FIREWOOD AND REVERY
September 20, 2011
This is something I promised I would never do, and then I did it once before. I have been immersed in a writing project and have little left at the end of the day. Like they say in sports, you leave it all on the field. But I know people check so, I am posting an older short story that has never been published, just for the entertainment value, and so you won't forget me. Take three days to read it in parts. I will be back. And just for the information value, this fancy new Mac only adds to the creative process in the sense that the work looks better on a larger brighter screen. As far as more intelligent prose it is more like an enlarging mirror or a flat screen HD TV.... all the blemishes are magnified. So it goes.
And some music to listen to while you read. There's a connection.
Copyright © 2011 by Tim Jones
He swung the maul between slices of developing fantasy. "Been on this hill too long," he muttered aloud to the trees, took another cut and then let himself drift into the other world. The combination intoxicated, mellowed the anxiety that drove him to the wood pile. He picked up a new section of birch cut for the length of the stove, set it on the block and lashed at it, but the heavy maul bit only slightly and then bounced away, twisting his arms and shoulders. The birch fell off the block, then the block itself, another larger section of birch, fell over from the glancing blow. He righted the block, set the resilient victim back in place and took another, this time more vicious swing. The wood parted into two equal sized quarters, but the bark on the side away from him held, leaving a hinged clamshell of birch, an open book of firewood facing him. He picked up the book, gripped
each half and ripped them apart. Laughed. "That the way you do it?" A voice intruded. One of those moments: If someone had walked up just then: "Don't hit 'em with a axe, just rip 'em apart."
"Yeah!" he shouted to the crowd, a showman professional wrestler growling at his fans. He tossed the two pieces toward the pile where he would stack them neatly later. How come no one was ever around when the time was right? He hunched a thick birch section onto the block.
"Hello," a voice called, too thin for a man, but husky enough to be there in the woods. "Hello."
A figure moved along the trail toward where it turned and began the climb uphill to the cabin. He reached for the maul. And watched the trail below. The figure, bent under the weight of a backpack, walked with the assurance of physical confidence, the hesitence of unfamiliar personal ground.
"Hello." Again. He swung the maul. This time the voice came from part way up the hill. He was aware now, the hint of a smile crossed his face ending in an upward curl at one corner of his mouth. He retrieved one of the split halves and set it on the block for another lick.
The figure continued climbing, approaching. Not much of a swing for half a section, just let the maul drop, always try to leave both halves still standing on the block. "Hello." The voice softer now, closer. The maul dropped, caromed to the side sending a splinter shooting off into the snow and leaving the remainder to teeter, then fall off the stump. Recognition. And, from how long ago?
"Hello. Are you Tom Compton?" The breath coming tough, a good hill up to the cabin, but not too tough, somebody in reasonable shape. Now he was sure. She looked the same, hadn't changed in how long, ten, no, closer to twenty years. But why the question about who he was. The curl at the corner of his mouth broadened into a full smile. Sweet Judy Blue Eyes. Warmth in welcome, recognition, recollection. Even more warmth than the work made. Thoreau was a fraud. He had the woods but he never did the work. He cheated. Wood warms you twice, he had written, once when you chopped it, once when you burned it.
It was obvious. Thoreau had his wood delivered already cut. Thoreau never cut the trees down (once). He never hauled the wood from where it fell to his cabin (twice). He did split, that was his once (three times). Obviously he didn't go through the hauling and stacking for a year ahead of time (four). But he did burn it. Don't they all. That's five at least and not counting any extra ones like the day the sled broke loose and took off down the hill spilling its logs one by one in the deep snow and alder. And then there was that other warmth, the one that came from the hours at the chopping block. Sweet Judy Blue Eyes.
He set the other half of the birch on the block. What would she be doing here. God, college. How long ago? How could she have found him?
"I came to find you. Are you Tom? Down the trail they said this was how to get to your place." She looked the same, always the hint of mirth in her round blue eyes. Did he? Of course not. "From school I knew to look in Anchorage. At the paper I met a guy who knows you. He told me where you live. I didn't know how to let you know I was coming."
Raise the maul. Drop it with power behind it and feel the reassuring shudder of resistance through the arms as metal meets wood. Square, equal portions fell off the block. Still hadn't left two standing there. That would have to be Morgan. The only one left there who knew where he was. He wondered what his friend thought when this beautiful, outdoorsy looking coed walked in asking for him. Probably smiled. Got really cordial and friendly. Sucked a cigarette. Too honest, too moral to try for himself. Just told her where and how.
He hoisted another section to the block. Why would she come? What would cause this woman, twenty years after the bitter disappointment to hunt him down somewhere in the wilds of Alaska? Raise the maul, let it drop; another bounce. Damn, you gotta mean it. At least it hadn't fallen. Raised and dropped again, this time with some muscle behind it. The section split. They'd dreamed of a life that involved mountains and clear streams, a clean, pure life together.
A snowmachine snarled past on the main trail far below, the pitch of the engine noise rising and lowering as the driver feathered the machine over the jarring bumps and moguls in the trail. Why come and find him? Now? From where? The last he knew he'd been told she married a rodeo cowboy, happy and heading for the Rockies.
He took one of the halves and set it on the block, but the original chainsaw cut had been angled and the wood tipped over into the snow. He retrieved it, turned it on the stump until it balanced tenuously. Hate those where you've got to swing quickly before it falls off again.
"You found it. What we talked about. A cabin here. The mountains. You're splitting wood to keep warm." The half stood for a split second and he swung. Ouick. Another glancing blow as it fell. Another splinter. And in front of an audience, just when you wanted to do it right.
"I heard you might have found it. I wanted to see." He picked up the larger piece of the splintered half. Spirit soaring. Beauty returning.
Time came for a change, a break. He walked over to the jumble where he'd been throwing the split pieces and started stacking them. Leave air. It had to season for a year, no moisture caught in little pockets. The air had to circulate. Stack carefully. He didn't want it to fall out from under the house into the summer rain or the early fall snow. She's here. Time to share that dream we started so long ago. And she came on such a long shot, such a chance. What a chance to take at such a distance in time and miles. He placed the last piece of wood on the stack and returned to the maul and the block and the unsplit birch.
"Hello, are you Tom?
Why? How? It didn't seem real. He swung at a huge section. It gave, cracked, but didn't split. Another shot. This time one side fell, the other went shooting down the hill into deeper snow, over-the-boot, sock-soaking deep snow.
"I'm trying to write a book." He slogged downhill to his knees, then mid thighs in the snow to retrieve the errant birch. This could work.
"I want to find the men I've loved and talk with them. Write vignettes. Renew the friendships that the loves came from. I think I can make a point; I can come up with something younger people could understand."
He slogged uphill through the deep snow, a swimmer with his arms wrapped around dead weight, falling, rising, bringing the heavy wood back to the block.
But she loses it. She realizes the dream we'd had in those piles of leaves so many years ago is here, now, and all those things we talked about, half knowing they couldn't happen, really did happen only she wasn't here. And now, despite all that, she's welcome. And open to that welcome. Here it is. All we wanted. Now. It exists. "You really count me among the people you loved?" Aloud. But the wrestling fans in the woods didn't respond to that kind of emotion.
He floundered up to the chopping block and set the heavy split on it. He swung the maul, this time to the audience he wanted, an appreciation he looked for. This time somebody was watching, somebody he wanted to know that this was perfection. This was the life. We're here. We can. The section split perfectly, falling off the block in even pieces. He retrieved them and tossed each toward the stack. He looked around for more, even kicked at loose snow but that had been the last one. Nothing was left to split. Empty.
"My God. I told her I didn't believe in love." The fans in the trees remained silent. A dumb Friday afternoon college beer hall argument. But he'd said it and she'd believed and ran out of the place. "I told her I didn't believe in love."
He stacked what was left of the wood he'd split, then walked into the cabin, opened the stove, stirred the coals and added wood. He dragged a cardboard box toward his chair, the box that held the memories, the photographs, the poems of life until then. In the last of the evening he reached for the whiskey bottle where he hoped he would be able to rekindle what had been... and what never had been. But whiskey doesn't warm a man like wood does. Even Thoreau knew that.
100-foot waves, 80 mph gusts, just another fall day in Alaska

A male and female Pine grosbeak pick among the leavings for the bird feeder over their heads. During the heavier gusts the stood almost perfectly still, facing into the wind.
There are reports from the Bering Sea of waves 100 feet high as a huge storm pounds the western Alaska coast. Williwaws ahead the storm blast their way down this glacial valley and across the yard sending up billowing clouds of fallen leaves, sometimes swirling like dust devils or tiny tornadoes, splashes of yellow against a gray sky. Under the feeder half a dozen Pine grosbeaks battle the wind, while they continue picking through the skeletal garden for sunflower seeds the chickadees and nuthatches have thrown off the feeders. More huddle among the thick spruce branches, pressed tightly against the trunks on their leeward side. One broken spruce in the yard leans into another and will have to be taken out when the wind dies.
100-foot waves predicted for the Bering Sea
Another snippet

A male and female Pine grosbeak pick among the leavings for the bird feeder over their heads. During the heavier gusts the stood almost perfectly still, facing into the wind.
There are reports from the Bering Sea of waves 100 feet high as a huge storm pounds the western Alaska coast. Williwaws ahead the storm blast their way down this glacial valley and across the yard sending up billowing clouds of fallen leaves, sometimes swirling like dust devils or tiny tornadoes, splashes of yellow against a gray sky. Under the feeder half a dozen Pine grosbeaks battle the wind, while they continue picking through the skeletal garden for sunflower seeds the chickadees and nuthatches have thrown off the feeders. More huddle among the thick spruce branches, pressed tightly against the trunks on their leeward side. One broken spruce in the yard leans into another and will have to be taken out when the wind dies.
100-foot waves predicted for the Bering Sea
Another snippet
Now I know why the call them the blues — plural. There are so many of them. I am not an interior decorator or painter so I don't know the names for all the hues but here's an attempt using only a couple I know. This afternoon sitting on the porch in the sun I noticed the different colors in the sky. The blues progressed in shades from a pale pastel over by Denali darkening at each altitude eventually to a deep cobalt overhead. If I had a guitar and even better knew how to play it, I could hear myself plunking out one of those John Lee Hooker riffs, maybe a little up tempo to mirror the happier mood I found with my discovery of the blues.
2019Rim of Red Water
I started working on a book in the late 1980s paralleling the life and importance of sea otters with the growth and history of Alaska. I had completed a good deal of research and wrote first drafts of nine chapters and outlined two more with the understanding in my head that this would eventually become a generational novel. Then life intervened. First came the Exxon Valdez oil spill, then an unexpected pregnancy which led to a hasty wedding and eventually a complete change in life style from living the romantic life of a boat captain and in the off-season a writer working at his craft in the Alaska wilds into a husband, father and responsible (somewhat) career person attempting to provide for his family. I came across it a week or so ago and thought somebody might like to read it even if it is unfinished and please understand this is a hastily edited first draft and if it ever sees the light of day beyond this blog it will take some serious rewriting, including the development of that generational narrative. I have posted 18 chapters on a separate page titled
The legend of Adak Charlie
February 25, 2016
By Tim Jones
Copyright©Tim Jones
We come off them square riggers in a hurry onct they shet down the whaling. We's comin' down the Bering Sea out of the Arctic when we heard, and the Skip, well, he says, What you want to do? and I says, well, I heard they was doin' some high-priced fishing right there in the Aleutian Chain. But, I also heard they was the roughest kinda sailors and I'd jest as soon head back for home. So the Skip, right predictable like he was, he says he's dumpin' me ashore at Adak and to go pack my kit. He says how we done so poorly my share don't come to passage to San Francisco, so he's tyin' her up right there and I could just go about takin' care of myself.
So, pretty soon there we was in Adak way out there so close we might as wella been in Siberia, which we might as well a been in anyways by the look of things. Just a little island out there, somethin' you could trip over if you wasn't watching, it was so small. Anyway, I bends my head into the horizontal rain and goes alookin' for some kinda ride. Weren't too many of them square riggers left no more and I didn't know what I was goin' to do. I jest went along hunchin' into that wind and rain proceeding one step forward and two steps back with my slicker a flappin' and that's when I run into Adak Charlie.
A course, nobody runs into Adak Charlie, he more runs over you. What I did was commence to crawl over this little hill until I realizes its the big bulb toe of a bigger rubber boot and I looks up and there was Charlie, well, at least there was Charlie's knees. Well, that man stood tall as a mainmast and just as straight and he blocked out the sun; at least he woulda blocked out the sun if there'd a been one. The sun showed up so little out there most folks didn't really believe there was one except now and again somebody'd recall seein' it one time or the other. Anyway, I crawls into Charlie's lee and looks up. Sure enough up there on toppa all that rubber, they's a face. I yells up Howdy and he yells down Howdy and I says is there any work for a honest sailor around here and he yells down he thinks they need crew on his boat and I yells up what kinda boat is it and he yells down BERING SEA CRABBER and I yells up Good-by and he yells down Ain't man enough, huh? and I yells up, Yeah, but I ain't stupid enough and right there he commences to look a little disturbed and I decides this ain't the kind of man to be callin' stupid so I decides I better ship with 'im or the whole situation could get a whole lot worse right there in the wind and the rain and the mud.
So, me and Charlie heads toward the wharf and I'm runnin' along in his lee while he's amblin' along and we gets to the ship and he steps over the gunwale and I climbs the ladder and no sooner's we aboard than I hear a engine start up somewheres and it scares me right out of my sail trim. See, I'm a sailin' man. I ain't never been on no steamer before and all that machinery whirlin' and growlin' kin get to a man used to the quiet creakin' in the rigging. I'm lookin' around for masts and canvas and the boat's moving and against the wind and I'm wonderin' how that could be when Charlie, he points to the focs'l and says. "Stow your gear."
Well, I walks down the companionway and runs into the roughest lookin' bunch a thugs ever turned a windlass. There was more eyepatches than a herd of spotted dogs and more scars than one doctor coulda ever sewed up in a lifetime of stitchin' and they looks at me and I looks at them and to myself I curses the Skip real hard for leavin' me to this and then onea these thugs points to a empty bunk and grins so hard the scar that run from his port side ear to clear under his chin turns so bright red he looks like he's smilin' twice.
We cleared port and heads out to sea and Twice-smilin', that was his name I swear by St. Elmo's fire, he says sleep some, but I ain't sleepin' with that bunch of criminals in attendance. I did lay down but I keeps one eye cocked, but I musta dozed some 'cause I hear this big CLANK and it wakes me up and I says what's that, and Twice-Smilin' says that's the first buoy and to hit the deck and then there's this other big clank and he says that's the other buoy and we goes up on deck and Twice-smilin' starts to showin' me the lines. I says I thought you picked little rubber buoys outta the water where the pots was and he says that's the way most of 'em do it but that was too slow for the likes of Adak Charlie and what he does is run with these two big magnets and when they come up on one of his steel buoys, them buoys jest fly outta the water and clangs into them magnets. "Saves a lotta time findin’ ‘em in the dark, too," Twice-smilin' says.
Well, we's standing there in rubber suits from head to toe and I says what's we supposed to do and Twice-smilin' starts explainin'. He says on most boats a guy stands there by this here little wheel pulley sort of a contraption, they call it a power block. Well, I ain't used to this power stuff and I got to ask just how many sailors it takes to power this thing and Twice-smilin', he shows me this know-it-all grin you save for a child, only twice, and he says it's the engine does all that powerin'. Anyway, he says one guy usually stands there and coils the line from the crab pot as it comes up through that block and one guy he runs the engine controls. I seen a guy in my mind with a whip floggin' them sailors to power that block, that's the kinda controls we use on the square-riggers. So, when the pot comes up over the side a coupla other guys wrassle it around and separate the crabs and put in new bait and toss her overboard again. I asks Twice-smilin' what I'm supposed to do and he says, "Wrasslin'."
"Ya see, Smit," he says, "On this boat she's done a bit differnt."
Right then Adak Charlie himself comes walkin' out on deck. He looks at them two steel buoys aswingin' from them magnets and he walks to the middle of the deck and he spreads his feet and he says, let 'er rip. Two guys start them two pulleys and that line come flyin' up at about forty knots and Charlie he takes one in his big right hand and he starts to makin' a coil in front of him and he takes the other line in his big left hand and he starts to make a coil behind him and we commences to hauling them first two crab pots.
Twice-smilin' he takes me over to one a them coils and he says we should just be watchin' them in case something goes galley west, but he says with Charlie coilin' nothin' ever goes galley west and we just watch that line go into those coils and the coils go higher and higher and Charlie's hands is just a blur and he's singin' away at the top of his lungs about great storms at sea and all I'm doin' is gettin' wet from all that spray flying offa that line as it comes over the block. Of course, nothing goes wrong and then there's the loud KEE-BANG! and then another one so loud, sounded like the king's navy was holdin' down on us with all their cannons blazin'.
"Pots," says Twice-smilin'. "Here we go."
We goes to one side and here's this big square contraption with webbing all round it and Charlie he reaches over the side and throws her up on deck and we tips her and dumps the crabs out. Twice-smilin' says how on most boats you have to separate out the female crabs and the small ones but on this boat we never get none o’ them and sure enough, every one a them crabs is a legal-sized male king crab, big ones and Twice-smilin' he explains why. "Watch old Charlie there," he says, "he always touches the bait with somethin' Charlie ain't tellin' what it is but whatever it might be works. Guys get to jokin'," he says, "and everybody figures it's the essence of Kiska Katie he's puttin' on that bait and that bait draws them big males just like Katie herself draws them crabbers to her place when they's ashore."
So, anyway, Twice-smilin' says, "We put them in the big crab tank there," and I says, "It's full of WATER," and I goes lookin' for a life jacket and Twice-smilin' he smiles twice and says it's supposed to be full of water, but he ain't convincin' me and I'm ready to abandon the sinking ship and he says it's to keep the crabs alive and I says who ever heard of pumping water INTO a boat and he says again it's OK, the boat's built that way and I says, all right, but I ain't convinced and I'm watchin' the freeboard from then on.
We goes on to dump them crabs into that water in the boat and Charlie he puts the bait into the pots, touches the bait and tosses 'em over the side and off we goes a runnin' until we hears them clangs again when two more a them steel buoys come flyin' out of the water and she starts all over again. I says to Twice-smilin' how this ain't near so bad as I'd heard and he gets to smiling real hard twice and looks at me real knowledgeable-like and he says wait til you see the mile-squares, and I says WHAT and he just walks off smilin' twice.
Well, we run like that day and night right into winter. Lost track of the days we just hummed along respondin' to them clangs and tossin' them crabs and working on the gear when there's time and I learned this and that and along the way I learnt these crab guys look the way they do from flingin' them pots and lines and crabs around all the time and gettin' banged up all the time and afore long I got a pretty good scar a formin' on my hand from the day the boat rolled when I was choppin' up bait and I'm startin' to look a little bit like the rest of them thugs, myself.
There was this day we was runnin' between strings of gear and everybody's sittin' around on deck on piles of line and we can hear the radio goin' and they come up on the weather report and we all liked to listen, even if it didn't make no matter, 'cause that Charlie, he didn't stop for nuthin, even a typhoon.
So, this guy gets through the weather report and starts to givin' what he calls notices to mariners and he says in this real official voice: "Two Aleutian islands are reported off station and missing," and he gives some latitude and longitude numbers from their last known position, and then he says, "Mariners are urged to exercise extreme caution when transiting the area." Then he says anyone seein' them islands should report them and that sets the whole crew to laughing. I’m wondering what's so funny about two missing islands and how they could be missing and Twice-smilin', who's laughing twice now, between giggles he says, "I seen 'em. Fer sure, Smit," he says, "You seen 'em too." And I says, "Where'd I see 'em?" Then he gets to laughin' all the more and when he catches his breath, he says, "They're right up there in the wheel house" and that gets everybody to listing with laughter even more. When they finally got 'er down to where they can breathe and talk at the same time, Boarder, now he's a story, lets off with that high-pitched giggle of his and commences to tell me the story.
Now I been told not to pay much mind to Boarder 'cause he's a little off his trim, like maybe he don't have both oars in the water, and nobody knows if he's called Boarder because he's borderline crazy or because of the two-by-four he's usin' for a starboard side leg.
Well, he goes into this real authoritative-soundin' voice he could muster when he wanted to and he says, "You see, Smit, we came in from a long hard trip one time. We unloaded the crab and then everybody crawled off into town for the party. Adak Charlie, there, he went up onto a hill after a while and laid down for a nap. He's so big when he spread out his arms sprawled out there, his hands sort of slopped off the island and his hands landed palm up in the water. And he fell asleep that way. Unfortunately that was the day the government people came to chart that part of the country. They went flying over and drew everything they saw and when the charts came out, there were these two new islands. Of course, they weren't new to the people doing the charting because they'd never seen any of it before. Those islands are a perfect picture of Charlie's hands. Well, when Charlie woke up and went back to the ship, he took those two islands with him and they've been off station ever since."
"They help him a lot with coilin', Twice-smilin' laughed twice and that set them all off to laughing again and Boarder finishes the story by sayin' the government people been out there every so often lookin' for the two islands and every so often they ask on the radio if anybody's seen 'em. That give us a laugh fer most of the day and we needed it 'cause it was that night we run into the big ones.
I was layin' in my bunk tryin' to get some sleep listenin' to them crabs a scritchy-scrawlin' around in that tank which didn't help none. Had a lot of trouble sleepin' on that boat and I had a lotta dreams about spiders, too.
Anyway, all of a sudden there comes onea them clangs again only, this one, it's different. For one thing, there's only one of them and for another it was louder than any I'd heard before. Twice-smilin' comes awake, too, and looks at me, only real serious, like he's frownin' twice and he says, "mile-squares."
Well, all us thugs, yup I was one of 'em by this time, didn't have no eye patch, but I was gettin' pretty cut up, all us thugs comes a-boilin' up on deck and there's Charlie standin' there real serious, too, rubber all the way to the sky.
Boarder told me once how a Mr. Helly and a Mr. Hanson come all the way from Scandinavia somewheres to build that suit of rain gear for Charlie. They brought 400 acres, that's right acres, of cloth. Then they built a scaffolding around Charlie and twenty-seven tailors with block and tackle climbed that scaffold and built that suit of rain gear for Adak Charlie. Took 'em a month. His boots is another story.
Well, we's standin' on deck with Charlie and one of them thugs puts the line through both blocks and they crank ‘em up and pretty soon line's comin' on board only slower and the boat's listin' way over to one side and Charlie's straining to take some of the weight off them blocks and I know somethin' heavy's coming up but all anybody says is "mile-squares."
Even Boarder come clumping up on that two-by-four and giggles the way he does sometimes real shrill and he says, "Now you'll see, Smit, mile-squares," and he giggles again and clumps off and I know he ain't rowin' straight.
When everybody got finally to settled in and alls you can hear is the creakin' and groanin' of that line comin' through two blocks and Adak Charlie strainin', too, and singin' a slower song about a storm at sea, and the coil just keeps gettin' higher and higher, Twice-smilin' comes over and he says, "Smit, yer about to see somethin'. Seems," he says, "out here somewheres there's this king crab. At least we think there's just one and he's a big old crab. We seen a leg or a claw now and again where he's holdin' onto a pot tryin' to git at that essence of Kiska Katie and we had to wrassle a pot away from him more'n once. So, Charlie, he decides he's goin' to catch that crab and he went and made him up some pots just for that and he's going to be catching it onea these days. See, a crab that big couldn't get into one of our regular pots, so Charlie, he made up some pots and they're a mile square. I don't have to tell you, Smit, they're big and they're heavy and even Charlie there, he needs some help pushin' them around and we got a string of 'em out here and onea these days that big old crab's gonna be in one of 'em and that ought to be really somethin'."
Well, about this time the coil got up over even Charlie's head and he climbs up into the crow's nest still singing that song about that storm at sea and he's still coilin', and now and then a big grin comes 'cross his face when he looks over the side fer that pot and what might be in it.
The boat kept a leanin' until the pot finally slams the boat's bottom and Charlie peers down from the crow's nest but he don't care for what he sees and we rigs all the winches and lines we can find and haul her up and it's loaded with crabs but there ain't none like Twice-smilin' was talkin' about. We can't put a pot that big on board so a couple of us thugs crawls down in it and starts to pitchin' them crabs up on deck.
That big old crab, he wasn't in that one and he ain't in the next one either, but he'd been around, 'cause the next one's got the web all tore out and the bait's all gone and all the rest of 'em on that string's just like it, tore to shreds and the bait gone like somethin' real big goin' real crazy after it and we're spendin' more time repairin' and sewin' pots than we're fishin'. In time we gets through them mile-squares and come back to the regular gear again and the hold's gettin' real full, which is fine with me cause there ain't so much room for water comin' aboard anymore. Never could get used to pumpin' water into a boat.
We finally got to the point where there wasn't no more room for crabs or water in that hold and I asks Twice-smilin' what happens now and he smiles twice and nods toward Charlie who's takin' off his boots. ‘Twas then I noticed the little pipes comin' from the heel and toe and a couple of thugs hooks up some hoses to them pipes and all of a sudden we got two new crab tanks. We kept agoin' til we filled them boots, too, and then we turned 'er for Adak.
Charlie says it'll be a quick turnaround 'cause he wants to git back to them mile-squares and he has an idea.
I'll tell you it was a quick turnaround, all right. We got in late evenin' and we just worked right through unloadin' and we's pullin' out before first light. Charlie, he's gone most of the time, come back on the boat real sneaky, nobody really seen him come back, but there he was and he sets a course for them mile-squares out there in the big ocean. He never come outta the house, just serious runnin', but every so often we'd be hearing these high-pitched tones and we's all wondering just what's goin' on and where Charlie was when he was off the boat while we was unloadin' and what he mighta brought aboard.
Boarder, he giggles now and again and says he knows, but nobody'd listen to him anyway and Twice-smilin' says he thinks he knows but he ain't guessin' out loud and all we did was steam toward them pots.
We come to the first one and the buoy hit the magnet and Charlie commenced to coilin' with his big jaw set and the hairs in his beard stickin' out straight and singing a new song about a storm at sea. "Looks like Adak Charlie means business this time," Twice-smilin" says.
Charlie just keeps coilin’ and again when the coil gets too high he goes up to the crow's nest and keeps on coilin' and when the pot's almost to the surface, he stops his song and lets out a bellow and the cabin door opens.
