I almost wrote, “‘THE’ is the
problem,” before I realized that there are a lot more of these problems
than just the one.  And that’s the nub of this problem.  I had been thinking specifically of The Long Dark
Night of the Soul.  It occurred to me that calling it thenight
implied that there is only one.  That would suggest that
once I got through that one spell of benightedness and emerged into the
Light, I’d be there.  I would have arrived, so to speak.  To
hold such a misconception easily leads to depression or despair when
darker times arrive and one forgets for a while that she is enlightened.

Having chased the light through the last years of the 1960s and most of
the 1970s, when relative enlightenment did finally hit me, I relaxed my
vigilance.   One person, at least, will grasp the
significance of that statement.  “Vigilance” is one of Greyfox’s
favorite words.  At the NA meeting to which I took him soon after
his last drug binge, it was these words in the preamble that caught his
attention and engaged his imagination:  “We keep what we have only
through vigilance.”

Vigilance, a sort of mindfulness, receptive attention with an open
focus, is an essential ingredient of any life that is happy, joyous and
free.  At least, it is essential to me and to many others with my
tendency to slip from the light.  I can see my lapse of attention
as a natural enough error.  Having found what I’d sought, I saw no
reason to think I’d lose it again.  At the time, I was unaware
that what I had “found” was a focus.  I’d tuned in, gotten “on a
beam,” so to speak, and mistook my little beam of light for something
much more extensive and pervasive.

I dislike metaphors and symbolic language, but have little else with
which to communicate.  Here — tune into my thoughts and know,
grok, what I’m trying to say.  Don’t get it?  Let me try a
different metaphor.  I had awakened.  Wakefulness,
mindfulness, essential being, was so pleasant and productive a state
that I had no desire to return to sleep.  But that “I”
that saw and knew and did so much was not all there was to me. 
The essential I exists on this plane within and through a meat machine
whose natural state is sleep.  If my focus shifted, my vigilance
lapsed, I’d slip into identification with the sleep of the machine.

One helpful facet of my situation as an habitual backslider, one of the
very few comforting thoughts about having fallen frequently into the
machine’s sleep, is that I now no longer ever really forget that I have
been enlightened.  To resort once again to the light/dark
metaphor, the blackness no longer seems so absolute and the light is no
longer so blinding.  The depression and despair that accompany the
sleep of the machine after the exultation of essential awareness isn’t
as deep or life-threatening as it once was. 

I no longer need to plunge so deep into the dark sleep before I bounce
back into the light.  I regain my focus and my vigilance more
easily each time I lose it.  Maybe all that bouncing about is
nothing but preparation for bouncing right out of the machine. 
It’s a faulty and malfunctioning machine, uncomfortable to live
in.  I suppose that one of these times when I transcend it, I just
won’t come back.  Meanwhile, here I am, and there’s a lot of work
to be done.

Today on NPR, All Things Considered ran a feature remembering the
evacuation of New Orleans a year ago.  I listened to people
telling their stories of the kindness they received from strangers
along the way.  It included everything from necessities such as
food and transportation, to strangers helping evacuees get messages to
family members reassuring them of their safety and hotel clerks looking
the other way when people brought their pets into their rooms.

Something in those stories and the evident unexpectedness of such
kindness resonated with an older set of stories I had heard from
various sources.  The Cherokees and members of other tribes driven
from their homes in the U.S. Southeast to be resettled in the Oklahoma
Indian Territory about 170 years ago told similar stories of unexpected
help received at the hands of kind strangers.

Extraordinary circumstances seem to remind many of us of our universal kinship.

‘shrooms

Several
people asked about mushrooms and me.  When I first moved to this
valley 23 years ago, I carried a field guide around, collected caps,
made spore prints, and identified as many specimens as I could.  I
discovered that there are many species here on the ground that are not
in any field guide.  That same thing is true of insects, too.

In this pic there are two mushrooms prominent in the lower left
corner.  The colorful red one with white spots is Amanita
muscaria, and the big brownish one above it is a Boletus species. 
Boletes are abundant and ubiquitous here.  They are edible in the
non-toxic sense, but must be collected as soon as little round knobs
emerge.  By the time the caps open, they are full of larvae and
have begun to turn to slime.

When I was healthier and more vigorous, I did a lot of wildforaging,
including for mushrooms.  Now that chronic fatigue curtails my
activity, it is catch-as-catch-can.  There are about half a dozen
tasty edible species I can easily distinguish from poisonous varieties,
and when I find them I eat them.

