Ordinary
August 11, 2008
Filed in: The Home Front, The Way We Live Now
Today I woke up early (6:30) to rain. More rain. I made coffee, fetched the paper off the driveway still in my sleep shirt (the top to a fancy pair of Books Brothers PJs that I bought T but that he never wore) so I could see if it was ever going to stop raining. It wasn’t.
I worked for awhile, said goodbye to T when he came down, tried unsuccessfully to walk the dog (don’t ask), showered, kept working. Greeted first W and, hours later, C as they staggered out of bed. Allowed them to do what they would on a rainy unscheduled momma’s-gotta-work Monday.
At noon we all drove the 1.5 miles to the nice campus with the woodland paths, finally walked P, drove back along the same road. There were five or six orange cones on the right-hand (southbound) side of the street that weren’t there when we first passed and a ordinary-looking sedan pulled fully up onto the sidewalk (there is no shoulder there) because I remember thinking, Dude, way to be parked on the sidewalk.
Came home, made the boys a lousy bowl of ramen noodles for lunch because I hadn’t shopped in a week but had a 1 o’clock conference call, took it, talked to S (more work, but fun work), finally shut down the computer, took the boys to GameStop (ugh) and food shopping (more ugh), came home, unpacked food, threw in a load of laundry, re-checked email, re-walked the dog, started dinner early because C’s GF was coming and ordinary people are not used to eating as late as we do. I stared at the onions and peppers cooking in the pan and thought, who fucking cares about onions and peppers in a pan.
That’s because this whole live-long day, this whole stupid wasted idle rainy August day of our lives, another mom very like me—someone who lives close enough that she could hear me if I opened my door and screamed as if my first-born child had been killed—all today she dealt with exactly that. Her first-born child was killed, this very same day, at the very same orange-cone spot we drove past not once but twice thinking not of her boy but of our dog, dinner, work, bills, what was on the iPod (what was on the iPod was a odd, fun-but-no-fun Killer’s song that I can now a) not get out of my head and b) never disassociate with today or her son).
I imagine, but I do not in any way know, that the mundane details of Swellville life must strike you in such a moment as both unspeakably absurd and unbearably dear. I imagine this boy’s mother would gouge out parts of her body to be able to be bored over onions, to be worried about walking her dog, to be replying to email and putting grapes in a cart and moving wet things from the washer to the dryer like the competent stay-at-home mom she was. I imagine she will never again do any of those things, for that matter never again draw breath, in exactly the same way, but that she would give her eyeteeth to have the ordinary crap-ass Monday we just had. Whatever happens to what’s left of this family, it will never again be ordinary, not any second of it.
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Doesn’t fish. Isn’t a cat.
August 02, 2008
Filed in: Alaska, The Way We Live Now
A couple of years ago I was walking Pip on a really dank and gray November morning. We crossed the culvert at the end of our street where a little stream trickles into the mighty Swellville river (that’s a joke—the river flows so slowly it’s legally in danger of losing its status as a moving body of water) when we were suddenly face-to-face with this, this thing—it was long and sleek and furry and throwing off the most awful karma.
It was very clear that this animal had mayhem in its heart. Seriously, the hair on the back of my head stood on end, and all for a creature that prolly weighed 8 lbs. The dog, an animal not known for her discretion, or her silence, was struck dumb. The three of us stared at one another for an instant before it slunk away and Pip and I hurried off to shutter our windows and mutter curses as we threw burnt offerings into the fire.
Turned out it was what they call around here a fisher cat, though, as the article I later read in AMC Outdoors pointed out, they a) don’t fish and b) aren’t cats. They do rip up the bellies of cats and small dogs and other various little mammals they can get ahold of. Lovely. They’re the littlest members of the weasel family, a group of mammals that are pretty hard to love when you’re looking at them nose-to-nose.
