Thursday, September 28, 2006

Purgatory





My country is at war. With itself.


It is a terrible war that turns brother against brother, that turns truth into concept at the speed of thought. It comes complete with computer graphics, rendering and theme music. If the cold war were still on, we'd blame the Communists for the divide.


Maybe it is.


I don't know where it started. I think the most brazen activities were probably initiated during the Clinton administration where the American populace was shocked to know our president would dare to suggest we didn't understand the definition of the two-letter word, "is". As shocked as we could be, nothing could have prepared us for the onslaught we are forced to withstand day after day as our politicians and their paid media minions write history in pencil then erase and rewrite it to their individual profit.


We have managed to convince ourselves we are in living in a time that demands the uprooting of our most closely held values as citizens and even as human beings. Our leaders feed us barely hidden lies to get us to follow them, and then wink snidely as if to let us know we're all in on the joke. The lie is that we need to unhinge 200 years of law. The lie is that our Constitution and 200 years of judgment is faulty.


Technology allows this cooperative deception to occur on a massive scale. We are fed bullshit through computer networks and cable television that are free from the restrictions of decency imposed by the archaic rules mandated by the government who limits itself to protecting only the free airwaves.


And consequently we are manipulated by tiny vicious men who send our children into war to do their bidding. And we don't care.


We get what we deserve. America is crumbling. What will fill the vacuum that is left by the implosion of the last great bastion of the free and brave? Who will stand in our place? Lucky for our former allies, we've relegated them to the sidelines, and they'll watch in horror as the giant whirlpool takes us all down into the sewer of history. And then they'll go about their lives.


I have ceased to be amazed that rational people are willing to believe what they're told in print and by shining spots on screens before their eyes. I have ceased to be amazed that people can continue to believe a lie after it has been uncovered before their very eyes like an audience who insists there are ghosts even after the magician has showed us the mirror and the smoke machine.


We are getting what the majority wants: a choice between the agonizing death of a thousand cuts, or the life-crushing pain of untreated cancer, all because we'd rather believe the screen than our eyes.


I want to believe a change of political party will cure my country. But it won't. We'll replace one set of corrupt, self-serving ideologues for another.


There is no hope but for people to turn of their computers and televisions and look into their own hearts.


And Rupert Murdock will never allow that to happen.


We are the TV generation. It is our true God. And God is selling our souls into slavery.







The Alaskan Panhandle is known to all as Southeast Alaska and abbreviated to "Southeast" by residents in speech. Southeast is a different country than the interior, which is again a different country from the Aleutian chain, over 1500 miles to the west. Due to spherical geography Alaska spans as many degrees of longitude as the continental 48 states. Due to political edict Alaska comprises a single time zone to the four in the lower 48. Our clocks in Juneau are set to the same time as those in Adik, even though they're 50 degrees of longitude to our west. Imagine New York and Los Angeles having their clocks set identically instead of 3 hours apart.


Almost nobody lives in Alaska. There's not a lot of concern about the sun rising at three in the morning and setting at ten AM in Okmok. It makes things easier for people elsewhere, which is how things are in Alaska: easier for everyone else.


We are into the rainy season in Southeast. Natives are used to the sun disappearing behind the clouds at this time of year. It's not supposed to be sunny in the "ber" months. It adds to the gloom as we lose four minutes of daylight with each 24-hour cycle. It seems we have gone from daylight for all our waking hours to a sunlight rationing system.


The tea-colored muskeg puddles fill faster than they drain. The streets glisten perpetually. The air is dense with fog and raindrops.


"What is your favorite water?" the question goes.


Insects have all drowned.


"What is your favorite animal?"


The bears have all found their sleeping places.


"What's the difference between a brown bear and a grizzly?"


Free. Wild. Nothing. How did you kill your last insect?


Yesterday, the last cruise ship of the season came and left. Now the ship dock will be empty for six months and I will no longer have to give directions to the Greek Orthodox church or the State Assembly chambers to people whose maps are too wet and crumpled to use.


We are once again in self-imposed isolation. Rain pelts us ceaselessly. Ravens practice their ten different calls.


Are you a Republican, or are you a Democrat?


Raven's wings sound like ropes whistling through the wind. When they pass you swear a bullwhip flicked past your ear or the sails were lifted on a distant schooner. They represent a deity to the Southeast natives. One out of many.


Clever Raven created the world. Bald eagle is a vacuous beauty, concerned more with looks than substance.






There was no rain the year I moved to California from New Jersey. We could only wash our cars on alternate Sundays. It was illegal to water the lawn.


Every day the sun sailed across cloudless blue. Every night the high fog clotted and formed a billowing ceiling that reflected our sodium lamps. In the morning it melted to blue clarity.


Free under the blue infinity, Californians will try anything.


People are cautious where the weather changes. In New Jersey, bad luck hides like a wolf in the brush, waiting to pounce upon the brave and the unaware.


"That's how they get you," my father used to say. It was a multi-purpose phrase.


As far as he was concerned there was a reason, a victim, and a guilty party to every misfortune on earth.


His phrase is suitably followed with: "I hate them for that reason."


There was the story of the man who broke down on Route 46, on the bridge that went over another highway, Route 1. It's an old two lane bridge. There's no shoulder, and only an old ivory-colored concrete barrier between the bridge surface and the roadway below. He set out flares and reflectors and parked as far to the right as he could, but eventually someone wasn't going to stop.


A tractor trailer did not stop. There was no place for the motorist to go to avoid the accident. Seconds before the truck collided into his stalled car at highway speed the man leapt from the bridge - and broke both legs in awful spiral fractures when he hit the route 1 fast lane on both feet.


His legs demolished, he had to crawl to the shoulder of the road on his elbows before the light changed and the traffic resumed and crushed him. And he as he started his crawl his broken car was hurled off the bridge by the collision with the truck. It hit behind him at the spot he'd just left while he slithered on his elbows.


What a bad day.


"That's how they get you," Dad said about the truck crash. "They never slow down. Not for any reason. I hate them for that reason."


"Far be it for me to be a ray of sunshine, but maybe the guy was totally lucky. He lived."


"Luck would have been not having a piece of shit car that breaks down on an overpass."


Luck would be having a better paying job and a career that led to a bright future instead of driving a Plymouth Dart with a leaky carburetor float. Luck would be living in a 6-bedroom home with a gated yard and a gardener named Luis who'd be appreciative for big tips come Christmas time. Luck would be owning a fractional Gulfstream IV.


Because we didn't have a jet, we'd be prey to those out to get us. And they were. And we would be got. And we would hate them for it.


"That's how they get you."


"You hate them for that reason."


"Yes. I do. You have anything else to say, smartass?"


"Nope. Not me."





How you answer to water is your subconscious preference for sex.


How you answer to animals is your subconscious preference for friends.


How you answer to killing insects is your subconscious preference for handling difficult situations.


How you answer to Republican or Democrat is your subconscious desire to please your parents.


Does God want us to be cautious, or carefree? Do you live in the sun or the rain?


We ask this way because you can't answer a direct question. Because everything means something, which is something else.



I can't help but think in this endless Southeast rain

of everyone who died who loved me. You have, in purgatory, only the hope you have brought with you. There is no sun I'll see again until I am forgiven my sins by those who no longer have a voice here. The resurrection of the dead. The return of the spirit.


On track, the motel rug

I pace step after step

As if I was anywhere

We could be anywhere

I have been anyone

A businessman killing time

A musician not sleeping midday

Wringing my hands

It's always too early for the show.





My father was a Democrat, but he might have become a Republican had he survived. He would have enjoyed the demonization of strangers and random events. There were times that having someone to hate gave him purpose.


It would never have occurred to him that taking fate from God and handing it to the Devil turned his world into purgatory, and that he could change it by refusing to strike our when his luck turned sour.


The formula is that anger is a release for the frustration we have built wishing we had when we don't. We are sold on the idea our lives will improve by patronizing the advertisers. Because we measure our happiness in terms relative to those around us, we can only "feel" the changes in our lives. So we must continue to patronize the advertisers. And when we have built up a high enough tolerance for that drug, we turn our efforts against ourselves. Then the politicians give us the chance to free ourselves from self-loathing by channeling our frustration into fear and hatred.


So that they can patronize the advertisers.


That's how they get you.


That's how they make you hate.

posted by iceowl at 3:43 PM 0 Comments

Friday, September 15, 2006

No Zen Radio


Garbage Bears are Zen




Compared to other people, we have no problems.

We are not dying of cancer.

We have not been ordered to our deaths on suicide missions by inept leaders.

We are not being round up and shot by extremists.

We are not being tortured with power tools by Ba'th separatists.

We are not poking holes in alkali soil looking for water and food.

We have not been written off by the federal government.

We have not been unjustly convicted and sentenced.


We have life and the right to live it.


We could be Zen masters.





Stress is ruining my life.


Lucky for me I can take out my frustrations on our current political situation.


Lucky me.


Rah.






Evolutionarily speaking, given the ubiquity of misery it must be a necessary component of survival. If misery wasn't useful, it would have been mutated out of the gene pool by now.


No one has the market cornered on misery. We've all got it to some degree. While there are depression experts among us who have mastered the art while under doctor's care and powerful drugs, most of us practice amateur misery, intermixing it with occasional mirth.


We are not pure. But we are many.


I have known naturally happy people in my life. They tend to be very successful in their endeavors. The analysis is simple: you get more things done and endure tribulations better if you can remain happy. It seems unfair that some people are naturally cheery, given there may be a body chemistry basis to where someone is on the misery/mirth spectrum. But physics doesn't develop by or respond to parameters like "happy" or "unfair".


So we have to live with it.




Mind control is unnecessary. Polls are unnecessary.


These days everyone has a blog and I wonder if we can consider it a phenomenon of monumental importance that you can find the thoughts of millions of people simply by perusing the internet. We tell everyone what we're thinking. We are a marketing service's wet dream. A pollster's joy. A therapist's nightmare.


Due to our on-line confessions we have given up our opportunity to run for any public office.


Or maybe not. Compared to accidentally getting America into a war, my worst social faux pas is strictly a Care Bears level problem.






Yesterday I had to go out in the dark of the night. I was in my Jeep. As I drove down my street a bear crossed my path.


There are bear icons all over Juneau. Stuffed bears. Bears carved from tree stumps. Bear talisman painted by the native Alaskans in that cool northwestern graphic arts style that existed before white people invented graphic arts.


