My Fairbanks Life

Uh-Oh

2010-06-16T22:18:00.000-07:00

I feel a rant coming on.

Do we (the state) regulate marriage to steer "procreative sexual relationships" in one direction?

Do we legally endorse marriage to fuel a gigantuan wedding and wedding-accessories industry?

Side Note: I cannot believe this fantastic online publication which tells another side of Alaska's stories is wasting time on a weekly feature about wedding planning. A story, sure! A five- or ten- or even 20-part series over the next 13 months, why not! But four stories a month for more than a year about the joys and sorrows, the pain and the pleasures, the guilt and the romance, the expense and the creative urges, the families and the friends and the magazines and the e-mails. The harrowing, excellent agony of one (awesome) writer's adventures in getting marriedland? COME ON!

Or do we regulate marriage to protect assets?

Here's a hint. Marriage does not = a stable family environment in which children can be raised by their biological parents. Biological parents do not have to be legally wed to raise their children. Neither do married people legally have to be stable.

In fact, marriage has nothing to do with children. It is a financial institution, designed to protect a couple from undue financial harm and individuals from the loss of their assets in the event of a dissolved marriage. It gives people tax status, hospital visitation rights and an attachment that can also make them vulnerable.

I know. I was married. Now I'm not.

I have a child, whom I still parent. Being married - and then not - didn't change that.

The only thing that changed for me was my financial situation. My taxes. My income. My debt.

So let's be clear when we "vote" to restrict a non-heterosexual couple's right to marry, it has nothing to do with protecting the sanctity of marriage as it is now recognized. It has nothing to do with the children (save the children, for the god named God's sake). It is simply a Dursley-style outing of the weirdness of the others and how we don't want them contaminating us with their weirdness.

Fer fuh sake! It is a childish game of you have to play by my rules or I'm taking back my ball. And for now all that's getting me through the hype and the drama and the hackneyed articles is that someday we will look back and say, "I can't believe some people couldn't get married at the turn of the century! I'm sure glad that's in the past."

The Blanket Leap

2010-06-16T12:56:00.001-07:00

One of the things I like about knitting is the way it invites you to improve and master certain skills while giving you the confidence and inspiration to want to learn more. Like making scarves? Excellent! Plenty of wools and patterns to try and, here in Fairbanks at least, lots of sub-zero days to wrap your neck against. Interested in making socks? Alright then, once you've figured out the gusset and turning the heel, you'll always have an easy homemade gift option.

For me, the most intimidating, exciting, can't-wait-to-make-my-own-type projects have been those larger in scope than something that can sit on your knee. I like making socks because they are portable and unique - any pattern or technique can be transferred to a sock. So I've mastered cables and ribs and even intarsia on a couple pairs of size twos or threes. But I've yearned to make something bigger. More substantial.

Years ago, I knitted my first blanket square. It was easy to do and I cranked out a half-dozen in a few months. Then I faltered. The yarn I was using - while cheap enough to rip and discard when I made an inexorable mistake - didn't feel as nice on my fingers as fine sock gauges. The pieces sat in the cedar chest until after I participated in a group project, knitting a square for a friend's baby blanket. Once I got over the stage fright, the fear of messing something up that would appear in a sea of more accomplished knitters' offerings (mostly by realizing the friend I had dragged into the project with false bravado would kill me if I didn't finish mine), I was drunk with the possibility.

I wanted a blanket of my own. So I dug up those squares. And I gradually added new ones, using the pattern as a sort of template, making up stripey designs, filching others from favorite sock and blanket patterns far too advanced for my experience. Every strange new step of the way, joining squares and crocheting edges, setting pieces aside in a limbo that might not earn me the satisfaction of a finished piece, I just took a chance. Until all my chances, all the mistakes and the rough spots, the weird curved corners and the bumpy segments, all represented by squares of surprisingly soft, textured matter, turned into something real.

Better Knit than Never

2010-06-08T10:11:00.000-07:00

Finally!
I bought this yarn months ago,

hoping to knit myself up a pair of intarsiaed socks, but it took me so long to get up the nerve to try. In the meantime, I made hats. Great big gobs of bi- and tri-colored hats. A knitting menagerie of colors and patterns.

And then I made some socks.

They didn't turn out the way I expected. I'm not sure I even followed the pattern correctly. It occurred to me near the end of the first that I might have switched it, flipped it good.

But the only way to learn is to try. Which is what I'm learning.

So I wear these socks and I see the success, not the failure.

Or at least I try.

Only the Names Have Changed

2010-06-07T14:43:00.000-07:00

I am back.

The cast of characters around here has changed, but I am still the same answer-seeking crusader, walking through the heart of a city, sitting on the banks of a river, only this time with a better view. Still reading and knitting, baking and loving. Trying to parent and teach so I can make better use of this space I'm taking up.

Today I asked a question seeped, I thought, with philosophical implications. How do we go on in the face of knowing what we know about entropy, the agony of being connected to everything. Long before iPhones and internet, intertwined liking, we resonated with the essence of the universe; we have fed on it, sustained it and been sustained by it until it was our time to be fed upon. We have been, as David Foster Wallace said, "on fire with the same force that lit the stars—compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things."

We can't unplug from that.

Then one said, yes, the universe is a butt grabber. If only it would move a little to the left.

There's my answer. Laughter at the absurdity.

We will survive.

Eighteen-Month Hiatus

2010-06-06T15:33:00.000-07:00

I just made up this recipe and thought it was worth an update:

Orangey-Molasses Cookies

4 slices of tea-seeped orange
1 c butter
1 c sugar
2/3 c brown sugar
2 eggs
1/4 c molasses
3 c plus 2 tblspoons flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
2 c chocolate chips or pieces or chunks
1 c chopped nuts of a certain type

Cream softened butter and sugars until really light and fluffy. Add pulp and juice of orange slices, molasses and eggs and cream some more. Meanwhile, whisk flour, baking soda and salt together. Add to butter'n'sugar mixture. Add chocolate chips and nuts. Refrigerate for an hour. Drop spoonfuls of batter onto parchment-lined baking sheets. Bake at 350 degrees for about 9 minutes, or until just browned. Cookies will look underdone when removed from oven, but nicely browned on the bottom. Cool on a rack for soft, gooey, orangey cookies.

Otherwise, life is fine. Everything in transition. Everything in time.

Books of my Childhood

2009-01-12T14:02:00.000-08:00

The spine jumps out at me from the bookstore shelf. My hand hesitates for a second before pulling Caps for Sale from the stack. This can’t be the same book, I think. But as soon as I see the cover, the memories come flooding back. The cheerful peddler dressed in a striped suit - he’s so hungry, yet still hopeful. The monkeys, laughing while they play the man like a marionette after he awakens from his nap to find that they’ve stolen his caps. I remember being fascinated by that pile of caps, the way they perched so solidly on the peddler’s head in that precariously tall stack. Their perfect cap shapes.

I hadn’t seen the book in years, but I must have read it as a child. Every word seemed as familiar as my kindergarten classroom decorated with balloons featuring the Letter People, a phonics tool from the seventies. I had to change schools halfway through the year and was devastated that I wouldn’t get to see what letters P through Z looked liked. Mr. Zipping Zippers, I never knew you.

Author Esphyr Slobodkina was born in the Siberian town of Chelyabinsk. She was an artist who collaborated with Margaret Wise Brown (Good Night Moon, The Runaway Bunny) before writing her own children’s books. Even though Caps for Sale was her second, it was published first in 1940. But would it stand the test of time?

When I was growing up, Christmas wasn’t a success unless it ended with a pile of books under the tree. My mom made her limited budget stretch by finding all kinds of treasures in the local bookstores and used book nooks. Before Amazon stocked every title imaginable or the big box businesses arranged artful displays full of titles you never even knew you wanted to read, she found forever friends for me on her own, classics like Stuart Little and a spider named Charlotte. She introduced me to some of my favorite authors, Madeleine L’Engle and L. M. Montgomery. Now I’m hoping to do the same for my son. That’s why the titles I read as a child are starting to show up in Owen’s stocking and at his birthday parties.

This Christmas he was a little disappointed to see that the heaviest box under the tree was full of books. “Can I open a toy now,” he pleaded.

Still, it was those books he curled up on the couch with later that afternoon after the toys weren’t so new anymore. And I know it’s those stories he’ll savor and remember when he’s grown. We’ve pored through the Adventures of Winnie the Pooh and read Peter Pan so many times. I sometimes forget the lost boy’s not my second child. He’s also got Blueberries for Sal. I can practically recite Robert McCloskey’s other classic Make Way for Ducklings, but I didn’t read this one when I was young. This story came alive for me in Galena, where I produced a half-hour radio show featuring locals reading children’s stories. I remember Wanda Attla grinning as she snuggled up to the microphone, her daughter watching, rapt, at her feet, savoring every word. I thought the book was about Alaska, with its berries and bears. I spent one of my first summer nights in the state camped out on our own Blueberry Hill near Valdez, hearing that song running through my head and thinking this new landscape looked like something out of a coffee table book about Ireland.

One late summer morning Owen and I followed our friend Oded and his sister Edit up a hill much like the one where Sal and Little Bear got their mothers mixed up. We were looking for the last of the season’s blueberries, but kept getting distracted by the abundant cranberries just beginning to ripen. Owen spent most of the time cramming the crisp, sour berries into his mouth and looking for bears, adamant that Little Sal and her mother were picking berries on that same hill. When he grows up, will he be surprised to learn differently? And will he find his own beat up copy of Caps for Sale and remember laughing until he almost fell out of my lap to see those monkeys stamping both their feet and saying, “Tsz, Tsz, Tsz.”

The Creation Cycle

2008-12-28T18:14:00.000-08:00

At the beginning of the year I made a resolution that I didn’t care if I kept. I had just begun to blog and was feeling that rosy glow of a fresh start, unafraid of failure and looking forward to the journey, so I decided to write something every day.

Those who don’t read or write blogs often belittle the practice. Call it a diary or a personal journal. That's not what blogs are, unless you blow up the pages of your diary and plaster them all over the outside of your house. What started as a way to index interesting and worthy sites on the Internet has evolved into something much more. When a blogger blogs, she wants people to read what she says, sometimes more than is healthy. Blogging can be very private. When it is, it’s more like a family newsletter, or maybe scrapbooking. You get to play around with layout, add pictures and insert clever captions, even write tag lines and dialogue. It’s up to the creator to decide how universal or personal they will be.

I posted stories and snippets on my blog, a litany of images and vignettes that influence me. I wanted to make my writing a practice, to find inspiration in the routine much as professional dancers and runners do. People who have a practice engage in the routine everyday, whether they want to or not. By pushing through that pain, they often reach new levels in their physical and emotional lives. Some days the words just flew from my fingertips, longish essays and narratives that made connections I hadn’t consciously noticed. Others weren’t so easy, I had to struggle to come up with something coherent or settle for a funny quip. For six months, I persisted, though. And then I stopped.

Looking back I realize that while my commitment to the blog ended, my writing didn’t. Since the work sat around for awhile, I kept mucking about with it, pushing through my dashed expectations and the frustration. In some ways what I’ve created in that darker space resonates more fully.

The blog won’t go to waste, though. Many of the images will be mined for the book I hope to complete someday. Or maybe they’ll just be fodder for another decade of columns. Either way, I was taking a chance with my writing by offering it to an audience that is changing the way it finds art. We are at the beginning of what I believe will be a new age of media. These days a blogger has as much of a chance to reach a reader on the Internet as the local newspaper. That doesn’t mean news-based publications are going away, but finally people are seeing what the media really is. Not an anonymous box of chattering masses, nor limited to corporate sponsors or celebrity journalists. I have met the media and it is us.

Artists have always been engaged in creating new media forms. Entire ages of civilization have been named after art traditions and musical styles. These days, the arts are under threat from the usual sources, a lack of funding and access. As unemployment rises and philanthropic giving shrinks, artists will find it even harder to get the in-kind support that exists completely off the books, whether it’s from spouses and partners with benefits or the help of generous patrons.

But even before the economic downturn, the media has been changing. Large scale layoffs in everything from public radio to the newspaper sector will have an impact, but out of this darkness will come something new. We are all constantly in the presence of cycles, whether it’s the same ladybug metamorphosis playing out in the humid climes of Southeastern Pennsylvania or the subarctic desert of Interior Alaska.

We find them in the underlying threads of human civilization, too. In religion, where the biblical stories of sin and redemption provide a base for its teachings. Even in science with its laws of entropy that say every system must fall apart only to be replaced by new ones that emerge to fill the void. It makes sense that the year ends at its darkest moment. With the sun barely making an appearance above the horizon, I yearn for the days when it will once again offer sustenance. At the same time I know I wouldn’t appreciate it, might not even notice it, if the sun were here all the time. Just as an artist must withdraw into an abyss of loneliness and despair for his greatest creation to emerge.

As the next New Year begins, I’m not making any resolutions. Instead I’m hoping that for each of us there will be at least a moment of gladness, a glimmer of belief in something larger than ourselves, something that can only emerge from the darkness.

Moose in the Yard

2008-12-03T01:32:00.000-08:00

(Nearly) Wordless Wednesday

I looked in the yard and what did I see?
Two moose looking back at me.
The mother seemed wary, the child merely curious.
I knew not to bother them, lest they become furious.
Living in Fairbanks has parts that may hinder.
It's cold and bleak and dark each winter.
But this is one of my favorite things.
Moose in the yard and all the surprises nature brings.

Don't worry. I won't quit my day job.
I'm not a poet. Don't I know it.

The Sock Chase

2008-11-29T22:51:00.000-08:00

This one's for Brownie:

It started the way so many of my obsessions do these days. Someone wrote about it on my wall. This wasn’t graffiti etched in metallic paint on the side of our house or a scrap of paper stuck to an office bulletin board. A friend wanted to tell me something, so she left me a note on my Facebook account.

For those of you not among the growing hordes of parents and baby boomers “friending” old classmates and looking up exes on the world’s largest social networking system - or those of you still in your adolescence who’ve reluctantly left the party now that all the old folks have crashed it - let me fill you in. Facebook is an on-line site where you can create a page devoted to your posse, your profession or just talk about the things you like. It’s part resume and part blog. A hybrid of e-mail and holiday letters. It’s My-Space without the annoying background music and swirling graphics. It’s a dorm room door where people can stop by and tell you they like your new haircut (thanks to a profile picture) or that the kids are growing up so fast (thanks to your photo albums) or that they cannot believe Alaska’s governor pardoned that turkey, only to complain in an interview about how “brutal” the campaign trail was while the rest of the flock got slaughtered in the background (thanks to an application that lets you post video and links to other websites).

Palin’s crew of Outside public relations professionals have been laid off now that the governor’s back in Alaska. Unlike the weeks during the presidential election, though, this obsession had nothing to do with the former Vice Presidential candidate. A friend wrote to tell me about the Big Sock making a pass through Fairbanks as part of its world tour. She knew I liked to knit from my Facebook display, and she wanted to make sure I got a chance to see it.

I started knitting late last year because it just seemed like the right time. There are these moments when life sweeps you up in the latest trend, leaving you wondering how you ever lived without it, while simultaneously shaking your head at the absurdity of becoming another cliché, an almost-40, ex-boyfriend friending lady who knits socks. It’s my obsession. I don’t go anywhere or do anything without dragging a set of double-pointed needles along with me. I’m not even the worst. Some of my friends spend their weekends combining two passions – hockey and knitting. (Or for their partners - it’s hockey and expensive cheap beer.) Their secret desire is to inspire a special addition to the camera that canvasses the crowd looking for couples kissing or kids crying. They call it the knitting cam.

So, I knit socks. Cabled socks, baby socks, socks made out of unwashable wool, socks made out of machine-safe blends. I don’t think I’ll be able to stop until every friend and acquaintance has a pair of wool stockings languishing in her dresser. Watch out Facebookers.

But the Big Sock is different. For one thing, it’s not fit for a human foot. How many knitters does it take to carry the big sock? At least five if you don’t want it to drag on the ground. Reportedly the Big Sock was started a couple of years ago by a woman in the United Kingdom who designed it as a charity event for National Knitting Week, and it’s been growing ever since. Literally. The sock that visited Fairbanks over the weekend was 76-inches long, weighing 50 pounds and sporting a 21-inch circumference.

Knitters from all over town stopped by yarn shops and bars to add a few stitches on the circular needles strung out along its diameter. They talked about their passion for knitting and felt a communion with people from different cultures and religions who felt the same way. Our connections go beyond our basic needs for food, shelter, clean air and water.

I never did get to see the big sock. Something even better happened to me instead. I went over to a friend’s house for an impromptu knitting night. We brought desserts and our bags of yarn. She provided a big pot of soup and some homemade bread. And for me, the obsessive sock knitter, she had a pair of hand knit socks more beautiful than anything I’d ever seen. They’re warm and machine washable, just the right shades of blue and red weaved into a pattern that looks like stars peeking out of a wintry night. They’re soft and cozy, and I’m never taking them off. Now if I can only get her to join Facebook, I’ll leave her the nicest thank you note one of those walls has ever seen.

Learning to Ski

2008-11-16T06:04:00.000-08:00

“Let’s go around the circle,” the instructor said. “Tell us why you’re here and how much experience you have.”

The sun had been gone for hours even though it was still early in the evening as we gathered under a pitch black sky, soaking up the stadium lighting at the Birch Hill Cross Country Ski Area. The temperature hovered around zero; the moisture in the air crystallizing like sugar from an old fashioned donut. Perfect skiing weather, except we weren’t skiing, we were standing around.

I shivered as my classmates spoke, trying not to let my skis slip out from underneath me. Some of them were new to town, sporting face masks and fleece coats, the kind of accessories you wouldn’t ever need in Hawaii. Others wanted to find a reliable way to get some exercise. While they talked, I tried to measure my own experience level. We were all here for a Beginner’s Basic lesson in classic skiing. My friend Nicole and I decided to sign up as incentive to get back on the trails. When I dug out my own gear, I groaned to find my trusty wind pants had a tear from one end of the back seam to the other. Everything was scattered in different boxes, evidence of my abandonment. We ended up paying a late fee because we couldn’t get our act together sooner.

I’ve been skiing for the fifteen years I’ve lived in Alaska’s Interior, but not very well. When it was my turn to speak, I tried to sum it up without writing the next great American novel. “Well, I’ve been skiing a long time, but I never really learned,” I said, smiling at the enthusiastic woman who’d been so patient with us so far. “Oh,” she groaned. “You’ll be one of the harder ones to teach.”

She was right. Even though I haven’t skied more than a mile or two at a time over the five winters since my son was born, I could already feel myself slipping back into the bad habits I’d come to rely on. Running up hills instead of planting my feet. Slowing down on the decline, so I wouldn’t even have to think about stopping. And using my poles to compensate for the cheap, waxless skis I’d stubbornly bought earlier that day.

I learned how to ski by following my friends around Fairbanks. I skied to cabins and on abandoned logging roads, looking more like a hiker than an Olympic athlete. When I lived near the Birch Hill trails, I used them a few times a week for exercise, stepping out of the tracks like an amateur sled dog team to let much faster, Lycra-clad skiers have the right-of-way. Now I was ready for a new approach.

The first lesson went well. I watched my classmates scrape off layers of ancient wax from skis long abandoned for snowshoes and other winter pursuits. I helped my friend crayon the sticky stuff back into the kick zone of her skis. That didn’t look too hard, I thought. Maybe I could learn how to do this after all. We didn’t ski much, practicing our balance instead. We zipped back and forth on one ski at a time, working on our glide. The instructor urged us to take risks. “There’s nothing to be gained from staying safe except repeating the same old bad habits.”

That’s a lesson I’ve spent my whole life learning over and over.

Afterwards, Nicole and I tried a turn around the warm up loop, me snowplowing down the hill at an old sled dog’s pace and her zooming like a team of puppies right past me, only to end up in a heap at the bottom. “I never learned to stop,” she said when I caught up. We laughed harder than we skied. After I finished the short loop, I was dismayed to realize I had forgotten one of the basic rules of layering. My cotton undershirt was soaked through with sweat.

After we finish these lessons, Nicole and I have a new goal. We might try something really adventurous, like skate skiing. Because I'll never know what I'm capable of if I don't try.

True Love

2008-11-13T04:57:00.000-08:00

I was surprised to learn last year, right after I’d finally finished Walden, that Henry David Thoreau might be gay. As the theory goes, Thoreau lived a chaste life and spent much time rhapsodizing over the beauty of the male form and his appreciation of phallic-shaped plants. He was committed to abstaining from heterosexual sex and a foe of marriage, positions that did not come across in my reading of his first book.

It’s not that being gay would change who he is in my mind, just that I assumed Thoreau to be of a passion almost transcending sexuality. He seemed to me to be in love with the world, choosing nature as his bride.

David Gessner nicely documents this romantic quandary in his book, A Wild, Rank Place. He doesn’t so much address Thoreau’s sexuality as celebrate his intimacy with the world, his embrace of the smells and sights of an almost disgusting side to human nature. They both want to get down and dirty with nature, to soak in the excitement of a cranberry bog, to be aroused by pokeweed and the briny smell of the marsh. It’s like welcoming both the sensuality of a sexual encounter and the nasty bits, too. The way a woman might be stimulated by the scent of a man’s sweat or a man by the sound of a woman peeing.

Gessner realizes that there isn’t really a line between the writer who takes pleasure in the raw sexuality of nature and the stern prude we know from Thoreau’s portrait. "When walking home drunk late at night, I would stop at a particular oak and mark my territory. ‘I have watered the red huckleberry, the sand cherry and the nettle tree,’ wrote Thoreau. Me too. To this day I insist there was something religious about the experience."

To push the boundary between sex and nature even further, Gessner is spending a year at his father’s cottage in Cape Cod, retracing his hero Thoreau’s steps while coming to terms with his father’s imminent death from cancer and his own battle with the disease. He notes that even the cancer hit him in his center of sexuality – “in the balls.” He’s afraid it might interfere with his ability to write, that impotence would make his pen dry, except that Thoreau “wrote quite well without screwing.” In fact, he poured his seed into his journal. To Gessner, writing is an act as powerful as procreation.

Gessner isn’t just interested in sex, though. He’s also a romantic. He wants to worship nature as an ideal, to find symbols in its landscapes, meaning in the neck of a gull treading air in front of him as he sits on a bluff overlooking the Cape. He romanticizes his father’s house, which looks like a living thing, “growing out of the ground.” He loves Cape Cod, “whatever that means,” and has trouble seeing it as it is, rather than the ideal in his imagination.

But maybe what Gessner is romanticizing most are his own fears. The fear of losing those he loves to cancer and other painful deaths, and that most unfair loss, especially since Thoreau warned of it himself a hundred years ago, wilderness. Gessner is frustrated by what man has wrought with our manic consumption and material progress, but he appreciates the same mean embodiment in nature’s destructive force. The way it is capable of reclaiming the land from poorly built row homes and strip malls, the way it can drag “expensive homes down cliff sides, drowning gas stations, washing and sloshing through the stores of Commercial Street.”

The loss of his father becomes the ultimate connection for Gessner between the untamed meanness of nature and a romantic love of life. His father dies, of course, even though they said he was larger than life, because none of us is. The author nurses his father through his last two weeks, angry at not having time for himself, but now more proud of that task than of anything else he’s done with his life. He even helps his father urinate, “shaking driblets of blood into his urinal, cherry red staining the blue of the container.”

What was once a proud experience, a religious connection to nature now becomes a reminder of our creatureliness. But Gessner can’t find the spiritual in the senselessness of it all. For all our plans and dreams, we are not more than creatures. We rot. In Gessner’s despair, I find hope. We do rot. And just like everything else, living or inanimate, we fall apart, but until we do, it’s our choice to embrace the rank or neglect it for something romantic, but artificial, something sanitized, but prudish.

Gssner appreciates Thoreau’s warnings from a hundred years ago, in the midst of the Industrial Revolution, that there wasn’t enough wilderness left. He admires the man’s passion for wild places, sees it as delight in all things feral and crude, a sort of virtue in the seemingly socially unacceptable condition of the savage state of wilderness. Maybe that’s the virtue in itself, he says, because to protect the wild is to protect what is truly creative. Even when we push the wild down, “it finds a way to break through the grid.”

Gessner tells us that ultimately, if we destroy what is wild and rank – if we fail to love and protect it in an active, sophisticated way - we destroy ourselves.

My Father's Daughter

2008-11-06T15:59:00.000-08:00

I'm surprised by how much author Danielle Trussoni and I have in common. Growing up we both had Swatch watches on our wrists and Cure posters on our bedroom doors. We both went to elementary catholic schools called Saint Patrick’s. We both had mothers who wore Dr. Scholl’s sandals. We even blamed our moms for their broken marriages.

And we both can’t forget Vietnam.

