Wasilla today: Three dogs act tough from the other side of the fence; Alaska awaits; car crash. Kalib moves out, part 3: Lisa amuses him with the big, red, inflatable ball

As I went walking today, these three dogs bravely threatened me from the safety of the other side of the fence.

Oh, was he angry!

"You're damn lucky there's a fence between us!" he barked.

And then I came to the muzzled dog, who bluff-charged me, then, growling, barking, ran a couple of circles around me, threatening that he would rip me to pieces, if only he wasn't wearing this muzzle!

But you know what? I don't believe any of these dogs. They just act tough, because they think they've got to. Take away the fence, take away the muzzle and they will be whimpering and wagging their tails lowly.

The good thing about living in Wasilla is that, even when you are trapped in a rut like I am right now and you are stuck in the midst of the overrun, wantonly developed, much-marred valley and town and you can't get out and do anything, all you have to do is just lift up your eyes and... there's Alaska, lifting itself up and stretching out in every direction.

Quiet, beautiful, harsh and still.

I can't tell you how good it feels - just to know Alaska is all around you.

As I neared my house, I saw that there are been an accident on the corner of Lucille and Seldon. It did not look that bad, but there was an ambulance, so I don't know.

They flagged me right through and I didn't have to wait at all. Maybe there are some people doing a lot of waiting, right now - maybe these kids, being ushered into the truck. I don't know.

Just another one of life's dramas that one passes by every day, sometimes seeing, sometimes not, not knowing how it happened, never knowing the outcome.

Now, back to Friday night, when Kalib moved out. You will recall that he was screaming and crying, but Lisa helped to cheer him up with this ball. He then followed his mother into the kitchen, but soon turned back toward Lisa and the ball.

He grabbed it and threw it to her.

As she propped herself up on the ball, he began to push his way beneath her.

He emerged with a smile on his face.

Then she lay flat on the floor and he put the ball on her ankles.

He rolled the ball up her legs.

She juggled it on her feet. You will notice a fog over Kalib. That is because as I was taking another picture of him, he reached out and smeared my lens with his finger.

Kalib, for Grandma Mary down in the Navajo Nation: may his image help speed your recovery

There was a car crash on the Navajo reservation Friday and it left Kalib's other grandmother, Mary Fatt, badly injured. She had to be medivaced by helicopter ambulance from just outside of Shonto to Flagstaff. Just to set the record straight, because I know that among those who do not know Mary there will be some who will be wondering, yes, Grandmother Mary is a sober person and was driving sober. 

We do not yet know about the other driver, who apparently was not hurt, nor do we know the details of how the accident happened. Lavina and Jacob were in Anchorage until very late in the evening and out here, Margie and I spent several hours, worried, wondering.

I will not try to detail her injuries, but the last word that we received is that she is stable, her life no longer in danger.

I had taken a few pictures earlier in the day as I took my walk and then later after I drove off on a coffee break, but I decided instead to make a special post, just for Kalib's Grandmother Mary.

So, beginning fairly late in the evening, I shot this series of photos just for her.

I hope that she will be able to see them soon - like today, if Kalib's aunts who are with his grandmother can figure out a way to show her - if she is able to look.

If not, then she can enjoy them later.

Whenever she sees them, I know the face of Kalib will bring her cheer and cheer will help her heal.

Here, Kalib rinses a dish for his Grandma Margie.

He prepares to throw paper into the fire.

Kalib takes a bath, #1.

Kalib takes a bath, #2.

Kalib takes a bath, #3 - he watches the water go down the drain.

His mother dries him off and carries him out.

Mom sits down on the couch to finish the job. The TV is on.

Kalib gets pretty excited by something on the TV.

After he gets dressed in his pajamas, Kalib pays a visit to his Grandma Margie. She usually wears glasses that cover up the mole on her nose. With the glasses gone, Kalib finds the mole to be quite fascinating.

Kalib blows his nose.

Then he tries to blow his grandma's nose - with the same tissue!

Grandma puts her glasses on Kalib. Despite all the nose blowing, a little bit of snot trickles from his left nostril.

He draws, then tries to figure out Margie's crossword puzzle.

Mirror-view of Kalib working the crossword puzzle.

