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.

Happy birthday, Robert John Gordon!

This is Robert John Gordon and today is his seventh birthday. Happy birthday, Robert John Gordon! We share birthdays, you and I. Robert lives in the Brooks Range village of Anaktuvuk Pass, but I took this picture in Kaktovik, outside the community center, just a little before midnight on July 8, the day that I arrived in Kaktovik.

Here is Robert again, standing amidst loved ones at the graves of Thomas K. and Simon Gordon. The woman wearing the parka and standing behind Robert is Mayuin Gordon, wife of Thomas and adoptive mother of both Simon and Robert. She had been out on a hunting trip with her family on August 1 of 2008 when her husband slipped on a steep bank and fell into a deep pool of cold water that he could not get out of.

Twelve-year old Simon followed him into the inescapable water, and it is my understanding that he did so in an effort to rescue his father.

Kaktovik has a population of just under 300 people and when Mayuin returned driving the boat without her husband and son Simon, the entire village came to her and then went back to the scene to find and recover the bodies.

Thomas had been a leader in the village and I can tell you from my own experience with him that he was an exceptionally warm and kind man. He was beloved in the village and the people also had high hopes for Simon, as they watched him grow.

Their loss left the community in deep and lingering sadness. Thomas had been a guitar player, and loved to perform gospel music. So, last summer, both to honor Thomas and Simon and to bring healing to the community, the village held the first Thomas K. Gordon Memorial Gospel Jamboree. Yes, there was gospel singing, but also community games, played on the beach and at the community center; there was a feast, a bonfire, a talent show, snert tournament and an Arctic char fishing derby.

The healing extended beyond Thomas and Simon to all those who had lost loved ones and families.

People cried, but they also laughed.

Had I have known, I would have been there, but I knew this year and so came for the second jamboree.

It was a wonderful experience. Needless to say, I took lots and lots and lots of pictures and it had been my hope to do a decent summary on this blog. However, deadlines are weighing heavy upon me. In addition to the healthy communities Uiñiq that will include this story, I have another Uiñiq on Kivgiq that is JUST ABOUT press ready.

What I have discovered is that JUST ABOUT - layout all done, most of the photos adjusted, most of the text written - can still mean days, even a couple of weeks, of work ahead and once that is done I must go to Kotzebue to do a job that has nothing to do with Uiñiq. Sometime in August, I plan to visit Atqasuk and maybe Arctic Village and then, somehow, I must have this healthy communities Uiñiq press-ready by the first week of September.

So I think I will wait until after Uiñiq comes out to post this story. By then, I hope to have figured out how to make and present the electronic magazine that I want to create. If so, then I plan to go back and rework some of the Uiñiq stories for that. This way, the stories can be shared with people who will never see Uiñiq magazine. 

As for those who do see Uiñiq, I will be able to share more pictures that space will have prevented me from including in Uiñiq.

So that is my plan. 

There is no way to know what will actually happen until it happens.

That goes for tomorrow and the next day, too. 

The fence beyond the graveyard is a snow fence - built to catch the constant fall, winter and spring drift so as to lessen the amount of deep drifting within the village.

I should note that when I first met Thomas Gordon, in September of 1986, he was living in Mayuin's home village of Anaktuvuk Pass. Each September, the people of Anaktuvuk eagerly await the migration of caribou that pass through and by their village.

Before passing through, the caribou tend to gather in herds just to the north of the Brooks Range. By their own traditional law, no one is to disturb or shoot a caribou until the first group enters their valley and passes by the village. This is because a gunshot or disturbance might frighten the lead caribou and cause them to change routes. Once the leaders have passed through, the rest will follow, no matter how many shots are taken. In that year, the people had observed the caribou gather as normal, but they did not come to the village. They chose another another route to the west.

There had been sport hunters camped down where the caribou had gathered. They did know of local, native, traditional law nor did they care about it. When they saw the caribou, they did not wait for the leaders to pass by and enter the valley.

They shot.

So, without caribou, Thomas and his friend Harry went out to hunt moose, and I followed. We did not find any moose. It was frustrating, but Thomas never grew angry. He did not swear. He did not say anything bad about anybody - not even the sport hunters whose shots may have turned the caribou from the village.

He was sad, but his humor remained good.

