Have It Ouray! (Speaking of Road Trips)

When my brother, sister and her grandson, and I took a trip to Roswell to see Mom, we accidently detoured through Red Mountain Pass in Colorado. Somebody blinked at the Moab, UT turnoff and by the time we figured that out, we decided not to turn back. The clerk at the filling station said it would be a beautiful drive through Red Mountain, just a little longer and we would surely enjoy the scenery. We drove through Ouray, CO, and I remarked that it reminded me of pictures I had seen of the Swiss Alps.

It took my breath away. Nevermind that I had traveled through there before--when I was a young child and we lived in that part of Colorado--it was surprisingly stunning. But, my brother the driver was not happy at having missed the shorter route and this new way seemed to never end. He was driven to get to Roswell and not waste any more time than we had to. I, on the other hand, wanted to stop and take pictures at every curve in the road. At one particularly striking pass, my sister looked back at me without saying a word aloud, but with a look that said, "Uh-oh--now THAT is a once-in-a-lifetime photo op that you're just going to have to do without." Then we got to Silverton and I wanted to take more pictures of yet another charming little mining town.

All I could do was pronounce, "I'm going to come here on vacation sometime." My brother answered, "You are on vacation and you are here."

Well, yeah...I guess.    We made it to my mom's, which was, after all, the point of the trip and had a wonderful time visiting with her and we even managed to work out travel details that allowed us another little detour to Santa Fe on the way home. That's another post with more pictures.

That was in the spring or early summer, and true to my impulsive nature, I announced that I was going to take a little trip back to Ouray, Colorado, the Switzerland of America just a few short months later. We had a four-day weekend and rented a van to make it easier and roomier for little ones. Katy and Jon, my neice Jillian and her two children, and I drove down in the van, my sister and her grandson came in their own car and we had a FANTABULOUS long weekend in October in Ouray and surrounding areas.

Had the run of a couple of suites in a Victorian hotel that was just getting ready to close for the season. A five-and-dime-type store was going out of business in town there, and I can't remember exactly what I purchased, but I do remember it was a great deal! Of course, we tried the local cuisine, including a candy store where they make cookies with left-over candy bits thrown in the dough. The regular hot springs were closed, but the clothing-optional hot springs were open. Actually, not really clothing-optional--that's just what we called them in California--here, it was just plain "nudist" because if you wanted to wear your clothes, you couldn't. We traveled to Telluride and Silverton and had a couple of other accidental detours on the way back through Gateway, Ut., which was another eye-opening experience for me.

The following pictures are a few of my favorites and are an example of the kinds of things I like to take pictures of on a road trip. The muddy-looking river is not muddy, but stained with iron tailings and my camera couldn't quite figure out how to get the true color. In real life that creek was very rust-colored.

Days Of Auld Lang Syne

Well, maybe not so long since.

Let me take this time right here and now to say for anyone who doesn't already know, I DO NOT MAKE NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTIONS and I don't often keep track of my life in increments from January 1st to Dec. 31st, so naturally, I don't think I've ever spoken or written, or caused to be spoken or written, any semblance of "the year in retrospect." Usually for me, the occurance of certain remarkable events tend to order my memories and relfections until the whole lot of them become so jumbled in the passing of time, I often don't even remember how old I am. Sometimes, periods that I call various seasons of me or seasons of some aspect or other of me, can take quite some time to fade into days of "old long since."

For example, I moved to Alaska smack dab in the middle of...last summer was it? and that event has been lasting until now, which is this winter. This, though, I so cleverly began to call my Season of This is Big. And it keeps getting bigger. 

Howsomever, on the 1st day of 2012 in the Year of Our Lord, here I am indulging in a look back at the previous year! Oh well, another thing those who know me know is that I succumb to at least a few contradictions of thought, expression and behavior.

First thing that comes to mind is the first road trip of 2011 when my kids (kid and kid-in-law) accompanied my mother and me on a trip from Ogden, UT to Roswell, NM via Ft. Collins, CO. My mother had come up to visit children, grandchildren and great grandchildren, as she sometimes does. My brother drove to her home in NM and the two of them had their own road trip up to Ogden, but that's their story and I can't tell it, not having been there. I can imagine it, as we take that trip a lot, but I think mother and son had some unusual alone time that they really enjoyed. When it was time for her to go back, the three of us took her home, stopping at another of her children's home in CO.

