A blog by Bill Hess

Running Dog Publications

P.O. Box 872383 Wasilla, Alaska 99687

 

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Wasilla

Wasilla is the place where I have lived for the past 29 years - sort of. The house in which my wife and I raised our family sits here, but I have made my rather odd career as a different sort of photojournalist by continually wandering off to other places to photograph people and gather information, which I have then put together in various publications that have served the Alaska Native Eskimo, Indian and Aleut communities.

Although I did not have a great of free time to devote to this rather strange community, named after a Tanaina Athabascan Indian chief who knew Wasilla in the way that I so impossibly long to, I have still documented it regularly over the past quarter-century plus. In the early days, my Wasilla photographs focused mostly upon my children and the events they participated in - baseball, football, figure skating, hockey, frog catching, fire cracker detonation, Fourth of July parade - that sort of thing. 

In 2002, I purchased my first digital camera and then, whenever I was home, I began to photograph Wasilla upon a daily basis, but not in a conventional way. These were grab shots - whatever caught my eye as I took my many long walks or drove through the town, shooting through the car window at people and scenes that appeared and disappeared before I could even focus and compose in the traditional photographic way.

Thus, the Wasilla portion of this blog will be devoted both to the images that I take as I wander about and those that I have taken in the past. Despite the odd, random, nature of the images, I believe they communicate something powerful about this town that I have never seen expressed anywhere else. 

Wasilla is a sprawling community that has been slapped down hodge-podge upon what was so recently wilderness of the most exquisite beauty. In its design, it is deliberately anti-zoned, anti-planned. In the building of Wasilla, the desire to make a buck has trumped aesthetics and all other considerations. This town, built in the midst of exquisite beauty, has largely become an unsightly, unattractive, mess of urban sprawl. Largely because of this, it often seems to me that Wasilla is a community with no sense of community, a town devoid of town soul.

Yet - Wasilla is my home and if I am lucky it will be until I grow old and die. Despite its horrific failings, it is still made of the stuff of any small city: people; moms and dads, grammas and grampas, teens, children, churches, bars, professionals, laborers, soldiers, missionaries, artists, athletes, geniuses, do-gooders, hoodlums, the wealthy, the homeless, the rational and logical, the slightly insane and the wholly insane - and, yes, as is now obvious to the whole world, politicians, too.

So perhaps, if one were to search hard enough, it might just be possible to find a sense of community here, and a town soul. So, using my skills as a photojournalist and a writer, I hope to do just that. If this place has a sense of community, I will find it. If there is a town soul to Wasilla, I will document it. I won't compete with the newspapers. Hell no! But as time and income allow, it will be fun to wander into the places where the folks described above gather, and then put what I find on this blog.

 

by 300...

Anywhere within a 300 mile radius of Wasilla. This encompasses perhaps the most wild, dramatic, gorgeous, beautiful section of land and sea to be found in any comparable space anywhere on Earth. I can never explore it all, but I will do the best that I can, and will here share what I find and experience with you.  

and then some...

Anywhere else in the world that I happen to get to, such as Point Lay, Alaska; Missoula, Montana; Serenki, Chukotka, Russia; or Bangalore, India. Perhaps even Lagos, Nigeria. I have both a desire and scheme to get me there. It is a long shot. We shall see if I succeed.

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Entries in Sandy, Utah (3)

Friday
Oct222010

My final day in Utah - Julie and her family, minus the chipmunk; surprise birthday dinner with a silent Bacon scream; back in Wasilla - Carmen's new do; Mahoney horses

This is Matthew Oliphant, youngest son of the very first niece that ever came to me, Julie, and her husband Kerry. We have not spent a great deal of time together but, my favorite memory of him comes from the time period after Mom died. He was very small then and I took a picture of him eating a chocolate chip cookie. It was part of a batch that his mom and brothers and sister had made and brought over for Dad and those of us who were hanging out to mourn with him.

As the rest of us visited, Matthew kept eating those cookies and by the time they left, the cookies were all gone. It's possible his brothers and sister might have helped a bit, but Matthew was the real Cookie Monster.

