Why I Keep Saying "VOTE!!!!"

From a Salon interview with 

"Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter David Cay Johnston. For 30 years, Johnston has covered Trump's life and career, as detailed in the bestselling book "The Making of Donald Trump." His new book is "It's Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration is Doing to America."

"Based just on normal historic averages, the Republicans should lose control of the House by about four seats. They should lose control of the Senate as well, although the map is pretty awful for the Democrats. If Republicans retain control, then I believe what will happen over time is that someone who shares Trump's dictatorial and authoritarian tendencies but doesn't have his baggage -- someone who is a competent manager and just as charismatic -- will eventually arise and you can kiss your individual liberties goodbye. That will take time, but it's the trend we are heading towards.
On the other hand, if enough people go to the polls -- remember, roughly 100 million people did not vote in 2016 -- if the Democrats get organized, if they can persuade the public they have an agenda that goes beyond just getting rid of Trump and they get control of Congress, they will move to impeach him. They need a two-thirds majority in the Senate to convict him, but they will certainly move to have public hearings."

This interview covers a lot of other topics about Trump, why he won, what the media and others didn't do, all of which yield just as important quotes.  But this seems to be the one that everyone can act on - voting and getting others to vote in November and beyond.

I grew up with parents who fled Nazi Germany in the 1930's and taught me that what happened there could happen here.  People forget that Hitler was democratically elected and then started changing the laws to keep his power.  He theme was to make Germany great again after the humiliation of losing WWI and the conditions of the Treaty of Versailles.

But I also feel that most US citizens are basically good people.  If they aren't voting based on politically generated fear or they aren't distracted by all their consumer products and consumer entertainment, they will make better decisions.

Screws And Nails - More Denali

Sanctuary Campground has seven tent campsites.  It's along the Sanctuary River and it's  23 miles into the park.  It's the first place we camped ever in Denali, back in the summer of 1978.  You could drive in back then.

Before May 20, the campground is closed and there's a gate with a long bar that blocks the road into the campground.  But you can park and walk into the campground, which we did.  I got one leg over the bar and as the second leg came over I heard this ripping sound.

I looked back at the bar to see how this happened.

My pants were ripped (that's why I brought another pair), but there isn't a lot of room between my pants and my leg and I was only thinking about the bloody mess I could have made.  Lifting your leg over the bar isn't a slow move that you can just stop - as the rip shows (it happened in less than a second).  We do have first aid stuff in the van, but I'm so glad I didn't need any of that.

While at Sanctuary, I got this picture of a snowshoe hare.  This is a beautiful fur coat worn by its intended owner.

And there's an old cabin at the entrance to the campground but I'd never noticed before how they bear-proofed the door.

I guess that would discourage bears from hitting the door too hard.  But I don't think the screw in the bar blocking the road was intentional.

Arctic Entries - Then And Now - Alaska Story Tellers Share Their Stories

Back in November 2010 we went to see and hear something called Arctic Entries - seven story tellers each with seven minutes to tell their stories.  It was a Cyrano's (the original theater on D St) that held about 90 people.

Here's what it looked like back then at Cyrano's:

Image from the 2010 post on Arctic Entries

Like most things at the old Cyrano's stage, it was intimate.  The guy on stage in the picture is Max [Matt] Rafferty who was one of the hosts this week.  He was stepping down from that role, saying the speakers get seven minutes and he's had seven years.  So he thinks it's time. [UPDATE May 14, 2018:  Barbara Brown has become my new editor, letting me know when typos slip in here.  Thank you Barbara!  I do appreciate it.  Memory is a weird thing.  All I can think of is that Max Rafferty was a politician in California long ago and my fingers without my knowing replaced Matt with Max.  Not even a politician I liked.]


We'd heard it had grown a lot - so much so that tickets at the Discovery theater sold out in minutes.  That seemed like too much work.  But I heard the last one of the season would be held in the Atwood Concert Hall (holds around 1900) so I checked on tickets when I had to go downtown anyway.  I got two tickets, in the upper balcony was all that were left.

