Promises

There are lots of stories about the aurora.  In Finland, it's the sparks thrown up by a fox racing across the snow.  The Norse believed it was the shields and armor of the Valkyrie as they carried the souls of the triumphant dead to Valhalla.  For the Chinese it was the flames of celestial dragons waging a war of good and evil.  Various cultures attribute the lights to dancing spirits, with the notable exceptions of the Eskimo tribes that believe that the dead are playing ball with the skull of a walrus--and one particularly questionable tribe that believes that it's walrus spirits playing ball with the head of a human. Depending on who is asked, it can be a sign of good or evil. The one closest to my heart, though, belongs to the Algonquin, who believed the lights to be the light from the fires of their creator, a signal to his people that he was still there, watching over them.

All my life I'd wanted to see the lights.  When we moved up here, I figured my chance had come.  It was practically a guarantee.  Up here you can see the aurora three out of four nights between August and April as long as the sky is clear.  I wasn't so lucky.  The first month we were here I looked for them night after night but I never saw them.  There was always too much light pollution, or they came in so late that I was asleep.  When I did finally see them I was disappointed.  I had expected the great swirling rivers of turquoise and emerald, flaring from all ends of the sky, that I had seen in the photographs.  What I got were small glowing bands that hugged the distant horizon, easily mistaken for clouds or smoke.

The first night I really saw them, I was crying.  We were at a church Halloween party, and in the middle of the candy and costumes and manic joy, I got a call from the obstetrics nurse. The ultrasound had uncovered several significant physiological markers for a genetic disorder.  They wanted us to go Anchorage, 400 miles away, for more in depth testing. 

To say it was overwhelming is an understatement.  We'd only been in Alaska a few weeks.  We knew absolutely no one outside of nodding acquaintance; our nearest family was over 2,000 miles away. The thought of not only arranging travel but finding someone to watch our other five girls, on top of the move and the news about potential complications with the baby, was enough to drown me.  I just sat in the bishop's office, face smudged with greasepaint and tears, trying to pull myself together while Rick comforted me, his voice shaking like mine, while goblins and superheroes ran amuck on the other side of the door. 

At the time, we were still living in a hotel while we waited for our house on post to come available.  It was a half-hour drive.  Rick and I talked in circles on the drive back, trying to adjust and make sense of things.  My mind was numb, my thoughts clumsy and disjointed.   Offhandedly I looked out the window.  There, finally, was the aurora, brilliant teal and curling across the darkness, pacing our car just above the horizon.  After waiting for so long to see it, I had expected to feel awe, wonder, excitement at the magic of it.  I felt none of those things.  Instead, I felt comfort settle around me, heavy as a blanket, as I watched the aurora gambol across the sky.  It was as if the lights were guiding me home.

The tears dried.  My mind began to clear, calm determination replacing bewildered despair.  The lights seemed to whisper a promise that everything would be all right.

That promise was sorely tested.

We buried Rick's mother less than a month later.  His younger brother passed the day after Christmas, and his funeral began our new year.  We discovered that our toddler would need surgery to remove a cyst touching her brain.  Several separations and the anxiety of a birth were endured as well as the thousand small worries and trials of everyday.  I didn't see the aurora again throughout the darkness of the winter except as a green ghost, disappearing as quickly as I saw it.  I clung to its promise that everything would somehow work out.

And it did.  Our daughter was born healthy and strong.  Broken hearts started the first steps towards healing.  Far from our blood family we found a spiritual one deep in the lonesome interior of Alaska.  We have received uncountable kindnesses from neighbors and strangers alike, and been able to share our own.

That's what I see in the gentle dance of the aurora, and why I can watch it caress the stars for hours.  I've found the magic and delight that I always expected to find, but beneath all the wonder there is always the same quiet, steady comfort that I have come to crave.  The challenges of our first year in the north are over, but the world is not easier.  Fires and earthquakes, hurricanes and floods, pestilence and war, selfishness and cruelty and fear...It is too easy to be overwhelmed, to feel hope fading in the face of all the turmoil in the world today.  Then I see the lights, and I don't feel like I'm struggling to keep my head above water.  It doesn't matter whether it is the slow, steady glow or the frenetic dancing river; I still feel the promise, just as strong and sure as it was on that October night long ago.

