My topic today is the same as yesterday:  political corruption in Alaska.  Apocatastasis facetiously commented, "I don't suppose he has any hats left over?"  That was in reference to the CBC [Corrupt Bastards Club (or "Corrupt Bastards Caucus")] gear created by the girlfriend of convicted Alaska legislator Pete Kott, which was listed on the search warrants the FBI served on Ted Stevens and other legislators who had been mentioned by VECO head Bill Allen as recipients of his "gifts" and bribes.  Any of the original gimme caps not seized by the FBI would now be pretty valuable, I suppose.

Allen, convicted last year on bribery, has had his sentencing delayed while he testifies against the list of Alaskan politicians, including Senator Stevens and former U.S. Senator and ex-Governor Frank "the bank" Murkowski.  Allen's transparently self-interested decision to confess and help prosecute his bribees has produced a long series of denials followed by trials and convictions, and some pathetically humorous audio and video that was entered into evidence. 

Ted Stevens has said he paid every bill submitted to him for the renovation of his home, which was allegedly done with VECO materials by VECO employees.  Presumably, he will produce receipts.    There was also an auto swap, of an old Ford for a new Land Rover, that netted old Ted thousands of bucks in financial gains, and what he apparently thought was plausible deniability.  It remains to be seen how it all washes out in court.  In all the years I have been watching and listening to him in the media, I heard a lot of bluster and bluff, and not one graceful admission of error or wrongdoing.  It's just not his style to admit fallibility.

Stevens is running for the Senate again this year.  There are people who say they will be voting for him despite the indictment.  I never did vote for him, and I'm used to being in the minority in this place where I fit so well into the natural environment but not in the political culture.  Not everyone is so inclined to reserve judgment or forgive, and it is being said that Ted now faces the toughest political campaign of his career. 

Since last October, five of Allen's co-conspirators have been convicted and three of them are now serving federal sentences from five months to six years.  Ted's son, Ben Stevens, who represents an Anchorage constituency, has not been indicted, and I'm not the only person in the Matanuska and Susitna Valleys who hopes he will be.  He was recorded referring to us all as "Valley trash," a statement that spawned a lot of t-shirts saying, "proud to be Valley Trash."

I have been listening to public radio, and have heard several people express embarrassment over the corruption scandal.  I suppose that is a natural reaction, especially for those who elected the Corrupt Bastards.  I didn't vote for any of them, so I'm seeing the humor and irony in these guys being brought down by the crooked businessman in whose pockets they once luxuriated.

Senator Ted Stevens
(Republican, Alaska)
Photo by
Susan Walsh
Associated Press

In the ongoing fight to clean up the government, a federal grand jury has indicted old Ted for seven counts of falsely reporting hundreds of thousands of dollars in services he received from VECO.

He has long considered himself bulletproof because of his committee chairmanship which has brought Federal megabucks to Alaska.  Undoubtedly, many of my fellow Alaskans will be rooting for him to slide out of his current predicament and stay in power. 

I am glad he is being prosecuted.  He and some of his now-convicted co-conspirators were so proud of their crimes that the girlfriend of one of them made up a bunch of personalized gear such as gimme caps, labeled "Corrupt Bastards Club."  I hope he will be convicted.  I hope his corrupt son Ben also gets his comeuppance.  While I'm at it, I will throw in a hope that those responsible for renaming Anchorage International Airport as Ted Stevens International will come to their senses and restore the old name.

Twenty-five years ago, my family moved here to the Upper Susitna Valley.  My ex, Doug's dad, Charley, was working at Anchorage International Airport, Doug was two years old, and we lived in a small trailer park in Rabbit Creek, south of Anchorage.  It was on a hillside, overlooking Potter Marsh and Cook Inlet.  We collected photos of spectacular sunsets.

Then our Athabaskan landlord lost his lengthy legal battle with the municipality and was forced to yield to zoning ordinances limiting that area to single-family dwellings, and close the little trailer park.  We were given thirty days to move, and two or three of our neighbors managed to do so.  When the deadline passed, Charley and I were still looking for a place to take our little 8'x35' thirty-year-old trailer.

