Lifted by the song; darkness coming on - for awhile, anyway

Back in the days before I broke my airplane and I would be somewhere in rural Alaska where the people had been singing - be it traditional musice accompanied by skin drums, gospel, fiddle or whatever, when I would finally leave and fly away, I would still hear the music in my head.

It would seem to me that it was not the flow of air against my wings that lifted up my plane to hold me in the air, but rather the flow and spirit of the music.

This is John Tagarook, performing in the singspiration that took place last night in conjunction with the Healthy Communities Summit.

Even though I was on the ground last night and not in my airplane, I got that same feeling again, as the people played and sang. I got the feeling that I could again sit in the cockpit of my own airplane, Alaska beneath my wings, kept aloft by the spirit of the people among whom I have been so fortunate to roam.

That would include Stephanie Aishanna, who, as you can see, sings with strong feeling.

Readers of yesterday's post would surely have noticed that winter has set in for good up here in the Far North. Elsie Itta, who here sings next to her husband, North Slope Borough Mayor Edward Itta, spoke of how hard this time of year can be on the spirit, when we know that the light is going and soon it will dark and cold all though the day.

Last year, the time of darkness was expecially hard on Elsie, as her mother passed away on the very day that the sun briefly rose for the last time that season and then slipped below the horizon for the next 63 days straight.

It was hard, she said. That was a long 63 days. But the sun did come back. No matter how dark it gets, the sun always comes back, Elsie said.

Here, she and those who sing with her, including Ada Lincoln, the Reverend Mary Ann Warden and Mabel Smith, perfom "Precious Memories... how they linger..."

This is Tiffany Kayotuk of Kaktovik with baby Calleigh Gordon, who is visiting from Anaktuvuk Pass.

The man pictured on the wall is Tom Gordon, who I once went moose hunting with in Anaktuvuk Pass, where he had lived for awhile. From that day forward, whenever I would see Tom, he would greet me with genuine warmth and love. He even used the word, "love."

In time, he moved from Anaktuvuk Pass back here to Kaktovik, his native village. 

In the summer of 2008, he was out hunting with his son, Simon, when a powerful storm hit. They were on land - a spit, I believe, when Tom slipped and fell into the water wearing his heavy hunting gear. Simon grabbed him and tried to pull him in, but wound up going out with him instead.

Both men drowned.

This past summer, Kaktovik, still grieving for this man who made everybody here feel just as he made me feel, and his son, staged a huge memorial Gospel celebration, for which they painted and decorated the cummunity center.

Since that time, nobody has wanted to take down the decorations and they are still there.

If I had known about that celebration, I would surely have come, but I first learned about it yesterday, when I walked into the hall and saw how it had been painted and decorated.

Singing beneath the portrait is Tiffany and Courtney Kayotuk.

Yesterday, I briefly mentioned the young guys who have come to the village from Utah. This is one them, Zac, who caught me off guard as I was eating and he suddenly broke out in break dance.

And this is Flora Rexford, who Eskimo dances in pure beauty, with her nephew, Colin. There will be an Eskimo dance tomorrow. I will make a point to show you.

A scene from the Healthy Communities Summit, early yesterday. 

Kids at play.

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Here I am, in Kaktovik, attending the Healthy Communities Summit

I have arrived in Kaktovik. I am at the Healthy Communities Summit and the summit has begun. My post will be brief - just to let readers know that I am here. After we landed this morning, I saw this snowplow, clearing the runway.

This is the Waldo Arms Hotel. I am not staying here, but Big Bob Aiken of Barrow was driving me around along with some young people who have come up from Utah and they wanted to get something to eat, so we dropped them off at the Waldo Arms - where the hamburgers are said to be superb.

It has been years - perhaps over a decade - since I last ate a Waldo Arms hamburger, but it was pretty good then, too.

A school bus, passing by, the Beaufort Sea in the background. There are polar bears out on the spit that you see, but this is too far away for me to get a picture. Maybe I will get a chance to get out there before I leave. Kaktovik, for those who don't know, is on Barter Island. It is also the only village located within the boundaries of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Those are not students in the bus, but people from other communities who have flown in for the summit.

I will be very busy here and probably won't have much time for this blog, but I will try to post a little something, every day.

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At Ted Stevens International, headed to Kaktovik, via overnight in Barrow

Here I am, trying again to do a 100 percent iPhone post. Will it work this time?

Yesterday, as I exited the post office; technological failures and woes

Despite the fact that it was Sunday, I went to the post office yesterday to check the mail as my trip to Kenai had prevented me from doing so the day before. I found nothing but an empty box - no bills, no checks, no junk ads, no political fliers.

I stepped out the door and headed back to the car, but before I reached it I saw this jet passing by above. I pulled out my pocket camera and shot three frames, including this one.

I then noticed a couple who appeared to be in their 40's, standing beside their car, grinning knowingly as they looked at me.

That's what I do, though. I take pictures - of any damn thing that catches my eye. This jet caught my eye.

