Camping extraordinaire -- this is why I live here

This was my plan: as soon as we had finished school on last Saturday, I was going to go out onto the tundra. I had a lot to accomplish: #1 set up a campsite, #2 set out my fish net, and #3 build a rack to dry the fish on. I have never done #2 or #3 before --though I've accummulated a bunch of advice over the months. I was just going to do it by trial and error, and by watching what other people did, and if I messed up, then I'd learn from my mistakes.

However, once school was totally over on Saturday afternoon, I was hit by a wave of elation, relief, and disbelief that the entire load of the school year was finished, over, done! (how could I have any other career that just keeps going through the summer, without that rush that accompanies finishing up a whole school year? It's addictive) So I didn't waste any time getting out there on a beautiful day; I packed up the honda:
got out onto the tundra and realized: What's the rush? I've been on this schedule, getting things done, for so long, and now I have all these routine-free days stretching out ahead of me. Can't I forget the mission-mindedness and take it easy for a while? So I just set up the campsite, got a fire going, and explored for a while. Esther and Odin seemed to like this goal just fine. We saw a red fox from a distance, the first fox Esther has ever seen, and it trotted away from us and we didn't see it again. I stained the knees of my pants blue and red from last year's cranberries and blackberries (that were under the snow all winter, and now are all over the tundra, but watery and fermented) trying to find the softest mossiest place to put the tent -- I found a pretty awesome spot: Our spot is on a penninsula between the Bering Sea and Hooper Bay -- in the distance in the above picture, you can see the bay. The ocean is a couple hills behind me in this picture, close enough that we went to sleep lulled by the sound of waves crashing on the beach every night, and close enough for Esther to go play on the beach in the sand every day, often with other kids who are out playing on the beach with their families:Later that first evening, teacher-friends Katie, Moses, and Marta joined us (along with their dogs Honey & Tika), and besides being awesome weather, it was a cool night because we walked a little ways away to Old Hooper Bay, one of the old village sites and checked out the remnants of sod houses that once were there.

Above: Marta with Esther, and the top one is Marta & Katie with the three dogs, as we were wandering the tundra at about 11:30 pm. Yes, lots of great light, still, that late!

This is the remnants of an old sod house at Old Hooper Bay; they were subterranean, so they were half in the ground and domed over with driftwood and sod. It's just so cool to see these, still.

The sun set at around 1:am, which surprised all of us when we realized it was so late that the sun was going down, and everyone but us packed up to go... but it wasn't lonely -- all those years that I camped by myself, I got used to being outside alone, and now with Esther, I don't feel alone in the slightest. Lots of people taking honda rides through the beautiful evening stop by, and so we are never by ourselves too long. We even have neighbors out there, Harvey and Mary, who are a couple dunes over, and they have been doing camping & fishing for three years out here, in this area, and they have quite the system, quite the camp set up. We visit each other all the time, and I am learning so much from them. They get worried that Esther and I are cold, and even though we totally stay toasty, we like to go over and hang out in their huge tent with their fancy stove inside. It's fun to have neighbors!
We sleep so well outside, too, though we often wake up early since it gets bright very early, as the sunrise is around 3 (though since the sun sets around 1, it just is dusky all the time; no night). The next thing I knew it was warm morning in the tent and Esther was saying, "Mom, a snipe did wake me up!" Super cute.

Poor Mosquito-bitten babe! I missed a spot on her forehead when I was using citronella oil on her, and the mosquitos all went to that particular spot. :( In general, though, the mosquitos aren't very bad since there is almost a constant wind, with no trees to block it. The days that the wind lets up are the days when the mosquitos come out, but that's not very often. I wonder: what do the mosquitos do for all those windy stretches of time? How do they eat? Why wouldn't they all just die out? I bet the mice and other animals in the grass are just one huge mosquito bite.

