Victoria's Window Excerpt--Alaska Bound

Victoria secured her orange and blue pup tent to the stainless steel deck shackles of the Marine Vessel Kennicott, and tied a guy line to the deck railing.  She crawled inside with her pack, roll-up mattress, and sleeping bag.  When she looked through the tent flap a few minutes later, she saw a float plane rock against the whitecaps and break loose to the north.  A white-hooded eagle soared against the dark green shoreline with a large fish in its talons. Mount Baker and the North Cascade Mountains backdropped the harbor to the east. 


After her long car trip from Michigan to Bellingham, Washington, she relaxed at the thought of floating the Alaska Marine Highway.  Her car was secured below. She would travel 3500 miles by water to Dutch Harbor through the Inside Passage, across the Gulf of Alaska and along the Aleutian Chain. No more driving for a long while.  Her first stop would be Ketchikan--38 hours away.  What a great feeling to be a passenger!  

Just a few feet to her left, another tent had just been placed, and Victoria could hear a rumbling growl from inside.  Just then a Yellow Labrador peeked out from the tent opening with its nose high in the air.  It looked like a big yellow ghost.  “Stay, Gravy!” shouted a voice from within.  “That’s my dog, Gravy,” a young man said as he popped through the tent opening.  “He’s an awesome dog.  Got him from Lab Rescue down in Portland.  He was half dead, but I brought him back to life after a few weeks.  Named him for a misunderstood hymn when I was a kid in church.  I thought we were singing, ‘up from the gravy he arose,’ and I could see Jesus rising from a steaming gravy boat.  Mom later told me, it was 'grave, he,' not 'gravy,' so I thought I would name my dog, 'Gravy,' since he sort of resurrected himself.  My name’s, Chris.  What’s yours?”

Astounded, Victoria just said, “Victoria.”

“Well glad to meet you, Victoria.  You have a very proper name.  Is that what you go by or do people call you ‘Vickie’ or something?”

“No, people call me Victoria,” and she added, “I have a car on board.”   Perhaps she thought that having a car would give her some kind of edge on this forward person, like someone saying, “I have a gun, so don’t get too close."

“Never owned a car.  I have a bicycle below.  I’m into bicycles.  Bicycles saved my butt--moved from an all-night crowd to a keep-fit crowd.  I make custom bicycle wheels in Portland--humming perfect wheels.  I ride every day, except when I’m on boats, of course.”

She looked him over.  He was about one-seventy-five, six-foot-two in his mid-thirties.  He was lean and muscular, and when he stood up, he looked as straight as a redwood tree.  He had short, sandy hair, blue eyes, and an angular, weathered face.  He wore a light blue denim shirt under a dark blue hoodie with canvas khaki pants.  He looked right at you when he talked, and seemed to have a permanent smile.  No tattoos that she could see.

Seven Autumn Haiku

split cordwood scattered 

on frosted red leaves

days before winter

you die in the fall

your voice greeting still on

hear me say I love you

September clouds

hide the sun then the moon

wild creatures know what to do

squash soup passing

hints of nutmeg through my mouth

spoon-fed fall

autumn on the porch 

writing a haiku

my pen casts a long shadow

humming birds gone

feeders half full sway in downpour

wind chimes play the blues

mother turkey in the shade

one through five survive

six, seven, and eight get ate

Dumstruck (This I Believe)

 I believe in finding a quiet place to gather strength in the face of suffering.

I pressed the red button that silenced the alarm to the memory unit, and walked through the double doors.  Outside dark clouds dumped sheets of rain.  I had just visited my father-in-law, and thought the deluge must have triggered his warning for me to watch out for submarines.  He once commanded a Sub Chaser in World War II, and probably had been through storms like this.  Perhaps the cyclone fence that surrounded the facility reminded him of the ship’s railing that separated him from stormy seas. 

As I walked the long hallway towards the exit, a social worker stopped me, and chuckled that my father-in-law had offered her $500 to let him go home. “He just wanted to see his wife, his dog, drive his car, and trim his shrubs, “ I said.  He had whispered all this to me during our visit.  He knew he was somehow trapped in this place, but much of the time, he thought he was in an airline terminal, and couldn’t find his gate. His brain filled with imaginings that replaced the vacating spaces of his brain.

On my way to the car, I noticed I could delay walking through the torrents of rain by taking a route through a large windowless series of parking garages.  The security lights glowed amber through the dark, cold cement-surfaced building interior. I made my way slowly past old cars, discarded sofas, old TV’s and stereos, mildewed shower curtains, plastic bags of clothes, a rusted-out snowblower--remnants of what I imagined to be dead people’s stuff.  So this was what remained after the bodies were shipped to the embalmers and cremators--a big, smelly mess for the janitor.