We's all lookin' to the door and out comes this woman and she's almost as big as Charlie himself and she's all gussied up with paint and perfume and when the wind spreads that aroma around it overpowers the smell of the herring bait; all them thugs come to a stop with their mouths open like a bunch of them Florida groupers, froze right there.
Twice-smilin' was standin' right next to me. "Kiska Katie," he says and that's all and she sashays over to the rail lookin' to that pot comin' up and it comes to the surface with them little crabs in it but not this big one Charlie's lookin' for. Well, we finally collected ourselves enough to get them crabs out and Charlie's gettin' ready to dump the pot over again but this time Katie herself puts the bait into the pot and blows a little kiss at it and Charlie sends 'er down, the pot that is, not Katie, and we heads for the next one.
It was on the next one that it all happened. Charlie coiled that pot up and Katie she watched and she put the new bait in it and, well, just as she was leanin' over to blow that kiss, this leg and then the claw come up over the far side of that pot and this giant crab come a clicking and raging out of the water after Katie. She screams and then she falls right into that pot and the crab come over the top a crackin' and a snappin' and all that weight on it was too much and she starts headin' for the bottom. About this time, Charlie sees what's goin' on and he's got to do somethin' and he dives right outta the crow's nest and right into that pot after the crab who was after Kiska Katie and him and the crab and Katie and the pot goes down and started pullin' the boat right along with them. Me and Boarder and Twice-smilin' jumps to it and lets the line fly so's the boat don't go down, too, and we looks over the side and all we see is water a boilin' and a bubblin' and a foamin' and every once in a while we see a big crab leg come up and go smashing down, or a big fist of Charlie's or a claw or somethin' and then more foamin’ and boilin'. Then Katie come floatin' to the surface spitting and sputtering and sayin' a few unladylike words and we tosses her a line. But, instead of comin' to the boat, she takes that line and dives back down into the foam with it and the boilin' gets all the worse and then she come up again and swims for the boat. ‘Bout this time we wasn't so sure we wanted her on board. With her in the water, the crab coulda cared less about the boat, but with her on deck he might be comin' after us, too. We brung her aboard anyway. Even thugs can't be completely fergettin' their upbringing. After all, she was a lady, at least fer them parts. So she joins us at the rail and says she got a line on the critter somewheres and now that she's outta the water and the current's carrying the essence away, it looks like the fight's calming down. Either the crab's lost interest or he's got the best of Charlie which nobody really believes, or Charlie got the best of the crab which everybody wants to believe and sure enough here come Charlie to the surface and he's spittin' and cussin' almost as bad as Katie, but the foamin's stopped and he crawls aboard, well, he's too big to just crawl aboard; we had to winch him up and then we gets him on deck and takes a good look. Well, Twice-smilin' takes to twice laughing and Boarder starts to giggling and everybody's laughing but me and Charlie and then he starts up. To look at him. He's got more pinholes in them rain clothes than a man can count. They were from all them spines on that crab and when Adak Charlie stands up every one of them holes starts spoutin' water soes he looks like he ought to be a statue in a fountain in a park somewheres. Here and there you could see where that crab got in a good slash at him, too. Charlie looks down at himself and allows how he's going to have to send for that Mr. Helly and Mr. Hanson again.
Anyway, they's all havin' a good laugh but me. I'm lookin' at what a crab can do to a man and I'm not so sure about this crabbin' anyway and I'm deciding right then I'm gettin' off this boat fer good next time she comes anywhere near land. About then, when I was decidin' that, the laughing kind of ebbs and they starts wonderin' about this here crab. Charlie says it's inside the pot and we got that line on it that Katie got a wrap with so he starts to pullin' the pot again and us thugs coiled on the Katie line. I really shouldn't say "we" cause I got as far away from that side of the boat as I could case that crab got a second wind or somethin' when he sees Katie and comes up snarlin'.
It took quite a strain on all the deck gear but they finally come up with the crab and the pot and the crab was sure enough subdued for good and they had to winch it on board, too, just like Charlie, and all in all it looks to be in a whole lot worse shape than Charlie did. There was no way we could figure the size of that crab. He took up the whole back deck, but a lot of him was still hangin' over the sides. Them legs was as big as spars on the clippers and the shell, well, they coulda held a concert in there. We tried to weigh the thing but he was so unconventional shaped, we couldn't ever get the lines on him right with the scale to haul it off the deck whole. We finally took to chopping up the legs in sections and tryin' to weight them one at a time. We come up over a ton and then the scale broke, sproinged right over the side and we give 'er up. Charlie, he says save the shell and he gits this faraway look in his eyes and says how someday when he gets shut o' this business he just might haul her someplace sunny, settle down and make a swimmin' pool out of it. Katie, she hears this and looks at Charlie real misty like.
Then we, well, Charlie and all them thugs, agrees the one crab'll make one heck of a payday and they turns the boat for Adak.
I don't mind tellin' you that was the end of my career in the king crab fishery. When we got 'er back to Adak I jumped ship, I come off that boat runnin', lookin' for anything I could find to get outta there. I think I woulda rowed for Frisco if I coulda found a boat. While I was lookin' and moving down the road leanin' into that wind again, there he was, I run right into the Skip. He almost passed me up; he didn't recognize me at first.
"Smit," he hollers out when he finally figgers out just who the heck I am. "What happened to you?"
"I been crabbin', you Jack Tar," I says real mean like.
"You look like you been cut up by half the rum-runners in Shanghai," he says, "You look criminal."
"Crabbin' did it to me," I says, "And I owe you."
"Gotta ship," the Skip says. I don't think he even knew I was threatening him. "A tramp, sailing south."
"Square-rigger?" I asks, forgettin' the threat for a minute myself.
"Yup."
"Got any fishin' gear aboard?" I asks.
"Not so much as a hook," he says.
"Good!" I says.
Then he gets this dirty smile of his and he says, "Git some if you want."
"‘Bout then I was ready to let him have it and he seen it commin' and he took a step back. He musta realized I was serious now, 'cause I never seen the Skip take a step back in his life. But I let him go. One punch wasn't going to make up fer what he did to me and right there I started to schemin' what was goin' to happen to the Skip for a payback.
So, like always, I shipped with him and we set our sails for the South Seas and that was that for my crabbin' days and I was pretty glad for it.
Still, you know, there's days at sea when a man's mind wanders and he gets to recalling this and that and there's even a day now and again in the doldrums and I'll get to thinkin' about that crew of thugs and Twice-smilin' and Boarder and who could ever forgit that Kiska Katie. But, mostly I recall that big man, that Adak Charlie, standin' there just as tall as a mainmast and just as straight and coilin' them lines clear to the sky with both hands and most of all singin' them songs about them storms at sea. Those times I gets to thinkin' real fondly about them poor souls in the Bering Sea and the time I spent there. Don't last long, though. I always come back to my senses.”
The siren song of the big ocean retold in a botched haiku
Across the deck
and through the rigging
from the open sea
I heard the tempting ocean
sing its song to me
I thought this was going to be my first haiku, at least the first one I intended to be a haiku. I worked very carefully to get 17 beats and it even came out with a rhyme.
Then just for kicks, I looked up the definition. After all what fun is there in doing research ahead of time? I like writing what I want and then looking for a place it might fit. As for haikus, first of all, it's not 17 beats, it's supposed to be 17 syllables. Not only that, they are supposed to be arranged in three lines of five, then seven, then five syllables. And most don't rhyme. I guess I could arrange the words with the syllables in the proper numerical sequence, but I think then I would end up with something ee cummings might have written and that guy didn't even know how to use capital letters.
So, while mine might not be an epic fail, it certainly isn't a classic haiku either, but I like it; there is a nice rhythm to it, so I am going to keep it this way and try haiku another time.
It is however my first meme, so we are going to have to deal with that.
Here's an example of a real haiku written by my friend Philip Munger, who is hanging out along the West Coast of the Outside states these days and is writing a series of them as he travels:
Now, that's the way it's supposed to be done.
Oh, and by the way, yes, that's me on a dock in Florida, early 1950s. And, yes, too, I did get to go to sea for a while.
Here's an example of a real haiku written by my friend Philip Munger, who is hanging out along the West Coast of the Outside states these days and is writing a series of them as he travels:
Road Haikus continued: in a waiting room
medical empires
reflected on the glass wall
to see inside us
Now, that's the way it's supposed to be done.
Oh, and by the way, yes, that's me on a dock in Florida, early 1950s. And, yes, too, I did get to go to sea for a while.
Singin' them songs about them storms at sea
Sailing in the wake of a personal hero
It's so easy anybody can do it
December 13, 2016
KGB ENLISTED YOUNG TRUMP IN SOVIET COLD WAR OPERATION – SOURCES
Author: Carlos Nodonaldo
Dec. 13, 2016 Inconsequential News Service
Federal agents this week revealed partial results of an investigation into Donald Trump that has unearthed what they say is proof he was and likely still is an agent of Russia, either as a willing participant or as an unwitting mind-controlled automaton who was awaiting instructions from deep inside the Kremlin
The investigation centered on almost three years in which Trump's whereabouts were unknown.
Investigators say they have confirmed where they believe Trump was during the years he mysteriously dropped out of sight. No record until now had been found about his location or activities during that span, but now documents discovered recently track his path through the two Germanys and into the heart of the Soviet Union in Moscow.
According to insiders, in a report issued Friday, Trump left the Wharton School in Pennsylvania in the summer of 1968 and in early 1971 reappeared to take over management of his family's businesses. Where he was during that time has long been a subject of speculation.
Authorities now say they have proof Trump left the country and traveled first to Berlin where for a short time he lived in a youth hostel. From there he disappeared, but recently documents discovered in former East German archives, show Trump crossed into East Berlin and was sighted about a month later in Moscow, capital of the former Soviet Union.
From there the trail went cold until he showed up in passport records as entering the U.S. on a flight from Beirut, Lebanon, in January 1971 at least until earlier this year.
It was those two and a half years out of sight that caught the attention of CIA investigators. In May documents supposedly expunged from KGB records but discovered in an abandoned building being demolished indicated a young American had been turned and was undergoing extensive training and mind-control exercises.
The report and several others found with it were signed by an agent named V. Putinchikov, believed to be a young Vladimir Putin who is now president of Russia. Judging by the information in the reports which is still being kept confidential, insiders say there's no doubt the young American was Trump. According to one source the reports document intense mind-control indoctrination. Documents detail actions beginning in late summer 1968 and ending in the fall of 1970.
Our source cited one document in particular that according to her stated that the indoctrination had been successful and the subject was ready to be deployed.
It is believed that during the 1950s and '60s hundreds of soviets lived in the Untied States as ordinary citizens awaiting orders from Moscow officials to perform duties not specified when they were deployed. The famous Manchurian Candidate was one such effort where an American. serviceman captured in Korea was brainwashed and sent back only to be activated by a psychological trigger to assassinate the president.
The sources believe Trump was among those who were sent to the U.S. as sleeper agents.
In January 1971 state department records show Trump flew into the U.S. from Beirut, landing in New York, and joining his family's firm shortly after that. From then until his election as President and his actions against China, there were no indications of whatever mission the Soviets may have prepared him for, but intelligence experts now speculate Trump could have been triggered recently to stimulate friction between the United States and China in order to further Russian economic interests.
Nothing in this story is true. It is pure satire meant only to entertain.
- Love it!
Me and Slim and the Major Leagues
Me and Slim and the Major Leagues
By Tim Jones
Copyright © 2015, Tim Jones
Our first conversation began with a challenge. "Hey, boy, throw me that ball," he called across the swimming pool. I turned to see this tall black man bending over to lay down the long handle of a skimming basket he had been using to lift debris from the guest pool. All of 12 at the time, I had been tossing a baseball in the air and catching it, having a catch with myself since no one else seemed to want to play. I threw the ball across that pool and it slapped into Slim's hand which enveloped it, the white ball disappearing into a fist of black.
"Pretty good snap for a kid," he said and tossed it back, gently. No slap in my mitt, just a gentle thud. "Throw it again, hard," he said, holding his hand open to make a catcher's target. I fired one at him without a windup. For the instant the ball was in flight, I noticed the light color of the open palm target against the deep black of the man. Again Slim let the ball slap his hand before it vanished inside his fist. "That all you got?" he challenged, again. "What position you play?"
At that time I had yet to specialize. I had tried all the positions, but I wanted to pitch.
"Pitcher."
"So, you a pitcher, huh?"
I shook my head.
"Comeon ovah heyah, boy," he said. "Don't want to shout."
So, I walked around the pool until I reached the end of the skimming handle.
"Lemme mark off a pitcher's mound and a plate," Slim said, and stepping off the concrete apron around the pool, dragged a line in the coquina with his foot. "You use that." Then, in easy graceful strides he paced off the distance from a pitcher's mound to a home plate. Again he drew in the loose fill, this time the outline of the base. He turned, looked at me and then squatted, holding up those white palms again to make a target. "Now give 'er a windup and let's see what you got."
I went into an exaggerated windup, lost control of where my arm went and winged a fastball over his head and into the palmetto surrounding the motel's inner courtyard.
Slim stood up from his catcher's squat, looked at me wide-eyed. "You might got some snap, but you ain't got no control," he said. Then he turned and in a motion that flowed from a shamble to a walk to a run, but seemingly distended as if in slow motion, he went to the palmetto hedge, found the ball and threw it back.
"Try it again," he said, "only this time don't go flingin' your arms and legs all over the place....easy motion and make sure you know where you're lettin' the ball go."
I toned down my windup, lifted my arms over my head, stepped forward and threw at that palm again. Slim had to reach for it but at least this time I threw it where he could catch it.
"You got to work on that windup, boy," he said. "You got to throw from your feet, you got to let it flow, your whole body got to throw that pitch." He tossed the ball back.
This time I tried to think feet, legs, shoulders, arm. This time I didn't try to throw so hard either. The ball went straight down the middle.
"Willie Mays woulda slapped that one into next year," Slim said as he tossed the ball back.
I threw him another and another and another, losing track of time. With each pitch, Slim offered his criticism, his suggestions, his encouragement and his challenges, a constant flow of chatter in a dialect I sometimes could barely understand. If I had thought about it then I would have realized, Slim was the only adult I had known to that time who would spend hours having a catch with me. I found myself trying very hard to please him, to get the windup and the pitch just right, to hear him say, "Good one," or shake his bare hand as if the ball had hurt him.
To this day I have no idea how long we played catch, that first day or in the ones that followed. Time mattered little to me anyway on vacation and having someone to catch with made it more vacation than following my parents to historic sites and reptile farms. After all this was before Disney World and all the other attractions began making Florida something other than a warm place with strange fish and wonderful beaches.
"I got to do my work," Slim said finally, ending our first day. "Might find me a mitt and look for you tomorrow though."
"I have another one," I offered, "a catcher's mitt." I did have it. I had sneaked it into the car when we packed for the trip south, thinking catching was one of the positions I might like if I couldn't work up the courage to tell people I was a pitcher, and also thinking maybe somewhere along the way I would find someone who would be up for having a catch. My father had bought the mitt and made a valiant attempt to join me in my baseball pursuits. But, it seemed he always wanted to quit before I did and eventually we just sort of stopped doing it. He didn't believe in the curve ball either and one day I bonked him with one. For the most part that catcher's mitt collected dust in my bedroom closet. But for whatever reason when I had been packing, I noticed it and took it along.
"OK, you look for me about the same time tomorrow," Slim said, "and you bring that mitt along."
We had moved closer together and spoke in lower tones. "Where you from, boy?"
"Buffalo," I said, "Buffalo, New York."
"Up north," he said, only when he said it, the sound was "up nawth" and slow. "I been up north a couple of times. What you gonna do now?
"I guess I'll go swimming."
"Oh, man, don't do no swimming," he said.
I didn't say anything, trying to absorb that, figure out why this man would tell me not to go swimming of all things.
"That swimming, see, it stretches your muscles out, makes them long and stringy. You gonna play baseball, you gotta have them bunched up muscles, hard and strong. Lemme see your muscle."
I flexed my right arm and made as big a biceps as I could.
"OOO eeee," Slim exclaimed. "Now there's a muscle." He stretched a hand toward me to feel my biceps, but that hand never quite reached me. It stopped in mid stretch. Slim looked at me, then he looked around the courtyard. Then he pulled the hand away and let it fall to his side. "Gotta finish this pool, I guess," he said and turned toward his skimming basket.
I went back to our bungalow, pulled on swimming trunks and headed for the beach to find my family. Despite Slim's admonition, I went into the water, too. The clear green Gulf was so different from the cold water of Lake Erie where we swam back home. But every time I went out to deeper water to swim, I noticed how conscious I was of stretching out my muscles as I stroked across the waves. I could feel that growing bunched muscle in my throwing arm, turning stringy and useless in the warm water.
The next day I awoke with the sun and found myself peeking through the slats of the jalousie door to see if my catcher was around yet. We all drove down the road a way for breakfast and when we returned, I saw Slim working the palmettos, pulling out weeds around the tourist plants. He saw me and waved when we walked from the car into the bungalow and I waved back. We exchanged no words.
My parents wanted to know who he was and I told them I thought he worked there and that he had played catch with me the day before and he seemed to know an awful lot about baseball and particularly pitching. I wished I could have understood the glance they gave each other as they listened to my story. I asked my dad if he would unlock the car trunk for me and I rummaged through it until I found the catcher's mitt behind the spare tire where I had stuffed it. He asked what that was for and I told him Slim wanted me to bring it so we could have a catch. This may have disappointed him, I don't know. He may have felt replaced but at 12 I had no mind for the subtle nuances of father-son relationships. All I knew was there was a guy over there who wanted to have a catch and I took both mitts and the ball and went across the courtyard to find Slim.
"Hardly looks like anybody used this mitt," Slim said examining the catcher's glove.
I recalled the history of the glove, but just said, "It's pretty new."
Slim pounded his fist in my father's catcher's mitt. "Ball probbly bounce outta here half the time," he said, "but I'll try her out. Git down there and throw me a couple. Let's see what you got today."
On that first pitch I forgot everything from the day before and winged a fastball over his head. He reached for it and it bounced off the padding of the new glove and into the palmetto again. Slim went after it shaking his head.
"Boy, didn't you learn nothin' yesterday?"
That shamed me and I settled down. I threw ball after ball into the strike zone after that, each one bringing a comment from Slim about how some hitter would have knocked that out to Ashland Avenue or on to the moon or clear up to Yonkers. He always had a name for the guy who would have knocked the pitch out of the world, too, guys like Willie Mays and Monte Irvine and Luke Easter. But, he also had some guys I had never heard of, Josh Gibson and Cool Papa Bell and more. The ones I knew already were playing in the major leagues, the others I had no idea about at all.
"How come you know so much about baseball," I asked him at one point.
"I played, boy, I played with the best," he said.
I winged him a fastball. "Where did you play?"
"All over," he started even before the ball reached him. He nipped it one handed in that fat glove and tossed it back. "Played up to Kansas City once, the Monarchs."
The Kansas City Monarchs, now to my mind Kansas City was a farm club for the New York Yankees. "Monarchs" didn't seem right, either.
"You were in the Yankee farm system?" I asked, eyes probably wide.
I tried a curve ball.
"Wasn't no Yankee bush team then." he said reaching as the curve ball flew straight to his right. "It was major league then."
He snapped the ball back to me, stinging my gloved hand. I knew that message: It was a way catchers had of letting the pitcher know they didn't like the pitch.
"What do you mean, major league. There's no Kansas City team in the majors," I said reasonably sure of my facts. I tried another curve ball.
"Was too," he said reaching again. "What you tryin' to throw anyway. You ain't tryin' no curve balls are you?"
Every Little League coach I'd ever had admonished us not to throw curve balls, something about injuring our arms while they were still growing. I expected that lecture. Slim stood up from his catcher's crouch and walked toward me.
"You goin' to throw a curve ball, you better learn how," he said. He held the ball in his big black hand and demonstrated the grip for a curve ball. "You got to line your fingers along the laces," he said. Then in an exaggerated motion he swung his arm imitating the pitching arc. "When you git to here, you gotta snap that wrist. What makes it curve is the spin on the ball. The more spin, the more curve. You want that ball to break down, too, down and away from a right hander if you throwin' right handed like you do. You try it.....slow."
I took the ball and aligned my fingers with the laces. This was exciting. For all my years of baseball, no one had ever taken the time to show me how to throw the curve. I had tried to figure it out on my own and apparently hadn't done too well, except maybe for the time I bonked my father. That ball had curved. Here was someone who really knew how to throw one, teaching me. Two fingers along the thinnest point of laces and ready, I noticed my fingers didn't go nearly as far around the ball as his. They looked pale and small against the smudged, dirty white of the ball and its red laces.
"Don't know how you ever gonna throw no curve ball with them tiny fingers," he said. I knew I would grow, just show me how to do it.
"OK, slow now, take your windup, bring your arm around and then, right there, snap your wrist. You let the ball go right there."
Even in slow motion, when I snapped my wrist I couldn't hold onto the ball and it slammed into the dirt at our feet.
Slim shook his head. "Whooo eeee. Batter was in China he mighta took a swing at it. Try it again, slow."
"When was Kansas City ever in the majors?" I asked him again.
Slim acted surprised. "Boy you got a lot to learn about baseball. Kansas City Monarchs was a major league team maybe 20, 30 years. I got there just to the end of it. Played with some of the best of them."
"What did you play?
"I was like you, I was a pitcher. What you think, a outfielder could show you pitchin'?"
"So who was on the Kansas City Monarchs? Did they ever play in the World Series?" I felt I was on pretty solid ground here.
"Played in 'em. Won 'em too."
"Against who?" Now I had him.
"Last time was the Baltimore Elite Giants."
"Who? The Giants are in New York and they aren't called 'elite' either."
"They was then and they played in Baltimore. Sounds to me like you're missin' something in your education."
Now he had me confused.
"You ever wonder where Jackie Robinson and Willie Mays and Monte Irvine and Luke Easter come from?"
No, I hadn't. In silence I thought about how just a few years before, I knew, Jackie Robinson had broken the color barrier. By the time I became aware of baseball almost every team had black players, that was the norm. Breaking the color barrier didn't mean all that much to me. Apparently it did to Slim.
"They come from the Negro Leagues, boy," he said, "the Negro Leagues where they played the best baseball in America, bar none."
There was another major league. Wow. But, how?
"Back then they didn't let no Nigra folk play in the white leagues so we had our own. We was good, too. Most of those guys coulda played in the white leagues but they wasn't allowed to."
For some reason I picked up a mental image of Willie Mays making one of those over-the-shoulder catches in center field at the Polo Grounds and firing all the way to home plate, shouting "say, hey" as he did. What if we never had gotten to see Willie Mays do that?
"Was Willie Mays in the Negro Leagues?"
"They all was. Heck, I pitched against Willie Mays. Knocked me clean out of the park, too."
"You pitched to Willie Mays?" I was incredulous.
"Yup! When he was a kid, too, when he still had it. He was almost old when he got to the white majors. Didn't have that many years left."
All of this overwhelmed me, almost too much to absorb. "So, all these guys were playing in another league, a major league, until Jackie Robinson went to the Dodgers?"
"That's just the size of it," Slim said. "I pitched against Satchel Paige once. Greatest pitcher ever was."
Satchel Paige. Now there was a name I knew. I had actually seen him pitch once, way late in his career when most people said he was in his 50s and pitching for the Cleveland Indians. They played the Buffalo Bisons one year in old Offerman Stadium and Satchel Paige had pitched. He didn't seem all that great then. Of course, by some counts he could have been 60 years old.
"Come on let's see you learned nothin' about that curve ball," Slim challenged as he turned and walked back to his home plate.
I threw curve balls over his head. I threw curve balls in the dirt. I threw curve balls way off to his left and then way off to his right. Maybe a couple actually went through the strike zone. I was playing with a major leaguer, though I wasn't absolutely sure how major his league had been. After all how could it be that great if I'd never heard of it before that day. Still, I believed him. He had known, had played with my heroes. He actually pitched to Willie Mays.
In time, my mother interrupted this reverie to retrieve me. I introduced her to Slim, proudly, the polite way she had taught me. She came across a little distant but accepted the introduction. She said she was nervous. It turned out on a drive while I was playing baseball she had hit and killed an opossum in the road.
"Did you pick it up?" Slim asked.
My mother's eyebrows raised.
"Man, I'd jump off a freight train for a possum," he said. And, with that he handed me the catcher's mitt, allowed that he had to get back to work and with a "nice to meetcha" walked away.
Over the next few days I learned more about the Negro Leagues and more about the curve ball. We tried sliders, too, but my fingers were just too short. Slim taught me how to throw the slow junk, too, the pitches no righteous, fast-ball 12-year-old would consider throwing: the change up and the slow curve. He even showed me the screwball, that curve that cuts away from a left hander when thrown by a right hander. He told me not to throw that one because it really would hurt my arm. Of course, I threw it anyway and was severely chastised every time. Secretly I was proud that he recognized it as a screwball at his end of the catch. Those days I pitched to every player who had ever hit a ball in the Negro Leagues. Slim knew all their names and how good they were and they would come to the plate where he squatted to catch another of my wild pitches. He knew the book on the ones he'd pitched against. "You pitch Monte Irvine around the knees," he'd say and I would try, most often hitting the dirt in front of the plate with those low pitches. In those few days Slim and I beat the great teams, struck out the greatest hitters, won seven or eight world series and played in every all-star game, lost in our world of baseball oblivious for those couple of hours every day to what might have been going on in the rest of the world.
In time, of course, the shadow grew, that shadow that meant packing the car and beginning the long trip north. Probably three or four days before our departure, I went with my family on our morning ritual excursion for breakfast, all the while anticipating my catch with Slim. After breakfast, my father stopped at a service station for gas. I had spotted a water fountain on the side of the building and told them I was going to get a drink. Against the white tiled wall of the garage, I leaned over the fountain.
Instead of the shot of cold I expected, the water came out tepid, warmed my mouth. Obviously, the fountain had been standing there in the Florida sun for hours. What I'd hoped would be cooling and refreshing instead added to my discomfort with its warmth and then with its unfamiliar, maybe rusty flavor as well. I pulled away from the stream of water.
When I looked up, water dripping from my chin, and saw the sign, it did not horrify me. It read "Negroes Only." What horrified me was the strength of the grip on my biceps, my skinny pitching arm with the muscles stretched out from swimming. When I turned to face my assailant I looked straight into the face of my mother, my own Mother, free state Mother, one generation removed from immigration herself, and into those accusing, yet, fearful and vulnerable eyes.
