The Arctic I.Cc.E. Project

If You Can't Take the Heat...

MEMORANDUM

To:     Sen. James Inhofe, Sen. Energy Comm. Chairman 

          Cong. Joe Barton, House Energy Comm.Chairman

Fr:      House/Senate Leg. Assistants on the Environment

Re:      Your Health and Safety This Summer

Date:  July 25, 2005

___________________________________________________________________

Recommend that you avoid travel to Phoenix this week due to health dangers from a heat wave that has broken over 200 records throughout the western U.S.  18 people have died from the 100 degree+ temperatures in the past few days -- more than all heat-related deaths reported in the surrounding Maricopa County last year. (Note: This does not include any heat-related deaths to illegal immigrants, who are counted separately.)  Temperatures hit an all-time high of 116 on Sunday and are expected to remain at record or near-record levels for several days to come.

In addition to Phoenix, you should avoid Las Vegas, Chicago, Tucson, Philadelphia, Georgia, the Carolinas, most of the midwest and the entire mid-Atlantic region, including Washington, D.C. where the heat index is expected to reach 110 degrees today. We recognize that staying out of the Nation's capitol while Congress is in session makes it harder to do your jobs, but believe the sacrifice is warranted. You can't be of much help to the oil companies if you're laid up from heat exhaustion or worse, if you die from the swelter.

Most of the people who have died from the heat so far this year been either homeless or elderly.  Unlike them, you have access to climate controlled homes, offices and cars.  Still, we believe it is appropriate that you take extra precautions -- like staying in a cooler climate -- and remain well-hydrated.  People who exert themselves outside in high temperatures can lose up to a gallon of water an hour.

Unfortunatley, traveling to Europe to escape the U.S. heat wave is not an option.  That continent is also experiencing record swelter that, so far this year, has killed dozens of people, caused crop-crippling drought, led to water rationing in the U.K., Spain, France and Portugal, is melting glaciers at a record rate and has led thousands of farmers to seek emergency help from governments.

On the bright side, we have received another report from ExxonMobil scientists repeating earlier findings that they find no evidence of climate change or global warming. This confirms what you've been saying in speeches and articles for several years. As a result, we believe Cong. Barton should continue demanding the research work and funding sources of scientists who claim to have evidence of climate change. Letting them know they'll be held accountable for such claims is the most effective way to curb their campaign of fear and misinformation.

"What Was Theory Is Now Happening"

Aqqaluk Lynge has been speaking out on behalf of Greenland -- as a journalist, poet, member of Parliament, a minister to the Greenland Home Rule government, a member of the United Nation's Permanent Forum on Indigenous People, chairman of ICC Greenland and vice chairman of ICC International -- for more than 40 years.  So when Lynge says, as he did yesterday at a Smithsonian lectures series on Greenland, that the number one challenge facing the Arctic is climate change, his opinion ought to carry some weight.

"I was looking at the exhibits of the dinosaurs here at the museum," Lynge told the audience gathered at the Smithsonia's Museum of Natural History.  "I realized that could happen to the Arctic habitat within the next hundred years.  Things are changing in the Arctic at a pace we could not have imagined ten years ago."

Lynge spoke at length about the accelerating devastation in the Arctic, from buckling airstrips built on melting permafrost to the shrinking polar ice cap and altered animal migratory patterns.  He noted that while Greenland is clearly feeling the affects of Arctic warming, Alaska is by far the hardest hit within the Arctic region.  "What used to be a theory," Lynge said, "is happening right now."

*******

I won't write any new blog entries until the end of this week.  I'll be in London attending a conference called "Climate of Change: Carbon, Companies and the Bottom Line," about the impact of climate change on commerce and vice versa.  I hope to return from that gathering with some useful, hopeful information and deeper insight into the problems, as well as some market-driven solutions.

I Can Get There From Here

The idea is to circumnavigate the Arctic starting in January of 2006, interviewing residents of the far north about the way climate change has affected their lives, their culture and environment. And up till now the plan had been to start in Alaska and then work my way around the planet.

I picked Alaska as a starting point because, having lived there for seven years, I know it pretty well and because as Arctic regions go, it's easy to get to.  Alaska Airlines flies to Barrow at least once a day, year round.  And even places that Alaska Air doesn't fly to, like Chicken, a microscopic blip on the Yukon border, can be reached by chartering a bush plane -- taxi cab of the last frontier -- flown by a uniquely Alaskan individual -- the bush pilot --who lives on stale coffee, Piper Cub exhaust and adrenaline. I went out with a bush pilot once. Just once.

