In answer to Saturday's quiz, I was hanging out at Metro Cafe on Friday when I heard someone shout, "horses are coming!"
I stepped out the door and this is what I saw - five women on horseback, coming down the bike trail. One of them, the second one from the left, looked like a truck driver. In fact, she looked like a truck driver who I had seen but a few nights before, on TV, facing terror on a narrow, windy, highway twisting through the Himalaya Mountains in India.
I seldom watch much TV, but this show caught my eye, because I have experienced the deadly madness of the Indian highway - although never in the Himalayas - and also because the truck driver was a beautiful, petite, young woman by the name of Lisa Kelly who lives right here in Wasilla, Alaska.
In fact, what I did not know at the time is that she lives right here, in my own neighborhood.
She gained her fame as one of Alaska's Ice Road Truckers, which has evolved to encompass the Deadliest Roads of all the world.
Now here Lisa was, riding her horse down the bike trail that passes by Metro Cafe.
Would she turn in?
Would she pull her horse right up to the drive through window and order hot chocolate for herself and a biscuit for her horse?
Lisa Kelly did pull in! And here she is, waiting in line at the drive-through with her friends and horses while Nola delivers an order to the customer ahead of her.
Sure enough, the horse ordered a biscuit. "Do we have any horse biscuits?" Nola shouted, "There's a horse at my window who has just ordered a biscuit!"*
Nola found a biscuit and served it to Sky, the horse.
"Damn good!" the horse neighed, after devouring the biscuit. "Now give me that one, too!"** Nola did. The horses behind would also all get their biscuits.
Camera and production people working on contract for CNN were following Lisa. I don't know when, but CNN plan to do a little story in which they follow Lisa as she takes them to her favorite places in Wasilla.
One of those favorite places is Metro Cafe. Another is Fat Boy's Pizza, which sits in the opposite direction from my house.
I bought a pizza there on the day Fat Boy's opened. If Fat Boy's is now one of the favorite places of the famous ice road trucker, Lisa Kelly, they must have figured out how to do it.
Sometime after I get back from my next trip to the Arctic Slope, I will go back and give them another try.
"Wasilla is MY city," she tells the camera people here, "and Metro Cafe is one of my favorite places!"
If one is going to sip on hot chocolate at Metro Cafe, it is more pleasant to sit and sip inside, rather than outside, in the saddle, on horse back.
Lisa... I will not tell you to stay safe out on those roads you drive. That is impossible and would defeat the whole purpose of your adventures. But please, always, do come safely home.
Outside, I had chatted briefly with photographer David A. Van Amber of Mankato, Minnesota. When I asked him who he was working for, he answered, "I'm hers," and nodded toward Linda Kelly.
I inquired a little further, and learned that this meant he was her photographer only, and that she is married.
Inside Metro, in what appeared to be an inside joke, he touched her on the shoulder and then they broke laughing.
Lisa autographs a baseball cap for David.
The cameraman depicts hard-working barista and writer in the making, Shoshana, making a smoothie.
When not out on the ice roads or the Himalayan highways, Lisa says she drops into Metro Cafe about three times a week. Hot chocolate and cinnamon rolls are her favorite.
She likes to come to Metro, she says, because, "sometimes you just want to go to a place where everybody knows your name."
When she said that, for some reason, I began to hear the theme song from Cheers in my head.
And it was a fact - every single person in Metro Cafe knew Lisa Kelly by name.
Lisa and Carmen.
Scott's dad is a truck driver and he drives Kenworth - the same kind of rig that Lisa drives. When he learned that she was a regular at Metro, he asked Scott to be sure to get a photo of Lisa with Carmen and him and send to him.
So, Scott's dad, this is for you.
My printer is broken and I am about to leave to the Far North for a couple of weeks or so, so it will be awhile before I can make a print.
Then I went back outside and to create one of my famous "Through the Metro window" studies with Lisa, Carmen, Scott, Nola and the crew that recorded her visit for CNN. I am afraid I did not get everybody's name, but the fellow at right is Russell J. Weston, of Weston Productions out of Anchorage, who contracted with CNN.
It had been decades since I had last seen him, but I first met him nearly 30 years ago when he was working as a photographer for the Anchorage Times and my family and I were living in two small tents, which we pitched here and there, trying to find a way to survive in Alaska.
There were three newspapers in Anchorage then and so whenever we would run out of money to buy gas for the Volkswagen Rabbit that had transported us from Arizona to Alaska, or food, I would stop in at the different papers.
If they had any extra assignments that staff had been unable to fill, I would take them and then they would pay me $25.00 per published shot.
That's how I met Russell, who is now an independent "An Emmy Award Winner" producer.
He gave his card and it says so right on it.
So here you have it:
Through the Metro Window Study, #3,444,899.23: With Lisa Kelly and CNN
And here is Scott.
Regular readers will recall the post when, after learning that he had cancer, Scott told me that in building Metro Cafe, he had created a stage for Carmen, that it was she who worked the magic that brought the stage and the plays that unfold therein to life.
On this day, another such play had unfolded on the stage that Scott had built for his beautiful and vivacious wife, Carmen.
So here is Scott, alongside the stage that he built.
As for Carmen, when I returned to the drive-through window at 4:00 PM for my regular, we talked a bit about the flurry of activity from earlier in the day.
"It will be very good for Metro Cafe," I assured her.
She remembered when Scott and she had opened the cafe, how much fun it had been and that now, what she wants, more than anything, more than publicity and success in business, is for Scott to get well.
That's it. She wants Scott to be well.
*Sometimes, when a quote cannot be precisely remembered, it must be made up. I am not saying that this is the case here, only that sometimes it happens.
**This is a definite, definite, quote, not made up at all. These are the very words that Sky the horse spoke.
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