August

Another year when my

 son was 10 or 11 and he led

the Valdez Fishing Derby

 for about half an hour 

one day with a 12-pound fish.

Some fishing stories came up tonight. It all started with a picture of a grizzly bear with a Pixie lure hooked in its nose. The jokes and puns flew around, a few of which ended up in the paper and online. Something about an adolescent showing off his nose piercing and another about being a teen being hooked on something and also the allure of a fishing tackle box. So it goes.

There are some things you can count on in August around here: huge cabbages and huge pumpkins for a couple. We had a picture tonight of a pumpkin expected to weigh close to 1,800 pounds when it's weighed at the fair Wednesday. And another thing you can take to the bank is silver salmon in Port Valdez. I made my living for a while trolling for them and on a few occasions actually went after them for fun. I had some success chartering, lots of limits and a few derby winners.

One I remember most and the one I told tonight involved getting hooked with a lure. I was fishing with my nephew and we managed to hook a pink salmon using a lure that had two hooks in line. When I went to grab the fish, the back hook which was loose got me right through that flap of skin between the thumb and forefinger, all the way through.

So there I was with a three or four pound fish jumping and twisting, flapping and flopping and fighting against a hook through my hand. Unused to this sort of thing my nephew wasn't sure what to do until after several shouts and curses, I finally got him to hand me the dikes. Still fighting the fish I finally got the dikes on the shank side of the hook and cut it. The fish when flopping into the bottom of the skiff we were fishing from and I pulled the hook end out the other way. You have to be thankful for the antiseptic qualities of salt water. I dunked my hand and swished it around until I couldn't stand the cold any more and pulled it out. The bleeding had stopped and that was all there was to that. When we got home I put a Band-Aid on it and it healed very nicely. And for once I was glad we had caught a pink salmon. If that had been a 15-pound silver I might have been in a whole lot worse shape.

A pink wasn't all we caught that day. I think we sent about 90 pounds of silver salmon meat back to his family the next day.

Just one more reason I have never cared for fishing much.

Garden surprise

I did promise no more peas, but other things are happening. The larger picture at the top and the one on the left of the smaller ones are flowers that bloomed early on and then stood there being green for most of the summer. Then all of a sudden in the past week or so they filled out with all those flowers. That coincides with a period with lots of rain and not much sun. I might look for those again next year if I can figure out what they are. The little yellow flowers just popped up all over the place but I never planted them. I thought they were pansies left over from other years but in the places they are showing up I never had any pansies. Maybe weeds. The are shaped a bit like buttercups. The last picture is the east end of the garden that gets the most sun, big petunias, big new flowers and those weeds. The tomato plants are turning so I picked all the larger ones and brought them inside for ripening. Last but not least two more frozen boxes of those little green round things. Ant work, not on the scale of my niece's but ant work just the same. As yet no one has won the nickel. As a matter of fact no one has even entered the contest. It is still here and the contest is still ongoing to point out what might be different from the early garden pictures and those taken more recently. As always no one directly connected with ownership or habitation of this house is eligible to enter. Get those guesses in, this contest won't run forever. (Will it?)

Take a step off the usual trail for a moment or two

Into the world of poetry if you will. This is about one of those retorts, the perfect answer you think of a day after it would have been perfect, only in this case it is 45 years.

Today on the drive for some reason I got to thinking about a poem by e.e. cummings that we read during a poetry class many years ago. It stuck with me, most likely because I understood it and was able to interpret it to the professor's satisfaction. I looked for it on the Internet today but couldn't find it, so here is my best estimation how it goes:

who,

at her nonself's unself

toothfully leering,

can this

platinum floozy

possibly begin

to imagine

she is

I suppose I could interpret properly, according to him anyway, because I had sat in places contemplating platinum floosies. And I always remembered the poem as a favorite, more perhaps because I did understand at least one e.e. cummings poem, than that I really liked it. Today I figured out what my response should have been. Not a college kid's eye view of a great poet, but in the voice of the platinum floozy herself. Like this:

she imagines her nonself a judgmental, elitist

poet who accepts

her role in life to judge and

criticize those who do not

meet her exacting intellectual

standards, but her unself

rejects that concept totally and

she returns to the comfort of

her ownself in

the mirror once more,

then turning coquettishly

to tell the poet,

"not with you,

not ever,

not in a million years."

As if to confirm the view now taken of this poem, I noticed on one of the e.e. cummings search pages I looked at, there was a notation that there are 6 Cummins diesel mechanics online. Wonder how the great poet would like being lumped in with those commoners. I bet one thing. They can take apart a diesel engine and put it back together and he couldn't. In the long run who contributes more to the general welfare, a guy who feels superior to a woman in a bar or a guy who keeps those trucks running that deliver our fresh groceries?