Kalib sees himself. Yes, our house is chaos. We are chaotic people, but, since I got hurt nearly a year-and-a-half ago, followed by Margie's two accidents, the chaos has intensified. We must live with it for awhile yet.

Kalib with pillow.

Kalib sees himself in the clock radio.

On this most difficult night, Kalib gives his mom a hug.

As Kalib's mom sends text messages to her sisters, his dad helps him into his bed. Kalib then turns around and pulls his hair.

Get well, Mary!

Many prayers for you.

Catchup,* part 5: Margie nearly gets flattened by a rude mother in a truck with her two, beautiful, young daughters

There were several empty handicapped parking spaces near the main entrance to Carr's when we pulled in. Given Margie's condition, we could qualify in some ways, but the fact is we do not have the proper license plate or sticker, so of course we did not park there. No one who does not need those spaces should ever park in a handicapped spot.

Someday, I will post my photo-essay on my late brother, Ron, and you will understand why I am a hawk on this issue. I am learning to control myself, to tell myself that I am not a police officer and that there is nothing I can do about the rude, ignorant, dolts of the world, but I simply get outraged when I see a healthy person with no sticker park in such a spot. In the past, I have unleashed my wrath on more than a few, but now I try just to take a few deep breaths and move on.

Yes, when I post that essay, you will understand.

A big pickup truck was parked in one of the handicapped spaces. I could see no sticker, no license plate - but maybe there was something in the front window that was not visible to me from the back. 

Despite the fact she would be slow, Margie wanted to go into the store and shop for herself and I wanted to sit in the car and listen to All Things Considered on the radio. We were fortunate to find a parking space not far from the door, so I parked and she got out.

As she did, a fairly young woman with two little girls, who appeared to be her daughters, came bounding happily out of Carr's. And I mean bounding. All three were laughing and smiling, the little girls skipped and bounced and the woman moved at a brisk pace to easily keep up with them.

You can imagine my surprise when they climbed into the truck parked in the handicapped space.

That surprise soon turned to helpless terror when the lady backed out at too high a rate of speed - headed straight for my Margie, who was hobbling helplessly on her crutches. I was helpless. I could do nothing.

She missed her by inches.

Then, laughing with the little girls, she drove happily away, oblivious to what she had just about done.

Damn!

This was from one of those days when I got up late and groggy and had to go eat at Family Restaurant. It is nearly noon and that is why the sun is so high. If I had been there at a typical breakfast time, it would have been dark.

Family Restaurant.

When Kalib was a brand new baby, this waitress was delighted to see him. She oohed and aahed and cooed and all that kind of stuff. I can't wait until we can bring the next baby in and see how she reacts to him/her.

Old, wrecked, cars passing through Wasilla. Were they part of the Clunkers program? Or just old, wrecked, cars?

Did anybody ever make love in any of them?

How many hamburgers and hot dogs were eaten within?

Did anybody ever die in one?

Or break their neck and never walk again?

Or hit a man on a motorcycle and break his neck, so that he never walked again?

I find myself stopped behind a school bus.

On one side of me, this dog, Tequilla, barked furiously...

..simultaneously, on the other side, this dog barked, observed by two cows. Barking dogs, in stereo.

A typical scene from Schrock Road during a coffee break.

Jacob and Royce.

*Although I have scheduled this to appear Thursday, November 12, I actually made this post on Thursday, November 5. There are two reasons for this: 1: whatever bug it is that has got me down has left me unable to concentrate to the degree that I must to do my work. 2: The project that I have been working on is very nearly done, but I have never brought such a project to a close without going full-bore, night and day, on it at the end, distracted by no other tasks, including this blog.

So, before I go to bed, I am going to put up several days worth of posts from photos that I have recently taken but have not used. Then, for the next several days, I will not blog, I will stay away from the internet as much as possible and just bear down on getting this job done - but my posts will keep coming.

I think Kalib with get three of those posts, two at the very least.

Addendum - one image from today:

A shadow self-portrait. This is not early morning, it is not late afternoon - it is high noon. This is the season of long shadows.

A memorial to a mother, fetus and teenage girl killed by a drunk driver is destroyed*

Today I found this little angel reaching out with a flower from the tumble of stones that remain of what very recently was a memorial to a mother and a baby who died in a car crash at this place.