Our fathers fought in that war. They came home, suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and fought very different battles with cancer, but that’s where the similarities end. Trussoni’s dad stuck around to wreak havoc with her life, giving her the same memories of that suicidal mission that kept him awake at night and drove him to self-medicate with alcohol and women. Mine left before I was old enough to ask him any questions about the war.

In her book Falling Through the Earth Trussoni explores the bond with her dad, ties that go much deeper than a shared name. They both had quick tongues and an honest streak that could quickly turn mean. Her father respected strength and she never wanted to let him down. “Loving him was a battle,” but one she enthusiastically agreed to fight. She was a loyal student, learning how to drink by sitting on a stool beside him at the bar, and how to hunt, even though she wasn’t interested in killing animals.

Ironically, as I’m discovering in my exploration of my own family dynamics, it’s actually Trussoni’s mother whom she resembles the most. The spitting image, her father tells a lover as she scrutinizes the little girl’s face after an afternoon visit fueled by pretzels and cartoons while the grownups disappear into the bedroom. Her father’s infidelity is one of the factors that leads to their divorce.

Trussoni grows up blaming her mother for what happened, but eventually comes to terms with the reality – that one person is never entirely at fault when a relationship falls apart. I was disappointed with the lack of interaction between the author and her mother. She lives with her father after the divorce and that’s where most of the action takes place, but after she moves back in with her mom, the story ends, just as we start to see the potential for a much healthier relationship, a healing bond to form.

Growing up, Trussoni and I both believed that the war had taken our fathers from us. “It was an amorphous monster that would grab hold and pull us into it, kicking and screaming. Vietnam claimed Dad’s past, his future, his health his dreams.” What we both come to learn, maybe partly by writing about the experience, is that they never really left Vietnam, that part of them died there.

Even if my father had stuck around, I wouldn’t have known the real him. For that we went looking in the movies and books about the war, trying to find their faces in every sweat-streaked soldier’s reflection. Whether we are orphans abandoned by retreating men as they left Vietnam or daughters forced to watch the drama continue to unfold, the war created a hole for all of us. No matter how hard any of us try, it will never end.

New Traditions

2008-11-05T09:54:00.000-08:00

(Nearly) Wordless Wednesday

We had a red (strawberries), white (shrimp fettucini) and blue (blueberry juice) dinner last night to celebrate the election. The kids ran around yelling "Bo-Bah-Ma in Oh-Ate." When NPR called the race for President-Elect Barack Obama, I clapped as Subarctic Mama started to cry. "Yay, tears!"

Double-Pointed Needle Love

2008-10-29T16:09:00.000-07:00

(Nearly) Wordless Wednesday

I'm on another sock roll. I've been churning out socks as fast as I can knit. This is my second pair using the acorn pattern from Vogue Knitting's Ultimate Sock Book. Patons Kroy Socks wool blends make a really soft, squishy sock. I'm just sorry I didn't buy more of the pink/brown yarn that I used for my friend's birthday present earlier this month. They were out by the time I went back for more. I've been knitting hats, too. Let me know if you want something.

Running Thoughts

2008-10-28T13:39:00.000-07:00

Temperature: -10degrees
Mileage: 3 Miles
Oct. Mileage: More than a marathon

I went for my first below zero run today. The trail was lined with hoarfrosted trees, the sun shrouded in a mist of ice crystals, the steam billowing off the river. A shiny black raven kept time, sitting in a tree just ahead and waiting for me to catch up.

Running at temperatures this cold is actually easier on my back. My pounding feet don't transfer enough energy to warm up the surface of the ice, causing that micro-thin layer of water and a slippery friction that upsets my balance. I like the hard crust on the snow, the dry atmosphere that makes me feel like I've worked harder just going a few miles.

With my mind unoccupied and my iPod broken, I pay much more attention to my body. I feel the funny turn my toes take inward, a paranthesis-shaped indention in my stride. As my body temperature lowers, my blood pumps slower and my face stiffens, a firming routine better than any cosmetic potion. Even my lashes get pumped. I can't imagine struggling with a debilitating disease, knowing that my body will run itself down, not being able to count on another jog tomorrow or the day after. But isn't that the point of life's journey. Some day I won't be able to do this.

I've got my sights set on next year's Equinox Marathon, so I'm planning to keep running this winter, get at least a marathon's worth of miles each month until my training regime starts up again in May. My sister is planning to run it with me. She was my first running companion, meeting me for an early run before our commute to a nearby university where I took classes for a semester. We got ourselves lost on endless sidewalks in the neighborhood, panting and moving and talking. Mostly we just basked in the joy of being together. I'll be thinking of her as I run.

Autumn Lessons

2008-10-19T06:49:00.000-07:00

I know Alaskan falls are short, still I was hoping for a few more days to admire the lapis lazuli sky framed by golden leaves. To smell the scent of wood smoke and decaying plants before winter blurred autumn's sharp edges.

After the snow started falling, I dug out our winter gear. Amidst the unmatched gloves and unraveling hats, I found one of Owen’s old coats and remembered him wearing it on another chilly October day. I had turned my back for a moment to put away some lawn tools. When I looked around for him, he was gone. Raking the yard with my eyes, a different kind of shiver rippled through my body. I paced the property, taking in every nook and cranny, vigilant for a glimpse of his bright blue jacket. When a neighbor signaled for my attention, I ran to the end of the driveway to see Owen's back fleeing down the street, a triumphant lilt to his step. That's not the last time that image will be locked in my site. He’s growing away from me every day with only the change of seasons to mark the time.

As we surveyed the lawn under the new crust of snow, Owen asked about the plants bent under the burden. "What happens to them? Do they die?" I struggled for an answer that didn't seem so harsh, but he beat me to it. "No, they’re just taking a rest before next spring." At five, he already knows so much, or is able to parrot the party lines. Like most kids, he’s been obsessed with death ever since he could talk. I stumbled on an analogy while we were taking a walk around the neighborhood. We crunched through the dead leaves piling up in swirls, almost monotone compared to the palette of oranges and reds I’d grown up with in Pennsylvania. When we stopped to examine an abandoned home, slumping with the weight of time, Owen asked me why the wood was rotting and the nails rusting.

“Everything falls apart,” I said, satisfied with my observation. It seemed as fitting a philosophy as the belief in a heaven. Everything must end - people, plants and houses - but the other side of the cycle is the persistence of life. The writer Annie Dillard likens our numbers to stars in the sky or grains of sand on the beach. New waves are always coming in numbers too big to comprehend. They join a world where even though the sun goes away for the winter, summer will come again.

I’ve been running on the trail beside the river on these snowy fall mornings, watching a squadron of geese flying low in formation under empty skies. They skim along the water’s surface so close I can see the delicate joints where their wings connect to their down-covered bodies. Most of the birds are gone by now, joining a mass migration to points further south, some warmer, others just as cold and snowy. Each winter my step-dad walks across the crunchy grass of his Pennsylvania lawn, wilted and stiff in the freezing temperatures like over-sprayed hair, to scatter seeds. I wonder if some of the birds leaving my backyard will stop in his.

When I was a little girl, I went along with Barry to the polling place when he voted in the fall. I loved to watch his legs underneath the striped curtain, although I felt a little voyeuristic for observing such a private act. He never told me who he was voting for, not that I would have recognized the names, but he was showing me something about the meaning of life. I learned that we all matter. We all get a chance to make a difference each day, whether we’re letting a car get a head start at a slippery intersection or offering a hand to someone who’s taken a fall on the new snow. We can all be another pair of watchful eyes keeping track of wandering toddlers.

Barry isn’t a deep thinker. He’d probably laugh at my philosophy about spiritual entropy, the way we’re all connected to the same life cycle. But he taught me something just the same when he said, "It doesn't matter who you vote for, kiddo. Just vote."

Winter Run

2008-10-18T16:08:00.000-07:00

Mileage: 3 miles
October Mileage: More than 10K, less than a marathon
Temperature: 23 degrees

I went for my first sub-freezing run of the year. After a week off my legs and on the couch with some kind of stomach virus and an early-winter plunge in temperatures, I decided to take it slow, to let my body get readjusted to the new conditions.

I elongated my stride and stretched my limbs in comical shapes. I listened to the squeak of my shoes, not used to the way sounds echo off the cold. My face felt as stiff as the ice along the edge of the river, thick with ducks scowling as if they weren't used to cold feet either. The seat warmers and plug ins for our cars no substitute for the heating properties of down.

Other ducks skimmed along the gun-metal gray water in the sluggish current, the vital spark thrown off by their tiny bodies dwarfed by the immensity of winter settling over the land. The blood in my veins, too, felt thick with slush. Through the wispish fog of my breath, I saw the moon's silhouette etched into the glass dome of the sky.

It felt good to go slow, to keep running even though the season has changed, the hectic pace of the productive months gone along with the long days. I spent the summer training for this fall's Equinox Marathon. I knew all along I probably wouldn't be at the starting line, planning ahead for a different kind of success. Maybe my accomplishment will come next year, after the odometer of my life rolls forward into another decade, after a winter of keeping my lungs and legs in shape so I'll be ready for what comes next.

As I turned the corner onto my street, I felt the air brush of wings as a flock of birds came in for a landing overhead. When I turned to see where they would settle, I saw pigeons in pear-shaped trees. Then I plodded steadily back home to my own nest.

Just Another Pretty Face

2008-10-13T08:23:00.000-07:00

After all the drama around here following the Sarah Palin Vice Presidential candidacy, my friends and I decided to do something about the general blahs that had descended. Tina Fey's performances helped, but we were committed to something more concrete. Something we could call on at a moment's notice and not have to wait until a certain high-demand comedienne could be enticed to help bail out her ailing alma mater.

Since we host semi-regular meetings of what we call the Cocktail Club, we decided to invent a new drink. Most of the credit goes to Subarctic Mama, who obsessed over the right ingredients. Vanilla Vodka, to mask the harsh edge. Tang, the original super sweet marketing success. Dragonfruit Vitamin Water, well that doesn't need any explanation.

After "inventing" many popular over the counter medicines, everything from Bayer aspirin to NyQuil, we came up with the perfect concoction. It actually tasted good, before it didn't. SM said she wanted to go home, mix up a big batch and get wasted. I asked for another and promptly started to forget all my troubles, and my grasp on basic facts.

The Sarah Palin

1x Vanilla Vodka
1x Grand Marnier
2x Dragonfruit Vitamin Water
a few shakes of Grenadine

Combine in a shaker, shake it up and pour in a pretty glass. Garnish with a maraschino cherry, which will nestle in the bottom like a glittering ruby, moist and poisonous with alcohol.

The drink debuted at our most recent meeting to mostly positive reviews. We had one holdout, who opted for a Gin and Tonic, the anti-maverick choice. All was well until yesterday when a wave of nausea confined me to the couch for most of the afternoon. Maybe it was the news of Palin's latest lies. Or maybe life isn't so pretty when the damage finally catches up with you.

Subarctic Mama has a much better write up right here.

Taillights Fade

2008-10-09T10:38:00.000-07:00

I left everything behind when I moved to Alaska. Sundresses and sandals. Books and cassette tapes. The few albums I owned. A lifetime of collecting couldn't fit into my duffel bag. For the first year, I listened to the same mix tapes over and over.

I had a little Husker Du and a lot of the Descendents; some Samiam and Fugazi. And when I moved to Homer and started working at the local public radio station, a whole lot of music library to entertain me. Certain songs nagged at me, though. They were missing from my life and fading from my mind.

This was before Amazon and iTunes, so I couldn't just download them for instant satisfaction. That's why the scratched plastic case featuring a smudged portrait of a scowling man slumped in a puffy red chair punched me in the stomach when I spotted it at the huge Army Surplus store in Anchorage. I had searched the hardest for this tape. It wasn't in the station's collection. My sister couldn't find it in my stash, and I never expected to stumble on a used copy at an overstuffed second-hand store on a deserted snowy street in the middle of the Last Frontier.

Buffalo Tom's Taillights Fade was my anthem after I graduated from college. I didn't know where I wanted to be. I didn't know what I wanted to do. I just knew I needed to go away. That path led me all the way to Alaska, and this song reminded me why. I played it over and over, trying to interest my roommates in the sentiment. But the words would never mean for them what they did for me.

Kazuo Ishiguro's novel Never Let Me Go is named for the song that has the same role in protagonist Kath's life. A song that represented a sadness for her so deep she would barely understand what it meant when she found it years after the original copy had been lost or stolen or misplaced. None of that mattered, just the song and a memory that would illuminate her own truth and lead her to her one true love just in time to realize she had lost him forever.

Ishiguro is known for sweeping tales of the human condition, books that probe the aching feelings we spend a lifetime trying to avoid with addictions and bad behaviours, too afraid to face the truth about who we are. Mortal. Flawed. Just like any unpleasant task, the sooner we deal with it, the sooner we will find peace, but it's a place we have to visit over and over again.

In this case, Ishiguro has set the story in a recognizable future that is quite different from the present. The characters are all residents of a boarding school where the students are special, without truly knowing why. The book feels almost sci-fi in the way it drops strange terms into conversations without explanation, leading us to understand that eventually we will grok what "completing" means and the role of the "carers" who populate the book, but for now we are strangers in a strange land.

You'll be in on the scoop all too soon, and although the prose is light and sweet and keeps the pages turning, I found myself rushing through the last bits, wanting to get to the end already. I figured out the mystery by the middle of the book and started to feel like the author was bopping me over the head repeatedly with the message. This was a novel that felt more like a short story that had absorbed too much water, an oversized sponge animal that would fall apart in my hands if I squeezed too hard.

Still, I'm glad I read the book. The message was worth it - that the gift of life is too precious to be taken for granted or used as a political bumper sticker. I hope it never lets me go.

Not Too Big

2008-10-06T09:16:00.001-07:00

Happy Birthday, Owen!

A child is a reminder of our own mortality, so it's funny that Owen is obsessed with death. He asks us almost every day why people die. Why pumpkins die. Even batteries in the camera. I tell him everything dies. Everything falls apart. He's soothed by this explanation. Spiritual Entropy. But five isn't just philosophical. When I ask him to pick up his toys, Owen says, "They're not toys, they're boys!" His favorite nighttime routine is mixing up the words to a familiar nursery rhyme. "Hickory Pickory Pock. The horse ran up the building!" He loves robots, space and especially robots in space. Transformers, dragons and dinosaurs. He wants to be a toymaker when he grows up, so he can make toys for all kinds of kids. And a police officer "to make sure the bad guys can't hurt people." But mostly he wants to be a kid forever. I'm so lucky that he'll always be mine.

Frontier Women

2008-10-05T18:17:00.001-07:00

We celebrated my son’s fifth birthday with a fall picnic, just in time for the season’s first snowfall. While the flakes settled on the barbeque, I made potato salad from the garden. The day before, I dug a couple of old deer roasts out of the freezer, the kind still too full of meat to throw away, but that wouldn’t look so pretty on a dinner platter.

As I sawed along angled bone, slicing bite-sized pieces and filleting off the tough sinew, I realized that I’ve made a meal out of almost every variety of meat that can be harvested in Alaska. I’ve cooked moose roasts and rabbit stew, bison burgers and sheep vindaloo. I’ve never shot an animal, but once it’s on the ground, I can provide in my own way. I did not grow up with this kind of relationship to food. I was one of those suburban dwellers, an elementary-school-aged kid who finally realized through my hamburger-stuffed mouth just what animal we were eating. My eyes watered to think about chewing the flesh of something with lashes as long as my own.

That wouldn’t have happened just a few decades ago. Since the 1950’s, when my step-dad was a young adult, grocery stores sterilized and separated us from our food sources. Our country can’t supply the fuel necessary to meet our vast energy needs anymore. We lost track of what it means to provide for ourselves. I might have become a vegetarian if not for the example set by the hunters I know - my uncle, who chose a life in the country surrounded by the animals he both loved and harvested over an existence that conformed to city values, and the indigenous people of Alaska. If they had caught the vegetarianism bug, their descendents wouldn’t be around today to tell us how they lived. I discovered that we omnivores can have our own kind of spiritual connection to the food we eat

Ever since Alaska Governor Sarah Palin burst onto the national scene as the Republican Vice Presidential candidate, pundits and comedians have had a field day with her hunting prowess. They’ve scoffed at her self-touted ability to field dress a moose and made her family’s salmon fishing business into a punch line. One of the theories about her popularity is that she symbolizes the ideal of a pioneer, balancing a fierce positive outlook with a feminine appearance. She represents the frontier women who had to face the same harsh challenges as the men, staring down bears and scrounging a living from an unforgiving land. Whether we agree with the implications or not, our governor has become the symbol of Alaskan women. That’s a subject I used to consider myself something of an expert on.

I grew up knowing that I could do anything I wanted, thanks to feminism and a natural equality in the relationship between my mom and step-dad, but the world didn’t always measure up to my expectations. I wondered where I would find my own unlimited opportunity, until I came here. Suddenly, it didn’t matter whether I shaved my legs or if I wore makeup to a job interview. I learned how to hack chunks from a freshly killed moose carcass and wrap the meat in freezer-sized packages. I wiped my fish-slimed hands on a pair of Carhartts and then slipped into a miniskirt to watch my favorite band. I made jam from berries I picked and pickles from vegetables grown by my friends. I noticed how the land and my own lifestyle changed in response to the seasons. When the passion of the national election – with the fate of the world seeming to hang in the balance – is over, I hope the country will remember some of the lessons the Sarah Palin experience has to teach. That whether we’re fighting over how to handle the predatory practices of immoral mortgage lenders or how to manage predator populations, taking care of the land is still our responsibility. If the wilderness goes and our frontier lifestyle ends, that’s on us.

After the birthday party started, we threw kabobs marinated in a whiskey/soy sauce on the barbeque as the snow melted in the afternoon sun. The deer-meat-on-a-stick was a big hit. I’ll never forget the look on the faces of the kids when they thanked the hunter – and the deer – for providing that meat. At that moment, they knew exactly where their food came from.

Five Friends

2008-10-03T17:19:00.000-07:00

If you're my friend, send this to five of your friends.

There now. That was easy. Kind of like passing the dutchie.

Dissing Dillard

2008-10-02T13:53:00.000-07:00

I’m a fan of the rambling essay, the kind that takes a leisurely stroll off the beaten path, only to wind up at a waterfall I never would have found by following the signs. When they work, these journeys are about more than the destination, a testament to living in the moment. I decided to look to one of our nonfiction masters for some clues, even though I feel a steely distance between Annie Dillard's voice and my own ability to listen.

In the essay collection For the Time Being, Dillard inserts quotes and statistics about everything from the Torah and the Qur’an to birds and babies, traveling from China to Israel and back home several times in the process. At first, it seemed like a random collection of facts and historical accounts. It took a few chapters to see that the writer is addressing the same ten subjects in each one: birth, sand, China, clouds, numbers, Israel, encounters, thinkers, evil and now. And that the stories she picks up and drops, seemingly at random, are threaded through all those loops, like a stunt plane through its own contrails.

Each chapter begins with a birth story, whether she’s exploring the phenomenon of unnatural births (birth defects) in the bird-headed dwarves who populate Smith’s Recognizable Patterns of Human Malformation or watching a team of nurses wash an assembly line of newborns. "She caps his conehead, and gives the bundle a push to slide it down the counter to the end of the line with the others she has just washed. The red newborn looks up and studies his surroundings, alert, seemingly please, and preternaturally calm, as if enchanted."

Dillard is preoccupied with death, so she’s trying to understand life. She’s looking for answers to the question of why we bother living when we will die in such incomprehensible numbers. To prove this phenomenon, she leaves stacks of statistics throughout the book, daring us to look at disasters we may never have heard about and still find a reason to believe that the individual is precious. How can we matter, when we are like stars in the sky or grains of sand on the beach, indistinguishable from afar?

"My children and your children and their children? Any other group you care to mention among the 5.9 billion persons now living, or perhaps among the 80 billion now dead? There are about a billion more people living now than there are years since our sun condensed from interstellar gas. I cannot make sense of this."

Dillard ends each chapter in the now, paying attention as “waves of new generations appear in bundles on counters.” This matters because each of them will go on living, plowed under just like the Chinese men who march through the book, the “deep-dwelling army of Emperor Qin.” Once we get here, she says, we spend forever on this globe, even if our feet end up poking through the wrong side of the soil.

I tried to read Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek last year, but was put off by the strong arm of her perspective. She kept forcing me to look outward, to see the hard edges of nature, where dragonfly nymphs are insatiable, clasping and devouring whole minnows and fat tadpoles. They've even been seen climbing up out of the water to attack a helpless dragonfly emerging from its own nymphal skin. Dillard is gob smacked by this show of force, asking herself whether this is where she draws the line. “Anything can happen,” Dillard says, “and anything does.”

But we’re not given any examples from her own life to balance the picture. I wonder how dispassionate she would be if she were observing her relationship with her own child, exploring how we sometimes hurt our kids in the quest for the greater good, sacrificing one’s needs to address another’s or denying some pleasure because of the potential for a greater lesson.

Another device Dillard uses to help us find our way through her book are a series of Roman Numerals that march through the chapters like some army intent on getting to the battlefield, no time for sitting and chatting over a campfire. There are arrogant insertions of white space between sections, too, as if she didn’t bother with transitions because we’re not worthy. I’m not sure why she decided the chapters should come in outlined segments, each with their own stubbornly separated sections, but I was left feeling manipulated, as if my mother were trying to teach me something she didn’t think I was ready to understand yet.

I did find some of Dillard's bread crumbs, but I couldn’t help comparing her methods with the way Sheila Nickerson led me through Disappearance: A Map. Both writers were looking for a reason to celebrate life in the midst of death. Both writers consulted historical figures for inspiration; Nickerson had her explorers and Dillard her thinkers. But the two differed most in their approach to self. Nickerson shared personal stories of the people who mattered to her, while Dillard introduced us mostly to the strangers she “encounters” along the way.

I’m left caring more about Nickerson, wanting her map to last. Dillard becomes just another shining star in the sky, inspirational in the moment, but not something I feel connected to, not somebody I will seek out during my own limited time spent in the alive column of one of her charts.

Quick Change Artist

2008-10-01T11:35:00.000-07:00

(Nearly) Wordless Wednesday

Can somebody tell me how we went from this:

to this:

in less than a week?

Knitting a Book

2008-09-25T09:32:00.000-07:00

I learned to knit last year, a few months after starting a graduate program in creative writing. The two endeavors quickly became entwined.

Making a practice of writing after a career as a journalist meant following an exercise routine that pushed and pulled muscles deep inside my brain. Knitting became a complement to this writing life, its musical rhythms and yielding materials balancing the physical toll of hours spent typing at a keyboard and scribbling in a notebook.

It was also a metaphor for what I was trying to do with words, weave them into pleasing patterns to create something beautiful, yet practical. Now after months of churning out scarves, hats and socks, I’m ready to try an intermediate skill, like juggling several different skeins of yarn to create intricate patterns of color, dropping one color while you knit with another, sometimes for only a few stitches at a stretch. I want to weave different themes into my essays, so they will stand together and create something bigger, a book or a collection.

That’s what Sheila Nickerson does best in Disappearance: A Map. First there’s the obvious theme of getting lost, reflected in the story of her colleague’s plane, which has gone missing. "Kent Roth, a fishery biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, has gone down with two brothers and two friends on a flight from Yakutat to Anchorage. It is an immense area, one that has swallowed people from the earliest times of its recorded history."

This tragedy unfolds just as Nickerson herself is getting ready to go off the edge of a safe career, to retire from the State of Alaska and set off with her husband for a winter on board their thirty-seven-foot boat, leaving everything and everyone she knew.

Nickerson uses these stories as something like a safe place, returning to the narrative at the beginning of almost every chapter of the book. She also tucks references to these disappearances into long passages about historical lost people, the famous explorers who brought news of Alaska to the rest of the world. Comte de la Perouse, the first European to visit Lituya Bay in the area where Kent’s plane has gone missing, and Sir John Franklin, who named Prudhoe Bay, “the source of Alaska’s great oil reserves.”

What intrigues Nickerson about these famous explorers is that they left journals behind, sometimes lost themselves and rediscovered. The journals become a map of who the writers were and what they were looking for.

Nickerson finds these maps everywhere she looks, in the last memo Kent wrote to his colleagues; her own stacks of paperwork, accumulated over seven years on the same job and even longer in her Juneau home; the journals and notes in bottles left behind by all the people lost in the far reaches of Alaska and tucked into cairns or other safe places. She mines these treasures for clues to their stories and for the one she does not know an ending to, her own disappearance.

Other shorter pieces of yarn work to hold the book together, too. Like oil - Alaska’s “black heart,” its “black blood,” its “pooled black secret,” the result of Sir John Franklin’s discovery of Prudhoe Bay. When Nickerson wrote her book, several million gallons of oil had recently spilled in Prince William Sound, a region she explored immediately afterwards in her role as a spokesperson for the state Department of Fish and Game. She witnessed the destruction caused by the “broken twisted rainbow” of oil on the water and will carry for the rest of her life the memory of the wounded animals’ cries.

