Bird's nest in Charlie's beard, he takes 3rd in US Beard Championships - see it in the Anchorage Daily News and The Oregonian

I don't usually post twice in one day, but this is big news - I have to do it. At some point after I left Arizona, Charlie and Melanie did, too - but they did not come straight back to Alaska. They went to Bend, Oregonian, so that Charlie could compete in the National Beard and Moustache Championships, amongst a total field of 189.

Today, I received an email from Charlie's mom and dad informing me that Charlie won 3rd place in the Freestyle category. Some birds helped him make this stunning achievement by nesting in his beard.

The Anchorage Daily News ran a blurb today, and you can find the partial full story, complete with a picture of Charlie and the birds that nested in his beard, in the Oregonian.

Congratulations, Charlie - we always knew that you have talent and would go far in this life!

I do not want to violate the Oregonian's photo copyright, so I have only posted an extreme crop from one of the photos in my Cibecue Creek series, but, please, if you haven't already, go look at the real thing!

Update (10:25 PM): Charlie's mom just informed me that Melanie was his stylist. Melanie took some pictures of her own and she is going to email an image or two or three. When she does, I will add it, or them, to this post.

Update (7:03 PM Thursday, 6/10/10): MgSoCal has left a comment informing me that Charlie's picture is on the front page of today's L.A. Times online. I don't know how long it will stay there, but here it is:

http://www.latimes.com/

A man wearing an orange shirt pedals his bicycle north on Tamar, toward the Talkeetna Mountains

This is the ONLY picture that I have taken since I put up my last post. Although I never let a day go by without taking at least one picture and usually anywhere from a dozen or so to a thousand or more on a big, intense, shoot, I did not want to take very many pictures today. I already had a post planned for this slot and I knew that if I took a bunch of pictures, at some point I would have to take some time to edit them.

I did not want to take the time.

But I have to get up early Wednesday morning to take the Escape into the shop for some warranted work and then I must drive the loaner car to Anchorage to take care of a very important task. Despite thinking that I would just veg all afternoon and evening, that I would walk, ride my bike, drive my car, do whatever, I found myself with a cascade of tasks to attend to and so I did not veg.

I did take one very short walk, late in the evening, and that was when I saw this guy riding his bike ahead of me.

As to the post that I had planned - one that would make a tie between what I did in Arizona and Anaktuvuk Pass - it is just going to have to wait one more day.

It is 10:26 PM and, just like last night, I haven't the energy to continue tonight.

So I will set the blog-timer for this to appear at 11:00 AM and will do the post that I had planned for today tomorrow.

I have one more task I must do before I go to bed. It, at least, will help bring in some genuine revenue.

I apologize for being so exhausted.

I must get a bit rested over the next couple of weeks so that I can go to Greenland and exhaust myself all over again.

That should be fun. I will take you all with me. It will be good - not what most of you probably think - but very good.

The collapse

As I pedal my bike, I come upon these two dogs. Head down, tail up, the black one turns toward me and approaches, growling. I do not believe him. I think he is bluffing. It turns out I am right. Still, it is a little nerve-wracking when this happens.

I pedal past a lady on a four-wheeler going in the opposite direction. I have ridden my bike three times since I returned from Arizona/Anaktuvuk Pass. Each time, it has been hard - much harder than when I first got my bike out after the snow melted. I had expected it to be very hard then, but it wasn't so bad.

Now, it has strained my muscles and burned my lungs. I do not think it is because my physical condition deteriorated that much while I was in Arizona and Anaktuvuk. I think it is because I have missed so much sleep, because I have sunk into so deep a state of fatigue.

That's my theory.

Naturally, in such a state of fatigue, I do not want to cook oatmeal in the mornings. I do not want to deal with dirty dishes. A couple of mornings, I have eaten cold cereal straight out of the box, dry. It has been good, but sometimes I just have to go to Family Restuarant, be waited on and have my dishes taken away to be washed by some poor guy or gal on the bottom rung of Wasilla's economic ladder.