My campsite has gotten fancier over the days; Roy decided to join us for a night and we built a lean-to to put my supplies in, and as an additional windbreak, since it is pretty windy out there, even though it's beautiful. We had a bit of rain this morning, but nothing that was unpleasant. We've been having some fantastic meals out there -- even though it's normal food, cooking it over the campfire somehow makes it amazing.... Now we've slept out there four nights, and we plan to just keep going for a week or 10 days; Esther and I go to my mom's house on June 25. This is one of the best things about living here, that the wilderness is off my back doorstep, and even though I can even see my house from my campsite, way off in the distance, I am in a totally wild place. We often come back to the house for supplies and showers, etc., (and to blog!), and then we just turn around and go right back out -- it's a 20 minute drive, tops. Awesome.

Esther by our lean-to, the Tibetan peace flags waving in the breeze....

Egg Hunting-- Now my favorite subsistence activity!

I was so determined to go out on the tundra and look for eggs that are being laid by migrating birds that I almost sold my soul! No, I'm joking. I was indeed a woman on a mission, single-track minded until I got myself a ride on a boat going to a place just inhabited by birds... and it was amazing.
Actually I had several working plans that didn't quite work out. First, we were going to drive north along the beach, away from town, towards the bay north of us, the Kokechik Bay. There are three rivers that flow across the beach out into the sea on the way, and the trick is to hit the rivers at low, low tide so that they are able to be crossed by walking or by Honda. I tried a couple times, but the tide always seemed high to me -- I have a lot of learning to do in that area, tides. So Esther and I always gave up and we went walking in the tundra near the beach, just past the sand dunes. We always had a good time, tramping around, and we saw lots of birds and bird pairs, but we never saw an egg. Zip, zilch, nada, nothing.

Esther on the tundra, on one of our tramping days, having lots of fun.
Then we were going to walk Northeast of town, on the tundra, but it ended up being too far that we had to go by walking, as Esther couldn't walk as far as we needed to go and I couldn't carry her and eggs and our stuff. Honda riding is illegal past a certain point on the tundra, to preserve the fragile moss, and I have no desire to be illegal and go tearing up the tundra on my 4-wheeler. So that plan was tossed out.

Then I decided I was going to hitch a ride on a boat, any boat, and pay for gas so that I could get an invitation. It took a little pleading from several different parties, but finally my old buddy Tul'uq took me out across the bay into a river towards the Chevak side of the tundra. He came up to my classroom around 1:25 pm on last Thursday and said, in such a typical Yup'ik way, "I'm going to take my boat out around 2, maybe check my net, check around." Even though my western social senses told me not to be rude and assume it was an invitation and not to invite myself, I knew that in a Yup'ik way, it was totally an invitation, and I need to jump on this opportunity. So I said, hey, I wanna go, do you need some gas? I can get some gas on the way?And he said "yeah but I'm going at 2".

I jumped into action. Since it's the end of the year and there are so few students here, my principal was great about letting me leave with short notice on a half a personal day, and I easily found another teacher to watch the 5 students I had. I called Roy for a ride and to make sure he would be OK watching Esther baby for another couple hours, ran home and grabbed my stuff, and pretty soon I was at the dock ready to go.

It was the first time I've ever really left Esther alone with Roy and not been basically within shouting distance. He's been great for a few months now, so I felt pretty good about it, but still a little nerve-wracking, and I think it would have been if I were leaving her with anyone, really, and going so far away from her that it would be hard for me to get back to her quickly. I had a VHF radio, so I could be in contact if I needed to be, but, still -- and I know I haven't left her barely at all in her life so far, especially compared to other mothers -- I haven't even spent a night away from her in her life! So I felt it was Ok to go, OK to expand the boundaries of going off and doing something by myself without her. Oh, and I wasn't quite comfortable with taking her in a boat, yet, since the lifejacket situation is slightly sketchy and I don't think she has the concept of what might happen if she climbed out of a boat or something like that. So, anyway, I was slightly trepidatious, but also very excited to go, and I felt really good and secure about leaving her this time. She was happy when I left, no tears or wanting me to stay -- she cheerily waved me off, saying, "You go by boat, mom? You will?" :)

I forget how wide open the bay is. We skimmed along for 20 minutes on smooth, deep blue water before I saw the other shore, and I didn't even think that we were still in the bay; I thought we must have gone out into the ocean and were going to some island. But then Tul'uq pointed out a barge near Chevak, and I realized where we were. I asked him, "what's this place called?" and he said, "Qalluvik, like "snowpants"". :) We entered a river on the other side of the bay, and flew along the mirror-like waters until we saw a bird along the edge of the bank fly up, and we swooshed to a stop and put the boat up onto the muddy bank.

