Lectra-Shave for the Soul

Normally, in these posts I'm accounting for some span of time, either in a coherent story like about Kate giving birth to Eva (which beats even getting married as the best moment of my year...sorry, bengal), or in the last post, with unrelated observations and reflections about where I am, without reference to time. I love telling a good story, and those need beginnings, middles and ends (no matter what is untold before or after). And I also like setting down small impressions too, things big or small which color my thoughts at any given moment during a day, or at several moments across a longer time. Since Alaska is still pretty new to me--I have a few habits now, so I've become very familiar with the road to Wasilla, the gym and the bookstore there, but outside of the general darkness and cold every Alaskan deals with--though it gets colder and a little darker as you go north, obviously--I've seen only a tiny bit of this huge state. But right now, that doesn't really concern me at all.

Kate's and my current circumstances are demanding enough that I'm not at liberty to be a tourist, and hit Anchorage once or twice a week, or browse bookstores or map stores and come away with a bag full of goodies to spend several hours with. We're in a fight for our financial survival. My sister Julie has expressed dismay at how much detail I put in my posts, especially about our economic situation. But I've always thought of myself as a performer and a storyteller, and I'm unashamed of my own story. I won't tell a thing if someone else was involved who might be embarrassed--I try to be very careful about that--but my life is my story, which is now bound up with Kate's and Eva's.

Kate and I talk about our situation every day, and about the decisions we need to make in order to maintain ourselves and our daughter. Little oblivious Eva is a special blessing at times like these. Her needs are simple, and she understands nothing else. Eva's already soaking in from Kate what it means to be alive and feel love: her dawning awareness is feeling and observing her mother's every act and gesture. But she's just a baby, doesn't know there's anything beyond her, and for Kate or me to look at her, is to make us briefly forget everything else and just enjoy her. I don't pretend that even infancy is some uniformly blissful state. She cries and shows plenty of looks of dismay and consternation on her face--even if it's just from the labor of filling her diaper again--that it's plain to see even being a baby is hard enough. But she's small, delicate, helpless and endearing, and that's more than enough to wipe away the challenges her mother and I are facing.

It's possible I shouldn't've bought a home while still in graduate school, and now that somewhat impetuous decision is coming back at me in a vicious way. Declaring bankruptcy has been an occasional topic as we've tried to navigate these partially-employed straits. Perhaps Chapter 13, a managed bankruptcy where we could perhaps keep our home, would be possible. At this point, it's become more likely. It would mean admitting that my word has gone bad in several different circumstances. But if that's to be a certainty regardless, then we might as well pursue a plan to save what we can.

Besides, down the road, even having to admit to future creditors that we went through bankruptcy might help cultivate in me that cheerful kind of directness that can be so persuasive, admitting a failure while stating my accomplishments. An echo from Kipling's lines,

If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same,

stirs in me at the thought. Much like my impression of Bob Ballard, having worked with him for a few years at school. He once spoke almost exactly that thought, and it's the cheerful approach he takes to any meeting or expedition: maybe something wonderful will happen, maybe some ridiculous misfortune will happen, maybe nothing will happen. But here I go, along with anyone who's coming with me. Life is the series of adventures you set for yourself.

So we're coming to terms with some very humiliating and enraging things. I for one, after we talked one night about abandoning the condo, felt a hole in the bottom of my stomach for several days that kept me from feeling very good at all. It coincided with another bad allergic reaction and day-long bout of fatigue I had at the end of my Homer job--my last post came a few hours before I got sick--and was with me the rest of the week. I missed Kate and little Eva, having only a photo of her in her righty layup pose (righty! jeez, girl, we're all lefties in this family, get with it), more intensely than ever. I felt less fellowship than ever with my housemates, decent folks but generally younger than I am, unmarried and of course childless, and without the financial concerns. And I could see that even a local gym membership might be more than our budget can justify right now, to say nothing of nights out. So...I felt on a bit of an island.

(Now, to wrap up an earlier point I introduced...why write about things so embarrassing, so close to the bone? Because I want to. Because I want this blog to be read by friends, family, anyone interested who comes across it, and sees a genuine account of a man and a woman coping with life, each other, raising a family, setting our hopes and working toward them. If my daughter Eva, and any children we might have later, should read this blog in later years, I want it to show her an accurate picture of what her parents' lives were genuinely like when she was young, or not even born yet. Good stories include the difficulties and defeats, so I won't be sparing them here. In later years, I'll want to read how I coped with these things too. Anyhow, back to my other point.)

Slowly coming to terms with the possibility of bankruptcy has calmed my nerves quite a bit. Seeing Alaska grow somewhat snowy, and decidedly chillier, has me thinking just enough of Christmas--at least we already have the tree and decorations, so that won't cost us any extra this year!--and Kate herself getting through a recent difficult family stretch has me feeling, now, better about things.

Most readers of this blog need not be told the news, but I will say it: Duggin died last Sunday. Kate, of course, came to Rhode Island because of her, and we wouldn't have met otherwise. I wasn't at the funeral, but heard about how the family was in the days leading up to her passing, and then after. It was no surprise, much like my own mother's, but made no less of an impact in her daughters' and grandkids' lives. She died as day was breaking, on All Saints' Day, her favorite of the entire year, Kate told me. The stress and anticipation had been rubbing away on everyone's nerves, including Kate's normally imperturbably cheerful mother. (When Kate's mother is stressed out, I know things are rough.)

