Walking Home - Takes the long way home

I just finished Lynn Schooler's Walking Home - in time for tonight's book club meeting.  It's not a book I would have picked and now that I've finished it, I'm trying to figure out my lack of satisfaction.  And should I evaluate Alaska related books differently from other books? 

Middle-aged Juneau outdoorsman, while building a house for himself and his new bride, decides to complete the last leg of a trek that would have him circumnavigate Mr. Fairweather.  There's already problems with the marriage.  Will leaving for a solo wilderness adventure save it?

As I tried, without much success due to the reflective library cover - to photograph the book, it seemed to me the book cover was a good metaphor for my dissatisfaction.

I looked at the photo, and reflected that Schooler is described as an 'award winning wildlife photographer" and though - "Ok, there are a lot of subtle and interesting parts to this photograph, and it reflects the darkness in this story, the coast, the clouds that provided lots of rain, but for a book cover, it's not really that striking.  Intellectually, it's a good photo for the book, but it doesn't quite work as a book cover."

And that's how I felt about the whole book.  There are a lot of interesting parts.  The interweaving of his present trip with the historical accounts of those who preceded Schooler to these parts.  The moving from what he sees as he walks the wilderness, and his discussions of the habits of the birds he's learned through experience and books.  Or plants, or boats, or weather.  And how members of his island community watched after each other.

"The Ulrichs and the Swansons all stood watching as the wave ripped the timber off the ridge above Gilbert Inlet to a height of 1,700 feet with a force that was later calculated as twenty-five million pounds per-square-foot, which was sufficient to instantly strip all the bark off the tumbling treetrunks and tear away their branches.  Then it rebounded to the eastern shore below Crillon Inlet, flaying the mountainside up to 500 feet above sea level;  it struck so hard that every tree, shrub, tuft of grass, and bit of vegetation was wiped away down to naked bedrock.  It was only after the wave lashed over 320-foot-high Cenotaph Island and tore a swatch through its middle that Ulrich came to his senses.  Seeing the wave rolling down the eastern shore toward them, he said, 'I began to move and I moved fast.'"(p. 81)

Interweaving different times and ideas is tricky business and for the most part it works, but we can see the edges where he moves from now to then, from specific to general.  Schooler was in Lituya Bay and recounting the records he'd found of the 1959 earthquake. 

Sonny (Howard Jr.) was eight and the boat with his dad Howard Ulrich Sr.  He'd be 60 or 61 today.  Juneau folks - does anyone know him?  In the book, they're described as 'from Pelican.' 

Generally, I liked the prose. 

"On a map it looked easy.  I could plant my thumb on Lituya Bay and cover the sixty miles to Dry Bay with an outstretched pinkie."

Some chapters are page turners - the 1958 earthquake and the Lituya Bay tidal wave, being stalked by an injured, hungry bear - others are merely interesting.

I'm sure a lot of folks will really like this book.  Ultimately, while it had interesting background on Alaska history and geography, I just didn't get any new insights.  The personal relationship that was woven into all the other threads was mundane.  There were no real insights into what happened.   If he had them, he didn't share them. 



 Oh yeah.  I didn't even notice, until I started this post, that the rest of the picture is on the back of the cover.  And with both parts it's a better photo.  But the cover is what people see.  And the contents, for me, were like the cover.  Not quite good enough on the whole, though with lots of good parts.

I'm not sorry I read it.  I noted in an earlier post I got to read some history of Mt. Fairweather as I saw it out my Seattle bound flight window. 

I'll hold off until I hear what the other book club members say about the book.

Later:  The book club guys seemed to like the book better than I did.  They like his prose, the liked the history and nature accounts interwoven into the other tales.  They liked the sailing and tidal details and how he described them.  They didn't think much about the relationship thread and some felt it could have done without.  I know I have problems at times about not wanting to leave things out that are important to me, but not to the story I'm telling.  As the person telling the story about his trek in the wild, he probably felt it would have been dishonest to leave his dissolving relationship with his new wife out of the book.  But as good literature, he needed to either make that part of the book more insightful or leave it out. 

It's not a bad book by any means.  I never considered abandoning it.  But for me it didn't quite reach its potential. 