At the moment, I stand on a rung not much above his; maybe not all. I am in one hell of an economic pickle. Although I thought I would have a new contract over one month ago, although a new contract was sent to me just before I left Arizona and I signed it and sent it back, legal-technical people keep finding reasons to stall that contract, to continually come up with one more task that needs to be done before it can be activated and then, once that task is done, they come up with another.

I feel as though I am living in the Twilight Zone.

My credit cards are completely tapped out. I still have a tiny bit of the cash that generous readers have donated to keep this blog going, but that's all and not much is left.

So I have no business going to breakfast at Family Restaurant, but I go anyway.

No, this is not a plea for more blog contributions

That contract will eventually be activated, soon, I think (but then I have thought so for a month now) and then I should be okay for half-a-year or so.

Maybe that will be enough time for me to figure out how to turn this blog into a more profitable, self-sustaining, activity so that I don't have to worry about contracts anymore.

You readers who have contributed have greatly bolstered my confidence that such a thing is possible.

I will write more about this in a later post.

I took the above picture at Family Restaurant not because this guy was walking through the door, but because the train was rolling by in the background.

I love the train. I prefer to catch the engines, but my camera was still in my pocket when I heard the whistle blow, when the blue and yellow engines appeared beyond the door. By the time I got the camera out and ready to shoot, the engines had moved on and this guy came walking through the door as the passenger cars rolled past behind him.

If I can't get the engines, I prefer freight cars or the caboose, but this was a passenger train for tourists, so there were no freight cars, no caboose.

In this life, when you can't get exactly what you want, you have to take what's there.

I am so damn wise I amaze myself.

Margie, by the way, was still in Arizona when I took this picture.

Later, as I drove down Lucille toward the Parks Highway - Wasilla's real main street - I heard a siren. I looked in my mirror and saw this emergency vehicle coming, so I pulled to the right and shot this image as it passed. I wondered what had happened.

I looked in my mirror to see if there were more emergency vehicles coming. There weren't, so I turned left onto the Parks Highway, right behind the red vehicle of the previous frame. The driver did not pull out into traffic, but instead entered the middle "suicide" turn lane and then proceeded forward, slowly.

The accident was right there. It didn't look bad. I could see no smashed-in vehicles. I did not study the scene to see what I could make of it, but raised my pocket camera and took a blind snap as I rolled by. Once I had passed, I accelerated and moved on.

At this small size, it is a little hard to see all the elements in the picture, so, having no actual knowledge beyond this frame of what happened, I will describe those elements to you:

It would appear that the gray mini-van was rear-ended by the black pickup - but I don't know this for a fact. It just looks that way. There is glass spread across the hood of the black truck and the man in the Levi's with the blue shirt seems to be examining that glass. Inside the van, an apparent EMT wearing a blue glove appears to be securing a neck brace on the driver. The open sliding-door reveals two small children, one of them an infant suckling on a pacifier, strapped into car seats. 

The children must be basically okay. They look fine; none of the EMT's are rushing to or hovering over them as they would be if they had been hurt.

Car seats - what a wonderful invention.

I'm not going to accuse anyone of tail-gating, because this picture is 100 percent of the information that I have and I don't know what happened, but let the implication stand as sober warning to all tailgaters anyway.

Don't tailgate. There is no need to. It won't get you there any faster. A baby's life could hang in the difference - maybe two babies.

Elsewhere, a young man worked to attact business to a car wash by offering a free one with every oil change. There must be a catch, of course.

I ate a sandwich on the back porch. Jimmy came out with me. As I bit, chewed and swallowed, he walked among dandelions going to seed.

Margie enjoys digging out the dandelions, but she was still in Arizona.

Late Saturday night, she came in on Alaska Airlines, with Jacob, Lavina, Kalib and Jobe. Although he, his brother and parents would be picked up and taken home by Rex, Kalib jumped into the car with me for a few minutes. Margie stood outside the door with Jobe.

Jobe looked so wonderful that I just wanted her to hand him through the door to me so I could hold him and give him a little hug.

"Margie, pass Jobe to me!" I kept saying.

