Back in Wasilla, where a moose ran into the trees and Branson caught a fish, I glimpse back at Cibecue Creek

It is a beautiful Saturday here in Wasilla, Alaska. The sun shines brightly upon foilage, lucious and green. The air is pleasantly warm, leaning towards hot but not quite there yet. A light breeze rustles the leaves and the aroma given off by all this new greenery and blossoming flowers is sweet.

So I don't really want to spend the day inside, yet I have spent the past two-and-a-half hours doing just that - editing my take of May 27, when several of us took a hike up Cibecue Creek from the place where it empties into the Salt River. This, of course, took place in the homeland of Arizona's White Mountain Apache Tribe, of which my wife and children are all enrolled members.

It was a hike that began in desert heat intense enough to cause me to wonder if it was such a good idea for all of us to take off into it with a two-and-a-half year old boy walking along, but our destination would be one of magic, if we could but reach it.

Do you think this little boy, Kalib, could handle the six-hour hike that lay ahead of him?

I can't spend anymore time on it right now, but please come back tomorrow and I will show you.

I have a great deal of catching up to do - from my trips to Arizona and to Anaktuvuk Pass. I hope to get all caught up within a week, possibly two, certainly no more than three, because three weeks from right now the plan is for me to be on my way to Greenland - I MUST be caught up by then.

Kalib, by the way, is enrolled not in the White Mountain Apache Tribe but in the Navajo Nation. Both the Apache and Navajo are matrilineal societies, hence Kalib and Jobe belong to their mother's tribe and clan.

Just to make it clear that I truly am back in Wasilla, where I am attempting to slip back into my "normal home routine" for the three weeks that it might be possible to do so, here is a moose that I caught with my pocket camera as I drove down Shrock Road.

Even as I catch up on Arizona and Anaktuvuk Pass, I will drop in images from Wasilla, just to keep up to date.

Just before I came upon the moose, I had made the usual afternoon stop at Metro Cafe, where Carmen showed me this picture that she took of her son, Branson, her husband Scott and the fish Branson had just caught. As you can see, it is a special moment, but it is even more special than you likely realize, for there is a bigger story here.

I will tell it when time and circumstance permit. Carmen is going to throw a big five-year birthday party for Branson on the 27th. She thought that this would be a good time for me to come, take pictures and tell the story, but I will be Greenland then.

I am excited to be making my second trip to Greenland, but I hate to miss this party.

That's how this life is, though. To experience one thing, you must miss out on another - no: a trillion-plus others. An infinite number of others.

I find this very frustrating.

In keeping with tradition, I now title this image: Through the Window Metro Study, #6699.

Anaktuvuk Pass: remembering loved ones who have passed on

This is the post that I had planned to put up Tuesday morning, but I could not get online. 

I arrived in Anaktuvuk Pass on Memorial Day afternoon with several friends and relatives of Ben (B-III) Hopson the Third and Nasuġraq Rainey Higbee, who would wed the next day.

There was much good food in the house - caribou stew, caribou meat, fresh rolls and such and I had already fed myself a good sampling of it when I learned that the community was going to gather at the cemetery at 5:00 PM, to remember loved ones buried there and to feast in their honor.

When the time came, I joined several members of the wedding party and we walked over together.

When we arrived, I saw a group of people gathered just off the southern edge of the cemetery, the mountains of the Brooks Range rising behind, in front of and all around them. They were praying.

The man leading the prayer was Dr. James Nageak, an Iñupiaq hunter, scholar, retired university professor and Presbyterian preacher. That's James to the left, wearing the green coat.

He thanked the Lord for the lives lived by all those buried here, and for the beautiful land and the animals that had sustained them and that continue to sustain the people of Anaktuvuk Pass today.

After he finished, the Reverend Keith Johnston, right, who now serves as pastor for Anaktuvuk's Presbyterian "Chapel in the Mountains," read scripture.

Then the feasting began. Although I had already eaten, I ate again. I had more caribou soup, I had fish, wild berries, Eskimo donuts; I made certain to get some of the bowhead maktak that had been boiled into uunaalik, seen here just to the right of the spaghetti.

