Yesterday,
I drove over to my neighbor Ray’s and got my winter tires put on the
car.  The pictures accompanying this entry were taken in the
muskeg across the road from here, as I waited for my car to warm up
enough to drive it.  The muskeg is frozen, so until the snow gets
too deep I can walk out onto it.

Today was water-run day.  Our supply was lower than we usually
let it go before we refill all the jugs and buckets.  After we
filled Kermit (the green pot on the woodstove that holds our hot water
supply), the kitchen pitchers, the coffeemaker, and the cats’ water
dish, all our water containers were empty.

I was wishing that I had remembered to take my camera to the
spring.  Not only was there unusually heavy traffic (counting
those already there before us and the ones who came as we were filling
our jugs, half a dozen other vehicles besides ours were at the
turnout), there was a notable terrain change. 

The spring is coming to the surface about forty feet or so north of the
outflow pipe.   We can see vapor rising there, but no liquid
water is visible.  All around the vaporous area, spreading
downhill toward the waterhole and out toward the edge of the highway,
is a sheet of ice.  This was a common occurrence years ago, before
the highway department dug up the spring and put in a new outflow
pipe.  Now the spring has once again burst out of its
confinement.  It doesn’t seem to have affected significantly the
rate of flow from the pipe.
 
I would suppose that someone with the highway department has made a
note of this and maybe the spring will be scheduled for new
“improvements” next summer.  I can’t see them tearing into the
frozen ground now, and it’s possible they’ll let it go for a few years
unless someone reports it and asks for the improvements.  From the
perspective of the people who get water there, it’s a pain in the
ass. 

It could literally be a pain in the ass, if someone slips on the
ice.  The overflow freezes slick over all the surfaces where we
walk and stand and crouch or kneel to reach the spring.  We
scattered kitty litter today to aid traction, and I used a folded throw
rug to kneel on to fill our buckets and jugs.  It’s a lot harder
now to get the full ones up out of the hole, because the thickness of
the ice on the platform effectively deepens the waterhole. 
Breaking up the accumulation of ice would be a temporary fix at best,
because it will glaze over again, but it will probably have to be done
anyway to keep it from getting so thick we can’t reach the
outflow.  Note to self:  next time take the Mutt (ice
chipper) and a pick and the camera.

Fifty years ago today, in 1955, fifty-five delegates met in Fairbanks
to frame a constitution for a state that did not yet exist.  The
building where they held their sessions was the newly-built Student
Union at the University of Alaska, but now that building is known as
Constitution Hall.  The document they created has been called the
best constitution in the world (and not just called that by
Alaskans).  It has also been called a sales pitch.  Both of
those labels fit.

The Territories of Alaska and Hawaii had been petitioning Congress for
statehood for years, but there had not been much action toward getting
a bill through.  The biggest obstacle to statehood for the 49th
and 50th states was racism.  Southern politicians had just enough
votes to ensure their ability to filibuster and delay passage of civil
rights legislation and they knew that new senators and congressmen from
Alaska and Hawaii would turn the tide against them.  House Speaker
Sam Rayburn was Congress’s most influential and outspoken opponent of
statehood for AK and HI.

Dwight Eisenhower was president.  He opposed statehood for Alaska
for military reasons.  Federal control of this strategically
important territory was greater then than it would be after
statehood.  The plan that Ike favored was to break up the
territory and consider statehood only for the areas of Southeast and
South Central Alaska that include Seward, Juneau, Valdez and Anchorage,
while leaving the larger portion of the land as a U.S. territory. 
Proponents of statehood in Fairbanks, Nome, and a number of smaller
communities up north, didn’t like that idea.  [I wish you could
see the crooked ironic grin on my face as I typed that understatement.]

The rationale for holding the Constitutional Convention was to
demonstrate the seriousness and “normalcy” of Alaskans, and their
worthiness for statehood.  This is how the Constitution gained
that reputation as a sales document.  Alaskans had an image of
non-conforming rugged individualism and general “kookiness,” to use a
term in currency in 1955.  The delegates worked hard to
demonstrate their responsibility and rationality.  Once the
constitution was complete, no one could deny that the wannabe state was
capable and worthy of self-governance.

The Territory of Alaska was divided into five legislative
districts.  The Territorial Legislature was made up of delegates
who were elected at large in each of those districts.  The
Southern district included the Panhandle of Southeast, the Aleutian
Islands, and Southcentral where Anchorage is located.  All of its
legislators came from Anchorage, where the majority of the district’s
population was concentrated.  The Territorial Legislature made
sure that the delegates to the Constitutional Convention would be
selected  more equitably by dividing the state into many smaller
local districts.

