On tax day, I take prints and visit Warren Matumeak and daughters; I return to Wasilla and find a Tea Party; my coverage is interupted

It had been very chilly in our bedroom when we went in to seek sleep the night before. After I tucked Margie into the single bed where, as a result her injuries, she still must sleep, I jumped into our bed and the cold sting of the sheets against my flesh almost shot me back out again.

But I held my spot, because I knew that the blankets would hold my body heat and soon I would be warm and toasty.

Sure enough, it happened just that way. Sooner or later, insomniac me went to sleep. And then, somewhere around 3:00 AM, I dreamed that I was out in the country somewhere but was inadequately dressed and so was getting cold. Then I woke up and discovered that I was inadequately blanketed and truly was getting cold.

I keep a special quilt on the bed just for such moments, but the quilt was gone, folded and put away somewhere. Oh well, I figured, I could just reposition myself a bit to create a better layer of air insulation between the blankets and me and I would warm up and be fine.

I did not want to get up and go search for a blanket.

And so the rest of the night went, me always thinking that I had found just the right spot, dozing temporarily off, then waking, chilled, again.

In the morning, when I finally got up, it was to a clear, blue, sky and a beautiful world. Barefooted, I stepped onto the back porch to shoot this image. The porch was frozen and I felt the cold, sting of ice against my feet, but it was only for a few a seconds and I did not mind at all.

A few months back, Darlene Matumeak-Kagak got in touch with me to request a print of a photo that I took at Kivgiq 2003 of she and her sister, Mae Ahgeak, dancing with their father Warren Matumeak. Warren is pictured in my April 14 post, drumming and singing.

Providing prints to people who want them is a very difficult thing for me because, literally, I have received requests for THOUSANDS of prints, dating back to my film days and it is just impossible. Furthermore, the big majority of people who want these prints are Alaska Native who have befriended and helped me and without whom none of this work that I have done would have been possible, so it has always been my policy not to sell prints to such folk, but to give them and, despite my huge backlog of undelivered orders, I have given THOUSANDS away.

So I always tell people that if they want a picture, don't be afraid to keep sending me little reminders. In time, a reminder may well hit me when I am in a circumstance that makes it possible for me to make a print. The digital age has made it easier for me to get pictures to people in .jpg form, but even then, there are so many that it remains a challenge -plus a .jpg is not a print.

Darlene and her husband Jake have been very good to me over the years. Warren, her father, is one of the great men of the Arctic, a man who I greatly respect, love and admire. So, when I learned that he was coming to Anchorage to get chemo for cancer, I decided that I needed to make those prints right now and deliver them personally.

So here I am, in my car, looking at the Talkeetna Mountains from the stop sign at the intersection of Seldon and Lucille as I drive to Anchorage. Sitting alongside me in the passenger seat is three, 13 x 19 Velvet Fine Art prints that I had made late the night before.

The road was slick, but the temperature was rising and would hit 40 come late afternoon. I don't know what the low had been. About 10, I would guess.

Pioneer Peak and the Chugach Mountains, as I cross the Knik River bridge.

Someone in the opposing, north-bound lanes of traffic had been pulled over. Police officers were positioned at both the passenger and driver doors and, if I recall correctly, three patrol vehicles had stopped.

I don't know what happened. For all I know, in the end, the driver got off with a warning. I could do some investigative reporting and find out, but I don't think I will bother.

After I got to town, the very first thing that I did was drive out to the Dimond area to pick Melanie up so we could have lunch together. Along the way, while stopped at a red light, I saw this scene. I thought about how thin is the line that separates me from being part of it and wondered if and when I might yet cross that line.

I did not recognize the man, but maybe I know some of his family, somewhere out in Rural Alaska. Maybe some of his relatives have brought me into their home, be it a house or a camp, and have fed me.

For some reason, I failed to take any pictures during my lunch with Melanie. We got to talking and I just forgot. I can tell you this, she is a big help to me and her mom right now and to her youngest brother, too. I need to be more of a help to her.

She has also helped many cats, and that is just one of the many trillion reasons why I love her so.

As I do all my children, and those with whom they have united to bring even more family into our lives.

After I dropped Melanie off back at her work, I drove straight to the airport to meet Warren and his three daughters, who were already headed back to Barrow. Given what I had heard about his cancer, he looked surprisingly strong and good, and his spirits seemed high. He told me, though, that how he looked on the outside hid what he felt inside.

His doctors here in Anchorage had started him on some intense chemo and he would stay on it back home in Barrow for about two more weeks and then he would return. If it was having the desired effect, he would stay on it. If it wasn't... well, he said, he had experienced 82 wonderful years in this life and was ready to go to his home on the other side.

Those of us who know him here, I answered, are not ready for that. We need and want him here. This, he said, was what he also wants and is hoping for, but, if not, he is ready. He has already experienced many miracles in his life that have kept him here when it seemed, perhaps, that his time was already over.

