Lead-in to this episode is HERE.

It was a new building, unfinished, surrounded by rough gravelly ground.  The company had expanded its facilities upon winning the contract to supply foodstuffs and general merchandise to Trans-Alaska Pipeline construction camps.  There was little talk and always a sense of urgent hurry to load and unload the vans backed up to the docks along the street side of the warehouse, except at break times.  Then everything went quiet and still, except for the voices of the men, joking, insulting each other, and making bets, or noises of joy or disgust, over the ongoing blackjack games in the “break room.”

It wasn’t a room… wasn’t even an alcove.  It was the roof over the rest room, tucked in behind the drive-in freezer and refrigerator next to the partitioned-off office area that took up a small portion of the northwest corner of the warehouse.  Access was a set of unpainted open stairs up the side of the rest room, and accommodations up there included a table and a few chairs.  I went up there once before I learned by observation that it was the exclusive domain of an elite clique of warehousemen, including the shift foreman and shop steward.  Everyone else took breaks sitting on the machinery or the merchandise.

I developed the habit of grabbing a cup of coffee and going back to my corner of the warehouse, propping a butt cheek on whatever pallet-load of boxes was a comfortable height for me.  Most of my time was spent in that northeast corner of the warehouse, at the end of the row of electrical outlets along the north wall, where pallet jacks were plugged in for recharging.  “Recouping”, I learned, meant cleaning up the men’s messes.

If a pallet was overturned or dropped, or rammed into a wall or the upright on one of the big racks, or if somebody had his forks a bit too high and ran them through the boxes instead of the pallet, damaged cases were hauled back to my corner and dropped.  Most of that hauling and dropping was done on the swing shift, when there were fewer incoming and outgoing vans, fewer warehousmen on duty, and the janitors could get into the aisles between pallet racks to clean up messes.  Unless a mess was badly obstructing the work of the day shift warehousemen, it would be left where it fell.  Union rules:  warehousemen didn’t do janitorial work.

On my first day there, a forklift operator approached me, stopped his machine, and asked if I’d been told that damaged cases of snack foods were to go to the break room.  My instructions had been fairly detailed and explicit:  I was to inspect broken cases, remove dented cans, broken jars, etc., repack the undamaged cans and jars, tape the cases shut and mark them to indicate how many were missing.  Dented cans, crushed cracker boxes, and anything else that was unsalable but apparently still edible was to be packed in assorted cases for donation to charities.  Nobody had mentioned taking snacks to the break room.

The guy insisted that this was the usual policy, and went on to say that he really liked Cheez-It Crackers, and if I ever found any of them, I was to bring them to the break room for him.  Not long after that, sure enough, I found a case of Cheez-Its in one of the heaps of damaged cases,  largely undamaged except for a deep dent in one side and a big boot print where someone, presumably the Cheez-It loving forklift operator, had stomped it.  Stomped Cheez-It cases showed up periodically afterward, every few days, as the supply in the break room ran low.  Eventually, a few other guys mentioned to me that they were getting pretty sick of nothing but Cheez-Its, so I diverted a few other kinds of crushed crackers and such from the charity boxes to the break room.

My job title was “recouper and inventory control clerk” but it was hardly a clerical job.  Each shift, before wading into the mess in my corner, I took a clipboard and walked the aisles, noting down the numbers of any empty slots in the pallet racks.  That was inventory control.  Picking up and dropping off my inventory clipboard were the only times I entered the office area.  The two women who worked in the office, a secretary and a receptionist, never entered the warehouse itself.  I was the only woman in that enormous ozone- and testosterone-reeking echo chamber, and from the demeanor of many of the men, I was the first woman they’d ever had to work with.

Some of them obviously resented my presence, and others seemed uncomfortable, inhibited around me.  Once, early on, a man was saying something to another as I approached, his speech liberally laced with the f-word.  As soon as he saw me, he went silent, lowered his eyes, blushed and said, “pardon my language.”  I shrugged and replied, “I don’t give a fuck what you say around me.”  He looked stunned, and I heard a few nervous laughs and one or two hearty guffaws.  Things started loosening up after that.

More about the warehouse, next time.

Think of me as a street performer, a storyteller with a battered old hat at my feet.  If you like my stories, and especially if you’d like to see them illustrated with the photos I am unable to scan because I can’t afford to replace my old broken scanner, please donate a little something.  The hat is a link to PayPal.

