FAQs

Here's an effort to respond to the most common questions we have fielded about our upcoming trip - listed roughly in decreasing order of frequency.

Yellowknife...that's in, um...the Yukon? No, but you're close. It's the capital of the Northwest Territories, immediately east of the Yukon. So from west to east, you have: Alaska, the Yukon, the Northwest Territories, and Nunavut. (I realize that expecting Americans to know Canadian capitals is like expecting a Canadian to know the capital of, say, Kansas.)

Seriously, the Great Slave Lake? Why would it be named after slaves? It's not. That's a mutation of the local Slavey peoples and languages, more accurately called the Dene-tha, part of the greater Na-Dene language group that includes native peoples of northern Canada, much of the US and Canadian Pacific coasts, as well as the Navajo.

How cold will it be up there? The average temperatures are roughly the same for all the places we're visiting, from the Rockies to Edmonton to the NWT: average high around 70, average low from 45 to 50 at night.

Just how remote are these places? The NWT is slightly smaller than Alaska, or about two thirds the size of Mexico, with roughly 40,000 people. Plus below that is the very sparsely populated portion of British Columbia and Alberta which never even appears in your atlas. Some of the towns we're stopping at in the NWT are described, with great precision, as having populations of 182, 90 and 69 in the travel guide. The roads are pretty much all packed gravel. That said, those of us in the West know that in sparsely populated areas, a small town boxes above its weight. A place like Yellowknife - a capital city with 15,000 people - will have robust public and commercial services because it's still the main population center, no matter how small. Even the 90-person town has "a range of services including gas stations, restaurants, accommodations, a grocery store and a native crafts gift shop."

How long will the days be up there? Is it land of midnight sun? Today, the sun rose in Fort Simpson at 4:27 am and will set at 11:50 pm. By the time we get there, sunrise will be around 5:30 am and sunset around 11 pm. Bear in mind that at those high latitudes, you gain or lose five to eight minutes of daylight each day, because of the huge swings between winter and summer. So in a two-week stay, the length of the days changes by nearly an hour.

What if the dogs get sick? Well, yeah, they are old. And even though we hope this will be fun for them, even good stress is a stressor. In the NWT, the only veterinary hospital is in Yellowknife. So we hope they don't get sick of course, and it would be stressful if they do - but we're sure that vets up there know a thing or two about dogs. Our own vets have said that there are actually fewer parasites to worry about up there, because they can't survive the winters. There is one particularly nasty form of tapeworm that they would only get from eating raw bison or caribou meat. So...no gnawing on bison carcasses. Check.

Will you stay in touch while traveling? Once we get far north, we'll have cell phone service in Yellowknife and Hay River, but not outside those areas. There are wireless cafes and such, and we're taking the laptop with every intention of checking email and posting some stories and pictures where we can.

I hear they have huge mosquitoes up there. Yes, we hear that too. Having read many first-person accounts dating back to the 1850s, I am struck by how consistently they all mention the bugs, and with the same horror mixed with wonder; people actually died from mosquito exposure. We have insect repellent and mosquito netting, and the nice lady at the NWT visitors' bureau basically said: Yes, they're bad, but not as bad as people make it sound. So we'll see.

You're going for a month? Did you quit your jobs or something? Nope. We're just taking vacation and some leave without pay, which employers seem happy to give at the moment...

Got other burning questions? Post below!

Introducing Sparky & Eva

Back in November, we traded in our beloved Subaru for a little red Prius. We named her Sparky, and she gets 50 miles to the gallon. Here she is in her native habitat:


Not content with our low-CO2 lifestyle, we decided to go on this crazy Canadian road trip, and began looking for a temporary vehicle that could provide us not only with transportation, but with lodging as well. Many of you know the saga that ensued, which involved renting a huge RV, contemplating the purchase of a small, 20-year-old Winnebago, realizing that I have an alarmingly stunted sense of spacial awareness and no business driving anything as large as an RV - and then buying a used Volkswagen Eurovan.

Now that we own a VW van, it feels like we've been admitted to a cult-like secret society. Because man, people love their VWs. We would have loved to buy one of the pop-top camper versions, but people hold onto them forever. For 30 grand, you can get one with 150,000 miles.

So instead, we found the simpler version, with a fold-out bed, a fold-up table, and curtains. It has surprisingly low mileage (65,000) and a clean bill of health from the preferred mechanic of the local VW Secret Society, who seems suspiciously chill if you know what I mean, but dude, the man knows his VWs.