There was a lot of noise out there. She didn't hear me. Soon, Jacob took him from her arms and then they disappeared. Kalib went with them.

Margie got into the car.

I drove away from the airport feeling extremely frustrated that I had not been able to hold my little grandson.

Why are we this way? What makes a grandfather so strongly want to hold his baby grandson that when he doesn't get to, he is left feeling frustrated?

Along the way home, we saw someone parked alongside the southbound lanes of traffic who was probably feeling pretty frustrated, too.

I got to have Margie's company for one day only. Then, early Monday morning, I drove her into town and dropped her off at Jacob and Lavina's, so that she could spend the week babysitting Jobe.

"We just vegged-out all day," Lavina spoke of their activites Sunday.

Man, I thought - that's what I need to do. Just veg out. I have become unspeakably exhausted. I go from one thing to another, never stopping, never resting. It has been this way for months and months and months. Never stopping. The push through Arizona and then straight onto Anaktuvuk was particularly draining, for reasons that my posts of the past few weeks make clear.

I vegged out and laid around through the summer of 2008, because I was hurt and recovering from my injuries and had no choice - but once I got going again, I have pretty much gone, non-stop.

"Be sure to take a nap," Margie told me when I drove away, leaving her with Jobe.

After I returned home, I sat down to my computer and tried to do a few things, but I was too tired. About 11:20 AM, I got up and headed to the bedroom. Jimmy followed me to the door but then stopped without entering.

"If you want to nap with me, you had better come in now," I told him, "because once I'm down, I'm not going to get up and let you in."

He didn't believe me. He plays this game all the time. He stops at the door and won't come in until he knows I am down and comfortable. Then he meows and raises a fuss until I get up and let him in. Then he settles down on top of me and goes to sleep.

Sure enough, he refused to come in.

"Okay," I told him. "I warned you."

Pistol-Yero was already in the room, sitting in the window sill.

I laid down, pulled the blanket over me and fell almost instantly to sleep.

Occasionally, I would wake up slightly, would barely hear Jimmy meowing and pawing at the door, but I did not get up to let him in. I could not get up to let him in. It was like I was paralyzed. I could only close my eyes and go back to sleep. Pistol-Yero was there, sleeping with me - sometimes next to me, sometimes atop me.

And so it went until a bit after 2:00 PM.

Then I got up and didn't do much of anything. I did spend some time in front of my computer, but it was pretty much all stupor-time.

I lasted only until a bit after 10:00 PM, then had no choice but to go to bed.

Jimmy played the same damn game, then sat and meowed and scratched at the door until 3:00 AM, at which time I finally got up and let him in.

Then the three of us, me, Pistol-Yero and Jimmy, slept snug until 9:00 AM.

Once again, I could not bear to cook oatmeal or wash dishes, so I breakfasted at Family. As I left to go home, I saw these kids with two adults, playing in the park.

I then returned home, determined to veg another day.

Once I got home, I kept receiving a flurry of tasks that came by email, all needed to be done immediately and all were non-revenue generating, but were the kind of non-reimbursable tasks one must do for clients.

These have continued to come in as I have worked on this blog entry, which I intended to be much shorter than it turned out to be.

In my next post, I plan to return to the undone work from Arizona and Anaktuvuk.

For now, I want to veg some more.

Not necessarily sleep - just veg.

And ride my bike.

Walk a bit.

Drive the car.

Whatever.

Cibecue Creek, part 4: We frolic at the magical falls; Jacob does a back-flop, Rex gets dizzy; we hike out in a race against darkness

As an old man watching from an audience of stone faces observes with a wry smile, Caleb takes a big leap and plummets into the pool below Cibecue Falls.

How could a place where spirit faces peer out from ancient stone be anything but magical?

You can be certain that when Jacob - who was actually the first to jump and jumped the most - hit the water on this plunge, he felt it. It stung; it felt for a moment like he had fallen into concrete. Later, when I asked him what in the world ever got into him to try it this way, he told me he thought that he could complete the rotation before he hit the water.

Remember, my children grew up in Alaska and never had much of an opportunity to hone their water-sport skills.

