Ahoy.

welcome to the rat cruise.

I’ve never done an art residency before. I struggle with impostor-syndrome around being an artist at all, which is a whole other substack of fish, but I get to do this nonsense full-time and even have a Room of One’s Own to do it in. TWO rooms, even, for when one gets too gross and I can’t deal. Residencies are for people who need the space or time to really focus on their shit and I have no shortage of either. I should leave them to those folks.

Yes, I know that makes no sense.

So do my friends, who encouraged me to stop being an idiot and apply to some. There are a lot, and I got completely overwhelmed after about 20 seconds, but one that stood out to me the Voices of the Wilderness program. It’s run by the Forest Service, National Park Service and Fish & Wildlife, pairing an artist with a specialist in one of Alaska’s 48 designated wilderness areas. Instead of staying in a cabin, you’re out in the field with the rangers, experiencing the environment and finding a way to communicate it through your chosen medium.

I love Alaska so much. I go every year to visit friends in Juneau, and something about my heart just vibrates when I’m there. Maybe this is my Russian peeking through - I like cold, difficult places where small numbers of people are making it work, usually by forming tight, supportive communities. I would rather go to Homer than Hawaii. I once did a trip on the Alaska Marine Highway Ferry and fell in love with the heated solarium, wraparound mountains and the way the people on board felt like a little moving village that all knew each other. Also the french fries. I wanted to see more of Alaska, and I fantasized about going all the way to the Aleutian Islands. 

So when my friend Pat showed me the VoTW website that was my first choice. My second was the “Fortress of the Grizzlies”, because come on.

I told them what kind of work I’d done in the past, that I’d like to make some diary comics and watercolors, and that my Oregon bona-fides mean I’m down with hiking and being damp. Then I tried to forget about it, because wanting something too much only leads to heartbreak (that is also my Russian peeking through). A couple of months later I got a call saying I got in. WELL.

There weren’t really any details about the trip on the website, since it was still being figured out. But the gist was I would be tagging along on a 20-day invasive species project in the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge. It consists of 2400 islands in 11 different wilderness areas, full of seabirds and, unfortunately, rats. The rats had found their way to some uninhabited islands and were chowing down on the seabird eggs, naively laid on the ground. This project would be a survey of various islands along the chain, looking for evidence of them (along with other invasives) and testing an emergency rat eradication protocol. One might say… a rat cruise. 

A team of twelve biologists, six crew and one cartoonist will be living on the Research Vessel Tiĝlax̂, starting in Homer, AK and ending in Adak Island, about 900 nautical miles away. These are not the exact stops but you get the idea. Maybe. 

I leave tomorrow and I am Very. Very. Excited. I’ll be helping with the surveys and learning as much as I can about this amazing part of the world and the work these people do. I plan to make comics and paintings of what I see, but also hopefully find some time to write about it here. 

What’s that thing the kids say? Like and subscribe? Like and subscribe. Smash it. Worst case scenario I’ll be too busy to post or the Starlink won’t work and you’ll be none the worse off. Best case there will be some PUFFINS.