First- there are just a few spots left in my February Arizona trips! If you want to build to confidence to hike a long trail, and you want to do it with a group of wonderful women, trans and non-binary people in the warm dez, and also if you want to eat KK’s fantastic cooking- then these are the trips for you. An incredible good time, guaranteed. More deets and reviews from past participants are here.
Also- I still have nothing useful to say post election. I have, however, found Heather Cox Richardson’s substack to be useful, as well as Timothy Snyder’s, and also this guy who posts news updates on tiktok.
When I returned to Fairbanks at the end of October, proper winter had arrived- there was frost on the windowsills in my cabin, the surrounding spruce trees were lumpy with snow, the roads were icy. The bog behind my neighborhood had frozen, and the trails through the forest that were too wet to use in summer had turned into tidy little snow paths, thanks to a neighbor who DIY grooms them on a snow machine pulling a bunch of tires. The pond in the woods back there had frozen too, and one neighbor had left a shovel out there and people, when passing with their dogs, took turns shoveling until a good chunk was clear, and then another neighbor started smoothing a patch with a weed burner, creating a skating rink. I was glad to be back in this place, where one lives in a cabin without plumbing in the wholesome forest, surrounded in nature in which to play, and “town” is always at least a few miles away- “town” being a humble sprawl of decaying seventies architecture, laundromat Costco gym thai food restaurant etc, utilitarian at best. That’s the vibe of Alaska in general- big nature, small town, decaying seventies architecture. Construction doesn’t really get updated here, not in any meaningful way, not since that original seventies oil pipeline boom.
The fantasy I had before moving to Fairbanks about living in a neighborhood of cabins where I’m friends with my neighbors- like the people who live in actual physical proximity to me- something tragically rare and weirdly hard to accomplish in the US these days? Continues to come to fruition, making me feel like I found some sort of cheat code.