Why Hello There

The view from the Canyon

I’ve been bumming around Alaska for close to a month now, and this is my first post? For shame… I blame the sunlight. Really, the fact that it never gets dark here changes the way we all act. It isn’t unusual to be sitting on the front porch of employee housing having a conversation at 4AM. The end of one day bleeds seamlessly into the beginning of the next, with the result that this month feels like one long day, and though in many ways I have made myself quite at home, part of me is still wondering when I am going to settle in.

Needless to say, I have much catching up to do. For now, I’ll just fill you in on the basics of where I’m living and working, and some terminology that will help you understand what I’m talking about when I used phrases like Creeksider or The Canyon. Don’t worry, there won’t be a quiz.

For those of you who don’t know, I’m working at a seafood joint just outside of Denali National Park. Though it has a much longer name, most of us refer to it simply as Fish and Chip, or even F&C, if we are feeling particularly abbreviated. It is located along the George Parks Highway, near the entrance of the park, along with a long stretch of other shops. This little sprawl is in the beautiful Nenana River Canyon, and the area as a whole is called The Canyon by locals. At the other end of the Canyon is another restaurant owned by the same people that own Fish and Chip. This restaurant is more of a hamburger and hotdog joint, and we call it the Doghouse. Also in the canyon is the one coffee shop and hangout spot, called Black Bear.

The owners of the Fish and Chip and the Dog House also own a bunch of cabins and a restaurant about thirteen miles south of the park. This establishment is called the Creekside, and it is also where employees of all three locations live. We live out beyond the guest cabins, in a two floor dorm-style building along the banks of Carlo Creek. Across the creek is Panorama Pizza Pub or Pano for short. It sits at the base of its namesake, Panorama Mountain. Behind employee housing are trails leading to two other mountains…most of the staff here refer them to First Mountain and Second Mountain (creative, I know). All of us who work at any of these locations and live at Creekside are known by the other locals as Creeksiders.

Yep, I just referred to myself as a local. This town is overwhelmingly populated by tourists breezing in and out, and the remaining community of workers is relatively small and close. So while most of us are seasonal employees and many of us have never been to Alaska before, in this Summer-only town we function much the same as locals.

Let’s see, did I forget anything? Ah yes, I may sometimes refer to Mt. McKinley as Denali. Denali is it’s original Native American name, meaning “High One.” To avoid confusion, when speaking of the National Park as a whole, I will simply say, The Park. What else? The grocery and liquor store is called Sled Dog, and it sits next to one of the oldest restaurants in the area, the Denali Salmon Bake (known by most simply as The Bake). Across from all these shops are the big resort hotels: Denali Bluffs, Princess Wilderness, McKinley Chalet, etc. A lot of the people who come in Fish and Chip are actually on cruises, but stop in Anchorage and take a train up to the park for a day. As you can imagine, there is a lot of hustle and bustle in the canyon, and while it’s nice to visit civilization (and cell phone service!) for a while, I’m also glad that I live a little out of the way of it, tucked in a valley surrounded by the mountains of the Alaskan Range.

I will get into more detail about what I actually do in my job, where I live, and post pictures soon. But for now, let this serve as a brief glossary of terms, if you will. I am having a blast here and appreciate the love and support of everyone back home!

Homeward Bound

My adventure is ending, sooner than expected.  I’m writing this from the airport on my way home.  What happened, you ask?

Good question.  Things at the farm weren’t all they were cracked up to be, but I figured that I would adjust my expectations and forge ahead.  I didn’t think it was a huge deal and I didn’t want to make a fuss.  Guess I should have said something about it, because feeling excluded, isolated, and under pressure to figure everything out at work with only a haphazard orientation came across as lacking enthusiasm and unwilling to be a team player.  I did my best to correct that impression, but Tom had waited until his breaking point to share his concerns with me.