Some threads don’t seem connected to the rest of the story, yet they would unravel the whole sock if they were yanked out, such as the letters from her father stacked in the basement of her Juneau home. She can’t look at them, can barely talk about him, a man who after many silent years disinherited her. “In his last will and testament, I do not exist.” Yet, the efforts of one man, even a father, can not erase the legacy she has left in other forms - in stacks of papers, in countless words, in the memories of her own children. They are all maps.

Like the wrong side of an intarsia sweater, messy with dead ends and carried over yarn, Nickerson’s book is really a search for meaning. Why do we spend so much time living and loving, working and exploring, if we are going to die? Does the fact that we leave a map make up for that truth? Because in the end, Nickerson say, “there is no hope. There is no searching. There is only the falling of the snow, the stillness in the sanctuary of true north.”

Sometimes those who are lost will never be found, except in the memories of those who are left behind.

Running the Marathon

2008-09-21T12:53:00.000-07:00

I watched several friends finish the Equinox Marathon last year and in a burst of admiration and pride, agreed to join their summer training regimen. In the nine years since I ran it, the sore muscles and exhaustion must have faded, leaving only endorphin-tinted memories of leaf-strewn trails lined with smiling supporters.

That optimistic schedule is still on my bulletin board, with its well-earned rest days and jaunty interval training blocks, even though a smokejumper husband who’s gone most of the summer and a four-year-old attached to me like Peter Pan’s sewed on shadow didn’t leave me with much time to run.

I decided to focus on cross-training, pulling Owen in a trailer behind a borrowed bike. We rode everywhere. To the university where he goes to pre-school, to Creamer’s Field and the post office. All that bike riding was good for both my stamina and avoiding record high gas prices at the pump, but I was only able to squeeze in a few three or five mile runs a week. Once I ran ten miles, a feeling that stayed with me for days.

I’ve always liked running. I’ve never been fast and my form is far from pretty, not like in the movies when the protagonist bounces along the paved river trail in perfect form. I had the earphones and the ponytail, but none of the rest. My underwear bunched up and my legs got blotchy and red. In high school track, the coach kept trying to get me to try shot put or the discus throw.

I surprised myself that marathon year, pushing through 10, 15 even 20-mile training runs. They took me a long time to finish, but that’s what I had plenty of back then.

Near the end of my training schedule, a local columnist was hanging out at the radio station where I worked. We started talking about the marathon and how he was going to run it again. Stuffed with timetables and information about portable nutrition and support strategies, I asked him what his longest run had been so far.

“Oh, about ten miles,” he said.

I’d been running two or three times that much each week for months. I must have laughed nervously, comparing my own relative over-training with anxiety, the only time I doubted myself.

The race went well, even though I slowed to a pace less than a crawl at times. My spirits alternately soared and sagged, taking me on an emotional journey that far outlasted any exercise routine, but I kept going. Finishing was my only goal. I wasn’t worried about times or personal records.

About five miles from the end, the columnist came up from behind. He slowed down to run along with me for awhile, chatting and smiling about how great it felt to be back in the race. I could barely summon the energy to smile back. After about a mile of matching my pace, he issued a cheerful, “see you at the finish,” and surged ahead. I almost cried watching him disappear in the crowd ahead of me. I barely finished in six hours. He had at least 15 minutes and as many years on me.

I decided this year not to worry so much about the long runs. I was way behind schedule in the middle of August when the weather had just turned autumnal and I could start to imagine the reality of tackling that 26 mile trail over undulating hills and across alternating miles of roots and rocks and paved road. It was time to kick my training up a notch.

My plan was to tackle the Warm Up and White Bear loops at Birch Hill twice, about 15 miles. The first five or six miles flew by. I ran past fields of shrews scattering at the sound of my hammering feet like I was the anti-pied piper. I didn't stop, even when an overgrown bush of teenaged cross country runners loomed with sharp points where there shouldn't be any, hesitant branches covering new growth.

I was running without even thinking about it, merging with the air, not forcing my feet forward or reminding myself to keep moving. Everyone has these moments. On the dance floor, flailing like a dervish, you whirl and turn, your arms waving in a willow's salute, in love with the world, that love flowing to you and from you and through you.

Then I came around the trail’s back bend, where the path starts to climb with a vengeance. All that lightness and openness was gone. My feet felt as heavy as the upturned tree trunks I passed along the way. They slowed, then shuffled and then almost stopped. I hiked the rest of the trail, glad for the Goo Drops and water I brought with me.

The marathon race roster is full of people who were injured or couldn’t make it to the starting line. In a way their stories are just as compelling as those who finish, their reasons for not running just as important.

I didn’t run the race this year. I’ll keep training, though. Maybe next summer I’ll try again. And if I do finish the marathon, I’ll remember that this has all been part of the journey.

Published in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, September 21, 2008

Make Me a Sandwich

2008-09-19T17:20:00.000-07:00

I've been putting off this post. Not because what I want to say is particularly difficult. It's just that I meant to do something before I wrote it. Something that I still haven't done.

Since I just came from my friend Lynne's house where the kitchen was cranking out amazing food - fresh salmon from Valdez broiled with garlic, ginger and cilantro; a crisp cabbage salad with toasted sesame seeds and scallions; and the best chocolate chip cookies I've ever had (the secret must be molasses and bittersweet chocolate, near as I can tell), the time is right.

A year or so ago, I wrote a column about all the changes Fairbanks has gone through since I moved here 12 years ago. I was reminiscing about the Whole Earth Grocery, which made amazing breads and salads. They were known for something called the Natchester sandwich. The power of the internet. I got not just one, but two versions of the recipe.

My dream was to make up a big batch of these sandwiches, along with some homemade whole grain buns, and have ourselves a Back in the Day party, but that just hasn't happened. It seems only fair to share the goods, though. So maybe somebody else can at least enjoy these sammies in the comfort of their own home. I probably lived there once, too.

Natchester Spread
Comes From acronym for: Not Just Your Ordinary Cheese Sandwich
From Sue Cole

4 cups dry Pinto Beans
2 pounds Monterey Jack Cheese
1 pound New York Sharp Cheddar Cheese
2 tsp powdered garlic
4 cups greek pepperoncini
4 cups mayonnaise

Soak the beans overnight, then cook in pressure cooker 15 minutes with pressure. Cool.Grate cheeses. Take pepper stems off and chop or slice. Mix all together

And then this slightly easier version:

Natchester
From Bonnie

8 c cooked pinto beans
2 lb jack cheese
1 lb sharp cheese
2 tsp garlic
4 c mayonnaise
4 c greek peppers, measure before chopping, 3 c chop
Salt to taste

If you're reading anonymous in Australia, let me know how they taste. Just like the real thing? Maybe we'll have a natchester party if you ever come back to Fairbanks.

Graphic from this cool place here.

The Day the Music Died

2008-09-18T08:47:00.000-07:00

I absorbed the news that David Foster Wallace killed himself last week with the same feeling I used to get as a child listening to Don McLean's American Pie. A hollow sinking in the cavity where my stomach and my guts churn in an endless production of energy and waste, a glitch in the machinery that pulled my heart along with it, as if the whole works were tied to a lead balloon.

The kind of grief that isn't necessarily focused on the loss of a real person, but the idea of a person. The hope of a person. The nostalgia of loss.

"I can't remember if I cried, when I read about his widowed bride."

Wallace was more than a writer with a knack for creating realistic characters and vivid scenes, a refreshing way of blending words that felt more journalistic than patronizing. He did not keep us at arm's length. What really made him matter to me is that he cared. He cared so deeply about our future as humans, as individuals who would not be tied like a puppet to the strings of corporate campaigns.

Wallace couldn't stop worrying about us and what that meant about himself. All that scrutinizing would send him into an examination of the authenticity of observed thought, whether one could weigh how he felt about himself thinking about something without congratulating himself for bothering to care in the first place. He knew that being sincere was not a substitute for action and that made him worry even more.

I read his book Infinite Jest as a 20-something single person, not yet sure that I wanted to be a writer. I carried the brick weight of it back from Juneau, where I was working at a fundraiser for the Alaska-One public television network, trying to convince viewers to support public broadcasting, selling them on the idea of public broadcasting because it's something I've always believed in, even though I despair that it can ever accomplish what I hope for it.

Wallace knew that the selling of a brand is a powerful force. That we are all vulnerable to the pull of self-gratification, whether it's feeling good about buying into an ideology or the way a certain label makes us look. He wanted us to know that none of that mattered as much as living an examined life. He wasn't the first writer to tap into this yearning for authenticity, but maybe he's unique in modern times for the way he was all over it.

Infinite Jest is filled with scary examples from the not-so-distant future of the way advertising and the front men of corporations could infiltrate our lives and make decisions for us based on profitability alone. It's set in a time when even the identification of a year is up for sale, a chance for some mega-corporation to drum its brand into every person's reality. The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment. The Year of the Trial Size Dove Bar.

I felt that future coming closer in my job as a public radio announcer, editing copy that identified the Sorel Yukon Quest or Ronald Reagan Airport in Washington DC. Those are brands. We've been sold out.

Knowing that Wallace was vigilant seemed like enough somehow, as if society wouldn't totally sink into an anonymous morass. There would still be those who observed the game without buying into it. In a way, Wallace became a player, too. He wrote to connect, to inspire, to be a part of a community he cared about, the American people. And he was deified for it, given book contracts and attended to as something of a celebrity. Maybe that's what he couldn't take.

Don McLean wrote American Pie to communicate the changes this country went through between the years when Buddy Holly died and the triple assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King. An awakening that tore the blinders off a society, but also meant the end of the kind of innocence that believed in apple pies and Chevrolet, an innocence that we still buy to quench our thirst with every winning Morning in America and Country First political campaign.

I was too young to understand all of that as a pre-teen listening to the American Pie 45 my step-dad gave me, the same day he told me he couldn't adopt my sisters and I, that it wouldn't feel right to claim the spot my father had abandoned all those years before. He was so glad I cared about that song, wanted me to understand what happened to his country while he was growing up, a childhood stolen from him, too.

The end of innocence is always the beginning of an opportunity. To remember why anything matters in the first place, to remind ourselves about the tiny lessons we've learned and relearned along the way. The reasons to keep living even after the music dies.

Laughter Knows Best

2008-09-15T12:15:00.000-07:00

I feel a little better everytime I watch this. Why is humor so damn soothing? Now to get rid of my Sarah Palin glasses. Should I get some Sally Jesse Raphaels and stay with my 80s theme? Oh, yes. I had me some of these, before she became popular, of course. I'm the tsunami causing all these waves.

And Another One

2008-09-14T11:21:00.000-07:00

Looking for a way to make that energy rebate (aka cash for votes) our governor generously shepherded through the legislature right before she announced her candidacy for Vice-President of the United States work even harder?

I just heard this on AK, the weekend features show produced by the Alaska Public Radio Network. Make a donation to Planned Parenthood in Sarah Palin's name to thank her for leading the charge on what it means to be a woman who has a choice in her own reproduction.

What's your idea? Let's meme these nuggets of wisdom.

Photo Credit: From the public domain as a work of the United States Federal Government under the terms of Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 105 of the US Code.

Gas in the Tank

2008-09-10T18:32:00.000-07:00

(Nearly) Wordless Wednesday

After all that kvetching and research, I still haven't bought a new camera. The old one's working well enough to take a picture of my newest possession, which I purchased using our soon-to-be-deposited energy rebate. Is there anything as beautiful on this earth? I figured Polly (yeah, that's her name) would be a good way to reduce my energy consumption. Hey, Alaskans, feel free to pass this idea on like a mother-frakking meme.

The Politics of Personal Obsession

2008-09-08T00:01:00.000-07:00

I surprised myself with all the Palin posts last week. I wasn't planning to write much about politics during this presidential campaign.

Not that I never do. It's just that politics as a sport - the reporting of rumors and strategy and polls - seems so frantic, like a never-ending, constantly updating distraction from real life. A horse race. A greased pig scramble at the fair. A reason to forget about the things that should really matter.

Besides, I'd wasted weeks on the job as a local reporter talking about the same old problems with the same old elected officials who used every carefully crafted question to promise all kinds of promises and sneer thinly veiled insults at anyone who thought they might deserve a chance to govern. It got worse in each of my twenty years in journalism, an obstacle between me and the real "regular folks" I wanted to spend my time talking to.

Admittedly, I was caught up in this frenzy myself four years ago and four years before that. I googled and refreshed the pages on my favorite partison blogs, every free mintue was spent squinting in front of the computer. Inevitably I felt drained. Cheap and disappointed. This year would be different, I thought. I would let the political show take place under a big top that I never bothered buying tickets for. Far, far away from me.

Then I got sucked in again. As the anger rose and the depressions fell, I realized that it wasn't so much about whether or not the "right" person would win this time. I realized that my own carefully honed talking points about Alaska's Governor were falling away like so many autumn leaves. My Sarah was as much a myth as what was being presented to a national Republican audience. The facts were vague and parsed, carefully vetted for the people who mattered, and frankly, I liked the Old Coke.

Now that the smoke has cleared from the wildfire of the Palin nomination, the pungent smell still scenting the air, but not burning my lungs when I take a breath, I'm ready for a different approach. While the rest of the political investigation team follows every lead and tracks down every lie, maybe I will come out of this with a better understanding of who I am. Someone who's not immune to packaging and advertising. Someone who wants to believe in an individual, to trust that she is who she says she is. Someone who will keep looking for that kind of leader.

But someone who will probably never enjoy politics. I do know what interests me about it, though. Just like every other subject under the sun, it's what politics can teach us about ourselves. That, I can never get enough of.

Coming Home

2008-09-07T00:06:00.000-07:00

I wasn’t ready to come back. For the first time since moving to Alaska, I thought about not returning. Maybe it was the looming threat of winter. The rumors I’d heard about a wet, rainy August followed by the promise of a slow descent into cold and darkness.

Or maybe it was my parents. I spent about a month back East, in the place where I grew up. Back where my mom is starting to show signs of living with diabetes for three decades in her failing eyesight and propensity for infections. And my step-dad is still trying to do everything at 73 that he had the energy for at 64, and then some.

When I’m there, confronted with the reality of them aging, I start to feel guilty about not living closer and doing more to help. I wonder whether I should arrange for them to spend extra time with my son, offer him more memories than he can squeeze out of a few weeks a year. I wonder if it’s time to go back to the people who knew me when I was a child and took care of me, so I can return the favor. Maybe I’m just not cut out for the frontier lifestyle anymore, so far away from my roots.

A couple of days after we got back to Fairbanks, we rode over to Creamer’s Field to help harvest the garden we’d worked so hard to put in early this summer. We returned to an overflowing bounty of plants. We found borage grown to the size of an English hedge, sporting a halo of bees busy gathering pollen from the cucumber-tinted blue star blooms. Kale sprouted like a thicket. Sunflower stalks towered over me. We picked peas and dug up the best of a potato crop besieged by the voles that had tunneled holes throughout the beds.

On our way down the pebbly driveway toward the barn, a cacophony of birds rose up along the fields edging the lane. We were in the eye of the storm. Cranes and geese honked overhead. They flew in waves, lifting and falling in the air in a complicated ballet that was confusing in its intensity, almost too much to bear. Like a rookie at my first rock concert, I held my hands over my ears to muffle the sound as I looked around for the cause.

A juvenile eagle, not yet five years old judging from its mottled feathers and brown head, was perched at the top of the tallest tree for miles, a Suessian spruce in front of the farmhouse that towered over an expanse of land spreading out in every direction. These fields of barley and other grains provide fodder for thousands of migrating birds.

The eagle fluffed itself, turning its sharp beak, gulping at the air. It surveyed the subjects gathered at its feet, but took no notice. The only time it flinched was when a trio of troublesome ravens snuck in close to twist and turn in front of the regal eagle, school kids taunting the bully on the playground.

Crowds of children on a guided tour of the refuge listened to the biologists as they provided a play-by-play. “The birds are telling each other about the danger. They’re afraid of the eagle because it eats other birds.”

When the kids cried out that the eagle was a bad guy, they responded, “No, not really. It just wants to eat like the rest of us.”

My son and I weathered the long ride home from the East coast, more than 12 hours in airports and on a plane stuffed with people who started to look and talk more like me the farther west we traveled. We were all returning in time to take advantage of the last fishing and gardening opportunities of the summer. To get ready for the hunting season ahead, a chance to feed our families, just like that eagle.

We woke up early the next morning after only a few hours sleep, in a new time zone, blinded by the light of the slanting late August sun. On the way to visit some friends, we passed our neighbors coming home from the school where Owen’s friend Ellie is starting kindergarten and where he’ll follow her next fall. We got caught up on the news, and when I looked at my son, he was smiling and relaxed in the presence of people who’ve known him all his life.

As we rode away he said with a sigh, “I’m so glad to be home.”

To be published in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, September 14, 2008

Picking Blackberries

2008-09-06T00:07:00.000-07:00

I've been reading Galway Kinnell in my journey toward understanding poetry. He's one of the country's best known poets, admired for his out-loud voice and deep affection for life. He's won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and published his eleventh collection last year at the age of 80.

But I started at the beginning. As Kinnell was preparing the poems in the collection Three Books for their latest edition, he expected them to need only a little tweaking. "I confess I was startled to find at this late date so many weaknesses." He blames Horace's well-known pronouncement, that a poet must wait ten years to see what he has wrought.

In his poem “Blackberry Eating,” Kinnell goes out to pick some fat, overripe, icy black blackberries for breakfast, “the stalks very prickly, a penalty they earn for knowing the black art of blackberry making.”

That reminds me of a different poem about blackberries. Nancy Pagh calls them fat ladies, says there are eight hundred sixty-four poems about blackberries published in English. (Does hers make 865?) They grow on low runners that snake unplanted along the driest hillsides of coastal British Columbia, “the tight knot of their fruit is smaller than all others, and shaped like the bud of your own coldest nipple.”

They fall “almost unbidden” onto Kinnell’s tongue, just as they “push into every unclaimed corner of the neighborhoods” where Pagh lives. My journey is to find the connections between these ripe fruits and the way language can be a type of black magic, intoxicating and relentless in its quest for new growth.

I know the master would scoff at my attempts, the student trying to outdo him and with barely ten days between writing and publishing, still I’m inspired to share my own blackberry poem. This is a cinquaine, a form made up of five lines arranged in this way: Line 1 is one word (the title). Line 2 is two words that describe the title. Line 3 is three words that tell the action. Line 4 is four words that express the feeling. Line 5 is one word that recalls the title.

Blackberries

Unintended consequence,
Our walk's discovery.
Sweet pleasure, sidewalk bounty.
Abundance.

She's Only Been the Nominee for Six Days

2008-09-04T10:29:00.000-07:00

And My Head Hurts

I guess I'm an emotional voter. I never believed that about myself, thinking I cared more about the issues than the personalities. Then I got dumped by the extreme political heartbreak known as the Sarah Palin Vice Presidential Campaign. Not that I've ever voted for her, but I did do something I have rarely done. I liked a Republican.

I liked the Governor Palin I saw on TV. She was funny and smart and sassy. She stood up to Alaskan Republican Party Boss Randy Ruedrich and the other mean boys. She had babies and followed her own dreams. I imagined us glossing over our differences - It's OK honey, I don't think you should be allowed to choose your own reproductive path, but I'll be sure to stop by with some hand-me-down baby clothes - and bonding over the way four-year-old boys think they know everything.

But now that she's running for Vice President, she's sold all that independence for a few beans and a chance to parade her family in front of the national news media. All of a sudden, this small town girl (who's from the fastest growing city in the state, a suburb of Anchorage, one of the folks who've put the urban in the rural/urban divide) is ignoring the ones who brung her for a whole new set of suitors.

She's hypocrisy spruced up with a little red lipstick. A woman picked to placate the right-wing elite who rails against insider Washington. A fundamentalist Christian who thinks God speaks to the president, that the Iraq War is God's task, yet calls herself his humble servant. She's Alaska's servant who took the first attractive job offer to come her way, leaving the dirty dishes still piled in the sink. She's the successful young journalist who now denounces the news media for daring to call her inexperienced. The candidate who diminished the job just a few months ago, saying, "What is it exactly that the VP does every day? I'm used to working real hard."

Then there's the speech. The Speech. All anyone is talking about today is that speech. The newscaster at our local public radio station said Palin proved she was ready to be Vice President with that speech. ("Sarah Palin erased any concerns that she's not ready for national politics last night, pulling off a smooth and animated acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in Minnesota.") Others said it sounded student councilish, like something out of the same divisive playbook that George Bush has used for the past eight years.

I'm still looking for the silver lining, though. That little smudge of pink along the smoggy horizon of air pollution. Now that our Sarah is running for national office, the whole world will be investigating her past. Maybe they'll do the job we Alaskans haven't been so good at, looking behind those pretty outfits in the closet to find the truth about her.

Let the Spin Begin

2008-09-01T10:50:00.001-07:00

You know all those rumours about the Palins' oldest daughter being pregnant and Sarah covering it up for her? Well, as they say, the truth will emerge like panty lines under a too tight skirt. Looks like 17-year-old Bristol was covering something up when she was carrying her little brother at the big Vice Presidential candidate reveal.

She's pregnant. And her proud parents couldn't be happier.

This makes me question the judgement of our Moral and Upright Governor even more. Bad enough to drag your vulnerable family into the world spotlight with its endless speculation and gossip just for a chance to aid your Party when it's down and take a short cut towards advancing your own career. Even better to do it when your child is preoccupied with the biggest responsibility she will ever face. The birth and parenting of her first child.

Some blogs are declaring a Palin-free blogging day to celebrate the holiday, but I couldn't resist watching the McCain camp spin this one. Turns out they knew about the news and decided it didn't disqualify her candidacy. (Neither did her complete lack of national governing experience or background in world issues.) Turns out they revealed the truth to stop the "mud slinging and lies" (which were actually true before they were lies). Turns out some of the "liberal blogs" spreading these rumours "even had Barack Obama's name in them."

Gasp. Now they're really grasping for something negative to say about the Democratic candidate. Those blogs had McCain's name on them, too. As in, "We can't wait until the national threat of a McCain Presidency goes away."

The teen pregnancy epidemic is such a crock to begin with and we can thank conservative activists for dragging it into the government's sphere of outrage. People have sex. People have babies. It's better if they wait, but that is one strong force to override with government spending and stick-you-head-in-the-sand virginity pledges. The important thing is to take responsibility for what happens. And hopefully, to support your family members if it happens, not feed them to the media lions. According to the Palins, Bristol and the baby's father will marry. What's next? His tour of duty to Iraq?

This feels like a movie script even Hollywood couldn't believe in.

Tip o' the keyboard to Maureen Dowd.

Then Came Anger

2008-08-31T17:47:00.000-07:00

Stages of Grief

Ever since Friday's big announcement, that Republican Presidential Candidate John McCain has chosen Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate, I've been doing a little running myself. Cycling through the stages of grief, but in reverse order.

First came acceptance. After all, Palin has what's been called an 85% approval rating among Alaskans. And I'm one of the Alaskans who approve. When she defeated His Royal Heiney Frank Murkowski in the Republican primary two years ago, she finally broke up the Good Old Boys network that has long ruled the state. She fought and won a statewide campaign without the support of the Republican Party Leadership and continues to defy and disagree with them publicly. I don't agree with all her positions, but so far have liked much of what she's done. Like many of the state's growing Progressive movement, I considered myself a fan.

Then came depression. How could John McCain choose a 20-month Alaska Governor, plucking her out of our tiny little pond and thrusting her into the big, wide ocean, as his running mate. What is she, some kind of anadromous fish? Our own species of salmon?

Then a sort of bargaining state settled in. Maybe this would be a good thing, exciting even. Alaskans would have a reason to pay attention to the election. People would talk about us, care what we think. Pay attention to our three delegates. Ask questions. And good for her. Why shouldn't a small-town mother of five have a taste of this kind of success.

But what's good for the state is nowhere near what the country needs. It's a double whammy. If the McCain Palin ticket succeeds in November, Alaska will be left without the leadership responsible for getting us into the AGIA agreement with TransCanada, while we put up a half billion dollars so the oil company can get started on the necessary federal permits. The country will be getting an inexperienced Vice President who simply looks good next to the oldest president ever inaugurated. Another "let 'em learn on the job" Republican.

What a lesson in tokenism. No reason to aspire to higher education or real world experience, kids. Just go to church and maybe someday you can be the president of the United States.

And now comes anger. I'm so mad that Sarah Palin has lied to Alaskans, running for higher office while her own term is still in its infancy. Sarah Palin needs to stay here and finish what she started, the job Alaskans elected her to do.