She glared at me and then nervously looked around. No one watched us. "You aren't supposed to drink out of that fountain," she said, "Didn't you read the sign?"
I admitted that I hadn't seen the sign until afterward.
"You have to be more careful," she said, still looking around.
That was when I saw the other fountain, the one below a similar sign that read "Whites only." I stared at it and then at the one I had just used. The idea of the two fountains confused me for a moment until I realized just why there were two and what two fountains meant and the weight of all that led to those two insignificant water fountains and their racist signs. This was all new to me, the reality of it. Previous to this the only distinction I had known was the separation of men's and women's restrooms. All my little northern sensibilities blew up inside me. Outraged, I turned, leaned over and took another sip from that tepid fountain, all the while expecting that the cleaner one for "Whites Only" probably also produced better tasting, colder water.
This time my mother did not release her grip. She dragged me half running, half skipping back toward the car, dragged me by that pitching arm that should be protected from such things. This time we noticed that two men standing near the sidewalk watching her drag me along to the car and most likely had seen me drink from the wrong fountain.
In the car she told my father what I had done. He, too began to look around nervously. I still wasn't sure I had done anything all that wrong. After all, I was just a kid wanting a drink of water. What actual harm could there be in that?
We pulled away and as we passed them I noticed the two men staring after us. Not much had ever been said in any school I attended about this sort of thing. I knew about slavery of course, but beyond that, beyond the Civil War, I had this idea that things were all right.
"They make water fountains for white people," my father said. "You have to use those. Bathrooms, too."
"All I did was get a drink of water."
"It doesn't matter. It is different here. I hope no one saw you. They can get nasty about that sort of thing here."
I wondered who "they" were. The two men standing by the sidewalk?
"It's stupid." There in two words at the tender age of 12 without realizing it, I had summarized all of Faulkner's work.
"Stupid or not, you watch out for those signs from now on. And, don't call it stupid, it is just the way things are."
By the time we returned to the motel, my mind had reduced the incident to insignificance. Youth forgets quickly and in the forgetting, forgives. After all, I was about to pitch in the World Series.
I found Slim and the game resumed. I pitched to Josh Gibson that day. I pitched to him all day because it took that long for Slim to tell me everything about a man I learned later may have been the greatest hitter ever to swing a bat. Of course there was no doubt in Slim's mind, but I had been brought up with Babe Ruth and Ted Williams. After Gibson had hit every pitch I threw anywhere near the strike zone, Slim let me know it was time to quit. We vowed to meet the next day. "You gonna pitch against Papa Bell, tomorrow, or maybe you pitch to Judy Johnson with Papa on base....that's where he was the most dangerous."
"Judy?"
"Never you mind," he said and walked away. This time I stood and watched him leave. I recall wondering at the time how a man who had played in the major leagues, at least his major leagues, ended up pulling weeds and skimming trash out of swimming pools for a living. That thought lingered through the rest of the afternoon while my father and I fished from a row boat in a calm lagoon.
Our trip to breakfast seemed to take so much longer than usual the next day . I couldn't wait to get back and pitch to Judy Johnson with Papa Bell on base. For one thing we hadn't gone into the stretch yet, the motion pitchers use with men on base so they can see the base runners and pick them off, particularly at first. As quickly as the car stopped, I raced to gather the mitts and the ball and go look for Slim. When I emerged from the bungalow I scanned the courtyard and pool area but he wasn't in sight. I set the catcher's mitt on the trunk lid of our car and walked off tossing the ball in the air and catching it. I walked all the way around the grounds, behind all the bungalows through all the passageways, I looked everywhere but I couldn't find him. I went down the path to the beach and looked across it to the water and in both directions. Sometimes he went down there to pick up trash from the sand, but he wasn't there either. Finally I returned to our bungalow and for a while leaned against the car, tossing the ball into the air and catching it, figuring he would show up sooner or later. After some period of time, it might have been ten minutes or it might have been an hour, I made the rounds again but Slim was nowhere to be found. Neither were Judy Johnson or Papa Bell. How could I find someone I'd never heard about before? I wondered if Slim knew the book on Judy Johnson.
I didn't find Slim on my second tour, and I couldn't find anyone to ask about him either. By the time I returned, my family was packing the car for an afternoon jaunt. If I remember correctly, we went to a water show at some garden sort of place. It blurs in my mind. I do remember by the time we left the show, stopped for dinner and then returned to the motel, it had turned to evening, a beautiful sunset on the west coast of Florida and baseball had passed from possibility.
The next morning instead of returning after breakfast, we went on to some other attraction. It seems to me we were near the winter headquarters of a circus and we went there and then spent the day in a city, Tampa possibly. All I recall of that day was a thunder storm and so much rain fell that streets filled up to the tops of the curbs. When the storm ended, the water disappeared just as quickly and we returned to the motel. With still a little daylight left when we arrived, I grabbed my glove and went looking for Slim, but again he was nowhere around.
When I came back to the bungalow, my parents must have noticed my disappointment. They asked what was wrong and I told them I couldn't find Slim and I wanted to have a catch.
"Even handymen get a day off once in a while," my father said. And that was all they said. "Even handymen get a day off once in a while."
But you don't take a day off from baseball.
That evening we packed our bags for the trip home. We left fairly early in the morning. I always wanted to sit in the front seat, but this day I sat in the back, watching out the back window, searching that courtyard for some sign of Slim. For the third day, no Slim. If only he could have been there just to say good bye, even just to wave, mostly to say something like, "Hey boy, you work on that curve," or "hey, boy, see you in the majors." I watched out the back window of that 1955 Chevrolet as it crunched the courtyard coquina to the highway and turned north, leaving the the motel to fade into the palm.
But Slim never showed up to wave. For reasons I’m not sure I will ever understand totally, the first African American and the only major leaguer I ever met had disappeared.
Kings of the Hill: Baseball's Forgotten Men
Video at the Negro League Hall of Fame mentions Judy Johnson and Josh Gibson
Kings of the Hill: Baseball's Forgotten Men
Video at the Negro League Hall of Fame mentions Judy Johnson and Josh Gibson
Conversation with an older writer
October 22, 2013
In August I posted an excerpt from something I have been working on for the past couple of years titled "Conversation with a young prostitute." It was an experiment in a couple of ways, first, generally it's not a good idea to expose work until it's finished; there are just too many pitfalls waiting for you in comments from people who have not seen the finished work or all of it. That can be pretty discouraging.
Secondly, the writing itself is experimental, at least for me. Briefly, the full story explores a modern relationship that occurs totally online and is expressed only in instant-messaging format with the inherent spelling, grammatical and typographical errors intact.
Copyright © Tim Jones
Old news
January 17, 2018
In the winter of 1980 and '81 I went to Nome to run the Nome Nugget, Alaska's oldest continuously published newspaper for my friend Mark Fuersteneau who had just purchased the Nugget while he toured newspapers Outside. My first task there while Mark was still around was to cover the first murder trial in years in Nome. At the time I was reading Norman Mailer's "Executioner's Song," a non fiction account of the life of Utah murderer Gary Gilmore. If you have ever read any of Mailer's non fiction you know the excruciating detail he goes into.With that influence I went off to cover the trial. The verdict came down in the middle of the night a week later on the day we had to prepare the paper which had to be shipped to Anchorage by airplane for printing and sent back to Nome for Thursday distribution. So first thing in the morning I started writing telling Mark about two pages typed double spaced. I don't recall how many pages I wrote that morning but it was a lot more than two. As a matter of fact it filled half the front page, two full inside pages and jumped a couple of times to the back of the book – on deadline. To this day I think of this as the best news story I ever wrote. That is not comparing to anyone else, but me comparing my writing to my writing. However I will tell you this: after the paper came out both attorneys came to the office and purchased several copies and both said they wanted to send them to their law school professors. Later in the week the judge took me to lunch and told me it was the best trial story he had ever read. It certainly is the longest, so be warned.
So here it is, the best news story I have ever written.
After a week-long trial, a Superior Court jury early Tuesday morning returned with a verdict, finding Ronald Bloomstrand, 33, of Nome, Alaska, and Hay River, Northwest Territories, Canada, guilty of manslaughter.
Bloomstrand had been charged with first degree murder in the shooting death of Harris Okbaok of Teller last June 22 in Nome.
As Judge Paul B. Jones polled the jurors at the 2 a.m. meeting Bloomstrand sat quietly at the defense table on the south side of the courtroom, his lean, stoic Indian face showing little emotion, the same demeanor that had sustained itself throughout the trial, failing him only once. Where he had faced a life in prison, the verdict on the lesser charge threatened a maximum 20 years, not a situation to cheer but better than what might have been.
Ron Bloomstrand had spent a lot of time at that table over the past week. He sat there looking straight ahead or looking down at the papers in front of him while District Attorney Mike White and defense counsel Jim Ottinger argued the case that would decide his future. The two attorneys could not have presented any more contrasting styles if they had wanted to. Jim Ottinger, who practiced mostly in Alaska’s urban center, Anchorage, appeared in court every days dressed in tailored suits, wearing shiny black shoes, and appeared to every measure the sophisticated urbane attorney. Mike White on the other hand wore plaid shirts and barely matching ties, covered by a herringbone jacket with leather patches at the elbows. His pants were one level above jeans and his shoes were low-cut hiking boots, a fashion much more suited to the courtrooms of rural Alaska, than they might have been in urban Anchorage.
Ron Bloomstrand had spent a lot of time at that table over the past week. He sat there looking straight ahead or looking down at the papers in front of him while District Attorney Mike White and defense counsel Jim Ottinger argued the case that would decide his future. The two attorneys could not have presented any more contrasting styles if they had wanted to. Jim Ottinger, who practiced mostly in Alaska’s urban center, Anchorage, appeared in court every days dressed in tailored suits, wearing shiny black shoes, and appeared to every measure the sophisticated urbane attorney. Mike White on the other hand wore plaid shirts and barely matching ties, covered by a herringbone jacket with leather patches at the elbows. His pants were one level above jeans and his shoes were low-cut hiking boots, a fashion much more suited to the courtrooms of rural Alaska, than they might have been in urban Anchorage.
After two full days of jury selection in which Jim Ottinger of Anchorage picked up on the difficulty of finding 12 persons in a small town who knew neither stories about the case or people involved, trial began in earnest Wednesday Morning.
That was when Mike White began spinning the web of circumstantial evidence he hoped would lead to a first-degree murder conviction.
Employees of the Board of Trade Saloon and the Polar Bar testified they thought Ron Bloomstrand was in a bad mood the evening of June 22.
One witness testified that morning that he’d seen Ron Bloomstrand and Harris Okbaok go into Bloomstrand’s apartment at First and Steadman the evening of the 22nd and that he saw Ron Bloomstrand leave alone at about 11 p.m.
Mike White called Ed Ottinger of Nome who said Bloomstrand had come to his house and said there was a dead man in his house and there was blood all over the place. Ed Ottinger, the witness not Jim Ottinger the attorney, also related through questioning a conversation he had with Ron Bloomstrand in which he said Bloomstrand had demonstrated how he held the gun when Harris Okbaok was shot.
Ed Ottinger, the witness, related how he went to find his and Bloomstrand’s employer, James West, owner of the Board of Trade Saloon after Bloomstrand went to sleep at Ed Ottinger’s place. When Ed Ottinger could not find West, he called police.
After a recess for lunch, Mike White, the district attorney, began calling a series of police and expert witnesses. The first was Officer Joe Lyon of the Nome Police Department.
Lyon described how he and State Trooper Robert Yates entered Bloomstrand’s apartment and found Harris Okbaok’s body, and how they checked for signs of life and how they looked the apartment over for other persons, but not for evidence and were careful not to disturb anything.
Officer Lyon told how he called his dispatcher who notified Chief Robert Kauer and how they stayed at the scene until Chief Kauer arrived with Lt. Richard Finney. They knew where Bloomstrand was and went to the home of Ed Ottinger, the witness. There Lyon said he and Trooper Yates waited outside while Chief Kauer and Lt. Finney made the arrest. He said he saw them come out of the building with Bloomstrand in custody.
Mike White asked him to point out the suspect arrested. Lyon pointed to Ron Bloomstrand and said, “He’s sitting next to Mr. Ottinger.”
“Please let the record show the witness indicated Mr. Jim Ottinger, the defense attorney, not Ed Ottinger of Nome,” Mike White said. Jim Ottinger, the attorney, smiled at that one.
Under questioning, Officer Lyon also said Ron Bloomstrand, while being transported the night of the shooting, was yelling and asking what he was supposed to have done and saying the police were picking on Eskimos and Indians.
Then Jim Ottinger cross examined. He asked if Mr. Bloomstrand was excited. Officer Lyon said he was. Ottinger asked about the times of the arrest, and transport to jail and back to the police station and back to the jail, questions Officer Lyon answered to the best of his recollection.
Mike White then called Inspector Lyle Haugden of the Alaska State Troopers’ office in Anchorage. Inspector Haugden had done some of the detail work on physical evidence and sent some of the evidence to the FBI for further investigation. What he provided for the most part was what attorneys call chain of custody, used to show evidence was always protected from outside influence.
After Haugden Mike White called Robert Yates, the Alaska State Trooper in the Nome Detachment who had responded the first night. Trooper Yates described how he and Officer Lyon had proceeded the night of the shooting. He was also asked to describe the wounds of the decedent, Harris Okbaok. He told of the upper part of the right index finger being missing and a jagged wound to a finger on the left hand and said he was unable to see the entry wound in Harris Okbaok’s head because of the blood.
Jim Ottinger began his cross-examination asking, “Did you transport Mr. Bloomstrand?”
“Yes, the following afternoon to arraignments.”
“The afternoon of the 23rd?”
“Yes.”
“At that time, did Mr. Bloomstrand say anything to you and Mr. White about …”
Ottinger never finished that question as Mike White, the district attorney jumped up to shout, “Objection!”
The two approached the bench to talk with Judge Paul Jones. After a short discussion, Judge Jones excused the jury while the two argued a point of law key to the defense.
Both attorneys, obviously agitated, paced in circles while they argued the admissibility of a statement Ron Bloomstrand allegedly made to White and Yates asking why he was being charged with first degree murder when the shooting was an accident.
Mike White said the defendant was trying to get a statement into the record that was hearsay and he gets no chance to cross examine.
If the statement stands, Jim Ottinger would have been able to place Ron Bloomstrand’s defense that the shooting was an accident into the record without having to put Bloomstrand on the stand where he would be subject to cross-examination by Mike White.
“I’m asking a question which seeks to illustrate the state of mind.” Jim Ottinger argued to the judge.
“The state of mind of the Mr. Bloomstrand at the time of the arraignment is immaterial,” Mike White responded.
“Everything he said that night has been brought into evidence through other people. But when he asks ‘why am I being charged with firs degree murder?’ it’s not. It shows he was dazed, somewhat confused while he was being asked to plead guilty or not guilty, Jim Ottinger said.
Judge Paul Jones ruled the question was outside the rules of direct examination and sustained the objection of Mike White If the accident defense was to come out before the jury it appeared Jim Ottinger would have to put his client on the stand and subject him to Mike White’s cross examination.
The jury returned and the district attorney called Nome Police Chief Bob Kauer. Defendant Ron Bloomstrand from his chair at the table had a decided reaction when Chief Kauer took the stand. The defendant who had been staring straight ahead through most of the proceedings now turned that stare directly at the witness for most of the time the police chief was testifying.
Chief Kauer answered questions about what he saw in the apartment, how the gun was found under the bed, bullet fragments, the blood, the posture of Harris Okbaok’s body the circumstances of the arrest, and he identified several pieces of evidence including the Colt Lawman .357 magnum revolver, the weapon in question. Sgt. Michael Murphy of the Nome Police Department testified to how he had found the pistol under the bed in Ron Bloomstrand’s bedroom along with an unfired cartridge and an empty shell casing.
Next, Mike White called Donald R. Riedman, an FBI specialist in firearms identification. Agent Riedman came all the way from Virginia to tell the jury the Colt Lawman .357 magnum revolver was indeed the weapon that had fired the bullet that killed Harris Okbaok. He also, in response to Mike White’s questioning, showed why the gun would not fire accidentally if thrown or dropped. Agent Riedman demonstrated the workings of a transfer bar within the mechanism of the gun which would allow the firing pin to hit the primer in the shell only if the trigger were pulled.
Agent Riedman also testified that he’d found only one fingerprint on the gun, that identified as from the right index finger of Ron Bloomstrand. He also said he had examined the shirt Harris Okbaok had been wearing the night he died and had found traces of chemicals found in gunpowder on the sleeves and upper chest portion of the garment. Mike White asked if that was consistent with a bullet wound “right here” and pointed to his own forehead just above the left eye.
“Yes,” Agent Riedman replied.
“And the sleeve?”
“No, unless the arms were up around the head,” Agent Riedman said.
After a series of questions on the ease with which the gun could be fired, Agent Riedman was excused to return to Virginia.
The next witness for the prosecution was Stephen Ede, a forensic chemist from Anchorage. He explained that he had examined swab tests taken from both Ron Bloomstrand’s and Harris Okbaok’s hands. He said he found traces of barium and antimony on the hands swabs, consistent with a gun having been fired by one at another who had his hands up in front of the gun.
Then, Dr. Michael Propst, the Anchorage pathologist who preformed the autopsy on Harris Okbaok told in physical terms how the victim died. He said the bullet first hit the middle finger of the right hand, then hit the tip of the index finger on the left hand amputating it above the first joint. The two wounds caused the bulled to tumble, he said, making a keyhole shaped wound where it entered the forehead. Then the bullet progressed downward until it lodged in the back of Harris Okbaok’s throat. The pathologist said with the type of wound, the victim was unconscious almost immediately and dead within seconds.
“What is your opinion as to the position of the hands?” Mike White asked. Expert witnesses are allowed to give their opinions.
“Like this,” Dr. Propst said, holding his hands up with the left hand closer to his forehead and the backs of both hands turned outward.
“Could Harris Okbaok have shot himself?”
“No, it could not have been done the way the hands were.”
Then Jim Ottinger, the defense counsel, was given a chance to cross examine.
“What was the spatial difference between the hands?” he asked.
“It could have been at arm’s length or anywhere in between. I don’t think they were on top of each other.”
“The forehead could have been atop the hand?”
“Yes.”
And then Dr. Propst confirmed through questioning that Harris Okbaok’s hands had been turned with the backs outward at the time of the shooting.
When the cross examination ended, Mike White asked that the court note that First and Steadman was in the Second Judicial District. Judge Jones said, so noted, and with that Mike White rested the case for the State of Alaska.
That afternoon, Thursday, defense attorney Jim Ottinger began to present the case for Ron Bloomstrand. The first witness he called was Percy Atwater.
Percy Atwater testified to the fact he had gone shooting with Ron Bloomstrand June 19 and they had fired Bloomstrand’s Colt Lawman .357 magnum revolver several times.
“Is it hard to shoot, easy to shoot?” Ottinger asked.
“Easy to shoot.”
The next witness was Kenneth Miller. After preliminary questions, Jim Ottinger asked Miller if he was with Ron Bloomstrand June 22.
“Yes.”
“What did you do?”
“We went down to Teller.”
“How long were you gone?”
“We left around 2 or 3, back about 6:30.”
“Were you drinking alcohol?”
“Beer.”
“Very many?”
“Yes.”
“Was Ron Bloomstrand intoxicated?”
“Yes.”
“Did you go to any bars when you got back?”
“We went down to the BOT.”
“How long were you there?”
“I left after a minute.”
“Was he very inebriated?”
“Yes.”
Prosecutor Mike White cross examined and asked how long it took to drive back from Teller. Kenneth Miller said less than an hour, to which Mike White said it was 74 miles from Teller to Nome.
So, Ron was driving fast, Mike White said, “so fast in fact you asked him to stop?”
“Yes.”
The next defense witness called was Daisy Jack, a house parent at the Nome Receiving Home and Ron Bloomstrand’s mother in law. Jim Ottinger asked her, “Did Ron come to your house any time during the night of June 22 and 23?”
“Yes.”
“What did he say?”
“I think he say, ‘maybe I killed somebody with my pistol.’”
“Did he stay long?”
“He was just a few minutes.”
Mike White cross examined:
“Did Ron appear calm?”
“He was the way he is.”
“Did he appear drunk?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did he stagger?”
“No.”
“Did he stagger?”
“I don’t think he was drunk. He didn’t stagger.”
Mrs. Jack was excused and Jim Ottinger called Percy Atwater back to the witness stand. Atwater testified that he, too, had fired the Colt Lawman .357 magnum revolver June 19. He said he had seen Ron Bloomstrand shoot the revolver with both hands and that the gun was easier to shoot than others he had fired.
Jim Ottinger turned to Ron Bloomstrand and for the first time, the long face that had remained virtually unchanged throughout the trial changed. The moment had come, the moment he would have to decide whether to take the stand or not. The two huddled and whispered at the defense table for less than a minute and then Ottinger asked for a recess to “advise my client of some of his rights.”
After a short recess everyone returned to the courtroom but one of the jurors was missing. While they waited Jim Ottinger talked with Ron Bloomstrand at the defense table. Ron Bloomstrand still appeared stoic but the inner pressure was beginning to have outward signs. While they talked he mostly listened intently, but some of the color had gone out of his face and he seemed a little less assured, taking occasional deep breaths.
When the juror finally returned and took her seat, Jim Ottinger called his client to the witness stand.
Jim Ottinger pointed to a diagram of Ron Bloomstrand’s bedroom which the prosecution had used.
“Does anything catch your eye?” he asked.
Ron Bloomstrand spoke in a very low voice, difficult to here across the courtroom, “doorway’s too small.”
Jim Ottinger went to a diagram of the whole apartment. “Anything different?”
“The table, closer to the wall, straight,” Ron Bloomstrand answered quietly, referring to an angular position of the kitchen table depicted in the drawing.
Ron Bloomstrand’s lawyer then confirmed through his client that he had fired the Cold Lawman .357 magnum revolver several times with the Atwaters June 19.
Then Ottinger led Ron Bloomstrand through that fatal day of June 22, a day in which Bloomstrand said he awakened around 11 a.m. and later in the afternoon drove to Teller with Kenneth Miller. He agreed they had taken liquor with them and consumed quite a bit. He said he and Miller went to the Board of Trade when they returned but Miller left shortly. He said he met Harris Okbaok in the BOT.
“Do you recall the conversation?” Jim Ottinger asked his client.
“He said he’d give me a .30-30 for a ride to Teller. I told him I just got back. Is and I got a .357 I don’t need a .30-30. He said he’d give me the price of gas.”
“Then you left to go to your place with Harris Okbaok?”
“Not right away.”
“Describe what happened at your apartment.”
“He asked for the bathroom and I told him where it was. I opened a couple of beers. He came out and wanted to see the pistol. I went and got it and handed it to him. He asked if it was loaded. I think I told him ‘I don’t know.’ He asked if he could pull the trigger.”
“Did he pull it more than once?”
“Umm, he was looking at the gun, handled in both hands, cocked the hammer back, pulled the trigger, had the gun sideways in his hand. I remember tellin’ him I got to go to bed. He handed the gun in his right hand. I took the gun. All I remember (here he paused and took a heavy breath then went on) is Harris falling away from me. Up against the wall … I slipped.” He looked away, toward the judge at his right and took several deep breaths.
Jim Ottinger asked Ron Bloomstrand, “Do you remember what happened after that? Do you remember striking the wall?”
“Yes,” Ron Bloomstrand said in a barely audible mumble, staring at the floor in front of him, his head bobbing apparently fighting tears.”
“Would you like a break?” Judge Paul Jones interrupted.
“Mr. Bloomstrand, would you like a recess?” Jim Ottinger asked.
His client nodded in the affirmative and the court called a 15 minute recess.
Following the recess Ron Bloomstrand returned to the witness stand with some of his composure regained. Jim Ottinger, the attorney, asked if he remembered going to the home of Ed Ottinger, the witness. He also asked if Ron Bloomstrand remembered seeing Daisy Jack, being arrested, going to jail, to the hospital, to the police station, being arraigned, telling Trooper Yates and District Attorney White it was an accident, talking with James West, or a doctor who drew blood for an alcohol test.
Ron Bloomstrand could remember few or none of the events following the shooting of Harris Okbaok.
“To the best of your ability, what is the first thing you remember after the shooting of Harris Okbaok?”
“Being charged with first degree murder.”
After a few more questions, Jim Ottinger relinquished the defendant to prosecutor Mike White for cross examination.
Mike White took to the questioning aggressively.
“Don’t you remember when you were arrested saying ‘What did I do? Why are you always picking on Indians and Eskimos?’”
Ron Bloomstrand shook his head no.
Mike White asked several more questions, the answers to which Ron Bloomstrand said he did not remember.
“Do you know how much you had to drink?”
“Quite a bit.”
“How’s your memory when you’re drunk?”
The answer was mumbled.
“Do you pass out when you’re drunk?”
“No … sometimes I do.”
“Do you recall what you were doing in the BOT?”
“No.”
“You were trying to pick fights with several people.”
“I might have. I do that sometimes.”
Mike White asked several more questions to which Ron Bloomstrand said he didn’t know or didn’t remember.
Then Mike White attempted to lead Ron Bloomstrand through the shooting again. He placed the Colt Lawman .357 magnum revolver in front of Ron Bloomstrand and asked him to show how the shooting occurred. And they held a long exchange over just how the gun was passed between Harris Okbaok and Ron Bloomstrand before it went off.
After a lunch recess, Mike White resumed, this time using a table placed in the center of the courtroom. Ron Bloomstrand told what he knew up to the stumble he had claimed, but questions after that brought “I-don’t-remember” responses.
The last question before the prosecution relinquished the defendant was: “Do you recall killing Harris Okbaok?”
The response was, “I don’t remember.”
Defense attorney Jim Ottinger then questioned his client again on redirect.
He asked Ron Bloomstrand again to recreate the shooting. This time the defendant first drew the scene on paper hanging from an easel, then the two sat down at the table in the center of the courtroom and Ron Bloomstrand again attempted to show how Harris Okbaok had passed the Colt Lawman .357 magnum revolver to him handle first. Ron Bloomstrand recalled starting to stand up, slipping or tripping, falling against the wall and Harris Okbaok falling away from him.
With a short recross examination by Mike White concerning the recoil of the Colt Lawman .357 magnum revolver, Ron Bloomstrand’s time on the witness stand came to an end. That was Friday.
