Month: July 2004

  • This valley is clearly divided….
    UPDATED


    Living for weeks under the smoke from wildfires farther north, many of
    us have been dreading the annual pyrotechnic insanity of Independence
    Day.  [update: 
    today, something different:  here (and in Wasilla, according to
    Greyfox) there have been big flat flakes of ash, particles bigger than
    the average snowflake, falling from the broken cloud cover.]
      I oooh and aaaah with the rest over skyrockets exploding in
    a dark sky, but frankly can’t see the point of it this time of year
    when all you get is a lot of noise, stinky smoke, and some washed-out
    color in the never-dark sky of the midnight sun.  We do our
    fireworks on New Years, when the sky is black and the colors reflect
    off the snow spectacularly.

    We live in a forest infested with spruce bark beetles, full of standing
    dead trees, dry and filled with volatile resin, that make great tinder
    for starting fires.  This year the state has banned sale and use
    of fireworks.  Here’s how one resident expressed it to a reporter
    in today’s Anchorage Daily News:

    Houston resident Tammy Bailey, who has lived in the Valley for more
    than 20 years, sympathizes with the state authorities. She’s converting
    her two-acre back yard into a rock garden because she didn’t like the
    idea of the dead spruce trees, ravaged by bark beetles, being so close
    to her house. She also sees small amounts of rain in mud puddles around
    her house but notes that under her car the dust is still visible.
    “Have you ever seen a spruce tree explode?” she asked. “It’s like a
    bomb going off. All that spruce is just standing kindling.”

    In the Houston/Big Lake area, where Tammy Bailey lives, in 1996 the
    Miller’s Reach Fire burned nearly forty thousand acres and destroyed
    hundreds of homes.  One of my close friends lost her home
    then.  The scramble to evacuate and to rescue stranded pets, etc.,
    as the fire exploded seemingly in no time at all, was a frantic and
    only partially successful mess.  The origin of that fire was
    established:  bottle rockets.  Residents remember.

    Interestingly enough, there is a cluster of four fireworks stands along
    the highway between Houston and Big Lake.  I think that’s where
    they ended up because sales of fireworks are illegal in Anchorage and
    Wasilla, and that was as close as they could get to town, where most of
    their customers are.  People drive about sixty miles from
    Anchorage to buy fireworks there.  This year, the proprietors are
    frustrated by the emergency order stopping their sales.  Robert
    Hall, whose family owns three of the four stands, talked to reporters:

    Hall plans to torch his inventory, one item at a time, in what he
    promises to be the best fireworks show Houston has ever seen.
    Afterward, he plans to declare bankruptcy. He is working on getting a
    license for the show but promised an act of civil disobedience if it
    doesn’t come in time.
    “I don’t care if they throw me in jail,” he said. He stands to lose 90
    percent of his business over the ban. July 3 and 4 are his two biggest
    selling days of the year.

    Knowing the attitudes of many locals toward those eyesores that
    regularly dispense their noisy, smelly and dangerous wares along the
    highway, and how many of them own arsenals of firearms, and the way a
    lot of them like to celebrate holidays with alcohol and other drugs, I
    think he’s risking more than legal action.

    Anchorage Daily News | Fireworks banned in most of Alaska

  • Hi y’ all!

    Are my fellow United Statesians enjoying their long Independence Day
    weekend?  Don’t forget to pause at some point and remember where
    and how it all began:  that rabble in Philly sayin’ they were mad
    as hell and weren’t gonna pay no tax on tea no more.   In a
    scant two-and-a-third centuries we’ve gone from taxation without
    representation to more taxation and a lot of misrepresentation, but at
    least we don’t have a foreign tyrant now.

    I have been thinking for days and daze about the next installment of my
    pre-teen memoirs, but today my head is stuffed with fluff and feverish,
    so ‘scuse me if I just let Molly Ivins speak for me.

    AUSTIN, Texas — Happy birthday,
    America! Ye Olde Fourth of July rolls around again and finds the Great
    Nation in, frankly, a somewhat pissy mood. Lots of blame game,
    name-slinging and general unpleasantness. But there’s always an upside.
    The vice president reports that if you go ahead and let fly with the
    f-word, it makes you feel better. Anything to get that fun Dick Cheney
    back to his usual sunny self, I always say.

    True, we seem to have had more halcyon national natal days, but if we
    ignore I__q for the day, we should be able to celebrate our national
    heritage without punching each other in the eye.

    So let’s salute all that makes America special, starting with us, the
    people. Here’s to all the musicians, from country to hip-hop to rock to
    classical to jazz to folk to be-bop to norteno to polka to reggae, and
    to all the fusion forms thereof. Here’s to all the artists who get no
    respect:  the washboard players and lute strummers, harmonica
    blowers and banjo pickers. Here’s to their endless generosity in
    playing special benefits for retired musicians who are ill and have no
    health insurance, all over America, every night. And here’s to the
    great Ray Charles, bless his heart. May we all hear his version of
    “America the Beautiful” this holiday.