Arctic Entries has seven story tellers tell seven minute stories each evening.  They have to be their own stories of their own experiences.  Those are the basic rules.  These are generally everyday folks, not professional story tellers.

The image is from before the story telling began.  The place got packed.  They said it held 1900 people.

They also had a band - Blackwater Railroad from Seward.

But the stories were compelling, even from so far away.  It just wasn't possible to find and talk to individual story tellers afterward.

The theme was "Timelapse" and each story teller represented a different decade.  It began with 2000s and went back to the 1970's.  Then after intermission, it went in the other direction - 1940's to 1960's.

The group was diverse!  Adil Raja is a Pakistani immigrant who talked about winding up in Anchorage and falling in love with Alaska.

Mao Tosi, born in American Samoa, moved to Anchorage as a child, got into sports in high school and spent a couple of years in the NFL until he got injured.  Then he came back to Anchorage and became a community organizer.  He told about how his parents left him, when he was in junior high, to live with his 19 year old brother.  It was through sports and people at school and in the community that he kept away from drugs and graduated from high school.  His message was that the love of strangers that 'saved' him is important and we should all share our love.

Penny Scales Fairbanks is a Fairbanks hairdresser and she was recruited by one of the Arctic Entries organizer after hearing the story when she got her hair done.  She talked about how her brother told her he was gay in the 1980s, living in California.  And then that he was HIV+ and wanted help in telling their parents, and how her father's attitude changed while they were in California being with her brother while he was dying.

Donna Walker, Alaska's current first lady, talked about coming to Alaska in 1976 right after graduating from college to become a recreation director at an Alaska pipeline construction camp in Glennallen.  From there she took a similar job in Valdez where she met Bill Walker.  She said before getting married, she told him she wanted four kids and he said he did too.  Later he admitted that however many kids she said she wanted he would have given the same answer.

Then there was intermission and we moved forward from the 1940's.

Margaret Anderson, born in 1933, talked about growing up in Seward in the 30's and 40's.  On the one hand she said it was a great life for kids back then, but on the other hand, she said she couldn't wait to get on the ship out after high school.  But she came back to Seward and packed her seven minutes with lots of stories.

Carmel Walder talked about spending time with her grandmother in SE Alaska while her parents were having trouble and there she learned about order and calm and harvesting herring eggs and fishing.  She went back to her parents and more chaos, but staying at grandmother's had shown her there was another way to live and she graduated from high school and made a life which now includes her own grandchildren.

And finally, we had Paul Ongtooguk who grew up in Nome and was put into a program in the 1960s where Alaska Native kids were sent to white Christian families to live.  He was sent to Oklahoma.  As disturbed as that program was, he did see another life and got through college and has worked at the University of Alaska Anchorage for many years.


At the end of the program, the hosts unfurled a huge check - no one gets paid for working at Arctic Entries and all the proceeds go to Alaska organizations.  The fall non-profit partner was Hospice and the spring 2018 partner is the Refugee Assistance and Immigration Service (RAIS).  I looked on their website to try to find more on the checks, but couldn't.  I think there was a check for close to $20,000!

Arctic Entries website is here.  And at another page you can find links to most of their old story tellers.  (A few in the first year are missing, presumably they weren't recorded.)

If You Didn't Live Through Watergate, Here's A Way To Let That Story Help You Understand What's Happening Now

Overview:  This post is all about getting readers to listen to Slow Burn over at Slate.  You can just go there now or read further why I think you should.

I was in graduate school during the Watergate years - the break-in, the coverup, the long painful years leading up to the impeachment and Nixon's resignation.  I've written a few posts already to help let what happened then, shed light on what's happening now.

