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 |  Opinions are like Blogs, everybody's got one |
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Every so often I have a thought or two, I might as well write them here...they may be political thoughts (I hate war, polluters and thieves), or thoughts about American culture (which I wished we really had) or even religious thoughts (I don't play favorites)...but you're invited to see these thoughts of mine right here. Comments are welcome... |
| I've been too busy working with wood, making picture frames. All kinds of wood, plain old oak, incredible myrtlewood, rock-hard bubinga (an African wood), dark, rich walnut, the list goes on and on. I've probably made two hundred frames, maybe more. I find I have a knack for matching the frame to the picture within, for example I have a frame of an elk, the pattern in the wood gives the illusion his antlers just keep going on up. I set up a frame factory in my front room, I can cut, clamp, sand and finish three frames a day. I have about a hundred frames hanging on the walls of my front room, which I could maybe sell with some clever marketing. I'd rather make frames than do marketing, which makes what I've been doing a very expensive hobby. A friend of mine told me I'm wasting my time and should instead get a 'real job'. I never had any illusions about making a living from framing, but I've been living by the skin of my teeth now for years and being my own boss in the frame shop appeals to me. The whole thing was an idea I had myself, I taught myself how to do it and got real pleasure fromt the experience. It is restful to me somehow to bring the grain out of a piece of wood making it smooth and solid and beautiful. A completion of sorts. Anyway, that's what I've been up to. |
| I don't mean to go political all over you, but just to mention a couple of things I've seen lately. So McCain picks Sarah Palin as veep candidate. Sarah is a gonzo Republican, conservative as all get out and Christian to boot. She's gone on record as teaching her children (and any other children she can gather in her governmental apron) the joys of abstinence. Safe sex is sex you have after you are married. If you jump the gun, so to speak, you are sinning. So you'll go straight to hell, do not collect Alaska's yearly kickback to its' citizens (this year about $1500/taxpayer). Wait! This isn't Monopoly, this is real life! Anyways her seventeen-year-old daughter jumps the gun and gets pregnant. Is Sarah Palin indignant? Not at all, the eighteen-year-old father promises to marry the daughter, thereby making it right. And being as how the Lord Jesus is quite the forgiver, getting married will wipe out the sin. So now is the time to heave a sigh of relief about that! But that's not my concern here. This woman, Sarah Palin, wants to be our leader. Well, she wants to be our Vice Leader anyway. So is she an effective leader? We might well ask, after all her daughter didn't practice the abstinent path her mother tried to lead her down,. I guess we should all praise Jesus for the miracle that happened when two children practiced sex without any contraception. Sarah could have been a leader and told her daughter and daughter's randy boyfriend about contraception if she hadn't been so up on the abstinence soapbox. Thank God Jesus is okay about it. But the whole thing does little for the success rate for abstinence. The lesson here seems to be if you get caught you better get married and if you do that then you can be forgiven for giving in to your sinful urges without using contraception. I think Sarah has handled the whole thing very well. The fact her teaching of moral principles fell on deaf (or at least hormone-induced) ears doesn't mean a thing! She is still perfectly capable, morally, spiritually, and politically, of holding down a post which could be more lucrative than anybody had ever thought (just ask Dick Cheney if he's better off after eight years of Bush!) And she better hope she gets elected. A young teenage parental couple who gets pregnant has already shown they will make costly decisions without thinking about them or practicing any restraint when hormones run rampant. Sarah and her husband (I guess he's some kind of champion among the snow-mobile crowd, so he's got that going for him) will probably end up supporting the two pregnant children. She's going to need the money a veep can pull in (although I'd advise her not to shoot her lawyer in the face, irregardless). So enough about politics already. Did you see the Portland Zoo has a new baby elephant? Let me tell you, that is news! Don't be late submitting your choice of name for the little tusker...and rest assured, the father is planning to marry the mother, so all is above board and hunky-dory too! Wait! Is it a sin for animals to have offspring without being married? I think I better go to AskJesusandSarah.com to find out... |