It looks to me like that old man who peers out from the rocks chuckled a bit as Jacob plunged past.

Even so, Jacob swam away feeling good about the experience.

I think he could have kept at it for hours - if we had hours available to keep at it. We didn't. The sun had long since left the canyon and we knew it would be getting dark soon.

It looked like a decent enough jump for Rex...

...but when he first tried to emerge from the water, he found that he had become dizzy, unable to stand. It took awhile, but finally Rex recovered enough to rise. He took no more jumps after that. Water had gotten into his ears and would stay there for a day or two.

Charlie hit okay.

As all this was going on, Kalib engaged in a game of "throw the rock." His mother stuck close by to guide and watch over him.

Lisa didn't jump, but she did swim a bit.

Melanie spent some time floating in the shallow end of the pool, where the jumpers would not come down on top of her.

As for me, I spent too much time trying to photograph it all with my pocket camera. Finally, I decided to go up and jump, but because of my shoulder, I began to climb very slow and deliberate, and then realized that it was going to take me so long that I had better abandon it, if we were to get out of the canyon before dark.

Anyone can believe that I just chickened out, should they choose, but anyone who knows my history in this life would know that is not true.

Still, I can't stop anyone from believing whatever they are going to believe.

Even before the jumping finished, everyone posed for a picture... well, not quite everyone...

Now it's everyone.

Before we began the hike out, we refueled on mangos, a giant sandwich, oatmeal bars, assorted berry candy and other delicacies.

Now we knew we had to hurry, if we were to get Kalib out by dark. Kalib himself gamely plunged forward.

Sometimes, he needed a little help - but remember, he is only two-and-a-half years old. I think he was doing pretty well.

Once he fell and completely submerged. Cibecue Creek took the hat that he had borrowed from Jobe and swept it right off his head. Still, he got up and forged on.

Not withstanding the big hurry that we were in, we had to stop when Kalib needed another diaper change. A dark rock was releasing the heat that it had gathered from the sun back into the cooling air, so, while Lavina changed the diaper, my fellow hikers laid down upon that rock to absorb some of that solar warmth themselves.

After his diaper had been changed, Kalib found a big stone and played, "strong man."

Now we had to hurry as fast as was safe to go. The sun had officially set - even above the canyon walls. Arizona is not like Alaska, where daylight lingers long even after the sun goes down. In Arizona, after the sun goes down, dark comes fast.

When we reached the small dirt and gravel parking where Cibecue Creek empties into the Salt River, the light was just about gone.

Before we could drive away, Lavina had to change Kalib's diaper one more time. She had only the light of the inside car lamps to work with. After spending six hours with his feet either submerged in water or held in soaked shoes, Kalib's feet were wrinkled to the extreme.

He was also extremely drowsy. At the moment his mom finished changing his diaper and strapped him into his car seat, Kalib fell asleep.

As we drove through the night along the dirt and gravel road that follows the Salt River toward the highway, the moon rose over the canyon walls.

Kalib slept all the way back to LeeAnn's house - a drive of about an hour-and-a-half. He did not wake up when Jacob unstrapped him and carried him inside. He did not wake up when his grandma took him from his dad so that she could hold him on her lap and love him.

He did not wake when his mother got him ready for bed. He did not wake when she put him to bed. He slept until the following morning.

It was a well-earned sleep.

I think he did pretty damned good.

Remember - he is only two-and-half.

Cibecue Creek, part 3 of 4, possibly 5: We happen upon a frog, experience a bit of adventure, then hike into a place of magic

I will begin with the frog, which we happened upon shortly after we started to hike. As you can see, it was a tiny frog, but it brought to mind a bigger frog that I encountered very near to this place over 30 years ago. On March 10, I wrote a bit about my friend Vincent Craig, who was fighting the cancer that on May 15 took him.*

One of the experiences that I recounted was a nighttime rescue that he led that took place in a canyon cut out by one of the creeks that flows out of the White Mountain Apache reservation into the Salt River.

Perhaps it was this very creek, Cibecue. I cannot remember for certain, as we did the hike in and out and scaled the cliffs from which two waterfalls fell in the darkness of night. I have no visual memories of the terrain through which we hiked.

