Even on this birthday, Melanie remains trustworthy; cats are not wierd, they are normal

Those of us who were free gathered together to celebrate Melanie's birthday. I will not tell you what birthday it was, but I will note that when I was a young adult, we feared this birthday above all others. The belief among young people was that no matter how good a person was before they hit this birthday, once they reached it, the ways of the world would overtake them and they could not be trusted after that.

Hell.

Melanie can still be trusted.

Now I will move write along, writing very little, because I have already spent quite a bit of time editing, preparing and placing pictures and I do not have time to write much. So I won't. Because if I write words that I do not need to write, it will just eat up my time, so why should I write such words that waste time when I do not need to write them?

So I won't write much.

Just a little bit.

Not much at all.

Because it would waste time.

And I do not have time to waste.

So I will write very little today.

I will just show you the pictures.

And not worry about writing many words.

That would be a waste of time when all that you need to know is in the pictures.

Well, maybe are other things that should know, too - like how to do math, for example.

Math is a good skill for anyone to have.

Here is Lavina, making frybread.

Once must have some comprehension of math to make frybread.

Otherwise, one might make 100 frybreads, when one dozen would do.

Or use 6 teaspoons of salt when one would be just right.

Kalib entered carrying his spatula, but then laid it down. I picked it up. He did not quite know what to think about that.

Melanie prepares her Navajo/Apache taco.

The tacos were damn good.

The day before, Rex had submitted his entry for a grant to help him with a sculpture that he hopes to create and then display at Burning Man in Nevada this summer. Unfortunately, due to some computer shenanigans, much of his proposal did not get submitted. Only a piece of it.

Anyway, this is model of only a piece of what he hopes to create. In the real thing, this salmon skeleton will be five foot long and there will also be a whole salmon, concrete, five feet long and a number of other elements as well.

His sculpture will cover some significant space.

I hope he gets the damn grant. 

Melanie was presented with two birthday cakes, not one. I am not sure why. I did not ask. I know Charlie made one of the cakes. I'm not sure who made the other.

Lisa made the frosting.

We ate the cakes with vanilla ice cream and they were damn good.

Afterward, she opened gifts.

All of the gifts were damned good.

Charlie gave her a damned good book titled "Cats Are Wierd." Not withstanding the fact that it is a damned good book, I take exception to the title.

Cats are not weird. As you can see, Diamond is as normal as normal can be.

Bear Meach is not weird.

Melanie observes Bear Meach being normal as Rex and Margie wash dishes.

Kalib studies Poof. "This cat is not weird," he would have proclaimed, had the proper words come to him to thus proclaim.

Perhaps it is little boys, not cats, who are weird.

Jobe goes for Poof, who is not weird.

The Three Musketeers showed up: Carl, Charlie and Bryce. They did not bring their swords. I was disappointed. I wanted to borrow a sword to cut the cake.

As the party drew towards its wild conclusion, Kalib crawled up to see his mom.

Two of my children, paired off. Lisa came late to the party, because she is carrying such a heavy load between being a full time student and full time job, and taking on extra tasks to help pay for it all.

She must deal with stress.

And then, as always happens, the time came to say goodbye, see you later.

Always this time comes. 

What a fine thing it has been these past 30 years to have Melanie as my daughter.

An absolutely fine thing.

Oh, dear! I was not going to say, "30 years," but I did.

Even so, I trust her.

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Sylvia Carlsson - the woman who gave me my start in Alaska; contemplating the future of this blog, part 3

Memorial services for Sylvia Carlsson were held at the Alaska Native Heritage Center and were presided over by the Alaska Native Sisterhood.

In the final years of her life, Sylvia Carlsson became well known for her letters to the Editor of the Anchorage Daily News, which appeared on a regular basis. This is her final letter, published January 21, 2011 - just two days before she died unexpectedly at the age of 76:

Anybody can destroy; ability to create valued

Following the State of the Union address, some Republican and tea party members of Congress will fall into full assault mode and will begin battering the health care legislation signed into law in 2010. They've dubbed it "Obamacare" and labels not fit to mention. The legislation is actually entitled the Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act or Public Law 111-148, but it is rarely referred to by its proper title in any of the media offerings -- "Obamacare" is more sensational maybe?

A few of the newly minted members of Congress seem to view themselves as foot soldiers specifically elected to wreak havoc on anything with President Obama's name on it, especially the PPAHCA. At least that's the impression I'm getting from interviews on the tube and in print.