The Territorial Legislature appropriated $350,000 for the
Constitutional Convention.  Delegates were paid $15.00 a day
salary and
$20.00 per diem for expenses.  Those delegates arrived in
Fairbanks for the convention by many means of transportation including
aircraft and dog sled.  The Parks Highway, which now links
Fairbanks with the populous parts of the state farther south and
defines the “Railbelt” where most of us Alaskans live, wasn’t here
then.  The delegate from Anchorage, Vic Fischer, drove a gravel
road to Glenallen and then another gravel road, the Richardson Highway,
to Fairbanks, at top speed of 35 MPH.

I listened to Vic Fischer, and the delegate from the
Yukon-Kuskokwim-Tanana region, Jack Coghill, on our local public radio
station today, talking about the convention.  I’m very happy for
the opportunity to hear and learn from them.  Not many of the
delegates are still alive.  I skimmed a roster of the delegates,
and saw that five out of the fifty-five names were identifiably
feminine.  Since several were identified only by their initials,
there may have been more than five women at the convention.  I’m
quite certain that their presence and their input helped make Alaska’s
State Constitution the exemplary document it is.

The Territorial Legislature had instructed the delegates not to write
law.  Their purpose was to frame a foundation upon which
legislation could be built.  They were also determined not to let
partisan politics influence the constitution.  Delegate William A.
“Bill” Egan, who was later elected as first governor of the new state,
was elected President of the Constitutional Convention.  Vic
Fischer and Jack Coghill credited Bill Egan with keeping politics out
of it.

When it was formulated, two of the concepts embodied in our
constitution were notable for their novelty:  the right to privacy
(which has spawned endless debates and confusion over our supposed
right to privately consume controlled substances, in conflict with
Federal law), and prisoners’ rights.  Our state constitution
mandates that correctional facilities and the criminal justice system
focus on reformation of the offender and protection of society, not on
punishment.   We have a correctional system, not a penal
system.

 Another provision prohibits “dedicated revenues.”  No tax
can be earmarked for a specific purpose.  The delegates studied
other states’ experiences and decided that we didn’t want to make
mistakes such as those in places where excess dedicated highway
maintenance revenues were channeled into private pockets while the
state’s school system fell apart.  Our state coffers (with the
exception of the Alaska Permanent Fund whose dividends we all enjoy
equally) are one big pocket, the General Fund.

Armed with the sales pitch of the Constitution, Alaska’s Territorial
Delegate to Congress, Edward Lewis “Bob” Bartlett sold a few key
politicians including Senator Lyndon B. Johnson and House Speaker Sam
Rayburn on backing statehood for Alaska.  Hawaii wasn’t far behind.

Exemplary as the document is, it wasn’t perfect.  It has been
amended.  One amendment recognizes the rights of victims of crime
and their surviving families.  Another amendment seems to many
people, including myself, to have introduced an obvious flaw into the
document.  Wouldn’t you consider an unconstitutional amendment to
the constitution, a “flaw”? 

Some of us see sections 2, 3, and 22 of Article I:

as conflicting with section 25:

Oh, well, bullshit just seems to creep in everywhere eventually.

I had a CFS setback from my day of chasing tarps in the wind, so Winky Jack didn’t morph into punkin pie with bean crust
until yesterday.  Fortunately the house was good and cold, so he
didn’t rot or go moldy in the meantime.  I cut him all up and
nuked his dismembered parts, froze most of the mashed “meat” but kept
out enough for two pies.

I made a generous batch of the garbanzo and fava bean pastry, and
managed with extra gentleness and care to roll it so thin that there
was enough left for a third pie crust.  I filled that one with two
cans of juice-pack peaches, thickened the juice with tapioca starch and
added some Splenda for extra sweetness.

I shoulda taken a pic before they cooled.  Almost as quickly as it
was cuttable, the peach pie was half gone.  When I got up this
morning there was a thin slice left to go with my first cup of
coffee.  It wasn’t a proper breakfast, so I followed it with some
pumpkin-bean pie.

Unless something happens in realtime to stimulate a blog, I guess the
next one (whenever I feel like a next one) will be more memoirs. 
A couple of you commented, as I’ve heard so many times before, that I
oughta write a book.  It’s going to be quite a job piecing it all
together with continuity.  Sorting out the road trips reminded me
of a time when Mama and I lived in a basement apartment across the
street from Granny’s house in Wichita, and I think that was when I was
ten years old. 

Recalling that time also reminded me of one of the trips to California
when we took the train, the Santa Fe Chief.  That time, if memory
serves, we bought a car in California and Mama drove it back to
Kansas.  That had to come before the trips I wrote about, and
probably was the summer that we wrecked the Chevy in the wheat
field.  We had two identical navy blue ’48 Chevy coupes during my
youth.

 Remembering isn’t the hard part.  The tricky part is putting
the memories together in a coherent string.  All that comes later,
now.  Today is another take-it-easy day, after being on my feet a
lot yesterday.  I dreamed last night that I was wearing a
turtleneck sweater, and I woke exhausted, barely able to hold my head
up.