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I break my absence with quick and cute: the dog who charged a polar bear cub and then got charged by a polar bear mom; two girls and pups; a special Charlie Brown plane in Nuiqsut

See the dog on the right? That's Ivory. I took this image of Ivory and friends right here in the Arctic Slope village of Nuiqsut, where I am right now, but a few nights ago, on Cross Island, I saw Ivory charge toward a polar bear cub that had wandered about 200 feet from its mom.

Then I saw the mom charge toward Ivory. Ivory then changed his mind and came running back to us.

Yes, I photographed the scene and I will share it, although I should warn you not to get your hopes too high, as the sun had already set, the sky was overcast, I was shooting a 400 mm lens handheld at something like 1/30 of a second.

I have not yet had a chance to look at the downloanded images, but I know they will be blurred. Still, I will share them.

I will comment more then.

Rochelle with cute puppy, right here in Nuiqsut. I might note that a little earlier in the day I had taken a long walk, missing Cross Island but glad that I could walk alone without carrying a gun. On Cross Island, one either carries a gun or walks with someone who is.

Usually, a warning shot will convince the bear to leave one alone.

Rochelle and Elizabeth, right here in Nuiqsut, with puppies.

And this is Lucy Mae, with puppy. Whale shares are being divided in the background.

Rochelle, loving puppy.

Everts Air on the Nuiqsut strip. I will have more on this plane in Uiñiq magazine.

Although it started with an immense personal disappointment, this has been a wonderful and amazing trip and I have shot many, many, pictures for Uiñiq. I have not had a chance to do any editing at all, but within my larger Uiñiq take there are three or four little stories that I plan to share on this blog - and yes, the polar bears are one. And I have what I think is a wonderful little story about an Eskimo drum - and, of course, there was that very brief stop at a haunted house that sits all by itself, right on the edge of the Arctic Ocean.

Something bad has happened to my laptop. The screen image is rapidly vibrating, bouncing up and down. It is extremely annoying to look at it - just putting this blog together has given me a headache and made me dizzy! - and it is impossible to edit and process photos. I can't color balance them at all. I have no idea how the images I have placed here actually appear in terms of color, contrast and all those kind of things that photographers worry about.

I plan to be home Sunday. I may not, or I may, post again before then. It is just too aggravating to work on this malfuncting computer. I may just wait until I get back to my desktop computer.  I don't know, I don't know.

I'm not even going to attempt to proofread this, either. Words are jumping all over the page.

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Slide Show, ten images: the Barrow Whalers football at practice

View the 10 image Barrow Whalers football practice slide show

In my last post, I wrote that today I would post images from yesterday's Barrow Whalers football game, the season opener, but I have changed my mind. I did prepare a selection of images from that game to post, but I was lacking some fundamental information that I can only get by talking to a coach, maybe a player or two and it is Sunday and I do not want to bother anybody by tracking them down at their homes.

Plus, I am feeling kind of lazy myself and don't really want to do any tracking.

So, instead, for today, I am just going to run this 10 image slide show of the Whalers at practice the day before the game. Perhaps tomorrow I will post the game.

It had been my intent to include a photo essay in the Uiñiq magazine that I completed several months back but which, for a succession of odd reasons, took a tremendous amount of time to get printed, mailed and then delivered and so only recently reached most readers. 

Before I had the chance to shoot that essay, I took my bad fall, shattered my shoulder, went through my two surgeries, lost my right shoulder and got a titanium one. So, when the 2008 football season started up less than two months later, I was in no condition to stand on the sidelines and try to shoot football.

By the 2009 season, my shoulder was still quite fragile but I could handle my big cameras again and had been thinking about it, but then my wife broke her knee for the second time in 7 months and I found myself unable to do much of anything but to help care for her.

Football was out. 

I still feel a little badly about that, because last year was the whalers 4th season and the final year that any players from the original team, one that has become a bit of a legend, would be with the team.

This year, the Barrow Whalers football team is in what is commonly called a "rebuilding season" in the sport - this means that the older, experienced players that made the team into the legend that it has become have moved on to be replaced by a largely younger group with less experience.

Yet, I have discovered that there is enthusiasm and fire in these boys and so this year I have set out to finally do my Barrow Whalers football essay - too late to capture any of the first squad of players, but then they were widely documented nationally by ESPN and others and may well be the subject of a future movie, so perhaps there was not much that I could have added to their story, anyway.

