Trip 3 - Week 3 begins with some snowflakes and lots of ice

Maqineq (Saturday)

Well not much to tell about Saturday, I got exhausted of my routine so I reopened a silly, free fantasy book I got on my computer a while ago and spent the entire day in bed reading it. Then, I went back to bed and it was Sunday. So yup, sometimes you just need a day off and I am here for two months after all.

Agasunermi (On Sunday)

So I went to church again and there were many more people there this time around including most of the elders so that was a great start. Church progressed as I believe church will always progress: sit, stand, sing, sit, stand, pray, sit, stand, sing, donate money, repeat. But on my way out I talked to one of my long-time elders who said she got my message and would find a time this week for her and her husband to meet me (I'll call again on Wednesday (pingasiritmi) anyway). I also re-met the elder I hope to work with who is bashful, and her daughter. After a short conversation in Yup'ik she agreed to be recorded and tell about her life and history, but only if I was not present. So YAY! Then I headed over to one of the teacher's houses for caribou stew, biscuits, and tundra tea (/ai.yowk/). It was awesome, I might like caribou more than moose, for now. I then spent some time on the computer talking to J and doing chores. The rest of my night went back to normal, that is: dinner, reading, coloring, looking at the stars, hoping to see the Northern Lights.

I should mention that its wonderful to get out of the city. There is no light pollution here so I can stand out on the little porch area and if I look up about 30 degrees and two inches to the left... there's the big dipper clearly, brightly, just sitting there. All around it is the rest of the Milky Way and all the other constellations. Kind of like they belong there, like they've always been there, like they rule the sky and just look down upon us and most of us have forgotten they exist. It's great to get out into the fresh air of the wild where things just feel right and you can see the stars again. I miss being able to see stars. And camping, I didn't get to go official camping this year and I miss it.

Pekyutmi (On Monday)

So Monday, day one of week 3. Wow, or in Italian 'uau'.

The temperature dropped overnight, I had to zip up my sleeping bag. The wind is storming down from the north lowing the temperature even further. The blasts of the wind are causing white-caps on the river which are flowing upriver instead of down. Basically, the river just became a lot more dangerous with the top half being blown one direction and the current taking the lower half out to sea. All of the puddles and small ponds out in this region of the tundra have now been frozen solid since at least Friday. The mud has dried to dirt and the ground has hardened solid. We saw our first sporadic snow flakes today. Winter has come to the arctic. Which for those of you back home who already have several inches of snow... this is nothing to call home about. Bu I'm excited to see my first “part of winter” up here.

Today was a lot of reading as I'm almost done with my first book. But I also pulled out the recorder and planned how to best, and easily, record a very soft spoken elder with a life-times worth of knowledge to share. I decided that since I couldn't be there I would use a traditional, but small and unobtrusive microphone on a tripod that was loaned unto me for this trip. I checked to make sure everything was on the appropriate settings and looked perfect and organized it all and wrote down instructions and tested it and worried and well basically tried to think about all possibilities. Then I talked to my hostess and went to the school to pretty much finalize my grant application stuff. At 5 I went to the Health Clinic and talked to the Tribal President and showed her how to set up the recording apparatus and turn it on and make sure to hit the record button twice! Make sure its quiet and windows are closed and electronics are turned off as much as possible and sit comfortably and point the mike like this and you both should kind of sit adjacent but facing each other and help facilitate by just keeping the conversation going and talk about whatever she wants to talk about: growing up, life on the tundra in the old days, traditional stories, what it means to be/speak Yup'ik, ect... Then I made sure she had my number, crossed my fingers, prayed for amazingness or just goodness, and walked away. We'll see what happens, but I'm excited and thankful just to have this opportunity.

My hostess made ground moose-tomato sauce spaghetti and brought it over for dinner. It was delicious! Now, that I know that you can actually grind meat like this, it is in fact somewhat okay culturally, I really just want the chance one day to make a bacon, mushroom, and seal oil - cheese mukluk(seal)-burger. Basically I think it would be fantastic. You could put lake greens (the plant used as a vegetable up here but I don't know what its called yet) in place of lettuce, and kind-of like a Hawaiian burger with pineapple, you could put salmon-berries (cloud-berries) or wild cranberries, or blueberries, or blackberries, or raspberries on it for good measure. I copyright this dream burger by the way. Yep sounds delicious, and I'm hungry again.

And that was basically my day. And my weekend.

Piurra!