You Say You Want Some Dirt

2008-08-30T09:33:00.000-07:00

Yesterday's announcement that Alaska Governor Sarah Palin will be abandoning her position at the helm of state government, still in its infancy, to run on John McCain's Republican presidential ticket swirled up a cloud of dust in the blogosphere. Sure, she's a right-wing hypocrite. A do-as-I-say, not-as-I-do conservative. Plenty to complain about there.

The fact that she chose to carry a special needs baby to term when she would prefer the state have a stake in deciding the fate of other women in the same position. The fact that she's earned a reputation as a budget-cutting crusader at a time of record high oil prices and an Exxon Valdez-worthy flood of cash into state coffers. The fact that her gamble with a state gasline project has yet to pay off.

Plenty of other commentators with better qualifications have detailed these discretions, as well as John McCain's disappointing decision to run his campaign as a cult of personality instead of focusing on the issues. Or his lack of a platform. No new strategy for Iraq. No real plan for weaning this country off its dependency on foreign oil. Instead he's picked a fresh, young face to stand beside him on the stage

For me personally, Palin was the ideologically-different politician I could respect. Someone who stood up for openness and might actually make a difference at home, but she's just become a big disappointment. She promised to put Alaska first, then took the first opportunity to waltz off into a national political scene. One of the best things about her administration so far has been its relative openness, a propensity for those in her administration to be responsive to reporters and somewhat candid in their conversations. Expect all that to stop.

Now that she's joined the big show, that famous smile of hers already looks more plastic. A wedding-day mask meant to distract us from the real work of a marriage, the drudgery of raising families in a capitalistic society determined to make mindless consumers out of us, the endless negotiations and compromises, the power struggles and the fifty percent divorce rate. I guess we'll call this one uncontested.

Seriously?

2008-08-29T21:04:00.000-07:00

So far the reaction among my friends to the announcement that Republican Presidential Candidate John McCain has chosen Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his VP running mate is, "Don't leave us." Granted, most of us didn't vote for her, except maybe in the primary if we were registered Independent or Undeclared and had a choice of ballots. I mean, we're all pro-choice. Still, she's the best thing that's happened to Alaska politics in a long time, what with her independent streak and all. But to leave us now, with a gas line pending and an energy crises looming, seems a bit unfair.

Still, this will give Alaskans a reason to watch the presidential election circus for the first time in decades. We finally have a stake in the game. Usually we're just a paltry three delegate state, with no one in the media on the national beat even bothering to check in with Alaska voters. This time around, Barack Obama's set up a home base in Alaska and now our Governor and perhaps even our Lieutenant Governor have a stake in the national elections. All that and a record setting permanent fund dividend, not to mention an energy rebate. It's gonna be a good year.

Right Back Where I Started

2008-08-25T04:13:00.000-07:00

Oh my, how the time does fly. When I decided to take a break from daily blogging, I didn't mean to make it permanent. Being on the road for a month just seemed like a good time for a vacation from the Internet. Please don't take it personally. I'm back and will be dabbling here once again. There will be weird weather reports and maybe even one more installation of "look at my new haircut." I'm still training for that marathon, too. So many things to write about, so little reason to think they deserve a blog post. I've missed you, though. That's why I'm back.

Learning to Swim

2008-08-24T00:16:00.000-07:00

My son’s learning to swim. He works on his flutter kick in the bathtub, riding the porcelain waves while his moon face struggles to stay above the horizon. Eyelashes soaked to three times their normal size ring his wide eyes before he squeezes them shut to dive under again.

He’s come a long way since the winter, when I announced that we were signing him up for lessons. “I already know how to swim,” he said with all the confidence of a boy who could walk around in the shallow end, arms flailing. If he could only stay this way, just turned four and an expert at everything.

I wanted to be a swimmer when I was young. Since we didn’t have a pool, I never knew the perfection of springing off the side from a motionless stance, one foot on the block and one foot back, my arms outstretched and my hands cupped in the perfect angle of attack, reaching for palms of water to propel me to the finish line.

Fairbanks has an active swimming program, so I harbor hopes that my son will get hooked. The thing every parent tries to avoid but gets sucked in by the undertow, living their dreams through their children. Over the winter I enrolled my son in the beginner lessons offered by the borough. The only drawback is the lack of space. Since sign ups are on a first-come, first-served basis, the potential of failure spurs parents to greater feats of strength to prove their kids deserve a spot.

For my first attempt, I accompanied a friend who knew the routine. We made plans to share coffee and chair duties, car pooling to the pool, where we would wait outside in the 20 below temperatures until the building opened. From there, I was warned, we would get a number and then have to wait some more. Until it was time to pay.

The doors were already open when we arrived, so we squeezed into the foyer’s worth of space, taking advantage of the heat and the satisfying hum of the waiting chatter. I liked it, leaning against the glass doors, watching the parents talk about swim teams and lessons. There was something comforting about the routine.

With another 30 minutes to go, a bogged-down mother appeared, infant car seat on one arm, cup of coffee in the other, wearing the kind of look on her face that tells the world this is not an easy job. She huffed and shuffled the weight of her load from one hip to the other. “You people know you’re bringing this on yourselves,” she announced to the room. “If we all just came when the doors opened, we wouldn’t have to wait.”

We absorbed her words with a few moments of respectful silence, but the happy hum of voices soon started up again. Even though she was right about the actions of humans weaving patterns that sometimes become a reason for themselves, most of us were content to be there. The truth is, some of these parents don’t actually mind. They look at the ritual as a chance to get away from the house for awhile. To wait in adult silence with friends before the tug of kids on our hands takes away any chance for an uninterrupted conversation.

For me it was a rite of passage, like sleeping out all night for front row seats at a performance of your favorite band. The kind of tradition that might not last, now that on-line reservations keep us all separate in our homes, tapping keys or asking an operator for tickets. So I’ll be showing up again this fall to sign my son up for more lessons.

He wants to learn how to swim across the pool underwater and pick something off the bottom. He wants to swim in the ocean, streaking through the waves like they were made of air. Now he sees a hint of how much more there is to explore, even if you already know how to swim.

Published in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner August 24, 2008

Everybody Knows Your Name

2008-08-23T04:25:00.000-07:00

I saw an old friend at the grocery store the other day. I knew her face right away, although it took a few moments for the details to catch up. We lived in the same village for a couple of years. While I worked at the public radio station, she taught at the local school.

Both of us came from other places, where Alaska was probably just a punch line, a looming character in a tall tale about rogue bears and a wilderness Mecca. We were newcomers together at an extended summer camp, destined to know each other because of our strangeness.

My friend has a daughter who was a little older than my son is now when we lived in the village. As we talked, her new grandson smiled and cooed from his perch in the front of the cart. We spent a few minutes catching up on the people we knew, marveling at the familiar clichés. The one about how fast time flies and the other one that says we never would have believed we’d actually be this old someday.

Then she looked at her watch, said she had to go, and turned the corner into the diary aisle. I thanked the grocery store fates for letting me see her again.

When I was little, people were always stopping to talk to my step-dad at the market. On hot summer days with the cool of the produce fans prickling my bare arms and legs, I wondered who all those people were. People I had never seen before, who obviously knew my dad much longer than me. They were evidence that he had a life before I came along.

My step-dad stayed in the same town where he grew up. He only left for a year when his military orders took him to Germany, then came right back to the place where he went to high school with some of the same people now calling out his name. He knew their sisters and their brothers. They’d married friends of his. His whole life story was right there for anyone to see.

He lives in the same house he bought with his first wife when it was still new, only one previous owner in the public file. His neighbors Larry and Harry lived on either side of my dad, whose name is Barry. They stayed that way for years, all those “arries” in a row, until Harry sold his house to be closer to the kids. Larry and his wife don’t live on the other side either, although their son does. He gets the mail for my dad when he’s out of town.

I always wanted to live in a place where people would know my name, but I left my childhood home right after graduation. I wanted to see the world, too. I yearned to discover something different than what my family knew. Maybe even something better. I didn’t know that I would find the same challenges no matter where I went, and that family and friends - a good support system - would make meeting them easier.

When I go to Pennsylvania, to the place where I learned to ride a bike and wrote my first stories, the place I once called home, no matter how hard I scan all those faces in the malls and public spaces, I never run into anyone I know.

Now that my husband and I have lived in our house in downtown Fairbanks for a few years, we’re starting to recognize the people around us. We’ve watched the first batch of kids leave the nest, like the young lady who grew up in a house down the street and cut my hair for awhile. Maybe she’ll come back someday to marvel at my own grown child.

When my sister and her husband came to visit a couple years ago, they were amazed at how friendly the people in Fairbanks are. I told them our town is just small enough to keep us that way, protecting us from the kind of numbers that we would have to avert our eyes from in order to avoid exhaustion. I spend my days smiling at people I don't know and always expecting to run into someone I do. Which I did, a lot, when they were here.

“You sure know a lot of people,” they said as they stood by in the grocery store, trying to keep all the connections straight, telling me with their amazed smiles how lucky I am to live here.

Published in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner August 10, 2008

On My Knees

2008-08-22T15:40:00.000-07:00

Not having a garden in my backyard doesn’t mean I didn’t do my share of gardening this summer. I spent several rainy mornings with my knees in the dirt, fingertips stained with mud. On hot days, the sun looked over my shoulder, leaving a ring of red in a spot revealed by my outstretched arms, a smiley shape between my shirt and my pants, a place I never imagined needing sunscreen.

I watched sprightly carrot tops struggle to stay afloat in a sea of grass and celebrated when, after prying each moist clump wriggling with sea tentacle roots free, those sprigs seemed to stand a little taller. They only needed a drink of water, weak as they were from the effort and a little lonely after losing their grass support system.

Peas and beets, turnips and lettuce, spinach and potatoes all grew in this garden not in my own backyard, wowing the visitors to the Creamer’s Field Wildlife Refuge. They came expecting to see birds and dragonflies at work in their winged efforts. The garden reminded them of home. They admired the huge potato plants, sometimes mistaking them for tomatoes. They wondered why we planted in exposed beds (to get warmer soil) and if that didn’t dry them out faster (it did). Sometimes they even crouched down beside us and pulled a few weeds as we adjusted the hoses so the garden could get a good soak.

I learned my lessons, too. That knotweed is actually a weed, even though it sounds like “not a weed” when my mentor advised me whether or not to pull its bamboo-jointed stalks from along the edges of the rows. What I didn’t know about the long, creeping rhizomes with zigzagging twigs could fill a produce share bursting with kale and chard. We encouraged the occasional interloper, letting unidentified plants thrive out of the way of vegetables until their identities were known, but I pulled this intruder before it could set up shop. Before it could sprout stems ten feet tall fringed with sprays of tiny white flowers that hypnotize with their sweet scent while the plant takes over.

We let the borage grow, though, thinning it out as the hearty survivors sprouted succulent cucumber-tinted leaves and star-belled flowers. A new lemon-scented herb was also welcomed, who cares how large those clover leaves might get. We rubbed our fingers in the velvety petals, sniffing them for a pick-me-up as we worked the unending rows.

Creamer’s was once a dairy, its proud barn still carrying the family name on the roof. In the years since Anna Creamer maintained a sprawling garden to feed the household, local volunteers have resurrected and tended a smaller version. Recently it’s been staffed by a group of parents whose children run through the rows like mice in a maze while the grownups tend to the garden. All summer the kids made forts under the towering spruce tree and climbed the chokecherry’s limbs, sometimes pausing to pick peas from the teepee (tee-pea) trellis or inspect a beckoning nasturtium. They made chains out of dandelions and caught long-horn whitespotted sawyer beetles mid-flight.

Not all the beneficiaries of this garden were human. A woodchuck claimed its share before the starts were even planted, sneaking out at night to nibble its favorites. These low to the ground mammals with the tiny paws of a poodle can run as fast as a dog. Strict vegetarians, they don’t confine themselves to woody plants. Our garden provided a nice complement to the bed and breakfast it set up under the Visitor’s Center porch. Each week we’d return to see what the animal had favored while we were gone.

A returning volunteer told us that once a family of woodchucks nested right in the middle of the garden, ignoring the fist shakes and epitaphs hurled their way when they popped their heads out to inspect the day laborers. Could all these woodchucks be the descendents of animals that watched the cows being milked, the cream separated and poured into glass jars, the fields planted in field peas and oats. Have they been nourishing waves of offspring from this garden while seeking refuge under the same farmhouse that sheltered the humans?

Maybe now they’re witnessing a new generation of farmers coax a meal from the earth, while the next plays along the fringes and learns the lesson of what it takes to make a garden grow.

Published in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner July 27, 2008

Star Light, Star Bright

2008-07-16T00:50:00.000-07:00

(Nearly) Wordless Wednesday

I planted several columbines in the plot along our back door years ago, after first admiring their perennial goodness in other beds. The way they seemed to take over a garden, propagating and proliferating, sending shooting stars forth from clover-shaped leaves, each flower a rocket on a skinny stalk that defied gravity by keeping itself stiff. The intervening summers started out with the promise of tiny columbine leaves pebbling across the soil, the stepping stones of potential plants that never yielded any luck in the form of a bloom. Finally this year, a display of sorts. One late bud, followed by another and then another. Maybe it's the beginning of a new tradition.

Idle Fingers

2008-07-15T00:18:00.000-07:00

I haven't been knitting much lately. The same unpaired sock sits in my basket while others were strung out on my needles, taking up all my attention. Letting me finish them without a thought to loyalty and who got there first.

But even that has slowed down. Sometimes when these summer days stretch out with legs that go down to there, I find myself losing focus. The distracting force of endless sunny mornings and light bright afternoons and evenings lit with a torch that burns my face as it streams in through the kitchen window while I do the dishes. It all keeps me away from my routine.

Like blogging. I started the year with a goal of posting every day while the earth completed its arbitrary turn around the sun, keeping us pinned to the surface by the force of its spin. Who's to say what marks the beginning and the end, other than generations of tradition and a careful observation of cycles. I was excited by the challenge, looking forward to a year's worth of original writing and a glimpse of what I'd done once the inevitable end arrived.

After a few months, I faltered. I thought about quitting. A little mind game two-step and some encouraging words from a friend helped me find new strength. I re-set my goal to the next best mark. Mid-year. Once I reached the end of June, I figured, the rest of the year would come easily, like the down after you've run up the hill or the back of an out-and-back marathon. I didn't anticipate how strong the pull away from this seat, from this routine, would be.

Quitting my daily blog commitment now is not such a big thing. I already have so much success, the beginnings and sometimes middles and even ends of many essays, all waiting patiently in a folder on my desktop for me to revise, beckoning me to comb out the snarls and shore up those healthy locks. Waiting for me to find the way to their finish and then send them out into the world to look for a new home.

There's something else. I don't want to sound whiny or ungrateful, but someone important to me is leaving and that makes me so sad that I have to remind myself to keep moving, keep planning for a life when she won't be here. Even though we won't see each other as often, I need to remember that we'll be going through the same familiar motions that overlap in experience and provide starting points of understanding, a place to learn from each other and feel for each other. I'll feel her energy surging through the path of least resistance, whether that's in the word, over the Internet or, less often, face-to-face. The flow of waves like water that won't be dammed.

I'll still blog. And knit, too. Maybe with increasing frequency at those times when I need these activities to keep part of my mind occupied while the rest works on some problem or tries to fill empty space. Maybe when I'm lonely or wondering how I feel about something. And I know she'll be there, too.

Backyard Wilderness

2008-07-13T09:21:00.000-07:00

I finally gave up. Every year I tried to plant vegetables in my tired plots. Too lazy to add new soil or build some raised beds, I defined insanity by plunking down fistfuls of cash for hearty starts budding with promise.

And every year the same thing happened. Nothing.

Sure, the plants grew a bit, what wouldn’t in this land of wet and warmth, the sun pulling all-nighters so even my dumb-start developmental offerings had a chance. No vegetables, though, nothing like what my produce-sharing neighbors got, prompting moans of too many zukes and an overabundance of roots.

This year was different. I decided deep in the stasis of winter, having secured us a regular spot in our favorite Community Supported Agriculture farm, that I would let the garden areas go wild, as an experiment of sorts. I wanted to see what would grow if I just left the dirt alone.

Actually, I started a couple of years ago with the smallest plot. Each healthy start would settle into the dirt dense with roots and – just exist. The ground already belonged to a plant I didn’t recognize by its pointy new spears, reddish green and ropy when I tried to pull them out, holding on to the earth like a kitten clings to a sock, all claws and nothing to lose.

When I got pregnant with my son, I decided to save my maternal attentions for a more promising patch, so I let that squatter takeover. By the following year there was a leafy green bush there, vibrant with leaves carrying a trace of a five o’clock shadow and thorns, not quite the dew-claw daggers of a rose, but sharp still the same. The following summer brought tight white blooms that fell off to reveal the unmistakable gems of a raspberry bush. Who knew what dormant treasures were waiting in the rest of my yard? Maybe ferns unfurling with a wave to the madness of spring, majestic irises or some other local celebrity.

What I got was mostly weeds, but some of my favorite plants bear that name. At my friend Lynne’s house, I admired a succulent stalk with stunning leaves. She told me it was called Jewelweed, easy to transfer and easily reaching heights in excess of five feet. That’s the plant for me, I thought. She promised to give me some starts. Later that day at an event sponsored by the Friends of Creamer’s Field, she found a brochure about invasive non-indigenous plants; a most wanted list featuring the star of her own yard in its centerfold.

I’ve admired many of those same plants, counting them among the welcome intruders in my backyard wilderness. The alluring butter and eggs, with its towering stalks and snapdragon-shaped flowers; the aromatic bird vetch sprouting in billowing clouds of cobalt blue; and the stately Siberian Pea Shrub, recommended as a good privacy shield by the utility workers who came to trim back our unwieldy trees.

Weed’s a label that’s thrown around like dandelion spores, so it’s hard to know when we should be cautious. Fireweed, considered invasive in Europe, is one of my favorite plants. Watching it sprout in meadows along the Kenai Peninsula helped me decide to stay. If this is what Alaska calls a weed, I thought, I must be in the right place.

I know scientists have the best interest of the ecosystem in mind when they release these lists of noxious plants, but I can’t help wonder whether somebody might just banish me from the Garden of Eden I’ve made for myself. Like the Freeze Frame cartoon by Fairbanks artist Jaimie Smith featuring a white professor, who says spit flying and zeal emanating, “We must act now to eradicate any non-indigenous invasive species! Once established, there’s no telling what havoc they will wreak upon the natural order!!” I’m with the native man who says, “OK. Get out.”

Some of the invasive species on the list are useful. There’s pineappleweed with a sweet scent released by a pinch of its velvet flowers, aromatherapy for my sun-stroked soul. Chickweed, which is good in salads. Even lambquarters with an iron and protein content higher than spinach, much harder to grow in my garden. Maybe that’s one way to stop the spread. Harvest edible weeds before they go to seed and toss them into the dinner.

Most of these weeds are here because of us anyway. Newly disturbed land encourages growth for the first act that comes to town. They sprout up along new trails and hitchhike into National Parks on our wheels. I’m fascinated by the way destruction benefits the ecosystem. The way wildfire helps spread some of these plants like a gardener tilling the land. My husband is a firefighter and he’s the wildfire in our garden, cutting down trees and tearing up the raspberry bush in the spring when it’s time to remove the snow.

I think of him when I'm angry as a destructive force, an interloper messing with my wilderness. And then I’m awed by the rejuvenating power of his actions when the raspberries come back twice as thick and abundant as before.

Published in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner July 13, 2008

Double Time

2008-07-08T10:00:00.000-07:00

I don't mind when it rains.

I always believed there'd be a Westfalia under every rainbow. So, where's the other one?

Not Much Running

2008-07-06T12:37:00.000-07:00

Date: July 5, 2008
Mileage: 25
July Mileage: 40

Mid-way up a seven-mile hill, shifting gears with a panicky, click, tic, whirr, click, looking for that magic chain length that will give my legs reason to believe. Proof that I might make it to the end of this cross training ride.

I consider turning around, abandoning the longest trek I've taken a bike yet.

The sweat dries from my arms in the buffeting winds, just as fast as my skin glistens with it, but not before the salt leaks into my eyes, mixing with my tears. I'm pushing past an arbitrary limit, a place I haven't taken my body yet. There are doubts. My mind plays tricks on me, tells me I might as well give up, I'm going so slow. Makes me look for a way out in every passing car.

Suddenly a voice rises above it all - the wind, the pain, the dialogue in my brain. A not-so-nice, kind of whiny voice coming from the trailer behind the bike. A fifty-pound, dragging-it-around-on-top-of-everything-else-I'm-trying-to-do-here voice.

"Why is this taking so long?"

Everybody's a critic.

Where I've Been

2008-07-05T21:34:00.000-07:00

Sprinklers. Sparklers. Skinned
knees. Sweaty heads. Drowning here
in summer's cauldron.

Does Cross Training Count?

2008-06-30T09:01:00.000-07:00

Date: June 23
Mileage: 4
June Mileage: 34
Cross Training Mileage: 64

I'm a little behind. I've got plenty of miles under my waistline, but they've been mostly on a bike. The freedom those wheels provide. You can go for miles, legs pumping, lungs stretching, muscles hardening. And get something positive done at the same time, a chore at the end of the line or a playdate for my kid. It's much easier to go somewhere on a bike than rearrange my schedule so I can run solo.

Now that I'm back on my feet, the pavement hurts more than I remember. My knees are sore. I've got a sort of limp to my stride. My breathing sounds funny. Is that a flutter in my heartbeat? Maybe I should rethink this marathon, just change my strategy and plan to ride along the race course on my bike, support a friend instead.

I've trained like this before, so I remember the feeling. Just when you think you've got the schedule and the practice down, running everyday, even when you don't want to, knowing that you can keep going without too much pain, adding on the miles like the sunny hours in an Interior summer day. Then suddenly running hurts again. The bargaining starts. The platitudes, too.

"I don't need to finish the race to get the benefits."
"The exercise is the important thing."
"At least I tried."

Sometimes taking an inventory is all you need. Self-examination, asking yourself what you really want, weighing the risks and the benefits . . . all the grown-up bits of being an adult. I'm just glad to have a different sort of goal in mind. Something that takes me out of my writer's mind and away from all the responsibilities of a family and a household. If I spend the rest of the summer flying down the bike trails, towing a kid in the trailer and feeling my heart's role in this whole thing, maybe that will be enough.

Museum Connections

2008-06-29T00:02:00.000-07:00

Fairbanks often feels like a living museum. A place where pipeline parts serve as front yard planters and rusty old engines decorate public spaces. Our kids grow up among relics from the past. Like the sawmill we found last week at Pioneer Park. Maybe it was used to cut the boards for the same cabins now strewn along the street in the Gold Rush Town, a replica of tea shops and souvenir stands. We can run down the middle of the road like visitors from another time.

Playing among these pieces of history and knowing what they mean are two different things. That’s what real museums are good at. We’ve got plenty of those, too. The giant among them, the University of Alaska's Museum of the North.

My friend Jill grew up climbing on its boulder–sized copper nuggets, reverently touching the salt lamps that glow with the earth’s own force. The building may not have been as impressive, with its renovated glacier-inspired curves, but many of the same specimens are still there, summoning our sons like Longhorned Beetles to a moose hide. When we bring both our boys to the museum, one adult actually gets a chance to look around while the other wrangles the kids. Our job is to help them make connections between what they’re seeing and what they’ve experienced in their own lives.

My son, who’s four, dreams of traveling to Mars to count volcanoes. He wonders what meteoroids look like and how they land on earth. Maybe that’s why he spots the display about the Hubble Space Telescope right away. Tucked inside the entrance to the Gallery of Alaska, in a case I’d overlooked on scores of visits before, he sees meteorites, chunks of debris caught in our atmosphere. He kneels down, points to each piece. We talk about where the rocks were found, what that must have been like, to pick up a meteor in your own backyard. And there in the front, a chunk of space rock found right here in Alaska.

Two-year-old Harper looks for the bison, perched high above the room on top of the display case in the Interior Gallery. “Come down buffalo,” he shouts. He’s been obsessed ever since he touched a bison’s thick hide at our house, the result of a state permit drawn by my lucky husband and weeks of walking around farmers’ fields in Delta Junction, proof that we still gather food from the land just like people have done for thousands of years.

Then Owen pipes up. “I want to show you something.” He leads us to a porcupine display. “Watch out for those sharp points,” he tells Harper. We talk about the quills and how the animal uses them to protect itself. The conversation is brief, because now they’re both looking at something else.

Folded into the display cases surrounding the main exhibit are drawers full of samples. Kids can open these and look inside. Harper explores the drawers themselves, watching how they open and close, experimenting with where to put his fingers so they won’t get pinched. Owen notices the different colors of weasel fur and surmises that the white pelt must be from an animal caught in the winter. “And maybe this brown one was from the summer.” He notices that they look different in between seasons, mottled with both brown and white.