I used to collect and consume a few of the psychoactive ‘shrooms as
well.  Psilocybes are rare this far north.  The only species
I have found here is coprophilia, a tiny translucent bell-shaped cap
with a distinctive white line around its margin and a delicate
flavor.  An effective dose is about thirty or forty of them, and
weather conditions must be ideal for them to appear at all, so it’s not
even an annual treat.

Amanita muscaria or fly agaric is toxic and psychedelic.  Popular
folklore is full of contradictions and misinformation.  Some say
the active ingredient is only in the little white warts on top, while
others say that the warts are poisonous and you should only eat the red
part.  An authoritative source, Andrija Puharich, in an appendix
to his 1973 book, Beyond Telepathy,
states that the red film or skin of the cap contains either atropine or
muscarine (I forget which), and the warts contain the other, and that
the two poisons interact to boost each other’s psychedelic effects and
help prevent each other from stopping the user’s heart.  He
includes preparation instructions and dosage information based on body
weight.  [DISCLAIMER:   uninformed or careless use is harmful and possibly fatal.]

My readers reminded me that the democratic process follows different
forms in other countries and does not exist at all in still
others.  My situation here was characterized as “lucky”. 
That’s a judgement I could dispute on grounds that I don’t believe in
luck, nor do I wish to try and determine whether such alleged luck is
“good” or “bad”.

Since sometime in the past century, when I began Working to transcend
dualism, judgement, and other such false and limiting beliefs, it has
become increasingly difficult for me to decide whether one thing is
better than another.  Rather than waste time in that effort, I
focus on details, similarities, differences, subtleties and
alternatives.

There are difficulties inherent in communication when one possesses
such an attitude.  I use words that have emotional load for my
readers but are simply labels or descriptive terms without pejorative
connotations to me, or implications of approval.  Things just are,
and I try to see them as they are and say what I see.  I try to
remain cognizant of things such as blessings in disguise and unintended
consequences, but despite my efforts I still have opinions and
preferences that come through in my word choices.

Although I tend to accept the idea that no person who is truly worthy
of governing others would actively seek such a position, I still would
not characterize the candidates for governor as gubers or
goobers.  I just wouldn’t, even if I felt it was more or less accurate.  It’s unkind and
inaccurate.  A goober is a harmless (unless one happens to be
allergic) legume, also known as a peanut.   Calling a
politician a goober or guber is slander (or libel) on a peanut.

As I considered the compusory democracy in Oz, where people are fined
if they fail to show up to vote, I realized that such a system would
have some interesting consequences here in the U.S.  Presumably
more poor people, those who can’t afford to pay the fines, would
vote.  More rich people might opt to just pay the fine and avoid
the bother of going to the polls.  This might result in a more
egalitarian form of government than the one we have, which is probably
the reason this system hasn’t been instituted here.

I view the “closed primary” instigated by the Republican Party in
Alaska to be an attempt to eliminate parties such as the Greens,
Libertarians and Alaskan Independence.  In this state, in order
for candidates to get their names on a ballot (as opposed to having to
run as a write-in candidate), their party has to have a certain number
of registered voters or the individual candidate has to submit a
petition with a certain number of valid signatures from registered
voters.

The way the primary used to be run, everyone’s names were on one ballot
and the voters picked the ones they chose.  They could choose a
Libertarian to run for governor and someone else to run as the
Republican candidate for lieutenant governor.  That was especially
useful in cases where someone not in one’s own party of choice was
particularly objectionable.  It enabled votes against people from other parties.

The Republican Party recognized that and moved to eliminate the
practice for their candidates.  As a result, any Libertarian,
Green, Democrat, Independent, etc., who wishes to engage in such
strategic voting must now register as Undeclared or Non-Partisan. 
As Alaskans change their registration, the public rolls of the smaller
parties shrink, and some of them, such as the Greens and Libertarians
in particular, may find themselves off the ballot in the near future,
making it more difficult to field candidates. 

Since it has recently become nigh onto impossible to get anyone other
than a Republican elected in Alaska, I ask myself why the Party thought
it was necessary to go to such lengths.  The answer, of course, is
fear.  Fear is the greatest resource at the disposal of the
Republican Party.  The Party’s followers are mired in fear. 
They do all in their power to spread that fear to everyone.  I am
impelled to question whether the fear-mongering leaders are likewise
fearful, or if they are cynically preying on the fears of others to
consolidate their power.  Who knows?

