Lake Otis Elementary School Wake

 Back in April I wrote about the School Board meeting when the Board voted to close  Lake Otis, Fire Lake, and Campbell Stem schools.

Tuesday afternoon, Lake Otis Elementary, where I've been volunteering in a third grade class for the last three years, held a wake.  They called it a tribute.  

Lots of folks showed up - alumni, former LO teachers, parents, current students, and folks from the neighborhood.  

 

More people were inside.

And the hallways were lined with boxes teachers and staff have already packed to go to Tudor and Rogers Park schools that seem to be taking most of the Lake Otis students next fall.

There was plenty of pizza.

Sweets

And there was a little bit of healthy food.

Below is Steve Waldron who went to Lake Otis when it opened in 1955!

Here's a picture of all the School Board Members who came.  To be fair, they were at a special school board meeting.  The school didn't have a lot of options though.  It's the last week of school

The musicians had moved into the cafeteria and a lot of the kids were dancing to the music.  

Here's a future student, but probably not at Lake Otis.  I say 'probably' because when enrollments eventually go back up, maybe it will reopen as a local neighborhood school

There were a couple of tables with old yearbooks

I didn't get to find out why this young man was at the event.  I assumed he was an alumnus or the older sibling of a kid at Lake Otis now.  But the opportunity to get the picture happened quickly and I took it.

Denali Time

We've been going up to Denali National Park in the spring before the busses take tourists into the park for over 20 years.  It's a brief time when you can drive out to Teklanika campground (30 miles in.)  Once the busses begin, the road is closed at Savage River (12 miles in.)

It's a time before things turn green, but there are fewer people around, campgrounds (but they were $55 a night, half that for Senior and other National Park Pass holders) are easy to get, and you can take your time, stopping where you want, as long as you want, taking in the magnificent views, and animals.  

This year there was still more snow than normal - lingering from this record breaking winter.  When we complained that we had seen no caribou at all (normally guaranteed) we were told that they are late arriving this year, probably because of the snow.  

We left Anchorage Thursday morning, with some sunshine in Anchorage, but as we drove north it got cloudy and we had short bouts of rain and wet pavement then dry pavement much of the way.  

There was a surprisingly good view at the Denali view point at mile 135.  You couldn't see Denali, but you could see all the smaller mountains. (these are eight and nine thousand foot peaks.)

People at the viewpoint tend to talk to each other and ask where everyone is from.  When they learned we were from Anchorage they wanted to know which mountain was Denali.  I had to say, "None of them.  It's the one towering above behind the clouds."  Then I checked my camera and found my picture from exactly two years earlier and shared it.  (The bottom photo was with a telephoto lens so there's some distortion between the two, but you get the point.)

As I compare the two images, it's interesting that there was more snow two years ago, because that definitely wasn't the case north of the mountain, in the park.  The mountains you see in the top picture almost look like they are part of Denali in the lower picture.  But they are all separate mountain peaks, about half the height of Denali.  

Gas prices were interesting.  The cheapest in Anchorage is around $5.49.  In Wasilla, there are stations advertising $5.19 and a few on the outskirts with $4.99. (Anchorage has a local tax on gas that raises the price.)  The Talkeetna turnoff station has $4.95 for the lowest grade.  

But in Cantwell, where the old Native run station seems to be closed down, the Vitus station is raking it in. (Yeah, regular was $6.45/gallon.)

We were tired when we got to the campground and made dinner and got into bed.  It wasn't sunny, but it also wasn't as cold as we expected.  

One of the many  awesome aspects of Denali is its vastness.  You can see wild landscape that seems to stretch out forever.  Below are two photos meshed together because one wide angle picture is way too small.  And as one tourist we met says, "The pictures don't come close to capturing it."

Below are some more photos from Friday, a gray day with occasional sprinkles.  

Here's J walking  down from the Teklanika parking lot and viewpoint where the road ends.  You can walk the mile down to the bridge over the Teklanika River.  Though beyond the bridge was closed off due to " a scheduled bear capture operation." (This for research, not to remove the bears.)

This is a view from the bridge.  It's not a black and white photo, but looks lie one.

There are a couple of large ponds (not sure how big it has to be to be called a lake) near the Teklanika campground where we can normally see waterfowl.  One still had a lot of ice and I didn't see any birds.  

