My apartment, as I said
in my last post, is generally ok, but there’s one problem.
I
don’t have my own washing machine, which means that once a week I have to take
my clothes to the laundry mat in the strip mall. Of course, the only time I have time for this
is on weekends, when the bus doesn’t run.
Which means I have to walk. That
wasn’t a problem at the beginning of the semester, when I could just stick my
stuff in a suitcase and wheel it along behind me. It worked for a time, but I knew those
halcyon days wouldn’t last forever. I
knew the snow would come.
Which,
of course, it did. And with it, my life
has taken a surreal, Jack Londonesque turn.
My fifteen-minute stroll to school has become a desperate struggle
through a blinding white void. The mile
walk to the laundry mat has become a tactical expedition through sheets of
blowing snow and howling winds as cold as death. My poor suitcase, designed for a carefree
career of being rolled across marble airport floors, is not quite up to the
challenge. The snow gets stuck in the
wheels, and you may as well be dragging the stupid thing. So I take a plastic sled and some rope, tie
the suitcase (with the laundry in it) to the sled, and then drag it behind me
through the snow. Which sounds
ridiculously annoying, and it is, but I also get to pretend I’m a Ket hunter
dragging his sled through the endless forests of Siberia. Which is fun.
Fun
Ket fact: the traditional Ket unit of land measurement (like a mile or km) was
the itaŋ, literally “day-drag”: the
distance a man could drag a sled in one day.
So
the other day I got my sled and suitcase together as usual and set off for the
laundry mat. I walked for what seemed
like an eternity. The cold pierced
through my coat, but I trudged on, leaning into the freezing wind. Time and space blended together in the
storm’s rage. Somewhere in the distance
I could hear Yes playing “South Side of the Sky”:
I
staggered on, and in the corner of my eye, visions of Vikings stepped from the
snow and beckoned me to join them. Tall
and proud they stood in their horned helmets and chainmail loincloths
(ouch). Fair rang the song of the
Valkyries, wheeling above my head. My time
had come, they told me. They beckoned me
to join them, to let the storm consume me, that I might take my place at the
feasts of Valhalla!
But no…I hadn’t finished
my quest to become Midgard’s mightiest comparative philologist! My journey was not over yet. My eyes met the Viking chief’s, and I shook
my head. My road did not end here. He nodded, understanding my quest yet
regretting the loss of such a mighty ally in the war of Ragnarok. A single tear rolled from his battle-weary
eye. I adjusted the laundry sled’s rope
on my shoulders, and turned my back on the gates of Valhalla.
I looked around me,
hoping to fathom some landmark in the void, something to tell me where I
was. Somewhere in the distance, a vague
outline could be seen through the whirling snow. It was…my mailbox.
I was standing at the end
of my driveway, perhaps fifty feet from my front door.
Screw this. I turned around and headed back inside. It’s
time for the big guns. Deep in the
recesses of my closet I unearthed a misshapen cardboard box, and took out my
secret weapon against winter: my Mongolian winter robes:
Ladies
and gentlemen, I give you, a winter deel. Used in Mongolia by the world’s baddest-ass
nomads, this is a garment that not only keeps you warm when eagle-hunting/Eurasia-conquering
in thirty-five below, but it also makes you look good doing it. Quilted on the inside with wool felt and
topped with a padded hantaaz jacket,
the warmth of this thing is only exceeded by the jaw-dropping awesomeness of freakin’ cool as hell dragons woven in
freakin’ gold silk. In fact, when
I’m wearing it, I have to go outside right away or I start sweating. But just to be safe, underneath I layered
with long underwear, fleece, sweatshirt and a camel-hair vest (also Mongolian). Around my neck I wound an Andean llama-wool
scarf, and put rabbit-fur mittens on my hands.
Upon my head I placed a Russian hat that had once been something alive
and cute. Thus attired, I stepped back
outside, astronaut-like, into the frigid vacuum.
Except
it wasn’t a frozen white void anymore, it was a frozen black void. It was 2:45 PM, you see. The sun had gone
down.
I
walked along the forest trail—that’s right, in Alaska the laundry mat’s on the
other side of a frozen Forest of No Return, full of angry wolves, bigfeet and,
for all I know, wooly mammoths. But at
least I didn’t have to worry about the cold anymore. The blizzard unleashed its fury on my deel; it did as much to me as much as a
gentle wind to a stone pillar. What was
I thinking earlier—this, cold? You call
this winter? Pathetic.
In
fact, I was hot. Wishing Fairbanks would get some cool weather
for a change, I took off my dragon jacket, badass as it was. I continued on through the heat of the day
(night?), unfastening my top buttons to let a little air in and cool off. Global warming. We used to have real winters when I was a
kid, not these wimpy death-rattles of an ecosystem destroyed by the avarice of
Man. I didn’t come to Alaska to die of
heat exhaustion. If I wanted that, I’d
go back to Hangzhou. Ridiculous.
I
made a triumphant entrance in the laundry mat that day. Ice clung to the rims of my glasses, and I
dusted snow from my princely Mongol garb as I stepped in. Around my shoulders was lashed a rope leading
to a plastic sled carrying an oversized suitcase. The owner of the establishment, always one to
choose his words carefully, regarded me for a moment over his newspaper.
“What
the fuck’s this?” he said by way of greeting.
I
paid for a machine, threw my clothes in, and sat down in a plastic chair. On the TV a courtroom drama was playing. Year-old People
magazines littered the table in front of me.
I exchanged awkward nods with the fat man next to me. I could have been in any laundry mat in the
country, and compared the manner of my laundry trip to that of a reasonable,
well-adjusted person.
Damn,
I thought. I didn’t bring a book.