Previously, I had to go see the bears. There are a couple bears at Mendenhall glacier near the visitor's center. They hang out entertaining tourists and locals who follow their every move, moving back and forth across bridges and footpaths the way tennis fans lock eyes onto the hurtling ball at Wimbledon.


These bears-at-the-glacier are wild in that the theory is nobody feeds them and they are free to maul whomever they choose. However, they are inured to photo flashes and video cameras and the continuous "ooh" and "aah" of the crowd. They come back year after year to put on their wildlife show. The older male bear is called "Hollywood" by the faithful, and he has met riverrun face to face. The baby bear is now 2+ years old, but is still in danger of being killed by his father, so he keeps a wide berth. Momma bear has ceased keeping a close eye on the baby. She's off pursuing a career as a featured artist on Wild Kingdom.


The bear I saw was much more wild than the bears-at-the-glacier (not to be confused with "glacier bears", which are a particular breed of bear). When I mentioned to the kids at work (yes, I work with a lot of kids) that I saw a bear last night, they said, "Oh, it must have been a garbage bear."


My first truly wild bear, and it's a garbage bear. Unphotographable. Unremarkable. About three times the size of a golden retriever. Yes, capable of killing a grown man, but being killed by a garbage bear would be tantamount to being run over by a two-year old who accidentally hits the gearshift in mommy's running car.


Not a bear who's going to take down a caribou for dinner, or even fish for salmon. But rather, a bear who's going to lick clean your cast off tinfoil TV-dinner plates. A bear who's going to eat your moldy leftovers. A bear not worthy of being labeled by any legitimate Latin term.


Ursus odoriferous.




I used to write about sex. Sex is on the minds of a lot of untroubled people. It was on my mind back then, back before I had to worry about everything. Sex is a life-affirming activity. No one having sex is miserable. Everyone having sex is lucky.


Once I had sex with a woman who looked at the sky in the middle of all of it raised her arms and shouted, "Yippie!"


"What the hell was that?" I said, figuring grunting and moaning were the appropriate aphorisms of sexual approval.


"Wah hoo!"


"Wah hoo?"


"WAH HOO!"


It was one of the happiest things I'd ever seen while incarnated in human form.


The good thing about something like that is being able to remember it when it's rainy and blue in your head. You can remind yourself it's a good world. It's a good life. People love you. There is love to be got and love to be given.


Yippie.




Then this gets into my head. The Bush Presidency. The Anti-sex. Anti-fun. Anti-goodness. How can anyone who hates as many people as our president smile so much?


Or is it just me. Maybe they're reasonable guys. Maybe it's all in my head. We're not sending under equipped soldiers to Iraq to fight an ill-defined war. It's a dream. It's a J.K. Rowling episode. It's going to end with wizards and spells.


My hands are writing what I can't stop thinking --



How do elected officials get away with it? I heard it said, yesterday, that the Vice President claimed he never expected there would be such an insurgency in Iraq - as if to say - I didn't think we would be getting into an actual "War" over there.


And yet he is aggressive and forceful. The people he speaks to are sheep. They cower when he opens his mouth to spew his lies and conundrums. I dislike him as much as I dislike those who oppose him while they back themselves into corners, shielding their faces like frightened children. The Democrats do not deserve to beat these beasts. They're right about one thing: the war on terror requires we adopt some new methodology. To beat the Republican zealots we will have to counterattack with equal viciousness, lovelessness, fanatic stupidity, and hatred. They will understand nothing less and there is no one with backbone in the Democratic party.


I am coming to the conclusion that only Republicans can beat the neocons. And that may be the strategy they're developing - distance themselves from Bush so that the party can live on despite the incompetence of these despot wannabes. I don't care. If I have to, I will support a Republican. I will vote for John McCain. I will absolutely vote for Rudy Giuliani. Unless the Democratic party puts up someone with enough guts to stand up and say: It is only a degenerate who feels the morals of civilized men need further "definition" Make no mistake, there is no confusion - I will hold sacred the Geneva Convention - I will hold sacred due process - I will hold sacred the tenets upon which this nation was formed - Unless someone with guts and the ability to back it up runs against this demonic juggernaut who hides behind the Bible I will campaign for a Republican who can wipe out the neocon scourge.


They've won, and we're all idiots.


Surely, this is not the first lying administration. Surely, this is not the first administration that has argued we need to torture prisoners of war and increase surveillance of our citizens and further break down the carefully erected barriers between international and domestic intelligence agencies. Surely, this is not the first administration that has suggested due process of law does not apply to those we select and label enemy combatants. Surely this is not the first administration to accuse its critics of treason.


Or is it?


How is it that it hurts so much with these people?



I should have more sex. Think less politics. Smile. Be happy.



Yippie.



wahhoo

posted by iceowl at 1:47 PM 0 Comments

Thursday, September 14, 2006

Electric Sheep


There's a three-legged dog on our street. It's a Shetland sheepdog. One of those miniature nuclear powered Lassie dogs that would wear a hole in the Earth's crust running in circles before it ever got across "Timmy's in the well." It's missing its left front leg.


The dog gets around as if having been born with four legs was a mistake of evolution. It dodges and weaves and barks and generally makes a nuisance of itself whenever you pass its home. The Dog Whisperer would mention it was bred to tend herds. When it runs up its driveway and onto the street yapping like the broken wheel on a grocery store cart, it's keeping us away from its herd of imaginary Shetland sheep.


The first time I saw it, I didn't know it was missing a leg. It got around like a quadruped. One day my landlord said to me, "Watch out for the three-legged dog," and I thought she was cautioning me not to step on it.


If it was human it might have been lying around feeling sorry for itself, bemoaning the loss of it's paw, complaining it couldn't run the doggie wheelbarrow races anymore. But it was running and weaving and yapping, just like it was born to do.


It antagonized me and my dog as we walked past the driveway it was protecting, hopping around madly like a weird transpecies creature: a bird going through surgery to become a mammal. Occasionally my dog would look up at me with that, "What exactly are you going to do about this?" look that pack members give the alpha male. "What is your plan? You do have a plan for dealing with this, don't you?"


But there was no plan.


"You should kill that so we don't have to worry about it biting us and maybe we can eat it," my dog seemed to say.


What I said with my body language, the only language a dog can really read from a human, was, "Let's get the hell out of here before one of us gets bit. I am much bigger than you, but I am stupid and planless. I am not worthy to lead."


What I said with my mouth in a language incomprehensible to my beast was, "Come on. Leave it. Leave it."


That's what dogs are all about. They see what is there, and not what you say. They do what they're born to do from the beginning to the end with no complications. People might not like what a particular dog is doing. We may scoop them up off the city streets and euthanize them. But sane people can't blame a dog for doing doggie things any more than you could blame a bear for doing bear things or a fly for being a pest.


As much as we would like for everything to fit our pattern of thought, the physics of life knows no need for such compliance. Things are rarely as we say they should be, were, or are. We talk about our existence as if it's a film we're directing, where we control the lighting, the camera angles, and the actors.


But it's not like that.


Dogs know it.






Primary day in Alaska was August 29th. The big race is for governor. Sarah Palin won the Republican nomination, soundly defeating everyone, including the incumbent governor.


Tony Knowles won the Democratic nomination. He has been governor of Alaska before.


Lots of other races were decided. I will not list them all here.


On primary day lots of citizens were out on the streets carrying campaign signs. In the capital city, every street corner was populated by one or more supporters of a particular candidate who were waving signs and encouraging cars to honk their horns.


It was a generally peaceful scene, save for Anchorage, where someone shot at the Frank Murkowski supporters.


All of that was interesting and is now in the past as we veer onward toward election day.


Yesterday as I was driving in to work I noticed a group of people standing on a prominent street corner waving signs and banners, encouraging people to honk their horns. These were supporters of Randy Wanamaker, who is running for state assembly.


As the primary is in the past, it is unclear exactly what these people were doing. While there is no reason they could not support their candidate at any time they chose a Tuesday morning to do it. It was a Tuesday that happened to be the primary day in other states.


And so it looked like the Randy Wanamaker team was a couple weeks too late and presumably, a couple dollars short.


Perhaps they'd erroneously entered the Alaska primary date on their PDAs. Perhaps they overslept on primary day and were having a make-up day. Perhaps they felt they should support their candidate on non-election days or perhaps they were drunk.


Whatever the reason, their being there, vigorously supporting their candidate on a Tuesday upon which no voting was occurring in the state of Alaska suggested to the casual passerby that they were less than the sharpest tacks in the box.


This is an example of at least one way in which trying to do something good politically can backfire on you.






Politics can be fun, but it's probably time I took a step back. I've been watching too much MSNBC. Reading too many internet blogs.


It's time I took stock. Why am I so worked up about politics? Why does the mere mention of the name of our president make my stomach churn?


What is my truth?


I would like to go back to being a moderate "fence sitter". I would like to be able to vote for Republican candidates without feeling I'm committing America to further fascism.


I'm tired of politicians of any breed. I'm tired of being told bald-faced lies by any administration. The difference with this administration is I'm being told I'm not American for not believing the lies. Prior administrations at least let me believe casting my vote meant something other than "you're either for us, or against your children's future."


I would not like to see a Democratic sweep of the legislature in November and the executive in 2008. Generally, I don't think they're strong people. I think they are wimps for the fact they can't administer the coup d'grace to an administration that is mired in its own hubris and the blood of nearly 3000 soldiers lives squandered slashing at Republican windmills. While there is less coordination of ideology in the Democratic party than the Republican party (and so the Demos would be less likely to force a national religion down our throats) the tension needs to be maintained. I want to see the branches of our legislature unbalanced. I want them all to debate in public. It shouldn't be that a couple dissenters from the majority party have to drag the whole thing into the light of reason because their consciences won't let them continue to administer and follow the lies.


I think we have lost the war and not one Democratic incumbent or candidate has the guts to stand up and say it. The administration did it by sending our fathers and brother and mothers and sisters into harm's way without the proper equipment, with no plan, and no clear objective. Get our people out of there - or - come up with the means to equip them and a goal they can achieve and a plan to get them there. This has got to be fixed. We have allowed ourselves to be blindsided by idiots.


Legislative gridlock would be better than this mess.


This is what I think about when I try not to think about politics.






