The Weather Report for Old Crow

Weather.com doesn't seem to believe in Old Crow--the largest town north of the arctic circle in the Yukon. You have to fly in, and just for extra fun, when you fly out, the plane goes by way of Fairbanks, Alaska.

If nobody hears the weather report, does the sun still come up in the morning?

Well, that far north, this time of year, the sun probably comes up around 2 AM or so.

I'll be in Old Crow by Monday morning, and from there, getting into a helicopter and flying out to Vuntut, which is the Yukon side of ANWR. Same landscape, same caribou, no insane politicians thinking a couple months of oil is reason enough to bring about the end of this particular world.

Tundra doesn't look like much from eye-height, but if you get down on your hands and knees, experience the thing on its own level, it is amazing stuff. Two years ago, outside Nome, I counted forty species of plants in not much more than a square foot. Willow trees, a hundred years old and an inch high. Berry bushes smaller than the berries they produced.

It's like the world in the old Dr. Seuss book, Horton Hears a Who. Too small, too intricate for most people to bother noticing.

But it's there, and like everything else, we deserve it the respect of our time and attention.

Because I'll be in the considerable boonies--the bush, the wop wops--no updates here for a while. Maybe the first week of August, depending, as I'll be in the more wired climes of British Columbia that week, but the week after that, it's back to the arctic, to paddle a river in western Alaska, a place utterly free of the 60-cycle hum of electricity.

Falling off the map, in other words.

And here's the question for the day: are we really stupid enough to believe that the classic mariners simply drew sea monsters out there for their own amusement? They were too busy for that. They drew what they saw, what other people needed to know about.