I've been here eight days and I'm not dead!

I haven't fallen into the outhouse pit or been eaten by a bear or been struck by lightning. It took about 12 hours to get here. We had to drive north along the mostly unpaved Dalton Highway which passes through the Brooks Range north to Prudhoe Bay. Our destination was about 100 miles south of that, and about 378 miles north of Fairbanks. In those passing hours I saw nothing but forests of spruce and birch and wondered when the tundra would appear. Even at the Arctic Circle there were forests, and I was kind of disappointed to find it looked more like Yosemite than the arctic. Of course, there were no giant sequoias, and gradually the trees became more and more diminutive until we passed a sign near Coldfoot indicating the very last spruce tree before the beginning of the tundra proper. I was a bit skeptical: surely there is at least one other tree north of that spot growing somewhere out there in all that vast landscape? My experience with wild plants is that they grow wherever they feel like it with no regard for our little imaginary lines.

Most of the time I'd spent in Alaska so far had been very warm, and the weather was great until the very last leg of the trip. The pass over the Brooks Range was wrapped in snow under a chilly fog, and once we got to the North Slope the sky turned dark and we were enveloped in a downpour. My boss drove a two ton government issue truck, but in that rain on that slippery bumpy road it felt like a plastic toboggan. As we drove into camp I remember thinking wow, we made it to some kind of civilization! And what a surprisingly large setup it was: a small city of trailers and trucks and barracks set on a few acres of gravel by a small lake. Two helicopters sat on a pad near the lake which was covered in ice. It was about 10 pm and kind of twilit and dreary. I thought of the theme song from MASH.

They introduced me to the camp manager who introduced me to the different buildings where you do the different things (experiments, sleeping, pooping, washing, etc) and suddenly I found myself alone in a rather musty but carpeted "weatherport" complete with boxspring and mattress, a dresser with three drawers and a small table. Not only that I had a small window, a lightbulb, and an industrial grade outlet to plug my laptop in. I turned on my computer and soon picked up the wireless signal. The wireless here is actually better than some internet cafes. The next day I was to report for duty.