While the majority population of Barrow remains Iñupiat and Barrow is definitely an Iñupiat town, it is also a cosmopolitan community with residents whose roots and origins reach around the world. So too, as Coach Mark Voss told me, is the composition of the team and coaching staff cosmopolitan - Iñupiat, Samoan, Tongan, Hawaiian, White, African American, Filipino, Latino...

Should I pull this off as I hope, I think it will prove to be an interesting essay. While my take yesterday does do a functional job of covering the game, it is not what I would have hoped it would be. Yesterday, I learned that when it comes to photographing football, a game that I had not shot a single frame on since the fall of '92 when Caleb played his final year at Wasilla High, I am out of practice and need to sharpen my skills.

So I will attend more practice sessions this week to take many pictures. My only real purpose will be to hone my skills for future game times and to better get to know the players and coaching staff, so that hopefully I can produce the kind of essay that I envision.

To see the ten image slide show from the practice the day before the first came, click on the photo or on either of the links above and below this text.

View the 10 image Barrow Whalers practice slide show

Uiñiq finally published; missionaries walk dogs; grandsons come to visit me before I leave for Greenland, but now I am enroute

Finally, this Uiñiq is published! Oh, my goodness, has it been a long haul! I started working on it in the spring of 2008 in anticipation that I would have it done and out by the end of that year. But then, on June 12, 2008, I took my infamous fall, shattered my shoulder, got a $37,000-plus Lear Jet ambulance ride from Barrow to Providence Hospital in Anchorage, where, after two surgeries, the doctor took out my shattered humerus and gave me a titanium one - a wonder, yes, but no match for a real shoulder.

As so much of my work is physical, a year then passed before I was really able to get back to work on it in a serious way. Finally, I pretty much had it all together late last year, save for a bit of touchup. Then one thing after another just kept happening to delay it and during the delays I would make some changes and then it would be delayed again.

But now it is published and soon it will be distributed across the Arctic Slope.

And within a week of when I get back from Greenland, I will return to the Slope to start on the next one, which I hope to complete by the end of the year. I shouldn't say "start," because I actually have many photos and stories left over that I was not able to fit into this one, some of them more or less complete, some needing more work.

So I have already started.

Shortly after I drove away from Metro Cafe this afternoon (Carmen was not there, by the way) I saw these two Mormon missionaries walking these dogs alongside Spruce Avenue. Of course, I stopped to take their picture.

That's Elder Wade on the left and he is from Logan, Utah, a mountain town, and has been out for a year-and-half. That's Elder Stoker on the right, from St. George, Utah - a red-rock desert town and a place of searing heat this time of year.

They were walking the dogs for a church member and they asked me what Mormon ward I lived in, but I didn't know. For more than a quarter of a century, the only times that I have been inside the chapels of the church of my upbringing has been for the funerals of family members and friends.

They asked me, why? I just told them it was a long and complicated story, but not to worry, I have nothing but kind thoughts toward them because I have walked just as they walk, with dogs following, but never on leash, because these were reservation dogs and they came and went as they pleased. Those dogs just liked us, so they followed us.

So, however strange they may look to some and however far I wander from where they and I began, I continue to emphasize with these young men and to have a feeling for them.

The dogs got restless.

Someday, I will make a book of all these pictures of Mormon missionaries that I happen onto and I will tell missionary stories - not their stories, my stories.

God, it will be a powerful book!

And a heartbreaking one.

Mine was a mission of blood and tears.

The world never again looked the same to me.

I was unable to return to the place from whence I came.

Lavina brought Margie back, so that Margie could drive me to the airport to catch the plane that will begin my trip to Greenland. Jobe and Kalib came, too. Jobe is growing so fast!

He will probably be a giant when I return from Greenland, July 4.

Kalib wanted to hold Jobe.

And then they left.

And what I am doing, sitting here at 9:41 PM, Thursday night, working on this blog, when my flight leaves Anchorage at 7:45 AM Friday and I still have hours of tasks to complete before I go?

By the time this post appears, I will be on my way to Nuuk, Greenland.

To all my friends who are also going - see you there. I won't be on the charter with you. There was no room, so ICC Alaska booked me on a series of flights that will take me through Copenhagen. I will spend Saturday afternoon and night there.

I will post from Copenhagen.

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