Chinook Howling
TONGUE-IN-CHEEK ALASKANA
The Ice Scootch and Other Winter Tricks
During Alaska’s brief summer it is sometimes hard to tell who is a sourdough and who isn’t. While it’s balmy out, clever resourceful tourons and cheechakos are usually able to fake it enough to blend in with the experienced Alaskans. As long as they don’t start talking, that is.
Once they open their mouths, they give themselves away. Inevitably, they’ll blurt out a telltale question like “Do you think we’ll make it back before dark?” Or they might refer to a “woodchuck” they spotted near a highway turnout, or the “huge crow” they saw in a “pine tree”. Often it will be place names that they fumble. They’ll mention returning from Anchorage via the “Tock” Cut-off, or brag about the halibut boat they chartered out of “Val Dezz”.
But assuming they have sense enough to limit their conversation to terse monosyllabic grunts, their behavior can uncannily mimic that of a true sourdough. After all, sourdoughs, like cheechakos, do spend Federal Reserve Notes at the store. Sourdoughs laugh and sneeze and scratch their chin just like a touron might. Everybody, sourdough and non-sourdough alike, wears pants and drinks Coca Cola and carries a cell phone. So, if during July, for instance, you spotted two strangers walking toward you, and somebody challenged you to identify which one was the sourdough and which one wasn’t, you might be hard pressed to do so.
The thin mask is jerked off, however, as soon as winter hits. A person who has never experienced authentic sub-arctic weather simply cannot fathom it. They have no reference point by which to process it. They may have read all the Jack London Books or National Geographic articles they could get their hands on. They may have watched all the television specials that were ever produced on the subject. They may even have pored over reams of meteorological data and consulted every blog and Wikipedia entry that they could Google. Still, it is impossible for such people to be prepared for Alaska’s winter, and as a result, they will miserably fail to believably feign nonchalance toward it once they find themselves immersed in its cold reality.
You see, there are certain skills–little tricks–that one picks up to compensate for the gaping ragged chunks of dignity that ice, snow, howling winds and fifty below temperatures rip out of one’s comfort zone. In order to survive, a sourdough has learned to broker a humble truce with the elements. Compromising where he must, and improvising where he can, he acknowledges that he must play by Jack Frost’s rules or be mercilessly destroyed. A cheechako has not yet come to grips with this humbling reality.
As a result, when it comes to winter, a newbie will tend to make one of two mistakes. On the one extreme, some cheechakos assume that sourdoughs are wimps who like to lie a lot. Convinced that Alaska can’t possibly get as cold as we claim, they figure we are either exaggerating or pulling their leg when describe such experiences as having our upper and lower eyelashes freeze together from the ice balls formed when we exhale. They just know that it is impossible to get frostbitten fingers from merely not wearing gloves during the five minutes it takes to fuel up their car at the self-serve gas station. This naivete proves to be their undoing. I can’t count the number of cheechakos I have found at the service station, dead as an icicle, still standing upright with their hand frozen around the gas pump nozzle and their eyes welded shut with ice balls. The look of incredulity on their face is enough to make a grown man break down in “I told ya so’s”.
On the other hand, certain other cheechakos assume that Alaskans are simply tougher than outsiders, and that the shortcut to sourdoughood can be achieve by pretending that the cold doesn’t bother them. Consequently, it is not uncommon during a cold snap to find the ground littered with the stiff carcasses of cheechakos who have succumbed to their own misplaced sense of bravado. Ironically, if you brush the frost from their lifeless faces you will find that most of them will still have a plucky grin frozen onto it.
This brings me to the first secret little trick that a sourdough learns early. It’s called long underwear. Since long underwear is by nature–well–underwear, it can’t be seen. Thus the secret factor. It’s not that sourdoughs are trying to keep it a secret particularly, it’s just that modern people have been trained not to discuss that category of their wardrobe. So cheechakos don’t have any way to know what they’re supposed to be wearing under there. The poor shivering cheechakos suffer under the impression that we, like them, are wearing nothing but goose bumps and skimpy cotton skivvies under our blue jeans.
That we sourdoughs should let such a thing happen is an outrage, really. Think about it. People comment about each others’ clothes all the time: “Nice hat.” “I love your tie!” “That skirt looks nice on you.” “Where did you get that jacket? It’s really sharp.” Yet, when is the last time you met somebody in a restaurant or at church and jovially called out the following exchange?
“Hey, Frank, good to see you! What are you wearing these days, boxers or briefs?”
“Are you kiddin’, man! It’s November! I’ve been wearing my Under Armour long-handles for at least a month.”
“Under Armour, huh! Well, that high-falutin’ Cabela’s stuff is OK, I suppose, if you can afford it, but why mortgage your house to take out a loan for underwear when you can just go to Value Village and pick up some good old brown polypropylene. Military surplus. The baggy kind with the little lint balls all over them that always smell like dirty laundry no matter how many times you wash them.”
I think the world would be a better place if more people could have frank discussions like that. That’s why for many years now I’ve been a tireless outspoken advocate of removing underwear from the list of taboo conversational subjects among polite company. If more Alaskans would have the courage and compassion to begin to open dialogues about their underwear choices, I believe we could avoid hundreds of hypothermia and frostbite cases each year. We might even save some lives.
Then again, maybe not. I suspect that many cheechakos are aware of the existence of long underwear, but refuse to wear it, because they haven’t mastered the second trick in the sourdough’s winter survival bag—fashion immunity. One cannot be addicted to high fashion and hope to survive in Alaska’s winter. Especially if one is a female. For some reason that I have never quite understood, female fashions tend to expose skin rather than to cover it. This is quite self-defeating, seeing that the ability to survive sub-zero temperatures is inversely proportional to the percentage of the epidermis that is exposed to the ambient air. I suppose that the female leg can be attractive under the appropriate circumstances, but I have never personally admired a female leg that was beet red, with white blotches and bright purple knees.
So, a sourdough learns to be immune to the snobbish and impractical demands of fashion. After, all, isn’t fashion invented in places like Paris and San Francisco? If I wanted to be fashionable, I’d move to one of those places. On the other hand, if fashion designers worked out of Delta Junction or Fairbanks, you know that all the supermodels would be strutting the catwalk in bunny boots and Carhartts and wolverine fur bomber hats.
Speaking of bunny boots, sourdoughs understand that proper winter footwear provides more advantages than warmth alone. The importance of choosing a boot with good traction is incalculable. For every cheechako I have found frozen at the gas pump or toppled over beside the sidewalk wearing little but a plucky grin and a stiff upper lip, I have encountered dozens who were performing acrobatic break dancing routines on an icy walkway. Such routines are typically spectacular but brief. Generally the only folks who appreciate such a performance are orthopedic surgeons.
Sadly, it is sometimes difficult for even a sourdough to identify whether the soles of a new pair of shoes will have good traction or not. I have bought shoes with treads that looked like a banana peel yet amazingly, they stuck to the ice like Velcro. Then there have been those that looked like their bottoms had been carved out of an X-treme ATV tire. However, they might as well have been skis, for all the traction they provided. Alas, a cheechako has never learned about the fickle nature of footwear manufacturers. Instead, he will naively trust whatever the company says about the aggressive traction characteristics of their latest product. A sourdough, however, wisely distrusts all shoe and boot manufacturers. What would somebody in Taiwan know about walking in my driveway, anyway? No, a true sourdough keeps from fracturing his coccyx by relying on an old Forty-Niner technique called the Ice Scootch.
You see, back when Forty-Niners were digging up the Alaskan and northern Canadian landscape like gophers, there was no such thing as Vibram soles. Their boot treads came in two varieties: smooth leather and smooth leather with hobnails. The problem was that the business owners in places like Skagway and Dawson City took a dim view of customers scraping and scratching across their expensive hardwood floors with hobnails. So hobnails were banned in any place where a prospector might be inclined to blow a poke of gold dust on a weekend.
Needless to say, this created quite a dilemma. At first, the Forty-Niners, like modern cheechakos, tried to step outside onto the icy street and set off with their characteristic long stride. That didn’t work out very well for them. A long stride requires the strider to stretch his leg out in front of him, plant his heel, roll forward onto the ball of his foot and then push off with his toes as the heel of the opposite foot is being planted for the next step. That’s fine and dandy on gravel or meadow grass, but on ice, such an ambulatory technique results not in a mile-eating pace, but in an instant somersault. Sometimes they would somersault backwards immediately at the heel plant. But usually they would somersault forward during either the ball of the foot roll phase or the toe push-off phase. This is the reason why all those old prospectors wore a hat with a brim that was smashed flat in the front. It also explains the disproportionate number of missing front teeth in the prospector population of the era.
Happily, those who survived to become sourdoughs developed the Ice Scootch walking technique which has been preserved virtually unchanged to this very day. Mastery of the Ice Scootch could literally render Alaskan orthopedic surgeons obsolete. Here, then is the technique. Instead of moving the feet back and forth, move them up and down, sort of like the way you use a toilet plunger to unclog the commode. Carefully. Very carefully. Plant the entire right foot–heel, instep, ball and toe all at once. Once it is planted do not move it or slide it in any way until you are ready to pick it straight up again for the next step. Do not shift your body weight forward or backwards by more than .005 degrees. Now, while your right foot is planted, very slightly ease your weight sideways until it is balanced directly over that foot. Next, lift the left foot that you have just shifted your weight from. Remember, straight up! When it comes back down, it should be incrementally forward of its last position. Now begin the process of shifting your weight back to your left foot. Repeat the process, alternating feet. If you now are walking like a cross between the Michelin Man and a tactical SWAT team member, Congratulations. You have just graduated to sourdough status!
The Walking Dictionary
Wesley Montrose was a pudgy, bespectacled fellow. I didn’t know him well. None of us at my alma mater did. It’s hard to get to know a fellow like Wesley. Let me rephrase that. It was hard to get to know Wesley specifically. There were no other fellows like Wesley. I don’t suppose there ever will be either. The reason it was hard to get to know him was largely because nobody could understand him. I don’t just mean that he had an eccentric non-social personality, although he certainly had one of those. We couldn’t understand him simply because when he opened his mouth to talk, pure gibberish came out.