We started with classified real estate ads, and searched concentric circles ever farther away.  Our requirements were simple:  down payment and monthly installments within our budget, and enough clear space to park our trailer.  The first place that met the budget limits was on a cul de sac where we might temporarily park the trailer while we cut trees to clear a space, but the ground was marshy and the air so full of mosquitoes when we walked it, Charley said it wouldn't do.  After a moment's reflection, although I was getting desperate to escape our landlord's wrath, I agreed.

That place had been just outside Wasilla, only a few miles away from where Greyfox now has his cabin and roadside stand.  We didn't find anything else within our financial range until we'd gone another forty-some miles up the valley.  It was a subdivision created from an old homestead at the time when the voters of Alaska had decided to move the state capital from inaccessible Juneau to Willow, where the Anchoraguans could drive or catch a train to oversee the legislature.  When the voters then learned how much the move would cost and voted to leave the capital down in the Panhandle, land values up here, which had briefly boomed, quickly went bust.

Ten lots were available in this subdivision at the time.  Some of them were on a south-facing bluff and had long beautiful views of the muskeg along Sheep Creek.  They also had a great potential for land slippage and mudslides that could take our land to the bottom of that bluff.  Others were low and swampy.  One lot had been used as a gravel pit, with all its topsoil scraped off but for one wooded hummock about 50 feet in diameter.  The rocky ground with one sandy area had excellent drainage and enough level space for our trailer, so we bought it.

The next hurdle was getting our trailer out here.  Marty Larrigan was a neighbor in the little trailer park who was renting his trailer, not just the space as we did.  He hadn't found a place to move because he had been collecting junk and salvaged building supplies from his job as a house wrecker, and none of the owners of rental houses he looked at would allow him to junk up the yards.  He had a 5 ton truck, and agreed to tow our trailer out here for us in exchange for our letting him park his junk "temporarily" on our land.

The move was an adventure.  The trailer needed work before it would be roadworthy, so we moved everything else first, including a wannigan we had built from salvaged lumber and sheathed with salvaged plywood, mostly old real estate signs found in ditches.  They had the advantage of being pre-painted and weatherproof and the added interest of various colors and colorful text.  The next-to-last trip was to tow our mechanically challenged bus, which we had outfitted as a kitchen from which we had been selling vegetarian meals at the Alaska State Fair for a couple of years.

Doug and I went with that load.  We were to sleep in our old broken-down VW van and use the kitchen facilities in the bus until Marty and Charley got the trailer moved.  That weekend job took more than two weeks because an axle broke on the trailer.  It happened conveniently close to the state commercial vehicle weigh station on the Glenn Highway, giving them a paved place to park and work on the trailer.  When they finally pulled it onto our land, they brought with it a pair of violet green swallows who had flown alongside all the way, escorting their nest inside a knot hole in the soffit under the eaves of the insulated plywood roof Charley and I had added to the drafty old trailer.

During the two weeks the trailer was at the weigh station, I saw Charley once, when he zipped out in his AMC Gremlin for a brief visit on Doug's second birthday, July 27, 1983, to let me know what had happened.  With no phone, knowing no neighbors who could relay messages, Doug and I just kept each other company, and listened to KSKA public radio on a battery powered radio.  I spent my days preparing gardens and transplanting perennials I had brought from the old place.

In the next seven years or so, Marty visited his junk pile two or three times to get some things he needed.  The car parts, tires, tools and building materials in that pile (about 100 feet long and ten feet wide) have been mined by us and our neighbors, and there's still some useful stuff there among the trees that have grown up through it.

That summer has been on my mind a lot the last few weeks, as that quarter-century anniversary passed.  The weather that year was hot and dry, nothing like now.  The gardens at the old place across the road have been overrun, mostly by poplar trees, but some of those hardy perennials I started from seeds more than thirty years ago in Rabbit Creek are still alive over there and a few have been transplanted across the highway to this place now.  Doug doesn't remember Rabbit Creek.  More than half of his life was spent in that old gravel pit that started out being, as I thought on that first morning when I stepped out of the bus with a spading fork, looking for a place to start gardening, "the most inhospitable dry camp I ever made."

