Food: From Beautiful Bounty to Embarrassing Bulk

FOOD. We all eat it. But where do we get it? Up here in Alaska, the answer can vary quite a bit...

FISHSLAYERS. Ahhhhh, Alaskan residents dipnetting. Perhaps best described using numbers:

1 big ass net
1 big ass handle
25 salmon (max, per head of household), clearly not higher order thinkers, swimming into net
1 human, not necessarily skilled in any way, chest-deep in the water, holding the handle
21 days in July
100 percent of success due to luck and luck alone

Remember our first stab at dipnetting when we first moved up? Complete fail. Ended up without a single fish and had a kind neighbor gift us one of theirs to feed our summer visitors. Over the years we've improved a bit, catching 8 fish on our best day ever, securing our own net rather than borrowing from friends, and somewhat mastering an efficient processing strategy (Kim de-scales the fish, J fillets the fish, and J-Dock Company down in Seward does the vacuuming sealing for about $1/pound).

Well this year we returned from Lower 48 travels and had just a few days left in the dipnetting season. Slightly bleary-eyed, we hit the road for Kenai with our supplies:

• cooler
• bag of ice
• dipnets (in pieces that can be reattached so they fit in Sally Ride)
• waders (for J) and dry suit (for Kim)
• neoprene gloves
• billy club (for bonking the fish on the head after they're netted and dragged to shore)
• fillet knife (with sharpening block)
• cutting board (with strong metal clip to hold the tail fins)
• bucket (to hold the other stuff and hey, it's just always good to have a bucket)
• water and snacks 
• hoola hoop and James Patterson kid novel (Indigo does not like to fish, but she likes to watch)

We got to the beach parking lot early and scored a spot near the stairs, carried everything down and hopped in the water. Within 1/2 an hour, J was dragging out the first fish. Then we started feeling them hit our legs... by lunch time we'd made two trips up and out to a local thrift store to buy more coolers!

23 fish for Team Leslie
3 humans, tired and pleased with ourselves, unskilled fisher people and all

Kim and J early in the game, starting to fill up cooler #1.

Filling the freezer and then some!

BLUEBERRIES. It just kills me in the winter when we go to the local Safeway and eye the teeny tiny half pint cartons of blueberries in the produce cooler section. $6... maybe $8 per half pint. Just enough for a good smoothie or a round of Saturday morning pancakes. Now every year we try to stock up and pick our own in August, but time gets away from us, school starts up, we eat a ton of what we've picked, and a few baggies end up with the dregs in the freezer.

Well this year we decided to do some picking up on Mt. Alice, usually framed across the bay in our window. It was my birthday weekend, also J and my 17th wedding anniversary, and one last summer overnight camping adventure was in order. We crossed our fingers that there would be some bloobs up high and after getting above treeline, we hit the mother lode: 1 gallon of big berries off a single bush! Eat your heart out, Safeway.

Serious work; a winter's worth of extra tasty breakfasts is at stake!

Powered by blue!

COSTCO. Last but not least, (and it does pain me slightly to write this), we of Team Leslie have joined a wholesale warehouse club. A company that started out selling food in an airplane hangar. A company that has more pallets per acre than blades of grass. Good God.

How did we come to this, you ask? Well, when we first arrived in Alaska, we quickly noticed that everyone had a Costco membership. Everyone. Pantries were filled with 144-packs of mac and cheese, plastic wrapped together; enough paper towels to sop up a baby pool; and goldfish crackers in boxes the size of small cars. Home-made robot costumes made of massive Kirkland boxes walked the streets on Halloween. Guests arriving at a potluck dinner needed to enter in pairs to hold up the 36-serving pies without having them cave in the center. We were terrified.

It's also of note that Team Leslie had moved up from the fruit and flower rich farmers markets of Oregon, from the organic samples on wooden platters in the Whole Foods of California. There was a time where we knew the chickens who laid our eggs, knew the orchardists who grew our apples, and milked the tits of the... okay, we didn't do that last one. But we did feel connected to our food and enjoyed our saunters up and down the isles in these nutrient rich market places. Market places. Not warehouses.

