by Mary Odden
The buff little yellow machine lifted the long chunk of logs easily. The load hardly trembled, so well was it balanced and also held to the forks with a carefully-built frame of two-bys and straps. The big header was soon perched on the vertical side logs. But—and this was the frustration—the tiniest twist in the cord of wall kept it from fitting into the prepared space.
It was hard to figure out what was wrong or where it was wrong, but the three builders talked and tried solutions one by one. Bob’s suggestions were couched in midwestern politeness: “Here’s what a guy might do. . .”
Mike’s Swedish logic came through in careful and musical English: “Ah, there is where it is too tight. I think we have to move this side in, just a little.”
Jim climbed to the top of the wall and peered along the expanse of header, looking for where to wedge a tool or swing a sledge at a likely stubborn point of logs. He tried all the solutions suggested by the two guys below. He tapped and pried, reported the slightest movement, but the header wouldn’t fit into place.
They all joked that having the thousands-pound header jump out of the gap onto something or someone 14 feet below might be inconvenient.
They adjusted straps, they reset the logs, they put pressure here and there with the little machine and with the straps and the sledge. Everything they did worked—a little bit. In the end, they resorted to power tools and shaved three saw-blades’ width off a small section of the receiving wall, allowing the header to finally ease into its place, tight and strong as the rest of the building.
It doesn’t get any better than this. Sell my front row seat at Carnegie Hall and let me listen to three builders figure out how to do something complicated on a sunny day with the tools at hand.
MISSING TED
In our circle of friends, there’s been a lot of illness and death in the last few years. In spite of knowing that this is an unavoidable part of life, the loss of the young people is tragic, and the loss of the older ones—with all that they know and can’t tell us any more—shuts irrevocable doors behind us.
The last time I saw Ted Almasy was last fall in Anchorage, in an extended care facility where he was entirely bed-bound, one of his legs gone—a casualty of his long battle with diabetes. He was so frail he seemed nearly transparent. Against the wall leaned a prosthetic leg in robust healthy plastic—waiting like a new horse to be broken and ridden if only the owner could manage it.
Ted would die on December 21 at the age of 85, but on that day in October his spirit was burning bright through his blue eyes as he talked with us. He showed us magazine articles and photos, telling us what he had to do as soon as he got out of bed, mastered the leg and returned to his home in McGrath. He had mining claims to develop, freight to haul up the river, a new garden technique to try.
And while he was engaged with those personal activities, he had some big picture things he wanted to accomplish for society and Alaska, among them convincing his beloved Catholic church to allow priests to marry. He also planned to bring legislators to their senses enough to roll back statehood and make Alaska its own country. Ted had been on the phone that very day—to lawyers working on his mining business, to politicians and old friends.
These ambitions for the future were in unbelievable contrast to Ted’s physical condition. But that’s how it always was with him. He had the most remarkable mix of nostalgia for past events combined with enthusiasm for the here and now and what he wanted to do next.
He and his pioneer partner Margaret Mespelt were our teachers and time machines when we lived in McGrath. They knew everyone in the state who had been here as long as they had—Margaret since 1929, Ted since 1945—politicians, miners, pilots, roadhouse owners reputable and disreputable, all in such vivid detail that you could see and taste those old times as you listened.
That wasn’t history out of a book, to find out that Ted learned to bake bread in Bettles from Sig Goodwig, who’d come to Dahl Creek in the gold rush. Oh my—we’d worked in a Bureau of Land Management camp in Dahl Creek 80 years later and Sig was a name half-remembered by people who lived there because their grandparents had known him.
But back to that bread—“The first loaf I made, you couldn’ta raised that thing with a stick of dynamite,” Ted said. And then he would tell you the kind of flour he’d just ordered a few days ago from Anchorage and he would tell you how to make your own bread—today, as soon as you got home.
Favorite topics of Ted’s were airplanes and pilots. He’d known the Weins and Jim Dodson, and Harold “Thrill ‘em, spill ‘em, but don’t kill ‘em’” Gillam.
I’m not going to make it sound like every conversation with Ted was golden. He could wear you out on politics just as fast as anybody else who has fervent concerns, and he had a way of telling stories in serial fashion—so that the new one started in the same breath the old one ended, with no beat in between to allow you to tell him that you had to go home and bake that bread.
But there was no place as wonderful to visit as Ted and Margaret’s house in McGrath because no one else would be as excited as they were to hear about your new pup, your hunting trip, or anything to do with places, people, or things of the Alaska out-of-doors. I could take a new kind of seed potato over to show Ted and Margaret and they would examine it like it was a precious stone. The talk of potatoes and gardens past and present would pump us all full of enthusiasm to get to this year’s planting.
There was always a reaching for the future, and famously—preparing for it. Twelve years old in Pennsylvania when the Great Depression hit, Ted had witnessed the hungry city-dwellers of Youngstown raiding his parents’ farm. Thieves took animals and grain, even the fence posts. Those memories, along with his remote adventures in Alaska, probably helped to make him the great obsessive shopper of equipment and food which he eventually became. He and Margaret stored and stacked those items all around their properties in sheds and barge containers during the last 40 years of their lives.