Katy and Jon with Mom on her porch in Roswell, NM

Not the first New Mexico road trip for any of us.  And certainly, Katy and I have travelled --well, --- plenty, I must say. 
Then, because of a very ugly, mean, appalling, damaging and did I say mean? political upheaval at work, I began looking for a new job.  Now I have this job.  In a whirl, Katy, Jon and I were on the road again, trekking across Canada for another almost week-long road trip to Anchorage, AK.  You've seen those posts too.  In Canada, I met up with a friend I hadn't seen since the early 1980s, if we're going to count in years, and I did manage to spend at least a couple of weeks in Helena, MT where I used to work summers, but won't be able to do that anymore, for a while.

I have imagined myself living/working/being changed in a number of regions of the country, maybe even in another country, such as Korea again, but somehow Alaska never really entered the picture.  When Katy would talk about wanting to travel to Alaska, I could let myself imagine how fun that might be -- for her.  When people would tell me how much they enjoyed Alaskan cruises, I thought it was great -- for them.

Also, living in Ogden, I was beginning to feel settled, rooted, if you will, for about the second time in my life as an adult, the first being our decade stint in San Francisco before another out-of-the-blue event sent us wheeling across Nevada headed for Utah.

Having experienced not just a few significant events in my life, facing many unexpected changes, challenges and pounding-on-the-door types of opportunities, it must speak volumes, as they say, that this coming-to-Alaska season is the one I choose to call "This is Big."   Maybe one reason is that I'm not as young as I used to be when I relished and felt strong and capable enough to handle the interjection of surprising and demanding changes in my life, and another reason could be that I don't think I was all that sure about leaving my only-child daughter so far away, however grown and happily married she may be. Still not overly thrilled with the separation, to be honest.  I do not remember a time in our lives together that I wished for her to hurry and grow up and leave me rattling and echoing around in that proverbial empty nest.

Other loved ones are also a lot further away, and if you'll notice, I spent the holidays away from family this year!

Part of this job now is to travel to rural, bush, village Alaska to provide low-vision services across the state, and you can read in previous posts about the other road trips and air trips I have taken so far.  I've taken other trips, too, just on my own to make sure I get to see something I think I want to see. 

What I would really like to be able to do in this blog is write about people I meet, but because of professional confidentiality, I can't so that so much. 

This month I am headed out to the Eastern Aleutian Islands--Sand Point, King Cove, Dutch Harbor and Unalaska.  Maybe I'll even be able to tour the Peter Pan Cannery.  Take some pictures, maybe get weathered-in and have to spend some extra time.  I've been told that it is not uncommon for people to not be able to get out of the area once they make it in.  Wind.  It has a tendency to make and keep flying unpredictable.  They have cautioned me to take some books to read, just in case.

Sometime "this year," I will also take a trip to the Pribilofs (used to be called Northern Fur Seal Islands.) 

I think I am going shopping for a warmer coat and maybe some other warmer articles of clothing, although last night at the New Year's downtown celebration, standing in the cold on the snow watching the fireworks, the only part of my body that didn't stay warm was my face. (Well, and my knuckles because I couldn't take pictures with my mittens on.)  A ski mask?

All in the name of having experiences.

Great Health And Every Good Blessing To You!

Happy New Year!

I have to say it, and love doing so, even though I think it seems a bit counter-intuitive to celebrate new beginnings in the dead of winter like this. And how is it that we treat the passing of a year like it's a thing rather than a concept? As though the year itself brought good things and bad into our lives.

Nevertheless, as we set our hopeful faces toward 2012: 

"... there's a hand my trusty friend,
And give us a hand o' thine."

Happy Very Merry Christmas!