Bookends

For the most part aging has been one more adventure in life. Though not totally embraced, it is not being fought either, more like learning as I go and dealing with what changes come up. Some aspects are accepted and some even comforting while others take some conscious adjustment. (I have finally accepted I will never be the heavyweight champion of the world). Other aspects can be very upsetting. One of those is the growing number of people in your life who die. It’s only natural, we are all growing older and a logical extension of that thought is of course we are crowding the end and some of us are going to drop off before others. Working in the news business can make this part of aging extremely upsetting. Three times in the past couple of years I have been editing a story and all of a sudden the name of someone I knew jumped out at me, killed before his time. It happened this week. It is an old joke that we check the obituaries every day and if we’re not in them it’s all good.

It's not all good. Not too long ago, three people I knew showed up in the obituaries within about a week. It reached a point where I avoided editing or reading them any more because I didn’t want surprises like that. Better to go on in the blithe ignorance of believing everyone in your life is still going strong.

Sunday night such a name jumped off the page at me. It was a story about a small airplane crash near McGrath in west central Alaska. A Cessna 207 went down in bad weather and two people were killed. One was a long-time teacher in the Village of Anvik, the other was the pilot, one Ernest Chase. Realization took a moment. Then I realized. No one calls him Ernest.

I had dinner at Ernie Chase’s home in Grayling in 1979. The invitation was a courtesy because he had invited an old friend, the fellow who was flying me along the Iditarod Trail, and I suppose he felt obligated to include me. I remember a very vibrant man never at a loss for words and wanting to make sure I did well in my writing by his brother Ken who was in the race. The meal, as I recall moose was on the menu, and the conversation were a welcome respite from the pockets of Corn Nuts and beef jerky I had been surviving on. After the dinner we said our good nights and I went off to sleep in the light of the main room in the Grayling community hall. We weren’t allowed into the back room because the body of a village elder was there awaiting transport.

We flew out the next morning. I only saw Ernie one more time and I cannot recall the occasion just that it was a surprise and a quick passing in which we only recognized each other and exchanged hellos. Not exactly close friends, but someone you are aware is in the world somewhere and that is somehow mildly comforting. Only now he is not out there in the world somewhere and that is the world’s loss.

Last night a story came up about another small airplane down with two people from Cordova, a town where I know people and have good friends, missing and presumed dead. I couldn’t even bring myself to read the story for fear I would recognize their names.

Please bear with me

No bears though. I am moving to a new computer and this process has grown exponentially more involved since my first Mac Plus. Among other things there is a broken power backer, a tangled web of wires that looks like any snake pit you ever saw in an Indiana Jones movie and wrestling matches with a totally uncooperative Airport router. Tonight it actually told me it was taking a time out. WTF? I will administer the time outs around here thank you very much. The transfer is good now except for iTunes playlists which I figured out today but it still won't transfer music that wasn't purchased on iTunes, so there is that to go yet. All of it has interrupted the creative process, the same process this whole operation was intended to enhance. But, if you have paid attention to the news you know absurdities are building, and Alaska things are happening and I am promising NO MORE PEAS posts. Give me a little time. There's a full moon and the stars are back as darkness reclaims the night sky and we begin the headlong plunge into winter. Several minor tragedies have made life interesting and there is still no sign of Kitty who is now part of that creative process. Another person I knew and liked was killed in an airplane crash Saturday night. They are falling out of the sky like rain this summer, speaking of which we have had weeks of rain and the other night it rained harder than I have ever seen it rain in Alaska. It rained so hard that twice in a week my Honda decided to throw off windshield wipers at 65 mph in hard rainstorms. So the Jeep has become the commuter vehicle because the Honda dealer had to order new wiper arms, and the change in gas mileage is expensive. The result of all this is as anybody who reads this knows, very little has been written for a couple of weeks. So I can only ask, please watch this space closely. In the very near future I will try to make it worthwhile. It would have to be. I mean, this new computer will increase wittiness, humor, intelligence and creativity. Honest, it says so in the instruction manual and if it doesn't there is a link to Mac technical support.

Harvest

Or as my niece who has a farm share calls it, "ant work." Nice sunny day with lots of fat pea pods on the vines, perfect for a nice lazy harvest, shuck and preserve. Of course the effort/reward ratio was very low. So far the total production would about fill one of those Birds-Eye boxes on the freezer shelf at the store. But sometime next winter the satisfaction element will go way up. There is an album here. Oh and there is a nickel prize for the first person who can identify something else that has changed in the pictures. Good luck observers.

Now this is funny

Short post. Lady Gaga has a song called "Teeth." It has in it a repeated line, "show me your teeth." I just heard a commercial for the Discovery Channel's Shark Week. Theme music? "Show me your teeth." Perfect.

