Last Friday, a sleepy man flew to Kaktovik

Despite multiple attempts, I was unable to put up a single post during my stay in Kaktovik - thanks to Squarespace.* So now I back up to Friday, the day I left, a day that began miserably. This was because I did not get to bed until 1:00 AM, but set my alarm for 3:55 AM.

It was not necessary for me to set the alarm at all, because when I must wake up at such an hour, I really don't sleep at all. I might drop into a semi-doze for five, ten - and if I am very lucky - 15 minutes at a time and then my eyes open and I check the time.

Still, I set the alarm just in case I should somehow actually fall into a deep sleep.

It didn't happen, though.

At 3:54, I was watching the clock. I could have turned it off, but Margie needed to wake up, too, and it was easier for me to let the alarm wake her than to wake her myself.

Margie has been blessed with the gift of sleep. Her head hits the pillow and she's asleep, usually until its time to get up.

I have been cursed with the curse of insomnia.

Worse yet, the less time I have to sleep, the more insomniak I am.

I often wonder how I function at all.

As for Jim, he sleeps at will and also takes many cat naps.

Soon, I was in the car with Margie, driving to Anchorage, to the airport, to hop on my first Era Aviation flight, the one that would take me from Anchorage to Fairbanks.

I desperatedly wanted to sleep on that flight, but I could not.

In Fairbanks, I switched to the plane that would take me to Kaktovik. I was the only passenger, but the plane was full - full of freight.

For those of you who may wonder why everything is so expensive in Rural Alaskan places like Kaktovik, this is why. Except for a barge load or two in the summer, this is how goods travel - including all fresh food, milk and such.

Even with bypass mail, this is not a cheap way to stock the shelves.

Again, I wanted to sleep but again, I could not. Still, I kept my eyes closed. I figured that would help. Accompanied by the roar of the engine and the props beating the air, I held my eyes closed as images, often bordering on dreams, played in my head.

Images of the living, and images of the dead; pictures of places, from Alaska to Arizona, to India and Canada and Greenland and New York City and San Francisco - all sorts of images of people and places, swirling about in my head as the plane carried me over Northern Alaska.

I wanted to hold my eyes closed forever.

I knew I could not do that. So I decided I would hold them closed until I felt the plane stall and the wheels hit the runway in Kaktovik.

But I couldn't do that, either. At a certain point, I knew we had to be drawing near to Kaktovik. We had to be passing over the Brooks Range.

"Eyes!" I ordered. "I have seen the Brooks Range many times! I do not need to see it now! It is better for you to stay closed, so that I might get what little rest I can."

My eyes did not listen.

They popped open.

And there, beneath the plane, stood the Brooks Range.

Very soon, the plane was descending, the Beaufort Sea below.

Then, it was dropping down over the westerns fringes of Barter Island, the northern-most point of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, upon which sits Kaktovik.

Then came the stall, and the bump of the wheels. Now we were rolling down the runway, past the massive hangar built by the Air Force in the early 1950's, when they force-moved the Iñupiat of Kaktovik out of their homes so that they could build this airport where the old village had stood.

More on this later.

I was hungry by now, so, after Crystallee Kaleak and Annie Tikluk found lodging for me in the Assembly of God Church and I got settled in, I walked to Waldo Arms and ordered an omelette.

As I ate, someone came in and peeked through the telescope that points out the Waldo Arms window toward the sea and shore, to see if perhaps there were polar bears out there.

He spotted none.

And then, I was standing on a beach, camera in hand. People were smiling, and waving. I will explain in a subsequent post.

I was about to state that I would explain in tomorrow's post, however, tomorrow is a very special day in someone's life, someone who had a most important role in the happenings that unfolded in Kaktovik, so maybe I will dedicate tomorrow's post to him, instead, and save my larger explanation for the next day.

*Squarespace has an iPad app, but it is a pretty lousy app. I did not have access to wireless where I stayed, so, when I would get a chance, I would go to the school and usually sit on the steel stairway and log on to North Slope Borough School District public wireless.

I built three different posts in the Squarespace app but at the end of each attempt was rewarded only with a rotating, circular, arrow above the word, "publishing." After the failure of my first attempt, which included three photos, I figured maybe Squarespace just could not deal with that tiny amount of information on a slow connection, so I made a new post with just one photo.

After that failed, I made a thrid post that contained only words and no image at all.