The biggest member is the wolverine. I have to be really frank here. Until we went to Alaska, I wasn’t 100% absolutely positively sure the wolverine was a real animal, like a real animal that still lives in the wild in this century, as opposed to something that died out in the Pleistocene era and only lived on only in the hearts of Hugh Jackman fans.
The day in Alaska that we went on our bear safari, we had lunch in a wilderness lodge in the Lake Clark National Preserve that had a stuffed wolverine that W and I could not stop staring at. I wish so much we had taken a picture (… but oh yeah! That was the day we had no camera at all! Duh.) Well, you’ll have to satisfy yourself with this pic.
They’re fascinating and terrifying to look at, and, apparently, still plenty wild in Alaska. They’re bigger than you think they’re going to be—like the size (and heft) of a hassock. They have really powerful forearms and claws. If they were people, they’d be those muscle-bound weight-lifters who are really big on top and teeny-tiny on the bottom. Also, they have a really scary teeth-and-jaws thing going. You can definitely picture them ripping things. Ew.
The lodge owner told us wolverines have been known to scare a bear off its kill. Also, according to that know-it-all Wikipedia, wolverines have killed moose before, which are obviously many, many, many times bigger, but not to worry—they’re only attacking weak moose in the winter when they’re most vulnerable. Phew.
They have no known natural predators—except two, the same two that pretty much any other wild animal has these days. 1) Humans encroaching on their habitat (wolverines are, surprise surprise, not sharers, and each one needs a pretty big chunk of land to do his hunting in) and 2) the Fish and Wildlife Service under the Bush administration (note they are not classified here as humans), which decided pretty much around the exact same time that we were learning about wolverines in Alaska that they don’t need any protection, even though there are only 500 or so (or, some say, considerably less) in all of Idaho and Wyoming and Montana.
You can read the Times’s op-ed on it here.
In the meantime, leave me to my fantasy: how fun would it be to introduce one of these fellers to the office-bound political puppets who’re making all these life and death decisions about this or that endangered species? Go get ‘em, wolvie, I’ve got your back.
Way back.
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Greasy Bits
July 16, 2008
Filed in: Alaska, The Way We Live Now
You cannot travel to the 49th State, even the supposedly “pristine” parts where the machinery is not in eyesight, without feeling the sludgey sloosh of Big Oil beneath the workings of nearly everything that goes on.
I would never presume as a tourist to try and explicate the complicated and slippery relationship Alaksans seem to have with the petroleum industry. I’ve tried to make sense of these anecdotes and opinions, but can’t, other than to acknowledge that Alaskans are at least as good at the rest of the world in holding two or more contrary opinions in their minds at the same time.
Without further ado, random encounters of the greasy variety:
“It’s not the oil companies who are the enemy, it’s the people who use the oil.”
That’s from J, a late-30-something eco-tour guide father of five, by all indications an evangelical Christian (though he seemed careful to keep this last bit under wraps from his well-heeled, maybe even secular humanist clients from the Lower 48), a man whose family lives at least part of the year off the grid, with solar panels and a backup propane-fueled generator, who will cautiously talk about “the current administration” and its culpabilities vis a vis the environment if he feels his clients are inclined that way politically.
J explained, when I asked, a little bit about the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend, the program where every October, every citizen, including the kiddies, who has been a legal resident for a least one year receives a check. From what I can tell, last year J in most likely got around $11,500 for his family of seven.
“I have no problem with them opening up ANWR. It would not be a problem if they started drilling up there.
Different day, different bay, different “J,” him also an operator of a wilderness lodge, this one much further out and more off the grid. He makes his money helping fishermen get to the fish and helping wildlife freaks like us drive around (gas!) in little ATV buggies looking for and then at bears.
When T and I admitted, under questioning, that we wrote things for a living (which is different from being a writer), he asked, “Do you know anything about grant writing?” He was interested in apply for grants to add to the wind turbine and solar panels he already has in place.