    And here’s to all the dancers who move to all that music, from the
    wildest Goth Watusi to the competitive ballroom dancers and the tango
    enthusiasts and the two-steppers and line-dancers and Celtic folk round
    dancers and square dancers and those who never got the beyond the
    box-step. Here’s to the African dancers and tappers, and the
    experimental modern crowd.

    Here’s to everyone trying to lose 10 pounds and all their lo-carb,
    hi-protein, all-fruit, cucumber-only, martini-drinkers’ diets — may
    they all succeed. Here’s to all their exercise machines and speed
    walking and gym workouts. Don’t give up, we’ll all be thin and gorgeous
    someday.

    Here’s to all the civic fandangles and to everyone who makes them
    happen — to moms who contribute brownies and dads who judge the goat
    contests, and the guys who set up the band seats. To all the Peanut
    Festivals, Turkey Trots, One-Armed Dove Hunts, Crayfish and Petroleum
    Days, Fat Stock Show and Rodeos, Blueberry, Strawberry and Artichoke
    Festivals, the Watermelon Thump, the Prairie Chicken Fling, Black-Eyed
    Pea Festival, the county fair, the school fair, the state fair, Puerto
    Rican Day, Gay Pride Day, St. Paddy’s, Cinco de Mayo, Juneteenth and
    thousands more. Not to mention the Fourth of July parades.

    Here’s to all the good deeds we never hear about, to people who stop to
    help change flat tires, return wallets, take crying children to the
    lost and found and stay until their mommies come, to those who help old
    ladies across the street and especially to those who make waitresses
    laugh.

    Here’s to Tony Korioth, who used to stop to carry an old lady’s garbage
    can up to her garage for her, and to his son John, who told the story
    at Tony’s funeral. Here’s to drivers who let others merge, the
    neighbors who baby-sit for pets and children and aging parents, here’s
    to the gardeners who donate their excess zucchini and home-grown
    tomatoes to their neighbors, to people who bring food when someone
    dies, to all those who pitch in, lend a hand and say, “Let me help.”

    And here’s to keeping America weird. To Scott Peterson and Kobe Bryant
    for making cable television so busy, happy and productive. Here’s to
    the tabloids, eternally discovering alien zombies from outer space
    (have they checked out the Veep lately?). Here’s to all our grumps and
    scolds, constantly insisting that we’re going to hell in a handbasket.
    Where would we be without an active core of selfless citizens
    constantly prepared to tell us we’re dumb, fat and lazy, and it’s all
    our fault? Concerning our national habit of polling ourselves to find
    just how dumb we are, a new study shows 88.2 percent of all Texans
    believe Osama bin Laden has two first names, like Jerry Jeff or Billy
    Bob.

    Here’s to all our dreams and fantasies, to the frumpy women who dream
    of looking like the models in Vogue and Bazaar, to the fat guys who
    read the extreme sports magazines, to the dentists who ride Harleys to
    get in touch with their Inner Biker, to the would-be gunslingers taking
    part in fast-draw contests, the karaoke singers and amateur-night
    stand-up comedians, to the sopranos who never made it to the Met but
    still star in the Methodist choir, to the frustrated explorers who take
    wilderness adventure vacations.

    Our national scolds say we’re something awful polarized these days,
    angry and snarling, don’t like our fellow Americans. The fundamentalist
    Christians can’t stand the so-called secularists, and vice versa. Oh,
    poop. Fellow citizens, we are, by and large, a splendid lot.

    Did you hear what the Buddhist said to the hot dog vendor? “Make me one with everything.”

    PS:
    If you read but didn’t comment on my latest blog about the ridiculous
    little supermarket checker, or commented early, you missed the joke sobasysta told.

  • Burn, Burn, Burn

    Wednesday, the light outdoors was orange and surreal.  The sky was
    brown.  Today (Thursday, because I’m starting this before midnight
    here, but I know it won’t be posted until Friday) the smoke/cloud cover
    was thicker and there was less light, less color to everything. 
    No real sunshine reaching the ground for a week or more has put a chill
    in the air.  I hear a little edge of fear in some people’s voices
    when they talk about the wildfires.  Many of us have friends and
    family in the Interior where those fires are.  Many are being
    evacuated.

