The Year of the Klingon

In today's modern world, there's not a whole lot you can get for a mere five dollars. For example, Arby's Five-For-Five is really five dollars and ninety-five cents in Alaska and rumored to have gone up to a whopping six ninety-five. Even a shrewdly bargained-for Easy Rider at a garage sale goes for no less than six dollars. And so it is a real delight when you can get something quality in exchange for an Abraham Lincoln.

This morning, I took my Abraham Lincoln to my former gym, Pete's City Gym, also known by old-timers as "10th and E," its cross streets. For five dollars, I can get a day pass to use the gym or I can pay $25 for the month. There is no start-up fee, no year membership, no strings, nothing complicated. In fact, if there were anything complicated about the gym, Pete's is not the kind of place that would know what to do with it.


A lot of people, members of Alaska Club or Powerhouse Gym, the so-called normal gyms in town, like to talk smack about Pete's, but much of it is undeserved. There is a cardio room with 2-3 treadmills, 2-3 elliptical machines, maybe a bike or two, and a whole bunch of nautilus machines for the lower body. The other main room is mirrored, well-lit, and clean and has free weights as well as nautilus machines for the upper body. You don't have to travel very far to find a can of Lysol, and there are saunas (albeit small and rather drawer-like) in the locker rooms. In other words, Pete's offers many of the amenities you'd expect from a normal gym.

A while back, there was a lot of talk about "The Fungus" at Pete's. The Fungus was apparently some kind of mold, probably a variant of athlete's foot, that was rumored to be lurking in the showers at Pete's, ready to strike. Those who went barefoot reported contracting The Fungus. But anyone who goes into a public gym without proper flip flops is asking for trouble, and if you ask me, just begging for The Fungus. The management can't be held accountable for individual poor judgment.


Equipment and Fungus aside, it is the people and the attitude that make Pete's my preferred gym. When you walk into Pete's, you are greeted first by a scantily clad Governor Arnold Schwarzenagger. This poster in the front hallway is an homage to hard bodies like his and reminds you why you are there. In fact, throughout the gym, the walls are plastered with posters of bodybuilders, past and present.


There are a few men who seem to run the gym, but the main guy in charge, as far as I can tell, is Pete's Pete Number One. His name isn't actually Pete (and in fact I can't remember what his real name is) but for ease of memory, we've always called him Pete Number One. Pete Number One is timeless; in the four years I've known him, I don't think he has changed a bit. His look is quite literally frozen in time - around the 1950s I'd say. Pete Number One has a handlebar mustache and a head of puffy helmet hair. He wears all black, everyday, and wears his weight belt twenty-four seven, whether he's behind the front desk, lifting weights in the upper body room, or sitting in his truck reading the paper with the engine running (which he often does). If I had to sum it up, Peter Number One looks a bit like a Hulk Hogan wannabe of yesteryear who maybe never gave the dream up.

Peter Number One takes the early morning shift, and hence, he is the Pete I see the most often. There is also Peter Number Two and Peter Junior (the younger man who takes the evening shift), but neither is as crazy nor as interesting as Peter Number One who easily is my favorite Pete by far.

I've had a wide range of exquisite experiences as Pete's, which include having an older Eastern European woman instruct me on how to use free weights to "make my butt hard," getting asked out by Pete Junior (whose suave pick-up line was, "So, you gotta a man?"), and having some of the best workouts ever. But last week, for a mere five dollars, I heard the words that I thought I'd never hear in my life:

"Have you ever thought of entering a bodybuilding contest? I think you should do it."

Let me explain. I am thirty-one years old, five two and three quarters inches tall, and the closest I've ever been to doing a pull-up was that one time I was sleeping and actually had a dream in which I did a pull-up. I play racquetball like Woody Allen, and when I run, people smile out of pity. In middle school, I was a straight A student... except for P.E.. I failed each and every Presidential Fitness test except for flexibility and was always the last to be chosen when it was time to pick teams. So I am not what I'd say a natural candidate for body-building.

Suffice it to say, in fact I am not an athlete of any sort. I play a decent ping pong game, but otherwise lack any sport-like agility. I am, however, strangely agile in other ways. I guess a few years of childhood ballet can really pay off in your thirties. To this day, I remain very flexible and have a good sense of balance ... and secretly think that I was destined to be a kung fu master. But that is another blog entry....

Ironically, I had actually thought about bodybuilding before because I always suspected it would be really neat to go to one of my high school reunions as a bodybuilder. It is the predictable fantasy of someone who has always considered herself always a bit too small and too weak. More than anything, it would surely freak out my former classmates.

I mean, wouldn't it be a riot to be five two and three quarters inches of PURE ROCK-HARD STEEL? I thought so.

But I never got beyond entertaining this idea in the abstract, so when the two hundred fifty pound black man lifting weights told me I should join a bodybuilding contest, my interest was piqued.

One might suspect that his comment was simply a pick-up line, but the man who uttered these words, Chris, is a gentle giant who doesn't seem like the womanizing type. He suffered a stroke a few years ago and while still massive, he has a slow and deliberate way about him that made me think he wasn't just being a jerk or joking around. So either he is a really nice guy, or it's just the stroke talking.

In response to Chris' suggestion, I pointed to places where my muscles should be and said, "Oh I don't think so. I don't have any muscles, and I'm plenty fat."

"Where you fat? On the bottom of your feet? Show me the bottom of your feet."

I patted my belly and thighs. "Here's the fat, really!" Chris seemed unaware of all the clever places I was hiding my fat. My less than perfectly taut back. My stomach rolls. My fatty cutlets right next to where my pecs should be.

Despite these shortcomings, I have to admit I was still intrigued and curious by the prospect of becoming a bona fide bodybuilder. I asked questions about how long it might take to train and how my diet would change. Chris said he thought I could do it, that he knew exactly what I'd need to do to get there, and that he could even train me if it weren't for his frequent medical appointments. According to him, the key was wanting It.

"That thick steak? That milkshake? You've got to WANT IT. You've got to WANT that trophy like you want that steak."

Well, that sounded pretty straightforward. I regularly WANT a thick steak or WANT a milkshake. This bodybuilding was going to be no problem at all.

"You have the look, the right facial features."

What facial features was he seeing? The clenched teeth during my workouts? The biting of my lip when I pushed myself harder? Or was this yet another unfortunate case of the "exotic Asian features?" It is undeniable that being Chinese, I have Asian facial features and for some reason, some people have tagged this as "exotic." Or was Chris saying that I already had man-like facial features, the seemingly inevitable destiny of most female bodybuilders?

Strangely, while chatting about what it would take to become a bodybuilder, what was flying through my mind was not whether or not I could do this (become a bodybuilder at age 31 having failed every physical fitness test ever put to me) but whether or not my bodybuilding would mess up my body in some kind of permanent way. In my youth, I was a bottomless pit and could eat almost anything with little negative effect on my body. It was not until college when I started sporadically working out that my metabolism started slowing down. I've often rued the day I started to exercise as the beginning of the end, the moment I messed with my body's natural balance. Would bodybuilding give my body a confused metabolic message and cause more harm? Did I really want to turn into a short, rippling man-like creature? For example, it would undoubtedly rob me of what little boobs I currently have. Would it all be worth the sacrifice?

Chris would say yes. He later came over and further explained, wholly unsolicited of course, "There's nothing like the sound of the applause. All of those people -- clapping, cheering, appreciating you."

He repeated rather dreamily, with a faraway look, "There's nothing like it."

For a moment, I stood in his dream. I tried to imagine hordes of people cheering me on, clapping wildly for the absence of my boobs, the fakeness of my tan, the grossness of my veins popping out of my muscles. Was it so unheard of? After all, wasn't this what I've always wanted, simply to be appreciated? Perhaps bodybuilding was the path to the Holy Grail I've been looking for all my life.