Now the kids are restless, so we explore the building itself. The stairs where they can look out the windows as they climb. Owen says it looks like we’re higher than the mountains, the towering Alaska Range with some of the continent’s highest peaks. On the first floor, we notice objects from the surrounding world: airplanes and birds, dandelions and cars.

And then, before we leave, a visit to the Western and Arctic Coast display. The boys pretend to be whale hunters climbing into kayaks. We talk about how the hunters feed the whole village with the meat, use the oil to provide heat and light, and then create dances to tell the story of the hunt.

All these stories of long ago people. Some of them stretching back even further. As we leave the museum, I ask the boys about their favorite thing. “Dinosaurs,” they say. They’re fascinated by animals that lived here before humans were even a gleam in evolution's eye, only overlapping in proximity to some of the same plants and maybe the dragonflies that play in the midnight sun, the light glinting off their jeweled wings.

Museums are supposed to connect us to the past. They remind us who we were and how we found our way to what we’ve become. Walking through the halls of a building that stands in a valley carved by a glacier, seeing items that have been in this collection since my friend Jill was a child, watching our own children explore, I realize they help connect us to the future, too.

Published in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, June 29, 2009

Midnight Sun

2008-06-28T00:06:00.000-07:00

This is what it's like to live under the steady gaze of the sun . . . full frontal in parade formation, never turning, no blinking. The horizon shrugging off its role as a bedroom respite, the moon appearing naked. No velvet backdrop to cloak the delicate craters of its face. Clocking long hours with that weak beam, the sun's a constant companion checking up on our progress, a productive parent not ready to let the kids have a life of their own. No need for a night light, the kids who go to bed at a regular time hear the calls of their neighbors at play past ten. They will fall asleep in a tired heap, still squinting against the persistence of the light. The clock ticks, ticks, ticks. The day never really ends. Relentless, this sun by your side, above your head, in your face. But don't ask, there is no future in this relationship. Soon the sun will be gone. A deadbeat dad, with only a paltry support check to remember it by.

Unless, of course, it rains.

Family Ties

2008-06-27T00:05:00.000-07:00

I told a friend recently that I didn't really write about my son anymore, that I was focusing on the bigger picture. That he had a right to his privacy besides. Those words sounded so good when they were being said. It took me almost a day to realize how pretty-pouted the lies.

Because of course, my son still shows up in my work. Sometimes he's a protagonist and other times he's a pair of fresh eyes. Or a metaphor for hope, the future. I want my use of his perspective to become more sophisticated. Instead of observing him and documenting his escapades in detail, I'm trying to pull my own story out of the experience. Keep the focus on me.

Realizing all this makes me feel some compassion towards Rebecca Walker, whom I've been criticizing recently for crucifying her mom in public, something she might feel is in retaliation for past sins, or maybe she doesn't even realize what she's doing. She's just writing to figure out how she feels, like the rest of us. Still, she might need some distance. Maybe that crutch has worn out, the rubber arm cushion cracked and peeling and pinching her skin.

Sometimes that hurts, to hear that your own writing has become trite or harsh, a parched throat at the end of a run, but pain often leads to revelation. We need to understand that our brains are like water, seeking the path of least resistance, pooling up in eddies that whirlpool lazily in the sun so the rest of the current can charge downstream. When I talked a few weeks ago about boring blog posts featuring cute kids, I was really talking about myself, trying to stand tall in the current and not be pulled down by the undertow.

As much as I admire Alice Walker and want to defend her as I make my own mistakes in this balancing act of motherhood and writing, I'm drawn to the experiences of another Pulitzer Prize winning writer. Anne Tyler found inspiration in the vocation of raising kids. "They may have slowed down my writing for a while, but then when I did write, I had more of a self to speak from." Tyler doesn't play one pursuit against another, rather she conjures up characters while she vacuums and writes down dialogue at the school when it's time to pick up the kids.

This way is not always perfect. Sometimes the dishes don't get done or a story never gets told. Still the balance speaks to a part of me that says, "You are not a fixed entity, a burned out star. You are a changing orbit, an evolving organism, a part of nature forever and for always, before your birth and after your death. An observer, too."

I don't try to be a perfect parent. I'm happy for the successes, the moments of joy, but despair speaks to me, too, gives me something to set my sights on, a surveyor's fixed point of no return. Failure also allows me to find empathy for my son who's engaged in the same struggle, to be human and do better. To try out his mistakes first on me. Doesn't it make sense that I model that skill the way I do a talent for baking cookies and making funny sounds with my hands.

I have another role model for balancing motherhood and a writer's life, a woman who discovered success as she was just hitting her stride, her children almost grown, a marriage predictable at its worst, but also rewarding with a nurturing and inspirational fountain. Just as the words started to flow and acceptance returned with the ebb, the spotlight cast its shadow. A cancer growing within as she was transforming on the outside.

By the time she died of the disease that would have taken her whether or not she had discovered this talent, nurtured it and dedicated a portion of her life in pursuit of its perfection, Michele Murray had published several books, including an academic volume about women in literature unprecedented in scope and impact. An accomplishment that the self-described housewife wouldn't have dreamed possible, before she tried.

From Poem - for Michele Murray

Waiting. There will be no more waiting
after this, the last crease smoothed,
last child dressed, sent down the steps
with lunch packed in a crinkled sack,
the last book closed gently toward the left,
settling like the lid of a jewelry box.
The click of a latch is all it is.
The soft sound of closure, the tiny snap
of a dry leaf pulling from its stem.

copyright 2006 Jacqueline West

Let Me Come Inside

2008-06-26T11:00:00.000-07:00

My friend Kim (I can call her that, now that we've met and aren't just Internet acquaintances) recently asked me how many books I read in a week. I'm ashamed to say, even though I'm working on dropping that good girl act, embracing the part of me that's alive and embarrassing.

Maybe you won't understand, though, because when it comes to books, I have the libido of a Lothario. Every part of them titillates. Folding back their pages, gently at first and then a little rougher as the spine cracks, I dive greedily into the nethers, looking for a place not visible from the outside where dressed up covers and carefully rehearsed blurbs obscure. And I don't stop at one, sometimes balancing two or three books, feeling their weight on my chest as I suck up the juices of the one in my hands, changing partners just to see how they blend.

Books are sexual. They speak of desire, of intimacy, of spending time with somebody's passion. And while every work is not refined (that's called literary in some circles) or even worthy of a review, each work is worth something. Books are a treasure, a testament to our vitality. Every book is a virgin, to be experienced with fresh eyes when the next reader comes along. My love affair with books might make you roll your eyes, but I've tried to quit, or at least scale back, trading book store receipts for library due dates. I have even tried monogamy, keeping one faithful book on the bedstand, forsaking all others until it's finished, but that just makes me stray further the next time.

Lucky for me I have the most accommodating of occupations. I'm a grad student, training to be a writer. I need books. They are my tools. Here's what I'm reading this week. I'm not finished with any of them and probably won't ever finish some, but they are all part of me now.

No Sweeter Fat, by Nancy Pagh - Holy Hot Tamale, for a narrator who claims to be a 40-year old virgin, this verse is verdant and wet. "So let's say that the wildest fat ladies grow on low runners that snake unplanted along the driest hillsides of coastal British Columbia. The tight knot of their fruit is smaller than all others, and shaped like the bud of your own coldest nipple." Surprising and contemporary, I'd follow Pagh anywhere.

Learning to Drive, by Katha Pollitt - Another writer of a certain age, I fell in love with her voice right away as she goes a little crazy, webstalking an ex, following him into the past and discovering someone other than who she thought she knew. "What kind of person walks out the door with a wooden spoon, a spatula and a whisk? For months, I would find myself in the middle of a recipe only to discover that some basic, necessary implement was missing." Pollitt takes universal experiences and makes them personal.

At Large and At Small, by Anne Fadiman - I've already quoted Fadiman's essay about collecting nature, mostly butterflies, and discovering shame after taking pleasure from killing the creatures. "I remember a period of painful overlap, when the light of decency was dawning but the lure of sin was still irresistible." She'll take you on a trip into places you thought you knew and make them new. From Nabokov as a lepidopteran weirdo to a presidential passion for ice cream and a beloved literary philosopher's career as a childhood runaway, this collection brings the familiar essay to a modern audience.

Nine Horses, by Billy Collins - A Poet Laureate for the rest of us. Collins charms us with his wit and wisdom. He's not afraid to tell us what he's thinking in direct action, plain speech. "I found next to a bench in a park an ivory chess piece - the white knight as it turned out - and in the pigeon-ruffling wind I wondered where all the others were, lined up somewhere on their red and black squares, many of them feeling uneasy about the saltshaker that was taking his place, and all of them secretly longing for the moment when the white horse would reappear out of nowhere." Absence you can feel in your palms, "stepping forward, then sideways before advancing again."

Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell - The latest from the fuzzy-haired wunderkind, the Einstein of a new generation. He can tell you what you're thinking when you are not even thinking. Weaving words like a coke dealer, the first sample's free, you'll keep coming back even when the prices go up. And he's always got a new strain, a new brand to unveil. He keeps them coming, in a relentless assault until just the sight of him evokes that familiar release, the soar of the rush and the eventual crash. Be careful, approach with caution.

The Guinness Book of Me, by Steven Church - What child of the Seventies doesn't remember poring through that fat book with its impossibly thin pages, a lurid photo to explore with each turn. The bright yellow cover, as tempting as a bumblebee with the sting of unimaginable human endeavors within. "I couldn't bear the thought of missing a new edition. There wasn't much difference from one year to the next. Maybe a few new records or stats. Maybe a few new pictures. But that was enough for me." Church takes us on a tour of the familiar stars of Guinness and wonders what's become of them now. But their juxtaposition with the amazing feats of his own life wore me down. Just like my own childhood thumbed-wrinkly worn copy of Guinness, I'm not sure I'll make it to the end.

Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress, by Susan Jane Gilman - Susie's a spunky kid, wanting to be Puerto Rican one day, practicing for the role of Mary in the Christmas play at home with her Jewish family the next. She's also quirky and smart in this lovingly resurrected portrait painted by her all-grown-up alter ego. "All we talked about was the Rolling Stones, and we didn't so much talk as shriek. We prefaced just about everything as if it was followed !!! by!!! triple!!! exclamation points!!!" The romps and hijinks come quick, but they exhaust, too. Long before I got to the end of the book, I needed a nap.

American Bloomsbury, by Susan Cheever - A fresh-voiced biography of the Transcendentalists of Nineteenth Century Massachusetts and the relationships they had with each other. From Henry Thoreau to Louisa May Alcott, Margaret Fuller to Nathaniel Hawthorne, I'm fascinated by the author's examination of the humans behind the masterpieces.

And that doesn't even include the stack behind the stack, the one under the tissue box. Or the books waiting in a corner of my room for our big trip Back East. Or the new titles for next year's graduate school assignments, just arrived and stacked neatly beside my desk, a siren calling me back from my abstinence.

Blinded By the Light

2008-06-25T09:25:00.000-07:00

(Nearly) Wordless Wednesday

The view from a recent run.

Loving My Monkeys

2008-06-24T09:55:00.000-07:00

There’s a familiar sock in my knitting basket. The pattern is monkey, because there was no way for the designer to get them off her back until she knit them. So she stitched and ripped, and then stitched and ripped again, until she created a sock with cascading loops and swirls, a cavalcade of vines and leaves. Lacey eyes along the edges setting it all off, a design in bas relief. The result is layers of heart-blooming stalks. Or maybe monkey faces peering out of the jungle. I see something new every time I look.

I carried the pattern around for weeks, waiting for the right yarn, wondering whether I was even ready to try. I finally bought a skein of an uncertain weight, meeting the requirements didn't mean as much to me as using this wool with the greens and blues of spring, swirled with leftover browns from old leaves and a background of cloud white. Meanwhile, I carried the intricate instructions in my mind, thinking about the 11 rounds of unfamiliar stitches, my fear of yarn overs, of trying anything new.

When I finally started, it was rough going as I watched the 16-stitch needles grow to 18. I ripped the first round out and started again, looking up “increasing stitches in monkey socks” to see if that was right. I couldn’t figure out how this mess was going to turn into a sock. But I kept at it until I finished the leg and saw a familiar design emerge, a little bumpy and saggy in places, but the monkey was still there.

Knitting is about trusting your instincts, even when they might be wrong. Stitching ahead, knowing you might have to start over or wear a pair of socks that don't quite fit the pattern. Taking a chance on yourself, which I'm not so good at, preferring to learn from someone else's mistakes instead. If I'm on my way to learning this lesson, I picked a good sock to try.

The monkey pattern is just plain fun, spreading across the web, a meme of sorts, taking over double pointed needles and popping up on textured photographs in a flower basket's worth of colors, even spawning a swap site. I don't remember how I first found it, but they were my monkey right away. I'd already developed a thing for socks, focusing almost solely (if you count finished projects, exclusively solely) on them for this not-quite-a-beginner, not-yet-intermediate stage of my knitting obsession.

I'm still not sure what I'm doing, now that I'm on my third pair of monkey socks. Maybe it's time to turn to all you addicts, googling "monkey sock month" and other combinations looking for your next fix. What does this mean, "Worked in the round over a multiple of 16 sts." Should I spread the pattern out among all four needles, or treat each 16-stitches as one round, repeating the brackets [like p2, k12, p2] four different times? And can you answer the mystery of the growing stitches? I've tried it both ways and I always end up with 18 on each needle.

Who knows if I'll ever get an answer. All I know is the socks look great; they feel great. Maybe they're an exercise in accepting my own less-than-perfection. Enjoying my creation without being too wrapped up in how well I've done. I've got a monkey sock on each foot and that should be enough for me.

Almost Five

2008-06-23T00:58:00.000-07:00

I was taking out my contacts last night, prying them from my dust dry eyes. Girls, I don't know if you've heard, but your body starts to change when you're doing that backstroke towards 40, already one arm length into the flip at the side of the pool, feet flexing to grab a toe hold off the wall, so you get a good push into the next half of your life.

Dry eyes are just one of the symptoms. Otherwise, I'd have had those lenses whisked away by the time Owen came into the bathroom. "Bap, what's that," he asked. And then answered himself before I could take a breath. "Those must be your iPods."

This is such a balancing age, one hand holding the extreme innocence of youth, the other open and aware, recording everything to be replayed later for a live and always-on-call studio audience.

Is grammy going to get me a turtle?
I don't want my voice to change. Well, maybe when I'm a teenager.
Daddy says I can pee in the woods when we're camping.
Here are some sunflowers for you. They're your favorite, Bap.

If you met four-and-a-half-point-five, you would notice his laugh first. That resonating chuckle, a little too sophisticated for my liking. A throaty warble that echoes deep in his half-pint of a chest. Because everything's a joke.

The way you tell him to "Stop It," hissing through teeth bared in an "I mean it" grimace when he's bugging you while you're on the phone. Anything that rhymes with poopy. The sound of snoring.

And especially this. The ultimate cracker jack, repeated every night before he goes to bed, our own version of Fractured Fairy Tales, sung to the tune of "Hey Diddle Diddle." I barely remember how we happened upon this delightful concoction. Somewhere between Toad and Frog Lose a Button and My Father's Dragon, we met a confused mouse who transposes the letters in a sentence's nouns. Let's see you say it out loud and try not to laugh.

Hey Diddle Diddle
The Fat and the Kiddle
The Mow jumped over the Coon
The Dittle Log laughed
To see such a sight
And the Sish ran away with the Doon

Synchronized Wording

2008-06-22T00:01:00.000-07:00

im·bro·glio /ɪmˈbroʊlyoʊ/[im-brohl-yoh]
–noun, plural -glios.
1. a misunderstanding, disagreement, etc., of a complicated or bitter nature, as between persons or nations.
2. an intricate and perplexing state of affairs; a complicated or difficult situation.
3. a confused heap.

To experience a random word connection, a synchronicity of occurrences not otherwise related, is to know what it feels like to be alive and aware. To be free and curious, stowing away a bit of information that comes roaring back when a second introduction to this strange and rare thing triggers a memory of the first.

Like the time my friends changed the name of their band from Catch 22 - they got tired of talking about Joseph Heller - to the pleasantly Continental-sounding Imbroglio. That silent, sexy "g" not forced out of the joining of the two plains of the throat, but ignored so the first "oh" could tuck the tip of the tongue lightly to the barest hint of an "el" and then quickly come full circle of the lips into that second, quieter, word-ending "oh."

With this name change, they were zeroing in on what they were really trying to evoke. Not just a false dilemma, a situation with no real choice, but a complicated or difficult situation, a broader shared experience, something we can collapse into daily, a confused heap. Actually they were going long, using a wider focus. Trying to say something about what it feels like to be young, finishing up college, in charge of your whole life with no idea how to make what happens next happen.

I like words, but I'd never heard this one. Suddenly, it was in my mind and it was everywhere. In Rolling Stone articles and newspaper headlines. The name of a coffee shop and a woodwind quartet billing itself as "an operatic scene in which the idea of intricate complication is artfully carried out by the simultaneous use of seemingly incongruous melodies, conflicting rhythms, etc."

I'm reading a book called At Large and At Small, a collection of familiar essays, which the writer calls a celebration of the conversation, an essay that speaks to one reader, not many or more, "as if the two of them were sitting side by side in front of a crackling fire with their cravats loosed, their favorite stimulant at hand, and a long evening of conversation stretching before them."

In a piece called "Collecting Nature," Anne Fadiman examines butterfly collecting, an obsession born when she and her brother stalked the neighborhood, netting and then killing and naming a museum's worth of specimens. They eventually stopped catching them, not because they wished to stop causing pain, but because they grew uneasy with the pleasure it gave them.

That's not to say the desire wasn't still there. During the withdrawal period, when they still caught butterflies, but were ashamed of enjoying it, a luna moth settled on the grille of the air conditioner in the window of their father's dressing room. "If you have ever seen a luna moth - pale green, hindwings tapering to long slender tails, antennae like golden feathers - you have not forgotten it."

I had never seen a luna moth, but that description was enough to awaken my desire. The perfect season for collecting insect sightings, my son and I have been catching and cataloguing our own field guide's worth: ladybugs and birch shield bugs, longhorn beetles and mosquito eaters. Luna moths only live a few days and I'm not sure they've ever been seen in this part of Alaska, but I grew determined to keep my eyes as peeled as a monkey's banana in case we'd see one.

Fadiman and her brother may have been able to see their luna moth from their perch outside on the front lawn on a hot, humid, firefly-filled summer night, but they could not catch it. "The light from the house illuminated the moth with a spectral glow. We could not reach it from the ground. We could not open the window from the inside. I cannot remember ever desiring anything so much."

Before I could even extend my search beyond the hot, humid, midnight sun-filled bedroom, I found another mention of the heretofore-unknown-to-me species, Actias luna. In a collection called Radio Crackling, Radio Gone, which I admit plucking from among the titles stacked snugly in the poetry section of the new books shelf at the library and extracting greedily just because it had the word "radio" in the title, I found a specimen called "Another Story with a Burning Barn in It."

The writer is on the porch, "pinching back the lobelia like trimming a great blue head of hair," reminiscing about planting the near field, "the far one the day before." The day is clear, the pearls around her neck not yet losing their luster because she happened to remember that morning and put them on for milking.

"It was the time of year for luna moths, but we hadn't had any yet settling on the porch or hovering above the garden I'd let the wild rose take."

Lisa Olstein's poem spoke to me, not just because I met my new friend, my random, synchronicity-inspiring friend, the luna moth again, but I knew that feeling, too. Of just recently letting a wild plant take over a garden, raspberry bush in my case, and spending endless usmmer days "hardly sitting down at all." But most especially, this bit of knowledge, well-earned, I imagine. "Trust is made and broken." I've learned that over and over again. I went to sleep that hot, humid summer night with a smile on my lips and a luna moth in my dreams.

And then I decided to write it all down, so I opened a few tabs and googled a few terms and found this. A pattern for a Luna Moth Shawl, a top-down triangular shape in two mirror image sections. A lacy shawl, one of the next projects on my knitting dream list. A simple shawl, a good beginner or intermediate project. So now I'm hoping that maybe I'll see a luna moth of sorts soon enough.

Happy Solstice

2008-06-21T16:54:00.000-07:00

On the longest days of the year, we've been biking everywhere. To the botanical gardens and the wildlife refuge at Creamer's field. To parks and pre-school. To friends' houses and the post office. We've been looking at dragonfly larvae and dodging longhorned beetles. Picking dandelions and picking up abandoned birds' nests. Splashing in man-made ponds. Planting starts and weeding the food bank garden. Climbing trees. Swinging on the buoy. Running through the grass. Knitting socks. Eating ice cream.

And smelling spicy irises.

Who Cares If We Get Wet?

2008-06-20T00:23:00.000-07:00

Where has feminism led us?

To a place where you can't be happy with either a career or a vocation as a mother, so we've got a third wave (of unabashedly successful women) who are advocating for both. They say you've got to dedicate your life to having it all, taking just enough time to have a child before you get back to the grindstone, no matter whether you're wealthy enough for private child care or too poor to afford a choice. Or maybe a dead-end where it's too late to have kids, something our mothers should have been encouraging us to do early and often, but the career isn't enough.

One thing's for sure, you can find plenty of bestselling authors to tell you that whatever you've chosen, it's wrong for feminism or that feminism itself is to blame for your unhappiness. So many women making a living out of telling other women what to do. We've substituted the misogynistic patriarchy for a sisterhood of strong-arming. Allowed ourselves to be drafted into the mommy wars or persuaded to join a consumer frenzy of investment in fertility chic. We want so badly to be accepted by each other, but nobody's making the first move.

We were raised by legions of stay-at-home moms and grandmas who failed miserably at their first task, making themselves happy. Trading a loss of their selves for mind-numbing behaviors, and then blaming the kids, they were pilloried by second-wave feminists. Now we've got the poster child for denouncing motherhood, she's a well-published author or a corporate-climbing businesswoman who finds herself sad and lonely when all she has for company are printed pages or boardroom execs.

What feminism means to me is the chance to fail miserably at whatever we get a hankering to do with our lives. Whenever my ruddy cheeked son steals my attention from words, dragging the pen out of my hand, my mind away from its solitary pursuit, I feel a fleeting pain, but it seldom lasts once I call it by name. The push and pull of a life, with all the complications and distractions, is what makes it worth living. Forget the avoidance of pain, that's futile and it messes with my wabi-sabi.

Emily Dickinson once said that she'd rather not dedicate her life to a church (or a cause or a family), at the cost of giving up her earthly connections. "It is hard for me to give up the world," she said, even though she narrowly defined hers as the birds and bees and bobolinks that populated her garden.

The recent London Daily Mail piece by Rebecca Walker, a daughter mourning the loss of a relationship with her mother while ensuring that wound can never be healed, speaks to so many dynamics in our role as daughters. There's the inevitable revulsion we must feel at their touch, necessary so we'll stake out a life of our own. A desire to be better, our initiation into the competition that will ensure our success in the world.

Both Rebecca and her mother are drawn to polemic, writing pieces about positions that are seemingly beyond reproach. Alice is known for an essay pen-smacking women who dare to call the goddesses among them "guys." Neither wants to lead by example or persuasion, but to demand our attention, to draw the line between choices: not this, but that; not motherhood, nor freedom from the burden, but the other. Their opinions alone are worth defending, more than any relationship.

Still, it's sad to see two bright and talented people lose a unique bond, the only chance they'll ever have at this, by using their talent with words to hurt each other in such a public way.

Now that we've seen what the extremes mean for our interpersonal relationships, maybe we can join together in a tsunami of feminism's fourth wave, eschewing polemic and sticking to one of the fundamentals of happiness. Encouraging each other to find a balance, because we've got the freedom to try.

Baby Jones

2008-06-19T13:48:00.001-07:00

Peggy Orenstein is like a friend I met at summer camp. Amid the fragrant pines and our wet bathing-suited bottoms, we bonded over a love of wabi-sabi and Wonder Woman, promising to be BFFs and KIT. Back at school that fall, our daisy chain necklaces wilted. The friendship pins broke, dripping a trail of colorful seed beads along the hallway.

On a research trip to Japan, coming to terms with a second miscarriage and finding solace in the stories of Hiroshima survivors, Orenstein is a brave and insightful narrator. The images of Jizo shrines to aborted and miscarried fetuses, with their knitted cap offerings of apologies and remembrances to the lost souls Americans prefer to ignore, will stay with me always. This is a window into a portion of women's lives we usually don't see, and Orenstein does a fine job of portraying these weighty issues with grace and humour.

