cast of characters
There’s a truly endless list of people who have contributed to this project, who have given us everything from freezers to fresh garden dirt, fishing advice to locally grown apples. To all of you, thank you.
This is a quick portrait of the main players who I mention in these musings. A crazy enough bunch that they deserve a little explanation.
the core four
The crew on the ground for the whole year. Making every decision and life choice together while living in an 800 square foot cabin. Sometimes it feels like we’re in a four way marriage. Sometimes we’re like siblings at each other’s throats. In the last nine months we’ve shared, by choice and by force, the most vulnerable, meaningful and transformative moments of our lives.
Ari
Ari keeps his pajama pants folded and socks matched. He is our self appointed treasurer, safeguard against botulism, and master of our food inventory. He stays in the melt water creek longer than anyone else cooling off from the sauna and wears a Hawaiian button up shirt with matching shorts (sometimes with his wool hunting pants over the top) to dance parties. Born and raised in Anchorage and the oldest of us by three years at 26, he first came to Gustavus when his Dad Bill moved in with our closest neighbor Kathy. To all of our luck he’s made Gustavus his home base over the past five years becoming my neighbor and one of my dearest friends. Ari was the first person to commit to this year with me. The reason it moved from idea to reality.
Kaia
Kaia fillets fish the same way she approaches life; with tip-of-pony-tail-to-top-of-extratuff slime-bath commitment. She’s the first one up in the morning, first to laugh at a joke, first to lend a helping hand (or shoulder or entire body if it requires getting grubby) to the task at hand. Raised on a Northern Iowan farm, Kaia grew up eating the highest percentage of local food of any of us. She found her way to the southeast Alaskan ice fields after her sophomore year at Carleton College, which also happened to be the summer before she became my housemate and one of my best and most badass friends. When I told her I was doing this project and she should do it with me, Kaia said Sure! and dedicated her free time senior year planning her next year three thousand miles away from her home and with two people she’d never met. After six months, it’s hard to imagine the town or neighborhood without her.
Atticus
Atticus shrieked in excitement when he caught the first fish of the project. It was a mid-sized dolly varden. His enthusiasm grew proportionally to the number and size of fish when our second fishing adventure yielded four mid-sized halibut. Whether it’s fishing or fart lighting Atticus jumps at new opportunities with boundless energy. He wears his bright orange rubber raincoat at every possible opportunity and leaves a constant trail of whittling wood chips, well stunk wool sweaters and wild questions. Atticus jumped aboard the project having met me only briefly while he spent 5 months in Gustavus as a Tidelines student three years ago. He’d never even spoken to Kaia and Ari. He graduated from Swarthmore, left his home in Connecticut and arrived on site for garden planting two weeks ahead of us and kept our gardens alive and slug free. His endless drive to learn from the places and people is contagious, infecting all those who come in contact with him and the project.
Linnea
(Written by Kaia)
Neither Linnea nor I can remember how we got so close so fast. All we know is that almost immediately we were in– past the small talk and straight into masterminding elaborate pranks. Linnea is like that. She draws people in and immediately makes them feel seen and loved. Be careful though, the closer you get to her, the closer you get to her armpits. Even with those smelly pits, Linnea is an incredible community builder. She was the initial driving force behind this project and continues to pull us back together whenever we drift, or fight, or take ourselves too seriously. The home for this project is her home. She welcomed us fully into her life: we live in her grandparents’ house, her parents have become our second parents, and her whole community here in Gustavus has become a part of this project. Linnea is like that — willing to share everything she has with the people she cares about.
our parents... to name a few
To say this project requires a village is an understatement. We’ve been swooped up by truly countless Gustavites who’ve become our parents, mentors and music playing buddies. Ari’s parents and mine adopted three additional children for the summer, kids who were in the constant business of borrowing their stuff from fillet knives to float coats, chainsaws to Costco cards.
Anya
The day we started local eating my mother picked us three gallons of nagoonberries. The pouring rain dripped off her raincoat hood and made the bucket a lake. The neighbors watching from their window thought she was a black bear. That fall Ani kept right on picking, adding 30 gallons of huckle berries alone to our stores. Whether it’s filling our freezers or feeding the neighborhood, Ani is a caretaker to her core. Born a second generation Juneauite, leaving only to attend college and med-school, Ani has been a harvester, processor and eater of this place since childhood. Now a retired doctor her full time job is taking care of my grandmother, a toddler and the locovores with some adventuring, harvesting and skiing on the side. Whenever something truly stumps us, whether it’s Why do we all have chronic diarrhea? or How do we create a palatable creation with just bull kelp and spices? Ani has the answer.
Hank
Hank wore the same sweatshirt every day this summer. He also tells the same stories and farts with the same sounds-like-he-shat-his-pants vigor every day. Hanks' consistency in humor and wardrobe choice is compensated for by his great diversity of roles in the project. In addition to being my biological and everyone else’s honorary parent, Hankers is our boat captain, hunter, fishing guide, four-way marriage counselor, playmate, editor, and go-to adventure buddy to name a few. A lifelong Alaskan, who’s made a career of eating, sharing and goofing off in wild places you could not design a better guide for our year. This entire website could be dedicated to what Hank alone has taught us in the last nine months, but limited to this bio three highlights come to mind. One - the best days always start at the butt crack (or even the ball sack) of dawn. Two - blurring the boundaries between ourselves and the places and people we are with is perhaps the most magic and meaningful work we can do. Three (this oneliner applied to anything we tried for the first time) don’t fuck up.
Kathy
Unless you’re asking her to grate cheese or go kayaking, Kathy pretty much always says yes. Want to walk around point Gustavus by full moon in winter? Ask Kath. Need early morning coffee in the hot tub and a relationship consult? Kathy’s there. Want to do a year of eating all local food fresh out of college? You’re screwed without Kathy and her carrot growing abilities. She seamlessly became the co-locovore mother - making our dinners, splitting our kindling, and providing an unofficial on-call counseling service. She’s been the organizer, matriarch and bridge builder of town essentially since her birth here in 1965, minus a few short breaks to attend high school, beauty school, and a chemistry masters program. Our houses are shouting distance across a small creek and connected by a shared network of trails and bridges. Our families share a root cellar, smoke house, sauna and dog.
Bill
Bill has the sharpest chainsaw in the neighborhood. He also has the neatest shop and with the most organized tools. That is unless we have recently borrowed his saws or filled his shop with drying mucky potatoes. Bill came to the neighborhood five years ago bringing with him a lifetime of knowledge and the generosity to share it. Raised on a farm in Michigan and spending his life in South Central Alaska in fisheries and mountain rescue, Bill rounds out our Southeast Alaskan crew with fresh ideas. Whether it’s knot tying after dark in the cabin or in troubleshooting a rusty carburetor or smoking a neck roast just right Bill’s your guy.