As the world turns

Last night a story came across about the Talkeetna Moose Dropping Festival and how a bunch of rowdies disrupted it. The festival is the small town’s summer carnival and gets its name from what moose leave behind in winter.

With no leaves or grass, moose generally eat twigs in winter and their droppings are little nuggets of pressed wood, with a consistency somewhat like particle board used in building houses. There is no smell, the nuggets are as hard as wood and you can pick them up with no ill effects. People even make jewelry out of them.

But not everyone gets the humor of moose droppings. One woman Outsider heard of the festival and wrote a very angry, demanding letter wanting to know how far they dropped those moose and were they hurt. For a while the logo for the festival became a moose dangling in a sling from a helicopter. So, this festival has been going on for 37 years as a family friendly affair with a tongue in cheek sense of humor. Until this year.

Apparently a group of youngsters from out of town raised hell, drinking and carousing and ruined it for the regular folks. One of the carousers even drowned when he jumped into the river and never came up.

The story quoted an Amanda Randles, a bartender at the Fairview Hotel (which is a story all its own). She was complaining about how the festival was disrupted.

Having known the Talkeetna community for years (it is the closest town to the East Pole) I questioned whether that name was correct. I know a Pam Randles from around that country and also a Pam Ranalls, who I know is a bartender there. I discussed it with a woman at work who is familiar with the area and even asked the reporter how old she thought the source was, thinking maybe she had gotten the name wrong. She said the woman sounded between 20 and 40. That didn’t fit with the age of the women I was thinking about. This led to a discussion of the two women and eventually to Pam Randles’ husband Slim and we what remembered about the two of them. It was in that discussion that the realization hit.

Their daughter was named Amanda. I remember holding her in my arms when she was a baby just struggling with her first words. At the time Slim and I both had long dark beards and dark rimmed glasses. To the chagrin of all of us, the baby tugged hard on my beard and said “Da-Da” for the first time.

But, I thought she would be too young to be a bartender at the age of 20 or so. Then we started going through the years. O M G! By our count she has to be 36 or 37. This little girl whom I remember mistakenly calling me Da Da is not only old enough to be a bartender, she is old enough to be the bartender in a famous Alaska saloon. But worse than that: SHE IS OLD ENOUGH TO BE COMPLAINING ABOUT THOSE DAMNED KIDS!

Can the Pioneer Home be far off?

Lazy, hazy days of summer

We are sure having those. Temperatures in the 80s this week with no letup in sight. Might be comfortable somewhere, but here it is just damned hot. A couple of months ago I mentioned the expert at the Bureau of Land Management who said we would have a light fire season because it would be cool and wet. Guess what. Cool and wet turned into hot and dry and we now have 70 wildfires burning across the state that have already consumed 629,739 acres. So much for the light fire season. One fire already has burned 125,000 acres. The picture is toward the mountain I have photographed before, only you can't see it today because of the haze from the smoke drifting over us from the fires farther north.

In other news, i saw a bear on the way home last night, on the bicycle path near Eagle River. A little farther along I saw a late-night hiker walking toward the bear. Nothing in the news this morning so everyone must have passed all right. It was a small black bear, so probably pretty easy to chase away if they did happen to meet.

Then there is the garden. The owl must have fallen asleep on duty and the squirrels stripped the plant. Kind of disheartening but now we have entered phase two as seen in that picture. Heavy bird screen around the plant, supported by stakes and held down with spikes and rocks. So far so good. This is quite the plant. It already has produced at least a dozen berries and there are at least half a dozen more on it now ripening. If you look you can see some red around the base. I went looking today for a live trap but no luck. I will find one and that is phase three. After that it starts to get serious. Then there is the second bloom on the Himalayan poppy. Another one is ready to go. And there are new flowers, yellow ones on this broad-leafed plant i have no idea what it is.

So with haze and bears (three so far this year) and strawberries and new flowers, not a bad day to be alive.

Son of Only in Alaska

As newspapers continue to decline, more ways to miss them come up. A fellow the other day cancelled his subscription because: "There ain't enough paper in them any more to start a good fire." I use those outdated phone books these days but it is more work.

Berries, bears and John Dillinger

Two more strawberries tonight. That makes it me 5 squirrels 2 and they haven't gotten one since the owl took his post. One more shrew in his food tonight. On top of that it looks like the Himalayan poppy as ready to show two more blossoms, PLUS the big plant with the wide leaves looks like it is going to pop a couple of yellow colored flowers in the next few days.

Went to see Public Enemies tonight. Good movie all around and I am continually amazed how Johnny Depp can be so credible in so many different roles. They made Dillinger a little more human than my impression of him has been and funny but in all the pictures i remember seeing of him in Life magazine, I don't remember a smile even. Of course in all those pictures he was headed into jail, so perhaps it was a not funny time for him. They did show the time he broke out of jail using a gun he carved out of soap though i didn't catch that they showed it being carved or that it was made of soap. The biggest surprise, though, was that the lady in red wasn't in red at all but in white and orange. Now you have to wonder if the story was just myth and the movie got it right or if the movie played with the facts to avoid the cliche. At any rate a good movie especially now that I can go to a movie for less than the price of a $15.99 DVD. Now that i only use a gallon of gas to make the 50-mile round trip that is.

So, the topper for the day? Besides the strawberries? I saw a black bear cub amble across the road on the way home.

Habitat

All right, I have tried to live in harmony with nature, live and let live and work around any animals in the neighborhood, with the exception of a few arachnids and other assorted bugs on one type or another. But, now they have gone too far and it is one step short of all out war, and that step can be taken if this keeps up. I have a wonderful strawberry plant in my little flower garden. Something, and i think it was one of the squirrels, ate the first two ripe berries. This is unacceptable. So the first step has been taken: A sentry posted. It already chased one of them away. Although owl statues in harbors end up with gulls standing on them or worse. The next step will be a frame and netting. If that fails the live traps come out and those squirrels are on their way to the river. We shall see. In the meantime i saved two strawberries... my first crop.

The garden evolution