I love Alaska.  But it doesn't feel like adventure anymore. And as much as I want to aid in the understanding of Arctic climate change, I also want wring some adventure out of this project. So I've changed the plan.  The Aujaqsuittuq Project will be initiated in a place much more remote than Alaska, a place without its own airline.  Or bush planes.  Or stale coffee.

Next winter I will go to the Nenet Autonomous Okrug in north central Siberia.

The Nenet Autonomous Okrug -- or NAO as it's known among the locals -- is a district to the east of the Barents Sea that's shaped like a bent index finger. The shape of the region reminds me of the Wicked Witch of the West in the Wizard of Oz, who pointed her finger at Dorothy and said demonically, "I'll get you my little pretty."  Which is apropos since climate change is playing the Wicked Witch to the Nenet's Dorothy.

But I digress. 

The NAO is home to the Nenet reindeer herders, one of the last nomadic peoples on earth. Or at least they try to be.  Between invasive oil and gas exploration and development, the loss of much of their land at the hands of the Russian government and climate change damage to the forest and taiga habitats where they breed and graze the reindeer, the Nenet culture is gravely endangered.  I mentioned in an earlier blog entry that in the 1930's Stalin made a concerted but ultimately futile attempt to wipe out the Nenet. Russia's version of ethnic cleansing. Sadly, climate change is succeeding where Stalin failed.

Anyway, next winter I'll take a series of Aeroflot flights from New York to London to Moscow to Murmansk to Narjan-Mar. Then I'll hire a helicopter and fly north several hundred kilometers.  And if I'm lucky and can find a guide and translator, figure out how to contact the Nenet, get permission to travel with them and actually find my way to a winter camp, I may collect a few interviews on my little digital voice recorder. I may actually begin documenting the impact of climate change on an Arctic people.

Note to self: Batteries don't last very long in really cold weather. Consider buying stock in Ever Ready or Energizer.

Unpredictability: The New Constant

The Aujaqsuittuq Project is hardly the first to turn to traditional Inuit knowledge about Arctic warming.  Charles Wohlforth's book, "The Whale and the Supercomputer", documents Alaskan Inupiat awareness of the phenomenon long before scientific grants began to fly.  And the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA) includes indigenous perspectives which ACIA co-author Henry Huntington says offer both new information and new ways of looking at scientific information.

One of the findings that both of these inquiries have in common is that the weather, currents and natural environment, which once had nearly Swiss-precision predictability, are now completely unpredictable.  We can argue about the causes and extent of global warming. But there's no arguing that the climate and related systems, which the Inuit have read for centuries like some naturally occuring and ever-prescient Poor Richard's Almanac, are now garbled and nearly incomprehensible.

According to Huntington, "Elders used to be able to predict the weather and now they cannot. This is not simply a problem of lost skills from one generation to the next, for it is often the same individuals who now can no longer tell what the weather will do."

And Wohlforth quotes Barrow elder Arnold Brower Sr., as saying the temperatures are getting warmer "earlier and later, are freezing and getting where, kind of, you can't predict each year to be the same."

That lack of predictability is not unique to North America.  Last spring I spent several weeks with Thule Inuit hunters in northern Greenland as they prepared for their annual polar bear hunt.  In years gone by, Thule hunters could kill all the nanooq they needed within a three week period and travel no more than 100 miles north of Siorapaluk. Today that hunt can last 4-6 weeks as the bears -- and consequently the hunters -- move ever northward.  Now the Thule must travel within a few hundred miles of the North Pole to complete their hunt.

Indigenous cultures are having to change in order to adapt to the new unpredictability.  When the ice in Barrow, Alaska can no longer support traditional whaling methods using skin umiaqs, the Inupiat may have to turn increasingly to aluminum boats with outboard motors.  That, in turn, will lead to the loss of umiaq-building skills and the cost of boats and gasoline will add one more expense to the already-stretched incomes of many Inupiat. 

Huntington has observed cultural changes are evident in Kotzebue, Alaska ( "People in Kotzebue may harvest more whitefish in total, but elders and children will not be able to participate because they usually fish on ice near shore. When freeze up is late, the ice will not have formed before the fish leave the area." ) and in Lappland ("Consider the effects of winter rain in Finnmark. Winter rain leads to ice on the ground, which makes it hard for reindeer to feed and worsens the impact of their feeding because they tear lichens and mosses out of the ground instead of grazing just the tops. A couple centuries ago, a herder might have been able to move the herd to a different area to avoid the ice after a rain. Today, land status is much more rigid, and the herder may no longer be able to move the herd. If climate change means winter rain will become more common, the combination of social and climate change will produce a much greater impact on the herder than either change alone.")  Similar stories are told by the Nenet of Russia's Kola Penninsula, the Siberian Yup'ik and the Canadian Inuktitut.