    Particulate matter in the air here under the smoke plume leaves cruddy
    little deposits in the corners of our eyes, two-leggeds and
    four-leggeds alike.  I suppose the feathered ones flying around
    out there and being quieter than usual have crap in their eyes,
    too.  Front page of the Anchorage Daily News today had a picture
    of a hot shot crew up near Fairbanks, taking a break in camp, looking
    smoke-grimed and exhausted.   Colorado is sending us 150
    firefighters, since they currently have no fires there to fight. 
    Thanks, guys.

    Locally, a ban on open burning led the fireworks stands to voluntarily
    take their rockets and other aerial fireworks off the market. 
    When conversation at the neighborhood general store (at Camp Caswell, a
    campground down the highway a few miles) centered on the fires, the
    owner told me that people have been coming in asking for campfire wood
    and they’ve been saying they don’t have any for sale and telling them
    about the burn ban.   State troopers and park rangers, who
    generally spend a lot of time figuratively putting out fires, have been
    doing it literally lately.

    It was my night to drive the rehab van to the NA meeting.  One of
    the women asked me how I was doing in the smoke and all, and I patted
    my pocket and said I’d been using my inhaler a lot.  She grinned
    and lifted her shirt tail, showing me the inhaler tucked into her
    waistband…. the sisterhood of the wheeze.

    At the end of the meeting, I walked out onto the porch and into the
    middle of a silly argument.  The sun has been no more than a hazy
    red-orange disk for days and daze, and there it was, barely glowing
    through the smoke cloud, right where it’s supposed to be that time of
    day this time of year.  One woman was insisting that it had to be
    the moon, that it wasn’t bright enough to be the sun.  I added my
    voice to those of the others trying to reason with her.  The
    moon’s in Sagittarius, nearly full, couldn’t be anywhere near the sun,
    and besides, I said, “the moon’s not bright enough to show through the
    smoke.”  Her heated reply was, “I’ve seen the moon plenty of times
    in the daylight.”  I went and got in the van.  Why
    bother?  Let her have her delusion.  I was in too good a mood
    to get involved in silly arguments.

    Greyfox didn’t open his stand today.  He spent the early part of
    the day doing his laundry and catching up before the big holiday
    weekend with the sort of work that needs to be done to run a business,
    but which doesn’t directly result in any income:  organizing
    stock, calling wholesalers about defective merchandise, etc. 

    This afternoon when I got there we went to lunch together and to a
    couple of thrift shops.  At the first stop, he bought five videos
    for resale.  At the second stop I found a few small items and was
    ready to leave when he called my attention to a coat.  He said
    he’d been looking for one for himself, but this was a woman’s coat and
    had, “the finest hand,” he’d ever felt in a coat.  He has taught
    me that term, my clothes-horse old man.  Since knowing him, now I
    know that “hand” means the way a garment feels to the touch.

    I let him lead me to the coat, I tried it on, and I let him buy it for
    me–a grand total of $6.00, for a full-length (to my ankles) dark brown
    double-breasted silk trench coat with a zip-in wool liner.  
    I’m laughing out loud as I write this.  He was so pleased to have
    found it, and I was at least that pleased to bring it home and put it
    in my closet.  Right now, I’m back to feeling that triumphant
    pleasure, but for a while this evening I was burned up, totally pissed
    off, speechless with indignation.

    I spent a good portion of my drive home letting the curves in the road
    and the jazz on my radio soothe away the slow burn I’d been doing since
    the checkout line at the supermarket.  I had vented to Greyfox,
    who waited for me in the car as I picked up a few items, and he had
    said if it had been him, he’d have talked to the manager about
    it.  That thought hadn’t even occurred to me, although I did
    stifle an urge to punch, slap and/or throttle the clerk who checked me
    out of there.  As it was, she got away with it, the bitch. 
    Maybe I’d better explain myself….

    There were four checkers working.  I had only three items, so I
    could have gone to the express lane, but it had the longest line. 
    Two other lanes each had heavily laden carts being emptied and other
    big loads waiting behind them, so I took the one where I saw a young
    girl pushing an empty cart through and the checker just finishing up
    bagging a big order.  The girl was with her mother and several
    siblings.  The kids were asking for various things from those bins
    the stores place there to catch the eyes of impulse-buyers.

    I could tell they’d been fed before they came to the store, because
    there was none of the whiny, irritable, out-of-control behavior I often
    see in kids at the supermarket, whose parents apparently don’t know
    shit about low blood sugar.  These children were asking politely,
    and their mother was refusing calmly.  I was impressed.  The
    woman had a plastic card in one hand and a couple of slips of paper in
    the other, and I heard her ask the clerk which way she wanted to do
    it.  This clerk often has a sneer on her face, but it was even
    more pronounced than usual as she told the woman that her food stamp
    total was six hundred and something.

    The daughter who’d been helping to push one of the carts exclaimed at
    the total and her mother told her, “It takes a lot to keep you guys
    fed.”  None of them looked as if they’d been going hungry, but
    they all had the soft contours of people on high-carbohydrate
    diets:  lots of cheap pasta, grains, beans and rice, not so much
    protein or fresh vegies.

