October 27, 2004

• The Reality Around Here

  Comments to which I have wanted to respond have been piling up. 
  It’s time for another of these comments-on-your-comments blogs. 
  I’ve got so many windows open now, so I can copy and quote you, that
  I’m inviting a crash.   Some of these are from new readers
  who just are not quite up to speed on Susitna Sue’s lifestyle. 
  Others are from old friends here who apparently missed some info along
  the way.  Then there’s also some not-so-new news from the local
  scene.  Well, here goes….

  ---

  A new subscriber who says she has read some of my memoirs some time back, merrow_mistral, wanted to know, “is the snow in alaska clean enough to make a cool aid slushie just from what falls on top of a car?”

  Fresh snow is clean enough to eat unless there’s volcanic ash mixed
  with it.  When one of the nearby volcanoes is sending out ash
  plumes, the snow can be gritty and gray.  If someone wanted to
  **shudder** pollute it with Kool-Aid®, I suppose she could.

  She also had an earlier cluster of questions about hobos:

  Do hobo signs differ from the street
  gang tags that are in alleys of the big cities apart from the obvious
  meaning that the gang tags signal territories in their control?
  Hmmm.  Can a train rider hobo still travel this way or is there a
  mean Ernest Borgnine train porter who is just dying to punch him/her
  off the train?  I wonder if a female hobo was treated differently
  from a male hobo.

  I suppose that monikers are closer to gang tags than hobo signs
  are.  They differ generally in being smaller, done in chalk or
  charcoal rather than spray paint, and in often carrying a date and some
  other information such as direction or destination.  The signs are
  not at all like gang tags, because they do not identify the person who
  wrote them but simply convey information about conditions in the area
  such as polluted water, alert police, kind people who give handouts,
  etc.  Most of that information was in that blog.  Didn’t you
  read it?

  There are still hobos riding freights.  That was implicit in that
  blog as well.  Porters are on passenger trains.  Hobos ride
  freight trains.  There are yard bulls (private police) in the
  freight marshalling yards who will beat and/or arrest anyone they find
  on railroad property.  Not only the yards and the trains
  themselves, but the entire right-of-way along the tracks is private
  property.  It has always been thus and snagging rides has never
  been safe or easy.  Nothing much has changed.  Hobos have
  been poisoned by handouts in towns where they were not appreciated, and
  have been welcomed in other towns, especially the ones where residents
  prefer paler skin on their migrant workers than they see on the ones
  who come up from Mexico. 

  The fact that illegal immigrants also ride freight trains adds another
  dimension of danger for hobos.  In areas near the borders, INS
  agents have trains stop out in the middle of nowhere and search
  boxcars, checking for green cards.  On my trips, I was traveling
  with a young man from the Netherlands whose student visa had run
  out.  He was taken off a train in California by the INS. 
  That was when I decided to get back out on the Interstates to travel.

  If you were wondering whether the bulls treat women differently, the
  answer is no, except that most of them wouldn’t rape a man.  If
  your curiosity was about whether hobos treat women differently, the
  answer is yes, in some ways.  Remember hobos are people, and
  individuals differ.  Some men are courtly and others are
  crude.  Nobody did me any special favors.  Some of them
  expressed appreciation when I produced the materials and cooked up a
  batch of reconstituted powdered scrambled eggs and shared them with all
  five of the hobos in one of the boxcars I was riding.  One of them
  had a duffel bag full of fifths of cheap tequila.  He shared with
  everyone, too.  On a different day, traveling in a different
  direction in a different boxcar with several Mexican illegals, my young
  male companion sat up all night with a knife, guarding me, after he’d
  caught one of them creeping toward us with his knife out.

  ---

   

  That blog about hobos also brought this informative comment from Sandking:

  The high tech underground does
  something similar to hobo signs… ever heard of “chalking”? 
  Walls in downtown areas are marked with symbols that indicate where
  free wireless internet access is available to hijack from unprotected
  private wireless networks, and how to access them (network names and
  codes are embedded within the symbols).

  I hadn’t known that.  I intend to find out more about it.

  [UPDATE 12:35 PM -- If you want to learn more, start here.]

  ---

  FaithHopeandTrick left this comment on that same snow blog where the breeze asked about edibility of our snow:

  “You actually have to go out and get water? I’m impressed. You probably appreciate a lot of things most of us take for granted.”

