Month: October 2007

  • A Dark and Stormy Night

    For the first of two October Featured_Grownups challenges:

    It was a dark and stormy night.  I had almost despaired of getting my daily caffeine fix, and it was getting a little late in the day for coffee, anyway.

    I had been awakened before dawn that winter morning by a scream.  Usually, I awoke to the aroma of freshly brewed coffee.  Greyfox, the Old Fart to whom I am legally wed, had screamed.  He kept on screaming, something about, "stupid primitive Alaska," and I could hear things being roughly moved about in the kitchen.

    I put on two pairs of woolen socks and my down booties before swinging my legs over the edge of the loft next to the woodstove in the wannigan and creeping down the ladder.  Not exactly keen on facing whatever crisis he had encountered or created in the kitchen, I let Greyfox rave on as I tossed a few pieces of wood in the stove. 

    By the elevation of the thermocline in the room, I could tell that it was about 30 degrees below zero outside.  Keeping the fire roaring would keep the loft warm, but nothing short of summer would warm that drafty floor.  I stood on tiptoe to light the mantle of the propane light overhead, flinching as I always did when at last enough propane had leaked from the open valve to reach the lighter's flame and explode into illumination.

    Another propane light, having been lit by Greyfox earlier, lighted my way to the kitchen, where I found my beloved husband shivering, half dressed, and looking haggard as he always does before he has had his morning coffee.  I don't suppose I looked much better, but I was dressed more warmly.  My beloved old man had barked his knuckles while turning the crank of my beloved old coffee grinder with its broad cast iron flywheel.  Overturning the grinder and the open canister beside it, he had scattered coffee beans across the table and onto the floor.

    I left him to clean up his mess and turned to assist him with the task of making coffee, by putting a filter in the cone and the cone in the top of the coffeepot.  Then I got the teakettle down off its hook overhead and shoved my way in beside my hubby to pull a water jug out from under the table and fill the kettle.  That jug moved too easily, obviously empty.  I set it aside and reached for the one behind it, hoping that it hadn't frozen solid on the cold floor.  It moved way too easily. 

    I stood up, laid a comforting hand on Greyfox's shoulder, and said gently, "Take your time with those beans.  We're out of water."   Understanding what came next, he groaned.  As soon as he had dealt with his spilled beans, he started suiting up for outdoors, planning to start the truck and let it warm up a while in the driveway.  Since I knew how cold it was out there, and grasped the low likelihood that the truck would start, being without benefit of electric heaters for its block, oil pan, or battery, there off the power grid, I returned to the wood stove, poked the fire vigorously to break up the charred wood, and added a few small chunks that would ignite quickly.

    I gave the Old Fart a few moments to run down the battery, then got the big old wok with wooden handles out from behind the stove.  I knelt by the open door feeling my facial skin crispen and smelling that unmistakable fragrance of roasting self, pushed the bigger pieces of charred wood aside and dug out enough burning coals to fill the wok.  In full winter outerwear and oven mitts, grateful for the thin light of dawn so I could see where I was going, I carefully carried my hot-hot-smokin' burden down the slick steps, around the house and out the driveway, where I knelt again on the packed snow and shoved the wok under the truck's engine.

    Then I carried the little gasoline generator around and clamped its DC cables onto the battery posts.  The truck's hood was already open from Greyfox's futile attempt to coax it to start with aerosol ether in the carb.  Next I pulled the generator's starter rope until I was out of breath, took a breather, and tried again.  That time, it started.

    I walked to the driver's door, opened it, patted the gray head that lay dejectedly on the steering wheel, pried loose the gloved fingers, and led the man of my dreams back into the house to wait for the battery to charge and the oil to turn back from an adhesive to a lubricant again.  As I entered the house, I groaned.  It was my turn to groan, after all.  As soon as I had reached the relative warmth inside, my nose had been assailed by the telltale skunky odor of the bottom of an empty propane tank.  The overhead lamp I'd lit was still bright, as was the camp lantern attached to a small tank in the kitchen.  I knew what that meant, but I had more important immediate matters to attend to.