Her name is Eva, and here she is on our recent test run to Oregon. Please excuse my finger in this otherwise lovely shot of Mt. Hood:

The trip to Bend was about seven hours each way, ample time to let the dogs check out their new ride:

Yes, we really plan to live in that thing with two 60-pound dogs, for a month. Believe it or not, that's a queen-sized bed in there.

Most supplies will be stored underneath. We've spent the past few weeks pimping our ride, and we're almost good to go. We've got a cooler that runs on the 12-volt (aka cigarette lighter) plug, a spiffy new 2-burner Coleman stove, and an adapter for charging the laptop. This weekend we hope to get one of those iPod adapter thingies for the car stereo. We'll bathe the dogs, pack the passports, and then head off into the sunset with 45 quarts of dog food in tow.

Starting at the beginning

Two weeks from today, our entire pack - two humans and two canines - will head north for a month-long Canadian adventure in a 2001 Volkswagen van. Our northernmost destination is Yellowknife: capital of the Northwest Territories, 350 miles north of Juneau, and 300 miles shy of the Arctic Circle. Total expected mileage: just over 4,000.


(You can click on the map to make it bigger)

En route, we will spend time in Banff National Park in the magnificent Canadian Rockies, camping along the banks of famous Lake Louise. Then we'll head to Edmonton for a couple days' visit with my aunt.

We plan to spend ten days in the Northwest Territories, where we can dip our toes in North America's deepest lake (the Great Slave Lake) and Canada's longest river (the mighty Mackenzie). It's big, big country up there.

We'll visit the world's second-largest national park (Wood Buffalo National Park), home to one of the largest buffalo herds in the world and the only remaining nesting area for the endangered whooping crane. We'll also see Fort Simpson, my great-grandmother's childhood home, and the Camsell mountain range named for her family.

On the way back, our plans are flexible, but we're hoping to take the less-beaten path (!) down the Alaska-Yukon Highway, possibly cutting back for a shot at Jasper National Park and the chance to meander along the spine of the Rockies on the Icefields Parkway.

That's the plan, anyway.

Not dead!

I know, last you heard from me, there was still a possibility that John McCain would be President of the United States. It's been a while. I haven't been terribly inspired.

Plus, I took a partial break from consulting work to put some concerted effort into my book-writing project, The Canadian Saga, based on my family history. I read dozens of books related to the history of Canada, the native peoples of western Canada, and the Hudson's Bay Company. I made mid-winter journeys to the frozen homelands of my people, where I visited archives and saw really enormous snow sculptures. I diagrammed elaborate timelines of events on my white board. I discovered that sitting down and writing fiction is fracking hard. So for a while, all my writing energy was absorbed elsewhere.

I also became an aunt! Which is also way cool, and some of my time has been absorbed visiting my adorable new niece and, of course, her parents. Since it's not my place to blog about her, or her family's joys and travails in the throes of new parenthood, or to post pictures of her - that takes another big part of my life off the table.

BUT - Enrico and I (and our two geriatric dogs) are soon to embark on a month-long road trip to the far north, land of my family tale. And travel, my friends, has always generated ample fodder for us here at Miscellaneous Shellfish. We've bought a used VW van, and it should be a hoot. So I figure I'll re-activate the old blog as a way of keeping up with family while we're on the road. Stay tuned, if you care to.

My experience BaRACKing the vote

I know my month-long absence means nobody will be reading this, but - I'm back, nonetheless.

Gentle Reader, trust me when I say you've been better for my absence, because I have been pathologically obsessed with the election and the polls. It's not pretty, though I know I'm not alone. The other night we had dinner with my friend Megan, and at one point I heard myself saying "I feel so much better after talking to you because you're WAY crazier than I am."

In the past few days I attempted to channel my anxiety into something other than obscene amounts of cable news-watching and internet poll-checking, by knocking on doors for the Obama campaign. These folks are crazy-organized, let me tell you. You get your list of people, with their polling place and ballot type, and a map. You get literature and talking points and a phone number to call for anyone whose absentee ballot went missing, or who has a problem with their voter registration. So off I went.

Both times, I was assigned to some hard-knock parts of my neighborhood. These were some of the lowest-income areas of a low-income part of town. And it says something in Seattle when you can spend four hours knocking on doors, and only talk to one white person. I also only talked to two undecided people, and no McCain voters. So really I spent my time making sure people knew how to vote. And boy, was that satisfying.

