A bittersweet anniversary

 I am at the cabin in the woods for the winter again and I woke up today thinking about you. I think of you often but this seemed different. Later when I realized the date is January 31 I realized why. Today marks two years since you've been gone. It seems much longer. I can only hope you are alive and doing well. I do miss you.
Last summer I got into a zone with our book and wrote steadily for more than two months. It got to more than 800 pages and with that I got discouraged, because I wonder who would read, let alone publish a book that long, espcially considering that at best I was a little more than halfway through.
What got me going was coming up with a subplot to tie things together and also give the whole thing a more fictional look, to respect your privacy. In the subplot the old man in the conversations dies and his son discovers the unfinished manuscript as he is going through the old man's stuff and now the story is from his point of view in reading the conversations. The son has a sister whose daughter ran away from an abusive father much like you did and gets in drug trouble with the law and comes home detoxing. Eventually she learns her uncle is reading this story and he enlists her to help him understand and perhaps finish the book. There's a lot more but that gives you the basic idea. Anyway I am waiting for the impulse to pick it up again and finish it and then at least as a friend once said I will have a pile of paper. From there i can figure out how to make it an acceptable length.
It has been at times tormenting to live through our relationship and at times wonderful. We did have some good times. I watched "The Hours" the other night. I believe that was the last movie we intended to watch together.
That's about all that's going on here besides cutting firewood. I miss you and I wish you would at least let me know you are alive. If you don't want to, I do hope you're well and thriving, you deserve that.
Love …

Another sunshine tree

Why, you ask would someone post a photo of empty sky? Read on.

"Take my love take the my land; take me where I can not stand; I don’t care, I’m still free; you can't take the sky from me." — Joss Whedon, "Firefly" theme song.

Rationalizing firewood as the endless chore resumes for another season.

     For 30 years out here I selected the trees I would use for firewood carefully. I searched the woods for blow-downs or standing dead even though I ended up at times with a long haul to the cabin.

     Then one day two years ago when firewood time came around again I had another thought. I had just taken a photo of Denali, once again through the upper branches and twigs of a large birch tree. That was the moment when the rationalization began. I'd put up with that tree in the way of my photos for all this time, maybe now was the time to remove it. Also crossing my mind was my most recent birthday turning 74 and thinking if I started now cutting trees closer to the house I'd be dead before it made the slightest dent in the health or aesthetics of this forest. The tree came down.The next year, last year, I took my usual seat on the porch in March to enjoy the sun. As it moved across the sky, the air began to cool as the sun moved into the tangle of branches in another huge birch tree, this one less that 50 feet away. I took that one down too and added an hour to the time the porch enjoys bright direct sunlight.

 Now, last year's cut extended the end of the sun's arc across the porch. Looking in the opposite direction I spotted one at the beginning of the arc even closer to the cabin. Today it went down. That's what the photo of the sky is all about. That used to be filled with birch twigs. This one, though, besides adding to the sun on the porch has another benefit.

     After watching the moon last night, and noting the times given by a local amateur astronomer I realized the eclipse of the moon this Sunday will reach the total phase as it crosses that open space. If I had hestitated some before, that cemented the fate of the tree in my mind. I will do my best to make it worthwhile with a good photograph, a memorial if you will, to that stalwart elder statesman of the forest.

     There's another one nearby that probably will be next, along with a standing dead spruce in the same little grove. All within about 50 feet of the cabin. I'm not cutting any of the huge spruce around here because I've noticed that's where the chickadees huddle up for the night, or fly into them escaping predators. An aside observaton: I've notcied once I drop a birch tree, the chickadees gather in the upper branchs where apparently they are finding something to eat, perhaps developing seeds.

     And so it begins. I put the splits from one round cut from the trunk under the house just to complete one cycle from cutting to stacking, more wood put back than I have burned today. That's my usual daily goal, twice as much put into the stacks as I take out for a day's heat.

Growing old gracefully - in the Alaska sunshine 

Flying the Seward Peninsula

Round and round and round she goes! Where she'd stop, we didn't know. I was the co-pilot on this flight where we crashed on take-off from Savoonga on St. Lawrence Island. I had eight of my eighth graders with me. Long story, and there was luggage flying all over as we spun down the runway. The kids were crying, but none of us were hurt. Vic Olsen, our pilot, thanked me for not grabbing for the wheel. "What would I have done with it?" He said he'd had to cold cock people for that in the past. I was too busy digging my toes into the floor to think about grabbing the wheel. (No, I am not a nervous flyer. I've flown and crashed with some of the best of them.)

My friend Kitty Delorey Fleischman posted this and the picture on facebook today.

My comment was, "I've never had an uneventful flight on the Seward Peninsula, which is the general area she's writing about.

So, I thought I would relate the story of a flight I took there. It was during the 1981 Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. I had paid to join a flight along the whole race with a TV reporter and cameraman. This was in another small airplane, a Cessna 206 as I recall. With the racers heading toward the finish we had landed at Elim on the south coast of the peninsula for an hour or so before heading west toward Nome. As we progressed, the weather began to deteriorate until we flew into not quite a white-out, but a pretty thick gray-out. Darrell, the pilot, had never flown along the peninsula before so he handed a chart to the reporter who was sitting in the co-pilot seat. We had to pass three major geographic promontories along the way named Topkok, Bluff and Cape Nome. We passed over the village of Solomon and the reporter identified it. I added the quip, well it's Solomon or Savoonga, which as Kitty noted is on an island quite a way to the west in the Bering Sea.

Summers in those days I earned my living as a boat captain so I had a fair knowledge of navigation and I was the only one in the airplane who had ever flown along this coast before, so I kept a close watch and listen to what was going on in the pilot seats. I am not going to name him because this reporter went on to do several nationwide reports on a major network and there's no sense embarrassing him. He got one land mark ahead of himself. I thought he had named the first one too soon but held my tongue as we proceeded into the gray. But as we passed the second one, he told the pilot that was Cape Nome. An airplane flying to Nome on a westward course rounds the cape and then turns northwest toward the town.

Darrell started to make that turn and I couldn't stand it any more. I tapped him on the shoulder and when he pulled his headphone back I said as calmly as I could, "Darrell, we have not passed Cape Nome yet." He reacted the way you hear pilots react to an order from an airport controller. He immediately banked to the left and flew farther out over the water. The minute he righted the airplane again Cape Nome came into view. We had been within a mile or two of the huge rocky bluff and heading straight for it.

Once past the cape we turned toward Nome and landed without further event. As we descended from the airplane Darrell and I stared at each other for the briefest instant and said it all with our eyes and raised brows without a word. We both knew we came damned close and nothing more had to be said.

Another one: I am thankful we survived this flight