I bike into Wasilla spring: preface

It is late Sunday morning and I find myself feeling extremely lazy and lethargic. I do not want to do anything. Melanie has bought Margie and I some tickets to an appearance by Ira Glass of This American Life, scheduled for 4:00 PM, so in just a few hours we will leave to join her there. At some point after that, I will drop Margie back off at Jacob and Lavina's house, where she will again stay for the next four days to care for Jobe, so his mom can go back to work - this time for real, I hope. No more e-coli!

Between now and when we leave for Anchorage, I want to do nothing but be lazy.

As much as I love this blog, I do not want to work in it right now. 

Yet, yesterday was a fantastically beautiful and warm day. At mid-afternoon, the temperature was 48 degrees, the sky was deep, clean, blue, the sun shone brightly and so I climbed onto my bike and took a good ride, one that took me past young children and old men, wary-looking police and through a park where basketballs soared toward hoops and kids on skateboards took to the air and I crashed my bike and could have ruined my shoulder all over again, but I came out just fine.

I also pedaled through the graveyard, where I could not help but feel sad to see memorials to children who do not toss basketballs, ride skateboards, bikes, or play at all.

So I had planned to put up a spread from that bike ride right now and I have already lined up 21 pictures from it.

But, on this Sunday morning, I haven't the energy or the will.

So I will make today's post a preface to that story and will plan to post it tomorrow.

Unless this blog gets too distracted by today's events.

The barista, her nipples and the hungry baby; Kalib jumps upon shadows

I pulled up to a coffee hut near Jacob and Lavina's house in Anchorage and the barista stepped to the window. It was one of those kiosks with a somewhat elevated floor and a window that is long in the vertical dimension so that when the barista moves about behind it, her full figure is on display and - by coincidence, I am certain - the figures always seem to be shapely.

Still, it is close to their house, I had promised Margie and Lavina that I would bring them each a cup, the coffee is Kaladi and usually very good, so I pulled up and ordered three.

Shortly afterward, the barista found that she had to perform a task that required her to bend over, toward me. This put her breasts within arm's reach and right at my eye level. Their magnetism pulled my eyes right to them. I then discovered that I was looking, not at cleavage, but at breasts - full breasts, in their entirety - and they were the kind of breasts that, once glimpsed... well, you know.

When such a sight is put in a front of a heterosexual male of any age, he cannot help but want to look at it. That is the way God made the human male and there is no way around it. That's how we are. Yet, I know that it would be impolite and unseemly for me to stare, so, naturally, I averted my eyes toward the nearby car wash. A GMC pickup truck was just emerging from one of the cleaning stalls. Steam rolled out with it and churned into the air all around it.

I watched that truck depart, then turned back to the window. The breasts were still there. The barista had to know, so I thought maybe it would be okay if I studied them for a bit, but I quickly rethought this position, turned away and watched another vehicle emerge from the steam and then depart.

I turned back... still there. I turned away.

Finally, the delightful breasts of the barista had been removed from my sight, she had handed me the coffees and I had paid and tipped her the same as I would have if she had been dressed like an old-fashioned school marm. I did not try to stuff the tip into anything. I just handed it to her. I drove away, feeling a bit shaken.

A few minutes later, I carried the coffees into the living room to give to Margie and Lavina. "I don't think that I should go back to that coffee hut," I said as I handed them their drinks.

"Why?" one or the other of them asked.

"I feel like I have just been to a strip club," I answered. They both laughed.

"Did you see something?" Lavina asked.

"Yes!" I answered. "Everything! From here up," I placed my hand at sternum level. "Even her nipples! Her nipples were fully exposed. So I don't think I had better go back there. I may be growing old, but I'm not dead."

Sometimes, when Margie holds a baby, she speaks for the baby, becomes its mouthpiece. Now she spoke for Jobe.

"Nipples? Oh, boy, grampa!" she spoke in happy baby tones. "Me know what to do with nipples! Me hungry. Me can make good use of those nipples."

We adults all laughed some more and then Lavina asked, "where did you get the coffee?"

"You know, that place right over there, where we usually get the coffee." The name had slipped me.

"The Hot Spot?" she asked again.