In Greenland, the inability of Thule hunters to catch enough polar bear, seal, narwhale or walrus, is eroding their self-sufficiency.  It's predicted that within 10-15 years, the remaining full-time Thule hunters will be just like other Greenlanders, using hunting and fishing only as a supplement to their paying day jobs. Of course, in Siorapaluk and similar communities, there are no paying day jobs.  In those cases, hunting and fishing will supplement public assistance.  I cannot imagine a crueler fate to befall a people for whom independence and self-sufficiency are part of their cultural DNA, their identity and humanness.

The one fact that most people can agree on with respect to Arctic climate change is that it is producing stories of unpredictability, stories that are being told locally -- all the way around the world.

Which Story Do I Tell?

Here's where I'm stuck.  How do I make global warming, a phenomenon that so far is only being felt in remote, sparsely peopled regions like the Arctic and some small, Pacific islands, relevant to those who live in the population belt?

One visitor to this blog recommended that I stick to personal stories. He said it makes for better reading and makes the subject easier to relate to. Another suggested that I remain objective and tell the stories like a journalist, gathering bits and pieces from around the globe and assembling them on this site. 

At the moment, for lack of any better idea, I'm inclined to do both. I stumble across a lot of interesting information as I travel around the Internet, receive research papers, read new books and articles and discuss the subject. In other words, I'm learning a lot that I want to share here. For instance, I've just started reading "The Whale and the Supercomputer", a beautifully written book by Alaskan Charles Wohlforth. The book brings traditional Inuit knowledge to bear on the subject of global warming. It opens in Barrow, the most northerly community in the U.S. Reading about Barrow distracted me momentarily from the subject of climate change and reminded me of the people I knew up there. 

There's a photo in one of my albums, taken about 20 years ago, of some of the scientists from NARL, the now-defunct National Arctic Research Lab.  When I saw them, a 30 minute snow-machine ride out of town, their testing equipment was set up on the sea ice.  As the equipment gathered data, the four bearded men, dressed in the latest polar-tested gear, occupied themselves building an igloo.  Near by, their Eskimo guide lay on his back and drew pictures of bowhead whales with a Magic Marker on the white canvas of a wall tent. He worked with bare hands.  It was 25 below.

That particular trip was in April of 1982, on Easter weekend.  I was visiting a friend, a photographer who lived in the North Slope Borrough.  We spent the first evening with the member of a whaling crew who was preparing his umiaq (an open whaling boat) for the season, stretching ugruk (bearded seal) hides over the frame.  He softened the hide by rubbing ugruk fat on it, grabbing handfuls of grey blubber out of a bucket and smearing it into the taught skin, moving nimbly within the tight space of a small enclosed garage.  Which is to say that there was no ventilation and the smell of rancid ugruk permeated the air, my hair and my clothes. At one point the whaler's wife brought in a portable stove and began making Eskimo Doughnuts, deep fried dough, sort of the Arctic equivalent of Indian fry bread.  The smell of rancid seal oil engulfed us as we chewed the oily dough.  Mine did not settle well.

(As an aside, I use the word Eskimo here because the Alaskan Inupiat are not bothered by it. In fact they use the word interchangably with Inuit. It's the other Arctic Native people, the Inuktitut of Greenland and Canada, who want only to be called Inuit because to them, Eskimo is an insult. It comes from a Huron word which means eaters of raw meat.)

Anyway, back to Barrow.  We attended Easter services that Sunday at the local church. The simple building was a carnival of color.  The women's knee-length tunics, kuspuqs, were sewn from brightly colored and patterned fabric, an antidote, no doubt, to the three months of darkness Barrow receives each year.  Some kuspuqs were trimmed with not one but two wolverine fur ruffs, layered one on top of the other so that they were over a foot deep.  They are called sunshine ruffs, a reference to the halo effect they create around a face when the hood is up.  In that setting, the brilliant kuspuqs reminded me of stained glass windows, bringing a sense of celebration to the otherwise unadorned building.

