By Isaac Hamlet
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For most, going south for the summer is ideal for capitalizing on the sunshine the season affords. The appeal of amusement parks, beaches, and boardwalks is a siren call for the standard traveler.
Yet California native Blair Braverman — a graduate of the Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program —  followed a slightly different instinct when making her summer plans.
For tonight, one can find Braverman at Prairie Lights, 15 S. Dubuque St., at 7 p.m. reading from her new book, Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube: Chasing Fear and Finding Home In the Great White North.
“It is an investigative memoir about growing up as a young woman on the northern frontier and learning how to negotiate the landscape and a male-dominated community,” Braverman said.
Her decision to move from California to Norway at the age of 18 wasn’t entirely random. Her family had lived in Norway when she was a child, so when she ventured to “a tiny socialist boarding school about 200 miles above the Arctic Circle” it wasn’t an uninformed decision.
“It would be anywhere from 20 to 50 below,” she said. “Celsius, Fahrenheit — at that point it’s pretty interchangeable. We’d go out for a week with six huskies each, a tent, and some matches and see how far we’d get.”
At this school, while beating back the best efforts of the elements, Braverman developed a passion for sled dogs. It was an experience so formative that — when the term was over — she wasn’t entirely ready to leave.
“When the school year ended, I was sort of desperate to hang on to that identity, this mountain woman, frontier person” she said.
To sate her desire, she went to Alaska. While there, she lived on a glacier the size of Rhode Island with 10 people and 200 dogs.
Despite her upbringing, it still took her some time to adjust to the physical landscape. Because of the snow, fog, and clouds, “the sky would be white and the snow would be white, like living inside a Ping-Pong ball.” That’s not where the perils ended, though.
“[The glacier] was technically a rain forest because it rained so much,” she said. “Everyone was getting trench foot and snow blindness. Your body’s not meant to be in a condition like that; your skin might just be peeling off in strips.”
In one instance, a lightning storm passed over them. Braverman and the other glacier residents realized no one was entirely sure if ice could conduct electricity, and the dogs were outside attached to a metal pole.
Thankfully, the dogs were OK after this slight scare and continued to work with Braverman.
“They’re dogs, and their minds don’t work the ways ours do, and the things they care about on the trail aren’t things that we care about or even can sense,” she said. “They interact with each other way more than our pets do because they’re a pack.”
The relationships among the dogs demanded an understanding of their body language and how their social standing among others in their group might shift. As Braverman described it, “It’s just like being in high school but high school for your life.”
Yet despite social hurdles, slight psychological distress, and environmental dangers, she stayed. She stayed because of the dogs.
“The dogs were by far the best part,” Braverman said. “I loved taking care of [them]. It’s really hard work, but that’s what you’re getting up for, that’s what you’re doing. That’s sort of the thing that saved me up there. I would just avoid people and hang out with my dogs.”

Blair Braverman Reading
Where: Prairie Lights, 15 S. Dubuque
When: 7 p.m. today
Cost: Free