On Father's Day, the mast snapped and then we ate at Bombay Valley

Rex called from Anchorage to announce that, for father's day, he would bring his sailboat out - the very same sailboat that launched this blog. A brisk wind blew, so he planned to drive straight to Memory Lake, give me a call from there and launch. 

Then I could come and he would take me on a little ride around the lake. Next, Melanie called to say that she was on her way out and Lisa would be leaving Anchorage a bit after she did.

So Melanie arrived with Charlie and we decided to go get a coffee. Rex called immediately after the decision, and said he would soon launch and to bring him a coffee, too.

Finally, we arrived at Memory Lake. Rex and his boat were a tiny dot on the other side of the lake, but no sail could be seen.

A man sat on the shore, fishing, and told us that Rex had really caught the wind and had been sailing fast, when suddenly his mast broke. Rex then called to report that he could not make any headway trying to paddle against the wind, so he was just going to let it blow him to the west end of the lake. We could pick him up there.

So, off we went. None of us had ever driven to the west end and we did not know how to get there. Melanie pulled up a map on her iphone, put in our GPS location and then navigated.

She got us there, but it was private property.

Still, Rex needed to be picked up so we picked him up.

Back at the house, a bit tired, slightly discouraged but not at all daunted, Rex uses Muzzy for a footrest. I hope to have some free time in August. I will be lucky if I can take even a single day off between now and then - maybe by late July.

But if I succeed at my goal, then we can go sailing in August. Out on the high seas. In gale force winds. The mast will be reinforced then. It will be great fun. Maybe we will wind up in China. I have long wanted to visit China.

We could wind up in Russia, but I've already been there.

Stark and harsh though it was, I liked it, but I would rather go to China this time.

Thus followed a great debate about what the kids should do for me for Father's Day.

In the end, we decided to go out for dinner at Bombay Valley Indian Food Restaurant. It is kind of amazing that there is an Indian food restaurant in Wasilla, but there is.

The food was really, really, hot - hotter than anything I had in India.

It was good, though. Very good. 

Yet, still, when the taste of Vasanthi's excellent cooking still lingers... along with the master chef's that catered Soundarya's wedding... and the other great cooks that we had, including Sandy herself, who cooked our very last meal in India...

It would just be unfair to compare, so I will just say Bombay Valley is quite good and, if you can't get to India, I would recommend it.

And my food was free, because I'm a dad, and at Bombay Valley, dads ate free today.

Camera shy man and his cat - fur on and off the body; a tiny bus in India...US and India come together in one little baby

I meet many people when I walk about and one of them I shall call Bart, who I see often, but never photograph, because he is very camera shy. We stand and talk about all kinds of things, from his stint in the military to his recent heart attack to my shoulder injury, but mostly we talk about his cats, Varmit and Jesse James.

When I got there today he was a bit  worried about Varmit. I was not certain how long he had been out there with the cats, but he said that Varmit had disappeared. He had not seen him for quite awhile, whereas Jesse was staying close.

As soon as he said this, I saw Varmit looking at me through the bushes and grasses. "There he is!" I said, pointing right at the little creature you see here.

Actually, I took this picture first, but I wanted to introduce "Bart" right away, even if you can not see his face, but only his pants, shoes and socks.

So the pictures are out of order.

I don't care. Life is often out of order.

Varmit walks to Dan. I never did see Jesse James. As you can see, Varmit is wearing his fur, just the way a cat ought to. 

I walked on and soon, up ahead aways, saw something furry that looked dead and mangled, like maybe it had been run over by several cars. I wondered if it was a dog or a cat, but when I got close, I saw that it was a bit of moose fur.

So what was this chunk of moose fur doing here? How had the moose been killed? When? It is way out of season. Did someone poach the moose? Did some dogs kill a calf? Did the moose die of natural causes and then get torn up by dogs?

Was it shot legally in moose season, and then maybe this piece of fur got frozen somewhere, or was stored somewhere and now it is here?

Did I know this moose?

Did I photograph it when it was alive?

I didn't know. I will never know. And neither will you.

Unless it was poached, and you are the poacher and you happen to also be a reader of my blog.

Arrest yourself then, you damn poacher! Turn yourself in!

These dogs were dressed in their fur, just like dogs ought to be.

I have been a little frustrated about my India take, because I simply have not had any time to delve into it and edit it and, for two weeks time, I have a lot of material. A lot. I could blog India regularly all summer long.

And I still have two ceremonies from Sandy's wedding day yet to edit and post!

No time!

So today, just to keep the idea of India alive, I picked a folder at random, dropped at random into a point near the middle, drug about 10 images to my editing program and then checked to see what popped up, so that I could post it.

And this little bus popped up. It was so small that it almost should not be called a bus, but it was too big to be a van. So I call it a bus.

And this beautiful lady was sitting right there, towards the back.

A little bit in front of her was this young girl.

And then there was this man in a turbin, and a young boy.

And this is the place that they had come to visit. It is called Aihole, and it is a magnificent series of ruins of temples and other buldings constructed in the sixth through eighth centuries. These are school children who had come on a field trip to observe some of their own heritage first hand.

