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litter

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the artsy fartsy corner

for eric

graduate school

the hood

It's Autumn and Nobody's Smiling

Many moons ago, in my late twenties, I found myself feeling isolated and deeply unhappy. I had graduated from college a few years earlier and had married my college boyfriend, but I found myself frustrated and depressed most of the time.  I turned to my diary as a sort of confessional, because I felt nobody else could really help me. Part of my problem was that I thought the misfortunes I suffered were completely out of my control, that life was meant to be “against me,” thus nobody else could truly understand my situation.  I had no awareness that my ability to control my feelings and choices could be the key to a happier life. In other words, my lack of self-awareness, my ignorance of where my own powers lay, left me feeling like a boat at the mercy of inhospitable seas.  It got so bad that I actually ran away from home.  The first time, I took all the money from the joint savings account my husband and I had, and I drove out west for 100 days, hiking in the mountains and sleeping in motels and campgrounds. The second time, I was divorced and living on my own, and I decided I’d had enough of my life again, and headed out west again for the summer.  Why I ever returned to Chicago is something of a mystery, but it probably had to do with the fact that I’d run out of money and ideas.  Once I learned that I had the power to navigate my little boat, my life began to become less of a struggle and more of an adventure.

Without these skills of navigation I doubt I would ever have landed in Alaska to study the Arctic. Sometimes I feel like pinching myself at how lucky I am.

Even so, every autumn in Fairbanks I feel myself internally bracing for an invisible storm. Not necessarily the coming of winter (although that’s surely part of it), but certainly the combination of the stress of the fall semester, the demands of my graduate program and all its attendant commitments and meetings and obligations.  Grad students at UAF who are awarded a TA assignment are expected to run two labs per week, attend all the lectures, and do all the assignments to keep up with student questions. I confess I have never looked forward to it. The only thing that gives me a sense of excitement is the idea that my data will show me something unexpected and wonderful, that it will one day be published, and that I will go on to other as-yet unknown adventures, hopefully having something to do with the Arctic.

Even so, after three years in this program, all the steps still required to earn my PhD seem as remote and untested as the steps to the summit of Everest. And some days I’m just not up for the challenge.

It’s helped tremendously to have good neighbors, people to hang out with and share a meal and some laughs and forget the frustrations of academia.  But nothing lasts forever. Recently, some my Alaskan friends have decided to leave Fairbanks to pursue other adventures.

I know that life goes on, but it is sad to see them go.

Gareth and Ryanne left last month to seek their fortune in the Lower 48. And tomorrow, Joanne is heading down to the lower 48 to work for the next eight months in Idaho and Washington. She’s sublet her cabin to yet another new face who comes and goes about her own business, and it isn’t clear if Joanne will be back in the spring to stay or to wrap things up and take off for good.

The undergraduates I’m TAing this semester will graduate and move on in a few short years, and who knows, I may even be done before they are. Right now it seems hard to imagine. There’s so much to juggle with my dissertation and the demands of the TA assignment, and I know my fellow grad students bear the same weight of their own tasks.

 The worse thing about graduate school is—hands down--the utterly disheartening look on the unsmiling faces of graduate students; these are people you pass everyday on campus who don’t look at you or speak to you. If you should dare to say “Good morning” or even just “Hi” they look as though you threw cold water on them.  These days I think about what it would feel like to drive out of Fairbanks to Delta Junction and then east into Canada, cutting south to cross over into Montana or North Dakota, or continue further on to Minnesota or Wisconsin, never looking back.  I have no idea what I’d do once I got to wherever I think I would go, but that isn’t the point. These are the days I just want to run away from the pileup of darkness and cold and grad school duties in this pressure cooker world of academia. Sometimes I worry that I am sacrificing my health and happiness for the right to be called a doctor of philosophy. But then I tell myself: if you walk away from all this work, you will have nothing to feel good about--so you might as well get those three letters after your name to compensate for all this suffering.

And then I go outside and I’m startled by the sight of a squirrel that has landed somehow in my rain barrel and drowned. I mean, it’s not like Alaska is in a drought. It’s been cloudy and rainy for the past ten days. Why did he end up in here? Squirrels are not what comes to mind when you think of accident-prone klutzbags. So what happened here, little buddy? Did you just decide to take the plunge like your lemming cousins? Was it just all too much to bear?  Or did you see a tasty-looking giant spruce cone, magnified in the lens of the water?

Love and Happiness

I just came back from a ten-day vacation in Northern California where my good friends Di Walsh and Lawr Michaels hosted me at their Lake Tahoe vacation house and their Bay Area home.

Nearly two decades ago I was introduced to Di through my sister, who recruited me to paint a likeness of a recently deceased pet of Di’s then-boyfriend.  I remember Di walking into my sister’s kitchen on a bright morning: she was funny and feisty and cheerful and I liked her immediately. Several months later at a Christmas party I was introduced to her cousin Cherie, whom I also liked immediately. Ever since, I have counted these people among my dearest friends.