The church was filled that day, pew after pewed lined with head after head of thick black hair.  Sprinkled among the adults were children, red-cheeked, swaddled and bundled, squirming, smiling, playing children. No one signaled them to sit still. No accusing fingers were pointed.  It was perfectly okay for these children to behave like, well, children.  One little girl with a ceaselessly runny nose crawled on my lap and fingered my bracelet. I took it off and let her play with it until her mother pulled it gently out of her hand at the end of the service and gave it back to me. The child wailed and grabbed for the bracelet, her tears streaming down her crimson cheeks and mingling with her snot.

From church we went to brunch at the local restaurant. I can no longer remember what the eatery was called but I recall that it was named after its owner.  At the time it was the only restaurant in Barrow. And it served Mexican food.  That Easter Sunday they laid out a huge spread -- tacos, burritos, hand made tamales, Mexican hot chocolate and undoubtely some halibut or other fish.  But the real treat, the dish that kept folks coming back for seconds and thirds, was the salad.  Nothing fancy, just some iceberg lettuce shredded in a big plastic bowl and topped off with tomato and cucumber slices. But reflect for a moment on how those tomatoes came to rest in that salad. The only thing that grows in Barrow is lichen -- and only in the 6-week-long summer.  The tomatoes were probably grown in California and flown thousands of miles in climate controlled cargo holds to reach that plastic bowl.  As fast as the restaurant refilled the bowl, the diners, with the suspenders of their wind pants hanging limp at their sides, emptied it.

The next morning as I prepared to board the plane for Anchorage, my friend handed me a paper sack.  Food for the road.  Two pita-bread sandwiches filled with sliced caribou. And a cold Eskimo doughnut.  Helluva lot better than the airline food.

Ok.  So this entry didn't tell you a thing about global warming in the Arctic.  But I promise that other entries will.  Along with a few more yarns about the north and the occassional Arctic recipe. 

Start by taking one ugruk cheek....

SPEAKING THE LANGUAGE

From the Mouth of A Babe

I met a ten year old boy in Qikiqtarjuaq, Nunavut who was playing with a toy, a rubber strap stretched across the Y of an antler.  He'd fit pebbles into the strap and then snap!, let them fly, targeting spots in the shallows on the shore.  Occassionally he'd hit a target and thrust his fists in the air, gleefully yelling out some celebratory word in Inuktitut.

So I approached him and, in my constant quest to learn new Inuktitut words,  asked in slow, hyper-enunciated English, "WHAT- DO-YOU-CALL-THAT-TOY?"  He raised an incredulous eyebrow at me and said, "Slingshot. What do you call it?"

Paul Simon Does Greenland

I was thumbing through Norman Hallendy's beautiful book, "Inuksuit" this evening when something struck me.  The Inuit have over 60 different words and expressions describing various types of inuksuit, the stone cairns that populate northern Canada and Greenland.  For instance, a pirujaqarvik is an inushuk marking a meat cache.  

Reading about all these different words related to inukshuit made me wonder whether there was an equivalent object or concept in English upon which we had bestowed so many terms. If there is I'll be damned if I can think of it.  But trying to come up with one reminded me of that old Paul Simon song, "Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover".  Now I can't get it out of my head.

Anna Nicole Smith Goes Yup'ik

I was in Bethel, Alaska in the early 80's making a documentary about subsistence fishing.  One day I passed two teenage boys who smiled at me and said what sounded like amooq. I assumed it was a greeting and smiled back.

That evening I was invited to dinner at a local fish camp.  Nearly a dozen people squeezed around a long table in a canvas wall tent.  I was at one end, by the open flap door and a hefty elderly woman, the matriarch of the family, sat at the other.  She asked me what I thought of Bethel.  I said I thought it was great and the people were very friendly. For example.... and I recounted the story of the two boys saying amooq to me in the street. The old woman choked and a piece of salmon flew out of her mouth and landed half-way down the table.

"Amooq?",  she said.  "Amooq?"

I nodded nervously, for now everyone at the table was laughing. Not polite chuckles or smirks, but full-bellied, open-mouthed, throw back your head and cry becuase you're laughing so hard it hurts gaffawing.

The round old woman looked me straight in the eye, thrust both her hands in front of her with her palms facing inward, then clasped them to her huge bosom.

"Amooq!!," she cried and shook the six-foot long bench with her laughter.

Amooq, it appears, means big tits in Yup'ik. And the hormones of teenage boys, it appears, transcend all cultural and linquistic barriers.

How Do You Say Gangsta in Inuktitut?

Last year I ordered an Inuktitut language text book, some workbooks and language tapes from the College of the Arctic in Iqaluit.  The lessons in the text bounce back and forth between conversational Inuktitut and formal discourses on the language, its pronunciation, syllabics and so forth.

