A little storm blew in just before tax day and came down upon an American bald eagle

I have fallen behind. April 15, tax day, is drawing close to its end and I have not even put up a post yet. It was a fairly eventful day for me. I went to town, had lunch with Melanie, visited with Warren Matumeak, who readers met in yesterday's post as he drummed for Suurimmaanitchuat, and his daughters; drove home, passed a Volkswagen, saw a bit of the Wasilla Tea Party rally.

But I am going to go to bed early tonight and I will wait until I get up Friday morning, April 16, and then I will blog about April 15 and try to have it up by noon, Alaska time; 4:00 PM East Coast. That means that this post will only be at the top of the page for a very short time.

In the meantime, just so the day does not end without me putting up a post, here are a few images from April 14, when a minor storm of no consequence blew in.

In the afternoon, as I headed toward Metro Cafe, I saw these kids walking through it.

I then drove down and crossed the bridge over the Little Susistna River, where I saw a bald eagle sitting in a tree. I was a little irritated with myself, as this was a job that my pocket camera simply was not up to. I wondered why I couldn't keep a DSLR with a long lens in the car, just for occassions like this?

Yet, when I set out to document the world around me with a pocket camera, I know that I can never do with it what I can do with a DSLR, but the goal is to get a picture that is somewhat worthwhile anyway.

So I parked the car and decided to see how close I could get to the eagle.

In places where eagles hang out by the score and more all the time, getting close to them is no problem at all. They will practically let you walk right up to them.

But this is not such a place.

At first, I walked straight toward the eagle and it watched my every step.

Then I turned so that I was not walking directly towards it, but rather at an angle to the tree, but was still closing the distance between it and me with each step. Then I turned back, still at angle to the tree, until I reached a point where something told me that if I came any closer, the eagle would fly.

I raised my pocket camera.

And the eagle flew.

Preaching, feeding and healing at First Native Baptist; late though it be, our first cold snap finally arrives: NC on Rogue release

I had gone to Anchorage to do an interview and get a couple of photographs of an 11 year-old boy who fed the first bull caribou that he ever shot to the homeless people who gather each Sunday at the First Native Baptist Church in Anchorage to be fed. 

I misunderstood a little bit, as I thought that the feeding would begin at 3:00 PM, so I made certain to be there on time. In actuality, a church service lasting just over an hour is held first, and then the feeding follows.

I had not intended to take any pictures during the service, but then this fellow was called up to speak. Alalsredo lives in Bangalore, India, where I have many in-laws. His stay in Alaska would be short. As I write these words, he should already be on a jet to continue his tour, which will now take him to several cities in the Lower 48.

"Why would I come from India to preach in the US?" he asked. His answer: Jesus had called him to travel across our nation, stop in all the churches that he could along the way and deliver this specific message:

The people of the US - particularly the church people - need each day to get down on their knees and pray to God. If they don't, he warned, "then this great nation of the United States will fall."

He said that the reason Jesus had sent him specifically to the church people of the United States is because they are God's choice people.

Afterward, he announced that he wanted to call up one person, at random, to pray for that person. He chose this young woman. She came up and he prayed for her.

I had my professional digital SLR's with me to do the picture of the boy, but I did not touch them during the worship service. I tried real hard not to take any more pictures at all, but I could not altogether stop myself, so I did them with my pocket camera, which is perfectly quiet, whereas the DSLR's are noisy.

I had been greeted by one of the pastors when I first entered, and he had expressed his admiration for my professional DSLR's, as if he expected that I had come to use them, so I assume it would have been okay. Yet, they felt too intrusive so I stuck to the pocket camera and even then only shot a little over a dozen frames.

I think one day I might come back and do a complete story on the church's feed-the-homeless program and then, after I have spent more time with them and gotten to know them better, I will photograph the happenings to greater depth.

There was a time to call for healing. This man was suffering pain in his legs. Maybe he felt better afterward, I don't know. I could not take the time to follow-up, but had to do the job that I had come to do.

This woman suffered so badly that she wept. I hope she felt better when it was all over. As for the young man who I came to interview and to photograph, it all came together excellently. I am saving those pictures, though, until I put them to their intended use.

The temperature in Anchorage had been about five degrees, but when we got home last night it was ten below. This morning, at 9:28, it was -18 (-28 C.). So it looks like we have finally entered our first cold snap. Not terribly cold yet, but still a cold snap.

