I have created my own Arctic winter day of night, right here in Wasilla; the new Uiñiq - front cover

I think I must be homesick for Barrow and the Arctic Slope, for those long nights that extend all the way through the day with no sun ever rising; those all-day nights during which, if one wants, one can slip into the comfort of a warm cacoon of darkness, hidden and protected there from the glare of world.

I think I must be homesick for this because, to the degree that is possible, I have converted Wasilla into a place where the winter sun never rises. Actually, it does, for just a few hours, but I go to sleep before those hours begin and wake up after they have passed.

So I do not see the sun. It is as if it never rose at all.

Today, I arose at 3:38 PM, pretty much right at the moment of sundown. It was time to head out for my regular afternoon coffee break, even though I had begun no task that I needed to take a break from, and to head to the drive-through of Metro Cafe, which is exactly what I did. I took this picture along the way. Admittedly, this is not a very good picture - I missed the good picture by a few seconds. It happened while I was too far back to get it, although I could have if I had had a bigger lens on the camera.

In the good picture, the one that I missed, the school bus had stopped and all of a sudden a whole passel of kids shot out and in a line sprinted through this little patch of light.

Oh, did it look neat!

By the time I got close enough to take that excellent shot, it was gone. A straggler got off and headed through the light, so I took this picture, so that I could tell you all about the one I had missed.

A couple of hours later, Margie was about to fix dinner. For some strange reason, I felt very hungry and decided that this a night to go out for steak - something we do maybe once every couple of years or so.

So we did, and here were are, at Denali Family Restaurant, where we had never tried dinner before. Margie had a chicken fried steak. They had a special that covered their New York steaks - $3.00 off but still pretty darned expensive, so I ordered one. The baked potato was very good, the roll was delicious - tasted like it might have been fresh out of the oven - and the once frozen half-ear of corn on the cob tasted the way corn on the cobs that have been frozen tend to taste.

The New York steak - it was okay. Not great, but okay and being okay it still tasted good. One would not call it "superb," "exquisite," "mouth watering" or anything like that. It was okay. Good enough.

Afterward, our waitress asked us if we wanted dessert, but we declined and went home, where I scooped up some Rocky Road out of the carton and made myself an ice cream cone.

I am happy to report that my shingles are diminishing. They are still there, but to a much lighter and more bearable degree than just two days ago. Maybe by this time next week, they will be gone altogether. My need for copious amounts of sleep still remains, however. 

Now I need to see if I can a little work done, so that I can finish up today's tasks in time to go to bed before the sun rises.

And here is the cover of my latest Uiñiq:

This is whaling captain Billy Oyagak of Nuiqsut, standing in the middle with members of his crew on Cross Island, balleen from their whale behind them. Other successful captains and crews that fall season of 2010 were Herbert Ipalook, Thomas Napageak and Edward Nukapigak, who hosted me.

That season happened very fast. The crews left Nuiqsut almost at the very end of August and arrived at Cross Island to find the weather perfect and whales passing by in good numbers. I could not come until September 2. Originally, I thought they might possibly have landed a whale or two by then, but that there would still be at least two, maybe three strikes left for me to follow.

As it happened they had landed all four before I even got there. They were still cutting and putting up the whales, and there were polar bears wandering about. I had a good time, took lots of pictures, but still fell far short of what I had hoped to do.

So I want to go back, get in a boat at Nuiqsut and ride out to Cross Island with them. Stay for a month, come back at Naluktak and a few other times, too. I had hoped to go back this year, but irony of ironies, I could not because I was working on getting this Uiñiq done. Nuiqsut/Cross Island was the first story that I laid out and originally I laid it out huge - my first layout filled up almost the entire 120 page magazine. But then, as I worked other storeis in, I had to keep cutting it back and cutting it back and so in the end it wound up at 17 pages.

That still left it as the largest single spread in the magazine, but 17 pages wasn't enough to even begin to do Cross Island-Nuiqsut justice. I couldn't even leave my polar bear shots in, and I had a couple of magnificent polar bear shots and a fun story based on polar bears coming into and passing by camp. Elsewhere in the magazine, I had a double-truck polar bear shot I took on the sea ice off Barrow, and that took up all the space I could afford to give to polar bears in this Uiñiq.

So I hope to go back and somehow find the way to produce either a Uiñiq or a Uiñiq sized or bigger publication wholly on Cross Island and Nuiqsut. In fact, I would like to do that with every village on the Slope - and some off the Slope, too, like Fort Yukon and Arctic Village.

