Life at 50 Below

How I usually tell it.

"Life at 50 Below"

I usually tell this story when people find out that I served in Alaska and ask all of the typical questions. I also worked as a tour guide in Alaska over the summer and had plenty of chances to tell some wild stories.

My companion and I landed at the top of the world in September. It was like stepping onto another planet as we got off the airplane. Just hours before we were surrounded by the beautiful trees, ocean, and the warm city of Anchorage. Now we only had the ocean...the Arctic Ocean. Being from Utah I am used to the snow. But 30 degrees and blowing snow in the middle of September seems unnatural. The adventure in Barrow began.

Our apartment was inside the church right across the street from the North Coast of North America. Looking out the window, all you could see was miles of really cold water. If you looked to the south, all you could see was miles of flat, frozen tundra. The houses and colorful tundra grass were visible only for a short time in September, so we enjoyed the variety before everything was to be plastered with the sideways winter snow. 

As the days and weeks ticked on, it invited more snow and more wind, and less and less daylight and warmth. We would call into the weather station often and were never satisfied with the result. "Today is Thursday, Otcober 31st. Current temperature: -10 degrees. Amount of daylight: 5 hours, 50 minutes." 

We had a strange relationship with that robot voice. "Today is Tuesday, November 12th. Current temperature: -22 degrees. Amount of daylight: 3 hours, 20 minutes." 

Every addictive call brought a strange feeling of being brought back to the reality of our position on the globe. Eventually they didn't even mention the amount of daylight.

Then the sun left us. Our emotional state seemed to drop as quickly as the temperature. I was ready to get back to the trees and the roads and the fast food restaurants. Two frozen, sunless months of trudging through the snow passed, then we got the call - Fairbanks, Alaska. Never have two words sounded so good. The sun was up for hours and there were trees and a fairly big town. I was warming up just thinking about it. I was going to see the sun for the first time in 8 weeks. It would feel so good to be in a car again.

I got out the phone and called to see what the temperature is like in Fairbanks. "Today is Sunday, January 5th. Current temperature: -55 degrees." I could not escape my frozen fate. 

Revised Version

"Missonary Work at the Top of The World"

This version is in a church setting, to people asking more specifically about missionary work.

It's always hard going into a new area, but this transfer was like getting sent to Hoth [simile] from Star Wars. On the plane ride up I was reminiscing about my new friends that you always have to leave so quickly. It was a great summer in Whitehorse, YT and a surprisingly hot one. I practiced my temperature conversion and found out that it got up to, in Celsius, 30 degrees. 30 degrees [anadiplosis] is so different in America, which we soon found out. 

We were picked up at an airport an average American [assonance] would just call a double wide trailer with a runway.[Hyperbole] Then the work began. We did a lot of tracting and service-tracking and inviting-people-to-events-tracing. We walked more than we had during the rest of our missions combined, since we had trucks in the rest of our areas. Talking to everyone, going to community events, and all of our tracting seemed to be fruitless. It wasn't until after we left that we saw our purpose of being there.[cause and effect]

The days got shorter and shorter, and colder and colder. If going outside in September was bad, we were dreading the dark days of December even more. [Degree] Some days it felt like the only thing keeping us going was the fire burning inside of us for the love of the Lord and His work. We knew He sent us there for a reason and that reason wasn't to sit inside and be warm. [Supernatural]

Months of freezing temperatures, sunless days, and cold, walking feet, and we didn't baptize anyone. We opened the door, however, for the next missionaries to come in and pick up where we left off, doing more work than has ever been done at the top of the world.