I walk about in hand and ankle cuffs, throwing rocks, as I listen to old songs play in my head

Although the nights have been cold, today was the third day in a row of exquisite, warm, sunshine and after Caleb returned from his late-morning coffee outing, I got him to agree not to go to bed until I could take a walk. I headed down Seldon to Church Road and, as I returned, I saw this vehicle pull out from Lower Serendipity. I should know the make, model, and year, I suppose, but I don't.

When I first saw it, I wondered if it had once served as a hearse. If so, I wondered about the people it had carried. I pictured an old man with pure white hair and a handle-bar mustache lying in the back inside a fine, blue, coffin, his hands folded on top of his chest over a black suit with blue pinstripes, taking his final ride. Then I pictured a tiny coffin.

I decided that instead, maybe it had been a woody, with surfboards piled on top. I pictured bleached-blond surfers and their bikini-clad honeys from the 1960's driving it along the edge of California seaside cliffs, damn near driving off the road because they could not keep their eyes off the waves breaking below.

I remembered driving along such cliffs, surfboard on top, the girls in the car screaming in terror at me to watch the road instead of the surf. I wouldn't have driven off the road. Even though I studied the surf, I knew at all times right where the edge of that cliff was.

I'm afraid the car was not a woody, it was a 1960 Ford Fairlane sedan and the girls did not wear bikinis. They were modestly dressed, actually.

Mormon girls. That's why.

A Jan and Dean song came into my mind:

I bought a cool wagon and we call it a woody

Surf City, here we come

You know its not very cherry its an oldie but a goodie

Surf City, here we come

Well it ain't got a backseat or a rear window

but it still gets me where I want to go

And we're going to Surf City, 'cause its two to one

You know we're going to Surf City, gonna have some fun...

...Two girls for every boy...

If I could but live my youth again, those girls would not be Mormons, or, if they were, they would be the wild ones (sorry, Mom).

One is only young once, and those who stand at the pulpit and preach to young people about what will bring them unbearable regret later in life can really miss the mark.

I walked under a sky that was blue, so deep, clear and clean and in the not too far distance, the mountains rose beautifully into it. The air was wonderfully warm and its aroma was sweet. Yet, I felt trapped, as though I was shackled in steel cuffs - both on my wrists and ankles.

This is how I had felt last summer, too, when I would get out and walk and see the sky and the mountains. This is because it was all inaccessible to me. I could see it, but I could not reach it; I could not go to it. I could not walk in it. This was because of the injury that I had suffered. I was horribly fragile and had a long way to go before I would heal.

And that's how the summer passed, and the fall, but always I was improving slowly and in the winter I began to feel new strength, but still I was limited. The pain in my right shoulder, upper arm and wrist was constant and that whole arm was weak. My range of motion was limited. Even a slight amount of stress, whether by bump or pull, could jar me with startling pain and seemed to threaten to knock me right back to where I had been.

Come the beginning of this summer, despite the fact that I still wore a brace upon my wrist and that the pain remained constant, there 100 percent of the time but usually at a low enough level that I could forget about it, I felt as though I were ready to go, full bore now.

I had a plan to do just that. I had what I figured would be a month's worth of field work - shooting pictures and conducting interviews - to do on the Arctic Slope. I created a fantasy in my head. Even as I did this field work - shooting and working oh, say, 12 hours a day, I would somehow find another eight hours or so to construct my 96 page Uiñiq magazine layout, write all my stories and get my publication press ready by August 1.

Then, I would cut loose for the entire month and do all those things that I had not been able to do last summer. I would hike in the mountains, I would canoe in the wild country, I would catch fish, including a king salmon, kayak in Prince William Sound and then at the end I would see if I could shoot a moose and put it on the table.

As anyone who has been with this blog knows, I had a great time on the Slope and I would judge my field work to have been quite successful. But how in the world I ever got the idea that I could put my magazine together at the same time as I did that field work, I do not know.

