Friday June 13^th 2014. 10:17pm. Bright light.

It hasn’t been easy to handle five bags all alone.

My trip to Cambridge Bay, Canada, began Monday morning and lasts two days. I’d planned to sleep during the first flight out of Fairbanks but the spectacular scenery of Denali National Park kept me fully awake. Then, just before the stop in Seattle, WA, I got a glimpse of the Space Needle and I smile as I thought of  ‘Grey’s Anatomy.’

Finally, we fly over the actual ice field.

Arrival at Cambridge Bay. It’s noon on Tuesday. I left 29 hours and five flights ago. It’s -6C, windy and I’m not wearing appropriate clothing at all.

The light is too bright. The roads and the streets are unpaved. I have never seen so much mud. Everything is white and brown. And not a single tree. The horizon is uninterrupted and the word “vast” falls on my shoulders with all its weight. Scary.

Even if I didn’t have any kind of expectations, I spend the next few days physically and emotionally bouncing around like the ball in a pinball machine. I learn the meaning of the phrase “being in the field.” About 95% of my toiletries are useless, as is 50% of the other stuff I brought. I share a bedroom with three PhD graduate students from Winnipeg University: Ashley, Aurélie and Karley. Water is rationed when it’s available; we are allowed one shower per week. The food is not diverse; we eat mostly carbs.

During the next several days, I sit next to my coolers, now full of lab gear I don’t know how to use. For a rookie in Oceanography and environmental sciences like me, with neither instructions or a defined subject for my work, planning an experiment does not require me to be creative—it requires me to be psychic.

A breath of anguish in the air.

Today is day four and I’m going on the ice to watch core drilling and luminosity measurement. It’s raining, snowing, the wind is blowing and visibility is 50 yards.

I’m in a sled behind the snow mobile in which Aurelie and Ashley are riding. The caterpillar track spews a snowstorm in my face and I shield myself with my arms until the girls stop and suggest I sit differently. Traveling the featureless landscape, without any contrast or dimension, only a faint horizon line visible, my mind goes blank.

Tonight as I lie in bed I know I’ve been changed permanently. I am so lucky.

Tomorrow, I will move into a one room cabin on the shore with my three roommates; three physicists of the mission already live there. There will be no more showers. The toilet is going to be a bucket covered by a plastic bag, separated from the 30 square foot room by two stretched pieces of fabric that are too short, too thin, too light.