June
Really the work began long before June. Ari did hours of prepping and planning in the winter. Kaia, Hank and I hauled sixty gallons of fish emulsion (ie a drum of rotten fish) from Tideline’s remote island campus at the Hobbit Hole all the way back to Gustavus in our boat in the name of fertilizer. Ani and Kathy planted garlic for us in the fall and then, with help from Bill and Hank, all of our gardens while we were still at school in May. A massive crew of Gustavus friends got together to till, plant and fertilize 600 hills of potatoes.
Atticus arrived on June 5th and adopted the responsibility of weeding, watering and most importantly protecting our shivering baby plants from slugs. Every morning and every night he patrolled our three vegetable gardens armed with tongs and a bucket of vinegar to pick off the voracious predators. He survived on trail mix and bread dough - fried, never baked. Kaia and I graduated from Carleton College and arrived in Alaska with a close school friend Caroline in the middle of the month. Ari came from working a field season in the middle of the Greenland ice sheet a week later.
The first night Kaia, Atticus and I were in Alaska we lay awake late and made a list of tasks we had to do that week. In January it’s still taped to our fridge, half the line items unfinished. Such were those first two weeks, unfinished lists, unpacked totes, unwashed jars, unprocessed emotions. I was days fresh from breaking up with my college boyfriend. Ari was adjusting to seeing green things again after four months on an ice sheet. It poured rain and our gardens shivered. We set probably four 20-hook halibut skates and caught mostly sea stars.
August
August might always be the best month. This year blew it off the charts. What we lacked in sleep and down time was made up for in the sheer volume of food flowing through our kitchen. We started out with a magical opening day of hunting season on Admiralty island. After butchering and testicle eating to honor Kaia and Atticus’s first hunting trip, our crew split for the first time - Kaia and I left with Hank to do boat maintenance in Sitka and hunt on the way home. The boys returned to Gus to take care of the gardens.
As soon as we finished butchering, we picked 20 gallons of red currants and juiced them all. And then the black currents were ripe and totes upon totes of greens needed to be harvested and blanched. And our woodshed needed to be filled and the cohos started running and we had to train and compete in the all important 6/12/18/24 team relay event (this blog has far too diverse a readership to explain what this race is but for those who know, please appreciate the 55 minute winning team’s time). Now two and a half months in, we became close enough to fight. Amidst the non-stop joy and richness flowing through our lives it didn’t seem to matter much.
As our freezers started filling up we started dehydrating everything we could - from currant sludge to zucchini to our bycatch pink salmon. We also lucked into two freezers from the neighbors so we’d have a place to put red meat. By the end of the month, we could run canner loads of fish stock in our sleep. Instead of taking Hank as our tree feller and round bucking guide, two of us could go out and grab a truck load of firewood in the afternoon. We made our first independent boat run to the closest island. We were exhausted and grubby and some of the richest humans alive.
July
The month of sockeye and slugs. We became a Gustavus summer pack with Caroline, my dear friend from school Zoe and Atticus’ Tidelines classmate Isador. We started catching real halibut on our skates. With the commandeered help of a visiting high school group we rediscovered our 750 potato plants from a tangled forest of popweed. Our house became an impenetrable pile of canning jars, dirty socks, drying clothes and dirty dishes. We tried our hand gill netting for pinks and caught about ten pounds of kelp and a good amount of rocks, logs, and barnacles for every fish.
Halfway through the month, and the last few days of Caroline’s stay, the sun came out. A whirlwind trip to surge bay yielded 74 sockeye and a week and a half of fish processing. The meadow strawberries finally ripened and yielded a constant rotation of cookie sheets freezing the berries, a faint pink sticky stain over everything in our kitchen, and many a sunburn. We took our first break from work (other than the essential watering, weeding, and morning/evening slugging of all three gardens) to attend the Glacier Bay science symposium. Through all the mess and mayhem flowed a rotating cast of college friends, neighborhood kiddos, and Gustavus characters dropping in for dinner or a night or two.
Towards the end of the month, one of my late night journals opened with these were the days I always imagined the project to be. That afternoon Kaia and I estimated we worked, if you could call it work, over ten hours a day. Our mornings began with making breakfast around the various in-progress processing projects in our kitchen. We’d chatter around plans for the days in the living room and then disperse to the greenhouse, or potato patch or compost bin. We’d scrape together leftover dinner or a salad for the neighborhood potluck and then come home to pick fish stock and do our evening slug patrol.
September
September held so many turning points. The first mornings ended with poop-your-pants-beautiful stingers of silver fish on the bank. By the end river trips yielded a few colored up cohos and spawned out humpies. The beginning of the month was heightened with anticipation of the massive crane liftoff and the beginning of eating. On the 8th after cranes pouring in in small trickles we decided we were done with waiting and would start anyway. Rilke and Hollin, Kaia and my dear college friends, were there for the first day helping us process fish, easing us through the pain of sugar withdrawal.
They left just before moose season and the fall downpour. Having scored an invite to a hunting crew we set up a camp out in the wetlands to expand their territory. We spent one night out in it before Hank got a bull barely a quarter mile from our neighbors house. The day we planned to start butchering, that same neighbor got a second one just outside his kitchen window.
Transitioning off the magic of the multitude of meat we crashed hard. Our non-stop summer of little sleep combined with our new diet caught us like a wake hitting the stern of the boat. We spent our mornings reading in stinky moods. After lunch we suited up in full rain gear to dig potatoes out of our mucky patch or pull carrots and carefully pack them into sawdust. We felt close and distant all in one, as did the reality of winter and what we were about to do.