Just like before, the publishing arrow just rotated and rotated and rotated - for two days it rotated. yet never published the post. Sometime before the end of fall, I must make the time to research some other web-hosting platforms. When I find the right one, I will move this blog and my future electronic publishing efforts to it.

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iPadding it: with Jobe, Kalib, Margie, Chicago, Jim and Pistol

I have been wanting an iPad since they first came out - mostly, because I want to see the capabilities for online magazine and e-photo-book publishing, but until now I have not been able to justify the expense. I justify it now because I had pretty much resigned myself to the idea that I was going to have to purchase a new computer that would cost many times as much as the iPad, but now that I don't have to, then an iPad seems a good investment.

Of course, the iPad comes with a built-in camera. The resolution is low and the quality less than the iPhone, but I love any camera I can get my hands on and I worry less about technical quality than if I can use it to capture a feeling in the picture.

So, all of today's images were taken with my new iPad.

I started out with Margie and me.

Jobe and me next. He and Kalib came yesterday afternoon and will be here through today, maybe into tomorrow. I'm not sure.

Kalib, eating peanut butter and jelly.

I went to bed about midnight and, as always, when these boys overnight, Kalib slept with me and Jobe with Margie in the guest room. I spent an hour reading, Miss New India, a book that I first heard about from an Alan Cheuse review on NPR and he convinced me that I must read it. It is the first book that I will have read on an e-reader - in this case, the iPad.

It was fun, because I did not have to turn any lights on and page turning was instantaneous. At first, I thought I preferred reading a paper book, but after I had been at it for awhile I began to change my mind. I wouldn't want to read a book on an iPad while soaking in the tub, though.

In the morning, when I woke up for good sometime after 7:00 AM, I found Kalib sleeping like this, and so picked up the iPad and shot.

The light was dim in the room. This would be approximately the equivalent of shooting at ISO 10,000 or so.

Chicago had slept on the other side of my head. Here she is.

Chicago and me, in the early hours. 

My hand, before I get out of bed.

Me, still in bed. I have to wear that damn thing on my nose if I am to breathe and get any sleep at all. Looks likes its time for a haircut and beard trim again, especially since I will be heading back into the field shortly.

Jim was looking out the window.

Jim - as captured in the early morning with my iPad.

I went into the next room, which was even darker. Jobe woke up and came to greet me.

He was still tired, so he collapsed at his grandma's feet.

Soon, Jobe and I were out in the front room. Kalib slept on. Margie was coming to and would soon join us.

You did not see Pistol in the bedroom because he did not want to share the bed with Kalib, so he pouted and slept in the front room by himself.

Jobe scurries across the living room, carrying the two golf balls.

You can't see them, but this is only a second or so later, so he is still carrying the balls.

Now he is eating them.

Margie and Jobe, immediately after a diaper change.

Gramma and grandson.

Grandson and gramma.

Jobe gets down.

Jobe is ready to go. Gramma is not ready to let him go.

iPad still life: half a small cup of coffee. When Melanie and I went to India for Soundarya's wedding, Murthy gave me a set of small coffee cups. In India, they tend to keep their cups small. Drinking from a small cup helps me to not overdo it.

Plus, I like the cups.

Margie feeds Jobe some Oatmeal Squares.

iPad still life: Artificial flowers on the kitchen table, flanked by math.

But then, isn't math everywhere?

That's what my kindergarten teacher would always tell us, whenever we complained about the difficulty of the latest calculus quiz she had given us.

"Math is everywhere!" she would say. "Around and inside us - in the number of times a bird flaps its wings as it flies overhead - and how many times does your heart beat per minute... how many bites can you take out of a cookie... how many decibels in the croak of a frog...?

"It's all math, students," she would say. "Math is everywhere."

Jobe dumped the garbage on the floor, found the diaper his grandma had just taken off of him and gave it a toss. It took .9128999999999999999999 seconds for the diaper to plop onto the floor.

Sorry I can't be more precise than this. My math skills have been on the wane ever since I graduated from kindergarten and left behind the most brilliant mathematics teacher I ever had.

So ends my first experiment with iPad photography.

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A brief, incomplete, look at Father's Day just past - furry Jim and Furless Jim

My documentation of Father's Day began in the morning, as I returned home from my walk by coming in through the back, through the remnant of now-dried up marsh and woods. I found Jacob, Kalib and Muzzy in the back yard, Jacob pulling old stumps and such.