Many parties later—Di’s parties at her place on the Fox River were legendary—we found ourselves going back to school getting our university education in biology: Di for her BS in Anthrozoology at UC Davis, me for a PhD in plant biology at UAF. I described Di to my Alaskan friends as “the other fifty-year-old college student.”

For eight years Di has shared her life with her partner, Lawr Michaels, a sports writer and musician, and their seven or eight animal family members, consisting of roughly equal parts canine and feline. Fittingly, they describe their household as a “pack.”

I got to be part of the pack for a few days. Everyone who knows me knows I’m not a “dog person,” and yet for some reason, several of my closest friends and neighbors are dog people. So, in order to be with them, I have had to deal with hot, fishy dog breath in my face, lots of barking and fussing, lots of dog hair, drool, nasty dog farts, and worst of all, picking up German Shepherd poo in the middle of the night because dear old elderly Mahi had an accident in the living room where I was sleeping. Di and Lawr told me I was the easiest house guest one could ask for, and I have to agree :-)

Coming home early this morning to my beloved house on Kiwi Korner, to my car Kaneesha, my pet tarantula Wata, my laughing Buddha statue and my pet cactus Bartholomew, I realized that the pack love I had been basking in at Di and Lawr’s is something I want for myself in some version or other--but I don't quite have it yet.

I see their life the way one hears a song never before played; I didn’t quite realize such notes existed, beautiful and tangled as the leashes on the side table in the living room, beautiful as the cupboards stuffed with dog treats in front of the granola and pancake mix, beautiful as the mounds of clean laundry that never seem to get put away in the tide of busy days, beautiful as the plants in the backyard garden that stand vulnerable to accidental annihilation by their large and playful four-legged children. Each night, the pack goes into the bedroom and drapes itself across the bed to watch “Family Guy” before falling asleep.  Even though this is not the way I choose to live my own life, I realize that in spending time with them I have seen the things that make life worth living. 

Television Eyes

When I was an undergrad, my roommate made a comment one day as I was showing him some pictures from childhood. He looked at photos of one of my relatives from about the age of five to fifteen. When he saw the adolescent images of her he remarked:

"She has television eyes."

I compared the photos of the innocent, wide-eyed gaze of her girlhood to the teenage pictures, and it seemed that she had indeed developed a vacant stare, as if under hypnosis. Television Eyes.

These days, it seems everyone is guilty. If television was a powerfully corruptive force in the sixties, today's constant stream of real-time internet updates creates the same sort of hypnosis. Everywhere you go, you see people staring down at their hands, at their laps. Since I joined Facebook, I have been doing pretty much the same thing. I wonder what's happening to my brain, to my health, to my natural self? In a few short days I'll be marching across the tundra, needing my more ancient systems fully intact for the physical and mental challenges of weather and data sampling in the field.

Will you be up for it, Television Eyes??

merrrr......

did somebody just say something????

Forget Drill, Baby, Drill (at least for now)

more like Burn, Baby, Burn.

What strange planet have I landed on??

NOT mushrooms in our local soccer field--but firefighters' tents. Many people have come up from the L48 to help (Thank you guys!!)

from AK Forestry on Twitter

...another great website of current fire distribution from UAFSMOKE:

There are about 300 individual wildfires burning in Alaska right now. Most of them started in the last few days, because we've had little rain and our main forest tree, besides birch, is spruce, aka the Christmas Tree.  We have literally millions of Christmas Trees in our forests, and if you've ever shoved a dried up old spruce into your fireplace after the holidays and watched it explode into flames, you understand what a vulnerable situation we're in right now.

Since about Sunday, the sun has been blood red, and casts no shadow, the air smells like campfire smoke and is really really---REALLY--hard to breathe. It gives you headaches, and not only that---some research suggests that inhaling air polluted by particulate matter in high concentrations can lead to chronic inflammation in the brain, and (shudder!) to dementia

Since I've moved to Alaska, I've never experienced such intensely unbreathable air. If this becomes the "new normal"--hot, dry summers and a long fire season until autumn rains clear the air--I don't know how much more of this I'll be able to take.

Big Dreams on Laundry Day

Today is a lovely warm Saturday--perfect for doing the laundry. My neighbor stopped by on her way to do her own laundry and told me she had a dream about having her very own water.

Unlike me, she lives in a real dry cabin: she has to buy and haul all her water from The Fill in town.

I'm much luckier. My old belowground tank still has a few hundred gallons of tea-colored water for my weekly "Better Than Nothing" shower and daily washing of dishes. If it wasn't so old and full of sediment I wouldn't have to buy drinking water, but that's minor compared to true dry cabin living.

I told her that her dream is not a First World Dream, but a dream for the whole world. And then I went back to my laundry.

my laundry room

my washing machine (with motor partially exposed)