But groceries here in Alaska are expensive; the price we pay for living so far from the rest of civilization, right? Except for our fish and our berries, most foods we consume are traveling thousands of miles. And when a lot of it gets here, especially produce, it's in sorry shape. The joy of cutting into an avocado and seeing that creamy green amazingness? Rare. The sadness of cutting into an avocado and seeing brown mush and dark grey strings? Standard operating procedure.

Enter Costco, and bulk food towers of power. Clearly, we have arrived.

Smoke, Sweat and Success

"The Toughest 5K on the Planet" 

"The World's Gnarliest Three Miler" 

"The Best Mountain Runners in the World Can't Crack 40 Minutes" 

SMOKE, SWEAT and SUCCESS. Before we even moved to Seward, we'd visited for the famed 4th of July shenanigans and Mount Marathon Race, dubbed "The Toughest 5K on the Planet" by Outside Magazine and touted as the oldest mountain race in the country. Sporty crazy people running 3000 feet up and down a super steep mountain in record time, often muddy, bloody and exhausted, while crowds of thousands go wild. Simple rules drive a complex race: Start at the line down on the paved road in town on 4th Avenue (our street!), get up the mountain on foot any route you want, round the rock at the false summit known as "race point," and get back down to the finish farther down the paved road. You want to free climb the cliffs? Fine. Drop from roots and slide down waterfall gullies? You got it. Where a costume like a tutu or Gumby suit? Why not. Just train like hell, feel like hell, and get the hell down in one piece.

And this year, ladies and gentlemen, J Leslie got off the wait list for the lottery and entered hell, I mean, the race!

Here are a few pix I snapped from the top of the mountain after race day, so you can try to get some sense of the elevation gain and steepness of the trail.

Near the top of the "race point" - you can see the squiggly trail leading up the final rocky pitch, above the cliff-y forested area. The start and end is near the far right part of town in the picture.

And the down trail, or controlled-falling-down-a-scree-field portion of things. I spy a cruise ship!

BURN, BABY, BURN. Now the race conditions are always unpredictable: a slip and slide mud fest on rainy years, dehydratingly hot and dry on others. And this year was hot. But it also had an added twist: The Swan Lake wildfire. Started by a lightning strike at the beginning of the summer, this fire about 50 miles to our north had kicked up significantly in the weeks leading up to the race, smoke filling our bay and obscuring the mountains. (PurpleAir.com has areas close to us ranked as the worst air quality in the world, right now... wowser). Race officials offered all adults a free opt out, with a secure spot to run again next year, and the youth race (ages 7-17) was canceled within an hour of start time when the air quality index put us slightly too high.

Interestingly, when the Junior Race was canceled, tons of Seward kids said, "we're doing it anyway!" and promptly charged the mountain at the original 9AM start time. 

So what happened? J went for it, of course! Like the wild and crazy youngsters, he'd been training in the smoke, so why not do the thing in the smoke?

Indigo came up with a few interview questions, to get you some of the inside scoop:

I: How was the smoke?
J: It wasn't that bad - it was smokey but it was more that it was hot and that it was smokey at the same time. 

I: Did anyone slap you on the butt?
J: No. 

I: Were you only thinking about the race during the race, or were you thinking about paint colors or something?
J: No, I actually talked, well not talked, but cheered other people on and made jokes and stuff during the race a lot. The nature of the trail is that you have to be focused on the trail, but it's just how I am during these sorts of things. 

I: Were there any points where you wished you hadn't signed up for the race?
J: No, but, and I knew it was going to be like this, but running the road was the worst... it was just awful... because it was super hot out on the road and you just want to get to the trail and start going up hill. And the road is also sneakily up hill. And the road at the end was the hardest part too, because my legs were cramping up and I didn't want to fall over in front of thousands of people. 

Who says Alaskans don't have style? Indigo waits in the unusually hot summer sun for her dad to pop out of the chute (and not fall over).

Kim (sneaking in a final question): What part of the whole experience are you the most proud of?
J: Just that I ran it and finished it. I mean you can train and prepare and all that, but it's the kind of race that lots of things can go wrong and you can get hurt... so just to finish.

J with Mt. Marathon in the background, just proud to finish!