Ted, in keeping with his enthusiasm for the future, wanted to learn to “run a computer,” and it is probably a good thing that there was never room in any of his houses to put one. The thought of Ted on eBay or Amazon or Craig’s List makes me grin and also scares the green beans out of me.
When I think of Ted, as I’m writing this for him, what I want to express is his combination of realism and dreams, neither of which ever stopped coming. He would tell you that he was at “the end of the trail” and then he’d buy another case of heavy socks, or 12 bottles of vanilla for next year’s prospecting season.
He gave me some of that vanilla and it was really good. It would be nice to have a few bottles of that stuff around.
WE STILL DON’T GET IT
How discouraging to read in the Anchorage Daily News this morning that Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech was a “rallying cry for black Americans and a classic of world oratory.”
Really? Is that all? Just for black people? Just oratory?
I thought it was for everybody.
A few years ago I listened to a talk by writer Rudolfo Anaya that woke me up to the tyranny of prejudice on both ends of our political spectrum.
Anaya, a Hispanic man born in New Mexico in 1937 who never spoke or read or wrote English until he went to school, has written a roomful of beautiful books—novels, children’s books, non-fiction, anthologies, poetry, and plays.
He said the great civil-war era poet Walt Whitman made him want to be a writer and gave him his first generous understanding of America—its endless varieties and its inclusiveness.
In school in the American southwest and then often throughout his career, Anaya was discouraged to be told that Whitman belonged to a different America than he did, because Whitman was a white man of one of America’s founding generations. For Anaya’s voice to be authentic, literary gatekeepers of the right and the left told him, he’d have to leave Whitman behind. Whitman did not belong to him.
Listening to Anaya, I realized I had the same problem. The America ins
ide me is so very much Walt Whitman and Robert Frost. Never mind that they are “white-headed men from the east coast,” and I will never be anything but one out of three of those things.
I claim their voices—the celebration of America’s clamor and trade, the silence of a forest profound with mortality, the bodies on our many battlefields, the road not taken—because I am a human being, and I can take the experiences of others in my country into my treasure trove.
Are we a country where only Native Americans can learn from Native Americans, only women can speak for women? That is the tyranny of the “politically correct.”
Separate is never equal. Do we wish to be parallel Americas, with fortifications raised around each ethnicity and each gender and each geography so that no one, no experience, no wisdom can get out or in?
We should be suspicious of reparations and special accommodations made on purely racial grounds—as voices on the right suggest—because of their power to trade past injustice for a present injustice that will fester in us and our children. But there’s a wall on the left, too, that doesn’t let us walk with each other, speak for each other, express the pain and wonder of coming to understand each other. We should not erase history, or cease to acknowledge that terrible things have happened, or allow ourselves to give up on the striving toward “justice for all” which we mouth each time we turn to the flag. All these things belong to all of us.
HAITI
I was surprised to learn during the last week’s news about Haiti, that a slow-rising revolution that culminated in separation from France in 1804—inspired by France’s 1789 revolution that followed on the heels of our own—in what is now Haiti but was then Saint-Dominque—probably enabled the U.S. to acquire the “Louisiana Purchase.”
That is, we have the middle third of the present continental United States because Napoleon Bonaparte got discouraged when he saw he would lose his new world island empire built on coffee and sugar, indigo and cotton—in short, slaves.
I looked in several sources, none of which students are accountable for in the readin’, writin’, and ‘rithmatic of No Child Left Behind, to find out that France subsequently charged Haiti 150 million francs (est. 21 billion present dollars) for the loss of “economic and human property.”
Haiti paid most of this, even with a crippled and barricaded economy, between 1825 and 1947.
The expressed logic: France had poured Africans into Haiti until slaves outnumbered colonists 10 to one, and France wanted reparation for their loss of those slave bodies. This, I think, casts complication on the word “reparation.”
Meanwhile, a lot of other things happened on the island, among them a gigantic impersonal shaking of the earth last week.
It was hard not to be affected by the widespread shrugging off of this tragedy, the too-handy dismissal that the victims were a “them” and not an “us.”
Avoiding my work at hand, I paged through online photos of the disaster. I stopped at the photo of a woman’s body in the rubble and my eye followed the line of her arm to its hand, and in her hand, the hand of a child, the body it belonged to not visible in the photo.
The caption on the picture noted that it was a woman’s body, and that she was a victim of the earthquake. The photographer must have seen the child’s hand. The Associated Press caption writer must have seen it too.
But for some reason they left unsaid what could clearly be seen, and so I “found” the subject of that photo for myself. And then I looked up at the bolts holding the beams of my own house.
THERE GOES THE NEIGHBORHOOD
NOT
I am chugging up the Glenn highway towards home, thinking about keeping both right-hand tires on the new asphalt surface. The Department of Transportation in all its wisdom has seen fit to provide a sharp drop-off of several inches on either side of the new road, which is also exceedingly narrow. The unfortunate traveler who hooks a tire of vehicle or trailer over the asphalt edge could have difficulty remounting the roadway, which at this particular place clings to a famously unstable rockslide above Long Lake, its waters shimmering hundreds of feet below.
