Feeling lazy, I step backward in time a bit

When I started this blog, I said that I would alternate current photos of Wasilla (and elsewhere) with images that I had taken in the past. I haven't really done much of that. It is too hard to keep up with the present, let alone visit the past.

But today I went to town for a doctor visit (shoulder surgery followup - yes, after all this time, I still must do followups. The doctor, by the way, is most impressed with how I have healed. He said most people who suffered the same injury I did would not be able to raise their arm more than 90 degrees out from their body one year later and he could hardly believe it when I held mine straight up above my head. Two reasons, I figure - he did a good job on the surgery and I worked really hard to put that arm back in action. Margie got upset with me sometimes, said I was pushing it too hard, but I had to push it hard) and when I came home, I started sorting through pre-blog photographs for a project I want to do.

I worked on it until just a little bit ago and now I am lazy, so I am just going to blog a few past photos, like the train above.

I love trains, don't you know?

And then there was the time the Little Su overflowed, but I drove through and across the bridge anyways, as did these happy kids.

A couple of hitchhikers that I once picked up on Church Road, sitting in the back seat, as seen in my rear-view mirror.

A barista by the name of Melanie at Cafe Darte. Cafe Darte is up for sale. My daughter Melanie wants her Mom and I to buy it. We have no money to buy it.

Becky bounces on her trampoline as I drive by.

And how about Wasilla Main Street? I am pretty sure she rose from the ground wiser than before she fell.

This girl is not on Main Street, but on the Parks Highway, which was mistakenly identified as Wasilla Main Street on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. I admire him, anyway. 

I was going to pull up an India shot, too, but I see there is only seven minutes left in this day and I have not taken a single picture. I will go take one, now. You will probably never see it, but I cannot let the day pass by totally undocumented.

Wasilla: moose drinks by the road - boy does wheelie; India - Cat family suffers mishap

This afternoon as I drove down the road looking for a burrito, I saw a moose kneeling in a four-wheeler track, drinking water. She stopped and raised her head to look at me as I drove by.

Shortly thereafter, I saw this kid doing a wheelie down the road in front of me, by the sign advertising a yard sale. I did not go to the yard sale. I probably could have paid $3.00 for a painting there that was worth $3 million. 

Once again, I have squandered the casual fortune.

So here I am, back in India. This scene of a mother cat nursing her kittens is serene, but the event was not. I don't have the energy to tell the story again right now, but you can find it right here, on Grahamn Kracker's Kracker Cat Blog.

India, Wasilla, work - I have hit that proverbial wall

To the 3.578 billion people out there who read my blog daily, you who hardly sleep at night because you are so excited to get up to see what I have posted that you can't even shut your eyes, let me say that I am perplexed. I am confused. I do not know how to proceed.

I just don't.

I am a perplexed, confused, man.

Anyway, here is a picture from India - a Hindu temple at a place called Hampi, which was a thriving city until Muslim invaders destroyed and ruined it in the 1600's, then left it to fall into the earth.

The temple did not fall, however. Much of Hampi did, and is now rising once again from the earth, but the temple stood tall through all the centuries that have since passed.

When I returned home, it was my plan to spend two weeks posting pictures and a narrative from my India trip. In that time, I planned to cover the entire experience. But here it is, two-and-a-half weeks later and I have not even finished my account of the first three days, including Sandy's wedding.

I have nearly two weeks of work beyond that wedding to cover, work that I shot over a fairly large swath of southern India and risked not only my own life but that of my beloved daughter to get.

You will see what I mean, if and when I get to the images that make the point.

I skimmed through the entire take the other day and was rather amazed at some of the images I spotted. For two weeks plus a day, I did pretty good, I think.

I have hardly even posted a hint of it, so far.

What is to become of all this India work? Will it just be buried, unseen, in my computer, as was my last trip to India? As is so much of what I shoot? Where do I find the time to edit, process and post it? Before it becomes ancient history?

Meanwhile, life is moving on in Wasilla. People need to know that the antics of our most famous citizen are not indicative of us all. Other than the short time I spend each day riding my bike and snapping pictures as I go, I am so overwhelmed that I cannot document this town, as I planned when I started the blog, as I promised to do. And in nine or ten days, I head north, to the Arctic Slope, where I plan to stay until late July.