Is there anything in the PPAHCA that could have helped the deranged shooter in Tucson? That question has yet to be asked.

When We the People begin electing members to Congress to destroy rather than create law, are we in trouble? Answer that question for yourself.

-- Sylvia Carlsson

I knew Sylvia for a different reason. I was a homeless person when I met her, and I had a homeless family. But I also had a dream - to make a life in Alaska for my family and me, to move out of the two tiny tents in which we endured the almost constant rain of the summer of 1981 into a house or apartment and to get to know something about this place they call Alaska.

It was Sylvia Carlsson, then President and Publisher of the Tundra Times who made it possible for me to begin to live that dream. She gave me my first and only non-freelance job in Alaska when, working in conjunction with Linda Lord-Jenkins, she hired me to come on as a reporter and photographer.

I worked there for 3.5 years and in that time, thanks largely to connections that enabled Sylvia to oversee agreements with the airline companies to provide me free transportation in exchange for ad space, I was able to do work in every region of Alaska, from the rain forests of Southeast, the wind-blasted volcanic islands of the Aleutian Chain, the Southwest Y-K delta, the Interior and, of course, the Arctic.

It was great fun and a big learning adventure. At times along the way, Sylvia backed me up against powerful individuals and organizations within her own Native community. Other times, we disagreed, and strongly so.

None of what I have done would have happened had Sylvia not hired me - not only my work for Tundra Times, but there would have been no Uiñiq magazine, no Alaska's Village Voices as I once shaped it - so many things.

So, when her niece and my good friend Diane Benson informed me that Sylvia, Tlingit, of the Raven Clan, had passed away, I made certain to attend her memorial service at the Alaska Native Heritage Center. There, I found her ashes on a small table alongside her picture.

I paid her my respects and gave her a Gunalchéesh, "thank you" in Tlingit, for hiring me and for giving me this great opportunity.

As Margie walks into one of the many campsites that we stayed in during the two months between the day we arrived in Alaska and when I was hired on at the Tundra Times, Caleb plays in the dirt. Melanie and Jacob visit in the master tent. Summer, 1981.

By June of 1981, it had become clear to me that if I was ever to realize my dream of making a life in what I knew to be my spiritual home - Alaska - I could wait no longer. I could not sit around until someone in Alaska gave me a job, I could not wait until a pile of money sufficient to finance the move and transition from Arizona to Alaska fell upon me. I had to go to Alaska and I had to go right then. I had dreamt long enough. It was time to take action - time to go.

So Margie and I held a yard sale, sold most all that we owned and then packed what was left on top of and into our Volkswagen Rabbit along with two tiny tents and our children, who then numbered four, and hit the road north.

Among those who loved us, many gave me good and loving council - "don't go!" You are not a kid anymore - you are a man with a wife and four children - a baby daughter, for hell's sake! Put your childish dreams behind you and be a man - be responsible, don't go!

Alaska is a harsh place. You're not prepared. Alaska will be cruel to you. Alaska will show you no mercy.

When we reached Salt Lake City, we stopped to visit my folks for a week or so. Rex Jr, my oldest brother, said he had shown my National Geographic work to a friend of his at the Salt Lake Tribune and she had a job there, waiting for me. He gave me her number and told me to call her.

I did not call. I loaded the family back into the car and pointed the Rabbit north, once again. "You'll turn around and come back before you reach the Canadian border," Dad told me just before we pulled out of his driveway. I called him from Canada. "You'll turn around and come back before you ever get to Alaska," he predicted.

Next, I called him from Tok, Alaska, just on this side of border from the Yukon Territory. "You'll be back within a year," he said.

That was almost 30 years ago.

When I drove across the border from the Yukon Territory on July 14 - my 31st birthday - and looked out at Alaska, at big, wild, country that I had never before seen, country in which I knew no one - hard, cold, country where no job awaited me, I felt this warm feeling of exquisite peace. I felt that finally, after having spent 31 years wandering in that wilderness called the Lower 48, I had come home.

It has long been my contention that although I was born in the city of Ogden, Utah, I have been an Alaskan since birth - it's just that I was born into exile.

I wondered why it took me exactly 31 years to get here, but it was better to have arrived late than not at all.

Rex, doing his art at the picnic table that serves as a tie down stake for the tent he sleeps in. Summer, 1981.