The tide was fairly low, so when we stood in the boat, just our heads were above the bank. The tundra was flat and just went on forever, as far as the eye could see, little grassy areas and grassy humps, broken up by stretches of muddy flats. It looks kind of bland, even in my pictures, and so it's hard to convey what an amazing environment it is to explore. The earth is spongy and fresh-smelling, and the mud is even neat. It's got so many different colors in it, and it has the consistency of jello, when the jello is almost done. Then sometimes, in some of these mud flats, there was a layer of slippery stuff on top, with the stuff farther below more solid. I found I could skate along, almost ski, through this mud, in my rubber boots. It was so fun, and less tiring than tromping through the mud and sinking in. Then there are the clouds of bugs on the mud, I'm guessing like gnats or no-see-ums, kind of gross but then it makes sense, with all these little birds running around who need to eat.

"Qalluvik" -- the tundra where we tramped, with grassy places and mud flats and creeks, and Tul'uq in the distance.Tul'uq stood up so he could see over the river bank and looked through the binoculars and said, "There's a bird nest up there with one egg in it" and laughed. I got excited anyway, because I've never seen an egg, a nest, or a bird on a nest, nothing. I knew from talking to people that you would be able to find eggs by watching for birds to fly up from the ground as you walked along the tundra, and by going where they flew, you would find eggs. The first Egg I found. You can judge its size against my hand, though I do have fairly large hands.
But I had a completely different picture in my mind of how a bird would sit on the nest. I was thinking chicken, you know, because I have had chickens and seen them sit on their eggs, even for a little while, all sitting up and stuff. But tundra birds are so smart! They totally hunker down over their nests, stretching their necks out along the ground to camoflague themselves. You'd think that I would be able to see the birds as I walked along, especially since the tundra is not even full of tall grass right now -- the grass is brown and still pushed down from the snow being on top of it for so long. However, I never once saw a bird on a nest when I was walking along, not until they flew up. I only saw the one through the binoculars that first time, and then a couple, later, who had nests along the bank and I watched them hunker down and stretch their necks out as we drove by in the boat.

In fact, Tul'uq was totally laughing at me because I walked by so many nests with eggs in them. He wondered how I could miss so many! I have no idea, because I thought I was looking! But I felt like I started to get better at it as the day went by. But anyway, the nests were AWESOME. It looks like the birds swirled some grass around, then plucked out some of their warmest down to line the nest. Then they would lay eggs inside that, inside that totally toasty place. Most of the eggs I picked up were still warm! And they were so big -- like two or three chicken eggs at least.

Here is a lovely warm nest of greenish eggs. I'm not sure what bird laid these, but I left these ones alone in the nest where I found them. I tried to figure out which nests to leave alone -- The Fish & Wildlife department published a booklet about which eggs to pick up and which to leave alone, and sometimes I could do it and sometimes it was difficult(by the way, that same booklet legitimized my ability to gather eggs: egg gathering is open to any permanent resident of the area of Alaska I live in, and by their definitions I am totally a permanent resident. It's different from marine mammals, who are just supposed to be hunted by Alaska Native people, as far as I understand. So I was totally legal.

I asked Tul'uq if we should leave some eggs in the nest for the bird, and he said they just come back and lay more. I know from chickens that they do in fact have lots of eggs to lay, and they lay often, so I inuitively felt OK about this. Plus, as I would walk along, sometimes I would see old footprints going to a nest, and I would see more eggs in the nest -- I mean, it must have been that the footprints were from someone who picked the eggs a few days earlier, and now there were many more eggs in the nest. I guess I had thought, also, that the birds would abandon a nest if it had human scent in it. But it seems like they go back to their nests and just keep laying.





