This was most disconcerting, particularly when we knew he spoke fluent English. English was his first language…and his greatest love, evidently. His grammar was flawless, his diction was impeccable, and yet he spoke gibberish. For instance, he liked to proudly describe himself as a hippopotomonstrosesquipedalian quidam. That sounded like something we didn’t want living in the same dorm with us, so we threw him in the cold shower and held him there until he simplified the term. It took him three tries until he got it into verbiage that we could actually understand. The result was anticlimactic. Instead of admitting to being some sort of weirdo, he was basically calling himself an unnoticed person with an exceptional vocabulary. Well, he was certainly right about that. The guy knew words that nobody else had ever dreamed of. Even worse than that, he used them in every sentence.
The frustrating thing about it was that his words were always legitimate, and could all be found in some official dictionary somewhere. That made people like me who considered ourselves to be above average at language skills feel pretty ignorant. Before I met Wes, I had viewed myself as a Scrabble champion. But playing Scrabble with Wesley was like a three-year-old trying to beat Garry Kasparov at chess. It was humiliating on a visceral level. I only did it once. Nobody else was foolish enough to try. As a result, for Wesley, Scrabble became a solitaire game. That didn’t seem to bother him very much, though. He could play Scrabble with himself for hours.
On a positive note, Wesley was a great guy to know when you were working a crossword puzzle.
“Hey, Wes! Give me a five-letter word for a ball of ceremonial rice. First letter ‘p’ and middle letter ‘n’. ”
“Pinda,” he’d shoot back without a microsecond’s hesitation.
Or, “Hey, Wes, a nine-letter word, for silly, beginning with ‘d’?”
“Desipient,” he’d yawn.
Wesley was a career scholar. He’d been a sophomore for nearly a decade and a half. I think he purposely flunked the final exam of each semester, so that he would not have to graduate and leave his beloved enclave. I once asked him if he had any career plans outside of academia. I don’t know why I wasted my time. His reply was completely unintelligible:
“I eschew chreotechnics, and nummular pursuits are my pisaller. My habromania, however, is vortiginously appurtenant on an apinoid phrontistery, with untrammeled sufferance to sedulously and omniligently chymify illimitible pendects. That would veritably render me squabbish and blithe.”
How do you respond to something like that? I tried to tell him that he needed to come out of his nerdy little world and try being normal like the rest of us. That seemed to rile him a bit. To my suggestion, he responded that no matter how renardy I might fancy myself, a neanthropic clamjamfry like me simply was incapable of being caritative toward a pedantic dockhma like him. I was pretty sure he had a point there, but I had no idea what it was. From there, the dialogue degenerated into an exchange of insults. At least I think it did. I know I was trying to put him down, and by the look on his face, he seemed to be responding in kind, but I never would have been able to prove it by what he said.
“Your momma dresses you, funny!” I taunted.
“My cisvestitism is incidental, you valgus gynotikolobomassophile.”
“Oh, yeah! Is that what I am, huh! Well…well…you have dandruff.”
“Epicaricacy isn’t your forte. You jargogled your recumbentibus, you ichthyomancing sneckdraw, because, serene in my fecundity, I irrefangibly ostend my furfuraceous cranial vertex. Interregnum, I descry your fashious hircismus and podobromhidrosis.”
There’s something creepy about being insulted so eloquently and yet so obscurely. If he had cussed me out like a sailor, I would have felt better about it. As it was, I could only respond to his psychological profanity with the vocabulary equivalent of “phooey on you, you meanie!” Deep inside, I realized that I was way out of my league, but like an idiot, I wouldn’t admit defeat.
“Go ahead, descry all you want, but at least people can understand what I’m saying.”
“Oh, I wamble!” He whimpered. At first I thought I had him, then I recognized the sarcasm dripping from his voice. Evidently, he wasn’t really wambling at all, whatever wambling was. “Oops, I xenobombulated.” He continued with a smirk. “Funkify, before you wane agroof, analagous to a nimptopsical muckibus, you dasypygal creodont!”
At that point, I mumbled something and left the room. As I did so, I had a nagging intuition that I was funkifying, but I didn’t care. It was time to cut my losses.
Gradually, I began to develop an odd fondness for Wes. In spite of his eccentricity, I grew to realize that he was a human being too. Perhaps the thing that softened my attitude the most was when I began to notice him gazing at female classmates from time to time with the universal tell-tale wistful expression. It had never occurred to me that Wes might want to date. I had always assumed that he had no interest in girls, absorbed as he was by his passion for words.
I broached the subject with him. With the help of a pocket dictionary and some creative negotiation, I was able to verify my suspicions. Wesley Montrose was lonely and he did indeed have romantic aspirations. After a fair amount of persistence, the two of us were able to hammer out a communication system. Eventually, I was able to elicit the name of the girl with whom he was most anxious to become better acquainted. Her name was Ellen. She was gorgeous and captain of the women’s volleyball team. My instinctive reaction to this disclosure, rather set back our relationship for a few weeks, but I determined to make up with him, and I had the perfect plan for doing so.
It took all of my persuasive powers, but finally I managed to secure Ellen’s agreement to let Wes take her to Big Bob’s Putt Putt Course and Burger Barn, on the condition that I would come along as chaperone and interpreter. When I told Wes the good news, he was so shocked that he began to speak normally. The biggest word he used for half a day was “unbelievable”.
By date time, however, he had fully recovered. In fact, his nervousness seemed to bring out his most preposterous vocabulary. When Ellen finally emerged from her dormitory and slipped into the passenger’s seat of his waiting car, Wesley might as well have been speaking Tagalog. It was a weird evening.
“Ok, like, what’s he saying now?”
“Um…I’m not sure. Hold on. Let me check the dictionary. Hmmm… ‘osculate’… ‘osculate’… here it is. Well, Ellen…uh…it looks like Wesley is wondering about your opinion of kissing on the first date.”
“No way!”
“Yeah, that’s what he said.”
“Seriously, Wes?”
“Asseveratingly.”
“Get out!”
I tried to salvage the situation. “Yeah, I know. Crazy. You’ll have to excuse him. Wes is a little naive when it comes to the whole social protocol thing.”
“No. I mean you, George. Get out.”
“Huh!”
“Get out of the car. Wesley and I obtest an interval to conduce suaviation. Our apanthropy is reciprocal.”
Last week I spent some time with Ellen and Wes and a couple of their grandkids. They’re about as proud as grandparents can be. It turns out that the youngest one just said her first word. Well, two actually:
“Matriarchal procreator!”
Rustic
My family displays a wide range of cosmopolitan tastes when it comes to décor and architecture. In architecture, my wife admires Queen Anne, French Provincial, Federal, Tudor, Victorian, Italianate, Renaissance, Cape Cod, Georgian, Colonial, Byzantine, Gothic Revival, Spanish Mission, Bungalow, Ranch, Tuscan and Rustic styles. I, on the other hand, appreciate Log, Igloo, Spruce Bough Lean-to, Tarpaper Shack, Sod, Cardboard-Box-in-an-Alley, Orc Castle, Tipi, Dome Tent, Pickup Camper, Tree House and Rustic architecture.
When it comes to interior décor, my wife favors Bistro, Urban Eclectic, Vintage, Boudoir, English Cottage, French Chic, Retro, Southwest, Victorian Romance, Beach House, Shaker, and Rustic. In contrast, I have developed into a rather discriminating connoisseur of Grunge, Valdez Trawler, Men’s Locker Room, Greasy Spoon, Hunting Lodge, Pastoral Bovine, Random Chaos, Gut Pile, Jiffy Lube and Rustic decors.
For a while this created a dichotomous tension in our connubial solidarity. It became difficult for us to balance our divergent tastes. For instance, I might come in from the barn yearning for a little Pastoral Bovine atmosphere. On an impulse to surprise my wife, I would begin to redecorate the living room.
Using random bootstrokes I would blend an organic medium into the carpet, producing bold texture, scent, and color enhancements. Then I would tastefully drape my well-worn Aussie Drover duster across the back of the sofa. Finally, I would brilliantly tie together the Pastoral Bovine elements by vigorously brushing off my hair and clothing, a patented technique which allows hay and grain dust to settle onto all exposed surfaces of the room in an understated, but pervasive accent.
Just as I would be adding the finishing touches, my wife would appear, adjusting the baby’s breath and silk ivy in a swag she was arranging. It would be just my luck that she was on her Victorian Romance kick. For someone claiming to dislike my Pastoral Bovine scheme she sure would have a cow!
If it were up to me, I wouldn’t have a problem blending décor styles. Personally, I think Bovine Romance would work: Lace and bailing twine–a tea set combining the elements of a Hydrangea chintz teapot and cups made out of upturned cowbells with handles made out of castration rings–a porcelain mantle clock trimmed with 24 carat gold finials and a cameo of a Guernsey heifer. It would work, if my wife would let it, but she’s a purist.
We hadn’t been married very long before it became clear to me that the only culture my wife possessed was growing in a little sourdough starter crock on the back of the stove, and I told her so. She retorted something about me being the most talented “inferior” decorator that she had ever seen. Shortly thereafter the discussion began to lose its cordial tone. When the dust had settled, we realized that our relationship was in jeopardy of deteriorating.
We discussed it and agreed that our marriage was more important than any idiotic décor or architectural peccadilloes that the other might be cursed with, so we struck a deal. We would stick to styles for which we shared a mutual appreciation. It sounded like the perfect solution until we compared our lists to discover that the only taste we shared was Rustic. So “rustic” has described every house we have lived in for the last 15 years.
At this point, it is necessary for me to define “rustic”. This is important, because I have run into some embarrassing misunderstanding through the years. It turns out that there are more definitions of rustic than there are spindles in a Queen Anne porch. Let me cite two cases in point.
On an airplane once, due to a computer glitch, I had the good fortune to be seated in first class. It was a stimulating and novel experience for me. I soon fell into conversation with a gaunt gentleman wearing an Armani suit, a Rolex watch and too much moustache wax. He introduced himself as Sir Milliquent Feldspar. When I mentioned my fondness of all things rustic, Mr. Feldspar proceeded to display photographs of the “rustic” country house he had just purchased in the South of France. Somehow, gilded wainscoting, ceiling murals, and marble fountains didn’t fit my definition of rustic.
Then there was the time I needed to replace a taillight lens that got broken when my son left a tree growing out in the middle of my driveway when he was done climbing it. It was one of those things that probably cost 4.97 cents to make, but could only be special ordered at the dealer for $497.00. I got out the phone book and started looking for junkyards.