I encountered a number of people who had questions about where to vote, or who hadn't received their absentee ballot, so I was (hopefully) able to help them actually vote. I met so many first-time voters, including many recently naturalized citizens. They were so excited, some of them invited me in so they could run through what they needed to do and make sure they understood. I met a family of east African women, all voting for the first time, who proudly reported that they'd already mailed in their ballots, and then they erupted into a happy kind of dance, cheering "Obama, Obama, Obama!"

At one point I caught a woman who was heading to her car, and she looked wary when I approached her. I explained my purpose, and she affirmed that everyone in her house knew what to do and that they were all voting Obama/Gregoire. As I walked away, she pulled up next alongside me in her car. "You know, I'm from Africa," she said, "and recently I was back home for a visit. And in Africa, they are all watching us. The world is watching what we do in this election. It is terribly important, because our choice will affect the whole world."

I don't know what it would be like to do get-out-the-vote work in Georgia, or Indiana. Maybe different, maybe not. But here, it was so inspiring. Not only to see all these people inspired to vote, excited about casting their first vote, determined to vote for change. But even just to get deeper into this neighborhood that I've called home for nearly 15 years, to walk down a block that intimidates me a little bit because I stand out so much, and to meet these people who are my neighbors, so different from me and from each other in many ways, but all holding firm to the belief that our vote can make a difference to the world.

A PS re: Obama and Africa - a relevant Doonsbury...

So scary, yet I can't stop looking

I'm sure everyone's seen Tina Fey's wickedly good impersonation of Sarah Palin's interview with Katie Couric, but...It took me a while to realize that for the scariest part - the answer about the bailout - Fey was simply quoting Palin, nearly verbatim.

The skit:
http://www.nbc.com/Saturday_Night_Live/video/clips/couric-palin-open/704042/

Ok, so she did add the part about the dollar value meals. Which was pretty funny. Here's the text of the original interview:

"But ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the health care reform that is needed to help shore up our economy, helping the -- oh, it's got to be all about job creation, too, shoring up our economy and putting it back on the right track.

"So health care reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions and tax relief for Americans. And trade, we've got to see trade as opportunity, not as a competitive, um, scary thing. But one in five jobs being created in the trade sector today, we've got to look at that as more opportunity. All those things under the umbrella of job creation. This bailout is part of that."*

*From the Seattle PI.

More on our first direct blow from the economy's collapse

Apparently the FDIC took over the bank, and literally auctioned it off to the highest bidder. The newspaper this morning has some helpful updates on what our that means to us - regular, everyday depositors, mortgage-holders, and shareholders. I paraphrase...

Depositor: Your new bank is JPMorgan Chase. Your money is safe. Please do not panic.

Borrower: Your new lender is JPMorgan Chase. Please continue to make payments as usual.

Stockholder: JPMorgan Chase bought WaMu from the FDIC, not from its shareholders. You will receive nothing.

So that pretty much sums it up for us.

They also have a few words for the employees:

Employee: Your new employer is JPMorgan Chase, who sent you an email last night asking you to please come to work this morning. Branch employees are probably pretty safe, because there is so little overlap between the banks' branches. Headquarters employees (about 3,500 people) are probably screwed, eventually.

And, a new twist on the real estate slide: WaMu is also downtown Seattle's largest tenant, with about 1.6 million square feet of office space. Fire sale on office space!

Where's George Bailey when you need him?

In other news, my bank collapsed today.

"The largest bank seizure in American history!" It's so exciting to be a part of history, isn't it?

Of course, I've been working on getting our money out of there. I have new bank accounts all ready to go, and we're going the credit union route this time - I'm done with greedy, adrenaline-junky executives who take crazy risks with your money and then pocket a bagillion dollars on the way out.

I initiated fund transfers on Monday, but they haven't gone through, yet. I guess they've been a little overwhelmed, what with me and my fellow WaMu customers withdrawing $17 billion, or 9 percent of the bank's assets, in the last ten days. So I guess I'll just have to have faith in the good old FDIC. And, it appears, JPMorgan, who just bought my checking and savings accounts at bargain-basement prices. I have no idea who owns my mortgage.

We're also shareholders in our bank - which used to be a fine, venerable institution, and a solid investment - and that's a TOTAL loss. But we've known that for a long time.

Strange times, indeed.

Vote Obama. Please, for the love of whatever deity you worship. Stop the madness.