It is beautiful in Alaska this morning.


When it is sunny in Juneau, there is no prettier place on earth. The morning sunlight turns the glaciers orange-pink. The bay turns azure and the bald eagles soar against a deep blue sky. The air is crisp. Snow-capped mountains far in the distance pierce the horizon like the remnants of a dream from which you've just awakened.


When it's sunny in Juneau each tree stands straighter, proud to have its own shadow. Fingers of light touch the forest floor and filter through the soft pine needles to animals sleeping below. We are an outpost of humanity in the mountains, surrounded by ice and trees. A place where visitors wonder how all of us came to be here, and why we would ever think to leave.






I have had a fight with my brother. In our lives we have had many disagreements, and several fights. When I was younger, they were fistfights. As adult males, both in our forties, they're wars of words.


My brother is a highly skilled, highly principled person. He tries to practice the rules he sets out for himself and he is merciless on himself when he strays.


He has been very concerned with his family matters, to the exclusion of everything, and everyone else. And his family matters have been numerous and serious. There are health issues to be considered as well.


So when my own family matters became all-encompassing, I could not expect to turn to my brother for help, and I didn't. When he offered his advice and judgment on my situation, I was unaccepting.


The therapist I was seeing recommended that I do not confront my brother about how action he has taken has hurt me and my family. She felt he would not be accepting. In fact, could not accept someone else's plight while he went through his own trials.


I didn't take her advice.


I'm not sure where we stand now. I have friends in this world but I only have one brother who has been my partner in trudging through this messy life. He has been my best friend, though I doubt he would say the same of me. I have never really known how to reach him through the thin veneer of attitude and stricture which kept him from every really expressing any strong feeling toward me that wasn't a criticism.


It's certain, I'm not a saint. Takes two to tango. Etc.


And as much as my brother has held me up against his own barometer of behavior, I have held him to mine. At times, we have both found the other grossly lacking.


But he is my brother.


I don't know what's best in this world, anymore. Times have been hard and I have been taking out my personal frustrations on the politics of the world. Now I understand the pundits and pollsters. When you have a big hole in your life you try to fill it with other things. Politics is easy to adopt as a scapegoat for frustrations.


When you get on the plane they tell you - put on your oxygen mask first before helping others. This is because you will quickly fall unconscious if you don't have oxygen. When you're unconscious, you're unable to help anyone else first.


My brother would argue that it is better to die while helping another put on his mask first than to help yourself during the limited valuable time another has to live. They might be dead by the time you get your mask on and regain the presence of mind to help them. And besides, he'd add, it's a stupid thing to consider having to do.


I say I would follow the airline's instructions.


In reality, neither of us has been in that situation, so neither of us knows what he would do. I only know what we are doing now.


Would it have been better to have not said a word and maintained tranquility till a time when we could discuss it more rationally? Or is it better I don't have those feelings eating at me anymore? Do either of us have the energy to try to understand the other, anymore?


I only ever had one brother. I miss him.


I suspect he doesn't feel the same way.






What separates men from Shetland sheepdogs is we claim to have the ability to step out of our skins and observe ourselves from a distance. We not only think, but we can think about thinking.


We can examine our behavior and correct it where necessary, or applaud it where appropriate.


These days I feel like a three-legged dog who's too busy protecting his imaginary sheep to realize that people aren't threats - that they admire him for how well he gets around with his handicap. And that their admiration hides the glaring truth that there are no sheep to guard, so perhaps there really was never any need to get around so well on only three legs.

posted by iceowl at 11:07 AM 0 Comments

Wednesday, September 13, 2006

A Juneau State of Mind

Sunday seemed like pizza day. And in my Juneau, pizzas are sometimes delivered.


I got out the Juneau phone book and looked up the local pizza parlor. There was no ad listed in the yellow pages. Nor in the white pages.


Realizing that this is, after all, Juneau, Alaska, and business disappear as quickly as they appear, I figured that pizza place was gone.


My landlord, who was also interested in pizza, said, "Which phone book did you use?"


"Which? 'The.' I looked in 'the' phone book."


"There's your mistake," she said. She went to the desk under the telephone, opened a drawer, and pulled out four phone books of different origin, each proclaiming to be the ultimate directory for "Juneau and Vicinity".


She said, "The number is probably in a different phone book."


"Which one?"


She shrugged.


"Is there a phone book to tell you which phone book has your number?"


"Don't be silly." She went back to the useful thing she was doing, while I pursued the number in one of the other books.


But I could not find the number. I suggested the owners had closed up and moved to somewhere civilized. Antarctica, perhaps.


My landlord said, "That's ridiculous. It's still there. I just passed it on the way home from work, Friday. It was open and serving pizza."


Then she pointed out I was looking at the "Vicinity" part of the phone book.


"Those are the listings for Wrangell."


"Wrangell? Where the hell is Wrangell?"


"It's a 150-mile ferry trip south of here."


"A 150-mile boat trip is '& vicinity'? What's wrong with you people? That's a different country."


The pizza place was not listed in that phone book. I tried another, and was sure not to be looking up phone numbers for people and businesses located on moving ice floes. There it was.


"'The Pizza Store'. Good evening. How can I help?" said the cheerful male voice that ended the ringing.


"Hi. I'd like to order a pizza to be delivered to my house," I said.


"Sure. What would you like?"


"Large pepperoni."


"Large pepperoni. Any drinks?"


"Nope. Just the pizza."


"We have a special going. A large pizza, a liter of Coke, and a gallon of buttered popcorn for only $19.99."


"It'll just be the pizza today," I said, wondering if he'd appreciated how he'd mixed the metric and English systems in one sentence without commentary.


"By itself, the pizza is $18.99. For a dollar more, you get popcorn and coke."


Pepperoni pizza is on my cardiologist's list of things that will kill me dead before I have the chance to join the AARP. Manufacturing depleted uranium bathtub toys is safer for me, apparently.


Pizza with popcorn is on his weapons-of-iceowl-destruction list.


"Nah. Thanks. Really. Just the pizza," I said.


"Amazing," said the pizza guy. "You're the first one who didn't take the deal. Ok. What's your name?"


"First one today?"


"No. Like. Ever."


"Wow."


"Name?"


"Joe."


"Pizza will be ready in 15 minutes, Joe."


"Don't you want my address?"


"Address?"


"Um, for the delivery?"


"Delivery? We can't do that."


"But your ad in the phone book says, 'Free Delivery'"


"Which phone book?"


"Juneau and Vicinity."


"Damn. Those are all wrong."


"So you don't do delivery?"


"Nope. But let me give you another number to call."


When I dialed the other number he gave me, I got a machine.


Machine: "Welcome to The Pizza Store. Your phone call is very important to us so don't hang up. Please press '1' for directions to 'The Pizza Store'. To hear the menu, press '2'. For home delivery, press '3'. For take out, press '4'."


Good now we're getting somewhere. I pressed '3'.


"The Pizza Store. How can I help?"


"I'd like to get a pizza delivered."


"No problem," he said. And he took my order, name and address. He did not try to sell me anything else.


Because I am the type of person who after successfully defusing a fuel-air bomb, becomes immediately disappointed he deprived himself of a nice 'boom', I asked him, "Hey, aren't you the same guy I talked to a minute ago?"


"Yeah. Wait. Um. No."


This sort of thing should probably have stopped surprising me months ago, but it makes me worried that sooner or later they'll turn off all the gravity here, and then I'll be floating in the sky with angry halibut and idling sport-utility vehicles.








The Tour de France was going to be run and so I needed the Outdoor Life Network so I could watch the coverage. That required getting cable TV.


There was a cable already run to the house, but my landlord had cancelled the service. When I convinced her to turn it back on in the name of international cycling, the cable TV people offered her phone service as part of the package. She took it.


The day they switched over the phones from the old Alaskan phone company to the cable company, the phones stopped working - in the sense that a phone is a conduit of information. They still emitted sound. But it wasn't human.


It probably would have been better for the line to go completely dead. Then we could complain he had no phones at all. Instead, a call could be interrupted by random warbling, static, and a sound similar to that of a pod of orcas slaughtering baby seals.


It was, after a fashion, phone service. The cable company claimed we had it, and that we should stop complaining.


But we complained and complained. My landlord is a professional science writer. She has to interview people over the phone. When a conversation with an atmospheric chemist was interrupted by the sound of a Sears lawnmower running over a case of Michelob empties, she had taken all she could bear. She responded by stamping her feet and pulling the phone cord out of the wall.


"The phone company isn't actually connected to that wire," I said. But she could only respond with molten hatred. Her phones had been working before I insisted on watching a bunch of short skinny guys pedal up steep hills.


I called the cable company. They sent a guy out named Raoul. Sensing the arrival of a repair man, the phones worked for exactly one hour. When he left, our callers were treated to a tour bus load of senior citizens being electrocuted by neon sign transformers.


My landlord threatened to set my bed on fire.


I called the cable company. Raoul came back. He came while everyone in the house was at work. He left a note on the front door handle. It was on one of those hanging things, like the "do not disturb" signs you find in hotels.


The note said, "Your phone is making a lot of noise. Raoul."


"Confirmation!" I said, waving the note when my landlord got home from work. "See. They acknowledge the problem."


She picked up the phone. Held it to her ear. Winced. From where I was sitting I could hear a tornado destroying a mobile home park. People were dying.


"Make them fix it."


"Raoul says..."


"Fuck Raoul. Fix the fucking phone."


I called the cable company's 24-hour service line on my cell phone.


The call center guy said, "Wow. Raoul was there."


"And he left a note," I added, trying to support his helpful mode.


"He says your phone is unusable."


"Yes. Totally."


"Maybe you need a new phone."


"I don't think so. It was working right up until you guys switched over from the Alaska phone company."


"What kind of phone is it?"


"Uniden."


"Those things have a tendency to just, go. It can be really coincidental."


I'm in the electronics business. I had to admit, sometimes that happens.


The next day I came home from work. The new phone I had bought was missing. My landlord was in the kitchen running the blender. It sounded like she was shredding mahogany saplings with a weed whacker. She turned it off. Her eyes were glassy and red.


"I figured it out," she said. "This is the sound the phone was making. Exactly. Tried a lot of things. The closest I could get was when I rolled a garbage can full of mirrors down the driveway. I almost settled for it. But this is it, exactly."