Monday afternoon Mike White called four rebuttal witnesses: Ed Ottinger, the witness, who again described how Ron Bloomstrand had told him the shooting occurred; Harris Okbaok’s brother who said Harris didn’t own a .30-30; Bruce Isabel, who lives across from witness Ed Ottinger’s house, June 23 saw a man in the window shortly before the police showed up; and Officer Joe Lyon who played a videotape of Ron Bloomstrand sometime on the night he was arrested as Lyon was attempting to administer a sobriety test.
After the questioning if these witnesses and cross examination by Jim Ottinger the attorney, the time came for final arguments and the charge to the jury.
Jim Ottinger argued the charge should not be given so late in the day, that it would be better if the jury got the case the following morning, but the judge allowed the process to continue.
After an hour’s recess for members of the jury to go home to gather some clothes and personal effects in anticipation of an overnight session, final arguments began shortly after 6 p.m. Monday.
District attorney Mike White charged into his final argument just as he’d pursued his aggressive questioning throughout the trial. He pointed out what he felt were inconsistencies in Ron Bloomstrand’s “selective memory.” He pointed out the fact that only Ron Bloomstrand’s fingerprints were on the Colt Lawman .357 magnum revolver; he pointed out that several people had testified to Ron Bloomstrand’s mood both before and after the shooting. In a rapid-fire delivery he pointed to what he said were facts that were inconsistent with the accident defense. He mentioned the alleged violent mood, the facts the defendant didn’t call police or an ambulance, his changes in stories.
“Harris Okbaok’s hands are pretty compelling testimony that it wasn’t an accident.” And he attacked what he called “selective memory.”
He also challenged the defense as being “vague on details.”
Then he told the jury what most prosecutors come to say, that they were not just there to see if the accused is innocent but also to find him guilty if that is right.” It is serious for the defendant, yourselves and the community. You are here to find innocent people innocent but also to find guilty people guilty.
“The story he (Ron Bloomstrand) gave doesn’t make sense in the details.”
Jim Ottinger, the defense attorney, then rose to give his final argument for his client. He removed a drawing from the easel still standing in the courtroom and then told the jury if he had done anything to offend the jury not to hold it against his client.
He said the D.A. started with a theory and a hypothesis and the defense submits it was based on faulty logic and faulty evidence. Jim Ottinger first attacked some of the testimony of some of the witnesses and then he said, “I don’t think it was proven he was violent.
“In a case like this we try to see what the reason was. What was the motive? If he was going to make a conscious choice, he’d have a motive. What was the motive here? No motive has been shown. Why would Mr. Bloomstrand want to do away with Mr. Okbaok?”
Jim Ottinger then talked about the inconsistencies he saw in testimony about Bloomstrand’s mood that night. “This person saw a fight, this person didn’t.”
He returned to the motive question. “There has been no motive shown why Mr. Bloomstrand would want to deprive anyone of his life. Without the motive where is the conscious objective to kill someone?”
“The prosecution is based on one piece of circumstantial evidence – Mr. Okbaok’s hands. But that’s flawed.” He showed how from testimony it had been shown that Harris Okbaok raised his hands with the palms inward toward the face. “ A person goes like this …” Jim Ottinger held his hands up with the palms out. “That’s what I looked at when I saw the autopsy report. It’s not logical (palms in), it’s not natural.”
He then defended Ron Bloomstrand’s testimony as truth drawn from the fragments of a memory upset and shocked from the shooting. He then talked his way through the events surrounding the shooting, again from his client’s point of view. Through it all the courtroom was so quiet you could hear the rustling as jurors twiddled their fingers.
Ron Bloomstrand sat quietly but as the moment of the shooting came in Jim Ottinger’s speech, his jaw tightened and he appeared to grow emotional again.
Still, Jim Ottinger continued through the events pausing at times to let points sink in. He maintained the fragments Ron Bloomstrand was able to recall were the truth in the case and on that basis the jury could only find that Ron Bloomstrand was not guilty of any crime.
Mike White then had his chance to rebut Jim Ottinger’s arguments , saying first of all motive need not be considered, that a crime could be caused by emotion, that murder was most often an emotional thing, not rational. “Somebody gets mad and blows up.” He talked about the hands again. He picked up the Colt Lawman .357 magnum revolver and said, “nobody knows what somebody’s going to do unless he’s been faced with one of these.”
And he said, “from your experience a man in a mood to kill has a loaded gun in his hand and something goes wrong, you don’t want to be around.” After a few more short comments Mike White sat down and the case was ready to go to the jury.
Judge Paul Jones read his instructions to the jury about 8:30 p.m. Monday and the jury left the courtroom to begin deliberations.
Shortly after midnight Tuesday morning, the call went out that the jury had reached a verdict. All the principals were rounded up in town and court resumed at about 2 a.m. At that time the jury foreman David G. Harding delivered the verdict to Judge Jones. The judge read aloud the three-part decision which found Ronald Bloomstrand innocent of first degree murder, innocent of second degree murder and guilty of manslaughter. Judge Jones set sentencing for Dec. 10 after a presentence investigation could be carried out. He set bail at $50,000 until a work-release bonding agreement could be worked out.
District Attorney Mike White complimented the Nome Police Department on the quality of work and said he thought the verdict was fair considering the evidence presented. Jim Ottinger, the defense attorney, said the wished the jury had been charged Tuesday morning and that he had expected either an innocent verdict of a lesser negligent homicide verdict. Ron Bloomstrand returned to his cell in the basement of the Post Office building.
The Alaska Tuxedo
 |
| Here's a photo of Alaska's U.S. Rep Don Young decked out in genuine Filson threads that make up the Alaska Tuxedo. Notice the bag and the logo on the wall. |
April 14, 2016
There are a lot of stories going around and a lot of opinions on just what an Alaska tuxedo amounts to. These days people claim any Carhartts suit will do, or any plaid shirt. But the folks who reallly know, say it's the Filson Company pants and jackets that make up the true tuxedo. How do I know, I met the guy who was there when they were invented. Here's his story. – TJ
THE ALASKA TUXEDO
AUGUSTUS BIRCH-ALDER
Some time ago a magazine lady come to a friend of mine askin' about the Alaska tuxedo. Now my friend's got some knowledge about Alaska and such, but he don't know everything. He let her know about me and eventually she come to ask me the same question. Now as you kin probbly tell I ain't much for writin' things down and if'n you think my language ain't so great, you oughta see what my chicken scratchin's is like. Well, I come to know about the question and when I got the chance to be near one of these typewriter machines, I let her know what I know about the Alaska tuxedo. See, I was there when they invented it. Real funny how it happened. Most of those boys is long gone now. I guess I'm about the only one left who was there that night. So I get to write the history.
Happened back in the early Twennies. Me and Spuds McWhortle was up the Koyukuk prospectin'. Spuds had just broke with his partner Gravy Dickens the winter before and me and him set up our stake and headed upriver after breakup to look over some creeks up that way. We hit a little pay along the way, but nothin' like we wanted until too late in the season to do anything about it. They's a little crick up there just past the Alatna that hit our fancy and we begun working our way up it, takin' a pan here and there until we got near this little waterfall. In the basin under that trickle we come across dust – maybe $25 to the pan and commenced to doin' some serious diggin'. Spuds and me worked hardern' we ever remembered, we was so concentrated we wasn't payin' attention to the signs and freezeup caught us. We'd planned to build a raft to get down but we come out of the tent one morning and durned if that creek hadn't froze all the way down to the Koyukuk and the river was about to seize up too.
So, whut we planned was to hike out over the ice hauling a sled with as much gear as we could. The rest of our stuff we planned to leave 'cause we was sure comin' back to that crick in the spring. We washed out all our clothes for the trip downriver and that's when we found we wasn't the only ones surprised by freezeup. Now I don't know how much you all know about this sort of stuff, so I'll explain a little here.
When you wash clothes in the winter time, you hang 'em outside 'til they freeze, then you bring 'em inside and stand 'em up by the stove and by the time they thaw, they're dry. Well, Spuds left the clothes out overnight and in the morning we got one of them Alaska surprises. We come out of the tent and the whole place had been tromped over and everything but the tent itself was ripped to shreds. Only one thing coulda done that and we knowed instantly it was a big old bear come through our camp that night. Spuds' clothes line was ripped down and that fool griz had ate my long johns. They say there's nothin' meaner than a bear out in winter and I think I can now say that's true. Can you think of anything so cold and so mean he'd be hungry enough to eat a man's long johns, specially after they been wore a whole summer doin' hard labor. This was one mean griz. I mean there wasn't nothin' left of them long johns enough to cover a kneecap. We got to thinkin' we might not want to be there when them longhandles started actin' up in his stomach. He was mean enough already. So, we packed everything that was left in a big hurry and made tracks downriver.
There we was with winter comin' on bigtime and I had to make this hike without long johns of any sort. It was cold and there was another problem, too. I don't suppose any of you ever wore a pair of them heavy wool trousers like we used to have. Them things weighed a ton, took two sets of suspenders and a belt to hold them up, specially after a summer's work and I was so skinny from it all. It took all that to hold 'em up and that was without change and dust in the pockets. Also, they was made of the roughest kind of wool imagineable and that come to be the big rub.
I tell you we trudged for days down that crick and then down the Koyukuk to the Yukon. We was hopin' to catch the last of the riverboats up to Fairbanks, but we was too late. Took us two weeks to the Big Yu and surefire, time we come to it, she was froze as solid as that old grizzly's brain. We traded some dust for grub at the post there in Koyukuk, stashed some more gear and headed upriver for Fairbanks where we planned to winter out.
By this time that other problem with them pants was becomin' a real pain, if you know what I mean. All that walkin' with that scratchy fabric in them stovepipe trousers swishin' back and forth was havin' an effect on my pore legs. Time come we was in quite a parade of folks headin' for the Tanana and Fairbanks. One of the folks we run into was Gravy, Spuds' old pardner. Didn't take long 'fore they was squabblin' about this axe handle and that stove and they almost come to blows afore I stepped atwixt them. That little Gravy ripped my shirt in the process and I tell you, I couldn't spare the threads. We finally picked him up and dumped him in a snowbank and we continued on, me with even more ventilation than before. Mind you this was early winter but it got down to the 40s below some of them nights on the river. With them extra holes in my clothes, and them pants rippin' my thighs to bloody meat, we flat hustled for town.
We finally come upon Fairbanks and what a sight that town was, growing up along that slough all fancy and modern as a little town in Alaska could be. It had some high-falutin' ideas, too. All the boys was there. Champagne Ricky was up from Kantishna country. The Slough Goose come over from the flats. Angus McQuarts must hit it big that summer 'cause when we come down Two Street he was marchin' along, blowin' his bagpipe scarin' wimmin and their kids right off the street. He's the one told us about a big dance party comin' up that very night.
Now you might not think two guys just hiked all the way from the Alatna to Fairbanks'd in any shape to do no dancin', but I don't expect you kids comin' to Alaska these days know what it's like out there on the creeks all summer with just another smelly old sourdough to keep you company. We'd get dizzy just tryin' to stay upwind from each other. And, once we come out and got a chance to mingle with other folks and maybe some of them other folks is of the other gender, well, they ain't no tired in the world gonna stop us.
So, we was fired up for Angus' dance. I even tried to tap a few steps right there in the middle of the street but I had to stop 'cause it was then I realized how bad them pants had tore up my legs. See, all that rough wool rubbin' against my tender thighs for all them days just about tore the hide off me. If I was going to do any dancing I was going to need some patchin' up. And, I was going to need some new pants.
First thing we done was head over to Mizz Marble's bathhouse to get the dust off and trim a little hair here and there. I soaked for about four hours, but I never got no redder than my thighs already was. Mizz Marble, she gives me some salve to put on my wounded legs and that helped some. She was all up for that dance, too and she told us the ladies of that town wasn't goin' to put up with no poorly dressed miners and we'd best be gettin' us some formal type threads or they wouldn't even let us into that dance. We paid up and then we went over to Spickle's store to see about some dancin' clothes. Now, a guy lives like we do ain't got room in his outfit to be packin' around nothin' like a dancin' suit and even if he did, ours probbly woulda been tore up by that bear. And I fore sure wasn't puttin' them wool pants back on.
Time we got to Spickle's and lookin' over his wares, he'd sold out most of his fancy duds. There was enough guys in from the cricks with dust and everybody was gettin' gussied up. He had a couple of them banker suits left but me and Spuds couldn't see much sense in buyin' one of them just to go for one dance. Old man Spickle, seein' we was doin' a good job of resistin' spending any of our dust says he's got an idea. Now Spickle's got this wife, well, she don't really belong in the country. Mrs. Spickle, now she's a story in herself, come down from Dawson where they say she did more than just clean house if you know what I mean. She's got more city ideas than Fairbanks can accommodate, I mean she reads things like fashion magazines and such and always dresses up. Spickle asks his wife what she thinks would be the right stuff for us and she hauls out one of them magazines. I'm sure they was both winking at each other, too. She reads how this one fashion place says men's clothes should be what she called functional and geographical and how the clothes should fit the man, more than just fit, if you know what I mean. So, Spickle, right on her cue, trots out these olive colored Filson pants and says to me try 'em on. I did that and then he shows me a nice wool plaid shirt about the same as the airbag on them bagpipes Angus plays. They all looked me up and down and then Mrs. Spickle says it's missin' something so she comes up with this fancy lookin' piece of strung and ties a bow around my neck.
I musta looked pretty silly all told cause as they started to looked me up and down, they also started to smilin', then they started gigglin, then they all broke into real laughter. Then Spickle plops this bowler on my head and they all crack up. Just about this time, Ricky comes in and he's been celebratin' a little and he wants to know what's all that funny. So they tell him they're me up for the dance and they falls to gigglin' all over again.
Ricky looks me over real good and then says he don't see what's all that funny, if that ain't an Alaska tuxedo, then he don't know what is. And if a man can't wear an Alaska tuxedo and get in anyplace he wants to go, then the place ain't worth goin' into. He says he'd just as soon have one, too, if they've got his size and they did and by that time Spuds decides he'll have one too and when we left, Spickle himself was looking for a waist size that'd get around him.
We paid up again and headed down Two Street to the saloon where the boys was gettin' ready for the dance. A couple of them give me a pretty good ribbin' but when they seen the women eyein' us up to dance, they was askin' where they could come across a similar suit. We told them it's called an Alaska tuxedo and Spickle's is havin' a sale. We done some good advertisin' for that little store, 'cause by the time come for the dance, Spickle's sold out all them pants that had probbly been layin' around that store for the past ten years or so. By the time we come to the dance hall, there's only about one guy in the whole town ain't wearin' one of them suits, except Angus, of course, 'cause he's got to wear his kilts. The one other guy turns out to be the man takin' tickets to get into that dance. He takes one look at them suits we was wearin' and says something like it ain't suitable attire for his dance Now every one of the men in that town was wearin' them twill pants and plaid shirts and them string ties. A couple of the rougher women had 'em on, too. While we was stopped there at the door, McKinley-hip Martha shoved her way through the crowd to confront this fancy little ticket taker. She allows as how she wants to dance and how she wants to dance with a man, not some panty waist in a waistcoat. She says if he wants to dance with someone like an Alaska woman, he better go get the proper suit himself, and she pitches him into the nearest snowbank. Then we all filed into that dancehall, leavin' our dollar at the door, just like the little dude mighta still been there.
I don't have to tell you we all had a grand time at that dance and from then on them tuxedos that Ricky named was the thing to wear if a guy wanted to get formal. I hear they's a couple places in them cities now don't allow a fellow in if he's wearin' one. Sure hope I never wander into one by mistake 'cause even at my age I could probbly tear up one of them citified joints. Ain't no place in Alaska for that kind.
Labels: alaska, Alaska fiction, tall tales, Writing
Floating in a winter wonderland
Bette Midler "Angst on a shoestring"
February 26, 2015
A snippet, only longer
"Counting flowers on the wall, that don't bother me at all, playing solitaire 'til dawn with a deck of fifty-one, smoking cigarettes and watching Captain Kangaroo, now don't tell me, I've nothin' to do …" Flowers on the Wall – The Statler Brothers.
Some days it feels like that, like when the biggest accomplishment is moving more firewood from the stacks in the woods to refill the rack just outside the door.
Temperatures floating in the single digits on either side of zero discourage more than a few minutes endured outside even when the sun is shining. Once in a while the temptation hits and a foray to photograph the birds in the yard breaks up the monotony. But even with those: I'm pretty sure I am looking at the same dozen chickadees and the same dozen grosbeaks day after day. Our conversations grow stale for lack of fresh input. There's a larger bird lurking in the back-side woods but not ever where he could be identified or photographed.
You read of old people isolated in their living quarters and wasting away in dingy brownstone apartments, and have to wonder. An idea for something to write about comes and then flees; who would want to read about that anyway, or care what I have to say about it, or, gees, that's a year's commitment at least.
A search through the refrigerator uses some time, not looking for food, looking for something I'm running out of for an excuse to drive into town, my exchange with the woman at the checkout the only interaction with another human being this week.
Then a bowl of soup and nap and it's time for Rachel Maddow, the gateway into the night's prime time but only to watch shows of secondary interest because the good ones are being recorded to watch later when sleep doesn't come in the night. Reading holds no appeal; all it does is add to the creative malaise the idle computer broadcasts into the room.
Sun crosses the southern sky showing briefly in the morning over the mountains to the east, then slipping behind the big mountain in the front yard only to emerge again in late afternoon to cast light and shadows across the yard for about an hour.
More interesting are the moonshadows in the evening as a waxing moon lights the night sky so brightly most of the detail in the yard is discernible and sparkles highlight the snow. Then there's the curiosity about what activated the motion-sensing lights, what critter wandered past their electronic eyes and turned them on. New tracks would tell the tale but that's too much of an effort to find out it's only the neighbor's black cat making his rounds and crossing my path several times in the process.
The opening line in that Statler Brothers song is "I keep hearing you're concerned about my happiness …" and I wonder, at times even tempted to post in the Craigslist missed-connections section for that far-off city on the odd chance the statement is true. So far it remains a temptation, but wording floats through the mind now and then, each time rejected in the silliness the thought provokes. Still there is the last line in the last dream, "From now on it's just us," in two-part harmony.
As for words, the tendrils of that novel reach out from every nook and ravine among the pixels this computer generates. attempting to entwine me in its milieu again, just as the subject of it often entangles me in chats on the same computer. I knew it was difficult writing going in, but eventually it became discouraging and fell by the wayside. Still the tendrils and the woman alternately fill me with optimism and guilty regret but neither the tentacles nor the entreaties can entice me into the plot enough to sit and actually write something.
Kurt Vonnegut wrote about the Statler Brothers' song. He thought it was about divorce. Maybe so, but I don't, although divorce could be one reason a man sits lonely in a room contemplating flowers on wallpaper or the birds at the feeder just outside the window. In one lifetime we all collect a number of people who conceivably could be out there somewhere concerned about our happiness, just as we at times must be concerned or at least think about the happiness of someone in our own pasts. Maybe we ought to give those people a little more thought and perhaps in that thought is redemption. Meanwhile those flowers and those birds have a lot in common, mesmerizing, hypnotic, sculpting a person into granite inaction.
And as Peggy Lee sang so beautifully, "if that's all there is, let's keep on dancing, break out the booze and have a ball." Maybe tomorrow.
What do Truman Capote and the Iditarod Sled Dog Race have in common?
February 28, 2014
On the eve of March every year thoughts of the Iditarod keep coming to mind. It always starts on the first Saturday of that month. Today being a thaw sort of day, I recalled the hasty retreat I beat out of the cabin where I wrote Last Great Race, and tore across the melting snow with all my stuff in a sled and five dogs pulling, hoping to beat breakup on the Susitna River. I had to cross it and if the river ice broke it meant about a 50-mile trek to the highway instead of seven. In that sled was precious cargo – what I thought was the completed manuscript which I had slaved over for the previous three months in a 10 by 14 cabin high above the river.
The dogs and I managed to beat the ice by a couple of days and I pronounced to all who would listen that the book was done, the first book about the Iditarod. I gave it a few weeks to get it out of my mind and then settled in to see what I had done. I usually write through something all the way to the end before I go back and read it. That way I get my ideas down without stopping that flow to correct a spelling mistake and look up some random fact. I sat back and read through the manuscript and when I was finished it had reduced me almost to tears it was so bad. Even to an egotistical, idealistic, overconfident potential author, it was just simply bad. It put me into a depression until the following weekend when another adventure beckoned
At the time I was staying with a friend and occasionally his girl friend joined us. None of us had much money, but we were taking care of a dog lot and there were a number of races in the area that offered small purses as prize money. Several weekends we loaded up the dogs and went out to win drinking money. The dogs were pretty good and we won a few races. They were usually held near a bar and seldom did we head home with any of our winnings left. Such a vivid memory from that time was the three of us in the cab of a pickup rolling down the road to a sled dog race and singing loudly Donna Summer's "On the Radio."
Those jaunts tended to lift my spirits but that awful book lurked in the back of my mind. I knew I couldn't send it to a publisher in its present condition and I didn't have time to do a complete rewrite. Nor did I have a clear idea what was missing, what made it so bad.
That was when I recalled Truman Capote's writing advice. I had seen him on the Dick Cavett Show some years earlier. Just for background, Cavett was the last intellectual night time talk show host. He could keep up with the amazing guests he entertained and could let them speak as well. This one night he was asking Capote about his writing process, and Capote said a couple of things that have stuck with me through the years. Cavett asked him why writers seemed so childish sometimes and Capote reminded him of childhood when you woke up every day and something new was going to happen. He went on to say as most people mature they lose that sense of wonder, but writers and creative people in general still have that. I have used that as an excuse for some of my adventures over the years.
But the statement Capote made that applies here was he thought in order to be a good writer you had to be gay. Now, that knocked me over and I recall having a very negative reaction to it. However, over time, I came to understand what he was saying and in that realized I could still write without changing my sexual preference. The way I interpreted what he said was that it takes the sensitivity of the feminine or gay personality to understand the world closely enough to write about it intimately. Right or wrong, I could live with that interpretation.
Then as I thought about it, I realized what was wrong with my book. All of the people in it were stick figures, marionettes that I was manipulating clumsily through their own actions. Even though this was nonfiction, I had to apply fiction writing techniques. What I had to do was love those people, love them enough to understand and give them humanity, at the same time exposing my own love for them, that almost gay love that Capote talked about. I determined to take the three strongest chapters and rewrite until I had filled those stick figures into whole human beings.
I managed to get that done before I had to go back to the boats for the summer and with those chapters in hand I had something I could send to publishers. I would rewrite the rest of the book when someone bought it.
That happened eleven publishers later. When I set out to rewrite the rest of the book I discovered I had rewritten the three best chapters for a reason. The rest of them were even worse. I had to go back almost to the beginning realizing I only had a skeleton. I also had to interview several of the people again, this time not focusing on the race, but focusing on the person gently digging for those details of personality and reactions to experiences on the trail that would bring them to life on paper. With some I think I succeeded; with others, not so much, but I did get the tale rounded out with real people for the most part and not just stick figures.
The result, anyway, was good enough for the publisher and I was on my way to being a published author with no small influence from Truman Capote of all people.
February 28, 2014
On the eve of March every year thoughts of the Iditarod keep coming to mind. It always starts on the first Saturday of that month. Today being a thaw sort of day, I recalled the hasty retreat I beat out of the cabin where I wrote Last Great Race, and tore across the melting snow with all my stuff in a sled and five dogs pulling, hoping to beat breakup on the Susitna River. I had to cross it and if the river ice broke it meant about a 50-mile trek to the highway instead of seven. In that sled was precious cargo – what I thought was the completed manuscript which I had slaved over for the previous three months in a 10 by 14 cabin high above the river.
The dogs and I managed to beat the ice by a couple of days and I pronounced to all who would listen that the book was done, the first book about the Iditarod. I gave it a few weeks to get it out of my mind and then settled in to see what I had done. I usually write through something all the way to the end before I go back and read it. That way I get my ideas down without stopping that flow to correct a spelling mistake and look up some random fact. I sat back and read through the manuscript and when I was finished it had reduced me almost to tears it was so bad. Even to an egotistical, idealistic, overconfident potential author, it was just simply bad. It put me into a depression until the following weekend when another adventure beckoned
At the time I was staying with a friend and occasionally his girl friend joined us. None of us had much money, but we were taking care of a dog lot and there were a number of races in the area that offered small purses as prize money. Several weekends we loaded up the dogs and went out to win drinking money. The dogs were pretty good and we won a few races. They were usually held near a bar and seldom did we head home with any of our winnings left. Such a vivid memory from that time was the three of us in the cab of a pickup rolling down the road to a sled dog race and singing loudly Donna Summer's "On the Radio."
Those jaunts tended to lift my spirits but that awful book lurked in the back of my mind. I knew I couldn't send it to a publisher in its present condition and I didn't have time to do a complete rewrite. Nor did I have a clear idea what was missing, what made it so bad.
That was when I recalled Truman Capote's writing advice. I had seen him on the Dick Cavett Show some years earlier. Just for background, Cavett was the last intellectual night time talk show host. He could keep up with the amazing guests he entertained and could let them speak as well. This one night he was asking Capote about his writing process, and Capote said a couple of things that have stuck with me through the years. Cavett asked him why writers seemed so childish sometimes and Capote reminded him of childhood when you woke up every day and something new was going to happen. He went on to say as most people mature they lose that sense of wonder, but writers and creative people in general still have that. I have used that as an excuse for some of my adventures over the years.
But the statement Capote made that applies here was he thought in order to be a good writer you had to be gay. Now, that knocked me over and I recall having a very negative reaction to it. However, over time, I came to understand what he was saying and in that realized I could still write without changing my sexual preference. The way I interpreted what he said was that it takes the sensitivity of the feminine or gay personality to understand the world closely enough to write about it intimately. Right or wrong, I could live with that interpretation.
Then as I thought about it, I realized what was wrong with my book. All of the people in it were stick figures, marionettes that I was manipulating clumsily through their own actions. Even though this was nonfiction, I had to apply fiction writing techniques. What I had to do was love those people, love them enough to understand and give them humanity, at the same time exposing my own love for them, that almost gay love that Capote talked about. I determined to take the three strongest chapters and rewrite until I had filled those stick figures into whole human beings.
I managed to get that done before I had to go back to the boats for the summer and with those chapters in hand I had something I could send to publishers. I would rewrite the rest of the book when someone bought it.