So I resigned myself to the idea that I had no choice but to use the month of August to put the magazine together - yet every now and then, no matter what, I would break away to go into the mountains, or onto the water, for one day, or even just an afternoon.

And then Margie fell. And now she needs me all the time. Even out here, on this short walk, knowing that Caleb was in the house with her should anything urgent come up, I was nervous and uncomfortable. I felt that I must get back to her quickly as I could. Those mountains were absolutely inaccessible to me. I felt trapped. Cuffed.

And then another old song came into my head, this one by the Everly Brothers:

Through the years our love will grow

like a river it will flow

It can't die because I'm so...

devoted...

to you!*

That "you" would be Margie. And being devoted does not necessarily mean romance at all; it does not necessarily mean holding hands and staring raptured into misty eyes. It means giving up what you so desperately want to do to be with that person when that person truly needs you - just as Margie gave up so much last summer to care for me; it means to be exhausted and to get up at any and all hours of the night, when you do not feel you can even open your eyes or raise your arms, to help that person through an unpleasant and painful task.

And even as I felt trapped and cuffed while walking in the open air under the bright sun, my Margie lay on the same bed where she had lain nearly eight days straight now, always on her back, never getting more than one foot... no, not even more than eight inches... from the bed in all that time.

And yes, I am devoted to my Margie. By so many standards upon which the marital relationship is often judged, I fail. Many is the woman who would have left me long ago. But we like each other. We don't just love each other. We like each other. We are friends. We enjoy hanging out together. And I am devoted to her. No matter how contrary to the idea of devotion some of my actions might seem by the so often artificial standards of the society that we live in.

So all those mountains must just sit there, for now, without me wandering through them.

I did not mean to get carried away like this. I should strike all this.

But what is that rock doing in the air, just beyond my thumb?

I threw it, and photographed as it left. See, yesterday, I threw an apple core into the bushes, for the birds, the squirrels, the bugs to eat. My throw was not good. In the time of my chidhood, if a boy had made such a throw his friends would have teased him, "you throw like a girl!"

It was a weak throw, and the core only traveled about 15 feet - the lingering result of my injury. So I decided that when I walk, I will stop every now and then, pick up a rock, and throw it, until I can hit a target a good distance away.

I probably threw two or three dozen rocks on this walk. I gripped the rocks the way you grip a baseball, and made a concerted effort to draw my arm over my head in good baseball style. It was difficult. It hurt. None of my rocks went much past 20 feet - until the last one. It flew maybe 30 feet.

So I am going to keep throwing rocks until they are frozen to the ground and buried under the snow.

In the midst of this coming winter, I will take Margie to Hawaii and I will rent a surfboard and with my strengthened arm I will paddle into the surf and then I will ride a wave.

It has been so damn long since I have ridden a wave.

So please, please... no more accidents!

Speaking of accidents... at the edge of Wards Road, over the tiny pond my kids named "Little Lake" when they were growing, I found this crash helmet in the weeds. See the indention that covers the nearby area? I could see that it was made by an up-ended machine, probably a four wheeler, most likely driven by a kid hot-rodding in wreckless abandon - maybe a little kid - just before (s)he went off the road.

But I don't know. Maybe it was a responsible adult. All I know for sure is that someone had an accident here and the helmet was left behind.

I wondered how bad it was? Hopefully, not too bad. Maybe Margie is not the only person around here laid up in bed right now.

The other day, Caleb bought himself an iPhone. He plays a game on it.

This is progress. I was able to help Margie out of bed and onto a chair, where she sat for a very long time and read a book. Since she can no longer babysit him, and Lavina had to go back to work, Kalib enrolled in daycare today, just as he did after she injured herself last January.

He and his parents did not get home until late, about 9:30, but they brought Margie's dinner with them. Hawaiian food -chicken and rice - cooked at that place in Mountain View, the name of which I forget.

