The deep freeze is here in Fairbanks, for the extended winter season. Consistently and clearly, we've been at 20 to 30 degrees below zero for the last two weeks, and concepts like movement, and clarity, and strangeness, have been squarely in our minds and breaths.

It's not really desolate here, at least not with the same connotations I think the term normally carries. The cold and ice and snow cover are almost exclusively gorgeous, and display colors and feelings that are varied and vivid. It's blue, as in the picture above, taken at about three in the afternoon, and pink and silver, and deep, dark green and charcoal. Relief, in its senses similar to both solace and contour, is a prominent idea.

Awareness of temperature and climate is also very clearly discriminated for me. My memories of temperatures this low, from the upper plains and Sandhills of Nebraska and South Dakota, include stinging winds and blowing snow, and temporary, limited confinement to vehicles rushing to warm and secure but anxious living rooms and fireplaces. Here though, the cold and dark are sustained, and still. Walking out, with others, into a late morning or afternoon of permanently frigid air, toward normal destinations and tasks, is tough to describe, but it is, ultimately, a confident and reassuring act. It's unique and stark and severe, but this weather lends the community a resolve that's weirdly comforting. And it doesn't feel all that mean.

That's a whole big bag of hops. It's always a little exciting to be presented with a surplus of specialty ingredients like this one, but it was about the only 'real' ingredient we used during the course of the six-week brewing and fermenting class I finished up last week. Most other constituents in our brews, such as dried malt extract and yeast were prepackaged or treated. The class, a basic one, both made it clear that beermaking is a pretty accessible chore and suggested the craft in most consumer brewing comes from additions, rather than modifications, to the cores and types of ingredients we used.

Hops aren't grown in Alaska, obviously, but there are plenty of Pac NWers here and they seem to have brought their tastes with them. Our Oregon and California friends have it awfully good, beer-wise, but we're not dry up here. We miss Dogfish and Sam, but beers from brewers like Stone, New Belgium, and especially Deschutes keep us plenty happy. And the Silver Gulch microbrewery up the road in Fox has some excellent beer and food choices on occasion.

Leave it to me, though, and you'll have delicious Hoppy Cabbage and Radish Ales from TanaNate Brewdogging in late 2011. Look out. 

Pictured above is something called 'Starvation Gulch,' an annual event at UAF featuring five or six house-sized structures built of transport pallets collected from businesses around the Fairbanks area. Like Halloween, it seems to be an event placed strategically on the calendar to mark the day(s) we all unpack boxes of gloves and hats and scarves, in addition to commemorating... not much else. No charities, no causes, no explicit historical context.

Big fires though. Like, 40-50 feet high, and not just one. In fact, the closest I could get to any sort of legitimacy for the University's seeming participation and promotion of the event was the inconspicuous and necessary constant presence of the school's fire department and Student Firefighter Program, a noted development and training unit designed to aid the surrounding community when dealing with extreme and unstable climate conditions.

So: it was a big deal, an event students were discussing and anticipating a week or two in advance. And, to be honest, it lived up to the hype, in a really primal, spectacular kind of way. It was, y'know, charming in how simple it was. 'Here, look - a bunch of really, really big, really hot fires.' Not completely unlike July 4th, though more unapologetic, if that's possible.

We're still here, I assure you. We haven't been eaten by bears, or wolves, or Joe Miller. Quite a strange and transitional time recently, it seems like for everyone here.

The run-up to Halloween kind of makes people anxious, I gather. Seems like folks approach it as the last real 'moment' before things get really hairy and life changes for the frigid and everyone heads inside.

But there's snow here already, and it's nighttime until ten in the morning (which is nice, since it lets me feel pretty ambitious no matter what time I get things rolling in the a.m.). So, again, we're building some kind of artificial boundary between the sun and the ice, when we all know it's a pretty explicitly gradual move.

Plenty of mountain shots to come; UAF Faculty Development took us on a trip through Denali National Park last weekend, and there was plenty to see and document. Mountains. Lakes and streams. Bears. Wolves. Mountain goats and Lynx. Very sweet.

