Monday/Thursday 15/18 August 2016, week 14: Buldir Island, 17:00
Since I was so wrapped up in relaxing on our day off that I forgot our day off means shower day, it seems fitting that I address how we deal with personal hygiene in field camps.
Field life is certainly not for everyone; showers – if possible at all – come less than once a week, in my experience. For someone like me who embraced 2 years of college life in a dry cabin – meaning no running water – in Fairbanks, Alaska, the limited bathing options of life in the field are no big deal. Teri and I used to go without showering for nearly a week and laughingly do “pit checks” in the cabin, which is when we’d realize we probably should find time to shower. Those who shower at least every other day might find that repulsive, and the daily showerers probably think I’m on the same level as animals.
Keeping that kind of lifestyle definitely has made field life seem less extreme, and my tendencies between civilized and field life are not that different. That’s not to say I don’t shower often. I do use running water and shower on a fairly normal basis when I’m in town. However, I’ve noticed that on over ½ of days in non-field life, I can have been around town for hours before realizing that I never looked in the mirror to see how crazy my wavy, curly hair had decided to be that day. It’s not that I don’t care about my appearance, but rather that I assume I look fine. I’m comfortable with my natural appearance, which is the easiest option for field life.
Bathing options vary across field camps, but I’d guess the most typical form is the solar shower. On the North Slope we boiled a pot of pond water and combined that with cool pond water in a solar shower bag. That was hoisted up by the ceiling in an old shed, and voila! A hot, relatively clean shower was possible.
I lived the life of luxury in buildings on St. George, my kiwi island in New Zealand, and in NE Alberta, so showers came fairly frequently.
In remote camps having one t-shirt and sweatshirt designated as “sauna/shower clothes” means I’m always guaranteed to have clean clothes to wear after the shower. These clothes NEVER get worn otherwise. Baby wipes are must-haves for field life, as a wipe-down with those can feel great on the particularly sweaty days.
My current and previous 2 summers provided me with my favorite bathing memories of field camps. The black brant camp on the Tutakoke River features a plywood sauna wrapped in Visqueen, and it’s heated by a barrel stove. By collecting firewood via snowmachine early in the season, we had a nice supply of wood to fire up the sauna about once a week all summer.
Since I have Finnish blood and have taken many a sauna on the shores of Lake Superior, I had low expectations for the heat levels. Boy, was I ever proven wrong. Both summers we got the sauna piping hot to the point where we were legitimately covered in sweat and needed to dash out of the sauna to jump in the Tutakoke River to cool off. We soaped up in the sauna, rinsed off in the tidal river, and then used warm snowmelt water in 4 pots on the floor to rinse off the saltwater. Sometimes I swam across the chilly river to walk around on the mudflat, and another time the crew rode the tide a good ¼ toward the mouth of the river just for fun. I didn’t expect to spend 2 summers sitting naked in the dark in a hot 7’x7′ box with my boss and co-workers, but sauna days were some of the best days of summer.
Here on Buldir Kevin ramped up the showering situation from last year. He assembled an old plywood shower stall around a pallet floor, but to this he added some corner shelves, a buoy for a seat, and a small net to hold clean clothes and a towel out of the shower spray. The brilliant feature is his crowning achievement for the summer: a window offering a view across North Marsh and toward Buldir Eccentric, as well as a skylight, which allows the stall to heat up with the water’s heat and any small amount of sunshine. With the right temperature of creek water in the solar shower bag, showering on Buldir is about as good as it gets for the field.