I did not want to wait that late for dinner and so had eaten mine  - a can of pinto beans and a ham and cheese sandwich - earlier.

But Margie gave me a taste of hers.

Oh, geeze! Had I known, I would have waited until midnight, if need be.

That's how good it was.

It may have been the best chicken that I have ever tasted.

Other than Mom's, of course.

Oh yes - the Sarah Palin experiment:

It worked. I had the biggest flood of hits today that I have received since I posted the Barrow baby contest.

No - Sarah Palin did not draw as many people to the blog as did the Barrow babies, but she drew quite a few, anyway.

*My condolences to Congressman Don Young, over the loss of his wife, Lu.

Sarah Palin experiment - a berrylicious walk with Kalib and his dad

The experiment:

Typically, the number of visitors to this site drops off come Saturday and Sunday, but this weekend something curious happened: for no reason that I could think of, the number of visitors actually rose. It did not reach the stupendous levels (for me) that it did for two days running when I posted the Barrow baby contest, but, none-the-less, it showed a healthy increase over what it had been and certainly over the typical weekend.

I was curious as to why, and so did some back-tracking and discovered that some blogs that link to me (most notably the Immoral Minority) had stories that Sarah Palin and husband Todd are about to divorce (denied by Palin's spokeswoman). 

And then, last night, the word "Palin" was in my headline.

I figured that these two factors led to the increase.

So, other than what I have stated above, this blog post has nothing to do with Sarah Palin. It is merely an experiment to see what kind of numbers I will get by including her name in the post headline. This is a one-time experiment. I will not do it again. Nor is Sarah Palin about to become a regular topic of this blog, even though it is obvious to me that my really-pretty-small audience could be significantly larger if I were to run a few Sarah Palin stories every week, perhaps every day.

If she stays in Wasilla, or even Alaska, it is almost inevitable that our paths will cross somewhere and then I will probably get a picture and post it with a few words, but, otherwise, this blog has other concerns and I will leave her to the other bloggers.

The walk.

It began in our front yard, where Kalib observed as his parents engaged in a lovey-dovey wrestling match. Shortly thereafter, Kalib found a mushroom.

He did not try to eat it and if he would have, I would not have let him.

Lavina stayed home, just in case Margie would need some help. Jacob took off walking. Fearing that he was about to be left behind, Kalib came running after. I followed with my camera.

Eventually, Kalib wound up on his father's shoulders.

By and by, he was transferred to Muzzy's back. It was sweet.

Muzzy galloped up the embankment, bucking Kalib from his back. Tenaciously, Kalib kept hold of the reins.

There were berries to eat - raspberries, blueberries and currants. There were cranberries, too, but they were not yet ready to be picked.

By the time we reached a hill that we had to descend, Kalib was walking again. Two trails went down that hill - one off at an angle with a more gentle slope, the other straight down, at a steep slope. Jacob tried to lead Kalib down the gentle slope, but he refused to go that way. He insisted upon going down the steep slope, so Jacob got in front of him and gave him his hands.

Fireweed grew in abundance at the bottom, so Jacob and Kalib plunged in. There were many honey bees flying about in those flowers, plus bumble bees and yellow jackets. When a yellow jacket alit on a blossom right in front of Kalib, Jacob warned him to leave it alone.

But, as you can see, Kalib reached out with both hands. Fortunately, he did not get stung.

And then we found more berries.

Now we are on the last stretch, coming through the marsh towards home.

Even though we are now within three hundred yards of the house, it will take Kalib and Jacob more than an hour to reach it. I grew worried about Margie and so, right after I took the following picture, hurried back to our bedroom, leaving the father and son to enjoy the delights of so beautiful a day alone together.

Jacob and Kalib, picking berries. "It was a berrylicious walk," Jacob said.

How long will I have her? How much time will I get to spend with him?

