Arugula, raspberries and exploring the Arctic

Arugula, because of its peppery taste, and raspberries, with their delicate and sweet flavor, are two staples in my diet. Year-round. Over the Fourth of July weekend I had freshly picked raspberries and local arugula, another reason I love summer in New Hampshire. There is nothing that compares with vegetables grown locally. Corn, just picked from the stalks. Beets, still covered with dirt from the earth, Long, crisp string beans. Vegetables make up most of my diet, and as always during these months of dining on food from local gardens, one realizes the berries, greens, and other vegetables in our diet during the winter months cannot begin to compare. I guess the lesson is to only eat the root vegetables that can be stored and enjoyed during the winter as the early settlers did.

There is also something about gathering your own food. Spending a Saturday morning picking raspberries from the bushes or walking out into a field to select your own tomatoes. There are many opportunities in the Lakes Region to visit farms or stands along the road to find the vegetables that have just matured and been picked from the garden, that morning or the day before. I often stop at places I haven’t visited before just to meet the people who manage the farms producing the fruits and vegetables.

A few weeks ago, reviewing the summer catalogue for Turtlepoint Press, I came upon a book titled A Line of Driftwood: the Ada Blackjack Story by Diane Glancy. Ada Blackjack was a young Inupiat woman who, in 1921, joined a group of four professional explorers as a cook and seamstress and traveled with the men to Wrangel Island, 200 miles off the Arctic Coast of Siberia. The expedition did not go as planned and all the men eventually died. When a rescue ship arrived two years later the only survivor was Blackjack.

This seemed like a fascinating story, and I immediately got a copy of the book. Diane Glancy is a poet, novelist and essayist and a professor emeritus at Macalester College. The slender book is part poetry and scans of the diary Ada Blackjack kept. Of course, I was excited to learn that the original diary and other Ada Blackjack materials are held in the Rauner Special Collections in the Dartmouth College Library.

As you can imagine I immediately made an appointment with the archivist so I can spend a day at the Dartmouth Library and read from the original diary.

In the epilogue, Diane Glancy writes: “Vilhjalmur Stefansson, Arctic explorer and ethnologist, purchased the diary for $500 ... Ada’s diary is mundane. But beneath it is her story, like the roots she dug for beneath the snow on Wrangel Island. I had images of a tea pot, needle, thimble, sinew. Sacraments of boredom. Arctic hysteria — a fight against isolation, overwhelming hardship, danger, and the uncertainty of survival. The outlier experience Ada suffered on Wrangel Island.”

Who was Vilhajalmur Steansson I wondered? A major explorer and later in his life the director of Polar Studies at Dartmouth College and a figure in the establishment of the United States Army's Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory in Hanover. Steansson was born Nov. 3, 1879, in Gimli, Canada, and died in Hanover on Aug. 26, 1962. His papers are also in the archives at Dartmouth, and I hope to have time to examine some of his diaries. His was, as well, a fascinating life.

The glorious months of summer slip by quickly. As quickly as a gin and tonic or a fresh lemonade disappear on a beautiful summer day. Enjoy every moment and store the memories for one of those long, dark, frigid winter nights.

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Elizabeth Howard is the host of the Short Fuse Podcast. Her career intersects journalism, marketing, and communications. Ned O’Gorman: A Glance Back, a book she edited, was published in May 2016. She is the author of A Day with Bonefish Joe, a children’s book, published by David R. Godine. You can send her a note at: eh@elizabethhoward.com.