That happened eleven publishers later. When I set out to rewrite the rest of the book I discovered I had rewritten the three best chapters for a reason. The rest of them were even worse. I had to go back almost to the beginning realizing I only had a skeleton. I also had to interview several of the people again, this time not focusing on the race, but focusing on the person gently digging for those details of personality and reactions to experiences on the trail that would bring them to life on paper. With some I think I succeeded; with others, not so much, but I did get the tale rounded out with real people for the most part and not just stick figures.
The result, anyway, was good enough for the publisher and I was on my way to being a published author with no small influence from Truman Capote of all people.
To no one in
particular he said, "I suppose I better not let that Smith get too Goddamn
far ahead of me." Then he
crossed the room, passed through the doorway and disappeared into the night.
Angels' light
March 14, 2014
A strange light fell across the woods below the cabin. Accented against a fashionable shade of gray sky and deeper grays in the woods which the light failed to illuminate, a small area fought back against the gloom. More striking than most you see in Alaska, it was one of those lighted areas that show up on some pretty dismal days and you can always spot one if you are elevated enough to see any distance at all. A black forest will suddenly yield to a bright gold meadow and then to black again, a bright red spot on an otherwise dusky tundra, the chartreuse green shining below a mountain forest that lines a beach.
This was that kind of light only brighter, perhaps because it was closer and perhaps because it reflected off snow still clinging to every branch in every tree.
Angels' light. When god in a foul mood decides to let everyone know by using the gray sky curtains masks the land to match his mood, that is the day we get. But the angels lie in wait and as soon as he turns his back or bends to sip his cappuccino or perhaps catch a quick nap, they pull back seams in the curtains and allow some light to brighten the otherwise gray landscape. Then, giggling, they run away, leaving the light to shine for those who chance to see it and, too, wait to hear the uproar when their little prank is discovered. But he knows, he always knows and there are never any repercussions.
March 14, 2014
A strange light fell across the woods below the cabin. Accented against a fashionable shade of gray sky and deeper grays in the woods which the light failed to illuminate, a small area fought back against the gloom. More striking than most you see in Alaska, it was one of those lighted areas that show up on some pretty dismal days and you can always spot one if you are elevated enough to see any distance at all. A black forest will suddenly yield to a bright gold meadow and then to black again, a bright red spot on an otherwise dusky tundra, the chartreuse green shining below a mountain forest that lines a beach.
This was that kind of light only brighter, perhaps because it was closer and perhaps because it reflected off snow still clinging to every branch in every tree.
Angels' light. When god in a foul mood decides to let everyone know by using the gray sky curtains masks the land to match his mood, that is the day we get. But the angels lie in wait and as soon as he turns his back or bends to sip his cappuccino or perhaps catch a quick nap, they pull back seams in the curtains and allow some light to brighten the otherwise gray landscape. Then, giggling, they run away, leaving the light to shine for those who chance to see it and, too, wait to hear the uproar when their little prank is discovered. But he knows, he always knows and there are never any repercussions.
Last night, talkin' 'bout last night
November 15, 2013
Moonlight twinkling off frost-encrusted twigs as it passes through the tangle of leafless forest branches illuminates the way as a thin layer of crisp, cold snow covering frozen leaves crunches underfoot.
Moonlight twinkling off frost-encrusted twigs as it passes through the tangle of leafless forest branches illuminates the way as a thin layer of crisp, cold snow covering frozen leaves crunches underfoot.
1 comment:
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This is almost a haiku.
HAULERS ANONYMOUS
A TALE FROM AUGUSTUS BIRCH-ALDER
The meeting began even before the boys had the big H.A. banner hung at the back of the little community hall stage. The room was packed with rough-looking bush folk, the kind of people who lived alone in the woods and mountains and spent a whole lot more time on the trail than they ever spent in a bath. Crosby Stills was clearing his throat to begin the HA pledge when the rear door opened and closed quietly. He was the only one who saw the stranger enter. The newcomer sat down in the back row so quickly few others made out who he was. In the row right in front of him Spuds McWhortle elbowed his partner Gravy Dickens and they nodded to each other. They had noticed the stranger at each of the past few meetings as he sat quietly in the back, entering just as the meetings began and leaving just before they ended. They understood. Just being here meant you were admitting you had a problem you didn't want others to know about.
Crosby cleared his throat again and recited the pledge to the murmurs of those in the audience following along. It began as each added in his own name: "My name is Crosby Stills, and... I'm ... a hauler...," and went on from there.
When the pledge was finished the boys congratulated each other, shook hands around and then looked again to Crosby at the podium. As he had done at every meeting since the first, he asked them to donate some money to keep the group in refreshments and literature and the like to which most of the poor woods folk laughed or looked at the ceiling, anywhere but directly at the speaker. Then he called for the meat of the meeting.
"Anybody want to make a Testimonial? Anybody new who ain't spoke yet?" A few of the boys turned toward the back where the stranger sat, but there was no movement from that quarter.
Ringo George raised his hand.
"Ringo? You talked before."
"Got more to say. I ain't testifyin' or nuthin', just want to discuss something."
"Okay, Ringo, you got the floor."
Ringo uncurled himself from the chair he was wrapped around and strode to the podium. He stood for a minute, nervously scanning his audience. Then he focused on the top of the wall at the back of the room and said, "My name is Ringo George and I'm a hauler and I got a little complaint here I think we ought to discuss." The others leaned forward in their chairs. "Come on, Ringo, what is it?" somebody shouted.
"It's about this support we're supposed to give each other. Now, when a guy gets the urge he's supposed to go see somebody else, am I right? And that guy's supposed to talk him out of it, right?" They all nodded agreement, though some seemed to hold back just a little.
"Well," Ringo went on, "I ain't so sure some of us is too good at doin' that part. I mean if a guy comes to you and says he's got the urge, by all rights you ought to be talkin' him out of it, right?"
"All right, what happened?"
"I'm gettin' to it, hold on." He paused for a few seconds, as if to decide something, figure out how he was going to say what he had to say. Then, "This last week I had the urge awful. I mean I had to move. I had to move things, lots of things, much as I could pack on my little sled. I mean I had to HAUL. I did what I was supposed to do. What it says in all the brochures. I went down to this guy's cabin, wantin' to be talked out of it. Now, I ain't sayin' who, 'cause I don't doubt any one of us mighta done the same. Well, I says to this guy, I says, 'I got the urge. I gotta pack that sled and I gotta haul somethin' somewhere."
Spuds dug his elbow into Gravy's ribs: "He said the 'H' word," and they both laughed.
The "H" word again. A few stifled laughs punctuated the general of agreement that ran through the hall.
"That ain't support," Ringo said and left the podium to take his seat.
Crosby assumed the podium. "Thanks for that, Ringo," he said and then to the rest of the meeting, he said, "We gotta help each other. That sorta thing doesn't help anybody."
"Helped the guy needed the gas," somebody shouted.
"Boys, this ain't funny. We got a problem and we gotta lick it." He stopped and looked around. "Anybody else want to speak?"
Another hand went up and another figure walked toward the front, only this body was hunched over and the man hobbled a little.
"Did most of his haulin' on his back," Gravy told Spuds.
The new speaker leaned over the podium. "Name's Nash Young and I'm a hauler," he said. "While we's on the subject of neighbor helpin' neighbor, I got a story to tell. Like all of us here, I was haulin' stuff on the trail regular. Seemed like every day it was a trip or two. One day I got to my place and was unloadin' and this guy comes walkin' into the yard. Seems he's buildin' a place up the crick a ways and he says howdy and looks over my kit. We had a cup of coffee and jawed a while and then he left. The next day I come in with another load and here he comes again only this time he's pullin' a little hand sled. I was unloadin' and I come to a box didn't look like any of mine. He says it looks like one of his and sure enough we find his name down in a corner. How it got into my stuff, I'll never know, but there it was. I just throw the stuff off the pile onto the sled, never looked to see what's what 'til I git it back to the cabin. Musta got some of his stuff mixed in.
"Well, next day it happened again, only this time it was a sheet of plywood and sure enough when I was unloading, there he was right on schedule to pick it up. Seemed like every day from then on somehow I'd get somethin' of his mixed in with mine. Couldn't figure how in the heck I was doin' it. Then one day I had some trouble on the trail, got stuck a coupla times and all that. Had to make a third trip that day what with some perishables left out and I got out to the end of the trail way after dark. That's when I surprised this old coot. He had the tarp up on my pile and he was just slippin' a window underneath where I'd be sure to grab it first thing next trip. He'd been doin' it right along, takin' advantage of my disease to git his own haulin' done. And I done it for a long time without eve thinkin'. Haulin' was haulin' and if I hauled another guy's stuff by accident, well that was okay. It was feedin' my habit."
Again some of the boys had a little trouble restraining their laughter but at least aloud they all agreed it was a dastardly deed indeed.
Crosby returned to the vacated podium. "Anybody else want to talk? How about you, stranger?" He nodded toward the back of the room.
The newcomer unlimbered himself. "I guess it's time, isn't it?" he said and received agreement all around.
He walked toward the front. A few in the room recognized him. "Tell you what," Young said to Ringo, "don't always think I'll make it, but if he can, I can. That man's compulsive."
By this time the stranger had reached the stage. He leaned on the podium and looked out at the gathering, hesitating. finally, he began to speak.
"My name's Augustus Birch-Alder, and I guess I'm a hauler." He stopped, looked around the room. "This is my first time talkin' here. I been sittin' in the back listenin' and I guess what I gotta do is tell my whole story here." He stopped again and looked across the faces in front of him. It's not easy to stand up in front of a bunch of strangers and tell them about your weaknesses. They'd all been there before, they'd all done it and they all tried to make it easy for him.
"I don't mind tellin' you boys the judge sent me here. It was either this or jail time, so I opted for here.
"I started like a lotta guys. I wanted to move to the woods, get away from town and people, live clean and free. I went out to my land with jest a backpack and what I could haul in a red sled." More than a few pairs of eyes in the place expressed an understanding for that.
"Well, I got out there, set up my tent and commenced to livin' the good life. Started cuttin' trees for my house and lived with it for quite a time. I even got to eatin' the local flora and fauna. Then one day I got to hankerin' for some fresher food and also thought maybe a box of nails'd make things go a lot easier. I dragged that sled to town and filled it and dragged it back to my place. I unloaded, looked at the pile, then looked around. What I thought was, maybe a few shop-cut boards'd make things go better so off I headed to town again.
"I brought in one load of lumber on that little sled but right there I decided I was going to need more, so I went right on back to town. This time it was moren' I could drag myself, so I bought one of them snowmachines and I could haul ten times the stuff. When I seed how easy it was with that little machine, I took to that trail like there was no tomorrow. I mean I started haulin' bigger and bigger loads until I got 'em so big I couldn't haul 'em with that little snowmachine no more. That's when I went and bought the Cat. Now that dozer was a haulin' machine. The stuff I dragged down that trail, you wouldn't believe."
By now the boys in the hall were quiet, listening. Not even the worst of them had gone so far as to buy a bulldozer.
"I never knew it was happenin'. I just kept draggin' stuff down that trail. The pile of things at my place got bigger and bigger, but I just kept to that trail. Then one day something strange happened. I knew it soon's I woke up in my tent, but I couldn't figure it out at first. It was late enough, but it was like the sun didn't rise. I got dressed and went out and it scared me, I'll tell you. There I was standin' out, but no sun. I thought it never come up. For a minute I thought this was the end of the world. I was about to start prayin', and then I took a few steps down the trail and that's when I realized what it was I'd done. I built that pile of stuff I'd been ahulin' down that trail so big it went and blocked out the sun. That's how much stuff I hauled down that trail. When it blocked the sun I knew I had to do something. I was in trouble. I hightailed it out of there. I headed right for town, no Cat, no snowmachine, no sled, not even a backpack. I just ran to town. And that's where the trouble come. I never should of tried to quit cold turkey.
"I run right to my woman's house. She's right next to a store so I didn't even have to bring groceries all that far. I did fine there for a couple of days and then one day while she was to work, it come over me again. I didn't even know it, I wasn't even all that aware of what I was doing. But, I started haulin' with a vengeance. I grabbed a kid's little red wagon and I started haulin'. In two hours I had all her living room furniture and half a bedroom down to the corner. I was headin' back for the dining room table and that's when the police come. 'Fore I knowed it I was spread-eagled on a car, read my rights and accused of grand larceny. They hauled me off to the hoosegow and up before a judge before I really even figured out what I'd done myself. I tried to explain to that judge and I think he was beginnin' to understand. Said he had a weekend cabin in the woods once but he never did get everything he wanted out there. Said he finally give it up. That old judge he give me the choice of jail time or meetin' with you boys here. Meantime, whilst I was coolin' my heels in that jail I gets this note from my woman sayin' she can't abide no man steals her furniture and good-by. So here I am. Don't mind tellin' you boys, I'm a broken man. Lost my woman, lost my pride, did jail time and got no place to live, less'n I haul some more stuff out to that cabin site. All I got in the world's that mountain of stuff out there, but I know if I go, I'm going to need more of somethin' and the whole thing starts up again. I come here for help. I'm a hauler and there ain't no doubt, no doubt at'all."
He stopped, shuddering, staring into the upturned faces. And then the voices of understanding began returning to him. They each walked up and shook his hand, said it'd be all right, he was among friends, they'd all been there, we're here to help. Augustus Birch-Alder stood there shaking, but gradually the boys brought him around again.
Crosby Stills cleared his throat. "We gotta thank Augustus for that one. A horror story for all of us to remember. Thanks. It helps all of us to know there's others been on that trail with a heavy load. Thank you, brother. It's the first step to recovery. We're here to help with each step and drag the others along with us as we go."
He stopped, looked around and then spoke again. "I guess that's about all the business we can take for tonight. How about if we quit and have a little refreshment?" Everyone agreed. Crosby looked across the room toward the door that led into the kitchen area. He hollered, "Okay, Maggie, you can bring the cart out now."
Maggie, the cook and waitress and just about everything else around the community hall, backed into the room pulling a cart full of snack foods and a big coffee urn.
As the cart came full into the room, Gravy Dickens stood up and took a step toward it. "Here, let me help," he said. Nash Young, catching Gravy's drift offered, "I'll give you a little push." Spuds McWhortle just a step behind Gravy shouted, "If anybody's gonna haul that cart across this room, it'll be me.
Gravy shouted back, "I was here first," but few of them heard him as he went down under the stampede of feet trying to get to that cart. Three more jumped into the fray pushing, pulling, gouging, kicking and, yes, hauling that cart across the room. The whole thing almost turned into a full-fledged brawl before they finally wrestled the cart to the serving table. Maggie crawled out from under the tangle of arms and legs on her hands and knees, her hair disheveled and looking like she was ready to dive back in herself. She stood up and walked over to where Crosby Stills was watching.
Maggie knew. Crosby knew. Some of these boys was going to need a whole lot more therapy than anybody thought they would.
Copyright © Tim Jones
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This is almost a haiku.
HAULERS ANONYMOUS
A TALE FROM AUGUSTUS BIRCH-ALDER
The meeting began even before the boys had the big H.A. banner hung at the back of the little community hall stage. The room was packed with rough-looking bush folk, the kind of people who lived alone in the woods and mountains and spent a whole lot more time on the trail than they ever spent in a bath. Crosby Stills was clearing his throat to begin the HA pledge when the rear door opened and closed quietly. He was the only one who saw the stranger enter. The newcomer sat down in the back row so quickly few others made out who he was. In the row right in front of him Spuds McWhortle elbowed his partner Gravy Dickens and they nodded to each other. They had noticed the stranger at each of the past few meetings as he sat quietly in the back, entering just as the meetings began and leaving just before they ended. They understood. Just being here meant you were admitting you had a problem you didn't want others to know about.
Crosby cleared his throat again and recited the pledge to the murmurs of those in the audience following along. It began as each added in his own name: "My name is Crosby Stills, and... I'm ... a hauler...," and went on from there.
When the pledge was finished the boys congratulated each other, shook hands around and then looked again to Crosby at the podium. As he had done at every meeting since the first, he asked them to donate some money to keep the group in refreshments and literature and the like to which most of the poor woods folk laughed or looked at the ceiling, anywhere but directly at the speaker. Then he called for the meat of the meeting.
"Anybody want to make a Testimonial? Anybody new who ain't spoke yet?" A few of the boys turned toward the back where the stranger sat, but there was no movement from that quarter.
Ringo George raised his hand.
"Ringo? You talked before."
"Got more to say. I ain't testifyin' or nuthin', just want to discuss something."
"Okay, Ringo, you got the floor."
Ringo uncurled himself from the chair he was wrapped around and strode to the podium. He stood for a minute, nervously scanning his audience. Then he focused on the top of the wall at the back of the room and said, "My name is Ringo George and I'm a hauler and I got a little complaint here I think we ought to discuss." The others leaned forward in their chairs. "Come on, Ringo, what is it?" somebody shouted.
"It's about this support we're supposed to give each other. Now, when a guy gets the urge he's supposed to go see somebody else, am I right? And that guy's supposed to talk him out of it, right?" They all nodded agreement, though some seemed to hold back just a little.
"Well," Ringo went on, "I ain't so sure some of us is too good at doin' that part. I mean if a guy comes to you and says he's got the urge, by all rights you ought to be talkin' him out of it, right?"
"All right, what happened?"
"I'm gettin' to it, hold on." He paused for a few seconds, as if to decide something, figure out how he was going to say what he had to say. Then, "This last week I had the urge awful. I mean I had to move. I had to move things, lots of things, much as I could pack on my little sled. I mean I had to HAUL. I did what I was supposed to do. What it says in all the brochures. I went down to this guy's cabin, wantin' to be talked out of it. Now, I ain't sayin' who, 'cause I don't doubt any one of us mighta done the same. Well, I says to this guy, I says, 'I got the urge. I gotta pack that sled and I gotta haul somethin' somewhere."
Spuds dug his elbow into Gravy's ribs: "He said the 'H' word," and they both laughed.
Ringo didn't even hear them. "This guy listened to me and smiled and acted like he was understandin'. I kept on talkin' and kept on tryin' to talk myself out of it, but he wasn't sayin' nuthin' finally I run out of things to say. Now, this is where he's supposed to talk me out of it, right? Well, he still didn't say nuthin'. I ain't gittin' no support at'all and just about when I'm fixin' to up and leave, my neighbor, my friend, my support mind you, the guy that talked me into comin' to these meetings in the first place, he says 'Ringo, don't go.' Then, of course, I argued a little, like I needed a little more convincin'. To that he says, 'I done my part. You oughtn't to go.' Then he waits a minute for this to sink in and then if you can believe it he says this: he says, 'If you're so bound determined to go, I got a couple of gas cans out there at the trail head. Maybe you could haul 'em in for me.'"
The "H" word again. A few stifled laughs punctuated the general of agreement that ran through the hall.
"That ain't support," Ringo said and left the podium to take his seat.
Crosby assumed the podium. "Thanks for that, Ringo," he said and then to the rest of the meeting, he said, "We gotta help each other. That sorta thing doesn't help anybody."
"Helped the guy needed the gas," somebody shouted.
"Boys, this ain't funny. We got a problem and we gotta lick it." He stopped and looked around. "Anybody else want to speak?"
Another hand went up and another figure walked toward the front, only this body was hunched over and the man hobbled a little.
"Did most of his haulin' on his back," Gravy told Spuds.
The new speaker leaned over the podium. "Name's Nash Young and I'm a hauler," he said. "While we's on the subject of neighbor helpin' neighbor, I got a story to tell. Like all of us here, I was haulin' stuff on the trail regular. Seemed like every day it was a trip or two. One day I got to my place and was unloadin' and this guy comes walkin' into the yard. Seems he's buildin' a place up the crick a ways and he says howdy and looks over my kit. We had a cup of coffee and jawed a while and then he left. The next day I come in with another load and here he comes again only this time he's pullin' a little hand sled. I was unloadin' and I come to a box didn't look like any of mine. He says it looks like one of his and sure enough we find his name down in a corner. How it got into my stuff, I'll never know, but there it was. I just throw the stuff off the pile onto the sled, never looked to see what's what 'til I git it back to the cabin. Musta got some of his stuff mixed in.
"Well, next day it happened again, only this time it was a sheet of plywood and sure enough when I was unloading, there he was right on schedule to pick it up. Seemed like every day from then on somehow I'd get somethin' of his mixed in with mine. Couldn't figure how in the heck I was doin' it. Then one day I had some trouble on the trail, got stuck a coupla times and all that. Had to make a third trip that day what with some perishables left out and I got out to the end of the trail way after dark. That's when I surprised this old coot. He had the tarp up on my pile and he was just slippin' a window underneath where I'd be sure to grab it first thing next trip. He'd been doin' it right along, takin' advantage of my disease to git his own haulin' done. And I done it for a long time without eve thinkin'. Haulin' was haulin' and if I hauled another guy's stuff by accident, well that was okay. It was feedin' my habit."
Again some of the boys had a little trouble restraining their laughter but at least aloud they all agreed it was a dastardly deed indeed.
Crosby returned to the vacated podium. "Anybody else want to talk? How about you, stranger?" He nodded toward the back of the room.
The newcomer unlimbered himself. "I guess it's time, isn't it?" he said and received agreement all around.
He walked toward the front. A few in the room recognized him. "Tell you what," Young said to Ringo, "don't always think I'll make it, but if he can, I can. That man's compulsive."
By this time the stranger had reached the stage. He leaned on the podium and looked out at the gathering, hesitating. finally, he began to speak.
"My name's Augustus Birch-Alder, and I guess I'm a hauler." He stopped, looked around the room. "This is my first time talkin' here. I been sittin' in the back listenin' and I guess what I gotta do is tell my whole story here." He stopped again and looked across the faces in front of him. It's not easy to stand up in front of a bunch of strangers and tell them about your weaknesses. They'd all been there before, they'd all done it and they all tried to make it easy for him.
"I don't mind tellin' you boys the judge sent me here. It was either this or jail time, so I opted for here.
"I started like a lotta guys. I wanted to move to the woods, get away from town and people, live clean and free. I went out to my land with jest a backpack and what I could haul in a red sled." More than a few pairs of eyes in the place expressed an understanding for that.
"Well, I got out there, set up my tent and commenced to livin' the good life. Started cuttin' trees for my house and lived with it for quite a time. I even got to eatin' the local flora and fauna. Then one day I got to hankerin' for some fresher food and also thought maybe a box of nails'd make things go a lot easier. I dragged that sled to town and filled it and dragged it back to my place. I unloaded, looked at the pile, then looked around. What I thought was, maybe a few shop-cut boards'd make things go better so off I headed to town again.
"I brought in one load of lumber on that little sled but right there I decided I was going to need more, so I went right on back to town. This time it was moren' I could drag myself, so I bought one of them snowmachines and I could haul ten times the stuff. When I seed how easy it was with that little machine, I took to that trail like there was no tomorrow. I mean I started haulin' bigger and bigger loads until I got 'em so big I couldn't haul 'em with that little snowmachine no more. That's when I went and bought the Cat. Now that dozer was a haulin' machine. The stuff I dragged down that trail, you wouldn't believe."
By now the boys in the hall were quiet, listening. Not even the worst of them had gone so far as to buy a bulldozer.
"I never knew it was happenin'. I just kept draggin' stuff down that trail. The pile of things at my place got bigger and bigger, but I just kept to that trail. Then one day something strange happened. I knew it soon's I woke up in my tent, but I couldn't figure it out at first. It was late enough, but it was like the sun didn't rise. I got dressed and went out and it scared me, I'll tell you. There I was standin' out, but no sun. I thought it never come up. For a minute I thought this was the end of the world. I was about to start prayin', and then I took a few steps down the trail and that's when I realized what it was I'd done. I built that pile of stuff I'd been ahulin' down that trail so big it went and blocked out the sun. That's how much stuff I hauled down that trail. When it blocked the sun I knew I had to do something. I was in trouble. I hightailed it out of there. I headed right for town, no Cat, no snowmachine, no sled, not even a backpack. I just ran to town. And that's where the trouble come. I never should of tried to quit cold turkey.
"I run right to my woman's house. She's right next to a store so I didn't even have to bring groceries all that far. I did fine there for a couple of days and then one day while she was to work, it come over me again. I didn't even know it, I wasn't even all that aware of what I was doing. But, I started haulin' with a vengeance. I grabbed a kid's little red wagon and I started haulin'. In two hours I had all her living room furniture and half a bedroom down to the corner. I was headin' back for the dining room table and that's when the police come. 'Fore I knowed it I was spread-eagled on a car, read my rights and accused of grand larceny. They hauled me off to the hoosegow and up before a judge before I really even figured out what I'd done myself. I tried to explain to that judge and I think he was beginnin' to understand. Said he had a weekend cabin in the woods once but he never did get everything he wanted out there. Said he finally give it up. That old judge he give me the choice of jail time or meetin' with you boys here. Meantime, whilst I was coolin' my heels in that jail I gets this note from my woman sayin' she can't abide no man steals her furniture and good-by. So here I am. Don't mind tellin' you boys, I'm a broken man. Lost my woman, lost my pride, did jail time and got no place to live, less'n I haul some more stuff out to that cabin site. All I got in the world's that mountain of stuff out there, but I know if I go, I'm going to need more of somethin' and the whole thing starts up again. I come here for help. I'm a hauler and there ain't no doubt, no doubt at'all."
He stopped, shuddering, staring into the upturned faces. And then the voices of understanding began returning to him. They each walked up and shook his hand, said it'd be all right, he was among friends, they'd all been there, we're here to help. Augustus Birch-Alder stood there shaking, but gradually the boys brought him around again.
Crosby Stills cleared his throat. "We gotta thank Augustus for that one. A horror story for all of us to remember. Thanks. It helps all of us to know there's others been on that trail with a heavy load. Thank you, brother. It's the first step to recovery. We're here to help with each step and drag the others along with us as we go."
He stopped, looked around and then spoke again. "I guess that's about all the business we can take for tonight. How about if we quit and have a little refreshment?" Everyone agreed. Crosby looked across the room toward the door that led into the kitchen area. He hollered, "Okay, Maggie, you can bring the cart out now."
Maggie, the cook and waitress and just about everything else around the community hall, backed into the room pulling a cart full of snack foods and a big coffee urn.
As the cart came full into the room, Gravy Dickens stood up and took a step toward it. "Here, let me help," he said. Nash Young, catching Gravy's drift offered, "I'll give you a little push." Spuds McWhortle just a step behind Gravy shouted, "If anybody's gonna haul that cart across this room, it'll be me.
