On tax day, I take prints and visit Warren Matumeak and daughters; I return to Wasilla and find a Tea Party; my coverage is interupted

It had been very chilly in our bedroom when we went in to seek sleep the night before. After I tucked Margie into the single bed where, as a result her injuries, she still must sleep, I jumped into our bed and the cold sting of the sheets against my flesh almost shot me back out again.

But I held my spot, because I knew that the blankets would hold my body heat and soon I would be warm and toasty.

Sure enough, it happened just that way. Sooner or later, insomniac me went to sleep. And then, somewhere around 3:00 AM, I dreamed that I was out in the country somewhere but was inadequately dressed and so was getting cold. Then I woke up and discovered that I was inadequately blanketed and truly was getting cold.

I keep a special quilt on the bed just for such moments, but the quilt was gone, folded and put away somewhere. Oh well, I figured, I could just reposition myself a bit to create a better layer of air insulation between the blankets and me and I would warm up and be fine.

I did not want to get up and go search for a blanket.

And so the rest of the night went, me always thinking that I had found just the right spot, dozing temporarily off, then waking, chilled, again.

In the morning, when I finally got up, it was to a clear, blue, sky and a beautiful world. Barefooted, I stepped onto the back porch to shoot this image. The porch was frozen and I felt the cold, sting of ice against my feet, but it was only for a few a seconds and I did not mind at all.

A few months back, Darlene Matumeak-Kagak got in touch with me to request a print of a photo that I took at Kivgiq 2003 of she and her sister, Mae Ahgeak, dancing with their father Warren Matumeak. Warren is pictured in my April 14 post, drumming and singing.

Providing prints to people who want them is a very difficult thing for me because, literally, I have received requests for THOUSANDS of prints, dating back to my film days and it is just impossible. Furthermore, the big majority of people who want these prints are Alaska Native who have befriended and helped me and without whom none of this work that I have done would have been possible, so it has always been my policy not to sell prints to such folk, but to give them and, despite my huge backlog of undelivered orders, I have given THOUSANDS away.

So I always tell people that if they want a picture, don't be afraid to keep sending me little reminders. In time, a reminder may well hit me when I am in a circumstance that makes it possible for me to make a print. The digital age has made it easier for me to get pictures to people in .jpg form, but even then, there are so many that it remains a challenge -plus a .jpg is not a print.

Darlene and her husband Jake have been very good to me over the years. Warren, her father, is one of the great men of the Arctic, a man who I greatly respect, love and admire. So, when I learned that he was coming to Anchorage to get chemo for cancer, I decided that I needed to make those prints right now and deliver them personally.

So here I am, in my car, looking at the Talkeetna Mountains from the stop sign at the intersection of Seldon and Lucille as I drive to Anchorage. Sitting alongside me in the passenger seat is three, 13 x 19 Velvet Fine Art prints that I had made late the night before.

The road was slick, but the temperature was rising and would hit 40 come late afternoon. I don't know what the low had been. About 10, I would guess.

Pioneer Peak and the Chugach Mountains, as I cross the Knik River bridge.

Someone in the opposing, north-bound lanes of traffic had been pulled over. Police officers were positioned at both the passenger and driver doors and, if I recall correctly, three patrol vehicles had stopped.

I don't know what happened. For all I know, in the end, the driver got off with a warning. I could do some investigative reporting and find out, but I don't think I will bother.

After I got to town, the very first thing that I did was drive out to the Dimond area to pick Melanie up so we could have lunch together. Along the way, while stopped at a red light, I saw this scene. I thought about how thin is the line that separates me from being part of it and wondered if and when I might yet cross that line.

I did not recognize the man, but maybe I know some of his family, somewhere out in Rural Alaska. Maybe some of his relatives have brought me into their home, be it a house or a camp, and have fed me.

For some reason, I failed to take any pictures during my lunch with Melanie. We got to talking and I just forgot. I can tell you this, she is a big help to me and her mom right now and to her youngest brother, too. I need to be more of a help to her.

She has also helped many cats, and that is just one of the many trillion reasons why I love her so.

As I do all my children, and those with whom they have united to bring even more family into our lives.

