Charlie types a prayer, computer gets fixed

I am reluctant to state it, just in case the thing should suddenly fly apart on me, but this computer seems to be fixed. I got my check late yesterday after I had gone to Machaus to shop out a new one to replace it with. Bruce, the Machaus tech wizard, felt very badly that I was about to invest about four thousand dollars into a new Mac Pro when Apple is likely to release the next generation within a couple of weeks - and it should be greatly improved over what I would have bought today and probably for about the same price.

So he suggested one more thing that I might try to see if it might improve my old computer just enough to allow me to limp through until the new release comes out. So I tried it - I installed Snow Leopard on a new harddrive, made it the startup drive and... BLAM! It is suddenly like I have a whole new computer!

Wow! Lightroom and Photoshop NEVER worked so fast for me as they do now.

In fact, I am coming to believe that my original harddrive might have been defective from the beginning, because I don't ever remember it being this fast. Maybe it was defective and just kept steadily declining, because this is quite incredible, how fast it is now.

So I am back in business now. I have lost most of the last two weeks, and wasted a whole lot more time slogging through long before that, even, but now I can zip.

I chose this photo to run with this story for a very special reason. I have spent the past few weeks working up a Kivgiq Uiñiq - and it has been a dreadful, dreadful, frustrating, aggravating slog - because of all the malfunctions that this computer went through. I cannot even describe the aggravation that it has been - to try to scroll through thousands of frames only to have stop and watch that colorwheel spin and and spin.

To try to open a photo for processing, only to have it take so long that I could go out, fix myself a snack, come back and the find the picture not opened yet.

That is what I have been facing.

This is Charlie Brower and wife Jan fun dancing at Kivgiq, with North Slope Borough Mayor Edward Itta dancing right behind them.

Just about every day, Charlie leaves a "like" and a comment on my Facebook link to this blog.

Yesterday, his comment was this:

"Praying for computer to fix itself!"

The computer got a little help from Bruce and me, all right, but, after weeks of struggle, it was on the very day that Charlie typed in that prayer that the answer came. So there you go.

Furthermore, in a very real way, the computer did fix itself. I put in the new $200 harddrive and the Snow Leopard CD and gave it the command, but after that, the computer took that information and did all the work to fix itself.

So there you go, again.

Charlie Brower - thanks for that prayer!

When on the ice, always look before you pee

I now take the reader back a bit over one month ago, either to the final minutes of May 10 or the opening minutes of May 11. I am unsure which day it was, I only know it was right about midnight, so it could have been either one. It is true that my camera stamps the time shot into the metadata of each image, but it is also true that I have only had this camera for about four years and so have not yet found the time to set the time.

Anyway, it was right about midnight, May 10 - 11, the final full night of my last trip up north. I was in the Saggan whaling camp of Edward Itta, Mayor of the North Slope Borough, and I realized that it was time to visit the latrine.

The people who know the ice will tell you that when on it, you must always be alert and prepared for polar bears. You, or someone nearby, must always have a good rifle or slug-loaded shotgun handy, just in case. I did not have a weapon with me, but this was not really a problem because everyone else in camp did and their eyes are sharp and they are always looking.

As noted, I had to go, so I left the spot at the blind where I had been with the others, watching for bowhead, and walked to the latrine, which was located in the cracks at the base of one of a multitude of ice upheavals. I didn't think much about anything, but just got straight to business.

About three-quarters away through my task, it suddenly occurred to me that had I done all this without even bothering to look about for polar bears. So I raised my head. What you see above is what I saw.

The thing at the bottom of the picture is the windscreen of a snowmachine.

I was in no real danger, because as noted, those whom I was with are sharp-eyed, well-armed, and always looking and even though their attention was focused primarily in the opposite direction, from which a whale might come, they, too, had spotted the bear and began to call out to me, just to be certain that I knew there was a photo opportunity in front of me.

The bear spent some time studying us from various vantage points, pooped, and then moved along to the northeast.