I decided to check online and see what the official temperatures were at a few other Alaska locations, including true cold spots, like Fort Yukon. I had expected that it might be in the -40's, possibly even -50s, there, but it was -31. Fairbanks, a much colder place than Wasilla, was exactly the same as us: -18. Barrow was in the grip of a heat wave: PLUS one.

Anchorage was two above.

In some ways, this is not fair to Anchorage, as the official temperature is taken at the airport, right by Cook Inlet and there are other places in the city that can be 5, 10, 15, or even as much as 20 degrees colder.

I might add that I have checked our car thermometer against official sources and it is amazingly accurate.

The Little Su.

Grotto Iona.

Two moose - momma and calf.

Sarah Palin releases her book:

As if you didn't know. In theory, being as how I am a Wasilla blogger and Wasilla's most famous resident seems at the moment to be the biggest news story in the world, what with the release of Going Rogue, I suppose that I should be writing about Sarah Palin today.

But 42 million people are already doing that and I have other concerns, so I have "no comment."

Not that I couldn't write about her today - I just choose not to.

That circus can tumble on without me.

First snow forces me to take a break from the break that I took so that I could do nothing but work

It came very late this fall - which seems to me to have been the warmest fall that I ever remember here - but finally, Sunday night, it snowed. It's true that last Thursday, I put blog entries together all the way through this coming Friday so that until that time, I would not be disturbed by this blog but could just concentrate fully on my work.

But how can I ignore the first snow, especially when it comes so late?

Here is a kid, getting off of a school bus on Ward's. As you can see, somebody did a bit of fish-tailing.

And here is an AWAC, flying through the clear sky the snow left behind.

I hope the driver of this vehicle guided it safely to its destination. 

He biked with a heavy load. This was about noon, when the temperature was 17 degrees. We have yet to experience our first cold snap. Perhaps he is glad that it is late.

More jets in the clear sky.

And here is the decoy frozen into the surface of Little Lake.

Tilted stop sign, with Pioneer Peak in the background.

Crossing the bridge over the Little Su.

Somebody is behind me. I hope it's peaceful person. I don't want any trouble.

I still have my respiratory infection, by the way, but it is not as bad as it was.

CM*D30: I blow past Mike, Hutch, and Hayden on my bicycle as they motor down to the Little Su

As I pedaled my bike down Shrock Road toward the Little Susistna River, I saw these two ahead of me, on the four-wheeler trail that runs down the ditch. It looked to me like there might be a third person on the first machine, so I pedaled harder, hoping to catch up so that I could find out.

Sure enough, there was, and as I came pedaling past, taking their picture, they were surprised to see me, but seemed friendly. Just after I shot this frame, I came to the steep downhill, so I hurriedly slipped my camera back into my pocket, cranked the bike up into the very highest gear, then pedaled hard until I was going so fast that there was no further resistance in the pedals.

I shot far, far, ahead of them. I figured that I would see them no more.

At the Little Su, I pulled off the road and went down to the bank. As I stood at the river's edge, I saw them coming down the hill. While the odds seemed against it, I hoped that they would pull off exactly where I was, so that I could learn their names and hear their life history.

And they did. They could have kept going straight or they could have chosen any one of five alternate paths from the road to the river, but they chose the same one I did.

So - the littlest guy, that is Hutch. The man with his hand on the littlest guy's head is his dad, Mike. The one in the blue jacket is Hayden.

And this is their life story: they live not far from me and on their walks, often come down Sarah's Way, right past my house. They were amazed at what a beautiful warm and pleasant day it was. 

And, as you can see, they are responsible four wheeler drivers. They did not take their machines past the sign prohibiting it. You can see tracks where others have.

Fourwheelers can be very hard on salmon spawn.

And a lot of salmon come here to spawn and die. If I am around more next summer or at least am here at the right time and nobody is injured and I have any time, I will show you. There used to be a huge cottonwood log that spanned the river just to the right of this spot and while the water is shallow there now, it was deep back then, about ten feet, swift, cold and crystal clear.

I would go stand upon the log and watch the salmon pass by beneath. Some would be red, some mottled green and brown, some already gray and decaying - the swimming dead. Once my dog slipped and fell in on the upstream side. There were some bad snags on the downstream side and I feared that the current would take her into those and hold her under, but somehow, and I do not know how, I managed to grab her just when she popped up on the downstream side of the log. I yanked her out of the water.