So, what do I do?

I don't know.

My black cat knows what I should do.

He has a perfect understanding of everything.

I wish I were as wise as he.

Yet he can be very silly.

I think maybe I will eat some enchiladas.

I really love enchiladas.

Back in Wasilla, I bike upon a gold panner mining the Little Su (as for India, there is plenty more to come)

I pedaled my bike over the bridge that crosses the Little Susitna River at Schrock Road and saw that there was a tiny number of people downstream but no one upstream, so I decided to go upstream.

It had been awhile since I had pedaled along the Little Su. Last summer, due to the fact that I was recovering from my injury and shoulder replacement, I could not pedal a bike at all.

Sometime before that, I had bounced off the back of a snowmachine and broken my tailbone and although that injury did not lay me up, it made it too painful to ride a bike for quite awhile and so I did not.

When finally I was able to ride again, the seat injured my prostate and gave me pain that lasted a mighty long time. The only way I could ride my bike was to stand up all the time and never sit down and sometimes I did, but not much and I did not go to the Little Su.

Then, the summer before last, I felt like I could ride again. One of my sons had borrowed my bike when I could not ride it, but now he was buying a new one for himself, so I told him I was going to come and pick mine up.

"Wait, Dad," he said. "I want to get it all tuned up for you first." The whole summer then passed with my sometimes telling him that I was going to come and get my bike, and he responding that I must wait until he could get it tuned up.

So last spring, I just went and bought a new bike, rode it maybe one dozen times, then went north, took my big fall off of chair and could not ride again until this spring.

So I did not know that someone had put a barricade up, to keep all people off the trails that go upstream. But, as you can see, someone had.

In Alaska, we all own the waterways and no one can keep you off of them. But they can keep you from getting to them. On one hand, I felt mighty irritated at the private property owner who lives somewhere else but chose to put up this barricade. On the other hand, it is a hard, undeniable, fact of life in Wasilla that there is an army - yes, a minority of the whole but an army none-the-less - of snowmachiners and four wheeler drivers that have absolutely no respect for anything, be it property, nature, peace and civility and they will tear things up and throw their litter and beer cans anywhere and everywhere.

So I suspect the property owner has had some problems with these folks.

I suspect he still does. This little barricade will not stop them. They don't care. They believe that what belongs to them belongs to then alone but if it belongs to someone else or to the public, they got the right to trash it however they want.

Meanwhile, they cost the rest of us access that should be ours.

So I crossed over to the downstream side, and soon came upon this fellow panning for gold. He introduced himself as David.

David told me that a geologist told him that 100 percent of the dirt in Alaska has gold in it, its just that, in most cases, it is there in trace amounts.

Before they turned the Hatcher Pass area into a state park, there were many active gold mines on the Little Su about 15 to 20 miles upstream from here, but they are all gone now.

David told me that a friend of his once had a bunch of gravel fill brought in to fill his driveway. He panned that and got gold out of it, so David figured that proved that his geologist friend was right.

David studies his pan for color. He doesn't see any.

He says he has found some, though, and its here, miniscule flakes, in this little bottle. It might not be much, David says, but it is a better way to spend such a beautiful, sunny, day than to sit inside and watch TV.

David, the gold miner. Wasilla, Alaska, USA.

Down stream aways, on the next island over from the tiny one upon which David has established his gold-mining operation, I see a man on a four wheeler and his black lab dog. The dog swims in the water. I decide to pedal over and see what's happening.

So I charge into the river, pedaling hard, determined to keep my feet out of the water.

I fail - perhaps because I was trying to take pictures and pedal at the same time - and into the water my feet go. The water will get deeper and soon it will be over my knees. The river water that I got into in India was warm - very, very, warm - but this water is cold.

Very cold. But it feels good. I am glad to have fallen into it.

And this is the man and his dog and it is the only frame I was able to shoot, because my pocket camera battery went dead. It was the dog's first swim ever, and the man was mighty proud of him. The man had come to do some fly-fishing for trout, catch and release.