The truth is I may have attracted attention at Pete's by doing what will likely become my signature moves in future bodybuilding contests. As I mentioned before, the Presidential Fitness test for flexibility was the only one I passed, and boy, did I pass with flying colors. Sometimes in between sets, I like to stretch my legs or do yoga-like squats to loosen up and relax. I like to plug in my headphones, grab my leg until my ankle is close to my ears, and then hold that pose, sometimes striking a flamenco flourish. Perhaps it was this "posing" that caught Chris' attention.

It also caught Al's attention. Al is a trainer who uses Pete's as his facility. More relevantly, he is a former bodybuilder, as I soon found out in listening to his rather long self-introduction. Apparently he has won, as he put it, "Everything," including contests in New York, California, the names of which made my eyes gloss over. He was dressed somewhat fashionably for the gym and was a bit blinged out. He was wearing sunglasses indoors even though it was grey and rainy outside. Al also had very fancy and shiny black and white velcro shoes. (It takes a lot for a grown man to pull off that look.)

Al motioned for me to unplug my headphones and then noted he had not seen me around before. He marveled at my flexibility and guessed that I must be some kind of athlete. He also instantly gave me a new, perhaps unfortunate, nickname.

"Human Rubberband. This here's the Human Rubberband, Tio!"

Tio was his large friend or perhaps client trainee. Standing next to Tio, helping spot him, was Glen, a white-haired man between sixty or seventy or eighty who had skinny pink bird legs. I often see Glen in various positions curling tiny 10-pound weights clutched tightly in his blue-veined hands. The three of them made a rather odd workout group, the only thing weirder would be if I had joined them.

But there is some inexplicable appeal in joining these men in shaping our bodies. I have to admit that when I'm plugged into music and sweating at Pete's, I do feel kind of wonderfully macho. I swagger and strut on the way to the water cooler. I wipe sweat from my brow like a tough guy, and if I have a runny nose, I swear that I even snort a little. Sadly, this is the image I have of what boys do.

And deep down inside, Little People like me have always wanted to be tough more than anything else. We want people to be scared of us, not to treat us like butterflies. I am the person that Big People like to pick up off the ground first. I am the first person who has to sit on someone else's lap when too many people try to cram into the car. Friends who have heard me discuss the prospect of bodybuilding are almost all universally disgusted by the idea of my transformation into a muscled monster. But these friends are Normal-Sized and don't quite understand that it would give me great joy to freak people out finally.

Suffice it to say, if I were a bodybuilder, nobody would put this butterfly on someone else's lap.

Still, becoming a bodybuilder would mean entering a world of fake tans, body oils, and string bikinis, three things that are wholly absent in my current life. As for wanting that trophy as much as wanting that steak, I find it hard to imagine that a Presidential Fitness Test flunkie could win such a contest, unless there are special categories for Most Outstanding Flexibility, Best Runt, or Most Improved.

But one thing is for sure: if this is the year for bodybuilding, this is definitely also the year to finally go to the Las Vegas Star Trek Convention as the don't-fuck-with-me Klingon I've always wanted to be.

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Pink Octopus Gets The Blues

Dear Tito,

I am writing a letter to you to thank you for your readership. As far as I know, you are my sole official reader, so this entry is expressly for you.

Today starts week six of Retirement, and because it is questionable what other readership exists, I am not ashamed to admit to you (because I'm sure you understand) that Retirement, predictably, is not a mere Walk In The Park.

Week Six of Retirement in Anchorage has brought something new in the air. Whether it be the early morning squawkings of birds planning the logistics of a long journey soon to come or the silvery look of the morning dew foreshadowing next month's frost, things here are different. It is now well past the middle of August, and hence, the inevitable studio fade of summer has finally begun. I should not begrudge Anchorage for our current rain or for turning down the volume of our summertime fun; the downpour held off for longer than I could have hoped, and certainly Mother Nature has gifted us a better summer than she allowed last year.

But I awoke this morning to the sound and look of rain and darkness which come hand in hand with bad weather in Anchorage. It is no longer so easy to borrow the sun and jubliance of the skies for my own purposes, and so the time has come (long overdue) to look deeply inward for my own inspiration. Today's Retirement started with the uncomfortable weight of this early morning thought.

But I took one more cue from the skies and decided that today would be a good day to watch a movie I had borrowed from the library last week, a German film called Schultze Gets The Blues. As the back cover describes:

Schultze Gets The Blues is a funny, touching peek into the world of a recently retired miner, who, like his father before him, entertains polka audiences with his accordion. When he discovers the fiery energy of Zydeco music on his radio, the rigid monotony of his daily routine takes a spicy turn.... His newfound fascination ultimately leads him on a life-changing, liberating journey to the Louisiana delta.

I suppose it is not so strange that this description compelled me to pick up this movie a week earlier, given my own recent "retirement," my own "journey," and my own discovery of the joy that lies in the strings of a banjo. The movie is a quaint little narrative, almost more like a short story, accented by carefully chosen visual stills (beautiful still lifes really) which serve as quiet pauses in the telling of the story. The import of the music is more symbolic than anything else. In the film, Schultze plays over and over again really only one Zydeco piece -- something he hears on the radio -- but it is the undeniable change in his face and body every time he squeezes his marvelous accordion to make Louisiana music that moves the film. When you see how Schultze unfolds his awkward accordion as easy as he exhales his own breath, it is clear that in playing Zydeco, he discovers a new emotion previously not known to be possible. I recognized this feeling immediately because it reminds me a bit of the flush of my own internal landscape when I really get going on the banjo.

In the end, in broad strokes, the film is about the power of music as a vehicle in sorting out matters of life. I have experienced no pure Eurekas! since Retirement began five weeks ago, nor did I expect them to happen. What I have actually experienced is far more vague and mysteriously encoded - a strange fleeting feeling of doing the right thing at that particular moment. I have not solved the combination for making this feeling persist, but it is the only thing I've been able to sink my teeth into in these last five hazy weeks. I feel it rise to my skin in the middle of playing the banjo.

Schultze Gets The Blues, like life, is also about sharing. In one scene in a small dirt town in the South, Schultze appeals to a brass band playing outside on a deck of an old house and in a heavy German accent asks for, "Petroleum." The American bandplayers do not fully understand him but guess that he is asking for beer. For a moment, the non-German speaking viewer believes that perhaps "petroleum" is how you say "alcohol" in German. Schultze downs the beer and then repeats, "petroleum," again, this time waving his two empty gas gans. It now becomes clear that he is looking for gasoline for the boat he is taking through the Louisiana bayou country. They finally point him in the direction of the station and before he leaves, wave him into the back of their band van to give him a ride to where he has left his boat. At the end of the scene, they push a case of beer into his arms as libation during his solitary journey, pat him on the shoulder like the good friends they've become and bid him farewell with the English word they've come to share as hello, thank you, and goodbye -- Petroleum.

In another scene, he pulls up with his boat up to a deck of a floating house where a black woman is cooking crabs, and he asks for a glass of water to quench his thirst. She gives him the water and asks him if he likes crabs. In one of the best scenes of the movie, the marshmallowy 300-pound non-English-speaking German man tips his hat and mimes as best as he can that he, indeed, thinks crabs are tasty, and yes, he would like to eat them. The woman invites him in to have dinner with her and her daughter, and later on in the night, takes him to a bar full of Zydeco music, full of old couples with awkward angles who somehow beautifully dance cheek to cheek while shuffling across the dance floor. She shares with Schultze the gift of crab, beer, and whiskey, and also of music, good times, and incredible indelible memories.

This quiet blog started with one principle: sharing is caring. As I watched Schultze share his music, the band share its petroleum, the woman share crab and a way of life, I was reminded of how thankful I am that you shared music during your short time in Anchorage. Thank you, Tito, not only for your readership, but for bringing music to Anchor-town, music to the Little Yellow House, and most of all, bringing it back to a very dusty and crusty music lover.

Make sure to come back and visit, and bring your banjo.

Sincerely,
The Madwoman of Anchorage

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A Week In Lake Clark

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Good Day For A Garage Sale

Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words.

