In the Grotto Iona - a moment of peace

It is true that I am not Catholic nor any longer a follower of any religion, but during yesterday's coffee break I stopped at the Grotto Iona, built by the Mahoney's both as a place to bury their dead and as a place of prayer, open to all who seek solace. I did not pray, but I did find a feeling of peace there. I will take peace wherever I fan find it, and for however long I can hold it.

Here, you will find a larger slide of the image.

Airplanes, ice cream and the need to escape; the final picture of the living Royce

I just want to escape for a bit now - not forever, not for years, not for months, perhaps not even for weeks. Days would be good, but I don't have days to spare. Hours, perhaps?

Just for a bit - and then while I am in escape to imagine that this little bit is forever. I want to climb into my airplane as I once used to do and go up there, into the clouds, into the sky, as I witnessed someone else do here, above me, late yesterday afternoon or early evening as I pedaled my bicycle.

But I want to be more free than the folks in this plane were. They were in the air, but they were completely controlled by people down on the ground, people who gave them orders as to just what altitude, heading direction and speed they could fly.

I want to be in the air, my hand on the stick and my brain free to choose what direction to push that stick and if I should push it that way and then change my mind and decide I want to go the other way and climb or descend to a different altitude than that is what I want to be able to do.

I want to fly into the updraft and then just let go of the damn stick altogether and let the wind carry me; see how high it will lift me into the sky before it turns me loose, and then to see what the view looks like from that perspective. There will be many mountains to look at, I assure you, and fields of ice and snow. 

I know, because it has happened just this way before.

And if I should come upon an eagle, bald or otherwise, I want to push the stick so that the airplane goes into a hard bank, to fly a tight circle with the eagle at center, it's pivot point, close enough to my cockpit window so that I can see the eye that it locks upon my eye.

When this happens with an eagle, even though one is flying a 360 degree circle around it and it is matching the turn degree for degree, the eagle appears not to move at all. The only hint that the eagle is rotating is that the areas of light and shadow upon the eagle change. Only the rays of the sun mark its turn, for its eye stays connected with yours, it's eye looks right into your's, and does not blink. It's wings do not flap, it's body appears to remain stationary.

But my airplane is broken and I cannot do such things now.

Yet I must break away for a bit.

What will I do?

Will I ride my bike, on and on, never stopping?

No, I am not fit enough right now to do that.

Will I walk, hike, up in the mountains?

I don't know.

But I've got to break free for a bit, somehow.

Of course, there is always ice cream. We have a Dairy Queen in Wasilla and I love their soft ice cream. This is from one week ago. Jacob, Kalib and Jobe were visiting us while Lavina went to Homer with Sandy for Sandy's early bachelorette party. She is getting married September 4 at Lake Lucille, here in Wasilla.

So us boys went and got ice cream. The chocolate coated cone Jacob is grabbing is for him. The other one is for Kalib. The milkshake, strawberry, is for me. Poor Jobe! He got none.

He didn't feel bad, though.

It didn't bother him at all.

Kalib, with his ice-cream cone.

Remember the patch of dandelions in the black and white series that Royce defended from Happy the dog and then floated above? This is the very patch, 15 years later. And that's Kalib in it, the little boy that has emerged from the baby that Royce loved so greatly.

If Margie were not spending her week days in town, babysitting Jobe, there would not be so many dandelions here. She loves to spend the days of late spring pulling dandelions out by the roots. There have been years where it has appeared that she has gotten them all, but, of course, with dandelions, you never get them all.

The dandelions are always there, surviving, even when not seen, even when the ground is frozen solid and the snow piled atop it. The dandelions are there, preparing to proliferate again. To a young boy, this is not a bad thing.

To a young boy, it is a magical thing, one that supplies him with many tiny parachutes to launch into the breeze.

Oh, dear! I have gotten things completely out of order! Chronologically, this picture should have preceded the ice cream shots. In it, we have just begun the trip to Dairy Queen. Muzzy needs a little exercise, so he runs alongside the Tahoe as Jacob drives down Sarah's Way toward Seldon. When we reach Seldon, Jacob will stop the car and Muzzy will get in.

Then we will continue on to buy the ice cream.

Now I am in the car. I have just stopped by Metro Cafe where Carmen and Sashana presented me with smiles and a cup, plus a muffin and I did not pay for either one. Someone out there, one of you my readers who refused to identify yourself, felt badly when s/he read about Royce and so bought this cup and muffin for me.

It was a very nice thought and I thank you.

So I proceeded on, to escape as best I could while drinking from the cup and eating the muffin. I passed by Grotto Iona, the Place of Prayer, and there were horses there.

On my way towards Grotto Iona, I came upon a place where a vehicle had gone off the road and was down in the bushes. A tow truck had just arrived and there were a few guys there. Before I could safely turn on my camera and get it ready, the picture was behind me.

On the way back, I knew they were there. As I passed, I lifted the camera as high as I could, hoping that it would catch the vehicle down in the bushes, but it didn't.

Out of chronologically order again - here is Carmen, before the Grotto and the horses, before the vehicle off the road, even before I got my cup and muffin. I have not even reached the drive-through window yet.

Metro Cafe, headed to drive-through window study, #32.9: Carmen and Branson

Financially, though I have managed to go far and do many things, these past few months have been hell. But finally my latest contract has been activated and yesterday I got my first check. I took Margie to the movie in Eagle River - Jonah Hex. 