The spaghetti, by the way, is caribou spaghetti. It was superb.

Rachel Riley asked me how my shoulder was healing up. Rachel was in the Barrow High cafeteria on June 12, 2008, when I took my fall, shattered my shoulder, got loaded into a Lear Jet ambulance and was flown on a $37,000 + ambulance ride to Providence Hospital in Anchorage, where I went through two surgeries and had my natural bone replaced by an artificial, titantium, shoulder.

I told her that it had healed well and I was doing good, but that it would never be what it was before. For all it's technical medical wonder, this titanium just cannot match my natural bone. Yet, I am greatly thankful to have it.

Rachel then explained to Ada Lincoln exactly what she had saw that day when I fell off the rolling chair while taking a picture (and Rachel, by the way, is in the last frame that I shot just before the chair rolled out from under me).

A boy walks through the cemetery, looking at the graves of relatives and friends.

Raymond Paneak took me to the grave of his brother, George, who died on September 19, 2009, at the age of 60. George had been Mayor of the village and was an active leader in the Healthy Communities movement, a grass-roots effort to stem the harm and damage that the abuse of alcohol and drugs has caused in the Far North.

Freida Rulland, left, showed me the grave of her father and my friend, Paul Hugo. A good twenty-years ago plus, Paul took me to many places in these mountains, by snowmachine, eight-wheeled Argo, depending on the season, and on foot in search of caribou. 

We found a few, too.

He had also kept me as a house-guest in his home. We had eaten pancakes in the morning, caribou in the evening.

Although I of course knew that he had died, it none-the-less shocked me to see his name stenciled into the cross that marks his grave.

He passed away on October 9, 2009, at the age of 49.

I told Frieda and her sister that I would stop by and say "hi" to their mother, but my trip was short and I was busy every waking minute of it and I never got a chance.

I expect to be back in Anaktuvuk before too long, though, and I will then.

Freida's sister, Amanilla Hugo, stands to the far right.

Two little ones, growing up in Anaktuvuk Pass.

The delay was long, but finally I flew to Anchorage and drove home to Wasilla, where a fish had jumped out of a tank

Given the non-stop intensity and full range of emotion that I have experienced these past few weeks, coupled with a chronic lack of sleep, I am a tired and lazy boy. I have no desire to blog or to do anything but to lay around, vegetate and indulge in the pleasures that lie on the soft and easy side of life, all of which seem to be out of reach.

So I will just post another traveling blog, with little comment. Tomorrow, I hope to get back to some serious blogging.

This is from yesterday afternoon in Fairbanks International Airport, where delay compounded delay. At one point as I was web-surfing, my adopted Wainwright Sister, Mary Ellen Ahmaogak (left, holding cards), appeared suddenly at my side and so I stood up and we gave each other a hug.

A bit later, she joined some other Arctic Slope ladies in a game of Snert.

Maybe if I had asked, I could have joined in, too, but they would have slaughtered me.

When it comes to Snert, they are all very cunning and ruthlessly ruthless.

So I sat in Fairbanks International Airport from 11:35 AM until about 5:30 PM. Finally, I was on the plane, sitting in Window Seat 7F. I observed other people debarking from another flight.

As you can see, the smoke from the wildfires remained heavy, although not so bad as when I passed through on the way to AKP.

Then came the preflight briefing. As usual, the passengers paid rapt attention to every word and demonstration, as all of our lives could depend upon it.

I wonder what it feels like, to have two batons in your hands and to order the pilot of a big jet around? Even if for just a few moments?

Of course, if that pilot were to accidently run over a duck because you waved a baton wrong, it wouldn't feel very good at all.

Then we were rising from the runway, passing over moth-balled airplanes as we climbed. Someone should give me one of those airplanes. I would put it in my back yard and move my office into it.

I think the cats and I would be very happy in such an office and it would give the fish a new place to swim.

Then I noticed that the sun had come through the window and had lit my hand up.

Lots of cumulous clouds in the air. 

Can you see Denali, right under the wing tip?

