Northern coastal life

Reason #3494983 I love Alaska: Sunset tonight is 10:54 pm.

I biked out to the Spit today for the Kachemak Bay SeaFest/Wooden Boat Festival. Wasn't all that interesting, to be honest, but I did meet a man with an absolutely beautiful wooden kayak. Apparently it took him 10 months, it's never been on the water, it has sat in his shed for 5 years. What a shame.

Environmental soapbox time

Environmental soapbox time: Tonight I saw a showing of Black Wave, a documentary on the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill and its aftermath. If you guys recall, when I was up here last summer the case finally was concluded in the Supreme Court.  The final settlement could not POSSIBLY do right to all who were affected by the spill. Even now, almost twenty years later, there are places in Prince William Sound where if you dig 6 inches into the sediment, you can find oil residue. The pink salmon fishery there was closed for 2 or 3 years after the spill (because the salmon didn't COME), and the herring fishery completely collapsed. Besides environmental effects, there are all these workers who were employed to clean up the oil who now have all kinds of health problems because of PAHs they inhaled from the oil. These are carcinogens.

It was pretty damn depressing.  The legistlative system, which is supposed to be protecting our rights, pretty much failed all these people, because Exxon is such a huge company that it was able to spend millions of dollars on legal fees to extend court proceedings and to appeal and reappeal...

However, what I found really interesting about all this is what is coming out/growing from the result of this movie. Riki Ott, a toxicologist/political activist who has lived in Cordova and written books on the spill was here at the movie screening for Q&A.  She has been touring with her books and this movie since October, and given the timeframe of all this - Obama being elected, the economic collapse, frustrations with corporate greed/deceit, the growing awareness that we really need to get off oil dependency (the environmental/health problems discussed in Black Wave just add more good reasons to do so), she's found that people are extremely receptive to DOING something about this. And so this movement has started, to create a constitutional amendment stripping large corporations of their ability to be treated in court equal to a person. I haven't looked too much into this but at the moment, what is most exciting is the idea that I could be around for yet another historical event. Winds of change people, winds of change.

I have to admit, given all that is going on lately - increases of natural disasters, growing global conciousness, collapsing economy, mobilization of people....Maybe the Mayans had it right.

Summer is here

Well I'm back in Alaska, and back on my environmental soapbox.

Personal news first: It is GREAT to be back. Like I mentioned last time, I jumped right into the night life my first weekend here. It was awesome to see 'my' people again, but I also realized that one reason I love this town is that I feel completely comfortable just turning to the stranger next to me and introducing myself. Especially being female, in the majority of contexts this is socially unacceptible/can be taken the wrong way. But not here. Ha, I suppose its possible that I'm reading everyone completely wrong and am actually living in this oblivious social faux-pas. But let's hope not. I think it's more likely just a friendly place because one, it's a small town and I generally know about half the people in a given place at a given time (which makes it likely that the stranger I'm talking to knows people I know thus making them not-quite-so-strange), and two, it's a seasonal town where so many people are coming in and out. 

The weather has been absolutely fantastic. Other than yesterday and the day before (which were rainy and chilly), its been sunny and warm for the past two weeks. People have been saying that we've had warmer weather this month than ANY day all of last summer. I'm hoping this is setting a trend for the summer. Last summer (the locals say) was unusually cold.

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I returned to Seattle this week as a stop-over on my way up to Alaska, in hopes of scoping out housing for the fall. It was a success! I found an apartment complex that was pre-leasing for the school year, and picked out a little one bedroom in the U-district. Mostly because it has a balcony. But I'm excited - a current tenant had good things to say about the management (lets just hope it doesn't change over the summer), it's close to campus but far enough away to be quieter and a bit more residential. Close to the bike trail, close to Trader Joe's, close to the water...I think its going to be good :)

It was fun wandering around the city this week with the notion of "man, I'm going to LIVE here!" I really like this city a lot (despite all the rain, and yes, it was cold and rainy even NOW, in MAY). I was perusing the city paper the other day and there are so many things going on! Art, music, theater, clubs...I'm betting the trick will be to actually take the time to detach myself from schoolwork and actually seek these things out once and in a while. And I can't not mention the numerous bookstores all over the U-district. 3 used, 1 new. I went a BIT overboard with book buying this week, but at least I'm all armed for chilly Alaskan nights. I cannot resist used bookstores. And the ones here are so awesome.

It hit me this afternoon, sitting in my friend's apartment, that tomorrow night I will be back in Homer! I've been so pumped this week about my Seattle future that I haven't even thought too much about the more immediate future. But I am going to jump right into the mélé there - tomorrow night my friend is playing host to a QUADRUPLE birthday, then next night is a concert...And I have an entire week before I start work. 

This year off is going pretty well, I have to say.

PSA

FYI, I'm now a contributor to my friend's blog Eat.Grow.Live - a collective of people writing about eating sustainably, growing locally, and enjoying life. I'll be blogging about sustainability in Alaska, but there are a lot of other fun tidbits from the other authors. Check it out :)

Nuevo México

My most recent jaunt was to Santa Fe, the capital of New Mexico, and the older capital city in what is now the United States, and one of the oldest surviving of cities founded by European colonists.  Before I left, all I heard was raving about how beautiful the city was. I have to admit, I wasn't particularly impressed with the city itself. It is very brown. And being an east-coast girl, it appears that I am partial to green. Now, that's not to say I do not appreciate the beauty of the high desert. There is something extremely powerful in the starkness of the landscape, the yellow earth and red rocks...But if I lived somewhere full of such muted, earthy tones, I'd want to spice it up with the colors of my house. And every single building in the entire city sprawl was brown. I actually found the city extremely hard to navigate due to this fact - because everything looked the same, I found myself getting disoriented the majority of the time.

That being said, New Mexico is a pretty fascinating place. Because it has been a settled region for quite some time (around the same time as Jamestown, my WM friends), there is a rich mix of Native, Spanish, and Anglo influence, which manifests itself in the culture, music and food of the region. 

I'll admit however, I probably didn't delve into this as much as I could have/perhaps should have. Because my reasons for coming were purely outdoor related.

I took myself on some fantastic hikes. The landscape there is so big, so vast, so loud. At first glance, it doesn't seem like much is growing, but as your eyes adjust to the nature of the place, you begin to pick out the small details - a little yellow flower growing in the shelter of a rocky outcrop. A scaly gold lizard basking in the sun on the dirt trail. The dichotomy of BIG (steep cliff faces looming upwards, huge puffy clouds in a sky that expands in all directions) and the small (beetles scuttling along the ground, aforementioned wildflowers) is so startling. You feel so small and large at the same time. You feel grounded in the universe.