My wife during the worst of her recent nights of suffering. I am a bit confused, folks. Anyone who has followed this blog at all has probably figured out by now that I am one of those people who cannot stay in one place for very long, a person who, just when he starts to get comfortable gets up and goes somewhere else.

Being a photographer and writer, I have been able to make a living, even if a scary one, always on the edge of disaster, doing this. Through my wanderings, I have even raised and supported a family.

But I have been so often gone from that family.

And lately, in my head, I have been planning and scheming on ways to get out and go, go - go again, travel again, leave everybody behind again. I have talked it over with Margie and she has said, yes, that is how you make a living and that is what you must do and I miss you but I will be fine. We will all be fine.

And now she gets hurt again and needs my care both day and night. I know that she will recover. but still, it makes me think. I have no statistics to back it up but I suspect that by this point in my life, probably 60 percent of all the people that I have ever met are dead and gone.

My time is limited. Her time is limited. The time for all of us is limited. How much longer will I have her? And how much of that time will I spend galavanting here and there?

Without ever taking on another job, I have enough work to do right now that I could spend every day for the rest of my life here, in this house, in my office, writing, and pulling photos together for this and that, working on all these unfinished books that I have constructed in part or in whole, just to tear apart and start all over again.

And if I did nothing else, I could never finish them all but I would be home and I could spend that much more time with her.

"Well," she said, "when you are home, you are always out in your office, day and night, working, and I don't see you anyway. But it is nice when I do."

And yet... I so greatly enjoyed the five weeks that I just spent on the Arctic Slope, and I saw so much potential work that I have yet to do there that I want to go back, again and again. Then there is the rest of Alaska, every region of which I have done work in but not enough - no, not nearly enough.

And India!

How did I ever wind up falling in love with India?

Well, I did. And I want to go back. Again and again. And the pages of the calendar just keep flipping past.

And then the truth is I lack the financing to do any of what I want to do, whether it be to travel, stay home, go here and there taking pictures and gathering stories, or to sit in my office to blog and make books.

Financially, my life is a nightmare. I am always riding the razor's edge, bankruptcy a thread away, yet, somehow, so far, every time I find myself going under a hand always seems to grab mine and yank me back up to the surface - but not out of the current.

And then how about this guy, little Kalib? He has helped his grandmother through this ordeal. 

And every moment that I get to spend with him is joy to me, even when he gets naughty. Why would I ever want to leave him? He changed so much in the seven weeks that we were separated!

I, a person who walks everyday, or rides a bike, or cross-country skis (I didn't this past winter due to still being in recovery from my injury but I sure plan to in the months to come) have only taken two walks since I returned home and Margie got hurt. Both were very short and Kalib came with me.

On one, we saw this boy. I have no idea who he is. A woman who appeared to be his mother was following behind and we stopped to ask her and to give her the address to this blog, but she had a dog with her and that dog raised such a ruckus that both she and I gave up and took our little people off in opposite directions.

Yesterday morning, after taking care of Margie's needs, I left her under Lavina's watch and took little Kalib to breakfast at Family. It was our first such outing alone together - just the two of us. I hope to have many outings with him. For some reason, I often picture the two of us, paddling a canoe through the wilderness together, stopping here and there to pitch our tent and cook our fish.

We will have rifles with us and if the country is beginning to turn red and yellow and the moose are in season, or the caribou, we will shoot.

These things may never happen, but in my mind I see them.

I don't know what could be much better than that.

Driving on, all the way to Palmer, we spot a woman telling a story to a cop. He appears to be most interested.

Before we left Family, Kalib went to the gumball machine. I reached into my pocket for a quarter, but I did not have one.

He still left happy.

The ordeal that my wife has so far faced - I wanted hospital care for her

Just today, the fourth day, the situation has begun to improve. I think we can reasonably manage it now, all on our own. But the previous three days and nights have all been hell; miserable, miserable, miserable; what little sleep could be had was for me always interrupted by Margie's screams of agony and for her prevented by the terrible pain itself. Simple, two minute tasks that everyone must perform have taken two, even three hours to carry out and it has taken the assistance of at least three strong adults each time. And very soon afterward, the task would need to be performed all over again.

