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A blog by Bill Hess

Running Dog Publications

P.O. Box 872383 Wasilla, Alaska 99687

 

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Wasilla

Wasilla is the place where I have lived for the past 29 years - sort of. The house in which my wife and I raised our family sits here, but I have made my rather odd career as a different sort of photojournalist by continually wandering off to other places to photograph people and gather information, which I have then put together in various publications that have served the Alaska Native Eskimo, Indian and Aleut communities.

Although I did not have a great of free time to devote to this rather strange community, named after a Tanaina Athabascan Indian chief who knew Wasilla in the way that I so impossibly long to, I have still documented it regularly over the past quarter-century plus. In the early days, my Wasilla photographs focused mostly upon my children and the events they participated in - baseball, football, figure skating, hockey, frog catching, fire cracker detonation, Fourth of July parade - that sort of thing. 

In 2002, I purchased my first digital camera and then, whenever I was home, I began to photograph Wasilla upon a daily basis, but not in a conventional way. These were grab shots - whatever caught my eye as I took my many long walks or drove through the town, shooting through the car window at people and scenes that appeared and disappeared before I could even focus and compose in the traditional photographic way.

Thus, the Wasilla portion of this blog will be devoted both to the images that I take as I wander about and those that I have taken in the past. Despite the odd, random, nature of the images, I believe they communicate something powerful about this town that I have never seen expressed anywhere else. 

Wasilla is a sprawling community that has been slapped down hodge-podge upon what was so recently wilderness of the most exquisite beauty. In its design, it is deliberately anti-zoned, anti-planned. In the building of Wasilla, the desire to make a buck has trumped aesthetics and all other considerations. This town, built in the midst of exquisite beauty, has largely become an unsightly, unattractive, mess of urban sprawl. Largely because of this, it often seems to me that Wasilla is a community with no sense of community, a town devoid of town soul.

Yet - Wasilla is my home and if I am lucky it will be until I grow old and die. Despite its horrific failings, it is still made of the stuff of any small city: people; moms and dads, grammas and grampas, teens, children, churches, bars, professionals, laborers, soldiers, missionaries, artists, athletes, geniuses, do-gooders, hoodlums, the wealthy, the homeless, the rational and logical, the slightly insane and the wholly insane - and, yes, as is now obvious to the whole world, politicians, too.

So perhaps, if one were to search hard enough, it might just be possible to find a sense of community here, and a town soul. So, using my skills as a photojournalist and a writer, I hope to do just that. If this place has a sense of community, I will find it. If there is a town soul to Wasilla, I will document it. I won't compete with the newspapers. Hell no! But as time and income allow, it will be fun to wander into the places where the folks described above gather, and then put what I find on this blog.

 

by 300...

Anywhere within a 300 mile radius of Wasilla. This encompasses perhaps the most wild, dramatic, gorgeous, beautiful section of land and sea to be found in any comparable space anywhere on Earth. I can never explore it all, but I will do the best that I can, and will here share what I find and experience with you.  

and then some...

Anywhere else in the world that I happen to get to, such as Point Lay, Alaska; Missoula, Montana; Serenki, Chukotka, Russia; or Bangalore, India. Perhaps even Lagos, Nigeria. I have both a desire and scheme to get me there. It is a long shot. We shall see if I succeed.

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« I dream a strange dream of noise and silence | Main | Shingles - what a relief! ...sort of »
Wednesday
Nov092011

My shingles proves to be pretty tough on the good black cat, Jim

DateWednesday, November 9, 2011 at 11:41PM

As you might suspect, I have a lot I want to write about right now and I sat down at this computer planning to do just that.

Now that Jim is on the screen, I realize that for the moment I am just too done in to write it all, so I am not going to even try.

Instead, I will write a tiny bit about Jim.

This whole process has been damn hard on him.

He likes to jump on my lap, walk across my shoulders, my keyboard and then settle down on my torso with his paws on my chest. And I can't let him. It hurts too bad.

Jim is a very good cat - there is none better - but he is not a healer cat in the way Thunder Paws was. If Paws were alive, he would want to be with me, too. But he would know not to walk across my shoulders, or put his paws on my chest. He would know the places where I hurt and he would not touch those places.

But he would touch where I did not hurt, and he would apply his healing powers.

I know this will sound nonsense to many, but that's the kind of cat Thunder Paws was.

He was a healer cat.

And a thinking cat.

Jim is a buddy cat, a fun cat to hang out with but he will walk across my shingles.

He does not understand why I won't let him; why I keep evicting him from the room, or pushing him away if I have collapsed on my back on the couch.

This has been very hard on Jim.

He is not a healer cat and he does manage to make contact and that contact hurts, yet, somehow, his presence makes the pain easier to bear. Even if he hurts me sometimes, he will help me heal faster.

Jim - my good black cat.

How lucky I am to have a buddy like that.

Buddy Jim.

 

AuthorWasilla, Alaska, by 300 | Comment1 Comment |
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Reader Comments (1)

Not difficult to understand at all. Even when our furry children cause us pain, they bring us even more in so many ways. My Bits loves to love me as I sleep or try to sleep. His idea of love is to butt heads with me, knead with his need-to-be-clipped claws on any bare skin he can find, then he nurses on that spot at the same time leaving me with bloody little holes & hickies all over any available surface on a daily basis. He is incapable of kneading on any cloth covered surface - it insults his need to be close to the "real" me. Heaven help me if I ever have shingles. He, too, would have to learn to love from a distance - for awhile.

Sleep well & recover swiftly.

November 10, 2011 | Unregistered CommenterKatzKids

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