"No Less of a Man"

NO LESS OF A MAN

Given the vastness and remoteness of Alaska, it is understandable that most Alaskans have traveled so little of it. Given the comparative smallness of the Kenai Peninsula—and its proximity to the population center of Anchorage—it might seem strange that most Alaskans have trod on so little of it, too. After all, the peninsula makes up only about 2-3 percent of Alaska’s 663,300 square miles, but a closer examination clarifies the situation. The peninsula, comprising some four million acres, contains few transportation corridors, most of them north-south passages on the western side, plus a west-east crossing or two over to the communities of Seward and Whittier. Much of the rest is mountains, lakes, streams, swamps, and mammoth masses of ice and snow. To travel these areas without roads, one must have certain tools—airplanes, boats, perhaps a bicycle or a pair of skis, or a good pair of boots—and certain characteristics—determination, fortitude, and a willingness to be uncomfortable in beautiful surroundings. The Kenai Peninsula can treat its travelers severely at times.

I have lived in this place for more than 50 years—I grew up here—and yet it seems that I have traveled so damned little of it. Perhaps that is because I have never owned an airplane, a boat with an engine, a four-wheeler, an all-terrain vehicle, or even a snowmachine. Consequently, what I have been unable to cover in the confines of an automobile, I have covered mainly in watercrafts I could paddle, on mountain bikes, or on my own two feet. And although I have seen plenty in my travels, I am reminded almost daily of how much more I have yet to see.

Most people who know me may have the impression that I am constantly afoot and on the move. For instance, I have climbed nearly every roadside mountain from the northern edge of the Sterling flats to the junction of the Seward and Sterling highways, and yet each time I have ascended to the top of one of those peaks, I have spied another valley that I have never worked my way along, or a sea of other mountains beyond those I’ve climbed. The peninsula contains hundreds, if not thousands, of lakes and ponds on which I have never floated when they were in a liquid state or strolled across when they were frozen. I have never traversed the Harding Icefield, never summited the peninsula’s highest peaks, never walked the slate-strewn east-side beaches outside of Resurrection Bay and Passage Canal, never hiked more than a few miles of the myriad trails across Kachemak Bay. On and on. I’ve seen so much, but there’s so much more to see.

And again, the Kenai Peninsula is just a fragment of the entire state—a state in which I’ve barely and rarely strayed far from the few asphalt ribbons that connect many of its major communities. I haven’t even traveled all of its roadways.

Is this a lament? Perhaps somewhat, but not entirely.

Is this a manifesto of my intent to mend my ways and expand the field of my Alaskan experiences? Not exactly, but the notion of change is refreshing. I’m growing ever more ready to open my eyes wider to the rest of the world.

Do I plan to purchase an airplane and take flying lessons? Learn to navigate a power boat and maintain the intricacies of its engine? Not likely, but I also have no wish to be limited by a dearth of machines in my life.

I’ll get by somehow.

Besides, as Shakespeare said in Romeo & Juliet, the world is broad and wide—and my desire to travel more of my birth state is endemic of my desire to travel more of the whole planet if I can.

I am not less of a man for having seen so little thus far, nor will I be more of a man once I have seen more, but the limitations of the past (self-imposed or not) do not have to be the limitations of tomorrow.

Perhaps this is some sort of declaration. Perhaps this old dog is ready for some new tricks.

 

 

"More Than a Pleasant Surprise"

MORE THAN A PLEASANT SURPRISE

The possibilities are endless: A splash of unexpected color in autumn foliage. An architectural improbability in nature or a cityscape. A nearly perfect blend of clothing style and human form. An evocative odor that forms a link to some distant past. A stretch of sudden syncopation that defines a musical sensation. A person whose personal vision alters our perception of the everyday world.

Occasionally in our travels through life we stumble upon something or someone special.

Sometimes the impact of that discovery lasts mere moments, other times a day or a week, a month or a year, or perhaps even forever.

We may notice the beauty in a mountain ridge that we’ve taken for granted before.

We may hearken to the silence of a calm winter morning.