After I dropped Melanie off back at her work, I drove straight to the airport to meet Warren and his three daughters, who were already headed back to Barrow. Given what I had heard about his cancer, he looked surprisingly strong and good, and his spirits seemed high. He told me, though, that how he looked on the outside hid what he felt inside.

His doctors here in Anchorage had started him on some intense chemo and he would stay on it back home in Barrow for about two more weeks and then he would return. If it was having the desired effect, he would stay on it. If it wasn't... well, he said, he had experienced 82 wonderful years in this life and was ready to go to his home on the other side.

Those of us who know him here, I answered, are not ready for that. We need and want him here. This, he said, was what he also wants and is hoping for, but, if not, he is ready. He has already experienced many miracles in his life that have kept him here when it seemed, perhaps, that his time was already over.

He told me about one, in the days before snowmachines, when he had been out on the ice with his dogs and had to cross a wide section of very thin ice, one inch thick at most. His dogs did not want to go on, but he had no choice and so urged them forward. He leaned into the sled, which was buoyant. The dogs pushed forward and as they did, their paws punched repeatedly through the ice, but sea ice is flexible in a way that freshwater ice is not and the dogs managed to keep moving forward without going all the way through. A couple of times, Warren gave a push with his foot and his boot also broke through.

Finally, they reached stronger ice about two inches thick and soon were on safe ice. Warren stopped his dogs, and offered a prayer of thanks.

All too soon, it was time for them to head for security and then on to the Alaska Airlines gate where they would board their flight back to Barrow.

One of his daughters offered to get a wheelchair to make the journey a little easier for him, but Warren said, no, he needed the exercise and he would walk.

This reminded me of another of his survival miracles, one that happened about 24 years ago and that I wrote up in an early issue of Uiñiq. In that instance, Warren suffered a heart attack out on the tundra while hunting caribou with his young grandson Tommy, who, if I remember right, was eight years old at the time. Warren knew that he was going to die and so had his young grandson bundle him onto the sled and then told him to drive the snowmachine toward the moon, because in that direction he would find his grandmother at camp and could return his body to her.

It was a tough and long ride, but young Tommy saved his aapa's life. 

Afterward, I would often see Warren in the evenings on the indoor track built above the Barrow High gymnasium - walking and walking and walking, building up the strength in his heart.

Behind him here are his daughters Darlene, Alice and Mae.

This is the photo that I had printed in triplicate for them, with Darlene dancing at the left and Mae at the right. Suurimmaanitchuat.

I should note that in his work days, Warren served as Planning Director for the North Slope Borough and later as director of the North Slope Borough Wildlife Management Department. He is a choir director at the Utqeaqvik Presbyterian Church and is well known for his oratory from behind the pulpit.

Do any of you regular readers ever pick up on the conflict that tears always within me, between the pull of my communal home on the Arctic Slope and my physical and blood-family home in Wasilla?

Now, at Ted Stevens International Airport in Anchorage, I had once again taken a mental trip back to the communal home, but it was time to return to Wasilla. As stated in the sidebar at right, one of the primary reasons that I started this blog was to better get to know Wasilla, where I have lived now for nearly 30 years. Yet, outside my house and family, Wasilla is a town in which I have mostly been a stranger, because my work, heart, and soul has always been out in the rural areas where I have done my work.

Yet, I love Wasilla and I want to know what this place, where I have for so long kept a physical presence, is all about. I want to find its soul, but, even since I started this blog, a lack of time and financial resource has severely limited my search. I am not even close to meeting this goal.

Perhaps I am little bit frightened by this goal, too. I don't know.

As I drove back to Wasilla, I passed this Volkswagen.

The first car that Margie and I ever owned was a lemon-yellow Super Beetle. We loved that car like we have loved no car since - but I do love the Ford Escape. Among the many cars that we have now ground down, I love the Escape second only to the Super Beetle.

Back in Wasilla, it was Tax Day, and the Liberty Tax mascot was out, seeking to draw in those who had procrastinated almost beyond hope.