| The landfill I recently threw out years and years of old poetry. It was faded, repetitive and I was sick of carrying it around. Why did I pack it along all this time, I wondered. Was it some misbegotten hope one day I’d be a Dickinsonian find, a sparkling diamond hiding in the rough? Scrawled jewels dashed off to this or that love (sometimes on reading them I had no idea which lost love it might have been written to). But a sidelight of going through and reading it were the memories stirred up by the process. A lot of it was written during periods of real pain. Loss cries out from the pages, poems written to my wife when we separated full of equal amounts of hope and despair. She gave them back to me years later but I haven’t looked at them up to now without feeling it all again. This time was different, they didn’t have the emotional impact anymore, I was able to look at them as poetry and not some painful thorny journal. As poetry it sucked. Don’t get me wrong there were parts of the poems that weren’t bad. Well written little blurbs in the chronicle of chronic frustration, it was the overall content of the stuff. Poems of lost love are a dime a dozen and that’s if they’re good, these weren’t. These poems of mine were too personal to be good. It was like finding a stack of band-aids you’d kept from a particularly gruesome wound. The scar has healed and doesn’t hurt, I don’t need the reminders of it anymore. I didn’t throw all of the old poems away, just the majority of it. I kept the few displaying some real insight, maybe I can rework them if I want to take the time. But I’m glad to be rid of the rest of it. It was like cleaning out the garage or some closet in the back bedroom. Who needs to keep carrying around all this baggage? Fill up the truck, take it all to the dump. I’m proud of the poems I’ve posted here in my portfolio. They represent work and even sometimes maturity. Although I’ve been writing poetry a long time it hasn’t been until lately I feel I’ve improved enough to be proud of it. I won’t go so far as to say my port is like a trunk of poems in Emily Dickinson’s attic, but at least it isn’t filling cardboard boxes in the basement either. The other thing is if all these poems I’ve posted here have to go to the writing.com landfill, the Storymaster will virtually have to haul them there. I don’t know why, but I feel like I’m traveling lighter now for some reason, and you know what? It feels good. Maybe some kind of change is coming, that’s an interesting thought, huh? |
| Ask your Doctor Do you recognize me? I’m the guy who was just about to have sex with my wife, Sally, when the sink blew up and sprayed us both with water. Kind of like what I did when I was a kid and turned the hose on the next-door neighbor’s dog when it mounted our family pet. Kind of like that, only different, I guess. For some reason my whole life is now revolving around my penis. Come to think of it a lot of my life has been like that, only back then the apparatus worked the way it was designed (and no I don’t believe in intelligent design, for that my penis would have to have a brain, something it’s never displayed up to now). So the pill I took was just taking effect when the water went off. Yes I take pills. I didn’t used to take pills, I didn’t have to. The thought of sex was all it took back then to ‘get me ready’, and being as how I was always thinking about sex, I was always ready. But now I have to take pills. They call what this particular pill takes care of ‘erectile dysfunction’. Personally I blame Sally. We’ve been married thirty years. When we first got married I didn’t have any problem at all ‘getting it up’, as they say. But now, I don’t know, it’s not the same. My penis just isn’t as excited about it anymore, or something, maybe it’s me. I don’t know. Sally is a bit broad across the beam these days, and her breasts have also drifted South. Not to mention the fact I’ve explored all of her ‘equatorial regions’ for thirty years. No surprises there. Not to say it hasn’t been good in the past. It’s just I might agree with Robert Frost’s attitude when he pined for ‘the road less traveled’, so to speak. But, things being what they are now, I’m no ‘young Hercules’ anymore anyway. Even if I wanted to stray, the heifers aren’t interested. So I’m stuck with Sally, and vice versa. Therefore I take pills. The erections come like clockwork in spite of whether I’m all that interested. Sally likes the results and so do I, I guess. I can’t afford divorce (besides the