But back in the US, ensconced again in her comfortable San Francisco lifestyle with a husband who loves her but is afraid he might stray now that she can't think of anything other than her fertility, this couple, one an Oprah-Show-call-fielding literary star and the other a handsome Gap-Ad-starring husband, is not very likable, or even self-aware. They are stereotypes, a marketing brand fit for a chain store book display.

Maybe that's because Orenstein's book comes amid a flood of consumer campaigns urging women of my generation not to wait to have kids, or if they have put it off for too long, whipping them up into a flurry of open checkbooks, enticing them to spend, spend, spend on fertility treatments and accessories. Making us miss what we don't have when a child is pretty much the only thing we might not have. So the book joins a growing list of miscarriage journals and in vitro journey memoirs that all sound pretty much the same.

To get to the good parts of Orenstein's tale, you have to skim plenty of fluff. She could have skipped the entire first chapter, with it's quickie introduction and title-dropping meant to frame her as someone worth reading about, an attendee of 1980's literary New York parties, even if she was a self-described member of the peanut gallery. Now she's a success.

"My first book, Schoolgirls, about the challenges young women face in their teens, had just come out to flattering reviews. Suddenly I was fielding calls from Good Morning America, Nightline, and Fresh Air; lecturing at universities; giving keynote addresses at national conferences. My agent - a forceful, older woman who'd opted against motherhood - warned me, 'You have to sell another book idea right now. If you wait a year, forget it. No one will remember you.' I'd dreamed of this kind of success since publishing my first story in my story in my high school newspaper at age fifteen.

"But I wasn't fifteen anymore. I was thirty-two."

Right, 32 and too old to start trying to have a baby, or that's what Orenstein thinks, even though she goes on to fill the next decade of her already fulfilling and busy life pursuing this obsession, asking herself relentlessly until we can all say it along with her, "(all together now), What if this worked? What if it was the only way I could have a baby?"

Orenstein doesn't deserve judgement for wanting to be a mother, even though she has plenty of that for herself. It's a natural, instinctual desire, but what is she really avoiding with this quest. Why can't she do as her husband begs, for the sake of their marriage, and think about something else. Why have we become a nation of mid-life cliches, with our empty cradle syndromes. Why do we have to fit the marketing profile so damn perfectly.

She doesn't say. Although she does tentatively question the whole ride, looking back at the excess with the knowledge that there are a million fertility-related medical appointments made each year and no one knows how many of them are necessary, how many of those women would have gone on to conceive if just left to their own devices.

"Infertility in this country is defined as failure to conceive after just one year, and many couples, as we did, storm the clinic doors after just a few months. So what's a girl with a ticking biological clock to do? As ever newer 'cures' are dangled before us, such as the much-hyped potential of egg freezing, it's up to the consumer to be alert to their pitfalls, to the lure of perpetual hope. I wish I'd understood that."

Because the Daisy of the title is out there the whole time, waiting to be found like the Japanese custom of en, a form of destiny. I can't help wondering how this new generation of children will feel when they grow up, as anticipated as a modern day second coming and still more human than Divine, appearing to sate the ultimate desires of a prosperous generation of parents who really do expect to have it all.

At least Peggy and I will always have Japan.

When the Bough Breaks

2008-06-18T00:05:00.000-07:00

(Nearly) Wordless Wednesday

At least it didn't fall on anything.

Just Like Riding a Bike

2008-06-17T00:30:00.000-07:00

I haven't ridden a bike in years. Someone stole my last one, a bright yellow big bird of a thing. I'd left it at the bike rack in front of the library, too lazy to lock it up. For awhile I spent all my energy running on the trails near my house. By the time we settled in our downtown home, I was pregnant and then my post-gravid body didn't seem bike-ready. I wasn't sure riding would still come easy.

Earlier this spring, my friend Lynne offered to let me bike-sit hers. The first ride went smoothly. I joined Ellie and Laura on a spin, figuring if I went with them, they could pick me up when I inevitably fell. That first moment, pushing off with my foot and wobbling down the street, wondering if I would find my balance or remain earthbound in my disbelief, I heard Laura's words ring more true than the first day they were uttered, "You'll be fine. It's just like, well, riding a bike."

I've been thinking about cliches, why they are villanized by the writing profession, the well-earned mark of a lazy mind, and yet recited ad nauseum by the rest of us. I remember the first time I read Hamlet, Shakespeare's masterpiece about the rotten state of Denmark, where beings shuffle stoically off this mortal coil, hoping for a method to the madness in the interim. Seeing those familiar phrases for the first time in their original source felt the same as it would decades later when I stood at David's feet in the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence. There were butterflies and tingles in my stomach and on my spine.

Some say the Bard contributed more cliches to the English language than any other individual. At least when we use them, quoting Shakespeare as though we are exceedingly well read, we are joining a fellow writer in our humble attempts to thereby hang a tale, even if it ends up being too much of a good thing.

Not all of Shakespeare's catch phrases are cliches, though. It takes a certain set of circumstances to be knighted with this title, from the French name for a stereotype block used in printing. The earliest appearance of the word attached to this definition (3. a. fig. A stereotyped expression, a commonplace phrase; also, a stereotyped character, style, etc.) comes in the 1890s. Before that, overused similes and metaphors were described by a range of other terms like commonplace or hackneyed.

Cliches are intriguing because what begins as a unique attempt to describe an abstract thought by using an everyday experience to connect it to the world, becomes trite. Sometimes when I'm writing, I get stuck on a familiar string of words that, even though they might be considered cliche, say what I mean so specifically, I know any reader will understand exactly what I'm talking about. Sometimes in an effort to prove that we are thinking, I wonder if writers try too hard to distance themselves from the rest of us.

At the risk of being a cliche myself, now that I'm riding a bike again, I've been trying to use it more often because it means I'm getting exercise and using less gas, all the usual reasons people cite when they talk about riding bikes. That means rearranging my life a bit. Setting aside more time to get where we're going, but the journey itself becomes part of the fun.

I like that being on a bike keeps us in the elements instead of tooling around town in my pod of a vehicle, removed from the world. That's why when Owen and I went to the Creamer's Field garden yesterday to weed and play with friends, we took the bike even though the sky threatened us with clouds that harbored a dark lining. And we rode home in the rain.

A Bug's Life

2008-06-16T00:19:00.000-07:00

I'm sitting in the hot sun on the front porch, knitting a sock while I wait for the cookies to bake. Somehow this doesn't seem right, juggling these two wintry activities. But the socks are made of cotton and the cookies are for a picnic we'll be making along the river. Maybe these familiar routines are a bridge between seasons, helping ease us through the transition.

Before the sun can find a cloud to powder its nose behind, my lap is full of sobbing boy, mourning the loss of his pincher bug, the only bug he will ever love, found in the bottom of his sand volcano. "He must have flown in there so he could be my pet." Loyal and true, this bug did not bite or sting, "only squeezed a little bit with his pinchers."

They'd fallen in love over the course of a hot summer hour, cruising the backyard together, checking out all the happening spots. The big birch tree. The ladybug house. The motorboat engine. Or more specifically, one had fallen in love with the other, so typical in these adolescent affairs.

Now the bug is gone, flown away to look for another tree, just as good a substitute as far as it could know with its bug-sized mind, that heartless bug who never really appreciated the depth of the boy's emotions, the selfless lengths he'd gone, filling his pockets with sand, so the bug could ride comfortably, and arranging safe homes out of leftover pudding cups and a fish net with holes, so the bug could breathe.

After the bug left, the boy sought a refuge of his own, crying unselfconsciously while his tears and snot mixed in an icicle drip off the end of his nose, streaked with all the dirt and sand he'd collected during a hard morning's work looking after his beloved, pinching himself from the joy and luck of it all.

I imagine all the times I will hold him, listening to his worst fears and heartbreaks, telling him I don't know why the world works this way, why we have to love and lose, to hold on, but not too tight, and set the ones we care about free. I look forward to sharing time and space with him and his sadness, until the day he, too, leaves.

Cheering him on when he finds a way out of his pain, a plan hatched in between lulls in the tears. He will make a sign, stick it in the sandbox where he'd found that perfect pet. Let the bug know he will always be welcome here.

Start of Summer

2008-06-15T00:37:00.000-07:00

The chokecherry trees in our yard bloomed a couple of weeks ago, leaving the boughs dripping with fragrant bouquets. A sure sign of summer. “It’s almost here,” I sang, while the flowers took their place as the official greeter of the season, offering spritzes like a department store perfume girl.

A friend asked, “What’s almost here, winter?”

Isn’t that typical? Even though it’s not even summer yet, we’re already worried that it’s over. Start counting down the days, folks. We might as well call the season a bust, now that we’re getting our first week of rainy weather.

In Alaska, the calendar doesn’t quite define the season. Spring begins as a gleam in March’s eye, then takes a sharp turn down a path that leads to break up, a dismal mess to navigate while we wait for the main attraction to arrive. No wonder we’re ready to claim summer when the first green buds pop out with a jack-in-the-box's timing.

For some it begins with a kayak or canoe slipping into ice-free water, the first river trip of the year. Or with bare skin, when the sun’s rays are finally warm enough to sit around outside. Others point to their gardens. For them summer starts with the planting of seeds, or when they can turn the watering hoses on the kids. Maybe it happens when we take a ride on the Crooked Creek & Whiskey Island railroad at Pioneer Park, or as I like to call it, the Park Formerly Known as Alaskaland.

Another sign comes in a familiar orange hue, sprouting out in varieties that spell Yield and Detour along roads and highways. The start of another construction season means ripped up roads and alternate routes. We may appear at the apex of the animal kingdom, the epitome of both creation and evolution, but we’re no better than the ants when our paths are blocked. We cluster around access points, looking for new places to park, a recognizable landscape in a changing routine.

Humans once counted on the powers of observation for survival, until we didn’t have time to notice. Now we’re lucky if we get to listen for the first notes of those returning birds, their songs committed to memory during the quiet winter months when only a raven’s call accompanies the icy silence.

Walking through the woods at Creamer’s Field recently, a swarm of mosquitoes in my eyes and nose, the birds tell me it’s summer with every swooping swallow and hoot of air rushing through the snipe’s tail feathers.

Even my young son has his own way of knowing when the season’s here. He sees it in the clusters of eggs that appear on our ladybug tree, a big birch perched right in front of our house. He knows how to watch closely while the life cycle unfolds. He’ll mourn untimely ends brought on by misplaced thumbs squashing egg sacks before ladybugs even get a chance to become peppery larva, spreading out in an aphid patrol.

Later they’ll return to that same tree, looking for a spot to curl up into a pupa spiral, a safe place to transform. Then just as the seasons do without our help, a new ladybug will emerge, a beetle for my son to pick up and protect.

Yet his desire is as dangerous as the passing fancy of a neighborhood wood pecker. A welcome visitor, accepting party favors we never offered, then entertaining us with an exotic tree-spiraling dance accompanied by a drum beat of a greeting.

Rat-a-tat-tat.

Maybe there’s no one way to define the start of summer. We all have a different reason to claim the season. Just as some of the last birds to appear, the arctic terns, must think it begins with them. They get busy, along with the gardeners and the kayakers, the field scientists and the construction workers, taking advantage of their time in the sun.

Then they are just as eager to call it over when they leave first to beat the traffic on their long journey south. Home to another summer, a hemisphere away.

Maybe it doesn’t really matter when summer starts, no three-month category with its neat edges tucked up into equal portions can contain what it means to live here. Each month, each phase of the year, comes with its own sights and sounds. And someday the edges might blur even further, the clues arriving in less clearly-defined clusters, because after all, the only constant is change.

Published in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, June 15, 2008

'When the Weather is High'

2008-06-14T20:13:00.000-07:00

You know it's summer time when . . .

You take a ride on the Crooked Creek & Whiskey Island train at Pioneer Park and every bench is full.

There's plenty of time to stop and smell the wild Sitka roses.

The bug wrangler's always got a "pet" around to play with. This one's a birch shield bug, I think. People around here call them stink bugs, but that's not quite right.

You'd rather ride your bike.

Riding the Waves

2008-06-13T00:18:00.000-07:00

Part of the problem with feminism is that you've got to have an advanced degree to understand what the movement's leaders are talking about. All the academic ideologies, the women's studies buzzwords and theories about pro-sex feminism versus over-emphasizing the experiences of upper middle class white women, have a shadow as unwanted as those upper lip hairs. They alienate plain old women.

Just when I think the definitions make sense, that I understand what my rights are and who deserves praise for making sure I have them, I discover something new. It turns out feminism comes in waves. The first wave began with the initial movement to get women the right to vote. With that political empowerment came activism, the ability to push for women's issues, like health care and child protection. Hence the second wave.

Then the waters rose and the earth was flooded all over again. Third wave feminists are today's young movement leaders, daring to criticize and disagree with their elders about everything from having children to race relations. This reaction has gathered a political will all its own. A backlash against the backlash.

Third wavers say, "Enough with guys who refuse to change their roles to match the changes women have made; Enough with the notion that women are permanent victims who will never succeed against sexism; Enough with women who think feminism is over because a few laws protect us; Enough with the male standard that puts women at a disadvantage in everyday life."

One of the most prominent third wavers recently published an article in the London Daily Mail blaming feminism for the poor parenting she was dealt like a bad hand of cards. Rebecca Walker, who has created her own publishing niche out of criticizing her famous mother (a second-waver, for those keeping track), takes the beloved writer and feminist Alice Walker to task for being, wait for it, a crappy mother.

Walker, the daughter, makes sweeping generalizations about her mother and the movement she rode in on. "I was raised to believe that women need men like a fish needs a bicycle, but I strongly feel children need two parents and the thought of raising Tenzin without my partner, Glen, 52, would be terrifying." What she doesn't tell you, too busy wrapping her package with pretty paper and bows, is that the father of her child was a married man himself when Rebecca conceived.

She's a mess, preaching about divorce one minute, "As the child of divorced parents, I know only too well the painful consequences of being brought up in those circumstances. Feminism has much to answer for denigrating men and encouraging women to seek independence whatever the cost to their families." And then having a child with a partner she never even married.

As far as motherhood goes, Walker is this generation's Cassandra, warning that women should get to it before it's too late. She discounts the second wavers' assessment, that motherhood can be a calamity, impeding the professional and artistic aspirations of women who will become preoccupied with the thankless role they've made for themselves. The warning carries its own implication, that motherhood may not be for everyone.

Rebecca criticizes her own mother harshly, blaming her for what started out as a happy childhood, but took a wrong turn, oh, somewhere around the teen years. "From the age of 13, I spent days at a time alone while my mother retreated to her writing studio - some 100 miles away. I was left with money to buy my own meals and lived on a diet of fast food." Her angriest judgment hangs around her own decision to become sexually active at a young age, leading to an abortion. "Now I simply cannot understand how she could have been so permissive. I barely want my son to leave the house on a play-date, let alone start sleeping around while barely out of junior school."

By examining Rebecca Walker's shifting allegiances and opinions about whether her white stay-at-home step-mother was a cold fish or a "loving maternal homemaker" and whether blood ties matter when it comes to motherhood, it's obvious that she is hurting, but freedom and equality, the goals of every feminist wave we've caught so far, offer no guarantees that we will be happy. For that we have to work on ourselves.

Wilderness Living

2008-06-12T00:15:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid, I couldn’t get enough of the Little House on the Prairie books by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I read them all from cover to cover, savoring the passages that described how the family replaced their greased-paper windows with glass and survived the long winter of 1880 by twisting hay into sticks for the woodstove.

I immersed myself in the world of the prairie pioneers, imagining what it would be like to grow up knowing how to do so many things. Milk a cow. Make butter. Knit stockings. My sisters and I would play dress up, pretending to be characters from the book. My step-sister Peggy would always be Pa, drawn to the more traditional male role of farmer. I was Ma, fussing about the house, cleaning and baking.

In her memoir In the Wilderness, Kim Barnes takes me back to that romantic idealization of a rough backwoods life with descriptions of the hollow where she and her family lived, filling their days with explorations into the near woods, "digging after ground squirrels, amassing piles of found treasure: feathers blue as river water, bones of deer, old buckets and chains, nests stitched through with colorful bits of moss.” These images are comforting, hiding the ominous truth of what will happen to Barnes and her family once they leave for a life in the city.

Like the Ingallses, Barnes' parents embraced their traditional roles. Her father worked as a logger, deriving a living from the forests of Idaho until the jobs began to disappear with the arrival of machines that could do the work of twenty sawyers. Her mother was a housewife, called to that vocation at first by necessity and then a religious conversion.

In the beginning, there were just hints of that fundamentalist lifestyle that would become repressive to the narrator. Barnes notices the diverging roles women and men play in the world of logging camps. “While the women cleared and washed the dishes, the men leaned back in their chairs, sucking on toothpicks.” Later she remembers the women “scooping up their husbands’ piled work clothes, mixing batter for breakfast, still wearing long johns and flannel to fend off the nights’ lingering chill.”

Then a more threatening shadow descends as her parents turn to the church in an effort to avoid the brutal cycle of alcoholism that has plagued their own families. Her mother is the first to find comfort in fundamentalism. Her father follows, moved by the Spirit to pick up his wife’s bible and begin reading the words that would change his life. Barnes doesn’t remember the moment her mother pulled the golden hoops from her ears, gathered her swimsuit and open-necked blouses and pushed them all into the drawers’ dark corners. What she knows is that their lives shifted.

"My father’s authoritative presence became absolute, my mother’s desire to please him even greater. In the teachings of the church, a man’s duty is to be the physical and spiritual protector of his wife and children. The woman is to be chaste and modest, subservient to her husband’s guidance, lest the mar of her sex tempt her to stray into the ways of the world."

That belief frames the rest of Barne’s childhood. From this moment, her every desire and rebellion will be in reaction to the gender-defining teachings of the church. Far different from the children in Wilder’s fictionalized memoirs, who take heed of Colossians 3:20, “Children, obey your parents in all things: for this is well pleasing unto the Lord,” while also benefiting from a father who continues to read the passage, learning not to provoke “your children to anger, lest they be discouraged.” Barnes must heed the first part, but finds that her father never bothers to understand the words that follow.

Now that I am an adult, I re-read the Little House books with nostalgia. Not only do I recognize the words that built such a sweet world for the Ingalls family, I also recall my own reactions to the images and emotions, but this feeling is one-dimensional. Only a part of the story is shared. Ma never doubts Pa, the way Barnes’ mother does during an attempted 40-day fast, which ends in the fateful decision to leave the woods. Her mother lets “the voice of the world reach her in the great grey of near sleep: He’s abandoned you in the middle of nowhere. He thinks he sees demons. He’s obsessed, dangerous, mad.”

The author digs deep, exploring the layers of betrayal. Her own betrayal of the family and the church. Their betrayal of her. She takes us to the depths of her family’s beliefs, shows us how they were tested, where they disappointed. Then she brings us back to the same Idaho river “whose feeding brooks once ran beneath my window, whose waters I drank from my hands.”

This is a place of hope. A place of forgiveness, where Barnes comes to understand the imperfect organisms that have shaped her – family and church – and the source of her own salvation. "Some are born to the wilderness. Some come to the wilderness to be reborn. It was where my parents first found their salvation, and where I would once again find mine.” Back to a place where she once sang “with the soul of a child,” although she, unlike the narrator called Laura, is a child no more.

Cue the Colors

2008-06-11T00:37:00.000-07:00

(Nearly) Wordless Wednesday

Summer in full bloom. Now the countdown begins.

Reignition

2008-06-10T12:06:00.000-07:00

He calls.
She comes.

Just a moment of
Shared space
To see if breath still
Catches.
If eyes still burn empty
Space between.

No distance can quench
That flame, the way
Water douses fire
While air feeds embers.

Can you move through
Both elements,
Let the waves
Support your weight?

One letter makes the difference.
One number transferred.

The Waiting Woods

2008-06-09T00:53:00.000-07:00

Date: June 7, 2008
Mileage: 9.0
June Mileage: 19.0

I went back to a familiar woods for a run after seven years away. At first I balked at the trails, a swirling Spirograph of potential. Maybe there was a map posted nearby. As my head swiveled, busy with the job of searching for information, my feet were pounding through the first turn, then the next until I was at the exact trailhead I was looking for.

White Bear: a ten-kilometer caterpillar-shaped loop that takes you over gentle undulations for the first few k's, then bullets you down a long ramp, depositing you in a knee-quaking lump onto a marshy lily field, only to turn you around and point you back up a steep incline. There weren't many people back there. Just bugs. And trees. And sunlight-dappled dust motes.

Some people search for wilderness, planning adventures in places where no human has been, or at least the evidence is well-masked. Those trips can be fun, a sharp intake of breath and a story that nobody else can tell. I like nature that's close enough to return to. The familiarity of walking in the same woods where the children of the trees I've always known start families of their own while they wait for me to return.

Maybe this is what Henry Thoreau had in mind when he extolled nature from his seat along Waldon Pond. He was not saying we should give up all materialistic connections, even while we strive to reduce our dependence. He was not saying we should completely remove ourselves from town, as he himself spent many days walking to and fro. He was saying we should not forget to enjoy the nature in our own backyards. To go there and listen to what it had to teach.

One Alaska naturalist I know has watched the same woods for as long as some people live. He can show you where caribou travelled through the year before, chuckling to see them choose the same path. He worried at the first sign of dozers and earth movers building a new road across the land, all that change and destruction a part of nature, intensified for a few years' worth of fuel to keep an industry's worth of entertainment humming while we avoid the woods.

On this challenging trail, I ran most of the way. I didn't expect to do that. I planned to walk steady and sure, up hills and down, but something unanticipated took over, now that I was back. Distracted by wild rosebushes - the kind that take you on a lifelong journey in a few weeks, watching the pregnant buds burst forth in heavy flowers, breathing in the intoxicating scent, already grieving the blooms that will leave behind fat hips bursting with the essence of rose in a batch jam or jelly - and the upturned trunks of trees that have given up, a hairy boar's back in the sharp light, I just ran.

As I moved through the woods, alone with nature, each of us part of the other, an intricate relationship forever joined in a union of carbon and matter, I remembered why this place is so special, to be approached on a rhythm of gently slapping feet. This is where I fell in love with myself, once. Forced by the emptiness of those solitary miles to confront my own failings, I forgave myself. For having a father who left me and for taking that out on my mother. For all the ways I found myself responding with anger and impatience instead of compassion.

That kind of love knows enough to step back when the self-loathing inevitably returns, waits awhile until it wears itself out with its own brand of loneliness and confusion, swoops in to pick up the pieces, takes me by the hand while we watch that lesson-teaching ex shrink in the rear view mirror.

Just like any relationship, it's up to me to renew this commitment; to remember why I fell in love with myself in the first place. From self love comes all love, radiating through this world and yet not contained by it, a reflection of the same matter that makes up the far flung stars. We are connected by this force that creates great masterpieces and leaves destruction in its path. Like the wildfire that fuels the burst of seeds from a pine cone, spawning the next phase of life. We coexist in nature and survive in spite of it.

When I came back to a quiet house after my run in the woods, I grabbed a literary magazine I like. It fell open to an essay by Andrew Harvey, a British-born man who has spent much of his life attempting to unite the spiritual traditions of East and West, and doing it sometimes outside the boundaries of those religions, which do not accept him because of his sexuality. In his practice of learning about spirituality and sitting in mediation, he's found glimpses of this same self-love.

"I had stepped back somehow into a place of no desire, no judgment. Paradoxically, this place of emptiness was filled with a feeling not unlike kindness: a kindness toward myself; a simple recognition of my own tragic, inescapable humanness. And I realized that this kindness was the basis for all other kindnesses; that one's own happiness was not a form of self-indulgence, but rather a precondition for doing good work in the world."

And so, I realized that by returning to this place, my place in the woods, a place of no desire, no judgment, I was reminded what I had learned there the first time. The power of rejuvenation and the importance of falling in love again.

Movie News

2008-06-08T00:10:00.000-07:00

Summer's here, so movie-making must be in the air. Two separate crews are working on productions based in Fairbanks. One is a bare-bones operation run by Suzi Yoonessi, the creator of the film short Dear Lemon Lima that was recently screened at the Tribeca Film Festival. (Note - It's pronounced "lime-uh" not "lee-muh." As in the bean, rather than the Peruvian city.)

The new feature film version tells the story of a "half-Native girl who has to reclaim the spirit of the World Eskimo Indian Olympics at a prep school in Fairbanks." Yoonessi says she's already spoken with WEIO officials and several local Tribal Councils and has their support and blessings, but she still needs some in-kind community support to convince her producers that it is financially possible to shoot in Alaska.

That means donations and more donations. They're looking for housing to accommodate a crew of 12 for five days and three actors for two days. They need a passenger van and car for five days and a truck for three days. They are looking for free filming locations. Also 20-30 extras per day, especially kids around 18 years old. And they need food donations, as in meals for 15 people. They are also casting for the lead character.