Easy Rider Exercise Machine at Garage Sale: $6.

Strapping it to the roof of a Chevy Blazer and having consequent good times: PRICELESS.

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Simplify, Simplify, Simplify.

Back home?

I am seated at my kitchen table in Anchorage. If I listen very carefully, I can hear the hum of my computer and the chirp-chirp of the carbon monoxide detector downstairs in the basement. (Does it want new batteries?) So different from the sounds of Port Alsworth.

The morning was crisp in Port Alsworth with dew on the windows, foreshadowing the coming of the fall. I ferried my things to the shop where the planes are parked, ate a little breakfast, and took a little stroll while I waited for Lee to show up. It was hard to leave on such a beautiful day, perhaps the most glorious bout of weather since my arrival more than a week ago. I consoled myself with the thought of the gorgeous flight that was sure to come.

The flight, like most things in Lake Clark, did not disappoint. I scarcely recognized Lake Clark Pass without all the cloud cover and silvery greyness that greeted me and Leon over a week ago. My ride with Lee was very different. By now, it was my third tiny prop plane ride, and aside from initially putting my safety vest on upside down, I was a real pro. (Thank goodness the zipper gave it away.) I had more time to stare at the instruments in the plane, especially the GPS, and to ask Lee questions. We took the Cessna 206 out (the same one that brought me in). It turns out it was built in the 70s (the font on the instrument panel betrayed its age) but had a new engine with only 100 hours on it. The pilots always think I’m nervous and afraid of flying when I ask them questions.

Lee and I talked about his work for the park and the difficulty of policing such a vast land. Lake Clark has three rangers for an area roughly the size of Connecticut. That the rangers can even figure when a moose has been illegally killed in the Park amazes me. I asked Lee more questions about his history – how he got to Alaska in the first place, how he ended up in Port Alsworth, when he learned to fly, etc., etc. This was how I learned that he, too, used to fly supplies out to Dick Proenekke. Lee did an impersonation of Dick, and although I have nothing on which to judge it, I hope that it’s dead on.

He said that you could tell if Dick was around if the flag was up at his cabin. (Dick was among many other things, a patriot.) When Dick saw the plane, he’d grab his green duffel bag of tools, and Lee would pick him up to fix whatever was ailing Port Alsworth. Dick was able to fix just about anything but was always muttering, “Simplify, simplify, simplify.” I only wish I could have met Dick Proenekke. I am at least very lucky to have met his old friends.

We somehow got to talking about Lee’s commute to and from Anchorage, where he also keeps a place, and he mentioned that his wife no longer likes to fly, having lost too many friends to the skies. He mentioned one friend, a fiery redheaded pilot with killer piano-playing skills, who died right at the opening of the Pass on a beautiful day just like today. His engine had caught on fire, and Lee was the one who found the wreck with the lone survivor inside, a teenage boy in the back who had been traveling with his father.

Lee said he still thinks of this friend every time he flies by there, and I felt our little cockpit fill up with something heavier than air – an old kind of sadness. I thought this ranger might just start tearing up, but soon we were out of the Pass and the bright skies with the sun blinding our eyes seemed to encourage us to look ahead.

As a modern traveler who regards planes as mostly inconvenient long hours spent on business trips, I have little fear for air travel. The big bellies and big engines on those planes make it easy. But it is ignorance, the kind that you get when you don’t spend hours in a tiny plane that sometimes feels like a second skin rattling in whatever Mother Nature has in store for you that day. In Lake Clark, flying is serious business. Legend has it that Leon is in a family feud with his uncle because the man insisted that Leon’s brother fly in bad weather once, and his brother perished in that flight. It is hard to imagine kind and gentle Leon, a man so fond of butter, bearing any kind of grudge, but apparently, he has not forgiven his uncle. I’m not sure if I would either.


As the flight went on, I found myself taking fewer and fewer photos, not for lack of views but due to a desire to fully appreciate Mother Nature’s work. I don’t know if anyone who has flown over these precious parts of Alaska and has gotten a glimpse of these aerial views could possibly ever create anything that would rival Mother Nature’s art. There are so many details she has thought of that would escape even the wildest imagination. On a sunny day like this, Lake Clark Pass is a studded showcase of glaciers with chiseled ice blue features. The mudflats in the Inlet are smooth and glistening, like the surface of a whale’s back or the puckered skin of an elephant wet from rain. The land glows as if pregnant with rich, unthinkable surprises.

And this is why I felt a little drop in my heart when I saw Anchorage in the distance. My, how sophisticated and urban Anchorage looks when you’re flying from Port Alsworth! I don’t know how many times I’ve made the approach to Anchorage and never ever thought it looked like the “big city” it was today. For a moment, I had a pang of regret. I had left today’s quiet cloudless skies of Port Alsworth for this?

Port Alsworth, founded by Leon “Babe” Alsworth (Leon’s grandfather), is a Fundamentalist, born-again Christian town. It is impossible to spend a week there without spotting the church camp in the bay, that unmistakable cross reminding the earth that man, too, lives here. There are numerous references in Dick’s journal entries to Babe’s Bible-thumping ways. Babe hardly ever dropped off supplies to Dick without also dropping a few words from God. Sweeping his hand over the skies and land ahead of us, Lee told me that Babe used to say, “All this here is a dung pile compared to Heaven.”

It’s not surprise that Babe Alsworth chose Lake Clark to be the setting for his missionary work. Flying in these skies, standing before the lakes in the region – it is hard not to feel the presence of something extraordinary, and if you have no particular words for it, you might just think it is God.

Lee told me that at the time he moved to Port Alsworth, he had a dream of living in the bush for a year. (He ended up spending seven years in a cabin that didn’t have running water – until it burned down.) It’s true that it’s hard to spend time out there, whether it be on Babe’s dung pile or in God’s heaven on earth, without wanting to do the same.

In the meantime, far away from the bush, I’m trying to make the transition home. My first stop after dumping my bags at the front door was my garden. Gone for nine nights and I scarcely recognize my children! The nasturtiums are still blooming but are finishing up their work. To my surprise, the gladiolas are already budding. Seeds I snuck into the ground just before leaving have offered up their first tender leaves. And the fava beans, as I predicted, a few of them have toppled over; I arrived not a moment too soon for staking. The late-planted snow peas also turned into gangly teenagers while I was gone; soon I will see the fruits of their growth spurt.

The few fireweed I had accidentally blooming in the yard last year have multiplied into a mini-meadow. The fireweed makes me nostalgic after observing all the lone fireweed in Lake Clark. I cannot help but think of my time there when I see one. I am growing a soft spot.


The compost pile looked almost compacted so before going inside, I gave the leviathan a good turning. It’s hard to say what the weather is like here in town apart from noting it is not what it’s like in Port Alsworth today. Regardless of the weather, my part of Alaska is still beautiful nonetheless. Billowy clouds are hugging the Chugach Mountains at various altitudes today, and perhaps they will part to make my first day home a good one. In the meantime, I am sitting at the kitchen table with my jar of historic starter, a little bit of Lake Clark that I’ve taken home with me.

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A Penultimate Day

Last day at Lake Clark, first solo hike. Better late than never. Finally I have a chance to see things up close, on my own.











Clean new birch bark revealing itself.


Emerging from the trees and getting the first peek at Holy Mountain.



Lower Tanalian Falls. The sound of the falls, while not quiet, is comforting somehow, like a mother’s shush.



Upper Tanalian Falls. Sometimes one begs to be distracted. I am now at the top of the falls. Moments like these, I wonder if there is any color more beautiful than that made by waterfall foam rushing downward.

Patience and fortune. The sun has broken into the sky, now highlighting the mist flying off the falls which rises from the water like breath on a cold day. Is it my imagination or have the falls begun to roar with greater force? Perhaps they are clamoring noisily for the sun. A nice way to end my last day here in the Park.


