Orange Chair

If this is any example for my mind set, than I have become not only very dull, but also terribly out of date and worn. I spent the past seven days entranced in a misanthropic day dream about dance. I watched shorts from Don Quixote and Swan lake on U tube. I danced and stretched every day of the week and composed numerous letters to not only the adviser of the dance program at Western Washington University, but also to the few professional dance schools in Bellingham. I began researching ways to improve my turn out (the extent of one's ability to achieve a 180 rotation, from the hips, of the feet) and ways to become even more flexible. Every time I tried meditation to relive myself from this madness, I had to cut my time sitting short as I had to get up and move; Mozart was in my head, or Bizet. I have lost the desire to even try to control my mind any more. It is miserable to be stuck in this nihilistic day dream of something not real, but it is harder still to be quiet and to not move at all. I am not good at being like a sled dog buried beneath the snow; waiting.
So I go outside for some fresh air even though it is -50F and there is absolutely nothing out there to entice or supplicate one's needs. Well, yes, there is the sun, setting ( I do not get up early enough for the sun rise anymore). It rises setting. And as it drags itself along the Northern horizon it bleeds out some very dim streaks of sun - blood. Then the sky fills up with a powder blue fog which appears as a burial ritual and then all is diminished.
It really is quite bleak here.
But we have planned a holiday; Procrastination Day. Two days ago Steve took a 25 pound turkey out from the freezer. I was supposed to have taken it out three days before. It still has not thawed out yet. Hence the name for the holiday. Actually, most of what we do best here is procrastinate. Only a few things really ever need timely doing. Water, when low or empty needs refilling, same with fuel, food needs to be cooked, we need to call in over the radio every morning to let the world outside know we are alive. We need to keep the toilet paper stocked.
There is a little over 2 weeks until the crew change begins. On Tuesday, November 4Th the plane will arrive with four new camp staff , one scientist (who will be made to understand the harsh reality of problems that the mid winter sub sub freezing environment accrues on instruments designed in warm collegiate basements) and three full time company employees.
Together we will spend one week turning over the duties of camp life. Then we will get on the plane and fly away over the bumpy pinking snow-scape to a remote arctic city of 567 people where the earth, already covered in snow, will seem so abundant with life yielding grasses poking through the crust, white hares hopping, song birds chirping, ravens gargling, children playing, dogs barking, smells smelling...
Steve is watching the last of the unwatched, extreme ski movies. I pop around the corner just in time to see some dude land in a pillow of perfect powder. He is surrounded by a vista of evergreens sugared with snow. I walk away muttering, " snows pretty awesome when theres trees and topography".
Katy has just walked in bemoaning her brownies which are ,"bubbling...no they are boiling...there gonna SUCK"! High altitude baking is notorious for being troublesome.
It is four thirty in the afternoon and almost dark. My heavy(philosophically) book requires much page consuming in order for me to reach my goal of finishing off the season here with yet another book: Herman Melville's, Moby Dick. Its important to have goals, after all, without them, what would we have to procrastinate over?