The Last Homeless in Anchorage

He saw me whip out my camera as I was waiting for the light to change and so he turned his sign around.

I imagine there will be some people who will focus on spelling here.  It's a legitimate point one could make, but spelling isn't the issue.  It's what happens to the homeless in Anchorage now that they've been rousted out of their camps and drivers have been warned they can be fined for giving money to 'signers' on corners near traffic.   Our why our wealthy nation

I called the number.  The man's name is Guy Nelson.  I recognize that homeless people is a broad label and that some people who have lived out in the camps in town have been a nuisance or worse to people living nearby.  When I asked how many homeless Guy thought were mentally ill and how many were homeless by choice he estimated 3,000 of the former and 2500 of the later.  And another 7000 who are homeless by circumstances - homeless being a broad category including coach surfers. 

• Since the Mayor has made it illegal to hand money to the homeless, and
• since Nelson has a phone, and
• since it's still legal to use your cell phone while driving in Alaska,
• perhaps Nelson can work out a way for people to give him money via their phones. 

I'm only half joking.  The mayor and police chief said this was a safety issue.  I don't think they are against people being charitable.  Just in unsafe places. 

Guy's basic point on the phone was that when you kick people out of the places they live, you need to help them learn to cope in the world.  He had ideas about alternative, cheap housing.  We made a time to meet this week.  I'll let you know what I find out.

The First Walt Parker Sustainable Community Award Winner

I forget that not everyone shared my luck.  I got to meet Walt Parker early, when I first got to Alaska.  He was active in the local American Society for Public Administration chapter.  It was only later that I found out he was active in a lot of organizations.  And that he's had a remarkable life.

A few examples:

• pilot in WW II China
• bush pilot Alaska
• trapper
• FAA employee
• amateur thespian
• city council member
• academic
• consultant all around the world on various topics
• chair of the Alaska oil spill commission
• member of the Arctic Council

And he's still getting new stamps in his passport and volunteering full time in his 80s.

He's a walking encyclopedia about, well, everything.  You mention any topic, any country, and Walt will explain it in detail and tell a tale of when he was there. 

Sunday night a bunch of community groups sponsored the night and the first Walt Parker Sustainable Community Award.  While the crowd would probably be seen as left of center, a BP employee was at our table, and the Lt. Governor, Mead Treadwell, spoke in high praise of Walt Parker.

Walt was asked to open the envelope and announce the winner.  You don't see Walt at a loss for words often.  But he was clearly surprised when he saw the name.  

New Eyes, New Images, New World

 We grow up being taught how to see the world.

 Some of us rebel and try to see it a little differently.

But constantly seeing anew gets tiring too and 

we settle into our own version of how to see.  

The people of the world aren't doing well.  

Some people see black, others see white.  

In either case we are locked into to seeing what we expect to see.  

Oil vs. solar.  Torture vs. Security.  Unnatural vs. Normal. 

But there is an infinite number of ways to see our world and to find ways to be prosperous, happy, and generous.  We just have to recover our childlike ability to see things freshly. 

These images are from my front yard.  Looking closely.   

The familiar becomes newly enchanting.  

What's there to discover in your yard? Or are you to busy to see?

We all need to look with new eyes at how we live and how we could live. 

It's not about winning.  It's about seeing.  Seeing a world we can all share.

Fairbanks to Sue Over Redistricting Plan

According to a story in the Fairbanks Newsminer by Christopher Eshleman, the Northstar-Fairbanks Borough voted 8-1 at 3am on Friday to file suit against the Alaska Redistricting Board's plan.

The main concern in the piece seems to be House District 38:

Local government will sue the state over redistricting plans that some argue would inappropriately and illegally dilute Ester and Goldstream Valley residents’ voting power.

Proposed maps would, among other things, link much of northwest Fairbanks with a slice of the Bering Sea coastline — and include everything in between — in one of five sprawling House jurisdictions proposed by the Alaska Redistricting Board.

Click to make larger and clearer

 Sprawling districts is nothing new to Alaska.  The last redistricting plan included District 6 (covering much of the new District 39 but without going to the coast) which was the largest state house district in the US - and probably bigger than a number of states.  But given Alaska's huge size and tiny population, this is inevitable.