 Jaynebug saw this closeup of devil's club seed capsules (some call them "berries") that I uploaded yesterday, and asked, "Could you take a picture of the whole plant?  What does the flower look like?  Is that succulent like or just thick?"

I have no personal knowledge of their succulence or lack thereof.  I have never touched one.  On one of my early trips out of Anchorage into Alaska, I saw what appeared to be a beautiful roadside patch of Queen Anne's lace or wild carrot, and asked Charley to stop so I could look at them up close.  He stopped, but he warned me not to get close.  He said it was devil's club and that the stickers cause a nasty rash on contact.

This is the only plant in this part of Alaska with a contact poison.  We don't have poison ivy, oak or sumac here, and no devil's paintbrush.  Having come into contact with plenty of them in my youth in the Lower 48, I am wary of devil's club, and thankful that it is so big and showy, nearly impossible to just blunder into.  

Oplopanax horridus is known to natives here as cukilanarpak, the big plant with needles.  The berries are said to be toxic, some parts are used medicinally, and young shoots are edible.  There are recipes, HERE, and a great photo of it, taken in the Panhandle of Southeast Alaska, where it really grows big in the rainforest.

Two weeks ago, when I drove past that patch of devils club down by Sheep Creek, it was a mass of white flowers.  Yesterday when we went to the spring for water, most of them had gone to seed already.  One seed head was close enough to the roadside 4-wheeler trail that I could capture that closeup.  I had no desire to venture down into the mud for more.

Incidentally, I have never seen Queen Anne's lace around here.  I guess it can't take the winters.

In the turnout across from the spring, two rigs were parked.  The bus above, pulling a pickup with a camper shell, canoe on top and dirt bike on back, is the sort of thing we all hate to come up behind on the hills and curves of this 2 lane highway.  It's not my way to travel.  Fifteen years ago when Doug and I spent the winter Outside, we put 28,000 miles on our Fiat X1-9, sleeping in those Bertone seats when we didn't find a good place to pitch the tent.

The old guy in his little motorhome, selling jerky to pay his expenses, is more my speed.  I guess I scared him.  I bought some jerky as a birthday gift for Doug, and told the old carpetbagger the story of how the state's sign law enforcers made Greyfox quit selling knives in that location.  Then I asked if I could take his picture, and as I was getting a few shots of his rig, he had a little flash of paranoia.  I'm not sure even now that I convinced him I wasn't photographing him so that I could turn him in for violation of the billboard law.

I tried to reassure him.  I meant him no harm, but I wasn't particularly in a mood to be nice to him, either.  I gathered from his conversation with the man from the big bus beside him that he was having a mechanical problem.  He had asked me when I walked up, "Is your husband a mechanic?"  That sort of knee-jerk sexist bullshit disinclines me to volunteer my mechanical skills.  My husband the poet has only recently, through association with me and my kid, ventured to gain some proficiency at tightening screws and driving nails.

I uploaded 20 new photos today, filled the entire photo module with shots taken yesterday evening on a short walk I took, accompanied by three of the Piebeans.

This tiny translucent mushroom, growing in a scatter of moose droppings, was one of the first things to catch my eye

Click here to fill your monitor with a 1024x768px moose nugget.

One of my favorite wildflowers is Potentilla palustris, the marsh cinquefoil.  I have never seen so many of them as there are this year.  The plants are lusher than ever and the flowers more numerous on each plant.

There are many berries thanks to the abundant rainfall, but they aren't ripe yet.

I have never seen this place so green before.  There has always been a lot of bare ground between patches of greenery in my yard, but now there are tall clumps of several grasses, some isolated spires of fireweed, Norwegian cinquefoil, yarrow, and duckfoot, and the ground around them is covered with a solid mat of chamomile, chickweed, and my favorite weed, knotgrass, below.

