"Bare-breasted young woman" draws bigger cyber crowd than "Sarah Palin" - and there are kites, a crash, crutches, motorcycles and dogs, too

The crash actually came first, but the kite image is both more pleasant and striking, so I begin with it. The lady flying the kites is Garen, and I found her on the Anchorage Park Strip, after I dropped Margie off for her therapy, passed the crash and stopped by the camera repair store only to find out they did not have the screws that I needed.

All three of the kites above her are Garen's and she was flying them by herself - and she was trying to launch two more. "Oh, yeah," she said, "I can fly five kites at once. I do it all the time."

She started flying kites on the park strip about two years ago, after she moved here from Lincoln City on the Oregon Coast, where kite flying is a much bigger thing than it is in Anchorage.

"It's very soothing to fly kites," she told me. "I can do it all day. I fly them in the winter, too. You should come back then."

I was curious as to what she thought of The Kite Runner, but she had not seen the movie or read the book. She had not even heard of either. She flies kites, she doesn't go to movies about flying kites, but I recommended the movie so maybe she will watch it now.

I don't know if she ever got the other two kites up so that five were flying at once, because I had to go back to the Alaska Native Medical Center to pick Margie up from her therapy.

As for the crash, I have no idea how badly the victim was hurt, or if there was more than one victim or if it was a man or woman, a child or teen. I just don't know.

I drove by and that was it. 

The crash is not mentioned in the online edition of the Anchorage Daily News, so one might want to conclude that the injuries were not that bad, because if they had been life-threatening, the accident most likely would have been reported.

But my injury 14 months ago was not life-threatening; it did not merit a write-up in the paper and neither did Margie's two this year.

Yet, the impacts upon our lives have been tremendous. So I feel for whoever it is that is being pulled out of the car and put on the stretcher, because it's a mighty big thing to him or her.

Everything might be different now.

Margie was pleased with her first session of therapy. She was especially pleased that the first thing that her therapist did was to take away her old crutches and get her some new ones, because, as it turns out, those old crutches were a good two inches too short.

This guy was smoking a cigarette when we pulled up next to him at a red light and he let loose with a big puff of smoke and even in the shadows of his car it looked quite dramatic. So I readied my pocket camera and waited for him to blow another one, but he never did.

I suspect these boys are cross-country racers, from one or another of the high schools in Anchorage. 

I was glad to get out of that city and so headed towards home and then along came these guys on their motorcycles.

We stopped at the post office in Wasilla, but before I went in to get the mail, I took a picture of myself with this dog, who was very angry. Margie gave me the cup and told me to throw it in the garbage so I did.

When I came out of the post office, this dog was there. The man said that he was a very good dog and he told me his name, but I have forgotten.

So I just call him, "Pooch," or "Poochie."

Hey, Pooch! Here, Pooch!

Poochie, Poochie, Poochie!

Concerning the salacious title of this post, readers will recall how I earlier conducted a test that confirmed that merely by putting the words, "Sarah Palin" into a blog title, I could cause my readership to soar - even if the post had nothing at all to do with Sarah Palin.

Yesterday's post brought in even more readers then did the "Sarah Palin" experiment. I figure it was because my title included these words, "bare-breasted young woman."

I wonder what will happen today?

To be precise, the numbers were: "bare-breasted": 6,982,490,324 unique hits; "Sarah Palin": 6,783,814,293 unique hits. You can see that it was close.*

*It is possible that I might have under-reported my numbers ever so slightly, so as not to embarrass my competition out there in blog space, but the ratio of "bare-breasted" hits to "Sarah Palin" hits is correct.

Bike ride, part 2: I happen upon a bare-breasted young woman and then pedal to a place of prayer, where I find myself kneeling among the dead

After I left Patti behind to battle her cancer, I continued on, not knowing which direction I would take at any intersection that lay  ahead. When I reached the first, Seldon and Wards, I went straight through, towards Church.

And when I reached Church Road, I turned toward the nearest mountains, the Talkeetna's, even though I knew I would not be able to get up into them.

This has always been my tendency - to turn away from the greater concentrations of people, toward the lesser, or best yet, towards none at all.

When I reached the bottom of the hill that descends to the Little Susitna and came to the bridge that crosses it, my eyes went straight to the aqua green raft and the young man preparing it for launch. As you can see, he, like his three friends behind him, was shirtless.