A thin filament of blue-white smoke rose from the overworked machine.


I nodded toward her handiwork. "It had caller-ID. Built in voice mail. There was a fax attachment. I thought it would be good," I said.


"No," she replied. "It didn't suit me." And she turned the blender back on.


I made the call on my cell. "My house Bedlam because of you. Bellvue. I'm going to wake up in the middle of the night with my toes wired to the 220-line. I can't watch the Tour de France, because every time I turn on the television it reminds her you broke her phone and she can't do her job. You have to do something."


"Has Raoul been back?" said the guy on the cable company help line.


"No sign of him."


"Lemme get Raoul out there."


"Please get someone out here."


When I came home from work there was another hanging note on the door.


"Your phone is broken. Nothing has been done to help this phone. Raoul."


When she came home, my landlord found me sitting on the sofa staring at the blank television screen. I'd planned it that way. The idea was that if it was suddenly impossible for me to enjoy the Tour, somehow her pain would be more endurable.


But she put her hand on the television, realized it was warm, and saw through me in a heartbeat.


"What's that?" she said, pointing. I'd still had the door tag in my hand.


"Raoul. Phone's still broken."


She stormed upstairs, closed the door to her bedroom, turned on NPR on the clock radio, and screamed obscenities at "All Things Considered".


"Wow. Raoul says nothing's been done to fix your phone," said the cable guy.


"Has anything been done to fix this phone? After all of this, have you guys done one thing?"


"Well. Honestly. No."


In the lower 48, he'd at least have had the decency to lie. But this is Alaska, and we're all heavily armed.


"They're not our phone lines," he said, amplifying his position. "They belong to the Alaska phone company. We can't touch them. We put in a service request when you first called, but, gee, I gotta tell you, they're not really responsive to us when we take their customers away."


"Ok," I said. "What do you suggest?"


"Huh?"


"Make a suggestion," I said, now quite angry because upstairs my landlord had gone into my room, tossed my breakables into the laundry basket, and I could hear her trying to get the hallway window open. Thankfully, the window had been painted shut decades ago.


Then she went to the basement and passed me on her way upstairs with a hammer and chisel.


"I could send Raoul out again," said the guy on the phone.


"The next time Raoul comes out here, there'll be nobody alive."


"I can let you talk to my supervisor."


The sound of a chisel breaking through a window casement dislodged an idea. I said, "I don't want to talk to your supervisor. I want you to pass him this message before my cell phone battery runs dead. You tell him we have poor cell service out here. Tell him all we have is the phone that we've been paying you for the past month and can't use. Tell him that I am a heart patient. I'm on lots of heart medication and liable to drop dead at any moment. If we call 911 and can't get through, I can't promise you my heirs won't sue your company. And you know the way rulings go up here. Hell, if I fall out a window or am hit in the head with a wood chisel, I'm going to need medical services. It the ambulance doesn't come because the sound of an earthmover rolling over a bag of puppies is too heart-rending for them to stand, I'll have to sue. Tell him that. Tell him that I'm holding an ungrounded skil saw in one hand and my foot is in two inches of standing bathtub water and I can't call the plumber for help because my phone is broken. Do you get the phone books? You know that lawyer that advertises on every one? As soon as I recharge my cell phone battery, I'm calling him. Bye."


Two hours later, there was a knock on my door.


"I'm here to check the phone," Raoul said. I let him in and he picked up the receiver of the latest phone I'd bought.


"Works," he said, holding it out to me. The receiver hummed with the sound of a pure two-note dial tone. I gave it back to him, and he handed me the pink copy of a multi-part form he'd written on.


Raoul drove away, smiling, without my thanking him.

posted by iceowl at 9:02 AM 0 Comments

Fireweed


There are signs. The fireweed is in bloom. The morning sky is gray and pink. It begins to rain.


Red sky in morning -


It works like this: when the purple blossoms start at the bottom of the fireweed stalk, denizens of the north know summer is still in full swing. When the tips of the fireweed turn deep purple. Everything prepares for change.


The salmon are running. Having spawned they're zombies, literally decaying while they swim. They're no good to eat unless you're a bear. Then you reach into a stream, pull one out, take a couple bites, and toss it aside. The riverbanks smell like garbage dumps. They're thick with decaying fish.


The humpbacks are bubble-net fishing. They swim circles around schools of herring, surrounding the fish in a cylinder of cavitation that traps them as surely as a seine net. Then they take turns rising up through the bubble tube, mouths open, swallowing fish by the hundreds.


The sun rises at five AM now. It sets by nine.


The air smells like ice.







Coming from the city I find it remarkable that you can find people almost anywhere on the planet.


I was born in New York city, and lived almost all my childhood between there and the suburbs of either New York or Chicago. I went to university in cities like Miami, Florida. My jobs have always been close to major metropolitan centers like, San Francisco, California. These are all places full of people. At any time of day you can't move more than a couple hundred yards without running into someone going somewhere.


And they run into you.


When I got my first California house, I discovered a road that went over the first set of peaks in the Mount Hamilton range. Riding over the crest of Mount Misery, I discovered an uninhabited valley just beyond the hills. There, no more than ten miles from the sprawl of San Jose and Silicon Valley, was a land of manzanita and rattlesnakes that stretched as far as I could see. In fact, I knew from maps that the nearest big town to my east was Fresno, some 100 miles away, and with a telescope I could see the snow-covered peaks of the Sierra Nevada range.


That's a lot of space. It's sparsely populated, but lots of people go back there. Yet, there was a strange sense of agoraphobia that came with that space. It was sort of a mini version of looking into the Grand Canyon. I'd take my mountain bike and venture over Mount Misery, into Hall's canyon and up Mount Hamilton behind it. I'd have to push myself to go into it. It was like a controlled descent into a bottomless pit I wasn't sure I could get out of. Irrational fears came into my mind.


What if I was attacked by mountain lions? What if I was trampled by deer? If I fell off the side of a cliff I might not be discovered for days.


Compared to the Joshua Tree National Monument, Hall's Valley is a major metropolis. Lots of people from San Jose go into it to "get away" for a while. Criminals do drug deals back there. Gangs dump bodies. And occasionally, mountain lions do eat someone.


But if you ride a bike back there for a couple hours you'll be passed by automobiles and hikers. Lots of other bikers. It's rare to spend more than an hour there without seeing someone. You're really not alone.


It took me a couple years mountain biking back there before I became entirely comfortable in that relatively desolate space. It took a long time for me to become comfortable not hearing anything except the occasional sound of a passing plane, crickets, and birds. Coming from the city, my security blanket was the ready availability of stuff: electric power, internal combustion engines, internet storefronts, 7-Eleven clerks for whom English was a fourth language.


Then I moved to Alaska. It's easy to be close to the earth here. Lots of times there's nobody around but you and the planet.


I bicycled up a trail this weekend. The hill wasn't nearly as steep as my familiar hill in Los Gatos, but it was muddy and full of obstacles. Roots and rocks. When I got to the top after four miles of what would hardly be called a climb in California, I turned to look from where I had come.


There was nobody there. Only the ocean. The ice. A couple thousand miles of air between me and a tiny place called Okmok, which is still not as far as you can go and still be in Alaska, but so far from anywhere the department of tourism has to highlight the lichen-watching season among the primary reasons for visiting.


I remembered California, then. I remembered Starbucks and sunshine and my house in the suburbs. Traffic jams and radio stations across the dial.


I remembered my children.


It occurred to me that we are so alone in space, and so close in heart.


We walk through one. But we should always live in the other.


I have to live in the other.


You can be anywhere, and never be alone.







In Juneau you can walk through the parking lot of any store and find vacant cars idling. Keys in the ignition. Radio blaring. Nobody home.


This morning I came to work and I mentioned to a native Juneau-ite that I'd seen running cars left in parking lots, their owners obviously off for so quick a jaunt they didn't feel the need to incur the inefficiency to stop and restart the engine.


"In California," I said, "it would be the obligation of any passerby to either hop in and drive away, or at least reach in and turn off the engine."


"Well," said my native co-worker, "In Juneau it's rude to get involved with someone else's business. And if you stole the car, it's not like you could actually drive it anywhere."


He was referring to the fact that you could drive the entire length of every road in the Juneau area and hardly put 80 miles on your car, even accounting for doubling back to get out of dead ends.


When I got home that night I mentioned to my landlord that it was so different from California, this unabashed trusting in humanity to leave a car running while you bolt into the grocery for a gallon of milk.


She said, "Cars do get stolen here. Usually, it's kids, though."


"Kids?"


"Just kids. They usually drive into something or get stuck in the mud. The owner almost always gets his car back."


I got the same response from a friend when I mentioned that nobody locks anything in Juneau. Not their car doors (God forbid, they'd never get back into them to shut them off), not their homes, not their garages or sheds. One suspects there's no need for a vault at the bank.


"Oh, there's no theft," he said. "Only time something will get stolen is when school's out. It's kids."


"Kids. Like stealing your car stereo, or maybe your laptop."


"Yeah. But they always catch them."


In California, most theft is caused by people of the age we'd say branded them as "kids". Only in California, we also call them hoodlums or criminals or miscreants. We lock our homes, install alarms, buy and feed vicious guard dogs to protect our stuff from kids. An MSNBC special I saw yesterday said most murders are committed by people under the age of twenty.


The office manager at the place I consult has had his truck stolen. It was taken on a joyride and dumped in the Gasteaneau Channel. They fished it out with a crane and declared it totalled. He'd had his briefcase inside at the time. Lost his laptop and all of his paperwork.


"It was just kids," he said. There was no anger. No need for retribution. He doesn't know if they ever caught the ones who took his truck. Doesn't care.


For all anyone would care to know, there's no crime in Juneau. No reports of grand-theft auto. No street gang violence. No jail overcrowding. Read the police blotter: cat in tree. Husband arguing with wife, throws bric-a-brac cabinet out the back door. Man cited for public drunkenness on Broad Street. Taken to the tank to dry out. Man shoots at bear within city limits. Given ticket. Couple caught fishing without license. Cited and fined.


Car stolen by juveniles, recovered.







Imagine a place that does not require children to face penalties as if they were ten years older.


And it would be as far away from Florida as you could get.







Last winter, a man came out of a city-sponsored square dance, got drunk and morose, found a can of gasoline in a trailered boat, and set the boat on fire.


