When I came back in, I said, “I have to stop doing that!  Time to start putting on a coat before I go out.”

But the house felt nice and warm.

It’s really fall now.  To capture these colors I had to act fast.  Windy weather is taking the leaves off the trees almost as fast as they turn.

I am bumping the recent series of photo-rich blogs down and off the page.

Wasn’t that clever?  It left me with these convenient “frames” for the shots I took after I posted this page of blogs.

There ‘s a good little lesson in Alaskan living above, in the bit about the house feeling warm when I came in from outside.  I’d been a bit chilly in here all day, trying to get a load of wet wood to burn.  Going outside for a while made the house suddenly a lot warmer when I came back.  That even works when it is -40° out and I have to wear a parka.  It’s hard to heat the house to comfort when it’s that cold, but it’s easy enough to take a quick trip out there and gain an appreciation for the fire and shelter when I come back in.

Talkeetna Historical Society

Alaskans tend to be proud of themselves and their history, even if that history doesn’t extend back much before the twentieth century.  Although people were here before that, since they didn’t write stuff down, that period is “prehistoric”.

Greyfox has wanted for some time to take me to the museum.  He has developed a proprietary attitude toward it since he joined the historical society, and it had been a few years since I was in the museum.  Many of the displays were new to me.

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Looking at one of the museum displays, I had to laugh.  A few of the tools on display there are newer than tools I use regularly.  They’re old tools, yes, and so are a lot of mine.

The museum is housed in several small buildings, some of which I recognized as having started out as “railroad” buildings.  There are a lot of them in our part of Alaska:  houses for railroad workers, old stations, shops, etc.  This strip of the state where most of the population is concentrated is called the “Railbelt” because these communities grew up around the tracks.  The baggage cart above is a relic of the railroad.  No explanation was given for the smiley-faced old Wards snowmachine, but it fits right in anyway.

A small building behind the main museum is devoted mostly to our mountain, Denali, AKA Mount McKinley, and the people who climb it.  This was all new to me, and I was impressed.  I especially admire the room-size relief map showing the ridges, glaciers and main climbing routes.

Each corner of that room shows a different view of the mountain.  The photo at left is an up-close look at the side of Denali we see from here.  Wowee, I never get enough of this mountain.  It is magical.

Climbers are one sort of local heroes.  Another sort of Alaskan hero is the bush pilot.  The breed has not died off yet; we still have a few of them around.  Talkeetna is home base to several flying services that exist mainly to ferry climbers and their gear to base camp on Denali, or to drop fishermen at remote sites then come back and pick them up.  It’s a different life, a different job, from when bush pilots had a much bigger role in keeping mail and supplies coming in to remote Alaskans.

Don Sheldon was one of these local heroes.  His display in the museum includes this chair he made from antlers, sinew and fur. 

He is known for many daring rescues, such as the time he was flying over and noticed an overturned boat.  He landed his float plane on the Susitna River in a narrow canyon four times that day, each time picking up one of the stranded survivors.  Unable to take off from the canyon, he floated the plane downriver until he could let each man off safely, then he took off, flew back and floated down with the next one.

The State of Alaska now prohibits aerial hunting of wolves, even to the exent of outlawing flying and shooting in the same day.  It was different before statehood, when this was the Territory of Alaska.  The territorial government paid a bounty on wolves, and Don Sheldon made his living back then partially as a bounty hunter.  The museum has his wolf guns on display.  These double-barreled shotguns  were mounted under the wings of his plane, and he sighted them with the aid of marks on his windscreen.

Any readers ready to jump in with judgmental comments about the evils of aerial wolf hunting would be well-advised to express them elsewhere.  That was a different time, and this was, and remains even now, a place much different from those most of you know.  My personal view is that the current prohibitions on wolf hunting reflect a more evolved mindset, but that it would be unfortunately narrow-minded to condemn an acknowledged hero for supporting his family on government bounties, or to overlook his ingenuity in devising this mechanism to do it.

Any report I make on our weekend getaway is going to sound like a commercial for the Talkeetna Alaskan Lodge.  I love the place.  So does Greyfox.  We both expressed some regret at not having taken pictures of our meals there before we ate them.  The menus offered a good variety of selections.  The food consisted of fine ingredients, well-prepared and beautifully presented.  The service was excellent, no complaints at all–and we are professional kvetches, here.

