wideeyedfunk

Tag: Alaska research

  • Indiana Jones may have been a little smelly.

    Think it through. He packs a gun and a whip in the smallest suitcase I’ve ever seen. There just isn’t room for spare socks and underpants.

    He wears the same pants, shirt, and hat throughout every field expedition. That suitcase is too small for a couple of clean sets of clothes.

    If you add it all up, he must have been really amazingly smelly. So smelly that it defies belief that he could sneak up on even the sleepiest, slow-brained guard.

    I am speaking from a position of deep knowledge and experience here. I just packed up my gear for a field session in the far northern wilderness. Gun, whip, hat – sure they are in the bottom of the crate if you want to think so. Let’s say that the moment I learned the grant support came through I checked the loads on the revolver and tossed the whip into my packing crate, then finished off a couple of fingers of whiskey.

    Or, you can picture me huddled over the computer monitor late into the night filling out over 100 forms for the university and the federal government so that I could legally perform the field research and justify spending the money. Exciting indeed. There may have been a couple of fingers of red wine involved.

    IMG_0208The packing crate, duffel, and day pack are downstairs lurking in the front parlor. Hamish the Corgi doesn’t like them. Miss Tibbit the Useless carefully monitored each item as it went in. Wiggins the Ancient Cat is considering peeing in the duffel. Or the crate. He can’t decide.

    Where ever Wiggins does decide to wee, he’ll be weeing on SEVERAL extra pairs of socks. I cut down on the collection this year and included only 16. So I like clean socks. I’ll be gone for a while.  I won’t provide details but there are also plenty of underpants. And some extras of everything else. Plus, my eucalyptus oil for dabbing on my belt.  I like to sniff eucalyptus all day and it aroma-protects me from colleagues who pack more like Indy. Way back in the 1990s, a colleague told me that they didn’t see the sense in bringing underwear to the remote field work because it just gets dirty anyway.

    We were out in the wilds for two months that year.  Yaaaah.

    Think good weather thoughts in a northerly direction. Think good garden thoughts for the WideEyedSpouse as he is stuck here with my perennial beds and vegetable dreams. Talk to you on the other side – unless I manage dispatches from the far beyond.

    WideEyedFunk, Buffalo NY, May 1.

  • My heart is a like a neutron star, dense and heavy.

    My heart is like a magnetar, dense and heavy and a thousand times magnetized.

    Four weeks from this day I will board a flight to the far away field location. I will have no phone, no lights, no motor car – ok, we do have a satellite phone for emergencies but not much else. Our sole luxury is the outhouse we are taking with us. Stacks of long underwear, socks, field pants, and equipment are growing in the front parlor. This is remote field research.

    My heart is heavier every hour. I look at the WideEyedSpouse and I think, I won’t see you for weeks and weeks. I pet the dogs and I worry – will you be ok while I’m gone? Wiggins the Ancient Cat creaks by, I fret, will you be alive when I come home?

    The weight in my chest is a coalescence of the open wide joy of learning that I was going to have a funded research program this summer. As the time for leaving grows closer, the plane tickets purchased, the boat charters paid, my happy heart tripping transforms to a sullen, weighty thunk.

    I know from past summers that this heart weight will increase. That I will be walking and talking and acting normal but this density lump in my chest will work to hold me in place. I’ll feel it sagging in the pericardium, threatening to rip through and plummet past my stomach to my knees, my feet, the floor.

    When the WideEyedSpouse drives me to the airport, the Pathfinder loaded down with crates and duffles and neutron star hearts, I’ll feel breathless. When I turn and walk into the airport, dragging my burdens with me, my magnetar heart will strain toward its lodestone as he drives away. When the plane takes off, I’ll feel it struggling, pulling to the ground, desperately reaching, trying to keep me home.

    Then…snap. The plane will level off and there will be no turning back. Magentar heart changes to neutron star heart, becomes tripping wide open joy heart and the pericardium can’t hold in the radiant glow of a well loved job. This transformation is heart denial, and a simple, true trust that I’ll head back to the lodestone in the coming months.