• A Look At Time Honored Advice For Keeping Focused On What's Important - Eye On The Ball, Follow The Money, etc.
• Who Will Be Trump's Woodward and Bernstein?
• We've Been Here Before - Time To Contact Your Republican Congress Members To Protect Mueller
• Using Nixon To Put Trump's Denials Into Context - What Are They Really Thinking And Doing In The White House

Well, Slate, has an audio series. Leon Neyfakh's Slow Burn sets out to help those for whom Watergate is simply history (Neyfakh included) get a sense of how it felt to slowly unfold.  It puts things into a much more complete overview than my few posts.  

There are eight fascinating, 25 plus minute, episodes.  Neyfakh's show reminds me of the huge influence of Ira Glass' This American Life style on radio journalism.  It's gripping.  And does a great job of showing how concern about Watergate very slowly grew, how Nixon's administration fought and retaliated against those who wanted to investigate Watergate.

It took a long time for the story to gain any traction.  The Democratic headquarters at the Watergate Building in Washington DC happened on June 17, 1972.  

"Months after the break-in, a Gallup poll found that 48% of Americans had never even heard of Watergate."

The 1972 election, which Nixon won by 23% over George McGovern, was not quite five months later.  

Nixon, despite his very serious flaws, was the president who

• founded the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970
• supported the passage of the Clean Air Act
• opened the doors for women in collegiate sports when he signed Title IX in 1972
• became the first sitting US president to visit China, breaking years of US refusal to recognize China

So, while the wheels of justice turned slowly, Nixon wasn't a maniac in the White House destroying treaties, trust, administrative infrastructure, and tradition and protocol every day he had until he was forced to leave.  

But it's useful to understand the Nixon history to get a better sense of what's happening today.  And maybe stop Trump from doing all the damage he's capable of sooner rather than later.  

Here's the link to Slow Burn.  I've listened to the first three episodes.  The first episode is about Martha Mitchell, the wife of Nixon's  Attorney General, who tried to get the word out early.  The second is about a House committee whose early investigation was shut down by strong-arm tactics by the Nixon White House.  

This is a good review for those who were listening to all this while it was happening. 

Old Posts Worth Rereading - Shoplifting Trick, Black Bugs, Trees With White Flowers, and Redistricting

They painters are still working upstairs - the schedule is somewhat unpredictable - and most of our stuff is in two rooms downstairs.  The bigger furniture is in the dining room crunched together or on the deck.

I've got a number of projects I'm working on, personal and community, including some longer blog posts like the Graham v MOA series.  More from Denali.  Thoughts on last night's Arctic Entries performance.  The weather seems stuck in "temps between low 40s and mid 50s, mix of some sun, lots of clouds" for a while.  The daffodils that were poised to bloom  when we left for Denali last week are still poised.

So here are some old posts you may not have read.

1.   How To Shoplift Without Getting Caught - Only Works If You're Black[White, obviously]  -  A visitor came to this post this week via a link in a comment (endof4th 10/13/2015 6:03 PM GMT-0800) on a Washington Post article about Georgetown shop owners alerting each other about suspicious black customers.  It's still a topical and insightful story from Neil Degrasse Tyson   - be sure to read the Tyson quote down to the bold section which answers the title question.

2.  Tiny Black Bugs - Fruit Flies or Fungus Gnats?  - This is the post that has gotten the most hits ever  (114,660 as of now on Google Stats) on this blog and continues to get most hits week by week.

3.  Three Anchorage Trees With White Flowers - This seems to be a seasonal hit.

4.  Various posts from the Alaska Redistricting series are getting hits as the 2020 redistricting process is coming up soon.  There's a lot there - here's a post that applies a lot of the concepts to how the Board created the house and senate districts in Fairbanks:  Was Fairbanks Gerrymandered:  A Look At the Riley Challenge to Alaska Redistricting Board' 2013 Plan Part 1    It's relevant to this November's upcoming race for Senate between Fairbanks Rep Scott Kawasaki (D) and Fairbanks Sen. Pete Kelly (R).  There's also a link to Part II which looks at truncation.

Getting A Handle on Denali National Park's Vast Expanses

We're back as of Sunday afternoon.  Our upstairs ceiling popcorn is gone and a new ceiling in place.  Everything is still shoved into spaces to allow for painting the ceiling and walls.