We are not alone.  We are not forgotten. Everything will be all right.

Summer Part Deux.

I got up yesterday and realized that the sun wasn't up by 8 and it was roughly 32 degrees outside.  It's actually getting dark now at a reasonable time.  We are expecting snow next week.  Winter is coming.  I should probably scribe my summer before it's buried by musings about the cold and pictures of snow.

Rick and I did manage to make it to the opening weekend of King John, which was put on by our local Shakespeare company.  It was held in a tiny little theater built in a clearing of old spruce.  It may not have been De Niro in the lead, but it was still a good production, and you couldn't beat the location.

The next week Rick left on a work-mandated vacation to Malaysia and Singapore for a part of the summer, so my mom came to keep me company and I used her visit as an excuse to tourist around Fairbanks.  We started with the Morris Thompson Cultural Center, a small local museum dedicated to the First Peoples of Alaska, primarily the Inupiak, Yupik, and Athabascan--who, fun fact, are actually closely related to the Navajo and Apache of the Southwest.  We got to see some beautiful native artifacts and were lucky enough to go on one of the days that a group of teens were displaying some of their cultural dances.  If anybody ever finds themselves in Fairbanks with a little time to kill, I highly recommend the Cultural Center, and not just because it's free.

I had a moment of insanity and signed us up for the three hour Riverboat Discovery cruise that I'd been eyeballing since I'd first seen the steamboat frozen into the Chena River.  Online it looked perfect--a three hour cruise on the idyllic Chena River to its confluence with the Tanana with stops to watch a float plane take off, watch some sled dogs do their summer training, and visit a recreated Athabascan village.  Planes, puppies, giant boat with complimentary donuts--how could it go wrong? It was even educational so I could technically claim it was a school trip.  There was only one problem.  I had, to quote one of my favorite Disney villains, forgotten one teensy-weensy, but ever so crucial, little tiny detail--my two year old was coming, too. 

The salmon and crackers was good, too.

Now, for those of you who don't have kids, or those of you who had preschoolers so long ago that they've faded into sterile memory, two-year-olds have two personalities: delightful and satanic.  There isn't really any in-between.  When they are good, they are very, very good, and when they are bad you'd rather have bamboo splinters shoved under your nails.  Long story short, we survived.  I spent three hours chasing her over the boat and being "that mom" with the screaming kid, and she spent three hours being that kid who is lucky not to be thrown off the boat.

You can't tell, but Echo is worming under my chair, kicking and crying.  This is the face of a woman at her wits' end.

Everybody else seemed to enjoy the trip, though, and we just kept running.  We hit up the Farmer's Market with all of its local artisans and overpriced but very fresh vegetables.  Golden Days, a celebration of Fairbanks' pioneer past, was also a must, even though we missed the highlight of the day--the rubber duck race, when thousands of rubber ducks are numbered and dumped into the river and fiercely watched until they cross the finish line, because whomever has the number of the winning duck gets a prize.  Pioneer Park, with vintage cabins and a retired steamboat, is always worth a visit. A quick visit to the Santa Claus House in North Pole--the town, not the actual pole--capped us off.

Show me your duck face.

A cool metal sculpture of one of the veloci-ravens that we get up here.

This is Charlie.  He sits on a table and gets tips for it.

I love this kid.  And whoever decided Fairbanks needed a riding salmon.

We also had a brief war with the fold-out couch.  It's crossed thousands of miles and been through five climbing kids and 2 really fat cats. The girls forgot it was broken and folded it out for a movie night, and when we went to fold it back it finally broke, stuck at a 45 degree angle that no amount of bouncing or shoving could fix.  The night before Mom flew home, she helped me fight the couch and reclaim my living room.  We won.

Hacksaws are the bomb.