P.S.  It was sub-zero Fahrenheit again here last night, but the
thermometer rose as the barometer fell overnight and there is a fine
powdery snow falling now.

These memoirs have been stalled here for months because of a failure of
memory.  I’d start thinking about these annual cross-country trips
and get bogged down trying to recall how many there were, when the
first one was, which year it was that we took the northern route
instead of Route 66… I give up.  In the interest of getting on
with my life story, I’ll tell this little part of it as best I can.

I
think the first trip was in 1955, between seventh and eighth grades
when I was eleven, after Mama sold the sundries store and we moved back
in with Granny (my aunt Alice) in Wichita.  I don’t remember
its being then.  I’ve deduced that this was the first one.  I
remember Mama making me take my dog Spooky to the pound because, she
said, we couldn’t take him with us.  I also recall Spooky living
with us there at Granny’s and waking me up in the mornings for
school.  That could only have been in seventh grade.  It
doesn’t make sense that there would have been any of those trips while
Mama was running the store, because she wouldn’t have had the free time
for it.  Therefore it seems likely that the first trip was in
1955, after she had worked in the Wichita schools for one school term.

Mama wanted to go visit the family she’d left behind.  I remember my
mother as having many sentimental attachments, not only to people but
also to objects.  The people she had left in California when we left
there with my first step-father Jim Henry included a younger brother in
Sacramento, his wife and two kids, and two sisters in Redlands
(Southern California, near San Bernardino) and their extended families.

I had cousins out there, both first cousins and their kids, my second
cousins.  There were about a half dozen girls within a few years of my
age in the bunch.  I wanted to see them again, but I wanted to take my
dog with me.  Mama wouldn’t have it.  I loved Spooky.  As we started
the trip, I was bummed out about leaving Spooky, leaving him forever. 
The only consolation I had was that the people at the pound said he
would soon find a new home because he was so beautiful, friendly, and
well-trained.

We
had everything loaded in the car, and stopped at the pound to drop off
Spooky on our way out of town.  Now, as I think back on how the
car was packed, I’m not sure that my mother intended for us to go back
to Wichita at the end of that summer.  She didn’t leave anything
important at Granny’s house.  Our Philco TV and household goods
were stacked in the back seat and on the floor back there, making a
level platform even with the backs of the front seats, with all our
blankets spread on top to make a bed and play space for me.  The
trunk of the old dark blue ’48 Chevy coupe was packed with our clothes
and other items.  (It looked like this one, except we couldn’t
afford whitewall tires.)

The first part of the trip was grim and tense.  Mama may have felt
badly about making me leave the dog, but I don’t think so. 
Probably she was convinced that it just wouldn’t do to take him and she
was pissed at me for not seeing it her way.   When her mind
was made up, that was all there was to it.  She preferred driving
at night and stopping in a motel during the days, so we had left
Wichita in the afternoon.  I rode in the passenger seat until I
got bored, then climbed onto my nest in the back, read for a while and
played Chinese checkers against myself until I fell asleep. 
Sometime during that night, the tension was broken with laughter. 
We were going through some small town with brick streets and hit a big
bump at a railroad crossing.  I was bounced about halfway down
into the passenger seat, and my Chinese checkers were spilled. 
Abruptly awakened and shaken, I wailed, “I lost my marbles,” and Mama
and I both cracked up.

Details of these trips just run together in my mind.  We went four
or five times, I think, both while we lived in Kansas and then later
after we moved to Texas.  It was our summer routine, made possible
because my mother was cooking in school cafeterias and we were both out
for the summer.  All except for one return trip, we went the
“southern route” on Route 66.  That one exception was when we
returned via Rabbit Ears Pass in Colorado and stopped to visit old
friends of my mother’s and some of my father’s cousins.  Whichever
way we went, the roadside monotony was broken by Burma Shave
signs:  “In this world… of toil and sin… your head goes
bald… but not your chin… Burma Shave.”  “She kissed the
hairbrush… by mistake… she thought it was… her husband jake…
Burma Shave.”

Route
66 across Arizona and New Mexico was lined with tourist traps. 
They were advertised with little signs that said things like “Only 384
miles to Jackrabbit Trading Post,” or “Rattlesnake Trading Post, 455
miles.”  Given the buildup, I wanted to stop at all of them. 
Mama didn’t want to stop at any.  This was when I learned the
phrase, “tourist trap.”  Mama spoke of them scornfully and said
they were just there to get our money and weren’t worth our time to
stop.  I think it took me several years, but I finally nagged her
into stopping at the biggies:  The THING, Jackrabbit, and
Rattlesnake.  Little America wasn’t there yet, then.