Saturday at Denali was Denaliesque.  I recently saw a Mongolian movie and thought, wow, those huge vistas remind me of Denali National Park.  The sun was out most of the time, the clouds here and there not threatening rain or snow.  The (still) white vistas - humans generally just don't experience stuff like this.  You see for miles and miles unpopulated land surrounded by mountains.  With the late snow everywhere it was almost too much.  After you enter the park, about four miles in, you're past all the park buildings - visitor center, camping and touring building, education center, housing for workers, sled dog kennels, and then there's just one road that goes for 90 miles.

Only 30 miles are open now (until buses start May 20), so what we saw is that part of the land you can see from the road in the first 30 miles.  There are a few structures inside the park - at campgrounds basically and lots of restrooms at the bus stops.  After May 20, you get past the first 3 miles or so only on the buses.  Or if you have a camping spot at Teklanika.  All the other camping spots are tent only and you get there by bus.  And there's a big visitor center at about mile 60.

The picture above is the road into the park (though we were driving back to the campgrounds at the entrance when I took this.)  You can tell we're still within the first 15 miles of the road because it's paved.  We're looking east.

And here's a panorama view - I've photoshopped three pictures together.  You see about 20-30 miles into the distance and probably 30 or so miles across from left to right.  If you click on the picture you can see it bigger. (Large vertical images work great here, but horizontal ones don't.)

Just think about what a 25 by 30 mile area in your city would encompass.   In LA that would be approximately from Santa Monica to East LA and from Beverly Hills to Palos Verdes.   It's most of the LA basin with one road and for 85 miles of that road just a few structures and outhouses.   Get a map online of your location.  Seeing such vast distances with nothing but one road and just a few structures stretched out of 90 miles on the road is always mind-boggling, even after 40 years.

And here's a map of Denali National Park and Preserve to get all this into even more perspective.

Original map from National Parks Maps  - This map is fairly large, but at the link it's much bigger

The entrance to the park is to the east where the little black rectangle is to the right of the red line. The first part of the road - brown on the original map here - is the 12 paved miles.  It ends at the red #1 on the map.  (I added the red because the yellow line is harder to see and to show you how far the road was open.)  #1 is where Savage River is, where we snowshoed on Thursday.  I didn't mention it in that post, but it was two years ago when we were there at the same time a young summer Park employee, Michael Purdy, had fallen and died and had not yet been found.  I wrote about that here.  A Park employee told me that his sister was in the park a week or two ago for the anniversary.  You can also see how different the trail looked in late April 2016 compared to early May 2018.
#2 is about where I took the panorama above from.
The Black Bear Paw is Teklanika Campground - the road is closed about a mile past there for now, though beyond it you can walk or bike.
#3 is Eilson Visitor Center (above the 3) - about 60 miles into the park with good views of Denali on clear days.
#4 is Wonder Lake campground, the end of the 90 mile road into the park.
#5 is the North Peak of Denali - the tallest mountain in North America at 20,310 feet (6,140m)

So what we saw last week is only 1/3 of the road in the park.  The panorama is of just one tiny part of the park.  The vast majority of the park has no structures at all.  And the views further in are even more expansive.  Even if you don't see any animals (not likely) or the mountain itself (much more likely), the landscape itself is worth the trip.

Looking through the trees across to a small mountain off in the distance.

Here you can see the slope of the land.  I took this from the road.  J is walking up the road in her red coat.  Since walking on the snow, even with snowshoes, is a challenge, we took turns walking along the road with the other waiting up ahead in the car.  You see much more on foot than in the car.

Here's an area where the snow had an icy glaze.  But if you tried to walk on it, you break right through the ice.

This is just past the gate that closes off the road at the Teklanika rest area.  I'm looking down at the Teklanika River, which at this point is mostly covered with snow still, just those few squiggly pieces of open water.  If you look closely you can see the bridge in the lower right corner.

And below you can see some of those squiggly spans of water from the bridge.

