I had seen Chris at work everyday in the Kuukpik Hotel and just kind of assumed he had been around the Arctic for awhile as he was friendly and seemed confident enough. I asked how his Thanksgiving was. He said he had spent the bigger part of the day cooking Thanksgiving dinner for hotel guests - mostly oil industry workers preparing to build the ice roads and it was like Thanksgiving never happened for him. He had worked all day long. He was ready for a break, even a chance to go home for awhile. When I asked where home was, I expected him to say something like Anchorage, Fairbanks, Kenai, Eagle River, Wasilla... Instead he said "Mobile, Alabama."
He had arrived one week earlier, after the sun had gone down for the winter. He was still in a bit of a state of shock. "Different," didn't even begin to describe how different it was here than in Mobile. When he had first arrived he had heard people talk about how unusually warm the weather was, but by his reckoning there was nothing warm about it. It was colder than he imagined it would be - could be. And the sun - he wanted so badly to see the sun again.
The sun will come back towards the end of January, I assured him, without mentioning that when the sun comes back, that's when the real deep freeze sets in.
At that, he was skeptical that the return of the sun in January would even mean he could see it. He wanted me to describe what the return of the sun would look like, so I held my right forearm horizontal to represent the southern horizon and then slid my left fist up in a shallow over the edge of that horizon as a representation of the sun and then let it slip right back down again. "But can you actually see the sun?" Chris asked.
"Of course," I answered.
He pressed me further. "But it goes right back down again."
Yes, but I illustrated how each successive day would be longer than the previous until the sun was up all the time, 24 hours a day. "How do you sleep?" he asked. I told him about summer activities, about children playing outside in the sun at 2 and 3 in the morning, hunters hunting on the ocean at any hour of the day or night the animals made themselves available.
Hunting - hunting was something he would like to do, Chris said.
Saturday, November 30, 2013 at 11:33AM 