I have mixed feelings about this turn of events.  I’m truly disappointed by the loss of this opportunity but I know that I did my best and the rest is out of my hands.  I’m also full of joy to be returning home.  Ithaca is where I want to be and this experience has given me an extra shot of motivation to build my life there.  I’m looking forward to finding a job, going to St. Paul’s, getting an apartment and a cat, seeing old friends and making new friends, and more.

I’ll turn the blogging over to Beverly, who’s settling in at her job near Denali National Park.  Hope you’ll stay tuned!

Catching Up

Guess who hasn’t posted in a while…?  Guilty as charged.

The highlights from the rest of May are in pictures: the farm participated in an annual charity walk fundraiser, jokingly known as the “charity graze” for the free samples of local food offered along the route.

I took off into the woods one Sunday because I was missing church so much.  I sat, looked, appreciated, meditated… and got some neat pictures of Alaskan fauna.  I also got pictures of caribou at the UAF research farm from my biking adventure to class.

At the end of May I traveled to Anchorage to meet Bev at the airport.  I finally saw my first moose en route!  Got some pictures of Denali and sunset over the water in Anchorage; there’s a beautiful waterfront trail that I walked while waiting.

The internet is excruciatingly slow right now so I won’t try uploading photos to the blog.  Please go to the album for viewing! 🙂

There’s No Place Like Home

First, a quick update.  When I looked over the teacher/group leader evaluations for the 2009 field trips, one of the most consistent suggestions for improvement was to make activities and vocabulary appropriate for 4-5 year olds.  A former field trip volunteer happens to be an early childhood education professor at UAF and she just happens to be teaching an intensive course this week… which I’m sitting in on so that I can bring back good ideas for improving the field trips for younger kids.  That means that I’m doing a lot of biking, which means lots of time for thinking, and this is some of what I’ve been thinking…

I’ll always be glad that I came here, but I miss home.  I’m looking forward to going home and building a life for myself in a place that I love.  This is an adventure, a good enjoyable adventure, but it’s not my life.  My love for home is renewed and reaffirmed every day.  I bike to class and wish that I was seeing dark kelly maple leaves instead of lime green birch.  The mountains are stunning and I love the view but I keep seeing the rolling Finger Lakes hills in my mind.  By the river, I wish I was down by the Cayuga Lake inlet, about to rent a kayak.  Passing the UAF research farm, if I ignore the caribou, I’m riding by the Hunter S. Thompson farm in Freeville.  On the flat stretch of road just before town, I think I could be riding to Tully to milk John B.’s cows.  I haven’t biked in a few years for several reasons that all come down to fear, so I hadn’t realized how much my riding was part of my experience of home.  I think I’ll have to face those fears – and Ithaca’s hills – next summer.

It’s amazing that I was able to “forget” my love of biking just because I was afraid, that I let fear come between me and something I love.  It’s equally amazing that a ~20 mile ride on a bumpy road on a mountain bike without my bike shorts – a ride that makes me wince every 30 seconds or so – could reawaken my interest.  I wish every moment for my road bike, my shorts, and my toe clips, but there’s still something about biking that I love.  Note to self.  And as much as it’s bitter to miss home, having something to love and look forward to is sweet.

One of my classmates told me that he’s living in Alaska even though he doesn’t like it because his family is here and they’re more important to him than where he lives.  I’m lucky: I love my family and where they live.  I don’t know what my life will bring.  Ithaca may not be my last stop, but it’s my next stop on this journey, for sure.

Field Trips and New Folks

The school year ended in Fairbanks on Friday (don’t get too jealous; they start again in mid-August), so that wrapped up the first whirlwind three weeks of field trips.  There were a few hairy moments – like the class that had to stay for two extra hours because their bus was late, and the class that arrived half an hour early while I was still getting set up – but everything went well on the whole.  I had the idea to make signs for chaperones to hold so that we all can easily identify groups (the “carrot” group, the “celery” group, etc.).  I think it really gives the kids something to identify with and the signs were especially helpful on the day when I had 75 second-graders here.  The second set of field trip pictures are from that day.