As for my current situation - my Canon 5 D Mark II, the cheaper of the two cameras that the rain in Kenai put out of commission - has dried out and come back to life. I don't know if greater damage has been done and if this just might be a temporary resurrection, but for the moment it appears to be functioning properly.

I hope that it continues to do so, because I need it.

My more expensive camera - the weather-sealed, storm-proof, indestructible tank known as the Canon 1Ds Mark III - is wiped out. It is going to require a trip to the Canon Factory to put it back into action.

So, equipment wise, this is my current situation:

My very favorite lens, my 16-35, got sheared in half early last spring in a silly little accident. I have not yet been able to get it repaired. The super-wide shots that you sometimes still see on this blog have all been shot with a cheap, Tamron 14 mm. lens of marginal quality that I purchased in 2002.

My Epson Stylus R2400 Inkjet printer - the only printer that I own, broke down on me in mid-summer and I have not yet been able to replace it.

The image on the screen of my 15-inch Macbook Pro laptop vibrates and jumps up and down at a maddening pace. I took it in to the local shop, where they determined that the computer was okay but the screen had gone bad. 

It will cost anywhere from $300 to $500 to repair it.

My harddrives are all full and I need to invest in about four terabytes of harddrives for my desktop computer and two portable terabytes for my malfunctioning lap top, just to continue on and to make certain that everything is backed up.

And now this with the 1Ds-MIII and the CF card.

Maddening.

And then there is the matter of that 16 gigabyte compact flash card that was in the Ids Mark III when the rain took it down - the camera and card on which I had recorded over 95 percent of the action pictures that I took at the final game of the Barrow Whalers football team. That card is ruined. I was able to save a number of images off of it, but lost a huge amount due to file corruptions.

Yet - despite the loss of so many action images, in human terms I have what I believe to be an excellent and strong take from that final game. This is because I kept the long lens on the big, weather-sealed camera and the short lens on the 5D. I caught so much spirit, feeling and emotion with the short lens.

Now, I just need to get some harddrives before I leave to Kaktovik via Barrow tomorrow afternoon and get it all backed up.

I don't have time to blog anything but this one picture.

I have wasted too much time by writing even this much.

I have an impossible amount to accomplish between now and when I leave.

I should not be blogging at all.

But blog I will.

Here is the post that went missing - the drive to Kenai, as seen through my iPhone; the rain takes my two work cameras and one CF card

Yesterday, for about 15 or 20 minutes, I had an incomplete blog post up titled, "On the road to Kenai." I had tried to make the post on my iPhone through the ap provided by my host Squarespace, but thanks to the exasperating vagaries of Squarespace, the most frustrating, time-consuming program that I have ever dealt with in the quarter-of-century since I moved my life and work into the computer age, I was unable to complete the post. I deleted the incomplete portion that I had managed to get up.

However, the link to that post remained on various blog rolls. Readers who followed these connections found only a broken link message.

Anyway, I had left Wasilla on the four hour to Kenai early in the morning. For yesterday's blogpost, I decided that I would take a few photos with my iPhone along the way and then once I arrived in Kenai, I would use the Squarespace iPhone ap to post a few of those images. I would thus inform readers that I had driven to Kenai to cover the Barrow Whalers in their playoff football game against Kenai.

After I arrived in Kenai and had some lunch, I parked, opened up the Squarespace ap and set out to make the post. When I went to place the first photograph, I was given two choices: "take a new photo" or "choose existing photo."

As I had already taken the photos, I tapped "choose existing photo." This took me to my iPhone Camera roll. I tapped that and it took me to a page that was blank, except for the fact that it showed the number of photos in the camera roll.

I waited and waited to see if the photos would come up, but they never did. I tried several times and even let the iPhone work on it for about half-an-hour while I otherwise occupied myself. Interestingly, when I would hit the "back" button to take me back to the camera roll, the actual photos that I had taken would slide quickly by on the screen, but there was no way that I could stop the Squarespace ap and access those photos. They just slid by.

So I decided that I would try the "Take New Photo" option and make a post with a single image. I will describe what happened under the last two images in this post.

Along the way, I begin here, with the above image that I took early in the morning as I drove out of Wasilla, enrouted to Kenai.

After I passed through Anchorage and drove along the edge of Cook Inlet's Turnagain Arm, I came upon a passenger train.

Further down Turnagain Arm. As can clearly be seen, rain was falling hard.

Cook Inlet and Turnagain Arm is behind me. I am on the Kenai Peninsula.

Another vehicle is ahead of me.

Here I am, headed south.

Traffic coming towards me.

I pass by a lake.

A place where the fall colors were protected from the winds that blew all of ours out here in this area of the Mat-Su Valley away.

A rainbow appeared ahead of me.

Okay... back to the story of how I lost the post that some readers  had clicked into only to find a broken link.