I didn't see him with a cookie on this trip, but I have a feeling that he is still a cookie monster.

Julie is the daughter of my brother, Mac, Rex's tall twin. Mac got his tall genes from Dad, whereas his twin and the rest of us all got Mom's short genes. Mac grew to be 6'4", Rex 5'7".

The tall genes were passed down to Julie, who also married a very tall man. All of their children are very tall and whatever age they are, they are taller even then their grandpa Mac was at the same. Six foot is nothing to them at all. Even in junior high years, six-footers have always stood short beside them.

Matthew is only seven, but he already stands eight foot, nine-and-three-quarter inches tall.

Well... maybe I exaggerate a little bit... but give him a couple of years.

It takes a lot of cookies to fuel such growth, but Matthew is up to the task.

That's Kerry off to the side and the nine-year old hefting the two-by-fours is Charlie. 

And this is Chase - Chaseninja. Now, the thing is, I may be the short one, but I am still the toughest member of the entire family and everybody knows it.

Well... maybe I boast a little too quickly. At nine, Charlie weighs in at 156 pounds and plays tackle on his Pee Wee football team. If you doubt that he hits hard, notice the abrasions on his forehead. He wears a helmet, alright, but when he hits someone he practically shoves his head right through that helmet and right through his opponent.

That's what those abrasions are from - the impact of his forehead against the inside of his helmet.

And yet, tough as he is, when his mom mentioned that a neighbor had some kittens, he lifted his hands to the praying position and began to plead that she let him adopt one. I was a little slow and caught the moment just a second too late, after he noticed the camera lens was upon him.

The family, minus daughter Riley, in the backyard. Riley had been to the dentist and, as I noted earlier, felt like a chipmunk and refused to be photographed.

Next time.

Julie and Chase.

In the evening, just before I drove to the airport, turned in the rental car and boarded the jet back to Anchorage, I had dinner with Ada Lakshmi, Rex, Tom and all the children of Mary Ann except for the one who had gotten married the day before, plus their husbands and boyfriend. We ate at Thai Gardens, just blocks from the house where Mary Ann and Greg live. The wedding and all its preparations had exhausted Mary Ann, and so she and Greg had stayed home with the two dogs.

As to the son who had gotten married and his bride, nobody had seen either, all day long, even though they were not scheduled to leave for their honeymoon in Vermont until the next day.

I did not get to say goodbye to them.

Tom's children who had not just married planned the dinner as a surprise birthday party for their father. He was completely surprised, especially since his birthday is in September. His children had not been able to be with him then, so they celebrated it now.

As you can see, Tom is now four years old. Either that, or each candle represents 15 years.

Eric, Amber's adventurous, mountain-climbing boyfriend.

And then I found myself in Wasilla, once again, and totally exhausted once again.

In the afternoon, I went to Metro Cafe at the usual time and found Carmen at the drive-through window. She had done some fancy things to her hair and wondered if I would notice.

Of course I noticed.

Carmen's beautiful new hairdo, from the back.

Scott was there, working, too. His cancer battle has been rough, with radiation and chemo subjecting him to ordeals the description of which make me cringe and I will not pass them on here. But he is a fighter, determined to win this battle.

We talked a bit about our separate wanderings into the same places on the Arctic Slope. We thought it might be good to one day write up some of our stories, side by side.

Shoshana came to the window to say "hi, stranger," so of course I photographed her, too. She is not there on Mondays and Wednesdays, as she has class those days.

After I left Metro, I did the old drive, down past the Mahoney Ranch and the Mahoney horses. I don't know why it hasn't snowed here, yet. I hope it does, soon. I saw some footage from the Alaska Federation of Natives Convention in Fairbanks and there is snow there and of course there has been snow on the Arctic Slope for awhile now.

Some may wonder why I am not at AFN and why I was not at the Alaska Tribal Leaders Summit and the Youth and Elders conference that immediately preceded the convention. I have been going nonstop for months, traveling here, traveling there. I am exhausted. And I can't afford either the time or the expense to have spent this week in Fairbanks.