Oddly, the flames from the burning gasoline did not greatly harm the boat. But they did ignite the 100-year old church which happened to be standing right next to where the boat was parked.


The church burned to the foundation. The congregation relocated to another nearby church building, that allowed them to share space while they were waiting for their church to be rebuilt.


The sum and total of public outcry amounted to: "He probably shouldn't have got drunk so close to the church."


"How come nobody cares about the church?"


"Why do you say that?"


"Well, why isn't the guy all over the newspaper and television so we can revile him as the slime-eating jellyfish-spined cur he is?"


"Wait. Are we talking about the same thing? I think he got drunk, or something."


See, in Alaska there's a long history of people getting liquored up and burning down irreplacable monuments. And anyway, it was only a 100-year old church.


Or something.







It's peaceful in Juneau. People are kind to each other. People take care of their children.


It rains all the time.


The other day I was talking to someone from Fairbanks. Fairbanks has the worst weather of any inhabited location on the planet. In the summertime, the temps are over 90F with high humidity. In the winter, it's -40. In the springtime, mosquitoes the size of baby thoroughbreds cruise the atmosphere in phalanxes of bloodsuckery so severe they've been known to bring down caribou by desanguination. In fall, temperature inversions trap every particle of smoke and engine exhaust at the level of the nasal passages of a typical human so that breathing becomes unhealthy.


I was speaking to a woman on behalf of my client when she asked, "Where are you located?"


"Well, I'm from California but I'm in Juneau, now."


"Juneau. Ohmygawd."


"Uh oh. Something I should know about Juneau?"


"Well, it's just the weather. I was in Juneau once. I had to get out. The rain drove me crazy."


I said, "Let me get this straight: you live in a place where if you leave your dog out too long it will either die of hypoxia, heat stroke, hypothermia, or blood loss, and you think rain is a problem?"


No. Actually, I didn't say that.


Because I intend to get paid by my employer I said, "Well, heh. Yes, we do get a bit of rain."


I wonder if they have any trouble with their kids up there.







In Alaska, there are busses and trains. Bears walk the streets. Your business meeting will get rescheduled when the salmon are running. There's a gun for every person. Everyone knows how to tie a bowline, a square knot, and the kind that lets you loosen up or snug down at will.


Everyone goes outside on the weekends, no matter what the weather is. When you come to work on Monday, if you don't have a good story to tell about spraining your ankle on a trail, or getting bit by a halibut, or having a bear cross your path, they presume you had a family obligation or a visit to the emergency room.


They don't understand how things are done in the lower-48, even though most of them (us) are from there. They don't want to know.


The politicians are crooked and people vote just to get it out of the way. By the time the polls open up here, the presidential elections are already called.


Nobody cares about first run movies or getting the latest CD.


They worry about your boat. The size of your catch. Whether or not you're okay to go hike another trail next weekend with that sprained ankle.


It's relativistic here. Like we're passing the rest of the continent at 0.9c. So fast each of us sees the other's clocks slowed down.


But one of us is in the real world, with real time.


And everything else is a dream of the heart.


Deep purple fireweed, almost gone. Winter's coming.


While the rest of the country swelters, Alaskan mornings smell like ice.

posted by iceowl at 8:17 AM 0 Comments

My Alaskan Life - II


It's raining. Always.


Lars's got a 21-foot Alumaweld Intruder. A beat up canvas and plastic cover offers some protection from the wind and less from the rain and spray. There's a 130-horse Evinrude that pushes the v-hull along at about 25 knots.


The water is milky blue-green in the channel. Even full of glacier silt visibility is tens of feet. I can see us zipping past unidentifiable submerged things. I'm thinking that things under the water have no concern for the rain, which is utterly remorseless. Wet is the normal state of affairs in Juneau, Alaska. I'm becoming prime habitat for fungi, lichens, and moss. Underwater I'd be a haven for algae, mussels, and kelp.


In Alaska, all of nature is looking for a free ride.


Every time I look back toward the roaring engine I'm reminded at how when I was a kid Evinrudes were the least reliable outboard in the fleet. We were just as likely to have to beg a tow from a passing yacht as to get back to the boat ramp under our own power.


I don't mention my concern to Lars. This is a new age. It's a new America. Manufacturing is different. Thinking is different. Politics are different. Our senator thinks the internet is the same as the post office only the delivery people are smaller and fit inside wire. He puts his shoes on the wrong feet. He tries to explain that he's not from the real world, but nobody believes him.


This should be on a sign at the cruise ship dock: "Welcome to Alaska: You've left the REAL world."


There's a burp in the engine drone. Lars takes a quick glance back.


"Damned thing is prone to flooding."


"While it's running flat out?"


"Or maybe it's blowing a gasket. Better slide forward. It might explode again."


We're passing Admiralty Island, which is known to the natives as Kootznoowoo. Kootznoowoo means "Fortress of the Bears" in the Tlingit language. If we are forced to beach here, we'll be eaten before we can find a spot with cell phone reception.


In Alaska, every man is food for fauna.


Hurray for the food chain.


Lars says, "Ten years ago we'd be dodging icebergs. When the Taku was calving into the narrows you'd have to navigate around blue ice as big as floating warehouses." It goes without saying that the Taku glacier has receded. No more ice in the waterway.


Hurray for climate change.


The engine burps again. Lars curses and fiddles with the throttle. Admiralty Island slides past. If we founder now we'll be crushed by cruise ships full of drunken senior citizens on their Alaskan holiday.


Lars flicks a forefinger against the screen of his high-end GPS/depth sounder. It cost as much as the boat. It tells you where you are when you are sinking.


"Damn thing. Transponder's snapped off again." The depth reads a thousand feet, then two and a half feet, then twenty seven. He says, "I think the fish are here. Somewhere."


The rain intensifies. I'm thankful. It dilutes the salt spray which is freezing my head.


But my feet are warm, so my body is happy. Juneauites shod their feet in vulcanized rubber boots called "Extra Tuffs". So covered in an impenetrable barrier, the wearer can wade gleefully through the Safeway parking lot, flooded basements, or whale-infested tidal basins without fear of dampness between the toes.


Mine have an extra felt liner for added warmth and steel toes. These are important for kicking the life out of landed killer fish. Put an eighty pound halibut in the bottom of a twenty-one foot Intruder and there isn't enough room for the feet of the two guys who hauled it in. Thus confronted with toes and mortality, the fish inevitably decides to attack the toes, which in my case, are stashed safely behind an eighth-inch of Pittsburgh steel.


Hurray for Pennsylvania.


Wearing Extra Tuffs, one looks exactly the way one has always avoided appearing in social circumstances for the entirety of one's life -- somewhere between categories "serial killer" and "village idiot" as specified by the DSM. But we don't care how we look to the uninitiated, sere rabble in the lower 48. Those people don't know moisture. Juneauites know moisture the way interns know bedpans.


The six-inch swells grow to a meter in three minutes. What seemed like a sheltered patch of sea in the lee of Grand Island is now a tempest. It reminds me of a passage in the book I just read about these waters. Every year swells in the channel swallow many unprepared fishing craft without the need for a perfect storm. The blips on the sounder are sonar echoes off the carcasses of 60-foot charter boats that litter the floor of the fjords, thousands of feet below us.


It reminds me of how little I like to fish, and how interested I am in dying for it.


Just as quickly, the water calms again. Lars hasn't taken note.


In terms of occupancy in the mind of man, life-threatening weather is no contest for hooking a big fish. Eighty-pound halibut on forty-pound test. This will take skill. The only thing in Lars's mind is not losing the fish. Naked supermodels could swim past tossing hundred dollar bills and he wouldn't flinch.


It's all about landing the fish. Get the harpoon.


Harpoon? "There's a harpoon in this boat?"


"Under the gunnels. Get a tip out of the tackle box. Overhand it like you mean business."


I am normal. I am from suburbia. I have never thrown a harpoon.


"You know how to do this?" he asks me, as if there was any possibility I had done time on the hunt with an Inuit whaling community.


"Um, no."


"It's easy. Get it through the head," Lars said of a fish as long as a grown man. I'd never been involved in pulling something quite so large out of the ocean that hadn't first fallen there out of a rusting '72 Ford Maverick.


"Through the head. Then what?"


"Then tie the rope around the cleat. Wait. First tie the rope around the cleat."


And so on.


An eighty-pound halibut barely fits in the cooler. You have to cut off the head and tail to get it in. It flops around anyway. The flopping of a big halibut is hardly fishlike. It sounds like your little brother falling out of bed.


"Is it okay in there?" I ask, to which Lars raises an eyebrow.


"It's not okay. It's got no head."


"I mean, can it get out?"


"What's the difference? It's got no head."


I remind Lars I am not concerned for the fish's well-being beyond it making the trip safely to our broilers along with equally dead lemons, dill, and a little parsley. Only, the clips have broken off the cooler. Maybe a six-foot, flopping, bloody ice-covered halibut body can flop itself out. And get guts all over.


Halibut blood is deep red like mammal blood. It congeals in seconds, forming a dark red film. It smells like fish death.


And so on. Five hours later, we've landed two more ten pounders. Those don't require harpooning. Before bringing them into the boat, Lars slices them open with a Bowie knife so they can bleed out into the ocean. Of course, the halibut heart pumps a couple extra times when the fish is aboard, and so we're wading in bloody seawater.


Avast. We are men of the sea.


It's a far cry from catching sunnies in the Rahway river on needle-fine hooks baited with Wonder bread balls. This is cruel fishing. It's fish hunting.


"He's a good size," Lars says of our harpooned prey. He aims us up the side of a swell. Home is on the other side, but Lars's in fish reverie. "But they get to six-hundred pounds." As far as he's concerned, we're about five-hundred twenty pounds shy of an interesting catch.


"How do you land those? Artillery shell tied to a suspension bridge cable?"


"Well. They're easier to maneuver when they're dead. Some guys carry firearms. I prefer the harpoon."


"Guns. For halibut. Lars, they're bottom feeders."


"They have teeth."


And here I am, foolish enough to think I'm safe wearing steel-tipped rubber boots.









The problem with catching fish is someone has to slice up the body into something humans want to eat. The other problem with catching fish is someone has to wash the boat.


The epitome of irony. The boat has to be washed after every use.


You'd think that by now we'd have boats that could stand water. Etc.