We may detect an arresting aroma, relish a new taste, heed an unfamiliar texture, feel an unaccustomed warmth upon our flesh.

Or we may notice the difference that a kindness makes, the uplift we feel at helping someone else.

We may also sense a void left by people we have lost and more fully appreciate the good fortune we had when they were present in our lives.

Sometimes the significance of our discovery dawns upon us slowly, while other times the importance registers with lightning speed.

And sometimes the best discoveries are the ones we were never looking for. They may knock us temporarily off our stride, but on occasion our strides may require disruption.

For me, the best discovery I have made in a long, long while caught me unawares, and it took a few months for its significance to fully sink in. Now, however, it is difficult for me to imagine my life any other way.

About a year ago, I took my golden retriever and met up with a woman named Yvonne for a bushwhacking snowshoe trip along a series of lakes in the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge. Yvonne and I had hiked before—once previously in roughly the same area, once up a mountain in Seward, once to an old mining area near Hope. We’d also performed chainsaw-powered trail maintenance together on a little-known trail. But on this particular excursion, I noticed something different. What I noticed was the way I was beginning to feel.

I had insulated myself socially in recent years—after my father’s death, my retirement from teaching high school, my failing marriage which ended in divorce—and I was only beginning to find my way back into some sort of social mainstream as a single father who was beyond middle age and just starting to rebuild himself into some semblance of physical fitness after too long a sedentary spell.

Truthfully, I barely knew Yvonne at the time. She was somewhat reticent and protective of her past, while on the other hand I was nervous and acting like a virtual Chatty Kathy. But as I calmed down, I began to see what I had in this new friend and outdoor companion. I began to appreciate her determination and her toughness, her creativity and her perspective on life, her enthusiasm and her smile. I began to really like it when she smiled at me, and I loved the peal of her laughter.

At the end of that trek, I stayed behind with my dog and our snowshoes while she hitchhiked in the semi-darkness back to retrieve my Jeep, but she was undeterred. In later outings I annoyed her by taking dozens of photographs, but still she seemed to enjoy my presence. At times I rambled almost non-stop through a litany of observations and old stories, but she never rolled her eyes or asked me to be quiet. In fact, we continued engaging in adventures—and with greater frequency. By early 2012 we were meeting semi-regularly—a walk down to the river, snowshoeing treks into the hills, doing trail-prep work for a winter challenge race, staggering through a blizzard on a glacial lake, watching the aurora from a hayfield near my house, ice-fishing for Arctic char, meeting every Tuesday for a mountain-trail climb.

And on and on.

Both of us could feel our relationship changing, but it didn’t change rapidly. Progressing in baby-steps, we edged forward, and along the way we cast aside shadows of the past to enjoy the sunshine of future possibilities.

It’s hard to say that I “stumbled upon” Yvonne, but—whether our union is pure chance, a mystical confluence of personal pathways, or something else entirely—I consider myself blessed every day by her presence.

 

"No Longer Pretty, I Guess"

NO LONGER PRETTY, I GUESS

REVISED FROM A DECEMBER 2000 PERSONAL WRITING

Almost every day when I was teaching at Skyview High School, I ate lunch with Dave, one of my colleagues, in his classroom. Sometimes, when we weren’t planning outdoor adventures, pining for freedom from paperwork, or bitching about something that had upset us that morning, we’d get kinda philosophical. And one of our biggest topics back in the middle of the 2000-2001 school year was the aging process. One day, Dave was saying that one of the most disconcerting things he had noticed about growing older—he was 43 then, a year older than me—was that the visual effect he had on people (especially those of the opposite sex) had changed. He was a pretty handsome guy, accustomed over the years to attracting a certain amount of female attention, even among women much younger than himself. In 2000, however, he said he felt sometimes as if he was invisible, as if younger women who once might have “checked him out” were looking right through him, as if he had reached a stage in life at which he simply had ceased to matter to them. He could have been a piece of old furniture or part of the wall, as far as they were concerned.