Within an hour or so of when I took these pictures, the wind had turned to the southwest. Ice was advancing, the lead was closing and we had to pull back.

The happenings of the next 30 hours or so are among the most frustrating happenings of this year for me ever in my career. In the hope that a whale would come to this camp, I had already delayed my departure by a couple of days over my plan. I needed to get home, prepare a few things and then head to Tok and Fairbanks to cover the honoring of Ahtna elder Dr. Katie John, but I had held off pushed my departure back to the last moment.

Twelve hours after I had left Barrow, the lead had reopened, conditions had become good, a bowhead came to the Saggan crew and they accepted its gift. For them, for the Iñupiat community of Barrow, I was happy and grateful.

For me, I was devastated. Absolutely. Devastated. Crushed, you could say. No one can know when a whale will come or what crew it will go to. Sometimes, several seasons can pass by without one coming to where you wait. Yet, this time, if I had stayed one more day, I would have been there when the Saggan whale came.

Then, of course, I would have missed Katie John receiving her honorary Doctor of Laws degree and that would have left me devastated as well. 

Sometimes, there is no winning, even when you do win - because I absolutely did win. To be there for all of Katie's honoring was a win... it was a special, once in a lifetime - a long and great lifetime - event, and I had to be there. I just had to.

But I still feel sick inside to have missed the Saggan whale.

What a beautiful, special, event that would have been and how honored I would have felt to have stood as a witness of it.

Originally, I had planned to post coverage of what I saw and experienced that trip to Barrow to the same degree that I posted Point Hope. Although I missed the final event, I none-the-less got several pictures that I believe many readers would have found amazing.

But I did not anticipate how long it would take me and it is just too late, now. Soon, I will be back in Barrow and at the rate I have been going I would still posting my last trip and people would think the snow never ever melts in Barrow, which it does, as you will soon see, right here, on this blog, if I but move along and stay in the present.

So, except for this bear and at least one people story I will yet work in, I am going to drop that coverage for now.

View images as slides

Leaving Tikigag: the flight from Point Hope to Barrow

As always happens, the time soon came when I would have to leave Point Hope and it came earlier than I wanted or would have planned - were it not for the Era schedule. Era is the only air carrier that links Point Hope and Barrow and they only fly twice a week - Tuesday and Thursday; $410 for a one-way ticket. This will give you an idea how expensive it came be to travel about the Arctic Slope.

I wanted to stay at least through the high school graduation on Friday but I needed to be in Barrow no later than Monday, so I had to go Thursday.

At nighttime before I left, I saw Jesse Jr. walking home. 

He and his brothers would now get their room back.

Many decades separate us, but Jesse and his brothers all felt like friends now.

On May 5, immediately after taking the picture of the Tikigaq Harpooner Three-Peaters, I barely caught a ride to the airport in the truck of a man who runs a little on-demand-cab service. If someone needs a ride to the airport, or anywhere else reached by the villages very limited road system, they can call and he will come and pick them up.

So Krystle called for me.

The cab was full of his family.

I thought I wrote down the names of everybody, including the dog, but I can't find them. Still, if you find yourself in Point Hope and you need a cab to the airport or someplace else, just ask anyone and they will direct you to the driver and then he and his family and his dog will come and pick you up and give you a ride and then when you ask how much he will answer, "whatever you want to pay."

Be as generous as is practical for you. His fares are not like those of a city cab driver, but come only sporadically - mostly when an airplane lands.

The cab driver's daughter, the little dog and the airplane. 

Once airborne, we passed over the Lisbourne, the last bumps of the Brooks Range, which themselves are the final northward extension of the Rocky Mountains, which come to an end just before they reach Point Hope and fall into the sea. 

Pans of ice floating in new ice forming below.

We landed for a brief stop in Point Lay, to drop off one passenger, plus this four-wheeler and to pick up a couple more passengers.

And here we are, landing in Barrow.

Some new readers who have come over as a result of the piece in the Lens blog of the New York Times may be feeling a little confused right now to find me flying in someone else's airplane instead of my own.