After Mom left, some friends suggested we go berry-picking.  I was game, but we weren't sure where to go.  People up here protect their prime blueberry spots religiously--I don't know why.  There are many things I absolutely adore about Alaska, but wild blueberries are just not one of them.  This is due in part to the berries often coming with a side of foraging bears, and in part because even once you liberally douse them with sugar they still only taste slightly better than your shoes.  Still, the experience is worth something, right?  One of our crew remembered roughly where someone had taken her before so we loaded up my gigantor van with nine kids and three adults and just went for it.  We pulled off the side of the road and spent an hour clinging to the side of a mountain, ankle deep in lichen and moss, scrounging for tiny dusty blue berries; every few minutes one of us moms would pop up like a prairie dog, count the children, and look around frantically for anything bear-shaped before crouching back down in the scrub.

So this looks easy to walk in, but you actually sink ankle-deep in the lichen and moss. 

There is no way you can outrun a bear in this.

I spent a few more weeks making bad decisions about diet and bedtime and scrambling to finish projects before Rick decided to come home.  By now the summer was burning itself out, but we kept busy.  We went hiking several times locally.  One memorable time we were about an hour and half away from the car when Rick let me know that the horrible reek that I had been attributing to a nearby swamp was actually a fresh kill, and a bear was likely nearby.  I don't think I've ever been so happy to get back to the car.  The kids never noticed a thing; they were busy looking at mushrooms and moving only a little faster than asthmatic snails.  We never saw a bear, thank goodness.  For all that I love it up here, seeing a bear without a car or some other barrier between us isn't on my bucket list.

This is a spruce and a birch that literally fused at the base.

These are technically grouse or ptarmigan, but "arctic chicken" is more fun to say.

We also went gold-panning.  There are two ways to do this--you can either take your pan and go out to a river and try your luck, or you can go for the sure thing and go to one of the tourist traps that guarantee finding at least a couple flecks for the price of your entry fee. Honestly, it's not my thing--gold panning is very repetitive, time-consuming, and requires the ability to tell the difference between the much prettier pyrite and the duller actual gold. My attention span is roughly five minutes, especially when I have a two-year-old trying to swim in the rinse-tanks and a nine-year-old scrambling up the dirt and rock pile.  Rick and Bren, the meticulous zoners that they are, were in their element; they found the most gold out of all of us, and Bren was particularly proud of the sprinkling of garnets she ferreted out.

Yes.  That is her boot.  Because she can.

Rick and I managed to get one last trip adventure together while the weather was decent.  We went kayaking at Tanana Lakes Recreation Area, and it was amazing.  I wasn't sure what to expect because my only prior boat experience was the clunky, leaky rowboat we rented earlier this summer in Anchorage.  Kayaking was amaze-balls.  It felt like I was flying over the water, and I could not believe how quiet it was in the middle of the lake.  I was hoping for moose, but was denied.  We did see lots of waterbirds, particularly a couple of diving ducks and three large swans.  I see myself on the water a lot next summer.  I apologize in advance to the children and possibly husband I'll be abandoning.

That about covers the most memorable parts of the summer.  We're well on our way to winter; the gorgeous, frenetic summer days have become chilly, drizzly and gray.  The green hills are scorched gold and the birch are quickly becoming indecently bare. 

A few confused flowers persist.  Driving patterns have shifted to avoid school pick up and drop off times.  Snow tires have been ordered for Bertha.  The best part, though, is that the aurora is back.

Technically, I guess it has been here since mid-August, but since the sun didn't set until 11 or so at night, I wasn't going to stay up until it was dark enough to see anything.  We've had some gorgeous lights over the last few weeks, though, and the best was when I got up to get Echo some water one morning at 3:30 and checked the sky on a whim.  The sky was a crazy river of blue, green, pink and white that flared from horizon to horizon.  I threw on a coat and shoes, grabbed my camera, and tramped around my yard for the next two hours absolutely mesmerized.  The lights are one of my very favorite parts of Alaska.  It's good to see them again.

That's about it for now.  I'm going to make an effort to not have months between posts again, but sometimes I manage to get everyone to bed and I'm too lazy to do things that require brain power or any more effort than turning on the latest BBC show I'm binge-watching.  Blame the two year old.