Kalib was wearing a red t-shirt that hung nearly to his ankles and gave him kind of a mischievous, sleepy-angel look and he wanted his dad to walk off into the trees with him.

His dad did not want to stop what he was doing and so told him grandpa would walk with him.

Hence, Kalib walked into the trees and I followed, taking pics as I did.

I think I captured something unique and special on that short little walk, but readers will not find it in here, at least not today. A read of yesterday's post will reveal the kind of problems that I am currently experiencing with this computer.

Once it takes a few minutes to figure out where it is and what program it is, the computer can handle word processing and basic internet tasks just fine, but when it comes to photo editing and photo processing tasks, it turns into an absolute nightmare.

As simple click that, when the computer is working as it should will result in almost instantaneous completion of the task can now result in ten minutes of doing nothing but watching the Mac colorwheel spin. It is not a bug, it is not a virus, but something has gone fundamentally wrong with this computer - maybe in the RAM.

So, it would probably take me an entire day - certainly half the day - to sort through the photos of that walk in Lightroom and then open them up in Photoshop just to complete the series that I believe is in the photos from that walk.

And I took many other pictures - Lavina barbecuing meat and veggies to all of us - and there were many of us - gathered around the backyard picnic table where we began to eat, but then it started to rain and I didn't care but everybody else did so we moved inside.

There, I took more pictures. I knew I faced an impossible editing task, so, when I took this one, I said to myself, "I will run that one and that can be it for the whole blog."

It is furry Jim sitting on the lap of Furless Jim while Muzzy sits out on the porch, wanting to get it, wanting to get at the beef and pork that Lavina had barbecued.

"Furless Jim," longtime readers will recall, is Jim Earnshaw, Charlie's dad. He and Cyndy came out and joined us. So all the kids were here (although Caleb slept through it all in preparation for his nightshift), grandkids and Charlie, who I also consider to be one of the kids these days.

Furless Jim is a genuine cat person - and dog person, too. Furry Jim knows this and took full advantage of it.

Shortly after I took the one picture that I marked for today's blog, Jobe came by to communicate with furry Jim as he rested on the lap of Furless Jim and I thought, "what the heck, these two pictures are right close together and so I will add it in, too.

So here they are, Jobe, furry Jim, and Furless Jim.

Although at this point I do not know where the money is going to come from, I have made up my mind that I am going to return to India in November for Soundarya's one-year memorial - and if the timing works out, for Sujtha's wedding as well. That will take me away at a bad time, because Sandy's death came on Lisa's birthday and it will also be Thanksgiving weekend, so I was talking to Lisa about that and she decided to come with me.

She can't afford to do that, but not being able to afford something is not always a good reason not to do it. So it looks like she will be coming with me. I hope so.

Jim and Cyndy brought some excellent potato salad and some celestial rhubard/blackberry cat; Charlie baked cookies and prepared black coffee, which we took late with the pastries.

Superb.

People began to depart a bit after 9:00 PM, with Melanie and Charlie the last to leave, shortly before 10:00 PM. Since they were the last, I figured it would not be that huge of an editing problem to go to the very end of my take and include this picture of them driving away, waving goodbye, on today's blog.

I then faced a minor writing task that I figured would probably take me until 3:00 or 4:00 AM to complete, but I needed a little exercise and some air first, so I got on my bike and pedaled off into the rain.

As I was nearing home, a little before 11:00 PM, some neighbors who are among the many who migrated to Wasilla from the former Soviet Block as it came apart and who live down the street, around the corner, down that street and around another corner, pulled up alongside me.

They matched their car pace to mine, rolled down the window and asked how I was doing.

We had not seen each other for many months, maybe over a year.

I told them I was doing good, and asked how they were doing.

They were doing good, too.

As I pedaled and we conversed, I shot a few frames, not looking through the viewfinder but just pointing my camera in their general direction.

That made this the last picture of the day, right next to Melanie and Charlie departing. So I decided to add it into the blog mix. 

I arrived home about 11:05 PM and found Margie on the couch, alternately watching Law & Order and dozing off for a few minutes. She was exhausted. So I sat down with her until the show was over.

Now I figured it would take me until 4:00 or 5:00 AM to finish off that minor writing task and I was tired.