The above map is from the Redistricting Board Website.  You can see that House District 38 (the S is the Senate district - it's paired with the Bethel district 37) goes from the Fairbanks suburbs out to tiny off-the-road-system, honey-bucket-hauling villages like Wales.  It also, conveniently (if you're a Republican) gets a chunk of liberal Fairbanks voters and sticks them into a basically Native (and Democratic) district and out of the Fairbanks mix.

One can easily make the argument that this district is not socio-economically integrated as the state constitution requires.

But Board attorney Michael White has told the board that the Federal Voting Rights Act (VRA) trumps the state constitution and that they needed the Fairbanks voters to get 38 big enough  (all districts have to be as close as possible to 17,755 people) and that they had to keep nine Native districts or they would be in violation of the Voting Rights Act.  They'll argue that they couldn't do this without taking a chunk of Fairbanks voters.  And due to the complicated balancing system used to determine 'Native Districts' taking Democrats would require a lower percentage of Natives.  [It's complicated. Here's a post that goes into these issues in detail.]

This map shows how Fairbanks was divided into house (numbers) and senate districts (letters.)  House Districts 1 and 4  and then 3 and 5 could have been paired for Senate seats.  Then 2 and 6 could have been paired and no incumbents would have been paired.  The board did not make saving incumbents one of their principles (though they discussed it.)  In some cases pairing incumbents is inevitable as it was in Southeast where one house district was lost due to population loss.  But otherwise incumbents shouldn't be paired. At least that was my conclusion after testimony in a public hearing where the person said, "If my rep is fired, it should be by the voters and not by the board."

My understanding is that other groups such as Alaskans for Fair Representation and the Rights Groups (the Democratic Party) were able to get nine Native districts without pairing urban dwellers with villagers who ride four wheelers to the pond out of town to get drinking water in buckets. 

Another issue I didn't see raised in the article is related to political gerrymandering, which is illegal, but hard to prove.  The plan brought to and approved by the board by board member Jim Holm of Fairbanks, pairs two Fairbanks Democratic Senators in a single district and then leaves a third open district.  It is hard to believe that the two Democratic Senators couldn't have had their House districts paired so that each would have been in his own district.  And it's hard to imagine that this wasn't done intentionally.  Mind you, I can't get inside the heads of the board members so I don't know their intentions.  But I do know that a lot of Republicans would like to end the 10-10 split in the state senate and regain the majority for the Republicans.  Pitting the two Fairbanks Democrats bumps off one right there, all that is needed to regain the senate.  There is an infinite number of ways that these lines can be drawn, and I just can't imagine that they couldn't find a way to make reasonable maps that would have kept both Democratic senators if they had wanted to.

But I didn't see anything about that in the Fairbanks Newsminer article.


The fact that a law suit is going to be filed doesn't mean much by itself.  This has happened in nearly all (possibly all) the prior redistricting processes.  Someone is bound to be miffed by how the districts end up.  But the basic questions the courts will ask, as I understand this, are:
1.  Does it violate the law?
2.  Was it possible to do it differently so it wouldn't violate the law?

If any of the plans submitted by interested groups were able to do meet all the standards without violating the law, then the Board wasn't, the court will take a dim view of the Board's plan.

Alaska Pridefest Photos and Music

By the time we got to the parkstrip, the Alaska PrideFest Festival was almost over, but there were still folks around and the music was great.   Blogging about this raises a couple of challenges for me.

First, I don't want to ignore the unfortunate accident at the beginning of the parade, but I figure that will suck up most of the media attention on this day, which many people saw as a special celebration coming on the heels of New York's decision to allow gay marriage.  My condolences go to the family and friends of James Crump. 

Second, is the question of how to handle photographs.  In November 2008 while covering an Anchorage demonstration in favor of gay marriage, I'd gone up the stairs in the parking garage across the street to get some pictures.  There was a man in the stairwell who told me he was there with his partner, but was a school teacher and didn't want to be seen at a gay protest.  So he was watching from across the street. 