The first chapter provides a broad overview of the how the Inuktitut language was believed to have orginated in the Altai region of Siberia, migrated to North American over the Berings Straits and spread east toward Greenland, morphing into various dialects as it went.  That chapter was fascinating, but, because it was packed with technical linquistic jargon, made for difficult reading.

Fortunately, the second chapter looked more accessible. It promised several useful introductory Inuktitut phrases.  I anticipated being able to ask, "Where is the main train station?" and "What time do you have?" to my new Inuit friends.  Then I began to read useful phrases out loud to myself.

I have a gun.   Qukiutituna 

He has a gun.    Qukiutitina   

You have a gun. Qukiutitiit  

I'm sure to someone from a hunting society, sentences involving guns are useful.  I, on the other hand, live in a hunted society where, if someone greets you with a sentence involving a gun, you generally respond by handing over your wallet.

So Many Questions, So Little Research

Ever wonder if people in the far north who spend from 1-3 months in complete darkness each winter are different than the rest of us? Have they adapted, like cave bats, to life in the dark? And in particular, have the Inuit been in polar regions long enough to evolve genetically, diminishing their predisposition to afflications like Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)?

I dug around on the subject and found that little formal research on these questions has been conducted. There was a paper published in the 1990 Journal of Circumpolar Health called "Adaptation and Circadian Rythmicity of Lymphoid System". (Alas, I'm on the edge of my seat.) Then in 1993 a cluster of international polar scientists published "Melatonin in Seasonal Affective Disorder" and "Prevalence of Season Affective Disorders in Icelanders and Canadians of Icelandic Descent." And if you go all the way back to 1976, a couple named Stillner and Stillner wrote "Adaptation to an Extreme Environment".  I'm trying to get copies of these papers. Ten days ago I sent an email to the librarian at the University of Lapland in northern Finland, where all of this is archived and I'm still waiting to hear back.

In the meantime, while waiting for the formal research, I've stayed busy scavanging around the informal stuff.  For instance, there's an anthropologist with the University of Florida, Dr. Peter Collings, who spent the past decade living with and studying the Inuit of Holman, a far north island community in Canada. Collings emphasizes that SAD is not his area of expertise and that it's often hard to understand Inuit feelings because they are subtle and nuanced when talking about emotions.  And then there's the whole cultural divide thing.  But differences and subtlety not withstanding, Dr. Collings says the people of Holman tend to be a little less energetic in winter.  Dr. Pat Orr, on the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Manitoba, agrees.  In her words, the Inuit become more reflective when prolonged darkness descends.  And Carl Hild with the University of Alaska-Anchorage, who lived in Barrow for years, says he's also noticed that things quiet down in winter -- but only a little.  In fact, all three question whether the Inuit tendency to slow down in winter is all that different from the post-Holiday blues and the cabin fever that many of us Kabloona (Inuktitut for "white person") describe around January and February.

There was some research published last year demonstrating that Icelanders have a much lower incidence of SAD than people living at similar latitudes.  The most popular explanation for this is that winter daylight hits Iceland at a particular angle, reflecting off the snow and somehow compensating for the shortened days.   

Russians on the other hand, seem more depressed than other Arctic inhabitants.  I read a two-year old paper by a Norwegian scientist who noted that rates of winter depression on Russia's Kolya Penninsula are considerably higher than those in Longyearbyen, Norway, only a few hundred miles away. The author attributed the difference to economic and cultural factors; the Norwegians had a higher standard of living and surrounded themselves with bright colors while the Russians lived in financial uncertainty amid grey, crumbling, dour surroundings.

And then, as Dr. Orr points out, back when the Western and Inuit cultures were beginning to get acquainted, there were occassional references to something called Piblitoq or Arctic hysteria. The opposite of SAD. It always involved women tearing off their clothes, running into the snow and making animal sounds.  Modern observers believe that the supposed episodes of Piblitoq were actually just garden-variety psychotic breaks seen through the eyes of middle-aged white men.  One of those white men, the vain-glorious Admiral Peary who took Inuit from northern Greenland to be put on display as living exhibits at the New York Museum of Natural history, may not have had the most enlightened perspective on Inuit women's responses to stress.  In any case, while Piblitoq is still viewed as an actual affliction by the psychiatric comunity (it even has its own DSM #), it's been pretty much discredited by everyone else.

