November 19, 2005

• Home Sweet Railbelt

  Okay, I’ll try this again.  Just after noon today, we had a brief power outage and I lost most of this post before I’d finished it.  I quit in disgust and found something else to do.  Then I waited a couple of hours to see if there would be more outages.  Heavy snow might be downing power lines all over the place today.  There hadn’t been a flicker until after I started this reconstruction, then the lights began to flicker occasionally but haven’t gone out yet.  I have done several insurance saves as I go along, each time I see a flicker, and now I hope I can finish this before we lose power again.

  When the Xanga Team created Metros, I liked the idea of finding other Xangans in my area.  I already know of two others who live between Wasilla where Greyfox lives and here where I live between Caswell and Sunshine on the map at left.  Since there are thousands of Xangans in the three Metros of Anchorage, Fairbanks and Juneau, I figured there would be some along the Railbelt, too, so I created a Railbelt Metro partially as a joke and partly because I’d really like to meet up with other Alaskan Xangans.  I know it’s not a city, but it is where most of the state’s population is concentrated, and it has its own distinct culture.  It’s a lot like a town five hundred miles long and a few miles wide, of variable width depending on terrain.

   Before the Alaska Railroad was built, population was clustered mostly at sites where big rivers reached the coast, with smaller villages scattered along the courses of the rivers.  Then the U.S. government opened up a lot of the interior for free homesteading.  People began settling along the railroad.  Then the Seward Highway was built along the railroad south of Anchorage, the George Parks Highway north of Anchorage, and the Railbelt began to fill up with people.  Well, I don’t suppose it’s really filled.  The population is still sorta scattered, but I have read that seventy-five to ninety percent of the state’s citizens live in the Railbelt.  What I mean is that I’ve read that seventy-five percent live here and somewhere else I read that it’s ninety percent.

  soonaquitter said she couldn’t find, “Railbelt” in her atlas.  That doesn’t surprise me.  The word is widely used in Alaska and virtually unknown Outside.  Here, we need a convenient word for this space in which all of us weirdos and misfits adventurous and independent Alaskans have settled who are too wild for the city and not bushy enough to head for the wilds of the Interior.

   ”Bushy” is a word for the mental state of those who have lived too long in the Alaskan Bush, the hinterlands.  Think of a state combining the concepts of “wigged-out” and “anti-social.”  The word also conveys connotations of unwashed and well-armed.  That’s the Bush, not the Railbelt.  Here along the state-maintained roadways, we’re more civilized, or more nearly civilized.  Some of us commute into a town to work.  Others go to town occasionally to shop, see a doctor, go bowling, or use a computer at the public library.  As a group, we tend to keep our old broken down cars around for parts, to dress casually and use few cosmetics.  As with all generalizations, there are exceptions, and as a group we tend to be a bunch of exceptional individuals.
  
  During the colder weather last week, I had cleaned a lot of ash out of the woodstove and then emptied the ash bucket that sits in front of the stove where it gets gradually filled with ash I scoop out and any burning embers that jump out when we open the door.  Several of the kittens found the empty bucket to be a warm and comfy spot to sit.  Doug got this pic of Alice in there.

  Snow was sticking prettily to the trees this morning when I got up.  It has been snowing all day and there’s a lot more snow on the trees now than there was when I took these pics this morning at dawn.

  The blue ones display the early morning  light as my camera recorded it, doppler blue.  The more natural-looking shots have been PhotoShopped, as has my new profile pic.  The profile shot shows an entwined pair of birch trees across the street from here.  I love those trees as much as they appear to love each other.
  
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  [power outage update:  the lights have gone off twice in the past hour, but I persevere]
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  The mutant-looking tree on the left in the foreground of the pic at right stands on a little high spot out in the middle of the muskeg.  It is another of my favorite trees in this neighborhood.  I love being in a place with great trees, and am glad to have lived here long enough to get to know some of them.

  To take that pic, I walked along the road past the row of bushes in the shot above on the left, and then walked down onto the frozen marsh along the trail made by snowmachines and four-wheelers.

  Except for a mis-step that ended in a slide into a hole out there, and getting my butt into the wet snow twice as I crouched for a low-angle shot, it was an uneventful walk.  After the second time of lowering myself into the snow, I started clearing little patches by pushing snow aside with my foot before I hunkered down.

  I followed the trail back toward home and then came back out onto the street on the path through the trees directly across the road from the end of my driveway.  I was on that path when I took this shot (left) of the light shining out my living room window, and also where I took the series of self-portraits that includes my new profile pic.

  I couldn’t remember whether I had ever posted a pic of my new bumper sticker, so I took this shot of Streak as I entered the driveway.  This illustrates what is for me the hardest thing about snowy weather:  cleaning the snow off my car.  Doug does the shoveling of the roof, paths and driveway, but sometimes it takes a lot of effort on my part to get him on task.  That is especially true during times like now, when his sleep schedule has him up only in darkness.  He doesn’t seem to mind being out there shoveling in the dark any more than he minds shoveling in daylight, but it’s harder for me to order him out there at night, especially when I’m asleep.

  Greyfox has been working a holiday bazaar in Willow today.  They used to call it the Holiday Bazaar, but it has been renamed and I don’t think the new name includes “holiday” or “bazaar”.  They must have gotten tired of the “bizarre” jokes.  The new name has something to do with crafts.  I hope it attracted a bigger crowd than the Holiday Bazaar used to draw.  It was usually a dismal group of crafters and bake sales, etc., buying each other’s wares and making trades.

  Greyfox called me several times with little news flashes.  I just got a final call saying that he’s done for the day, exhausted, has everything packed in the car ready to head back down the valley to his home.  He hates the snow.  His eyesight isn’t very good and snow just makes it harder to see where he is going.  I’ll be uneasy about him until I hear that he is safe at home.

  • 8:55 pm
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