Same conversation, same breath, he said he’d worked on the North Slope for a year, was impressed with how the oil companies ran things, and didn’t think opening up the Alaska National Wildlife Reserve would have any negative impact on the land or the animals.
What he said was pretty interesting: apparently all the “vehicles” (and by the way he talked, it was pretty clear we were talking about some kind of massive trucks and other machinery things, not like an SUV-sized unit or anything) are all equipped with these big diapers so no drips or spills or other fluids will seep into the ground. Separately, he said there were as many “cops” as workers on the North Slope, but again he made it sound more like MPs or something than ordinary run-of-the-mill police officers. Apparently, it’s a rule, punishable by citation or whatever from one of these cops, that every driver has to walk all the way around his vehicle before getting in, because most accidents, they found, occur when drivers back up and hit something they didn’t realize was behind them.
[Huh: just went surfing for a picture of those diapers and found this instead, which doesn’t show any diapers but sure does seem to back up the point just below about what’s up on the North Slope. Blogger seems to be a pretty interesting and knowledgeable guy.]
“Prudhoe Bay is nightmare. It’s a pit. They count on people not going up there to see what’s going on.”
That was not an Alaskan but a Californian, R, with whom T and I had a beer in Homer’s super-funky dive bar, the Salty Dawg Saloon. He’s a 30-something school teacher, teaches Middle Schoolers somewhere south of Los Angeles in a town where the kids sound pretty hard up. He had taken the summer to ride, I think he said from Baja California, so from Mexico, all the way up to Prudhoe Bay, the tippy-tippy top of Alaska (and of our country), the place where they pump all that oil that flows through the pipeline that runs the length of the entire state down to Valdez, where…well, I’m hoping you know the Valdez part.
There’s a road, a service road, which I believe is still unpaved in most places, that runs beside the pipeline all the way up, and he was on that with his motorcycle most of the way.
He was unapologetic and visibly disgusted by what he saw of the oil-making machinery in Prudhoe Bay, that’s for sure. What if he had been talking to a couple of nice young Swellville free-market Republicans? We were pretty scruffy by that point, 2 or 3 days unwashed. I guess he assumed FMRs would never appear that beat in public. Even in a bar that dive-y (and I say that with deep affection. I adore dive bars, as long as middle-class me feels safe).
The gig in this place is you sign a dollar bill with a Sharpie and tack it to the ceiling. (I know, smart of them, what? Recession gets any deeper, they just take those bills off the wall and cash them, Sharpie signatures or no.) We gave R a dollar, because he didn’t seem like he was going to part with any of his for such a frivolous use, and all three of us signed one and tacked them up.
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Coming Out of the Country
July 06, 2008
Filed in: Alaska
Yes, the title is a play on John McPhee’s brilliant Coming into the Country, which I am about halfway through and will someday reagle/bore you with my thoughts on (I know that’s not quite 100 percent good grammar, but bear with me—I’m typing in the dark next to my snoring family). “In to the country” is a term Alaskans use, and McPhee liked enough to swipe for his title, for going deep into the bush, as if all the rest of Alaska is some kind of suburb and only the real wild stuff, the bush north and east of Fairbanks, is the real “country.”
They’re tough up here with their categorizations, baby. What we saw was pretty wild, pretty “country,” specially as compared to, say, Swellville or the rest of our suburban 70s upbringing.
We never went anywhere near McPhee’s kind of country, but up til the 4th of July (a cool coincidence), we had been going out and out and further out. Anchorage to Homer, then across the bay to Kachemak State park, then up to the face of the Gwruwink glacier...it’s country up there.
Then out the other way, north across Cook Inlet to the Lake Clark national park, which is, depending on which guide you trust, either the least-visited or the third-least- visited national park in the United States, the reason being you need either a small plane or a pretty sturdy boat to get there. There are no trails in that wilderness at all. The very few people over there, the ones who’ll show you the bears for a largo fee, stick to the coast. The bush is too dense to hike through for any distance. Also there are the volcanoes—we were closest to Mt. Iliamna --and of course the bears to contend with.
