Passing airplane still generates magic; a man, a horse, and Catahoula; two girls on a riverbank; four-wheeler in the river; ice cream on the face

Despite all the work facing me, I remained lazy throughout the remainder of the day. One should not work on magical days such as yesterday, especially when his grandsons are present.

I was out in the back yard with Margie and the boys when an airplane passed overhead. I remembered when I was a child how wonderful, mystical, and magical it was to see an airplane pass overhead. What with their constant viewing of videos, the trips to the 3D movies and all that, could Kalib and Jobe ever possibly get that same feeling from watching an airplane pass overhead?

Ha! Kalib got the feeling!

And so did Jobe!

In the afternoon, I took off on a 16 mile bike ride. It wasn't long enough. It was too short. I wanted to go and go, but I figured I would be gone too long. Down on Sunrise Drive, I saw a man, a horse, and a dog coming toward me.

It was these three - the man is Jim, the horse is Warrior and the dog is Chain. Chain is a Catahoula Leopard Dog, a breed that I had never heard of.

"I never thought I would wind up with a Catahoula," Jim said. "But I did."

I looked Catahoula up on Google and found they originated in Louisana. Here is part of what I learned about them:

The Catahoula Leopard Dog is independent, protective, and territorial. Loving with its family and all people they know well and reserved with strangers (this would include strange children)...

These dogs need attention. This is not a dog that can be tied to a doghouse, fed, and ignored. Chaining and or ignoring a Catahoula Leopard Dog will either make them shy or aggressive. They need human companionship. This breed needs direction, training, something to do, people, attention...

A Catahoula Leopard Dog enjoys the company of a good horse...

Maybe I made up one of the above lines.

I pedaled until it looked like the road was about to end in someone's yard.

On the way back, I decided to stop, climb up the rise over the road and see what I could see. This is what I saw - the Little Susitna River, with two girls sitting on the bank. Hence, this series of studies, beginning with:

Two girls on a riverbank, study #4,328: They stick their feet in the water.

Two girls on a riverbank, study #2: The sky overhead.

Two girls on a riverbank, study #282,881: they are joined by a dog.

I shot this four-wheeler image as I pedaled across the bridge that crosses the Little Su.*

*In comments, reader AkPonyGirl has pointed out that it is illegal to drive a four-wheeler in the Little Su, due to the damage they cause to salmon spawn.  Thank you, AkPonyGirl.

About 10:00 PM, I mentioned the words, "ice cream cone" and Kalib got excited. So I loaded up the boys, left Margie home for some moments of solitude and headed off to Dairy Queen. On the way, we saw a rainbow and began to chase it.

We did not catch it, but we did overshoot Dairy Queen, so we turned around at the next stoplight and headed back in the direction of ice cream.

At Dairy Queen, we got our cones, then parked for awhile. In the outside driver's rearview mirror, I saw two Dairy Queen workers, taking a break.

The boys and their cones. After I took this picture, I started the car back up and drove home.Jobe was a sticky mess when we got home, but the cone made it all the way without being dumped on the floor, in his lap or on Kalib and that was a first.

View images as slides 

(or click on individual images to see larger version)

Warm sunshine, two boys, a cat, an uncle and a gramma

This is from almost right now - just shot these and then came in to put up a lazy blog entry. Lazy, because I slept in very late this morning and although I have had breakfast and coffee, I still feel groggy, plus the sun is shining, it is warm and the grandsons are here to spend the weekend with us.

I have much work to do - a magazine to be made press ready by Wednesday, thousands of pictures to edit and place for the next magazine after - and had been planning to work hard all through the weekend. Right now, I don't feel like it. I feel like all I want to do is to hang out with the grandkids and the cats and be lazy.

This picture really needs to be bigger to be grasped. That's why I make the slideshow, so readers can see bigger copies of the pictures, but the Squarespace slideshow setup is pretty tedious for the viewer, so, as I am only posting two pictures today, I also set these up in the "click and view" method, which, in Squarespace, is a very tedious process for the blogger, but as I only have two pictures today the tedium will not be that terrible. 

Click on the image and you will see a larger copy.

The grandkids and the good black cat, Jimmy.