But we don't. Three hours of slicing later, we've yielded about seventy pounds of edible halibut. It's going for $12 a pound at Safeway, even here in Alaska. So by my back of the soggy envelop calculation, we've just netted about $840 in fresh fish for about nine hours work.


Some people think this is a good deal.


I get back into my jeep with a plastic garbage bag containing about fifteen pounds of halibut. In the enclosed space I smell enough like dead halibut to disgust myself. But for the first time in nine hours there is no rain on me. My head is happy for that.


My feet are even happier, safe and warm behind steel and rubber and felt.









One day it doesn't rain. Hallelujah. There is sun. Shadows. I can see in three dimensions instead of two. Praise God. Warmth. Dryness. Please, dear Lord, my feet. Dry my feet.


There are people in the ditch at the side of the road.


They're digging.


The first time I saw people in the digging ditch at the side of the road, I figured something flew out of their car as the passed, and they were trying to find it. In fact, one sunny day I saw two people in the highway median about half a mile apart from each other, talking on their cell phones. They were kicking at things. As I drove a little farther up the road I saw a Subaru SUV with the back hatch open. Splicing together unrelated events, I imagined their Subaru hatch opened while they were driving and something flew out. They were searching the median looking for it.


That explanation made sense to me. I forgot about it. Until I saw the another group of people in the ditch at the roadside. They were on their hands and knees, digging. I passed them at fifty and saw them in my rearview mirror, receding while they plowed the earth with their hands.


A few days later I was walking my dog and one of those tiny wiener dogs burst from the ditch at the side of the road yapping like a loose hatch cover on a speeding jet. I was seriously thinking to let my Akita eat the poor thing when it's owner, previously invisible in the roadside ditch, came out after it and collected it into her arms.


She said, "Sorry about that." Her hands, face, and clothes were covered in dirt. She rubbed her sweaty forehead with the back of her hand.


"No problem," I said, because it really wasn't. Then, figuring I could get to the bottom of the ditch thing, "You lose something over there?"


"What?" she said, and suddenly finding something interesting about the lack of cloud cover, began to examine the blue above. "Oh, no. I'm just digging up wildflowers."


I was going to suggest to her that moss was not considered a wildflower in the lower 48, but it was too embarrassing to expose her ruse, and besides, if it turned out she was digging for gold, I didn't want to know about it for fear the mania would hit me as well. I have a lot of hobbies and I didn't need to add casual surface mining to the lot.


When I left she went back into the ditch to dig with her wiener dog.


When I went into the ditch, there was no gold. Just a couple dandelions.









It starts raining again.


Weather here is variations on rain density. Light. Moderate. Sprinkly. Hard. Sideways.


Today is a hard rain. The straight-down soaking kind like your shower, only everywhere.


I'm walking from the office to the parking lot where I leave my car and I see some tourist ladies trying to take a picture of the historic Greek Orthodox church. They are from the boat. They are always from the boat.


As I pass they ask me, "Do you know if it will stop raining?"


Of course I know. "Yes," I say, leaving a pause for emphasis because I am becoming as twisted as the rest of Alaska. People here have no need for verbal discourse. We converse telepathically or through encoded small talk. Such as:


"I hear they're running a sale over at Fred Meyer." Which means,


"The idiots in the stocking department sent over a shipment of picnic table umbrellas and they're selling them to boaters for use as sea anchors. Go get one before they're all gone."


Or, "How long have you been living here?"


Which translates to, "Hey, you can get a cheap fishing license now."


Or, "???"


Which translates to, "The garbage truck passed my house without picking up my trash, and a bear got into it, and the police gave me a ticket and now I have to pay a $50 fine. So I asked the garbage guys, 'Why didn't you pick up my trash?' and they said, 'Because it wasn't your day.' And I said, 'But it's Friday. Friday is always my day.' And they said, 'Yeah, but not every week.'"


You have to be perceptive, but eventually you get it. Occasionally, when you have to communicate with people from other parts of the world they think you're crazy for staring at them with an entire conversation spinning in your head. So you have to say something. Which takes energy. It's a pain in the ass.


"Is it going to stop?" the dripping tourist lady asks me. She has on a floppy yellow hat. Rainwater is pouring off of it onto her bright blue polyester-panted thighs which extend beyond the rain shadow of her hat brim.


I want to say, "Yes. At the dawn of the next ice age." But I don't.


Welcome to the civilized wilderness. It's rough here. Our houses are growing mold and bears gnaw the limbs of the unaware. This is a hostile, rainy place.


I want to deliver her my pity. It's the pity I have for the town economy when I drive past the docks in the morning and see four bright white cruise ships lined up in a row in the rain and fog, wondering how long this can continue. How many more perfectly sane American vacation goers can come to Juneau in the summer before Alaska is officially advertised as a trip for people with a desire to become asthmatic? How many more embarrassed vacationers will return home unable to show pictures taken from off the cruise ship because the batteries in their cameras were shorted out by rain dripping from their noses?


They don't know what they're getting into until they're here and getting soaked in their Disney World t-shirts and Bermuda shorts. It could be bad for everyone.


I said. "I'm afraid it's like this all the time."


"All the time?"


"Yes."


"Why?"


Well, there is truth. There is the perpetual low pressure zone in the Pacific Ocean that pumps moisture down here. The mountains and islands funnel the winds in the perfect direction to bring the incessant moisture. There are deserts, so there must be rainy places. Yin and yang. Up and down. NASDAQ and NYSE. The mighty Manitou's thirst is infinite.


Can she conceive this wisdom?


But my telepathy tells me she is wondering if God is punishing her by raining on her vacation. I know it is really quite the opposite. Alaska is something to see. It is a blessing. It rains a over hundred inches per year here. You can't see that in Iowa. Where else can you see American homes covered in moss? Where else do high-school basketball teams need to travel by boat to away games? Where else will sunscreen of strength SPF one will not only keep you from getting sunburned, but you will become so deprived of vitamin D you'll develop rickets? Where else can you find an airport where human passengers are incidental cargo on a Boeing 737 with a hold filled with fresh seafood?


This is a thing to see, indeed.


"Because it's a rainforest. Did you see the eagles?" I point, and make my exit while they're looking at some dots in the sky.


Probably ravens. Maybe Stellar Jays.

posted by iceowl at 8:11 AM 0 Comments

My Alaskan Life


My office is on the third floor of a small building at the corner of Fifth and Franklin in Juneau. Right next to us is a 12-story condo complex.


My desk is next to the window. When I look to the right, I see the condo windows.


The person with the window closest to mine has covered it with a big magic screen picture. You know the type. It's a multi-colored, dense pattern of wavy lines that seems random until you look at it for a while, and then something jumps out at you in 3D. I didn't really take note of it until I stared at it for a few moments and saw a Kodiak bear sitting on a toilet reading the New York Times.


Or maybe it was a king salmon devouring an elk.


Something like that.


The magic screen moved and way in the corner a shard of a face appeared in the slit between the screen and the window frame. There was an eye.


It was sizing me up.


I smiled and went back to work but every time I turned I saw the eye and imagined its owner delighting in my dismay. Eventually I couldn't work anymore so I just stared back.


Then I realized the eye was part of the magic screen image.


It's not going to work out for the condo owner in the winter. When there is no sunshine the picture will be unviewable for nearly three months. Then there will be no bears or elks or salmon. No eye. Just me staring at him from under the office lights. In the darkness.








There's a big dock a few blocks away from my office window. Large cruise ships park there. Usually, there are three or four. Holland America. Princess. Celebrity.


They park and disgorge a couple thousand passengers. Most of these people hustle into the cruise line-owned shops right by the dock. They buy souveniers and get back on the boat quickly so they don't miss any of the 24 hours of food being dispensed.


Some of the ship tourists get on busses and go to the airport. Helicopters take them on 30-minute trips up to the glaciers, and then back. The tourists take pictures of the ice from the air.


Some of the busses go out to the glaciers themselves. The tourists take pictures of the ice from the ground.


Some of the busses take the tourists to the big whitewater raft trip. The river is meltwater from the Mendenhall glacier. The water is white because it's full of glacial silt, and not due to speed. The tourists don massive life jackets and get into pontoon boats to have a Disney-style, merry float past the Safeway, Don Abel's hardware store, and the U.S. Post Office.


They take pictures of all of that.


The rarest clusters of all tourists are those who decide to walk up the hill from the boat to the stuff up here.


Up the hill is the historic Greek Orthodox church, a couple of parking lots, and my office. They don't know this when they get off the boat, of course. That's the essence of tourism in general, and Alaskan tourism in particular.


Once I was coming out of my office after work. When I opened the door I bumped it into a tourist who was trying to take a picture of the historic Greek Orthodox church across the street. I had disturbed his picture taking, and he was peeved. In a challenging voice he suggested I take a picture of him and his group, as a penalty, I suppose, for his having positioned himself in front of a steel door I could not see through when I opened it.


Because I have no fight left in me, I took the picture. When I gave him his camera back he asked me if I was an Alaskan.


"I live here," I said, because I certainly haven't lived here long enough to consider myself an Alaskan. I make no claim to this place.


His group seemed delighted by my answer. One of the women pulled out a small digital camera and took my picture.


I had to tell them my name and what I did for a living. Because they were tourists, I lied. I told them my name was Ralph Stevenson and that I worked at the Department of Fish and Game.


The man asked me how much a fishing license cost. I told him I didn't know because the prices had just changed. But I was pretty sure he couldn't fish off the cruise ship, anyway.


"Unfair to the fish," I said, and he agreed it was hardly sporting.


Then he asked me if the white water rafting trip was any good.


"Very," I said. Then they thanked me and went on their way.


I went home thinking I'd warm up a frozen chicken pot pie for dinner and in my reverie I nearly stepped on a freshly cooked dungeness crab my neighbor had placed on my front step. As I was eating the crab thinking of pot pie the phone rang. It was a guy I work with.


"Did you say something to some tourists out here?" he asked.


I told him the whole story and he said they'd come back with a copy of my picture looking for my autograph. Apparently, being someone who lived in Alaska was important to them. When they showed Roger my picture, he wondered why they were calling me Ralph.


"You shouldn't do that," he said.


"Why?"


"Because it's a lie."


"You're absolutely right," I replied. "I should stop lying. I'm sorry. It's a California thing. I have to get over it."


"But I didn't want to let them down, so I told them you were out investigating some salmon smugglers."