I sure hope they fix this edge—but on the thin air side of the highway, there is nothing to fix it to.
Luckily I am not pulling a trailer, so I am fairly sure where all four of my wheels are. I am not going very fast, maybe 30 mph, because I have been following an immense motor home since we passed King Mountain, a motor home that speeds up on the straight-aways, keeping me from wanting to pass, then slows to packhorse pace on any incline or curving section of road.
The motor home ahead is so big that it obscures all of the highway and most of the sky, though I am keeping well back of it in case it staggers off the asphalt. It is a lumbering thing of plastic and aluminum, with picture windows, ladders, propane tanks, spare tires. It is heavier than the Titanic, slower than geologic time. It is called “The Breeze.”
We meet “Sunset Country,” “Fleet Adventurer,” and “The Zepher” headed the other direction. At this point, I am not so worried about truth in advertising as I am hoping that the behemoths stay on their assigned side of the teeny road. But once we get to wider highway and a cruising speed of near 50, my usual self-righteous sense of humor bubbles up.
The people in the motor home ahead are innocently trying to get away from it all by bringing it all with them, but the humor comes from discrepancy, which is the word English teachers would have taught you instead of “irony” if they really wanted you to be as smart as they are.
Once your discrepancy consciousness has been engaged, it’s a little hard to pop it out of gear. You inconveniently begin to muse that you have to swipe a card if you want to use one.
Advertising is the Valhalla of discrepancy—because discrepancy is a great way to draw attention. Unless we the people really need what the other people are trying to sell us, which happens almost never, the un-tweaked truth is never going to earn anyone a buck. Think how boring a society of truthful products would be: “Transparent Glass,” “Fattening Donuts,” a motor home called “The Obstruction.”
Unfortunately for business, humans have woefully modest needs: safety, love, and oatmeal. If you want to expand our central needs to include lime-flavored ice cubes and phones you can carry in your pockets that take photos, play music, and connect you to the internet, you are going to have to lie.
I rush to assure you that all the products advertised in this paper are needed, and all of our advertisers sincere. Also, if they stopped advertising, there would be no paper.
PICKING UP
Spring Cleanup Day in Nelchina dawned bright and clear. The wind of the last few days had calmed down, and most of the piles of snow were off the Glenn and its side roads. We started off on our mile, garbage bags in hand and a few extras tucked in our pockets. We had our broom handles with the cut-off nails on the ends for picking cigarette butts out of gravel. We had our leather gloves.
We were ready for baby diapers, beer cans, and shreds of tires. But there weren’t any. We were pretty impressed with the tidy consideration of travelers along the Glenn until our neighbor came along and told us he’d already picked up that mile.
Sooooo, we scooted another mile down the highway, picked up some tire parts and plastic bottles with another set of neighbors, met yet more friends at the transfer site and raised the standards of dump site cleanliness to new levels—disposing of paper scraps and plastic shards down to the five millimeter size.
Now it was only 11 am and we were faced with a dilemma—the picnic didn’t start until two. We could go home and do some neglected chores until the community gathered and we could PRETEND that we’d been out killing garbage all that time, or we could leave our caps set for civic duty and go in search of more garbage.
The next mile and the next all featured assiduous neighbors with yellow bags. Then, suddenly, we were approaching a feature we didn’t even want to think about: the state highway pullout at Mendeltna Creek.
We’d been warned away
from the Mendeltna Creek pullout because of an understanding that “the state is supposed to hire somebody to clean it up.” Like all state pullouts that feature toilets, this one should be an EPA Superfund Site.
Here’s how it works: residents and tourists have a vague memory that there was once a decent toilet facility at a state pullout, and so they control certain of their biological functions until they get to the facility, only to find that the door has been locked all winter—and was in fact, on May 17, still locked. Travelers now in desperation, the toilet function is performed anyway—on the little trails, behind the nearest tree, and most noticeably right in front of the locked door.
The roadside toilet building is at this very moment a kind of outhouse “decoy,” cunningly designed to test our moral characters and physiological restraint.
A notice on the door, signed “Alaska Department of Transportation” explains helpfully that if people throw garbage in the toilets, the toilets will be closed. Apparently that means forever.
We tried to ignore the toilet building and started picking up nasty stuff in the ditch behind the pullout. Since I get a lot of my exercise by jumping to conclusions, I was trying to figure out what kind of slob would just wing a dirty baby diaper out the passenger window instead of saving it for a dumpster. But the ditch indicated the presence of both high class and low class slobs—designer coffee cups and USB connector boxes mingled with junk food wrappers, cigarette boxes, dirty socks and much, much uglier stuff. Camel smokers did not outnumber Marlboro fans.
Then the multitude of fast food containers and anti-freeze jugs got me hoping that all the slobs were travelers from far off places who somehow just didn’t know any better. This was a comforting thought for someone who has a lot of faith in Alaska and Alaskans.
Eight passenger vehicles, one motorhome, and a tractor-trailer combination stopped to yank on the locked biffy doors while we were there. All spoke unkindly of the Alaska Department of Transportation, all in the English language and loud enough so that we trash picker-uppers could hear.