I don’t recall which trading post we were at when I got this shot of
the “Old Chief” beating on his drum and chanting through a PA
system.  His garb is all wrong for the tribes indigenous to that
area, and the same tourist trap had some Navajo women selling their
blankets and rugs. 

I started my rock collection at one of those desert trading
posts.  We had stopped for lunch and I was browsing the gift shop
as Mama finished up, paid the bill and used the rest room.  I was
fascinated by a basket full of selenite roses on the counter. 
Mama came over and started to drag me away, saying we couldn’t afford
to buy a rock.  The man gave me one, valued at 25 cents.  I was thrilled.

Mama did let me buy post cards.  Picture post cards sold then at
six for a quarter in most cafes and gift shops.  I was allowed one
quarter a day while we were on the road, and over those years collected
a cigar box full of post cards, both the scenic ones and cartoon
jokes.  The post card collection had started on our trip from
California to Arkansas with my step-father Jim.  One of those first joke
cards was a poem:  Texas ain’t so big, and across it ain’t so
far.  I went across from border to border, and only wore out one
car.”

We didn’t see my Uncle Scotty (Harrell  Scott, the baby of that
family, my mother’s only younger sibling) and Aunt Ella and cousins Don
and Nancy in Sacramento on any of those trips.  Mama and Scotty
were not as close as she was with her sisters in Redlands.  That
was where we always ended up, staying with Aunty Pat (Nora Howard
Gavin, whom everyone called Pat) at her little stone bungalow in town
part of the time, but mostly out in San Timoteo Canyon at Clock Ranch,
the orange grove where Unkie, my uncle Hubert Hendon, was the
foreman.  Unkie’s wife, Aunty Sis, was my mother’s sister Flora,
who hated that name.  All her siblings just called her Sis, the
same way they called their eldest sister Alice, “Mom,” and I called her
Granny.

I used to walk through the orange grove with Unkie as he went on his
rounds opening or closing irrigation gates.  He carried a hoe all
the time.  There was a hook welded to the back of its head for
operating the gates, and the blade of the hoe was sharpened for
decapitating rattlesnakes.  One of those summers, I got heat
exhaustion and went temporarily blind.  After that, Mama kept me
in the house during the hot part of the days, and to occupy me, Aunty
Sis let me use their old black and gold Royal manual typewriter and a
typing course book.  That’s when I started learning to touch
type:  fjf jfj kdk dkd tyt yty uru rur lsl sls p;p qaq ghg hgh
endlessly.

There was a swing hanging from a big old pepper tree in the yard, and I
spent hours in it seeing how high I could go.  With my cousin
Sharron Hendon, who is about three years younger than I, I would throw
rocks at the lizards sunning themselves on trees, trying to knock their
tails off.  The dismembered tails would keep wiggling for a long
time after being detached.  Later, we would keep an eye out for
those lizards and watch as their tails grew back.  In the evenings
when the lawn sprinklers were on, tarantulas would come out for a
drink.  Unkie caught one under a cottage cheese carton for me and
tied a string around its middle so I could lead it around on a
leash.  Mama freaked, so Unkie turned it loose.

Among the things I took away with me when we returned east from those
visits were a four-foot-long seed pod from a palm tree, and a
radiosonde that had fallen from the sky into the orange grove with a
collapsed weather balloon.  Unkie let me take it apart, and then
let me take the collection of instruments home for show and tell at
school.

Sis
and Unkie had four grown daughters:  Dorothy, Iris House, Leta
Willunga and Donna MacIntosh.  Iris lived in Redlands with her
five daughters, the eldest of whom, Linda, was a little older than
I.   Leta lived with her husband and his family on a dairy
farm outside Redlands and was just starting her family.  Donna was
recently married, and lived in Seal Beach.  As often as I could
talk Mama into it, we’d go into Redlands for an evening with Iris and
her girls or Aunty Pat.

That was my first taste of tacos.  Mama had conservative tastes in
food, or else her xenophobia extended to cuisine.  She didn’t
trust foreigners or foreign foods.  On the evenings we stayed with
Aunty Pat, we’d go to a Taco Tico and get a dozen tacos for some
ridiculously low price.  Iris’s tacos were better, homemade, and
she taught me how to make them.  I still do it just as I learned
then.  Another rare treat was going to Mel’s drive-in late at
night on the way back to the ranch, just Mama and me, for hot fudge
sundaes.

The year that we took the northern route home and stopped for a visit
with Chloe Day and her family, I got another bit of culinary
novelty:  pizza. 

Chloe
and her late husband Tom had been friends of my parents before I was
born.  Chloe had about five or six kids, all older than I except
for one girl who was younger (pictured here with me displaying my souvenir pennant at Red Rocks
Park).  Most still lived at home, but had jobs.  The house
was run quite differently from my mother’s home.  Mama thought it
proper for the whole family to sit down to meals together.  Only
reluctantly did she convert to sitting with TV trays in front of the tube, instead of at the
kitchen table.