"Good call," I said.


"Tourism is everybody's business."


"So I'm told."








"You know why they want to take your picture, don't you," said Roger.


"Nope."


"They think you're an adventurer for having survived a winter up here."


"Of course, I've never been here in winter."


"Right. So they're not really getting their money's worth, now, are they?"


"Nope. What should I tell them next time?"


"You might want to consider honesty."


"Ok. I'll tell them I've been to the south pole."


"Much more rugged than California."


"Tourism is everybody's business."


"You'll get the hang of it."






My neighbor is a psychiatrist. He has a small green motorboat named "Crustacean". He uses it to set his crab pots, and to haul in the crabs he catches during the season. One day he asked if I would go out with him to pull in some crabs.


We motored across Auke bay, around Spuhn Island, and over toward the Mendenhall River where he had placed a couple pots in three hundred feet of water.


We found one of his buoys and I hauled it in and started pulling up the rope.


He asked me, "Ever see that show on the Discovery Channel, about the guys who go crabbing in the Bering Sea?"


I told him I had. He said, "Love that show."


When the pot came to the surface I saw it was full of king crab.


"We're on the crab!" I said, emulating the TV show and trying to open the full pot.


"Eahhh...those are kings. It's not king season. Gotta throw them back."


I put on some thick rubber gloves and threw seven spiny juvenile crabs back into the water.


Then we found his other buoy. That pot had some king crabs, but also the dungeness crabs that were in season. We kept those.


On the way back with the crabs we encountered some six inch swells. The small waves made spray that broke over the bow of the motorboat.


"Pretty deadly out here for us Alaskan crab fishermen," he said.


"This is just like the TV show," I said. And then we passed a sixty foot charter boat filled with fishermen. They were all holding bottles of beer and fishing poles.


My psychiatrist neighbor said, "Well, not really."








As we were cruising the F/V Crustacean back to our homes my neighbor pointed to a big house on shore. He said the couple that bought the house were a pilot and flight attendant for Alaska Airlines. The parties they had there were infamous.


One day they had a party and one of the neighbors brought a VHS tape. After everybody was good and drunk he popped it into the VCR and played it on the big screen TV in the great room.


The movie was a secret video the neighbor had taken. It was of his wife having sex with the pilot who was the husband of the flight attendant.


My neighbor said, "Needless to say, it made quite a splash. The couple got divorced. The flight attendant got the house, but had to move, eventually, because of the video. For a while it was all over town. Everybody saw it."


"Did you see it?"


"Oh yeah."


"Do you have a copy?"


He looked at me for a second, and then smiled.


"I'm a professional," he said.








The postman on my street refuses to put my mail in the mailbox. He sends it back to where it came from with the stamp, "Unknown address. Unable to forward."


I went to the post office. I told them I'd lived in places all over the country and that usually, when you get somewhere, letters addressed to you show up. That's the way the post office works, in case they needed a reminder about the charter of the U.S. Post Office.


They did not agree. I spoke to the route supervisor.


"Did you fill out a rural route address card?"


Not only had I not filled one out, I didn't know they existed.


"Shouldn't you have told me that when I got here rather than returning my mail?"


"Sir, how were we supposed to know you had arrived without your telling us?"


"You could have surmised it from the fact my mail was being forwarded to Alaska from California -- to that address."


"But that mail could have been coming from anywhere."


"????"


"And how were we supposed to know where you were? We can't keep track of everybody now, can we?


I filled out the form. My mail still didn't come.


"Did you speak to the letter carrier?" said the route supervisor.


"About what?"


"About delivering your mail."


"Isn't that your job?"


"I'll have him call you."


When I got home I had a message on my answering machine from a guy named Bob who claimed to be my mail carrier.


"I can't deliver your mail because your mailbox is too far from the road," said Bob's voice on my recorder.


"What about the other people at the house? Is their mail longer than mine? How does it get into the box?" I said this to the machine, not to Bob, because I did not know his phone number and he did not leave it in the message.


Eventually, I got a Post Office Box. The mail gets into there, just fine.


Every time someone asks me my address, I have to talk about Bob.


"Don't bother mailing me anything. Bob won't stand for it," I say.


Upon hearing my story the town dog groomer said to me, "Oh. That Bob. He just hates delivering the mail."


"Then why doesn't he cut hair or fix cars, instead?" I asked.


"Because he's the mailman."








Yesterday I was cut off on Egan Drive. A big sunflower-yellow school bus careened from the right lane to the left and then back again. On the side of the bus these words were painted in three-foot tall brown and red letters:


"SALMON BAKE"


When I got home I said to my friend, "What's with the Salmon Bake bus? It almost ran me into the marina."


"Probably late to deliver the cruise ship tourists. The salmon bake is part of their tour. Holland America, I think."


"Don't you think it's demeaning?" I asked.


"What? To take a cruise?"


"To have to be in a bus with the words SALMON BAKE in big huge letters, as if the whole world needed to know where you were going. Do they think it will make me envious? It reminds me of my grandmother. In fact, the whole bus was full of blue-haired people. What makes old people want to be in big emblematic theme busses?"


My friend stared at me as if I had burst into flames. Eventually she said, "Are you done now? Did you get anything for dinner?"


"Have some sympathy, I was almost killed by a bus full of old people about to eat fish."


"Tourism is everybody's business. Get it through your head."


"Roger that."

posted by iceowl at 8:11 AM 0 Comments

A Circle


The sum and total of world politics can be described this way: Change is inevitable. If you are on the top of the mountain, there's not a lot of room and down is where change will bring you. If you are at the base, there's lots of space but if you get tired not being able to see over anyone's head you have to climb.


Having everything to lose breeds fear and concrete walls. It breed bullets and mistrust. It is an unenviable position rife with paranoia and sleeplessness.


Having everything to gain is the root of progress. It provides infinite degrees of freedom. In time and space, yearning drives us forward.


Therefore, the poor are more fortunate than the rich.


There is a bridge. It's pretty and people will pay to cross it.


Interested?








On my twenty-second birthday I filled the white board of my cubicle with the number twenty-two, written in red erasable ink. White boards were a new technology, then. Only a few months prior I had a green chalkboard in my office along with sticks of chalk and erasers. One evening the physical plant guys came and replaced the chalkboard. It was there when I arrived to work in the morning.


I was working for RCA in Somerville, New Jersey. My first full-time job. I'd already been working there for nearly a year and a half, having started the summer of my junior year as a co-op student, and then moving to a part-timer, and then to a full-time permanent employee.


When I think of my youth it is all tangled up in my career. I spent my eighteenth birthday delivering prescriptions to shut-ins for the local pharmacy. On my thirteenth birthday I caddied 36 holes of golf. I watched my 32nd, 35th,and 37th birthdays dissolve into nothingness from the window of a 747 crossing the International Date Line.


In Antarctica, I met people in their early twenties who were spending multiple years climbing twenty-thousand foot mountains or volunteering in Nepalese orphanages or teaching English to children in Tanzania. They seemed to subsist outside of the world that required money for continued existence. They had no permanent addresses. No possessions beyond what they could carry on their backs or store in friends' garages. When their job in Antarctica was over, they were all going to Fiji.


In my world, going to Fiji required a massive outlay of capital. Plane tickets and hotels rooms would need to be booked. Island transport would need arranging. Meals bought.


None of this was a concern for the young Antarcticans. Missing a meal and sleeping on the beach was expected. When money was needed, it would arrive. Somehow. Someway.


This is the way the world works, apparently.


It was lost on me. I was making a decent salary. Buying a house. Buying a car so I could drive to work to pay for the house. Having babies to fill the house I bought with the money from the job I needed the car to drive to.


I had life insurance so my dependents would be cared for if I died. Auto insurance for when the car I needed was wrecked. Phone bills from calling my mother to tell her my life was fine. The power was on because I paid the electric bill. We took hot showers because the gas company had been sent their monthly vig. The bank would let us live in the house of which we owned less than ten percent.


I joked I only owned half of the garage. But there was a garage. And if I'd had an Antarctican friend in those days, I might have stored his stuff for him while he worked on the Beardmore glacier in the perpetual polar daytime. I would give it back to him when he got back from Tahiti, via Brunei, via Bombay, via Haifa, via Athens, via Rome, via Paris, via London, via St. John's Island with lots of hitchhiking and train travel in between.


He would have no children. No car. No house. He'd have a couple thousand bucks in an account in a bank in a state where the plane landed when he got back from the ice and which he had never been to again. He would have no spouse, but a girlfriend who had been traveling with him since New Zealand, but who was going to take off for Canada when they got to New Hampshire. He'd be heading west to Iowa to see his grandmother, whom he'd heard was sick some months ago. When he took his stuff out of my garage, it would only be to sell it, give it away, or move it to another garage while he planned his next season afoot.


There are many ways to live a life.


When I was young, I didn't know it.








"I hate Christmas," said my Antarctic friend.


To me, Christmas had always been the high holy day of the year. The one day all misery could come to a halt. Nothing hurt on Christmas. You could eat candy all day, not brush your teeth, and have no worries about cavities.


"I love Christmas," I replied.


"That's because you have a family."


Which was probably true. When I was a kid, the excitement of unearned booty appearing magically in the living room was too much to bear. Every kid is certain he does not deserve his Christmas gifts. The "naughty-or-nice" platitude was mythological. No kid is always naughty or nice. And every kid becomes an angel an hour before bedtime on Christmas eve.


First we are the children, and then we are the gift givers. Either way, there would be Christmas goodness that was larger than any of our abilities to extinguish with Scrooge-like grumpiness.


"What are you doing for Christmas?" I asked him, figuring I'd invite him to spend Christmas with me.


"Flying to Sydney. Going to hitchhike out to Alice Springs. I have a friend who lives in a town in the bush about 200 miles from there."


"Woah. Cool. How'd you drum up the money for a plane ticket to Australia? Last time I talked to you, you needed a hundred bucks to ransom the camping gear you left in the storage locker all winter."


"It showed."


"Just like that?"


"Dude. My mom gave me her old flat-screen television because she won a new one in some sort of bread contest. I mean, what am I going to do with that? So I sold it."


"A bread contest?"


"She bakes bread at the state fair."


"State fair."


"Wisconsin."


"Your mom lives in Wisconsin. I though she lived on Gayle Lane."