I said to hell with it, I've put in too many all-nighters in my life and that probably has a lot to do with why I live in an almost perpetual state of brain-fried exhaustion.

I decided just to go to bed and do the writing task today. That means I cannot take my computer into the shop until tomorrow.

Oh, well.

Everything will get done and we will survive - perhaps not in grand fashion; maybe we will have to sell the house and move into a small RV and live on the road, but we will survive.

And I got to sleep a little bit.

I still feel tired, though. Brain-fried and exhausted.

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Happy Father's Day, Son!

Lavina had a health fair to do in conjunction with the Chickaloon and Knik tribes at the Palmer fairgrounds, so Margie and I went and picked her up when it was all done, about 4:00 PM. Jacob and the boys came out about two hours later. The boys were asleep when he arrived and so we left them that way.

We took turns peeking into the car to see when they might wake.

Jobe woke first. He reached for me, right away.

In the past on this day, I have paid tributes to the fathers from whence we come. Today, I pay tribute to the fathers who descend from us and since one of those is my oldest son, I focus that tribute on him.

Here he is, yesterday evening, tossing my middle grandchild Jobe into the air.

Now he shows him the first frog of the season. It used to be that our yard teemed with frogs - one could hardly walk without stepping on one.

Now a frog sighting is an occasion to take note of.

Jobe does take note. 

As for the oldest grandson Kalib, he still sleeps in the car.

In time, Kalib wakes up and comes back, too. The frog is still hanging out nearby, so Jacob shows it to Kalib. He invites Kalib to touch it, but Kalib is wary.

To demonstrate that this frog poses no harm, Jacob gives it a kiss. 

A bit later, Jimmy begins to wander too far away for my comfort, but I am entertaining Jobe and Jobe does not want me to leave, so Jacob goes and hauls him back.

Well, I took a lot of pictures last night and my computer is acting up big time - it is headed to the repair shop tomorrow or Tuesday and if I could afford to I would just replace it because I am spending maybe 30-40 percent of the time that I work with it - and sometimes, all of the time for an hour or two straight - watching the spinning color wheel go round and round and suffering mulitiple freezeups and forced shutdowns, so it is just too exasperating to try to look at the photos I took.

It was possible to navigate my way through the spinning color wheel and crashes to the toss and frog shots, because they were clear in my memory and I knew just where to find them, and the two shots that wrap up this series were at the end of yesterday's take, but it is too much of pain to search through the others.

This one, however, just popped up on my screen as I was swearing and cursing at my computer and it was so damn cute I just grabbed it.

There are some serious people within the photographic community who dismiss cute photos as irrelevant and facile, but, damnit, cute is part of life, too.

Please take note: I am a very serious photographer and this is a very serious photograph of real and true life.

More serious stuff - my son, the dad, with his entire family, his wife and three children. Jobe is taking an ever greater interest in spatulas.

Wait a minute, the astute reader protests... your son Jacob has only two children, Kalib and Jobe... why do you say, "three?"

Remember when Jobe quit breast feeding and I noted that Jacob and Lavina had been using the breast feeding method of birth control and it would soon become apparent how well that worked out?

See that little bulge in the tummy, right behind Jobe?

That is how well that worked out.

Very well, indeed!

So here is my son, the dad, with his wife, his two children that the light now falls upon and the one that is scheduled to make a first appearance in the light of the delivery room in October.

Happy Father's Day, son!

I don't know how you ever got to be such a good dad. You didn't have the greatest example to follow and you were kind of wild there, for awhile. Yet, an excellent dad is what you have become. A little overindulgent at times, perhaps, but overindulgence is love, and infinitely superior to neglect. These kids of yours are pretty damn good kids and that didn't just happen.

I love them.

You make me proud.

And so does Lavina. Even though this is Father's Day, not Mother's Day, it has to be said.

Happy Father's Day!

To all you good dad's out there!

Young dads, old dads, dead dads like my good dad - all dads.

Happy Father's Day to you all!

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Memorial Day, 2011: the big water battle; flowers at roadside memorial; we feast

On the final night of Kalib and Jobe's final Memorial Day weekend visit with us, Jacob and Lavina came out to sleep at our house. On Memorial Day morning, we went to breakfast at Denali Family Restaurant. I fear that I am shifting my loyalties from the old Mat-Su Family Restaurant to Denali. It is the hash browns, that is why.

