otters of the twin variety

This week I had a couple of long days - I went on training to be a spotter for air search and rescues. It started with ground school, which was kind of boring. Somehow, and I'm not sure how this is possible, the material was interesting after a fashion, but it was being presented in a sort of junior high science movie format. At one point in the movie, a man with some gooey blood on his head is standing in a field, waving his arms excitedly, while an 'injured' man (you can tell he's injured because he's covered with a blanket)lies on his back, at goo-head man's feet. The airplane, apparently filled with poorly trained spotters, passes overhead and disappears. The concerned voice-over says, "Imagine the despair of these injured passengers, when the rescue plane they have been waiting for flies right over without seeing them." The man standing up assumes a posture of great despair, with his gooey head in his hands, and the injured man on the ground gives a feeble and heart-rending wave in the direction of the oblivious aircraft. That made me laugh. I mean, it's not really funny. Really.

The second day, which was much more interesting (but colder and more uncomfortable) was the flight training.

Nine of us went on a Twin Otter, and it was a bit chilly and cramped. Very nice little aircraft, though. You can really see a lot out the windows, which is good if you're meant to be looking for small things on the tundra.

Spotting is funny. We were told we had targets - an abandoned snowmobile, a tent frame, a couple of old cabins, and a disintegrating boat. So we performed our procedures, as directed, but it's hard. You are meant to be scanning in the same direction that you would read, I guess because that's a natural movement for your eyes. At first I was concentrating really hard and it was making my eyes hurt a lot. Eventually it began to feel more natural, but then I started getting distracted. As previously mentioned here, there are a lot of muskox around and they run away when planes go over. And, as a human being, my eyes are drawn to moving objects. So the mental soundtrack was: "scanning, scanning, don't look at the muskox, damn, I'm looking at the muskox. what did I miss?"

The man sitting in front of me spotted the cabins, I spotted the boat, but we never did see the snowmobile, despite frequent passes. At the end the pilot said, somewhat sheepishly, that there was a possibility that he had plotted the snowmobile wrong, and it never was where we were looking...

The flight training has to be two 1hr flights, so after an hour of looking for the damn snowmobile, we landed at Jayko Lake, on a short gravel runway, and got out to look around. And I wished I had my camera because it was very pretty. We ate our snacks and laughed at each other, and then we all got back in the plane to do the second half of the training.

So now, if there's an air search called, I might have to go and be a spotter. I'm told that the hard part of that is that they keep going until either they find what is being looked for or the search is called off, and the last one they did was 36 hours of spotting, napping, and peeing in plastic bags. But my bag is now packed, I'm certified, and ready to go.

Aha! the internet has relaxed its vigilance. I can access pages.

All the kids are now away. Kirsten is in Quebec (with my laptop, as previously mentioned), Ian's in Vernon BC doing a rifle coach course until the middle of August, and Rachel's at cadet camp in Whitehorse.

Kirsten has called lots, she's having a good time now that she's stopped being homesick. Rachel called last night and she doesn't sound homesick at all, she has a posse already, and they're all going horseback riding on the weekend. She was really quite apprehensive about going - she's a worrier and she felt that all the wasps in the Yukon would be having a convention to decide how to torment her while she was there, and that all the army guys would yell at her. She told me gleefully that the leaders had taught her and her cohorts how to make their beds, but that it was so complicated and so hot there that they figured they were just going to sleep on top of their covers rather than mess it up and have to remake. (To be fair, she did step in a wasp nest, during a camping trip when she was about four, and got stung very badly. And at home she never makes her bed.)

Ian hasn't called at all, but he's a boy.

Miguel and I went and stayed at the cabin for the whole weekend, and the sun shone (no romantic sunsets in the land of 24hr daylight). We went overland on Saturday to Long Lake, about an hour away from the cabin. The muskoxen have fuzzy little calves and I tried to take pictures but they don't like to be disturbed and I didn't want to get too close. One old shaggy muskox was standing on top of Mount Pelly, like a sentinel.