It would prove to be a very hard tax day for us, as we came up owing, with no funds to pay the difference. It won't be fun, but we will get through this. It happened before, in 1997, about ten times worse than now. We got through it. I never wanted it to happen again, but it did, and we will get through it again.

Not far down the road, I saw a man riding his four-wheeler like he was part of the US Calvary, leading a caravan of three, charging to the rescue of his beleaguered nation on Tax Day, charging to Wasilla's Tea Party rally.

All of a sudden, my coverage of Tax Day and the Tea Party is interrupted. This is because, as I sat here, diligently working on my report, my office door flew open and Kalib came charging in.

His mother had brought him and Jobe out to visit us while she goes to Metro Cafe to go online and do some homework.

I thought he had come rushing in to hug me, so I extended my arms, but he was not interested in giving his grandpa a hug. He just wanted to feed his grandpa's fish, and he didn't want to waste any time getting at it.

After he fed the fish, he disappeared, but I soon followed him into the living room and this is what I found: Kalib, Caleb, and Jobe.

In time, I came back to the blog, but I had stated that I would have it up no later than noon and here it is, nearly 2:00 PM, and I cannot spend another minute of this day working on this blog.

So I will save the tea party part for tomorrow. Or, perhaps, by then, life will have moved on and so will I have and my tea party coverage will just languish, perhaps to one day be seen, perhaps never.

We will see.

PS: My niece, Shaela Ann Cook, has a new blog. I have given her a link and invite all to visit her site. You will see that her outlook towards food is very different than mine, but it doesn't matter. We love each other and she supports Iñupiat whaling. She wants to make a movie on my book, Gift of the Whale, if only she could find the means.

I return to Wasilla and then kick about around town

It's about time this blog just kicked around Wasilla for bit. I begin in the parking lot outside Mat-Su Valley Family Restaurant, where this little American flag fluttered in the breeze from the back window of someone's car.

And this was one of many scenes inside, where the ham, eggs, hashbrowns, toast and coffee were all very tasty. Margie won't return from being snowed in down in Arizona for another full week yet. I will probably wind up here again a time or two between now and then.

In the afternoon, I took a walk with a half moon above.

I had not walked far before this dog came trotting down the street, eager to meet me. I was afraid that it would want to follow me, but it only wanted to say, "hello." Then it turned around and returned from whence it came.

This dog's name is Sampson. He was walking with a woman named Summer, and a black and white dog named Cher.

A little further along, I came upon a young man sitting on a four-wheeler going nowhere. "You're not broke down, are you?" I asked.

"No," he said. "I ran out of gas and then my battery died." Someone had gone to pick up what he needed to get going again.

"Bill is my name," I said.

"Good to meet you, I'm Eric," he said, as he extended his hand.

We shook hands.

"Good luck," I said.

Then I walked away, leaving him to sit on his machine to wait for gas and a battery.

An airplane flew overhead.

On my coffee break, I took the car to the gas station. As I was filling the tank, I heard the whistle and the clacking rumble of the train coming down the tracks.

"Damnit!" I said, because my camera was buried deep in my pocket and I did not know if I could get it out and turned on before the engines passed by.

It was a big challenge, but I did it and here is proof.

As always, when the train rumbled by, it gave me a thrill.

Then I was back in the car, and as I approached Kendall Ford, I began to pass a long truck, with a flatbed at the back. On the flatbed were two vans, both of which claimed to have fire extinguishers inside.

This is the trailer of the same truck. As you can see, it is an Alaska truck.

And this is the cab, now falling behind me.

And here I am in the parking lot outside of Pet Zoo, where I have stopped to buy Royce some good, healthy, soft, cat food. I did a self-portrait of myself, with this dog.

He must have been scraping ice. It's been so long since Wasilla has had anything but a token snowfall. Early December, maybe.

I passed these kids on their snowmachines.

I saw these people walking down Spruce Street.

Late at night, just before they closed, I drove to Dairy Queen, where a young woman named Ashleigh sold me a vanilla cone dipped in chocolate. The temperature was right about 0 degrees (-18 F); much warmer than when I made my first trip to the new Dairy Queen last January.

