Neighborhood Watch

Earlier this month, after the season finally turned and the leaf buds were starting to bulge, my neighbor Mark waved to me as I drove down the street. His gestures got more emphatic as I got closer, so I stopped. Right there in the middle of the road.

“Hey,” he said. “Look over there. Can you see it?”

I got out of the car. I could do that because ours is not a busy street. We live downtown in one of the residential pockets tucked between Lathrop and Cowles, Airport Way and the Chena River. I asked what he was pointing at.

“A raven’s nest in that tree,” he said. “They’re back. I watched a couple of babies learn how to fly last year.”

We talked a bit about birds. About the habits of ravens, which I thought were known for roosting by the hundreds in a black spruce stand outside of town. We joked about whether they were starting their own colony, right here in our neighborhood.

This is what I always wanted. To live in a place where people stop and chat. I dreamed of gardening tips over the fence, but also warnings about current events, whether it was a rash of broken car windows or an injured moose holing up in a nearby field.

That actually happened. Over the winter, a moose was hit by a car and curled up in a yard on our street. Somebody called Mark’s wife Mikki, who happens to be a block captain for the town’s burgeoning Neighborhood Watch program. She knew the landlord and was able to warn the tenant, so he wouldn’t walk outside unprepared, right into the path of an angry moose. Then she tracked down some relief for the moose.

I grew up in a Neighborhood Watch zone. Those scary signs were kind of confusing, with a hooded burglar straight out of Mad Magazine feature. Spy vs. Spy. Like something from the novel 1984, where people were encouraged to turn in their neighbors for thought crimes. But our streets were safe. Kids played in huge roving packs and traffic slowed down in the development.

For years, Mikki asked around about starting up a Neighborhood Watch, but it was out of fashion. “We don’t do that anymore,” she was told. Then several agencies in Fairbanks teamed up to get a federal Weed and Seed grant to pay for coordination.

The goal is to weed out the bad elements and start seeding something good, like crime prevention and revitalization. In our neighborhood that means keeping an eye out for suspicious behavior. Getting to know our neighbors. Cleaning up vacant lots and lending a helping hand. Like the folks on Sixth Street who took turns watching over a local home when a resident died recently and his daughter couldn’t get back to Fairbanks right away.

This is what neighbors do. It’s what the police can’t and maybe wouldn’t even want to do, as busy as they are cruising high traffic areas and responding to more serious crimes. Mikki worries that people will be focused on the spying. That they’ll think this is a troop of vigilantes. She said it’s mostly about communication.

“There’s stuff going on that we don’t even know about,” she said. “If this expands and people like us start talking, we can be more aware. It’s about taking control of our own safety, not expecting government to solve all your problems for you.”

Not everybody can live in our neighborhood, practically unchanged in the 23 years Mikki and Mark have been here. I noticed their house right away, with its manicured lawn and wooden cutout of a woman bending over in the garden. I don’t know how many times I’ve been fooled, waving when I walk by. Because they made us feel welcome. They're good neighbors, something no sign or government program can replace.

The Fairbanks Volunteers-in-Policing program is hosting a series of organizational meetings in the next few weeks. So far people haven’t been flocking to these. Mikki thinks the best way to reach residents is by getting outside and talking to them on their own porches and driveways.

A few years ago, our car window was smashed. Glass strewn everywhere. A police officer at our door in the middle of the night. I felt so alone. I didn't know who to tell, how to warn my neighbors. Now I do.

Published in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner May 18, 2008

Extreme Falafel

The reward for suffering through break-up and late season snowstorms. For living in a place of temperature extremes and light (or lack of) extremes and allergy extremes and philosophical difference extremes.

We would stand in line for hours to get a taste of the hummus and falafel at the Pita Place, but luckily we timed our season premiere just right. Jill had us there a minute before the opening bell, so the wait wasn't too long.

Is it wrong to love a food source so much, to salivate at the sight of a sign announcing the return of the summer hours at the Tanana Valley Farmers Market, to pepper the owners with questions about their plans, to wake up at night in a cold sweat because you dreamed they decided to pursue another career?

One thing I do know, if loving the Pita Place is wrong, I don't want to be right.

Under the Bus

Throwing Us, Memes Are


At the sentencing hearing for a former Fairbanks mayor and his wife, convicted of stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal funds, Chris Hayes took all the blame, calling her husband ignorant of the financial doings at LOVE Social Services, the non-profit they both created and oversaw.

