Fending for Ourselves

Part of the mentality of living in Alaska, even in Anchorage, is that you not only can but should depend on the land for part of your food. The most frequently seen manifestation of this is state residents who take advantage of their right to catch up to (depending on the stock) 20 salmon per member of the household using a dipnet. Think pulling goldfish outof the bait tank with an aquarium net, but big salmon from a river with a 42" net. People use this limit to catch enough salmon to eat all year round.

While some fishing has been done by members of this household (nonresident limits are stricter, licenses more expensive, and we have to use poles), we have been enjoying the gathering component of Alaska's fend-for-yourself culture. Kirsten and Soren have become avid berry pickers. Unlike in New England, where we wouldn't feel comfortable harvesting from public land, the expectation in Alaska is that you will harvest (for personal consumption) from public berry bushes. There's even a part of a trail at a local state park known as Blueberry Hill where you can see lots of folks with buckets.

A couple weeks ago, we took a local wild berry learning tour. We learned to identify raspberries, blueberries, highbush cranberries, red currants, and watermelon berries (watermelon-shaped red berries that taste like watermelon), as well as some berries you don't want want to pick.

Our best resource is a medium-sized patch of raspberries along a little-used access path to the heavily used Coastal Trail bike path that is only a block from our house. Kirsten has cruised down there many evenings and filled a yogurt container for use with dessert. Soren has learned to pick them, too, and cannot pass by the path without heading to the patch for some berries. He actually can identify the berries and pull them off the plant...it's funny to watch his clumsy fingers grasping the delicate berries. Unfortunately, he's less discriminating about finding the ones that are actually ripe (and, in other places, he goes for any red berry, including those he shouldn't eat).

We're up to half a fish, a cup of blueberries and about eight quarts of raspberries, all of which have been delicious.

Long Weekend with the Guys

Kirsten's flown back to Rhode Island to take care of some things at Ichabod House (Did we mention that all worked out and we closed a couple weeks ago? No? Well, we did.) I finally learned today, when Kirsten first saw the house this morning, that I will not be sleeping in the potting shed for the next 15 years because I totally blew the house purchase; she likes it.

A secondary consequence of Kirsten's trip is that I'm truly solo parenting for more than half a day for the first time. Soren's weaned, Kirsten wants a break from full-time mothering, and I can take a little while off work now. So, to ease into it, we figured we'd go for six and a half days. We're planning to spend from Friday Night Football through Sunday sitting on the couch watching sports, drinking milk and eating peas, but that still leaves three and a half other days.

Adding to my anxiety heading into this, Soren is in a phase where he's been very clingy to Kirsten for the last week. He wants her to hold him, or he tries to climb her legs, or he sits at her ankles and cries. I think he's a little conflicted about being a toddler, one moment eager to wander off in his own direction on his own feet, and another scared by giving up his total dependence on his parents (so he thinks). I had visions of whole days spent sitting in front of the door, wailing.

Yesterday was our first day together, and Soren's just a blast when you can give him full attention and do the things he wants when he wants. I hadno problems with clinginess. He woke up around 7:30, I gave him his breakfast (a banana and some baby cereal), and we took a walk to get me some coffee. When we returned, he was acting a little tired, so I asked him if he wanted a nap. He paused, stood up, walked into his room and pointed at his crib; I put him in, and didn't hear from him for 90 minutes.

In the afternoon, we went to the Anchorage Museum of Art and History. I had hoped that after some time in the children's gallery, he'd let me look around the "grown-up" galleries a little, but we spent two hours playing with interactive art exhibits, including a play kitchen, a table for using magnetic building blocks, and a reading bench made of encyclopedias. While there, we ran into some friends, and arranged for dinner with them.

On this trip, I also was reminded of Soren's peculiar magnetism. He attracts people all around. On this trip, he drew all three of the young women running the ticket desk at the museum to talk with him, and even pulled a grandmotherly woman from across the street to say hello. While he mostly draws women of all ages, he even regularly gets responses from teenage boys, who are shocked by his super-friendly, super-enthusiastic, "Hiii!" I certainly wasn't interested in interacting with babies as a teenager, or until about 15 months ago.

Rough Seas Ahead

It seems we have accumulated quite a backblog, having recently been so busy that we haven't found time write about the many things we have to write about.

For the last week, my sister Rachel and her husband Jeff have been visiting us from Indiana. I think this isn't a typical vacation for them (most of their vacations have involved the Gulf of Mexico), so I'm especially glad they came up for a taste of something different. And, they pushed us to try a few new things.

They were interested in trying some good Alaskan seafood, and weren't impressed by the frozen king crab clusters we'd served other guests (although they are delicious). But the first live dungeoness crabs were in, so we bought four and endeavoured to try to cook these beasts--two at a time--in our spaghetti pot. The first three went in OK, but the fourth one managed to wrap its legs around my wrist as it was being lowered into the steaming water. (Did I mention crabs aren't banded like lobsters? Yeah, the crusher could crush if, if given the opportunity.) I did manage to flick him off (ironically, into the melting butter), but I did take a minute to count my fingers, lest I be working in base 9 for the rest of my life.