People often remark on the quality of my memory.  From my perspective, it’s not very good.  I know I have forgotten more than I remember – I can zoom in on some incidents and tell their stories in detail, but those sharply defined times are surrounded by long periods of time with no associated memories.  One thing that helps me remember is the fact that I moved around a lot, and memories are associated with places.  At this point, I come into a period of 23 years during which I lived in the same little trailer, only moving it once in those years.  These times run together and chronology is hard to recall.  Sometimes I’m not sure if something happened before or after we moved the trailer from Rabbit Creek to the Susitna Valley… but that’s getting ahead of the story.

Lead-in to this episode is HERE.

I know approximately when I moved into that trailer (an 8′ x 35′ uninsulated aluminum box built in California in 1953) because Charley wrote a date on the wooden molding beside the door.  Trouble is, it wasn’t the date we bought the trailer, nor was it the date I moved in.  I didn’t even notice the graffito for some time after he made it.  When I did, some discussion ensued but we could never agree on exactly what the date on the wall commemorated.  He claimed it was the day we bought the trailer, but I knew that wasn’t right.  However, that date, September 15, 1975, was within a week or two of the night I moved in.

He was up at Pump 8 on the pipeline, hauling loads of fill and gravel in a big belly dump truck.  I was working at Youth Employment Service in Spenard.  A couple of times I loaded Lucy, the VW bug, with clothes and stuff, drove to work in the morning, then up to the hillside after work, unloaded and went back to Chugiak to reload the car, sleep, and do it all again.  One day in early September, I got up early, loaded up the pile of carpet padding that I used for a bed, and left the duplex clean and empty but for the reason we were compelled to move out:  my five marijuana plants in their 5-gallon buckets.

That evening after work, I drove up to the trailer park, unloaded, removed the back seat from the bug, and headed down and out to Chugiak for that final load.  It was dark and raining by the time I had my plants stuffed into the space behind the car seats, their tops gently bent under Lucy’s curving roof.  It was an uneasy drive that rainy night, across Anchorage, with every passing car’s lights illuminating my illicit cargo.  The Ravin Decision had legalized private possession within one’s home, but did not address the blatantly open haulage of the distinctive foliage.

I continued working at YES, and Charley went on with the routine of 2 weeks on the pipeline job, 1 week off.  When we were home, we spent most of our time working on the trailer.  I hung the 8-foot fluorescent fixture for the pot plants from the ceiling, by chains, along one side of the bedroom, and put the two 4-foot fixtures for my tropical houseplants in the front room.  He put a work bench and shelves in the little 6-foot square lean-to that sheltered the door, and repaired a few holes and gaps that let in the weather.  We blocked, covered and insulated the loosely-fitting back door because it let in too much weather.

The whole time that I had been working at YES, I’d spend coffee breaks around the corner in the adult Job Service office, standing in front of the cork boards where the job listings were posted, looking for a better job.  My hope was to find something in social services, but few positions came open and, despite going out on several interviews, I wasn’t hired.  I widened my scope to include clerical work, but found nothing until one day not long after the move, when I saw a job opening for “recouper and inventory control clerk.”  I didn’t have a clue what kind of work a “recouper” did, but I was willing to give it a try, since the pay was more than double the hourly rate I was getting at YES.

The Job Service clerk who referred me to the interview told me that a recouper recouped damaged merchandise in a warehouse.  The warehouse in question was J. B. Gottstein’s, the wholesaler that supplied Carr’s supermarket chain as well as all the Trans-Alaska Pipeline construction camps.  Uncertain exactly how recouping was done, but confident that I could learn, I emphasized my inventory experience and clerical skills to the clerk and she set up the appointment. 

I must have made a good impression on the exec who interviewed me.  There was no waiting for a call to find out if I was hired.  After showing me around the big echoing steel building busy with men zipping around on pallet jacks and forklifts between tall rows of steel pallet racks, he led me back to his office, talked to me for a couple of minutes and told me to come in at 8 the next morning.

First the brakes, and then the gear box, went out on Charley’s belly dump on a long incline with a full load, and he damaged 2 other trucks in passing before bringing it to a stop by ramming it into a roadside bank of dirt.  He was shaken up, banged around, not too seriously hurt, but the belly dump was totaled.  He lost that job and started spending his days seeking work at the union hall or at his “office”, the local Denny’s restaurant where a lot of building contractors hung out drinking coffee and talking shop.