The point is, that was out there. Definitely as out there as I personally have ever been—looking at thousands of acres of wilderness that no human has ever set foot in, that’s pretty awe-inspiring, and humbling. ( I wonder how long it will hold; they’ve discovered gold of all things just down the peninsula from the Lake Clark park, and there are apparently plans afoot to build a nice, environmentally friendly mine.)
I wonder if T and I will ever be in a place that remote again in our lives—we have loved this, but we do have Italy and France and Spain and Hawaii on our life lists (and I of course have Kansas and ND too), and them college costs are coming closer every day.
I wonder if the boys will—will there be anything left by the time they get the means and wherewithal to travel on their own? Especially in Homer, we saw lots of 20-something kids from the Lower 48, girls with tats and boys with those little goat beards the guys all wear these days. Will either of my boys grow up to be one of those boys? (Just typing that and thinking of my wired-boy C makes me LOL, but you never know; he might make a digital conversion and give up his e-ways.)
Either way, from that moment standing on the volcanic sand as the tide was coming in, watching our Piper cub circle around to land and take us back to Homer, from that point forward we’ve been coming away from the country, coming back into civilization, adding baggage quite literally.
Like Adam and Eve, once we returned to Homer and a real hotel, our eyes were opened and we saw that we were dirty and disheveled and had been wearing the same hiking socks for three days in a row. Last night, I did laundry for the first time in a week (as opposed to my other life, when I literally do a load every single day).
Yesterday we made that big long beautiful drive up the coast and around Turnagain Arm back into Anchorage. I imagine that must always be a shock, even for native Alaskans, simply because Anchorage and its plain boring anywhere outskirts appear out of nowhere after a final turn in the road. Wilderness one mile; Office Depot the next.
Today is big carbon-footprint day for us— two flights that will take us to San Fran, then back across the continent tomorrow to Boston and, finally, back on into Swellville and our middle-middle-middle life (that’s middle-class, middle-aged, middle-brow, for those not in the know).
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Da Bears
July 05, 2008
Filed in: Alaska
OMG you guys we did it! We went on our bear safari and we survived—we survived the tiny, rattly little Piper Cub flying mere feet above the towering cliffs and angry gray ocean and huge threatening clouds of Cook Inlet, we survived the landing-on-the-sand business, and we survived seeing lots of bears, at first very far away, and then closer and closer and closer and then, right when we were getting ready to leave and our guard was down, VERY close. Which was both tremendously cool and a little bit scary.
This big guy (they use pig terms, don’t ask me why, it seems a little disrespectful, so the males are “boars” and the “females” are sows) who was too close to our little ATV buggy cart turned his head and sniffed the wind and looked straight at us for a minute too long, like he was wondering if he had time to kill and eat all before he went back to clamming on the tidal flats.
Our guide (our very nice but young and completely inexperienced guide, who’s not even from Alaska and hasn’t even been doing this bear thing for more than 8 weeks total) whispered in a low voice, “I think he smells that muffin box in your backpack.” Great. Killed by our own inability to eat breakfast before our 7:30 a.m. call at the teeny tiny airstrip.
But then the bear thought better of us and ambled off. Man, they have big behinds. Can I be petty and say that? Even the youngish girl bears, who “only” weigh 600-700 pounds, have a lot of junk in that there bear trunk. Every one of them looks like they pulled on a big hairy pair of bear pants before they climbed out of the bush to do their tourist thing. Given that each of us came to Alaska with exactly one pair of pants (what were we thinking? hello? Alaskans don’t even own shorts), we’re starting to look a little hairy-pantsed ourselves, so we could totally relate.
We saw two different sets of bear cubs, wildly cute, and here I’d love to show you a picture, but guess what? We forgot to charge the camera battery so we got exactly two pictures off before the thing died. So, trip of a lifetime, all in our heads. What can I say, at least we had our bear pants on.