But the other one had Northern Shovelers.  Pictures in bird books often show the males with green heads.  These had black heads.  I asked the bird guide on Saturday and she said the green shows iridescent when the sun is right.  

We were stopped at an overview, relaxing when a car stopped and asked if we'd seen any caribou.  They hadn't either, but they said there was a bear about 3 miles down the road.  

And not much later, we saw a driver looking out over his car.  Following his gaze we saw a big blonde bear sleeping on the tundra.  After a while, he raised his head, move a little further away, and crashed again.  

This raven was making a racket.

There were lots of ptarmigan on the road.  They're in the process of transitioning from the white winter plumage to the summer brown.  

When we got back Friday afternoon, there was someone parked in our campsite.  I wouldn't even mention this - he simply didn't see the paper clipped on the site marker, and since the site across the road was nice and was empty, we just pulled in there.  But I'm mentioning it because the vehicle was

 from Storyteller

unlike any I'd ever seen.  It was dark gray, almost black and looked like a combination of a truck and a tank.  It was big.  The license plate said Storyteller and I mentioned he could tell us a story.  No, he said, that's the name of the company that makes the vehicle.  He'd driven this thing up from Birmingham, Alabama and I don't know why I didn't take a picture.  

But I looked up Storyteller when we got home.  It's a company that makes very expensive and fancy campers.  

The picture is from Storyteller.  The sticker price for this model is $799,784 or $5385 per month.

There are different models and this seems to look like the one we saw.    Look for it in Anchorage this week, where the driver was going to meet his wife who flies up to Anchorage regularly for work.  

I guess there is a market for luxury goods for all those in the $50 million and up category.  

The next morning there was sun and we'd found an 8:30am bird walk listed on the Denali Website at Mountain Vista trail, near the Savage River campground.  We turned out to be the only visitors for the walk and our guide, Autumn, was great.  She identified a number of small birds by their calls and some we saw.  And at one point, we saw that Denali was out of the clouds.  

I identified the bird on the right, which is a heftier bird than the picture shows, as a gray jay, but Autumn told me it is now called a Canada Jay.

Below is a white crowned sparrow.  When we mentioned the bear and I showed her a picture, Autumn thought it might have been one of the bears that had been tranquilized.  

The artwork below is what I'm calling 'stained ice' - which was naturally formed on the trail.  

As magnificent as the park was on Friday, the sunshine on Saturday added to its glory. 

Below you can see the landscape with Denali seeming to rise over the horizon.

And a closer look at North America's tallest mountain through the telephoto lens.

And then we turned around and headed to the Alaska Geographic bookstore next to the Visitors Center and then toward home. 

We had lunch at a pullout along the Nenana River, just north of Cantwell.  The 'shoreline' in the middle on the other side of the river is actually large blocks of ice stacked up.  As we ate, ice floated by along the river.  The Denali rivers flow north, into the Nenana, and then the Yukon according to Autumn.

A couple of hours later we got back to the Denali South Viewpoint.  It had clouded up again as we drove south, but we walked back up to the viewpoint, where three young men from Orange County, California told us the mountain had been out.  There had been a cloud obscuring the middle, but the bottom and the top had been visible.  As we chatted, one of them said he thought the mountain was visible again.  I took this picture, but it wasn't until I got home and looked carefully, could I see the white of the mountain showing through the grayer clouds.  

Now we're back home.  It's gray and the weather app says that won't change in the next ten days.  Temps will get up to 50˚F (10˚C) and a little above.  But the plants know summer is coming and the birch leaves are showing green, though they aren't fully open.  

This All Sounds So Familiar

 From Peter Pmerantsev,  How to Win an Information War

"Describing the allure of such reality-denying propaganda, the German Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt, who had fled Nazi Germany and eventually immigrated to the US in 1941, described how Germans, lost in  "an ever-changing, incomprehensible world . . . are obsessed by a desire to escape from reality because in their essential homelessness they can no longer
bear its accidental, incomprehensible aspects. . .What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part."