Then, the temperature was about -30 (-35 C). Last winter was much colder than this winter, all over Alaska. This has been a warm winter for us, even as it has been a cold winter for people down south.

Poor Margie. Snowbound and freezing in Arizona.

A hard wind blows, glacier dust tears my throat and sinuses apart; I wish it would snow and bury all that damn dust

I took this from my car about noon - the temperature was 36 degrees, warm for this time of year, but the voice on the radio was saying that the wind was 40, gusting to 70, so if you were to have gone and stood out there, it would not have felt warm.

This is all wrong. Wasilla Lake is supposed to be frozen by now. Some years, it has frozen in the second week in October, quite often by the third and almost always by the fourth. In only one other year do I recall seeing the entire month pass without this and the other lakes freezing.

Of course, October has not completely passed and it could yet freeze before the month is over, but I don't think it will.

The ravens were having fun, riding the wind.

They rode it low. They rode it high. It carried them up, it pulled them down.

She appeared on the trail and she shouted at me, but the wind carried her words away before they could reach my ears.

"What?" I shouted back.

She shouted at me again.

"What?" I again shouted back.

Then she really put her lungs into it: "The birds love the wind! They ride it high! They ride it low! It carries them up, it pulls them down!"

The wind grabs the glacier dust and drives it through the air. Glacier dust is extremely fine, like powdered sugar. It is horrible to breathe. And undoubtedly, it has some volcanic ash mixed in with it.

One year, it froze very early, but no moisture came. It did not snow in October, it did not snow in November, it did not snow through most of December, but it got very cold. Day after day of teens and twenties below zero, sometimes 30's and even -40.

And on many of those days the wind tore, just like this. There was no snow to hold any of the glacier dust down, so the wind just picked it up and in the midst of all that cold, blasted it into you.

It was horrible.

Traveling through the streaming glacier dust. I write this with a sore throat, plugged nose and irritated sinuses.

Kalib was in the car with us - with Margie and me, that is. We had been baby sitting him. Fierce gusts frequently broadsided the car. It would rock, it would jerk.

It was windy in Anchorage, too, but not as windy as out here in the valley. On what they call the Anchorage Hillside, though - it would have been fiercely windy.

This was why we went to Anchorage. Every Halloween, they put on a chili feast at the place where Melanie works. Every employee brings in a pot of their own special chili. Melanie wanted her mom to help her as she cooked hers, so she did.

Me, I went off to try to visit a friend who had been severely injured in a snowmachine accident while returning to Wainwright from an ice-fishing trip.  He was medivaced by air-ambulance to Anchorage and then taken to the Alaska Native Medical Center. Also, I finally got that check that I had been waiting for, so I thought maybe I would buy the new Canon G11 pocket camera, because its high ISO, low-light, capabilities are much improved over the G10 that I have been using.

Yet, when the time came, I could not bring myself to lay down $499 for that camera. I really wanted to, but I just couldn't do it. So here I am, at the chili feed - the perfect place to test out the low light, high ISO capabilty of the G11, but instead I used the G10, which is very noisy and grainy at high ISO, but, oh well, so what?

That's Melanie on the left, of course. The fellow on the right is Chancey. A bit over two years ago, he was one of her coworkers at Duane Miller & Associates, but then he left to go be a Mormon missionary.

And where did he get sent? Japan? South America? France? New Zealand?

No. The Mormon Church sent him to Salt Lake City. For two years. To be a Mormon Missionary. In Salt Lake City. But he did get to learn to speak Spanish.

He is not being rehired, but he remembered how good all the DMA chili feeds were, so he came back to eat chili. That vat of chili in the foreground is Melanie's. Pumpkin chili. It is very tasty. "Don't eat too much, Dad!" she warned. "It's very spicy." It was very tasty. I would never have known that pumpkin and chili go well together, had it not been for Melanie.

I did not get to see my friend. They are being very strict about visitors, due to swine flu, and were only allowing two family members to go in with him. I did see his daughter, but not until after the feast. I was able to introduce her to Margie.

He has not yet come to, but he is in stable condition and his prognosis is good. He is just about to turn 70 and still he is shooting about the country on a snowmachine, hunting caribou, catching fish - doing that kind of thing.