So I am here in Wasilla. I plan to stay put for a couple of weeks, if I can get away with it.

I have not seen Kalib, Jobe or any of my children except for Caleb yet, but I am going into Anchorage this afternoon, so maybe I will. If I do, then readers will, too.

 

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Thursday
Oct212010

This Volkswagen and Taco Bell is not the post that I have been working on, but a shallow substitute

I don't quite know what to do here. I have just spent at least four hours, maybe a bit more, working on a 20 image post that I had titled, "the day that I dropped by my brother's house to visit the ghosts of my parents." Text wise, I had worked my way through 10 pictures and still had 10 to go.

Not only was the effort taking up more time than I can afford, but it was creating a great deal of text that was plunging deeper into some aspects of my life and musings than I suspect many readers would care to go.

It's all material that I must write about, but maybe I am getting a little ahead of myself and this is not the right moment.

Anyway, I do not have the time to finish it today.

So I am going to drop it. Maybe I will pick it up again tomorrow or later, maybe I won't. Maybe it will just sit in the draft section of my blog - unpublished, unread, never viewed. 

Instead, just to get something up today, I now post this picture of a Volkswagen parked near the Taco Bell that sits about one block from my brother's house, where the ghosts of my parents reside - at least in the form of artifacts that play with my mind and memory.

As I have already noted, I am back in Wasilla, but, even if I never post what I have been working on, I want to introduce readers to my niece, Julie, and her family. They came to the wedding reception, which Rex and I missed, but not to the functions that I attended and photographed.

I did pay them a visit, however, and I did get photos of all, except for Riley, who had just suffered some dental work, felt like a chipmunk, and refused to be photographed.

And Melanie - please do not get upset with me. I did not eat at this Taco Bell. I was too stuffed to do that.

Maybe next time.

Sunday
Jun202010

A loving Father's Day tribute: My Pepsi-drinking Mormon dad, Apache father-in-law, humble whale hunter adoptive dad, loving son dad

For once, I look at a picture and I am at a loss to write. I cannot sum my father up in a photo and a few words - it would take a book - just to sum him up. I hope to write that book, but I am very much aware that the years are closing in on me, just as they closed in on him, and the list of books that I have yet to complete is too long to be written in whatever time I have left and I am not putting much time into book-writing these days, anyway.

For now, let it be enough to say that this is the man who flew into flak in World War II to bomb the Nazis and their Fascist allies, this is the man who, by his gruff exterior, often scared me when I was small, but in whose presence I also found a comfort and strength the likes of which I have felt nowhere else. Even at my age, with him in the grave for three years now, I still miss that comfort and strength and long to feel it. Sometimes, I think I do feel it.

Being devout in her faith to the extreme, my mother taught us truth in terms of absolute black and whites, but Dad taught us to question everything. 

There are so many places I could go in telling you about my dad, but since I landed on this picture of him smuggling a Diet Pepsi into the house, I might as well tell you about my Dad and Pepsi.

Remember now, I grew up Mormon and my mother was devout, more so, I suspect, than even the even the very highest church leaders themselves, President and Prophet included. In the Mormon Church, there is a tenet called the Word of Wisdom, issued by Joseph Smith, that prohibits good Mormons from indulging not only in alcohol and tabacco, but also coffee and tea - but it does not name coffee and tea directly, but rather "hot drinks."

This has been basically defined to mean coffee and tea, but the vagueness of the statement has created arguments inside the Mormon community that I expect never to be resolved. Some Mormons insist that even hot chocolate is banned under the Word of Wisdom.

As do many Mormons, my late Mom believed the restriction covered all caffeinated beverages, Pepsi and Coke included. Dad loved his Pepsi.

When I was small, a soda pop of any kind was a rare and cherished treat, but every now and then he would buy me a pop as a reward for some accomplishment, usually athletic, like when I swam across the pool for the first time, or hit my first triple in a Little League baseball game. In the early days of my life, these rewards were always drinks like Root Beer, cheery or orange soda, maybe Seven-up.