I stopped on the bridge and then began to compose my photo, keeping my concentration on the raft and the young man with it. For the sake of composition, I noted the positions of the three who were behind him, but did not study them as I studied him. Two were working to ready gear for transport to the raft while the other lay chest-up on an ice-cooler soaking up sunrays.

"Where you headed?" I shouted to the young man at the raft, "all the way to the mouth?"

He looked up, startled, and then answered, "No, we're going to a place near Houston."

The sound of our voices also startled the sunbather, who sat up on the ice chest, then got up and started walking about. It was then that I noticed she was a woman, a rather finely sculpted one at that. 

And if I were to include the picture that I took just before this one, when she was still lying on the ice chest, her breasts bare and aimed at the sky, you would wonder how I could not have noticed earlier.

But I am not going to show you that one. 

She then walked over toward the boat. If she felt at all self-concious, she did not show it. I decided to end my interview and move on.

"I hope you enjoy your trip!" I shouted. "Have fun!"

"Thanks!" the guy attending to the raft shouted back. "We will!"

This afternoon, I took Melanie and Charlie out for coffee and afterward drove this very route and told them of the incident.

"That's so Wasilla!" Charlie said.

I pedaled away from the rafters, wondering why I have reached upper middle age so fast, why my body is aging and headed altogether too swiftly in the direction of old age, even as my mind, ambition and desire remain basically the same as when I was in my 20's.

In fact, I often believe that I am still in my 20's. Sometimes, I'm convinced that I always will be, no matter how many years I live.

Many times, especially on my late afternoon coffee breaks, I have passed by Grotto Iona, the Place of Prayer.

I have always been curious about the place, but have always kept going. Now I looked closely at the cross that marks the grotto and then read the smaller sign that hangs from it.

"Welcome," it said.

So I pedaled my bike into the driveway, laid it down upon the ground and entered this place of prayer.

Grotto Iona is not only a place of prayer, but a tiny graveyard, with but a handful of occupants. It is a quiet place and even though I do not share the faith of those who so lovingly built it and continue to care for it, I felt an atmosphere of peace here. It felt like a special place, a sacred place.

I am certain that people kneel before this shrine and pray, but I don't believe that way, so I didn't, but I did feel a strong sense of respect. I sensed the pain that people have brought here, including the worst kind of pain that humans can feel, the kind of sorrow that none of us who live long enough can avoid. 

People have brought that pain here in the hope that they might exchange it for comfort. I suspect that sometimes they succeeded and sometimes they did not. Sometimes they succeeded for awhile, but then later it all came back. In time, it would have retreated into that place in the human heart where pain no longer brings tears or robs one of laughter, hope, and happiness, yet once put always resides.

Just outside the fence that surrounds the shrine, I found a tiny grave, with no inscription written upon any of the rocks that circle it.

Upon the mound contained inside that circle I saw this toy truck, which by vintage speaks of a sorrow that happened decades ago, yet the fact that it still stands upright, rusted though it be, states that this sorrow still lingers in at least one living, beating, human heart.

And now it resides in my heart as well.

I walked over to the big cross and found that it stood above the grave of a woman, eight years younger then me. She died on April 6, 2004.

A tiny angel with butterfly wings: placed in sadness, so sad to look upon - so utterly still, so quiet.

Within the fence that embraces the shrine there is a grave and it holds two people - Paul George Mahoney and his wife Iona Mae, who was three years younger then he but preceded him in death by just under six.

Perhaps that is why, atop the slab on this memorial a poem is inscribed, which you can read at the bottom of this post.

I read the poem first and then I looked at the picture of the Mahoney's, their hair and his beard white. I looked at my reflection, my hair still brown but my beard turning ever more white, and then decided that I wanted to photograph myself with them. 

So I positioned myself just as you see here and placed the camera at a low angle so that it could see their portrait even as it captured me in self-portrait. As I did, I was surprised to notice that I was on my knees, in a place of prayer. 

I was raised religious, but now consider myself to be agnostic. Agnostic is not the same as atheist. To me, agnostic means that you look around at both the wonders and brutalities of this world and the universe that it travels in and you marvel. You wonder how such a magnificent place could be created except by God, even as you wonder how God could be so cruel as to have laid so brutish a system of survival upon it.

It means that you look at all the religions and you do not know quite what to make of them. In the case of Christianity, from which I come, you see, at one and the same time, preachers of high position and stature stand at the pulpit and preach hatred toward those who are different than they say all should be, yet you see other preachers of the very same faith call for love and tolerance towards all their fellow humans, whatever their belief, race, gender or sexuality.