But how do I all this? The decades are flying by. I still think of myself as a young man, fit and strong enough to do anything, but in fact I am on the verge of becoming old - and this bout with shingles that I have just about but not quite won is kind of a telling sign. And this work is not easy to do. It is hard - both in the field and back home, when it becomes necessary to put in 20 hours, 24 hour, 30 hour and even 40 hour days to ever get it done.

I do not wish to listen to this sign the shingles have given me. Yet, if I don't, and just keep living in the manner that I have so far lived, I might just get taken down and not get anymore done at all.

And there was a great deal of material that I gathered from all over that I did not manage to get in at all. I don't why, after all this time, but when I set out to make a 116 page publication (which is what it was budgeted for but I pushed it up to 120 at my own expense) I think that gives me enough space to cover the whole world.

So I shoot this, and I shoot that; I go here, I go there, I interview this person and that person and all the time I am thinking I can work it all in and then when it comes down to it, I can only work a fraction of it in.

That's one of the reason I plan to create on online magazine. I could work it all into an online magazine. I remain at a bit of a loss on how to go about it. I have a colleague who is expert at online publishing and he says he will help me set it up. He's booked solid until January. Once he helps me set the format I want, then how do I fund it?

It ain't cheap to travel around Alaska, you know.

Still, we will see what happens then.

For sure, I need a new airplane. I don't merely want one, I need one. It seems impossible right now, but I know it's not.

Well, I've been rambling, writing more words than most visitors will ever read. Guess I'll stop now.

I've got some things I must do and I had better get at it if I want to get to bed before sunrise.

When rest takes over, conquers all

Yesterday, soon after I got up, I discovered that a new, daunting and totally unexpected task awaited me and I could not rest until I addressed it. Rest was what I needed, the doc said. If I did not get rest, then I would not shake these shingles off. Yet, this task had to be done. So I turned my attention to it and here is what I had to do: open up a document, go a certain page, change a lower-case "i" to a capitol "I," make a pdf of that page and email it.

It took some doing and nearly put me in my grave, but I did change that "i" to "I" I did make a pdf and I did email it.

And that was it. Two minutes work, maybe three. I had no other job pressing me - not one other thing that I needed to do, and the day was still early. To be under no work pressure - what a strange feeling! 

I was under doctor's orders to get rest. I had been given the assurance that if I did not rest, I would not get over these shingles. So, for the rest of the day, my mission would be to rest. Nothing else would matter. Rest, and rest only

But how? How does one rest, especially after such a prolonged stint of not resting?

"I will read," I told myself. But no, I could not read. The weight on my brain was dragging it down below the reading point. Then the answer came to me. I had purchased the photo book, burn.02, weeks ago, but had not yet even removed it from the packaging. It would involve a little bit of reading, too, but not much, as the stories are told in the pictures.

So I got the book, freed it from the packaging, took a seat on the couch, and began to slowly page my way through. The photography, of course, was quite excellent and I was enjoying the experience, but still the weight was heavy on my brain and all the shingles remained in place -- although thanks to the vicodin and the other drugs, the intensity was less and it was more bearable.

Margie had a nice fire going. The heat felt good - much better than furnace heat or electric or natural gas heat can ever feel. Chicago thought so, too. Normally, if I go to the couch, I either have to scoot her over or she joins me within minutes, but this time she made herself comfy on the floor, where she could soak up the heat.

Jim was maintaining the office by himself and who knew where Pistol was? He tends not to join in the couch napping scrums, because of the animosity that he and Chicago hold for each other.

But about halfway through the book, as I was in the midst of the Arab Spring, as shot by Paolo Pellegrin, chapterm Pistol-Yero came nosing his way towards me.

I put the book down so that I could use my hands to keep Pistol from stepping onto my chest. After a few attempts, he got the idea and settled down onto my legs. Due to the heaviness of the weight on my brain, I did not pick the book back up, but just leaned back into the pillows and dozed off into another strange dream.

And then I rested - a strange rest that at once was both pleasant and troubling... I want to explain but it is too complicated. So, to keep it short and simple, I remained on the couch, in a state of rest both troubled and pleasant, for about three hours. Then I got up for my coffee break, headed to Metro Cafe, and took the long way home, sipping, with the radio on.