Cocoon mode,* day 23: My futile search for Old Girl and her woman

You will recall that Carol Shay did not know the address of the house where Old Girl was reunited with her woman, but she did give me general directions on how to get there and assured me that, once I did, it would be obvious to me. So, I pedaled my bike right into the area that I believed her to speak of, but it was not obvious at all. 

There were a good number of homes around and the only way that I would have known Old Girl lived at one of them was if she was out in the yard. She wasn't.

I did, however, see this American flag, hanging limp in the shadows, where a triangular patch of it caught the sunlight.

...and I saw this horse, peeking out of a nearby barn. I am told this barn is where I was born, but I don't believe it, since I did not first step into Alaska until I was 22 years old.

It was the horse that told me this. The horse said, "brother, you were born in this barn, just like me." I think the horse lied.

True enough, though - I was born an Alaskan, its just that I was born into exile in a town called Ogden, Utah, and it took me awhile to come home.

And, as I neared my house, I saw this dog. But I never did see Old Girl and her woman.

In the afternoon, when I took my coffee break, I drove back into the neighborhood, where I spotted this little family, as seen in my rearview mirror. I drove to them, described the dog, and asked if they knew where it lived.

They were friendly and helpful people and they spoke with what I took to be a Russian accent - a strong Russian accent. It could have been from somewhere else in that part of the world, but it sounded Russian to me.

By my description of the old dog with one blue and one brown eye, they recognized it right away. "Very old dog," the man said. "Husky. So stiff with arthritis it can hardly walk." 

So they told me where the dog lived, with two other dogs. I drove there, and found an old husky, with two dogs and a woman, but it was the wrong husky and the wrong woman.

"No," she said, "my dog did not get lost."

I should have taken their picture, but I was in a hurry and already had more pictures than I could justifiable stuff into a "cocoon mode" post, so I just said "thank you," got back into my red Ford Escape and drove away.

But I will yet find Old Girl and her woman.

I will.

*Cocoon mode: Until I finish up a big project that I am working on, I am keeping this blog at bare-minimum simple. I anticipate about one month.

Cocoon mode* - day 3: The American Flag unfurls above me; Margie must bear her crutches for two more months

As much as I just wanted to stay home and work, Margie had two doctor appointments in Anchorage and she needed someone to drive her and that someone was me. I figured if we could get back between 2:00 and 4:00 PM, I could still get in a full day's work, but a full day's work is not enough.

I had NPR on the radio and the discussion was all about 9/11. At first, there was talk about all the things that had been taboo after 9/11, but how the taboos are breaking down. After 9/11, for example, those talking claimed, no one dare say anything that could be interpreted in a negative light about firemen, either in discussion or art. Now, they said, you can criticize a fireman and make fun of one in a movie.

I can't personally think of any who I would want to criticize or make fun of, but I hate for any subject to be taboo.

They said it was considered terribly wrong to show anyone falling through the air, in light of all the people who chose to jump to their death rather than burn in the fire.

After I dropped Margie off at the Alaska Native Medical Center, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen came on Talk of the Nation to speak of how he still felt the need to have revenge taken against Osama bin Laden and all those responsible.

He was not a vengeful person he said, he did not believe in the death penalty, but that's what he felt. He wanted revenge then and still does now. Maybe, he said, in taking some of the actions that we took afterwards as a nation, we had acted like the bull charging the matador's red cape.

I pulled into the Dimond Mall parking lot, and saw this flag above me, unfurling in the breeze. I shot a series of pictures, each different, as it continually changed its shape. I could easily run a dozen shots or more, if I were not in cocoon mode.

I want to, too, but I guess I won't.

Poor Margie. When she first went to the hospital on July 26, they told her it would take about six weeks before she could begin to walk around normally. Of course, without being able to take a catscan right then, they misdiagnosed the severity of her injury. 

Today, the doctor told her that she must continue to use crutches and keep weight off that leg for two more months. She was not happy and neither was I. What can you do, though, but bear it?

*Cocoon mode: Until I finish up a big project that I am working on, I am keeping this blog at bare-minimum simple. I anticipate about one month.