"VANESSA LEMOR (14-18)Half-Native, loving, innocent, wide-eyed, creative, sincere. Please email a photograph and your contact information to director Suzi Yoonessi"

The other project is but a screenplay under construction. The writer asked my help in answering a few questions and hopefully clearing up any misconceptions about this very special place in the heart of Alaska. A place called Fairbanks, as in where the river offers fair banks to moor. Actually, that's not true. The thing about misconceptions is that sometimes the lie, the untruth, sounds so much better than the truth, which in this case is that we named the town after a second-rate politician we hoped to influence.

From the Fairbanks Convention and Visitors Bureau: Originally known as "Barnette's Cache," the name was changed in 1902 to honor Charles Warren Fairbanks, a U.S. Senator from Indiana and later Vice-President under Theodore Roosevelt. Sen. Fairbanks was also the political patron of Judge James Wickersham who suggested the name to the city's founder, E.T. Barnette.

So, on with the show. I'm sure Lindsay won't mind if I post the questions here along with the answers I came up with. Feel free to add any comments you think will further illuminate the discussion. That's what we have comment sections for.

1. What do Alaskans think of people from the lower 48, in terms of differences in life philosophies, ways of living, personality, etc.? We think they're all idiots. Nah. I think the biggest difference between life inside Alaska and Outside is that we have the luxury of treating people as individuals, since there aren't that many of us. We tend to be friendly, to look strangers in the eye. And conversely, we let each other alone. Kind of a I-don't-care-what-you-do-as-long-as-you-do-it-in-the-privacy-of-your-own-home philosophy.

2. What do you wish people knew about Fairbanks that they may not currently know? The time? If I get another middle-of-the-night phone call from some East Coast telemarketer, I just might . . . Well, I don't know where that came from. We're on what's called Alaska time, four hours behind the East Coast zone. When it's noon there, it's 8am here. A perfectly respectable time to call, if you have a four-year-old kid around.

3. What misconceptions do you think people have about Fairbanks/AK? (both lower 48 Americans and other countries) That it's always dark and that we get tons of snow. The dark thing is easily cleared up. Winter=dark. Summer=light. In almost exact opposite measures. We are located in a subarctic desert, so while we do get nominal amounts of moisture, the water tends to stick around. Unmelted snow piles up in the winter and unevaporated or permafrost-blocked water pools in the summer, creating lovely marshes beneath the tussocks and grassy meadows in its path.

4. What's it like to be a woman in Fairbanks? I'd always heard that it was a bit rough and the men could be troublesome, but I've never experienced that in my visits. Aren't men troublesome everywhere? Again, just joking. I honestly don't think there's any difference. Although maybe people here just take each other more seriously at first glance. Give each other the benefit of the doubt. Because, if you're tough enough to survive a winter here, you must be OK. Even if you are a girl. That doesn't mean we don't have our own special breed of intergender difficulties. Domestic violence rates are high here. That might be the downside of a tough life. Sometimes you're so used to struggling, you don't realize it when you're taking it from somebody who's supposed to love you.

5. Did you relocate to Fairbanks, or are you from there? What were the hardest adjustments? I grew up in Pennsylvania and came to Fairbanks after several years exploring other parts of the state. By the time I arrived here, the place seemed big and cosmopolitan, so I liked it right away.

6. How does the cold climate affect the way you live in winter? What do you have to do differently than in the summer? Remember to sleep! The winter is for slowing down and spending enormous amounts of energy dealing with the cold and all that entails, like frozen pipes and cars that won't start. We act like ants in the summer. Busy, busy, busy - gathering the grain (or the salmon and the berries and the veggies) to help us make it through another tough winter. I sense a theme. We're Tougher in Alaska. See what I mean? This is how stereotypes get started.

7. There's a saying about men in Alaska...the odds are good, but the goods are odd. While I don't find that to be true, what's your take on it? I think people have the freedom to be more, shall we say, unique here. People don't necessarily follow conventions - like taking showers or living in a house with running water. That might make for some odd men - and women. For a time, there were proportionately higher numbers of men, what with the hordes of gold prospectors, soldiers and pipeline builders who came north. Things seem to be evening out now, so we came up with a little ditty to scare the competition away.

8. Do people know everything about everyone else, or is it a big enough town that you can have some space? It's an in-between town. Nothing like a village, where people knew if I'd called in sick. Although, I did work at the one radio station on the dial, so that was pretty obvious. Here's a better example, after my friend Susan visited, people were still asking what ever happened to "my friend with the square hair" a couple of years later. Here in Fairbanks everyone's separated by about three degrees, so that familiar person at the party might just be your cashier at the grocery store. I spend my day smiling at people I don't know and always expecting to run into someone I do.

9. What are some Fairbanks traditions/rituals? Celebrating the sun. Having huge bonfires at the Solstice on each end of the calendar and observing the Equinox as either the start of something wonderful or the death of summer.

10. What are the common religious beliefs and family values in Fairbanks? For example, I'm from the Midwest, and there's a high stress on family values, going to church and family members tend to stay in the area, rather than spread out. Is there a general opinion on these things there? If so, why? This was probably the toughest question you had, Lindsay. I think we have a similar values, although many of us are living far from where we grew up. Family means something more here, extending sometimes beyond blood ties and other times literally including entire villages of cousins. As for religion, it's been said there are more churches than bars, and there are plenty of bars. I think there's a stress on human values, as in you don't pass by your neighbor on the street if he's bleeding. We spend great effort recovering people lost in the wilderness and generally keeping an eye on each other, but we don't tend to judge folks if they live a different lifestyle. These are all generalizations, of course.

11. What is the impression in AK of the lifestyles and religious beliefs of the lower 48? I think people assume outsiders are more materialistic, thus more in need of some churching.

12. What do people predominantly do for work in the Fairbanks area? (popular professions based on the region, etc.) We've got some wacky occupations here. Firefighters who jump out of planes to beat back flames with hose and hatchets. (My husband's a smokejumper.) Seasonal jobs are common, from fishing to construction and farming. Lots of government jobs managing all the federal land. Also energy jobs, from mining to the pipeline and beyond. We have more than our fair share of artists and writers, too.

13. What do people do for entertainment, both in summer and winter? Do people actually karaoke at Pump House? (that actually factors into the screenplay, in an odd way...) Most summer entertainment seems to take place outdoors. You should see the bikes pile up at the racks all around town once it gets nice. There's also canoeing and kayaking, hiking, music festivals. All outside. In the winter, we ski and snowshoe. There's dog races (dog mushing) and some traditional activities like trapping and hunting, even ice fishing. I think people do more cozy socializing. Dinner parties and movie nights. Knitting circles and book clubs. That sort of thing. The biggest difference seems to be that in the summer, we're counting down the days until it's over, like Orpheus leaving the Underworld. In the winter, we're moaning about how long the season lasts. As for karaoke at the Pump House, I've heard rumours, although I've never indulged.

Thanks to Steve at What Do I Know? for getting the Fairbanks Movie Project rolling and being a blogtastic mentor. Or did he invent the Internet? I forget.

Do You Know My Name?

2008-06-07T00:04:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite memories from my school years was getting a new teacher or a sub. As the unsuspecting educator stood at the front of the room, negotiating a roster of unfamiliar names, right at the top was mine.

"BAKE-er, Theresa BAKE-er," she'd announce.

And the whole class would answer back in unison. "BACH-er. It's BACH-er"

There's something so comfortable about that , so safe and protective. They were my class, these kids in the same Catholic school garb as me, scratching our knees under synthetic kelly green socks, squirming in our polyester skirts and stiff slacks in the overheated church basement.

Many of them weren't my friends. We probably never even exchanged hellos, but they knew how to pronounce my fish-out-of-Dutch waters name. They knew I had two younger sisters. That I was tall, but not good at basketball. That I played clarinet in the marching band and had a cousin in the woodwind section. That I liked a chicken patty with extra mayo at lunch and drove our dented station wagon home from school every day.

Sometimes I wonder where they all are. Whether I would recognize them in a crowd. Whenever I go back home to visit, I see their faces in every person of a certain age. I'm always looking for a member of my tribe.

The Politics of Feminism

2008-06-06T00:30:00.000-07:00

I haven't been calling myself a feminist for long. It took an awakening of motherhood in my case, an understanding that choosing this role leaves us more vulnerable to society's inevitable misuse of power. Equality, in that sense, became something worth fighting for, not something I was born into. Before that, I figured the work had already been done. That it was time for unity. I was turned off by the media stereotype - angry, man-hating bra burners.

Lucky for me my conversion happened before the first female presidential candidate emerged on the national scene. Hillary Clinton's campaign began as a testament to the accomplishments of a remarkable woman, devolved into a poorly-managed call for political inevitability and eventually became, for some, a case study of sexism at work.

There's no doubt sexism has been on display. In the poorly-picked words of media talking heads and the barely-concealed attitudes of many Americans. And yet, Clinton herself seemed comfortable taking the votes of "white, working class Americans," who couldn't imagine a black man with a funny, foreign-sounding name in the President's office.

If sexism's responsible for Clinton's loss, it's a weakened, barely-viable form, since she was able to defeat no fewer than four other politically-powerful men along the way. If we're to blame sexism, it wouldn't be a trait demonstrated by her eventually victorious opponent, a man who has celebrated her, describing her candidacy as a legacy for the nation's girls, children like his own daughter, who will believe it's normal for a woman to be president.

"Our party and our country are better off because of her," Obama said, "and I am a better candidate for having had the honor to compete with Hillary Rodham Clinton."

There are many reasons Clinton lost this race, like her polarizing presence and outdated internet skills. But in an opinion piece in Salon, the on-line magazine she edits, media personality Joan Walsh blames sexism. She takes Barack Obama to task (after he'd declared victory, but before Clinton conceded defeat), demanding that it is now his responsibility to reach out to the older white women who voted for Clinton, but feel marginalized by the Obama coalition.

"The self-described 'hope-monger' now needs to be a grace-monger, in a word, to win back Clinton supporters proud of what she's accomplished in this race and angry over her mistreatment."

Then she quotes some of these older, angry white women, like Geraldine Ferraro who complains that she's been demonized for saying Obama's campaign was easier because he's black. "If you're white you can't open your mouth without being accused of being racist. They're not upset with Obama because he's black; they're upset because they don't expect to be treated fairly because they're white. It's not racism that is driving them, it's racial resentment."

Walsh says she's found her own writing dismissed because as a 50-year old white woman she's supposed to be Clinton's demographic. She finds "dismissive, derisive references to bitter old white women" in comment sections across the blogosphere.

More variations of the term "bitter old white women" popped up in this column than any other portion of my media-enriched life, a poppy field along the yellow brick road on the way to the Wizard of Oz's Emerald Palace.

I worry that Walsh has become tainted by a shattered mirror, the Ice Queen's slave, left to a future where evil spirits loom in every hopeful face. Because feminism is not about being sheltered from bad taste or despicable remarks. It's about having the freedom to expose yourself to the worst of what the world can throw, to have a chance at winning a promotion, editing a major publication, earning a presidential post, no matter your gender.

Another Salon story, published in April, saddened me with its myopic view that Obama supporters themselves are sexist. Because dozens of hand-picked women, some pro-Hillary, others backing Barack, felt that the perceived sexism among some male Obama supporters and the Clinton-defending role they'd taken on had become a form of sexism itself.

"A lot of guys just can't stand Hillary," went the typical complaint, "and it's the intensity of their irritation with her that disturbs me more than their devotion to Obama."

They described their disappointment in the face of this "Obama-mania." Sounds like something out of Candidate Clinton's own talking points. That Obama has nothing to offer other than feel-good platitudes, hence those of us who believe in him must be either delusional or reluctant to vote for a woman. (Another one of Walsh's devises - summing up the cause of trends in an either/or choice.) The writer even goes further, quoting a Clinton supporter who sounds like she's come up with the plot for the next horror film cult classic. "Have you seen their eyes? It's this faraway look. It's scary."

This opinion, that Obama supporters are a den of salivating women-haters, one that's caught on like the most contagious meme, launched a major political coverage piece in one of the nation's top on-line magazines and attracted hundreds of comments, but it did nothing to further the cause of equality for women or blacks, or any other minority for that matter.

As for the reaching out that Walsh hopes Obama does, she doesn't have much to offer other than the hope that he'll meet with top Clinton advisers. I hope he will, too.

There's more he could do, of course. In the words of one commenter, how about this for a plan. "He supports the feminist agenda - in Supreme Court appointments, in policy and in practice." Would that be good enough? It is for this feminist.

Lead Role in a Cage

2008-06-05T10:52:00.000-07:00

Verse may be the original form of writing, back when only men, and well-born ones at that, even knew how to write, but prose soon took the lead as the go-to form. Verse was left to hold a position of pretension. Nowadays, it barely gets taught at schools, is rammed down students' throats along with the accepted meanings, except for those lucky enough to have a teacher who cares. Who understands the mystery in its form, the grace in its distilled images, the potential in its open ends.

I am a late-comer. It's only been a few months that I have even begun to believe that I might learn the language of poetry. A love of words has never been the problem, only the same insidious thought that plagues us all. Insecurity. I did not understand poetry, I felt intimidated by the messages I might have missed, so I believed I never would.

Thanks to the help of friends, an encouraging hand offered in the midst of a deep and icy lake, the comforting immersion of graduate school-level reading, I'm discovering writers with something to say to me. Into this growing community, enter poet Kathleen Flenniken. Now that the poetry shelf in the New Books section at my local library is a regular stop on my monthly route, her book Famous was a lily pad in my outstretched hand. Not because of its sultry cover, strung with lights glowing in a necklace of festive colors. Not even due to the American Library Association sticker, proclaiming it a Notable Book.

Flenniken is a recent graduate of my MFA program. A cool and kind person with a quick smile and a collegial attitude, her first book won the 2005 Prairie Schooner Book Prize, even though you'd only know it thanks to her trumpeting teachers, the proud smiles of those who have seen her authentic struggle to be a writer who lives in the real world.

The success of her collection begins with its premise; that we all have the potential to be famous. In this fashion, two-year-old Elisabeth, one of the characters in the book, reads poetry with a strong singing voice, "Yah yah sumpin to eat, Dibbah dah ze Rosie." Flenniken watches as she tosses the book to grab a red crayon. She's already changed her clothes six times, is now naked and reciting her ABDB's. I don't think you have to be a mother to recognize the pure potential in this little girl and, by extension, in all of us. Flenniken knows that she is a genius, "of prolonged babyhood, of its light, its wild uncoded rhythms, playing late into the open afternoon."

Others, some of them minor celebrities, line up for inspection in these pages, too, but Flenniken introduces them with a light touch. She doesn't mock or belittle the "restaurant critic in your city, perhaps, with his predilection for chocolate and free wine." Or the "news anchor who reports his fate in careful, disappointed tones." She salutes them, "for creating a backdrop. For stepping aside." How else could any of us take center stage - somehow a shared human need - if there weren't other souls around to make up the supporting cast, even if their witness is a burden borne in our own minds.

And finally there's fame. Mary Todd Lincoln trades in a grieving husband, cousins killing cousins, a never-ending end of war for "kidskin gloves adorned with pearls, embroidered daisies and chrysanthemum stars, white on white filigree so fine one might believe a fairy tatted them." If I woke as Mary Todd, Flenniken tells us, I would need boxes and boxes of these gloves to tell me who I am.

Flenniken's verse snaps like fresh picked peas. The poems are as artfully arranged as a summer salad. Hints of feathery herbs share the plate with both spicy greens and more subdued leaves. There are nasturtiums and violets scattered on top. Just like eating a course at a fine meal, it doesn't matter if I've noticed the age of the wine or the cut of the meat. The tastes combine, leaving me satisfied along with a lingering sensation of intrigued. Maybe there's more going on in these poems than I'll ever see, but that doesn't mean I'm not worthy to take a bite.

Thank goodness for Flenniken and her belief in me. I can be famous for something, even if its recognizing my own passions, and that one of them could be poetry.

This Means Summer

2008-06-04T00:04:00.000-07:00

(Nearly) Wordless Wednesday

When the Chokecherry trees are in bloom, you know that the change of season's not far behind.

It's About Time

2008-06-03T19:22:00.000-07:00

I got a letter from the Democratic Presidential Candidate today.

Theresa --
I'm about to take the stage in St. Paul and announce that we have won the Democratic nomination for President of the United States.
It's been a long journey, and we should all pause to thank Hillary Clinton, who made history in this campaign. Our party and our country are better off because of her.
I want to make sure you understand what's ahead of us. Earlier tonight, John McCain outlined a vision of America that's very different from ours -- a vision that continues the disastrous policies of George W. Bush.
But this is our moment. This is our time. Our time to turn the page on the policies of the past and bring new energy and new ideas to the challenges we face. Our time to offer a new direction for the country we love.
It's going to take hard work, but thanks to you and millions of other donors and volunteers, no one has ever been more prepared for such a challenge.
Thank you for everything you've done to get us here. Let's keep making history.
Barack

Three Miles

2008-06-02T00:07:00.000-07:00

Date: June 1, 2008
Mileage: 3.0
June Mileage: 3.0
Temperature: 69

I ran three miles today. That doesn't sound like much, but when I say I ran three miles, that means I never stopped, never walked. I ran the whole way.

This still wasn't pretty, not like in the movies when the protagonist bounces along the paved river trail in perfect form. I had the earphones and the ponytail, but none of the rest. My underwear bunched up and my legs got blotchy and red. I wasn't even dressed properly, my non-jog bra ruined forever from the sweat stains.

I ran past fields of mice scattering at the sound of my hammering feet like I was the anti-pied piper. I didn't stop, even when an overgrown bush of teenagers loomed with sharp points where there shouldn't be any, hesitant branches covering new growth.

Many of you unconsciously run ten times three miles, whenever you want. You race out the front door without a thought of schedules or endurance. You may run through pain, but you don't battle that part of your brain that doubts, thinks you can't do this. You are true runners and may not understand what it means anymore. To run three miles.

Once upon a time, I moved to a village on the Yukon River. I got lost in the adventure, watching people at work in the same traditional tasks that have been taught for hundreds of years. I was young and unaware of myself, even though that's all I thought about at the time. Battling freezing winters that banished me indoors and tempted me to add an extra layer, I lost track of my body and gained thirty pounds in a few months.

When the next spring rolled around, I wandered outside, following a certain scent along the river. Before I knew it, I'd run a mile. Then another and another, until I was pounding out regular six and seven mile runs.

I used to pass my friend Alby on these jogs, a local guy about my age who was as quick as a fox and as sleek as one, too. When I see him in Fairbanks, we always stop to talk. If you noticed us really looking at each other, you'd know that we have a long history of these brief but meaningful conversations. Alby grew up on the River, covering miles of the surrounding land on snowshoes, cutting through forests of spruce and alders to set traplines and hunt for moose, running the river, too, as effortlessly as an otter sliding down the bank.

Sometimes I'd see him in the bar or at the grocery store in Galena. "How's the running," he'd ask, a slight smile marionetting the corners of his mouth. Once I tried to box him out, play defense against the inevitable teasing, like Eminem did with his rap against Papa Doc in 8 Mile, "I am white. I do live in a trailer with my mom." Dissing himself before his opponent could take a shot, leaving him nothing to make fun of.

"Aw, I'm not sure you can call what I do running," I said. "More like dragging my feet for a mile or two."

The whimsy left Alby's face. He made sure he had my attention before he said in that low voice that doesn't ever repeat itself, even if you ask. "It don't matter how far you run. That's still more than most people." Then he slid away, back to greasing his traps or tucking a son into bed.

Some of you may wonder why I even bother. What's the point? Running hurts, forces the bones together in a collision of sinew and cartilage. All I can say is that ever since I could, I've run. Sometimes in shame, knowing my body is not built for speed. Sometimes with pride, wondering if I could beat that slow-moving youth who spends too much time in front of the television. Sometimes there are long gaps in between my runs. Sometimes I really, really don't want to, but I do it anyway.

There's a moment in each run when I stop being a body with skin to hold myself back. I merge into the air, floating, not forcing my feet forward or reminding myself to keep moving. Everyone has these intervals, whether on a bike or at the computer. The pedals spin and the words flow from a place you don't even recognize. On the dance floor, flailing like a dervish, you whirl and turn, your arms waving in a willow's salute, in love with the world, that love flowing from you and to you and through you.

That's why I run. For that one moment, when my body takes control. Because I still can. And one day I won't have that.

I ran three miles today.

Bread Bags and Coupons

2008-06-01T00:07:00.000-07:00

I went to Anchorage for a journalism conference a few weeks ago, leaving the kid and the husband and the household behind. It was like high school. I crashed in a friend’s hotel room, where we stayed up too late eating junk food and talking about boys. Whole stretches of time were unclaimed and available for adventure.

Bonding with a young colleague at a bar one night over 80s songs and current fashions, we realized that what was cool when I was in school – pegged pants and long shirts, the B-52s and Duran Duran – was in again. Even that old fogy Henry D. Thoreau would understand. “Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new,” he said.

Eventually, I noticed something different about this cross-generational relationship. Maybe it was the way she gushed about her mom, who’s only a few years older than me, practically inviting me over for a mom-date.

My closer-in-age friend Lynne and I are both in training for half marathons and relay-a-thons, our spring migration of resolutions. Lately our exercise dates have ended with creaky joints and jokes about us being old ladies. That used to be funny, when we were in our late twenties. Now the label sticks, just like those lines around our eyes and mouths, even after a full night of beauty rest.

We see signs of our moms and grammas in every handed-down habit. The way we scold our offspring, a little dog named Bailey in her case and a human kid in mine, and take them everywhere with us. The way we save our grocery bags for garbage liners and flock to special holiday sales, because you never know when you’ll need a bulk package of Post-it notes or a biscuit jar with little dog paws running all over it. The more we examine these routines, the more we know what we will look like when we’re really old.

“I know one thing,” Lynne said. “I’m never going to knit a sweater for my dog.”

Sure, but she’ll knit one for everyone else. We’re knitters now, cranking out homemade gifts with the ferocity of World War II-era volunteers serving in the home guard. We look for bargains the way we once scoured record stores for picture vinyls featuring the Smiths. We even clip coupons.

That’s something my step dad did when he was my age, filling legal-sized envelopes, one with weekly promotions and another for the deals with longer term expiration dates, the golden tickets of coupons. Now my husband hoards them, reminding me to use a coupon if I’m going to buy coffee when I announce another grocery store outing.

Lynne remembers her grandma sending anything that looked remotely useful along with her care packages. Coupons for cat food and snack cakes, even cleaning products. “At least I don’t save those plastic bread bags,” she said. “My grandma used to have them hanging up all around the kitchen.”

Later that night, back in my own house, I buttered the last piece of bread for my son’s dinner and then washed and dried the thick plastic wrapper, tucking it away because I thought it would make a good bag for my husband’s lunch the next day.

These hobbies and habits don’t necessarily make us old. I always thought I would know when I crossed that line, reaching the moment in this marathon of a life when I became not young anymore, but young at heart. Not an old person, but an older one. Turning 30 fooled me into thinking it would be easy, since I still looked and felt the same. Now that I’m 39, something’s changed.

For as long as I can remember, there have been people younger than me to pick on and babysit, even encourage sometimes, but I only had to turn my head and look the other way to see a long line of those who had been here, where I am, before. Now the column of people behind me snakes out like I’m a Sunday driver holding up traffic.

On the last day of my lost Anchorage weekend, I went out for coffee with my new young friend. We giggled over some of the stories we’d collected, remembering the funny parts in carefully rehearsed quips. She reached into her bag, saying, “I have something for you. I hope you don’t mind, but they were free.”

“Why would I mind,” I said as I took the sample-sized tubes of face wash and moisturizer, getting excited over the fancy label. “Thanks, that’s so sweet of you.”

I sniffed the goods and proclaimed them delightful. Then I twirled the tiny tub of moisturizer, holding it up close to my aging eyes so I could read the small print. “Youthtopia,” it said, “For younger looking skin.”

Published in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, June 1, 2008

Things I Did Not Know

2008-05-31T00:03:00.000-07:00

Ten Years Ago

I like my alcohol dry, not sweet and syrupy. Vodka, please. With extra pickled things.

I like my chocolate dark and my wine that way, too. Congener hangovers be damned.

Being tall is a good thing. I will never look back and point to my height as a reason I failed at anything. Sometimes the view's good from up here, too.

We all need boundaries. And a little help with transitions.

I should have stopped biting my fingers and making faces when my mom told me to.

Afternoon naps are the sweetest sound of all.

Never wake a sleeping child.

A good neighbor picks up the dog poop.

When your son says, "You look boo-tee-full," you will believe it, even though you didn't when your mom, your boyfriends, your sisters, your cousins, your husband and your best friend all said the exact same thing, without the lisp.

There's always more to learn.