One evening, he picked me up from work and drove up to our moldy little trailer on the hillside.  The door was open.  My marijuana plants were gone, along with a cookie tin with our stash, and another tin containing pipes, roach clips, papers and such.  Also missing were 35 troy ounces of silver and a box full of cassette tapes. Some of the tapes contained music, but most were tapes I’d made myself, recording Tarot readings, conversation at parties, journal entries and notes for a novel I planned to write.  One, the one I valued most highly, was a past-life reading done for me by Aron Abrahamson. 

Our moldy little trailer had been burgled.  I called the State Troopers.  It didn’t take a psychic to recognize the bemusement of the trooper who responded.  He’d never before had anyone complain of having their dope and paraphernalia stolen.  He looked around, took a few notes, told us it was unlikely they’d ever find the person or persons responsible, and left. 

Within a week or so after the burglary, the teen-age son of a neighbor knocked at the door and said his mom told him to come over and apologize to us for her.  His older brother had ripped us off, apparently in the middle of a crime spree that had ultimately landed him in jail.  The boy, Todd, said he didn’t know what happened to my tapes, but that his brother had buried the silver on the hill below the trailer court.  He and Charley went down there several times before snow fell, digging up every likely spot, but never found anything.

CONTINUED HERE.

Think of me as a street performer, a storyteller with a battered old hat at my feet.  If you like my stories, and especially if you’d like to see them illustrated with the photos I am unable to scan because I can’t afford to replace my old broken scanner, please donate a little something.  The hat is a link to PayPal.

Lead-in to this episode is HERE.

When Charley and I were evicted for growing (legal) marijuana in our rented duplex, we started looking for another place to live.  This was the height of the housing shortage brought on by the Trans-Alaska Pipeline construction boom.  Charley was working on the pipeline, two weeks on, one week off, making great money driving a belly-dump truck, but at the time he was between paydays.  My job didn’t pay as well, but we were having no problems getting by financially — until we started looking for housing.

There was nothing to rent in our price range, not in Anchorage, Eagle River, Peters Creek/Chugiak (where we’d been living), nor in Wasilla or Palmer, even farther from Anchorage.  If a place went vacant, it was rented immediately.  People were living in their cars, and there was a tent city in a park on the edge of Anchorage.  I had once lived in an MGB.  I supposed, if I had to, I could live in our VW bug, but where would I put those two 3′ x 4′ mirrors?

As the clock was ticking on our eviction, we were willing to take whatever we could find.  Finally, we saw an ad for a trailer for sale, “$2,000 cash.”  We’d be able to pay that when Charley got his next check, and we had enough money to put half down immediately.  We called Mr. and Mrs. Blackard, then went to their house for the key and directions to find the trailer.  It was on the Hillside of South Anchorage’s Rabbit Creek area, on Golden View Drive, which even then was becoming an upscale neighborhood with gated communities in the works.

The little 8′ x 35′ sky blue and dirty white trailer wasn’t upscale at all, and neither were its surroundings.  It was in the only trailer park on the Hillside, a small place with about ten or a dozen trailers, on a muddy terrace overlooking Cook Inlet, where Golden View crested a steep hill.  It was owned by the Roehls, a Russian Athabascan family who kept the place despite its being in an area not zoned for such things, by virtue of grandfather rights, its having been there before the zoning ordinance was passed.

The Blackards had told us the trailer they were selling was in space number 3.  We drove in one entrance, saw no numbers on any of the trailers, went back to the other entrance and cruised through the other side of the park, and saw the number “28″ on one of the trailers.  We figured that for an anomaly.  There was an “office” sign on the big house there, so we knocked and told the kid who answered the door what we were looking for.  He gave a grin, stepped out the door and pointed to the little blue trailer next to Golden View Drive on the first driveway we’d cruised. 

Walking across the yard, he mentioned that some people who had been there previously had been using it as a dog house.  The door wasn’t locked, so we didn’t need that key.  We walked in to look it over and the kid came with us.  The first thing I noticed was the moldy canine smell.  It looked better than it smelled, paneled in warm pine.  There was concealed lighting in shallow boxes all around the front room, a Panel-Ray gas heater in that room.  Across the front, south-facing, wall was a window the full width of the trailer, and under it, a trough wide enough to hold a six-inch flower pot, long enough to hold lots of them. 