Of course, this led him to the realization that many times he himself had done the same thing to older women—women who may still have appeared vitally attractive to older men. And this realization led the two of us to a discussion of the many people (men and women) whom we daily passed by and gave no second thought—perhaps not even a “first thought”—because they were older, fatter or uglier (or different in myriad other ways) than the people to whom we preferred to direct our attention.

How many people, we wondered, were living vital, rich lives but somehow had seemingly fallen beneath our notice? And how would it feel to live most of one’s life that way? And wasn’t it a shame that we didn’t give some people even a ghost of a chance to influence our lives simply because we “dismissed” them before they ever had that opportunity? And just how much of life were we missing out on because of such preconceptions and actions, whether they were conscious or subconscious?

Our talk that day reminded me of a master-teacher with whom I had  student-taught back at Soldotna High School in 1986. She had been a teacher of mine back in the early 1970s, and by 1986 she was just a couple of years away from retirement and probably somewhere between 40 and 45 years old. In fact, she was likely about the same age I was during the discussion Dave and I were having in 2000. In 1986, she was an attractive, athletic woman entering middle age, and she had noticed the way that a few of the young girls at the high school attempted to flirt with me. (I was then in my late 20s.) Almost wistfully, she said one day, “Enjoy the attention now. It doesn’t last long. I can remember when many of the young boys used to flock around….” And I knew that her nostalgia wasn’t prompted by any sexual desire for those boys of those bygone days, but more by a desire for the acknowledgement of her own vitality, and what she perceived in 1986 as her own fading physical desirability.

I understood intellectually what she was talking about back then, but 2000 I had internalized her message personally. I’ve never been a “pretty boy” or the object of considerable female interest, but by the turn of the century I had certainly noticed that I was dropping beneath the horizon line. The important thing, I know, is to be happy with one’s self.

Aging men and women don’t need the attention of attractive younger men and women to make their lives worthwhile or meaningful, but having a little of that attention is better than seeming invisible, and it even feels good sometimes.

 

"This Memory Stinks"

THIS MEMORY STINKS

For eight years, until I retired from the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District, I told this story to my students, making many of them queasy in the process. Now I offer it to a more general audience:

On Wednesday, June 28, 2000, at approximately 1 p.m., I picked up my children at Ridgeway Preschool, where they’d just finished another day of a summer-fun session set up by Susan Larned, the school’s owner and main instructor. Olivia, at age six, was actually too old for the program, but she was eager (like Kelty, who would turn five in mid-August, and just loved Mrs. Larned) to go and play with some other kids, to make some art, to work with plants in the preschool greenhouse, et cetera. The day was partly sunny, with just a hint of a breeze, and the air was warm by Alaska standards. I had to run an errand in Kenai, and the kids were hungry, so we worked out a compromise: If they followed directions and behaved appropriately while I ran my errands, we’d stop at Burger King (which had a playland for kids) and grab a bite to eat. All in all, this describes the makings of a pretty ordinary afternoon.

And it stayed that way … for a while.

I ran my errand, the kids were good, and we soon found ourselves in the Burger King, where I made my children wait with me in line until I’d confirmed their orders. Then I sent them to the playland section while I ordered my own food and wrote out my check. While the kids played, I gathered up the cups I’d been given and ambled over to the serve-yourself drink station to dispense our liquid refreshments. A couple minutes later, I was shuffling to the playland area at the back of the restaurant when Kelty came racing past me. “Gotta go potty?” I astutely asked. “Gotta poop,” he confirmed without stopping. He zipped on through the restaurant and whisked himself through the door of the men’s restroom. I placed our drinks on a table near the tubes and nets and ladders comprising the playland equipment, where Olivia was still busily and obliviously scrambling, and then I headed back out into the main part of the restaurant to wait for my order number (#44) to be called.

Suddenly Kelty was back, shuffling sheepishly from the bathroom and stopping directly in front of me. Suspicious, I asked, “Done already? Did you wipe? Did you wash your hands?”

“Daddy,” he said, “I pooped in my pants.”