The first call I made was answered by a voice that sounded like he’d been gargling with Drano. Yes, he had the lens, and, yes, I could have it for five bucks or a case of beer. Drano gave me directions to his place:
“Da third gravel road to da right. Take dat for about thirteen miles till ya pass da toxic waste dump. You’ll see a lane on da left. Watch out for da ruts. Last week, I hadda guy in a Hummer high center and rip out his whole rear end. Almost hurt his Hummer, too! Anyway, my place is about three miles down da lane. Can’t miss it. It’s a real rustic place wid a fence. Wait at da gate and honk so’s I’ll know to put da Dobermans away.”
He wasn’t kidding! His place was, indeed, “real rustic”. It was part Quonset hut, part school bus, and part converted chicken coop. On top he had cobbled together some sort of a cupola from car doors and the bottom of an old wooden boat. He had nailed tarpaper to any surface that was flat, and squirted spray foam on whatever wasn’t. Drano’s concept of “rustic” wasn’t one that I shared.
So, when my wife and I talk about rustic, we mean unfinished or rough—basically anything that creates the effect of having minimal human involvement. We like natural materials with plenty of character, especially wood and stone. Basically “character” means that we want the wood to be loaded with knots and warts and burls. We like our stone to have flaws and distinctive graining as well. I never could understand why someone would want to have an exposed wood surface and then pick something with a straight, fine, knot-free grain. What’s with wood that doesn’t look like wood?
I know it isn’t always easy to find building or décor materials with character, but whenever we have run into that problem, we find ways to improvise. We used rough-cut lumber for our kitchen cabinets, but it just wasn’t rustic enough, so we tweaked it. We laid it out in our gravel driveway, scattered a five-gallon bucket worth of assorted nuts and bolts across it, and drove on it for about a week.
Then we collected it, brushed off the stones and bolts that weren’t embedded to deeply, and took a blowtorch to it. You should see the character now! The first time houseguests see our kitchen, they ask us if anyone got hurt in the explosion.
The best thing about rustic is that it covers up a multitude of sins. If I don’t mow the lawn for three months, I can just call it rustic landscaping. If the wall I build is eight inches out of plumb and forty-two degrees out of square, I just call it rustic. If it takes four years to get siding on the back of my house, until the OSB sheeting is hanging in weathered gray scales, it looks rustic. If my carpet is blotched with a grid of unsuccessful attempts to remove cat, dog, ferret, and baby nephew deposits, it’s rustic.
No-one ever knows if I am lazy, incompetent, unfortunate, or charmingly rustic. No-one, that is, except my wife, and she better not tell anyone if she values our connubial bliss.
The Free and the Brave
I wouldn’t be quite the man I am today if I hadn’t grown up in a rural Alaskan village. Moose Hole added a perspective to my formative years that would have been impossible to replicate in any other setting. Its remoteness and rusticity have colored my outlook on life until this day.
The village didn’t have a single street light until my late teens. The closest clinic was 76 miles away. The nearest traffic light was 210 miles away. The fire department, which was only functional if the neighbors weren’t out at fish camp, consisted of an improvised mix of garden hoses, fire extinguishers, and a lake water bucket brigade. Except for the occasional passing State Trooper, there was no police presence in Moose Hole at all. There was no Chamber of Commerce or Better Business Bureau to complain to when the Cleaver sisters threatened to put you in a headlock if you didn’t listen to their Amway presentation. Children on their walk to and from school frequently experienced dangerous run-ins with bears, mother moose, and rabid escapees from Jake Flemblaster’s squirrel menagerie. The closest thing to an animal control officer to be found in Moose Hole was Klondike Clancy who was always eager to donate his expertise with the Ruger .44 magnum that swung from his ever present gun belt. During the winter, everyone knew to keep one eye peeled for wannabe musher Sally Blunt. Without warning, Sally had a tendency to burst out of the brush in the oddest places, lashing her mongrel dogsled team onward with a pink foam swimming noodle. Cross-country skiers or firewood cutters would have just enough time to hurl themselves out of her path before the yelping pack would go careening by with inches to spare. In short, Moose Hole provided all the adventure a kid could hope for.
I loved every minute of it until that fateful day when my parents finally gave my downy derriere the swift kick which toppled me out of the nest. When I landed with a resounding “kerplunk,” I found myself sitting disheveled and confused on a college campus near Indianapolis. To my dismay, I soon discovered that my new environment was much more lonely and savage than Moose Hole had ever been. To assuage my homesickness, I began to entertain the other residents of the freshman dorm with stories of back home. As a result, half of my friends began to regard me as some sort of a feral nut case, while the other half revered me as a living legend who had strode out of the sunset after surviving a harrowing ordeal in a primal no-man’s land. All of them, however, shuddered at the thought of being forced to live in such a God-forsaken outpost as the Moose Hole I described.
So taxed was their credulity, that I periodically found it necessary to defend myself against charges of making it all up. In all honesty, their comic reactions to my narratives did present a fertile breeding ground for fictional tall tales. Nevertheless, as you can imagine, I made a point of conscientiously resisting the temptation to prevaricate. Exhibiting Herculean self-control, I restricted myself to only embellishing the isolated details which I determined to be particularly lackluster. Since then, as my readers can attest, I have matured into a responsible and serious journalist who has abandoned even such marginally ethical forays into hyperbole.
However, in spite of my best efforts to describe the excitement that had enriched my childhood, it was incomprehensible to my gape-jawed freshman listeners how I had managed to survive those years without dying of sheer boredom. They wondered if I had used a lot of drugs or drunk a lot of beer to compensate for the absence of skateboard parks, movie theaters and basketball courts. No, I told them, I hadn’t ever gotten around to it. There was too much fun stuff to do.
Not that drugs were unknown in our enclave. In fact, Skeeter Moss was notorious for experimenting with mind altering substances. We once found him passed out in his uncle’s cache with a soda straw protruding from his left nostril and a bottle of trapline lure spilled all over the front of him. He was stoned for a week until the right side of his face swelled up like a beach ball and they rushed him to a doctor in Fairbanks. Evidently, while he had been happily snorting lure by means of a straw up each nostril, one straw had become plugged. As a result, poor Skeeter had accidentally huffed the whole lure-laden straw up into his sinus area where it had become lodged. There it began to serve dual functions as a time release muskrat urine dispenser and infection incubator.
But I digress. After wondering how I could stand the boredom, my college friends would do a sudden mental flip-flop and express surprise that Moose Hole didn’t somehow disintegrate into anarchy. I guess my description of Klondike Clancy, a civilian, sauntering about while wearing an actual handgun in plain sight evoked stereotypical images of spaghetti western brawls and Ozark mountain feuds. Quite the contrary. The insipid statistic was that our village never experienced a single violent crime. Why, if any Moose Holian had ever contemplated committing such a thing, one quick glance at big, hairy Clancy pre-emptively rehabilitated them on the spot.
After considerable reflection, I have decided that it all boils down to a difference of world views. My college friends had come from a mentality that considered comfort, convenience and security to be necessities. I had come from a mentality that placed self-reliance and elbow room higher on the priority list than having life handed to me on a silver platter. As a kid in Moose Hole, my imagination was captured by heroes vastly different from the ones which must have inspired my college friends. When I went outside to play with my friends, we reenacted the exploits of Daniel Boone and Robert Peary and our very own Gomer Clodhopper who lived in a sod-roofed cabin that canted precariously out of the sphagnum moss down by the river, and claimed to be the “fust white feller ter drop a tree in these hyar parts”.
Speaking of sphagnum moss, Rory Smithers, was the only one of my childhood friends who refused to play our “stupid games”. There was nothing personal about it. He was one of those reluctant Alaskans who thought that anything originating in Alaska was stupid. His father, Roland, was a biologist with an energy consulting firm whose company had sent him to Moose Hole to “assess potential aerobic methane oxidation in a boreal Sphagnum-dominated peatland, and establish the viable biomass of methane oxidizing microorganisms in relationship to their probable controlling environmental factors, such as water table depth, soil temperature and pore-water methane concentrations”. I had no idea what that meant, but it sounded important. The point is that both Rory and his mother chafed at their exile and worried every waking moment that their friends “back in America” would think they had become Neanderthal Eskimos whose dinner preparations consisted of mashing whale blubber with a rock.
Therefore, Rory wanted nothing to do with pioneer role-playing games. No indeed! On the rare occasion that we could persuade him to come out and join us, he insisted that we play things like “The Six Million Dollar Man” or “Starsky and Hutch”. You can guess who always got to be the Bionic Man. Back then, Moose Hole could only get one TV station. It had such poor reception that every show looked identical—faceless silhouettes jerking robot-like across the screen, barely discernible through a blizzard of static. As a result we had but a vague awareness of these popular shows.
Other times Rory would wheedle us into playing games in which he could impersonate his own real-life heroes. He would make us take the part of ordinance violators while he became an intrepid building inspector or IRS agent or health board official. We were supposed to dig a hole in a place that wasn’t zoned for digging, build a clubhouse that didn’t meet code, ride around on unlicensed bicycles, open an unapproved lemonade stand or some other equally horrendous crime. Rory would let us get almost finished, then he would pompously arrive on the scene with a clipboard to save the day. His day-saving consisted of fining us heavily. If we didn’t give him whatever we happened to be carrying of value, up to and including the shirt on our back, he would promptly throw a bucket of water on us, then taser us with a hair dryer before dragging us away to the dog kennel which served as our prison. It wasn’t hard for us to play our part convincingly since we had no clue about building codes or zoning regulations or suchlike. We couldn’t have pretended to keep the law if our lives had depended on it. As a matter of fact, we thought Rory was asking us to participate in some sort of futuristic science fiction scenario that he had dreamed up.
Usually those games ended in an argument. We would protest that his unfair law presupposed that we were so stupid and irresponsible that we had to be treated like a baby. Inspector Rory would bristle and slowly enunciate that it was all for our own protection, and did we know who we were talking to in that tone of voice? We would reply that, yes, we knew exactly who Mister Smarty Pants was, and if we were stupid enough to build a shoddy clubhouse and install a poorly constructed wood stove in it, he should grant us the dignity of being able to burn it down around ears without his regulatory interference. We demanded the right to break our own neck if we were stupid enough to drive our three-wheeler too fast without wearing a helmet. In fact we insisted that we be the ones responsible for our own actions, stupid or otherwise, and that our well-being really wasn’t any of his darn business unless we hired him to babysit us. The inspector would then pound on his clipboard and holler that we were big fat jerks who had better be grateful that he was trying to introduce a little civilization to our backwater corner of Redneckia. We stood our ground, invoking our constitutional rights and informing him that he was a retarded dork head whose jurisdiction we did not recognize. He would counter by suggesting we would be well advised to shut our booger faces and pay our fair share of taxes for the privilege of being so efficiently managed and protected. Being fed up with Rory’s version of civilized society, we would revolt, hold him down, and give him a noogie or a wedgie. As we ran off to play Daniel Boone, Rory would run squalling to the Maternal General’s office to tattle on us.