I should say right away that I am most confident that he is not one of the outlaw-type four wheel drivers that I complain about above. Earlier, I saw him turn upstream on the opposite bank of the river from where I had been, but as soon as he came upon a barrier, he turned around and headed downstream.

I agree - if I had stepped just a bit to the left, it would have improved the compoistion of this picture, but my battery had gone dead. When I lifted the camera and pushed the shutter, I did not think it would even take.

But it did. I tried again. The battery was again dead. Somehow, this one last shop sneaked in.

I turned around, and there were some late teenage boys, or maybe even early 20's, pumping air into poontoons for their pontoon boats. They were going to float all the way to the mouth.

"It's a long eight hours," one of them, a tall, lanky, fellow told me. "We did it just a few days ago and you should have seen it. There was a bald eagle and a duck, and that bald eagle was diving on that duck. The bald eagle was trying to eat the duck. It was some crazy shit!"

He said the duck escaped. I could not get another shot out of my dead battery, so I left them un-photographed.

Then I looked up and saw two jet trails, side by side, reaching from directly overhead all the way to the Talkeetna mountains. The wind up there was blowing at different speeds, so there were curves and bends in those two trails. The sky was deep, deep, blue. It was so incredibly beautiful to look upon, but I could not photograph it.

Then I pedaled for home. As I went up Church, through the midst of a marshy area, I suddenly heard some mighty splashing and thrashing. I looked to my left, and there was a moose, charging out of a pond.

I could not photograph it, for I had forgotten to recharge my battery.

That battery is charging, right now, as I type this very sentence.

Float plane landing on Sarah Palin's lake, and other Wasilla scenes: will soon continue the India series

I am so ashamed of myself. This blog has nothing to do with our former Mayor, present governor and ambitious woman traipsing about the nation in preparation for 2012, but I figured if I put "Sarah Palin" in the title, someone might google her name and wind up on my blog.

Not only that, the lake the airplane above is landing on is not her lake at all; she just happens to live on it. It is called Lake Lucille and it belongs to all of us Alaskans - even to you who are not Alaskans.

But don't try to get on Lake Lucille by passing through Sarah Palin's yard.

I don't know if she has a mean dog, but if she does, it might bite you.

The picture was taken through my windshield as I drove down Lucille Street.

A fence and imitation well on Gail street. We have a well in our front yard, too, but it doesn't look like that. We don't have a fence. I don't want a fence. I hate fences.

My next door neighbor has a fence. He put it up so that he would not have to look at my wrecked airplane.

Speaking of which, I saw this Citabria for sale at the Palmer airport. I had a doctor appointment at 4:00, but had to wait until 8:00 PM to see the doctor. I got bored, left the doctors office and drove to the Palmer airport to see what kind of airplanes might be for sale.

And here was this Citabria. Looks almost like the Running Dog once did.

Look at that! $28,000! When I saw that number, my hopes rose. But then I read that part about the fuselage and windows showing their age. Plus the part about the engine and prop "still" passing annual. And nothing about time on the engine or prop. I figure that means they must be high time and so soon will have to be replaced or rebuilt.

So I reckon that once this Citabria is purchased and put into good working order, the buyer will have spent anywhere from $45 to $60,000.

Hell. There's no way I can afford that.

In fact, there's no way that I can afford $28,000.

Yet, seeing this airplane gave me hope and still does.

I don't have $60,000 today but that doesn't mean I won't on another day.

And if I get it, I will buy me a good airplane and Margie will shrug and sigh and think of all the things that she could do with $60,000, but she will love me anyway, and she will smile, and be happy to see me take off and then later buzz the house and then come in for a landing.

That's how it used to be around here.

That's how I want it to be again.

And when it becomes that way, you will see this blog turn into something, because Alaska will once again be mine.

And here is a dog that was at the doctor's office when I returned. I was officially ahead of him in line, but still, he got in to see the doctor ahead of me.

I didn't see it for myself, but I'll bet she petted him.

She didn't pet me.

How come?

Despite suffering two flat tires since I returned from India, my bike works pretty good. I took this picture as I pedaled past this kid.