist in these very hills, catching stickleback minnows in our palms while the cotton grass blew.

Today I spent most of the working hours on my back underneath a suburban removing all of the parts in the way of the transmission. Steve handed me tools and moral support. Tomorrow we'll lower the old tranny and install the rebuilt transmission. While Steve wasn't handing me tools, he was building "pooper boxes" which he has sanded to the smoothness equivalent of a river rock and stenciled, "NO. 2" upon the side. Asked if I thought most people would "get it", I said, "I would certainly hope so" (there just aren't that many boxes with pink Styrofoam cut outs the shape of a toilet seat). Later on, I found myslef deeply envying those researchers who will get to use one of his new "NO 2"s far away from here, out in the deep wild field. When there are orchids so small, a blade of grass looks like a sword, anytime that one can spend just sitting, ouside studying sky and hill and lake, flower and bird is worth a million billion indoor rests upon the very finest of poreclain thrones.