  Greyfox was here when I read it, and I read it aloud to him.  His
  comment was, “Yeah, like breathing.”  You’ll have to imagine the
  sarcastic tone.  I had been having several days of severe
  dyspnea.  It goes with the ME/CFIDS, along with the “sensorimotor
  deficits” such as the stumbling-and-fumbling shit and the
  anosmia.  If you’ve never lost your sense of smell, you can’t
  imagine how much I appreciate those times when I get a little remission
  from the anosmia.  And those rare occasions when I can walk
  straight, talk straight, and think straight… and even sometimes
  dance, yes I do appreciate them.

  There is profound truth in that quote from Thomas Paine in my
  sidebar:  “What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is
  dearness only that gives everything its value.”  Still, I wonder
  if I would fail to appreciate our clean air and pure water, and the
  social climate of this neighborhood, if Alaska’s climate were any more
  favorable to life.

  ---

  …and that leads quite conveniently into this from fatgirlpink:

  …I am curious about something. 
  Is there a way to dig a well at your place?   This might be a
  stupid question. I am sure this is a stupid question but I’ve asked it
  just the same.  If you could, I know that there are enough of us
  who love you who would pitch in for such a nice luxury.  At one
  point in my life, I lived in an old house and the well would go dry and
  we’d have to run for water.  Not my father and stepmother of
  course.  They left it to me and my ten year old sister.

  It is not a stupid question.  It is, however, one I’ve answered
  before, in one form or another.  There is a well on this
  property.  It was here when we moved in.  The water is not
  fit to drink, but that’s not the main reason we shut it down and no
  longer even use it in summer for watering the garden.  The man who
  owns this land and who gave me this trailer we live in after we’d been
  housesitting for him a couple of years, used to use the well water for
  his laundry.  His whites all had a rusty tinge to them.  A
  nearby laundromat had to install and continues to maintain a costly
  filtration system.  There is a lot of iron and other minerals in
  the water unless one goes down between 300 and 500 feet, through some
  solid rock.

  It may be of interest to some if I describe how that man, Mark, handled
  his water system here.  When he had this trailer moved in, he put
  a pressure tank in the little now-vacant cabin that was on the lot when he
  bought it, piped water into the trailer, had an electric water heater
  and flush toilet — but for some reason never got around to digging a
  septic tank.  Did the people before us here just flush stuff out
  onto the ground?  I don’t know.  I do know that before we
  moved in here, Mark was using honey buckets and hauling his waste out
  under cover of darkness and dumping it in the woods.  Sarah
  and Jono, who housesat here briefly before going south again, dug a
  latrine, which we use for the warmer parts of the year… but I digress.

  An earlier set of housesitters kept the place while Mark spent a winter
  in Mexico, a year or two before Sarah and Jono moved in to take care of
  Mark’s cats and his wolf-hybrid dog Leroy while Mark went to
  Florida.  During a cold snap, there was a power outage. 
  Power outages often happen when it gets down to forty or fifty degrees
  below zero Fahrenheit.   This place is also furnished with an
  oil furnace, which for several reasons we also do not use.  It is
  dependent on an electric igniter and blower.  When the power went
  off, instead of stoking up the wood stove and staying here, the
  housesitters fled to town.  Mark’s water heater froze and burst,
  also the porcelain toilet in the bathroom, and some of the water
  pipes.  The pressure tank survived, but the glass on the pressure
  gauge didn’t.

  Just before he left for the final time, when Sarah and Jono moved in,
  Mark was still working on the plumbing, working toward getting it back
  in working order.  His water system, meanwhile, was a summer-only
  system.  He ran a garden hose from the pressure tank through a
  kitchen window and used it to fill his washing machine with cold water,
  or fill pans on the stove to heat dishwater, etc.  He hauled
  drinking water from the spring just like the rest of this neighborhood.

  We used Mark’s garden hose for a couple of summers after we moved in,
  not for laundry or drinking, only for cleaning and garden irrigation,
  but continuing to use it would have meant either getting a plumber in
  to stop leaks around the pressure tank in the cabin or having the cabin
  floor rot out from the water.  It wasn’t worth it.  I had
  already spent fifteen years at my old place, Elvenhurst, hauling
  drinking, bathing and dishwashing water from the spring or melting snow
  if that wasn’t feasible, and catching rain water off the eaves for
  irrigation in my garden.