It was a beautiful day - I know that's relative.  The sun was out and the sky was mostly blue.  The temperature was in the 40's but there was a brisk wind in most places and especially on this bridge.    It was also a Saturday so there were a fair number of people who driven to the Park for the weekend from Anchorage and Fairbanks.

This post has taken a direction of its own - the vastness of the park - so I'll save some of the people   and critters we encountered for another post.

"Crackdown on illegal foreigners: Many claiming to be students to get fake visas"

Just to put things into perspective, this was a headline at ThaiVisa - a website for ex-pats in Thailand - about foreigners (Westerners generally) staying in Thailand illegally.

We're back (sniff, sniff) from Denali and I saw this in my email and thought I'd pass it on.  Yesterday was sunshine all day, pics at six.

Moose's Teeth and Denali Patterns

I read in my cloud  spotter's guide yesterday that Alfred Stieglitz was the first professional photographer to take pictures of clouds, not just as part of a landscape, but as abstract art.  I guess that encouraged me to follow my druthers as we drove through the park today.  Today's clouds, for the most part, were one mass of grayish haze that the sun tried to burn through now and then, but that also included intermittent rain and snow.   This first one is the mountain above Savage River.

Another snowy landscape.

Snow/Ice on the side of the road.

More formations in ice and snow and dirt as the plowed snow on the side of the road melts and sublimates.

Rocks below the ripples of Sanctuary River from the bridge.

OK, time to get more representational.

A view from the road.

Another view from the road, in an area that had less snow cover.

A magpie flies across Sanctuary River.  At this point a car stopped and a woman asked if anything was moving.  I said, "Just a magpie and the water."  She said, "I love the magpies."  I said, "I see them at home everyday so they aren't that special."  She said she was from North Carolina so she never sees them."  "You're right," I said.  "They are really beautiful birds."  And they are with their striking black and white patterns and their dark colors that turn green and blue in the right light.

But here are much better magpie pics from  my front steps and here in my back yard.  The magpie made it across the river.  A number of years ago my daughter and I watched, at this same spot, a mother moose with a very young calf cross the river.  But the calf couldn't make it up the snow bank on the other side.  The mom tried to push it up, but after a while it got tired and the current carried if off down the river.  It was real life nature.  The mom climbed the bank and wandered off.  No one to to comfort her and I know she had to have feelings about this.  But someone down the river was in for a tasty treat.  The natural world is harsh, which  is why civilization, in its best meaning, is important and worth striving to keep alive and improving.


And while I was hoping to see some caribou today, again we only saw moose, which we can see in our on front yard.   But again, they are still magnificent and fascinating to watch.  Here's last year's calf (I think).

And her mom.  I've labeled this picture "Moose's Teeth" which has a little more meaning for Anchorage visitors.  Moose's Tooth is the most popular place for pizza and beer in Anchorage and also the name of a  peak in the Alaska Range.  She was with the calf eating on the side of the road just a mile or two from the visitor's center.  The elevation is lower here and there isn't as much snow and the vegetation is a little closer to greening.

Quick Denali Pics

I'm sitting outside the closed visitor center at about 8pm to get the wifi.  It's in the 30s so I'm just going to put up some pictures without much conversation.  But I will say there's more snow than we've ever seen here, but the roads are great and we borrowed some snow shoes at the visitors center and I hiked a very windy mile with the snowshoes along Savage River and back.  Lots of rugged fun.

This was still about 40 miles from Denali National Park.

Here's the trail.  Well it's covered with snow, but you can faintly see some snow shoe tracks of the last person, but they're being covered quickly.

Snow shoes aren't the tennis racket kind of things of yesteryear.  These worked well, but you use different muscles and the wind was pushing really hard the whole way.  In my face on the way back.

 Much of Savage River along the trail is still covered with snow, but parts were showing.

Here are my tracks, just after I walked there, but on the way back they were barely visible.  The wind was blowing the snow as you can sort of see in the pic below.

The brown across the snowed over river near the top left is the bridge.