Locavorism update

One of the things I was doing while not blogging of late, in addition to taking vacations and re-starting the book, was the continued pursued of locavorism. Many aspects of this way of life have now become habit - the farmer's market, bread-baking, using honey instead of sugar. The juice and the milk that we buy has the added benefit of coming in returnable glass bottles (the old deposit system), which adds the satisfaction of reducing our waste. I know, glass is recyclable, but the world can only absorb so much recycled glass.

One thing that didn't go so smoothly was my quest for canning tomatoes. Because we had The Summer That Wasn't here in the Northwest, the tomato crop was rather sad, and in particular, there was a near-complete absence of canning varieties. That would be the meaty ones, the Romas and San Marzanos and such.

I had in my head that I would attempt to put up some of the foods that would not otherwise be available in winter, rather than import them from California or Mexico. I canned 12 pints of cherries and four quarts of peaches. I roasted and froze five pounds of peppers, blanched and froze a couple pound of green beans. I purchased, and have stored in neat glass storage jars, two quarts each of dry kidney, red, black and garbanzo beans.

But the tomatoes proved elusive. Week after week I would ask around at the farmer's market, even visiting other markets. People had a few canners here and there, but not enough to make it worth the effort. Twice I received an absolute promise that they'd be there the next week, at another market...only to be disappointed.

Finally I saw a box of decent-sized Romas at one stand in the U District. I bought their whole stock - 20 pounds, at a 10 percent discount. I brought them home and cleaned them, skinned them (after a quick dip in boiling water), and then hot-packed and canned them in quart jars.

How many quarts do you get from 20 pounds of raw tomatoes? Ten. I might have canned more the next weekend if I could've found them, but alas. Nothing but slicers and cherries to be had. And yellow tomatoes, which aren't acidic enough to can safely.

One interesting thing about the locavore experiment is thinking about what really is better for the environment. So: growing summer produce year-round using greenhouses and irrigation, and then trucking it all over the country, uses an unsustainable amount of energy and water. Fine. What was required to produce my ten quarts of canned tomatoes?

I bought them from a local organic farmer. Good. They cost me $55 - that's $5.50 per quart, just to start. Then there's the cost of the jars, which I'm not really counting because they're reusable, though the flat part of the two-piece lid can't be re-used for canning purposes. So add a few cents for that. Then there was the lemon juice needed to ensure a safe level of acidity (tomatoes being right on the PH bubble, in terms of being inhospitable to botulism). And then lots of boiling water: the initial boil to loosen the skin, the boiling water to fill up the jars, and enough to fill a 20-quart canning kettle. Lastly, there's the electricity to run the stove, bringing the kettle to boil and keeping it there through two 45-minute rounds of canning. Theoretically you could throw in the value of my time, about four hours total for the canning process, but we'll ignore that since I don't have a billable rate for canning.

Conservatively, we're talking $6 to $7 per quart of tomatoes.

That's not totally outrageous, but it's not cheap either. It probably still produced fewer carbon emissions than the fresh tomatoes shipped up from Mexico in the middle of winter. (Though to some extent that turns on the electricity that powers my stove, which happens to come from greener wind and hydro sources in this neck of the woods...still more complexity.) So, I'm doing better eating these than eating fresh this winter. But how do my canners compare to other canned tomatoes I might buy, industrially canned and shipped in bulk from ... somewhere?

Well, I don't know where exactly the store-bought canned tomatoes come from. If it were Oregon or California, that might still be a better deal than home-canning, carbon-wise, but maybe not Florida.

I have ten empty quart jars left, and would consider doing some more canning before the season ends but I'm not sure I have the time. I'm out of town the next two weekends. And I'm only really committed to it for things that I legitimately can't get fresh and local in winter. The best fruit for canning right now is pears, and we'll be able to get Washington-grown pears that are cold-stored all winter.

If anybody out there has 20 more pounds of San Marzano tomatoes, though, let me know.

Updates and possible adventures

Wow, nearly a month since I last blogged.

I like to think that I've stopped blogging because (in addition to taking lots of great vacations this summer) I finally started writing the long-awaited Saga of the Canadian North. The one that Moxie and I have outlined, researched, even travelled to three different far-flung Canadian cities to research, courtesy of various archives and distant relatives. But now I've actually started writing. And I like to think that I am using up my writing energy there, rather than procrastinating it away on blogging.

The book is painful. At every, single, sentence, I am confronted with questions. It's 1859 in what will eventually become Winnipeg, Manitoba. My protagonist is 10 years old. What does she eat for breakfast? How does she address her mother? What does she buy at the store? How high is the river running?