Before we arrived in Alaska, as we were making plans and coming to terms with such a big move, Sarah relayed a couple of times the truism she'd heard from a UAF colleague: that in Fairbanks, we'd never forget our location on the globe. There are plenty of reasons for this... our weather shifts dramatically and rapidly, daylight hours are first abundant and then rare and precious, and access to amenities can never be taken for granted. But the mountain above, Denali, is perhaps the most dominant and dramatic reminder of our unique position and landscape. One hundred and twenty miles away, the mountain is plainly visible from Fairbanks on a clear day, and the closer one gets, the more intimidating and surreal the vision becomes. It's a monster.

Yo y'allz, sorry I've been off the grid for a hot minute, but I'm back in the blogging game now and ready to drop some skillz.

I'm gonna stay on the 'time' tip for a bit, since it's really what's made it difficult to get into the site for the last week. I've had plenty to say about concepts and adjustments to schedules, but all those changes really make it tough to imagine the wedding and reception were just a couple short months ago. The kind of changes and experiences we've seen since then make me wonder whether the kind of 'standardized' scales we use, with little exception, are always effective and useful in the way we want them to be.

Bakhtin, for example, wrote about the 'chronotope' as a way of distinguishing linguistics and narrative characteristics according to ideas about time and space present in the culture from which stories originated. The notion that respective temporal and spatial adjustments can both characterize, and result from, unique communal experience, is especially resonant to me now, after months of upheaval and readjustment. Quite literally, spending weeks and crossing countries when traveling leads to 'big' feelings and expressions, and translating these signals back to daily patterns and charges is a process that deserves attention.

This whole thing should sound at least slightly familiar to anyone back in the varied rigors of a school's semester after a summer of more scheduled and leisurely daily work, or to those preparing again for Saturdays and Sundays now consistently full of student activities or regular yardwork or college and pro sports on TV. I suppose this is about habits, too: how long does it take before speedy- or expansive-seeming behaviors begin to feel 'natural' or normal? Still working to establish effective personal rhythms and itineraries here, I wonder exactly how flexible and adapted our sensibilities can be, and how influential our adjacent cultures and lifestyles end up.

Chesterton: "The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land."

There are stronger forces than culture. Maybe.

We experienced some pretty abnormal-seeming places on our way here, including plenty of Canadian towns on the Alaska Highway that appeared to be little else than bouquets of eateries and lodgings collected around the vital fueling stations and washrooms.

Driving the Alaska Highway through sparsely populated areas of British Columbia and the Yukon can add up to revelations about important things like space and time. It's odd and sort of refreshing to experience the marriage of modern roads and vehicles with much older ideas of isolation and long-distance travel. Pace and distance are largely undefined, left for individuals to scale and log. Infrastructure carries a different meaning, something both leaner and more extensive.

Along with new and more robust ideas of geography, we've stepped into time that is more fluid and tonal. Since the heavens leave us with progressively little from which to map our daily structures and limits, we strive to grow new or newly apparent qualities, termed maybe something like "mental rhythmic rigors" or "temporal biopower."

In other words, if you're ever writing about the "Heroes" song and album by David Bowie, don't forget the quotation marks.

The joys of Silly Season in Alaska. Enjoy Singin' Sam's Web presence here. As you can see, he loves punctuation.

First day of classes down (for me anyway; s42 is finishing up with her grad students now). And along with a liberal use of apostrophes, I'm preparing for lots of everything. The undergrad population at UAF is notably diverse; it's fantastic. My Tu/Th Technical Writing course ranges past the 18-35 demographic and past the North American continent. It includes hockey players and musicians and a mother of seven and a veteran of Alaska Pipeline construction.

There's a open spirit of learning at UAF, and it's a pleasure to have students with wide interests and experience, with whom to build a semester of progressive writing and discussion.

Tomorrow: Academic Writing about the Social and Natural Sciences. Whether they indulge as willingly as technical writers in nostalgic Neil Diamond quotes? We shall see.

As Matt Damon says: yeah I'm a doorman. To the SKY.

Some of that slammin' wine we drank up, this bottle courtesy of the Sedgehammer. On Sarah's July b-day.

During our Napa honeymoon week, we had so much vino that it took me at least two weeks afterward to break the habit of swirling everything (water, soda, coffee, milk) around in its glass to aerate it. It was a delicious and incredible experience. I'll have pictures and words to share about this for the rest of my life.