Best hug ever

It’s funny how something can trigger a memory of what seems like a totally unrelated event. I went to see the new Harry Potter tonight, in Imax even. In the second to last scene, where Harry throws Voldemort’s wand into the abyss and walks away, Hermione and Ron stand and watch him go. (No spoiler alert necessary, that’s all that will be said.) I had the strangest feeling she was going to run after him and jump on his back in celebration, just like someone did to me many years ago. Wait. What?

Wow there it was. It would have been the summer of 1981. I was running a small charter boat on Prince William Sound, working out of Whittier. Early in the summer, I met a wonderful woman and hired her as crew. What impressed me? Only in Alaska. On the charter where I met her we were taking a friend of hers out to an island to spend at least a month observing pigeon guillemots, a shy shorebird. To do it she had a small inflatable and an outboard motor and to run the motor she needed fuel. Here’s one of those lift solutions. She wanted a full 55 gallon drum but I knew we would never lift a full drum off the boat. The solution was two drums half full. Those we could lift, toss overboard and float them to shore.

After we arrived at the island we helped the scientist load all her gear ashore and then went to the fuel barrels. This woman and I prepared to lift one. Figure the drum and 25 gallons of fuel weigh something over 200 pounds. So, this woman and I got a grip and I was prepared for a heavy load. That drum came up so easily it surprised me. I looked at her and I could swear she smirked. I fell in love right there. All the way back I schemed how I could see more of her as we chatted a little. It turned out she didn’t have a job and was kind of looking around. It turned out I didn’t have a crew person and I was kind of looking around.

It took a call to the owner but he was all for it, and there we were. As the summer progressed we grew closer and closer. There are several stories but this is about the hug.

The previous winter I had been sending my first book manuscript to various publishers and receiving it back only to send it out again. I mailed it one last time before I headed back to the boat in the spring and checked the mail religiously the twice a week it arrived in Whittier. The rejections may sound depressing but I had read about a writer who said, “naw, every day I go to the post office and my book is accepted. Only once is it rejected and I have all those days of acceptance. I send it out again and then approach each day with optimism and dreams of acceptance.”

We came in from a trip late on a mail day and while she stayed and cleaned the boat, I raced to the post office. I was standing there in the small room filled with people waiting for their mail while the postmaster, I remember his name as Cowboy, called out names. Whittier is a small town after all.

He called my name and handed me a normal letter-sized envelope. It was from a publisher. This wasn’t a returned manuscript. This was a letter. I knew what that meant and let out a whoop. Cowboy who knew what I was looking for asked if that was it. I think so, I think so. Others in the room knew also and pretty soon there were cheers and jumping up and down going on. I remember a very short tourist woman tugging at my sleeve and then asking anybody who might know, what is it? what is it? Somebody said, “It’s his book.” Sometime in that melee she actually asked me to sign an autograph, my first.

This was going to take a celebration and I was not going to do that alone. I probably half flew back to the boat. People were driving past me honking and waving, giving thumbs up.

It was less than half a mile to the boat and I think I did it in seconds; it felt like it anyway. I hopped onto the boat and hollered for her and told her what happened. At this point I realized I had not opened the letter yet. We opened it together and sure enough it was an acceptance. I was officially a writer, there it was in mauve and green (woman publisher).

A couple of people stopped by as we gathered our things to go up to the bar for that celebration we knew was about to happen. There were five or six of us in a group heading toward the bar. Rain had begun falling while we were on the boat. It is understatement to say it rains a lot in Whittier so this was barely noticeable.

Somehow I remember I was talking with someone as we walked and she had ended up walking behind me. I was pretty happy and was probably close to that bubbling we hear about. Suddenly I heard what could only be called a growl behind me, then something hit me hard in the back and an arm went around my shoulders and neck. She hit me so hard we both went down in the wet and the muck and she never let go. I managed to twist and throw my arms around her as well and we laughed and rolled around in pure wet muddy joy. The best hug ever.

That still didn’t stop us from spending several hours celebrating with the rest of our friends. The letter was passed up and down the bar for everyone to read, beers were drunk, songs were sung hugs were exchanged. Memories of the later hours of the evening have disappeared into a haze, but given our proclivities during our time together, I am quite positive it had a happy ending.

The book was published a year later, but sadly the relationship didn’t last that long. Over the winter I had to go someplace alone and quiet to do the rewrites and revisions and she had to go back to her home and straighten out life and a former boy friend and we drifted apart. If you have been reading this blog, it was she who led me to call the bar Key Largo.

In the 1990s I learned she and her more recent husband had been flying from a claim they worked near Yakutat back to their home in Kenai and were lost over the Gulf of Alaska, never to be heard from again. It’s a sadness I carry when I think about her now and then, like when it looks like Hermione is going to jump onto Harry’s back in celebration.

The photo is a pigeon guillemot stolen from Wikipedia