Kalib at the Fair, Part 1: He visits the animals; we bump into Taktuk

We had to park far, far, away from the entrance. And there, in the makeshift grass parking lot, which I suspect was originally a hay field, Kalib got his first amusement ride.

As for me, I had a big debate this day - whether to bring my big pro digitial single-lens reflex camera and two or three lenses or my pocket camera. The argument for the pro camera was that it would give me a lot more versatility and I would get many more good pictures. I would be able to count on the camera to shoot the instant I pushed the shutter (you just never know with the pocket camera) and I could knock off a dozen frames or so all at once if I wanted to catch a sequence of events.

The technical quality of the images would be considerably better than those I could produce with the pocket camera.

The argument against the DSLR was that it would be big and heavy and bulky and when it was all over, I would have many more photos to edit and so it would have to spend more time doing so.

The pocket camera had one thing going for it. It would be light and easy to carry.

I chose the pocket camera, even though I knew it would cost me some pictures. And it did. It cost me plenty and it put limitations on those that I did get, but, oh well.

It made the fair experience more pleasant.

We had to stand in line for a very long time, but afterward Kalib saw some goats. I am not quite certain what he thought of them.

A goat sticks its head through the rails of its pen to get a better look at Kalib.

Kalib turned to his dad for protection against the frightening goat.

Donkeys are very special to Lavina. When she was a small girl on the Navajo Reservation, her grandmother had one and Lavina used to ride it.

It wasn't easy, because the donkey was stubborn. She would climb on and it would just sit there. Only a whip, repeatedly applied, could get that donkey to go.

She liked it anyway. "Donkeys are so cute," she explained.

When she saw this little tiny donkey, she was quite thrilled and took Kalib straight to it. He placed his hand upon it.

Kalib fed some tiny goats. I wonder who the goats will feed?

Kalib learned something about birds, big, birds, Thanksgiving turkey birds.

Kalib also learned about bees - busy, buzzing, honey- making bees. Sadly, the bees here have but one season of life, because they cannot make it through the winter and so they must be replaced each spring with new shipments from the Lower 48.

However, somebody had made a super-insulated, heated, big bee house where people can bring their hives, so they are going to experiment and see if they can get these Wasilla bees through the winter.

I hope they succeed.

Every year when we got to the fair, I see someone from the Arctic Slope. This year, it was Taktuk,  Roberta Ahmaogak of Wainwright, part of Iceberg 14 - the whaling crew and family that took me in and made Wainwright home to me - with her children. Roberta is studying at the University of Alaska, Anchorage. You can find Taktuk and daughter Kara dancing at February's Kivgiq in Barrow right here.

Next up in part 2: Kalib gets frightened by a horse, he zips down a slide and dines on nutritious fair food.

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.

I pass by a series of modest calamities, and then wind up at Taco Bell

Calamity Number 1: A four-wheeler is broken down, less than two blocks into my journey. I do not know what the problem is, but it looks pretty bad.

Calamity Number 2: Somebody's hood is open. There is a gas can on the ground by the red car. This is a perplexing combination. I can't figure it out. This happened less than one mile from my house.

Calamity Number 3: A tire has gone flat. A man fills it from a can as a woman observes while smoking a cigarette. This happened right in the Taco Bell parking lot.

A lady two vehicles ahead places her order as I think of inept calvary men. This is the Palmer Taco Bell, by the way. They tore the Wasilla one down while I was in India. When I left on that trip, I had this feeling that something bad would happen before I came home. Sure enough, it did. Margie thinks they had a fire in there, but is not certain.

Some people choose to eat inside. Me, I choose to sit in the car and eat outside.

The man ahead of me gets his order. I grow impatient with hunger.

He gives me my Pepsi. It is only my second Pepsi this week, so its okay that it is a large one. Plus, I am riding my bike a lot.

This is why I chose to eat outside, and not inside. I don't know why anyone would want to eat inside.

And then this worker comes to throw away trash. He is very thrilled to have the opportunity to be in my blog.

I get to witness the action. If I had eaten inside, I would have missed this.

Back in Wasilla, I see two dogs through a dirty windshield. A man walks with them.

Such is life in the Far North - well, the southern part of the Far North.

I will get back to blogging India. I just don't have time, right now. I don't even have time for this. That's why I drove to Taco Bell in the first place, because I did not have time to make a sandwich for lunch. And there was no ham.

I think it will take me all summer to blog my two weeks in India. Maybe a year. I will blog it, though - else why did I even take all those pictures?