At the far end of the building, I was dumbstruck by a ten-foot high pile of aluminum walkers.  They were all thrown together at different angles.  There were so many of them that they formed the shape of a bell.  I crouched down and stared at this symmetrical assemblage of rubble. It looked like a mountain of white bones, leftover sacrifices laid on some ancient stone altar under a copper sky.  Then I remembered the pile of shoes I had once seen in Jerusalem at the Holocaust Museum.  

I wept in this sorriest of places for the cruelty, confusion, and general misery of people who suffer.  Then I wept because I felt powerless to help the fenced-in father-in-law I loved.  I felt like I was a jumble of walkers in a dying world, where my father-in-law was dying. What would become of his wife, his dog, his car, his shrubs that he had cared for? It would soon be time to get practical and solve problems, but for now, I bent over like a folded-up lawn chair, and rocked rhythmically to the rain on the sheet metal roof.

Submitted to This I Believe, Inc. (Sept. 18, 2011)

Indra's Pearls

 Guess what?  We are all connected!  A hundred years from now, our children will study our recent preoccupation with divisions of ethnicity, race, religion, and national citizenship, and say, “What were they thinking?”

Quantum physics has already proved that we are all connected.  Just as butterfly wings create a small disturbance in the wind off the West Coast of Africa that results in a Caribbean hurricane, human actions anywhere can create human consequences everywhere, especially when you consider the grouchy used car salesman in New Jersey. 

Global warming shows that we are all connected by one world ecosystem.  Pollution in the northern hemisphere is killing babies in the southern hemisphere.  Alaskan bark beetles, thriving from 20 warm summers, have chewed up four million acres of spruce trees.  Floods, draughts, and hurricanes have increased in frequency and intensity.  Fresh water is decreasing, causing an increase in malaria.  Polar bears are becoming skinny.

All the major religions of the world have as a central truth that we are all connected.  The Hindu goddess, Indra, wraps her hair around an infinite number of pearls. Each pearl reflects, and is reflected by all the other pearls, each connected to, reflecting, and composed of, all the others. We are all little threads of life wrapped around the stars in a vast web of existence--little innumerable nodes circling the universe and running into each other in the supermarket.

Do we want to leave the last tracks of naked feet on an earth vacated by perpetual warfare, famine and disease?  Do we want to leave our children and grandchildren a brambly, grassless, yellow earth wobbling around a yellow sun? Do we want our legacy to be dry river beds filled with the dusty remains of dead soldiers, and Manhattan condos with nothing left but the roaches?

After human extinction, perhaps a distant traveler from beyond the Milky Way will lay down new footprints of some sort on the vacant earth, and say, “What were they thinking?” 

Today, all fields of human knowledge are moving in the direction of “wholes” rather than “parts.”  Our social systems thinking is well behind the best of science and religion.  We need to stop thinking about people by placing them in  categories; we need to look at the larger social system when making decisions; we need to stop expecting people to change in a social vacuum-- we need to take care of ourselves, but also take care of others, especially mother-in-laws.

We are not all alone; we are all connected.  

Interpretation of Psalm 23

God keeps me safe
and I need nothing more.
God lays me down in a field of gentle grass.
God leads me to a park bench on a quiet bay,
and restores my life on a golden afternoon.
You help me do things better for higher purposes
that are far greater than my clumsy imaginings and dreams.
Even though I walk alone down a wooded path on a moonless night,
you overcome my isolation, and touch me with your infinite power.
You bless me like a warm summer rain flowing over my head.
You sit me down with people I despise,
then illuminate the room with your divine love.
I am confident that I will always know goodness and mercy
in the world around me as long as I live,
and I will be silent and listen for your presence in every moment of my life.

John Kamp's Favorite Poem

John Kamp, my father-in-law, passed away last Friday morning at age 88.  Denise and I have posted his obituary on our Facebook pages. As a lifetime private pilot this was one of his favorite poems:

High Flight

Oh!   I have slipped the surly bonds of earth

And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth

Of sun-split clouds...and done a hundred things

You have not dreamed of...wheeled and soared and swung

High in the sunlit silence.  Hov’ring there,

I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung

My eager craft through footless halls of air....

Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue

I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace

Wherever lark, or even eagle flew.

And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod

The high untrespassed sanctity of space,

Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

--John Gillespie Magee, Jr.

Vancouver to Anchorage

Calving at the Hubbard Glacier

Skagway to White Pass

Tracy Arm Fjord

Tracy Arm

Vancouver from Stanley Park

Denise before boarding a DeHavilland Beaver

Arctic Waterfall

Abandoned Railroad Trestle near White Pass AK

Approaching the Hubbard Glacier

Calving (see my video on Facebook page)

Mugging for our local newspaper in Skagway

Alaskan Fjord