When I first got into the internet, and when I first saw blogs, I had this feeling that both had been made and created just for me. Basically, I had made a career of creating publications that I wrote, photographed and designed on contract, and I had longed to create my own publication.

I even tried it once, but the effort went nowhere. Even though I have spent 29 years of my 35 year career in business for myself, I am not a business man. I always put what I want to do ahead of money, and so tend to often wind up short. The expense of keeping a high-quality paper publication going while I figured out how to fund it was beyond my resource. I published one issue and then the thing died.

But with the internet - with a blog - the expense of producing and distributing a publication with a potential worldwide audience would be nominal. 

Yet, I hestitated for over a decade. I feared that if I put my photos on the internet, people would steal them, put them to unauthorized use. In fact, people had already done so, but I feared that on the internet, the problem could prove severe.

So, as badly as I wanted to launch an internet publication, I didn't.

Too bad. If I had have done so, perhaps I could have figured it out long before now. Perhaps by now, I would have a self-sustaining publication going. There are a good number of these out there, you - many produced by individuals, most of whom seem to have jumped in and built there readership and found their support before there were a billion blogs to compete with.

I don't think "a billion blogs" is much of an exaggeration at all. 

But because of this fear of theft, I waited until it became clear to me that the entire photographic world was moving online, anyway. Not just the young up and comers, but even the greatest known works by the greatest masters were coming online.

So a bit of theft and appropriation would just have to be tolerated. If something major were to happen, there are always the courts.

To all my Facebook friends - be assured, none of this applies to you. It gives me pleasure when you place my pictures on your wall, or use them as your profile pic - so long as my copyright mark remains and credit is given. I liken this to when I step into people's houses and find my pictures, clipped from magazines and newspapers, hanging on the wall.

Rex visits Melanie in the master tent. The summer of 1981 was the wettest on record to that time. It rained almost every day, sometimes all day and all night, too.

Well, damnit. I have again surpassed my alloted blogging time today and once again have done so much rambling that I have not gotten down to the main point of this "Contemplating the future of this blog" thing.

So I will have to do a part 4.

From comments that I receive, both here and in Facebook, I see that some of my readers still fear that one of the things that I am contemplating is to shut down the blog entirely.

No - no, not all.

I see this blog, and the electronic magazine that I plan to add to it, just like I saw Alaska after I drove across the border on the Al-Can with my family. I was looking at my future - Alaska. My past was literally behind me. I would still make short returns back into that past. The places and people who had been important to my life down south would continue to be so. From time to time, I would go down there and we would get together and do things.

Sometimes, I would go to places outside Alaska where I had never been - but my spirtual home was now my physical home and would remain so. I had almost no money, no home, but I had desire. I did not know where the money would come from. I knew that  it would come and it did - never enough to make it easy, but enough somehow to always carry on.

Now, this blog, and electronic publishing - this is what is before me. This is my future. I will still make my visits back into paper, but this world of electronic publishing is where I am and I am only going deeper. Once again, I lack all but marginal resources and I do not know where sufficient resources are going to come from. The resources will come, though, I know it. 

And you readers - you have encouraged, by coming and by your support.

Tomorrow, I will see if I can do what I was going to do today so that I can close out this series.

Two Ravens, in honor of Sylvia Carlsson of the Raven Clan. Thank you again, Sylvia, for the many good things that you made possible in my life.

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The wind tries to blow the moon away; Jimmy is a bad good cat; we pick up Kalib and Jobe; beauty at the cave temples

Again, I found myself walking in the hard, cold, wind which has seemed to become perpetual lately - temperature about 0 F. Yesterday afternoon, I heard a forecast on the radio calling for an overnight high wind advisory, with winds gusting up to 80 mph (130 km/h) at some places in this valley and temperatures going to -20 F (-28 C).

That would be quite a wind-chill factor.

Well, the night has past and none of that quite came true here - maybe it did somewhere else in the valley but not here. Still, it was a mighty cold brisk wind out there and when you went walking in it, it let you know it.

Even so, Ubiquitous Raven came sailing by.

On the moon, there was no wind at all. See how still it is up there?

The day before, a triple stop sign had ordered me to stop three times. Now, I was ordered to stop once, but I was on foot, so I did not obey that order.

Well, I guess I stopped to take the picture.

But not because I was ordered to.

If I were a child, and  had a sled...

So, just why did the chicken cross the road? I don't know, and this dog doesn't either. Furthermore, neither one of us cares. If a chicken wants to cross the road, that's the chicken's business.