You see the cruel people, see the sincere and kind, all espousing the same faith, and then you learn these people exist in the spectrum of faith - Christianity... Hindu... Muslim... the Apache beliefs that nurtured your wife's forebearers, the Navajo beliefs of your daughter-in-law...

You hear the hymns, the gospel songs, the music of faith as it is performed only for commercial purposes and as it comes from the heart to bestow comfort upon those who mourn. You hear this spirit of comfort against hardship sung by your Mormon blood relatives, your born again and Protestant Christian friends on the Arctic Slope and throughout Native Alaska and, yes, you hear it in the songs of your new Hindu relatives in India.

You see that the true believers among them all are equally sincere, their faith rises just as strong within their divergent beliefs.

And so you conclude that, despite your upbringing, your own experience as a missionary, the preaching that you once did, the prayers you have pled, the days of fasting you have endured, the sweats you have sat through, the peyote administered in the midst of physical ordeal, the testimonies that you have heard and delivered - it is beyond your ability to know. It is all a mystery. 

And then you see the reflection of yourself kneeling, an agnostic among the Catholic dead, in a place of prayer, and although you did not kneel to pray, you feel that it would be wrong for you to rise to your feet without doing so.

So you pray, not quite certain who you are praying to; you pray for Patti, whom you have just spoken to and who battles cancer for her very life... for your wife, that she might heal quickly and not fall again, for your children and their spouses, your grandson and the one that is coming, that they might be kept safe and live long and healthy; for the family of Senator Ted Kennedy who is being buried in the dark even as you kneel in the sun and for this nation that so struggles against itself... for all those Iñupiat friends and adopted family who have experienced and are experiencing so much loss; your friends of all ethnic backgrounds in all parts of Alaska, the USA, Canada, Greenland... for those in India who became your family only recently but are dear to you... in Africa...

Then I got up and walked away and saw this toy shovel, just inside the entrance to the grotto. I stepped through the gate, pulled my bike upright from the ground, straddled the seat and pedaled away.

And I gave myself an assignment - to find out who Paul Mahoney was, and Iona Mae, for whom the grotto is named. I can't do it right away. I don't have the time. But maybe later, in winter, when the projects that I now work on are done, when the night is long, when it is the time to learn of stories and to tell stories.

Blest with the Grace of a Saint

by Paul Mahoney

Many nights of bliss

many children to kiss

and still it comes to this.

That heaven I've missed

Nod with lady up there,

Eyes dimmed and stare

Frame needing repair

and soul wrought with care.

Ahah! Finally comes pay

The great Milky Way

that looms ever so bright

In the darkness of night

Each star but a step

Leading on to the next

Like hopscotch I'll go

be it quickly or slow.

So I'm circling around

And studying the ground

Where first star step be found.

And me thinks "it's the mound"

of a newly filled grave

so the one who lies there

May be off up the stair

Toward more heavenly air.

It was a hairy fellow who first cultivated coffee: Images from breakfast, my bike ride (that's so Wasilla!) and my afternoon break

It was another one of those mornings when I woke up and simply could not bear the thought of cooking oatmeal, one of those days that I felt like I just had to start out of the house, somewhere else. I knew Margie would not want to come and hobble in on her crutches, but I asked her anyway, just in case, but she didn't.

She wanted to sit on the couch and eat Cheerio's.

So, I made certain that she had her Cheerio's and then I headed off to Family Restaurant to have a Denve - 0h Man! I just heard my email "ping," so I went to check and it was a "breaking news" notice from the Anchorage Daily News. Senator Ted Kennedy is dead! Damnit! We need him, now. We really do.

Anyway, there was a table in the corner and I took it, so nobody could shoot me in the back. And this little boy turned around and looked at me. 

He made me think of Kalib, who had long since left for daycare.

As I ate, this man walked past my red Ford Escape, carrying a cup of what I believe to be coffee, although it might have been hot chocolate, for all I know, or tea. It might have even been gasoline, because maybe he had an old 1950 Ford that wouldn't start and he needed to prime the engine. But I am pretty certain it was coffee. I suspect it was black. Unless he was taking it to his wife. Then, perhaps, it had cream in it, and Splenda.

There I am, stereotyping. Maybe he likes cream and sugar and his wife likes it black.

What an assumption on my part.

Perhaps he does not have a wife. Perhaps he lives alone with three cats.

And then again, he might not even like cats. He might live with a dog, a poodle.

Or five hamsters, three goldfish and a pet rattlesnake.