And it's not like there were very many footprints-- just here and there I would see some. It was almost reassuring to see them, though, because at times I felt like I was out at the end of the world. There was no sign of any kind of human habitation for as far as my eye could see, and sometimes I got separated far from Tul'uq, because we were walking in different areas, and as we walked we would have to cross little creeks, and somehow we just got more and more separated. He had put a big pole in the bank with his jacket on it so that we could remember where the boat was anchored, and as soon as I got a little ways away I saw the extreme sense in that, because I would never have figured out where the boat was -- in fact, the jacket seemed to grow exponentially smaller as I got a distance away, and it seemed to hover or float -- a wild optical illusion.

But, essentially, I felt like I was so far away from everything and everybody in the world -- human, that is. I was surrounded with hundreds upon hundreds of birds, all different kinds: tons of different species of geese and ducks, also swans, cranes, and little seabirds like arctic terns and plovers, snipes, sandpipers, seagulls. The birds would notice me and fly up in great flocks, but, honestly I felt like I was insignificant to them, because they had all kinds of drama going on, with big birds swooping down on little birds, and little birds retaliating in groups against loner big birds. It just felt like birds were perfectly adapted to this place of grassy humps and mud flats, like I was in a bird land, or bird world. I almost felt like I was in this discovery channel movie that I had been showing to my students, about scientists' guesses about what the world might be like in 100 million years, when everything is really hot and there are muddy and salty plains all over the place, and there are no humans, just animals. Yeah, it was like that, like I had fast-forwarded through time and I was the only human left in this world of birds.

A small flock of Emperor Geese glide by.
Not that I would have really liked that in reality, but it was a fun feeling to be so out of time and space. I got that wonderful feeling of time just not passing, which the sun helps since it doesn't set till late at night these days, and so it doesn't move much from up in the sky for much of the day. It rained a couple times, and then cleared up, and the sun was very warm. I am positive that I haven't walked as much as I did that day for pretty much all winter, but though I felt tired, I didn't even feel like I needed to stop; I felt like I could keep tramping around forever. I just love that wide expanse of tundra so much, like finally I have enough SPACE. I was totally in my element. I don't even know how long we spent out there.

And then, the eggs, Bonus! I would be surprised every time, when a bird would flap up with a rush of wings and air -- the closest I ever got was around 3 feet away. I actually really wanted to catch one on the nest, before it flew away, to get a picture, but they always surprised me and flew up before I had the chance. And then there would be these gifts, these wonderful HUGE eggs, all warm and lovely, many times in cool colors.

Finally we got back to the boat, had some snacks, and turned the boat to go. The tide was even lower at this point, so we got a little stuck in the sand a few times, even once we were out in the bay. But Tul'uq is such a pro at boat stuff that we were able to get out into the deeper channel again. We stopped on our side of the bay, very close to Nuvok, to check his net. He put everything back, because he had caught only things he didn't want. But in the interim, I saw that there was a rainbow across the bay -- and the fantastic thing about living on the tundra is that you can see rainbows from start to finish, from end to end. From where I was looking, one end of the rainbow was sitting on the spit of sand that is Nuvok, which is littered with remnants of whale carcasses right now. So my big joke is that I found out what is at the end of the rainbow: a bunch of dead whales!
So after we docked the boat and Roy & Esther picked me up, on the way home with my almost-five-gallon bucket-o-eggs, we saw Esther's great-grandma Bridget standing on her porch, and so the very first thing I did with the eggs was to give a great big colander-full to her, and she was really surprised and happy. It felt great to give her something that I had collected myself.

When I got home, I divided eggs into other little parcels to give away, to Roy's other grandma and his mom, to my friend and classroom aide Norma, to my neighbors, and to another elder who has been helping in my classroom these weeks, Nellie.

Here I am cooking a goose egg and a seagull egg -- the gull egg has the darker yolk.