This creek does lead to a couple of falls, however, and it is a creek that is sometimes visited by non-tribal members, such as the blond woman who fell on the cliff and broke her leg.

There is another creek further upstream that also does. So it could have been either one. Somewhere, I have it written down and stored away, but that document would be hard to find and I haven't the time to look for it.

Near the beginning of that rescue hike on that night three decades ago, I was stumbling about on the rocks as we worked our way upstream when suddenly I felt something cool and clammy plop down upon my left wrist. "Snake!" was my immediate thought - "rattler" in particular. I let out a little shriek, but kept enough composure not to jerk my hand away until I knew what was on it and what it was doing.

I transferred the beam of my flashlight from the rocks below my feet to my wrist and there saw the startled eyes of a big frog, looking back at me.

Lisa holds the frog out for Kalib to see. Kalib cautiously touches it.

From the moment we came upon the creek and I looked at the walls rising into mountains on all sides of us, this line from Vincent's song, Someone Drew a Line, came into my head: "Between The Four Sacred Mountains we lived in harmony..."

These were not The Four Sacred Mountains that Vincent wrote about, yet, in their way, I believe all the mountains to be sacred and so it seemed appropriate. This song would stay in my head throughout the hike - for every minute of it, every second. Not for a moment would it leave me.

Sometimes Kalib hiked on his own power. Sometimes, he would be carried - either by his dad or his uncles, Caleb, Rex and Charlie.

Due to my shoulder, I could not carry him.

Mostly, we hiked through water. Before we started to hike, the heat had felt oppressive and I had wondered how we were going to do it. The water mitigated that heat. It turned out to be no problem at all.

Jacob trips and goes down while carrying Kalib.

Jacob gives Kalib an assist up a boulder, to his waiting mother.

There, atop the boulder, she changes his diaper, then helps him into a new one. Let no one doubt - she will pack the dirty diaper all the way up and all the way out. Other than temporary footprints, we would leave no sign of ourselves behind.

Kalib splashes water.

Jacob and Lisa hiking up Cibecue Creek.

Lisa comes to a big rock. She debates whether to go over it or around it.

She chooses to go over it. I walk around and get this picture of her as she tops it.

Although everyone had spread apart, we somehow all came together at this point. Something in the sky then caught everyone's attention.

It is a magnificent bird - a turkey vulture. At this moment, I kind of wished that I drug along my big cameras and my 100 to 400 zoom, but it was really nice to hike with a just a little tiny camera that I could slip in and out of my t-shirt pocket.

As everyone was gathered in one spot, we decided this would be a good moment to make a good group portrait - sans me. Kalib had grown hungry and so dug into his nose to see if might find something good to eat there.

He did. And he ate it.

Rex carries Kalib as we continue on.

Jacob and Lavina, hiking through the water.

Lavina and Jacob, stepping out of the water.

Melanie pauses by a big rock.

Kalib rests upon a rock.

Jacob and Rex survery the terrain ahead.

Jacob climbs over a rock and comes upon this drift log, wedged into a crevasse. "It looks just like a big b..." he exclaimed. I will leave the "b..." to your imaginations.

I will probably get in trouble with some of the female members of the family for even having said just this much.

Jacob climbs out onto the log and waves at Kalib, who is still working his way in this direction.

Uncle Caleb assists nephew Kalib as he works his way over a series of big rocks alongside water that was too deep to walk through.

Kalib tops the rock. Caleb offers him a "high-five."

Melanie finds a very pretty rock, which she shows to everybody. 

She by-passes a deep pool via a well-scuplted boulder. By now, we can hear the distant roar of a water fall. It sounds kind of like a jet.

As we move upstream, past cutouts in the rock, the roar of the falls grows louder.

And here it is, the lower of the two Cibecue Falls. It feels as though we have hiked into a place of magic.

Tomorrow: We frolic in the place of magic.

*Today, June 6, would have been Vincent Craig's 60th birthday. Today, his mother Nancy Mariano passed away, also from cancer.