Come to think of it, Rory had the same mentality as my audience in those college dorm bull sessions. If I had to do it over, I would have simply kept my mouth shut. Some things just can’t be explained to another person who lacks the proper frame of reference with which to grasp the concept being discussed. Either a person is raised as an independent, self-sufficient type who knows at least three ways to make a fire or they aren’t. Either a person has been taught that real water doesn’t taste like chlorine or they haven’t. You’re either comfortable eating things that you personally picked off of plants or you aren’t. You either understand that a firearm is a useful tool that can be dangerous if used irresponsibly or you consider it the sum of all fears. Either you know how to operate a Dutch oven, a handyman jack, a pair of knitting needles, post-hole digger, a splitting maul, a rolling pin, a snow shoe, a hay hook, a canning jar, an Ohio blue tip match, a butter churn, and a calf castrator or you don’t. In an emergency, either you know how to quarter a caribou, perform the Heimlich Maneuver, fell a tree, rebuild an engine, field strip a Colt model 1911, operate a ham radio, and make birch syrup or you don’t.
If you don’t, I’ll cross my fingers for you that you never lose your electricity or your government assistance check. But if a disaster occurs, it will be somebody like me who will dig you out of the rubble and shoot the looter who is pummeling your wife with a half empty gasoline can. Then I’ll share my canned moose meat with your starving family. That’s just the way I was brought up.
Voice Over
Have you ever noticed how disappointing it is to see your favorite radio personality for the first time? Back in Pennsylvania I used to listen to a great morning show on my way to work. There were two co-hosts, a man named Steve and a woman named Melanie. They were witty, cosmopolitan, charming, riveting, and they had the most amazing voices.
Steve was a rich baritone with a full, resonant timbre and a trace of a dashing accent that might have originally been anything from South African to Australian. He enunciated with excruciating precision, yet had the vocal versatility to capture emotional nuances in a way that would make a brilliant actor delivering a Hamlet monologue sound like a robot in a bad Flash Gordon flick.
One day I made the mistake of turning the radio on when my wife was in the car with me and was quite annoyed to notice a dreamy expression creeping over her face when Steve started talking. Her head kind of tilted to the side, her eyelids began to flutter, and a faint exclamation of delighted surprise escaped from her smile.
As she turned toward me, I noticed her pupils were slightly dilated. “Why don’t you ever talk to me like that?” she scolded.
I squawked out some sort of an indignant retort which only served to reinforce her opinion of my desultory and unromantic voice. In frustration I reached for the knob to turn off the radio, but my hand froze in mid-reach, for just then Melanie laughed! I don’t remember what Steve had said to make her laugh, but I will never forget that tinkling trill that danced joyous from the speakers and floated around the interior of the car on fairies’ wings.
Then the goddess spoke. Her voice was like sunshine on buttercups in a breeze-kissed spring meadow. Its melody bubbled out of the speakers, caressed my ears as it entered, then slid giggling down to rest in a warm pool of comfort deep in my heart. I let out a long ragged sigh like a desperate dehydrated man in a desert with salt-cracked lips who has just discovered a gigantic pitcher of ice cold lemonade sitting on top of a cactus.
My wife reached over and slapped me. “Watch where you’re driving! You just about creamed that little old lady in the Toyota Corolla…and for goodness sake, wipe that goofy grin off your face. You’re giving me the creeps!”
Her voice sounded coarse and vulgar in my ears. “Have you ever considered seeing an Ear-Nose-Throat doctor?” I inquired. “I read somewhere that 15 percent of American housewives have polyps on their vocal chords and don’t even know it.”
Surprisingly, my wife seemed to be open to the idea and promised to schedule the appointment as soon as she got home.
“I’ll try to get it on the same day as your orthopedic appointment.” She winked.
“My ortho appointment? I didn’t know I had an ortho appointment. What’s it for?”
“For your cervical fracture.”
“But I don’t have a broken neck!”
She just looked at me then with a smile that made the hairs on the back of my neck snap to attention with a crisp salute. That panicked a flock of goose pimples that had been napping on my spine and they began stampeding from the base of my skull to my tailbone. I somehow lost interest in the topic and returned my attention to the radio.
I became aware that Steve and Melanie were announcing that they were broadcasting live from the Oak View Mall for a radio station promotion and would sign autographs for any of their listening audience who wanted to meet them. I tried not to act too excited, but I knew that this was a once in a lifetime opportunity. I only hoped I could talk my wife into going. I decided to try the roundabout approach.
Summoning my most nonchalant voice, I enquired, “Hey. Did you ever wonder what radio people look like?”
“I was going to ask you the same question.”
“Just out of curiosity, we could swing by the mall and take a peek at Melanie. Oh…uh…and Steve…too…of course. Melanie and Steve. It’d be interesting to see if they look as good as they sound.”
“Why? What do you think Melanie looks like?” My wife was eying my neck like a logger sizing up a Sitka Spruce.
“Oh…I…er…I have no idea…hard to tell from a voice, you know.”
Actually I had a very vivid idea of what Melanie looked like. She obviously had the skin of Nicole Kidman, the cheekbones of Michelle Pfeiffer, the eyes of Halle Berry, the smile of Julia Roberts, the body of Catherine Zeta-Jones, the pout of Angelina Jolie, the nose of Elisha Cuthbert, and the hair of Monica Bellucci.
“Really?” My wife had a faraway look in her eye. “You must not have much of an imagination, I didn’t have any trouble visualizing Steve.”
“Is that a fact? So what do you think he looks like?”
“He has Matthew McConaughey’s smile, Patrick Dempsey’s hair, Viggo Mortensen’s eyes, Tom Cruise’s jaw, Brad Pitt’s abs, Jude Law’s chin…”
I cut her off. It was too humiliating to hear her talk like that. “Wanna bet?”
“How much?”
“If you’re right, I’ll do dishes for a week.” I thought that was quite generous of me.
“Very funny! We have a dishwasher. How about if I’m right, you take elocution lessons.”
“It’s a deal, and if you’re wrong?”
“I’ll make that ENT appointment!”
I did a U-turn right there in the street and headed for the mall. When we got inside, the line was so long that I couldn’t see Melanie no matter how hard I craned my neck and stood on tiptoe.
My wife tugged at my sleeve. “Can you see him?”
“Who?”
“Steve, of course!”
I couldn’t see him, or Melanie either, but something seemed odd. The people in line ahead of us were wide-eyed with anticipation, clutching notepads and cameras. The women giggled excitedly to each other over the makeup compacts that seemed to be universally and busily deployed. The men were all coincidentally standing in poses that bulged their unremarkable biceps and pecs, while at the same time rendering their bulging stomachs unremarkable. One fellow looked as if he might pass out before he made it to the front of the line from the strain of sucking in his considerable beer belly.
That wasn’t the oddest part, though. There seemed to be a steady line of other folks approaching from the somewhere ahead of us, and moving toward the exit. As they passed, I noticed that many of them had notepads and cameras as well, but they were in a completely different mood. Some hurried by, head down, as if embarrassed to be seen by us. Others smirked at us knowingly. A couple of girls were burying their faces in each other’s shoulders, giggling a high embarrassed sound like you would expect them to make if they had just dropped an ice cream cone on the front of their blouse.
I was about to ask my wife what she made of that, but she was busy with her makeup compact and some blemish cover. So instead, I crossed my arms so that my fists were tucked behind my biceps and sucked in my stomach. The line moved faster than I would have guessed and soon we were close enough for me to identify the radio station’s display. I clenched my fists a little tighter behind my biceps and craned my neck some more. I could see a couple of radio station employees sitting at a table handing out brochures, but Steve and Melanie were nowhere in sight.
About three minutes later, I had gotten close enough to the radio station booth to distinguish voices, and it was then that the awful truth suddenly struck me, for lo, out of the throats of those two employees came the unmistakable dulcet tones of Steve and Melanie.
It was unbelievable. Melanie wasn’t even close to what I had pictured. She had the skin of Tommy Lee Jones, the cheekbones of Michael Jackson, the eyes of E.T., the smile of Yoda, the body of Kirstie Alley, the pout of Gollum, the nose of Barbra Streisand, and the hair of Sinead O’Conner. Steve wasn’t much better. He sported Buster Keaton’s smile, Britney Spear’s hair, Steve Buscemi’s eyes, Don Knotts’ jaw, Chris Farley’s abs, and Jay Leno’s chin.
We didn’t even bother to get an autograph. We stepped out of line, went straight to the Hallmark card shop and bought each other one of those ridiculously mushy cards the size of a sheet of plywood all covered in ribbons and lace and poetry and stuff. As embarrassing as it was, a few good things came out of the whole experience. My wife got a clean bill of health from the ENT doctor, I no longer endanger little old ladies in Toyota Corollas while listening to the morning show, and both of us have learned to cherish the treasure we hold rather than some fictitious fantasy created in our own minds.
Smokerers Anonymous
I am hopelessly addicted to smokering. For years I was deep in denial, pretending that my obsession was just a relaxing activity that felt and tasted good without hurting anyone. Nevertheless, I was recently compelled to face up to the fact that I need help. Bad.
Last week, I started making some phone calls. At length I reached a person whom I will call Nat. He listened to my halting confession and reassured me that he hosted a support group for people just like me. He invited me to the group’s next meeting which was scheduled for the following night. I hung up on him, panicked by my self betrayal. That night, though, as I thrashed in sleepless turmoil, I came to realize that Nat’s support group might be the last barrier between me and insanity.
It was only 3.2 miles to the support group’s undisclosed location, tweaked into 29 circuitous miles on my odometer by the time I finished trying to lose anyone who might recognize me. It didn’t help that I drove past the place four times before I had the courage to actually park my four-wheeler and get off.
I slouched down a set of cracked concrete steps and knocked on a basement door until it was opened by a man silhouetted against the yellow light within. He smelled of smoke, and his eyebrows were missing. Instinctively, I knew what had happened to them–they had been singed off. Wordlessly he stepped back and motioned for me to enter. As he did so, I could see the burn scars on his forefinger knuckle. I felt a twinge of camaraderie. Could it really be that someone else in the world thought oven mitts were for sissies? Hope stirred within me. It had been a long time since someone who knew about my problem had not looked at me as if I were a pervert. With a ragged sigh, I stepped inside.