Hash browns have always been a gamble at Mat-Su. You just never know - they can come fried to a crisp, reduced to mush, or cooked just right. So far, they have been cooked just right at Denali every time - and it sure seems that they are fresh cut and not taken from a package. They are as good as any hash browns I have ever eaten, anywhere.

Denali Family Restaurant hash browns are superb!

Mat-Su Family has long been a place of morning refuge for me and I feel kind of bad about shifting over, but that's what excellent hash browns will do.

I will still go to Mat-Su, sometimes - if for no other reason than old times sake.

Later, in the early afternoon, Margie and Lavina went to the store to do some shopping. After awhile, I went out to see what the three boys were doing. Jimmy came with me. We found two of the three boys watching a butterfly pass overhead.

I am not certain what the other one was into.

Then Kalib turned on the faucet. He began to fling water around.

Soon, both boys were getting a bit wet and muddy. Jobe was most interested in the process.

Kalib got the idea that it might be fun to spash his brother, so he did.

After taking the blast of cold water, Jobe turned and momentarily fled.

In just seconds, he fully recovered, and began to laugh. He laughed so hard he blew the snot right out his nose.

Dad joined in the fight, allying himself with Jobe.

Oh, it was a battle insane!

Jobe was most amused.

Kalib checks his ammo as Jobe strategizes.

Jacob knew that he had to get the boys dried off and cleaned up before Mom and Grandma came home.

Jobe didn't stay clean very long.

As all this had been going on, Jim had found a patch of dirt to roll around in. Only his face remained undusted.

Jim then trotted off into the woods. I cannot let him go there alone, so I followed.

So did the other three.

Then the ladies came home. We guys mentioned nothing at all about the battle that had taken place. The ladies can find out when they read this blog. Jake will be in big trouble then.

The boys and their dad lay down to nap. I took off to ride my bike. I found a broken scooter on the Seldon Road bike trail, just lying there, abandoned.

I wondered what the story behind that was?

If I had the time, I would write a novel based on this mysterious scooter. It would be a best seller. I don't have the time. If you do, feel free to steal my idea - go ahead, write a novel based on this image.

When I reached the corner of Church and Schrock Roads, I was reminded that although Memorial Day was established at the end of the Civil War as a holiday to honor and mourn our military dead, it has also become a time that people take to honor all their dead, to bring flowers to graves and memorials.

This is not a grave, but is the place where where three people were killed in 1999 in a collision caused by a drunk driver - a woman, a teenaged girl and an unborn child. 

For years afterward, loved ones kept memorial crosses atop this pile of stones, but vandals repeatedly tore down the memorials until the loved ones gave up and settled for just the pile of stones.

On Memorial Day, someone had brought these wreathes and placed them here. 

Let us hope that respect and compassion can now replace ignorance and cruelty in the hearts of the vandals.

I stopped on the bridge over the Little Susistna River. These two came by as part of a carvan of four-wheelers.

I have crossed the bridge a number of times since I began biking again, but I had not gone down to the river itself. Today, I did - and symbolically put my front wheel in the water.

I do not know what this symbolizes, but it must symbolize something.

On the bank and in the shallows, people frolicked.

When I returned home, I found Margie and Lavina repairing the picnic table.

Inside, I found the boys napping. I then went off to buy some iced drinks and to fill the tank with expensive gas. When I returned, the boys had not moved at all.

Lavina began the cooking by roasting bread on the barbecue.

If one studies all the faces in this picture and then gives some thought to it... it is just incredible to think about, to ponder the history, the sorrows, the changes, distances covered, the links from then until now.

Lavina kept the grill going.

And then we ate - but Kalib was napping and Caleb was sleeping in prep for his night shift.

And then, somewhere between nine and ten PM, it came time to say goodbye.

Margie and I had enjoyed the rapidly enlarging little ones for three days, but now they were going.

Caleb missed everything. He slept through breakfast. He slept through the water battle. He slept through dinner. But he awoke in time to say goodbye.

And then off they went, the people in the car and Muzzy running alongside, all the way back to Anchorage.

Well, I exaggerate a little. Muzzy would only run to the stop sign, about 200 yards away. Then he would trade places with Jacob and drive the family home while Jacob ran alongside the car - all the way to Anchorage.

Don't worry. It's okay that the dog drove. Muzzy has a license.

I then found Margie in the back yard, cleaning up.

"It's too quiet now," she said.

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