It's quiet out there. Yeah, too quiet

I know, I know, several days without a post. There are preoccupations but the muse has struck and a humdinger of a post coming soon. That's what the title threatens, like a quote from how many old western movies, that usually led to an attack at dawn an attack on your senses is in final mobilization stages. Brings back memories like wanting to yell at Tonto not to go to town. If you ever listened to the Lone Ranger on a radio under the covers with a flashlight, you would know Tonto always got beaten up when he went to town. You'd think he would have learned. I have been to town and didn't learn either.

Anyway for lack of something profound to say, there's that picture. Those three moose laid down just outside our office windows a couple of weeks ago. With the deep snow in the high country there are a lot of them around this year. (Photo by co-worker Pamela Dunlap-Shohl)

And as the saying goes, watch this space! (It might be two weeks) I have finally figured out what the Mayans said would end in 2012 and it's not so bad. But I might buy one of those Walmart survival packs just in case.

6,000 and almost 10,000 in another category. Who would have thought?

Another sign the apocalypse is upon us

Just a normal Thursday shopping trip, going to Walmart. I only go to watch the elderly greeters at the door. I think I need to learn how that job is done in case it comes to applying for work there. I watched a guy for a while. I can do that. As a matter of fact as the saying goes, I could phone it in. Writing a letter to the Mart right now applying. I plan to sit at home, say hello every 10 minutes, scowl a lot and they can send me a check every couple of weeks. That might be a personal apocalypse but not the one at hand.

Once I tired of watching this guy, I headed through the aisles filling the basket with stuff from my list, like normal. Incidentally I had to buy my fourth 40-pound bag of bird seed this winter. I came to the end of one aisle and something new caught my eye. It was a package about the size of a carton of Campbell soups and shrink-wrapped. But something about the different colors intrigued me and I looked closer. It was an emergency survival kit. According to the label it held 40 complete meals and didn't have a shelf life, it had a half life. I moved around the corner and there was a whole display from floor to the top of the shelving. Number 10 cans of all kinds of dried foods, vegetables, mashed potatoes, even some kind of chocolate powder "with all the advantages of whole milk."

Living as we do in earthquake country, of course most Alaskans are at least aware of the need to squirrel away some supplies in case of isolation. I live between two rivers and the only way out would be over bridges which could be destroyed in a quake so I do have some supplies that would help me hold out for a week or two.

Anyway, as I stood there looking at Walmart's survivalist display I started laughing. Got to thinking about the company foreseeing that apocalypse. It's difficult to picture an executive sitting in Arkansas somewhere worrying about Alaskans and their earthquakes. Unless it was marketing thinking up more crap they can sell us. There might have been a surplus somewhere they had to get rid of. "I know guys, let's freeze dry it and sell it to survivalists."

That isn't so far from truth. Studs Terkel wrote a great book about World War II called "The Good War." In it he interviewed more than 300 people who did various things during the war, from fighters on both sides, to Polish slave laborers in a Nazi factory, to supplying groceries. Each is related in a three to five page chapter. One of those people was a wholesale grocer in California, who thought GI's who were getting freeze-dried foods at the front would come home liking freeze-dried food. Among other things he bought the whole California carrot crop one year late in the war and freeze dried it. Of course when the troops came home they detested freeze-dried food, wouldn't touch it. So, what did the guy do with warehouses full of freeze-dried carrots? He invented carrot cake. People, that is why we have carrot cake today.

So, not too outrageous a thought that Walmert freeze dried some overstocked food and now is selling it as survival emergency supply.

Or, and I like this better, maybe somewhere in the upper reaches of Walmart management there's a guy with not much to do who just discovered that Mayan calendar calling for the end of the world in 2012.

Walmart is getting ready. That should be of some concern to all of us. But remember the survival gear Walmart sells was probably assembled by child laborers in Southeast Asia or China.

Props

I am a little hesitant to put this one up but today is a day I could use a prop or two so here goes. Please bear with my ego. I've never been very good at receiving compliments so I am not sure how to react to this.

Maybe it's that the race is coming up in a few weeks or that I am helping out with another book about it, but I have heard from a couple people about my 30-year-old Iditarod book recently. Both come from Alaska writers I have the greatest respect for and whose own writing often leaves me in awe.

One wrote on Facebook, just out of the blue. something like "I just re-read your Iditarod book. It holds up after all these years. It's still the best book about the Iditarod. It's a classic." That knocked me over. But, hey, a classic? I thought you had to be dead. Anyway, thanks, and what I have done pales in the face of what he has done in both quality and quantity.

Then yesterday I was talking with another friend who covered the race for the newspaper and is the best of all the people who have done that. We were discussing ways to write our current project. He mentioned years ago telling a teacher he thought he would like to be writer as he grew up. The teacher told him just one thing: "Don't just be an observer." Then in our own conversation we figured we both had accomplished that in that we flew along with the race (he even rode a snowmachine over large sections of the trail), slept on the ground at 20 below, ate, traveled and slept with mushers along the whole trail. We were immersed if not actually running the race. In that context he brought up something he had told a dog musher in conversation once: He said of himself, in writing about the race, "I like to put the reader standing next to the trail seeing what I see. But, Tim puts the reader on the runners." Again a bit overwhelming.

