Murder most fowl

I witnessed a murder today, personified by dark sinister beings challenging any who would cross the bridge, with more gathered on the beaches below on both sides of the river, more yet along the water's edge to the west. Easily visible against the background of new fallen snow. Black and white, evil and good, the eternal struggle.

They gathered in a place where the movie was being shot just a few days before, a movie based in the evil that stalked this place a quarter century before, an evil that left its victims in unmarked graves, many of them never found.

Was the murder recent, of course it was, but was it also founded in that time and now its victims rise on All Hallow's Eve to torment those who paid little attention to their fate because they were considered less than worthy of a proper investigation by authorities.

Like a lawman facing unbelievable odds, the eagle stared from his perch in the old cottonwood at the gang gathered below perhaps wondering too, what evil brought this murder out on this particular day. Maybe with his vision he can see the spirits of those long-dead souls drifting through the forests seeking salvation or retribution, or both.

And this is the mystery, my friends and the new challenge. Can anyone define this murder? Muwaaaa haaaaa haaaaa!

'Frozen Ground' the Sequel: Aftermath

Having spent the better part of August 2010 sailing around in the North Pacific Ocean with a group of people trying to get a handle on the amount and possible cleanup of all the plastic trapped in a gyre out there, I've become a lot more sensitive to the amount of plastic I and everyone else use and thought a bit about the supply chain. Where does all that plastic come from and how does it get into the ocean? Granted most of what we saw could have come off boats, but it originated on land one way or another.
How some of it gets there became crystal clear during the drive to work yesterday. At the Kink River I glanced over and noticed the movie people were gone and wrote about that, but another thing I saw was a big wad of Visqueen blown into a tangle of brush on the beach. (For non Alaskans, Visqueen is plastic sheeting and we use the term genericly) The plastic in the brush bothered me on the drive and I convinced myself to go over there and clean up what I could. It also led to thoughts about its location. That Visqueen was about a hundred yards or less from the Knik River. At this point it's probably less than two miles to Knik Arm, Knik Arm empties into Cook Inlet which in turn connects to the Gulf of Alaska and the North Pacific Ocean. It doesn't take too much imagination to figure out that this Visqueen which incidentally is in a high wind area could easily end up in the river and the ocean. All so people could watch a movie about an Alaska serial killer and because a few people with the crew couldn't take the time to clean up after themselves. To be fair it's possible some of this trash was left by others before the movie people arrived, but I am sure the Visqueen wasn't there and (ugh) I opened one bag and the garbage smelled fairly fresh. I suppose I could have poked around and looked for discarded paperwork to confirm it, but then, you only get so much from volunteers.

There's a bit of an added problem boat people will appreciate, at least any of us who have tangled Visqueen in a propeller. Awful stuff and if the shaft or outdrive overheats, that crap melts to the metal and is almost possible to remove. It could get worse than that if it gets sucked into a cutlass bearing.

The trash is in a good place now and just to balance the bad with the good, when I told the nice woman at the landfill where it all came from she only charged me two dollars instead of the usual six.

THE PHOTOS: The one with the black bags is the total pile collected. The one with the smaller Visqueen is to show the proximity to the Knik River and the large piece is self explanatory.

For images from the North Pacific trip click on the Sailing with Chip gallery in the right-hand column. There are photos of some of the trash we collected out there.

Weather thwarts Knik River Valley invaders

Two nights ago a new critter popped out of the brush onto the road. Pretty sure it was a mink: the right dark color, too small to be a wolverine or an otter and too big for a weasel and too dark to be a martin. It ran with that hunch and stretch motion weasels have, so that's my guess anyway.

If omens are to be believed, there is now some indication the mink may have been one. The next day heading for work, I noticed the parking lot at Del Roi's tavern was packed full of matching Winnebagos. It seemed awfully late in the season for a tourist caravan, but what it could have been puzzled me until the next day. Again they filled the parking lot, but farther on there was a lot of activity on the wide gravel beach at the Knik River that included several large trucks, a pagoda type tent and lots of people milling about.