“Are you Nat?” I asked Absent Eyebrows.
He shook his head. “Bob. Nat’s in there.” He jerked his thumb toward the dull murmur of voices. Panicked, I turned to run, but Bob laid a hand on my shoulder. “Weber,” he said. That single word pierced my heart and I collapsed into his arms, blubbering. For the next few minutes, I couldn’t see very well through my tears, but I heard footsteps and low, reassuring voices. Firm but gentle hands guided me until I felt myself being eased into a chair.
As the blur began to clear I became aware that I was seated in a circle of faces, and that all eyes were on me. A plump, bespectacled gentleman smiled at me.
“I’m Nat. Welcome to Smokerers Anonymous. Why don’t you give us your name and tell us why you’re here.”
“My name is George, and I’m addicted to smokers.” The relief at admitting that out loud to other humans was palpable.
“Hello, George!” chorused the group acceptingly. I almost began to cry again.
Nat explained that no-one was going to condemn me. In fact they were all proud of me for having the courage to be there. I could join in the discussion or not, whatever felt comfortable for me. He asked who would like to start.
Bob put his paw in the air. “I guess you all figured out by the way I smell that I had me a relapse. Over the weekend I went to Wal-Mart and saw me this irresistible little Hibachi. I bought a plastic storage bin to hide it in, which I told my wife was for organizing the garage on Sunday, like she’d been pesterin’ me to do. I couldn’t think of anything but that Hibachi, until my wife left for the hairdresser. Then I drug it out, wrapped me some mesquite chips in a perforated foil packet and smoked me some kabobs. The bad thing is that I can’t make myself feel sorry.”
Nat clucked sympathetically. “I’m so glad you felt safe enough to be honest, Bob. What’s our motto, boys?”
“Just one smoker’s all you need,
Any more would smack of greed.
Though your taste buds crave burnt wood,
Doesn’t mean your fam’ly should!”
“Now what else could Bob have done,” Nat prompted, “when he felt the urge to spend money on another smoker that he didn’t need?”
“Suck on a piece of charcoal,” someone piped up.
“Burn a toothpick on the kitchen range and snort the smoke.”
“Drop a hot coal down the front of his shirt.”
Nat beamed. “Great answers. I see you all have been using your coping tools. Let’s not forget the disastrous results of allowing our addiction to take charge.”
A shriveled up little fellow name tagged Clarence nodded fervently. He was draped in an apron mottled with barbeque sauce stains “Yeah, like what happened to Morton.”
The guy next to me whispered an explanation. “Morton ran out of cottonwood chunks, so he tried smoking a moose brisket with some old pressure treated wood scraps he had laying around. They found the whole family sitting around the table mummified from the toxins in that treated wood. Didn’t even have to embalm them.”
I connected with this group on a visceral level. I felt I could trust them with my marinade drenched secrets. I raised a hand. “I need some help, guys. This thing just has a grip on me, and I don’t know what to do. During the winter months I get to thinking I have it licked, but about the time the Nenana tripod collapses, the desire comes back with a vengeance.”
“That’s good, George. Let it all out,” crooned Nat.
“It all started when I was a little kid in Moose Hole. I was walking by an Athabaskan elder’s smokehouse. His wife was just taking some salmon down from the drying poles. As she stepped out of that smokehouse that day, like a specter materializing from the billows of alder smoke, she smiled at me and held out the succulent amber meat, smoked on the skin. If I had known what I know today, I would have turned and ran until there was no more breath in my lungs. But I didn’t.
“She tore off one of several strips joined at the tail and handed it to me. ‘You like smoke fish? My daughter, he get them in fish wheel, out Tommy Creek. Eeeee, so many! Big one too!’ Tentatively I reached out and touched it. I expected it to be slimy, but it was firm and slightly tacky. It had been deeply scored at one inch intervals, so I pulled off a cube and touched it to my tongue. Oh the bliss! I had never felt such ecstasy! In one instant, all my cares were gone. I sucked that chunk of smoked salmon into my mouth so fast, I nearly bit my finger off. As I snatched the rest of the salmon strip, like a wolf cub, tearing at a gut pile, she cackled. ‘You like! You help me pick berry, I give you more.’
“That was it! I was hooked. I spent hours picking berries and cutting moccasin patterns out of moose hide, just for the chance to get my daily fix of smoked salmon. As time passed, along with the elders, the smokehouse began to fall into disuse. I needed to satiate my craving elsewhere. The stuff in the supermarket cost a neurosurgeon’s years salary per ounce, and wasn’t pure. The dealers had obviously cut it with fillers. It didn’t even taste like salmon. It tasted of pure salt. Nothing I bought could replicate that first experience with alder-smoked, Athabascan-style smokehouse salmon.
“It became clear to me that my only remaining option was to try to smoke my own. That’s when I began my affair with smokers. My first boxy little Luhr-Jensen, wasn’t big enough to smoke a whole salmon, but it cranked out great chicken and shrimp…and burgers to die for. I began to lay awake at night inventing exotic marinades and brines.
“The snare tightened around my neck as I lost myself in the quest to create a unique taste that would thrill the palate. I discovered combinations that didn’t work. Never mix Thai fish sauce with fresh squeezed grapefruit juice and eggnog, for instance. Once I had pushed my sauces past their practical limit, I began experimenting with wood and game combinations.
“Cherry? Good with Dall Sheep. Not recommended for muskrat. Mesquite? Excellent with ptarmigan or moose. Awesome with squirrel. Doesn’t help lemming or lynx. Hickory? Great bold flavor that can even make fall grizzly palatable. Diamond willow? A good caribou cold smoke. Not bad with halibut. Spruce? Tolerable if you don’t mind your meat tasting like turpentine. Birch? A sweet smoke that goes well with snowshoe hare or King crab. Old creosote fencepost? Leaves a distinctively nuanced aftertaste especially great for serving to visiting in-laws and IRS auditors.”
Nat interrupted me. “Yes, yes, but we don’t need so many graphic details. We’re trying to recover here.” I noticed that Bob was drooling all over the front of his shirt, and that Clarence was chewing holes in his apron where the barbecue sauce stains were. “Would you simply share with us when you first realized you had a problem?”
I cleared my throat. “Sorry. My wife first noticed it last spring, when the diverted floodwaters of Jarvis Creek filled up the lower levels of my house. I was delirious with happiness. Because the flood had ruined the compressor motor in our little upright freezer, I now had an excuse to convert it into a smoker. My wife found this weird at the time, but it wasn’t until this week during a trip to Fairbanks that it became obvious even to me.
“What did Lowe’s have on display, but an entire section of grills and smokers? Without thinking I began fondling them and poring over price tags. I couldn’t stop myself! I had a beautiful smoker at home which I had spent months building from my old freezer shell, my shed was full of grills and smokers of all shapes and descriptions, and here I was craving another one. I tell you, guys, I’m beyond hope. Guys? Guys…Hello? Where’d they go?”
The room was deserted. Outside I heard the squealing of tires. I ran up the steps just in time to see Nat and Bob playing crash-up derby in the driveway, trying to beat each other to the street. Nat was leaning out of his window shaking his fist at Bob. “I’ll be at Lowe’s before you’ve cleared Tenderfoot Hill, you lousy so-and-so!”
“In your dreams!” Bob screamed. “I hope all the smokers are gone before you get there, and you have to stand behind me in line watching me pay for the last smoker grill they have in stock.”
I just shook my head, and trudged back down the stairs. At the bottom lay the trampled remains of Clarence’s apron. It smelled of hickory smoke. I sat down on the bottom step and began eating it, blissfully.
Mush!
The Yukon Quest and the Iditarod have consumed my attention lately. Some of my earliest memories revolve around fledgling mushing aspirations. In fact, my mother tells me that my favorite breakfast as an infant was mush. I have never acted on those primeval instincts in a professional capacity, but I have done a lot of dribbling…er…dabbling.
I distinctly remember my first attempt at mushing. It was when I was a seven-year-old tyke living in the State of New York. Back then, my only companion was my beloved poodle, Suzette. As you can suppose, Suzette played a prominent role as a Beta tester in my maiden mush.
Now Suzette wasn’t one of those ankle biting yappy things that smell of perfume and wear ribbons around their necks. She was a very intelligent and faithful friend. She was actually embarrassed to be a poodle, so I didn’t hold it against her. She fulfilled many roles in my imagination drenched childhood—predatory mountain lion, circus elephant, T-rex, St. Bernard with a keg of chocolate milk on its collar, Winnie the Pooh, longhorn steer, packet of airdropped supplies for the French Resistance, etc. The part that will always be seared into my memory, however, was her stint as Balto.
Portville, New York that summer in the early 70s wasn’t exactly the North Slope, so it was necessary for my imagination to work overtime to transform my backyard into blizzard-choked muskeg. Come to think of it, Suzette didn’t look much like a Siberian Husky team, either–but I never was one to let minutia like that get in the way of creative playing.
When my muse breathed inspiration into my heart that afternoon, I knew that the fate of millions rested in my dimpled hands. The hysteria vaccine needed to get from the garage to the swing set, or Captain Hook would gobble up little Red Riding Hood and Gotham City would fall to ravaging hordes of bloodthirsty Apaches.
Only one intrepid soul dared smirk into the bared fangs of that god-forsaken gauntlet of a trail, where the freeze-dried bodies of men and dogs fell, fell, eternally fell between the bottomless blue walls of glacial crevasses, and Frostbite prowled with whetted blade. Only one weather-bitten sourdough had the nerve to harness his team with a sneer on his lip and a gleam in his eye. It was I, but I needed to get it done before Mommy called me in for my p&j sandwich and nap.
I lovingly broke out my Lightning Flyer dogsled. Every musher knows that the best dog harnesses are hand tied from your Dad’s lawnmower pull cord which has been carefully harvested using your Mommy’s favorite German sewing scissors. In a few moments the harness was expertly tied to the handle of my dogsled. Now came the almost sacred moment of communion between a musher and his lead dog—the moment for which each of them was born.
“Here, Suzette! Come here, girl!”
Suzette hung her head and tried to slink behind a burdock bush. It was her way of being humble whenever I invited her star in one of my epic adventures. When I reassured her that she had nothing but honor, prestige and Alpo advertising contracts awaiting her, she demurely allowed me to drag her to the sled. She was eager to have her name inscribed in the doggie hall of fame beside Lassie and Rin-Tin-Tin, but was too classy to show it. For the benefit of any paparazzi or spying fans, she made a convincing show of whining and digging her claws into the ground as, both hands gripping her collar, I escorted her toward fame and glory.