Over on Picasa you’ll see photos from the excursion I (finally) made to see the wildflowers with Abbie and Anaka.  Farm folks call it “the bluff” because that’s where the flowers are blooming, but the whole surrounding area is a natural area and research station.  Susie did her graduate work on mosses there.  I once had a dream that I was on a hill so steep that I was falling UP it, and the bluff nearly fits that description.  You’ll also see the total adorableness that is baby lambs!  This year’s naming theme is “herbs and spices”, so you’ll see Szechwan, Pepper, Cardamom (the one with the most gray), and Pod.  They’re all rams, which is somewhat of a disappointment, but at least you can still get wool from them.  That makes them the most useful non-breeding male animal that I know of!  Good job, boys.

In other news, the two Farm Apprentices and the Supers’ Supervisor arrived at the beginning of May.  (How the heck have I not written about this yet?)  Britt and Allie are the apprentices; Spencer was an apprentice last year and will be doing most of the support for the School Garden Supervisors this year, freeing up some of Susie’s time.  That’s Spencer on the roof of the Super’s house during a potluck that they had this weekend.  I have apparently been lax about taking people pictures, but I’ll try to do more of an intro soon.  Having more people around has definitely made things more fun for me!

I have a bit of a break in my field trip schedule in the coming weeks, so I’ll be working on a library of activities to be a useful resource for volunteers and future Field Trip Coordinators.  It’ll be nice to not run ragged every morning for a while, but office work isn’t my favorite thing either.  I’ll balance things by helping in the fields, too.

Bev graduates next weekend (yay!) and will be coming to Alaska soon!  You can expect posting from her too in the next few weeks.

Sheep Shearing Video

The farm hosted a Sheep and Wool Workshop on 23 April and I took a video of Tom shearing the ram, Kjell (“Shell”).  I needed time to sit down and edit it because the original is 20 minutes long – but now I can share the 8-minute version with you!

Two Awesome Projects

I’m not the sort to shamelessly solicit people for their support; in fact, I generally hate it when people shove their causes in my face.  I hope you’ll forgive me if I take a momentary 180 and tell you about two things that I think are really great – and are in need of support.

My internship in the summer of 2008 was with the Recycling Ag Plastics Project (RAPP).  The project is based on a simple but revolutionary concept: farmers should be able to recycle their used plastics.  Why is this revolutionary, you ask?  Why can’t they just take their used plastics to the local recycling center like the rest of us?  Local recycling centers are only set up to handle municipal waste – empty water bottles, yogurt containers, milk jugs, and the like.  Waste agricultural plastics are the “wrong” type of plastic and the wrong shape, and they are usually contaminated with dirt/manure/waste feed or with chemicals.  Those of you who live near a farm may be familiar with “Ag Bags” and other film plastics that farmers use to wrap bales of hay or to cover their bunker silos.  That type of plastic is especially problematic because most current technology shreds the plastic, but film doesn’t shred; it stretches.  Other uses for plastic on farms include containers for soaps, pesticides, fertilizers, and veterinary products, as well as greenhouse covers, plastic potting flats and trays, plastic mulches, and drip irrigation tape.  All of these things have at least one of the above issues when it comes to recycling.  Until 2009, farmers had three choices: burn the plastic, pay to put it in the landfill (which can be cost-prohibitive and also serves to take up lots of landfill space), or bury it/just let it float around into the environment.  As of 2009, open burning is illegal in New York.  Farmers are left with one “responsible” disposal option – the landfill – and that’s not exactly environmentally friendly.

There are existing technologies capable of handling waste agricultural plastics for recycling, but in practice such facilities are few and far between.  RAPP is working to bridge the gap between farmers, recyclers, and markets.  The project is entirely grant-funded, and here’s where the support part comes in: they have applied for a grant offered by Pepsi, and the winners are determined by public vote.  If you’d like to support the project, go to the website and create an account.  Then go to “The Planet” category, choose the $250,000 grant award, and look for the entry called “Develop a sustainable, local process for recycling waste ag plastics.”  You’re allotted 10 votes per day, but you can only vote for a given applicant one time per day until voting ends on 31 May.  Feel free to ask me for more info about RAPP; I got a pretty good look at the innards of grassroots organizing during my internship and would love to tell you more about how the project works.