In many ways, it was an absurd movie and the bad guys came to predictable ends, but it was fun. It was escape and I enjoyed it. Afterwards, Margie and I dined at nearby Chepos.

The food was good and the atmosphere pleasant. 

And then, last night, as I was going backwards through my largely neglected take of the past week, I came upon this, the very last picture of Royce, alive and aware, that I ever took or ever will take.

Since his passing, Chicago has been a very needy cat. She wants to be with me constantly. As much as is practical, I let her.

I pedal into the graveyard and am surprised to happen on Wasilla's former mayor - this individual who put us into our house on Sarah's Way

I have pedaled by the Wasilla graveyard on Aspen many times, but, until today, never into it. Today I did and was surprised to come upon this grave first thing: Charles Howard Bumpus - Charlie Bumpus. Mayor Charlie Bumpus. Were it not for this man, perhaps my family and I would never have lived in Wasilla at all.

Lisa would probably not even exist, because where else but inside this house could circumstance have brought Margie and I together at just the right moment to conceive her? 

We met Charlie Bumpus a little more than a year after we had rolled into Alaska, homeless and jobless. By then, I had a marginal income, plus the first Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend and the state had a low-interest, guaranteed, loan program to help first time home buyers on the struggling side to purchase a house. Charlie Bumpus had come up with a brilliant scheme on how to bring these home buyers to him.

Even with the state program, a house like the one we are in would have been out of reach, but Bumpus figured out that if he created a subdivision, then took orders for five houses at a time, he could build at package prices, lower the cost and make them affordable to more people and thus make a good profit himself.

So we drove out from Anchorage and met him in a downtown Wasilla devoid of fast food joints and chain stores. He was tall, slender and freckled; he had blond, curly, hair and was highly animated and energized. Soon, as we followed, both desperate and fearful to keep up, he sped at an insane speed down Lucille Street, which in those days was a narrow, windy, gravel, road, kicking up gravel, dust, and stones. Each time he rounded a curve, it looked like we was about to slide off the road. I could feel the tires slip a bit as we rounded those same curves behind him. It was easy to imagine that we might soon fly right off the road.

Finally, we reached Ravenview Subdivision, # 1, where we transferred to his car. Charlie drove us through the gravel streets past empty lots of birch, spruce and cottonwood that stood over a spongy, mossy forest floor and then gave us an inside tour of the few model homes he had already built.

"I'm not doing this for the money," he insisted. "I'm doing it so that one day I can drive through here with my daughter, show her a thriving neighborhood and tell her, 'your dad built this!'"

We chose a lot on Sarah's Way, picked the cheapest of the three-bedroom home models, looked at linoleum samples, cabinets, sinks, refrigerators, showers, toilets, ovens, woodstoves and such and chose what we wanted.

We then signed the papers, knowing full well that we had just wasted his time and ours. We knew the state was not going to approve us for the program.

But the state did. And here we are. 

Bumpus quickly rose to become one of Wasilla's most important residents, famous not only for his business skills, but his talent as a saxophone player. He ran in races and participated in other sports. 

He was fit and prosperous. Life looked good for him. In 1985, he was elected Mayor of the City of Wasilla. Less than a year later, at the age of 45, Mayor Bumpus suffered a sudden heart attack and died - right on the 15th birthday of his daughter, Sarah.

I wonder how many times he had driven her down the street that he named for her? Our street? Did he swell with fatherly pride as he drove her past our house? Did she feel daughterly adoration toward him? 

And what would he have thought of Sarah Palin, who, in 1996, became the third mayor to succeed him? If he had finished his term and had then been relected, the whole political landscape of Wasilla would have played out differently than it did. Would Sarah Palin have even become Mayor? Would anybody, outside of a few locals, even know her name?

So today I pedaled into the Wasilla graveyard and came immediately upon his headstone. It was a modest headstone, for one of such wealth and prestige.

A little further, I happened upon a cherub.

Just beyond that, I found a married couple waiting for three of their four children to join them. The other already has.

What did this mean? Was it a child's grave? Or an adult, who was loved by some who imagined this to be the way he had lived as a child? Or was he, perhaps, a fan of Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer?

I saw some graves that were definitely children and, just as I did these, I photographed them as I pedaled past. But I didn't post the pictures.

Out in the trees, I saw the Virgin Mary looking at me.

A cherub, bathing nude in the sun.

In the upper graveyard, the new part, devoid of trees, I again saw Mary.

They seemed to rise from the ground as ghosts, and I could not even read their names. I wondered about their origins and how it was that they came to live in Wasilla, and if some of the many people of the old Russian faith that I see around here - the women in their long skirts and head scarfs, the men in their plain clothes - descend directly from them?

Since this was a bicycle shoot, I had resolved not to get off my bike or the trail, but I compromised, because I wanted to see this couple closer up, as individuals. I laid my bike down at the edge of the grass and walked over. 

This is he.

And this is she.

Can you see how much work I have ahead of me, if I am to meet my goal of finding the soul of Wasilla? 

So far, I have done very little. Given Margie and my needs to survive, coupled with all the work I still want to do outside of Wasilla, it seems so impossible, but I believe that I am going to do it.

That means that one day fairly soon, before I join them, I must get to know these two, at least a little bit.

I then picked up my bike and pedaled home.

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.

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.