Arctic Light

Last full day of my fall road trip, which is good because I'm starting to receive plaintive "when are you coming hooooome" emails from the Beloved Spouse.

My previous places were pretty swank, but this cabin is appealingly rustic. Well, mostly appealing - it does have running water and the info on the place says that the water is "potable," by which you might guess "won't kill you but tastes terrible" and you would be correct. It was so bad that I went out at 8pm last night hoping to find a place that was open (which I did, a little convenience store at a campground up the road) and bought a few bottles of extremely overpriced bottled water for drinking and tea. I think it's all right for cooking and brushing teeth with.

The propane stove is so old that it doesn't have an igniter or a pilot light - there's a long-handled barbecue lighter to ignite the burners. I think it's distinctly possible that we had this exact stove when I was a little kid in the '70s. It looks just like it. (And I can't get over how much smaller it is than a modern stove, it's like half the size of ours at home. You can see the scale of the stove by the size of the teakettle, which is not huge, it's just a normal-sized teakettle.)



All of that aside, the place where I'm staying is behind an airstrip used by a flightseeing service (not too busy, I see a few planes a day) and the view from the kitchen table looks like this:



That's the view out the window, not paintings!

It was cold and rainy today, so I stayed in most of the day, worked on my Closer exchange assignment and did some business stuff related to my book launch on Tuesday. But later in the afternoon I decided to go for a scenic drive out to the Savage River hiking trail (as far as you can drive in a private vehicle on the Denali park road; the drive goes from the park entrance, which is a bit north of here, to Mile 14) and I had no regrets because it was STUNNING, peak colors and sweeping red and gold vistas. It was "I can't believe this is a real place and not a fantasy world" levels of gorgeous.







This sign implies adventures ahead.



After that I was going to be EXTREMELY salty if I saw no moose at all - but I did! It was a cow and a calf, their presence advertised by a large cluster of RVs and tour buses on the side of the road.



One more scenic visa:



And tomorrow I drive home.

My current location:



It's a riverside cabin on the Resurrection River near Seward. This river flows out of the Exit Glacier, and if you drive up the road a few miles, you will in fact see the glacier!



I was getting a bit jaded about glaciers by this point because I had just driven through a mountain pass with lots of them, but they were all far away and high up, so by this point I was thinking "meh, another glacier" and then I came around a corner and there was that view and I guess you don't get jaded about glaciers after all.

( More pictures and the rest of the day under the cut )

Today I read a NYT travelogue on the remote Scottish island of St. Kilda, which so intrigued me that I ended up following up with more reading on two things.

First: mailboats! The island (inhabited until the last inhabitants moved away in the 1930s) had no mail service, so by the late 1800s, the islanders had developed a unique way of posting mail. They would put them in a makeshift "boat," made of anything handy that would float, and set it loose on the water in the hopes it would make its way to a shore where someone would post the mail for them. (Which apparently happened surprisingly often due to prevailing ocean currents.) This article talks about it in detail. There was also a commemorative mailboat launch in 2010 that turned up in Norway 10 years later.

The other thing I was reading about was the feral Soay sheep, which have lived on the islands for perhaps as long as 4000 years and may represent the last relics of the small, shaggy, hair-coated Neolithic sheep that were first kept domestically on the British Isles. They are hardy and extremely easy keepers, much less delicate than most domestic sheep, and if I ever get sheep, I want these. I bet they'd do okay in Alaska.

rachelmanija and I are now in Arizona! Highlights and lowlights (mostly highlights) of our Tucson trip so far:

* At the rental car place in the airport, Rachel asked if our rental had a built-in GPS. It did not. The attendant offered to go see if they had any cars that did. He came back to inform us that the only car currently on their lot with a built-in GPS was a 2019 Mustang convertible. So guess what we are now driving.

.... it is amazing. Though slightly nerve-wracking to drive, because it is a brand new $50K car with an astonishing amount of horsepower and controls that are so sensitive and complex that we keep finding ourselves spending 10 minutes trying to figure out how to do normal car things like turn on the air conditioning. Taking the top down and cruising on the highway is FUCKING AWESOME, though. :D

* The first night, we decided to pick up a six-pack of beer to take back to our AirBnB. We asked the clerk if they had a bottle opener. There was a baffled pause and he was like "uh, I'm not sure" and starts LOOKING UNDER THE COUNTER. We went "No, no, to BUY!" and were directed to the right shelf, but we left the store wondering just how far this would have gone and in what possible set of circumstances having the clerk in the store open our beers for us and then let us walk out of the store with them would have led to anything good.

* We got two different AirBnBs so that we could split our time between a quiet, secluded location in the suburbs, and being in the middle of downtown. The first one was quiet and clean and nice, and we heard coyotes howling and stargazed from the deck. AirBnB #2 so far has turned out to lack the extra bed that was promised (this isn't that big a deal because it was at least partly due to our failure to read the optional details, and we don't mind sharing a bed), and perhaps more critically, it has turned out to lack hot water, and the bathroom is first of all down the hall and shared with a next-door shop, secondly is not very clean, and ... did I mention the lack of hot water? Because it's kind of a problem. >_>

It is, however, cute and quirky and charming. We had a conversation with our hostess which went something like this:

Hostess: So, have you two been friends for a long time?
Us, slightly baffled: Uh ... about five years, I guess?

