This week's subject is suggested by Assipassi

Art in Nature

I have been feeling too ill to rise to many challenges lately, but saw this one and thought I'd take a little retrospective stroll through my Georgia O'Keefe period last summer.

Not until this morning did I know that there are people who confuse or conflate Leap Day with Sadie Hawkins Day.  I was surfing along through my subs and found a reference to its being Sadie Hawkins Day.  I looked back up at the posting date, and sure enough, it said "February 29."  So, I wondered, how the hell did Sadie Hawkins Day migrate over here from November?

The only link between the two days is that on both of them, women are "allowed" to ask men out on dates.  How archaic is that?  

If you're too young to remember Li'l Abner, here's the Sadie Hawkins story:

Sadie Hawkins Day, an American folk event, made its
debut in Al Capp's Li'l Abner strip November 15, 1937. Sadie Hawkins was
"the homeliest gal in the hills" who grew tired of waiting for the
fellows to come a courtin'. Her father, Hekzebiah Hawkins, a prominent resident
of Dogpatch, was even more worried about Sadie living at home for the rest of
his life, so he decreed the first annual Sadie Hawkins Day, a foot race in
which the unmarried gals pursued the town's bachelors, with matrimony the
consequence. By the late 1930's the event had swept the nation and had a life
of its own. Life magazine reported over 200 colleges holding Sadie Hawkins Day
events in 1939, only two years after its inception. It became a woman
empowering rite at high schools and college campuses, long before the modern
feminist movement gained prominence. The basis of Sadie Hawkins Day is that
women and girls take the initiative in inviting the man or boy of their choice
out on a date, typically to a dance attended by other bachelors and their
aggressive dates. When Al Capp created the event, it
was not his intention to have the event occur annually on a specific date
because it inhibited his freewheeling plotting. However, due to its enormous
popularity and the numerous fan letters Capp received, the event became an
annual event in the strip during the month of November, lasting four decades.

lil-abner.com

 

Happy birthday, Baron von Olin, wherever you are.  Is this your sixteenth or seventeenth?  I forget.

The Last Great Race starts four days from now.  Last weekend, seventeen-year-old Jessica Klejka's team won the Junior Iditarod, two seconds ahead of the team driven by Lance Mackey's stepson Cain Carter, sixteen, in the closest finish of the Jr. race's history.  The leaders finished three minutes ahead of veteran Iditarod contender Ed Iten's son, Quinn.

Next year, Jessica will age out of the Junior Iditarod and be eligible to run the Iditarod, if she has the requisite qualifying finishes.  Cain Carter is at least two years away from the Iditarod, but most of his team will be running the big race this year in Lance Mackey's team.  Another past Junior Iditarod champion, Rohn Buser, who aged out last year, is signed up for this year's Iditarod.  Earlier this winter, he finished the Kuskokwim 300, a very tough trail that is going down in history as the Kuskoswim, ahead of his father, Martin Buser, four-time Iditarod champion and current holder of the Iditarod speed record.

Martin is upset about plans by the race officials to attach radio locator beacons to twenty of the top mushers so that fans can log onto the website and follow the race by virtual reality.  Martin believes that this could reveal his secret resting places to other contenders.  He says if the Committee does this, they should also raise the purse.

Race Marshal Mark Nordman was quoted in the Anchorage Daily News
making one of the most absurd statements of all time, a complete insult
to the dogs and drivers who put so much work into running this race: 
"You'll win or not win with or without a tracking device," he said.
"It's either your year to win or it's not."  If it really were all in the hands of fate, that would tend to dampen the enthusiasm of a lot of hard working mushers and their sponsors.  Strategy is definitely one of the factors in winning.

Lance Mackey, defending champion this year and first musher to win the Yukon Quest four consecutive times, doesn't mind being tracked.  He believes that the competition can't keep up with his team anyway.  The VR tracking is for the fans, and Lance says if it wasn't for the fans there wouldn't be a race. 