grand-kids’ parents would not understand) so Sally and I had to work out our little ‘dysfunction’ among ourselves. I don’t get it. The penis used to work fine. Besides for the aforementioned readiness, it could pee like anything too. Back in the day I could have written novels in the snow with the thing. Now it just dribbles. I take pills for that too. There should have been a warranty on the prostate gland. It goes bad you pull it out and replace it, but no, apparently it doesn’t work that way. You’re stuck with the thing. All you can do is take pills when it acts up. Or doesn’t, as the case may be. And that bugs me. I mean the pills have some side effects I’d rather do without. What do they say in the commercials? “Some swelling of the breasts can occur.” Well, as a guy I got news for them, I don’t have breasts, I have a chest. Sally has enough breasts for the both of us, I’d have to think. I don’t know which side effect I’d rather have, breasts, or “a drop in blood pressure which could cause fainting in some cases.” See what I mean? And all because of starting and stopping, and weak stream, and going often at night. It seems to me intelligent design isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Intelligent design would have allowed me to replace the thing when it went gunny-bag. Instead I have to take pills. Which gets me back to the plumbing disaster. Again I’d have to blame Sally for it. When she knows I’ve taken the pill she starts getting frisky. “What you got there?” She’ll ask, groping me for evidence. It scares Hell out of me these days (although it didn’t used to be the case, because back when I encouraged a good groping). Maybe she’s sick and tired waiting for me to start things up, but there’s something about the gleam in her eye as she contemplates ‘an erection lasting four hours’ or something that unmans me. I tore the faucet off the sink in self-defense. The pill hadn’t started working yet, if I didn’t create a diversion things could go badly. Faucets don’t have prostate glands, the water went everywhere, and by the time we had everything cleaned up my hickory stick was ready for a good whacking, so it all worked out. Don’t believe everything you hear. The truth probably is Hugh Hefner would be in the same boat as I am if he didn’t have blond triplets at his pill-induced beck and call (if you can trust Playboy magazine, personally I think he pays them money like he always did and they take their clothes off for the camera, surely those girls have better sense than to hang out with an old codger like Hugh). What I’m worried about is the day I take the pill and nothing happens. You know the field you see Sally and me walking out into? They’ll probably find my decomposed body there, ripped to shreds. I told you about that gleam in her eye, did I tell you about ‘a woman scorned’? My penis and me both are living on borrowed time When the commercial ends we are holding hands while we’re both satiated and naked in our separate claw-foot tubs out in the back yard. It reminded me of the old days when you rent a motel and get twin beds. Me I’d rather be in the hot-tub, after Sally’s had a dozen orgasms I need the soothing action of the Jacuzzi jets if I hope to remain ‘healthy enough for sexual activity’ in the future. One thing I’m glad of, they didn’t show my frontal profile, and I’m not talking about my penis here. I think my chest is getting bigger and it ain’t from doing pushups either. I’d be smart not to take any more pills. Now if only I could get Sally to agree. Fat chance. |
| The Feral Elder Refuge Every year in July I attend the Oregon Country Fair (Google it, you’ll be amazed). I tent camp out there, which after two months up in Alaska I’m very used to. This particular fair marked my 21st complete fair, either as a booth member or a staff worker. The years I snuck in and just stayed for the duration don’t count for some reason. But, with my tenure and my age (over 55) I am now eligible to join the ranks of the elite Elders. The Elders have been given their own camp and even though they don’t have jobs out there at the fair, they don’t have to pay to be there. To my way of thinking all the fair board did was to put the Elders on a reservation, which doesn’t sit well with my natural renegade spirit. In revolt I’ve kind of helped create an alternative to the Elders, a place for renegades like me to gather and plot, and we’ve adopted the title of Geezers. A particular bench in the mainstage area is where we hang our ‘Geezers’ sign. Unfortunately a flood washed the bench away and trust the hippies on construction not to recognize a bench had ever been there, so no replacement has been built. This year we had to steal benches. We stole one bench