Here's the trail going back.  You can sort of see my old tracks.

Not sure whose tracks these are.  Rabbit?

I'll check tomorrow.

Here's some glaciation on the other side of the river.

Here's a view looking toward the west and the mountain, except the clouds are hiding the mountain.

And this is where we parked, popped up the top, and cooked some dinner - why our VW camper has been such an important part of our lives all these years.  Where else can you get dinner with a view like this?

We didn't see a lot of wild life.  A bald eagle flew alongside the road on the way to the park, just above the trees.  I saw a small flock (10-15 birds) take off on the side of the road.  They were white and 'snow bunting' popped into my head, but I have to check.  I did see snow bunting in Wales, Alaska once.  Also three ptarmigan - all white.  I don't remember seeing them like that before.  Usually, they are shifting to their summer plumage so they are half white and half brown.  Or in the summer all brown.  And then this moose.

My fingers are getting cold, so good night to you all.

Stopover In Talkeetna

It was sunny and warm, though windy when we left Anchorage.  The workers already had plastic on the floor, a couple of daffodils were close to opening,  buds on the birch trees were greening.  After reading about yesterday's "heavy snow" in Denali, along with the road being open only to mile 3, and temperatures dipping to the low 20s, I booked a room in Talkeetna for the night.








We got here and napped - catching up on some sleep we needed - then walked on the back streets which got us this view of a creek that I'm assuming empties into the Susitna nearby.

There's still a lot more winter here than in Anchorage.







We wandered back and took the trail through the woods into town.

Our first glimpse of downtown:

There's one main street, several blocks long.  Talkeetna's about 110 miles north of Anchorage.  Denali National Park is about 235 miles north so this seemed a good stop and we haven't really been here for quite a while.  It's about ten miles off the main road, so we tend to pass it by.  It's the jumping off point for Denali climbers.  In summer climbers from around the world are here (well they're here already) to fly to a Denali base camp in hopes of getting to the peak.  We were told that people had been stuck on the mountain due to the recent storms and a plane was able to get folks back yesterday.

We stayed a night in the Fairview Inn one winter many, many years ago.  It was a long noisy night as the bar is downstairs and they have frequent concerts.

The Fairview Inn was built in 1923 and soon after President Harding, on a long visit to Alaska, was there for lunch.  He died shortly after, though I don't think there's a cause and effect relationship.  It's registered as an historical monument.

If you're paying attention, you'll see it has a for sale sign.  An ADN article from 2014 said that attorney Phillip Wiedener had it up for sale at that time for $1.8 million.  I checked today and the price is only $1.2 million.   For people seeing prices like that for little homes in California, it might seem a steal.





We passed the cannabis shop, but it wasn't open.









And then on down to the Susitna River.

Further north, the Nenena Ice Classic ended yesterday when the tripod on the ice moved the required distance down the river giving someone a $225,000 jackpot for being the closest to the exact time the tripod was tripped.   And some ice passed by while I was watching.



Looking up the river, we could see the Alaska range, at least the foothills below Denali which would have been off the picture to the right if the clouds were gone.

We had pizza for dinner at the Wildflower Cafe,which was surprisingly good and not very expensive.  But the highlight was the amazingly illustrated bathroom.  (A bit distorted as I tried to photoshop two pictures together)


Denali's supposed to have a high of 37˚ F tomorrow, with a partly cloudy forecast for the morning and early afternoon, and then the days get warmer through the weekend (into the 40˚s) with some chance of rain and snow each day.   But the park is a large area and the entrance is fairly low elevation, so I think we'll take our chances.  Being outside walking around today was great, and we've been in the campgrounds with snow before.  Though the Park's website has conflicting info - the Alert says the road is open to mile 3 but the map (now) shows it open to mile 30.

Here's a webcam of the Alaska RR depot in the Park.  There's plenty of snow.  And this one from Mt. Healy suggests the Alert is more accurate than the map.  I guess we'll explore near the park entrance.  Or we'll cuddle up in the van and read a lot.