    My removing the coals had left the wood stove without much fuel or fire.  I leveled the remaining bed of coals, added a layer of small wood, and left the draft open until I could hear the fire roaring and crackling.  Then, using caution not to put out the fire with too much cold wood, I loaded the stove fully so that the fire would last until we returned with water and propane.  That skunk oil smell meant that the big tank out beside the house, the one that fueled our kitchen range, had run out.  I knew this even before I went to the kitchen and laid a hand over the cold pilot light.

    Between the two of us, while the truck was warming up and its battery charging, we loaded empty water jugs, disconnected the empty propane cylinder (almost as tall as I am), skidded it along the snow path and loaded it into the truck.  Winter days are short in the land of the Midnight Sun.  That midnight sun stuff happens in the summer, and we pay for it in winter.  By the time we got that truck loaded and started, and drove to the lodge, it was well past mid-day.  The brilliantly clear sky that had let all the earth's heat escape into space the previous night had by noon clouded over and the wind had begun to blow.

    The bartender at the lodge had trouble finding the wrench he needed to fill our propane tank, and he had a few other customers demanding his attention at the gasoline pumps and the bar.  By the time we had wrestled the full tank into the truck, now a hundred pounds heavier than when empty, a few fine white flakes were blowing across the road ahead of us as we drove toward the spring to fill our water jugs.  At least it had warmed up with the arrival of the storm front.  The thermometer at the lodge was reading zero when we left there.

    The stop at the spring was relatively uneventful, given the fact that the lids were frozen onto the jugs, the path down to the waterhole was slippery and covered with a concealing layer of new snow, and I soaked my mittens and splashed water into Greyfox's face when I lost my balance as I swung a full jug up out of the hole.  He carried the jugs and I led him, blinded by the ice that had immediately formed on his glasses, up the slippery path.  He got into the truck, which we had prudently left running, and defrosted his glasses while I loaded the full jugs in beside the propane.

    Then, in full-blown whiteout conditions, as the sun crept below the cloud cover to let us know it was going down, we crept home with virtually nothing but our memories to tell us where the road was.  Pulling into the driveway, Greyfox ran over the wok.  Oh, well . . . .  Faced with the choice of eating a cold dinner and crawling onto the loft to get warm and sleep off the day's exertions, putting off hooking up the propane until daylight next day; or heaving the heavy propane tank out in the dark and connecting the brass fittings by flashlight, we dithered.

    We discussed it as I fed wood into the fading fire with the wind howling outside, and as we looked around the kitchen for something to eat, maybe something that could be warmed a little on top of the wood stove.  What cinched our final decision was the scent of the beans ground that morning, waiting in the filter cone, and the thought of having to wrestle with the propane cylinder in the morning without our coffee.  He grabbed the flashlight.  I grabbed the wrench.  And out we went into the cold, dark and stormy night.

    Inspired by "Alaska Coffee," a much shorter story written by Greyfox, which appeared in The Shaman Papers during one of his first winters in Alaska.  Events in this story actually occurred, but they just never all happened on the same day, and in a few cases they happened to other people.  For brevity's sake, I left out the bit about the truck's engine catching fire from the hot coals underneath.  That has happened to several of my neighbors, but never to me.

  • Windfalls with a Catch

    The first of these stories has an obvious moral:  "Be careful what you ask for."  The moral to the second one, if there is a moral, is less obvious to me.

    One cold winter day a decade or so ago, during a very rough time in my life -- Greyfox's NPD and addictions were in full expression and I was trying to maintain a household and pay debts on what I could earn from mail-order readings without spending money on ads -- in a conversation with my Spirit Guides, I said something to the effect that we could really use a windfall about then.

    A few days later we were in Wasilla on a shopping trip.  The wind was so strong that I could barely open the car door against it, and when I did, some papers blew out the open door on Greyfox's side.  He moved to catch them as I started picking my way across the icy parking lot.  Hit by a big gust of wind, I lost my footing and fell on my back, hitting my head on the ice.  It took me a while to realize I had a concussion.  Then I went to the emergency room.

    The concussion was confirmed and I was warned not to sleep that night.  The store had been advised of my accident and had given Greyfox their insurance info.  On the next trip to town, we went to see their adjuster.  I was handed a form to fill out, on which there were many blanks.  I filled them in and watched as the man read my answers.  At one point, he paused, looking startled and a little pale.  That was when he came to the line for my attorney's name.  Roger Aloysius McShea had represented me in a car accident about ten years previously, and although I hadn't consulted him in this case, when I came to the line marked, "attorney," I wrote down his name because he was the only attorney I knew.

