Nice view

I stayed up late last night watching the Perseid meteor shower from a canoe drifting through a silent lake. Despite the light pollution from the nearby town, it was a good show. We even saw at least one bolide. (I did not know what this word meant until just now.) Afterwards, of course, we broke out the flashlights and gunny sacks and collected about two hundred pounds of fresh, steaming meteorites -- enough to make at least three meteorite pies for dessert this week. Can't wait!

Blogging has been difficult lately for several reasons. For one, the internet connection here is terrible (it's a  satellite link that parsimoniously allots a pittance of bandwidth each day). Last weekend I was not able to blog because I was rendered mostly inoperable by my first and (hopefully) last Soldotna bar experience, in which I unwittingly ended up on the receiving end of a spiked cocktail intended for my coworker, a lithe Ecuadorian girl with a come-hither Georgia accent. (I know I just claimed that I collect metorites and bake them into pies, but I promise you that this part is all true.) And this last week I could not blog because my job required me to spend four days and three nights in the bear-infested woods.

 No bears were seen on this trip, however. There were five of us working, with two chainsaws between us. Our job was to clear fallen trees off of a trail that winds up through twenty miles of steadily climbing hills, ending at the edge of a vast alpine tundra. The trail is used by parties of hunters on horseback seeking access to the caribou and Dall sheep that roam the wilderness. Because it is meant to be traversed by horses, it is a lumpy, poorly kempt nightmare of a trail crowded with bushes and grasses and composed of uneven terrain that is alternately too steep, too muddy, or too root-filled for bipeds to find steady footing. And for some reason, each of the legions of horses that walk this trail place their steps in the same spots, meaning the trail is composed entirely of alternating hillocks and divots carved out of the ground by the systematic pistoning of clomping hooves. Hiking consists of stepping awkwardly from hillock to hillock for mile after mile.

We also had four pack horses to carry our stuff for the trip, a service provided by a local contractor who does such things (usually for hunters, I assume). Because horses are expensive and complicated machinery, the contractor came with us for the entire trip to lead and care for her creatures and also brought along another woman whose role was unclear, other than to drink Bota Box wine around the campfire and brag endlessly about how tough she was by relating boring Alaskan hunting experiences. Both ladies were uninterested in anything we were doing and (other than the all-important bragging) mostly ignored us whenever we both made camp. This was fine by me, because I was too busy each night trying to pretend I wasn't rapidly dying. Ten miles of hiking per day is something my body was totally unprepared for, let alone with packs and saws. And sometimes they actually expected me to, you know, use the saw to cut through trees, which is a loud, messy, and heavy process. I have not really gotten the hang of it yet. Still. I limped my way through it, and when we reached the summit at the end of the second day, a radiant white light filled the sky from horizon to horizon and the five of us were transformed into rearing, snorting stallions with wind-whipped manes. Then we were transformed back into hourly employees and we had to carry all of our shit the twenty miles back down the hill the next two days.

Comin in from all directions. Or, chewing placidly.

Who do I work for now, you might ask? As usual, it would be imprudent to discuss directly. Let's just say that, in a sense, this person and I have the same employer (congratulations, by the way). All in all, man, I am loving this job. I have gotten really, really lucky (and I have great friends). I spend all day outdoors -- digging, sawing, chopping, uprooting -- and whatever physical stresses come my way pale in comparison to the unending vistas of emotional and psychological stresses at my last position. Were I still at my old job, I'd be spending this beautiful Sunday evening bracing for the rumbling tide of returning children rolling into the school tomorrow. As much as I did enjoy many aspects of working with teenagers, I rarely, if ever, got to solve problems by using a chainsaw. Spare the saw and spoil the child, I say.

 In a scant six weeks, this weird miraculous gig ends (as does the part of the Alaskan year that is not winter) and I'll have to move on elsewhere. But at the moment, I'm for once nothing but thankful for things.