That could be true.  It was a race in name only for its first two years, 1973 and 1974.  Those years, the front runners took 20 days to get to Nome.  Insiders call those years The Iditarod Trail Camping Trip with Dogs.  Then along came Emmitt Peters, an Athabascan from the Interior village of Ruby.  He won the 1975 race, cutting the time by six days and setting a speed record that stood for five years although he never won another Iditarod.  He was an innovator in the resting and running strategy, and in his dog care and training techniques.  Others watched and learned, and the race got faster.  Peters went on placing in the money on most of his attempts until he had a severe knee injury in 1986.  He tried a few more times before retiring.  In 2000, he came out of retirement for one race, turned in his fastest time ever, placed 40th, and was voted Most Inspirational Musher.

The race had a loyal fan base by the mid-1980s, but few people outside of Alaska had ever heard of it and organizers were having money trouble.  Then in 1985, along came Libbymania.  Libby Riddles lived up north.  The final portion of the trail, along the coast, between Shaktoolik and Nome, was where she had trained her dogs.  When a deadly storm hit the coast and left the other leaders pinned down in Shaktoolik, Libby's dogs wanted to go home.  She couldn't see trail markers, but she could hang onto the sled, pedal, and push along with the dogs.    She trusted them, and knew they knew the way home.  I remember listening to her describing her run between the last checkpoint, Safety, and the finish in Nome, as she listened to KNOM radio with Hobo Jim singing, "I did, I did I did the Iditarod Trail".   There's a line in the song that says, "With no tracks up ahead and no one out behind...." She said she cried at that moment.  I get misty every time I remember it.

As the first woman to win the race, Libby got a lot of attention.  President Reagan sent her a congratulatory telegram.  Her picture appeared in Vogue magazine.  The Women's Sports Foundation named her Professional Sportswoman of the Year.  She had been a mediocre competitor in two previous attempts:  finishing 18th in '80, 20th in '81.  She tried again in '87 and scratched, finished in 16th place in 1989 and 32nd in '95.  Some still refer to Libby's win as a fluke.  I think this ignores the fact that she had the courage, and the trust in her team's ability, to get out on the sea ice in that blizzard, while everyone else was holed up in Shaktoolik.  Race organizers love Libby.  Many Outsiders who got Libbymania ended up with Iditarod Fever, and the race began to attract fans and mushers from Outside, and the Committee's checks stopped bouncing.

Nobody knows who would have won in '85, if Susan Butcher hadn't gotten herself and her team stomped by a moose early in that year's race.  She scratched, and Libby made history as the first woman champion.  Susan's winning streak, first, first, first, second, and first in 86 through '90, coming along right behind Libby's victory, drew a lot of international attention, and won more fans for the race.  Her accomplishment was immortalized  in the saying, "Alaska, where men are men, and women win the Iditarod," on bumper stickers, coffee mugs and t-shirts.  Susan's dog care, breeding and training set standards everyone else then had to try to meet and beat. 

Susan died of leukemia at age 51, in 2006.  Of the seventeen Iditarods she ran, she finished twelve of them in the top five.  She was loved for her compassion and down home humility... by just about everyone except the man who had been her main competitor at the start of her winning streak:   Rick Swenson, the Iditarod's only five-time champion (so far).  The last time he won, in 1991, when asked why he set out from White Mountain in a blinding storm that had turned back other veterans, he said, "Desperation, I guess.  I wanted to win the Iditarod." 

He still runs, but desperation apparently isn't enough now and either his dog care and training hasn't kept up with the competition, or he can't keep up with his dogs.  Swenson's record has been going downhill (scratched '05, 26th in '06, 25th in '07), and his dour, misogynistic demeanor on the trail doesn't win him many fans or friends.

In 1978, Rick Swenson lost to Dick Mackey in probably the most memorable finish of Iditarod history.  The two teams had seldom lost sight of each other through 800 miles of jockeying for position at the front of the pack.  Reporter Doug O'Harra of the Anchorage Daily News wrote:

The decision of who won that race had been laid down by the rules.  Officials said, "the lead dog's nose, not the musher's behind, determined the winner."  Dick Mackey stopped running the Iditarod more than twenty years ago, but has served in several official posts, and as he emceed the awards banquets and announced starts and finishes, his voice became the voice of the race.  When Dick won in '78, on his sixth attempt, he was wearing bib #13.  His son Rick Mackey won in 1983, also wearing bib #13.  Dick's younger son, Lance, camped out at the Iditarod office last year, to assure that he was first in line and got his choice of bibs.  He took #13, and won.