Our conversation came to a close with our usual gentle kidding about one aspect of writing about the race we share but in different ways. It is about the romance that surrounds the race, the heritage. I have always teased him about all the sunsets and sunrises that show up in his stories and in return he gets on me about all the historic cabins that show up in mine. One night years ago we were both working at the paper and the newest Iditarod writer called in with his story. He complained he was having difficulty finding things to write about in slow times. I suggested he do what Frank does and describe a sunset. Not too far away Frank shouted loud enough to be heard through the phone, "do what Tim does, find a historic cabin." The writer hung up on us.

A new contest

OK, this one isn't as easy. I counted 25 of them around the feeders this morning before I lost track. Anyway, how many pine grosbeaks in this photo? Thinking up what might be a suitable prize for a correct answer.

One time years ago at Alaska magazine, we accidentally used a photograph of a taxidermist's mount of two ptarmigan in a calendar. A wildlife photographer pointed out the mistake and we were suitably embarrassed. But, I wrote back to the photographer under the pseudonym Augustus Birch-Alder explaining to him that the person he wrote to was unavailable because we needed a photograph of a herd of caribou and it was getting damned hard to find 1,000 full mounts of caribou to arrange for the picture.

But we used to get a kick out of counting and then writing in the captions there are X number of something in this photo and imagining readers trying to find them all. We were always tempted to add one to the number just to get people going a little, but as far as I know it never happened.

So, how many pine grosbeaks? I told you this one isn't as easy. (And the shadow doesn't count.)

Lost in the woods

Can a woodsman actually get lost? Sounds like a simple question, but it isn't. It's a matter of perspective, but the seasoned woodsman is always at home in the woods. He may not know exactly where he is, or which way he needs to go, but he is comfortable enough being where he is that he is not really lost. He is in the woods. The same thing probably holds true for the sailor, or at least some. Again like the woodsman, the sailor is at home on the sea, and like the woodsman, he knows the signs and features that guide him.

To understand this, take it in another direction. Leon Russell has a song named "Out in the Woods." In a recording of a live performance he tells the audience the source of the chorus words, which as best as I can spell them phonetically are "dola koo tanga, dola koo tada." How an Oklahoma rocker met a Zulu would a be story in itself, but he said he did and as he was looking for words for the song he asked the man what were the words in Zulu for "lost in the woods." As Russell put it, the man looked puzzled for a moment and then said, "Zulus don't get lost in the woods. There are no words for that." In the ensuing conversation they decided on those words above which translated from the Zulu words mean "a man gone crazy." That was the best they could come up with as a metaphor for lost in the woods.

Think about this. Can you get lost in your own house, over even your yard? Most likely not. It has to do with comfort zone and knowledge. A woodsman might not recognize where he is at the moment. But he knows he is in the woods and most likely how he got there and where he needs to go if he needs to go anywhere.

Here's what one skookum Alaskan did in that circumstance. I have been talking about woodsmen, that's generic and not meant to exclude woman. This happened to a woman. During the Iditarod race she was moving along the south coast of the Seward Peninsula, which is the last 150 or so miles before Nome. Sometimes on that coast there are very few landmarks to position yourself. At one point she realized she had missed the trail and been going for some time in a wrong direction. Now, is that lost? She knew she had done it and she knew she had to get back to the trail. What did she do? I love this phrase and have used it a time or two when it fits. "I sat down and wrote it out in the snow." What she did is stop and with a finger retraced her movements drawing in the snow, where she had taken turns, that sort of thing, and eventually she figured out what she had to do and in short order found the correct trail. That's not lost, that's simply not being where you want to be at the moment. Even for someone like me who has never run that race, I know in that area the ocean is to the south of me and mountains are to the north. And to get to Nome I want the ocean on my left and the mountains on my right. That gets you heading west. You are either going to hit Nome, or if the ice is right, Kamchatka.

Obviously there is no definitive answer to the question. At the point of feeling lost, it is not time to panic, it is time to "sit down and write it out in the snow."

Stranger in a strange land: Recalling Leon Russell

I feel the earth move, under my feet

Stumbled out of bed to look out the window for a peek at the thermometer. Still melting. Then something seemed wrong. It was like the ground was moving, serious movement. Well in the blearyness of waking up and not wearing glasses it took a moment to realize there were so many birds on the ground it really looked like the ground itself. There must have been a hundred, mostly redpolls and pine grosbeaks. Apparently the melting of the surface snow exposed all the seed they have spilled so far this winter and they were chowing down. Hardly any were on the feeders themselves, it was like they all took to grazing. They never cease to be amazing.