Are there people who are at the festival who wouldn't want their pictures on a blog?  I've discussed at length the ethics of posting pictures of children, but what about adults who are still fearful of discrimination?  The conventional journalist response, I think that would be this is a public event.  And a lot of people at the event are openly gay and a lot of others aren't GLBT anyway.  Nevertheless, I've blurred the most obvious faces except for those who gave me permission (no one I asked said no) or were people clearly involved in the festival.  (For the dog close-up, I asked its leash holder.) This also affected how I took pictures - much more timidly than normal. 

Ms. Gay Alaska - Amber Do All Lá Chores Sawyer - explained to me the difference between Ms. and Miss Gay Alaska.  Ms is the category for lesbians and Miss for drag queens.  










I'd encountered Miss Gay Alaska - Micah Sauvageau "Vanity Affair" - at performances of  Midnight Soapscum where, as Mama Rose Mary, she narrated the show and kept the audience in line. 

Mister and Mr. Gay Alaska had left already, so no pictures. 

I've added a video - mostly with still shots - because a huge part of being there was the music.  Pictures by themselves don't capture the mood of the event. The music by Pandamonica was great and my Power Canonshot gives you a sense of it, but doesn't do it justice. 

In the Meantime, Here's Some Devil's Club

When you have a big event, a lot gets done in preparation, but a lot of other things get put aside until after the event.  My daughter's been graduated and my son's been married and now that everyone who came here for the events has left, I'm reviewing what needs to be done in the various facets of my life.

So, in the meantime, I was going to put up some devil's club photos I've taken.  But they really aren't that good.  So, I deleted most of them and settled for a couple that are just barely ok. Sorry, I've got things to do. 

 From an old NPR story:

Devil's club, or Oplopanax horridus, is a plant with an unmistakable presence. It has leaves like palm fronds, spines like daggers and red fruit that's candy for bears. It sticks its long neck out as far south as Oregon, and to the east, has even surprised a few Michigan hikers with its cloak of vicious thorns. But the plant is perhaps most common to the bear, deer and salmon habitats of Alaska's Tongass National Forest.   [Well, we aren't near the Tongass, but we have lots up here in Southcentral Alaska too.]

 "The Tlingit have turned to devil's club for a list of ailments you wouldn't wish on an enemy: from coughs and colds to stomach ulcers, tuberculosis and hypoglycemia. 

Tribe members steep it into teas, mash it into salves, chew, sip and steam it. It's also used to ward off evil. The plant, dubbed the "Tlingit aspirin" has not been approved for medicinal use by the Food and Drug Administration."

From Drugs.com:

"Externally the prickly outer bark sometimes is scraped from the stem, leaving the cambium for use in the preparation of decoctions and poultices; however, others use both the cambium and stem together. Poultices were applied to sores and wounds to prevent or reduce swelling and infection. The cambium sometimes is softened by chewing prior to being placed on a cut or burn as an emergency analgesic and local antiseptic. In many cultures, the plant is believed to possess “magical” powers that impart great strength."

Devil's Club superficially is similar to Cow Parsnip - in the size of the plant and the leaf shape and size.  An older post on cow parsnip compares devil's club and cow parsnip.

Playing-with-Your-Head Art

It's been a great week with lots of people in town for the wedding this past Sunday.  The last few days we've had doing Anchorage things with our visitors.  I've tried to post every day, but my attention has been elsewhere.

Here are some websites I've been wanting to share that visually play with the notions of reality and not-reality.

The Wondrous - This post features Belgian artist Ben Heine mixing drawing and photos (I think.)

When I sent my friend Tómas the link to Heine, he offered back this link to a post on chalk sidewalk art by Julian Beever at Cecilitaa’s Blog.  More playing with how we see reality.  In many cases I can't tell where the art ends and reality begins.  Is the photographer in this picture a real person or drawn on?  It looks obvious in this one, but after seeing some of the others I'm not sure.








Both sites have LOTS of examples of these artists' work and most are amazing.

Deer Fly? Maybe.