Chloe’s family was seldom all together at the same time.  She’d
cook up big pots of stew or beans or pasta, and either keep them warm
or let the kids warm stuff up when they came in.  Some evenings,
someone would bring in a big pizza.  Yum.  It quickly became
my favorite food.  Chloe’s more relaxed lifestyle became my
practice when I started running my own household, too.

That Chevy was a wonderful car, practically indestructible… well Mama
did total one on a dirt road in Kansas, by flipping and rolling it into
a wheat field, but as long as she kept it on the highway, it went like
a charm.  Cars were simple then.  Daddy had taught me how to
adjust the carburetor, and how to pour water over the glass bowl on the
fuel pump if it vapor locked from overheating.  Mama and I
together could change a flat tire.  That’s about all we needed to
know.

One trip, outside Needles, California in hundred-and-ten-degree heat,
we got stuck with a vapor lock and no water.  They had been
charging a dollar a gallon for water at our last stop (when gasoline
was only about 19 cents a gallon) and Mama had decided against filling
the canvas bag that rode dangling from our front bumper.  A
trucker stopped to help us, and he didn’t have any water, either. 
He asked if we had any oranges or grapefruit.  We had an
orange.  He cut it in half, handed me one piece, and pushed the
other one down over the fuel pump bowl.  Car started right up.

 This last photo was taken on one of the last road trips, and maybe the
last one that Mama and I made together.  We had already moved to
Texas then, because I had my chihuahua/manchester terrier mix, Button,
with me.  She’s standing up on that sign post beside me there.  Maybe Mama realized the pain she’d caused me by making
me leave Spooky behind, or maybe it was just because Button was a
smaller dog.  For whatever reason, she let Button go with us.

Yesterday, I complained about the weather.  It really hadn’t been
bad, just cold, a little colder than usual for this time of year. 
I shoulda known better.   Later in the day the weather really
gave me something to complain about.

Doug
and I had gotten the five tarps spread over the big pile of firewood
where the woodsellers dumped it beside our driveway.  We rounded
up the strays that had rolled off the pile so they wouldn’t be lost
under the snow later on, and covered the pile and weighted the tarps
with some heavy chunks of wood.  When there was just one small
tarp to be placed over the last exposed part of the pile, I was
breathless from the exertion in the cold air, and went inside. 
Doug finished up and then came in and went to bed, having been up all
the night before.

Later in the afternoon, Koji started barking.  He was looking out
the front window going nuts.  I had to see what was getting him so
excited, so I went and looked.  Tarps were flapping around in the
wind.  Lots of leaves and a few bigger bits of debris were blowing
by, from north to south.  When I paid attention, I could hear the
whooshing and sighing over the sounds of the radio.

I fortified myself against the breathlessness with a few hits of
albuterol, suited up against the cold wind, and went out there. 
Before I could start on the tarps, I had to chase one of the garbage
cans halfway to the end of the block.  Then I tracked down three
of the small tarps that had blown away into the woods, carried them
back and dumped the bundle on the ground, weighting them with some
hefty sections of logs while I dealt with the big heavy silver-colored
tarp that was flapping around trying to get away from its anchors.

I managed to grasp a flying corner and hang onto it as I climbed 
to the top of the pile, which  is at least eight feet high,
fifteen feet wide and maybe 23 feet long.  I got my corner
stretched to where it needed to be, but it slipped out of my hand and
blew away before I could anchor it.  That gust of wind loosened
more of the anchoring logs and the tarp was flapping freer and farther
away than before.  I made my way cautiously back down the shifty,
treacherous woodpile and grasped that corner again.

Despite my wariness and greater care to hang onto the thing, the wind
took it out of my hand again.  Altogether, I had to retrieve the
flapping end and drag that tarp over the pile three times before I got
it anchored against the wind.  Then I spread it all out and added
more weights around the edges and across it in spots where there were
little dents or flat spots in the pile so the chunks of wood wouldn’t
just roll off.

Around
that time, I needed a break, so I went in, caught my breath, inhaled a
bunch of albuterol, returned a call to Greyfox that had come in while I
was out, caught more breath, warmed my frozen fingers and had a hot bit
of nourishment.  After that, I went out and started in on the
smaller tarps to cover the places that weren’t covered by the big tarp.

I may have gone into overkill on the anchoring out there.  I told
Greyfox later that there was now more wood on top of the tarps than
under them, but that was exaggeration.  Whatever… it
worked.  The wind blew all night, and the tarps are still in place
this morning.  I haven’t checked to see if both garbage cans are
still snugged up against the side of my car where I left them.