...and this just about leaves me where I started out.  I have just covered a few of the winners and some mushing highlights.   Many of the race's biggest heroes never won a race, and some of them never entered the race.  Unless something intervenes (something like death or disaster), I will work on that next time.
 

I have a wonderful and marvelous immune system.  I marvel over it and wonder about it all the time.  Today, I'm wondering whether yesterday's high fever, rattling unproductive cough, all-over bodily discomfort and disquieting delirium were the result of my immune system's having mobilized to battle some new microorganism, or whether it was just one of those little ME/CFIDS blips, the immune system kicking into high gear for no apparent reason.

The spelled-out version of the "ID" portion of the extended abbreviation of ME is, "immunodysfunction."  This crazy immune system of mine has its redeeming features.  I have always
been told I "heal fast."  Cuts and bruises clear up quickly.  I get
over traumatic injuries faster than most people.  If you don't have an autoimmune disorder, let me tell you, it can be more than just painful and scary, it can be baffling.  I won't go into general details.  Anyone who is interested can find the symptom list at the link above.

I felt like crap warmed over, yesterday morning when I wrote about going out with my camera the day before.   As Doug cleaned out the wood stove, I watched.  I noticed about that time that something new had been added to my chest sounds.  The wheeze was still there, but it was masked by a loud, crackling rattle.  Coughing just hurt my throat and diaphragm, didn't do much besides that.

When it came time for him to start a new fire, he needed guidance and supervision, but first I had to convince him of that.  Finally, with paper and kindling placed just so, the fire took off just fine, without filling the house with smoke or going out.  I managed to convince him to hang around and watch it so he could add wood as necessary, but my mind was only partially on that task.

I'd had enough clues to make it obvious I had a fever:  sensations of heat alternating with chills, frequent need to pee, and that tight ache in my head, to name a few.  I knew I needed to force down fluids, and I did so, despite the discouraging fact that each trip from the bed to the bedside potty and back got me perilously out of breath.  I was taking the nebulizer with me on each of those trips, pausing several times along the way to catch my breath.  I was miserable and getting more so by the moment.

In midafternoon, I got out the fever thermometer, just for curiosity's sake, and to have something to tell the paramedics if they asked.  I don't know how accurate that reading was, 101.4, orally, because my nose was totally blocked and I couldn't breathe with my mouth shut.  After two temp readings a few hours apart, indicating a slight rise in my temperature, I just sat there, let the fever rise and the delirious scenes play across the screen of my mind.

The thought of food was repugnant, but I knew I didn't want to add hypoglycemic symptoms to the rest, so I asked Doug to bring me some liquids with nutritional value.  When Greyfox called, I sniveled and whined a while.  Doug was asleep and I wasn't sure whether I'd sleep or not.  I didn't feel that I had any control over that.  The fire needed tending, so I asked Greyfox to call back in two hours just in case I fell asleep.  He did that.  I hadn't slept, but Doug was still asleep and unresponsive to my calls.  I told Greyfox I'd call him back in a moment, hung up, picked up the cordless handset, and used the phone-finder klaxon button on the base unit to wake Doug.

When I called Greyfox back, I whined and sniveled some more, and we got into a discussion of suicide, with me saying it didn't seem like the appropriate solution, and him offering practical suggestions of how and where to do it.  He didn't want to do the callback again for the fire watch, so I said good night, hung up, told Doug to bring out the kitchen timer and set it, and went back to just sitting in between potty expeditions.  At some point, I fell asleep.

I am not whining and sniveling today.  I'm crabby, which I have been told is a sign I'm healing.  I don't need the thermometer to tell me the fever is down but not out.  Right now, I'm on my way back to bed because it is just too far from here to the pot for me to want to do yet another of those treks.  Be well, if you can.  If not, be yourself.