Every time I go and vote, I feel a little dirty, as if I’ve
participated in something immoral, beneath my dignity.  I’m always
torn between the dread of letting the miscreants get away with their
machinations without any opposition from me, and that of encouraging
them by my presence.

Yesterday’s gubernatorial and congressional primary here might have
gone on without me if there hadn’t also been two ballot measures,
campaign finance reform and a tax on cruise ships, that were important
to Greyfox.  If he hadn’t come up here and taken Doug and me to
vote, we probably wouldn’t have bothered to go.

I did not imagine that our two votes would decide the fate of the two
issues, nor was there the remotest chance that any of the races for
party nominations was going to be close.  In other words, the
outing was pro forma, showing the flag, keeping our names on the voter
rolls, and an opportunity to stop by my friend Lois’s bake shop to
support the local economy and our sugar addictions.  (Yes, my
abstinence has slipped.  May public confession help me get it
back.)

The scene at the polling place was a black comedy, low drama of a kind
that leaves a nasty taste behind.  An elderly couple was there
ahead of us.  He, being registered as “undeclared,” was allowed to
choose which of the three available ballots he wished to use.  It
wasn’t that simple for the old woman.

The poll worker had to explain to her several times that she wouldn’t
be allowed to vote on any of the Republican candidates.  She
wanted very much to cast her vote for cute, sweet, vapid and evasive
Sarah Palin against the sleazy incumbent Frank Murkowski and the other
two candidates, an ordinary glib politician and an extraordinary raving
lunatic.  She had a choice between the “combined” ballot and one
that contained only the two ballot measures and no primary candidates.

The old woman was registered as a Libertarian, and in Alaska’s new
closed primary system, one must be registered as a Republican,
non-partisan, or undeclared, in order to obtain the separate Republican
ballot.  The poll worker explained that she could change her
registration, which she did, but for this election she was stuck with
either the combined ballot containing the names of the Democrats,
Libertarians, Green Party candidates, Alaskan Independence Party
(secede or succumb), Independents and others.

Muttering and whining, the old lady took her ballot and shuffled off to
the voting booth.  She need not have feared for cute and
mealy-mouthed Sarah; she has won her disreputable party’s nomination by
a hefty margin.  It never ceases to amaze me how far a politician
can go by simply not taking a stand on any issue, and answering all the
pointed questions with the same wandering discourse on how honored she
will be to serve Alaskans and support the Constitution, blah, blah,
blah….

I was up next.  I handed over my voter card and, since I am
registered as non-partisan, was offered a choice between the combined
ballot and the Republican one.  For no better reason than to show
to the poll workers that I’m decidedly not
a Republican, I took the combined one.  Greyfox, undeclared and
given the same choice, took the Republican ballot so he could vote
against Murkowski and Palin.  He said he voted for the person with
the funniest name, which has to have been the lunatic.  Doug’s
registered as a Libertarian (because there’s no category for
anarchists) and had to take the same ballot I chose.

I didn’t ask Doug who he voted for.  It doesn’t matter.  The
Green Party hasn’t the ghost of a chance in any Alaskan election,
independent candidates don’t have enough money behind them to buy
enough airtime to get many votes, and even among my fellow Alaskans
nobody can dredge up a substantial number of votes for seceding from
the Union, so why bother choosing among those candidates in the
primary? 

I voted for Tony Knowles for the Democratic gubernatorial
nomination.  He has had the job before, is competent, and has a
fair chance of defeating vapid Palin.  What more could I want in a
candidate?  He didn’t need my vote, but he got it anyway, and got
the nomination.

Sometime during the night I awakened briefly to the all-too-familiar
sound of water dripping from the roof.  It is dripping inside and
out.  When I got up a few minutes ago and went outside, the
surface of the ground was glistening, reflective, from saturation with
water.  Last night’s rainfall must have been heavy; more soil has
been washed away leaving new rocks exposed.  More flooding is
expected.

Yesterday, it was announced that all Valley polling places would be
open for today’s primary election.  Greyfox plans to be up here
later today for that, to deliver fresh supplies to us, and to have some
time at the computer.  I went online this morning to check news
sources for updates and find out if the road is still open.  I
guess it is.  Nothing had been updated for several hours.

I spent some time looking through the  flood photo gallery
at adn.com. I saw a big mudslide that blocked a road near Girdwood, a
house floated off its foundations and hung up on a logjam in the Little
Susitna River, our old friend Dusty Sourdough pointing out the new
channel of the Big Su that now flows through his yard…. 