"Moved to Wisconsin two years ago."


"You stole your mom's TV, didn't you?"


"Man. Google it."


He left. I haven't seen him since.








A couple months later, when I next thought about it, I did an Internet search on his mother's name. She had indeed won a contest for her seven-grain gluten-free bread at the "Great Midwest Fair". She took second place. The prize was a 35" flat-screen Philips television, MSRP $2600.


The fair was in Illinois, not Wisconsin.


Technically, I hadn't been told the truth.








There's a saying that I remember as attributed to Massachusetts politician Paul Tsongas. He said this when he gave up his bid for the presidency after being beat by Bill Clinton and diagnosed with cancer.


Paul said: "No man ever looked up from his death bed and said,'I wish I had spent more time at the office.'"


He later went into remission and returned to public life. However, soon after his cancer returned and he died of pneumonia and liver failure.


While Paul's quote rings absolutely true to me, I always think of it as pertaining to other people. I suspect on my death bed I will wish I had spent more time at the office, because reaping the rewards of hard work might have kept me healthy enough to stay off my death bed until I was good and old and infirm. Or when I was good and old and infirm, I'd look up from my death bed and say, "Thank god I have this good medical plan due to my hard work at my job."


It's difficult for me to believe that on his death bed Paul Tsongas regretted the time he put into his career.








On my thirty-third birthday I got a nice card from my agent, Virginia Kidd. She'd just sold one of my stories. It was going to appear in the British edition of an anthology called, "Bleak Houses".


I called her to thank her. In her usual manner, she told me she preferred e-mail to phone calls. We also had one of the early versions of "AIM" through Compuserve available to us.


Writers should write, not speak, was what she was saying. And when the coven of her writers got together on line it was as if we had created another world for ourselves. I called it a Treehouse one day, and it stuck. The Treehouse was like AIM on fiscal steroids. One month, after spending a lot of time going through edits with V. on one of my stories, I racked up about $800 in Compuserve bills on my AMEX.


Didn't stop me, though. Looking back now I realize I spent more on Compuserve and postage than I ever made back selling stories.


It seemed to be about the selling back then. All of it.


Virginia particularly enjoyed receiving UPS packages as the UPS guy arrived in his characteristic brown shorts, which she felt made his ass look cute. So I sent her my manuscripts via UPS ground for which she thanked me regularly.


For her birthday I ordered her some flowers. Sent a card congratulating her on selling the unsellable me. She replied via Compuserve mail that the girl from the flower shop was even better eye candy than the UPS guy. Thanks.


She was, after all, a former member of the Futurians and so likely to sleep with anyone who would entertain the thought.


Though she divorced James Blish because in her own words, "He masturbated too much when he should have been doing me."


That was my 87-year old agent.


A couple months later I asked her how I could get a copy of "Bleak Houses". She told me the edition has been canceled. The editor had given up on the project.


I don't remember what my reply was. Most likely I put up a good front. Something on the order of, "Well, back to the drawing board," or, "That wasn't my favorite story anyway," or maybe I just switched the subject to what I was writing next.


Virginia put up a stoic facade on all things relating to business. She did not coddle me nor did she discourage me.


She'd say things like, "You will get sold. I'm never wrong." I was sold. She was not wrong.


In those days I thought my life depended on sold stories. I was already as old as Jesus ever got and I'd done nothing earth-shattering.


Meanwhile, Virginia lost Diana Gabaldon as a client and she'd just taken her first book to the NYT bestseller's list with Perry Knowlton. Virginia needed a winner to replace her. She'd picked four of us out of the dust over at the Compuserve writer's group just as she had Diana. Now Diana was gone we were all she had left.


Then Mike got Joan pregnant, and her husband wasn't happy. So Mike had to leave town because Joan's husband was hunting him with guns. I never thought Mike's stories were all that great, and he probably thought the same of me. Whether Joan could write or not was immaterial now that she was forbidden to browse the Internet again by courts, who sided with her husband and kids. She was out of the Treehouse, forever, and I've never heard from her again (nor do I remember her last name).


Mike was not shot or killed, but had to leave his home in Canada because his wife kicked him out when she found out he'd been cohabitating with and knocking up another married woman and absconding with her and her infant child to various roadside motels along the New York Thruway.


Mike wound up living with Virginia at her house in the State Park in Milford, figuring nobody would find him there and that there'd be a good supply of writer-wannabe women coming through he could tap for various purposes. He managed to get Brenda to leave her husband and children behind in Branson and move to Pennsylvania for a while for the purpose of collaboration on a novel Virginia was sure to sell. They worked on it in pieces. As far as I know it was never finished.


Virginia never sold any of Brenda's stuff. Nor did she sell any of Joan's. She sold a handful of Mike's short, randomly humorous stories, as she sold a handful of my bleaker ones. I always suspected Mike of attempting to poison the relationship between me and Virginia. He was always too suspicious of me for my own comfort, and I'd by then learned that people who harbor great suspicions are themselves doing things worthy of suspicion.


He did help me with my first website. I think that once Virginia was gone and he was on his own he realized how rough the real world was, and how little progress we were capable of making on our own without a mentor.


When I moved away to North Carolina I wrote a short story I sent to Virginia and got no reply. Around then I got a note from Brenda saying that Virginia had retired to her second home, which was code for "assisted living." Virginia's right-hand man, Jim, had died of AIDS. Mike had hit the road with a young writer that Virginia had recruited into our Treehouse when I stopped my regular attendance. And anyway, they had turned Virginia's house into the Treehouse. It was no longer electronic.


Concurrent with the growth of my potential as a writer, my career began to take off in the electronics business. Money came in. I didn't have time to write.


Everything became finite. Meaning ceased to be subtle. I grew weary of the sexual politics going on in Milford and the bad luck I was having even getting Virginia to show anyone my stories, much less pursue an editor for publication. I never made a conscious decision to stop writing. When Betsy Mitchell turned down Tarantula Season after stringing me along for 18 months, I looked back on the thousands of hours I poured into the book and weighed it against the return I was getting from silicon valley. Writing became an irresponsible waste of time relative to my promotions and bonuses.


For about seven years all the magic in my life was measured in dollars for which I sacrificed all my time. I could buy anything I could think to want. I had more money than I ever thought I would make doing anything short of becoming a rock star (much more than Diana Gabaldon with her now 5 bestsellers).


All I thought about was how not to lose it. I thought about it night and day.


Then one day it disappeared. And I was free again.








When I moved to Alaska my wife gave me a card that said, "I believe in you."


It made me realize how easily I had accepted my bad luck not as chance occurrence, but as an unchangeable characteristic of my being. I had decided that the way to avoid bad luck was to subordinate my aspirations to a theory of pragmatism that dictated it was better not to try than to lose.


I was packing when I found a picture at the bottom of one of my many drawers full of electronic junk. In it were Virginia, Mike, and Brenda. I chucked the Polaroid into the waste bin. I was in the process of eschewing the accumulation of my years of excess.


God knows why I fished out the picture. Why I look at it from time to time, the image of these people I knew mostly through a Compuserve chat room.


I also packed 450 double-spaced pages of my novel, Tarantula Season, replete with corrections by Virginia and other editors along the way.


I was thinking to have it bronzed and mounted on a plaque to remind me we don't escape our creations.








No man ever looked up from his death bed and said, "I shouldn't have written my life's story."








Eight months after my forty-third birthday I stepped off a C130 and onto the frozen surface of McMurdo Sound. For years I'd forgotten my dream had been to come to Antarctica. I'd even forgot that my first professional publication was a short story about Antarctica, one I sold before Virginia took me on as a client.


I'd forgotten about Mike and Joan and Brenda and Virginia. Were it not for seeing Diana's book in the airport bookstore, I'd have forgotten all about her as well (and news anchor Brian Williams, with whom I graduated high school).


I set foot on the ice in Antarctica and became a story I had to start writing.


One by one, stories came to me, as if they'd been locked in a garage for the summer along with the skis and snowmobile.


In Antarctica, I found the Antarcticans. The lost thirteenth tribe who migrated to the bottom of the earth in search of an unpromised land. Antarcticans who seemed to live in a dimension that inhabited the same space as "normal" earth, but was somehow not the same earth.


These people with no cellphones had sex and never discussed it. Went days without eating or drinking, and then drank whatever came their way in anticipation of the next dry season. They'd been everywhere on the planet. They were attached to nothing.


The idea of their life horrified me. Didn't their parents care about them? Didn't they love anyone?


"Am I supposed to live more than this life?" one said to me at an Antarctic bar, after explaining how she'd wound up in a hospital in Laos having come down with a rare parasite whose name had no English translation, the treatment for which was massive doses of laxatives.


"But who did you call when you were sick?"


"I managed to get a call out to my father, but he wasn't going to come out to the jungle. I mean, we were in the Golden Triangle. They'd probably kidnap him."


"How do you do these things. All by yourself? I can't stand being alone."


Her eyes glazed over. She went back to her bar drink. "I don't want to be, it's not like I have to be...I don't choose to be alone. I'd like. I mean. It just turns out that way."


You don't have to ask someone like that how it is they never run out of money.








One winter's day after my fifty-fifth birthday I will watch the sun bleed pink and green on a razor thin horizon. The snow on the mountains reflecting the sunset will appear in pastels closer to mauve and puce than primitive primary colors. Raptors will pierce the skies on their endless eagle-eyed hunts and whales will breech making distant booms like echoes of yesterday's thunder.


Behind me, golden light will flow from windows of my house while my wife and children set a bountiful holiday table. Every pine tree will be adorned in pinpoints of starlight and the ground will be strewn with brightly wrapped boxes. It will be difficult to hear the wind for the singing angels and the cry of my newborn grandchildren.


Everything will have changed yet again. Circles will complete. Trials will end and adventures will commence. Unexpected gifts will fall from the heavens and appear in the outstretched hands of laughing children who believe in such things, and their grandparents who having once surrendered to the drudgery of pragmatism, ascend back into the fantasy that can be truth.


I will stand beside my fathers. And my wife and children will say they always believed in me. Finally, I will too.


In that massive pause between birth and the final breath, both heart and mind will agree this life has been a magnificent experience. Though at times I had forgotten, I always had everything. And that even for all the pain and failure that seemed to dwarf those kernels of true joy, it has all been for


something.

posted by iceowl at 8:03 AM 0 Comments