Join the Club

Current temperature in Fairbanks: -35 F

"The sea's only gifts are harsh blows, and occasionally the chance to feel strong. Now I don't know much about the sea, but I do know that that's the way it is here. And I also know how important it is in life not necessarily to be strong but to feel strong. To measure yourself at least once. To find yourself at least once in the most ancient of human conditions. Facing the blind death stone alone, with nothigh to help you but your hands and your own head." ~Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

          It’s been a little while since I have posted and I have a lot to catch you guys up on! I have started classes and they are going great! I dropped my graduate level class for psychology, I decided I wanted to spend less time on school work and more time exploring. My organic chemistry class and immunology class seem like they will be challenging but manageable. My immunology teacher is a very interesting individual. He is a tall, lanky and rather quirky Italian with a thick accent and a slight lisp. The back of his head looks like someone hit it with a frying pan and he always comes in dressed like your stereotypical European; Italian dress shoes, and vibrant ties that somehow match the rest of his flamboyant attire. My native art studio class is the class I am most excited for. Starting this week we are going to be carving ladles using hand tools, the same way the people of the native northwest would make them.

            Something that both surprises me and repulses me about here is the fact that EVERYONE smokes. It is really rather gross, especially since the cold traps all the cigarette smoke and car exhaust close to the ground resulting in a persistent air quality alert. I would think the idea of having to expose your hands to -40 F weather would be enough to deter one from stepping outside for a butt and may even be a sort of motivation to quit, but apparently not. I was outside taking pictures for 20 minutes in such weather and ended up looking like this:

Speaking of cold weather in this sub-arctic climate, there are some pretty neat and unusual things that come along with it. For starters, whenever a car is parked, it is plugged into an outlet set up at every four parking spots. This is done to help keep the battery and other vitals from freezing. 

It is funny to see people driving around campus with three prong cords sticking out of the hoods of their car, almost skipping along the ground as if even the cars are sticking out their tongues in protest of the cold. Even the trees have resorted to wearing sweaters!

            Back home when people see fog, they associate it with warm, humid weather. Here, it is associated with frigid, dry conditions. It isn't just called fog here, it is called ice fog or by a name that doesn’t sound quite so menacing, pogonip. It happens because the water in the atmosphere is freezing. This usually only happens when it gets to be about -40 F which is the coldest atmospheric water can get before freezing. I also learned that it gets so cold and dry here that if you blow bubbles when it is below -20 F, they freeze and you can actually put your finger in them without popping them. I also learned that you can also throw a cup of coffee, or any hot water based substance in the air and it will evaporate before hitting the ground. Yes, evaporate, not freeze. I plan to try both and will post pictures and videos, so don’t worry!

            I had my first moment of truly feeling like a foreigner the other day, of course besides occasionally being called out for saying “wicked”. I was sitting in the dining hall with my gentle giant friend Matt who was enjoying a grapefruit, the same way I would eat an orange. I asked him why he didn’t use a grapefruit spoon. He just looked at like me like I had sprouted another head. Of course a grapefruit spoon was mentioned right after our discussion about how New Englanders have a tendency to be rather rude and fast-paced, almost snooty. I then began asking anyone I could find in the dining hall if they had ever heard of a grapefruit spoon. No one. But I did get an “I don’t know, but I think I saw one the other day,” making it sound like some unusual ancient artifact. Apparently grapefruit spoons are an east coast thing, who knew?

            The other night I went to the College Coffeehouse with my roommate Katia, for some coffee and bluegrass music performed by a local band. It was quite cute! Definitely a place I will go back to for another band or open mic night.

            Last night was by far my most successful Alaskan experience so far. It started out seeming like it would be a pretty bland evening, I was about to get ready for bed when I checked the weather and realized it was -40 F. Time to join the 40 below club! I texted Katia and a few other people who were planning to join the club that night too, but everyone started to chicken out. I found my friend Matt who wanted to do it still, and we proceeded to try and find a sober driver to take us down to the school sign. We went to Matt’s room to ask his roommate and found a gathering of rather intoxicated individuals. A nice enough native girl came up to me with the intention of a normal introduction, but ended up falling on me and slobbering on the side of my face a bit as she spoke directly into my ear, my hand clenched in hers. Her boyfriend had a car, and decided we could use it so we could all join the 40 below club. We packed his car like a clown car and drove down to the school sign for a picture. -38 F. Damn! We drove around campus a bit waiting for it to cool down when I looked up at the sky out the passenger window. “The northern lights!” I shouted. Someone asked me what color they were. Knowing I had never seen them before, they were testing me. They were green, the most common color of aurora borealis. I almost started crying I was so happy to see them. I announced to everyone that it was my first time seeing them and that I had just checked something off my bucket list. Everyone always says how beautiful the northern lights are, but nothing compares to seeing them in person. It is like a green wave slithering across the night sky. It is amazing to watch them change right before your eyes, almost disappearing at times, ebbing and flowing like a cosmic ocean.

I was told it usually isn’t possible to get pictures of the northern lights, but I managed. I will try to get better ones on a night they are more intense and it isn't so foggy. Depending on weather conditions, they can actually be seen as often as a few times a week! For those of you interested, aurora borealis is caused by the collision of gaseous molecules in the atmosphere with charged particles released from the sun, these particles then get sucked into the Earth's magnetic field and are then channeled toward the poles. This is why it can only be seen near the poles of the planet. The colors seen in the lights are dependent of the atmospheric molecules involved. The green is produced by oxygen molecules about 60 miles above earth, nitrogen produces blue or purple auroras, and rarely red auroras can be seen caused by high altitude oxygen, at heights of up to 200 miles.

Not only did I get to see the northern lights for the first time last night, I also joined the 40 below club. After unloading the car and being given the keys by the owner of the car who neither Matt nor I knew, we decided to drive around town while waiting to join the club. This is a tradition here at UAF where students go down to the sign at the main entrance to campus that tells the temperature outside and take pictures in their bathing suits or underwear. It sounds crazy, perhaps even stupid, and it really kind of is. I don’t really know how to describe it, but -40 F really isn’t as cold as it sounds. I am not saying it is warm, I certainly wouldn’t break out the sunscreen and beach towel, but for about 2 minutes in a bathing suit it isn’t all that painful. The cold is really only bad when you try to breathe. It feels like your lungs are freezing like the wooly mammoth in The Day After Tomorrow that was found frozen with food still in its mouth. It is definitely essential to cover your mouth when it gets that cold. This is by far the coldest it has been since I have arrived, though it does get much, much colder. There is also a 50 below club and a 60 below club, but it hasn’t gotten that cold. Yet...