Once again I sent a silent “thank you” to Charley, who nixed my idea of
buying a riverfront lot 23 years ago when we were scouting out property
before our move from Anchorage.  The lot we bought here in the
woods didn’t have the sweeping views, and it also hasn’t been swept
away.  I have been watching the rivers and creeks cutting away at
their banks, with that same feeling of gratitude, ever since we moved
out here.

I’m going back to look at more pictures while I drink some coffee and wake up.

More later….

Yesterday afternoon, our phone service (and internet connection) went
down, undoubtedly due to the flooding.  After about eighteen
hours, it was up again.  But before that happened, the sun was
shining brightly in a nearly cloudless sky.  That hadn’t happened
yet in August, so I’m pleased to see it.  It’s not an unmixed
blessing, of course.  Now there is work to be done on the roof,
cleaning the stovepipe, and sometime in the next few days we have to go
to the spring for water. 

This morning, after checking the phone (dead still) and having
breakfast, I walked out to capture some images of what remains of
summer here.  Nights will be getting cold now that the cloud cover
is gone, and some of the leaves have already turned color and
fallen.  The water level in the muskeg is even higher than it was
when I took the last set of pictures.  I tried and failed to get
shots that would show that.  Here is what I did get:

Out on the muskeg, a white-haired woman in hip boots was picking
blueberries.  She asked me if I’d seen any bears around here, had
me turn off the headlights on her truck to save her wading back to the
road, and said the rain had knocked most of the berries off the bushes,
and many others were under water.

There’s hardly any traffic on the highway.  It is flooded and/or
washed out in four places, so the usual steady stream of big trucks
growling by on their way between Fairbanks and Anchorage is
stilled.  Likewise, in the opposite direction the railroad tracks
are uncommonly quiet, without even the sounds of the local traffic that
continue on the highway.  We are not facing evacuation, being on
relatively high ground here, but not far north of us an area has been
evacuated, and another one to the southeast.  (adn.com/news story with photos and map)

Several people have expressed interest or curiosity about my
health/well-being.  Well… physically I’m still limited and
mentally I’m still inclined to forget that fact and come crashing into
those limits from time to time.  Having a critical case of cabin
fever after weeks of rain, yesterday when the rain let up for a while
and there were a few breaks in the clouds, Doug and I went out to view
the high water.  I overdid, knocked myself out yesterday, and am
paying for it today with an unusual level of neuromuscular dysfunction.

First, I drove out the cul de sac.  That apparent stream of water
across the muskeg is actually just the portion of the flooded marsh
that’s visible where the snowmachine/four-wheeler trail has killed the
vegetation.  A month or so ago, the ground was dry out there and I
could walk the trail.

Sheep Creek, usually a narrow stream down the middle of a wide, rocky bed, is over its banks now.

A long line of salmon was hugging the bank trying to get upstream to
spawn, but barely managing to make any progress against the flood.

Along the south side of Sheep Creek, water was flowing through the woods and we heard fish jumping back in there.

From Sheep Creek, we turned around and headed north.  At Goose
Creek, the stream was bankfull, but the riprap (heavy rocks used to
stabilize the banks) that was put in after the floods about twenty
years ago was keeping it from overflowing, and the new bridge was
intact, so we headed on north to Montana Creek, where the old lodge had
washed away in the floods of the mid-1980s.  One of my favorite
crazy neighbor stories involves the usual crowd of drunks sitting in
the bar that night watching the water rise until it floated the fridge.

There was a broad, shallow stream flooding across the footpath by the
campground that replaced the old lodge.  On both sides of the
highway, acre after acre of campsites were under water.

A bunch of weekend recreationists on four-wheelers were there when we
arrived.  They skirted around the closed gate and the signs saying
that the place was closed due to flooding.  While we were there,
the
new owners drove in and vehemently ordered the quads out of
there.  They complained to us about the floods putting them out of
business and the weekenders tearing things up, as if they wouldn’t have
enough cleanup and repair to do already.  Businesses all up and
down this highway are experiencing increased expense and decreased
income due to the rain, including Greyfox’s roadside stand.  He
hasn’t been able to open for business for about two weeks.

Just off the shoulder of the road, the highway department had set up
this solar powered stream gauge to alert them if the water rose enough
to threaten the highway.  The bridge at Montana Creek, as well as
the one at Sheep Creek, had washed out in the eighties flood, isolating
us so that the National Guard was supplying people out here with
necessities by helicopter while repairs were made.  The
“necessity” most commonly requested was cigarettes — no surprise
there.  All the new bridges appear to be holding in this
area.  The nearest washout is about thirty miles from here.