Perhaps he lives with a chimpanzee, and he is taking the coffee to the chimp.

Chimps are known to be big coffee drinkers.

In fact, coffee was first cultivated by chimps.

Not everybody knows this, but it is a true fact.

Two other men pass by my Escape on their way into Family. I believe that they were coming in to buy a bowl of oatmeal for their elephant.

Personally, I don't think one bowl would be enough.

And elephants like bananas, too.

So I hope they bought a lot of bananas.

All right, now I am no longer at Family, but am riding my bike. Don't ask me to explain the above. How would I know?

It's just the normal, everyday kind of thing that one sees here in Wasilla, Alaska.

As Melanie would say, "that's so Wasilla!"

"You have a pretty dog!" I shout at the lady as I pedal past.

"Thank you!" she responds.

"What's the dog's name?" I shout louder, as they fall further behind me.

"Sarah," she screams, just before I go out of hearing range.

So there you have it - Sarah the Dog.

It never ends. It just never ends. Everyday, more of Wasilla falls away.

I spot a calico cat. The calico cat spots me. 

When I get back home, I find Kalib working on his bike. He has been riding 20 to 30 miles every day. He has lost weight. I want to lose weight, too. Well, today's ride should surely help.

Now I am in my car, late in the afternoon, on my coffee break. This is where I bought it - a brand new place called Metro Cafe, where they park cute cars outside. There used to be a dog wash here, but the owners sold out and the new ones tore it down and built this place.

They don't serve breakfast, though. If they did, I wouldn't have gone to Family this morning. I would have walked right in, sat down and ordered eggs, because its always fun to try breakfast at a new place.

They do have a drive through window, so this afternoon I tried it out. The coffee was excellent. Unfortunately for me, I bought an apple fritter to go with it. It was big and sweet and when I discovered this, I told myself I would only eat a small fraction of it but once I started I couldn't stop and so I ate the whole thing and there went all the good that I had done for myself on the bicycle ride.

I finish this day fatter than I began it.

I take a trip to Anchorage - bikers blast past me, cloud dancers dance atop the clouds

I had a to take a disk of photo proofs into Anchorage, to deliver to a client. As I returned on the Parks Highway, two men on a Harley and Kawasaki blasted past me so fast and loud that I could not even react to snap a frame. If this is the case, you must wonder, then how did I get this picture of them in my rearview mirror?

It was in a highway improvement construction area, where the speed limit was 55 and signs warned that double fines would be given to all speed violators. This fellow was in the lead. When he had put about 300 yards between he and I, his friend right behind him, he suddenly braked and began to pump his hand up and down over the road, his fingers spread out and his palm facing the pavement.

There was a cop ahead, sitting off to the side of the road, waiting for double-fine candidates.

The other biker slowed down, waved a thank you and then both pulled right, out of the fast lane and into the slow. Now I passed them, which did not worry me because I was doing 55. Now, they could not have been going more than 45. 

A bit of an overreaction, I thought.

But maybe they felt like cop targets.

Maybe they are cop targets.

They stayed behind me for a few miles, then, still in the 55 zone, decided that no more cops lie in wait ahead and, once again, blasted past me. I was now pushing my luck, doing 59. It felt like I was sitting still when they passed by.

Hey, Sandy - I bet you would like a bike like this, wouldn't you? What a sight you would be, roaring through Bangalore, the fabric of your saree - cut and tailored especially for motorcycle riding - rippling in the wind. 

And just a little bit before, back in Anchorage, I had to stop behind these guys while they worked out whatever problem it was with the driver of the car in front of them that had caused them to stop.

I think they performed a good deed, that the driver ahead had experienced car problems of some kind and they got him going again.

This is pure speculation on my part, because right after I stopped, they got back in the car and, flying the Stars and Stripes with the Confederate Flag painted in triplicate on their roof, hood and trunk, set back off to wherever it was they were going.

And shortly before that, I was passing near the Anchorage Park Strip when I looked up and saw two people dangling below a hang glider.

"What kind of idiots are these?" I wondered, even as I wished that I could be up there with them.

Then I saw that it was not idiots at all, but fabric people, cloud dancers, dancing with the clouds from the tail of a kite.

And this was even earlier, in Wasilla, as I waited at the stoplight at the corner of the Parks and Palmer-Wasilla highways to change so that I could continue on to Anchorage.