from the Child Care booth but darned if they didn’t find it and take it back. The other bench stayed stolen, but it underscores our need to take matters into our own hands. Stealing benches, as entertaining and rewarding as it is, should not be considered a solution to our problem. One of the benches was damned heavy and I don’t look forward to dragging benches throughout the rest of my twilight years. My chief crony, Bob Heilman, put it this way: “We can’t expect others to carry out our own traditions.” So if any of us can get off our lazy asses next spring, we’ll by god go out there and build our own bench to our own design. Don’t say I didn’t warn you when you see the results, complete with a sign reading “Feral Elder Refuge”. It should be a good place to sit and hoot, solve the world’s (and the fair’s) problems, and trade jokes and lies (even if you aren’t a Geezer we might let you sit there, we’ve been known to make exceptions, we’re incorrigible flirts). We’re actually doing the country fair a service by getting Geezers off the path, they can get in trouble out walking around loose like that, even if they pride themselves on being ‘Free-Range Elders’. A few notes on this year’s fair. Sunday morning bubbles. Every Sunday morning a group gathers in the mainstage meadow and makes huge glycerin bubbles, which other people then try to keep off the grass and sleeping hippies, creating air currents so the bubbles will stay airborne. There was one guy who could make bubble dragons (which is a long stream of bubble which ultimately breaks into individual bubbles. This year was the best bubbling I’ve seen yet. The marshmallow war. Sunday night a crowd gathered outside of Fair Central. Feeling besieged, I guess, the doughty volunteers who had been managing the fair all weekend attacked the crowd with marshmallows. Those besieged had the advantage, they were on the second floor and they had the ammo, but soon a spirited battle erupted and it was hard to tell who had the advantage. The Hell’s Fairies. Three rough-looking bikers (on bicycles) wearing disheveled fairy costumes, scraggly wings, which looked like they slept in them (they probably did) rode through the crowd yelling “Look out, here comes the Hell’s Fairies, we’re looking for little ones with wings.” It would have been troubling were it not also so incongruous. The heat. I was out in 90 plus degree temperatures for all three days I had to work. In the heat of the day. Since I just got back from Alaska I was whiter than a halibut. I’m not usually a believer in sunscreen but I made an exception. I will admit I ate the most delicious Popsicle ever, an orange one made out of real orange juice, given to us on the road by a passing Samaritan. The fair needs commended on how well we were taken care of, water-wise, we always had cool, if not cold, water and plenty of it. But I think being out there for so long every day was the main reason I was tapped out early each night, out cold in my tent while others partied all night. Too much exposure, or something. So there you have it. |
| Spending two months on an unihabited island is a good way to become disconnected with everything going on in the world at large. As a result I was ignorant, but blissful. It is absolutely true what they say, in this case, ignorance really is bliss. Can you blame me for wanting to stay in that state? I did learn a thing or two. I learned how to build big bonfires capable of burning whole logs. All the beaches on every island around have huge stacks of driftwood logs, like a raft of logs had broken loose and washed onshore. We never knew what the beach would look like in the morning. Logs would move around, new logs would appear. The only thing that didn't happen was any of the logs going away. Since we needed to clear a path down the beach to skid the old cabin to the water, we resorted to the time honored method of beach clearing, the bonfire method. Now I'm back home and my evenings are kind of boring. I miss making big fires, sigh! But I mentioned I'd learned two things, the other being a magical, if expensive, device I first learned about on the ferry from Ketchikan to Prince of Wales Island. The price of a ticket is stated at being 35 dollars, but you end up paying fifty due to the 'Surcharge'. This surcharge thing could be a real money maker in the hands of the right person. Your deck will cost twenty-five hundred dollars to the penny, oh that little clause, the surcharge? Don't worry about it, it's just language I throw in on my contracts in case something happens outside my control, like higher material and logistical costs, say the price of gas goes up, things like that. Then the customer is not surprised when the final bill