She was a an Alaskan husky, the daughter of two dogs that the late, great, Susan Butcher sold to Ketil Reitan, an Iditarod racer originally of Norway, married to an Iñupiat who was living in Kaktovik - the only village in the famous Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. He gave her to me once when I was visiting Kaktovik, so I put her in the back seat of my airplane and flew her home.

It was an interesting trip.

She is buried in the backyard, along with Thunder Paws, Clyde, Sherbert and Little Runt. Perhaps in the future, I will find ways to work all of these wonderful characters into this blog. I don't know how I would do it, but perhaps I will.

And then when the salmon all spawned out, died, and washed up on the bank, it smelled terrible, yet it was one of the smells that we in Alaska treasure so greatly.

*Cocoon mode: Until I finish up a big project that I am working on, I am keeping this blog at bare-minimum simple. I anticipate about one month.

Cocoon mode* - day 11: Old man charges up steep grade on four-wheeler and then charges back down again; fall from the car

As I rode my bicycle along the two-foot wide path on the other side of the guardrail from Seldon, just over the steep drop off that could surely cripple or kill me if I were to lose control and plunge over, I heard the screaming engine of a four-wheeler, churning out more RPM's than it was built to churn. I could not see it, because there were some leaves hanging from some bushes that blocked my view, but I immediately surmised that it had to be a kid, trying to charge up the steep grade you see here.

Just ahead, there was an opening through the leaves, so I pedaled to that spot as fast as I could. When I got there, the four-wheeler was nearing the top. I stopped, dug into my pocket and pulled out the pocket camera.

Auuugh!!!! 

It was still set on last night's settings for very low-light photography: 1600 ISO, 1/10th of a second. If I were to try to take a picture at those settings, under this bright sun, all I would get would be a blinding, white, glare.

I quickly dialed the ISO down to 100 and set the shutter speed at 1/400th of a second, but by then the rider had topped the hill and had turned around to go back down.

I was surprised to see that he was not a kid at all, but an old man, with white hair and a white beard. Just like that, he dropped over the edge and charged back down the grade.

I then hoped that he would turn around and charge back up again so I could get a climbing picture, but he didn't.

He just kept going and drove through the abandoned, dug-out gravel pit that the lying developers never did turn into a pleasant neighborhood lake, the way they had promised they would do way back when they first tore up the wetlands above it. In those horrid days, a lone man sitting on the seat of a gravel extracting machine would work all the way through the summer night and if the air was flowing from him towards our house, I could not sleep over the rattling and crunching of the gravel being ground through that machine.

A few times, I got out of bed and went to talk to the man doing the extraction and his response was... "f.. you." It was summer, it was light and he was going to work through the night, the peace and sleep of the neighborhood be damned.

I would return home, climb back in bed and, unable to sleep, would fantasize about returning with my 30.06 so that I could pop the rude sob right off the seat of his machine.

Irrational, I know and I knew it then and I would not have done it, but so works the human mind when it is tormented and deprived of sleep night after night just because someone is rude.

At least when it was all over, we were to have this nice neighborhood lake, but instead we got an ugly pit.

As for this old man who charged up the hill today and then turned and charged back down, my feelings were mixed. On the one hand, I admired him, for not yielding easy to the calendar, for not giving into his years.

On the other hand, after he exited the gravel pit, he continued on and I saw him disappear into the marsh, the one behind my house. He was headed toward where the property owner across from us keeps putting up signs and baricades to try to keep the four-wheelers out, because they have done so much damage to the vegetation. Yet, the drivers just keep finding ways to get in and they just keep tearing up the property.

With kids, you can kind of understand, but with an old man whose hair is white...

But then, I don't know... perhaps he turned away before he reached that man's property. Perhaps he lives in one of the houses further down from ours that borders the marsh. Perhaps he has a trail that leads into his own backyard.

He might just be a decent fellow who would never trespass and tear up another man's wetlands.

I just don't know. I must give him the benefit of the doubt.

I pedal on, back onto the road where there is no guardrail to push me into traffic.

I took this as I drove past in my car, on my coffee break.

I would have driven slowly across this bridge so that I could have gotten a couple more frames out of the pocket camera, which is a very slow camera to operate, but there was a truck behind me so I had to rush across and was lucky to get even this one.

Technically, I have somewhat exceeded cocoon mode tonight. Oh well. The weekend has begun. I must have a little fun.

*Cocoon mode: Until I finish up a big project that I am working on, I am keeping this blog at bare-minimum simple. I anticipate about one month.