With a few deft loops around the neck of Balto, I had her harnessed. I tied it off with an original and bewilderingly complex knot, conceived in the genius of the moment. Balto’s eyes were accusatory as she resignedly lay down.
“No, Balto! Mush!” I sang out. “The vaccine must be delivered.”
Balto gave a strange chuckle and pawed at the harness around her curly mane, no doubt admiring its fit and peerless design. I climbed into the dogsled and held onto the wooden slatted sideboards, anticipating the pending rush of wind in my face, when Balto lunged into the traces. “Mush!” I cried, “Mush!”
I have since learned that the correct command is “Hike”. This probably explains why Balto was so confused. She tried to crawl back into the sled with me. I guess she thought I was mentioning breakfast. She licked my face, assuming that the “mush” must be smeared where she usually found it.
I was getting frustrated. I pushed Balto out of the sled and disembarked after her. Seizing her harness, I tugged encouragingly. “Come on. Mush!” I pleaded. Balto started to make raspy sounds in her throat, anticipating the thrill of the chase. Jerking the harness out of my grip, she finally began to pull. The only problem was that she was in reverse. She was backing away from the sled, shaking her head and straining against the harness. The raspy noises got louder.
I knew Balto was gifted, and she could probably run for miles backwards, but I thought backing all the way to Nome was tempting fate a little too much. I didn’t fancy spending eternity freeze-dried and falling. Besides, if we reached the grateful and cheering throngs at our destination, I was afraid if Balto was running tail-first, the folks in Nome would think we were escaping with the vaccine instead of arriving with it and would lynch us.
I tried another tack. I ran a few feet ahead of the sled and hunkered down. “Come,” I ordered. Balto turned toward me, attempted to obey, staggered a couple of steps, gurgled and collapsed. The raspy noises were gone. As a matter of fact, she wasn’t making any noise at all. She wasn’t even moving. I shook her. “Suzette?”
What an actress! I hadn’t thought of this plot twist. It was brilliant! The vaccine had frozen and burst, infecting my entire team. Talk about pathos and drama! I followed her cue. Clutching my throat, I staggered around, as if I too had been overcome by the dread hysteria epidemic. Dramatically, I expired, collapsing onto the cold form of my devoted lead dog. In my death throes, my convulsing fingers entertwined themselves in Balto’s harness. I felt the monstrous knot loosen just as I shuddered out my last breath. Even in death we were one—man and dog lying in a frozen embrace as the Arctic wind mercifully hid us beneath a shroud of snow…
Then, for some reason, my faithful lead dog reverted to her lupine heritage. I felt a sting in the seat of my pants as she sunk her fangs into my overalls. She wriggled out from under me so fast that my head smacked the ground. I sat up and rubbed my head. My lower lip began to tremble, and my eyes pooled up with indignant tears.
Suzette’s yap told me in no uncertain terms that she had no intention of going to Nome, or anywhere else for that matter. It was one of those moments of disillusionment that every child must struggle with as the reality of life hits him. I sniffed the air, and it almost seemed that I could smell perfume. Was that a ribbon I saw, beginning to materialize around her neck?
It has been many years now, and Suzette has gone off to sign Alpo contracts in the sky, but when March rolls around, I still feel the mush flowing in my veins. I occasionally find myself gazing off past the clouds and murmuring, “Mush, Balto, Mush!”
Defending the Castle
I’ve always believed that a man’s home is his castle. Now, with the world’s current unstable economic situation, my thoughts have turned increasingly toward home defense. To thwart today’s savvy high tech criminal, one must proactively develop a creative defense plan. I recommend doing that right now, rather than waiting until the unthinkable happens. However, it is important to understand that a modern home defense plan must be a tad more sophisticated than the obsolete redneck strategy of emptying a couple of loads of buckshot into an intruder’s face while your Rottweiler chews on his rear end. The old mindset of keeping a gigantic slavering dog in the house and hanging a loaded scattergun on a couple of nails over the front door is a mindset that is not only crude and outdated, it is also highly illegal most places in this land of the free and home of the brave. In fact, shooting a burglar has probably been classified by Homeland Security as an act of domestic terrorism. Siccing a dog on a scumbag most likely violates several United Nations animal cruelty treaties.
Thus, to avoid the risk of becoming a double victim (first by being the victim of a home invader’s criminal acts, and then of the United States legal system by means of arrest, litigation and/or prosecution), shooting an intruder has become a tedious, ponderous affair; quite unlike the nonchalant gunslinging action you may have seen in the movies. Nowadays, lawyers get rich on things like shotguns and dogs when carelessly deployed by unsophisticated yokels.
I’m not discouraging any of my readers from using a firearm with deadly force, mind you. That is certainly your prerogative…your constitutionally protected right, even. I just don’t trust myself in a dangerous, adrenaline-charged, potentially deadly situation, to remember all of the precautionary legal steps required of today’s gun-packing victim of crime. Such steps seem neither practical nor efficient when I have a crazed meth-head charging toward me brandishing a 14 inch machete or when I find myself staring at the gang tattoos on a set of knuckles that are gripping a .25 auto held sideways in my face.
Nevertheless, for those of you who prefer to use the old lock and load home defense technique, let me lay out a step by step procedure that you might want to consider following when and if you find yourself in a potentially sticky situation. Hopefully, the information contained in this material will keep you from running afoul of the justice system when you find yourself using the toe of your shoe to gingerly poke at a bad guy who is lying on your floor with three dribbling 1” MOA taps to center of mass.
Here’s the scenario. You’re in bed during the wee hours of the morning. Something wakes you up. Groggily, you peer about and to your shock discover that there is a shadowy figure looming over your wife’s side of the bed with an upraised hand in which something glints ominously in the feeble glow from the nightlight. How do you secure your family’s safety and hopefully protect yourself from any unpleasant legal repercussions?
First, Remain calm and assess the situation. A good way to assess the situation is to politely inquire who is there. After all, the shadowy figure could be your dementia-afflicted grandmother-in-law, who has mistaken your bedroom for hers after returning from the bathroom with a glass of water in hand. Even if she lives in Kansas. You know how those dementia afflicted people can wander. If the intruder does not respond, turn the light on to assist in identifying the person.
Once you have gotten a clear visual on the intruder, or if they identify themselves but you do not recognize the name, ask them what they want. Perhaps they are simply a tourist looking for the registration office for the next Denali Park bus tour.
If the intruder responds by verbalizing criminal intent, it is time to evaluate their threat level. Ask them to assure you that they mean no harm to you or your family. Ask them if they would consider going away if you let them have everything of value in your house down to the copper plumbing and the electrical wires in the walls. Do they appear to be armed? If so, do they seem to really, really mean it, or could they be bluffing? Have you done anything that would provoke them into an attack? If so, would an apology be helpful? Does the intruder appear to be a hardened criminal or are they perhaps an at-risk youth who could benefit from a compassionate hug, followed by enrollment into a government perk such as a rehabilitation or education program? Do they appear to be high or drunk? If so, can you determine why they may have chosen to participate in substance abuse? Perhaps they are trying to drown the sorrow of some deep pain. Consider walking them down to the kitchen table and offering them a cup of herbal tea and a sympathetic ear.
If, after assessing the situation and evaluating the threat level, you still feel unsafe, immediately dial 911. Law enforcement response time in Delta Junction on a good day should be no more than 20 minutes or so. Remember that law enforcement officers are the trained professionals and are really the only people qualified to responsibly and safely interact with a criminal. Explain to the dispatcher that you have an intruder. Stay on the telephone with them until they finish asking you any questions that they may have, such as your name, date of birth, social security number, physical address, father’s maiden name, number of family members in the house, whether anyone is hurt or is in the process of being hurt, whether you have a dog or an alarm system, what the intruder is wearing, what he looks like, whether he is armed, if he has accomplices, etc. This will help assure that the law enforcement personnel have sufficient information to collect any appropriate equipment as well as additional personnel necessary to safely de-escalate the situation without exposing said law enforcement officers to undue risk. It also provides them with accurate location information so that they will not have to break down half-a-dozen doors and discharge their tazers at an assortment of your neighbors before they find your address.
Not only will you be reassured by talking to the operator, but you will be able to create a recording of the incident and what is happening. This recording can then be used in court. “He’s right in front of me now. He’s about 5’ 9”. Muscular build. He has me by the throat. Now he is inserting a knife into my abdomen and torso. Repeatedly. It appears to be a lockback folder with a blade approximately five inches long. Okay, now that one felt like it might be partially serrated.” While you have the dispatcher on the line, it would be a good idea to request an ambulance as well. Just to be on the safe side.
Staying on line is especially true if you plan to use some kind of home defense weapon. Inform the dispatcher that you are armed. Police HATE coming onto a property with an armed owner and an intruder, not only because of their chances of getting shot, but also because it requires them to identify their target before firing. That’s an added annoyance that most cops would rather not have to deal with. It’s less stressful for them to be able to blast away at anybody who pops up with a gun without having to worry about the possibility of going on paid leave while internal affairs investigates them.
Meanwhile, it is imperative to alert your family to danger. Yell out the secret code word to alert other family members to proceed directly to the safe room. The code word should be something short, easy to remember, yet unlikely to be used in ordinary conversation. Something such as “Rumplestiltskin” or “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” or perhaps the uncrackably cryptic yet panache ripe “pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis”.
The centrally located safe room should have a solid core door with multiple locks and reinforced walls where you can cower until help arrives. It should have been stocked ahead of time with soft ambient lighting, floor cushions and soothing music. This will help temper the stress of the situation as well as drown out the screams of any family members who failed to make it there in time.
Now politely excuse yourself from the intruder and follow your family toward the safe room. En route, you may retrieve your locked gun case from your locked child-proof gun safe. Proceed with it to the secondary location where you may now retrieve your ammo from its separate locked box, hopefully in a different room than the one in which your gun is stored, in compliance with child safety protocols. Then continue your retreat to the safe room.
Once all family members are accounted for, ensure that all doors and windows in the safe room are barricaded. It is now time to turn your attention to armed defense. Before actually handling your firearm, remove the owner’s manual from its case and read it completely. Next, remove the firearm from its case, being careful to follow all safety precautions outlined in the manual. Remove the trigger lock. Carefully load the firearm per instructions in the owner’s manual. Don appropriately rated shooting glasses. Wear hearing protection and provide hearing protection for all members of your family. Offer to throw some hearing protection out the door to the intruder. Explain that you expect to shortly be discharging a firearm in his direction and that you don’t wish to be liable for any hearing loss he may sustain. Don’t take it personal if he refuses. Not all thugs are safety conscious.