I kept a bowl aside of some of the rest in the fridge, to use for us the next couple weeks, and I froze the rest. I looked up on the internet how it's totally OK to freeze eggs, and it gave me a couple different methods. People in the village usually just freeze them as is, in the shell, in the freezer. I tried that, and as I expected, they got a crack from the expansion, but they seem ok. Some I tried by putting them in a bowl of water and freezing that whole bowl, and those seem to be fine, though when I thaw them I'll have to use all of those particular ones at once. But the way that I learned on the internet and seems the most user-friendly to me is to crack the eggs, whisk them together, and then pour them into ice-cube trays. When they froze, then I popped them out of the trays and put them into a ziplock, so I have perfect serving-sized eggs to use for later.

Here is the production line: crack & mix them, pour them into ice cube trays.

I think I am having success in raising Esther to be a good Yup'ik eater, because as I was cracking the eggs to mix & freeze, a couple times I came upon an egg with a bird embryo that was pretty developed. I called her to me to show her the baby bird. Her immediate reaction was to say, all in a rush, "Ooo! A baby bird I wanna eat it!". Ha! So I cooked them for her, and she munched on her bird embryos and pronounced them "really good, mom!". :)

And, then, cooking them, of course, has been fabulous. Tul'uq found swan eggs yesterday and gave me one -- it was enormous, as you can see! The egg, when I cooked it for breakfast, filled up my entire skillet, and seemed like a large omelet in intself. I can't contain my excitement about all of this... this egg stuff is just too fun!

Remember, I have large hands, so this egg is enormous!






From left: a Swan egg, a Sandhill Crane egg, a goose egg, a duck egg, and a chicken egg from the store. Wild, huh?

Cracking this egg I had a flash of memory of the cartoon "The Flintstones", when Wilma would crack a dinosaur egg? yeah, it was just like that. :) This is a 10 inch skillet.

Fruits of the Ocean (aka Sea Life Extravaganza)

The wave of foods from the ocean began in March, with the arrival of pike and smelt, which folks gathered via ice fishing. Since we don't have a snowmobile, we didn't go, since it was kind of far away to go by Honda. But we got given some very tasty smelt, and to my surprise, some huge ones! Maybe my midwestern buddies remember smelting on Lake Michigan, and how teeny those little fish were; these smelt were actually a decent-sized fish. And yummy. Here is a picture of Roy preparing them for baking while Esther looks on:

Soon, people in the village began seal hunting, and we had our first fresh seal of the year at Roy's mom's house. Seal meat is one of my favorite things in the world -- I have this irrational craving for it; it definitely has a strong taste, but it is very tender and very filling. When I eat it I feel like I could never eat anything else again, it's that satisfying. It's wild, like it satisfies a craving all the way down to my bones, or something -- maybe it's because it's so rich in nutrients like iron and omega-3s, etc, that my body knows it's fulfilling those nutrient-needs. I don't know, but I know I like it! Here is a picture of Esther and her cousin Sheila enjoying their seal:

Then we began to get seal given to us from Roy's mom, and Roy's aunt Emily, the aunt Emily who often takes care of Esther. Emily and Melba (Roy's mom) would get called by other families who had hunted and caught seal to help with the butchering of the seals, and they would be given large parts of the seal in return. They in turn shared it with me, for which I was very grateful. At one point, Roy's mom was given a whole small seal, and her freezer was already full, so she gave it to us, the whole thing, minus the skin. For the first time, I had seal blubber, also, called "Uuquq", which traditionally is rendered down into oil, and then the oil is used for seasoning soups and fish, and dried salmon is cured inside it to make something called pokefish. I decided to try my hand at it:
Here is my workspace on the floor, with the bucket of blubber and my traditional knife, called a "Kinaluq" out here on the coast, opposed to the inland, "Ulu". It has a very strong smell, perhaps some westerners would find it offensive, but I have gotten used to it and enjoy it.


Here are some of my jars of Seal Oil, Uuquq, when they are about done rendering. Only the jars in the front -- the ones in the back are my store of water jars, for when the water goes out,as it is bound to do up here!

