The top off the barbecue????

The cabin was pretty much as we left it. For some reason, on the way out, I was anticipating that we might find that someone had broken in. And when we arrived, we found that someone had been moving furniture around in the porch, but hadn't broken into the main cabin. They had also taken the top off the barbecue, the metal lid, and thrown it on the tundra. Really I don't mind if people use the porch. It's warm in there when the sun is shining through the big windows, and if you were cold I would want you to stop in and warm up.

We sat on the deck for quite a while. Hundreds of geese flapped overhead, towards Lady Pelly, barking to each other.

There's something about the silence of the tundra that is seductive, that makes me want to sit and listen. Listen to nothing, endlessly. And all the things in my head, all the worries that go in tight circles in the back of my mind, they lose urgency and dissipate, and I don't miss them. Every spring that I have been living here, and this is the third, I have had a moment on our first real trip out across the tundra on a warm day where I've felt that I'm part of all creation in a way that is only possible up here. And I begin to understand in a physical way, why this place is different from any other - because on some level, time is behaving differently here. I want to say ...Vaster than empires, and more slow... but then I'm playing with words, intellectualizing it.

I read Ed's post about Jon Krakauer and co. And I really enjoyed it. A lot of what he's talking about, I used to muse on while I was working at the coffee shop. About how nobody can last long without help from others. (I'm paraphrasing, it is a long and eloquent post). I know that I'm not living the same lifestyle as the Inuit who live(d) here for aeons. I have a snowmobile, a parka made of nylon, a thermos full of coffee, a kamotik made of wood (not bone), and when we get to the cabin there's an oil-drip furnace and some Coleman lanterns. When I was first here I went through a period where I wished I had been here a hundred years ago, so I could see what it was really like, but quite frankly the best part of a spring trip on the land is the nap on the couch in my warm living room when I get home. Although Miguel and Ian have been out and shot caribou and muskox for our consumption, I cook them in my electric oven.

So. In the spirit of everyone being dependent on each other, Ed, or anyone else, if you're ever out near Ovayok and you need a place to warm up and drink your hot chocolate, feel free to use my sunporch. Just don't take the top off the barbecue. And close the screen door behind you. We have enough flies as it is.