Farther back were a fridge and gas range in the kitchen, a perfect blank wall on which to hang one of my mirrors beside the bathroom door, and, along the east wall of the bedroom, the wall that faced the street, a gap where the wall and floor didn’t meet.  The kid explained that some former tenants, “drank a lot, and he threw his wife up against the wall.”

Okay, so it wasn’t perfect.  It was a real fixer-upper, but it had one thing going for it that nothing else we’d seen had:  it was available.  Back at the Blackards’ house, we stood on their porch and talked through the screen door, offering them our $1,000 down payment.  Mr. Blackard reminded us that the ad said, “$2,000 cash.”  Charley explained that he was about to go back out on the pipeline for 2 weeks, but that I would be able to bring them the other thousand dollars before then.

Mr. and Mrs. B, looked at each other, and in the silence that hung over that dubious look, Charley made a smart move.  He asked if they were related to so-and-so Blackard.  I don’t recall the name, and don’t recall whether it was their son, their nephew, or what, but when Charley started to reminisce about things they’d done together as kids, the screen came open and we were invited inside.

Charley still had some of the Texas of his youth in his voice, and my accent was California to the max.  They’d tagged us as boomers, but when they realized that we (or at least one of us: I kept out of the conversation) was an Alaskan, they warmed to us at once.  That’s a funny thing about Alaskans.  Except for the Natives, practically everyone is a newcomer, but they don’t tend to like or trust newcomers. 

One winter up here isn’t enough to cleanse someone of the pejorative name, cheechako.  If you can get through that first winter without fleeing southward, and stay willingly through another winter, you can begin to pass muster, providing you don’t exhibit any grievous faults or egregious behavior — and those things, of course, are all in the eye of the beholder.  Charley told the Blackards about the jeep trip up the Al-Can when he was ten, with his mom, step-father and 5-year-old brother, and about growing up on the homestead outside Wasilla, and we were IN.

Continued HERE.

Think of me as a street performer, a storyteller with a battered old hat at my feet.  If you like my stories, and especially if you’d like to see them illustrated with the photos I am unable to scan because I can’t afford to replace my old broken scanner, please donate a little something.  The hat is a link to PayPal.

I had a deeply, wildly, shamanic dream this morning just before waking.  I woke wondering about a detail:  there was something I was supposed to leave behind.  In the dream, I was unsure, and asked my shaman/guide just before I woke, just which of several things involved, I was supposed to leave behind.

I thought about it as I charged the coffeemaker and switched it on, and decided to ask an oracle.  I sat down here and picked up my most-used (recently) oracular device: a D6 — six-sided die.  After several rolls, I knew that the oracle was toying with me.  The next roll confirmed that.

I reached out to the basket hanging at arm’s length over my worktable here next to the desk, and picked up my rune bag… picked it up by the bottom.  The drawstring was loose, and a bunch of runes fell out.  I could tell by the sounds that some of the smooth rounded rectangular etched glass “stones” landed on soft surfaces, some on hard metal, some on resonant wood, and some slid and bounced several times.  One hit and landed on top of my foot.

That’s the one I picked up first… set it on the mouse pad, read it — very appropriate, for starters.  As I retrieved five more runes, eventually getting a flashlight to find the fifth one under a low shelf on the base of the desk, I lay them on the mouse pad.  They made a coherent but somewhat elusive, unfinished, reading.  Two of them even drew laughs, somewhat ruefully, from me.

With a feeling that I wasn’t done with the search, I dumped the rest of the runes from the bag, and all of them fell face up except for one.  I turned it over:  blank — another laugh.  I counted — sure enough, I have 24 runes here; one is still missing.  It didn’t fall into the basket; that’s already been emptied and searched.  It could be in one of the baskets or trays of jewelry-making tools and parts on the table below that hanging basket.

It could also be on the floor, way back under the table, in which case I have to move a chair to look for it– two chairs, really, because the chair under the table isn’t going anywhere until I get this office chair out of the way first.  It could also have landed somewhere between the table top and floor, on one of the shelves of the bookcase, holding beads, crystals, findings, tags, labels, vitamins, pens, action figures and other talismans, between the end of the table and the window.