Rendering the oil is a simple process --you cut the blubber into strips, score the surface of it for better oozing, and let it sit for a couple weeks. Then you are left with little fatty remnants that you take out of the jars. Some people use those strips of fat for food, in soup, or whatever, but I think I'll use them to start my campfires this summer instead of using some kind of petroleum-based fire starter.

As I was rendering this blubber down, I got lots of different advice from various sources, and some that I considered superstitious, but as with all supersitions, they must have their root in something practical. For example, I had them originally up high on a shelf in my pantry, and I was told they needed to be down low or they would be sour. I was told they needed to be in the dark, in the cold -- both of which makes sense. I was told that only certain containers, and certain colors of containers, all of which was interesting to me. My uuquq has turned out Ok so far, except for the jars that grew mold -- eew! Which I got rid of. I know how it happened, too: being a good, clean-obsessed westerner, I washed some parts of the blubber that seemed dirty to me. Guess which jars molded? The ones that I had washed. So interesting.


And we were given yet another seal, under interesting circumstances. Several teachers and I went out to the beach one Saturday evening to see hunters who had caught whales (I'll describe this adventure at the end), and we encountered some out-of-town hunters who were having difficulty getting a whale they had caught into their boat. The guys from our party helped the hunters, and in return they gave us a whole seal, for thanks.
Here are the guys doing the huge work of helping put the whale into the hunters' boat.

We had an adventure figuring how to butcher the seal best, and how to separate the blubber from the skin and meat. There were six of us working on this little seal, a spotted seal. It took us a long time and lots of trial and error to get it right -- I was the only one who had worked on one before, and that was only once. We flagged down a few students to help us, who were quite adept at it, but all of our other calls we made out to people we knew might could help went unanswered -- everyone was out, away from home on a beautiful, sunny evening. So we muddled through as best we could, and enjoyed ourselves a ton.
I know my eyes are closed in this picture, but I was tired! No, I joke -- I like it anyway because it shows how many people were working on this seal at once in my kitchen -- teacher Audrey is to my right, and her husband Mike's hand is reaching in at the forefront of the picture.



In this picture you can see how the blubber is a layer in itself outside of the meat, and the first step is separating those two layers.

The next sea-life adventure was clam-digging, on such a sunny day that I actually got a sunburn, in late May. We went out to the point, the spit of sand that reaches out into where the bay and the Bering Sea meet, called "Nuvok"(and I think I have pictures of this place at winter time, as well, in previous posts) at really low tide. It was very muddy out there, very sloppy, but we found an enormous cache of clams, and really big ones!

It was a gorgeous day at Nuvok, low tide, with the mountains very clear in the background. There were a bunch of clam diggers out there that day.


Esther is holding a little clam she helped me dig up, its foot out.
It is so fun to dig them up, because they spout water out of their little foot as you hoist them and the mud they're in up with a shovel. It was totally addictive to dig these clams and only a tired, muddy, wet, cold baby could make us quit.

She was so muddy that it looked like she could be all decorated for some kind of primal celebration! :)



After I got her cleaned up, she totally zonked on the honda, as we gathered our stuff and packed up. :)

Some of our haul of Clams -- steamed up wonderfully.

So the next portion of our adventure might be the most offensive for those of you who aren't sure you're OK with sea-mammal stuff, because I'm going to write and post pictures about whale hunting and butchering, etc. Just to give you warning, just in case!
The whales in question are Beluga whales, the small white and grey whales (small by whale standards), and they come to the waters around Hooper Bay to feed on fish like salmon and herring (herring is what they are after right now) - - they are toothed whales, not baleen. And, while I have lots of romantic pictures of whales, and I feel that they are really magical and wonderful, I also feel OK about them being food. Especially since Esther and I caught a glimpse of the entire pod of whales when they were swimming close to the beach, parallel to shore -- and there were just a ton of whales. I mean, at least 200, maybe more. They just kept coming! It was amazing, because I've never seen whales in the wild before, alive. We were on the beach and I heard this lowing kind of sound, like a foghorn, and I got to wondering what that was, and when I got the binoculars out, I saw them, swimming and diving, flukes in the air and all. Esther couldn't really tell what they were, and was a little tickled by all my excitement. I told her to keep watching out there, because one of them might jump, and she started to holler, "Jump! Jump!". Hee hee.