  I still have not gotten to the main reason we don’t make any effort to
  get the well deepened, the plumbing fixed, etc.  We live on
  permafrost here.  Winter cold goes deep.  People around here
  who do have indoor plumbing have perennial freeze-up problems. 
  They depend on electric “heat tape” wrapped around their pipes. 
  When a power outage coincides with a cold snap, their pipes
  freeze.  The best-case scenario then would be burst pipes and a
  flood.  People use all sorts of things to thaw pipes:  big
  industrial space heaters that run on propane or gasoline; blow torches;
  pans of embers from their woodstoves, etc.  They burn their cabins
  down in the attempt.  It happens every winter around here. 
  The local general store usually has one or two jars on the counter
  collecting donations for someone’s burnout fund.  That’s why so
  much of the social life in this neighborhood goes on around that spring
  – that and the quality of that water.  City people stop to fill
  jugs or barrels when they’re traveling between Anchorage and
  Fairbanks.  The spring at Mile 89 of the Parks Highway is
  justifiably famous, and I’m fortunate enough to have landed within a
  couple of miles of it.

  This was also in that comment:

  “Sorry Greyfox read your blog.  I
  wonder why you put up with it but I’m sure you have reasons and
  convictions.  I dont have your back bone.  I run and push
  people away when it gets tough.”

  Greyfox usually does read my blogs.  I assumed he’d read that one,
  and I knew it might trigger a narcissitic rage, or at the very least a
  little snit.  That gives me opportunities to confront his
  pathology.  He is either over it by now or he switched from rage
  mode into ingratiation by nine o’clock last night, because he was sweet
  as ever in our phone conversations last night.  He’s like that.

  I’ve done that:  run away, dumped relationships when they weren’t
  perfect.  I tried for years to get Greyfox to move out, and even
  took a long (27,000-mile) trip eleven years ago because I just couldn’t
  handle his bullshit.  But then I decided I wasn’t going to let the
  asshole chase me out of my home, and I came back.  I have a strong
  ego, so for the most part his bullshit doesn’t hurt me.  I’ve had
  to put a lot of effort into keeping his abuse from warping Doug, and
  haven’t been entirely successful.  The kid despises the old fart,
  and that emotional baggage is bad for the kid, but if and when we can
  work through it the experience and the lesson are going to be something
  that will help him throughout his life.

  “…reasons and convictions,” yes…  Greyfox has always been an
  interesting person to know.  Even disregarding our long
  reincarnational history together (including a life in Asia thousands of
  years ago when we were both wandering masterless warrior monks, one
  just a couple of thousand years ago when we were army buddies in the
  Roman Legions, and a more recent one when we were a May/December pair
  of lovers in Elizabethan England [I was the December one], he’s one of
  the few men I’ve known who is even close to my level of
  intelligence.  That there is an in-joke he may get, if he recalls
  having once told me that I was one of the few women he’d known who was
  close to his…. :-p

  After he sobered up and diagnosed his own NPD, it became sorta obvious
  to me why we came together this time.  There may not be another
  person on this planet at this time who has both the skill and the
  motivation to help Greyfox through this therapy.  There is
  probably not another person around who could provide me with the mental
  challenge I crave and need to keep going through my physical handicaps,
  and who is willing to provide the material support for this strange duo
  of Doug and me, the slacker and the gimp.  We’re a pair, a diverse
  mismatched pair of misfits with a history that has only begun to be
  told.  If I could get him to collaborate with me on a book of our
  past-life recollections, we’d surely be rich and famous.  
  But he’d rather not remember most of that stuff, and I don’t push it
  because I don’t want to be famous.  Maybe after I’m dead he’ll use
  what I’ve written about my recall and fill in his own part and write
  that book.  Then he’ll have to deal with the fame and
  fortune.  Would serve him right, the asshole!

  Oh, by the way, in case it’s not blatantly obvious, I love the asshole
  in my own bitchy way.  I love him enough not to cut him too much
  slack.  And totally aside from loving, which is just something I
  choose to do because being a loving person is important to me, and not
  because of anything he is or does, he’s funny.  Doug has long said
  that living here is like living in a sit-com.  And it’s a more
  intelligent sit-com than any on TV.  A lot of our jokes would just
  sail right over the heads of a general audience.

  ---

  I did want to share with you the story about what Carl McCunn, Chris
  McCandless and Bart Schleyer have in common, plus what columnist Craig
  Medred had to say about one of our neighbors who, “did the best he
  could for his dogs,” but this has run long and I want to get some work
  done before I run out of this day’s ration of energy.  I may be
  back later today with those bits of last week’s news, which I’ve
  intended to post for several days now.
  

  • 2:23 pm
  • 12 Comments