I did not touch the angel, I did not move it. This is exactly how I found it.

This is what the memorial looked like on May 6, 2005. Until I pedaled my bike up to it today, I had never before stopped here. I had taken a few pictures as I zipped by in the car and from my bike as well, but I never stopped. 

Other than that two lives were lost, I have no knowledge of what happened here. I do not recall reading about it in the paper, seeing the story on TV or hearing it on the radio. Perhaps someone who reads this will know and will fill me in. (Three lives, it turns out. Update at bottom.)

All I know is that one day, well before I took this picture, the white cross appeared. I wondered why. A lady who is now dead and who I would often see in her yard and who seemed to know about everything that ever happened anywhere near this neighborhood told me that a young mother and her baby had been killed when she crashed her car here. She thought it was a single-car crash, that she had just gone off the end of Church Road, across Shrock and into the embankment.

This might be correct, it might not be. I did some googling today, but I could not find the answer.

Later, the brown cross, decorated with the engraved bear, appeared.

Throughout the years, the memorial always seemed to be well-cared for.

It was the work of an ever-loving and forever-pained heart.

Only a very different kind of heart could vandalize it.

I chose this photo because it was the only one that my search engine found when I typed in the word, "cross."

One day very recently, as I passed by, I noticed that the white cross had been split and knocked down. It looked to me to be the work of vandals. I do not know for certain. It is possible that another car lost control here and drove over the cross and damaged it.

Perhaps someone driving a four-wheeler off the side of the road too fast after dark did not see it and ran over it.

I do not know.

But it looked like the work of vandals.

I had intended to take a photograph of the damaged cross, but I never did.

And now both crosses are gone.

If you look closely at the upper-left hand corner of the rock pile, you can see the little angel, lying at the junction of three rocks and a leaf.

And if you look to the right, you can barely make out some wilted flowers, and some plastic flowers.

These are the plastic flowers.

Not far from the destroyed memorial, I rode my bike through a blanket of downed leaves as fast as I could without losing control while reaching as far forward with my pocket camera as my arm would extend so that I could photograph the action.

It was hard, but I did it. How about that, Charlie? (Explanation in Wednesday's comments).

Later in the afternoon, as I was returning home from my coffee break, I saw this lady checking the mail. As you can see, the leaves are just about all down now.

Last year, by this day, the snow had set in for the season.

I am still in cocoon mode, but I have gone maybe 15 minutes over my time limit.

I wanted to keep my title short, anyway.

*Update, 8:42 AM: I originally posted this under the title:

A memorial to a deceased mother and baby is destroyed

Mark Dent, editor of the Alaska Newsreader at the Anchorage Daily News, read the post and sent me this ADN clipping from October 9, 1999 - ten years ago today - with an account of the fatal accident:

By S.J. Komarnitsky

Daily News Mat-Su Bureau 

Day:   Saturday 

Page:   E1 

Print Run Date:   10/9/1999 

Dateline:   Palmer -- 

Text:   A Wasilla man with a history of alcohol abuse and driving

illegally was charged with two counts of murder Friday in connection

with an August accident in which a teenager and pregnant woman were

killed.

John F. Magee, 37, was arraigned in Superior Court in Palmer on two

counts of second-degree murder, one count of first-degree assault and

driving while intoxicated. He may also face additional charges in

connection with the death of the fetus, prosecutors said. The woman was

eight months pregnant.

According to court documents, Magee was drunk and apparently driving

with broken windshield wipers in the rain in the early morning hours of

Aug. 15 when he ran a stop sign and crashed into a Subaru driven by

Laura Boles, 20, of Wasilla, at the intersection of Shrock and Church

roads. Boles was headed west on Shrock when she was hit by Magee, who

was headed north on Church, troopers said.

TX: The impact shoved both cars more than 60 feet off the road.

Killed were Boles, the fetus she was carrying, and a passenger, Mary A.

Williquette, 16, of Wasilla. A third passenger in Boles' car - Jacob

Buswell, 18, also of Wasilla - suffered severe injuries. Magee was also

injured.

According to court documents, Magee told troopers he had been drinking

at the Wasilla Bar, and the last thing he remembered was seeing a

stoplight near the Safeway grocery store in Wasilla, several miles from

the accident scene.