is three grand. The surcharge. Why didn't I think of that? I also miss the whales going by and the dog barking at them. I got to see all those cool things I've seen whales do on TV, the fluke thing, the breaching, spouting, tail-slapping, fin-slapping, maybe even making love, I'm not sure. Give us this day our daily whale and forgive us our surcharge. Then there's the boats, they were fun to watch. One day a fellow called 'Crazy Ray' (for good reason) decided to pull his halibut skate in a gale. His friend Loy towed Ray's little whaler out to the skate and then both boats looked like they were in the rodeo with all the bucking around they were doing. Ray was actually able to pull in one of his lines (maybe fifty hooks) but lost the other one. I think the radio had called it a 'Small craft advisory' but Ray doesn't think it applies to what he wants to do. My guess is Ray won't be able to get Loy out there next time. Anyways, I've got to get motivated by other things than huge fires, cabin-building and whales. I want to make some picture frames, one picture in particular I took needs framing. It's a picture of a dandelion, I'll show you. ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** |
| Catching up I am finally home from Alaska, the last few days of the job were a blur and then one very long travel day. It has taken me a couple of days to catch everything up here at home after being gone two months. Houseplants to water, refrigerator to restock, laundry to do, you get the picture. But the cabin I left behind, seeming to be peering from between the big spruces, is a beauty of which I’ve every right to be proud. It looks more like a house than a cabin, especially surrounded by big decks. I’ll show you a picture of the cabin and the builders (I’m the one in the middle). ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** The new cabin sits directly over the site of the old cabin. We’d drug the old cabin forward on a couple of skids and then used it as a cook-shed and one of the guys slept inside as well. It was sweet we were able to use it, usually we have destroyed the previous cabins (or it had already been done for us). But our contract with the Forest Service required us to get rid of the old cabin and the time finally came to do it. ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** Our plan was to drag the cabin down the beach, put it on some kind of float and then watch it go away into the sunset. The plan worked to perfection, even if it took three men and a boy as well as two dogs and a piece of rope we found beach-combing. It wasn’t easy, cabins sliding over driftwood logs is not an exact science, it also requires a mix of bar oil and elbow grease. A kind of pontoon platform had been built to receive the cabin and then bear it proudly over the bounding main. The event was timed to take advantage of the tide coming in, so actually the ‘dock’ (as the builders of the device kept calling it) was coming in to meet the cabin at the same time the cabin was going down to the ‘dock’. When they finally got close enough together, we secured our grip-hoist (do you know what a come-along is? The grip-hoist is its grand-daddy) directly to the platform and pulled the cabin up on it and the whole thing floated on the incoming tide. It was perfect. I’ll show you a couple pictures. ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** Then they hooked a boat to the floating cabin and towed it toward the snow-capped mountains shining in the setting sun over on Prince of Wales Island. Two days later we finished up all the little details and were embarked toward POW our ownselves. ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** But a lot happened I haven’t told you about. One day a boat landed on the back beach by our building site and the dogs ran down barking to welcome the folks. It turned out they weren’t there to see how the cabin was progressing, although they did take a little tour and reminisced about the old cabin and the times they’d spent in it. They actually had been looking for a good beach to skin out the five sea otters they’d ‘harvested’. Although it’s illegal for anyone to kill sea otters, the native population can take them if they are going to use them in some kind of handi-craft, which was exactly the case. I’ve been told my totem animal is the otter and I’ve got little otter memorabilia scattered around my house. I’ve had the pleasure to work in an area where I got to see river otters at work and play, this time it had been my pleasure to watch the sea otters go by our cove on the outside, along the kelp, floating on their backs and doing little things with their human-like hands. I couldn’t stop myself, I had to go down and see these critters up close. They were still warm to the touch and the fur is so dense and soft, it is a pleasure to touch it. I’d taken my camera to get a picture of them but realized I didn’t really want a picture of five otters bleeding from fatal head wounds, that’s not how I wanted to remember them. I asked the old Inuit woman (who was afraid of dogs and so stayed at the boat) where they’d gotten them. “Over there,” she told me, vaguely waving her hand toward other islands not far off. “They were very curious,” she added, “they came right up to the boat.” A couple of days later I saw an otter swim by again. I was glad to see it. |