Instead of "evidence," whether fake or real, what people were looking for was a larger sense that they were special, that they were surrounded by enemies, that they were part of a common destiny.  Fealty to the leadership became a value in itself.  The Nazi leadership could often change their policies - at one moment the USSR was an ally;  the next moment Germany war at war with it - but such inconsistencies didn't matter, thought Arendt.  In a world where Germany was portrayed as being surrounded by malign, deceptive, endless conspiracies, the leaders duty was to lie:

"The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood . . .they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness. . .

The essential conviction shared by all ranks, from fellow-traveler to leader, is that politics is a game of cheating and that the "first commandment" of the movement:  "The Fuehrer is always right," is as necessary for the purposes of world politics - i.e. world-wide cheating - as the rules of military discipline are for the purposes of war."  (pp 90-91, emphasis added)

 

Why Books? Some New Ones At the Library

 While picking up my next Book Club book at Loussac Library, I went up stairs to peruse the new book section.  In this day of 300 character social media posts, I find books a great place to retreat to a deeper way of knowing about the world.  

So here are, in no real order, some of the books I looked at in the New Books section. 

Hush:  How to Radiate Power and Confidence… by Linda Clemons   (for an audio intro:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FyKL-6OvyE )

I saw Hush first   This is a self-help book to give the reader "power and confidence."  The "without saying a word" more than suggests it's going to be about body language.  There's a link above to an audio intro to the book by the author, who let's you know she can tell all your secrets by the way you hold and move your whole body as well as parts of your body.  

Language is Gesture -  by David McNeill     I saw this second book, ostensibly on an overlapping topic a bit later.  This is more of an academic book outlining this idea that language is based on gesture.

"Abstract:

A new way of viewing language, as a dynamic mode of meaning-making of which gesture is a fundamental part.

When David McNeill began his work on gesture more than forty years ago, language and the action of speaking were regarded as separate realms. But language, says McNeill in Language Is Gesture, is dynamic and gesture is fundamental to speaking. Central to his conception of language, and distinct from linguistic analysis, is what McNeill calls the “growth point,” the starting point of making thought and speech one. He uses the term “gesture–speech unity” to refer to the dynamic dimension of adding gesture to speaking. It is the growth point that achieves this unity, whereby thought is embedded in gesture and speech at the same time.

Gesture is the engine of language. It is foundational to speaking, language acquisition, the origin of language, animal communication, thought, and consciousness. Gesture is global and synthetic and brings energy; speech is linear and segmented and brings cultural standards. The growth point is a snapshot of an utterance at its beginning psychological stage, the starting point of unifying thought and speech. Growth points create gesture–speech unity by synchronizing a bundle of linguistic features with a gesture that carries the same meaning. This gesture–speech unity is a form of thought, a unique form of cognition."  [From Linguist List]

I found the similarity of the covers of these four books interesting.  

The Rolling Stone's review title is 

"OZZY OSBOURNE’S ‘LAST RITES’ MEMOIR  IS HAUNTING, REVELATORY, AND OFTEN DEEPLY SAD"

Rolling Stone offers 14 things they learned that hadn't been in other Osbourne bios.  There was nothing I needed to know, but if you're a big Osbourne fan, maybe , . .

From Kirkus on Sumner:

"A skillful blend of legal history and biography that honors the 19th century’s foremost champion of civil rights..".

Given today's Supreme Court ruling gutting the Voting Rights Act, perhaps we can bring Sumner back to life to help fight again for civil rights.  The decision is 36 pages.  Kagan's dissent is 48 pages.

 

Also from Kirkus on Lionel Richie's book:

"There’s an abundance of love and gratitude in this wildly entertaining, utterly charming memoir."

Roosevelt, also from Kirkus

"Roosevelt’s forceful life is portrayed as the embodiment of America 'as it was meant to be.'

Baier, chief political anchor for Fox News, is a prolific biographer whose volume on Theodore Roosevelt joins his works on George Washington, Ulysses S. Grant, Dwight Eisenhower, and Ronald Reagan. The author’s portrait of the 26th president draws on Roosevelt’s writings, diaries, letters, speeches, and other biographies. Baier sketches Roosevelt’s transformations to politician, president, soldier, writer, and naturalist. .  .

This portrait of an iron-willed president digs only so deep."

I wonder if the author embraces Roosevelt's trust busting and preservation of natural wonders in National Parks.  