She also pointed out about 5 times in the conversation that Tucson is very LGBT friendly, that this place is very LGBT/trans friendly, etc. It was something like 3 hours later that we looked at each other and were like "Uh ... I think she was asking if we were a couple."

We are dense.

(And now there's only one bed. I think I've read this fanfic.)

At least she didn't ask us if we were twins.

She was also one of multiple people in Tucson who have successfully guessed that I'm from Fairbanks (not merely Alaska generally, but Fairbanks, specifically) before I told them. She had also not only lived in Fairbanks in the past, but worked in Denali Park the same summer I did, at a business next to the one where I worked at. Small world.

* Today we went on a guided nature hike. As we were cruising down the road toward the trailhead in our Mustang, one of us (me, I'm pretty sure) remarked on how smoothly the trip was going so far. (This was before we discovered the lack of hot water in tonight's AirBnB.) Not 2 minutes later, we drew to a halt at water flowing across the road and a "road closed" sign.

We contemplated this, contemplated our incredibly expensive rental car with the 2" ground clearance, and decided perhaps we'd walk. We were due to the trailhead at 5, and it was at that point almost exactly 5. This was our second try at the nature hike, because on the previous day we'd ended up cancelling and rescheduling due to having underestimated how long it would take us to drive back to the city from our south-of-Tucson excursion to a lovely little arts community called Tubac, which had involved making everyone on the nature hike wait for us for about 15 minutes while we desperately tried to fight our way across town through road construction and rush-hour traffic before we ended up rescheduling. So it was with a certain amount of embarrassment that we texted the guide to let him know that we were almost there, REALLY, WE MEAN IT THIS TIME ... as we were hopping over braided channels of the CREEK flowing across the middle of the road and trying not to get our feet wet. The GPS said it was only 0.2 miles! We could be there in 5 minutes!

He came and picked us up, which was good since it was more like 3/4 of a mile. The hike was fantastic, and we saw a coyote and bats and learned a lot about saguaro cactus, and then got a ride back to our car. "The water has gone down a foot since yesterday," he remarked as he let us out at our car. We contemplated on the drive back to town that possibly the information that the road is bisected by a creek should have come up, maybe just ONCE, in all of our various texting/calling with him over the last couple of days as we failed repeatedly to show up for his nature hikes. This is doubly ironic because during the hike he had mentioned that flash floods are very dangerous in the desert and just a foot of water can sweep a hiker off their feet or a car downstream. So maybe mentioning the foot of water on the road would have been helpful then?

It was a really fun hike, though!

* Rachel has been talking me into buying all the cactus things, including an actual cactus (edit: two actual cacti) that I am going to try to take on the plane with me because I have no common sense.

And now it's 12:15 a.m. and our not-so-great (but LGBT-friendly!) AirBnB has a party going on next door. I plan to try to sleep anyway.

Skin Game was my on-plane reading for the flight(s) from Tampa to Fairbanks, interspersed with writing fanfic in which characters are stranded in the Canadian wilderness (while flying over the Canadian wilderness). And boy, flying from Tampa to Fairbanks is a LOT OF PLANE. First there was a 1.5 hour hop from Tampa to Atlanta, then a 5.5 hour Atlanta-Seattle flight, then the 3.5-hour Seattle to Fairbanks stage. BUT IT GOT WORSE! We were delayed for 2 1/2 hours in Atlanta (2 1/2 hours of sitting on the plane, because there were mechanical issues that they kept thinking would be resolved quickly, which weren't) so that ended up being 8 hours in the same seat (ow my legs), and I missed my connection in Seattle and ended up being rebooked on a flight that got into Fairbanks at 1:40 a.m. I think that was 19 hours in airports, total? I really needed a distracting book, is what I'm saying.

Luckily I had one.

( Spoilers for Skin Game )

I'm leaving tomorrow (well, as it's past midnight, technically today) for most of a week with my in-laws in Florida, so my slow and erratic responses to comments and whatnot will be even MORE slow and erratic than usual. I'll see if I can manage to avoid almost drowning this time. Wish me luck.

I was thinking today about writing in different fandoms, and how the exact nature of the source canon brings out different things in my writing. It's not just fanfic -- I write a little differently on different original projects, too, but I think that with fanfic the process is a little more ... obvious? Transparent? Because it's not a matter of thinking "Oh, this is YA, so I shouldn't [xyz]" -- trying to tailor a project for a particular market or rating, or just being subconsciously constrained by having decided "this short story is urban fantasy", for example. There are no market considerations at all with fanfic, it's entirely a function of what the source material makes me want to write, and that's what makes it so interesting.

The specific example I was thinking about today has to do with characters swearing. When I was writing White Collar fanfic, I tended to shy away from using profanity, for the most part. It just didn't feel right. Whereas for the MCU characters, even though the actual source material is just about as PG-rated as White Collar, it doesn't sound right if I don't -- especially for military or ex-military characters like Sam or Bucky. This makes a little more sense when it's a matter of consciously reflecting how they talk in canon, but in this case it isn't, really -- they don't swear all that much in canon, either. But that's how their character-voices sound in my head. Whereas if I were writing, say, Peter from White Collar, I don't think I'd have him swear (much) except in really desperate circumstances, as opposed to Sam who I think probably tosses around words like "shit" in his inner dialogue all the time.