P.S.  RaineWalker asked about my new profile pic, "How is it there's no gray in your red locks?"

Look again.  There is a streak over my temple, and another over my ear.  Those are not sun streaks.  The sun's not intense enough at this latitude to do much bleaching, and I am seldom out in it.  The streaks aren't really gray and probably never will be.  In this family, we don't go gray, we go pink.

Yesterday the sun shone and I could feel its warmth where the sunlight touched my skin.  That's a clear indication that it is past the middle of February.  At this latitude, winter sunshine may be blindingly bright on snow, but it holds no warmth.  Just the opposite:  clear days tend to be colder than cloudy ones, until about this time of year.  Days are longer now, too.  The sun rose today at 8:22, and will set at 6:07.  We are gaining daylight at a rate of almost six minutes a day.  In another month our daylight hours will exceed those of places farther south.  Midnight sun, here we come.

The warmth made me overconfident, I guess.  Besides that, all my profile pics were at least a couple of years old, and I wanted something that would show my new shorter haircut.  I went out in the early afternoon, captured a few shots of cats and trees, and tried to get a decent self portrait.

I got several shots that showed part of me.

...and one that caught my shadow.

I was stumbling with fatigue and out of breath when I got back into the house.  In case you're imagining me wading through deep snow or trekking down the road, that is not the case at all.  I had walked slowly out to the sunny end of the driveway -- that's all.  I'm just way weak and out of condition.

By later in the day, I felt recovered enough to try again.  I went out during the golden time just before sunset and, out of close to thirty attempts, got one shot that shows the current length of my hair.  It's my new profile pic.

I got my first clue that I'd overdone it when I started back up the driveway to the house.  I was in serious respiratory distress by the time I got inside.  Before bedtime, my muscles were all unresponsive and aching.  I slept in only brief periods of an hour or less, and finally gave up and got up around six AM.

Doug had started letting the fire go out so he can clean out the stovepipe.  Add the discomfort of chill to my already aching muscles.  Greyfox called from the store in town, to consult me on some grocery choices -- he will be making an extra trip up here before the scheduled trip to the clinic, because I am running out of asthma meds.  He was having trouble understanding what I said, because I was having trouble talking.  Breathing, swallowing, moving... it all takes extra effort and the results are not always what I intended.  Typing is no easy thing either.  I think I'll quit now and crawl under the covers.

The image below was in the camera when I started saving yesterday's photos.  I must have taken it in December, before my trip to the hospital.

This is the way I remember bikers looking to my eyes forty years ago.

This is how I see them now.

The old man playing darts at right (in an image I captured a few summers ago at a party in my neighborhood) is more or less typical of Alaska Hells Angels.  He is older than many, but reports in the media indicate that the average age of the population of motorcycle riders, outlaws included, is increasing.

I said in my recent entry about outlaw bikers that I haven't been hanging out with them since I moved to Alaska.  This is true, but it doesn't mean that I have had no contact with them.  Years after I moved to this area of the Susitna Valley, the Hells Angels from Anchorage established a party place and "clubhouse" nearby (cleared some land and moved a trailer onto it).  I hear their bikes go by on the highway in summer, and run into some of the guys occasionally.  The number of young ones seems to be diminishing.

When I moved to Alaska, the Brothers MC were the only outlaw motorcycle club in the state or at least the only one I knew about, the only one I ever saw any sign of.  From this point on, if I forget to qualify or attribute some questionable statement or characterization, just refer to my title.  First, I heard that the Hells Angels were trying to take over the Brothers, then there were no Brothers and there were a lot of clean, new Angel colors on the backs of former Brothers.  It had not been an entirely peaceful transition.

I'm still bemused at this message "Coxtom" went to so much trouble to deliver to me over and over again without leaving me a way to get back to him and respond to his question:

Although, to get to the comment boxes, this nitwit at least had to scroll through the entries in which I mentioned being "violated" by Gypsy Jokers, he seems to think I should retaliate against the Hells Angels ("HA"), some of whose members retaliated against the Jokers at the time.  I probably made a misstatement in that entry the other day, when I said those guys had no chivalrous intent.  Nobody knows what was in all their minds.  Some of them were my friends. 