The management has chosen a staff whose members come from all over the map, which is evident from their speech and accents. 

Over breakfast yesterday, when Greyfox turned to me for the proper West Coast “over easy” terminology for how he likes his eggs (it’s called “over light” where he comes from), the waitress understood perfectly the East Coast/West Coast language divide.  She is from Alaska and her boyfriend is from New Jersey. 

A business such as this one could turn into a miserable failure if it depended on local people to staff it.  The labor pool is too small, and our local population tends to be less “snappy”, for want of a better term, than the norm.  In other words, we are largely a bunch of non-servile bushrats, poor prospects for success in service industries.

Many of the staff are now in the process of leaving to go back either to school or to homes which are mostly in the warmer southern states.  I talked to two women from the Deep South who work here in the summer to escape the heat at home.  Sounds like a good way to live, and they seem to love it.

I was impressed at the way the staff met and often anticipated our needs while maintaining an easy and humorous informality.  It is not simple providing such service without fawning, without dehumanizing oneself or those one is serving.  Everyone there did it with flair.  From all I observed, staff morale seemed to be high.  This is in marked contrast to the perfunctory verging on surly service we’ve received a few miles away at a hotel run by Princess Cruises.  Avoid Princess at all costs, folks.  I don’t think they care a whit for repeat customers.  Once they get you in their clutches, you’re their captive and you take whatever shit they hand you.  Complaints are met with a blank stare or sarcastic smirk.

Even my “new” used car, Streak, seemed to enjoy the trip.  I know I enjoyed the plentiful provision of handicapped parking spaces right by the doors.  That’s Streak himself, in the shot to the right.

I guess you can tell that I liked the flowers we found planted everywhere.  Frost had already touched many of the plantings around the grounds and drives, but the tubs and planter boxes in sheltered areas around the lodge were still in spectacular full bloom.  Gardeners from warmer climates will appreciate what the Alaskan climate does for begonias.  In most temperate areas, begonias are early-spring, cool temperature bloomers.  Here, they last all summer and bloom like crazy.

Begonias are my favorite flowers, since I’m allergic to gardenias, roses and a lot of others that might otherwise be favorites.

Well, if you waited for all these photos to load and were hoping for a story to compensate you for your time, I apologize.  I have one more of these photo-rich blogs “in the can”, about our trip to the Historical Museum.  Gimme a few comments on this one, and then I’ll get that one out of the way and try to get back on track with the memoirs.  When Doug wakes this afternoon, I think I may try to coax him back onto the roof for a little work.

We had a lovely weekend getaway.  On a clear day, you could see Mount McKinley in the distance here.  You can see the Susitna River there in the mid distance right of center.  It was so overcast all weekend that only the bases of the mountains and a few glaciers were visible beneath the clouds.  For my purposes this was ideal weather, for the threat of rain assured Greyfox that he wasn’t missing out on business, and he could relax into the outing.

We drove up there Saturday afternoon and had a great dinner before retiring to our room.  Next morning, I wandered around taking pictures after Sunday breakfast, while Greyfox slept in.  He was tired, the dear, sweet man.

With my coffee cup refilled, I roamed around the hotel, enjoying the ambience and the sparsity of the crowd at that early hour. 

The Talkeetna Alaskan Lodge has the feel of a place built to last.  It is a smoke-free facility, which was incredibly enjoyable for me.  We always reserve non-smoking rooms when we stay in hotels, but this was the first time I’ve stayed at a non-smoking hotel.  It was nice being able to breathe.  A few encounters with perfumed tourists were the only noticeable allergic reactions all weekend.

The art hanging on these walls blew me away.  Tapestries, paintings and native carvings are everywhere.  Many of the works are traditional Alaskan Native motifs like this Loon Girl painting.  One section of a corridor was lined with a series of photos of traditional and not-so-traditional masks.  One of the masks wore a cool pair of shades.  The beige wall hanging visible beyond the stone fireplace in the shot of the lobby (above this one) is a tapestry of two stylized walruses “wearing” representations in tapestry of the masks worn by walrus dancers.

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Other works, such as this Alaskan impressionist painting of a dogteam eager for a run, celebrate not the traditions but the life of this land.  Many wildlife photos graced the dining rooms, and in the bistro was a Mount McKinley climbing hall of fame, on which I saw some familiar faces.