"Yes, the Hot Spot."

"The REALLY Hot Spot," she added.

"Yes," I agreed. "And they looked really nice, too."

To be quite honest with you, I still haven't fully gotten over it.

The worst part of it is, right now, Jobe cannot have mother's milk. Regular readers will recall that Margie went into town Sunday night, planning to spend four days and nights taking care of Jobe so that Lavina could go back to work.

Instead, Lavina got sick - very sick, painfully sick. e-coli sick. So Margie took care of both her and the baby and stayed a fifth day. Lavina is now feeling much better, but even so is taking medication that will prevent her from breast feeding Jobe again until May.

So Margie fed him some formula and then burped him.

A bit after 6:00 PM, Jacob came home from work with Kalib, who he had picked up from day care. A tennis ball preceded them up the stairs.

Muzzy snatched the tennis ball and made it his own.

Kalib walks across the living room floor without his tennis ball.

Where is the tennis ball now?

Here comes Martigny. Maybe she hid it.

Kalib, Lavina and Martigny. No tennis ball can be seen anywhere.

This cannot be disputed.

I was even more tired than Kalib and I knew that Margie was, too. I wanted to get going, headed back home.

Jacob and Lavina invited us to go to dinner with them at Taco King. We decided to delay our departure long enough to take them up on it.

Jacob left ahead of the rest of us, walking with Muzzy. Kalib and Jobe got buckled into their car seats in their family's Tahoe and, given the fact that Lavina was still weak, Margie drove them all.

I drove our car, so that we could head straight for home afterward.

I arrived at Taco King first and, as I waited outside for the others to arrive, an airplane flew overhead.

When dinner was over and it came time to say goodbye, Kalib jumped on his mom's shadow.

Then he jumped on "Shadow."

He stomps on Shadow's left leg.

Kalib, living in his grandfather's shadow.

Kalib, shadow hopping.

More shadow hoping.

Then it was time to go.

I should note that before I went to buy the coffee and pick Margie up, I had a little business meeting. Very soon, I will be working on a new project and can start paying bills again. Such can be life when you are a freelance photographer.

I am very glad about it - but this does not change the fact that, whatever projects I must take on to survive, I now see my real work and future as tied into the development of this blog. I will still put up that button, hopefully today and will work on other schemes to bring in blog-based funding. I give myself until July 14, 2011, to figure out how to make this thing self-sufficient.

And whoever you are in New Jersey, thank you. I will be in touch.

Weak though this winter was, it does not want to die

Yesterday morning, I stepped out the door into the driveway to pick up the newspaper when I saw something that I had not witnessed since I arrived home from the east coast. There were puddles in the driveway, and they were liquid. On all the other mornings since I had returned home, I found the puddles frozen, often solid, top to bottom. 

Usually, they melted before the day ended, just as the snow was doing, but come the next morning, they had always refrozen.

I also saw some pussy willows, their fluffy baby kitty cats expanding rapidly towards the green into which they will soon disappear.

"Do you think its finally going to be spring?" a friendly man at Family Restaurant who introduced himself as Rob asked. Yes, I answered, and I told him about the liquid puddles, but I did not think to mention the pussy willows.

And then, in the afternoon, it started to snow. Big flakes. At the usual time, I got into the car and headed toward Metro Cafe. The external temperature read 32 degrees.

For you in the celsius world, that would be "0."

"Bill!" Carmen exclaimed, when she saw me at the window, "it's winter again!"

Then she, Baranson and Jason posed for Through the Window Metro Study, #22.39.

I am pretty certain that, by this time next week, MOMA in New York will have discovered this image and my financial problems will be solved forever. The money will flow in and Margie and I will spend a lot of time in Mexico, at last able to spend the remaining portion of our lives fishing under the sun, alongside poor people who have spent their entire lives fishing.

Carmen was born in Mexico. She gets that one.

We often laugh about it - the people who work hard all their lives so that they can save up enough money to retire to Mexico and fish.

I drove on, sipping, and saw this lady walking with an umbrella on Church Road.

And at another coffee shop, one that I often frequented before Metro Cafe opened and still sometimes do on Sundays when Metro is closed, I saw someone else buying coffee, or maybe soft ice cream.