I briefly mentioned the second project in my last post, but I thought I should offer some more detail here.  One of my favorite Cornell professors researches ladybugs.  That in itself is pretty awesome, but the citizen science effort connected with his research is even cooler.  The researchers are trying to find out how the population distribution of different ladybug species is changing, and you can help by finding and photographing ladybugs and submitting your photos to the project along with some basic information (location, habitat, time, and date).  Looking for ladybugs is a great activity for anyone who thinks they need more time outdoors, for kids, for teachers, for 4-H clubs… and you become an important part of the scientific data collection process.  Check out the Lost Ladybug Project for more information and cool photos.

First Field Trips

Hey everybody, I knew that things would get busy once field trips started, but I didn’t mean to leave you out in the cold… I’ll be getting back on track now.

My first field trip on 26 April was a mixed group of 2nd/3rd and 5th/6th graders.  I did take the kids through the forest station, but I felt more like an observer than a Field Trip Coordinator.  I was thrilled with the kids’ enthusiasm!  My second/third field trips were morning and afternoon preschool classes with the same teacher.  I enjoyed having the small groups (12 and 6 kids respectively) but they were still a little harder to wrangle.  I learned quickly that I’ll often be directing chaperones who aren’t keeping a close eye on their charges.

My third field trip on Thursday was for two classes, one K and one 1st.  The field trip part went smoothly, but the bus to pick them up was 2 hours late.  Thank goodness for my totally wonderful and supportive volunteer that day!  She kept coming up with games and activities to entertain and occupy the kids – way better than the counting and spelling drills the teachers wanted to do.  The “art contest” (draw in the dirt driveway with sticks) was her most inspired moment.  I am now soliciting as many ideas as you can come up with for entertaining kids in such moments – agriculturally related is good, but I’ll take any ideas that come.  So far I have:

• the Farmer in the Dell
• London Bridge
• Simon Says
• driveway art

I had another field trip this morning for 1st and 2nd graders and I’m really astonished at how much difference a year or two makes at that age.  The Kindergarten kids that I’ve seen so far have been enthusiastic and engaged, but the 1st and 2nd graders know a lot more information about seeds/animals/gardening and I feel like I need to step up my game with them.

For those of you who are interested, here is the Anatomy of a Field Trip.

The volunteers and I meet the bus at the bottom of the driveway and collect the kids.  Because the driveway is long and we want to keep the kids engaged, we play a little game to get them up to the top in stages.  Next the whole group gathers around the milk stand and either Tom or Christie goes through the milking routine with them.  That’s something I’m definitely qualified to do, but I need those few minutes to check in with the teacher(s) about permission slips and payment.  Then we split the students into smaller groups of about 8-10 kids plus a chaperone and they rotate through 3-4 stations depending on the size of the whole class.  The “default” stations are animals, seeds and planting, and forest exploration; we’ve also added a bee station with one larger group.  I’m trying to keep my volunteers happy and assign them their preferred stations, but I really enjoy the forest station and would prefer not to do the seeds and planting… but that’s what I’ve done the most of so far, go figure.  Still, it’s pretty neat because they get to plant a pea seed to take home.  I’m a little concerned because the peas I’m using are from last year and nobody has done a germination test on them, but I suppose it will work out.

During the first field trip, Edge ran the first forest station so that I could watch Tom do a bee station.  I’m just learning about bees myself and I wanted to see how he did it.  I did get a couple pictures of that trip, which you can see along with some others that I posted recently.  The new pictures include the promised bread bake photos and a ladybug that I photographed for a professor of mine who runs the Lost Ladybug Project.

Bee Video

The upload worked this time!  Check out the video on YouTube.

Buzz Buzz

Look at me go, I keep meaning to post about last weekend and it’s almost the next weekend!  If you haven’t checked out my photos this week, I put up several of the sheep shearing and of putting the newly arrived bees in their hive.  The captions explain the sheep shearing pretty well.  On the other hand bees are unlike any other farm critter so I’ll offer some more in-depth explanation.