Dance of the cotton grass

Way back in July of this year, drenched in the warm, dry, brilliance of the the high Arctic summer, I would ride my bike up a steep sandy hill to a stream which flowed from out of lake. I would lie in the tall grasses and rushes by the edge of the steam and peer into the clear but turbulent current of the water and watch the Stickleback fish. They were tiny. Smaller than the stub of a well worn down pencil; no longer than 3 inches in length, yet they were strong enough to hold position in a swift current bound for a falls that fell into the saline head of the fjord. I could see them gulp food. I could see them stop their effortless hovering and turn to dart to gulp another quickly passing morsel. They were dancers of another world. Conditioned to control their bodies as the graceful instruments of performing lives. Though every cell of their beings was toned for survival, their efforts were executed harmoniously with the water's motions itself. Like birds soaring on air currents, a ballet of life.
For the past three years now I have been entertaining the idea of going to school again. Why not? I have time off when we are not away working on distant islands or other continents. Perhaps having had so much exposure to travel in the midst of so many professional academics, professors, scientists, artists, etc. has allowed for a culture of thirst for knowledge to grow within the petri dish of my intellect. We are fortunate to have enough free time in our lives to experiment with dreams. If Steve wants to build furniture out of wood in our shop, he can. If I want to take dance classes at an annex of the university, I can. He remodels the house, I build the compost. We walk to the view of the Twin Sister's Mountain range, seen from the north bank of the Middle fork of the Nooksack River, just behind our house. He researches fuel efficient battery powered adaptations that we could make to our little Geo Metro while I plow through the chemical chains found in the emissions comparatively, between Swedish Masonry wood burning stoves and conventional wood burning stoves.
These free form "thinkering,-tinkering", time episodes of puttering , lead to small ideas which blossom into bigger ideas which grow into large "Why -Nots?".
And so my cute little kitten idea of going to school has grown into an enormous jungle cat named, "MR. Whynot". Well, one good reason is that it would significantly cut into my lovely ski bum life style of waking up at 0500 to press the speed dial button on the phone (which instantly rings up the Mt Baker ski report, which usually has most excellent news), and then go racing about the house getting ready to go skiing while singing, "15 inches fresh pow, 15 inches fresh pow....." or something like that.
Another reason of hesitance is the field of study, which has ranged from physics to atmospheric chemistry to math to mechanical engineer, to dance, to philosophy to fine arts to machinist and most recently, from paramedic to information technologist.
Certified.
But back to the fish...........I think they have got it all figured out. Even though they might only live for only one short summer or one very long year, they can dance every day through the atmosphere of their medium and exist symbyotically with this graceful movement, which I call dance, which swimming is a sort of kind of, dance, or choreographed movement designed specifically for survival; could it be that some people have to dance in order to survive. I mean, in order to survive, by using the term, survival, as the purpose driven expression of one's happiness and contentment with life; of feeling alive. We all must have some thing that bring this sort of sensation to it's maximum, causing it to go triumphantly coursing through our veins, trumpeting "life"; whether it be skiing or riding a bike or conversing with friends over tea or coffee, or watching birds, or bees, or loving someone or building something or going somewhere new. So why not dance?
It seems so impractical and self indulgent, a B.A. in dance, after all, I don't want to become a professional dancer; or even a choreographer; we would have to move to the city. And though I wouldn't mind teaching, how practical is that idea? Would I commute to a studio in town or lease one of the old chicken barns near our house on Mosquito Lake Road? Getting a B.A. in studio arts would at least contribute to helping me develop my potential as an artist, or a designer, or a sculptor. And what about all of those other ideas, either continuing along in the trades or working towards being able to become a teacher, or a paramedic, at least those ideas have some sort of practical application.
Maybe having worked for so long in impracticable situations with whatever skills I have garnered along the way has suited me just fine, like the fish in the stream, gliding, and floating and gulping.
And dancing in that sparkling buoyancy of water, the medium of origins.
Why not dance then, "MR cat"?

Dramatis Personae

We have just received word that we will be leaving camp officially, weather permitting, if the other group, somewhere else on the island who also contracted "our" chartered plane doesn't cause us any further delays, on, Thursday, the 13th of November. Seven people are coming in to our little camp, four of them will stay. Then, seven will leave again for Kangerlussuaq on the west coast of Greenland via a twin otter turbo prop with skis. The twin otter will not need the skis to take off or land in Kangerluusaq, only here, on the ice cap covered with drifting snows which have been blown into rock hard formations called sastruggi. After a night in Kangerlusuaq, we will all depart for Copenhagen, Denmark where some of us may visit for a short time before returning state side.
We are all very excited. We get along, we are not running out of things to eat or things to do or things to say, or read, but are well aware of being tired of eating from out of the freezer or from a can. We find it harder and harder to push ourselves, to keep active, (mentally and physically) or to do the dishes. Tonight, over lasagna, we talked about corn syrup, ( have you ever noticed that it is in everything) Agri- pork, bicycles, and Robert Falcon Scott, the famous, dead Antarctic explorer. He died because he arguably may not have had enough corn syrup.
I jest.
We then laugh at number one of the last two pineapples. It looks like it was run over by an ATV with green moldy tires. I cut it up anyway and we eat it.
The sun set tonight was a dramatic visual display of alto cumulus clouds ribboning through the various hues of the color mariners find comforting at night. Red. Beneath the setting sun's spectacular performance was another maritime shade, though one not so comforting: green. This horizontal pallor was intensified by a muffled, rolling ground fog that crept in underneath the awning of brilliance so slowly, so carefully it was as though it was intending to either not disturb the harmony of light or to ruin it quickly. But then came darkness and the stars.
We have all made lists of the things we must get done or hope to get done before the little plane arrives. I find myself giving pause to my normal chores. Relishing them for their strange detail. Giving them the significance they are deserving of. I toss large blocks of snow broken off from a corniced drift, by the sheer weight of the Cat, (having traversed nearby on another rendezvous earlier in the week), into the snow melter. I feel a previously cold sensation grow warm through my muscles working. The blocks splash into the scalding hot water and begin to melt, adding to the, always being in a state of depletion, camp water source.
The science technicians use paint brushes to delicately brush off the heavy rime ice which builds up so beautifully on their tiny, plastic, anemometers.
These feathery ferns of ice astound us by their resilience from the wind, indeed they are born of the wind. Prints, made by our boots last weekend, now stand several inches above the current level of the snow. Everything is buried or carved or etched or embossed or drifted in; sealed shut. Even the very surface of the snow itself is harder now. Nothing can be done without first shoveling.
But the four characters of ACT I are growing tired of having to go stumbling over new, sperm- whale- sized -drifts -of -snow parked daily, by random, in their front yards and of having to dig their way into buildings. They are beginning to remember, what their teeth feel when they bite into fresh, tree -ripened organic apples. They miss their soft, purring or wet, wagging pets. They dream of grass, leaf sodden forests and song birds. They prepare to exit stage left.