I have options.  I can drink some coffee and let the whole thing rest for a time while I wake up.  I can look at the runes I have and see which one is missing, or I can start moving furniture and crawling around under the table with my flashlight.  I’ll give the whole matter some more thought. 

In Anchorage in 1975, I had been using marijuana for less than a decade – with about a 3-year hiatus in that decade for jail time, prison and homeless, largely smokeless, poverty.  Until Charley moved in with me, I didn’t use it every day, even when I had it.  It was mostly for parties, for social occasions, for concerts, dances… not an everyday thing.  Living with Charley changed that pattern.  We smoked when we had smoke and did without when it was gone.

The two 40-Watt fluorescent tubes in my living room plant alcove barely supported photosynthesis for a baby avocado tree, a few other little green things either purchased in 2″ pots or grown from fruit seeds, and half a dozen or so small marijuana plants grown in six-inch pots from seeds gleaned from Mexican dirt weed.  I didn’t know much about horticulture, but was reading books, learning how to care for plants.

It was the time of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline construction boom.  Boomers had been coming to Alaska on the hope of finding high-paid jobs for several years before the actual construction started, making jobs and low-cost housing harder than ever to find.  Charley had the same talent I had for losing jobs or getting pissed off and quitting.  I had a decent, but low-paying, clerical job at Youth Employment Service when Charley’s job at Replacement Glass came to an end.  Not finding other work right away, he decided to try for a pipeline job.

Before he had done his jail time, Charley had been a cabdriver and member of the Teamsters Union.  We scraped up enough money to get his Teamster’s membership reinstated, and he started going to the union hall every day for job calls.  My basement apartment was dank, dim, and cramped with the two of us and, being furnished and downtown in the Anchorage bowl, the rent was relatively high.  We found a cheaper, unfurnished place, called a “duplex,” actually just a house with a family living in an apartment in the basement, in suburban Peters Creek.

Our furniture was sketchy, at best.  My big 3′ x 4′ mirrors were hung, one in the front room and one in my bedroom.  I made a bed by piling up several layers of foam carpet padding we found in a dumpster.  There were some built-in shelves and drawers, and we supplemented them with crates and planks.  For living room furniture we bought a camp bed: nylon stretched over a tubular aluminum frame, and hung up the rattan swinging settee I’d had in the basement apt. (The child in the photo is Shanda, daughter of my best friend, Mardy.)

This is where Irwin Ravin comes in.  He was a lawyer, in partnership with Robert Wagstaff.  Both men were dope smokers and decided to challenge the constitutionality of the state’s marijuana laws.  Alaska’s constitution guarantees our right to privacy, and that was the grounds for their challenge.

The late Mr. Ravin, my hero and the hero of just about everybody I knew at the time, set himself up to be busted for pot possession.  He drove around with a baggie of weed in his pocket and a broken taillight on his car.  When he was stopped for the equipment violation, he refused to sign the citation, which got him taken to jail, searched, and busted for possession.

His partner, Bob Wagstaff, represented him, and they won!  Private possession then was technically legal in Alaska, and stoners were so giddy with the joy of it that there was an awful lot of public smoking going on.  I’ll have more to say about that later, but for now I’m sticking to my chronology here.

Charley went to work driving a belly dump truck at Pump Station 8 on the pipeline.  We splurged on an 8-foot fluorescent fixture, and I potted my 5 wee plants up into 5-gallon buckets, the size of pot recommended in The Cultivator’s Handbook of Marijuana (first edition) for growing potted pot.  I lined them up under the lights, in the part of the kitchen intended for a dining table, nurtured them, talked to them, trimmed them carefully and gave them praise and thanks for what they gave us.

Charley would fly out to the pump station for two weeks of work and come back for a week off.  I continued the commute across Anchorage from Peters Creek out east of town, to the YES office in Spenard in west Anchorage.  One sunny summer day when Charley had just gotten in from Pump 8, the landlord knocked at the door.  He’d been watching for us, and left his house headed for ours when he saw us drive past.

He gave us an eviction notice.  “Why?” we asked.  “You’re growing mary-jew-wanna in here,” he said.  “But it’s LEGAL!” we protested.  He explained that our place shared a common ventilation system with the apartment downstairs and our neighbors down there were worried about the health of their children, breathing our smoke.