Then one day, we were in a gas station and he bought me a Coke - but only because Pepsi was not available. I was not to tell my mother. Soon, I followed in his footsteps and began to drink Pepsi at every opportunity - much to the consternation of my mother.

She would say, "I don't want Pepsi in this house," but Dad would sneak it in, anyway.

He kept doing this even when they grew old and fell into ill-health. After she died, Rex, the senior of my oldest brothers, the twins, took up where she left off. Not for religious reasons, but because he believed Pepsi was killing my father.

He did all he could to keep Dad from drinking his Pepsi.

Dad drank it, anyway.

And at the very end, after Dad suffered his final stroke and by his living will precluded the kind of medical heroics that would have extended his life at any miserable cost, he could not eat or drink.

All we could do as we watched him slowly die was to wet a sponge with water or other liquid and bring it to his lips, wet them and then let him suck on the sponge.

Yes - it was a sponge dipped in Pepsi that seemed to give him the greatest relief. When brother Rex saw this happening, he could not altogether hide his dismay and made certain to give Dad some sponge-loads of his own health drinks, but, what the hell, Dad was dying anyway.

It was proper that he go out with the good taste of Pepsi on his tongue.

This is my dad, Rex J. Hess, Sr. He loved his Pepsi.

Readers have met my mother-in-law, Rose Roosevelt, and now you can meet my father-in-law, the late Randy Roosevelt. This is he, holding my little sister-in-law, Chy, who in turn caresses a stuffed goat that I had found on a shopping trip to Globe, Arizona and bought for Margie as a Christmas present in the winter that we were engaged.

That Christmas vacation was the first time that she took me home to the reservation to meet her family and she had been very apprehensive about it, in large part because of this man. She greatly feared how he would react to her bringing a white man home to introduce as her husband to be. Plus, Randy was known to have a temper that could become exacerbated when he drank and, to be quite honest, drinking was a problem for him.

But her fears proved to be groundless. Randy took to me immediately. He took me into his pickup truck and drove me here and there on the reservation and introduced me to many people, both drunk and sober. Everyone that he introduced me to expressed great admiration for him; all said that he was a good man and that if he approved of me to be his son-in-law, then I was okay by them and I would have a home here, on the White Mountain Apache reservation. 

When Christmas vacation came to an end, Randy drove Margie and I to Flagstaff, so that we could catch a bus back to Provo, Utah, where we were students at BYU. Rose and Chy came with him. I took this picture in Flagstaff, just before we boarded the bus.

A little less than two months later, he, Rose and several members of the family traveled to Provo for our wedding. They could not attend the wedding ceremony itself, because, as was expected of us, it took place inside the Provo Temple of the LDS Church and while the entire Roosevelt family was Mormon, only Mormons deemed worthy by their bishop or branch president can receive "a temple recommend" and then be allowed to enter the sacred building. 

And you cannot get a temple recommend if you are drinking alcohol, coffee or tea (Pepsi drinkers can get recommends and, along with my mother, my Dad was called on a home-based temple mission in his later years) so Randy, Rose, and family were not allowed to attend the ceremony.

They did come to the reception, held in the gymnasium of our local Mormon chapel, and I will never forget how proud and happy Randy was to stand alongside us to shake the hands of all those who came to wish us well.

After we married, we visited the reservation in the late summer of 1974, when Margie's belly was growing big with Jacob. Again, Randy took me all over and introduced me to many more people, for he seemed to know everyone on the reservation. Now that I had actually become his son-in-law, the feeling of welcome acceptance that his friends gave - many of whom had great distrust of and low regard towards white people in general - was even stronger.

When the visit ended, we again returned to Provo, this time in our little yellow Volkswagen Super Beattle, which the people of Carrizo had named, "Billy Bug." Two weeks later, we drove back again, along with Margie's sister, Janet, who had just enrolled as a freshman at BYU. We came for Randy's funeral. He had died in a head-on collision and so had the woman driving the other pickup truck. Both drivers had been drinking. The accident happened almost right in front of the house of Vincent and Mariddie Craig.

Who crossed the line? I don't know.