Hopefully, before the summer ends, I will be able blog it better.

And here is a little bit of America and India blended together; of my family and Soundarya’s family, united as one family in the ultimate way: 

Ada Lakshmi Iyer, the baby that I told you about last night, in the hands of her father, Vivek, my nephew-in-law, but I just call him Nephew.

My sister, Mary Ann, Ada Lakshmi's gramma, took the picture. She did not send me one with my niece Khena, her daughter and Ada's mom.

Had Vivek and Khena never came together, none of this would have ever happened. I would not even know Soundarya existed and I certainly would not have photographed her wedding. I would probably never even have stepped into India, not even once, over my entire life.

Unbearable thought. Just unbearable.

Thank you, Khena and Vivek, for bringing us all together.

And congratulations!

That's a lot of hair on your beautiful daughter!

A Citabria, a ragdoll and a baby

I had planned to leave for the Arctic Slope Sunday, but then Margie said that I should wait until Monday, to give whomever of our children might be around the chance to honor me on Father's Day. So I agreed to wait. By today, I realized that I could not possibly accomplish all that I must do before I leave by Monday, so I put the date of departure to Barrow off until Tuesday afternoon. Then Wednesday morning I will leave for Point Lay.

Having all this to do, I have basically spent the entire day sitting right here, where I sit now, in front of my computer, working my fingers off. And that is pretty much all that I will have time to do between now and my departure.

Still, I must walk a little bit, pedal a bike a little, and as I walked, an airplane flew overhead. Do you recognize it? It is a Citabria, like mine, like the one that I crashed on that dreadful day in Mentasta, Alaska.

And yet the day was so happy, for that was the day that Katie John celebrated her victory over the State of Alaska, the day that the right of she and her family to catch salmon at their traditional home was finally recognized.

And everybody who came to the celebration, from Governor Knowles to Katie's Athabascan attorney, Heather Kendall-Miller, drove by the wreckage of the Running Dog and they all said, "My goodness! Someone crashed an airplane. I hope no one was hurt."

And then they discovered that it was me that had crashed and I carried on, and photographed the celebration, because that is what I had come to Mentasta to do.

I got some good pictures, too. I wrote up a decent enough story.

Do you feel the longing?

And it is more than longing. Not having that airplane is a damned hardship. My jet ticket to Barrow will cost nearly $800. My roundtrip ticket from Barrow to Point Lay over $500. And then it is imperative that I visit as many of the other North Slope villages as I can.

All those tickets will cost money.

As airplanes go, the Running Dog was a gas sipper, not a guzzler, and I could even put car gas in it. I probably could have made the whole trip for not much more than the cost of that round trip fare between Barrow and Point Lay.

And I could come and go when it suited me, not on someone else's schedule. And I could carry more gear, including a good knife, a rifle and bullets, without ever going through security.

And it was a whole lot more fun.

As I walked, a lady friend from Serendipity picked me up and took me to her house for coffee. Her ragdoll cat was there and so was her husband. And a little dog.

We talked about moose and such.

My niece, Khena, delivered a baby today in Minneapolis.

Ada Lakshmi Iyer is the name of the little beauty and there are pictures of her on Facebook, taken by my sister, Mary Ann, the proud Gramma. Hey, baby sister - how can this word, "gramma," apply to you?

And yet, given the ages of our children, you and I could both have been grandparents over ten years ago.

Khena's proud husband, by the way, is Vivek, first cousin to Soundarya.

Vasanthi, Vivek's mother, is planning to move in with them in September to help take care of the baby and will stay until January. Come the Minnesota winter, she will have a brand new experience.

But then I know India Indian people who live and work on the Arctic Slope, so I suspect that she will do okay, but there will probably be times when she won't like it at all. 

Family Restaurant: the Little girl, her umbrella, the Vietnam vet and his Harley; Wasilla graveyard and thoughts of death; Red Escape at Midnight

I can hear the criticism already. "Bill, you are damn near broke, yet you waste entirely too much money eating out, driving to Taco Bell and going to Family Restaurant for your damned eggs! You should have stayed home and cooked yourself some oatmeal with raspberries."

You who thus criticize are entirely correct, yet, this is how I look at it: Margie, Kalib, and Lavina have been gone to Arizona for nearly ten days now. By the time they get back, I will be gone myself, not to return until late July. Basically, since they left, I now spend my entire day hanging out with cats but no people. Combined, I see Caleb and Jacob for 8 minutes and 47 seconds per day. 

I am a person who does good alone. I always have something to do, I never get bored and if am not working on photographs or words or such, which I almost always am, then there are many interesting conversations taking place in my head.

Yet, sometimes, I feel this ache, this unbearable feeling. I tend to feel it very strongly right after I get up. I do not want to cook, not even oatmeal. I just want to let my head and mind relax, not worry about anything. I want to sit down somewhere and have someone take care of everything for me - cook my food, pour my coffee, bring me toast, lie to me and tell me how handsome I am. Some waitresses will do that.

So I get in the car and head to Family Restaurant.