Just then, my order was called.

Almost immediately afterward, Olivia strolled out from playland to see what Kelty and I were talking about.

I ignored Olivia. I turned to Kelty. “Very much?” I asked. He nodded sorrowfully. “A lot,” he confirmed.

“Let me look,” I said.

He was wearing a long white t-shirt and summer shorts with Batman underpants underneath. I lifted his t-shirt and started to pull out the waistband of his shorts when I noticed with some trace of horror a soft brown, egg-sized turd stuck to the top of the waistband, sort of teetering there like a gooey boulder in Feces National Park.

“Number 44, your order is ready!” a worker called again.

“Oh, gross!” said Olivia.

I went into action: I made Kelty hold up his t-shirt but stand so that no one else could see his “surprise.” I told him to stand perfectly still. I told Olivia to calm down, and walked up to grab our food. I put our food on our table and told Olivia to sit and eat by herself (and play with her Kid’s Pack prizes) until I returned from the bathroom with her brother. Then I hurried back to Kelty and scurried gently with him back to the men’s room and into the only (and, thank God, unoccupied) stall, where I found another soft brown, egg-sized turd on the tiled floor, about two feet away from the toilet.

Now it needs to be said at this point that I have an excellent and active gag reflex, and it began to kick into high gear when I bent down with a handful of toilet paper to scoop up the turd from the floor and then the one from Kelty’s waistband. Both turds were barely more substantial than whipped cream, and it was a scientific wonder that they held together at all….

Next, I helped Kelty drop his shorts down to his ankles and his underpants down to his knees, and I was gagging a bit, and trying semi-successfully to say encouraging things to him because I didn’t want this to be for him any more traumatic than it already was. “Don’t worry, buddy. It’s gonna be okay…. (cough, cough) Man, that’s a lot of poop. Are you feeling okay? Does your tummy hurt?” (He said it didn’t.) “It’s gonna be all right…. Hey, can you bend over a little more? You’ve got some down your leg…. There, that’s better. I wish this bathroom had some paper towels.” (It had an air-blower for drying hands.) “We’re sure using a lot of toilet paper. Good thing there’s a lot here…. Hey, good job of coming out and telling Daddy you needed help. You’re being a big boy about this…. Wow, that’s a lot of poop in your underwear. I don’t think I can get all of that (cough, cough)…. Okay, bend over some more. I’ve gotta get as much as I can out of your crack, buddy.” (It was packed in there so brown and tight that it appeared like mortar in need of excavation.)

Then finally Kelty himself had something to say: “Dad?”

“Yes?”

“This sucks!”

Bent over him, examining his butt cheeks, I began to laugh, not only because what he said was so true, but also because I’d never heard him use that phrase before, and it sounded funny coming from him.

“You know what, Kelt,” I said, “you’re right. This DOES suck. That’s usually not a very nice thing to say, but THIS time you’re right.”

I got him cleaned up enough (including a thorough scrubbing of our hands) so that he could go eat and play, and when we returned home his mother helped him out of his poopy clothes and into the shower.

And a perfectly ordinary afternoon became an event that I may never forget.

 

"An Ancient Behemoth"

AN ANCIENT BEHEMOTH

REVISED FROM A LETTER WRITTEN ORIGINALLY IN JULY 1998

When George Pollard offers to reveal something that very few people have seen, it’s best to take him up on the offer. George doesn’t lightly make such gestures.

Consequently, when George told my father and me in late May 1998 that he’d like us to accompany him for a brief adventure on the far end of Tustumena Lake, we readily agreed.

Tustumena Lake is an unpredictable mass of watery silt that sits like a giant turquoise gemstone in the heart of the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge. George Pollard is a family friend who at the time was in his early 70s; he is one of the few old-timers actually born in Alaska, a claim rare among white men with no Russian or Native Alaskan bloodlines. George was born in Anchorage in the mid-1920s, when Anchorage was little more than a squalid town along Ship Creek, and when his own father (like mine, nearly four decades later) was a pioneering Alaska dentist. Formerly one of the longest-serving hunting guides in this part of the country, George now lives alone in Kasilof, in the same home he has occupied since the 1930s, not far from the big lake.