Going to Extremes

2008-05-30T00:02:00.000-07:00

Journalists and critics and writers like to smirk at blogs. To discount them and belittle them, using the power of their own pages to decry their lack of readers, who are too busy flocking to blogs to notice.

That's alright. It's a natural reaction to change, to resist it and look for reasons not to. This has happened before. Newspapers were the blogs of the Nineteenth Century. No less a privileged observer and lofty thinker than H.D. Thoreau was writing them off as base, lowbrow and not really worthy of attention.

"We are under-bred and low-lived and illiterate; and in this respect I confess I do not make any very broad distinction between the illiterateness of my townsman who cannot read at all, and the illiterateness of him who has learned to read only what is for children and feeble intellects. We should be as good as the worthies of antiquity, but partly by first knowing how good they were. We are a race of tit-men, and soar but little higher in our intellectual flights than the columns of the daily paper."

A blogger I like because he's a writer recently posted a piece that he confessed wasn't handcrafted first on paper. Instead, he just let his thoughts flow where they would, following them like they were a leak looking for the easiest path through the basement. Commenters expressed surprise that he would ever write out a blog post, go through a draft and revise. Why all the trouble?

Maybe they don't realize that good writing isn't what happens when you open your mouth and express. Quality writing takes the kind of crafting that comes with experience and the right tools. The blogs I read have a hint of this, a clue or a suggestion that the writer is doing something more than just sharing Amazing Stories of Survival or What my Cute Kid Said. (Not that there's anything wrong with that!)

Writers have to walk this balance beam. Too much spontaneity isn't so good - that's confusing and boring - while holding on too long can backfire, too. How many of us know people who are self-professed writers, but when you ask about their work, they have nothing to show. They either think the rejections mean the publisher isn't smart enough to understand or that it's still not good enough to share. They're holding on so tightly, they're in danger of smothering their work. "Look how pretty, Lennie."

You have to let go sometimes, so you can see what your writing has to teach.

That's why blogs are so great. They offer an outlet, a safe place to experiment, even when you have to deal with haters and trolls. Guess what? So do writers in the real world. This is as good a place as any to find out if you're OK with that. If you can take it. If you believe enough in what you're doing.

Some blogs are not quality. Even some popular ones. That doesn't mean they don't serve a purpose, offering mini-dramas with no real point, other than a voyeuristic thrill from reading about other people and their problems. I read these too, thrilling with every click at what they'll say next. The National Enquirer for the reality class. Their existence doesn't threaten us so much as add to the general fatigue caused by navigating this mass media world, with its mantras for whiter teeth and cleaner sheets. Even when we resist the urge to shop at Mal Wart Y or buy Brand X , we expend energy ignoring them.

Maybe to experience something truly special, with a level of quality that implies hard work, no shortcuts or quick fixes, unskilled labor or artificial ingredients on the label, to experience this and appreciate it, then recognize it for what it is, we need to look over plenty of three-leafed clovers first.

* Image from the talented Ishkur, who says "feel free to meme these things around the internet like a motherfucking religious cult."

My Daddy and Me

2008-05-29T00:09:00.000-07:00

I was not a daddy's girl. If mine had stuck around long enough to be much more than an insecurity, a constant reminder of how much there is to lose, I still wouldn't have been his. That role was reserved for the middle sister of our family, the feisty one with a temper much like his own. Sometimes I think she'll carry that burden all her life.

That's what happened to Kelly Corrigan. In her book The Middle Place, she describes the unmoored feeling of being a parent, yet still needing the approval of her own, or more specifically her daddy. The first time she brings her fiance to meet Big George, the Green Man, Greenie, she briefs him relentlessly.

"'And sometimes he refers to himself in third person, like "The Green Man likes his eggs over easy." And you know, he might burp or maybe even pick his teeth after lunch,' I shook my head in resignation. 'He doesn't even know he's doing it. He's completely outward focused.' What I really want to say is Love him, Edward, you gotta love him. It'll kill me if you think he's just okay.

"Kelly. Kelly, stop," her soon-to-be-husband says. And you might, too, if it weren't for the sparkling narrative arc of Corrigan's prose. She brings us on a journey through cancer and to the edges of life and death. She's got breast cancer and her dad's down with his third bout, this time it's in his bladder.

She didn't even know about his first fight with prostate cancer. She was abroad, trekking through Australia, or was it Nepal, where she "went because a girl I knew came home . . . fifteen pounds thinner." While she's gone, her family decides not to tell her the news, knowing she would be difficult to deal with on top of everything else.

In describing this part of the story, she sets up a rivalry with her mother who dares to know what's best for her own husband. "I knew ... that she had a comfort with and a skill for recasting things to her liking and moreover, that she had her own rubric for what was 'a lie' and what was 'none of your business.'"

Corrigan seems at a loss to understand her mom's role as the strict parent, except when she's contemplating her own kids. The book is about negotiating the two roles. The writer tries to capture that moment when you "go places and you do things that are beyond your parents' capacity to imagine or understand and that's how you start thinking of them as quaint or peripheral." Ironically, she's much tougher on her mom, the original tough guy on the Corrigan team.

More than anything, she doesn't want to lose her father. Not to cancer. Not to her mom's need to keep him close while he's sick. Until she's faced with the prospect of a lost kid at the beach. Even though Corrigan's not the praying sort, a sharp contrast to her devout Catholic parents, she's willing to trade him in during the search. "I sold my dad out. Nobody knows, but I traded him for Claire. Because if it's one or the other, you have to pick your kid."

There are lots of people floating through this quick little read of a book. Many of them have their own cancer connections, loved ones they've lost to the disease. She describes them as "the people who are aware of the other," a sort of subculture made up of persons who have been made real by getting sucked into a related, but seperate existence. They know the shape of at least the shadow of grief.

Corrigan tells her story in contrasting chapters, between the present year, her cancer year, and her past, which unfolds chronologically as she's growing up. She gives us a few literary glimpses into what it's like to be in this middle place that feels like "gravity pulling my body into the mattress while my subconscious drags my mind from one thought to the next." I would have liked more of these. More connections to the larger world than the occasional reference to the Guess jeans and pink-leather-wallets-stuffed-into-denim-purses of her youth.

She does a good job of setting up another potential metaphor. Back in Nepal, trekking along the Annapurna trail, she meets a Buddhist mother traveling with her young son. In trying to understand the four tenants of this faith, Corrigan realizes she could never choose a life without attachments in lieu of suffering. She can't imagine not being attached to her loud, messy family. The father she adores, even the mother she radiates around like a pair of repelling magnets, never getting close enough to love unconditionally.

We make a choice in this life, to love and be loved, but that choice comes with a responsibility to accept our fate. To someday lose the ones we love. Corrigan leaves us no doubt that she's not ready to do that. And maybe that's right where she needs to be.

Jailhouse Rock

2008-05-28T15:38:00.000-07:00

(Nearly) Wordless Wednesday

I used to make this face when my parents took pictures of me. Um, wait. That's right. I still do.

I Hate to Write *

2008-05-27T00:11:00.000-07:00

My first year of graduate school is over. I am one year closer to an MFA in creative nonfiction. I've written hundreds of pages, but I don't have one finished piece. Not one essay ready for publication.

Even though I pretended to know that's how it would be, that I would labor, uncompensated for my efforts, until my wrists ached and my head felt fuzzy, that I was down with all that. Even though I understood that it would all be part of a process. That my goal would be something bigger. Not finished pieces, but a body of work, an entirety of an experience, an arc of a narrative. Even with all that, I'm feeling a little deflated.

I learned a few lessons in the past year. I started taking risks, the kind that embarrassed me while pushing me out of a routine, so my writing could sniff out a new path full of interesting textures and surprising conclusions, yet hold back a bit, refrain from taking a stinky dump right on the front porch.

I dropped some old habits, like my precious predilection for both melodious, myriad adjectives and alluring alliteration. I picked up a few, too. A weird attraction to fragments. Pieces of sentences meant to imply that I'm still learning. Grasping at ideas. Trying to find my way.

Over it all like a wise moon rising, the power of revision has compelled my soul. Everything you see here has gone through at least one revision, some of it is still being revised. Some of it could stand a whole lot more. I keep trying to remember what the poet Sharon Bryan said at my first graduate school residency, "The first draft should be the booster that gets your rocket off the ground."

Sometimes I hate writing. I hate the work and the unsung nature of the work, with no landscape portrait to hang on the wall when I'm finished. No magnificent building. Not even a sweater to warm a loved one. Writing is so fleeting. So immaterial.

When I get a little whiny about it all, I remember an article written by Garrison Keillor, who is not my favorite writer. He's not even my favorite public radio personality, not by a long shot. If he were the last public radio personality on earth, he still wouldn't be my favorite.

Still, he wrote this piece that I've carried around with me like an oversized comb in my back pocket with teeth wide enough for my unruly curls, the only one that works in my hair, explaining why whiny writers should just get a life. There are much harder professions, he admonishes, with less reward and more sweat equity. Physical labor that wrecks bones and joints, causes chronic pain and lasting injuries.

I wanted to shout at him, to accuse him of not being much of a writer if he wasn't suffering for his work. But, really all that posturing and antagonism would only be hiding the fact that he was right. I write because I want to. Complaining about it is as useless as complaining about the need to keep my heart beating and my lungs breathing.

* The title is an homage to a song by that other chicken-and-egg band of my youth, All's "I Hate to Love."

In Memoriam

2008-05-26T08:05:00.000-07:00

A few years ago I sat on the porch of my Fairbanks rental, an historic home downtown with corner San Francisco style windows and pretty flower boxes along the front. I laced my shoes for a run in the bright glow of a late-May sun. I had the day off, but I couldn't remember why, which holiday we were celebrating. The one about presidents? The one about national pride?

Then I remembered. It was Memorial Day. A day to remember and thank those who had died in service to their country. Our country. I thought of the soldiers working at a nearby army base, wondered whether I'd even recognize one if I ran into him at a local store, out of uniform.

As I took off down the street, slamming my running shoes into pavement warmed by the sun, buoyed by the scent of choke cherry trees in bloom, the sky a blue tablecloth splashed with milk, I remembered my father.

My father left when I was not much older than my own son. He walked away from his family, a wife and three little girls all under the age of five years old. He was eventually diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. Vietnam. He’d served two tours of duty before he met my mom.

She told me their first year of marriage was peppered with terrifying screams in the night. Once, she awoke to discover him missing from their bed. He was crouched down into a sniper stance in the corner, his eyes wide with fear. Soon enough, he was gone, but not before their relationship devolved into a merry-go-round of spectacular fights and bouts of him missing all night. When he finally left, it felt like we had survived an emotional tsunami, leaving a dead calm in his wake.

My father finally surfaced many years later, sick with cancer. He died on Mother’s Day in 1990, while I was away at college. One of the many who would survive the war but remain crippled by the experience. At his funeral a soldier gave his mother the folded flag, a symbol of a grateful nation. I sat stiffly in my seat.

When I went back to school, there were finals to finish and a new apartment to occupy. The normalcy surprised me. I’d expected immobilizing grief. I thought his death would finally force me to make sense of what he meant to me, but I couldn’t even cry.

Until that Memorial Day, on a run through a town that was new to me then and now more familiar than any home I've ever had. I thought about how hard it must have been for my father to leave his girls. How ashamed he must have been when people asked about us and he had no answers. As forgiveness came over me, bringing me closer to him than I’d ever felt before, I started to cry. For that one moment I understood. And I was grateful to him.

Right Foot

2008-05-25T00:05:00.000-07:00

As Mark Knopfler once said, "That's the way you do it."

This is the way my fortieth year was launched. In pink-tufted tiara style with a crew of amazing friends and my ever-loving, ever-faithful husband by my side; with presents and provocatively-named drinks, music stylings by a man named Fireball, who just flew in from Aniak, and the Thneeds, the best band that ever "opened for a band that opened for a band that opened for a band that opened for Kiss;" with a drink spilled on a too-drunk guy as I was jumpandjiving to the side of a woman rediscovering night life after years of helping kiddos make it through the night; with misleading declarations about my age, because, heck yeah, I make turning 27 look good, but I'm even prouder to be doing this to 39; with well wishes from pretty much every patron in the bar; with Roller Derby tryout invitations and the kind of life and happiness in the "right here, right now," that I wouldn't trade for all the extra decades and "If I could just go back to being 29"s in the world.

Thanks.

And Holding

2008-05-24T00:34:00.000-07:00

The Power of Three

2008-05-23T00:01:00.000-07:00

The number three hovers over my life. A benevolent moon, waxing and waning. Taking center stage, then exiting with a flourish of scarves and skirts, only to wait in the wings.

The lone number missing from the chronology of my birth date, as if it were needed elsewhere. I'm the oldest of three girls. I married a man with two younger brothers of his own. Now we have three in our family.

As I near the end of the first year of my blog, the number shines through the window, renewed in strength, taking the place of artificial light. Letting me read without turning on the lamp. Helping me find the bathroom in the dark. Making sure I see what I need to see. Know what I need to learn.

There's three again, in the number of this post. Number 300, published on the 23rd day of the month on the eve of my 39th birthday. The age of threes. Three times three equals nine.

This synchronicity reminds me of the cyclical nature of things. The way fire roars through an ecosystem, revitalizing plants and forests, then fades back until it's needed again. Rabbit offspring booming in a breathless explosion until they've eaten themselves out of their own homes, falling prey to a responding predator population.

Our own lives follow these cycles, too. Any parent can recognize the way children nearing a developmental leap start to act strangely. The fussiness of an infant understanding the separateness of self. The tantrums of a toddler on the verge of talking. They reverberate with anxiety and pain, turning easy interactions into a battle of wills. Then suddenly there's peace, as they relax into their roles and the team takes the field again.

At first these leaps come fast and furious as the infant learns unidentifiable ways of relating to the world. As the puzzle pieces drop back into place, the pace slows down until something new is acquired every two weeks and then once a month. By the time children are walking and talking, the developments occur maybe twice a year.

As I settle into adulthood, my cycles seem to be lapping on a twice-a-decade loop. I see in retrospect how I had to reinvent myself as I became a mother. Make a new commitment to my work and my mind. And then another to my body. Now I wonder if I'm undergoing another transformation. I feel the familiar twinges of anger and rage. Out of control.

When I was about to turn 30, a friend gave me a speech that helped me see the milestone in a new light. Not with a futile struggle against the tide of time, but with the confidence of somebody who has experienced life. I turned 30 like I was winning a beauty pageant, strutting and crying with joy. My tiara is still on my dresser.

Now I'm looking for a new mentor, someone to guide me around the corner and into my fifth decade. Tell me what's in store. What I can look forward to. What new insights and appreciations will I discover? And how bad will the tantrums be before I get there? Before I relax into my role.

Control Freak

2008-05-22T00:00:00.000-07:00

The first essay in Anders Monson's book Neck Deep is told in an outline – complete with Roman Numerals and indentation. The author leads the reader through an examination of how he mines his own mind for material. A satisfying parallel to his family's rich history of working in the mines.

Just as mining is interested mostly in the horizontal, the mineral deposits that lay naturally in planes, Monson wants his outline to lead us to something worth at least as much as what his family did in the dark. He expects big things from himself, from his writing, agonizing over whether the metaphor stands up or if it's only a protective sheath, the way his mother’s womb once was.

By choosing the rigid scaffold of an outline to hang the opening essay, he takes a risk with his reader’s patience. I kept wanting to look away. To resist the descending structure, maybe too much like the pyramid style of a newspaper story. The kind you can leave behind at the breakfast table when it’s time to go to work. I wouldn't want to miss Monson’s message, though. The male essence of his outline “defined by penetration.” What a dirty bird he says he is, poking fun at himself, and yet uncovering the truth. These are themes that run like a mineral vein through the book.

The truth is Monson wants to be in control, but like many control freaks, it’s because he feels so out of it. He’s a student kicked out of school for his crimes. A friend to “Liz,” lost in a violent death. A motherless child. A writer questioning his tools of the trade. "Maybe this – my criminal and educational history, my life – is in the end about control, about understanding limits, running my finger along any boundary I could find."

In the essay “Cranbrook Schools: Adventures in Bourgeois Topologies,” he returns to the hard metaphors of science. This time he’s interested in topology, a geometric subject without shape or measurement, and architecture, the science of designing physical structures. These scientific fields-as-metaphors allow him to look for the connections between his past as a troubled youth, who didn’t feel like he belonged to the elite private school he’s returned to, and his present as somebody who can’t get it out of his system.

Just as Monson begins the book with an outline, a map of where we will go with him, he ends with an Appendix, titled "Parts of the Book You May Additionally Enjoy, such as An Appendix.” This structure is what the Chicago Manual of Style calls “a repository for raw data that the author was unable to work into the text.” Yet, the careful reader already found hints of this material in the preceding pages.

Monson uses his appendix as a confessional. To tell us that he’s lied several times in this book, but even more troubling, he’s told the truth. “I feel much more vulnerable here, in this book, on this page. Is that good or not? Can one become addicted to confession?”

An appendix is also a “blind-ended tube connected to the colon.” (American Journal of Retinology) A worm-like protrudence that can be removed without causing much harm. A dead-end with no absolute importance, in terms of the body’s function. Monson's appendix is “a repository, a depository, for a number of my secrets.” Here is where he tells us that he loves us. That we can trust him. “I … wouldn’t lead … you wrong.” Isn’t that what people say when they want us to give up control?

There are hints of Monson’s controlling ways tucked into each essay, especially in his self-examination of the metaphor. He can’t seem to leave his alone, poking at them, asking if they stand up, pointing them out for the reader. Monson shows us a statue on the grounds between his alma mater (literally his "nourishing mother") and the nearby girl’s school.

“A naked young woman with one more fountain behind her. Someone has placed a daffodil in one of her open hands. One of these two things must be a metaphor.” Not “could be a metaphor” or “must be a metaphor for me.” One of these two things must be a metaphor.

There is no doubt that Monson is in control here. We are only along for the ride.

Marathon Mileage

2008-05-21T00:07:00.000-07:00

Wordy Wednesday

Date: May 20
Mileage: 3.0
May Mileage: 3.0
Temperature: 53

In case you were absent that day, I recently announced an exciting development in my transition towards a happier, healthier me. I'm going to run the Equinox Marathon in Fairbanks this fall. Today was the first of many training "runs" to come and to describe how it went, let's take a tour of a cute little place I like to call Clicheland.

The first step is the hardest. There was a time I could head out for a three-miler without wincing or even thinking about aches and pains. Not today. This hurts. And it's going to hurt for awhile. Until it doesn't anymore, or I can start and finish 26.2 miles without having a heart attack.

Before you criticize, walk a mile in my shoes. Because these shoes are new and kind of ugly and at first they really hurt. My feet felt like they were being squeezed by a python with wacky yellow laces. By the end, I have to admit things were a little looser down there. Not there. Lower. Yeah, right there. My feet feel great now, so there's another excuse out the window.

She huffed and she puffed. My strategy was basically to run when nobody was looking, because this shit wasn't pretty. And when I walked, I tried to use that fast-walk gait with arms pumping and legs flapping. As one local athlete put it when I admired her stride, "Walk like you used to walk at the pool when the lifeguard yelled at you to stop running."

Consistency is the best policy. Eventually, I want to run all my shorter training outings and fast-walk the longer ones. When I did this race almost ten years ago, I ended up dragging my feet in a scary shuffle when I was tired. This time around I want to look lively through all the tough spots and run like the wind on the easier terrain.

Runner's high. Even with all the pain and the messiness, the flailing and the wheezing, I still reached that moment when the endorphins were rushing and I felt a surge of love and acceptance swirl out from my chest in a wave of energy that almost wavered in the morning light. My eyesight sharpened and my scalp tingled, my feet felt lighter than air. "This is what my body is capable of," I thought. Then I started craving a bagel.

Fragile Things

2008-05-20T00:00:00.000-07:00

There once was a mighty leader who commanded an army of millions. An image-blind and bureaucratic man not given to extremes of emotion. He used the technological wonder of these forces to invade a much smaller country an ocean of a continent away. He was only successful in the fact that he did not destroy his own in the process.

Then came his son, a man whose swagger competes with a certain emptiness at his core. A leader given to grandiose gestures, who seems incapable of comprehending, or maybe simply incurious about, how different and foreign his enemy may be. He takes his army back to the far-away country, this time in larger and more aggressive numbers.

Although he emerges from the conflict unharmed, "the fortunes and the reputation of the country he rules are seriously damaged."

In a recent New Yorker profile, Daniel Mendelsohn tells us how Herodotus, "The Father of History," told this story in his Histories more than two millennium ago. A sweeping account of the Great Kings Darius and Xerxes and their Persian Wars, "in which a wobbly coalition of squabbling Greek city-states twice repulsed the greatest expeditionary force the world has ever seen." Or maybe a twisted reflection of a more modern tale, in which a coalition of squabbling Islamic republics twice repulse the greatest Super Power the world has ever seen?

But there's more to this story than an alarming synchronicity between the Persian kings and the American Bush Dynasty. Mendelsohn also tells us that Herodotus was the first person to use the walking language of prose to shape a narrative instead of the airborne flights of poetry.

The birth of Creative Non-Fiction, in other words, was not celebrated at a baby shower honoring Truman Capote's offspring or even Daniel Defoe, who fictionalized an account of the Great Plague of 1665 using exhaustive interviews and other tools of verisimilitude. Rather it was at the hands of this garrulous writer, whose first person digressions and susceptibility to the same kind of imaginative flights Mendelsohn fancies tour guides taking off on, afforded him a sort of disdainful interest from the previous generation of history students at the most prestigious institutions of this country.

"All you wanted to do was put some distance between yourself and him, loaded down as he was with his guidebooks, the old Brownie camera, the gimcrack souvenirs - and, of course, that flowered polyester shirt."

Herodotus' reputation seems to have recovered today, earning newfound respect in the academy and perhaps from modern readers of a new user-friendly edition of his Histories, complete with dense annotations and rich illustrations, "bristling with appendices by a phalanx of experts."

What fascinates me about Herodotus is his observation - in this exhaustive, nine-volume work exploring the rise of the Persian Empire and its inevitable fall - that Super Powers of the Persian Empire kind are unnatural and doomed to fail once they try to expand beyond the natural boundaries of their own continent. Risking comfortable livings and ignoring the needs of their own people. Greedy for yet one more natural resource.

Although Mendelsohn calls his facts unreliable at times, he says Herodotus gives us the truth about the way things tend to work as a whole. Everything is linked, whether we're talking about world history, local civics or even the personalities in our own circle of family and friends. We all suffer from the same limitations.

We are fragile things. Destined to die. Stories are fragile things, too, "made up of nothing stronger or more lasting than twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks," in the words of Neil Gaiman. But some stories have outlasted all the people who told them. Some will even outlast the countries and lands and times in which they were created.

That is the power of History.

New Level of Knitterhood

2008-05-19T11:18:00.000-07:00

Too Many Socks in the Basket?

First there was one. I'd work on my knitting project, concentrating fully on each stitch. Counting and recounting rows and pattern repetitions until I was finished. This was enough for me. Admiring one sock while I finished the other. Picking up where I'd left off.

Then there were two. I had an easy going sock around all the time. A tried-and-true pattern, one I'd already waded into, swimming through waves of Make Ones and Yarn Overs, holding my breath as I went over the waterfall of turning the heel. Sometimes I'd test out the deep end, using bigger needles and thicker yarn while my new sock explored the territory of unfamiliar knitting term reefs and intricate pattern shoals.

Now I have come to the stage of my knitting career where I can't stop at one or two projects. Now I've got three different patterns on my mind. Three different skeins of yarn in the basket. Three different needle sizes in my hands.

Different socks for different times of day. The most intricate patterns for the morning, when my mind is fresh and the sun spotlights my work from behind. Different projects for different company. Familiar patterns for role playing with my son. "The queen must finish her knitting." Socks for far-away-friends while we watch movies at night.

As I work each piece, testing for gaps at the gusset and leg length, I think of the foot that will wear this sock. I wonder what kinds of shoes will accept the fabric, whether the recipient will keep them on in bed, feeling loved in the land of dreams.

Neighborhood Watch

2008-05-18T09:09:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-17T08:57:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-16T00:06:00.000-07:00

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 2006 prosecution purge. Rocker Melissa Etheridge said that's where gays and lesbians were thrown after the presidential election of 1992. 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 the phrase works, suggesting 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?

2008-05-15T00:05:00.000-07:00

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.

But for every lost soul in our society, hungering for a connection to the land, searching for a reason to live, there are hundreds of happy, successful, honest and earnest folks. They find nature just fine. 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. 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, making our cities a treasure 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, along with those who troop to Conway's Turtle Island utopia and eventually leave him behind.

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

2008-05-14T00:01:00.000-07:00

(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

2008-05-13T04:08:00.000-07:00

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?