I have more pics for you, from the hotel and from a trip to the Talkeetna Historical Society Museum in town.  For now, Xanga doesn’t seem to want to accept any more photo uploads.

Both of us had a wonderful time over the weekend and are glad to be home again.  That the getaway coincided with my boxcar’s rolling out of the roundhouse on the whitelitexpress was a most excellent synchronicity.  I couldn’t be happier about the convergence of recent events.  I have more energy now, less of the painful, debilitating after-effects of activity, than I’ve had in a very long time.  Greyfox has experienced a deep and pleasant shift in his attitude, and our relationship has taken a sweet turn along with it.

I shall be back later with more photos and details of the getaway.

I’m pleased with everyone’s reactions to my childhood pictures and the story of my beginning (beginning of my story…??).  Several of the comments mentioned my parents and what good ones I had, how difficult their job must have been, etc.  I know that I owe my loving nature, my freethought, and my very survival to them.  However, they were not perfect parents.  For one thing, both had been reared in the “Spare the rod, spoil the child,” mythos prevalent at the time.  And then there were subtler forms of child abuse…

My mother’s friend Audrey, mother of Donald and Leroy, my first playmates, should have had a girl.  Then she would have had an outlet for these crocheted dresses.  I had one to come home from the hospital in, and one every Easter until we moved away from San Jose.

This shot was taken in 1948, and the one below in 1949.  Perhaps my opinion of the dresses shows in this picture.  I think the worst part was the hat.  Each one was stiff and scratchy, having been starched with sugar solution to hold its shape.  Not only was it irritating to my tender skin, but it attracted ants.  I was tickled pink one easter when Mama took down the hat box from the top closet shelf and found it full of ants.

Audrey put months of work into each little dress, and my mother was thrilled with them.  I was less than thrilled.  Always most comfortable in pants, when I donned one of these monstrosities, I knew I’d be closely watched and continually cautioned to be ladylike.  The openwork of the dresses tended to snag on any protruding object.  It always seemed as if things jumped out to snag my dress.  In this one, I recall that those furbelows at the bottom tickled my knees unendurably.  And then there was the Easter church services… ‘nuf said.

Clothing was not the only way my mother found to torture me.  Before I was old enough to forcefully assert my objections, she gave me several “permanent waves”–nasty, smelly, dangerous things whose milder modern cousins are called “perms”.

My superfine hair always frizzed and burnt with a perm, and it seemed like she just kept trying again, hoping finally to get it right.  I hated the perms because of the way the damaged frizzy hair felt to the touch, and the way it looked.

Of course, I was far from a perfect child.  My intentions were generally “good”, unless you count the two pairs of orthopedic shoes I buried in the yard and wouldn’t reveal their location.  I hated the things, with one thick sole and one thin one, the stiff tops laced to above my ankles.  Barefoot has always been my style.  After I buried and “lost” the second pair, my parents gave up on the expensive shoes, thanks be to the sandbox.

This shot was taken on the day of one memorable early screwup of mine.  Allowed to play with the garden hose on a hot day, I noticed that the white paint on the front of our house was besmirched with soot and grime from the polluted air of the industrial district just across the creek from our neighborhood.  I decided to clean it up.

I found a rusty old coffee can, a dirty old rag, and started hosing down and wiping the front of the house.  The effect was a smeary mess of swirly smudges from the foundation up to the extent of my reach.

Mama was in tears as she contemplated the job required to clean up my cleanup job.  I remember my own horror as, first, I noticed that my efforts were making things worse, and then, my mother saw the mess.  I clung to her skirt and sobbed that I was sorry.  Then the crisis shifted from worrying about the grimy house to attempting to comfort Kathy.  Perhaps that is where I learned that ploy….

FISH STORY

Mitch‘s question, about the species of fish I’m holding in the pic in the previous blog, jogged my memory of that day.  I sat here and looked at the pic and marveled over how SMALL I was.

I caught that fish all by myself.  I baited my own hook, cast the line, watched for nibbles, and when I saw the red and white bobber go down, I lifted the tip of the rod and set the hook in the fish’s mouth.  And I was so little!