Bees are cold-blooded so they mass together to keep warm.  They store honey (energy) and pollen (protein) so that they can survive the winter.  Bees also don’t defecate inside the hive.  If you put these three things together, you get a picture of how difficult it is to overwinter bees in Alaska.  Tom tried to overwinter one of last year’s hives and they were going strong until March… and then they died.  His best guess is that they just lost critical mass for keeping warm (even in the basement), but he also commented that it’s a long time to not pass any waste.  You’ll see evidence of that in the pictures too… even a few days’ journey is a long time for some of them!  The new bees were sent up after pollinating a California almond orchard.

Beekeepers breed and artificially inseminate (no idea how that works) queens and then gather bees from hives all over the orchard when they’re shipping a hive.  The worker bees will kill a foreign queen, so she’s shipped in a little plastic cage inside the screened-in box.  By the time the bees arrive, she’s won them all over by sending out yummy pheromones and they won’t try to kill her anymore.  In the pictures you’ll see the frames of honeycomb that are inside a hive, the queen in her cage, and part of the process of putting the bees into the hive.  I’m also trying to upload a video of the process; it didn’t succeed earlier today but I hope to link to it soon.  My little point-and-shoot digital camera did a great job with the video!  It’s crystal clear and the image is remarkably stable.  I’m excited by the quality and am crossing my fingers that the upload works so that I can show you.

All that excitement happened on Sunday afternoon.  Going backward from there, my weekend consisted of Quaker meeting, contra dancing, calling lots of people and asking them to volunteer with my field trips, and a Board of Directors-sponsored fundraising dinner in support of the school gardens that the farm runs in the summer.  The dinner on Friday night was really great.  They made a locally-sourced meal and had a few people talk in support of the gardens at the beginning and the rest of the time was socialization.  I’ll say it again when I get to the contra dancing part, but people are so friendly here!

The Supers, Anaka, and I went dancing on Saturday night.  Contra dancing is a style of folk dancing that originated in Britain and France.  Many of the steps are similar to square dancing, but in contra the couples are arranged in a long double line. During a dance, you and your partner dance with all the other couples in the line.  I got started contra dancing in Massachusetts a few years ago and haven’t had the opportunity much since I’ve been in Ithaca.

I love the contra scene because it’s welcoming to everybody and accessible whether or not one knows how to dance – all the dances are taught.  Gender is a little more fluid there, too.  If a guy likes how a flowy, swirly skirt feels when he’s dancing, nobody cares if he wears one (I don’t blame him – that’s one of the best parts of dancing!).  Often there will be more girls than guys at a dance, so many girls dance the “guy” or lead part.  I enjoy switching back and forth between leading and following.  It can get confusing but it adds a little more challenge and (often) laughter!  People are also encouraged to dance with a new partner each dance, so it’s a good way to meet people if you’re new in town.

The Fairbanks scene is rockin’ on about the same level as most of the small town dances that I went to in MA, which is to say that it draws a middle-sized and very enthusiastic crowd.  Fun!  People seemed a little bit awed and intimidated when I mentioned dancing in New England, but there are really only a couple dances there that deserve that sort of reaction.  Fairbanks gets points for creativity, too: they keep a stash of ties on hand for ladies who are dancing lead to wear.  It’s a great way to differentiate while in motion!

I feel like I’m going on and on, so here are a couple quick thoughts before I sign off.  I realized today that it’s been about a week since I’ve seen true darkness.  It’s still light enough for me to read in my cabin at 10:30 pm!  Also, I missed last week’s baking because of my town adventure, but I have a multi-grain bread planned for tomorrow.  Stay tuned for pictures!  I’ll post more about my work (the reason I’m here, after all) in the coming weeks because field trips start on Monday.  And… the snow is almost totally gone.  Yay spring!

Take care everybody.  I hope you’re well and that I’ll hear from you soon.