I think this shot of Linda, my favorite Piebean, is the best cat photo I have ever taken.  You can have her in a 1024x768 size for your desktop HERE

.

This is a mystery plant.  All I know about it is that it is a hardy perennial.  It could be wild, or some kind of cultivar.  I found it, as a rosette of leaves, in one of my old gardens across the road last year.  I didn't recognize it, but dug it up and potted it, and placed it in the yard here.  The showy yellow flowers were a great surprise this week.  The closeup below is also desktop size HERE.

The wild fleabane we have around here is usually short, sickly and scraggly, but it is thriving in this extraordinarily wet season.  This one is also desktop size.

...as is this fireweed.

...and Mandoline Piebean.

Okay, I got carried away... so sue me.

Yesterday I explained the reason for the rhubarb security tunnel, the sightline through the trees that Doug and I hacked and clipped and sawed, so we can see if anyone is messing with our garden.

Today, the rain slacked off a bit -- enough that I wasn't worried about getting moisture inside my camera body -- so I went out and captured the promised images.

The first one shows the meandering path curving to the left in the foreground.

The second one, when enlarged, reveals the road at the end of the tunnel, that faint horizontal line across the lighter open space at center.

Last year, early in the growing season, I brought some hardy perennial plants from our old place across the highway and planted them here.  Most went into containers near the house, since the ground here is too acid for those species.  I planted two chunks of rhubarb root into large "planters" the previous owner had created from chicken wire lined with black plastic sheet.  He made a dozen or more of them, on the south edge of the property where they get more sun than we get back here in the trees.

My plan had been to wait 3 years before harvesting any of the stalks, to allow the roots time to develop enough that the plants wouldn't be set back by the loss.  Then a thief/vandal cut back all my mature stalks late in the season, not even having the smarts or consideration to twist them off properly to avoid letting disease get to the plant.  One reason this happened is that at the time, there was no direct sight line between the house and the garden area.  The path out to the garden meanders through the trees and bushes, so that the house can't be seen from the road.  It is possible, though unlikely, that the malefactor thought my garden belonged to the abandoned cabin next door.

A few weeks ago, when I saw that my rhubarb was alive and growing, although not thriving with the abundance it had last year, I decided to take steps to prevent a repeat of last year's plunder.  Doug took a hand saw and I took my pruner, and we cleared a tunnel through the trees.  Now, people passing on the road can see that there is a house back here, and I can sit in my bed and see the rhubarb, and anyone who might be messing with it.  The tunnel, with lighter green at the end, is beautiful.  Right now, some fireweed is blooming in it and bushes are encroaching already, so it will need maintenance.

A "no trespassing" sign is the next step.  If it stops raining, I'll get a picture of the tunnel for you.
 

My intention this morning was to redo the email about genealogical stuff that had been lost yesterday when my ISP webmail login timed out, and then blog here and post Greyfox's latest past life reading for him on KaiOaty.  It doesn't sound like much, even to me, even now.

I got the email to my distant cousin done after breakfast.  It took a while, and I forgot about lunch until about 2:30 PM.  The last half hour or so of that genealogical transcription was done on an empty stomach with plummeting blood sugar.  It would have been more prudent, less self-destructive, to stop and eat, but I told myself I was almost finished....

Well, I'm finished... for the day.  Exhausted, I'm going to put off the rest until tomorrow.  I don't even recall what I wanted to blog about.  I remember that I was going to title it Timespace Relativity, but beyond that my mind is a blank.

If you didn't do so yesterday, clicking HERE
now will enter you in a sweepstakes for a new BMW sedan or an alternate
cash prize of US$85,000, or lesser prizes of $5,000 and $10,000 gift
certificates to Best Buy (if you are a resident of the U.S.A.), and
your entry will also add an extra entry for me.  If I win, I'll pay off
my doctor and the ambulance and EMT bills from last December, get a
window replaced that got broken while Doug was shoveling ice and snow
from the roof last winter, buy a new wood stove to replace the one that
sorta fell apart last winter, and have some rewiring done in here to
make the place safer and get rid of this mess of extension cords.

