they have tuesdays up here too, you know. they’ve got almost all of the days of the week.
i’ve been here in alaska for almost a week now, a place i have not spent significant time in during the summer in many, many years now. i haven’t been at all since 2019, and most of my visits since i moved to portland and finished my architecture education and got my first “real” job and moved to seattle and then ultimately moved back to portland, most of those visits have been for a handful of days around christmas.
but i had a friend’s wedding to attend this weekend in the charming little ski town of girdwood, about 45 minutes south of where i grew up, and i had some lease timing and apartment occupancy shuffling and juggling to deal with, and until last week i had a set of drawings for a house to finish, and all those factors combined brought me up here at the very end of alaska’s summer to stay for about another week.
returning to alaska in the winter, it’s very easy to remember why i was so eager to leave. it’s dark. it’s cold, of course, although less so these days, and it’s covered in snow and ice, although also less so. you need a strong network of friends who like to do things inside, and you need to enjoy one of the 2.5 outdoor winter activities that are available to you. or you will go insane. and anchorage is so spread out that you also need to construct some sort of personal balance between enjoying alcohol in places that are not your house, and getting to and from those places. it’s tricky. (40 years from now when anchorage is one of the last habitable places on earth and has achieved tokyo-esque density by sheer force of necessity, you can show your kids this paragraph and all have a good laugh about the fanciful notion of things “being far apart.”)
but being here in the summer, you start to shift from thinking “thank god i left” to “why haven’t i moved back” in a real hurry. everything is green. it rains a lot, which i love. it stays light until well after midnight. and so on.
and they even have an incredibly pretentious craft beer scene here now too. what’s not to love?
let’s get into it.
1. painting
here’s a meadow in girdwood near the little condo some friends and i rented for the weekend. it looks nice but keep in mind when you are standing out here in the 50 degree weather watching the mountains slowly dim at 10pm, “enjoying” a 5 year old joint one of your friends found in his old camping stuff, keep in mind that your feet are sunk roughly three inches into icy bog water. everything up here is drenched from may-september and frozen the rest of the year.
sketch. pretty straightforward.
let’s peel back the curtain on this one a little bit. under the sketch, i brought in my reference photo on a layer and shoved it off to one side. at this point you have a couple options: you can eyedropper individual colors out of the reference photo and use them to paint with, or you can fiddle around with your color selections manually until they sort of look like the colors in the photo. i think purists would rather you did the second one. but honestly who cares. i did both in this instance: select a couple key colors, and then adjust hues, saturations, and values ever so slightly from there to build up the more varied palette.
from there you can put away the reference photo and just kinda go for it.
lightening up some areas, adjusting tones, tweaking little details. scroll up for the final.
2. poem
“trail poem” - summer 2021
i’ve chiseled out all the little fragments
and whatever was under there, it’s come out now
into whatever it was going to be.
if you stand back a little, and squint
what would you think if i asked you what you saw?
— and have you guessed yet?
when it’s too late to set out,
and our lamps are all turned down til morningi’ll fold you up another letter
and take it with me when i go
3. egg roll bowl
wow, would you look at that. this bowl of food cost $75 to make because vegetables are so expensive up here.
it is hard to be vegan here without eating every meal at your own house. obviously i was not going to be an ass about it at the wedding, and obviously i would like to meet up with friends at actual restaurants, so i have been relaxing my personal rules ever so slightly to allow for some dairy. and it is insane the impact that one tablespoon of cheese has had on my digestive system as a result. it’s the kind of heartburn that makes you think that something is medically wrong. like there’s a hole being burrowed in your esophagus by some kind of animal that was living in the cheese you ate.
i’ve done “whole 30” a couple times in my life and a version of this recipe was one of my favorite discoveries during that process. i don’t think i’ve tried it since going vegan but it’s very possible that i have and just didn’t write about it. it’s just about equally possible that i tried it and wrote about it, but i have no idea. 32 editions! it’s a lot.