If at any point the intruder attempts to enter the safe room, request that he refrain. Avoid profanity, racial slurs or threats that may provoke him. Instead, deliver concise, clear commands. Communicate such neutral messages as “I have a properly registered firearm and I recognize my right to shoot to defend myself.” Another possible message might be, “My friend, I am preparing to dump a mag of live rounds downrange and you happen to be standing in my line of fire.” Such a non-confrontational tone may decrease the likelihood of having to use deadly force at all. It also decreases your likelihood of being charged with a crime even if you do end up discharging your firearm.
Whatever happens, don’t leave the safe room or let anyone in until law enforcement arrives and shows a badge. Your family is with you. That’s what matters. Stuff can be replaced…except for priceless heirlooms and items of deep sentimental value. But think positively. At least somebody will get some use out of everything you worked so hard for all these years to acquire. Even if the intruder sets your house on fire, stay put. It is better to die a horrible death with your family in your arms, than to live with the knowledge that you presumed to engage in a risky and frowned upon attempt to apprehend a dangerous criminal without proper law enforcement training.
Beyond this point, if the intruder continues move toward you or exhibit threatening behavior, raise your firearm and work the action with an intimidating “shik, shik” sound. Close one eye and peer at him over the sights. Be aware that under the surge of adrenaline your peripheral vision has dropped to near zero. So before you pull the trigger, familiarize yourself with your target’s foreground, background, and what is flanking it. In other words, make sure your little girl isn’t behind the bad guy when you unleash a hail of bullets. Or a propane tank.
Now kill him. Don’t shoot to wound. Even if your defense is 100% successful and you drive a wounded attacker from your home, you have avoided injury or death – but passed it on to the next victim. Wounding an attacker doesn’t guarantee that he can’t still beat the snot out of you. Remember, the probability of a dead home invader jumping up and killing you or your family is precisely 0%. So drop him in his tracks. Otherwise, your prosecuting attorney will argue that if you really felt your life was in danger, you would have shot to stop the threat. If you wound him and he crawls out a window and dies on the front lawn, drag his corpse back inside, unless you want the lawyer to say that you are responsible for his death because he was outside your house and no longer harming anyone when he died. Most importantly, let’s show some consideration for the poor judge. Why, if the intruder lives, the judge will have to listen to two sides of the story. That will waste the judge’s time and confuse him. One last thing: make sure every bullet enters the front of the bad guy and every exit wound is in his back. Otherwise, the dead guy will come back to haunt you in the courtroom.
By the time the SWAT team shows up, you better have unloaded your gun and put it somewhere far away from you. They’ll want you to show them where it is. Comply, but there are only two things that had better come out of your mouth: “I shot out of fear for my life.” and “I wanna speak to my attorney.” If you follow this protocol, it should go a long way toward minimizing your legal liability in an unpleasant situation. Don’t take my word for it, though. Ask your lawyer. Of course, like I said, I personally don’t bother with firearms. Too much red tape. I’ve found that there are plenty of other ways to protect your home. I can’t divulge any details due to security concerns, but let’s just say that you’ll be hard pressed to find any scorpions or tarantulas at the pet store in Fairbanks. I hear that Home Depot has a hard time keeping crazy glue in stock too.
The Versatile and Indispensable Five Gallon Bucket
I’ve always known that the measure of a true Alaskan could be determined by the number of five-gallon buckets he owned. You call yourself an Alaskan? Prove it. Count your buckets. Mind you, I’m not talking about the ones that are still half full. You see, non-Alaskans and cheechakos are often constrained to acquire a product that happens to come packaged in plastic five-gallon buckets. But as soon as they use up all the drywall mud or honey or paint or pickles or whatever else the bucket contained, they readily and heedlessly throw away said five-gallon bucket. I never could understand that mentality. Would you throw away a Fabergé egg after you had removed the trinket from inside it? I think not! Likewise, Alaskans would sooner part with their DEET bug repellant or their bunny boots than to discard a perfectly good plastic bucket.
So once you have completed your personal inventory, you are ready to determine your Alaskan ranking based on a sliding scale ranging from venerable sourdoughood at the top to sheer cheechakoism at the bottom. If you own zero plastic buckets, you don’t even register. You are an Alaskan only in your own self-deluded fantasy. You’re not even a cheechako. You’re either a tourist, or you are temporarily in Alaska for business reasons. On the other hand, if you own thirty or more beautiful buckets, you may indeed be a true sourdough. Do you fall somewhere in between? You’re highly likely to be a genuine Alaskan. I’ll let you calculate the percentages.
However, it must be noted that sourdoughood cannot be accurately calculated by quantity of buckets alone. Some people never throw anything away even if they never use the things they keep. They just accumulate stuff, including buckets, because they’re too lazy to get rid of them. So, if, during your inventory, you discovered thirty plastic five-gallon buckets in your possession but you also found eleven junked ATV’s, three sets of mildewed box spring and mattress sets, a pile of broken pallets, two rusty engine blocks, fourteen trash bags full of dirty pampers, seventy linear feet of slightly used sewer pipe, a rusty 1972 El Camino, an old dentist chair, eight dozen cases of empty beer bottles, a stack of newspapers dating back to 1953 and at least one dead cat carcass, you should disregard the bucket count as a reliable method of calculating your Alaskan sourdoughood. Instead, the results might be useful in calculating something else…like your slob quotient.
Truly, in determining one’s Alaskan status, the way a bucket is utilized becomes fully as important as the quantity of buckets owned. To paraphrase Elizabeth Barrett Browning, a true Alaskan can say about the five-gallon bucket, “How do I use thee? Let me count the ways.” The more creative a bucket application, the higher the probability that its owner is a true Alaskan.
You see, anybody can figure out how to sit on a bucket, or use it as a storage container. And anybody can carry water in a bucket. That’s fairly intuitive. It doesn’t take an Alaskan to pick up on that. Not that Alaskans don’t carry water in buckets. Oh boy! Do we ever! We carry buckets to water our plants and our livestock. Bush Alaskans carry water to drink and for laundry. We carry water in five-gallon buckets to our sluice boxes. We carry water to wash our cars and mop our floors. We carry water in them for cleaning fish and dousing fires. But Michiganders and Arkansans, New Hampshirites and South Dakotans, Arizonans and Oregonians all carry water in five gallon buckets too.
No, the thing that sets the Alaskan five-gallon plastic bucket collector apart from all other people is the brilliant, wacky gift for improvisation that they pour into their bucket applications. There is hardly any walk of life, hobby, sport or vocation, for which an Alaskan cannot find a multitude of bucket uses.
Let’s take sports for example. What Alaskan has not carried a five-gallon bucket full of hockey gear? How many times have pairs of buckets marked the goalposts of an improvised Alaskan football or soccer game? When I was a kid back in Moose Hole, we couldn’t afford a regulation basketball hoop so we cut the bottom out of a five-gallon bucket and wired it to a birch tree. Five-gallon buckets are also required equipment in such uniquely Alaskan games as fish-gut toss, moose-nugget-carry relay racing and glacier-pool-blue-lipped-mega-water-battle.
For usage in construction applications, the five-gallon bucket’s usefulness goes far beyond a tool caddy. I’ve known Alaskans who used inverted buckets for drywall stilts. They simply take a pair of buckets, turn them upside-down, screw a flip flop to each and, presto, they just gained 15 inches in height! The versatile buckets also work great for concrete forms when pouring footer pylons or planting fence or sign posts. Attach a pulley and a rope to scaffolding, tie a bucket to one end of the rope, and you have a simple dumbwaiter for shuttling supplies between the workers and the supervisor, or, alternatively, dropping supplies on the supervisor’s head. I once visited an Alaskan residence which was constructed primarily of stacked sealed five-gallon buckets stuffed with old newspaper insulation.
The agricultural applications of the trusty five-gallon bucket are almost endless. Alaskans can hardly garden without mixing goat-berry tea or fish emulsion or hydrated lime in a…you guessed it…five-gallon bucket! Sealed five-gallon buckets full of water distributed around the perimeter of a greenhouse can provide thermal mass during those chilly late-summer days and help coax a few more reluctant days out of Alaska’s notoriously short growing season. If I had a dollar for every tomato vine or flower arrangement that my wife has planted in a five-gallon bucket, I’d be retired by now. She doesn’t just put dirt in a bucket and plop a seedling in it, though. To her, a bucket isn’t just a bucket. It’s a basic component which when artfully modified with a drill and a jigsaw can be converted into an ingenious masterpiece of horticultural engineering. She comes up with mad scientist contraptions such as the “nested dual bucket sub-irrigated planter” or the “wicking dearthbox bucket stack”. Her next project is something called “aquaponics”. I’m a little bewildered by it, but it seems to involve lettuce and fish somehow. Not dead fish. Live fish. It also involves a bunch of buckets with pvc pipes plumbed into the sides and a grid of large holes cut into the lids. It sure looks impressive. I just hope it results in at least one fish sandwich for me.
Speaking of fish, I honestly can’t think of a single fishing scenario in which a five-gallon bucket doesn’t play a prominent role. Anybody who has ever fly fished for grayling knows you don’t carry grayling home on a stringer. The stringer tends to rip out their soft flesh. Instead, keep them in a five gallon bucket full of creek water. It keeps them alive longer. Ice fishing? What do you sit on? What do you put your fish in? Enough said. Chitina? The five-gallon bucket is indispensible for cleaning and hauling those magnificent Copper River Reds. It’s also critical for sloshing the slime and blood off of the rocks when you’re done fishing so that the mess doesn’t attract a bear to the next hapless dip-netter who uses your spot. Halibut? Where do you keep the bait? What do you use to swab the decks, me hearties? Lake trout fishing? There’s no better boat anchor than a five gallon bucket full of concrete.
On the farm, there is no better chicken waterer or feeder than a five-gallon bucket modified with a shallow pan, some wire, and a few strategically drilled holes. When it’s time to collect the eggs, you can just reach into the nesting boxes made out of horizontal buckets. For those Alaskans who are vermiculturalists, a couple of stacked buckets appropriately perforated makes a better worm bin than most of the fancy schmancy $150.00 units you can buy off of one of those internet dealers.