When All the Men Wore Hats, Susan Cheever

 The Cheever book looked particularly interesting, though I've only read a few of her father's short stories.  

From Spectrum Culture:

"When All the Men All Wore Hats, the second study by author John Cheever’s daughter Susan, follows Home Before Dark, her longer 1984 memoir, inevitably repeating some of the material. Both accounts blend candor and tact, respect and pain, as she delves into his sense of never quite belonging to the patrician New England-New York smart-set her father limned.

John came from a checkered New England legacy, one that, like the many floundering characters in his short stories, trended downward. Susan archly observes: “The New Yorker was the stern father who would occasionally hand you a dollar and tell you to go and buy yourself a new fifty-dollar shirt.” Cheever’s standout stories mostly had been published before the 1966 success of the adaptation of The Swimmer into a Burt Lancaster film, and John didn’t publish more than a handful of stories at the magazine that had cemented his mid-century reputation after that."

Cloud Warriors, Thomas E. Weber 

 From Princeton Alumni Weekly:

"As his reporting proceeded, Weber began to focus on why more accurate forecasts don’t necessarily translate into better outcomes, in lives and property saved. Weather satellites, radar stations and the specialized scientific knowledge to understand the data they produce are all important, he concluded — but a key, underappreciated factor is how to manage human psychology.

A turning point came with Weber’s interview with a social science expert who traveled to locations that had recently been struck by tornadoes. As her colleagues were focusing on estimating wind speeds and damage patterns, this researcher was asking community members about the warnings they’d heard before the storm and how they decided to take the actions they did.

“I realized then that there was a huge push in the weather world to start better understanding people, as well as the atmosphere,” Weber says. 'The real issue is, how do you get people to make the safest decisions? You have to communicate that to people in a way that gets them to treat it with a gravity that is appropriate to the danger. It’s a complicated chain of events.'”

Empty Vessel:  The Story of the Global Economy in One Barge, by Ian Kumekawa 

From the New York Review: 

Over the past few decades journalists and academics have chronicled the “lawless ocean,” documenting widespread human rights abuses in the shipping and fishing industries and what might be termed “the outlaw sea.” In Empty Vessel, Ian Kumekawa, a historian at MIT and Harvard, finds that the seas are in fact replete with laws—but that many of them are designed to get around other laws, to exploit or create loopholes, or to obtain regulatory and tax advantages, all with the goal of maximizing profits for shipping companies. This parallel offshore universe of laws and contracts was slowly built up by lawyers, corporations, and territories that function as tax havens, enabling them to reap profit without paying their due—and becoming central to what we call globalization.

Empty Vessel tells the story of a single barge, from its construction at a Swedish dockyard nearly half a century ago to its current status as a rusty, “laid up” accommodation barge for oil workers in the port of Onne in Nigeria. (The book also cursorily follows its sister ship, an identical vessel built at the same time, which had a similar course over the years.) By tracking the ship’s many lives—as a floating barrack for British troops during the Falklands War, as a prison ship moored at Pier 36 in Lower Manhattan and then in Portland, England, and as a temporary housing barge for assembly line workers in West Germany—Kumekawa charts the dramatic transformations that the world economy has undergone since the 1980s: globalization, the decline of manufacturing, financialization, neoliberalism. The ship’s trajectory lays bare both the physical infrastructure of the global economy—in the form of ships, ports, and the workers who operate them—and the invisible legal architecture without which it would be impossible. 

The Injustice of Property - Steven Przybylinski

From Project Muse:

"With the rise of homelessness in many U.S. cities, municipal governments are sanctioning organized encampments as an official strategy for sheltering unhoused people. Examining the shortcomings and consequences of these municipal policies, The Injustice of Property explores how unhoused individuals living in self-managed encampments navigate and organize themselves within and against the confines of liberal property systems. Through ethnographic research in Portland, Oregon, a paradigmatic city in advancing this model of homeless shelter, Stephen Przybylinski details the everyday struggles of self-managed encampments to highlight how key contradictions inherent to liberal ideology maintain property as a means of structuring sociopolitical equality. He argues that justice cannot be realized for unhoused communities within the liberal model of private property due to how liberalism and liberal ideology prioritize the rights and values of property over the personal rights of self-governance.