I looked at Charley, and saw him looking back at me.  I was no Irwin Ravin, willing to sacrifice my freedom for this principle.  I’d already done time in Oregon for simple possession of less than an ounce of Cannabis — spent about seventeen months locked up, out of a 3-year sentence.  Charley was only recently out of jail on parole after serving six years of a ten-year sentence.  (Details of this are HERE, the same link as the “cabdriver” one above.)

We gave up without a fight, and with 30 days to vacate the premises, started looking for someplace to go.

CONTINUED HERE.

Think of me as a street performer, a storyteller with a battered old hat at my feet.  If you like my stories, and especially if you’d like to see them illustrated with the photos I am unable to scan because I can’t afford to replace my old broken scanner, please donate a little something.  The hat is a link to PayPal.

For a few years, I was posting episodes of my memoirs here almost daily.  I started in the middle of my life, wrote about a decade-and-a-half’s worth of it, up to 1975 in Anchorage, then focused on filling in my early years.  About three years ago, I drove my Golden Spike, linking the childhood and youth to the already written ‘sixties and ‘seventies, with an episode set in Tacoma, WA, 1961.

That stuff that happened fifty years ago turned out to be easier to remember and write about than things that happened more recently.  I got stuck, not only on memory but on the sensitivity of some of the material — or, rather, the sensitivities of some of the people involved.

I couldn’t figure out how to go on being as frank and honest about my life in that time as I had been about the previous part, without risking getting killed, or at least maimed, or maybe only despised and ostracized, for it.  I backed off, scared.

I can’t change the three years of memoir writing time I lost that way, but I can face the fear, blow a big raspberry in its face, and get on with the job.

Stay tuned for further developments.  I’m back.

It is important to me to illustrate my memoirs with photos whenever such photos exist.  Many do exist for the period of time I’ll be writing about next, but I have no scanner now, no way to get them onto these pages.  If you would be so kind as to contribute a little something to the purchase of a new scanner, please drop a little something in my old purple PayPal hat, below.

I have proven to myself, by a circuitous and deeply thoughtful process, what I already knew.

Last night, when I told a new online friend that I had been waiting for a pie to come out of the oven, he said that he is a cooking and baking fanatic.  There was a time, I realized, when that description would have fit me, but it no longer does.

I didn’t really give it much thought at the time.  It was late in a long busy day, I was mentally tired and physically fatigued, and focused on that keyboard conversation.  This morning, it lurked in my mind, a puzzle to unravel:  Why do I no longer derive the joy I once did from my kitchen creativity?

The moment that I hit upon the phrase, “kitchen creativity,” I realized that although I still like to cook and to eat my own cooking, there is just one aspect of cooking that still fully engages me and gives me great joy.  It’s the improvisation, and the tinkering to perfect, then record and share, new recipes.  Last night’s pie was a version of my apricot, pepita, oatmeal, quick and easy gluten-free pie, made with a different, not better, crust recipe, and too much oatmeal — still tinkering… still having fun with it.  The fun, I realized, comes not from the process nor the product, but from the challenge. 

How long have I known that I thrive on challenge, that this is where my joy comes alive?  I don’t think I’d reached that realization yet when I came to Alaska around the end of my twenties.  I already knew it by the time my youngest son was born, eight years later.  He turns 30 this summer, so it has been roughly close to half my life that I’ve known I live for challenge.  The knowledge has been a saving grace through three decades of parenting this challenged and challenging man, but in only one way is he still a challenge to me.

This leads me into the answer to the next questions I asked myself today:  Where now does my joy reside?  What’s the big challenge currently engaging my consciousness?  As soon as asked, those questions were answered.  The task that puts the smile on my face each morning is nothing more than mere survival, to live another day.  The secondary one that draws me toward this machine is challenging indeed:  human relations.  Ironically, after spending most of my life becoming the hermit and learning how to survive in relative solitude, I’m facing the challenge of relating to other people. 

For this joy, I am grateful to those who developed the web and social networking sites, and to the flaky southern man who asked me to move in here on the grid and house-sit for him while he went south for the winter, more than a decade ago, and then never came back.  I certainly would not give up my life out here on the edge of the fringe of the back of beyond to undertake the challenge of people.