| My brother came and spent a week with me, he was awed by Alaska and its wonders. The first night we spent in Ketchikan and then took the ferry to Prince of Wales Island. My co-worker Locke picked us up at the ferry and then we skiffed out to San Fernando Island and Point Amargura (where we're building the cabin). He was awakened during the night several times by whales makiing "such a racket I couldn't sleep". I personally don't have a problem sleeping during the whales' symphonic behavior, but trust me, for animals that supposedly don't have vocal chords they sure can be vocal when they want to be. And the tail-slapping!! We had a big bull humpback not more than two hundred yards off the point the other day bellowing and slapping his tail on the water repeatedly (it sounds like rifle shots). I think he was pissed because the dogs barked at him, but perhaps I'm anthropormorphizing. We have a cow and a calf who hang out in the area a lot of the time, but it's hard to tell them all apart, it could be several cows and calves for all I know. My bro and I went fishing for two days last week and caught an s-load of fish, including a 30 pound King salmon which if we'd filmed it would have been an episode on one of those fishing shows, for sure! We also caught halibut until our arms were sore from pulling them up, none very big, but I'm sure they'll be delicious. We also caught a variety of rockfish (I caught a very beautiful red one). The first day we went out we saw a pod of orcas, maybe half a dozen, the guide said it was the first orcas he'd seen in two years. All in all we were very successful and my bro took home nearly 45 pounds of fillets. The cabin is progressing nicely, I was gone a week and was surprised how little they got done in my absence. Right now we've got nearly the first floor completed and are putting in the loft at present. I'd be out there working right now if the circular saw had not broken its electrical plug so we had to come to town. There actually are other reasons we have for coming in, so as we say, it is what it is. I should be here nearly another month. I hope so, the scenery is splendid and the money very welcome. So I'll try and keep everyone updated who cares. |
| Well I've been at the cabin project now for three weeks. The weather the last few days has been magnificent, it's a pity I'm on vacation instead of working. My brother just got up here from Oregon and we're going fishing for king salmon and halibut the next two days, then we're going to rent a car and I'm giving him a tour of Prince of Wales Island, Alaska. We'll probably see deer and possibly a bear or two, and some projects I've worked on here on the island. Last night he got to go out to the cabin project I'm working on now, an eight mile skiff ride over an exceptionally calm ocean. We enjoyed the sunset, a driftwood fire and the sights and sounds of whales out in the sound. This morning we saw a mother humpback and her calf not more than a quarter mile from shore as they spouted and then dove, showing us their flukes. A lot of bald eagles nest on San Fernando Island, the island where we're working, one nest is so close I am awakened in the morning by the pitiful screams of a young, hungry eagle. I felt bad for the li'l guy the day it rained three inches, I knew he didn't have any raingear and must be soaked to the bone. When the weather is beautiful we have a gorgeous view of snow-covered mountains on Prince of Wales Island, gleaming in the sunset, obscured by rainbows, etc. The work is progressing well, we've got nearly all the material out to the island that we need. I've been piloting a 33 foot landing craft loaded with the cabin structure back and forth across the eight miles of distance between dock and cabin site. A couple of times the wind made the going a bit scary, with choppy waves washing over the bow, not quite at the level of the World's Most Dangerous Job, but still hairy. The odd thing was I kind of enjoyed it, telling my building buddy, Locke, "It was kind of fun, in a grim sort of way." To which he agreed. I'll probably be here close to another month, I'll try to update the blog again, at least one more time. We'll see, Internet time cannot be taken for granted in my position. |