Here is a picture of the pod of beluga whales, courtesy of Teacher/Photographer Sabrina Silvernale.

It was awesome. And when I saw the pod, I knew there would be hunters catching whales, also, so Esther and I drove down to Nuvok, the point, where I knew they would be, and sure enough they were there. I was glad I had brought buckets, to bring back meat and skin -- most of the time it is just fine to go where hunters are butchering the whales and to ask if you can have some of the whale, since they are so big. Roy expertly cut some off for us, and then I tried my hand at it, much less expertly. It was a really different feeling than butchering the seal because the whale, though dead, was still warm -- and to cut off some of that was just a little overwhelming. But, still, there was an emotional line between what I had seen swimming in the ocean and what was here, on the beach, being butchered.

Hunters who have caught two beluga whales.




Roy and another hunter butchering a whale.





Me trying my hand at cutting some whale meat, with teacher-friend Melody and the hunter, Leonard Bell.

So now I had this big load of whale meat and skin, and what to do? Yeah, this is where the real work began.

First I had to deal with the skin -- it is a real delicacy here in Hooper Bay, and I have to admit I liked it a lot. The first time we had some, I tried it raw, and it was very chewy, very buttery. Esther LOVED it raw, and kept demanding more, but we suddenly had a call from Roy's mom to tell us that if we were eating whale, we couldn't eat anything else that evening that came from the land, including the goose we had going in the crockpot. The belief is that if you eat a land animal and a sea animal, you will get indigestion because they will fight in your stomach. However, since that time, I have had multiple discussions with people on this topic, and they say that they won't eat moose and whale together, but they'll eat whale with potatoes, or crackers, or even pop or candy. As my good friend Norma said, "Pop and candy are from the land!". So, anyway, I'm not going to flout this superstition, but I'm going to slowly, cautiously, probe the boundaries of it over time. :)

Preparing whale skin -- cutting fat off, cutting into pieces for freezing.
So, anyway, The preferred way to cook it is to boil/simmer it for a couple hours, until it is very soft, and to eat it with tamari sauce. It was excellent! However, I ate too much of the fat with it -- at first I thought I was feeling ill because of the superstition, but then it just began to be clear when it just felt like I had eaten something overly rich. Roy had told me to cut off the fat after I cooked it, and I did cut off a lot of it, but it was very tasty, and I was thinking it was full of healthy sea-mammal fatty acids(if they had survived the boiling), so I ate it. Mistake! But I was OK the next morning.

The next time I cooked it, I cooked the clams the same day -- I cooked them each separately, and then I made a super-yummy clam chowder and added the fat-free whale skin. Wow! What a great recipe, totally unique to Hooper Bay. :)
My bowl of clam and whale skin chowder -- you can see the grey chunk of skin and a couple clam feet on top of the soup.
The whale meat was a whole 'nother project. I had nearly two buckets of it! One bucket I cut into nice portions and put them in ziplocks in the freezer. I cut a portion of stew-meat chunks and made my mom's beef stew recipe. I browned the meat with onions in a skillet, and then I put it in the crockpot with potatoes, carrots, peas, and tomato sauce, with some spices. It turned out remarkably like the beef stew of my childhood! It was really good, and the meat was very tender. However, I learned I should have washed the meat more thoroughly, because there was some sand in some of the pieces of meat! yikes. It was chew-chew-crunch! The only one who didn't mind was Esther, who still eats sand at the beach anyway. :)

The second bucket of whale meat I cut into nice strips and marinated overnight with salt and tamari sauce.
Then Roy tied them onto strings, and we hung them to dry on his mom's drying rack. Now we just wait until they've dried, to put away for the summer and next year.