Gravy shouted back, "I was here first," but few of them heard him as he went down under the stampede of feet trying to get to that cart. Three more jumped into the fray pushing, pulling, gouging, kicking and, yes, hauling that cart across the room. The whole thing almost turned into a full-fledged brawl before they finally wrestled the cart to the serving table. Maggie crawled out from under the tangle of arms and legs on her hands and knees, her hair disheveled and looking like she was ready to dive back in herself. She stood up and walked over to where Crosby Stills was watching.
Maggie knew. Crosby knew. Some of these boys was going to need a whole lot more therapy than anybody thought they would.
Copyright © Tim Jones
The times they are 'changin'
Another long snippet
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.
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.
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.
A fictional adventure into a cluttered mind
I came across this story a couple of days ago. I wrote it several years ago and as best I can remember, only one other person has ever read it. Since I read it the other day I have been wrestling with the idea of posting it. So far I haven't published much fiction on here, but today, watching the wind bend huge trees like it did the night five of them fell, I went through the story again and decided maybe it is a good day for it. Warning, it is fairly long.
Drive the road slowly
Copyright © 2014 Tim Jones
"I want to get a job erasing."
"We can go to a movie. It's going to be late when we get there. But tomorrow we can go see a movie."
I came across this story a couple of days ago. I wrote it several years ago and as best I can remember, only one other person has ever read it. Since I read it the other day I have been wrestling with the idea of posting it. So far I haven't published much fiction on here, but today, watching the wind bend huge trees like it did the night five of them fell, I went through the story again and decided maybe it is a good day for it. Warning, it is fairly long.
Drive the road slowly
Tim Jones
Copyright © 2014 Tim Jones
"I want to get a job erasing."
The question, demand, came out of the jumble in the backseat, as much of a disorganized jumble of luggage and modern instructional materials as three people could throw in there in the rush to get into the car and out of the cold, cold that knocked the thermometer's mercury all the way down to something like 40 degrees below zero. It came, too, from the jumble of a mind thrown awry for reasons experts were just beginning to understand, a jumble that produced excitement, enthusiasm, innocence.
"I'm not sure there are any jobs erasing, Seth. Why do you want a job erasing?"
"I want a job, I want to move out. I want to move to Anchorage. Can I move to Anchorage?"
The driver: "Maybe you can move to Anchorage. We'll have to see. Do you want to get a job and move to Anchorage."
"I want a job. I want a job, erasing. I like erasing. I want to see a movie. I want to see two movies. Can we go to a movie tonight?"
"We can go to a movie. It's going to be late when we get there. But tomorrow we can go see a movie."
"I want to see Rain Man. Can we see Rain Man?"
"Yes. I want to see Rain Man, too."
"Did you ever see the movie Silverado? I saw Silverado. A guy went into a place and ordered a drink. They told him they wouldn't give him any. The sheriff suspended him from town. I don't want to drink alcoholic beverages. They're bad for you. Why do people drink them when they're bad for you? I won't smoke ever. I'm never going to smoke and I'm never going to drink things with alcohol in them. The sheriff suspended him from town. He suspended him from town. Why did he do that?"
The passenger: "Was he a bad guy?'
"No, I think he was a good guy. Why would they suspend him from town?"
The passenger, again: "He was a stranger in the town. And sometimes people who live in a small town are very close and when a stranger comes to town they don't trust him. They look at his clothes and the way he does things and if he looks like a bad guy they don't want him around."
"But why did he get suspended from town? Am I a stranger? Will I be a stranger in Anchorage? Will they suspend me from town?"
The driver, "No, most of that only happens in movies. Yes, you'll be a stranger in Anchorage, but people don’t just throw you out of town."
"Why did they suspend him from town?"
The passenger: "When somebody causes trouble they throw him out in the movies. They tell him to get out of town. 'This town's not big enough for the both of us.'"
The driver: "It's called being 86ed, 86ed when a bartender decides somebody is causing trouble, fighting with people or..."
The passenger: "...throwing up on people..."
"Throwing up on people. The bartender says, "you’re 86ed, you're
out of here."
"Can I get a job? I want to get a job. In Anchorage."
"Yes, you can get a job. Maybe not in Anchorage. When you graduate from school. How old are you Seth?"
"I'm l7, 17 and a half. Is that old enough to get a job? I want a job erasing."
The Driver. "I'm not sure there are any jobs erasing. Is there anything else you can do?"
"I have a job at school. I just got a job at school."
"What do you do at school."
"I erase the blackboards."
"Is that your whole job?
"No, I do vacuuming, too. I vacuum places."
"Do you like that?"
"Yes, I like vacuuming."
"Well, there are jobs vacuuming. Janitorial."
"Janitorial, Janitorial. Yahoo. Janitorial. I can do janitorial. Yahoo. I can do janitorial in Anchorage."
The volume of music from the tape player grew, filled the car. Outside, snow-frosted mountains rose above a narrow river valley, a low winter sun sending blue shadow to give texture to the crags and crevices. Cold, that sun for all its promise meant only that it was clear, clear and cold outside the car.
The passenger: "If you were to have a baby this way. How would you go about it? I mean how do you find the guy. How do you choose. And if you find the right person, what happens to him?"
"I'm not sure. I haven't thought it all through yet. I know several men, nice men, right now."
"Breeding stock," a laugh.
"Yes, I suppose," a nervous laugh. "I don't want to get married again. I really don't think I want to get married again."
And, from the jumble in the back, "Go away, go away, get out of here. Get out of here."
"I don't think I could do that. Just have a baby with a woman and then leave. I would want to participate. It's a responsibility. I think it would be tough to find someone you'd consider as a possible father who wouldn't want to participate."
"I know. There's artificial insemination. That's possible."
"Did you ever see the cartoon in Playboy?"
"Which one?"
"There's these two women walking into a sperm bank talking. Walking out of the building is this gnomy looking guy with warts and a hunchback and he's counting a wad of money."
"How sensitive of you to say that," she thought it but said, only, "That's a good one."
Cold intruded into the conversation. A window had opened.
In back a head was out the window, hair flying in the breeze, a face reddening in temperatures of 40 below, at 65 miles an hour.
"Seth, what are you doing? Close that window."
"Your smoke. I was getting your smoke out of the car."
"Better close the window."
"Here, I'll crack the wing."
"Seth, close the window. He's going to open the little one here. That will let the smoke out.
"All right. I'll close the window."
The Driver: "You must be excited going to Anchorage, too. Glad to get out of that small town for a while."
The Passenger: Well, yes and no. I do have work to do. But I'm not leaving under the happiest of circumstances. We've kind of gone our separate ways."
"I'm sorry."
A nod. A closed look. Please drop the subject.
"Who can you talk about private things with? Who do you tell private things to?"
"How about your mother, Seth. Sometimes you can talk things over with your mother. Seth, do you call her mother, or do you call her Eileen?"
"I call her mother. It's OK. I had another mother. I called her Mary. But I call Eileen Mother."
"What happened to Mary?"
"She went away one day. She went away. Then my father went out and found me a new one. I call her Mother. Can I talk about private things with her?"
"Sometimes you can. Sometimes mothers aren't the right person to talk about private things."
"Then who can you talk about private things with?"
"Why do you ask all this? Do you have private things you want to talk about, Seth?"
Silence grows in the back seat. Silence within the sounds of the rock music."
"Do you want to talk about private things, Seth?"
"Yes."
"You can talk to me Seth. You can talk to us."
"I want to talk about sex. I want to talk about making love. Can I make love? Can I have sex?"
"Yes, Seth, you can."
"Can I make love, can I get married and make love with a woman?"
"Yes, you probably can."
"Oh, Boy."
"Have you ever had sex, Seth. Have you ever touched a girl?"
Silence blossoms again in the back of the car. Silence within the music. Then, "No."
"Have you ever masturbated, Seth?"
"What's that? What's masturbated?"
"Have you ever touched yourself? Have you ever touched your penis?"
The back seat went quiet again. So did the passenger side in front.
Staring out the window, "How do women talk about this? How can these words come out so frankly, so bluntly. She works with people like this all the time. It must come up often. There must be an incredible tension among people like this, people who know about sex, but probably never have had and probably never will have it. But to hear the words from a woman's mouth, penis, masturbate. How does she talk about this so frankly? Is it clinical technique? Or, is she like this? Does she talk like this? And why am I so concerned about it? It doesn't really offend. It doesn't shock. It fits right here. It's the right thing to say. But why does it sound so blunt. It sounds so incongruous coming from her. Are you really Prufrock after all?"
"It's all right, Seth, it's all right to touch yourself. Everybody does it. Women do it too. It's all right to touch yourself."
"Can I make love? Can I find a woman and make love with her."
"In time, maybe, yes, maybe you can find a woman and make love with her."
"Have sex?"
"Yes, in time."
Again the silence in the back seat. Paul Simon sings "Call me Al" for the sixth or seventh time in a row, a time of absorption, absorbing a thought of great magnitude.
The passenger, "When you do this, you have to go slow, Seth. You can't just grab the first woman you see and marry her and have sex. You have to get to know her. It takes time."
Still silence.
The passenger: "I'm a great one to be advising anyone on that. Here I am a 46-year-old adolescent, blunder through all this and then I decide I can tell a kid what he should do with women."
The driver stares straight ahead, the hint of a smile curls the visible side of her mouth. Eyes straight ahead, no comment. You said it, not me.
"I want to make love in a wet suit. Can I make love in a wet suit?"
"Ha- Ha. I don't know, Seth. It sounds awfully uncomfortable."
"I can do it. I want to make love in a wetsuit."
"People do it in water, but I never heard of anybody doing it in a wetsuit. It would be awfully uncomfortable.
"I do. I want to go with a woman and make love in a wetsuit."
The Passenger: Maybe a big one. Room enough for a pal and you?"
"What?"
"He said, maybe a big one. One both of you could get into."
"They have zippers."
"Maybe you could, don't they zip all the way down around the crotch."
Another one of those words, those frank words. "You wouldn't want to get caught in it."
"What?"
"He said you wouldn’t want to get caught in it. You wouldn't want to get your penis caught in the zipper. It would hurt."
Another one.
"You can keep the zipper down."
The Passenger: "Yeah, zipper down, penis up." Now I said one.
"...If you'll be my bodyguard, I can be your long lost pal..."
"Whew, a wetsuit."
"Might work." Can I talk like her, around her? Here I'm telling him to go slow with women. Then we're talking about sex in all these terms, and here I am, bleeding, because I haven't learned to go slowly myself. Why can't I slow down, why can't I let things happen. Slowly, we might have found something. Intensely it didn't work. But they're games, aren't they, games. If you love, you love and you go the limit. Who am I protecting telling him slow? Women I think. But, Seth, too. He gets hurt here. Things he won't understand will happen. So much happens when another person is involved and he isn't ready for that. Can we prevent, at least, him getting into trouble, serious trouble. The blind innocent so filled with enthusiasm without the tools to function. Trouble coming, for Seth, maybe for others. Ha. He'll probably get along better than I do. Where do I get off advising him about women. If I knew anything I wouldn't be in this car. I wouldn’t be going to the same city as Seth, or if I did it would be with his enthusiasm, not this incredible sorrow, this torment.
"Can I meet girls in Anchorage? I want to meet girls in Anchorage."
Can I meet girls in Anchorage? Do I want to?
"Maybe you can meet girls in Anchorage, Seth." The driver. "John might introduce you to some girls. We're going to a party tomorrow night. Maybe you'll meet some girls there."
"I want to go to a party tonight. Tonight. I want to meet girls. I want to meet a girl and marry her and we can make love."
The passenger: "What about me. Can I meet girls. Can I go to parties?"
"You're on your own."
"...let me be your bodyguard, you can be my long lost pal..." Paul Simon again.
The driver: "I was going out with this man. I liked him. I adored him. I worshiped him. We went out for almost three years. One day I came home. It had been a tough day. One of the attendants had molested one of the patients. He had molested one of the men and he was being arrested. It was something I couldn't deal with. I needed some support. He screamed at me. He screamed. 'That's what you get for hanging around with a bunch of homos.' It ended right there. I lost so much right there. It was over. Then I couldn't get rid of him. He kept bothering me. I lost all respect for him. He wouldn't leave me alone. I finally just had to tell him and his family to keep him away from me. It took a long time, but he finally left me alone. He would sneak into my house or sit in his car out on the street."
The passenger: "Isn't it amazing how you can know someone and then realize you don't know them at all. You went out for three years. And you didn't know him."
"What's generous to a fault? What does that mean, generous to a fault?"
The driver: "Well, Seth, oh, do you want to try this one?"
"I think I can. Seth, generous to a fault. That means you're so generous, that you actually hurt yourself."
"Hurt yourself?"
"Not really hurt yourself. Here, try this. Suppose you have a hundred dollars, OK? You need ten dollars for food. A friend comes to you and says he needs a hundred dollars. If you give him 90 dollars which is most of what he needs, you still have your ten dollars for food. If you give him the whole hundred dollars, then you don't have any money left for food. Then you have hurt yourself. You have been generous to a fault. You gave all your money to your friend and now you don't have any food."
"But Metropolis was generous to a fault. In Superman III the city of Metropolis was generous to a fault."
"Sometimes these phrases are expanded, sometimes they're used to describe a broader concept."
"What?"
Help.
A look from the driver. You're in this now. You got into it, you get out.
"OK. Metropolis was generous to a fault. They let the Joker in. They let him stay. He was a stranger. He was a bad guy, but Metropolis let him in, let him stay, they didn't suspend him from town. Metropolis was generous to a fault."
"Is Anchorage generous to a fault?"
The driver: "No, Seth, Anchorage is not generous to a fault. It's not a bad place, but you have to make your own way. If you do things right Anchorage will be all right."
Paul Simon: "...da da dad da, daaa, call me Al." Then, louder. Absorption.
The driver: "I like the way you explain things. You do it differently. You're good at it."
"I don't know. Maybe I can do it because I'm not in the field. I don't know the terms, I don't know the cliches. I don't couch things in the clinical. Maybe when you're so close to something, you have trouble extracting yourself from everything you know."
"You're right, maybe. We get too close to it. Our big drawback in the field is, we know what we're doing."
"Don't you wish we could disassociate ourselves from things sometimes?"
"It might help."
"That's a good line. The biggest thing wrong is we know what we're doing."
"Let's pull in here and use the bathroom. Do you need to use the bathroom, Seth?"
"Yes, yes. I need to use the bathroom."
They stop at a lodge. The driver and Seth leave the car running in the cold, enter the log building and a few minutes later, return. The car takes to the road again.
The driver: "You don't need to turn out the lights when you're done in a public bathroom, Seth. You turn out the light at home, in a private home, but you don’t need to turn them out in a public bathroom. That's what the lady was upset about."
"You just turn them off at home, OK."
"...let me be your body guard..."
"I'm glad you’re playing that tape, Seth, I like that tape. It's one of my favorites."
"...You can be my long, lost pal."
"I'm just drifting through the day until night."
"What? What did you say? Seth. That's something you could put into a song."
"I think it's already in a song."
"Is that your words, Seth, part of a song?"
"Part of a song."
"Some of the new music I just don't like. It's just noise."
"I know. This is one of my favorites, too. I built my whole cabin to this album."
"I like how the light changes on the mountains, look it's so deep blue right now."
"At my cabin, from my picture window, you can see the mountains, McKinley, Foraker and Hunter. The first day I put that window in, well, the next day, I sat there with a jug of wine from morning until night and watched the light change on the mountain. It went from pink in the morning to blue to white then to blue again and lavender and almost purple. That night, there was a full moon and you could see the mountain in the moonlight – silver. Not much in Alaska really takes my breath away any more, but when I realized I could see the mountain, and it was a hundred miles away, at night, it took my breath away."
"I'd like to see your cabin some time."
"Any time, let me know, you’re welcome anytime. We can go out there."
"...if you'll be my body guard."
"I'm the best. I'm the best there is. If I get a job, I'm the best. I can get a job. Does everybody in the world know me."
"I don't think everybody in the world knows you, Seth. There are a
lot of people in the world. A lot of people in Anchorage who don't know you."
"But most people know me."
"No, Seth, not even most people know you. You're from a very small place and the world is very big. Most of the people aren't even in Alaska and all those people don't know you."
"I'm the best. I'm proving my innocence because I'm the best."
"Competency. Don't you mean competency, you're proving your competency by being the best."
"Competence."
"Competence? What is competence?"
"Seth, that means you're good at something, you're competent."
The passenger: "No, he was right. Don't you see? He was proving his innocence by being the best, proving his innocence by thinking he's the best. Can I write this down?"
"I wish you would. Write it."
"I'll always be on time. I'll always be there on time at my job. Janitorial. I want to do janitorial. I'll always be there on time."
The driver: "That's good, Seth. It's good to always be on time." A look to the right. "I'm always a half hour late. There's always something to do, somebody wants something. I'm all ready to go and one of my kids does something."
"I'm the best. I'll always be on time. I'm the best. Am I the best?"
"Seth, there are an awful lot of people in the world. It's hard to be the best. You're probably not the best. But you can be good. You can be the best you can be."
The passenger: "You can be the best Seth in the world. You can be the best you."
"...if you'll be my bodyguard..."
The passenger: "Have you ever read Kurt Vonnegut's 'Bluebeard'? He talks about how you can't be the best anymore, because you have to compete with world champions. TV and communications. Everyone sees the ten or fifteen who are the best at something in the world and the guy in his small town, small world, has to compete with them instead of those around him. If a kid runs fast in a race, he's still compared with Karl Lewis. You can't be a big frog in a small pond, you're always competing at the world level, with the greatest of champions."
"Will I get suspended from Anchorage?"
"No, Seth, not unless you do something awfully bad."
"I don't want to get suspended from Anchorage. I won't do anything bad. I won't disagree with anyone."
"Seth, it's OK to disagree with someone. People disagree. People argue."
"Do people argue with people they love? Do they disagree with people they're married to? I don't want to do that."
"People argue all the time. It's part of life. Husbands and wives
argue. That's how they settle things. As long as you don't hurt each other. You don't want to say things to hurt, but people have differences."
The Passenger: "That's what you get for hanging around with homos."
"What, what did he say."
A laugh, an agreement. "Nothing Seth."
"I don't want to argue, I don't want to disagree."
"No, Seth, it's all right to disagree."
"I disagree with that."
"What?"
"He made a joke, Seth, a joke."
"Oh."
"...I can be your long, lost pal..."
"I was up all night. They came and got me late and we went out and partied. I didn't get home until four and then I stayed up getting ready for that class."
"You must be exhausted. I'll drive if you get tired. No problem. I had a couple of beers last night, but I went home early. I fell asleep watching a movie."
"I'm Ok. Does my driving bother you? Let me know."
From the back: "Go away. Get out of here."
"No, you're fine. I haven't been worried at all.
"If it does, just tell me."
"...if you'll be my body guard..."
"Can we go to a party tonight? I want to go to a party. Can we see a movie? Can we see two movies? I'll take you to the movies."
"It's going to be late when we get there, Seth. We'll be tired. We're going to a party tomorrow. And maybe a movie."
"And shopping. I want to go to Carr's."
"Why do you want to go to Carr's"
"Albums. I want to get albums. I have albums. I have enough money for albums. Do I have enough money for albums. Enough for two?"
"I don't know, Seth, we'll have to count your money. We'll see. How much do albums cost?
"Nine- ninety-eight. I want to meet girls. Let's go to a party tonight. Oh, boy. Can we go to a party tonight."
"I don't think we can go to a party tonight. Maybe we can rent a movie at the store."
"Star Wars. Did you see Star Wars? I don't want to be a stranger. I don't want to be suspended from town. Why did they suspend that guy from town in Silverado."
"Do you remember in Star Wars? The scene in the bar where they make the deal with Han Solo to get them out of town. They walked in and there were all the crazy looking creatures in there. The bartender said to Luke, "We don't serve your kind in here?" Do you remember that? Luke, even though he looked all right to us, was out of place with all those crazy looking critters in the bar. He looked like a troublemaker. 'We don't serve your kind in here.'"
"I'm not a troublemaker. I won't disagree. I'm the best. They won't suspend me from town."
"Good, Seth."
The passenger: "Are you hungry, Seth? Would you like a hamburger. " Turning, "Can we stop up here at MacDonald's. I'm starved."
"Sure, are you hungry, Seth? Want a hamburger?"
"Yes, yes. I want a hamburger. Oh boy, a hamburger."
The driver: I've never been in a MacDonald's."
"Never? Amazing. How can you avoid that? How do you get through life without ever going to a MacDonald's."
"For one thing, I don't eat fried foods."
"Maybe we can find something. They have salads."
A traffic light, the first in 300 miles, turns red. On green they turn up a side street, go a short distance then turn in under the commercial arches of the hamburger store. They step down from the car and two watch Seth race for the building. Inside he's disappeared, a flick of a heel just vanishing behind the men's room door. Knowing looks are exchanged, nervous smiles. The adventure is beginning. In a short time they're reunited in line, waiting.
"Seth, why are you jumping up and down?"
"I'm excited, excited."
Smiles again.
"It's all right to be excited. But you don't need to jump up and down."
"Or shout."
"Or shout."
"OK OK, but I'm excited."
"Watch the other people, Seth. See how the other people stand quietly. Watch the other people and do what they do."
"OK. I'll do what the other people do."
"Give your order now, Seth. Tell him what you want."
"I want a cheeseburger. A cheeseburger and a coke and a strawberry milkshake. And a caramel sundae."
"A hot tea please."
"A cheeseburger and two milks. And make his a double cheeseburger."
"Where did he go."
"Over there."
Over there is a table with three teenaged girls sitting around it. Seth sits in a booth seat next to one of them, his arm up on the back rest around but not touching her. The adventure.
The looks on the girls' faces register shock, politeness, nervousness, understanding maybe, even amusement. Comes a conversation of gentle extraction.
"Let's go over here and sit, Seth."
"But, I want to sit here."
"We don't know them, Seth. We can't just sit down with people we don't know."
"But I want to sit with them. I want to sit with the girls."
"Seth, we can't just sit with people we don't know. We can't just sit down with them."
"Am I a stranger."
"Yes, you're a stranger to them. They don't know you. There's our food, let's sit over here. Come on, Seth. Let's leave them alone."
"I'm sorry."
"It's all right, Seth."
"Did I do something wrong?"
"Yes, it was wrong to sit with someone you don't know."
"But, I want to meet girls. Where are my French fries?"
"You didn't order any. Did you want some."
"I did, I did. I ordered French fries."
"No I was right there. You didn't order any French fries. You forgot. Did you want some?"
"Yes, yes. I want some French fries."
"Here's some money. Go up to the counter and get some French fries.
"OK."
He turns toward the table with the girls around it, then looks back to two faces nodding "no" to him.
Returning with the French fries: "I just want to meet some girls."
"You have to take your time. You can't be in a hurry. You have to get to know them first. See how that boy is, they know him, but he's standing up talking to them politely. He didn't just jump into the seat and put his arm around them."
"I'm a stranger."
"To them you are, to us you're not."
"I don't want to be a stranger."
"We are strangers here, too."
With the meal finished and the Coke and milkshake in hand they leave the store, climb into the car and drive back out onto the highway.
"Can we go to a party? Can we go to a movie? I want to meet girls. I want to fall in love. I want to have sex. I want to marry somebody. I want to be nice. I don't want to be a stranger. I want to learn."
"Did you learn anything in there?
Yes, I did, I learned something."
"What did you learn, Seth?"
Ahead in the distance a dome of amber light rose over the highway, the lights of the city reflected under low clouds, beckoning.
"Yes I did. I did learn something." Then slower, more measured, forced by realization, "I learned something. I learned to go slow."
Then silence, lost again in the music.
"...if you'll be my bodyguard, I can be your long, lost pal."
1 comment:
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AnonymousJanuary 17, 2014 at 5:13 PM
Tim, you should watch the movie Snow Cake. Think you will hear echoes of your story.
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AnonymousJanuary 17, 2014 at 5:13 PMTim, you should watch the movie Snow Cake. Think you will hear echoes of your story.
Three white lights
In navigation, three white lights vertically and red to right
and green to left mean a tugboat and tow more than 200
meters long is coming toward you.
November 26, 2014
That Thanksgiving night seems like it was more than a hundred years ago now. That night I learned what the loneliness of the ocean sailor is all about. We were delivering an 83-foot fish tender from Alaska to the Seattle area and Thanksgiving found us off Namu, British Columbia, about to enter Fitzhugh Sound.
Below in the galley we had a turkey we'd brought along cooking in the diesel stove. The odors wafting up through the house brought memories of their own. The boat rose and fell on a gentle swell as we entered the sound and I checked all the visible navigation aids against the chart to make sure we were far enough offshore and heading the way we wanted to go. With all signs good, I set the auto pilot and leaned back in the chair casually watching the dark water ahead. The VHF radio had barely issued a peep all day, but occasionally traffic on the Single Sideband disturbed the quiet in the wheehouse.
Then out of the buzz and garbled voices a clear one loudly called for a particular vessel. That vessel responded equally as clearly and suddenly a father at sea connected with his young son on the night of Thanksgiving. The father said he was on a tug off the coast of California near San Francisco; the son responded with an unhuh. And that was how the conversation went from there. The father trying to coax any kind of conversation out of the boy he could, wanting that connection so desperately and the son unsure and shy answering in affirmative grunts and mumbles. Did you have a good dinner? Uh huh. Did you have turkey? Yeah. Did you have mashed potatoes and gravy? Mm hmm. Did you eat your vegetables? Ummm. The seaman laughed at that response.
But you could almost feel the desperation in the man's voice as he queried his son most likely wanting any sign at all that they were connected and he was appreciated. If it did come, I never heard it. In time the father said he had to go and the boy said OK and that was that. Given that a woman never came on I assumed this was a divorced father, as I was, which probably made the pain all the worse.
On and off through the night I thought of that father on the tug somewhere south of us, not even knowing which way it was headed. I replayed the conversation in my head and thought of my own son 2 years old at the time with whom I could not have even had that stilted conversation.
I actually thought of a song. For a long time I thought it would be cool given the number of folks on the water around the world to write a series of country-western-type songs in the way of truck driving ballads but about work boats and the people on them. A tug with a tow longer than 200 meters shows three white lights vertically forward and I started on "The Three White Lights of Christmas." Perhaps fortunately for the world, I never got very far with it, but I have never lost the memory of that night on Fitzhugh Sound and that sailor's conversation with his son.