Please do.

This day has been a frustrating one so far.  I have been using my ISP's webmail service until I can install a new email utility on my denuded hard drive.  Today, I composed a lengthy reply to a newly discovered distant cousin who asked for some genealogical info, and lost the whole thing when I tried to send it, because my login had timed out.  I am not highly motivated to get out the charts and reconstruct the message right now, and Doug is going to be wanting the computer soon.

I could snivel about the gray, wet weather, but the truth is that if it
were otherwise I'd probably be sniveling about smoke from wildfires.  I
have already sniveled enough about my physical debility and discomfort,
and it is far outweighed by the emotional and material support from my
guys, the pleasures of unending new intellectual discoveries, and
higher spiritual stuff about which it would be infra dig to brag, so
what's left to say right now?

Clicking HERE will enter you in a sweepstakes for a new BMW sedan or an alternate cash prize of US$85,000, or lesser prizes of $5,000 and $10,000 gift certificates to Best Buy (if you are a resident of the U.S.A.), and your entry will also add an extra entry for me.  If I win, I'll pay off my doctor and the ambulance and EMT bills from last December, get a window replaced that got broken while Doug was shoveling ice and snow from the roof last winter, buy a new wood stove to replace the one that sorta fell apart last winter, and have some rewiring done in here to make the place safer and get rid of this mess of extension cords.

Seeya later.

    Things are very different here this year, and most of it can be ascribed to the increased rainfall and cloudy days.  I don't know for sure, but I suppose it was the overcast sky, keeping out the sun, that was responsible for the decreased height and delayed blooming of the fireweed.  I don't know whether the increased moisture is what has caused there to be more than the usual number of open flowers on each stalk, or whether that's just the plants' way of getting all their blooming done before frost.

Most summers, only about four blossoms are open on each stalk at a time.  Now it's about twice that many.

This is not the only noticeable difference due to the wetter weather.  Along the roadsides, where fireweed is usually the dominant wildflower, there is less fireweed and more lupine, which does best in partial shade and wet soil.  Devil's club, which grows mostly around the edges of marshy areas, is more abundant than usual.  I'm hoping for good light on our next water run, so I can take the camera and get some shots of the patches of devil's club down by Sheep Creek.

Another difference this summer is pretty easy to figure out.  The "cotton" that carries the seeds of balsam poplar, the tree that many Alaskans mistakenly call, "cottonwood", usually floats through the air for a week or so in June or July, and settles in drifts that look like dirty, fluffy snow.  It didn't do that this year.  On my latest trip to town, I noticed clumps of white stuff, about the size of baseballs, scattered under the branches of big poplars all along the highway.  The stuff came to maturity in wet weather and was knocked off by rain this year, not by wind.

I don't know if it is just coincidence, serendipity, synchronicity, or happenstance that has given us an unusual variety of wildlife sightings, and caused some of their anomalous behavior.  Greyfox saw a black bear recently.  Doug and I saw a fox.  Ravens congregated and were cawing raucously in nearby trees here one day as we were leaving for the general store.  When we got to the store, another group of ravens was making the same sort of racket in the woods down there.  I'm used to hearing single ravens cawing that way as they circle over some carrion, and often hear two or three ravens calling back and forth with liquid sounds or softer vocalizations, but I've never heard that many cawing in concert before.

Rodents and insects are numerous.  I have gotten some decent pictures of various bugs recently.  The one above appears to be a baby grasshopper, but I'm not sure.  If anyone can help me identify it, or the flowers below, I would appreciate the information.  Lots of things in life are uncertain and I'm okay with most of it, but I am not comfortable with that kind of uncertainty that is really nothing but correctable ignorance.

The photos in this entry are only illustrations.  I uploaded a number of fresh scenic and nature shots today.  If you're reading this in your subscriptions or came to it directly through your universal inbox and didn't see the photo module on my main page, you can view today's additions here.