It was earlier than I normally go out and instead of All Things Considered, Fresh Air with Terry Gross was on KSKA. The segment was devoted to wounded veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and a soldier who had lost his legs and five buddies to an IED was being interviewed.

As he spoke, I saw a raven, sitting atop a utility pole as another flew by overhead.

Soon, I was passing by the horses, wondering what insults I might have to bear today. "Hey Bill," Black horse shouted. "We hear you got the shingles. We don't care. We don't care at all. It is no big deal. They will soon pass. So we are just going to ignore you, as if there is nothing wrong."

And ignore me they did.

So I drove on. I decided the horses are right. Shingles is no big deal. It hurts like hell for awhile and then it is gone. At the moment, to me, it does seem like a big deal but it isn't. It is a temporary discomfort and nothing more.

When I got home, I found Chicago stretched out on my dreaming couch. I scooted her over, pulled the blanket up over us both and soon fell asleep again. The fire was hotter than it had been before, hotter than I normally like but somehow that heat just felt wonderful to me. I felt as though I never wanted to rise from the couch. I stayed there, Chicago purring at my side for about two hours, until about 6:30, when it was time to get up and take another vicodin. Margie had dinner just about ready, so I stayed up to eat it.

I should note that, except for the book, Margie put the other things on top of the couch to try to keep the cats off the cushions. She does not like the way they crumple the cushions when they lie on top of them.

After dinner, I asked Margie if she wanted to go to Dairy Queen. I expected her to say, "no," because it was very warm and cozy in the house and cold outside and she is not one who likes to venture out needlessly from a warm house into the cold, especially to get ice cream.

"Sure," she said.

So off we went. And here is Miranda, handing me the cone I bought for Margie. I had a banana split. During times of suffering, one must take pleasure where he can find it.

After we got back home, I decided to put this post together. I downloaded the pictures, selected the ones you see here, uploaded them into this blog in draft mode and then stopped, without writing one word. That weight was mighty heavy on my brain. I hadn't done much, but still needed to take a short break. It was about 8:30 PM.

I returned to the couch, adjusted Chicago, pulled the blanket up and then Jim joined us too, settling in on my legs. Again, I slipped into dreamland. Again, the heat from the fire felt wonderful to me. Again, I felt as though I never wanted to open my eyes again, or to ever rise fom the couch.

I stayed put, right on the couch, my blog unfinished, until midnight. By then, it was time to go to bed. Even though I was on my feet, I did not feel that I had fully awakened. I did not want to fully awaken. Having spent so much of the day asleep, I feared that if I did fully awaken, I would not be able to go back to sleep. But I wanted to do one thing only: sleep.

Still, certain things had to be done. The fish needed to be fed and so did the cats. Margie had already cleaned the litter. I had to check email, brush my teeth, etc., take my next vicodin and the other bedtime pills. I decided just to leave the blog unfinished.

So I spent five to ten minutes doing all that I needed to do and then went straight to bed. It was about 12:30 AM now. I feared I might have trouble going to sleep. If I did fall asleep, I felt certain that I would wake up at 2:30 or 3:00 AM, certainly no later than 4:00 and would not be able to go back to sleep.

I was wrong.

I quickly fell back to sleep. With a few, short interruptions, I stayed asleep until just a few minutes before noon - almost 12 hours - and this after spending more than half of the previous day napping!

I got up and took Margie out for a late breakfast. After that, Margie dropped me off at the house, then turned around and drove through falling snow to Anchorage, so she could help Lavina care for the little ones, because Jacob was off doing ski patrol at Alyeska.

I came out here to add words to the photos and complete the blog post I had started last night.

I did not want to do it. All I wanted to do was nap.

But I did it. This post is now up. Next, I will add a few more logs to the fire. Then, if necessary, I will adjust Chicago and lie back down on the couch.

Who knows how long I might sleep? Half-an-hour? Four hours, when my next vicodin is due? All day?

I don't know and I don't care. I will sleep however long my body demands. The doc says I need to rest, my immediate work is all done. I want to plunge these shingles back into dormancy, so I am going to rest.

I just realized - this is a long and boring entry. I could tighten it up, but the weight on my brain is too heavy for that. Couch, here I come!

I dream a strange dream of noise and silence

The closing credits to the movie, Rum Diary, with Johnny Depp, based on the work of Hunter S Thompson, photographed with my iPhone just before Margie and I left the theatre.

Today I had one of the strangest dreams ever. It began close to noon and lasted until about 2:30 pm, although it was interrupted three, maybe four times, by phone calls, but after each call it resumed.