Randy died three months before the birth of Jacob, his first grandchild.

Less than a year-and-a-half later, we moved to the reservation and I took over the job of producing the tribal newspaper. Sometimes, in the early days as I wandered about the reservation, I would track down someone who I needed to talk with and/or photograph, a person who would see a white man coming with a camera, pen and notepad and would grow wary to the extreme.

Still, I would introduce myself.

"Say," aren't you Randy Roosevelt's son-in-law?" the person would then invariably ask. "Randy was my friend. He was a good man. You're okay, then."

That's how it would go.

I often think back to our wedding. It was a quiet, beautiful and special experience, yet when I think about it I truly do wish that we had not begun our life together with a temple wedding.

Randy, Rose and the whole Roosevelt family should have been present to witness our ceremony. It is not right that they were told they were not worthy to attend the wedding of their own daughter and sister.

I'm sorry, my good, faithful, Mormon friends and relatives, but it just isn't.

They were denied too many things because of a larger society that deemed them to be less worthy than they. They should not have been denied our wedding. I feel badly that I allowed it to happen this way.

If I write fewer words here than I did for my natural dad and my father-in-law, it is not because the late Ben Ahmaogak, Sr., my Iñupiaq dad, is any less deserving, but only because I did not intend to write so much as I did and I do not have the time to keep going on like this. 

Father's Day is half over here in Alaska, which means it is more than half over in the rest of the world and in some places, it is over altogether. Soon, my children will arrive for dinner.

Plus, I have this idea in my head that in the future will enable to tell the bigger story of how Ben took me into his Wainwright whaling crew, Iceberg 14, and beyond that, into his large, extended family, so I will save my longer writings about him for that time.

Certainly, I have more dramatic pictures of Ben than this one, but I chose it because of all the men that I ever met, he was at once one of the smartest, toughest, most skilled and daring, yet most humble and gentle.

I should say, too, that this is also true of Jonathan Aiken, Sr., Kunuk, who also took me into his crew and let me follow them for four years. They never referred to me as their adopted son, but our relationship was close and they feel like family to me as well, as does Elijah and Dorcas Rock and, to one degree or another, every hunting crew that I have followed. 

In this picture, Ben serves tea to the guests who have come to the Nalukatak, the whale feast, that he hosts with wife Kanaaq and family. As the whaling captain who caught the whale that came to his village and provided the sustenance for this feast and beyond, his status is as high as status can go. He was worked hard and long and no one could hold it against him if he were to just sit back now, relax, enjoy the feast, and let the young girls serve the tea.

But he doesn't do that. He walks through the crowd himself, serving tea to all who desire it.

He is a humble man, that's why.

I included Margie in my Mother's Day tribute, and so I guess I must include myself on Father's Day. I feel odd about this, because I am acutely aware of my great failings as a father and husband. I do not say this to be modest. It is just fact. 

Although I always hate to leave my family and home, I am a wanderer and probably spent close to half of the time that my children were growing up wandering away, to other places.

Nor was I much of a teacher. I started out trying to teach my children right and wrong as I had been taught, but the more I thought about things the less it all added up for me until finally I did not know what to teach them. So I basically taught them nothing, but left them to try to figure life out and learn things as their consciences saw fit.

They grew up, however, with an excellent mother and that was what I did right as a dad - I made her their mother. I believe that I did one other thing right as well. I loved my children and they always knew it. No matter what else I did or how often absent I was, they always knew that I loved them.

This is what I will say then about my children - they are all good people, each and every one. They live in various degrees of confusion, as do we all, whether we admit it or not, but they are fundamentally good people.

And if anyone says anything to the contrary about any one of them that person is wrong and speaks falsely.

It took him a long time to get there, and so far not one other child of mine has followed suit, but now my oldest son is a dad twice over.

Sometimes, he might a be tad over-indulgent but I have to say he is a much better dad to Kalib and Jobe than I ever was to him. He showers love and attention upon them and makes certain that they get to experience many things.

 

To all you dad's out there:

 

Happy Father's Day!

 

It's a hard challenge, but it's worth it.