basically the idea is to recreate “egg roll” filling but without the wrapper and without frying it. i guess you could call it some kind of stir fry. whatever.
soy sauce, green onions, regular onion, plum sauce, ginger, carrots, mushrooms, garlic, tofu, and coleslaw mix. you could just get some cabbage but i never manage to finish a whole cabbage. this spread cost $115 what with the price of the etc. etc. up here. these days. you know how it is.
onions, ginger, garlic in some sesame oil. use a lot of ginger!!!! it’s so good. and its flavor really is what makes this work, in my opinion. i probably used about two tablespoons of fresh grated stuff.
press and drain your tofu (do this before you get to this point, sorry) and then crumble it up and put it in with the onions and ginger and garlic.
originally this recipe called for pork, which i remember also being very good. just a heads up.
add some salt and pepper to this as you go.
in a separate pan i started up the veggies. if you have a big enough pan you don’t have to separate them. also i steamed the carrots beforehand so my throat wouldn’t swell up causing me to perish. always remember you can enjoy crunchier carrots than me. that’s one of the many things you have going for yourself.
after a bit, add the coleslaw mix. when it’s shredded this fine, cabbage cooks up real fast, so no reason to rush it. just add it when it feels right.
while you’re cooking this, sprinkle some white pepper in, as well as some salt. the white pepper, along with the ginger, is the other secret ingredient here.
after the veggies cook for a bit by themselves, add in about half of the sauce you made earlier. which was about 3 parts plum sauce to 4 parts soy sauce and a tiny bit of cornstarch. you remember. from earlier.
toast up some sesame seeds for toppings
combine your two pans (tofu + veggies) together, stir in the last of the sauce if you didn’t do that yet, probably add some more white pepper, and let it all cook together for just another few seconds, then plop it all into a bowl. i added cilantro, some green onion, cashews, the toasted sesame seeds, and some spicy vegan mayo (vegan mayo + sriracha + a little rice vinegar).
yum!
4. things to do in alaska
see a bear in person. the zoo does not count.
talk with your friends about what to do when you see a bear. allow the friend who did not grow up in alaska to voice their opinion on when to play dead and when to climb a tree, and then politely correct them. do this only after seeing a bear, and only after the bear has noticed you and your friends and gotten scared and run off back into the woods.
try to remember where’s good to eat. besides moose’s tooth, yeah, besides that, we already went there. wasn’t there a place on northern lights for a while, oh i think that closed, you mean over by the old… oh, yeah, no. huh. there’s a place on lake otis that i think is okay…
eat at moose’s tooth again
climb flattop mountain; resolve to get in better shape
see a moose in person
take some pictures of cool old houses
take some pictures of very stupid old houses
get a summer job that pays more than any job you’ve ever had and lets you work with all your friends and play games with kids all day and doesn’t really require you to be non-hungover at the start of the day
get one of your friends’ parents to leave town for the summer and allow their amazing house on the hillside to be transformed into kind of a perpetual party house that everyone just kind of shows up at every day after their summer jobs
shoot a hole in one on a disc golf course when nobody is looking
shoot a hole in one on a disc golf course with your friend’s borrowed disc
hurl your friend’s borrowed disc so deep into the woods that it will never be seen by human eyes again
take the ferry from haines to prince george in british columbia, and park your car on it, and sleep on the deck
pitch a tent on the deck of the ferry and do not tie it down
narrowly avoid being swept into the pacific ocean when the wind kicks up and you’re in your tent on the deck of the ferry
think about what it would be like to live here again
think about what it would be like to raise a family here
think about whether or not you even want kids, fuck, it’s really time to be thinking about that, huh
eat at moose’s tooth again
well that’s it for this week! next week i will hopefully have a bunch of fun pictures of weirdo houses i’ve seen up here so far. i will let you know if they “whip” or “suck” accordingly. have a good week everyone. see ya next tuesday. bye.