To help get her through this, four adult family members have taken leave from work. It quickly became obvious to me and all the others here that she needed hospital care, at least for the first few days. The demands of caring for her in a way that would alleviate as much pain as possible were beyond our capability and facility. 

I will begin with the third night, when neither Margie or I got more than a few minutes sleep straight at any point. Every ten to fifteen minutes throughout the night - and I do not exagerate - Margie would scream out in terrible pain. This was how often the muscle spasms struck in her left leg. Each time one did, it pulled at her injured knee. This knee has been excruciatingly sensitive to movement and touch. The lightest touch upon her leg or foot could cause her to scream out in pain, as could the tiniest movement, often imperceptible to the eye.

This is why it would take us so long to perform those two minute tasks, for which we never moved her farther than one foot away from the bed.

So the third night passed with virtually no sleep for either of us - me, because the moment I would begin to doze would be the instant that her scream would jar me to full awake. Once awake, I was helpless to do a single thing for her. It is obvious why she could not sleep.

She took all her medications as prescribed.

Now I will bounce back to the first night, the first day, after we left the Taco Bell on Muldoon in Anchorage where I had bought her a burrito so that she could take her pain medication. I drove home, with her sitting in the back seat and, as usual, it took close to one hour. For her, it was a miserable ride.

Once I got her home I had to get her from the car into the house - but remember, the slightest movement, the slightest touch, would cause her to scream out in pain. We retrieved the crutches she had used after her last injury, but while there were no broken bones this time, whatever damage has been inflicted upon her ligaments has brought even more severe pain than did the break. After about 15 minutes of struggle, punctuated by scream upon scream, we had not succeeded in moving her more than a foot from the car.

We then decided that we needed a wheelchair, just to transport her, but we did not have one. So I came here, to my office, retrieved my desk chair and took it outside. Then, through many more screams, Jacob and Caleb slowly lowered her into that chair while I attempted to keep her leg straight and her knee from bending by supporting her brace wih my right hand just below the knee and her ankle with my left hand.

Once we got her into the chair, we could not really roll it because our driveway is not paved and the tiny wheels of my office chair would not roll over rocks, gravel and dirt. So we picked the chair up by its wooden arms, carried her into the house and sat her down in the middle of the front room. We padded another chair with pillows and placed her injured leg upon it in a way that would keep it straight.

She was now so exhausted by the pain and effort that she wanted to do nothing but sit in that spot without moving. So she sat there for about an hour, maybe longer, then decided that it was time to move to the single bed at the foot of our bed. This is where she had slept after I had I got my titanium replacement for the shoulder that I shattered on June 12, 2008. It is where she continued to sleep after she fell and broke her left kneecap and right wrist January 20, even before I had healed enough to share our bed with her.

So remember how last Saturday night, after I returned home from the Arctic Slope, I looked forward to climbing into my bed with my wife who I had not seen for seven weeks?

That night, last Saturday night, the night before she fell again, was the first night that we had slept together in our bed in fourteen months. FOURTEEN MONTHS! Who knows when we will next spend another night together in the same bed?

So we moved her slowly down the hall and then to the bed. Once at the bed, with me always trying to keep her leg straight, it took us three hours, again punctuated by many pained screams and shreiks, to place and position her.

No sooner had we accomplished this when she needed to use the restroom. We could not get her to the bathroom, but we did manage to raise her from the bed and we did manage to take care of the matter and then to place her back upon the bed - and again, the entire process was torn by the screams and shrieks and it took another two hours.

Altogether too soon, it would be time to do it all again. Any reader who has been with this journal for awhile will understand that I entered this new nursing job with its 24 hour shift followed immediately by 24 hour shift already in a state of exhaustion, yet it had to be done and so I did it. 