I am certain, come the hot days of summer, that, despite our loyalty to Carmen and her coffee, we will still come to Little Miller's for ice cream now and then.

This was a weak, warm, winter. One of the warmest and weakest that I ever remember here. Maybe the warmest and weakest. I don't know. I haven't seen the final statistics. Plus, as warm and weak as it was, sometimes, even much colders winters are interrupted by big, huge, long-lasting South Pacific storms that blow in hard, bring driving rain and temperatures up to 50.

Those storms came, but not with quite the same heat and intensity, so I do know if this brought might have constrained the average from rising as high as it otherwise would have. But most of this winter, it was mighty warm for this area.

Sometimes, the warmest winters are the most reluctant to depart.

Now, as to that button, I had planned to put it up with this post, but I got sidetracked on a different site, where another photographer who thinks that he knows more than he does disparaged pocket cameras and any need to ever use them if one has a DSLR.

I had to defend the honor of the pocket camera.

It's true - technically speaking, all of these pictures would have turned out a bit better if I had used a DSLR instead of a pocket camera, but that is beside the point.

Thanks to that argument, I have no time left to figure out how to put up the button, so it will have to wait.

The Vietnam veteran and the returned Mormon missionary; the bicycle and the wrecked airplane

Doubtless, regular readers are wondering what a man in my financial situation is doing dining out at Mat-Su Valley Restaurant for breakfast? Four nights have now passed since Margie went into Anchorage to stay and take care of baby Jobe and one more will pass until she returns to spend just two nights here before she goes back again.

As much as I love this house and the cats who wake with me, it feels awfully chilly and damn bleak in here in the mornings. Whereas, it will be warm at Family Restaurant. There will be smiling people there, waitresses who will serve me coffee and laugh even if I make an unfunny joke.

This is Jobina, doing just that.

I like the name, "Jobina." It's like a feminine version of Jobe. 

If I can, I always like to get this spot, because from here I have a good view not only of all the people sitting and moving around inside this busy, warm diner, scented with the aroma of breakfast cooking, but of those wandering to and fro outside.

My observations tell me that a very broad array of Wasilla life passes in and out of this diner, particularly at breakfast time.

Also, if I am very lucky and the train comes bye, I can often get a pretty good look at it from this window seat.

So I would rather be here in the midst of all this than all alone inside my chilly house. The melting snows did expose a fair amount of firewood that had been hidden in our yard, so I can always heat the house up, but, by the time it gets comfortable, I will be done with breakfast. 

And even if I have no cash, I do have a credit card. So its off to Family I go.

Plus, to eat here is a sign of optimism, that things will soon get better and I will be able to pay all my bills.

I took this picture for future reference and it had not been my intent to post it just yet. Many veterans come into Mat-Su Family, and I have a desire to know their stories to the extent that they would be willing to share - just as I would like to know the stories of so many who I see gathering at Family. 

I have this idea in my head that as time progresses and I figure out how to fund this blog so that I can have the time to more effectively pursue my goal of finding the soul of Wasilla and to tell such stories, I will do just that. Seeing the hat, I thought this veteran might have a good story to tell, so I took the picture to remind me to look for him in the future, when that time comes.

As it happened, we wound up in line together at the cash register, so I asked if he had been a POW. No, he said, he had friends that had been and the experience had been hell for them. However bad combat might get, he said he had always kept a bullet in reserve for himself, just to make certain that he would never become a POW.

He served in Vietnam in the very early '70s, in what he described as the clean-up stages of the war, as the US was deciding to quit and pull out.

When I talk to such men, I am always self-conscious of the fact that they risked their lives in Vietnam and I did not. It had been my intent to go. When I was a senior at El Camino High School in a suburb of Sacramento, I decided that I would break with what had become the tradition in my family and what all of us males were expected to do. I would not go to Brigham Young University and I would not serve a two-year Mormon mission. I would enlist in the Army, and go for the Green Beret.

But I was in love with a red-headed girl who did decide to go to BYU. I knew that if I did not follow her there to protect my interests, she would marry a returned Mormon Missionary, as any good Mormon girl would.