I was known as Gross to a few of my closest friends and as "that mouthy redhead" to many guys who were not even aware of the existence of some of the quieter women around.  I had gained a lot of respect, however grudging, for my mechanical skills and my enthusiastic and imaginative efforts at "freaking the straights" and showing class.  One might even say it was a chivalrous gesture when I was offered the first whack at Linda for having abandoned me to the Gypsy Jokers.  Nevertheless, I am sure that the Hells Angels' perception of my rape as a valid excuse to raid Gypsy Joker territory had to figure into their motivation.

Members of one club are likely to object that their group does not deserve to be mistaken for another or lumped together with all the others, but the fact remains that many of them are associated in criminal conspiracies, nearly all of them observe similar mores and customs, and the government, media, and "straight citizens" tend to lump them together.  If there is some difficulty inherent in trying to encompass all outlaw motorcycle clubs under a single umbrella, there is an even greater difficulty in assuming identical motivations for individual men in those clubs.

My friend and fellow rape survivor here on Xanga, has posted the first cliffhanging part of her reconstruction of the story of her rape by yet another outlaw motorcycle gang, neither Hells Angels nor Gypsy Jokers.  When she came to Xanga, she messaged me with a multitude of questions, seeking to understand why anyone would do such a thing.  That presented me with more than a few difficulties.  As soon as I began trying to answer her questions, it became apparent that there was a vast philosophical gulf between us.  I don't see the world in terms of black and white or right and wrong.  She does.  She was seeing them as evil, while I was seeing them as human.

I did my best to explain their belief system, and we went around a few times over concepts such as chivalry (a medieval belief system based upon the assumption of the inherent superiority of males of high, "gentle", or "noble" birth), and the evolution of small females and large males by natural selection versus creation of one to take care of the other. 

Needless to say (to anyone who knows me), I'm not about to be converted to her philosophy.  Neither do I suffer because she doesn't share my beliefs, nor worry overmuch about whether she ever achieves the understanding she seeks.  Everyone has his or her own beliefs.  It is not my job to alter those beliefs even if they form a barrier to an understanding of reality, and even if, like the outlaw bikers' beliefs and the beliefs of religious fundamentalists, I find them bizarre and counterproductive.  What is, IS.

Despite my thinking that their ways are bizarre throwbacks to less enlightened cultures, I don't find the bikers hard to understand at all.  Most people on this planet live in cultures where women are undervalued and/or viewed with superstitious fear.   China now has a severe shortage of women and has developed the unique phenomenon of bachleor towns, because their government mandated population control and their mores and customs dictated the killing or sending out of the country of their female children.   Some Africans mutilate the genitals of young girls to discourage any interest in sexual activity.  Some religious nuts in this country and elsewhere are just as unappreciative of their women, so why not irreligious nuts as well?

To understand these guys, it is also helpful to understand the psychology of mobs.  It has been said that the intelligence of a mob is equal to the IQ of its stupidest member, divided by  the number of members.   Anyone who doubts the capacity for ordinary "good" people to demonize and torture those who are different from themselves need only look at Abu Ghraib or the Stanford Prison Experiment.

The outlaw bikers that I got to know intimately were more emotionally vulnerable than most men.  Most of them had been in military organizations and appeared to need to be part of some group that was perceived as powerful.  None of them was sufficiently subordinate to succeed at a military career, however.  Virtually every one of them exhibited signs of one or more of the Cluster B personality disorders:  antisocial, borderline, histrionic and/or narcissistic.  They talked a lot about brotherhood and solidarity against their enemies, and they fought a lot among themselves.

When considering their behavior, it is also important to bear in mind the influence of drugs on their personalities, particularly alcohol at the time I knew them, and now also meth and crack, I have been told.  Given the facts, it all makes sense.

I started to answer these questions in the comments to yesterday's Coming Clean entry, using that nifty new "reply" feature.  Then I changed my mind and decided to do it this way.

EminemsRevenge asked: 

Where the hell do you live?