| There are no computers on Point Amagura About eight miles west of Craig (the largest town on Prince of Wales Island in Southeast Alaska) is the island of San Fernando. I don't believe anyone lives on the island, but the Forest Service has maintained a cabin there for many years on Point Amagura, the southern-most tip of San Fernando Island. We'll be going there to remove the old cabin and build a new one. I leave Monday, May 5th. So I won't be home to vote in the Oregon primary, I won't have to make a sticky choice between Obama and Clinton. I'll have to leave that up to others, it's out of my hands. At first I liked Hillary and thought she was a shoo-in for the nomination. But then when Obama joined the contest I began to compare the two of them, deciding I didn't mind either one. Then Hillary started getting desperate and got out her Carl Rove playbook of dirty tricks and smear tactics, and I liked her less and less. Although either Obama or Clinton would be a change from McCain and his inept Republicans, I'm thinking Obama would be the bigger change. And I think we need the biggest change we can get after eight years of Bush running the country into the ground face-first. Of course out here in Oregon we never liked Bush. Now, as a result of his giving farmers in California water three or four years ago, thereby denying the salmon fry a way to get to the ocean, the Chinook fishery on the west coast is a disaster. That's only one example of bad decisions turning into disasters, there are many more (Iraq, Katrina, Ethanol, etc.), and if Dubya has his way he'll start drilling for oil on the ecologically fragile north shore of Alaska. So far Congress has stood in his way, I hope they continue to do so. According to the President this oil will go a long way to help keep us from depending on foreign oil, but I've heard all the oil up there has been contracted years ago to Japan. If so, we'll never see any of it. But back to the cabin job. This will be the seventh Forest Service cabin I've had the pleasure to work on. The cabins are for rent, through the internet, just Google ‘forest service cabins Alaska' and you'll find a number of them. You'll be amazed how cheap they are to rent and even more amazed how much it'll cost you to get to them. I've only built one that was on a road, the rest involved helicopters, float-planes or boats to get to. I'll be camping in the wilderness for over a month building this cabin, with an eight-mile skiff ride (a skiff is a motor-boat) to go to town for a shower, a real bed and food I don't have to prepare myself. There are no amenities like electricity or running water, the place is isolated. It's a good place to go to insulate yourself from everything happening in the rest of the world. On Point Amagura we'll only have to contend with the weather, tides and hopefully only small animals invading our kitchen supplies (I'm sure there are black bears on the island, they're great swimmers). But this trip I'm going to do something different. I've been up to Alaska many times and never took advantage of the fishing. This time I'm going to take a week off and my brother is coming up from Oregon to go fishing for King salmon (some call them Chinooks) and halibut. He's always dreamed of fishing in Alaska and now he's going to do it. He needs the adventure, he's spent the last three years helping his wife, my sister for forty years, in her battle with cancer. She lost the battle two months ago. My brother has earned some diversion and I'm looking forward to showing him all around Prince of Wales Island and the projects I've worked on. I hope he's able to go back with a couple of fish boxes full of fillets and a bunch of good stories to tell. The point of all this is I won't be around the site very much for a while. The truth is I haven't been around here very much anyway lately, there's been jobs to do. I characterize it as the sun's been shining lately, therefore I've needed to make some hay. I'm going off to make more, but I'll try to check in from time to time to fill you in on what's going on, if you're interested. Cabin jobs are hard work and can be dangerous too, I'll try not to cut off any body parts this time (last time I cut the end off my thumb, I can't afford to do that again). In town there's a place I can rent internet time, I'll drop you a line right here when I can. In the meantime I won't care about politics, polygamous sects, the price of gas or the nasty wars our country is engaged in. I'm looking forward to it! |
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