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Polar Summer
by Cameron Walker
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Sonia holds a silver funnel over her nose while I strap it around her head. In the corner, Donie peels red labeling tape off of a roll and sticks it along the sides of her X-tra Tuffs, the insulated, waterproof boots we wear in the boggy tundra. The brown boots slowly transform into ruby slippers. Kristen cuts a lion’s mane out of a grocery bag, while Laurie wraps tinfoil around her arms and legs. This is how the Fourth of July is celebrated hundreds of miles north of the Arctic Circle.
The five of us are working at a research station in northern Alaska for the summer. Donie is the U.C. Berkeley post-doc who is leading our project, and the rest of us are undergraduate field assistants.
The research station consists of seven trailers, a row of tents and three outhouses, which are covered with graffiti only a scientist would understand. It all sits on the shore of Toolik Lake, and the Brooks Range glows in the midnight sun to the south.
Toolik means “loon” in Inupiak, and I can hear the loons calling from the inlet at night. Maybe they laugh because they think they have driven the darkness away.
Returning workers have been telling us about the Fourth of July festivities since we got here in June. It’s the one day of the summer when no one works, when the beakers and test tubes are left with their magnetic stirrers turned on and the LI-CORs are left to record data on their own. Dinner will be a feast. All the big shots will be there, the researchers, the PhDs, the ones who are listed in the indices of Nature and Science . . .