Why do people make such a big deal about a chicken crossing the road, anyway?

When I left to go on my walk, Jimmy had been sitting on the sill of my office window, looking out. This had made me a bit nervous, as Jimmy can do some pretty bad things when he has the office to himself. He turns off hard drives, erases things from my computer and types gibberish into my stories.

I am not making this up - he does all of these things.

Plus, he loves to push things off counters, desks and tables and watch them fall to the floor.

Even so, he looked so happy in the window sill that I decided to chance it and leave him there.

I came home the back way, through the marsh, hoping that I might find some moose there.

I didn't, but when I came up through our back yard, I saw Jimmy sitting right where I had left him about one hour before.

He had been a good cat.

But then Jimmy is always a good cat, even when he is bad.

I don't know how there could be a better cat than Jimmy.

He is ten-and-a-half years old now.

If he goes before me, which seems quite possible, it will be very hard.

Jacob and Lavina wanted to do some major house cleaning this weekend, so they asked us to take the boys. We agreed and in the late afternoon drove into Anchorage to get them.

As you can see, Anchorage has not been scoured by the same high winds that we have - except for the Anchorage Hillside, populated largely by rich people who every winter endure 100 mph plus winds, but they have a really good view from up there. They can see Cook Inlet, Denali, Foraker and a host of active volcanoes.

The snow did not mostly all blow away there the way it did in Wasilla. Plenty was left behind to weather the big warmup - that warmup now being history.

Here we are, picking up the boys. Muzzy wants to come, too. We will not let him.

Now we are getting ready to leave, but before we do, Lisa stops by. That's her and Jacob in the driveway.

On the way out, we stopped at Taco Bell on Muldoon and found a cop with his lights flashing, parked behind an empty vehicle.

I have no idea what the story was. You could look in the Anchorage Daily News, but I doubt that you will find it there, either.

I could have played the role of the true reporter, gotten out, interviewed the officer, took a picture of any suspect with her hands over her eyes. I could have done something like that. I have those basic skills, you know.

If I had done it, then I could tell you why the cop had stopped behind the empty car.

But I was more interested in eating my burrito than in getting the story.

Nobody can fire me.

This is my blog and if I would rather eat a burrito than report on a cop-stop, I can.

We then drove on to Wasilla. The winds weren't bad at all until we reached the hay flats. Then it felt kind of like being in an airplane, flying through turbulence, except that the bumps and jolts were all lateral - no up and down.

A couple of times, we damn near got blasted out of our lane. I could hear the sound of dust and small pebbles smacking the car.

But we made it. I was glad, too, because if we hadn't have I would never have seen this tanker truck roar through the intersection of the Parks and Palmer-Wasilla highways.

I don't know about you, but, at the end of a long, hard, tough, day, I really enjoy seeing a truck blast through the intersection like this.

It just takes all the stress that I feel and carries it down the road with it.

Poor truck driver! Now he must deal with that stress.

Better him than me.

He's probably tougher than I am, better able to take it.

Truck drivers are known for being tough, able to take it.

Once in the house, Kalib found a flashlight. I found another. We played flashlight games.

Jobe does not know how to use a flashlight, but that did not stop him from joining in the games.

Yes, Kalib had brought his spatula - none of the expensive, fancy toys that he got for Christmas and his birthday. Just his spatula.

And this from India:

Two girls in front of the cave temples of Badami.

I hate to say this, and I mean no offense to any of my fellow Americans, but after one spends a little time in India and then returns to the US, the way people dress here - at least the women - just seems kind of dull and drab by comparison.

The women in India just dress beautifully - even poverty stricken women, begging in the streets.

They remind me of the Navajo saying, "I walk in beauty."

Badami is a long way from Navajo land, but the red rocks kind of remind me of it, as do temples, built in caves - not the same at all but yet evocative of cliff dwellings.

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A cat full of coffee and other New Year's tails

The New Year began with me sleepy and exhausted and I am sleepy and exhausted right now - too much so to write much with these pictures. So I will simply say that, with breakfast and such behind us, Margie and I are in the car, driving past Wasilla Lake, enroute to Anchorage to celebrate the New Year at Jacob and Lavina's house.

The wind is howling and it is one of those horrible warm winds from the South Pacific that sometimes materialize this time of year and then ruin a good Alaska winter.

There is nothing to be done about it, though, so we just drive to Anchorage.