I am in the Upper Susitna Valley of Alaska, in Subarctic Suburbia.  That's at approximately latitude 62° North, and just about 25 road miles in either direction from the nearest small towns; 50 miles or so from the closest town big enough to have a pharmacy, bowling alley, or fast food joint; 62 miles from the hospital (That's the mileage the ambulance service charged me to the new hospital.  Until recently, it was almost ten miles farther.); and over a hundred miles to the nearest international airport and federal offices (where we're required to go if the IRS wants to see us or if we have business with Social Security).

It is more or less what my old neighbors when I lived in Kansas and Texas would have called, "the sticks," but not far enough off the road system to qualify to be called, "The Bush," in Alaska.

I am indebted to forwhomthebelsentolls for my third hearty laugh of the day (the first two came from Morning Edition on NPR).  He suggested I get Doug to "rig up some plumbing pipes."  With apologies to my Xanga buddies who have heard it all before, several times, here I go again [edited after feedback, to clear up what appears to have been a confusing explanation]:

It has been done before.  It was done here, when this trailer was moved onto this lot, by Mark, the southern white boy who ended up giving up and giving it to me around the turn of the millennium.

The trailer came with all the standard plumbing features:  water pipes in and out, water heater, toilet and flush tank, etc.  Mark had a well drilled, installed a pressure tank in the little one-room cabin that was on the land when he bought it, and piped the water through it and into the trailer.  The debris lying around in the yard and under the trailer when we moved in indicates that the pipes were wrapped with electric heat tape to prevent freezing.

His well is shallow.  Down 500 feet or a little more, there is a bountiful supply of clear and wholesome water.  Maybe Mark didn't talk to his neighbors before he hired the drillers.  Maybe the drillers he hired weren't familiar with the area, or maybe Mark thought they were just trying to get more money out of him by recommending a deeper well.  He is/was sorta paranoiac.  By the time we had moved in here, he had learned; he used the rusty, smelly water from his shallow well for washing and the garden, and got his drinking water from the same spring where we and most of our neighbors get ours.

Mark never could handle Alaskan winters.  He would leave the place and his dog and cats in the care of house sitters and go to Mexico, Hawaii, or Florida.  One of those sets of house sitters, some young people Mark had found in town somewhere, found themselves here during a cold snap that coincided with a power outage.  That was during the years that Doug and I were living off the grid, when the only way we found out about power outages was when we went to the lodge or the laundromat.

Mark's oil-fired furnace has an electric igniter.  His kitchen range is electric.  His house sitters couldn't take the cold and the dark, with only the wood stove for heat, so they locked the place up and fled back to the lights of town.  Water expands when it freezes.  Not only the water pipes froze.  The ceramic tank of the toilet froze and burst.  The water heater froze and burst.  The pressure gauge on the tank in the cabin froze and its glass face broke.

Maybe by then Mark had gotten acquainted with a few of his neighbors and learned why so many of us get all our water at the spring.  Maybe he just got a bad case of fukitol.  By the time we moved in here, the old water heater and toilet were on the ground in the backyard, the water heater compartment (with its door on the outside of the trailer) was empty, providing shelter for feral cats, and the water supply in here was cold only, and only in the summertime, coming in through the kitchen window in a garden hose.

Maintaining it was out of the question for me, draining the pressure tank and a few hundred feet of hoses each fall before freeze-up, just for use in the garden, because boiling stinky water in summertime for dishwashing, letting my clothes get that rusty look, and leaving the kitchen window open to let in mosquitoes all summer, did not appeal.  I quit using the well even before we decided to leave the TV antenna down the last time the snow load tore it off the mast.  Getting the water system repaired professionally is certainly much more expensive than I could afford.  I don't know, haven't asked, because I don't want the grief.  

Even with global warming, permafrost is still just a few feet below the surface.  Around here each winter, more houses burn down from people trying to thaw their water systems than from creosote fires.  A walk around the neighborhood will take you past a number of abandoned cabins with defunct water systems.  Even having one's own backup generator in the event of a power outage isn't enough.  You'd need a backup for the backup because at thirty or forty below, pipes can freeze and burst while you have the generator shut down for maintenance or refueling.  I know of a couple of my neighbors who learned the hard way not to try refueling a gasoline generator while it's running.