Cold strange

Late yesterday afternoon Steve received a phone call from the Greenland Police. They rang to tell us that they had received a signal from an emergency, position indicating, radio beacon or, E.P.I.R.B., registered in Peru. This beacon gave it's location as being just 18 miles E.N.E. of camp. The Police, who are in charge of launching search and rescue missions, told Steve they were not concerned however as anyone traveling into or through the National Park (yes, it may seem odd, but most of the ice cap is a national park) must first register with the Greenland Home Rule authorities and they had had no such Peruvian on their list of expeditions. But, with less than two hours of daylight left on our side, we decided that it would be unethical for us to not at least go out to the location and have a look around. Once the decision was made, Steve began boiling water for the thermoses. He then entered the postilion we were to go to into one of the hand held GPS units. I brought the snow machines out of the garage and hooked one up to our Poly Pod, a light weight plastic tow behind camper shell. Katy gathered up some food, the trauma bag and sleep kits. Andy and I dressed for two or more hours out in -48 F, plus wind chill, loaded up the poly pod with the gear and set off into the setting sun. We had fairly decent visibility but for some patches of ground fog. Each of us had in our own minds different scenarios: a privately owned turbo prop airplane had crashed, a guy on an unregistered winter sledging expedition had to toss in the hat, a drunken expat Peruvian, now living in Greenland got cabin fever and struck out on a stolen snow machine........ As we made our course over ground we kept our eyes out for any tracks in the snow or for a bright flare igniting the dulling sky; anything that might be out of place. Later, back in camp we both remarked about how the changing smudges on the horizon as it grew dark seemed to be smoke, and how it felt that we were surely heading for the edge of the world. To have that feeling of increasingly encroaching upon "there might be dragons" corner of the known universe, here in the 21st century, was a remarkably bizarre, but sincere sensation. When we got to the position, we looked around through frozen binoculars which could not be focused and of which we each had one lens too fogged up to see through. We drove around for another 2 miles in the general area and finally decided, through deductive reasoning, that anyone out here smart enough to have an E.P.I.R.B., not to mention, to have set it off, would have a camp and would by now have heard our snow machines and set off a flare. Or so one could only hope. The sun had set and we were cold. We pulled out the iridium phone and tried to make several calls to camp. Andy's fingers were numb form having had to check the GPS on our way out so I punched the tiny keys on the phone pad by repeatedly pulling my bare hand out of a mitten, entering three numbers, and shoving it back in again. Finally I broke into the tool kit under the seat of the snow machine for a phillips head screw driver with which to poke at the keys with. Though we sent about seven phone calls out, none of them worked. We gave up on the phone calling and decided to just get back to camp. Following our own tracks in the dusk with the last of the day's color lingering on the horizon to our backs, we crouched our bodies behind the wind screens and zoomed along at 80 kmh. After about 35 minutes we could see the lights of camp. As we approached the garage, we could see Steve and Katy by the back door of the shop with head lamps on waiting for us. We both gladly gave up our snow machines for them to take care of and went inside to warm up. Even after eating the fine fish diner which Steve cooked for us, and a having seconds of the lemon meringue pie that I had baked earlier that day, it took a couple hours for both of our bodies to reheat. Katy said she had wished she had taken our temperatures as soon as we had returned, but accurate core temperatures on potentially hypothermic individuals requires rectal thermometers, so we were quite relieved she hadn't thought of the idea until it was too late.
I fell asleep on the couch in the Big House after being lulled unconscious by Peter Sellers' simpleminded sleuthing of the mysterious jewel thief, the "Panther". When I awoke at that magical pre- dawn hour , and walked back over to the Green House, the Auroras were out and so were all of the stars and the Milky Way. I stood for a moment underneath the heavens admiring the sight until the cold began creeping in again. It was -51F when I crawled back into my own bed at five A.M..
This morning, Andy, tuned into the signal of the mysterious Peruvian E.P.I.R.B. on the single side band radio but there was no signal. This made us feel much better as it confirmed every one's initial suspicion of this whole ordeal being rather too weird to be true. We are all very happy that no there is no possibility of any one being out there needing help; a normal, lazy, Saturday could begin. Steve is cooking crepes, and reading, dreamily about the Azores, Andy and Katy are going to do their daily science rounds and I am anticipating a few more decent strikes with my recently discovered driver and precious collection of five golf balls, painted bright green, for snow fairways, of course, before I loose them all in the soft drifting cold strange world we are living in.