I knew that if she was going to get the care that she needed to keep her pain and suffering at a more tolerable level, she needed to go back to the hospital and be admitted. Yet, she had been through too much, suffered too much and was too exhausted to try now. The car was parked just outside the front door - less than a minute walk away out the bedroom, down the hall, through the front room and then outside - but it felt as far away and inaccessible as the moon.

It was late now, well after-hours, and there was nothing to do but to give Margie a chance to rest as best she could - which would not be much rest at all - and then see how we could get her back to the hospital. In the meantime, I decided to call the Alaska Native Medical Center, explain the situation and see if there was any kind of advice or help that I could get.

I called the main number and was transferred to the emergency room. I explained the situation to the person who answered. In an impatient tone of voice, she told me that she could neither offer any advice nor connect me with a doctor, nurse, or anyone who could, as it was against policy to make any kind of diagnosis or give any kind of advice over the phone.

The remainder of the first night and of the wee and early hours of the morning passed with many shrieks and screams of pain and with almost no sleep.

Come the second day, I was so exhausted that I could hardly function; I had strained my back in two places, but still my wife needed my help. I felt guilty for thinking of my own comfort and fatigue when I knew that what Margie was going through was so much worse.

Over the course of the next day, we spent some time on the phone with various people at ANMC, all of whom were most courteous and all expressed a desire to help. In the end, concerning the matter of further hospital care, a gentleman called me back and we engaged in a fairly lengthy discussion. This was the gist of his message: the chart for your wife has been examined. This is not the kind of injury that warrants hospital care. You can bring her back in. She will then have to be reexamined - the examination will mean we have to move her leg around and bend her knee. This will aggravate her injury even more. Then we will almost certainly send her home again and she will be in worse condition than she is right now.

This was followed by two more days of no sleep, of multiple two-hour, even three-hour, screaming ordeals. Her pain killer was changed and strengthened, yet not much seemed to change. 

This is me, late last night, lying on our bed not far from the one where Margie lay in pain. As he always is, Jim was there to help me through the ordeal. Not long afterward, an amazing thing happened. Margie improved dramatically. The two hour ordeal dropped to 20 minutes, her pain became bearable and her screams ceased. My help alone became sufficient to get her through it. Come morning, Jacob was able to drive back to Anchorage and return to work.

Lisa works at ANMC and had been busy serving as a go between to help her mom at least get a prescription for a stronger pain-killer, plus muscle relaxants. Perhaps that is what finally made the difference. Thank you, Lisa. And thank you Jacob, Lavina and Caleb for what you have done to help us get through this hard ordeal to this point.

On one of those miserable nights, Kalib looked out the door into the backyard and spotted a bull moose in velvet.

The bull moose, in velvet, in our backyard.

And so passes this recent chapter of our lives, right here, in Wasilla, Alaska.

Kalib goes away - I wonder how he will have changed when next I see him, six or seven weeks from now? (Part 2 - and then some more India)

When we leave Auntie Lisa's to return briefly to Auntie Melanie's, Kalib rides with us, holding his teddy St. Bernard.

Up the stairs to Melanie's Duck Downs apartment.

Kalib climbs into a kitty tunnel. He meows and purrs and swishes his tail.

Soon, we are the airport, where he looks upon the stuffed remains of a once wild Kodiak brown bear.

Kalib tries to sneak on with the baggage. Jacob grabs him.

He was with his dad in the bookstore, but then he saw his mother.

His dad kisses him goodbye.

Then the three of them head for security and out of sight.

Poor Jacob! He drives away separately from me but does not get far before Lavina calls him. Kalib does not have his teddy St. Bernard. It was left at Melanie's place. Jacob drives over. Melanie runs out to meet him and gives him the St. Bernard. He rushes it back to the airport. He can see Kalib, Lavina, and Margie on the other side of the security barrier.

A security man comes forward. Jacob gives him the bernard. He takes it back to Kalib. The flight is on.