The New Year got off to a poor start for someone. On occassion, these guys in their patrol cars with their sirens, beepers and flashing lights unnerve me a bit, but I am damn glad they are there.

While I do not believe the US should enforce or coerce its ways upon any other nation, I just cannot help but to think that if in India they set up and enforced traffic laws, honestly, with no bribery, to the degree that they do here, I might have slept a lot better these past six weeks and three people who should still be breathing and walking on this earth would be doing so.

Yes, only two of them went by crash, but the third would not have followed had there been no accident in the first place.

So, yes, I appreciate these uniformed men and women who we call cops, these who we ask to risk their lives to keep us safe even as they sometimes suffer our abuse. Yes, there are some bad ones to be found here and there among them - the same is true of preachers, teachers, astronauts, photographers, and baseball players -but on the whole they do a pretty good job and get cussed at all too often.

Even if they pull me over later today and write me a ticket, I will appreciate them. I will swear and cuss when they walk back to their car, but still I will appreciate them.

When we arrived at Jacob and Lavina's house, we found a bag filled with something in the living room. It was kind of curious, because the bag was upside down.

I wondered, what could this bag be filled with?

Why, it was filled with Kalib!

Remember those dinosaurs Kalib had been surrounded by in yesterday's post? As part of his late birthday present, his parents let him pick one out.

This is the one he choose. They say that it was the most realistic out of the bunch. Some were bigger, they say, but Kalib went for realism over size.

I am jealous. I loved dinosaurs when I was little, too, but I never got to have one like this. I think the biggest dinosaur that I hever had stood maybe three inches tall and was made of hard plastic - and I only had that one because I found it lying in the road.

Jobe had been napping when we arrived, but soon he floated out to join us.

Jobe and his mom.

Did you know that my daughter, Lisa, carried a full semester worth of credits this past fall even as she worked full time, and also made the honor roll?

She did. 

I wonder who she is calling? Could it be me? Is it possible I placed my phone somewhere and could not find it?

I was lying on the floor, in front of the TV, feeling so exhausted that I could hardly move. Yet, I wanted to get a group New Year's day picture of everybody that was there. The light here is very dim, so I wanted to get them in front of the TV, both so that there would be a little more light on them and so I would not have to move from my position on the floor.

I called everybody over to pose.

I could see that it was going to be a challenge to get them to do so.

Still, I was determined to get the photo, and to do so from down on floor.

It took some doing, but finally I got it. You will notice that Caleb, Rex, Ama and Bryce are not here. Sometimes, you can get everybody together and sometimes you can't. So you take a group picture of those who you can.

I am in this picture, too - just on the other side of it, sprawled across the floor in front of the TV.

I was so exhausted I did not know how I was going to drive home. And Margie hates to drive at night, on black, slippery roads.

So Melanie poured me a cup of coffee from her cat thermos. "Charlie and I never go anywhere without a cat full of coffee," she explained. She also said that she was a chick-a-dee, and that in the winter she eats one-and-a-half times her weight everyday.

As for Lavina, she wound up with a cat full of... cat!

Just in case you were worried that with all the new Christmas and birthday toys Kalib might have forgotten about his beloved spatula...

Kalib and Jobe came home with us. Kalib feel asleep in the car. When I brought him into the house, he transferred his sleep to the couch. Then about 3:00 in the morning, he came in, climbed onto the bed and slept right by me.

Margie likes to collect rocks. She keeps some of them in this little basket. Looks like she needs to find a new place to keep the basket.

Jobe woke up maybe three times during the night, but went back to sleep after he dined on mother's milk stored in a bottle.

Looks like I wrote a little more than I though I would. I'm still sleepy and exhausted. I need to go back to Barrow before the sun rises, find a nice cubby hole somewhere, crawl into it, pull a quilt over my head and sleep for 20 days straight.

Hey - what would you do if you found a suitcase filled with $50,000 cash?

This actually happened to a friend of mine in Barrow. I will see if I can find him by phone or net and will make this the subject of my next post.

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2010: The end of dreams, the beginning of dreams, the continuation of dreams

So this is the final day of 2010. I don't quite know what to think about that.

I had planned to do a month-by-month review of the entire year - just as I did last year before 2009 came to an end. I was also going to expand stories that I managed to get the beginnings in but never finished, or to fill in some of the huge gaps that I left out because time ran out - like at the Gwich'in Gathering, the Inuit Circumpolar Council General Assembly in Nuuk, Greenland and to complete the tribute to my late friend, Navajo artist, poet, cartoonist, songwriter, performer, husband, father, grandfather and brother, Vincent Craig.