For survival or camping purposes, a stack of five-gallon buckets can serve the function of a whole room full of appliances. What Alaskan has not used a five gallon bucket for a porta-john? When it’s laundry time, a five-gallon bucket with a hole in the lid, and a toilet plunger handle sticking up through the hole makes an awesome churn style washing machine. Just put in the dirty clothes, add soap and hot water and then plunge the dirt away. Now to dry them, you just remove the lid and the plunger, slide another bucket with a bunch of holes in the bottom into the first bucket on top of the clothes, turn the whole thing upside-down and sit on it. Your wet laundry is drained and the excess water is pressed out of them while you sit there and eat an energy bar. When you feel the need for refreshing, you hang up a bucket with a rubber hose plumbed into the bottom, fill the bucket with hot water and treat yourself to a hot shower. What could be more convenient?
One of the most neglected applications for the humble five-gallon bucket is water transport. Shoot, by the time I was twelve, I had learned that 8-14 sealed buckets lashed together beneath a plywood deck make an awesome lake raft or swimming platform. But we Moose Hole kids didn’t limit our bucket boating to rafts. We launched flotillas of clever bucket ships ranging from outrigger canoes to looming pirate galleons. I clearly remember the kayak that Walrus Fahnestock built entirely out of five-gallon buckets and duck tape. The reason I remember it so clearly is that Walrus nearly drowned before we were able to right his craft and get his head out of the water. I think he needed to work some bugs out of his keel design.
I trust that I’ve provided enough evidence do demonstrate the role that the five-gallon bucket plays in everyday Alaskan life. Personally, I would be devastated if for some reason they were to be declared illegal. I don’t think Alaska would survive. Hopefully the terrorists don’t find out. Five-gallon buckets could become the next high-profile targets. Next time you see a bucket, take time to give it a warm hug and thank it for the role it plays in preserving your Alaskan heritage. If you can’t bring yourself to do that, it’s pretty obvious you’re not a true Alaskan.
Butchering the Tuther Mung
I once had a distant relative, whose exact relationship to me is unclear. His name was Nate Malaprop-Spooner. The best I can figure, Nate was the great uncle of my third-cousin-twice-removed’s brother-in-law’s stepmother’s half sister’s godmother’s stunt double. Nate is remembered around the clan for his genius at butchering the English language in brilliantly creative ways. If there were a Guiness world record category for breaking the most rules of English grammar simultaneously, Nate would definitely be in unchallenged first place.
As a result, the guy sure was funny to listen to. He would pull to the “shudder” of the road to “yell right away” to an “avalanche” on its way to the “horse spittle” with its “Styrene” wailing. He’d go hunting for “eight-boink putts” with his “liver-action rifle.” He liked to “vocation” in “Sasquatch-a-one Candida” or take a “carob bean cruise” to “the Bananas” or “Jamocha” or the “Wittish Breast Indies”. He didn’t always travel to other countries, though. He made a point of being in “Nylons, Lusitania” every “Marly Craw”. He especially liked to frequent the “Rolaid tables” in “Lost Vagueness” because he was looking for a way to become “effluent” without having to perform “menial labor” like a “blue colored worker” for the rest of his life. He had owned a fascinating “monogomy” of pets which included a “bit pull,” an “Irish shutter,” a “laboratory retriever,” an “African gay parrot,” an “inguinal lizard,” a “hamper”, a “slime-ease cat,” and a “Petland shony.
Of course when anyone tried to correct his terminology, he would claim that it was just a “hairball” scheme to “blame the finger” at him and make him a “staffing lock”. When we showed him the proper definition in a dictionary, he asked what we were “incinerating”, protesting that he had never used the term we “reclused” him of. It was just a “pigment” of our imaginations, and we were “barking up a dead horse”. If we recorded him and played his voice back as proof, he considered it a “mute” point because we weren’t exactly “club scouts,” “as white as the dribbled snow” ourselves!
He went through a “phrase” in which he determined to change his “sedimentary” lifestyle. At first he tried running, starting out with “juggling,” and transitioning to the “hindered mitre dash”. He even entered the Boston “mastadon,” but had to “throw in the trowel” dripping with “precipitation” before he had barely gotten started. “Prostate” with “extinction,” he claimed to have developed a “snitch” in his side, which he blamed on not having done his “starching extra sizes” before he started. Somebody suggested that he probably was dehydrated from the heat, but Nate dismissed the suggestion, insisting that “it wasn’t the heat, but the humility” that had “snapped his strength”.
As it became “oblivious” to him that he was making a “skeptical” out of himself, he decided to “shunt” such “carnival-vascular” activities and “consecrate” on something less “vinegerous” like the “vulnerable spurt” of “angeling”. Accordingly, he bought a fishing pole and located a “comfrey” spot under a “popular tree” by a “blabbing” brook where he could “commute” with nature. Later he related that if he had not “expectorated” it first hand, he would never have been able to “phantom” how “relapsing” it could be to listen to the “rumpling” water, the leaves “wrestling” in the wind and the “churds burping” to each other. Before he knew it, his head began to nod and he faded into “a Bolivian”. At that point he “tippled” over and “honked his bed” a “blushing crow” on a “gronite outcrapping,” resulting in a serious “percussion”.
That “dramatic” brain injury marked the end of his fishing career for all “intensive purposes”. Undaunted, he decided to become a professional singer. He started with “Curry Okie” bars and gradually began getting “gags” singing “acalpulco” in night clubs. Actually he did pretty well at that, because everybody thought he was a comedy act. Some of his most popular songs were “A Soy Named Boo,” “Widge over Bubbled Trotters,” “Even Cowgirls Bet the Glues,” “Paint the Sty with Scars,” “Keeled with a Cyst,” “Rake me Home, Country Toads” and “Man Sty, You’re Banned”. One day he saw an ad soliciting folks to audition for what he thought was the “Oprah” show. When he returned from the audition he seemed sullen and traumatized. Nobody ever heard him sing again. Under duress, he reluctantly revealed that the folks at the “Yew Nork Noeopolitan Oprah” had been very “insulating” and tried to get him to try on a “hamlet” with horns on it. It had been the most “humidifying” experience of his life.
After that, poor Nate just kind of drifted for a while. He related later that during those “hardscramble” days he became a professional “oboe”, eating “scripts” out of “dampers” and sleeping on “bark pinches”. Without proper “attrition” he soon began to “shiver” up until he was so “emancipated” you could have knocked him over with a “fender”. Although he looked like “a bone of bags” he “resembled” anyone who tried to “insist” him. He wasn’t about to accept “chastity”. He said the “tuning point” came when a “hopeless” shelter “indicted” him to take “a vintage” of their “faculty”.
While he had been homeless, Nate must have gotten involved in some shady activities, because he became paranoid of law enforcement officers. Whenever he saw them coming he would “make like a tree and split”. If they “stuck up a convolution” with him, he suspected that they were some sort of “underclever defective” or “secret urgent”. He would try to “bleed into the woodwork” or give them the “gold shudder” if possible without acting too “auspicious”. He always took “consolidation” in the fact that there was a “statue of limitations”. We never found out what crime he had committed. Nate “voweled” to take that “misery” to his grave with him and until the day he lay “deader than a hangnail” he never “indulged that inflammation” to anyone.
Although Nate always liked to portray himself as a colorful “caricature”, he never was completely “stratified” with his “loot in life”. I think he tried as many jobs as he had hairs on his head which was probably about fifty or sixty. For a few weeks he sold fire “distinguishers” door to door. He worked for a “constriction” company. He became a professional “tarbender”. He was a dog groomer for a while until he accidentally “animated” the left ear of a “spotted dilation”. The poor creature ran home “whelping” all the way, at which point the “furriest” owners “shooed the cert” off of Nate, effectively forcing his business into “bank rupture”.
Nate was even a nurse’s aide for a while. After reviewing his medical chart entries, however, the hospital staff asked him to leave. He tended to record things like: “The autopsy results were positive. Patient is here complaining about that.” “69-year-old male here for a pregnancy test.” “Pulses are fixed and dilated.” “Patient complained of an obnoxious order coming from a wound on her leg.”
Perhaps his longest lasting job was at a parochial school. There he taught the kids all sorts of wonderful things. “You can lead a horse to manure, but you can’t make him drink.” “The walls of medieval cathedrals were sported by flying buttocks.” “Under the Constitution the people enjoyed the right to keep bare arms.” “Socrates died from an overdose of wedlock.” “A citizen should respect all duly constipated authorities.” “Louis Pasteur discovered a cure for rabbis.” “King Harold mustarded his troops and conquered the Dames at the Bottle of Hastings.” “A proverb is a word used in place of a verb.” “Julius Ceasar’s throat was cut behind his back.” “Henry VIII found walking difficult because he had an abbess on his knee.” “The government of England was a limited mockery.” “The American colonists demanded no taxis without regimentation.” “The Convolution of the United States was adapted to secure domestic hostility.” “Abraham Lincoln became America’s greatest precedent.”
It was amusing to eat at a restaurant with the guy. He ordered things like “Pie Alamo” and “sore cream on the slide”. He demanded his “rake stare” and liked “oral and vigor” on his salad. He always ordered his pizzas with “acrimonies” and he liked his coffee “blank”. Hamburgers were “hum-boogers,” malted milks were “milted malks,” appetizers were “apple teasers,” and french fries were “fresh fires”. We never complained, though because Nate always insisted on “ticking up the pab” and “tripping” the waitress.
I’m ashamed to admit that we tended to tease Nate unmercifully. I fear that our insensitive cruelty hastened his premature death in 1981. You see, in 1975, he abruptly left the country, no doubt searching for a peaceful neighborhood where the residents would not “spiticize his creech”. A couple of years later he surfaced in “Papau Goo Ninny”. There he must have found a gentle accepting people willing to overlook his grammatical peccadillos, because he soon moved into a grass hut in the highlands and became fascinated with collecting historic carved wooden thrones formerly used by cannibal chieftans.
He would store his treasures in the attic of his grass hut. Unfortunately, Nate never bothered to reinforce his bamboo rafters, because in June of 1981, moments after a friend, Bobby Lever had finished helping him lug his most recent heavy mahogany throne upstairs, the whole thing collapsed, crushing Nate to death under several tons of accumulated thrones. Bobby was quite shaken up by his own narrow escape. He kept repeating, “People who live in grass houses shouldn’t stow thrones.” When asked how he felt about losing his friend under such tragic circumstances, Bobby tersely replied, “Better Nate than Lever.”
Chinook Howling 