wednesday, captain mike flyin away to pick up more mail, hank takin a turn holding down the cargo.
Boundaries
I like simple and easy, and it’s fun to do the ‘bush food’ thing. Canned peaches and vienna sausages for breakfast? delish.
Tonight? Tonight I flew too close to the sun. White beans and spam.
Before eating:
After eating: no photo.
Back at it
Six days off the island, 350+ miles on my jeep, good times with some great friends (thanks for the food and hospitality, jason and heidi and carl and janet and dorothy johnson!). It was great and it’s wonderful to be back on the island, albeit two days late. We got to fly direct from nome, which means an absolutely beautiful hourlong low altitude helicopter flight, complete with extremely low mountaintop fly-bys and swooping and banking through arctic valleys.
And not a moment after I step off the chopper one of our super energetic 3rd graders nails me with a flying bear hug. Life is good.
..and tonight? Hours of lesson planning and organizing? Kinda miserable.
but part of the deal, and it’s a good deal.
Life is good.
Happy new year
I can’t think of any way to say it better then this:
“May your new year be blessed with deep relationships, adventures, and happiness. Cheers.”
Happy new year!
-Dave
Blizzard warnings
Sunset
Christmas day
-> a day of getting the school ready (technically not actually christmas day, but plenty relevant to this post)
-> playing cards with the guys until 4am
-> community feast (hats off to the gals who made the food!)
-> video call with the family
-> getting to dress up as santa claus, at the end of the feast, to hand out stockings to the kids (THE highlight of the day for me
-> snow
-> christmas gifts from home (hats off to USPS for delivering mail to the edge of the world, and hats off to captain mike for flying a chopper to an island in the middle of the bering strait)
i love it here :-)
PS
some things happened, some ideas went through my head, and an idea came to be, and the idea’s this: all the pain and ill of the world vanishes, even if for a moment, when a child smiles
To you and yours: merry christmas
May you spend the day, for all it is to you, in good company with lots of laughter, smiles and love.
12/21/12 12:01am (in Chukotka)
IT IS 3:01AM HERE AND 12:01AM 12/21/12 IN CHUKOTKA, RUSSIA, AND I JUST TOOK A PICTURE FACING EAST, HERE IT IS!!!!
just kidding. lol.
For real, here is a 30s exposure of the view east from the front porch of my duplex apartment, taken a few minutes ago at 3:03am. Too much weather to see big dio, but the dateline is definitely within visibility. The verdict is in, folks, the world is not ending, unless the end of the world is taking the form of complete coverage by sea ice. In which case, for us on diomede the end of the world would be hard to notice :-).
That’s great, it starts with an earthquake, birds and snakes, an aeroplane
I live one and a half miles away from the international dateline. Because of some time zone tomfoolery, my eastward neighbors (the Russian military post on Big Diomede Island, 2.5mi away) are 21 hours ahead. Big Diomede Island, in other words, is the one of the fist places in the world to see tomorrow. Check out the wikipedia article, they’ve got cool pictures and complicated graphs and big words to explain: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Date_Line .
That all is to say that if the world’s gonna end tomorrow, it will begin to end two and a half miles east of where I sit in my cozy duplex in a little more then an hour. At precisely 3:00am AST, it will be 12:00am 12/21/12, and I’ll take a picture of Big Diomede (OR WHATEVER IS LEFT OF IT!) and post the picture here.
Stay tuned
High noon
Inupiaq 101
Ice fishing
Click the panorama below for the full size version:
Walking stick
When you walk out on the sea ice, a walking stick is crucial. The tip is used for testing for good ice to step on. What’s good ice and what’s bad ice is pretty simle–good ice is thick enough to walk on. You walk with the stick horizontal–if you fall, the stick provides something to hold onto, to pull yourself out with, and (very important!) it keeps you from falling all the way in. Falling all the way in, aside of the obvious unpleasantness of submersion in very, very very cold water, is a dangerous thing because of the current. I’ve heard of several folks’ lives being saved by their stick.
Ed took me out with him for a little ice fishing, let me borrow one of his walking sticks.
So what’d I spend my afternoon doing? Working on a walking stick :-)