I didn't spend Christmas with my family this year. And honestly, I didn't miss them anymore than I have already been missing them since I moved up here to Anchorage. The thing about wanting to be near loved ones is that you want to share things with them. The whole time I've been enjoying all these new experiences, I've been wishing someone I know who would appreciate them like I do was also along for the ride. Naturally, I miss my kid and kid-in-law, and I've been places and done things that remind me of others in my family, some I will never see again in this lifetime, imagining what it would be like to have them along, but that doesn't mean I haven't been enjoying the experiences anyway. I certainly have. 

(This is how Katy decorated my first package from "home." She likes to surprise me with sentimentality.  I wonder where she gets that.)

I think everything I've been doing, seeing, being for at least the last several months, if not most of my life, ("the goodness of loving, the gladness of living,") has been every bit as wonderful, mystical and magical as Christmas usually is for me.  So, how much I miss my family now, (and a couple of friends, too) and how much most people miss loved ones who aren't with them at Christmastime, is how much I've been mssing them all along.

Second In A Series Of Delightful Christmas Readings

This is my all-time favorite!  I'm including passages of description because Truman Capote is such a crafty wordsmith, as well as a captivating story teller.  I won't include a spoiler, but believe me, this story is magically poignant.  You could read the whole thing in one sitting.  Please do.
A Christmas Memory
Truman Capote
http://www.nexuslearning.net/books/holt_elementsoflit-3/Collection%204/Collection%202/A%20Christmas%20Memory%20p1.htm

"...A coming of winter morning...
"...It’s always the same: A morning arrives in November, and my friend, as though officially inaugurating the Christmas time of year that exhilarates her imagination and fuels the blaze of her heart, announces: “It’s fruitcake weather! Fetch our buggy. Help me find my hat.”

The hat is found, a straw cartwheel corsaged with velvet roses out-of-doors has faded; it once belonged to a more fashionable relative. Together, we guide our buggy, a dilapidated baby carriage, out to the garden and into a grove of pecan trees.

Three hours later we are back in the kitchen hulling a heaping buggyload of windfall pecans. ...Caarackle! A cheery crunch, scraps of miniature thunder sound as the shells collapse and the golden mound of sweet, oily, ivory meat mounts in the milk-glass bowl. ..The kitchen is growing dark. Dusk turns the window into a mirror: Our reflections mingle with the rising moon as we work by the fireside in the firelight. At last, when the moon is quite high, we toss the final hull into the fire and, with joined sighs, watch it catch flame. The buggy is empty; the bowl is brimful.

"Tomorrow the kind of work I like best begins: buying. Cherries and citron, ginger and vanilla and canned Hawaiian pineapple, rinds and raisins and walnuts and whiskey and oh, so much flour, butter, so many eggs, spices, flavorings: Why, we’ll need a pony to pull the buggy home.

"...The black stove, stoked with coal and firewood, glows like a lighted pumpkin. Eggbeaters whirl, spoons spin round in bowls of butter and sugar, vanilla sweetens the air, ginger spices it; melting, nose-tingling odors saturate the kitchen, suffuse the house, drift out to the world on puffs of chimney smoke. In four days our work is done. Thirty-one cakes, dampened with whiskey, bask on window sills and shelves.

Morning. Frozen rime lusters the grass; the sun, round as an orange and orange as hot-weather moons, balances on the horizon, burnishes the silvered winter woods. A wild turkey calls. A renegade hog grunts in the undergrowth. Always, the path unwinds through lemony sun pools and pitch vine tunnels.

 Scented acres of holiday trees, prickly-leafed holly. Red berries shiny as Chinese bells: Black crows swoop upon them screaming.

(While lying in a field flying homemade Christmas kites:)
“My, how foolish I am!” my friend cries, suddenly alert, like a woman remembering too late she has biscuits in the oven. “You know what I’ve always thought?” she asks in a tone of discovery, and smiling not at me but a point beyond. “I’ve always thought a body would have to be sick and dying before they saw the Lord. And I imagined that when He came it would be like looking at the Baptist window: pretty as colored glass with the sun pouring through, such a shine you don’t know it’s getting dark. And it’s been a comfort: to think of that shine taking away all the spooky feeling. But I’ll wager it never happens. I’ll wager at the very end a body realizes the Lord has already shown Himself. That things as they are”—her hand circles in a gesture that gathers clouds and kites and grass and Queenie pawing earth over her bone—“just what they’ve always seen, was seeing Him. As for me, I could leave the world with today in my eyes.”