I don't understand it.  I'm not alone.  Once in a while, when I run into a neighbor at the spring or sit around and schmooze with a few of them at the lodge, we agree that we don't understand the city people who come out here and try to bring civilization with them.  It generally turns out to be more trouble than it's worth.  Most of them feel this way about the power grid, too, which seems always to go down at the most inopportune times and costs a bundle to tie into in the first place.  If Mark hadn't been connected to the grid before we got here, and if we hadn't become addicted to the web, we wouldn't be on the grid now.

I have noticed this phenomenon previously, but I don't think I ever mentioned it here:  when I confess on Xanga to some personal lapse or flaw, the public confession appears to facilitate my correction or transcendence of whatever it was I was confessing.  I say, "appears," because I don't know whether I have cleaned up my act because I'd confessed, or if I had confessed because I was ready to clean up my act.  It's probably not strictly a matter of either/or.

Not long ago, in my entry about cutting my hair, I mentioned that I was filthy, hadn't had a shower or shampoo since I got out of the hospital over two months ago.  That's not actually alarming, not even surprising if one knows my circumstances here.  In this area, where private home water systems are the exception rather than the rule, and people are more casual about personal hygiene than city dwellers tend to be, there are some people who haven't showered in years.  To get a shower, most of us have to go to the laundromat and pay around $5.00 for a few minutes of warm water.

Until I caught that case of fungal pneumonia in the late summer last year, my practice was to fill a plastic camp shower bag and shower in the bathtub that came built into this old trailer.  Two things combine to prevent me from being able to do that now.  The bathroom still contains residue from the electrical fire a couple of years ago, which make my breathing in there, already compromised under the best circumstances, difficult bordering on impossible.  Also, since I have been ill and unable to get to the laundromat, dirty clothes have been piling up in the bathtub, for lack of a better place to pile them.

I have not gone totally unwashed since coming home from the hospital.  When I change clothes, I do a quick "wet-wipe bath."  It takes some of the stink off, but does nothing for the stringy hair.  Today, as soon as I woke, I started preparing for a more thorough and satisfying wash.  Standing on a flattened cardboard box in front of the wood stove, I stripped from the waist up, sponged my skin clean, shampooed my hair, rinsed once, emptied the pan and got clean water, then did a second shampoo and rinse, and took off my pajama bottoms and washed the rest of me.

It was far from easy.  I nebulized and loaded up on bronchodilators before beginning, and stopped for more, and for several rests to catch my breath, during the course of the stand-up bath.  The cost was fatigue -- muscles burning with lactic acid, hand tremors, aches in shoulders and legs.  I might not have the stamina for sitting up at the computer for as many hours as I have done in recent days.  That's a price I am willing to pay.

It feels great not having that stringy hair clinging to my scalp and neck, and the feel of clean clothes on clean skin.  Love that sensation!  There's another unanticipated benefit, too.  After I had gotten all clean and squeaky, Doug went out to bring in firewood.  He came back all puffing and panting from shoveling snow off the woodpile, and revealed that we have only a very limited supply of birch left, and most of it is stuck in ice.

Birch produces a long-lasting and relatively slow fire.  The rest of our wood supply is spruce, which burns fast and hot and produces a lot of flying sparks.  Until the stovepipe is cleared of its accumulation of creosote, burning spruce would be an invitation to a chimney fire.  If I had known about the firewood situation before I bathed, I would have waited until after Doug and I had cleaned the stovepipe.  As it is, I raised my eyebrows, held my clean hands out, turned them this way and that, and told Doug he is on his own for the chimney cleaning.  I will advise and supervise, but I am not willing to get this squeaky clean body and my clean jammies all besmirched with soot and ash so soon.

Amazingly, gratifyingly, he agreed.

Today, I'm going to be working on a followup to yesterday's Hells Angels entry, expanding on what I wrote and responding to comments.  If I bog down on that task or get a second wind, maybe I'll get around to visit a few of you.  It has been fun, these last few days, catching up with what's going on at Xanga.