Distance is so much greater without the Historian’s pace. Dinner seems very very far away, but the lake did not disappoint. It does not have the black and white mystique of the other day but instead has dressed in summer colors – warm greens, blues, and tans. If I sit here and listen carefully, I hear only the falls breathing nearby and the distorted buzz of insects nose-diving for a bite – and the sound of tiny leaves falling from above. Something stirs in the lake! Against the silence, it sounds like a thrashing but disappears as quickly as it came. I must watch more carefully.



9:00pm. The thought of dinner has been a homing beacon. Dinner will be Lake Clark style – what did I pick today and what do I have leftover? The highlights: bolete mushrooms picked during my hike, radishes from my garden, udon noodles from Anchorage, half an onion and a tomato leftover from J. In half an hour, I am eating Lake Clark Minestrone straight out of the pot. I deem it a delicious meal but after the hike, probably would have eaten my own hand.

11:20pm. Accidentally hiked around six miles today. How does such an accident happen? Poor sense of direction and bad math. I had miscalculated the hike to the Lake that I took with the Historian, and on the way back, must have missed the trail that leads directly back to the house. The hike seemed twice as long without the Historian’s pace and conversation. I did stop frequently to inspect mushrooms and take the photos I missed this weekend, such as shots of lone fireweed – fireweed where no other fireweed companion stands. It all reminds me that summer is ending, as usual, a bit too soon.

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A Good Day

It started out as a seemingly ordinary day. Our backhoe soap opera continues: the company that makes the hose had the order sitting on the desk and promised to overnight it. In the meantime, some members of the maintenance crew have temporarily plugged the hole which has apparently made the backhoe marginally functional.

Today was honestly sunny, and so the Chief deemed it a paint day. So once again, I donned on the noisy yellow suit and spent the morning masking and painting green trim on the headquarters building.

It took a long time for the crew to get mobilized. I find in general, time passes twice as slowly in Port Alsworth as in Anchorage, not in a bad way but in a way that has left me feeling as though I’ve lived in this “neighborhood” and known these people for two weeks, not the mere one week I’ve been here.

Around lunchtime, word was out that I’d likely get to join the Park Ranger Lee in dropping someone off at the ranger cabin at Twin Lakes. I tried to keep my expectations low so that if all I ended up doing for the day was getting green paint on me, it wouldn’t matter. But Lee arrived in town and gave me a green light and soon, I was running to the shop to get my backpack and go.

To land at Twin Lakes, you land on the lake, literally, so Lee flew us out in a float plane. Before taking off, I helped pump water out of the skids (floats). We circled in the bay a few times and then started to take off. Sprays of water flew out from underneath the floats. Because of the good weather, everything was blue, turquoise, and green. I could not ask for a better day for my first float plane flight.

It is undeniable when flying from Lake Clark to Twin Lakes that anyone looking out of the plane would declare this is beautiful country. Magnificent country really. That it still exists and has been seen by my eyes makes me feel unbelievably fortunate. Even during the short thirty-minute flight from Lake Clark to Twin Lakes, the landscape is varied. Lush woods. Open tundra. Our great Alaskan mountains. Swampy bogs. Turquoise lakes. Any vista someone might desire can be found along the way.

I was not prepared, however, for how stunning the Twin Lakes would be. Sure, I’d been reading Dick Proenekke’s journal entries these last few nights but thought a lake is a lake is a lake. But the Twin Lakes are truly something else.

I haven’t had a full chance to explore Lake Clark which is so large and stretches so far that sometimes I forget it is a lake. The Twin Lakes are such that you can see where the lakes begin and end. Perhaps it is because you can grasp the full context that it feels so isolated and remote, even deeper into the wilderness.


The flight to Lower Twin (where the ranger cabin is) and seeing the inside of the cabin were real treats, but I did not realize that my day was only going to get better. We took off from Lower Twin and flew toward Upper Twin. On the radio, a friendly woman’s voice crackled, inviting us in. As we landed, a woman and a man in boots were standing in the lake to greet us. I suppose this is what happens when you live at a stunning lake – you greet your visitors by standing at your water “door.”

Kay and Monroe must both be in the 50s or 60s, but I cannot describe them as old. There is a vitality, a steady unbreakable energy in both of them that defies their physical age. Kay quickly ushered me into Spike’s Cabin which is where Dick Proenekke stayed while he build his own, now famous, cabin.

Spike’s Cabin, which has been Kay and Monroe’s abode for the last eight summers, is actually more like Spike’s Room. I would estimate that it is less than 10 X 10. It has bunks, a stove, shelves, and a cold box (a hole dug into the permafrost which serves as storage space for Kay’s eggs and yogurt). What I found most remarkable was the floor of nice cool gravel. Kay did note that she had just “cleaned” the gravel, meaning they had just changed it out for fresh gravel from the shore.

I wasn’t sure how long we had before taking off, but Kay asked Lee if we had time to show me Dick’s cabin (!), and so leaving the men to catch up with news and headed off on a path that passes by Hope’s Cabin (a larger cabin built by Dick and Spike and named after Spike’s wife), and then finally, leads to Dick’s place.


The first thing you see on the path is a chair, Dick’s chair, where he spent his days observing the infinite faces and views at Twin lakes. It is the chair of a solitary soul and in one piece of furniture, sums up the ethos of this man.

Only a few days ago, I had picked up One Man’s Wilderness at the visitor’s center as additional reading during my time at Lake Clark. It was thus a fortuitous happening that no sooner had I finished reading the entries detailing his completion of his cabin by his own two hands that I got to see with my own eyes what Dick was talking about. I’ll admit that one of my first gut responses to Dick’s entries was that he was so self-aware, so self-satisfied … almost smug. But when I saw the cabin, I instantly understood.


Dick’s work, still standing, like the country between Lake Clark and the Twin Lakes and the surrounding area, is undeniably beautiful. I have never seen a log cabin constructed with such detail and grace – it seems to be a home created out of deep affection for its surroundings. Alaska has its fare share of cabins, and they truly run the gamut. Dick’s cabin is nothing short of a work of art at the far end of that spectrum.

I suppose the cabin is what you’d expect from a craftsman trying to build a home of a lifetime, or a home for a lifetime. My single favorite thing about the cabin is Dick’s Dutch door with a top half that swings open independently of the bottom half. Kay pointed out where the porcupines had worn down the door. But the most beautiful feature on the door is its hinge – something out of a Swiss clock! Dick seemed so pleased with himself when he finished this door, and now it makes perfect sense.



There are endless other marvelous details. The wonderful sod roof (watering of which is part of Kay’s official job description, in addition to raking beach). Right now you can even see the purple flowers of monkshood growing on the roof. Even the outhouse, with its crescent-shaped peephole, has a great view. Inside the cabin, you can see the ingenious way this man lived, finding new uses for everything. I was experiencing nothing short of schoolgirl delight in making all of the discoveries.



I signed the visitor’s log, and recognized other items in the cabin from the book. The driftwood sculpture in the window. The hinge made from old gas cans. A birch spoon he made that perfectly measured enough batter for exactly one sourdough hotcake. Kay showed me a map that had pin points for every place Dick had explored (to tell people where to look for the body, as Dick explained). He also scrawled notes onto a calendar with meteorological data, animal sightings, and even records of his daily meals.

Speaking of meals, Kay showed me where she suspects Dick put his sourdough biscuits for rising. This got us onto the subject of sourdough starters, and I got to asking Kay if she and Monroe used one (seeing as how they are out here by themselves). She said in fact they use starter, and in fact, it’s Dick’s starter! There was a long story I didn’t quite catch which explained the chain of custody over the starter, but basically, when Kay and Monroe got it, it had been dormant or virtually dead for several years. Monroe “scraped off the black” as he described it, added some flour to see what would happen, and voila!

The starter was resurrected.