The movie! There has been a crew in Anchorage for the past several weeks filming a movie about a serial killer who operated in the 1980s and who actually released his victims in this general area and then hunted them. Nicolas Cage and John Cusack are in it and have been spotted around Anchorage.

Nature was not cooperating. Blasts of wind gusted down the valley from the glacier, actually stirring up whitecaps on the river and sending clouds of glacial silt over the camp and the road. Welcome to Alaska, I thought as I made my way across the bridge.

Coming home that night it had built into a whole lot worse storm. Along the blue highway wind rocked the car. At the sharp curve that turns on the bridge at the south end, wind tends to be strongest and dust and silt blown up from the river bed sometimes builds up across the road creating a slippery surface right on the sharpest curve along the whole road. It can also create a washboard effect that can easily send a car flying. This night I hit that curve wrong, just as a gust blew up a dust cloud so thick I actually had to stop because I couldn't even see the guardrail right next to the car. I could hear bits of beach dust hitting the car. It let down and I went across the bridge to see lights on at the movie camp and guys working tying their tent to pickup trucks so as not to lose it to the wind. Welcome to Alaska again, I thought.

The next day still blowing like snot, two helicopters had joined the equipment at the camp on the river. but there didn't look like any work was under way.

That night going home, I noticed the camp had disappeared and the parking lot at Del-Roi's only held a few local vehicles, no rolling campers or equipment trucks.

It all tells me to pay attention when another mink hops out onto the road.

Another one of those "never-do" things

NEVER get behind a cat lady in the checkout line. Holy mackerel! 120 individual cans plus several large litter boxes. PLUS coupons for every single one of them.

On the positive side: Read the whole front page of every single tabloid in the rack. Or is that a minus?

Doing my part: Occupy !!!

The small print says "Take it to another level"

The times they are 'changin'

After days of low overcast and long periods of rainfall, the clouds have finally lifted revealing a snow line well down the mountain from where it was the last time it could be seen only days before.

Patches of wispy snow fill the hollows at the base of the mountain on its north side, the residue from whatever fell during the night. Transparent pans of thin ice that broke away from shore float down the river. More snow clings in larger amounts to the gravel and silt along the bank where it is still in the shadow of the mountain.

Across the river two moose stand at the water's edge looking and listening nervously, being much more exposed than they are comfortable with and a long way from the safety of the forest behind them. Occasionally one or the other dips its head to take a drink from the water flowing past.

A little farther along the bald eagle glares out over the water from its perch in a huge cottonwood tree where it has returned to take up its winter residence.

Overhead a raven flaps by. On a quiet day you can actually hear their wings as they beat the air. A black bird in winter without the usual camouflage most animals require. This apparently serves two purposes. For one the dark color absorbs what warmth the sun rations out and second the story goes they taste or smell so bad to predators that they are left alone. You seldom see ravens and gulls in the same place. Crows yes, but not ravens. I used to figure they were the same bird, wearing white in summer to reflect the heat of the sun and then black in winter to absorb it. Of course like the society matron, what fashionable bird would wear white after labor day anyway?

Winter has begun to slip its silent shroud over the country.

Sixty-nine

I had a great idea for a blog post a little while ago and now I can't remember what it was. Senior moment? Save the jokes. They get tiresome and so do those instances where you are saying a sentence and all of a sudden a word totally escapes you, or you can't remember the words to a song, or the author of a favorite book slips from memory. Every time that happens there is a moment of panic: Is this it? Is this the start of it? Is this the beginning of the slow descent into that feared state of dementia?

The jokes don't help. Like this one. An old man is sitting at a table in a diner, obviously weeping. A waitress comes over and asks him if anything is wrong. He looks at her and says, "I have a beautiful young wife. We have sex, great sex, anytime I want. She is a great cook, she keeps the house great and she is intelligent and we always have something to talk about." The waitress asks him what is wrong with that, to which he replies, "I can't remember how to get home."

That aside, I had an idea about this sort of thing. Yes, they are senior moments, but not the too obvious simple loss of memory. The next time some youngster thinks it's funny having a senior moment, I am going to give him this. Look, sonny, I have lived much longer than you, and I have absorbed a whole lot more information than you have, and it just takes a little longer to sort through the database and come up with the correct piece of data. That's all it is, more stuff to look at before you find what you want.