I wasn’t all by myself.  My mother and father were in the little rowboat with me.  We were on the San Joaquin River, near Manteca, CA.  Mama seldom even wet a hook, didn’t like to fish.  She just went along in order not to be left alone when we went fishing.  She used to peel apples and cut them in wedges for us as we fished.

When I started reeling that fish in, Daddy started encouraging and admonishing me:  “You can do it.  Hang on tight.  Don’t let him take your rod.”  I worked the big (to me) fish nearly up to the boat several times and had to let him run out and then play him back again.  Finally, he gave up and let me reel him in.  I was used to little perch and small catfish that I could just lift over the side of the boat on the hook, but the striped bass was too big.  The tip of my rod was bent over.  Daddy looked over the side and saw how big it was, grabbed the gaff hook and flipped it aboard.

Looking at my picture now, I see a little girl, barely twice the height of the fish I hold.  Sitting in that boat, though, playing that fish, I was a big girl.  I can still feel how it felt to be so big when I was so little.  It’s a little bit weird, that feeling.

My good fortune started with parents who cherished me. If they hadn’t, I am sure I wouldn’t have lived this long. I wasn’t supposed to live long enough to grow up. I start the story of my own life that way because it has been the central fact of this life. Each year, every decade, has been a surprise and a triumph for me. Because my mother and father loved and wanted me I learned to love, and I wanted to live. I fought for life against infections, attacks and addictions and an endless series of undiagnosed and misdiagnosed ailments I eventually learned to lump together and call autoimmune disease. I focused a lot of attention on survival. And I’ve survived.

By the time she conceived me, my mother had had several miscarriages and had borne my short-lived sister Neva Ann. She’d been told that further pregnancy could be life-threatening. But reproduction must have been important to her, or maybe contraception wasn’t reliable. I was always told that my parents wanted a child very much. She was in labor two or three days before I was delivered by forceps in a breech position. I came out of the experience in bad shape, and my mother in worse. My mother and I both spent an extended stay in the hospital after I was born. I had surgery and I think she had to be stitched up, too. I had the red hair and translucent skin I have learned to associate with a number of genetic weaknesses, as well as some compensatory advantages. Thus my good fortune continued.

Note the tongue above as I try to get out of the doll bed I’ve squeezed into.  I still bite my tongue that way when I’m concentrating or making some extreme effort, despite many attempts to break the habit.

I was quick and precise in my mind. My father and his cousin Richard soon began having fun teaching me, challenging me, and watching me perform. I learned to read sitting on my father’s lap at the kitchen table. When he came home from work he would sit there and read the evening paper as my mother cooked dinner. I remember the scents of smoke and grease on his clothing from his work as a welder, and the feeling of his rough five o’clock shadow combing through my fine, thin hair as he read news aloud to me and Mama. When I was old enough to point and ask what things were, I started learning the alphabet. By the time I was three, words such as “circumstances” and “integration” were part of my working vocabulary, and I could spell them.. I was encouraged to perform for friends and neighbors by spelling and reading on command. I thrived on the attention and applause.

These two pictures only begin to illustrate a few of the neat things my father made.  The horse above was entirely his design and workmanship, using a spring (in shadow at rear) for the motion.  The vehicle below was an old Hupmobile coupe he turned into a pickup truck.

My diction was flawed–the parents accepted my lisp, and “w” for “l”, etc., which had to be corrected by a speech therapist in school later. But my thinking was clear, and I knew what I was talking about, because if there was any doubt between my parents over a definition, we went to the dictionary. My first trip to the public library was to find the meaning of a word (I wish I could remember what it was) in their big unabridged dictionary when it couldn’t be found in ours. I was given a library card then, and libraries, both mine and the public ones, have been important to me ever since.

My parents’ relationship was mostly peaceful and affectionate. The only time I heard him yell or her cry was when, while turning a mattress, she knocked his fiddle off its hook on the wall and broke it. Disagreements were usually mild and quickly settled. One area where they “agreed to disagree“ was in how to handle my short, sick life. Because of my poor prognosis and the impossibility of replacing me, Mama wanted to coddle me, keep me safe from harm. Daddy wanted to let me have as much living experience as possible in whatever time I had.