News of the historic starter was quite exciting, and I asked Kay if I could see it. When we got back to Spike’s Cabin, Kay told Monroe that this young lady would like a photo of him holding the starter. Monroe shyly said, well, maybe she’d like some starter. I froze with joy, and in moments, I had a little jar of historic starter, Dick Proenekke’s starter!

Kay also mentioned they picked their first quart of blueberries today, and I sampled a few along the path, the best blueberries of this season so far. All of the talk of starter and blueberries got Lee to thinking about a feast of sourdough blueberry hotcakes he had with Kay and Monroe several years ago. Our hosts, upon revisiting this memory, quickly got up and started making “sourdoughs,” as Monroe calls them.


Monroe’s Sourdoughs:
- bowl of sourdough batter/starter
- some salt
- 1 egg
- some oil
- handpicked blueberries
- maple syrup

Monroe makes a paste of baking soda and water and adds a spoonful to a small bowl that holds enough batter for two hotcakes. He says if he added the baking soda all at once, the last cakes wouldn’t have any rise left in them.

I think Lee ate six, and I ate at least four. We also talked about Bella Hammond’s blueberry pie. A slight revision to the description given by John – Bella used a secret ingredient – fresh blueberries in addition to the cooked ones.

The day had been full of history and memories. Dick’s most frequent visitor during the first year was Leon “Babe” Alsworth who flew in his supplies. In recent years before Dick's death, it had been Babe’s grandson, my pilot Leon, who brought supplies to Dick. My decision to pick up the book the day before magically turned into a visit to Dick’s cabin. And happy memories of a good hike and hotcakes afterwards brought us happy bellies today. After the sourdoughs, I fell into sleepy contentment in the midday warmness of Spike’s Cabin. Lee and I finally said our goodbyes and returned to Lake Clark an hour and half later than expected.

A good day.

It has been one week since my first night at Lake Clark. What has changed? More mosquito bites. Hands and fingers dry and chapped from maintenance work. Fingertips of my fretting hand hardened into callouses thanks to one week of dedicated banjo practice. A lower body stiff and full of lactic acid from trying to keep up with a sixty-year-old man. How did the little Chinese girl whose dad never let her camp outside ever get here anyway?

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Smells Like Dirty Diaper

Update on the backhoe situation: The hose has still not arrived. A new theory is that maybe it was never ordered. Purchasing has no clue what we’re talking about.

I spent most of the day doing some tent inventory. Tents of various shapes, poles of various lengths, all different colors and fabrics. And smells. Part of my task today was to determine whether a tent is Too Smelly To Use Again. I found quite a few Slightly Funky tents, which I dutifully so tagged. But the worst was the one I tagged “Smells Like A Dirty Diaper.” I am assuming (hoping) that I will be eventually asked to dispose of the Dirty Diaper.

Today was my first full day at work without J, my second week on maintenance. It seems that I have settled into the margins. A little less than two weeks is not ideal for integrating oneself into a small community. And so I find my mind drifting to thoughts of departure. I felt the first pang of loneliness – alone in my clean garage, setting up tents I do not know and will never use. Like an arbitrary wind, unexpected and unexplained, I thought about whether I could really live in Alaska forever.

Later in the day, the Historian and I took another hike. We again talked of many things such as China, global warming, blueberry pies, baked beans, and cholesterol.

Bella Hammond's Blueberry Pie:
- graham cracker crust
- boil blueberries, cornstarch to thicken
- pour into crust, refrigerate
- add fresh blueberries, top with 2" layer of whipped cream.

The Historian's Boston Baked Beans:
- 1 ceramic bean pot
- 1 bag of beans from Maine (red or pinto will also do)
- dried ginger
- dried mustard
- molasses
- 1 onion
- Canadian bacon

Soak beans overnight. Boil in soaking water. Take spoonful of beans, blow on them, and if peels move, take off heat. Drain liquid. Put whole onion at bottom of pot. Mix other ingredients into paste. Add paste to beans, add water. Bake for 12 hours at 350F.

In order to keep pace with him, my mind was mostly focused on the roots and mud underfoot, with an occasional pause to admire something unusual or out of place, like a lone fireweed at the top of Beaver Loop or a patch of fiery red moss where all other moss was green. The Historian pointed out a ripe salmonberry and explained that these are different from the ones growing on the other side of the Inlet. Indeed. The berries back home are watery and don’t taste much like anything. These Lake Clark salmonberries are more fragrant, a little pungent. I cannot recall it perfectly as they were tiny jewels that disappeared in a quick swallow.

The end (or return leg) of Beaver Loop was really quite lovely. The dogwood is no longer blooming with its perfect star-like white flowers, but in their place were tight cluster of perfect red berries. I saw some lupine on the hike (first I’ve seen since Anchorage) and wondered what my own lupine looks like right now. But what I think what is quickly becoming my favorite is the forest of birch. With their gentle, leaning order to the landscape, birch glens leave me feeling very calm.


At home, I decided I had fully earned my frozen enchiladas packed from Anchorage and could not resist making some Lazy Man Lake Clark Bread Pudding:
- Sauté chopped white peaches in a pat of butter.
- Add half can of mango juice to thicken into syrup.
- Add chopped bread and vanilla yogurt.
- Dust with cinnamon.

After dessert, it was looking rather beautiful out, so I decided to sneak in an evening stroll in my pajamas since all of my other clothes were in the wash. I had no clear idea of where I was heading, feeling only an urge to see more sky and a little more of the day. I found myself going to my stomping grounds – past the shop – and then to the runway, gravel and sky with trees as minor characters. I walked down the length of the runway to where it meets the bay. The bay was eerily lit by dusk – I wished I had a boat to take on further explorations of the Lake.

But I had no way of getting back onto the water, so I decided to turn back toward the shop. The side garage door was open and the light was on. Two members of the maintenance crew were working on an outboard. Leon (my pilot) was also there, just shooting the breeze in the maintenance shop at 10:45pm.

I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised by the late night attendance; after all, I was out on my own evening stroll in my PJs. While I was there, I watched the mechanic refasten the drip pan and also learned what a torque wrench looks like. The men allowed me to hover like a mosquito and thankfully did not swat me away.

Watching the men chat and turn wrenches with their greasy hands, I suddenly became very thirsty, maybe hungry, when I remembered that I had a luscious slice of cantaloupe in the shop refrigerator. So I snacked on cantaloupe as the guys finished up and then walked home with fork in one hand, fruit in the other.

As I trudged along the path to the house, I thought about what an odd picture I made, with my evening-stroll fork and cantaloupe. To make matters worse, my evening outfit consisted of:
- my chartreuse slip-on garden clogs
- white socks
- baggy blue sweatpants
- my fuchsia rain jacket
- and my light brown Hike Alaska! cap.

Just as I was thinking about how weird I must look, I bumped into one of my neighbors, clearly dressed for bed, hair still wet from a shower. She was carrying several baking pans and cookie sheets full of frozen blueberries. Apparently her husband had picked them earlier, and she was retrieving them from their auxiliary freezer. Perhaps I'd fit right into Port Alsworth more than I think.

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A Man Sleeps Here Alone

I started with a slow comfortable day (made myself a delightful fried egg sandwich with ingredients painstakingly packed from Anchorage) and spent the morning reading a book. Although it was decently fair the day I arrived at Port Alsworth, each day since then has been grey skies with the looming threat of rain. There has been not so much actual rain aside from the occasional downpour. Now, having spent five nights in Port Alsworth, I’ve noticed that it likes to rain in the Park at night, when everyone is done with their business – a kind of nice studio fade of the day's activities.

The weather improved very slightly as the morning went on, and I decided today was as good as any for a hike in the Park. Since my arrival in Port Alsworth, most of my activities have only been marginally recreational. I’ve done more maintenance than I apply to my own house, and certainly J and I have been occupied with subsistences winter-squirrel-chores up until the moment he left. So today was my first solitary day in Lake Clark.

I stopped at the visitor’s center to pick up a trail map. While there, the Park Historian invited me to go on a walk with him. I hesitated only a little; I had full intentions of going on a hike, but I had already heard of this sixty-year-old Historian's legendary hiking skills. Still, it was not an offer to be refused.