This blog is called "What Do I Know?"  But I'm probably more interested in "How Do I Know?"  Since my camera does a decent job of taking macro shots, I've been able to take fairly close-up pictures of bugs.  But that leaves me with the problem of identifying them.  So, I bought Dominique M. Collet's Insects of south-central Alaska. Sometimes it gives me a pretty clear id, like for the birch shield bug. But other times it leaves me still uncertain, but it narrows down the possibilities and then I can start googling.

The book has 29 families of flies. (He includes mosquitoes and midges.

"The most distinguishing characteristic for these insects is a pair of well-developed forewings and hindwings (halteres) reduced to stubs.")

Most of us probably can distinguish 'flies' from 'mosquitoes', but now we have 27 more different specific families.  And then each family can be broken down - though he doesn't do that for most.  You can see, though, how the more you know, the more you realize how much you don't know.  And if you're honest with yourself, you'll realize that what you don't know dwarfs what you do know.  And this should lead to humility. 

Going through the pictures, I decided the deer fly seemed the most likely.  Especially this:

"These . . . flies have gold and green metallic eyes . . ."

So I googled deer fly (family Tabanidae).

Bugguide offers a lot more detail. [my comments in brackets below]

"Medium to large flies, females take blood, and some are pests. Typical characteristics:

• stoutly built flies with large squamae (scales above the halteres, also called calypters);
  [It is stout.  I'm not positive about the squamae.  If you click the links to halteres it tells you
  

  "calypter noun - a small membranous flap at the base of the hind edge of the wing in some flies; it covers the halteres."

  but I can't tell from the pictures they provide and this one I took. There is a lump at about where the wing comes in.]

• feet with 3 pads (as opposed to 2); [My picture doesn't show the foot pads]

• 3rd antennal segment elongated, clearly made up of several fused parts; [???]

• 3rd antennal segment with a prominent tooth at base in some groups [????]

• wing veins R4 and R5 fork to form a large 'Y' across the wing tip." [Yes! you can see the Y pattern of the veins on the wing.  Look at the tip of the wing on the left.]

So, I'm not certain, but at this point I'm tentatively identifying this as a deer fly until I get more evidence one way or the other.

Horsetail: One Person's Weed is Another Person's Scouring Pad

Writing for the blog often makes me question things I think I know.  I took these pictures of horse tail at the Helen Louise McDowell Sanctuary, but is that really what it is?  Or just the name we tend to use?  It does seem to be horse tail. 


 
My first stop on the google express got to this at gardenstew:

"I have a weed growing in a bed in my yard (Horsetail). From my research I have found out that this is a very hard thing to get rid of. Unfortunately it has begun to spread in my lawn and into another vegetable bed that I have. I don't want it to get much further, but from what I am reading most weed killers do nothing for this. Has anyone ever dealt with this weed before? Any suggestions? (I have pets and don't want to expose them to anything toxic in my yard.)

Thanks"

 (You can find suggestions for getting rid of horsetail there at gardenstew and also at the UBC botanical garden site.)

But horsetail has beneficial properties too. 

Alaska Herbal Teas tells us:

"Horsetail is edible, but not choice. It must be boiled, as it is toxic raw. Some Athabascans use it as a seasoning. A fluidextract of the sterile stems and ashes from the burnt plant are used for medicine against kidney and bladder trouble, stones, ulcers or wounds in the bowel, and externally on sores. Horsetail has historical uses for cleaning and polishing. Its high silica content makes it good for scouring and soap preparation."

There's overlapping info at  Wikipedia:

The Water Horsetail has historically been used by both Europeans and Native Americans for scouring, sanding, and filing because of the high silica content in the stems. Early spring shoots were eaten. Medically it was used by the ancient Greeks and Romans to stop bleeding and treat kidney ailments, ulcers, and tuberculosis, and by the ancient Chinese to treat superficial visual obstructions. Rootstocks and stems are sometimes eaten by waterfowl. Horsetails absorb heavy metals from the soil, and are often used in bioassays for metals.

According to Carolus Linnaeus, reindeer, which refuse ordinary hay, will eat this horsetail, which is juicy, and that it is cut as fodder in the north of Sweden for cows, with a view to increasing their milk yield, but that horses will not touch it.