He told me about one, in the days before snowmachines, when he had been out on the ice with his dogs and had to cross a wide section of very thin ice, one inch thick at most. His dogs did not want to go on, but he had no choice and so urged them forward. He leaned into the sled, which was buoyant. The dogs pushed forward and as they did, their paws punched repeatedly through the ice, but sea ice is flexible in a way that freshwater ice is not and the dogs managed to keep moving forward without going all the way through. A couple of times, Warren gave a push with his foot and his boot also broke through.

Finally, they reached stronger ice about two inches thick and soon were on safe ice. Warren stopped his dogs, and offered a prayer of thanks.

All too soon, it was time for them to head for security and then on to the Alaska Airlines gate where they would board their flight back to Barrow.

One of his daughters offered to get a wheelchair to make the journey a little easier for him, but Warren said, no, he needed the exercise and he would walk.

This reminded me of another of his survival miracles, one that happened about 24 years ago and that I wrote up in an early issue of Uiñiq. In that instance, Warren suffered a heart attack out on the tundra while hunting caribou with his young grandson Tommy, who, if I remember right, was eight years old at the time. Warren knew that he was going to die and so had his young grandson bundle him onto the sled and then told him to drive the snowmachine toward the moon, because in that direction he would find his grandmother at camp and could return his body to her.

It was a tough and long ride, but young Tommy saved his aapa's life. 

Afterward, I would often see Warren in the evenings on the indoor track built above the Barrow High gymnasium - walking and walking and walking, building up the strength in his heart.

Behind him here are his daughters Darlene, Alice and Mae.

This is the photo that I had printed in triplicate for them, with Darlene dancing at the left and Mae at the right. Suurimmaanitchuat.

I should note that in his work days, Warren served as Planning Director for the North Slope Borough and later as director of the North Slope Borough Wildlife Management Department. He is a choir director at the Utqeaqvik Presbyterian Church and is well known for his oratory from behind the pulpit.

Do any of you regular readers ever pick up on the conflict that tears always within me, between the pull of my communal home on the Arctic Slope and my physical and blood-family home in Wasilla?

Now, at Ted Stevens International Airport in Anchorage, I had once again taken a mental trip back to the communal home, but it was time to return to Wasilla. As stated in the sidebar at right, one of the primary reasons that I started this blog was to better get to know Wasilla, where I have lived now for nearly 30 years. Yet, outside my house and family, Wasilla is a town in which I have mostly been a stranger, because my work, heart, and soul has always been out in the rural areas where I have done my work.

Yet, I love Wasilla and I want to know what this place, where I have for so long kept a physical presence, is all about. I want to find its soul, but, even since I started this blog, a lack of time and financial resource has severely limited my search. I am not even close to meeting this goal.

Perhaps I am little bit frightened by this goal, too. I don't know.

As I drove back to Wasilla, I passed this Volkswagen.

The first car that Margie and I ever owned was a lemon-yellow Super Beetle. We loved that car like we have loved no car since - but I do love the Ford Escape. Among the many cars that we have now ground down, I love the Escape second only to the Super Beetle.

Back in Wasilla, it was Tax Day, and the Liberty Tax mascot was out, seeking to draw in those who had procrastinated almost beyond hope.

It would prove to be a very hard tax day for us, as we came up owing, with no funds to pay the difference. It won't be fun, but we will get through this. It happened before, in 1997, about ten times worse than now. We got through it. I never wanted it to happen again, but it did, and we will get through it again.

Not far down the road, I saw a man riding his four-wheeler like he was part of the US Calvary, leading a caravan of three, charging to the rescue of his beleaguered nation on Tax Day, charging to Wasilla's Tea Party rally.

All of a sudden, my coverage of Tax Day and the Tea Party is interrupted. This is because, as I sat here, diligently working on my report, my office door flew open and Kalib came charging in.

His mother had brought him and Jobe out to visit us while she goes to Metro Cafe to go online and do some homework.

I thought he had come rushing in to hug me, so I extended my arms, but he was not interested in giving his grandpa a hug. He just wanted to feed his grandpa's fish, and he didn't want to waste any time getting at it.

After he fed the fish, he disappeared, but I soon followed him into the living room and this is what I found: Kalib, Caleb, and Jobe.

In time, I came back to the blog, but I had stated that I would have it up no later than noon and here it is, nearly 2:00 PM, and I cannot spend another minute of this day working on this blog.

So I will save the tea party part for tomorrow. Or, perhaps, by then, life will have moved on and so will I have and my tea party coverage will just languish, perhaps to one day be seen, perhaps never.

We will see.

PS: My niece, Shaela Ann Cook, has a new blog. I have given her a link and invite all to visit her site. You will see that her outlook towards food is very different than mine, but it doesn't matter. We love each other and she supports Iñupiat whaling. She wants to make a movie on my book, Gift of the Whale, if only she could find the means.