When we met up later as agreed, he was wearing rubber boots, three reflective plastic triangles stuck onto the small of his back with Velcro (if not the sign of a hard-core pedestrian, I don’t know what is), and with his hoodie and sunglasses, looked a bit like a retired Unabomber. It turns out that the legends are true. The Historian turned sixty this year, but believe me, you wouldn’t know it from his hiking. The Historian is a true billy goat. We came up on steep path fairly early in the hike, and as he launched upward, I followed dragging behind, heaving. At some point all you could hear was the sound of my heavy breathing. The Historian was not making a similar noise.

We eventually made our way to the Tanalian Falls and then further to the lake. I had a few breaks during the hike, once to tie my shoelaces, and then a few more times to take photos. While scrambling up rock from the falls to the lake, I noted that not only do the Historian’s speed and stamina outclass me, he also is the most sure-footed person I’ve ever seen. His rubber boots seemed magical as he quickly scampered up crumbling rock. I wondered if this was some kind of divine agility or if he had climbed these rocks so many times so that he knew them like the back of his hand. Regardless, I was ashamed how miserably this 31-year-old body matched to his.

After the falls and the lake, I think fatigue started to take on a tinge of delirium, and I found myself being more relaxed around him. As his detachable hazard signals imply, the Historian walks everywhere. He does not have a truck or an ATV like most people here. Most days, I see him walking home with his backpack. His house has a few rooms, but the main one when you open the door has a bunk bed (in which he sleeps in the bottom bunk), a wood stove, and a plasma TV. The wood stove looks as if it was ordered out of a Sears Roebuck catalog from 1910. The plasma looks like it was purchased from Costco. The bed looks like a man sleeps there alone.

We talked of many things. This Historian said I was idealistic because I am young and had yet to admit that human beings are far from perfect. He has the view that human existence is a difficult time, punctuated with only moments of euphoria. My father, seven years senior to the Historian, regularly refers to life as “misery” with a few moments of happiness.

My standard response to this kind of talk is that the “pursuit of happiness” is written into the Declaration of Independence, but in talking to the Historian, I started to wonder if “pursuit of happiness” (as opposed to plain “happiness”) is actually a euphemism for my father’s frequently cited “misery.” The Historian said that as human beings, we were probably happiest as hunter-gatherers. This statement was particularly interesting to me because many of my happiest moments here in Alaska have been when I’ve been engaged in hunter-gatherer activities. He said hunter-gatherers did not have to worry about destroying the world the way we are in the modern age. (This is where I suggested that we were discussing modern man’s idea of unhappiness.) I told him the hunter-gatherers had their own relative miseries to contend with – starvation, freezing through winter, warfare, dying in childbirth….

It was at this point that I asked him if he were a solitary man because instinctively I knew him to be so, but it was interesting to me that the solitary man appeared to have the angst of the world on his shoulders. I find it interesting that this hermit sits in his cabin eating dinner he cooked on his woodstove, watching baseball on his plasma, thinking about the angst of the world thanks to CNN brought to him by satellite TV.

We hiked up past the Tanalian falls to Kontrashibuna Lake. The weather from town appeared to be foul but up by the lake, the grey mist took on another feeling of quiet soft gentleness. The lake glistened not in the way it would on a sunny day but in a manner far less showy -- a silvery shyness affording us a glimpse intended for us and no one else to see. Mother Nature had manage to turn our full color skies into black and white.

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Do Not Eat This Sh** Under Any Circumstances

Today was my last day hanging out with J before he returns to Anchorage and then on to Sitka for a week. We started our last day in separate corners as Saturday is a work day for J but not for me. When I finally made it to the shop to check on him, we decided to regroup at my house for a breakfast of pancakes.

Since I was going to be in Lake Clark for less than two weeks, I did not think to pack ingredients for pancakes. J had a bag of amaranth flour that had a pancake recipe on the back, but we were missing several ingredients. I made an executive decision that anything missing that had a granular texture would be substituted with multipurpose flour, which J had in his tent cabin. Since we did not have maple syrup, I added a few tablespoons from one of my instant maple-flavored cream-of-wheat packets into the dry ingredients, then chopped up a white peach I had brought from Anchorage, sautéed the fruit in a precious pat of butter, and dumped half a can of mango juice to reduce into a syrup (having not brought sugar). What resulted was a satisfying stack of Lake Clark pancakes.

As I was making this breakfast, it occurred to me how scarcity deeply affects the value of things in our lives. In Anchorage, I frequently buy eggs eighteen at a time at Costco for a couple of dollars, and I think nothing of them. But for my short stay at Lake Clark, I brought only a precious three eggs. J gave me two more, but after today’s breakfast, I am down to only two. These last two eggs will likely be The Most Important Eggs of My Life. Not having what I needed to make pancakes also forced me to be a little bit resourceful. At home, I would have absentmindedly reached for the good Vermont maple syrup I keep on hand and hence would have never wandered into the white peach mango fruit chutney we ultimately had for breakfast.

Scarcity gives every resource here a multifaceted life. Everything used here has to be burned or taken back to a landfill in Anchorage. Everything eaten here has to be hunted, grown locally, or more likely (because the soil is so poor), flown in from Anchorage. In my few days living out of small boxes of food, it has become clear that waste is a luxury and curse of big city life. Port Alsworth, on the other hand, is a place built and constantly fixed with broken parts – odds and ends given second, third lives through the efforts of hardworking people. In this sense, I understand Port Alsworth.

It has also become apparent to me that the people of Port Alsworth have come here to be left alone. While everyone is very friendly and is genuinely happy to see you trudging up the path, there are few invitations into someone’s home or plans to get together. Despite this strange strain of indifference, I feel an overwhelming desire to feed this entire community, to say something in food to replace the silence of words.

J and I ended the day with yet another resourceful dinner in the form of old MREs (Meals Ready to Eat) found stored somewhere in a shop cabinet. As part of reorganizing the shop from floor to ceiling, the MREs had been alphabetized and placed next to the microwave for anyone to eat. J and I had sampled the Fudge Brownie and Pound Cake as fuel while bottling homebrew. I recommend both highly. J is of the opinion that the Pound Cake may be the best MRE ever. For our dinner snack tonight, however, he wanted to try something different. We had Cheese and Crackers, but I didn't have much appetite for dry stale crackers and cheese out of a plastic bag. The really scary MRE we sampled, however, was Omelet With Ham. It should have been more properly labeled as "DO NOT EAT THIS SH__ UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES." The Omelet With Ham tasted something like soggy cardboard. I've never eaten soggy cardboard before, but I think the taste is unmistakable. While I took no more than my initial bite, J polished it off. Boys are funny that way.

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Rare Oompa Loompa Spotted in Lake Clark National Park

This morning, it looked like another drizzly day was ahead, and so I decided to show up for work not wearing the torn-up jeans I had specifically packed for dirty work but rather, probably the “nicest” outfit I’ve worn all week, having gone through most of my older work clothes. Details of today’s attire are relevant only in that wearing my clean jeans got me to where I found myself shortly after our 8am meeting: sitting in the maintenance shop wearing a bright yellow plastic full-body suit (complete with yellow elastic hoodie) which had been described to me as “coveralls.” When someone offered these coveralls, I thought I would be donning on a pair of grimy dark green Park Services coveralls, like the pair the shop mechanic wears. His coveralls make him look like he really knows that he’s doing.


My “coveralls,” however, make me look like the ill-fated love child of Big Bird and a large grocery bag. I had to suffer the further indignity of being an extremely bunched-up, extra-poofy yellow grocery bag because the shop had only one size available: MEN’S 2X LARGE. (I may be a lot of things, but Men’s 2x Large I am not even close.) Furthermore, it was hard not to suspect that my coveralls were actually some form of hazing by the maintenance crew. After all they were suspiciously pulled out of a cabinet labeled “SPILL RESPONSE."

