Hello everyone,
I wrote this email a while back and figured I'd edit it and send it. After about two weeks, here it is, relatively unchanged, in a new medium that helps to justify the semi-anthropological dimension it has acquired as a "vintage" email. I don't necessarily feel the same way I did then, especially about the first and last paragraphs, but it's a good attempt at a picture of what arriving in a place like this is like. Here goes:

I'm sitting in "my" lab and I don't want to plow through a science article so it's time to write, to narratively or just discursively explore the alter-world I'm currently living in. I'm still pretty much the same person, presumably, but I've encountered a bit of a role reversal. In the city I'm often the active one, the adventurous one. I feel like a lazy guy here. One of my favorite activities is sitting in the cafeteria, which is a wooden slant-roofed structure built onto the side of a trailer, and reading national geographic and talking to the people who wander in and out in between meals. On days off many of the other young people here go on back-breaking, or at least very high altitude hikes up mountains and through the dramatic alpine valleys that abound just ten or fifteen miles away, where the mountains rise up from the small rolling hills of the tundra. Not that I can't or don't do those hikes; I did one last Sunday. But there's a difference between me and people like Joanna, who came with me yesterday on what was supposed to be a short paddle across Toolik lake, for which the field station is named, and then a jaunt up to a large hill nearby. She did not care about the thunder that started to rumble above us and that eventually rolled into lightning. In fact she was excited by it. I, on the other hand, was more than slightly perturbed by being the tallest upright object for miles around, in the middle of an electric rainstorm. Don't get me wrong, the people are great and nice and she was quite happy to turn around, but this place, it's different and difficult and fun.
The twenty-four hour sun and the buzzing clouds of mosquitos that often engulf your body like an itch-causing carpet are not fun. I walk around in my waterproof sun hat and I wear a goofy torso-suit of mesh netting when I go out to collect samples. I also use bugspray that says it's 100% DEET- it's a heady feeling to see my high-pitched tormentors hovering and darting back and forth a good three inches from my body. But the protection lasts only about 10 minutes, after which the bolder mosquitos deign to endure the pain my spray causes them. They're not like a solid cloud, the mosquitos, more like gangs of noisy kids that accumulate and won't go away, especially in areas of open tundra near water. Well I guess kid's don't get blown away by wind or grounded by rain, but you get the picture I hope. But this paragraph was supposed to be optimistic, the mosquitos a brief detour into pessimism. But they're so much fun to talk about!
Toolik lake field station is a permanent research facility that is also a well-run village. It reminds me of a summer camp for scientists. It has lots of sharp minds, prominent researchers, nature enthusiasts, as well as a staff that is friendly, devoted, down to earth. I think that having the scientists and the staff live and dine in the same general area creates a very good working relationship. Being hundreds of miles from most other human places helps too. Besides the distance thing, Columbia could take a page out of Toolik's book, possibly connecting their big inefficient bureaucracy with their academics.
The science atmosphere pretty much pervades- it is the goal of much every-day activity and intention. Other things, like friendships and eating, are important and focused on. But I'd say they're like the connecting tissue of a body, like the metabolism of that body, while science is the motion towards which the sentient brain sets itself. It is such an interesting and different atmosphere to be in. I could small-talk with most people, but with all the scientists I merely need to broach the topic of their research or any science to set them off on a discourse about data and theories. It's like uncorking a keg of wine, or, if you don't like science, something less pleasant.
The hikes here are interpretative. It's so different from the east coast where hikes are an extension of guided lives daily lived, with their set trails, known routes, relatively safe courses. Tundra and mountain hikes in Alaska are, to a larger but not complete extent, walks in the wilderness. They are better if people look at a map beforehand, but there are few trails and it's basically just walking in the wilderness wherever there is beauty and relative passability. In the arctic national wildlife refuge (anwr,) visitors are actually advised to walk in a horizontal formation, not a vertical line. By walking spread-out over the landscape as opposed to single file, like one would do on an east-coast dirt trail, you can minimize your impact on a wild and "pristine" area.
I have a few theories about why that is. Maybe there's just too much developed area in the east coast, but then again Adirondack state park in upstate NY is one of the biggest public parks in the world. I think there's also a bit of the west coast/settler mentality mixed in. Perhaps that is represented by the fact that my lab-mate Heather is always criticizing east-coast regimentedness and my own conditioned or endemic obsessiveness. Maybe she's just too critical. It's interesting to note that despite the freedom of hiking, people at the field station still congregate around certain hikes and few people go off hiking on their own.
More news soon. I'd love to here what other people are up to this summer.
Love,
Jonathan