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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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Entries in berry (1)

Wednesday
Sep092009

The last wild berry of summer - blog goes into cocoon mode

DateWednesday, September 9, 2009 at 10:43AM

With summer on the wane, Jacob, Kalib and Muzzy walked back into the marsh and I decided to follow, for just a little ways and then to leave them behind, because I needed to move fast and stretch my muscles.

 

 

We had not gone far before Kalib insisted on walking himself. Shortly after he was put upon the ground, he darted off the trail and into the bushes. He wanted to find berries.

Dad looked around and did not see a berry. "Looks like the berries have all been picked, Shiyashi," he lamented. But then they found a blueberry, big, plump and juicy. Was it the last berry of summer?

As Kalib chomps on the blueberry, Jake searches to see if he can find one more. He did, but no more after that.

 

Blog now goes into cocoon mode: While I have never been able to devote the time and energy to this blog that will be required to make it into what I want it to be, I am at a point with my big project that I simply cannot afford to devote anything but the very smallest amounts of my time and mental energies toward any other tasks - including this blog.

In contemplating how to handle this, I have debated just signing off the blog for a month or so, but even though I have not given it what I want to, I have still worked too hard to do that.

So I have decided instead to put the blog into "cocoon mode," meaning that on the outside not much will happen but on the inside, things will be churning and developing as I finish my project. Hopefully, when I am done, this blog will emerge into something brighter and better, something that will take me closer to my blog goals.

This is the way it will work:

I will still keep a camera with me at all times, will continue to shoot whatever catches my eye as I move through the day and will post something, every single day that I have an internet connection, but I will limit myself to one or two pictures, from the present or past, and will give myself five minutes max to write the text.

Maybe some days I might cheat just a little bit, but not many and not much.

I am kind of sad to have to do this. After struggling with this thing seemingly in vain for a full year this past Monday, my readership remains miniscule, but keeps steadily, steadily, growing. On the average day, it is now nearly ten times what it was at the beginning of June. That is growth enough to give me some hope.

Now that the blog is in cocoon mode, my readership will certainly fall back to its earlier numbers.

For awhile, anyway. Once I finish this project and rip my way out of this cocoon, I will see what I can do with it then. In the meantime, please keep coming back to see my one or two pictures per day.

 

AuthorWasilla, Alaska, by 300 | Comment9 Comments |
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