I am trying to remember what time I got up this morning, but it is unclear to me. Was it 7:00? 8:00? 9:00? It was somewhere in that stretch. There was a piece of work that I had to do first thing so I did it, but the whole time I had the feeling that my density was increasing, that I was becoming heavier and heavier and pretty soon my weight would crush the chair beneath me and I would fall to the floor, then through the floor, then into the earth and I would not stop falling until I reached the molten core.

That is the feeling of pure exhaustion, sleepiness, sleep denied.

I had to sleep, so I left my desk, left my office, walked through the near corner of the garage into the living room and then lay down on the couch. It is kind of funny - if I am in my bed, I cannot lie on my back at all. It just aggravates my shingles too much and leaves me no hope of sleep. There is only one position that I can lie on in bed and that is on my right side, tilted towards the front.

The shingles start on the left side of my back, pretty close to my spine, wrap around through my left armpit and across my chest in an ugly, dark-red, mottled, blistered band that seems to range between three and four inches in width and then stops right on my sternum.

I cannot lie on my left side at all. So I hold that one position on my right side, all through the night. I do not sleep through the night, but only in brief periods - but that's good, because before I started taking the drugs I couldn't really sleep at all.

Oddly enough, I can lie on my back on the couch. I think it has something to do with the pillows that I put beneath me and how they position me. It still hurts my back to lie like that, but I can handle it.

So that is what I did. I lay down on the couch and closed my eyes. The cats, Jim and Chicago, happily came to join me. Both wanted to step all over my chest until they could find just the right spot to curl up and nap with me, but I refused to let them. I kept picking them up and pushing them down to my legs. Finally, they got the idea. One settled down on my thighs, the other in the gap between my calves.

Then I closed my eyes, fell asleep almost instantly and began to dream. Margie had the TV on - tuned to the news channels. Even as I slept and dreamed, I could hear and was cognisant of every word and sentence that came from the TV. I followed the conversation, but as I did, in my dream I was in the midst of a big crowd in a warm and sunny place and there were green trees and flowers and stores. It was not Alaska. Maybe it was in the tropics somewhere - but it looked American, so maybe not. Florida? Arizona? Puerto Rico? People were talking, people were waving their arms - others were driving cars and motorcycles; airplanes kept flying by, low to the ground, so low that I could see the faces of the pilots.

Dogs ran past, barking.

Many more things were happening.

All this - the conversation, the shouts, the pumping of pistons, the spinning of props, the barking of dogs was taking place in complete silence. I could hear no voices, no engines, no props roaring, no dogs barking. The activity before me was furious and mouths were flapping - in silence, making no sound whatsoever.

Picture a lady with curly red hair tied back with a checkered kerchief, standing two feet away from me, looking right at me, the motion of her mouth, lips and teeth telling me that she was talking loudly but not a sound came from her.

As her jaws worked, what I heard was Rick Perry, saying "oops!" I could hear, understand and follow everything that was coming from the TV. Perry, Herman Cain, Romney, the recent horrors at Penn State and a whole lot of serious nonsence being debated by left-wingers and right-wingers, with a moderate or two thrown in for the heck of it.

And then the phone would ring and I would want to ignore it but there were critical matters pending, so I would take the phone and someone would say I should donate money here and someone else asked for John and I told him he had the wrong number, there is no John here and he said are you sure and then someone called wanting to use some of my pictures in something - and each time I fell back to sleep at practically the moment I put the phone down. The dream resumed as if it had never stopped and once again I was perfectly following the dialogue from the TV as the cats napped happily upon my legs.

Then a call came about a completely unexpected matter that absolutely had to be dealt with immediately and so I disrupted the cats, staggered into my office to my computer, talking on the phone, trying to grasp the pertinent details and then I opened the appropriate software and began to type and calculate but kept making mistakes and a task which should have taken maybe ten minutes at most took me about half-an-hour.

Had that not happened, I think perhaps I would have lay on the couch dreaming a silent dream as I followed everything that was actually happening around me for another two, three, four, six, ten, hours or so.

Maybe it was the Vicodin. 

This is what pushed me into a state of such exhaustion and stress that I wound up getting shingles. Not by itself, mind you. It has been a long chain of events beginning in early summer or maybe late spring, perhaps even winter or earlier, including the completion of the Kivgiq Uiñiq that so closely preceded this one, including my almost sleepless eight or nine days in New York, death here and there, and a few other events that I will not bother to detail, but in the end it was the 12, 16, 20, 30, 40 hour days that I repeatedly put in over the past couple of weeks in order to finish this thing.