Mushrooms are plentiful this year.

It is still raining.  For the first couple of weeks of rain, we
only had two small leaks in our roof.  They were in the usual
places and easy to deal with:  just a couple of dishpans under the
drips.  Two nights ago, when we were hit by the thickest of the
remnants of the supertyphoon that tore up the Asian coast a week or two
ago, the rain came down in sheets and new leaks developed all over the
house.  One of them was right over the monitor here.  We hung
a little bucket from a hook under the leak and shrouded the monitor
with a thick towel.  The new leaks have stopped and we’re back to
just the old familiar drips, but the monitor still is peeking out from
under its towel.

The mayor of the Matanuska-Susitna Borough where I live has declared a
disaster.  His declaration isn’t an application for federal
assistance, but just fair warning to residents and putting the state on
notice that the water is rising and there may need to be some rescues,
bridge and road repairs, etc.

It had to happen.  I would have been surprised if all this rain
we’re having hadn’t caused any flooding.  Rainfall has been almost
constant for a week or so, and frequent all summer.

My yard feels spongy underfoot and many rocks have been exposed by soil
washing away during downpours.  I haven’t needed to water outdoor
plants since May.  The tub I placed to catch water dripping from
the roof has filled to overflowing many times between the times it was
emptied for dishwashing and to water houseplants.  If I forget to
pick up the outhouse seat and stand it in a dry corner, the drip
directly overhead guarantees me a wet seat next time I go out there.

When the rain stops, Doug and I will repair the outhouse roof and clean
our stovepipe. We keep two big thick towels handy in here, one by the
computer desk and the other on my bed, to deal with an unending
sequence of soggy cats.  It’s hard to determine which they dislike
more:  staying indoors or getting wet.

I caught this pic of Max during a break in the weather a couple of days
ago.  When I ducked back into the house to grab the camera, two of
his brothers had been up there with him.  I have been trying all
summer to get a shot of the cats in that tree.

Doug captured the picture below, an old steamtable liner that’s about half filled with an assortment of my crafts materials.

Left to right:  old Auntie Muffin, Max, Faust and Sammitch. 
The only one of the Four Horsekittens of the Apocalypse not present is
Buzzy Truffle AKA Fuzzy Trouble.

The Horsekittens belong to Hilary’s second litter.  It was her
third litter that I rescued from the entangling shreds of fabric on the
bottom of my boxspring last month.  Fancy, below in Doug’s pocket,
is the one who was hanging by her neck when I found her.  Since
then she has gotten her head stuck in an open space of a plastic crate
in Doug’s room.  He had to cut away one of the bars to free
her.  His judgement:  she has a talent for trouble.  She
owns a piece of my soul, too.

The Oil Spill Working Group, a coalition of non-governmental agencies,
is in Beirut preparing to begin cleaning up an oil slick that is up to
a foot-and-a-half thick offshore in Lebanon. 

They had been trying to achieve a cease-fire for purposes of cleaning
up the oil spill.  Having failed that, they now intend to start
cleaning it up anyway.  This is especially important because of
the season.  Soon, sea turtles will be coming ashore to lay eggs.

The wreck of the Exxon Valdez is one of the most horrific memories I
have.  Even here inland hundreds of miles from the site of the
spill, everyone I know was profoundly affected by it.  As everyone
knows who is familiar with Prince William Sound before and after, the
ecosystem hasn’t and never will fully recover.

Many people I know spent their summer that year working on the
cleanup.  One of my dearest friends committed suicide in Valdez
that summer while she was there to work on the cleanup.  She had
troubles of her own, but I don’t doubt that what she experienced in the
spill had its effect on her mood.

One man I know can’t talk about his work there without weeping. 
His job was to stand in the hold of a tanker ship and clear out the
bodies of fish, birds, sea otters, and other animals that clogged the
pipes as the oil-tainted sea water was pumped into the hold. 
Others I know who worked cleaning oil off of rocks onshore now
experience chronic illness from the toxic effects of that work, in
addition to the psychic scars from living in that devastated landscape.

So, when I hear the words, “oil spill cleanup,” I am predisposed to
think of it in terms of environmental devastation, pain, sickness, loss
and grief.  As I listened to the news story about the Oil Spill
Working Group in Beirut, I couldn’t help crying for the sea turtles and
all the other creatures who are dying right now and will die in the
near future, for the families whose lives depend on the sea harvest,
and for the others whose lives will be changed or ended because of the
spill and the task of cleaning it up in the middle of a war.