That's the highest mountain in North America, you know - and the tallest mountain in the world, measured from base to peak rather than feet above sea level.

We here in Alaska all love this mountain and most of us hate to hear it called McKinley. It is just not right to call it McKinley.

Here we are, descending over the Cook Inlet mudflats on final approach into Ted Stevens International Airport in Anchorage.

I wonder how Ted Stevens feels, when he sits on a plane descending on final into this airport?

And then we were at the gate, ready to deboard.

Back in Wasilla, a dog looked at me.

After I returned to my house, I discovered that the small green terror that had disappeared and so I had thought might have been eaten had not been eaten after all.

It had jumped out of the tank, had flopped its way several feet until it was under my work table and there it had died and dried. It didn't smell too good.

I try to keep my tanks covered, but awhile before I left, Pistol-Yero climbed upon the 95 gallon tank and broke one-half of the cover.

I wasn't worried, though, because I did not think there were any jumpers in there.

Just a little bit ago, Pistol-Yero climbed atop the 55 gallon tank and collapsed one half of the cover. I don't think he broke it, though. I don't think there are any jumpers in there, but I had better fish that cover out and put it back.

I was wrong before, I could be wrong again.

It just wouldn't be right to lose another good fish because it jumped out of the tank.

Back online at Fairbanks International Airport, enroute AKP - to ANC

This is Anaktuvuk Pass, this morning about 8:00 AM. I will make a couple of good reports from Anaktuvuk -maybe three or four, perhaps even more, but this post is not one of them. This post has but one purpose - to let you know that I am back online and to get something up at a reasonable hour of this day.

I am online because I am at Gate 1 at the Alaska Airlines Terminal of the Fairbanks International Airport, where my plane is scheduled to board, shortly. The airport has free wireless - as, indeed, all good, full-service, airports should.

This is Nasuġraq Rainey, formerly Higbee, but as of yesterday afternoon, Nasuġraq Rainey Hopson, her cat, Harley and her sister, Angela. Eventually, I will prepare a good report on the wedding of Rainey and B-III, and I will also give Harley a post all of her own, because she certainly deserves, but I will not do so now.

Right now, I just have to get something up, so I can catch my plane.

And here is Payuk, with one of Rainey's puppies. The puppy's dad just might be a wolf, who Rainey spotted one day eyeing a penned dog in heat. Maybe the wolf figured out how to get to the dog.

And here I am, in the plane, wishing that it was my plane, as the pilot prepares to lift off the runway.

And here we all are, the pilot, me, Byron and Alvira, airborne, leaving AKP, headed to Fairbanks.

And here we are, flying through the Brooks Range.

There are wildfires burning and so the air is filled with smoke. Two days ago, enroute from FAI to AKP, the smoke was so thick that we could not even see the Yukon River when we flew over it.

Today, although hazy, we could at least see the Yukon.

And here we are, landing in Fairbanks.

This is all I am going to post for now. My plane is scheduled to begin boarding in 11 minutes. I want to get a treat before it boards.

Update, 2:45 PM:

Well, my flight has been delayed. By an hour-and-a-half.

Damnit.

Guess I will sit here and web surf.

I am experiencing technical problems here in AKP

Here I am, in Anaktuvuk Pass, where the 80 degrees that everyone tells me had warmed this tiny community in the midst of the Brooks Range just the day before I arrived has yielded to wind and ice-cold rain, which is now turning to snow. This would be okay, except that Rainey and B-III had planned to wed outside, up in the mountains, with caribou and other Iñupiat foods cooking all around, and this weather is not conducive to that.

As for me, I am having technical problems between my computer and the local wireless signal. I am momentarily on a borrowed laptop, with none of my photos in it. It just may be that I will not be able to make a full-fledged, illustrated, post until I return to Wasilla, probably either late Wednesday or Thursday.

Yesterday, I went to the community Memorial Day gathering at the village cemetery. It was beautiful and there was much good food. I saw the graves of some old friends. Even though I knew they had passed on, it was a surprise and it took me back a bit to see their names written upon the varnished wooden crosses that now stand over them.