Slideshow view

Last Friday, a sleepy man flew to Kaktovik

Despite multiple attempts, I was unable to put up a single post during my stay in Kaktovik - thanks to Squarespace.* So now I back up to Friday, the day I left, a day that began miserably. This was because I did not get to bed until 1:00 AM, but set my alarm for 3:55 AM.

It was not necessary for me to set the alarm at all, because when I must wake up at such an hour, I really don't sleep at all. I might drop into a semi-doze for five, ten - and if I am very lucky - 15 minutes at a time and then my eyes open and I check the time.

Still, I set the alarm just in case I should somehow actually fall into a deep sleep.

It didn't happen, though.

At 3:54, I was watching the clock. I could have turned it off, but Margie needed to wake up, too, and it was easier for me to let the alarm wake her than to wake her myself.

Margie has been blessed with the gift of sleep. Her head hits the pillow and she's asleep, usually until its time to get up.

I have been cursed with the curse of insomnia.

Worse yet, the less time I have to sleep, the more insomniak I am.

I often wonder how I function at all.

As for Jim, he sleeps at will and also takes many cat naps.

Soon, I was in the car with Margie, driving to Anchorage, to the airport, to hop on my first Era Aviation flight, the one that would take me from Anchorage to Fairbanks.

I desperatedly wanted to sleep on that flight, but I could not.

In Fairbanks, I switched to the plane that would take me to Kaktovik. I was the only passenger, but the plane was full - full of freight.

For those of you who may wonder why everything is so expensive in Rural Alaskan places like Kaktovik, this is why. Except for a barge load or two in the summer, this is how goods travel - including all fresh food, milk and such.

Even with bypass mail, this is not a cheap way to stock the shelves.

Again, I wanted to sleep but again, I could not. Still, I kept my eyes closed. I figured that would help. Accompanied by the roar of the engine and the props beating the air, I held my eyes closed as images, often bordering on dreams, played in my head.

Images of the living, and images of the dead; pictures of places, from Alaska to Arizona, to India and Canada and Greenland and New York City and San Francisco - all sorts of images of people and places, swirling about in my head as the plane carried me over Northern Alaska.

I wanted to hold my eyes closed forever.

I knew I could not do that. So I decided I would hold them closed until I felt the plane stall and the wheels hit the runway in Kaktovik.

But I couldn't do that, either. At a certain point, I knew we had to be drawing near to Kaktovik. We had to be passing over the Brooks Range.

"Eyes!" I ordered. "I have seen the Brooks Range many times! I do not need to see it now! It is better for you to stay closed, so that I might get what little rest I can."

My eyes did not listen.

They popped open.

And there, beneath the plane, stood the Brooks Range.

Very soon, the plane was descending, the Beaufort Sea below.

Then, it was dropping down over the westerns fringes of Barter Island, the northern-most point of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, upon which sits Kaktovik.

Then came the stall, and the bump of the wheels. Now we were rolling down the runway, past the massive hangar built by the Air Force in the early 1950's, when they force-moved the Iñupiat of Kaktovik out of their homes so that they could build this airport where the old village had stood.

More on this later.

I was hungry by now, so, after Crystallee Kaleak and Annie Tikluk found lodging for me in the Assembly of God Church and I got settled in, I walked to Waldo Arms and ordered an omelette.

As I ate, someone came in and peeked through the telescope that points out the Waldo Arms window toward the sea and shore, to see if perhaps there were polar bears out there.

He spotted none.

And then, I was standing on a beach, camera in hand. People were smiling, and waving. I will explain in a subsequent post.

I was about to state that I would explain in tomorrow's post, however, tomorrow is a very special day in someone's life, someone who had a most important role in the happenings that unfolded in Kaktovik, so maybe I will dedicate tomorrow's post to him, instead, and save my larger explanation for the next day.

*Squarespace has an iPad app, but it is a pretty lousy app. I did not have access to wireless where I stayed, so, when I would get a chance, I would go to the school and usually sit on the steel stairway and log on to North Slope Borough School District public wireless.

I built three different posts in the Squarespace app but at the end of each attempt was rewarded only with a rotating, circular, arrow above the word, "publishing." After the failure of my first attempt, which included three photos, I figured maybe Squarespace just could not deal with that tiny amount of information on a slow connection, so I made a new post with just one photo.

