Our second day in Alaska began where the first day ended: on the back of a truck. After eating his breakfast and getting bundled to meet the brisk tundra air, August crawled up onto the bed of the yellow truck and stood there with his impression of a badass. The likeness was uncanny, and for a moment I felt something like actual alarm.

But then Alden and Kato showed up and things returned to their usual state of weirdness.

The threat passed quickly, replaced by something much more ridiculous.

Once everyone was properly bundled, we headed down the road to the beach.

The beach is like the mall of the tundra. It’s awesome at the beach. It’s where things happen. It’s where you go to hang out.

There are, for example, a lot of dead flounders.

And some almost dead ones that cause Robbi’s heartstrings to clench and drive her to do crazily counterintuitive things such as save the flounder’s lives even though they are the bane of every fisherman’s existence.

She enlisted Aunt Tracy’s help in collecting a few not-dead flounders and carrying them down to the water’s edge where they could live to be washed up on the beach another day.

We hadn’t been on the beach long when something awesome happened. Our friend George drove up and gave us all sorts of news.

We see our friends from Alaska for about three weeks each year and generally don’t talk to them over the summer, so there is always a lot of catching up to do.

George was on his way to set out his nets, so we let him go and continued our walk on the beach. Mere moments later, a second awesome thing happened. We ran into Aunt Maiko, who was filling up water buckets at the spring.

After thoroughly filling Maiko in on all the excitement (not-dead flounders, seeing George, etc.), we headed up a road that lead to the top of the bluff.

Just as we reached the top, another incredibly awesome thing happened. George had gone back to his fishing camp and had acquired a bunch of Hershey’s bars for us. The kids are like candy magnets on the tundra. We are regularly able to leverage their novelty for candy, which we then take from them and eat ourselves.

In case you’re wondering why we have so many kids.

We went to our neighbor’s house to pay a visit. August climbed a ramp and then ran back down again.

Meanwhile, the rest of the kids played on swings made of old tires and buoys.

Since nothing particularly awesome had happened for a few minutes, Alden decided to just BE awesome for a while.

Alaska is weird. Everything is made by hand. Nothing can be thrown away. All the buildings look ad hoc and haphazard and all the empty spaces are strewn with old junk. Or stacks of lumber, just waiting to be made into something.

Also, there are enormous earth-moving machines just sitting around.

So, naturally, Kato decided to drive one.

Of course, there are no gas stations on the beach (there is no electric grid and no public plumbing; there are no roads), so people have to set up their own fuel depots.

Here’s our neighbor’s house. Four people live here, but he decided to build it to the code standards of a cannery in case anyone ever wants to use it as such. Also, he has a lot of free time in the winter when it’s dark 20 hours a day.

As we contemplated a return home and anticipated lunch, we paused briefly to settle an argument.

The dispute in question regarded the matter of whether Robbi or Raiden was larger. Though it was hard to tell with the untrained eye, by placing then both next to the same tire, we seemed to have the answer.

Robbi by a hair.

But we’re guessing that, this time next year, the result could be very different.