Clad in a color that seemed to scream, TOXIC CLEANUP GOING ON HERE, as the relatively new kid on the block, I was not really able to blend in anywhere today. No tree or shrub provided sufficient cover; you could see me coming miles away. As I passed people, most of them tried to suppress smiles. What could I do? I’m only a Park volunteer.

The bright yellow color was only the beginning of my problems. My coveralls also made a hell of a lot of noise – whenever I walked with anyone and that person tried to talk to me, the rather obnoxious rustling of my voluminous plastic folds made it all but impossible to hear what the other person was saying. (One of the crew said in no uncertain terms that I sounded like a giant diaper.) My sunny garb also gained me a truly unfortunate nickname – Oompa Loompa. (I’d have to re-watch Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to determine whether this name has any legitimate basis, but my fear is that it does.) When yet another member of the crew called me Oompa Loompa later in the day, I realized that there was a real danger that my moniker could become permanent. This nickname has the benefit of being easier to pronounce than my real name, but if the crew starts singing Oompa-Loompa-Doompa-Dee-Do , I swear I am getting on the first plane back to Anchorage.

Putting on the coveralls was only the first step in a seemingly endless series of steps related to our painting today. First, I had to wait for the other painter to return from bailing boats. Then we had to set up the sprayer. The windows had to be taped. Buckets of paint had to be lugged to various places. After we had sprayed a very small remaining patch of all leftover from yesterday's work, there was much monkey business with moving the scaffolding to reach our next second story wall. We rolled the scaffolding right over a large shrub, and it was then decided that this large shrub should be killed anyway. So then there was further monkey business involving an effort to tear the shrub out with bare hands, despite a request that someone find some clippers. After the scaffolding had been pushed as close as possible to our desired spot, it became apparent it was not going to position us as we needed. Then there was much consulting, chin-stroking, head-scratching, all of which led to us deciding that this area could not be painted without a man-lift. The man-lift, however, was out of the question because the backhoe needed a new hose that had not yet arrived from Anchorage.

The irony of all of this is that although I had donned on my ridiculous yellow coveralls shortly after 8am, and already had some paint smears on me, by lunch break I myself had done no actual painting whatsoever.

Real painting commenced after lunch break, and at some point in the day, I realized that there was moisture building up in my suit. To my alarm, I also realized that the moisture was coming from me. I was sweating up a storm, and the rather impermeable aspect of my suit was keeping it all in there. I worried that by the end of the day, that I, like many things in the maintenance shop, would smell like sweaty man sock.

“Sweaty Man Sock” is a smell I first encountered yesterday while moving some chairs. Someone had put a bucket on a chair that had a seemingly harmless-looking rag in it. The harmless-looking rag, however, was emitting an odor that was truly awful, something that can be only described vaguely as Sweaty Man Sock. Since then, I’ve smelled Sweaty Man Sock in many maintenance-related places. And my greatest fear is that soon, it will happen while I’m sniffing myself.

In addition to smelling Sweaty Man Sock in various places, I’m starting to see some other repeated themes around the maintenance shop, even though today was only the second full day of serving with the general maintenance crew. For example, this week there has been much talk of the broken hose in the backhoe. The backhoe is apparently essential to most of the Port Alsworth construction/maintenance-related projects; it apparently is some kind of Magical Mover Of All Things. Of course, the Park only has one backhoe. Many a task floated up as a possible activity for the day, only to sink back to the bottom as soon as someone remembered, “Oh but we need the backhoe to do that.”

Man-lift for painting?
Backhoe.

Pour concrete forms?
Backhoe first.

We spent a good amount of time today lamenting the defunct backhoe and its very important replacement hose which, although promptly ordered, has yet to arrive. The backhoe has become our Holy Grail, our Achilles’ heel, our fatal Shakespearean flaw. I think if our backhoe hose arrives before I leave Port Alsworth, I may just have to pee my pants which would be a real problem in a yellow plastic suit.

The backhoe is typical of the kinds of challenges we have here. While painting in the shop today, I looked out the garage door to see three members of the crew pushing an old Chevy truck with Government license plates on the gravelly runway. Fifteen minutes later, I spotted the shop mechanic on a four-wheeler facing the front of the truck trying to nudge the truck away.

Today was a Friday, and aside from my Oompa Loompa costume, I did feel as if I was starting to get the hang of things. For one thing, at our 3pm break, to my surprise, I discovered that I, too, wanted to do nothing during our 15-20 minutes off but sit in my chair, say little, and stare blankly out through our open garage door. Today’s silence was broken only by relatives of one member of our crew who had trudged up from the runway into the garage, apparently looking for a bathroom for the little kids. A younger woman lingered at the doorway. The guy on our crew waved at her and in the direction of the older woman chaperoning the children and said, “This is my daughter, and that’s Martha.”


He then waved at all of us in the maintenance crew and said, “This is this and that and that and that.” I’m not sure if I was a “this” or “that,” but decided that as long as it was not Oompa Loompa, I’m OK with either.

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"Making of the Sausages"

I woke up this morning to windy rain in Port Alsworth, which had the ultimate effect of stranding our Chief of Maintenance across the bay. The weather, coupled with the Chief’s absence, meant that many of the usual maintenance activities, such as exterior painting, had to be suspended. The sixty-something-year-old woman who is part of the barebone year-round crew, decided that it was high time that we scrubbed the shop.


This is how I came to mop garage floors for most of the day. From my layperson point of view, I might say that a garage is meant to be a dirty place, an area in which grease and grime are expected and even invited. Garage floors should not be judged for their dirt. But the EMT garage was destined for an important Park Services meeting later this month, so it had to be spic and span. In addition to disinfecting all of the counters and cabinets, I was also asked to mop the floor using a heavy duty degreaser and hot water that we had to shuttle in from headquarters (since the maintenance shop ironically has no hot water).

Mopping the floor sounds simple enough but let’s be honest – very few of us mop our dirty garage floors. I found that my loose ropey mop mostly smeared muddy water on the floor but did little to remove dirt, even where I had sprayed degreaser on the worst spots. But there's an interesting learning curve to every process, as well as a perfect soundtrack (in this case, for maniacally mopping floors, I recommend Willie Nelson singing Rainbow Connection).

Not far into my task, I decided I had two choices: (1) get down on my hands and knees and scrub like Cinderella or some scullery maid or (2) turn my maintenance task into a Karate Kid workout. I chose the latter. Mr. Miyagi would have been proud. I put a scouring pad under my foot and worked it in every so direction to simultaneously (1) remove ground-in dirt and (2) perfect deadly leg sweeps that could topple any opponent in a karate tournament. (I’ll note here that aside from perching on a dock like a bird, Mr. Miyagi’s workout offered little in the area of lower-body defense and offense.)

There is no doubt in my mind that after Mop Left Foot, Mop Right Foot, I could have kicked Daniel LaRusso’s ass today. With my eyes closed.

Let it be said that a Type A Personality should never be asked to mop a dirty garage floor. I found myself chasing down every errant spot, realizing that it could disappear if enough effort was applied. But such a pursuit is futile; there is no use in making a garage floor so clean that someone could eat off it. It’s a garage. Nobody eats of a garage floor, nobody you want to know, that is. The other problem with obliterating one spot is that all of the sudden, other not-so-dirty-looking places start to look more grimy than when you started. I soon found myself in an endless feedback loop of fervent foot mopping.

Somewhere in all the dirt and grime, and looking for Willie's rainbows, I hit a strange emotional spot. If there is such a thing as a Runner's High, perhaps this might be described as a Mopper's Low. I thought about how I got here, in the EMT garage room in a national park in Alaska, scrubbing floors with a scouring pad under my feet. I thought about what I really wanted to do when I grow up. I thought of long lost loves. I thought of many things wholly unrelated to grease, grime, and garages. Something about a grown man singing a song first made famous by Kermit the Frog had me in a vise, squeezing both sweat and tears out of me. I held it together enough so that the rest of the crew wouldn’t notice that the strange new kid on the block who was doing odd isometric ninja exercises in the garage was also on the verge of inexplicable bawling.