Flashback to India, August, 2007: the girl who Latika brought to mind; two of her street peers

In the previous post, I refered to the movie Slumdog Millionaire and mentioned how, when I saw the character Latika begging on the streets of Mumbai, I thought of a girl whose path had crossed mine in Bangalore. This is not her, although I did meet him on the same day.

When he first showed me the snake and the tiny chess set, I told him, politely, that I did not wish to buy either, or anything else that he was selling. He must have been quite certain that he could change my mind because, over the next couple of hours I roamed here and there and he continually materialized in front of me, smiling, exuding complete confidence that this time I would be either so charmed, impressed, or exasperated that I would buy from him.

When I look at this picture now, I kind of wish that I had bought that snake from him.

I hope he is doing well. Maybe he will be a millionaire one day.

These flying legs do not belong to the girl that I first thought of, either, but they do belong to someone who also survives by making her living on the India street. I was riding in an "auto-rickshaw" with my nephew and niece, Vijay and his wife Vidya, and we were briefly stopped in backed up-traffic. I glanced at the driver's mirror. I saw the reflection of a girl as she wind-milled our way in cartwheels from behind, nimbly navigating the narrow gap between two uneven rows of vehicles, all jam-packed tightly together.

Quickly, I raised my camera and shot, hoping to catch her image as she cart-wheeled by. The first part of her to enter my frame was this - her upturned, bare, foot which barely escaped her long, billowy, pantaloons.

The momentum of her cartwheel pulls her all the way into my frame...

and then she stops, obviously surprised.

This is the girl who Latika made me think of.

And when I saw her up ahead of me, begging like this, getting turned away, I thought of my oldest daughter, Melanie, when she was the same age.

There are strong resemblances between them, both in physique and facial structure.

She went from car to car, begging.

And then she was at our cab. Latika. My own daughter.

I look at this picture that I took as part of my incessant quest to document the world as it unfolds around me and I feel helpless. There is no way for me to know, but I hope that there is not a Fagan, a Maman, waiting to confiscate her earnings, eager to manipulate by other means her profibility in future years.

For the moment, when she stands in front of me, it does not matter. I must give her something. One way or another, even if by chance it means I must also fund to an even greater degree an evil Fagan, her survival depends upon it.

The only thing is, at some point in every day that one roams in India, he must stop giving, for there are too many open hands that reach toward him and he lacks the capacity to drop something, even small, into each of them.

Yet, I cannot tell you how badly I yearn to return to India. Every single day I feel this desire. And it has been a year and four months now. And each day when I look into the mirror, I see more white in my beard than I did before. And now the white even creeps into my hair.

What the hell was God thinking, to create such a magnificent, full, complex, challenging and diverse earth, and to give a human such a short time to get to know it?

The street man: what his Alaska Native peoples fed me; what I gave to him

I saw him standing on the corner ahead of me as I drove toward the green light. I hoped it would stay green, but the traffic ahead of me was moving slow and when it turned yellow, I knew that I would come to stop on the corner, right beside him.

I did. He came walking toward me through the zero degree (F) air, a friendly smile on his face. I could not turn away as if he were not there, so I smiled back and rolled down the window.

"God bless you on this good day, sir!" he said.

"You too," I answered. "Where you from?"

"Mountain Village," he said. "Yukon River. It's located on the Lower Yukon."

"Yes, I know," I told him. "I've been there."

I've been in villages all over Alaska, which is different than going to villages in any other state. Mostly, you fly to these villages, as very few are on our limited road system.

The people out there have treated me good. They have put me up in their homes and they have fed me: moose, caribou, salmon, bowhead whale, beluga whale, seal, duck, goose, swan, beaver, sheefish, whitefish, crab, blueberries, salmon berries' berries of many kinds, seaweed, walrus, bighorn sheep, musk ox, mountain goat...

Food does not get better than what they feed me.

I gave the man a dollar. I don't know how he will spend it. The light turned green. I drove away.

The incident described happened in Anchorage. This is the kind of day that it was.

And here I am, a bit earlier on the Glenn Highway, passing through the East Side of Anchorage. I should replace the cracked windshield. But soon, it would be cracked again.

Passing by Merrill Field.

What it looked like when I reached downtown Anchorage.

This is why I went to Anchorage. I had something that had to be mailed today. The only Post Office that was open was the Airport Post Office. I took this picture, looking backwards, after I had been in line for over an hour. I still had quite a wait ahead of me.

I suspect that most of them were mailing Christmas gifts.

As I drive away from the airport post office.

The Marriott Hotel, with Conoco Phillips rising behind it.

And this is from earlier in the day, when a bunch of us gathered at IHOP for the usual Sunday breakfast. Tots always pick each other out of the crowd.