In the beginning, there was Greensaw, my construction company. 1205 S. 8th Street, my rowhome I renovated and sold for a tugboat in Alaska. A blue Toyota 4Runner bought off Ebay for 1500 bucks that spirited me, at times at the speed of 35 mph as we climbed the Rockies, across the country. Around this time, in fall of 2011, I started this blog.

Morning. A silver mug of black coffee on the deck of a schooner. Perhaps it harkens back to the Adak, or even earlier, tendering on the Heron for sea cucumbers with Grant Miller, prowling the inside waters in November picking up product when this ritual started.Later on tending Spencer on the Snorkel as he dove for sea cucumber, fishing in Security Inlet for pinks with Karl on the Saturday. Pouring hot water over the grounds, taking the cup out on deck, squinting into the cold and sipping as the wind gusts over the water, waves lapping at the planking as the day broke.

The original plan called for us to untieJordan Rosen Photography-9752 from Tromsø harbor on April 18th, but a low pressure system with winds out of the east pinned us in town. As we grouped around the computer Rasmus pointed out the Windy app where the low pressure system moved east, while another blow moved in along the coast of Spitsbergen to the north. We had already decided that Bjornaya, Bear Island, in the middle of the Barents Sea, wasn’t going to happen due to the weather and our course. That was fine. We all agreed that we really just wanted to get there. Save Bjornaya for another time.

Five days ago I left the family in Sitka to begin a journey to Tromsø, Norway, the home port of the Linden, the boat pictured above. This will be our home for the next two weeks as we venture north to the Svalbard Archipelago, just sixteen degrees beneath the North Pole.

As the days grow longer here on Finn Alley, the girls slip into a routine of Haley at homeschool, with an emphasis on Russian and math – how her brain works – and Kiki and I starting mornings with a walk across town to Mt. Edgecumbe pre-school.

We left ourselves with the last post, I believe, on a grassy knoll about 30 miles from Dayton, near the town of West Liberty, in Salem Township, Champaign County, Ohio. Citronella candle burning. Trying to figure out whether to turn south towards New Orleans, or continue through the Midwest along 70, trading off the doldrums of Kansas for the peaks of the Rockies. Thus taking the straightest, and most sensical line across the country.

After selling our 2009 white Jetta, and picking up a 2013 GMC 2500 diesel in Utica, NY, we gathered the kids in New Jersey, and redirected to Nashua, NH, where our 27-foot International Serenity Airstream awaited. Staying with my stepsister, and good friends Andrew and Annette in their sweet little treehouse just outside Walpole.

So the plan when we left Russia in July 2019 had been to return to Siberia the following winter. To finish our sentence breaking rock in the gulags, as so many of our friends in America loved to joke. Also Rachel and I would be teaching at Irkutsk National Research Technical University.

New Year’s 2020. About five months since we’ve returned from Russia. It’s taken this long to arrive at this report on a journey that continues to ripple through us. Even as I write, we prepare to return to Irkutsk in February, to teach at the university.

Last week the city of Irkutsk announced they were shutting down schools due to a SARS epidemic. 20190210_182758The streets empty, like something out of I Am Legend. The schools were being “quarantined,” the City of Irkutsk said on their website.

Sitting at a cafe on Karl Marx Street, austere wooden benches and concrete walls giving off a self-conscious, post-Soviet feel. Lattes, muffins – hell, they have Americanos – along with a selection of loose teas you can smell from the jar before making your selection. Edison bulbs suspended by wires, cured brick walls.

Well hells bells we made it to Russia. After a week got the kids enrolled in pre-school, the dog on hearty Siberian kibble, and found an apartment in Irkutsk, capital of Siberia and our home for the next nine months. All thanks to a Fulbright Scholar grant, that will allow me to research the disappearance of the Russian ship The Neva off the coast of Alaska in 1813.

At the moment sitting in a coffee shop at 96th & Columbus waiting for the the dog to have his anal glands cleared. I kid you not. For $90 Playground Pups at 93rd & Amsterdam will clean and groom and clean the anal glands of your dog. Ostensibly to freshen him up for the plane this evening, and to meet his Russian hosts. NYC – GEN – MOS – IRK. We leave on Swiss this eve.

In his book “Travels in Siberia” Ian Frazier describes how, in his early 40s, he became obsessed with everything Russia. Its people and its landscapes. How the love hit him hard as he stepped off the plane at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport. And he came to know, over the course of his many visits, a particular Russian smell:

There’s a lot of diesel fuel in it, and cucumber peels, and old tea bags, and sour milk, and a sweetness—currant jam, or mulberries crushed into the waffle tread of heavy boots—and fresh wet mud, and a lot of wet cement.

It was skiffing back from three days in the woods at the southern end of Deadman’s Reach searching for Sean, my buddy, when I got an email from the Fulbright Commission. After finding his floatcoat with the sleeves pulled out, discovering an empty survival suit bag behind a log – completely dry, as if someone had taken the survival suit and slipped it on just above the beach – after finding fleece pants hung from a log, and beginning to believe my strong, good friend had made it – an email.

The other day in the grocery store, while my daughter Haley eyed the gumball machine by the doors, a headline in the Daily Sitka Sentinel caught my eye: “Search for Missing Boater Suspended,” or something like that.

The school bus strobe works across the the wall of our room, lighting up the closet doors. Haley shifts on the mattress in the corner, moans something about her socks on the wrong feet. A few days before winter solstice, a holiday Alaskans seem to care about more than Christmas, because it means this darkness will begin to scoot away. The baby snores. We’re all packed in here together, the window cracked against our cumulative heat – and also the boiler, which seems intent on heating us out of our new home.

Plums ripen off our porch. Meantime I’ve been thinking about killing goats. They’re up in the alpine as we speak, dotting the cliffs, tawny specks on the snow fields. You’ll see one, then another, and, of a sudden, scattered, a whole herd, hanging out, munching away, goating around, kids and nannies, billies at the fringes.

It’s been a strange one, to be sure. Gouts of sun. Squid instead of herring. We prepare to send our chickens to chicken heaven, or “freezer camp” as one friend breezily calls it. IMG_9358Usher in the baby chickens, who have been moved ungracefully from the bathroom (holy chicken poop) to the garage (holy chicken poop). IMG_9141