So, at the last possible moment, I surrendered my plan to enlist, applied to BYU and was accepted. I followed the red-headed girl there and lived in misery as a returned Mormon missionary courted her. We would still get together to share an occasional lunch or movie or a concert and I took her motorcycle riding a couple of times. The the RM who courted her ordered her not to ride with me anymore, as it was just too damn dangerous.

I might crash and break her neck.

She did marry him, but by then I was in love with her best friend and was not troubled.

Vietnam was a very unpopular war and many people felt that the draft was being most unfairly applied. If you were wealthy, a college student, a Mormon missionary or fell into a number of other categories, you could get a deferment and most likely never be drafted to serve.

But if you did not fall into such a category and you were in good health, then you could pretty much count on being drafted.

This unfairness created such an uproar that a lottery system was instated in which each date of the year was drawn at random. If one's birthday came up number one, then, in theory, whether he was rich, a genious in college, a Mormon missionary or whatever, he was going to be drafted.

If one's birthday came up at #365, there was no chance in the world that he would be drafted.

My number came up 321. After that, the draft was not an issue for me anymore.

In the meantime, I found myself the object of a horrendous amount of social pressure, filled with exhortations that I repent, make my life right with God, yield to The Spirit, accept the call and go serve a mission. Worse yet, I looked into the eyes of my sweet mother and saw that if I did not go, I was going to break her heart. And there was no chance that the best friend would ever marry me if I didn't.

So I told everyone that The Spirit had come to me and so I had repented and was ready to go on a mission. No more weed for me. I had toked my last joint, taken my final hit off the hookah.

That's how I wound up not going to Vietnam. Instead I went to South Dakota, to teach the Lakota that they must never drink coffee. It was my mission to remake them, but they remade me. After two years, I returned to BYU - but found that I could not really return. 

As to this gentleman, he remarked that Vietnam was an unpopular war and that when he returned, he found out what it felt like to feel the wrath of the people for whom he had served. He said that people sometimes ask him why served, did he believe in the war?

It was not a matter of whether or not he believed in the war, he told me, but rather that the fact that he had a duty to serve his country and so he did.

This is what passed between us as we paid our bills at Family Restaurant. It was a very brief visit, and I thought that I would wait until another time and then have him tell me more of his story. I would take a portrait to go along with the interview, and would then include this picture as well.

But what if that time never comes? What if I do not see him again at Family?

What if I forget I ever took this picture and it just slips away unseen into my archives, as do the vast majority of the pictures that I take, never to be seen by anyone?

So here it is, with this tiny fragment of the man's story along with one from my own.

I got lucky! The train came rumbling by!

Yes, many veterans come to eat at Mat-Su Valley Family Restaurant.

When I came out, I saw this dog in the back of a truck. When I see such a dog, I find the urge to reach out and touch it to be...

...irresistible!

Inside the Metro Cafe, Study #8881: Carmen and Tyler, who is ten and loves to play football - and me, too.

After I completed the study, Carmen caught the unmistakable scent of cologne wafting off Tyler. She teased him a little bit for that, as she now knew that he had interests even beyond football.

After driving away from Metro Cafe, I saw a man riding a motorcycle.

And another sweeping the place where his driveway meets Church Road.

Some days I see Caleb and some days I don't. As he works all night and sleeps in the day, our waking paths seldom cross.

They crossed here, though - with me going one direction down our street and he the other. They also crossed when he stepped into my office to pay me a surprise visit.

"Dad," he said. "I patched your back tire. Your front tire was low, so I put air in that, too."

So I took my first bike ride of 2010. I am badly out of shape now and did not know far I should go. I decided to pedal the 1.5 miles to Church Road and see how I felt when I got there. If I felt good, I would turn right, go to the Little Susistna River and put my front wheel in the water.

If it felt like that might be overdoing it, that the return trip, largely uphill, would overstress my flaccid muscles and tear apart my weak lungs, then I would turn left and follow a shorter, flatter, more easy route.

The final approach to Church Road is all uphill, and I was a bit upset when I realized how it was taxing me. I deemed myself unfit to make the return from the Little Su and so concluded that I must turn left.

