From Chapter 8…
“I was relieved to finally be alone. There was nothing to hurry up and do, and if all went well, there wouldn’t be for seven and a half months. This was a stunningly novel sensation. I’d been rushing toward one obligation or another since I was born. All the while I’d fantasized about having the ability to freeze time. In video games I could hit pause in the midst of a frantic battle. Now I’d managed this for real.”
Chapter 15…
“The Lukinek had begun to fill with ice as November advanced. Platforms of it the size of football fields drifted past my Lodge. Bench ice accumulated on the shores. Inside the Big Bend to the north, a lake sized eddy rotated. Clouds of ice—delicate, gauzy—floated just beneath the surface, revolving, mating. In the still water of inlets and marshes, dendrites of ice branched suddenly across the surface like living things. Two branches could meet and form a bridge in seconds.”
Chapter 17…
“… the wind was growing fierce, scouring snow from the River, polishing black ice. Going outside for more than a minute was an operation like a spacewalk. I learned to expedite my trips to the outhouse. The diesel stove ran 24/7. I left minus 40 behind, plunging into a new dimension. The world was not merely dead, but lethal. I became obsessed with fuel levels in the tank farm. Now that diesel was my life’s blood, the whole arrangement—tank, narrow pipe snaking through tundra, ‘50s era stove—seemed tenuous. I fantasized something more reliable: a core perpetually radiating in defiance of physics, armored with nanotech wonder-insulation. I dreamt about staying warm as the sun died, as the universe underwent heat death. Within the normal temperature range of human experience, small fluctuations are hard to detect—55 to 50, comfortable to slightly chilly, might go unnoticed. It’s different below minus 40. Strange new phenomena become possible. At night, and during the day with wind chill, it got down to 50 below. At this temperature, numbness will strike exposed flesh within a minute. Spit will freeze in mid-air with a crackling sound. One night I conducted an experiment and flung a cupful of hot chocolate outside. The liquid hissed, froze in mid-air, and with a small detonation became a vapor of tiny crystals. Nothing hit the ground. Breathing air at minus 40 is uncomfortable, but at minus 50 it’s painful. You can listen to your breath hit the air, crystallizing, a sound like crumpling cellophane known to Arctic Natives as ‘the whisper of the stars.’”
Chapter 19…
“Auroras are caused by solar wind—charged particles like electrons or protons—interacting with the earth’s magnetosphere. They manifest as radiant clouds, arcs, rings, and most often latitudinal curtains. On that freezing night in March, I stood inside a magnetic field line, looking straight up into a curtain. I watched it bloom into a pinwheel of light, with rays flung in all directions. I was peering through a tunnel of green fire hundreds of miles high, a shifting, flickering tunnel that trumped all the CGI vortexes in cinematic history.”
Chapter 20…
“Although they are heavy set compared to Lower 48 deer, they were graceful in headlong flight. As a group they fled in choreographed unison, abruptly changing direction all at once, like a school of fish running some group behavior algorithm. The 30-strong herd was like one 24,000-pound organism, thundering over the Lukinek, a flood of mammal driven before me.”
Tags: Alaska, Anchorage, arctic, aurora borealis, author, bush flight, cold, creative nonfiction, creative writing, fishing lodge, graduate school, memoir, narrative nonfiction, nature, nonfiction, Northern Lights, puddle jumper, puddle jumpers, snowmachine, snowmachines, snowmobile, snowmobiles, survival, unemployed, unemployment, wilderness, winter caretaker, writer, writing