On the stand Jim Hayes apologized - for his wife's actions. The Fairbanks judge, who sentenced them to three and five-and-a-half years respectively, wasn't buying the argument. Afterward one of the jurors praised the judge for not giving validity to Jim Hayes' lies about his wife acting alone.

"I think he threw her under the bus," she said.

Suddenly that term is everywhere. Republican operatives whispering that Barack Obama threw his grandmother under one after his poignant speech about race. And then they said he threw his former pastor in right after her. Hillary Clinton supposedly threw her chief strategist there. And that's where John McCain threw a former-supporter when he apologized for the man's comments about "Barack Hussein Obama."

Former Arkansas attorney general Bud Cummins used it to assess the fate of nine colleagues who were mysteriously dismissed in the Bush Administration's great prosecution purge of 2006. Rocker Melissa Etheridge said that's where gays and lesbians were thrown after the 1992 presidential election. It's in my own mind, too. I used the phrase on a walk with a friend the other day and then wondered, flabbergasted, where it came from.

Newsweek's Tony Dokoupil has an in-depth examination of how we're all throwing each other under the bus from the "tar pits of the blogosphere to the peaks of the mainstream media." (Nice metaphor, oh, dweller of the highest of highest heights.) He says it suggests a degree of intimacy lacking in other words like "scapegoat" and "fall guy."

"Another reason for the star turn of the phrase could be the lazy nature of the human mind."

In conversation people usually grab the first phrase that comes to them, often what someone else has just said. Fresh Air commentator and former chairman of the American Heritage Dictionary's usage panel Geoffrey Nunberg points to the film The Big Lebowski, where characters repeat the same lines scene to scene. The principle is simple. Parrots do the same thing.

Which reminds me of the summer of my thirteenth year. A whole gaggle of cousins were camping with my Aunt Mae and Uncle Ron. We swam and fished and bought ice cream cones at the country store down the road. And we said, "Oh. My. God." Constantly. About everything. In between the giggles and the snorts.

Our sweet, pious Aunt Mae asked us to stop. Begged us to stop. Threatened and cajoled and seethed at us to stop. We tried, saying, "Oh my God, I said, 'Oh, my God.' Oh, my God!" when we messed up. But we just couldn't do it.

This must be what Malcom Gladwell describes in his 2000 book The Tipping Point, an examination of the mysterious sociological process that happens when ideas and products and messages spread like a virus. He points to Hush Puppies (the shoes or the fritters?) and the decrease in New York City crime in the 1990s.

A similar phenomenon has been recognized for almost 40 years as a meme, "a unit of cultural transmission." Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene, says some examples of memes are tunes and catch phrases. "Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leading from body to body via sperm or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation."

He says memes should be regarded as living structures. By planting a fertile meme in my mind, you literally parasitize my brain, "turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell." How wonderfully seminal.

Memes are poetry in the blogging age because we've yanked the anonomymous parasitizing out of the equation. There's no planting of fertile material. Instead we stick a turkey baster in there and squirt it ourselves. It's like seeing somebody with a cold and then forcing yourself to sneeze and calling it "Tickle-Nose Tuesday."

There are whole websites devoted to memes. I've played around with a few myself, laughing ironic chuckles to watch submemes and zetamemes morph out of the mama and dada memes. As if I'm in control here. Sometimes people think they're making them up, but I wonder whether there are any original memes left.

Welcome to the collective.

Who's the Last American Man?

I came to Alaska to make money. Slinging salmon along with the rest of the fish hippies at the Nautilus plant in Valdez, Not-alot-of-fish to the locals, I fell in love with the place. The vast landscape and the people brave enough to go into it. I decided to stay.

A bunch of us traveled to Homer, where I met my would-be guru. He was oldish and shortish and sharpish and bossy. His greying beard jiggled when he talked. He had an accent as thick as the stew in his everlasting dinner pot, the one he kept on the stove, dumping leftovers into it as a form of sustainable eating.

His name was Yule Kilcher.

He's well-known around these parts. For grandfathering the singer Jewel. For helping draft a state Constitution with an international reputation. And for wanting to change the course of modern society.