My coworkers have regarded me with some suspect, for which I don’t blame them. I arrived somewhat unexplained, with a strange difficult-to-pronounce name, and for the first day, appeared to do little except serve as the personal assistant to the outsider on-site engineer (my friend J). The maintenance crew gathers at various times in the day: 8am for our initial meeting, 10am for break, 12pm to leave for lunch, 3pm for break, and 5pm to leave for the day. We have a hodge-podge of chairs seemingly randomly arranged around a long table for meeting. I’ve noticed that these chairs, while appearing to be arbitrary and nondescript, are invisibly designated. Each member of the gang seems to base some of his identity on where his butt comfortably sits during break. Since I am new, I have yet to figure out where is best to park my butt.

I also made a huge faux pas today by arriving at our 10am break late. My first union break, and I was already acting like a scab! Break is something the crew takes very seriously. At first, I thought I would get to know everyone better during these fifteen minute periods, but for whatever reason, very little is actually said during break. People sip coffee, twirl around in the chairs, pick out dirt from under their fingernails with pocket-knives. But few words are exchanged.


After dinner, J and I embarked in yet another series of common Port Alsworth activities: preparing salmon for canning and transformation into jerky. The Park Services historian had agreed to lend us his heavy duty pressure cooker for canning, and we got tips and equipment for the jerky from the maintenance and safety officer. J and I spent much of the evening washing fish, cutting fish, stuffing fish, grinding fish, mixing fish. I have to admit, however, his stash of sockeye reds was truly amazing. J had frozen much of it in solid ice, having run out of vacuum bags, and the soft bright red salmon flesh seemed to be as beautiful as it must have been on the very first day.


To make salmon jerky, you must remove the skin from the filets, thoroughly debone the fish with needlenose pliers, and put it through a grinder. For grinding, we borrowed an old-time contraption stored in an original box happily labeled "Making of the sausages" in four different languages.

At the end of our rainbow, we had a beautiful pot of ground up salmon. Patting the salmon jello was a strangely satisfying thing to do, but our work was not done. After adding jerky seasoning, the mass had to marinate overnight before being stuffed into a tube that looks like a caulk gun and then piped out onto a grate for drying in the oven. Luckily those steps had to be saved for tomorrow.

After being dropped off on my side of the bay, I went home to do a late-night prep of salmon for dinner tomorrow, during which we hoped to woo the Park historian with the massive pressure cooker for canning. I had brought along miso paste, scallions, grapefruit to marinate the fish overnight. It turns out the perfect soundtrack for late-night marinating of salmon is Shania Twain.

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More of a Threat Than Her Beret Suggests

It is hard to believe that it is already the first day of August or as I can’t help but think, the first day of the last month of summer! To ring in the last hurrah, the Pink Octopus decided to leave Anchorage to volunteer at Lake Clark National Park. It is now half an hour before the end of my first full day here at the Park.

My journey began yesterday when I got on a tiny prop plane with Leon Alsworth, one of two pilots who make runs between Anchorage and Port Alsworth (yes, he is one of the Alsworths). Leon is a man of few words. I know not too much about him except that he loves the taste of butter (this came up when I shared some cookies) and that his tiny self fits perfectly into the Cessna 206 that he often flies from Port Alsworth (the gateway town to the Lake Clark region) to Anchorage.


Just before we took off, we had pull the plane over to load up some supplies from a Port Alsworth family visiting Anchorage. In Port Alsworth, there is simply no place to buy anything. It is a town where the physical dollar bill seems to have little place or meaning. Hence, a trip to Anchorage often means an opportunity to bring back essential and more affordable supplies from the “big city.” After carefully putting my belongings under the cargo net, Leon repacked the plane in a manner that seemed to be guided only by one principle: let us not crush the eggs, pizza, and strawberries.

Once the plane was scientifically packed, we were off to the skies. Anyone who has been in a prop plane in Alaska knows that the aerial views are nothing short of spectacular. During this time of year, Mother Nature paints one-of-a-kind landscapes with silty muds, trees of all kinds of green, and splashes of bright fireweed. During the 90-minute flight, the view was constantly changing. Leon pointed out a waterfall which is literally a spout coming out of the middle of a mountain, gushing with such pressure that the spray was visible even from our plane, so forceful that it looked like the water was moving in slow motion.

The first thing you see when you arrive in Port Alsworth is obviously the runway, a long stretch of gravel running from the bay. Port Alsworth was more or less built around the runway, as would be natural for a town founded by a pilot (Babe "Leon" Alsworth, Leon's grandfather). The town now actually boasts two independently operated runways running parallel, less than a mile apart. Legend has it that two Alsworth brothers fell into a rivalry after one insisted on charging the other for the use of the first runway. The second brother solved the problem by building one of his very own.

For my stay in Lake Clark, the deal is that I am to volunteer with the Maintenance Crew in exchange for transportation to the Park and free housing. My only clear pre-designated responsibility was to pack all the food I intend to eat during my volunteer period, a difficult task for a perpetually hungry person.

For my first day with the crew, I was assigned to my friend J, who is the on-site engineer helping the Park finish its construction of new housing. J was in the process of doing surveys of the various existing buildings for purposes of appraising the property and evaluating whether any repairs are needed. And so, I spent most of the day measuring the windows of Park buildings.

As with any task, there is a learning curve. By the end of the day, however, I still had not mastered the art of wielding a tape measure without having it flop impotently off a window ledge. But I did learn that there is a soundtrack for every task, and for measuring windows, folks, nothing beats Dwight Yoakam.

Measuring windows was a funny way of getting to know a new town and its inhabitants before actually meeting anyone. In the process of determining the size of their windows, I learned much about the lives of the residents of Port Alsworth. Art on the walls and photos of family members gave obvious clues. But there were other details, more subtle. Potting soil in the bedroom, house plants cluttered in a living room -- gardener. A fiddle left on a kitchen table, jars and jars of recently salmon in the dining room, lingering yummy smells -- good cook and musician. A loft area that smelled like dog -- dog-lover. It was strange to see these lives inside out. It is often said that eyes are the windows to the soul. By the end of the day, I would have been ready to argue that windows are also the eyes to the soul.


My favorite building during my "survey" was the weight room used by the park rangers because it had only three small windows, all of identical size, very easy to measure. It is also a great building because of its rather unique decor: a motivational poster for target practice which depicts (presumably) a potential perpetrator of crime. Why this strange woman in a blazer and matching beret would be found in a National Park, much less cause trouble in it, is a mystery to me. But she apparently is what gets the Park Rangers to pump more iron and run faster. Upon closer inspection, her strangely large man hands and squarish jaw betray that she may pose more of a threat than her beret suggests.

Standing outside, measuring windows made me inordinately hungry. I now understand why many construction works have pot bellies. It’s probably not all just beer. In order to remain sufficiently fueled for outside work, one must nourish the insides. I blew through a number of my snacks in my first day. Luckily, my stay here is limited.


Summertime is an important period to store up goods for the winter. Among the local pastimes is the art of home brewing. J was ready to bottle his first batch of his first homembrew, and we spent the evening making it happen. Our task for the night was to sanitize the bottles, pump the brew into them, and cap them for storage and additional fermentation. We filled bottles halfway with sanitizing liquid, stuck our thumbs in them to fully agitate the bottle. I held up the bottles to the dim yellow light in the laundry room in order to inspect their cleanliness. For a few of the bottles, I had to pick a few horsetail plants to use as a scrubbing brush.


The rest of the evening was spent trying to find the sweet spot of the cheap-ass bottlecapper we were using. By the end of the night, though, J had two cases of Smoking Rock Porty Ale ready to be sampled in two weeks. And I was ready for bed after my first full day at Lake Clark.

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