In particular though, that week provided roughly ten more chapters in the big book about why we have the single best collection of friends in the entire world. I'm not sure there's a word for the kind of time we had in California, and so much of the unique experience is thanks to the people we had around us. 'Joy' is good, but it's a little too vague. 'Indulgence' is a favorite of mine, but it implies a kind of submission and gluttony that, while most definitely present during the week, were not the focus. 'Ecstasy' sounds too dirty. 'Celebration' is getting close, for no other reason than it binds the experience tightly to so many other great events shared with these folks and others from the past.

To put it another way, there's a Napa poem in me somewhere that I'll work on for years and never get quite right.

Crossing into the Terminal Range, Canadian Rockies. August 9.

Notions like shift and change are redefined here. Driving through the mountains, temperatures regularly swung 50 degrees over the course of a few hours. Daily and weekly rhythms, during and since the trip, have seemed both essential and completely inconsequential. We've alternated between large crowds and complete isolation so often that it's hard to say which feels more familiar.

More than anything, these new measures of change have prompted resignation, and quick acceptance. We build and consult new gauges. We haven't abandoned thermometers and calendars; rather, they're bigger. And a different color maybe.

Wanted to get into this yesterday but didn't really have a chance...

From wildlife refuges to Friday night football, there's a whole lot in Fairbanks that's familiar to someone who grew up in the rural Plains. There are parties out in the woods. There's a generous helping of lumber yards. Everyone knows what kind of bacon to buy at the store.

Howevah.

Remarkably, the seclusion we experience here leads to some pretty stark differences from similar-sized rural cities like Rapid City, South Dakota or Grand Island, Nebraska. There are things like expressways and industrial parks. Falafel is easy to find. The Saturday morning farmers' market is likely the best we've visited outside of San Francisco.

It's a bit of a surprise, but juxtaposed with a rural confidence and pragmatism are diverse and abundant resources.

Doubtless these characteristics will be even more greatly appreciated in another 8 or 12 weeks, when good sense and Thinsulate are not luxuries, but requirements.

"It is the artist who is truthful and it is photography which lies, for in reality time does not stop."
--Auguste Rodin, 1878

Rebroadcast this week, the "Time" episode of Radiolab* covers the event that prompted the Rodin quote above, the Leland Stanford/Eadward Muybridge experiment that leapt camera technology and techniques forward and prompted the accelerated development of motion pictures in the late 19th century.

The thing is, though Rodin can be excused for defending his craft against new and threatening competition from photographic images, there's little in my mind to distinguish theoretically the striving realism of Rodin's sculpture from the selective and crafted photographs produced by early, complexly constructed camera equipment.

A hundred and thirty years later though, I've got a picture machine that fits in the pocket of my dungarees and also rings the switchboard operator and also plays my phonograph records. Admittedly, consumer technology has removed much of the artistry and craft from our visual production, and this is almost definitely something to lament. Qualitative change, it seems, can happen gradually.

But: if I had to assemble a stable tripod and step under a big black hood thing, or if I had to purchase and replace emulsion film after every 24 shots, this laptop certainly wouldn't contain more than 2000 images from the last three months alone.

Costs! Benefits!

So! While not every photo you'll see here belongs in a gallery, just about everything worth posting will reveal and illustrate some "real" and "reliable" experiences now etched on my mind. And that's something.

Above is a herd of bison, some as big as the car we're driving, leisurely crossing a busy British Columbian section of the Alaska Highway, which stretches the roughly 1500-mile distance from Fort Nelson, BC to Fairbanks, AK.




*Listen to the episode, from Radiolab's first season, here. Then listen to the 35-odd other episodes they've produced since 2005. It is time well spent on learning.

Hi all.

We're here, in Alaska. And I'm here, on the Web.

The Web is a crazy spot, obvs. Now, and here, you'll likely see me construct an amalgam of a personality that in some major ways is likely to be more reliable and genuine than any I've had before.

In other ways, it will be "built" and "considered" and artificial... because I hope for an unpredictable and dynamic and unfamiliarly merged audience. But more, because of how I imagine interaction taking place here, hopefully between me and others. More likely, between me and the virtual space.

A blog is smaller than Facebook and Twitter, tools whose limits seem harder and harder to locate. Advantages of owned spaces are their real and imagined and intentional and unintentional limits, all of which can prompt some important things like imagination and creativity.

So here's hoping those are things that happen here.

Thanks for visiting. Comments are open. Come back tomorrow.