In my first three years, Mama was in the hospital several times before finally assenting to a hysterectomy. When she was home, she was usually in her rocking chair. As I began to crawl, she would sometimes tie the drawstrings of my long gowns to her chair so I could not get out of reach. With this restricted activity, my development was delayed. I didn’t walk until I was two–took off after another kid at my birthday party when he grabbed one of my new toys. After I could walk, the screen doors were always locked. Then, after her surgery when I was three, I was allowed out into the yard because she was then able to get around and keep up with me. Oddly, though my walking gait is a limp from having legs of different lengths and I never have been able to run without falling, I’ve always been able to dance.

From the start, I had an adventurous nature. I climbed the apricot tree in the yard almost as soon as I could walk, and then instead of just eating and climbing down, I called out to her, to show her, triumphantly, where I had gotten to. She panicked. She came out and stood beneath the tree, crying, and told me not to move. There we stayed, with her leaning on the trunk crying, while I chose the ripest apricots and got as much on the outside as the inside. (I still tend to wear my food.) Soon my father got home and quieted her and coaxed me down into his arms.

My only playmates at first were the two sons of some friends of my parents. They lived about three blocks away, and my mother and I would walk there sometimes. One day, I went by myself. Only I wasn’t all the way there yet when my mother caught up with me. She broke a twig off a bush and switched my legs all the way home.

She had been wary at first of the Mexican immigrants who were moving into the neighborhood, but eventually made some friends among them. There was a girl named Lupe who used to look after a whole flock of younger kids. She was in school, and taught the little kids English words as she taught me Spanish. I still speak fluent West Coast Spanglish.

My infancy and childhood must have been very stressful and challenging for my parents. I had seizures, fevers, allergic reactions and reactions to medications. The most severe of those early health crises was the result of a smallpox vaccination. Day and night, my mother had to sponge me to bring down my temp.

My memories of these episodes evoke feelings of frustration and disorientation. Consciousness faded in and out. Often muscles wouldn’t respond when I said, “move”. I hated restraint, had no self-restraint. I’d hop out of bed on the run as soon as I could, and often I’d relapse. My bed was piled with puzzles, books, comics and toys, there was a radio beside it… anything to hold my interest and discourage activity. I diverted myself willingly enough, but wanted out to explore.

I started kindergarten a few weeks before my fourth birthday. I was kinda frozen in shock and fear as I watched my mother take a last look through the door before leaving me there. Then my friend Donald, the younger of the two boys I’d played with since infancy, grabbed me and held on, wailing and sobbing for his mother. We both survived that day, but school never became comfortable or easy for me. The social aspects were always more troublesome for me than the academic requirements. Kids teased me for the red hair and freckles, for the withping thpeech, the funny walk and falling down. Frequent lengthy absences for illness disrupted social connections and earned me the nickname, “Sickie”.

The positive aspect of those absences was academic progress. My parents got me textbooks at my level of competence so I learned a lot faster than my classmates. A few of the meaner kids, especially boys, liked to call me Egghead or Brain. I think the kick for them lay in my reaction: fists on hips, nostrils flaring, I’d stomp my foot and demand to know what’s wrong with being smart.

I made several attempts to run away from home.  The photo at left could be one of them; I’m not sure.  In first grade, a girl tore the head off a doll-shaped purse I’d gotten for my fifth birthday, and I told my mother I wasn’t going back there again. She wasn’t buying it, so I packed a wash cloth and a book into my little suitcase and asked my visiting cousins to take me home with them. They drove me back to my home after driving me around talking logic and moderation to me for a while.

I desired autonomy, solitude, sugar, and dopamine. I remember begging for crackers and jam between meals… sneaking a spoonful from the sugar bowl on the kitchen table on my way to the bathroom… being restricted to 3 bottles of orange pop a day after I’d guzzled 8 bottles on a hot summer day. School days were hard because I could not adjust my pace and patterns to theirs. They certainly could not adapt theirs to my needs. I lived for the snacks and lunchtime, and in dread of kindergarten nap time and then the “quiet times” in first and second grades when we were compelled to lay heads on desks for minutes at a time… agonizing torture to me. I was told it was growing pains. I now know it was fibromyalgic trigger point activation.

I was in pain, it hurt almost all the time, and I cried a lot. I got close to the school nurses everywhere I went. I got to know a lot of doctors, too. My first career ambition was to be a nurse… actually, I first wanted to be a doctor, but someone told me girls had to be nurses. It was okay, I knew a lot of nice nurses, too. A nurse taught me how to relax.