The Injustice of Property is a conceptually robust and empirically rich account of the limits of liberal thinking regarding what “just” property relations look like for unhoused and housed people alike. The book shows that while encampment communities struggle to establish alternative property relationships to the traditional model of private ownership, the injustices that residents of encampments face provoke a necessary reevaluation of how beneficiaries of property systems influence who can become housing stable and on which terms. This insightful book reveals how the injustices surrounding Portland’s encampment communities reflect the limits and injustice of liberal property more broadly."  

The Cost of Being Undocumented, by Alix Dick and Antero Garcia

From interview on UUWorld:

Dick: I would like people to understand that the decisions that immigrants make were never made lightly. Nobody leaves home by choice. When people read this book, I want them to understand that what happened to me could happen to anybody. It’s a privilege to think that tragedy will never hit you.

A black-and-white portrait of Antero Garcia, couthor of "The Cost of Being Undocumented."

Antero Garcia: Taking the “cost” part of the title, I hope readers see that the costs of undocumented life are so much more than just financial numbers. Sure, we offer a financial estimate of what living undocumented has cost Alix at the end of the book. However, more importantly, I want readers to understand the toll of living away from family, of navigating language and social barriers, of losing the opportunities for youthful joy in a new country. The financial costs also go both ways: while existing economic reports point to the fact that undocumented individuals actually provide a net-benefit to the U.S. economy, Alix’s story also highlights the ways wage theft, out-of-pocket medical expenses, and inaccessible university costs actually extract even more income for the most marginalized individuals in this country.

 I pulled out a few more books, but this is a good enough selection.  In this time of social media, influencers whose test for truth is how many viewers they have and how much money those viewers bring, and a president who's truth is measured by his own perceived best interest, taking a mental vacation from all that and reading a few books feels like a luxury.  

And it's a good time to support your local library.  Most have a new book section.  You can even find a comfy chair and just lose yourself in the library.  

Changing Seasons - Yard, Trails, Critters

 

Our front yard (south facing) no longer has any snow.  The tulips have poked out of the ground in a bed in front along the house.  Back yard still has some but it's retreating quickly.

The bike trails along the streets I've been on are all clear of snow, with some residual ice in shaded spots and large puddles of water here and there.  

The trails along the the greenbelts are not quite that far along.  some are clear - from Goose Lake parking lot to UAA has pavement all the way, though at some points it's narrow.  

The trail from Goose Lake parking lot toward the Chester Creek trail along Northern Lights to the Alaska Native Medical Center is clear. 

There was a guy in a pickup truck doing spins in the parking lot.  He was the only vehicle in the lot.  He straightened up and drove away.  Not sure if it was because he saw me on the bike, or he was just ready to go.  

Chester Creek south (from Lake Otis) to the Peanut Farm is clear in some spots and covered in snow in other parts.  This picture is just north of the bridge under International Airport Road.  

I passed a couple of rabbits near Loussac Library.  I backed up and they were still there, not moving.  

They didn't move when I pulled out my phone and took their picture.  Nice birch bark too.  

There was a pair of mergansers in the creek between UAA dorms and the dining commons. (Thanks Dianne for the identification.)

And at Lake Otis Elementary yesterday, the kids got a visit from the Bird Treatment and Learning Center (Bird TLC) and they brought along a Peregrine Falcon.  The kids were quiet so as not to agitate the falcon and asked a lot of great questions.  

They listened quietly in rapt(or) attention.  (sorry, couldn't resist, it's completely accurate.)

Oe more related note.  We had a lot more snow this winter and the weather stayed a lot colder longer.  For many weeks our daily  high temperatures were below our normal low temperatures.  So the snow and ice clung to the ground far longer than normal.  And to top it off, last year the sidewalks and trails cleared much earlier than normal.  

All this means I'm way behind in my biking.  Today, April 24, 2026, my total is 70 kilometers.  Last year on April 24, I was at 180 kilometers.  Can I catch up with last year's pace?  I'm guessing not, though last year I did do 100k weeks.  My total last summer was just over 1600 kms, or 1000 miles.  We'll see how things go as the trails get clear of snow.  

But biking is back on the agenda, even if we have trouble getting out of the 40s F, and going outside to get the mail or take the compost out, doesn't require putting on a coat anymore.