George invited me and Dad to cross the length of the lake in his red-and-black, 15-and-a-half-foot inflatable Zodiac on a blustery Saturday afternoon to see one of his treasures, something that had been shown to him back 35 years earlier by a long-time area gold miner named Joe Secora. The treasure was an ancient cottonwood tree, thought to be the oldest tree in Southcentral Alaska, perhaps even in the entire state. The tree once was aged (by an amateur named Von Phillips who took a core sample while volunteering for the state Division of Forestry or the U.S. Forest Service one summer) at no less than 900 years old. A decade or so later, after the base of the tree had begun to hollow itself out, a professional forester named (I think) Borg arrived to take an official sample, but it was incomplete and inconclusive because of the hollowing. The forester determined, however, that the tree was at least 600 years old and could be much older. (That more conservative measurement means that the tree was alive and at least a century old when Columbus sailed the ocean blue.)

I was very eager to see it.

The three of us motored out of the landing on the Kasilof River and began the mile-long run up to the lake at about 1 or 2 o’clock in the afternoon. Typically, it takes about an hour to run the 26-mile length of the lake. Today was not to be the case. We encountered small rollers after just a few minutes on the lake, indicating the possibility of a strong wind blowing off Tustumena Glacier and the Harding Icefield at the far end of the lake. Soon the rollers were growing larger and arriving closer together. Occasionally the front of the boat went airborne and crashed down. The wind lashed at our faces. Windblown water splashed us, saturating our rain gear. Sometimes the sun broke out from the clouds; sometimes the sky hinted at rain. Halfway there, we encountered white caps, but George kept plugging ahead, zigzagging doggedly forward, find the proper angles to safely cut the waves. Dad and I eyeballed each other; with anyone else at the helm, we would have asked to turn around and go home.

The trip up the lake took an exhausting two and a half hours—the calmer return trip later that evening would take only 90 minutes—and we beached the boat near a clear-water stream pouring its dark blue payload into the light turquoise of Tustumena. Dad and I then followed George’s slow, methodical walk of nearly two miles toward the cliffs he used as a landmark to guide him through the spruce- and alder-infested moraine that contained small streams and ponds only fragmentary game trails. He arrived about 50 minutes later within a few dozen yards of our target--a moist, secluded grove of cottonwoods, which at first appeared very normal in size because they were all so large that they skewed our perspective. All of the cottonwoods there were ensconced in a tangled, prickly bed of Devil’s club, all in a declivity of rolling hills, kissed only lightly by the winds that battered the trees beyond the grove.

“That’s it,” George announced, when we were about 40-50 yards away, and then he pointed to one tree obviously stouter than the rest. At first I was disappointed. It didn’t seem so big. But as I walked closer, I realized that this specimen dwarfed every Alaska cottonwood I’d ever seen. Eighteen and a half feet in circumference at the base, it would take more than three men with my six-foot wingspan touching fingertips to reach all the way around it. The cave-like hole in its trunk had bear hairs stuck in the bark near its entrance.

I crawled inside and could almost stand up in there. This behemoth, like some of its younger, smaller cousins nearby, stood straight as a flagpole, nearly all of its branches and leaves at the top 60 to 80 (perhaps 100, who knows?) feet in the air. The gnarled bark of the average large cottonwood contains innumerable grooves, usually an inch or two deep near the base of the tree; the grooves on this giant may have been three to four inches deep.

The cottonwood grove, in obvious black bear country and protruding from mossy ground laden with large ferns and spiky plants, had a primeval, almost spiritual quality, enhanced by the shafts of sunlight spearing through the leafy canopy overhead, by the burbling creek about 20 yards from the big tree, by the alder-draped cliff of shale we could glimpse rising high above us, and by the windy turmoil we knew existed elsewhere.

It was, after all, just a tree. But the experience of that tree was more than that, and the journey to that tree was also something more.