The wind has died down somewhat, but it’s still sighing through the
trees.  The temp this morning is warmer than yesterday.  It’s
13.6 above zero.  This time yesterday, it was that far BELOW
zero.  Warmer is better.

Overnight, outdoor temps here reached a seasonal milestone: 
double subzero digits.  It’ll get colder, no doubt, in months to
come, but for now that is quite cold enough.

My kid’s sleep cycle usually runs on an approximately 25-27 hour
period, so that sometimes it coincides with mine and most of the time
it doesn’t.  Theoretically, his being awake while I sleep is
helpful because he can keep the woodstove going through the
night.  In practice, he tends to snuggle down under blankets next
to the woodstove in Couch Potato Heaven and neglect the fire while he
plays on the PS2.  That’s the way it went last night, and it was
chilly in here when I got up.

I poked the fire to encourage it and fed some more wood into it to
increase the heat.  Then I nuked a cup of leftover coffee and
picked up an open bag of trick-or-treat popcorn I found beside the computer.  No kids stopped here
on Halloween night, so we are eating leftover popcorn.  Doug asked me
what was for breakfast and I answered, “I’m having popcorn.”  Then
we started discussing what was available for a better breakfast, and I
prodded him out of CP Heaven to take the trash out before the garbage
guys get here.

I had my hands full with breakfast prep and was dodging half a dozen underfoot cats
in the kitchen when he came back in.  He was out of view in the
front room when I called out to him and asked if he was busy.  He
answered that he was “just standing here being cold,” so I asked him to
get the bread out of the fridge for his toast.  As he moseyed into
the kitchen, he said, “Oh, sure, now I can get even colder.”  My
response, as he bent into the refrigerator, was, “It’s no colder in
there than it is out here.”  He straightened up and grinned at me
as he said, “Actually, it’s a little warmer in there.”

As it has on many other occasions, it struck me how absurd it is for
us, living in Alaska, to complain about the cold.  I mean, what do
we expect?  But complaining
about the cold is an old Alaskan tradition, just as is complaining
about the heat in summer and cold in winter on the Great Plains. 
We have to complain twice as much about cold winters because we don’t
have hot summers.

Alaskans have made an art out of complaining about the weather. 
It’s a twisted sort of celebration.  We take great pride in our
geographical hardships here.  We have the annual Healy Wind
Festival, for example, in a mountain town where a wind-tunnel landscape
creates wind speeds that on occasion can pick up fist-sized rocks and blow
them through windows.  We have tourist t-shirts showing an Alaskan
“weather map” with local conditions listed as “partly shitty,”
“intermittently shitty,” “totally shitty,” and “perpetually
shitty.”  That last one is in the islands of the Aleutian Chain.

As porcelain_lumberjack
noted in a comment on yesterday’s entry, my seasonal stories tend to
repeat year-to-year.  Life events tend to repeat that way
here.  There’s the semi-annual outhouse maintenance (the pushing
of the poop),  the midwinter Outhouse Olympics event (the
poopcicle put), the autumn acquisition of a big woodpile for winter
(Ours is huge this year, a challenge to get covered by six tarps of
various sizes.), and after winter there is breakup, the season that
passes for spring in the Arctic.  I try always to find fresh
things to write about, but sometimes I repeat myself.

Today, I have a reason for repeating myself:  new readers.  Dingydarla asked:

It wowed me when we first brought the computer in here and set it up on
an old card table.  For a while, until we got a computer desk and
rearranged the furniture, we had to climb over the wood box (the handy
firewood supply by the stove) to get to the computer.  This part
of Alaska, the Railbelt between Seward, Anchorage and Fairbanks, where
nine-tenths of the state’s population lives, is hi-lo-tech in ways that
can often be surprising.

The electrical grid spans the entire 500 or so miles along the highway
and railroad, but doesn’t extend very far off to the sides.  In
this area where I live the phone co-op has extended its lines farther
than the electric co-op has.  I got our phone in 1985.  It
would have been 1984, but I applied for it
after the ground froze and the phone company would have charged me an
extra few thousand bucks to cut the frozen ground with concrete
cutters, so I waited for the spring thaw.  If we’d had a reliable
power source for a computer (we had a series of little gasoline
generators), we could have been on the internet ten years or more
sooner than we were. 

Doug and I lived for fifteen years, from 1983 to 1998, off the power
grid.  Our lights and cooking fuel were propane, heating fuel was
wood, radio and fans to move the heat around were powered by a 12-volt
system based on car batteries.  Lots of our neighbors still live
that way.   In ’98 we moved in here to house-sit for
Mark.  It’s less than half a mile from our old place, and it’s on
the power grid.  And yes, Darla, we do have indoor plumbing. 
We live in the mobile home that Mark ended up just giving to me
when  he decided not to come back from Florida.  It was fully
plumbed when Mark moved it in here.  But “indoor plumbing” does
not necessarily equal running water.