What the Times said about me being a bush pilot is true, all right, but for some reason they chose not to mention the part about how I crashed my airplane in Mentasta and, for now, anyway, must fly in other people's airplanes.

Originally, I had intended to blog my time this trip in Barrow pretty much the same as I did Point Hope and I have every bit as much material to work with. However, I had also intended to have the whole package complete at least three weeks ago and here I am, still muddling along.

Realistically, I do not have time to do a decent edit of the Barrow pictures right now, although in time I will, for other purposes than this blog. I think what I will do is, on Monday, after returning this blog to Wasilla over the weekend, I will just put up anywhere from one to half-a-dozen images from the Barrow portion and then get back to blogging the present, but only briefly most days, as I have tons I must do this summer, so, even though in my mind I have no higher priority than developing what this blog has begun, for now, I must put the huge bulk of my time elsewhere.

Thanks for traveling with me!

View images as slides

Hit with the ball, the big wheelbarrow race, the sign lies, Mahoney horse, looking back at Barrow through the water glass

Kalib and I played catch. His objective was to dash in close enough and throw the ball hard enough so that instead of me catching it, it would bounce off my head.

Quite often, it did bounce off my head. Today, my artificial shoulder is very sore from throwing and catching the ball. I suppose that is not correct. The artificial shoulder has no nerves. There is no feeling in it. It cannot possibly be sore. It is the muscles and connections around it that are very sore.

Twice, Kalib knocked the lens shade off my lens when he struck it instead of my head.

Jobe and his grandma engaged in a series of wheelbarrow races. Jobe won every time. "Damnit!" Margie exclaimed after the last one. "I can't understand it. I run as hard and fast as I can and the damn little kid doesn't even run, he doesn't even walk he just cutes away in the wheelbarrow and yet, every time, he crosses the finish line before I do!

"Damnit! Damnit! Damnit!"

I was shocked.

Margie doesn't usually swear like that.

And it got worse after he beat her in the next race - the race that followed the final race.

I would quote her, but I don't use that kind of language in this blog.

The road ahead is not really closed at all. There is merely a detour around a construction area. Here we are, paying taxes to our Borough government and they use that money to lie to us.

The weather, by the way, is about 20 degrees cooler than it was on that glorious Memorial Day weekend just one week ago. It is good, though. As much as I enjoyed feeling those temps in the upper 70's, I feared the country would soon catch on fire and burn up.

So the cooler weather and the moisture is good.

And there is a Mahoney horse, not caring whether the road is open, closed, or detoured. 

Yesterday, I stated that I was going to use the day to completely work my way through my recent Arctic take. I only partially succeeded. As you can see in the above pictures, I allowed myself to be distracted often and frequently. I did very loosely edit all of my Point Hope pictures and I got into the Barrow pictures, but not very far.

At one point as I edited the Barrow pictures, I drank a glass of water. Just before I put the glass down, I noticed the screen looked kind of neat through the glass, so I took this picture through the water glass.

Here is an assignment for astute readers:

Once I get to Barrow in this blog, try to remember this picture and then see if you can match it up to the scene from which it comes. I might use this very picture or I might use a different frame of the same scene.

Anyway, see if you can match the two up.

View images as slide show

Breaking ice to keep this blog alive and hobbling along

Due to the impossibility of truly looking at photos on this malfunctioning laptop, this is a random "grab" from a series of ice-breaking shots that I took either late last night or early this morning, I can't remember for certain. Night and day tend to blend together and become to seem as one, this time of year.

I will explain later, when I can sit down at my home computer with a monitor that works and do it right.

I had planned to fly out of Barrow for Anchorage tonight, and then drive home to Wasilla, so that I would have two days to square things away and maybe get a little rest before getting up early Friday morning to make the six hour drive to Tok.

But I think now that I will stay here, mostly on the ice, until tomorrow night. 

I have just come in after three days on the ice to recharge my camera and phone batteries. I will head back out, shortly.

Today, btw, begins the time when the sun remains above the Barrow horizon 24 hours a day, from now until August 2.