But you know what? If you moved me back two weeks in time but kept the memory of these shingles and how painful they are alive and vivid in my mind and then said, "You are stressing yourself too much. Go ahead, push it aside for awhile. Because if you don't you are going to get shingles and you are going to think for awhile that you are at death's door and then even when you find out you are not going to die you will still have to bear this miserable pain of shingles for at least two weeks, maybe more. Push it aside and rest." I would not push it aside. I would do just what I did, even knowing the pain that was coming.

That is what I would have done and I would be suffering just as badly now as I am, but not as badly as I would be were it not for Vicodin.

This is just a proof copy. It is at the printers and will be there for awhile so it is not yet available to be read. But it's coming.

It's got some huge flaws in it.

It is a work of love.

Love is the only way I know how to work. It is good to get money when it comes, and it may not come again for quite awhile now, but money has never motivated me.

Love, and love only. That is my motivation.

To those who do not understand I cannot explain it. To those who do, I need not explain.

I am going to go to bed now. At 4:00 AM, I can take another Vicodin.

Don't worry. I will not become another Dr. House.

My shingles proves to be pretty tough on the good black cat, Jim

As you might suspect, I have a lot I want to write about right now and I sat down at this computer planning to do just that.

Now that Jim is on the screen, I realize that for the moment I am just too done in to write it all, so I am not going to even try.

Instead, I will write a tiny bit about Jim.

This whole process has been damn hard on him.

He likes to jump on my lap, walk across my shoulders, my keyboard and then settle down on my torso with his paws on my chest. And I can't let him. It hurts too bad.

Jim is a very good cat - there is none better - but he is not a healer cat in the way Thunder Paws was. If Paws were alive, he would want to be with me, too. But he would know not to walk across my shoulders, or put his paws on my chest. He would know the places where I hurt and he would not touch those places.

But he would touch where I did not hurt, and he would apply his healing powers.

I know this will sound nonsense to many, but that's the kind of cat Thunder Paws was.

He was a healer cat.

And a thinking cat.

Jim is a buddy cat, a fun cat to hang out with but he will walk across my shingles.

He does not understand why I won't let him; why I keep evicting him from the room, or pushing him away if I have collapsed on my back on the couch.

This has been very hard on Jim.

He is not a healer cat and he does manage to make contact and that contact hurts, yet, somehow, his presence makes the pain easier to bear. Even if he hurts me sometimes, he will help me heal faster.

Jim - my good black cat.

How lucky I am to have a buddy like that.

Buddy Jim.

Shingles - what a relief! ...sort of

I took this picture as I was driving home from the doctor's office a bit before noon. It was the first morning that my car thermometer registered in the subzeros in our neighborhood, where it read -2 (-19C). In downtown Wasilla, where, in times of cold, it is always significantly warmer, it registered in the upper single digits some places and all the way up to 11 in others.

These past three nights and days, I had been wondering if maybe I had reached my end. That's how great the pain in my chest was. Each night after going to bed, I had hit the point where I was ready to get up and dash for the emergency room and would have done so if my insurance company had not forced me out by raising my premiums so damn high. Then there was all that strange stinging and burning on my skin.

I did not think I would have a heart attack, and yet I thought I might.

Sometimes I thought, "I just overdid it, this time, tough it out for a week or so and it will go away."

Then, last night, I discovered a horrible, ugly, rash curving around the left side of my torso.

This morning, I went to the office of my doc. She was booked solid, but a PA who is working with her took a look and he quickly diagnosed "shingles."

Shingles, for those who may not know, is the chicken pox you had as a child rearing up once again, but in a more brutal, painful, way. It is a herpes virus and never goes away. Once you have chicken pox, it is there for the rest of your life. It can attack you at any time, expecially when you are exhausted and under stress.

It had never sprung out on me like this before. The PA said it undoubtedly happened because of all the work stress I have been under, all the nights with little to no sleep. He gave me some prescriptions, but said it won't go away until I am able to rest up.

I hate these shingles, but, I am great relieved. I half expected to be hospitalized in the cardiac unit.

He said I will probably have to endure this for two weeks although hopefully the meds will help.

In the meantime, I cannot pick up little Lynx or Jobe, or give Kalib a hug.

I could give them chicken pox.