I turned right, anyway, and headed for the Little Su.

I did not put my front wheel in the water, though, because I felt that if I did, the under-cut ice might break beneath me and I would get my shoes, socks and pants wet. I wanted to keep them dry.

After I left the Little Su and neared the curve that leads to the biggest and steepest hill, I saw this guy ahead of me, cutting down the vegetation alongside the road before it can begin to grow.

No more snow plows for awhile.

After I topped the first big hill, I pedaled along on a flat stretch toward the corner where I would turn back onto Church Road and then face the next set of up and down hills. At some point, I glanced behind me and saw another biker, who had just topped that hill. I pedaled a little further and then looked back again. It seemed he was gaining on me.

I did not want him to pass me, but I realized that he was almost certainly younger and stronger and in better shape, that he was going to pass me whether I wanted him to or not.

I reached Church Road, turned right, climbed up the first big hill, then began my descent towards the next upward grade.

As I coasted down, I glanced back and there he was - closer yet, I was certain.

Damn. He was going to pass me.

Oh well. I would take a picture of him as he pedaled by me.

I decided that I would take a series of pictures of him closing the gap, passing me, and then moving on. I began with this one.

I then climbed the next hill and then again coasted toward the bottom of the third. Again I looked back. I was surprised to see that my competitor was now further back than he had been.

I figured maybe it was because I was going downhill now and he had been going up. Now he would be going downhill and I would soon be going up. I was certain he would yet close the gap and pass.

But no, he never did - even though he turned left on Seldon just like I did and followed me all the way to my street. In fact, each time I looked back I found him to be a little further behind. It became pointless to take any more pictures, for he had become such a small dot, readers could not have even picked him out.

That's what he gets for deciding that he, being so young and strong was going to humiliate a much older man who hadn't pedaled a bike since early October.

Of course, he never came close enough for me to actually confirm age or sex for certain.

I supposed it is possible that he was actually an 87 year-old woman who was pretty damn pleased that, though she never caught him, she kept that young guy worried every pedal of the way that an old lady was going to smoke him.

Or maybe it could even have been Patty, out keeping her cancer at bay.

When I got home, I parked my bike by the wreckage of my airplane, The Running Dog. I thought about the good days, when this dog and I flew together all over the main body of Alaska, up and down the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers, through the valleys of the Alaska and Brooks Ranges, across Canada's Yukon Territory and into The Northwest Territories.

Why did I ever have to get cocky and crash the damn thing?

I can't stand it, being grounded like this. As I have said before, I dream about airplanes - usually this one, every night.

I have a friend in Cordova who says that if I really wanted another plane, I would have one by now. He cites himself as an example, pointing out how he wanted a big crab boat once, didn't have the money for it but got one anyway.

I'm glad for him, but he's 100 percent wrong about me. He is a bachelor and lives in a house that he inherited from his father and he simply has no idea what I face.

But he's right, too. To accomplish what I want to accomplish, I must get another airplane. Somehow, there is a way.

On this day, when I have no money to pay the simplest bill, when I owe the IRS, when I go to Family Restaurant only because I have a credit card and then I bring the leftovers and derive a second meal from them later and to Metro for coffee only because Margie has given me access to the bottles full or quarters that she has saved up over years, it seems utterly impossible.

But it's not impossible. It can be done. I must yet find the way.

A Pay Pal donation button to help with this blog isn't going to do it, but still, you who have urged me to put on on here have convinced me that I am not begging if I do, so I will.

Soon.

In need of a break, I turn to Tequilla

I don't care how much someone loves doing something, every now and then he must take a short break. 

So, right now, I am going to take a short break from this blog. Not a complete break, for I will post these two pictures of Tequilla, who came running and barking at me as I walked. 

Again, she wanted me to think she was mean and tough, instead of sweet and nice. Again, I was not fooled.

Tequilla!

I will be back tomorrow to catch up a bit - more or less back on schedule. I will address the suggestion that a number of you have made to me regarding a donation button, and some of my thoughts as to how I might fund this blog. As absurd as it may sound, I want to make this blog into a real, genuine, online publication that pays for itself and gives me a foundation from which to pursue my work.

I must do it.