[OOoops -- edit:  I left this 'graph out first time around] In
summer, we can run water down the drains and out, but there’s no
incoming water and no functioning water heater.  The water heater
froze and burst long before we moved in here.  Most winters, the
sink in the kitchen will drain until December or January,
usually.  One year that drain froze in November and didn’t thaw
’til May.  Another year, the sink drained all winter.  This
year, the bathtub drain is already frozen.  I shower in there
using a plastic camp shower bag filled with water we heat on top of the
woodstove.  Last year, the bathtub didn’t freeze at all. 
This year, I’m going to be dipping my bathwater out into a bucket and
dumping it down the drain of the wash basin until that freezes
up.  After that, I’ll carry it out to dump it.

Mark did have running water here for a while.  He had a well
drilled, put in an electric pump and a pressure tank in the little
cabin beside the trailer.  Mark didn’t make friends quickly, he
sorta kept to himself, or someone would have told him he needed a
deeper well.  There’s a water table not too far down that is high
in mineral content and polluted with Giardia, B.coli, E.coli and God
knows what else.  That’s what Mark’s old well pumps out.  We
don’t use it at all.  He used it for gardening, laundry and
cleaning before he left, but by the time we had gotten to know Mark,
the trailer’s plumbing was out of service, and he only had cold
“running” water, running in a garden hose through his kitchen window in
summertime.

To get to the same source that supplies the clear clean water we get
from the community spring, we’d need to drill a few hundred feet
farther down.  The expense of drilling a deeper well is
not the main reason we don’t try that.  More important factors are
what we would be losing socially if we did it, and what we would be
setting ourselves up for in terms of maintenance and care of a water
system.

At this time of year, the surroundings at the community
spring look like the shot at left.  That’s Doug down there,
kneeling to fill a water jug, before the improvements were done to the
spring a couple of years ago.  Since I don’t hang out in the bar
at a local lodge where most of my neighbors meet, or in church where most of the rest of them get together, this is
where I usually run into my neighbors.

Some of us spontaneously and unofficially take responsibility for
maintaining the area around the
spring.  We pick up litter, deepen the hole under the outflow when
it silts up, put in new freight pallets for access when the old ones
fall apart, and keep the steps on the slope clear of ice and
snow.  My guess is that the group that takes care of such tasks is
somewhat smaller than the group we’re cleaning up after and looking out
for.

The spring is actually under the jurisdiction of the state highway
department and they have messed it up for us a few times making their
“improvements,”  digging up the old length of culvert pipe and
putting in a new one.  When they do that, we have to go a few
miles up the highway to another spring with a less abundant flow of
water.

The real improvements pictured here just appeared, seemingly overnight,
a couple of years ago.  I’m fairly certain the job wasn’t done by
the state.  For one thing it’s too neat and aesthetic, and uses
recycled materials.  For another, it was completed so fast and
without hoopla.  When the state plans any work here, they tack up
a notice on a tree a month ahead of time, and they take forever
completing the job.

Mark was working on his
plumbing here right up until he left that fall seven years ago. 
He wasn’t a good plumber, and certainly not a fast worker.  It had
been several winters since the original plumbing had burst, and he had
been making do with the garden hose through the kitchen window ever
since the freeze up that killed his indoor plumbing. 

He
had left the place in the care of some young housesitters who abandoned
it during a power outage that came with a deep cold snap.  
When I read Darla’s comment this morning, I sent Doug around to the
back yard to get this photo of the toilet that broke when the water in
it froze up.  The pipes under the trailer had frozen and burst,
too.  Mark had them wrapped with electric heat tape, which is, of
course, absolutely useless during a power outage.

Indoor plumbing and running water in homes are relatively rare around
here.  Some people have them, and they also have the headaches and
expense of maintaining them.  Every winter a few of them have the
heartache of having their house burn down due to their efforts to keep
pipes thawed or to thaw them after they freeze.

Even in the city of Anchorage, on the coast at a lower elevation where
it never gets as cold as it gets up here in the Upper Su Valley, some
winters the water mains freeze.  Every winter the pipes in some
people’s houses freeze.  It’s enough of a problem to keep several
steam-thawing businesses working profitably.

In cold or nasty wet weather, I grumble and moan about having to make
water runs, but once I’m out there most of those runs, even in winter,
provide interesting glimpses of wildlife or pleasant encounters with
neighbors.  In summer, you’ll never hear a complaint from me about
a water run.  The spring is a beautiful place I love to visit.

Additionally, the water we get there is one of the best things about
living here.  Our clean air and water make the various
difficulties and hardships of this harsh environment worth the
trouble.  Air and water are basics, and few places on this planet
have better basics than we have here.