    The mother swiped her food stamp card through the reader and put it
    back in her purse.  The clerk had laid a big ring of keys on the
    scanner and looked annoyed as she told the woman she’d have to swipe
    her card again because the scanner had apparently been trying to read
    the code-strip on a tag on the key ring and the card-swipe didn’t
    take.  Calmly, the woman got her card back out and swiped it again.

    With nothing better to do, I was just standing there observing her and
    her family.  She was tall, statuesque, graceful and gracious, in
    plain but clean and neat clothing, with understated make-up. 
    There in that noisy place surrounded by children making unreasonable
    requests (though they did so quietly and politely), coping with
    inefficiency and rudeness from the clerk, she was unruffled.  This
    was no placid cow of a woman who didn’t know how to be ruffled. 
    She was a queen who wouldn’t allow herself to stoop to behavior beneath
    her dignity.

    The kids were clean, well-groomed, well-behaved and working together to
    organize and deal with four cart-loads of groceries.  I got the
    impression the woman was quite young, and I was trying to get a close
    look at her face, to see just how young.  I guess she felt my eyes
    on her, because she turned and made eye contact.  I smiled
    sincerely and got a sincere smile in return.  I guessed her age at
    mid-to-late twenties.  Then she had to turn back to the impatient
    clerk who was ready to handle the non-food part of the order.

    I suppose the slips of paper the young woman had were some sort of cash
    vouchers, because she signed them both and the clerk took them and
    handed back a few dollars cash.  Seeing it, one of the little
    girls said, “Oh, can we go to…” and the mother replied, “No,” as she
    put the money in her pocket.  “This goes in my gas
    tank.”   As the clerk folded up a yard or more of cash
    register tape and handed it over, she said in a snotty tone of voice,
    “Today you saved $129.45, Ms. ____.”  The girl who had exclaimed
    over the total exclaimed again, “One hundred twenty nine!?!”  Her
    mother smiled at her and said with evident pride, “I know how to shop
    the sales.”

    The stately young mother and her sweet kids began wheeling away their
    month’s groceries and the clerk raised her voice to almost a shout… a
    whiny, snide half-shout, dripping sarcasm:  “Eenjooy your holiday
    weeeekend, Ms._____!”   As my few items traveled the conveyer
    belt and I shoved my basket through, the clerk raised up on her
    tippy-toes and looked past me at the two people in line behind me, who
    had apparently seen that this was the shortest, fastest-moving line and
    grabbed it.  The clerk whined, “Why’s everyone getting in my
    line?  There are three other checkers working.”  She sounded
    aggrieved that any of us would dare to expect her to do her job.

    Then, as she turned and looked up at me, the woman’s voice changed, and
    just as polite as can be she asked me, “how are you?”  I answered
    sincerely, “grateful that I don’t have a big family,” as I took a last
    look at the back of the tall young woman and her helpful little brood,
    because I knew that I would never have been able to have remained as
    regally unruffled through that experience as she had.

    Then the despicable little wretch leaned over toward me and whined,
    “but she didn’t have to pay for any of that… it was all food stamps.”
      My lips clamped tight, I censored the first response to cross my
    mind,  “Who the fuck do you think you are!?!”   Doing my
    best to emulate that calm young single mother, I just stood there
    dumbfounded as the sawed-off little fireplug-shaped runt
    continued:  “She does this every month, and she always comes
    through my line.”  By then, I’d already thought of three other
    things to say to her, none of which would have been proper. 

    I kept my mouth shut as she went on telling me about how she’d had the
    good sense to stop after her two boys were born, and on and on in that
    vein.  I was remembering those few years when Doug was little and
    he and I had been on food stamps and what a mixed blessing it had been,
    being able to feed us just barely adequately, but at such a high cost
    in time, aggravation and humiliation.  I used to refer to those
    trips into the welfare office for interviews, “fighting the dragon.”

    I know there are many working people in this country who resent paying
    taxes to support people like that beautiful young woman and her alert,
    intelligent and polite children.  I suppose that was part of the
    motivation for that sawed-off little Caucasian bitch’s rant, too. 
    But that wasn’t all.  For her, I’m sure that race was an issue as
    well.  That stately and statuesque young mother was brown, you
    see, the color of sweet coffee and cream.  And, truth be told, I
    think there was some envy involved as well.  The runty little
    grocery checker never had been and never will be one tenth as
    gorgeously, impressively regal as that lady she was dissing, and those
    two boys she was bragging on probably weren’t nearly as polite or as
    alertly aware as that lovely little brown family, if they’re anything
    at all like their mother.