It was part of preparing me for some painful procedure. I don’t recall the procedure, but I never forgot the deep, slow breathing and progressive tense-and-release process to turn myself into a puddle. That puddle visualization clicked right into my little mind and I used it whenever the pain got bad.

I was catching every disease that came around, getting sicker faster than most other kids. To some of them it seemed, since I got sick and then everyone else followed, that they all caught it from me. I felt somewhere between a canary in a coal mine and the messenger that gets blamed for the bad news.

Social repercussions of the chronic illness were worse than the various symptoms: vomiting, rashes, swelling, pain, fever…. There! Found the good side. Mama said always look for the good side, and fever was so strange. It appeared to scare the hell out of everyone around me. The range between 103-105 Fahrenheit is, to me, one of life’s best natural highs. During youth and young adulthood, in periods of remission, I’d dance or bicycle for similar effects: endorphins, dopamine and probably other brain chemicals I don‘t know about..

Between the fevers, the pain, and all the advice from nurses about relaxation, at some point during one of the three cases of measles I had within a year or so of age five, I learned how to turn pain into pleasure. At first, it was something I did only when driven to it by severe discomfort. Within a few years, I was toying with my sensory nerves. Some combination of the intense pain, the fear born of pain and the fear picked up from parents and medical personnel, and the obsessive self-injury for the sake of endorphins and dopamine, triggered a series of recurring dreams in which I was the young female sex slave of a blond man I named Bad Man. Only when I was in my forties and met the one who is the reincarnation of the original Bad Man of my dreams, did I understand that those recurrent dreams were inspired by past-life memories.

It was deeply disturbing to my mother to catch me acting out the Bad Man fantasies I invented after I had a few of the dreams. I learned to keep the  Bad Man games quiet and hidden.

I walked in my sleep, talked in my sleep, was extremely difficult to arouse from sleep. To get me to school on time through third grade, Mother would call me several times, then drag me out of bed, dress me, set me in my chair and start feeding me. Usually a drink of orange juice would be all it took to get me tracking, if only approximately on track. My diurnal clock has never been in synch with institutional time. I’m an evening person. My energy and clarity peak around 5, the time most people are beginning to relax and unwind.

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Roof repair, phase 4

The whole family is more or less under the weather and for once I seem to be the healthiest of the bunch.  Wahoo.  I love taking care of a couple of sullen, whiny men.  I’m convinced that part of the problem with these guys is that the haven’t had enough experience at being ill.  I am a much better patient than they are.

Doug did manage to make it up to the roof with me for an hour or two yesterday, to move the ladder to the other side of the trailer and slip some sheet metal and protective corrugated plastic (translation:  a shot-up old road sign [loose gravel] sandwiched between some salvaged political campaign signs) under the tarp over Greyfox’s room. 

It will, we hope, spread the load and strengthen the “mushy” roof supports in that area for protection to and from Doug as he shovels snow up there this winter.  Those saggy support beams are responsible for the leak over Greyfox’s bed.  Water forms a puddle there in the low spot and seeps through and onto his bed.

I also got our latest seam sealed (#3 of 5) and cut and sealed the opening for the next-to-last vent.  In deference to Doug’s diminished energy and non-existent good humor, I didn’t take pictures while we were working, and didn’t ask him to take any.  As we were shutting down the jobsite for the night, I tried to get a shot of him moving the ladder, but the camera took too long to warm up.  I took two shots of him anyway.  In the first, he has just set the ladder back in its usual position and in the other, he is waiting for me to come take the folding chair he is holding.

Most of the work we did up there yesterday was head work, trying to decide the best way to secure the TV antenna mast.  It is a skinny birch tree that Mark (who owns the land and gave us the trailer for staying here and caring for his pets) set up.  Its base rests in one hole of a cement block on the ground, and it is held in place by ropes tied to a cement block on the other side of the trailer and two cement blocks on the roof.

Before we can tarp that end of the roof, we have to eliminate the blocks and ropes, and I have no desire to put them back when we are done.  They make shoveling the snow off there more of a chore, and aren’t anything even approaching neat or professional-looking.  I’ve decided to use plumber’s strap to fasten the upper portion of the mast to the side of the trailer.

No roofing today:  it is raining and Doug has an online game set for the afternoon.