When we moved into his former barn, the six of us with our salvation army clothes and laid back ways, he thought we were the disciples he'd been waiting his whole life for, just as he'd thought many times before. He was determined to teach us how to live off the land, the way he'd been doing for decades, ever since walking across the Harding Icefield to this utopian spit at the edge of Kachemak Bay.

We dug potatoes and baled hay. We hauled coal off the beach and split wood. We stoked the sauna and played chess. And then one day we stopped. We were tired of his authoritarian ways. Bored with his lectures.

I think every generation must have a few of these guys. In The Last American Man, Elizabeth Gilbert introduces us to hers. Eustace Conway once hiked the entire Appalachian trail, feeding himself only with food found along the way. He lives in a teepee and wears buckskin. There's no doubt he's interesting.

Tough, too. Once he cut his hand with a chainsaw while he was finishing a cabin floor. Instead of stopping to bandage his hand, he worked through the gushing blood until it coated his arms, the tools, the logs, even the hands of his co-workers. Later he talked about stitching his own sliced thumb.

One spring day when we were baking ourselves in front of the Barn's window, the door slammed open and Yule staggered inside, the hand clamped to his eye holding back a tide of blood. He'd cut himself with an ax, chopping wood. Something we "kids" should have been doing ourselves. On his orders, we ran to fetch his son, who stitched his dad's head right there at the kitchen table while Beth and I assisted, fetching clean rags and warm water.

I'll never forget Yule. I'll always admire him, too. The way Gilbert obviously does Eustace Conway. The problem I have with men like them, the evangelists of any religion, is they always want to change us. To prove that their way is the only right way.

They are anything but perfect, often plagued by an inability to maintain a healthy relationship with family or friends, anyone who might want to maintain equal footing. Conway drives away loved ones with his uncompromising standards, his overwhelming personality, just like his emotionally abusive father did to him.

Listening to the author talk about her book is very different than reading it. She says she's exploring our tendency to romanticize the wilderness. I don't think she pulls it off. Instead she wants us to believe in Conway, to accept him as a symbol of our lost manhood. She calls him uniquely American, with a mission to transform this nation singlehandedly, to bring people back to nature, awaken us from our modern sleepwalk. She wants to help the lost men of our generation find someone to emulate.

Gilbert seems to think that our society is made up of New York City urbanites who wouldn't know what to do if our sandals ripped on a hike through the woods. Who would starve and freeze to death before gathering berries or snaring a grouse. Digging a snow cave. Does she really believe Conway is the only one left who can grow and hunt his own food, make his own clothes and tools? The last survivor?

This is not to say that I'm a wilderness expert. I've been there, with people who know much more than me. I've enjoyed it, but was always ready to come back to town. To leave them to their life's work. If we all spread out on a thousand acres like Conway, we'd be elbow to elbow. Maybe we should appreciate our cities for the economical use of space they are.

Gilbert wants to equate Conway with other mythical members of our frontier society. Henry Thoreau, Daniel Boone and "Davy Fucking Crockett." They were modern businessmen, selling themselves and their philosophy to a young nation. Tough guys. Good providers. The kind of man Gilbert herself seems to be looking for.

Does she remember what Thoreau finally said in Walden? "I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one."

Thar's Green in Them Thar Trees

(Not Nearly) Wordless Wednesday

We had a massive leaf burst overnight. They were popping out of the trees so fast, you could almost hear them. Of course, where there are big juicy buds, there's pollen.

There are a million grains of pollen in one of these birch catkins.

Owen and Mike woke up wheezing with crusted-over eyes. Allergy season is here and love is in the air, birch tree style. Luckily, local scientists are all over this story. They say allergy-inducing sperm live in the center of each pollen grain, but you can't fight these invaders. They're tiny. Too little to spot with your human eye. Unless you can see something one-eighth as small as the period at the end of this sentence.

Birch pollen contain irritating proteins. When they come in contact with moisture, like the mucous membranes in your nose or the lining of your eyelids, these protein molecules leach into your tissues. If you're allergic, your immune system will produce antibodies, triggering the release of histamines. This inflammatory response helps neutralize bacteria when you cut your skin with a knife or causes a runny nose and itchy eyes when you have allergies.

Since birch trees start releasing pollen at least two days before the leaves spring from their buds, the air around here is already saturated. Hold on to your sinuses, because the concentration of birch pollen is greatest about three days after the leaves come out. But it should all be gone by the end of the month.

Whew! Allergies wiped this little guy out.