Plus, there were many little picture stories that I got pieces of, perhaps shot in whole and never posted at all, simply because I ran out of time and energy.

So that is what I was going to devote this blog to these past couple of weeks - a review of what I did post and a glimpse at what I didn't.

But, as it happened, when it came time to review this year, I did not want to go there. I just didn't. And so I'm not. Suffice it to say that it was a year when beautiful and hopeful dreams came to abrupt and crushing ends, when new dreams sprouted, and old dreams, diminished in scope and joy but still determined, pushed on.

I took this picture of myself two days ago as I walked with ravens and breathed frost into my beard and mustache. I think it is a pretty good summation of the year 2010 as I lived it.

I will not here go into the dreams that came to an end, nor even look at those that continue, but will instead focus upon those that began. Here is such a new dream of hope and joy that began in 2010 - little Jobe, born February 12.

I know that right now he has dreams and desires, some in the very early stages, others of which have yet to even begin to shape themselves in his conscious mind.

I have a dream for him, too and it is a very simple dream - that one day, he and I might paddle a canoe together, through a quiet place frequented not by people but by animals, fish and birds, surrounded by a tiny piece of the beauty that is Alaska.

I dream that we would catch a fish or two, barbecue them on the bank or shore and then eat them together.

As for the present, or at least the very near past, this is how I found Jobe when I went into his house the other night to pick up Margie and bring her home.

This is the moment that he noticed that I had entered the room.

Jobe immediately rolled over and began to crawl towards me.

...he drew nearer...

He reached up for me...

Jobe loves his grandpa. His grandpa loves Jobe. One day, I hope, we will catch and eat fish together.

As to Jobe's older brother Kalib, many of his dreams seem to involve a spatula. Before I returned home with Margie, Lavina invited us to dinner at Taco King. Kalib brought his spatula.

Carrying his spatula, Kalib heads to the door at Taco King. Having seen how neat this picture looked large, it pains me to present it so small, but such is the format of this blog. If you click slide show, it will help a bit.

Kalib, his spatula and his mom, at Taco King.

How the moon loves the sun!

When I look at this, I cannot help but wonder what kind of babies the two might make, the sun and the moon? Stars, perhaps? A trillion, zillion, quadrillion stars?

Even more than that?

Star children, without number.

The dad joined us. Two chefs, one spatula, at Taco King.

Sometimes in a restaurant, Kalib will suddenly leave the table and start to run all over the place. I was trying to chase him down, but I had to shoot at least one frame before I caught him.

And this one from India:

Do you ever think of these two ladies when you drink your tea?

To be quite honest, I tend not to, either. But here they are, picking tea in the Ooty area of Tamil Nadu, at about 7,000 feet above sea level.

One must be careful walking about here, because there are cobras and other chooo'weet snakes slithering about amongst the tea plants.

I did not see any men picking tea - just women. Their boss, a man, told me that is because women are the more diligent workers. They stick to the job and don't goof around, he said, but men do.

He also made some kind of joke about how women deal with cobras better than men do, but I can't remember the joke.

Somehow, given the dreams that so recently came to an and abrupt end this year, including dreams that walked together not far from me in the form of a newly wed wife and husband at the moment I took this picture, the phrase "Happy New Year" does not feel quite right to me at this moment.

Yet, happiness is what I wish for us all.

May you all find happiness within the new year that is about to begin.

A request for help to the village of Savoonga

I received this message from Jenny Canfield, concerning the power outage that has left the village of Savoonga frozen:

This note comes from my good friend Ossie. His good friend Yaari is from Savoonga and they're having a tough time right now. Please read the note below and consider informing your readers, listeners, friends, coworkers, etc. 

They are mostly in need of non-perishable goods. Era aviation is providing free shipping to Savoonga.

If you're so inclined, have a food drive at your workplace. The holiday weekend is coming up, so many of you may be out of the office. Savoonga will still need your help come Monday, so please don't forget.

You can contact Yaari at 223-4124 or yaari30@yahoo.com for more information. 

per my good friend, yaari kineekuk: Savoonga (her village) had power outage for several days now. Some recovered as of yesterday. 150+ stayed at the school to keep warm; 50+ at the City Hall; 20+ at the Fire Dept. Pipes bursted, store is closed, all phones are down. If you can please help... 

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