The five of us went down to Seward last weekend, where we were going to switch off days taking a glacier cruise and watching Soren, Rachel and Jeff cruising Saturday, and Kirsten and me Sunday. My parents had earlier done one of these six-hour cruises, on perhaps the nicest day of the summer, and saw lots of orcas, birds, endangered Steller sea lions and seals on the way out of the mountain-surrounded Resurrection Bay and around a penninsula to the adjacent fjord to see a large tidewater glacier. With this experience, Rachel and Jeff set off on an overcast Saturday, and returned excited from seeing orcas leaping out of the ocean and breeching humpbacks, though cold from the drizzle falling in the wind blowing off the glacier.

Sunday morning, Kirsten and I turned Soren over to Rachel and Jeff and set off for our cruise. When we got there, we were told there was a weather advisory and we had three options:

1. Take a full refund now.
2. Rebook for another day.
3. Go on the boat and give it a try. If too many people got seasick, they'd turn around and turn it into a cruise of Resurrection Bay. If this happened, they'd give us a $40 refund (making the cost of the trip $89).

Since this was really our shot, we went for it. (Consider what it says about people's risk preferences that they (we) still pay a premium for the chance to see the glacier, even when it doesn't happen AND it doesn't happen because a significant number of people get seasick...they offer a Resurrection Bay tour for $69, so really they're just charging $20 for the opportunity to get seasick.)

Well, we had a cold, wet tour. But we got to the mouth of the bay, hit strong crosswinds and 12 foot seas, many people ran for the stern, and we turned around. Most people on the cruise would tell you they saw three sea otters. Kirsten and I saw a fair number of birds you can't usually see from shore. No whales or glacier for us.

Behold the Ice Worm

Ice worms are real! It's true!
They thrive at a cool thirty-two.
But at twenty they freeze
And at forty degrees
They turn to a puddle of goo.



We got to see real, live ice worms on a boat trip near Portage Glacier. They're teeny little things that live exclusively in ice and eat algae, and if they're exposed to temperatures above 40 degrees Fahrenheit, their natural antifreeze gets messed up and they explode. Sensitive little buggers, eh?

Enough about Denali...

... let's talk about Mt. McKinley.

No true Alaskan calls it Mt. McKinley -- out here, it's Denali ("The High One" in the Athabascan language). So why is it named after McKinley, anyway? Did he climb it? Drive a golf ball off the summit? Have his remains interred at its foot?

No, McKinley never even visited Alaska. It was named after him to piss some people off.

A prospector named William Dickey, a Republican, was exploring the area in 1896 with some Democratic traveling companions. A big issue at the time was the proposed abolition of the gold monetary standard (Republicans were pro-gold-standard, Democrats against), and Dickey apparently liked to discuss it at length with his Democratic pals. Poor Billy must have felt awfully lonely out there, the only true supporter of beautiful, beautiful gold, constantly forced to listen to a bunch of haters. I mean, they all obviously loved gold, since they were out in the middle of nowhere looking for it, but my man Dickey was the only one there who really understood gold and wanted to rub it all over his face and have his currency based on its worth and stuff.

So how to get back at the haters? Well, during his travels, Dickey "discovered" Denali, and upon his return to civilization, he published his "discovery" with the announcement that he'd decided to name it Mt. McKinley. After the Republican, gold-standard-lovin' presidential candidate of the day. Because he wanted to annoy the people he'd been traveling with. I guess that's one way to win an argument.

Plenty of people who have an opinion on the matter believe that the mountain's official name should be Denali -- so why don't we just change it?

Bureaucracy, of course!

If you want to change the name of a national park/monument/whatever, you have to take it up with the U.S. Geographic Names Board. But the Names Board won't consider a name change if the issue is already being considered in Congress. It turns out that a certain Ralph Regula, a representative from Ohio who happens to have McKinley's former seat in the House, is really attached to the current name; he introduces a bill every year that declares the mountain's official name to be Mt. McKinley. And so the mountain will be called Denali over Ralph Regula's dead body.

Long Time No See

I went outside at about 11:30 last night to see if I could spot any Perseid meteor shower action (I couldn't).

While I was out there, I realized it was the first time I'd seen stars since June 1.

Denali with a Long Lens II

This time with an actual picture of Denali.



And our two best wildlife shots -- a caribou and a willow ptarmigan.





(A heavily-pared-down set of our Denali trip pictures is here, and as always, our full photoset is here)

We saw a ton of wildlife -- it was amazing. We saw moose, caribou, Dall sheep, ptarmigans, snowshoe hares, twelve grizzly bears (some very close), a golden eagle, and a gyrfalcon. All from the bus (they do stop the busses for wildlife viewing, so it's not a drive-by or anything).

Of course, you can't please everyone. On the bus ride back, I could hear a woman b*tching to her husband about how dirty everything was, and how long the bus ride was, and how they could have seen more animals if they'd gone to the zoo. Yeah, Janey Complainy, and then you'd be at THE ZOO. But I guess you can at least get a Slurpee at the zoo, so that makes it way better than big ol' dirty Denali National Park.