First In A Series Of Delightful Christmas Readings Or Parts Thereof

(Not necessarily in order of their value to me, but as they come to me.)

Excerpted From A Child's Christmas in Wales, by Dylan Thomas (a teaser--you would really love the whole poem and it's not that long or you could watch it on Netflix or something.)

"All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find. In goes my hand into that wool-white bell-tongued ball of holidays resting at the rim of the carol-singing sea...

"Bags of moist and many-colored jelly babies and a folded flag and a false nose and a tram-conductor's cap and a machine that punched tickets and rang a bell; never a catapult; once, by mistake that no one could explain, a little hatchet; and a celluloid duck that made, when you pressed it, a most unducklike sound, a mewing moo that an ambitious cat might make who wished to be a cow; and a painting book in which I could make the grass, the trees, the sea and the animals any colour I pleased, and still the dazzling sky-blue sheep are grazing in the red field under the rainbow-billed and pea-green birds. Hardboileds, toffee, fudge and allsorts, crunches, cracknels, humbugs, glaciers, marzipan, and butterwelsh for the Welsh. And troops of bright tin soldiers who, if they could not fight, could always run. And Snakes-and-Families and Happy Ladders. And Easy Hobbi-Games for Little Engineers, complete with instructions. Oh, easy for Leonardo! And a whistle to make the dogs bark to wake up the old man next door to make him beat on the wall with his stick to shake our picture off the wall. And a packet of cigarettes: you put one in your mouth and you stood at the corner of the street and you waited for hours, in vain, for an old lady to scold you for smoking a cigarette, and then with a smirk you ate it. And then it was breakfast under the balloons...

"Always on Christmas night there was music. An uncle played the fiddle, a cousin sang 'Cherry Ripe,' and another uncle sang 'Drake's Drum.' It was very warm in the little house. Auntie Hannah, who had got on to the parsnip wine, sang a song about Bleeding Hearts and Death, and then another in which she said her heart was like a Bird's Nest; and then everybody laughed again; and then I went to bed. Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steady falling night. I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept. "

Peninsula Panhandle Ports; Juneau and Sitka

Tlingit totems.

Sitka, Alaska, the city itself, is like a living historic center.  It was settled by the Tlingit Indians when it was “discovered” they Russians. Alexander Baranof, Chief Manager of the Russian-American Company built a trading post in the late 1799 where Sitka is now. Relations between the two cultures deteriorated and the Tlingit’s burned down the Russian sector. Baranof returned, rebuilt, and became governor of Russian Alaska.

Salmon fishing was the main industry of this area until the 1950s when Salmon populations dropped. Today, tourism, commercial fishing, and the government are the economic mainstay of Sitka, Alaska. When we arrived, whole place was buried under an unseasonably large dump of snow. After skating around the slippery little town for a day or so, I finally broke down and bought a pair of boots--my only souvenier from this trip.

Temperate rainforests, such as this lush area, sport a larger biomass compared to tropical rainforests with their larger biodiversity...(or so I've been told.  It looks quite biomassive to me.)

Juneau grew from a Native fishing village inhabited seasonally to harvest fish, to become a hub for a large-scale hard-rock mining industry. The mountains surrounding Juneau were honey-combed into a giant underground gold mine: the Alaska-Juneau Mine (better known as the A-J Mine) and the Alaska-Gastineau Mill, owned by The Treadwell Gold Mining Company. The AJ Mine, at its peak, was the largest gold mine of its type in the world. Economic factors caused the mine to close in 1944. At that time it had produced more than $75 million in gold. It still has more miles of tunnels underground than there are surface roads in Juneau.

Mendenhall Glacier:

A growler, or bergy bit?  From a calving glacier.  So very blue!

This lovely little home was being decorated right as I took this picture, so I didn't get the finished product, but nonetheless, what is a post about Juneau without a picture of the governor's mansion?

And finally, a couple of studies in contrast.  Just for fun.