Family Restaurant: the Little girl, her umbrella, the Vietnam vet and his Harley; Wasilla graveyard and thoughts of death; Red Escape at Midnight

I can hear the criticism already. "Bill, you are damn near broke, yet you waste entirely too much money eating out, driving to Taco Bell and going to Family Restaurant for your damned eggs! You should have stayed home and cooked yourself some oatmeal with raspberries."

You who thus criticize are entirely correct, yet, this is how I look at it: Margie, Kalib, and Lavina have been gone to Arizona for nearly ten days now. By the time they get back, I will be gone myself, not to return until late July. Basically, since they left, I now spend my entire day hanging out with cats but no people. Combined, I see Caleb and Jacob for 8 minutes and 47 seconds per day. 

I am a person who does good alone. I always have something to do, I never get bored and if am not working on photographs or words or such, which I almost always am, then there are many interesting conversations taking place in my head.

Yet, sometimes, I feel this ache, this unbearable feeling. I tend to feel it very strongly right after I get up. I do not want to cook, not even oatmeal. I just want to let my head and mind relax, not worry about anything. I want to sit down somewhere and have someone take care of everything for me - cook my food, pour my coffee, bring me toast, lie to me and tell me how handsome I am. Some waitresses will do that.

So I get in the car and head to Family Restaurant.

The girl above is Nya Lee, "I just turned four," and she also headed to Family Restaurant this morning. It was not raining, but she brought her umbrella, anyway. "When it rains, I am ready."

She dressed herself this morning. She was very proud of that.

This is Dan, Vietnam veteran, who also ate at Family this morning. He is from Fairbanks and drove his big Harley down, but now that he had eaten breakfast, he was going to drive back. Given the overcast, I do not think that he would have gotten the chance to see Denali today - but, oh, how magnificent that would be, to motor by Denali on a big Harley!

And the lady with Dan is Sue. She has her own big Harley, but moved to Dan's to get in the picture. Sue has lived in Fairbanks all her life, which is 50 some years - I can't remember precisely. She likes Fairbanks, but she is tired of winter. She can hardly stand the thought of another winter. She wants to get out for the winter.

I do not know how Dan feels about the Fairbanks winter. We did not talk about it. We talked just the tiniest amount and that was about Vietnam. He could not remember for certain when he went there, but thought it was in 1969, and 1971 when he left. He served in the Navy, both on a surface ship and a submarine, which he said was the last World War II sub still in commission.

I wanted to know more, of course, but he was anxious to hit the road. "I'm going to start to sweat if I don't get moving soon," he said. So I thanked him, both for posing for my blog, and for giving himself to my nation. Maybe I would have wound up in Vietnam, too, but when the draft lottery was instituted, I drew number 21. So I would never be drafted.

I thought about enlisting, but did other things instead. 

Someday, I will write about some of those other things.

Many of you will be surprised, if not shocked.

I took this picture as I pedaled my bicycle past the Wasilla cemetery. This is the upper, newer part of the cemetery. The lower part looks more traditional, with larger crosses and tombstones. I never want to lie here. I want to be cremated, and spread about.

Not that I will give a damn.

Shortly before I took this picture, I was pedaling along the bike trail that follows Lucille. There is one point where that trail rises up a hill, maybe 30 feet above the road. As I pedaled up that slope, my mind dwelt upon the topic of death, because I know a great many people who are dead and one cannot help but contemplate who might be next and when that next person might be he.

Just as I reached the top of the hill, I raised my eyes from the trail and looked down at Lucille Street. There, coming from the opposite direction, almost directly below me, was a van with these words emblazoned upon it: "Rock of Ages." It surprised me, and I momentarily lost control of my bike. As I had been pedaling uphill, my momentum was erratic. The bike turned sharply to the left, towards the drop off down to the road, towards a telephone pole.

I recovered at the last possible moment, just before I would have went over.

That would have been an interesting way to die. Trouble is, no one would have known about the series of events that led me to that death, except for me. And I wouldn't have known either.

I'll bet "Rock of Ages" would have just driven on, because by the time I went over I would have been out of the driver's vision. So he would have driven on, not even knowing he had just helped send someone to the promised land, whatever that might be.

Three nights ago, I stopped writing in this blog just a few minutes before midnight, as I had not taken a single picture that day and needed to get some kind of image before the day ended. I stated that you would probably never see that image, but I changed my mind.

This is it. I headed straight for the front porch and took this picture off of it.

So this is the red Escape at midnight. Midnight in Wasilla, Alaska, as the summer solstice draws near.

This is nothing compared to the Arctic Slope - as you will soon see.