At the same time, our story is following real facts wherever we have them, which just goes to show that truth really is stranger than fiction. Even as I struggle with a dearth of knowledge about the details of everyday life, I am paralyzed by an embarrassment of historical riches. Floods. Political intrigue. The first steamboat. An honest-to-gosh plague of locusts, for heaven's sake. I could not possibly make that up.

I know the exact plot of land that my ancestors lived on in 1859. I can see it on a map. I can find out how high the floodwaters of 1826 and 1852 rose on that exact plot of land. I know the names of their neighbors, their clergy, their teachers. I know how many oxen and horses they reported to the census-takers. I know the location of the general store, the post office, and the saloon.

So my goal is to crank this story out, and take a couple more research trips next year, ideally one to Winnipeg in February or March (god help me), and one to the Northwest Territories next summer.

Enrico really wants to go along to the far north. He is proposing a month-long driving trip, with the dogs. To a place 1,500 miles due north of here. A place with 35,000 people spread over an area two-thirds the size of Mexico. Where you have to carry your next tank of gas with you. Where the only animal hospital - should our geriatric dogs require one - is in Yellowknife, a good 250 miles away from the places I really need to visit. Where the town has only two restaurants, but six air charter companies. Where the largest surviving herd of wild bison in North America roams. And bears - lots of bears.

In other words, it would take some planning.

But we're considering it. What the heck, you only live once, and if Enrico wants to see the Great Slave Lake and the mighty Mackenzie River - see it he shall!

Let's just pause, shall we?

I have been dipping my toe in and out of the Democratic convention, half hoping that my sense of inspiration and hope would get re-ignited, half fearing the relentless gravity of that dreary, myopic, politics-as-usual that drained the primary of all its sunlight.

I listen to NPR and read the speech post-mortems on Slate, mostly on the XX Factor, where for months I've followed the most intelligent debate I could find on the Clinton and Obama candidacies, and all the hopes and angst and bitterness that they engendered.

This morning the post-mortems were all about Bill Clinton's speech, without a single mention of one of the momentous events in US history: Yesterday, one of the two major political parties named a non-white person as their candidate for president.

Oh, the actual roll call vote was buried early in the day's schedule, thanks to lingering nervousness about how the die-hard Hillary supporters would behave. And the traditional absence of the presumptive nominee himself always detracts from the drama of the moment, in my opinion. But still, it was a moment that literally made me weep. I'm not sure I really believed that I, born less than a year after the Voting Rights Act gave black people a meaningful right to vote in this country, would ever see a black man at the top of the ticket.

Sure, seeing a woman at the top of the ticket would have been just as momentous, and I am just as hopeful about that too. I refuse to be unhappy about having to choose between two kinds of momentous.

When we were in France in April, once someone realized they had an American who could converse in French, it was as if they couldn't resist the opportunity to ask: Really, you actually might elect a black man? I could see them rock on their heels a bit, rethinking all the exasperated thoughts they had about us. They want to like Americans, they really do; they find us endearing and strangely, naively kind as a people, yet also so selfish and short-sighted. We share an historical legacy with the French, birthing Western representative democracy through our twin revolutions. But they have been despairing about us lately. This unexpected twist in our election process made them feel genuinely hopeful, for their strange old friends, and for the world.

It really does give me hope, that we might be that kind of a country after all. It's a nice feeling. Not nearly as nice as it'll be if it actually happens.

Floating along

In general, when I get so far behind that I don't know where to start, I respond by procrastinating even further. I cannot face the deficit of shoulda-done's piling up, and thus the should-do's in front of me go straight to the avoidance list too. It's not a very healthy response, I know. But eventually I snap out of it. I pick something, anything, off the endless behind-schedule list, just to get moving; once moving, I triage everything else, and get myself off the dime.

Thus, my back-to-back vacations (Hawaii, Canon Beach) and business trips (Portland, more Portland) got me out of the blogging routine, and every time I'd think of ALL the things I could've blogged about, I'd become overwhelmed and put off blogging for another day. Feeling neglected, Gentle Reader? Just imagine what my Inbox looked like. Oy. At least my bills got paid.

So: here is me, getting off the dime.

This week the consulting work is a tad slow (and by slow, I mean I have billed exactly one half hour all week). So I took a load of stuff to Goodwill, took a load of food to the overwhelmed neighborhood food bank, updated my emergency kit, filed a year's worth of paper, mailed a bunch of stuff to my parents, baked bread, canned four quarts of peaches, got the finances up to date, and weeded the vegetable garden.