    I was more interested in a settlement and some ready cash right then than extended negotiations and/or a lawsuit and whatever that might bring farther on.  Once the man was reassured on that point and understood that Roger wasn't (yet) representing me in this matter, he made an offer that sounded okay to me, I asked for a little more, and he accepted my suggestion.  We weathered the existing financial crisis and I learned a valuable lesson about language.  Further crises and further lessons have ensued.  I still get sloppy with language, but I no longer go around looking for windfalls.


    Two or three summers ago, a prosperous middle-class man down on his luck moved into the cabin beside Greyfox's at Felony Flats.  I never spoke to the guy beyond a few casual words as I browsed through the stuff in his yard sale.  Greyfox didn't really get to know him well, either, but there were things we could surmise from the stuff he was selling, other stuff he threw in the dumpster, and some passing remarks he had made.

    He was recently separated or divorced, evident from the monogrammed silver and engraved crystal he was selling, and some disparaging remarks about marriage.  He had moved from much larger and more luxurious digs to this one room cabin with a loft, which was big by Flats standards but forced him to pile a lot of furniture on the porch and set up an Easy-Up shelter beside the cabin to hold his overflow. 

    I knew the house he had moved from, because I was used to passing that place with the big "INCENSE" sign on its front on my way to and from town.  That the sign came down and the house was vacant around the time this man moved in next to Greyfox trying to sell massive amounts of incense and the materials and equipment for making it, were all the clues I needed to draw that conclusion.

    I saw the same stuff on his yard sale tables week after week through the summer, with the same optimistic price tags.  The guy apparently wanted to get a satisfactory return on his stuff and wasn't too familiar with yard sale pricing.  Then Greyfox said the guy had made him a super deal on a bunch of videos and DVDs, before stuffing all his furniture and remaining impedimenta into the Easy-Up and moving out.  He had told Mike, the landlord, that he would be back for his stuff in a month.

    He did not come back at all that winter.  The Easy-Up was blown apart in a windstorm, and its contents buried under several feet of snow.  Greyfox and I, and other neighbors, salvaged what was salvageable as the snow and ice melted during breakup.  I was reminded of him and that Easy-Up windfall yesterday as I was trying to close an overfull drawer in my kitchen.

    I hadn't asked for that windfall, but as I dug around in the slushy remains of it, I felt as if it had been meant for me.  I have a weakness for kitchen gadgets, pots, pans, dishes, and such.  A quarter century ago, I converted an old school bus into a mobile kitchen using salvaged materials -- junk, frankly, and served nutritious natural food from it at the Alaska State Fair. 

    Since my teens when I started working in commercial and institutional kitchens, I had dreamed of my own eatery or catering business.  Six years was all the time I managed before my junky infrastructure and other considerations forced me to close the Beanery, but I had gone right on collecting pots, pans and kitchen gear since then, on the theory that it might come in handy someday. 

    I could, today, with a few hours notice and some kitchen help willing  to labor in this ill-designed, inadequate kitchen (since I am still not breathing normally due to pneumonia, and must take it easy) provide a balanced meal for a hundred or so people, providing they're willing to eat beans, rice and cornbread.  If necessary, I could cook for a large crowd over an open campfire, which might be easier than trying to do it in here.

    The gear that guy left behind in his Easy-Up was not junk.  I was the perfect patsy, the person most likely, of all those who picked through that pile of  icy stuff, to appreciate the small appliances (ice cream maker, rice steamer, etc.), utensils (cake decorators, meat grinder, ladles, etc.) and the pots and pans.  With things I recovered from the windfall Easy-Up, I could, if I wanted, bake and decorate a 7-tier wedding cake.  I could make donuts, or muffins in any size from mini to maxi.

    I used one of the cake pans yesterday, but just using it was not what made me think of the catches attached to these windfalls.  It was the difficulty I had in closing that drawer that made me pause and look around at the ladles in the hanging basket, the bundt pans and racks of mini-tube pans hanging from hooks, and wonder if I'd ever get around to dusting them, much less using them.  That was what set me to thinking about windfalls with catches.