He registered a blood-alcohol level of 0.138 three hours after the

crash, according to court documents.

Ira See, an acquaintance who told troopers he was at the bar with Magee,

said the car Magee was driving did not have working windshield wipers

because the wiring had burned out, according to the court papers.

And while troopers said Magee had a valid driver's license when the

collision occurred, that has rarely been the case in recent years.

Over the past decade, Magee has been convicted at least six times for

driving without a license or driving while his license was revoked or

suspended. He also has been convicted of assault, criminal mischief, and

misconduct involving a controlled substance.

In 1980, he was convicted of driving while intoxicated and in 1988, he

was convicted of reckless driving.

Thank you, Mark.

"Bare-breasted young woman" draws bigger cyber crowd than "Sarah Palin" - and there are kites, a crash, crutches, motorcycles and dogs, too

The crash actually came first, but the kite image is both more pleasant and striking, so I begin with it. The lady flying the kites is Garen, and I found her on the Anchorage Park Strip, after I dropped Margie off for her therapy, passed the crash and stopped by the camera repair store only to find out they did not have the screws that I needed.

All three of the kites above her are Garen's and she was flying them by herself - and she was trying to launch two more. "Oh, yeah," she said, "I can fly five kites at once. I do it all the time."

She started flying kites on the park strip about two years ago, after she moved here from Lincoln City on the Oregon Coast, where kite flying is a much bigger thing than it is in Anchorage.

"It's very soothing to fly kites," she told me. "I can do it all day. I fly them in the winter, too. You should come back then."

I was curious as to what she thought of The Kite Runner, but she had not seen the movie or read the book. She had not even heard of either. She flies kites, she doesn't go to movies about flying kites, but I recommended the movie so maybe she will watch it now.

I don't know if she ever got the other two kites up so that five were flying at once, because I had to go back to the Alaska Native Medical Center to pick Margie up from her therapy.

As for the crash, I have no idea how badly the victim was hurt, or if there was more than one victim or if it was a man or woman, a child or teen. I just don't know.

I drove by and that was it. 

The crash is not mentioned in the online edition of the Anchorage Daily News, so one might want to conclude that the injuries were not that bad, because if they had been life-threatening, the accident most likely would have been reported.

But my injury 14 months ago was not life-threatening; it did not merit a write-up in the paper and neither did Margie's two this year.

Yet, the impacts upon our lives have been tremendous. So I feel for whoever it is that is being pulled out of the car and put on the stretcher, because it's a mighty big thing to him or her.

Everything might be different now.

Margie was pleased with her first session of therapy. She was especially pleased that the first thing that her therapist did was to take away her old crutches and get her some new ones, because, as it turns out, those old crutches were a good two inches too short.

This guy was smoking a cigarette when we pulled up next to him at a red light and he let loose with a big puff of smoke and even in the shadows of his car it looked quite dramatic. So I readied my pocket camera and waited for him to blow another one, but he never did.

I suspect these boys are cross-country racers, from one or another of the high schools in Anchorage. 

I was glad to get out of that city and so headed towards home and then along came these guys on their motorcycles.

We stopped at the post office in Wasilla, but before I went in to get the mail, I took a picture of myself with this dog, who was very angry. Margie gave me the cup and told me to throw it in the garbage so I did.

When I came out of the post office, this dog was there. The man said that he was a very good dog and he told me his name, but I have forgotten.

So I just call him, "Pooch," or "Poochie."

Hey, Pooch! Here, Pooch!

Poochie, Poochie, Poochie!

Concerning the salacious title of this post, readers will recall how I earlier conducted a test that confirmed that merely by putting the words, "Sarah Palin" into a blog title, I could cause my readership to soar - even if the post had nothing at all to do with Sarah Palin.

Yesterday's post brought in even more readers then did the "Sarah Palin" experiment. I figure it was because my title included these words, "bare-breasted young woman."

I wonder what will happen today?

To be precise, the numbers were: "bare-breasted": 6,982,490,324 unique hits; "Sarah Palin": 6,783,814,293 unique hits. You can see that it was close.*

*It is possible that I might have under-reported my numbers ever so slightly, so as not to embarrass my competition out there in blog space, but the ratio of "bare-breasted" hits to "Sarah Palin" hits is correct.