Thoughts on a Subsistence Lifestyle -- How I justify and rationalize hunting

So it has been such an amazing spring in regards to reaping the bounty of the sea. Since I began living here, I have wanted to feel more connected to the ocean and the subsistence activities connected with it, and finally I feel like I have my finger on the pulse. I know that people who have not lived here in Alaska often feel squeamish and sad about the hunting of sea mammals, and I respect that -- I don't expect everyone to want to hunt or eat seals & whales because they read my blog. I want to share my experiences doing this because it is still so amazing to me that this is part of my life, and I am thinking it might feel amazing to many of you, too. I do feel a bit of sadness when I see these animals butchered, but there is also an emotional line that is growing broader within myself -- I am beginning to see them as food, and I don't mean that in any derrogatory way. Some of you may remember that I was a vegetarian for 9 years, for all sorts of reasons, and then when I came to Alaska, I had a personal revelation that a subsistence hunter's relationship and respect for animals is actually closer and more spiritual than a vegetarian's, and although I would never disdain my agrarian roots, it started to feel to me that the hunter/gatherer lifestyle is actually closer to the earth than a farmer's -- especially since the hunter/gatherer spirituality is enmeshed with a kind of reciprocity and gratitude that I have never encountered with agriculture. Not that all hunters out here are perfect or totally in line with the old spirituality, but as much as I can, I try to be. I try to use all the animal that I can, and I try to not be arrogant and expect that we will catch anything -- and, yes, I do feel closer to the animals and to the earth than I did when I was a vegetarian.

And eating this food is very much in alignment with my desire to eat whole foods and organically; although there are toxins found in all wild foods, since those toxins are in the environment, now, the levels are still lower than in processed foods at the grocery store. A research team came from Fairbanks to report on their findings about levels of heavy metals in seals, this spring, and they confirmed that belief, that even with toxins in the environment that get into sea mammals, it is still healthier to eat wild foods.

And an animal that is caught out here in this totally wild land has had an amazing life, a really full life. If I stand still and look around me when I am out in the tundra, on the beach, or in a boat on the bay, I realize how enormous this land is, and how small our (human's) part of it is. It really does feel that if an animal is caught, it must have given itself to the hunter, because how else could anyone have caught it otherwise? There are miles and miles it could have gone, in every direction including up and down, to get away from the hunter. Animals have complete dominion here, and life has flourished in this region for thousands of years partly by the grace of them.

And a whole bunch of hard work. Subsistence life is a whole lot of work -- if I thought farming was a lot of work, well, I guess I don't know which is more work, honestly. But the preparation of subsistence foods is a job in itself, and is just as hard on the physical body as farming is. When I would talk to elders in the past about how they used to live, they would always say, "It was a lot of work", and I guess it just didn't register with me, exactly what they meant. I think there are muscles in the body that are never used until you are trying to deal with a huge carcass of something, and deal with it quickly so that it can be preserved in the best way possible. Hands, arms, shoulders, back, legs, wrists, fingers all get so tired and sore from bending, squatting, sitting, carving, slicing, plucking, etc. As I prepared the subsistence things this spring, I finally had a real physical understanding of what the elders meant. The refrain that would come into mind many times is, "If I didn't have to go to work, I could do....", or "If I wasn't so tired from working all day, I could...", always something further with this wild food than I had done. I wish I could live like people here did, and sometimes still do, with subsistence as their main occupation and way of life -- it's totally a full-time job, and totally fun and rewarding -- especially to open the freezer and see the bounty inside and remember that it got there through hard work and kind gifts from others in the community, not via money and the grocery store (well, except for the purchases of shotgun shells and gas!).

So I felt like this topic needed addressing in my blog, so that you all, if you don't know me and my thoughts on this topic already, would know where I am coming from. I am not a blood-and-guts kind of hunter, I am not an arrogant shoot-everything-in-sight hunter, I am coming from a truly respectful place. I find a lot of enjoyment in the connection I experience between myself and the natural world in living this way. I also feel like I am doing what I can living a healthy lifestyle and helping Esther to grow up connected to her cultural heritage.