Which brings me to an initial, albeit only-partially informed opinion. I have yet to hear about anything resembling a pan-Arctic response to prolonged darkness.  Rather, there seem to be local pockets, little micro-climates of response types. It might be interesting to map the differences and the variables suspected of contributing to the differences (economics, cultural traditions) and see if any patterns emerge.

But Carl Hild makes an important point. He suggests that when we consider the spectrum of Arctic adaptations to darkness, we should consider the reciprocal as well -- Arctic adaptations to summer.  In other words, it isn't enough to compare northern moods in January with those of, say, central New Jersey.  They've also got to be calibrated against high-latitude attitudes under the mid-night sun.

Immaqaa

The question is: Can a 48 year old woman who hasn't published a story in years enter a profession dominated by athletic men and become an adventure travel writer?  The answer is: immaqaa.

Imaqaa.  One of the most frequently used words in the Inuktitut language.  In English it sort of means "maybe".  But to really understand the word, you've got to put it in context.  As in, "Will you go hunting before or after sunrise?"  "Immaqaa."  Or, "How much snow will this five day-old white out blizzard leave?"  "Hmm.  Immaqaa." Or even, "Can a middle-aged woman who's 20 pounds overweight, in lousy shape, but with perfectly manicured finger and toe nails, squeeze out one last career involving frozen outhouses and raw walrus?"  Go out on a limb and guess what the answer is.

I've wanted to be an adventure travel writer since I was 16 years old. When other girls were reading "Tiger Beat" magazine and ogling pictures of Paul McCartney, I was reading "People of the Deer", an account of the demise of the Inland Inuit, written by the great Canadian nature writer, Farley Mowat.  Mr. Mowat, or Farley as I prefer to think of him, was a married man with a face like a bearded cabbage-patch doll.  Yet I fantasized about him. I fantasized about hiking through the Northwest Territory with him. I'd wear one of those brimmed hats with the mosquito netting, clothes I hadn't changed in days and yet be radiant with health and beauty. I imagined myself, like Isak Dineson in "Out of Africa",(see: "Out of the Arctic") stoic and silent, sitting beside Farley, my leading man, as Inuit elders told stories of Sedna and other traditional legends around a camp fire. (These clearly were fantasies because I can't remain silent for very long and I rarely leave the house without mascara, much less go for days without showering and changing my clothes.)

The flames of my adventure writer dreams were fanned further by a quirky friend of my mother, a woman named Cora Cheney-Partridge. Cora was the wife of a Navy lawyer and the mother for four kids. But what really interested me was her status as a published author. To me, writers were the brahmin of all professional castes. I believed that people who wrote and published books lived purer lives and breathed thinner air than the rest of us. Cora wrote all kinds of books.  Cook books, non-fiction, children's books. One of my favorites was book called,"The Incredible Deborah" about Deborah Samson,  a 21 year old woman who dressed as a man and fought in the Revolutionary war.  True story. Samson was the first woman to fight on behalf of this country.

Cora Patridge was also a pioneer of sorts.  She was an adventurer and writer in an era when other women either stayed home to raise their children or assumed one of the three careers open to women: teaching, nursing or being a flight attendant.  Call it bravery. Call it eccentricity.  Whatever it was, Cora was driven to join her husband Ben on an adventure, write a book about it and then use the proceeds from the book to fund her next adventure.  In the late 70's, she and her family walked -- you heard me -- walked around the world on the Arctic Circle, after which she wrote "Crown of the World", a book about circumpolar politics. Another time she traveled around Africa and wrote a cookbook.  The she visited Iceland and wrote a children's book.

Cora's treasure-filled home in Vermont reflected her travels.  African zebra skins. Chinese jade. South American textiles. My favorite was on the ceiling of her bedroom. Cora tacked a polar-centric map of the world over her bed.  I imagined her falling asleep at night thinking of exotic places like Pevek, Siberia; Kaktovik, Alaska and Tuktuyukutk, Canada. Then I imagined myself in those places.

And in spite of the fact that I've procastinated for 30-some years, I still imagine myself in those places. Do I wish I could write for Outside magazine or National Geographic? Hell, I'd chew off my write arm and tap the story out with the stump if I had to.  Who wants to write in obscurity?  But I recognize that being read is only part of being an adventure writer.  Having the adventures and telling the story, spinning a good yarn is the other part. And that's the part I know I can do. 

If I ever manage to publish something in a "real" news outlet, I promise to dedicate it to Cora and Deborah Samson and all the other eccentric women who figured out how to tune out the noise of the world around them, tune in their personal siren song and follow it, stumbling, one foot in front of the other.  No immaqaa about it.