Well, what about the idea that short term memory is what goes first. Got an answer for that too. That is new stuff that hasn't been filed yet, so your brain doesn't know exactly where to look for it. Instead it searches the huge mass of filed older information before it looks in the piles on the desk waiting to be organized and put in the proper places. If it takes too long, well, just give up and look later.

So, the real problem is not loss of memory but data management. What we need is a way to clear the disk cache and another to defrag the hard drive. Find those processes and there goes memory loss in a heartbeat.

Oh, and the great idea I had for a blog post, but forgot? This was it all along. I didn't forget anything. If the title fooled you, that is your dirty mind, not mine. It does have significance but figuring out what is up to you youngsters. Let's see what you come up with.

Things to like about Alaska today

That first breath of crisp, cold, clean air when you step outdoors.

Clean white snow on the mountaintops so bright against the cobalt blue sky it almost hurts your eyes.

That first little skid of winter on some ice you didn’t expect..

Driving home under northern lights green across the sky with spires reaching higher into the stratosphere, obscured some by a bright full hunter's moon.

But, most of all, the humor. The Alaska humor with such a sense of place.



This photo was posted on Facebook today by someone named Diane McEachern who is a friend of a friend. It cracks me up every time I look at it. By the end of the day it had 3,664 "likes" and 1,952 "shares."

‘Got out of town on a boat for the southern islands....

“...sailing a reach for a following sea.
“She was making for the trades on the outside
“on a downhill run to Papeete.
“Off the wind on this heading lie the Marquesas.
“She’s got 80 feet on the waterline,
“nice for making way.
“From a noisy bar in Avalon I tried to call you ...”

Still waiting for that phone call, the kind that should come on a breezy blustery fall day. Late August, early September when Lord Hinchinbrook beckons you to the entry into and exit from Alaska’s Prince William Sound. Set a course due south through the entrance and once the islands disappear behind you, the next land you’ll see is Hawaii. You go as long before the Equinox as you can to avoid the Gulf of Alaska’s violent storms and make for those trades on the outside.

Usually, though, we go down the inside, ducking past Cape Spencer into the Inside Passage ever southward through Southeastern Alaska and British Columbia to Puget Sound.

On one such trip we reached Elfin Cove in the morning, having made an uneventful Gulf crossing, ate breakfast at the inn there and fueled up before heading generally eastward through Icy Strait past the mouth of Glacier Bay with its humpback whales feeding near us. Night fell and in darkness we motored along through a still, clear night with a bit of a moon reflecting on water so smooth it didn’t even distort the moonbeam, the calm sort of night when sound carries over long distances. Even motoring, a sailboat is fairly quiet and the calm of the night let this lone sailor slip into reverie, barely conscious of the detail of the world around me but watching nevertheless.

In that tranquility was when I learned humpback whales have a sense of humor. As we made the turn south into Chatham Strait. alone in the cockpit and lost in reverie an explosion burst so close to me, I must have jumped clear out of my seat; at the very least I jumped clear out of my reverie in time to watch the whale slip back below the surface of the water right next to the boat, not in a dive, but simply sinking out of sight, barely making a riffle. Then came the realization. In case you haven’t heard a whale breathe, that sound can be heard over long distances. Up close it is loud and sharp as the animal rises and exhales; that was the explosion I heard, and then the whale disappeared without a sound never to be seen again.

It struck me that whale did it on purpose. Humpback whales have that curve to their mouths that looks like a smirk and that night I realized why. I imagined the whale swimming just below the surface close to the boat and seeing that lonely sailor lost in his thoughts up there so relaxed. The whale thinks, “watch this,” rises and exhales right next to him, scaring him totally out of his wits, then sinks into the depths laughing a bubbly whale laugh while the startled sailor tries to figure out what happened, his reverie shattered for the rest of that watch.

“... thinking ‘bout how many times I have fallen;
spirits are using me, larger voices calling...”

--“Southern Cross” Crosby, Stills and Nash

THE PHOTO: A humpback waves off the coast of California near San Francisco Bay. Or is it a whale version of the bird?