The girl above is Nya Lee, "I just turned four," and she also headed to Family Restaurant this morning. It was not raining, but she brought her umbrella, anyway. "When it rains, I am ready."

She dressed herself this morning. She was very proud of that.

This is Dan, Vietnam veteran, who also ate at Family this morning. He is from Fairbanks and drove his big Harley down, but now that he had eaten breakfast, he was going to drive back. Given the overcast, I do not think that he would have gotten the chance to see Denali today - but, oh, how magnificent that would be, to motor by Denali on a big Harley!

And the lady with Dan is Sue. She has her own big Harley, but moved to Dan's to get in the picture. Sue has lived in Fairbanks all her life, which is 50 some years - I can't remember precisely. She likes Fairbanks, but she is tired of winter. She can hardly stand the thought of another winter. She wants to get out for the winter.

I do not know how Dan feels about the Fairbanks winter. We did not talk about it. We talked just the tiniest amount and that was about Vietnam. He could not remember for certain when he went there, but thought it was in 1969, and 1971 when he left. He served in the Navy, both on a surface ship and a submarine, which he said was the last World War II sub still in commission.

I wanted to know more, of course, but he was anxious to hit the road. "I'm going to start to sweat if I don't get moving soon," he said. So I thanked him, both for posing for my blog, and for giving himself to my nation. Maybe I would have wound up in Vietnam, too, but when the draft lottery was instituted, I drew number 21. So I would never be drafted.

I thought about enlisting, but did other things instead. 

Someday, I will write about some of those other things.

Many of you will be surprised, if not shocked.

I took this picture as I pedaled my bicycle past the Wasilla cemetery. This is the upper, newer part of the cemetery. The lower part looks more traditional, with larger crosses and tombstones. I never want to lie here. I want to be cremated, and spread about.

Not that I will give a damn.

Shortly before I took this picture, I was pedaling along the bike trail that follows Lucille. There is one point where that trail rises up a hill, maybe 30 feet above the road. As I pedaled up that slope, my mind dwelt upon the topic of death, because I know a great many people who are dead and one cannot help but contemplate who might be next and when that next person might be he.

Just as I reached the top of the hill, I raised my eyes from the trail and looked down at Lucille Street. There, coming from the opposite direction, almost directly below me, was a van with these words emblazoned upon it: "Rock of Ages." It surprised me, and I momentarily lost control of my bike. As I had been pedaling uphill, my momentum was erratic. The bike turned sharply to the left, towards the drop off down to the road, towards a telephone pole.

I recovered at the last possible moment, just before I would have went over.

That would have been an interesting way to die. Trouble is, no one would have known about the series of events that led me to that death, except for me. And I wouldn't have known either.

I'll bet "Rock of Ages" would have just driven on, because by the time I went over I would have been out of the driver's vision. So he would have driven on, not even knowing he had just helped send someone to the promised land, whatever that might be.

Three nights ago, I stopped writing in this blog just a few minutes before midnight, as I had not taken a single picture that day and needed to get some kind of image before the day ended. I stated that you would probably never see that image, but I changed my mind.

This is it. I headed straight for the front porch and took this picture off of it.

So this is the red Escape at midnight. Midnight in Wasilla, Alaska, as the summer solstice draws near.

This is nothing compared to the Arctic Slope - as you will soon see.

I pass by a series of modest calamities, and then wind up at Taco Bell

Calamity Number 1: A four-wheeler is broken down, less than two blocks into my journey. I do not know what the problem is, but it looks pretty bad.

Calamity Number 2: Somebody's hood is open. There is a gas can on the ground by the red car. This is a perplexing combination. I can't figure it out. This happened less than one mile from my house.

Calamity Number 3: A tire has gone flat. A man fills it from a can as a woman observes while smoking a cigarette. This happened right in the Taco Bell parking lot.

A lady two vehicles ahead places her order as I think of inept calvary men. This is the Palmer Taco Bell, by the way. They tore the Wasilla one down while I was in India. When I left on that trip, I had this feeling that something bad would happen before I came home. Sure enough, it did. Margie thinks they had a fire in there, but is not certain.

Some people choose to eat inside. Me, I choose to sit in the car and eat outside.

The man ahead of me gets his order. I grow impatient with hunger.

He gives me my Pepsi. It is only my second Pepsi this week, so its okay that it is a large one. Plus, I am riding my bike a lot.

This is why I chose to eat outside, and not inside. I don't know why anyone would want to eat inside.

And then this worker comes to throw away trash. He is very thrilled to have the opportunity to be in my blog.

I get to witness the action. If I had eaten inside, I would have missed this.

Back in Wasilla, I see two dogs through a dirty windshield. A man walks with them.

Such is life in the Far North - well, the southern part of the Far North.

I will get back to blogging India. I just don't have time, right now. I don't even have time for this. That's why I drove to Taco Bell in the first place, because I did not have time to make a sandwich for lunch. And there was no ham.

I think it will take me all summer to blog my two weeks in India. Maybe a year. I will blog it, though - else why did I even take all those pictures?