Naturally, my plan was to photograph the game with my big DSLR cameras, but I could not quickly and easily put any of those images into my iPhone and I wanted to get a post up as quickly as I could and my iPhone was the only tool that was readily available to do so. So, just as the team began their march from Kenai High School to the stadium, I tapped the "Take New Photo" option in the Squarespace ap and took this single photo. I then was given the option to "retake" the image or "use" it. I tapped "use."

Next, I was given the option to "save," so I tapped "save."

This gave me the options to "publish now" or "Save Draft to Website" or "Save to iPhone." I chose to save to the website, and then went and followed the procedure to enter text. Once I had done this, I chose the "Publish Now" option. The ap then went to work on the publishing procedure, which took awhile. When it was done... there nothing in the post, other than the title. Neither the picture nor the words had been posted.

Just the post title. Nothing else. The photo and the words had disappeared.

So I chose "Take New Photo" a second time and took this photo. I followed the same process. This time, on "publish now"  the photo posted but not the words. So I went to "edit" and wrote some new text. Again, the photo published, but not the words.

I debated for several minutes whether or not I should just leave a picture hanging up under the title, with no explanation whatever. I decided that was not a good idea and deleted the post instead.

But the blog roll links that had already been created by my post remained. Those who would click these links would just find a broken link message.

From the beginning, Squarespace has been a nightmare to me. Sometimes, I feel like an utter fool for having stuck with this program for so long, but the fact is I have established many connections out there that link back to me and I will lose those if I move to another host. Yes, there are little things to do to mitigate the damage, but genuine damage is inevitable. Such a move would also undoubtedly create more problems to be solved than I have even imagined right now.

I started my first blog, "No Cats Allowed" - which time has pretty much forced me to abandon - on blogger, the free bloghost, a good half-year before I started "Wasilla by 300."

I chose Squarespace for this blog because I was in hurry to get started, and because Squarespace does have page customizing features that Blogger does not offer.

Yet, there are so many tasks that must be completed with every post that free blogger performs so much more efficiently and quickly than paid for Squarespace. There are tasks that Squarespace demands five actions for everyone that the same task requires on Blogger and, yes, it takes five times as long.

Some of what they do is incomprehensible. If it makes sense and will save an action to put a button at the top of a work page, they will put it at the bottom. If it makes sense to put it at the bottom, they will put it at the top. Other programs might put such a button at both the top and bottom, but not Squarespace. It is one or the other.

As simple thing, perhaps, requiring only once action to overcome, but indicative of a mindset - and it cascades, until one necessary action becomes three, four, five... then the actions compound, gang up on you and throw big chunks of your life away.

Squarespace can misfire on any given task, no matter how well you have it down, at any given time. One can appear to have minutes worth of work left to do before posting and then Squarespace misfires and an hour later one still wrestles with it.

Squarespace does have a committed support staff and they try hard to help, but the tools they have to work with are just deficient. They pass on all suggestions to improvement to their developers, with the promise that the developers take all suggestions serious, but in over two years of frustration, I have not seen even one of my suggestions implemented. 

AUUUUUUGUUHHHHH!!!!

Well, I am venting. Readers don't care about this kind of thing.

Worse yet, and this cannot be pinned on Squarespace, despite a slight lull in the rain just before the game began, it rained throughout, often hard.

I don't care about rain - but, as the game drew to its close, I got an "error" message in the camera that I had put the 100 to 400 zoom on and had used for 99 percent of my action shots - the $7,000 weatherproof camera. The message said the camera could no longer record to the Compact Flash card that I had shot all my action images on as it was defective.

I put in a new card and got a new error message - that card could not be formatted. I tried an SD card in the backup slot - same thing. 

That $7000, weather-proof, top-of-the line Canon 1Ds M III camera had been put out of action. It remains out of action. I am going to have to send it to the Canon repair shop. How much will that cost?

I had kept the other camera, my Canon 5D Mark II, protected from the rain through most of the game and had only used it to do the non-action shots - huddles, sideline action, things like that. It is not weather proof, just a few drops of rain in India had put it out of action and left me with a $350 repair bill. I did not want to ruin it again, the game was almost over, so I took no more pictures until after the game ended.

Then, there was such strong emotion that came from these tough athletes whose hearts are so big and who had fought so hard and relentlessly, but whose season had just come to an end, that I had to put that camera into the rain, too and take the pictures.

Then there needed to be group pictures - offense, defense, back field, line, whole team... etc.

So I got all those pictures and some of them are damn good - and afterward that camera failed, too. At least the card was still good. 

The card from the camera that I had used to do the action pictures was truly ruined, right along with the camera. I am working at saving what I can from the ruined card that contains the action pictures, but many of the files themselves are corrupted and cannot be read or copied.

So, the only working camera I was left with was my pocket camera. I used that to record the players eating pizza.

Oh, yes - of course the camera in my iPhone still works. So that's what I, a professional photojournalist, am down to at the moment - my pocket camera and my iPhone.

Anyway, enough complaining. Perhaps tomorrow, I will show you something of the football game - or maybe I will just save all that I can save for my Uiñiq essay and take you surfing, instead.

I don't know - come back and see.

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