I guess on holidays no matter who we are or what our circumstance is, in one way or another we reach for family. I have spent many holidays alone since that night and in a way feel that kinship with mariners and in that understanding I know that every year somewhere in the world, there are sailors out on the big oceans trying to converse with a child across the waters and, one can hope, making that desired family connection.
 |
| In navigation, three white lights vertically and red to right and green to left mean a tugboat and tow more than 200 meters long is coming toward you. |
That Thanksgiving night seems like it was more than a hundred years ago now. That night I learned what the loneliness of the ocean sailor is all about. We were delivering an 83-foot fish tender from Alaska to the Seattle area and Thanksgiving found us off Namu, British Columbia, about to enter Fitzhugh Sound.
Below in the galley we had a turkey we'd brought along cooking in the diesel stove. The odors wafting up through the house brought memories of their own. The boat rose and fell on a gentle swell as we entered the sound and I checked all the visible navigation aids against the chart to make sure we were far enough offshore and heading the way we wanted to go. With all signs good, I set the auto pilot and leaned back in the chair casually watching the dark water ahead. The VHF radio had barely issued a peep all day, but occasionally traffic on the Single Sideband disturbed the quiet in the wheehouse.
Then out of the buzz and garbled voices a clear one loudly called for a particular vessel. That vessel responded equally as clearly and suddenly a father at sea connected with his young son on the night of Thanksgiving. The father said he was on a tug off the coast of California near San Francisco; the son responded with an unhuh. And that was how the conversation went from there. The father trying to coax any kind of conversation out of the boy he could, wanting that connection so desperately and the son unsure and shy answering in affirmative grunts and mumbles. Did you have a good dinner? Uh huh. Did you have turkey? Yeah. Did you have mashed potatoes and gravy? Mm hmm. Did you eat your vegetables? Ummm. The seaman laughed at that response.
But you could almost feel the desperation in the man's voice as he queried his son most likely wanting any sign at all that they were connected and he was appreciated. If it did come, I never heard it. In time the father said he had to go and the boy said OK and that was that. Given that a woman never came on I assumed this was a divorced father, as I was, which probably made the pain all the worse.
On and off through the night I thought of that father on the tug somewhere south of us, not even knowing which way it was headed. I replayed the conversation in my head and thought of my own son 2 years old at the time with whom I could not have even had that stilted conversation.
I actually thought of a song. For a long time I thought it would be cool given the number of folks on the water around the world to write a series of country-western-type songs in the way of truck driving ballads but about work boats and the people on them. A tug with a tow longer than 200 meters shows three white lights vertically forward and I started on "The Three White Lights of Christmas." Perhaps fortunately for the world, I never got very far with it, but I have never lost the memory of that night on Fitzhugh Sound and that sailor's conversation with his son.
I guess on holidays no matter who we are or what our circumstance is, in one way or another we reach for family. I have spent many holidays alone since that night and in a way feel that kinship with mariners and in that understanding I know that every year somewhere in the world, there are sailors out on the big oceans trying to converse with a child across the waters and, one can hope, making that desired family connection.
Below in the galley we had a turkey we'd brought along cooking in the diesel stove. The odors wafting up through the house brought memories of their own. The boat rose and fell on a gentle swell as we entered the sound and I checked all the visible navigation aids against the chart to make sure we were far enough offshore and heading the way we wanted to go. With all signs good, I set the auto pilot and leaned back in the chair casually watching the dark water ahead. The VHF radio had barely issued a peep all day, but occasionally traffic on the Single Sideband disturbed the quiet in the wheehouse.
Then out of the buzz and garbled voices a clear one loudly called for a particular vessel. That vessel responded equally as clearly and suddenly a father at sea connected with his young son on the night of Thanksgiving. The father said he was on a tug off the coast of California near San Francisco; the son responded with an unhuh. And that was how the conversation went from there. The father trying to coax any kind of conversation out of the boy he could, wanting that connection so desperately and the son unsure and shy answering in affirmative grunts and mumbles. Did you have a good dinner? Uh huh. Did you have turkey? Yeah. Did you have mashed potatoes and gravy? Mm hmm. Did you eat your vegetables? Ummm. The seaman laughed at that response.
But you could almost feel the desperation in the man's voice as he queried his son most likely wanting any sign at all that they were connected and he was appreciated. If it did come, I never heard it. In time the father said he had to go and the boy said OK and that was that. Given that a woman never came on I assumed this was a divorced father, as I was, which probably made the pain all the worse.
On and off through the night I thought of that father on the tug somewhere south of us, not even knowing which way it was headed. I replayed the conversation in my head and thought of my own son 2 years old at the time with whom I could not have even had that stilted conversation.
I actually thought of a song. For a long time I thought it would be cool given the number of folks on the water around the world to write a series of country-western-type songs in the way of truck driving ballads but about work boats and the people on them. A tug with a tow longer than 200 meters shows three white lights vertically forward and I started on "The Three White Lights of Christmas." Perhaps fortunately for the world, I never got very far with it, but I have never lost the memory of that night on Fitzhugh Sound and that sailor's conversation with his son.
I guess on holidays no matter who we are or what our circumstance is, in one way or another we reach for family. I have spent many holidays alone since that night and in a way feel that kinship with mariners and in that understanding I know that every year somewhere in the world, there are sailors out on the big oceans trying to converse with a child across the waters and, one can hope, making that desired family connection.
The one you feed
Creeping white death, another snippet
December 4, 2012
It's been zero or below it seems like forever now, probably a month. Today it has been 20 below just about all day. Might have gone up to minus 10 for a while, all of it leading to literary inspirations like this one:
Cold crept across the land like a misty white shroud of death, leaving only a mortal silence, a silence similar to what a man must leave at the moment of passing. But unlike the man whom others would take away, the cold stayed, its frost coating the tree limbs and twigs, a hole in one trunk frosty all the way around as if the tree exhaled there and its breath froze. A slight covering of snow provided the only music and that only when one stepped on it. That crunch of shattering flakes of ice and the frozen leaves underneath signaling the passage of anything heavy enough to crush the crystals something that seldom happens in the immobilization of the world at this temperature.
December 4, 2012
It's been zero or below it seems like forever now, probably a month. Today it has been 20 below just about all day. Might have gone up to minus 10 for a while, all of it leading to literary inspirations like this one:
Cold crept across the land like a misty white shroud of death, leaving only a mortal silence, a silence similar to what a man must leave at the moment of passing. But unlike the man whom others would take away, the cold stayed, its frost coating the tree limbs and twigs, a hole in one trunk frosty all the way around as if the tree exhaled there and its breath froze. A slight covering of snow provided the only music and that only when one stepped on it. That crunch of shattering flakes of ice and the frozen leaves underneath signaling the passage of anything heavy enough to crush the crystals something that seldom happens in the immobilization of the world at this temperature.
The day the New World turned Brave
June 6, 2017
Years ago perhaps inspired by George Orwell and Aldous Huxley I wrote a short story about the day, the one particular day and hour, the world changed into that brave new one. It wasn't a very good short story but there have been times over the years when I have been reminded of its message and wary of what my government is doing. In it, a man of the 50s came home from his job to his house in the suburbs. His wife had prepared a pleasant dinner, his polite children sat at the table eating quietly while the adults spoke to each other. After dinner the perfect wife began clearing the table and washing the dishes while the husband returned to his favorite chair and turned on the television news. You get the picture, the bland, stable 1950s.
During the broadcast there was a static interruption of the signal and a new face and voice came out of it first pointing out how great life for people was and then saying that recent improvements to the general benefit of the society as a whole were now to be laws and that the lives people lived, the jobs they held (ending labor unions?), the homes they owned (subprime loans?), the schools their children attended (private charter schools?) had transformed into a rigid structure for the benefit of all. To maintain order (these days terrorism would be blamed) a new National Security Force had been formed which would replace the former military and police departments (providing police departments with military hardware?); this would be couched in terms of efficiency and cost-cutting. Life would go on as usual, the inanimate face's voice said and everyone would be better off for it.
Static buzz again and then the former newsman came back on and began reading the news again. The man in the chair had barely absorbed what had been said, but something in it bothered him enough to stand up and walk out onto his front lawn. He looked left and right up and down the street and saw several others looking aimlessly around or into the sky. Finally when he couldn't put his mind on exactly what had happened and deciding there couldn't have been much to it, he went back into his house and settled back into his chair.
Like I said, not a very good story. But my point was things can progress in tiny increments until one day you look around and it's too late, the damage is done, the billboards are up and we hardly notice that instant when all the parts merge and finally evolve into that Brave New World.
These days I see the attacks on the press, leading the less informed and ignorant among us to distrust what they read or watch, that consists of lies or fake news if you will. The rest of us may wonder but seldom do much. We build up the military at the same time we dumb down the population by slowly curtailing education and opportunity and grow the percentage of the population that is enveloped in ignorance. With that body of ignorance overwhelming the electorate, we elect leaders who through bombast and bullying challenge every aspect of a constitutional democracy that has claimed to be based on the elusive and difficult to define atmosphere of freedom.
By whittling away at all aspects of that freedom and in order to do that turning the ignorant majority against those who protest at each step of the way and putting the blame for problems onto them, the governors reach the point where with one simple turn of a switch sending a televised message into every home in the country, they only make formal the state where all those freedoms have disappeared and the oligarchs now own the utopian nightmare. That was the day I was attempting to describe, never thinking that threat would actually materialize and I would be watching the country growing dangerously close to the day when we are living in Airstrip One or 2540 London happily sucking down soma and believing we are happy.
Fortunately in the current situation, the opposition fighting every step of the way appears to be slowly gaining the upper hand but we can't be complacent, the fight has to be kept up. It might be odd to say but maybe it's a good thing that Trump is president at this time. A more intelligent, educated, less flamboyant man would be much more dangerous. Look at the vice president and the speaker of the House.
June 6, 2017
Years ago perhaps inspired by George Orwell and Aldous Huxley I wrote a short story about the day, the one particular day and hour, the world changed into that brave new one. It wasn't a very good short story but there have been times over the years when I have been reminded of its message and wary of what my government is doing. In it, a man of the 50s came home from his job to his house in the suburbs. His wife had prepared a pleasant dinner, his polite children sat at the table eating quietly while the adults spoke to each other. After dinner the perfect wife began clearing the table and washing the dishes while the husband returned to his favorite chair and turned on the television news. You get the picture, the bland, stable 1950s.
During the broadcast there was a static interruption of the signal and a new face and voice came out of it first pointing out how great life for people was and then saying that recent improvements to the general benefit of the society as a whole were now to be laws and that the lives people lived, the jobs they held (ending labor unions?), the homes they owned (subprime loans?), the schools their children attended (private charter schools?) had transformed into a rigid structure for the benefit of all. To maintain order (these days terrorism would be blamed) a new National Security Force had been formed which would replace the former military and police departments (providing police departments with military hardware?); this would be couched in terms of efficiency and cost-cutting. Life would go on as usual, the inanimate face's voice said and everyone would be better off for it.
Static buzz again and then the former newsman came back on and began reading the news again. The man in the chair had barely absorbed what had been said, but something in it bothered him enough to stand up and walk out onto his front lawn. He looked left and right up and down the street and saw several others looking aimlessly around or into the sky. Finally when he couldn't put his mind on exactly what had happened and deciding there couldn't have been much to it, he went back into his house and settled back into his chair.
Like I said, not a very good story. But my point was things can progress in tiny increments until one day you look around and it's too late, the damage is done, the billboards are up and we hardly notice that instant when all the parts merge and finally evolve into that Brave New World.
These days I see the attacks on the press, leading the less informed and ignorant among us to distrust what they read or watch, that consists of lies or fake news if you will. The rest of us may wonder but seldom do much. We build up the military at the same time we dumb down the population by slowly curtailing education and opportunity and grow the percentage of the population that is enveloped in ignorance. With that body of ignorance overwhelming the electorate, we elect leaders who through bombast and bullying challenge every aspect of a constitutional democracy that has claimed to be based on the elusive and difficult to define atmosphere of freedom.
By whittling away at all aspects of that freedom and in order to do that turning the ignorant majority against those who protest at each step of the way and putting the blame for problems onto them, the governors reach the point where with one simple turn of a switch sending a televised message into every home in the country, they only make formal the state where all those freedoms have disappeared and the oligarchs now own the utopian nightmare. That was the day I was attempting to describe, never thinking that threat would actually materialize and I would be watching the country growing dangerously close to the day when we are living in Airstrip One or 2540 London happily sucking down soma and believing we are happy.
Fortunately in the current situation, the opposition fighting every step of the way appears to be slowly gaining the upper hand but we can't be complacent, the fight has to be kept up. It might be odd to say but maybe it's a good thing that Trump is president at this time. A more intelligent, educated, less flamboyant man would be much more dangerous. Look at the vice president and the speaker of the House.
Fortunately in the current situation, the opposition fighting every step of the way appears to be slowly gaining the upper hand but we can't be complacent, the fight has to be kept up. It might be odd to say but maybe it's a good thing that Trump is president at this time. A more intelligent, educated, less flamboyant man would be much more dangerous. Look at the vice president and the speaker of the House.
Stopping by the woods – another snippet
February 6, 2011
Lace in the trees, bright sunshine when you come out from the shade of the mountains and warm enough to almost feel that winter's kiss. Faint northern lights on the way home and temperatures in the tolerable range. All that was needed for a perfect winter day was a little more snow.
February 6, 2011
Lace in the trees, bright sunshine when you come out from the shade of the mountains and warm enough to almost feel that winter's kiss. Faint northern lights on the way home and temperatures in the tolerable range. All that was needed for a perfect winter day was a little more snow.
Dark mystery on a white background
February 11, 2011
In the woods a new fallen snow becomes a newspaper into the world among the trees, a clean sheet awaiting imprint to chronicle the comings and goings of the citizens within its circulation area. All one needs to read that journal is to slap on a pair of snowshoes and take a tour across the broadsheet to see who’s been there, what direction that critter took, whether it was running or walking, in fear or confidence, some chased, occasionally the trail ending abruptly when one is caught from above by the owl, the snow disturbed where its wingtips touched as it grabbed its prey. News without headlines, the passing in nature that needs not the added drama of bigger type, only the imagination of the viewer to fill in the details. Occasionally one ends in mystery, just stopping for no apparent reason or going out of sight into the distanceNow a new mystery has been added, promoted by the availability of electricity and motion sensor technology. With sensing lights on both sides of the house, the yard illuminates without apparent reason sometimes. A cat running through the yard perhaps or a bird flying by. During the huge windstorms that blow through here often they will be on constantly, triggered by the bending swaying branches of the trees. Tonight, though, a mystery.
Tonight the west side light came on. There is no wind so that was not the cause. New snow had left its sheet over the ground awaiting the news, but there was no news, no telltale tracks hinting at what might have moved past. So, what was it triggered the light? The spirits of the forest perhaps, wisps of fairies dancing just above the snow. In the dark few birds fly by and the feeders remain untouched. No spy of my imagination slipped up to a window, no cat followed the squirrels across the yard, no moose came to nibble the lilac. What mystery motion could have sparked the light into brilliance? Perhaps morning will reveal the answer. And then came a tapping, tapping tapping at the entry door…
Tonight the west side light came on. There is no wind so that was not the cause. New snow had left its sheet over the ground awaiting the news, but there was no news, no telltale tracks hinting at what might have moved past. So, what was it triggered the light? The spirits of the forest perhaps, wisps of fairies dancing just above the snow. In the dark few birds fly by and the feeders remain untouched. No spy of my imagination slipped up to a window, no cat followed the squirrels across the yard, no moose came to nibble the lilac. What mystery motion could have sparked the light into brilliance? Perhaps morning will reveal the answer. And then came a tapping, tapping tapping at the entry door…
In the next day's light the mystery deepens
February 12, 2011
Sun rose bright on the east side of the mountain and set just below the peak before rising again on the west side. Won't be long until it passes over the mountain instead of behind it. But even the clarity of sunlight did not solve the night before's mystery. Not a track to be seen anywhere within the arc of what the light would have illuminated. A line of squirrel tracks from one tree to another was all that spoiled the surface of the new snow and that happened early in the day. Perhaps back in the woods the critters held a wake for the fallen hero Brian Jacques who died Feb. 5 at the age of 71. I recall my son and I late at night when he was younger taking turns reading alternate pages of his Redwall books, (there are 22 of them) following the adventures of Mathias and nibbling on scones once we found out what they were.
I left for work yesterday over a clean blanket of snow in the driveway. When I returned in the dark, there appeared to be more tracks in the yard than there should have been. Just at the doorstep were two footprints even and next to each other, much smaller than mine(they were about 2/3 the length of mine) and with pointy toes. Definitely not mine. In the dark and being tired I waited until morning to investigate. A vehicle with wider tires than mine, probably a pickup, had pulled in sometime yesterday. Unless it backed in, the driver did not get out, only a passenger with those pointy shoes who walked to the doorstep and apparently stood there but did not go up on the porch. Very curious. Oddly I could not find tracks of those pointy boots leading away from the step. But there was quite a mix of my own tracks in that area from when I went to work and returned. Obviously these were not the causes of the light going on the night before, but now a new element has been added. Perhaps all this mystery can be grown into a story. We shall see. Meanwhile there have been lots of visitors today.
Pixie dust
February 20, 2011
Stepped out yesterday into a sparkling world. Everywhere in the air little bright spots floated. Bright sunshine meant it wasn’t snowing and though it was cold, it wasn’t ice fog and sundog cold. It seemed to be going on for no particular reason until I saw a bird fly out of a tree heading for one of the feeders. We had had a light snowfall of that cold, tiny flaked type over night and when the bird took off it sent a bunch of it flying off the branch into the air. The flakes were so small and so light they drifted in the air for a time and reflected the sunlight. Given there were several birds flitting from the trees to the feeders and probably a couple of squirrels running around, a considerable amount of snow was thrown into the air and created this little storm of sparkle in the yard. Or maybe it was pixies after all, and they are the cause of all the mystery. Watching the trees for a sign of Tinkerbell, but the way the rest of the day went I doubt I received any pixie dust from her.
The last airplane on skis
March 24, 2011
As the red and white Cessna 180 hit the first bit of turbulence from the updraft along the last mountain massif, its pilot looked past the snow-covered mountains, past the white and a panic began to grow in his stomach. The world stretched out in front of him brown, the brown before the green of the spring burst he’d hoped he would outrun, but he saw no welcoming patches of white anywhere in front of him. He leaned to glance out the side window and look down, skis, they were still there, that hadn’t changed. He sensed more than heard movement in the tiny cargo bay but when he looked all he saw was a bundle of fur where the wolf slept held there immobilized by the biologist;s tranquilizer dart. The biologist had told him he had at least three hours before the sedative wore off and the animal came out of it. He looked at his watch and then turned again to the country passing below him, searching franticly for that patch of white on a still-frozen lake that would offer him a place to put the airplane down. None of it provided him with even a sliver of confidence, not like the confidence he’d felt when he told the supplier he wouldn’t need the skis with wheels and saved himself a little money ...
A bit of background: Every year as warmer spring-like weather releases the snow, I will notice a small airplane or two with skis, flying over and apparently looking for a place to land. The same happens in the fall when everything freezes overnight and there is that last airplane on floats. Airborne with no place to land. Thought it might be fun to explore that adventure.
A bit of background: Every year as warmer spring-like weather releases the snow, I will notice a small airplane or two with skis, flying over and apparently looking for a place to land. The same happens in the fall when everything freezes overnight and there is that last airplane on floats. Airborne with no place to land. Thought it might be fun to explore that adventure.
Clash of titans – another snippet
April 21, 2011
Wispy lines of cirrus streak the sky from the northeast. From the southwest cumulus rises in gray pillows. New snow dusts the mountainsides higher up. In the valley, wind caught between the fronts roars down the river kicking up a dust storm of the flour caught between gravel pebbles exposed until glacial dams upstream break later in the spring. On the bridges cars have to slow because their drivers can't see through the dust at times. It is a time when weather fronts and seasons collide, sometimes catastrophically.
Scarecrows dressed in the latest styles
June 24, 2011
A lot's been going on around here and has built to the breaking point. Interesting how such small things can change the mood, like some success in the garden and then a little change in the background music, too. One of those days when money was burning that perpetual hole in the pocket, seems most of my pants have that hole. So that explains the pictures. The plants are those peas that threatened to take over the house. Would you look at them now. Not to bore anyone on here (like i don't anyway) but there is a small album of garden pictures here.
And then there's the second picture: How long were we going to go without mentioning her anyway? Actually the subject of the photo isn't really her. That money burning that hole led to the display of iPhone docks that amplify the music. They were on sale and I grabbed one and was heading away when I saw this one. Whoa. an iPAD dock. Of course it was the only one that wasn't on sale. And to top that off, and I know I'm late with this, but discovered Pandora, too. Now this is cool. I plugged in just a few favorite musicians and since then have been listening to an assortment of music I haven't heard in years, including many I didn't name in my list.
"Broken windows and empty hallways,
a pale dead moon in a sky streaked with grey"
Prime time television was interrupted last night for one of those alert test messages. I thought it strange it wasn't done in the early morning hours when it only interrupts TV for those of us limited to those hours of freedom. Then it came up with tsunami warning. There was a sizable earthquake in the Aleutian Islands and a tsunami was deemed possible. Then the predictions for the time of arrival at various places came up on the screen. At first I thought that was a good idea, and then I looked at the clock. All those arrival times had already passed. I was already dead. Thanks GCi. Save it for late-night next time.
"...the frozen smiles to chase love away ..."
Driving around the past two hot and sunny days, I have seen several children sitting on the grass, lawns and parks..... reading.....books..... real books. I waved to them. It's been so warm the top almost came off the Jeep today.
The other night driving home I saw a moose wading through this swamp:
Understand it was after midnight you could still spot a moose against a dark background. Twice last week I pulled out of work about 11:30 p.m. and the sun was so bright setting that I had to put the visor down. That of course was right on the solstice which passed without much fanfare this year. Still a solstice and now the days start getting shorter or the nights start getting longer depending on your outlook.
"Bright before me signs implore me..."
And one pretty neat thing came up this week, but to see it you will have to click on the "More Wild Critters" book cover in the right hand column. I came across it by accident just wandering around the web on a lazy day.
"Help the needy and show them the way."
So much for observations, now on to the adventures in Alaska government. Once again the powers that be have shot themselves in the foot, though it's possible it was done on purpose. There is a federal program for coastal zone management. It was ostensibly designed to give people living in coastal areas some voice in the development of resources along the coast and offshore. Each state with ocean frontage has to develop a coastal zone management program. Once that is established it gives those folks their voice. If the state fails to install a program the state and local folks are excluded from influencing development in their neighborhoods. There is also federal grant money available through the program for projects like studying the effects of such development and creating base line data banks among other things. The state of Alaska has such a program, at least until June 30. It expires then. During the regular session of the Legislature passage of an extension failed. It failed again in a special session. Now there's another special session set for Monday. It may still work out. The effort to pass some kind of bill that would keep the program received no support from the milktoast toe-the-conservative-line governor and a lot of opposition from people like the oil industry. Giving people who live in an area a voice in things like offshore oil exploration and development, well, that can create some expensive problems. Much better to keep the people out of it so they can go ahead and develop without restraint. That worked out really well in the Gulf of Mexico last year. And anyway, what harm could come from drilling offshore in the Arctic? That may be the real reason for the lack of leadership from the governor and the Republicans in the Legislature. A person in the oil industry once told me there are no coincidences where that industry is concerned. Perhaps a sharpened harpoon launched from the people who will be most affected by offshore drilling in the Arctic would be enough stimulus to get some action.
But there's a twist. No politician worth his salt in Alaska ever ran for office without using the word "jobs." It is like they think it is the magic word that will grab votes. You can't talk about any issue at all without someone saying it will either cost jobs or create jobs. It took politicians to create the mess in the Legislature a mess that is costing 33 people their jobs. Thirty-three people in Juneau, Alaska, which isn't that big a place and has no industry to speak of, except government. Wonder how many of those guys will talk about creating jobs next time they have to campaign. Answer: All of them, conveniently forgetting they put 33 people in jeopardy of losing their jobs.
"Tin can at my feet.
Think I'll kick it down the street.
Human kindness overflowing,
and I think it's going to rain today."
"Broken windows and empty hallways,
a pale dead moon in a sky streaked with grey"
Prime time television was interrupted last night for one of those alert test messages. I thought it strange it wasn't done in the early morning hours when it only interrupts TV for those of us limited to those hours of freedom. Then it came up with tsunami warning. There was a sizable earthquake in the Aleutian Islands and a tsunami was deemed possible. Then the predictions for the time of arrival at various places came up on the screen. At first I thought that was a good idea, and then I looked at the clock. All those arrival times had already passed. I was already dead. Thanks GCi. Save it for late-night next time.
"...the frozen smiles to chase love away ..."
Driving around the past two hot and sunny days, I have seen several children sitting on the grass, lawns and parks..... reading.....books..... real books. I waved to them. It's been so warm the top almost came off the Jeep today.
The other night driving home I saw a moose wading through this swamp:
Understand it was after midnight you could still spot a moose against a dark background. Twice last week I pulled out of work about 11:30 p.m. and the sun was so bright setting that I had to put the visor down. That of course was right on the solstice which passed without much fanfare this year. Still a solstice and now the days start getting shorter or the nights start getting longer depending on your outlook.
"Bright before me signs implore me..."
And one pretty neat thing came up this week, but to see it you will have to click on the "More Wild Critters" book cover in the right hand column. I came across it by accident just wandering around the web on a lazy day.
"Help the needy and show them the way."
So much for observations, now on to the adventures in Alaska government. Once again the powers that be have shot themselves in the foot, though it's possible it was done on purpose. There is a federal program for coastal zone management. It was ostensibly designed to give people living in coastal areas some voice in the development of resources along the coast and offshore. Each state with ocean frontage has to develop a coastal zone management program. Once that is established it gives those folks their voice. If the state fails to install a program the state and local folks are excluded from influencing development in their neighborhoods. There is also federal grant money available through the program for projects like studying the effects of such development and creating base line data banks among other things. The state of Alaska has such a program, at least until June 30. It expires then. During the regular session of the Legislature passage of an extension failed. It failed again in a special session. Now there's another special session set for Monday. It may still work out. The effort to pass some kind of bill that would keep the program received no support from the milktoast toe-the-conservative-line governor and a lot of opposition from people like the oil industry. Giving people who live in an area a voice in things like offshore oil exploration and development, well, that can create some expensive problems. Much better to keep the people out of it so they can go ahead and develop without restraint. That worked out really well in the Gulf of Mexico last year. And anyway, what harm could come from drilling offshore in the Arctic? That may be the real reason for the lack of leadership from the governor and the Republicans in the Legislature. A person in the oil industry once told me there are no coincidences where that industry is concerned. Perhaps a sharpened harpoon launched from the people who will be most affected by offshore drilling in the Arctic would be enough stimulus to get some action.