After that failed, I made a thrid post that contained only words and no image at all.

Just like before, the publishing arrow just rotated and rotated and rotated - for two days it rotated. yet never published the post. Sometime before the end of fall, I must make the time to research some other web-hosting platforms. When I find the right one, I will move this blog and my future electronic publishing efforts to it.

View images as slideshow

We dine at the hog shak; dog lunges at bike - I am off to Kaktovik

Atop the bluff overlooking the once fine meadow that, despite the developers promise that they would leave a nice lake behind, is now a barren gravel pit Margie and I spotted a new kiosk. The sign in front of it said, "The Hog Shak"

So we pulled up to find out what it was all about.

Turns out, it is a new eatery featuring hog products.

So we both ordered a hog sandwich and a bottle of water.

As we waited, I looked in my rearview mirror and saw these two passing by.

This is Eric, who founded the hog shop three days ago, and his mom, Margaret, who is giving her son a helping hand to crank up his new little business.

The hog sandwich was pretty good, too. I kind of wanted a hog burrito but Margaret was still making the tortilla dough.

After I return from Kaktovik, I intend to try a burrito.

Late Thursday night, as I was pedaling my bike home on a shorter-than-usual ride, this dog charged me. I could see that it was just a silly pup and it did not frighten me, but it did give me some interesting moments.

Joseph was out walking his dog. The pup went and gave them some interesting moments, too.

If all goes according to plan, by the time this posts, I will be in Kaktovik. Now - perhaps you see a picture at the top of this post that I took with my iPad inside the Era Aviation flight that just brought me to Fairbanks, enroute to Kaktovik. Using the Squarespace iPad ap, I just tried to add it to the bottom of this post, the rest of which I put together last night before I went to bed for three hours.

*After I added it, it simply disappeared from the working window of the Squarespace ap. I opened up Safari and saw that it had gone to the top, sideways. So I came back to the Squarespace ap window to see if I could fix the problem, but the photo still does not show here, at the top or the bottom.

Given the general troublesome nature of Squarespace, I am not really surprised.

*This is the image that was at the top, as described above. As that was how it happened and how I described it, I was just going to leave it that way, but it bother me too much to look at it. So, I just now happened upon an online computer here in Kaktovik on which I could work on this without using the Squarespace ap and so I moved the photo down to the bottom where I had tried to place it in the first place and rotated it.

View images as slides

UK coffee treat; a shadow, biking through the shadows

When I pulled up to the drive through window at Metro Cafe yesterday afternoon and went to pull my wallet out, Elizabeth told me to put it back. Carmen had received a letter with a purchase order for a Metro punch card from Martin Garrod of the UK.

Carmen came out and read the letter. It was a very nice letter. She said she will make me a copy of it.

Here is Elizabeth, bringing me my coffee as Carmen talks with Martin on the phone... I jokes! I do not know who Carmen was talking to.

Thank you, Martin! It was a big and welcome surprise and the coffee was excellent.

Martin sometimes leaves a comment after a post.

I feel rather bad about comments right now, as it has always been my intent to keep up a daily dialogue with those who leave comments, but my days are so packed and I am always so far behind schedule that most days I just let the comments stand for themselves, without responding to them.

I hope that sometime in the future I can do better.

Be assured, I appreciate all comments that are left here.

If everything had gone according to my plan, I would be hanging out at Era Aviation in Deadhorse right now, waiting for the airplane that I had expected to take me to Kaktovik where I was scheduled to land at 3:45 this afternoon.

However, an order for pictures that must be delivered before I can leave came in yesterday and it involves some searching and lot of sorting, editing, and processing. I thought I could get it all done by 1:00 AM and then get a little bit of sleep and make my 9:30 AM flight out of Anchorage, but I couldn't. So I postponed my trip to Kaktovik by one more day - except that tomorrow I leave on the 6:30 AM flight, which means I must get up about 4:00 and that is going to be tough - but my scheduled arrival is 10:30 AM and that will give me most of the day to get a little work done.

Late at night, I got on bike and went shadow biking.

View images as slides