But you wouldn’t like it.  It’s a nice place to visit, but you
wouldn’t want to live here.  There’s NO industry, few jobs, only a
few civilized amenities and they’re a hundred miles away in
Anchorage.  You’d hate it.  Believe me, and remember that,
because one of the most important “basics” for me here is the relative
isolation, the absence of crowds.  It’s crowded enough here
already.

I must clear up this misconception.

The
topic of the blog where barney left his comment was the toilet seat
that spends most of its time in wintertime behind the woodstove so that
it will be warm when we use it in the outhouse.

I had said that at this transitional time, I tend to either forget to
take it out with me, or forget to bring it back.  Barney was
apparently reacting to my saying that Doug had been the one this year
who decided it was time to warm the seat, and brought it in.

It’s just a little, lightweight seat, easy to carry, no lid flopping
around, no unwieldy porcelain attached.  Here it is in its winter
home behind the woodstove in our living room.

What does it take to keep a toilet seat in your living room? 
Chutzpah?  Savoir faire?  Hedonism?  Simple
practicality, I suppose.  A warm seat on a cold day just makes
sense.

Several of my recent entries have mentioned the colder weather and
onset of winter.  Today, another sure sign of winter jumped up and
bit me in the butt, so to speak.  Doug apparently noticed that
winter is here, and brought the seat in from the outhouse to place it
in its winter home behind the woodstove.  On my first trip out
there this morning, I wasn’t prepared, so I got to sit on the cold and
splintery plywood bench instead of the warm and smooth varnished
seat.  I also did what I frequently do at this transitional time
of year.  I forgot to bring it back in with me.  Now my
choice is to either go back out and get it, or to risk either having to
sit on it cold or having to apologize to Doug if he’s the one who has
to sit on it cold.

The latest entry, earlier today, received these apparently unrelated questions in comments:

What are my personal feelings about “spiritual
things” being attached to tangible objects?

Do I believe that a
person has the capability to attach part of their spiritual self to a
possession?

Can that possession be passed on and still retain the
original owners spirit?

facts…
reality…
truth…
words…
shit.

I still flounder about, trying to find the words to expand on the “Wake up!” injunction in my work-in-progress for KaiOaty,
the FAQ on Lightworkers and Light Working.  I could say, “Pay
attention.”  Or I could say, “Look within.”  If I say all of
them, my treatise is now up to six words.  As I mentioned before,
anyone who gets it from that, doesn’t need it in the first place.

I found some excellent words in the works of Ramana Maharshi. 
Unfortunately, most of the best of them are in Sanskrit.  Maharshi
himself said that the terminology for his basic self-realization
technique is difficult.  realization.org states it this way:

Yeah, no kidding.

E.J. Gold talks of this technique in terms of a labyrinth.  We
Workers, labyrinth voyagers, are seeking the Heart of the
Labyrinth.  “Heart” figures prominently in Maharshi’s work,
too.  But talk about “heart” to your average American girl (most
wannabe Light Workers are young and female) and they think valentines
and romance.  That’s not what E.J. and Maharshi had in mind.

E.J., early on, encountered expressions of fear, particularly a fear
that the seeker would become lost in the labyrinth.  He assures us
that this is no problem, that as soon as the fear sets in our
consciousness is back in its accustomed state of identification with
the “sleep” of the biological machine.  He doesn’t mean the delta
brainwave state of snooze.  He’s talking about walking sleep, the
everyday “waking” state of the mass of humanity.

I know just what he means.  My mind wanders.  I Work my way
into the labyrinth from time to time, have a few lucid moments and
then, like a rubber band my mind snaps back into something else besides
transcendent awareness.  Even when my work is of a more mundane
sort, such as the research I’ve been doing to find works to cite for
this FAQ, I’m easily distractable.

I was following links from Maharshi to a few others who have been
influenced by him, such as Papaji, Ken Wilber and Paul Brunton. 
In the 1990s, Wilber’s words about how we affect
our own reality became one of my most useful resources when I was
dealing with clients who had swallowed the YCYOR line in full and were
wondering how the hell and why they had created their current
realities.  In the 1960s, Brunton’s The Secret Path  led me to my first transcendence and first out-of-body experiences.

See how easily I was distracted from my research by those memory
triggers?  That’s not all.  The bio on Paul Brunton stopped
me cold.  I looked at his dates of birth and death and saw that he
died July 27, 1981, the day Doug was born.  When I realized how
far my mind had wandered from the course I’d set myself this morning, I
decided I might as well blog.

So, here I am.  I see that in my first few paragraphs above I have
achieved a little of the exposition I’ve been looking for.  Thank
you, all of you, for giving me the sounding board.  It occurs to
me that I might do better here by addressing my FAQ not to the wannabe Light Workers, but to a general audience about them.  That’s progress, I think.