But there's a twist. No politician worth his salt in Alaska ever ran for office without using the word "jobs." It is like they think it is the magic word that will grab votes. You can't talk about any issue at all without someone saying it will either cost jobs or create jobs. It took politicians to create the mess in the Legislature a mess that is costing 33 people their jobs. Thirty-three people in Juneau, Alaska, which isn't that big a place and has no industry to speak of, except government. Wonder how many of those guys will talk about creating jobs next time they have to campaign. Answer: All of them, conveniently forgetting they put 33 people in jeopardy of losing their jobs.
"Tin can at my feet.
Think I'll kick it down the street.
Human kindness overflowing,
and I think it's going to rain today."
Take a step off the usual trail for a moment or two
August 25, 2011
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?
Labels: ee cummings, poetry, Writing
It's not what you think
September 21, 2011
When I go walking in the woods.
I never see a thing.
I never see an animal
on hoof or paw or wing,
There are some big ones out there:
that I know for fact.
So how can something big as deer,
even hide its rack?
I guess I'll just keep walking,
ever on my guard.
Someday I hope I'll see
some kind of critter in my yard.
From "More Wild Critters" by Tim Jones and Tom Walker
So I finally see a critter in my yard and go rushing out with a camera only to find out it's a horse. What a disappointment. Although as far as exotic critters in the yard, I have seen several moose but this was the first horse, so maybe it's time for a different perspective on exotic wildlife. Unfortunately I also noticed all the snow coming down the mountain. I think I will bring in the last tomatoes and the geranium today.
Labels: alaska wildlife, fall, horse, moose, Wild Critters
The times they are 'changin' another snippet longer than usual
October 19, 2011
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.
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.
Eat your heart out, Paris Hilton; an observation
December 10, 2011
If ever there was a perfect example of the Alaska sourdough from the mining genre, this guy was that guy. Short and stocky to the point of being bull-chested, he wandered through the aisles of the big box hardware store, looking at this, looking at that. He wore bunny boats and heavy Carhartt pants, a sweater over a wool shirt under a heavy outer jacket that showed the effects of hard wear. He covered his head with one of those round furry hats, with thick ear flaps fastened over the crown, held up for his being indoors. His dark eyes squinted under bushy eyebrows in the bright florescent light of the warehouse and his beard overflowed his jacket spilling out over the sweater and coat in shades of black and gray and white. He turned and looked at a fellow shopper gauging his worth and evidently deciding this one was not going to be any help. But, as he did, one of those cute little poufy dogs like the celebrities are always carrying, peeked out from underneath the jacket and the beard. Its coloring gave it almost perfect camouflage against the beard. The man gently scratched the dog's head while he turned away to continue on down the row of electrical materials seemingly without another thought. No worries. Dog or no dog this was not the kind of man paparazzi pursued and if they had, well, lord help them.
2010
The view from 20 below, another snippet
December 17, 2010
Severe clear day, the kind that would have sun dogs if the sun hadn't gone behind a mountain already, with a steel blue sky, mountains pure white rising into it as if attempting to reach a silver and white full moon, until late in the afternoon alpineglow turns those white slopes a subtle pastel pink. As if nothing that pure could be left alone by mankind, an Air Force jet crosses the sky leaving its contrail, the only break in the blue, an accepted form of military tagging, a gangsta marking territory.
PRINCE WILLIAM AND THE
BLUEBERRY QUEEN
Prince William Sound is the body
of water where I live. It wsa named from
the second son of King George III of England by Captain James Cook. A lot a blueberries grow in the sound, and
the inspiration for this story came from a woman I spent time with in the sound
who was always picking them and making pies. The was rewritten into a play that was put on using 3-foot tall marionettes and performed by a group of Valdez Alaska kids in the summer of 1089
--Tim
A sound is a noise like waves crashing on a beach. A sound also can be a large, protected body of water, a place where waves don't crash against a beach. This is a story about the second kind of sound, only one so long ago and so far away, you can't hear it any more.
In its beginning, this sound was not protected. It presented a wide-open mouth to an expanse of northern ocean whose weather drove storm after storm over the water against the mountains that rimmed the sound. Darks clouds stopped by the mountains always hung over the sound and precipitated a constant shower of rain into the bays and coves. The mountains around the sound always stood dark, black with trees that were bent by the constant winds that failed to blow away the clouds that delivered the rain. No one ever saw the tops of those mountains because they were always hidden by the clouds. As a matter of fact no one ever saw much of the sound at all for it was a dark and cold forbidding place. How cold and how dark no one knew for even the bravest of mariners avoided the sound. The sailors who plied the northern waters stayed away from it for it was said an evil giant inhabited the sound and those unfortunate ships that entered seeking shelter from a storm were never heard from again. Few did enter, for besides the stories of the giant, the sound offered little in the way of shelter without some land mass to cover the opening as a buffer to the weather.
To the east and west of this sound lay two small kingdoms. These kingdoms existed peacefully with each other, but the sailors from each competed in the ocean for the same fish and there were occasions when one king would send an angry reprimand to the other over conflicts on the fishing grounds. With no shelter between the kingdoms when the great northern storms blew, often the fishermen from one kingdom would seek safe anchorage in the harbors of the other. Although the harboring would be allowed, the outland mariners would be made to feel they were unwanted and their welcome ended with the storm they were hiding from. There were too many arguments over the fishing for the fishermen to be welcomed into the other's port.
The kings, seeing the conflicts growing and fearing their subjects would make more trouble, began sending emissaries back and forth with suggestions for resolving the issue. Eventually, as they neared agreement, the court of the Eastern king made plans to journey to the west to complete the accord and celebrate with a feast.
The Eastern king took with him many of his advisors and in an attempt to broaden the world of his son, William, took him as well. In three ships they sailed for the Western kingdom. It was an easy voyage for no storms blew and their passage was a safe one. As they crossed the mouth of the dark sound, Prince William asked his father about the forbidding wilderness. His father told him about the sound and when he'd finished, as if to prove what the king had said, way off deep within the sound they heard roars and loud splashes.
"They say the rain drives the giant insane," said old king Hinchinbrook, "and he goes into a bay and rips massive boulders from the cliffs and hurls them far out into the water or, sometimes, back into the mountains."
Prince William listened intently to his father and to the sounds from the sound and thought long about the dark place. But, as they passed into the sunshine of the western kingdom and new sights and sounds, his thoughts of the dark world faded. The three ships entered the harbor of the capital of the Western King and were welcomed with great fanfare for the Western King had hopes as great as his eastern counterpart for an accord. At a state dinner that evening Prince William was introduced to the western king's daughter, the beautiful Princess Virginia. During the days that followed, while the two kings and their advisors met in endless conferences, the Princess Virginia became guide and escort to Prince William, showing him her western land while he, in turn, entertained her with stories of his eastern homeland. As days turned to weeks, their daily trips became less guided tours and more in the style of time spent together. As time passed their talk turned to subjects beyond the homelands, and they found themselves growing into a fondness that with their first kiss blossomed into love. Where at first the meetings had been just a courtesy, they now became an obsession and they plotted to see each other. Their plots worked, for seldom was either seen in public without the other. Though the princess always had to have her chaperone, still, the two found ways to sneak away for their precious moments alone in sunlit glades, holding hands walking in the forests and dreaming the dreams of young lovers.
But, while the friendship grew into love for the two youngsters, their fathers and their advisors were growing farther apart. Where an accord had seemed so close at the start, as each day passed, the two sides seemed further apart. By the end of the second fortnight the Eastern king and his advisors decided no treaty could be reached and they had just as well prepare to return to their homeland. Plans were made and Prince William informed. When he heard the news, the young prince felt a deep sadness. With a fear in his heart, he ran to the garden beneath his beloved's window. She came to her balcony when he called and listened with tears in her eyes as he delivered the news of the coming parting. Also listening from another balcony, unseen by either of them, was the Princess Virginia's father King Montague. The message was double for Montague as he had been so busy with the talks he'd failed to notice the growing affection between his daughter and the Eastern Prince. With this also his first news of the Eastern delegation's abrupt departure, he rushed to his daughter's room where he burst onto the balcony and pulled her back into her chamber.
"I will love your forever," Prince William called after the princess before her father could slam the balcony doors.
"We will be together," the princess shouted back despite her father's efforts to silence her.
A morose Prince William boarded his father's ship the next day for the long trip home. He stood in the stern watching as the castle and then the city and harbor and finally the kingdom, all of which were home to his beloved princess, disappeared in the wake and with them faded the vision of the beautiful Virginia. Through the long passage home he walked the decks alone, barely even taking notice of the dark sound which had piqued his curiosity on the outbound voyage. Inconsolable he returned to his homeland and nothing his parents or friends could do would drag him out of his sadness. He shared his secret with no one, and even the king's funniest jesters could not raise the hint of a smile from him.
The Prince had made a mistake. He hadn't properly heard the princess's call as her father pulled her from the balcony. In the words, Prince William had only heard a plaintive call of love, but the princess Virginia had called out a promise, and even before Prince William departed her city, she was making her plans to fulfill that promise. She first consulted with her chaperone who had been her governess in childhood. They had loved each other very much and the princess had come to depend on her as a friend. The governess was the one who suggested a plan and called for her fisherman husband. To them both Princess Virginia explained her predicament and pleaded with the old fisherman to take her in his boat to the Eastern kingdom to be with Prince William. The two heard her tale and the husband knew of the fondness between the princess and his wife and how well he and his wife had been treated at the castle. Although fearing the king's wrath should he discover who had taken his daughter, the fisherman agreed to make the voyage and plans were made to leave on the early morning tide. There would be a great ball at the castle that night and the king could be expected to sleep well past noon the next day so they would have many hours behind them before anyone knew the princess was missing. She would make her appearance at the ball and then slip away in the darkness to the boat and await dawn and the tide.
This she was able to do easily and the little fishing boat with the princess on board slipped out of the harbor unnoticed and caught a fair wind to the east. The Princess Virginia did not look back as the Prince had done, but stood in the bows facing the direction of the harbor she sought.
As they sailed the ocean, the fair breeze freshened, propelling the boat faster and faster. The breeze grew into a wind as black clouds marched toward them from the horizon. The fisherman knew the signs and watched the storm grow, but the princess stared only eastward toward the love she sought to regain. Blue sky turned to gray and gray turned to black. As the waves began splashing over the sides, wetting her clothing, the growing danger began to intrude against her all-consuming goal. The fisherman fought the storm but to little avail as huge waves began tossing the little boat, carrying it ever closer to the dark sound. As the blackness deepened, fear finally encroached into Virginia’s thoughts.
The fisherman knew the tales about the sound well and feared the darkness as he fought to keep the boat on course, but one wave after another carried them closer and closer. Then they flew atop a wave through the mouth into the dark sound. In fear the princess turned to the man at the helm, but before she could utter a word the boat and the two of them were plucked from the waves by a huge hairy hand. High out of the water they rose until, quaking with fear, they looked into an immense face to be examined by eyes as large as the sun but as dark as the new moon. The giant studied his prizes for some time until he picked the princess from the boat and then flung the boat and the fisherman far out to sea. The quivering, fearful princess he held tightly in his hand while he looked her over curiously. He spoke no words, only grunts, and his foul breath engulfed the princess, making her choke. After an eternity he turned and strode, wading, deeper into the bay until he came to a cave which he crawled into. There he put the princess into a stout cage. For a time he teased her with a stick he thrust between the bars. Then he tired of his game and grabbed a bone that had some meat hanging from it. From the bone he tore a piece of raw meat and tossed it to the princess as he would to a dog.
The princess ducked away from the flying meat. She stood defiant, wavering between demanding anger and quivering fear. As her hours of entrapment grew into days, she brought her emotions under control. She attempted escape; she actually got out of the cage once but the giant caught her quickly and fixed the hole she'd made. She determined to keep her courage though her plight left her in desperation. No one knew she was gone from her home and if by now they had found out, no one knew where she was. The old fisherman was dead no doubt, and she was a prisoner not knowing what her fate might be. In front of the giant she maintained her dignity as a princess. But she knew better than to raise his anger. She couldn't know what the giant had planned for her, if there was a plan at all, but she assumed angering him would not help her, so she gave the appearance of accepting her fate and all the time schemed a way to escape.
After her first attempt to escape, the giant no longer trusted her alone. When he left to make his rounds of the sound he took her along, tied into his shirt pocket in a sack with only her head showing. And there, under the giant's beard where he could not see her, she rode as he walked through his dark realm. She saw and felt his rage when he faced into the rain and tried to brush or even claw the water from his eyes. His roar would deepen and he grasped huge boulders and hurled them against the mountainsides. When his rage would subside he'd move out of the bay where the rocks were loose and search for food, but little game showed in an area so full of hate and fear and anger. Now and then the giant would catch an unsuspecting deer or bear that ventured out of the forest, or maybe a porpoise or salmon that swam too close to land. When he did he immediately bit off the victim's head, laughing as he did, and then devoured the animal whole, saving only shreds and bones for the princess who refused to eat them despite her hunger. Instead she gave the giant a haughty face when he teased her with the meat. She was a princess, after all, and resolved to show courage and grace in the face of such despicable evil.
But when she was in the pocket out of sight the princess's bearing and defiance broke down and she wept uncontrollably at her fate. All the time the giant walked the princess wept the tears of terror and hopelessness, and her tears fell everywhere on the shores of the dark sound.
The princess Virginia had not been forgotten. Once the Western king learned his daughter was missing he immediately suspected the truth, that she had run or been spirited away to join the Eastern Prince. The king dispatched his most important emissarial potentate to the eastern court to demand the return of the princess and threatened the direst of consequences if she were not. But news of the princess preceded the potentate, for the fisherman whom the giant had cast into the water to die had regained his boat. Fearing reprisals from his own king for aiding the runaway princess, he had continued his voyage to the east until he fetched that capital. Wet and bedraggled, he had been cast before the king on the supposition he had been poaching fish in the eastern waters. He told his story to the king and had just finished when the western emissarial potentate was announced to the court. The emissary reiterated King Montague's demands and threats and then King Hinchinbrook asked the fisherman to repeat his story. The potentate listened, then demanded a search party and army be organized to rescue the princess. He also demanded the fisherman be handed into his custody for punishment at home. This Hinchinbrook refused to do extending instead his personal protection to the fisherman.
The king issued a call for volunteers to join the rescue effort, refusing to send any of his subjects into the dark sound against their will. No one responded; no one would go into the dark sound unless they had to, because it meant certain death. The king directed the visiting potentate to return to his own country and attempt to raise a party there.
In the meantime, Prince William had sequestered himself with the old fisherman, barraging him with questions about the princess, the giant and the sound. When he learned all the fisherman knew, he went to the wharves, to the boats and to the inns and taverns where the nation's mariners spent their time. Of all he asked for information about the dark sound, but the western fisherman was the only man anyone knew of who had returned from that dark place and even the eldest of seamen could add only the slightest to what the prince already had learned. As he listened to the mariners, two realizations became apparent to the young prince. The first had nothing to do with the sailors. He knew now that the princess's words had been a promise and not an idle call. He now knew, also, that it had fallen to him to fulfill that promise and he would have to do it alone.
Not only would he have to do it alone, he would have to venture into uncharted dangerous waters where none had gone before, at least none who had lived. As he came to understand his quest, his questions turned to boats and he asked after the fastest, most maneuverable boat available. Upon the advice of several sailors, he found the perfect boat. Then he approached his father. He, as heir to the throne, had trained as an officer in the king's small navy and this his father took into account as he pondered his son's request.
On reaching his decision Hinchinbrook said, "This, my son, is something you must do and no ruling from a father can stop you. This I can see. Go with my blessing, but be not afraid to turn back, for no man would call another a coward who had turned back from the dark sound. You go just more than a boy. Acquit yourself well and come back a man."
With this the king ordered the palace stores opened to the prince and the stocking of William's small, fast craft began. The king's own chandlers prepared stores for the long voyage and packed them for stowage aboard the small boat.
The king's shipwrights worked on the boat, fixing what needed fixing, making a new suit of sails from black fabric, painting the hull and decks black and cleaning what needed cleaning. The black boat would hide in its own darkness from the giant's watchful eyes.
The king's astronomers worked with naval navigators to plan the times and places and courses the prince should use on this most dangerous of voyages. Even the magicians of the kingdom offered him potions and incantations, and though the prince thought little of them, he took everything that might give him an advantage over the immense power of the giant.
Finally the day came for the prince to set sail on his perilous voyage. The navigators went over the plans one more time and the chandlers took a final stock of their stores. All the weapons were placed aboard carefully, and with great fanfare the Prince was ready to depart safe harbor to rescue the fair Princess Virginia.
As William began to cast off his lines, the old fisherman who had first taken the princess into the dark sound rushed down the wharf with his sea bag slung over his shoulder. Despite his age and the weight of the bag, he leaped nimbly aboard the Prince's ship and said: "Name's Blinker, sir. You never asked. And you never asked me to go with you, but I took 'er in there and it's only right I should be goin' along to bring 'er out. If you'll 'ave me, sire."
The prince welcomed Blinker aboard and together they cast off the rest of the lines. Once they passed out of the harbor and had trimmed the sails for their course to the entrance of the sound, the prince fell back into his thoughts. The voyage was timed so they would arrive at the entrance just before nightfall and could enter and find a hiding place, they hoped, without detection before daylight could betray them. Now the full weight of his mission fell over the prince and he wondered how the princess fared in the hands of the giant, if she were still alive, even. His fear was not for himself, but for her.
For her part, the princess refused, at least outwardly, to yield to the terror of the evil giant. She met his evil with defiance and in those times when she was out of his sight she began making herself a weapon, just a pointed stick to be sure, but she kept sharpening it as she could against rocks and other sticks and then she'd hide it in her petticoats before the giant could see her. She knew not when she might use it or if it wasn't a wasteful project, but it gave her something to do and something she might be able to employ at the right moment. Still, at times her plight became overwhelming and silently, riding in the giant's pocket, she wept.
Prince William and Blinker reached the outer entrance to the dark sound just as the sun dove in behind the western mountains, leaving a dark, moonless night. Even the stars hid from view over this darkest of waters. With only the slightest of twilight left to guide them, they sailed the boat into a small anchorage and set the anchor. They were in the sound now and the plan was to begin exploring for the giant's hideaway at the first hint of dawn. If they hugged the shoreline and moved slowly, Prince William thought they could go a long way without being detected. While Blinker slept, the prince spent a restless night. He would lie down, toss, turn, get up and pace the decks, then go back to his bunk, but there would be no sleep for the prince this night.
At last a morning halo of light rose over the eastern mountains, ending the prince's long night. Prince William and Blinker hoisted their black sails and made for the entrance of their anchor cove.
All day they sailed through the sound, hugging the shoreline, watching for some sign of the evil giant and the princess. By late afternoon the prince was beginning to think all the talk about the giant was just talk, but he had to remember old Blinker had seen him. They were nearing the mouth of a large bay at the end of a long fjord when they realized they finally had come close to the giant. First they heard a low, rumbling roar. Then came gigantic splashes and waves came rolling out of the bay.
William and Blinker quickly sought shelter in a cove just outside the bay and there the prince went ashore. He climbed a short ridge over white granite rocks until he could see into the bay. About a quarter of a mile away he saw the giant, a horrible creature with shaggy hair sticking out from his head everywhere. A big, bulbous nose hung out over a mouth full of broken teeth. The giant's clothing hung in rags. He stood knee deep in the sea, digging rainwater out of his reddened eyes, and then he'd grab huge boulders in his rage and hurl them out into the bay water. Prince William marveled at the power of the giant, but refused to be intimidated and as he watched he began to form a plan to subdue the beast. Also as he watched, he began to discern the cause of the giant's rage, for the constant water in his eyes was bothering the prince, too. He pulled the visor of his black battle helmet down to shelter his eyes from the rain.
Prince William returned to the boat where he told Blinker what he had seen and the two worked late into the night making a plan for the next day.
The plan they made was a simple one. Prince William would circle the bay on foot until he was close to the giant. After a time, Blinker would sail the boat across the mouth of the bay to divert the giant's attention and when the time was right, Prince William would shoot the giant with an arrow tipped with a potion given to him by one of the king's sorcerers. The potion, he was told, would put a whole regiment to sleep and surely would be enough for one giant. Once the giant had fallen, William planned to tie him to the ground, then search for the princess and hope for escape before the giant could awaken and threaten them again.
All the preparations were made and again at first light the prince began moving. He had three hours to reach the giant, for in three hours' time Blinker was to sail the boat across the mouth of the bay to catch the giant's attention.
Prince William had seen the section of shore where the giant snatched his boulders and that was where he intended to go.
William scrambled and fought his way over rocks and through thick brambles working his way to the giant's lair. But he was taking too long and he knew it. Blinker would be sailing before he reached the spot he wanted. Fearing he would expose himself if he rushed, he could hurry no more than he was doing already. Still he moved as fast as he could through the bushes and over the boulders. He kept watching the giant and the bay mouth hoping Blinker would hold off, but, too soon, the prince saw the black bows of the boat emerge from behind the rocks guarding the bay mouth. When Prince William saw this he took a chance and sprinted across a clearing to bring himself within firing range of the giant. In this momentary exposure his motion was spotted, not by the giant, but by the princess Virginia. Riding in the giant's pocket, the princess saw William as he raced across the clearing. From then she kept a watch, following his progress as he scrambled toward them.
The giant saw the boat first and his reaction was to grab a boulder to fling at it. When he did, the prince was not yet in position to stop the giant from throwing and the first boulder almost swamped the boat.
Fortunately Blinker had the boat up to speed and sailed past the opening before the giant could reach for another boulder. As the giant turned to rip another rock from the shore, he spotted Prince William scrambling through the brush toward him. The prince had climbed to a ridge almost at the giant's eye level and was concentrating on where to place his feet on the uneven ground. He didn't even know the giant had spotted him. But, the princess in the pocket sensed the direction the giant's body and head had moved and realized he was staring right at the Prince. In desperation, not knowing how much good it would do, she pulled out her sharpened stick and drove it as deeply as she could through the shirt and into the skin of the giant's chest. The giant yelped, not so much in pain as in surprise, for the stab could have had little more effect than a bee's sting. Still, it diverted the giant's attention just long enough to give Prince William an instant to raise his bow and let an arrow fly. The giant's neck was bent as he searched for the source of the sting on his chest and the Prince's arrow struck the exposed neck just under the giant's ear.
Now a second bee had stung the giant and he reached for the new pain, but even as he did, his hand and arm slowed as the potion worked through his body. He blinked, looked at his hand that wouldn't go to his neck, and then sat down dumbly, his eyes falling out of focus. As his eyes began to close he fell over backwards, crushing several boulders into pebbles as he did.
Prince William scampered down the slope in front of him, ran around the boulders and climbed up onto the giant's chest. There he found the Princess Virginia just crawling out of the giant's pocket.
They met, standing knee deep in the giant's chest hair, and embraced. As they did, the joy of their reunited love coursed through their veins as if beaten by a single heart and they became one. And, as they stood there on the giant's chest, the rain increased. Water beat against their faces and their clothing soaking both of them, though they hardly noticed. The rain pounded the boulders and the trees and the mountainsides. It drove harder until sheets washed down the mountains and gullies and valleys and through the bushes. But as the water rushed on, it drove the darkness before it. This sudden rush of water drove away the darkness and with it the anger and both washed away into the waters of the sound, spreading and weakening until there was no more anger left in the dark sound.
Once the rain had cleansed the sky and the earth, the sun broke through, lighting the sound as it had never been before. Where there had been gray in the sky, now there was blue. White peaks of mountains split by blue glaciers towered over bright green forests. The water took on a brilliant green reflected from the mountainsides and the ocean sent happy little white-crested riffles to splash against the beaches. The ground where the giant slept turned white from the granite pebbles and made almost a sand beach where the two reunited lovers now walked to the water line to greet Blinker, who had seen the giant fall andwas bringing the boat toward shore.
Their path took them a short way through bushes and there they discovered a miracle in a small clearing. It was a place the giant had stood often and a place, as may be guessed, where the princess had shed many tears. Now, everywhere a tear had fallen, a blueberry grew. And, everywhere across the sound where the giant had carried the weeping princess, now a blueberry bush sprouted. The Prince saw this and said, "You are indeed the Blueberry princess. Be my Blueberry Queen and we will forge our lives together here and it will never again be known as the dark sound."
To this the princess said, "Yes, and if I am to be the Blueberry Queen, let this place be known as Prince William's Sound."
"Hoorah! Hoorah! Hoorah for the Blueberry Queen and Prince William's Sound!" cried Blinker, who had come up on them without their noticing. "Long live the good Prince William and the good Princess Virginia!
"'Twill be a fine place, sire," Blinker called. "Done right it could be safe harbor and solve the fishing dispute between our nations."
"Excellent, Blinker," the prince said. The princess added, "For your fine thinking, you shall be prime minister and chief potentate and your first task will be to work out the details. Also, we must send for your wife. She also shall have a position of great responsibility."
Said Prince William, "We shall have to find a way to shelter the mouth of the sound to make safe harbor."
"I've an idea, sire," Blinker said. "'Tis true the heavy rain washed away the anger." Blinker walked over and sat down on the giant's chest. He sat for some time until the giant began to stir from his sleep. Prince William prepared another arrow just in case some of the anger remained.
The giant began to show some alertness and as he did, Blinker smiled. The giant smiled. Blinker spoke a few words the prince and princess could not understand and the giant responded. Blinker came over to the William and Virginia, winked, and said, "The anger is truly gone, washed away. No water in the eyes." Then the giant rose with Blinker on his shoulder and waded to the mouth of the sound. Before long Blinker had the giant piling huge rocks in the water and within a few hours, they'd built two islands that stopped the ocean swells and calmed the waters of the sound.
The prince and princess stood at the water's edge and watched and saw that their new realm would be a good and peaceful one. "We shall name the islands after our families. The one to the east will be Hinchinbrook and the one to the west Montague," they agreed.
Before they could go on to live happily ever after in Prince William's Sound, the prince turned to Virginia and said, "I love you my Blueberry Queen."
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