Shaping Our Own Lives

The comic artist Seth named himself. He was born Gregory Gallant, a cartoon character's name if ever there was one, but after leaving his troubled teens behind, decided he wanted a new identity. A brand.

In Seth's semi-autobiographical comic novel It's a Good Life If You Don't Weaken, the main character goes home, exploring his old neighborhood while carrying on an inner dialogue about the comfortable nature of industrial areas and the 50s feel of his Canadian roots.

Dressed in a top hat and tie, long overcoat and rimless glasses, Seth looks like Dick Tracy. Or Clark Kent, but when a coupla kids call him Superman, he thinks to himself, "I hate people." Wonders why he never has anything clever to say, a good comeback, the way the people in the funnies do.

"My attitude towards life has mostly been shaped by 'Peanuts.' Well, as much as your life can be influenced by a comic strip."

Or a movie. Or a song.

Certain songs made sense to me as a young girl, the way an essay can be both intimate and universal. I mouthed along to the words as I drove in my car, flicking Descendents cassettes onto the back seat over my shoulder when the short, sharp songs were done.

These Southern California punk rockers were already adults when I went off to college with their lead singer Milo on the cover of the album. Bobbing my head along with their poppy rhythms - derisive lyrics about suburban homes - I knew those cookie-cutter boxes were not for me. I would not be stereotyped. I would not live in anything classified as a ranch style or a split level. No Modenas or Messinas either.

This was a chicken-and-egg moment. Was I hearing something in that song that shaped me, or was I already shaped and appreciating my reflection in the mirror of the lyrics? When it came time for me to buy my own home, I wouldn't let my husband look in the planned communities scattered around Fairbanks like fancy cheeses on a deli platter. Too suburban, I'd sneer, as if only an urban landscape could flourish outside my front door.

The funny thing is Seth, the cartoonist and author who once distanced himself from his own youth, has begun to see continuity in the arc of his life from a middle-aged vantage. "In the last couple of years, I've been looking back at my childhood and teen years and sort of reconnecting. I felt a real alienation from my teen years for a long time."

I wonder what kind of houses the Descendents live in today?

When Movie Soundtracks Rule

I hate taking those quizzes that ask you to categorize your life, like a book filed under the Dewey decimal system. What's your favorite kind of car? Your favorite fruit? Your favorite color? The choices seem endless, and I want to reserve my right to change my mind.

That's why I had to laugh when I read about my columnist friend's predilection for a certain Kenny Loggins-soaked soundtrack. Sure, I spent some time raving about a movie score myself, the new wave sounds of Pretty in Pink will always mark my coming of age, the way Kevin Bacon punching his card and getting all Footloose does for others. But it's not my favorite.

After the column came out, another writer friend sent us an e-mail, dissing both of our "choices." She claimed the best soundtrack title for another 80's-flavored flick. Grosse Point Blank. When I first watched that movie about people my own age - but looking oh, so much better than me in their own skins and on that big screen - my nostalgic heart started to sound like eyelashes scrunched up against the car window. All fluttery and feathery.

Because when I say people I mean John Cusack and Minnie Driver and I loved them before loving them was cool.

I always knew that someday a-ha would get their due. That Nena's Luftballoons would do more than float in the summer sky. That the Clash would be recognized as the second coming. And that ska would be seen as the thread that tied it all together. Punk. New Wave. Hardcore.

But this was kind of cheating. The movie came out in 1997, just in time for our tenth reunion. (Remember, I'm a member of the class of '87. And we are all going straight to heaven.) By allowing a whole decade to go by, time to let the songs distill and age, this collection was setting a scene, not doing the scene setting itself.

For that honor, we have to board the way, way back machine. All the way back to 1986, to a movie about finding joy in doing nothing. To one hip slacker with a taste in girls, clothes and friends that transpired trends and set some itself. Because, yes internets, I do have a favorite movie soundtrack. Maybe it only exists in my mind because it never actually existed. John Hughes did not see any commercial potential in this one, calling the collection of songs too eclectic to sell as an album.

From Sigue Sigue Sputnik to Wayne Newton. The Star Wars score to the Smiths. From the I Dream of Jeanie theme to the Dream Academy, the soundtrack to Ferris Bueller's Day Off was eclectic before eclectic was cool, spurring random buttons on CD players and genre-jumping playlists on iPods.

And now it rules the soundtrack scene.