Kate had been grieving for quite some time now, as her mother and aunts had too, but Kate especially, having lived there until March and done more than anyone in the last year for her grandmother. She felt an especially close bond to this woman whom she loved deeply, and whom she admired for her imperturbable strength (yes, imperturbability seems to run in the family--and I suspect somday Kate will draw similar admiration). But at times like this, Kate's extreme impatience is an amazing restorative. She doesn't like to dwell on things. She doesn't loiter in one emotional place for long. The grief and despondence she felt earlier yielded to the Kate I've known since I met, easy with a smile and able to enjoy the things around her.

Grief is a lifelong condition, of course, but its strength and immediacy diminish with time. And you can grieve before the person is actually dead, missing perhaps the strength of a relationship you shared earlier. This softens but doesn't take away the force of someone dying. So I think part of my better feelings now come from knowing that Kate and Eva are with her mother and her husband Dave...even though Dave insists on watching Fox News with Eva on his chest, and making her listen to it. Because Katie and her mother can help each other, and they can both take solace in Eva. It's a comfort I can't quite describe, knowing that Dave and ma (I call her ma too) have opened their home to Kate while I'm gone...hell, they've even invited her to bring Jasper up too! (And I'd say, absolutely, just remember that if you bring him loose in the car the way he likes to travel, leave him a little litter box somewhere. He'll be sure to use it. He'll likely spend half the trip curled up in your lap...) But I take immense relief from knowing that she's surrounded by family, and they all enjoy each other. There's no better way for her to pass the time while we're apart, in my mind.

So for a number of reasons, I'm feeling much better than I was on Wednesday (when I slept for six hours in a pickup truck riding from Homer to Palmer). And last night MTV showed Kill Bill. Now, it was MTV. So they'd sanitized some parts of the movie almost beyond recognition (her escape from the hospital, for example...and they renamed the truck...Party Wagon?!!? "I'm Buck, and I'm here to...party.") And there were commercials. Ridiculous commercials. Endless commercials, nearly as bad as on AMC (where it took me 3 and a half hours to watch Tora! Tora! Tora! one night in Lafayette. It was worth it, but still...a slightly-over-2-hour movie, stretched to nearly three and a half. Geez). And of course, if I needed reminding that MTV is marketed toward girls between the ages of 12 and 16. Or thereabouts. I don't know how many times I watched that dumb commercial for liquid face soap with "freshness bursts", or whatever the hell they're called. And doesn't everyone want to get paid in layered flavor bubble gum? But not even those commercial breaks could entirely defeat the dramatic movement of one of my very favorite films...if I had to list my top five, they'd be, in no particular order, Citizen Kane, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Kill Bill Vols 1 & 2, and...I'll have to get back to you on the fifth. Blues Brothers is an honorable mention, Elephant (a grotesque but compelling indie film about a Columbine-like incident...well worth watching)...Friends In Good Company, another indie flick about a bunch of old women, would be amongst the contenders. But those are the top four, certainly.

So I forced the house to watch Kill Bill with me, when I realized that the movie had just begun. Nobody else had ever seen it, and nobody even seemed to like Tarantino flicks. Eh, their loss. If you can't deal with graphic violence raised to the level of farce, filled with the foibles of both assailants and victims, scored with a thrilling, far-reaching soundtrack and shot with impeccable artistry, then, your sense of humor needs some improvement, in my opinion. Reservoir Dogs is probably the most brutal of all his films (though I've yet to see Inglourious Basterds), and Kill Bill 1/2 are far sleeker, with Pulp Fiction somewhere in between (though probably closer to Reservoir Dogs).

I drove my housemates away. All except Jason, whom I'd told this was one of the best films ever made. He later went to bed unimpressed, and I think upset with himself that he'd paid attention to me and watched it at all. As I implied earlier...I don't think these people know how to laugh. And none of that mattered anyway. I was having a soul moment.

Kate silently ridicules me for having private grudges against men my age who've been fabulously successful, especially actors. For a long time I've had trouble watching the Olympics, because I'd be consumed with self-loathing that I'd never become an Olympic athlete myself. But specifically, Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben Affleck, and Matt Damon, have always been difficult for me to watch. (Though I'm warming to Damon. I do like those Bourne flicks. And Catch Me If You Can was very clever...I enjoyed the relationship of fugitive and law agent.) I sat, drunk, in a Philadelphia bar in 1998 and watched Damon and Affleck stammer and struggle through their Academy Award acceptance speech for Best Picture for Good Will Hunting, and draw a heartwarming round of applause from the crowd when Affleck bellowed out at the cameraman signaling to them: "Buddy, there is NO WAY we're finishing in one minute."

You couldn't watch that and not feel like you shared just a little bit of their triumph.

And then I reminded myself that I was drunk, alone at a bar, with nothing particular going on in my life. And so the grudge began.

But Tarantino's a little older than I am, enough so that I don't quite feel his age-mate rival. And, more importantly, I didn't really discover him until I was already underway with my own progress toward (yeah, right) looking for shipwrecks in the Mediterranean and Red Sea. (Yes, that's why I'm in Alaska...at least, it's a small part of the explanation.) So I don't feel nearly so threatened by his success. And that's good, because unlike Affleck, Tarantino puts out really good films.

Ridiculously violent films, yes. Violent to the point of obscenity, perhaps. Involving characters none of us would ever, under any circumstances unless we had something hideous to avenge, and maybe not even then, want in our lives. I concede that. But really, really, REALLY good films.

And my favorites are Bill 1 & 2. They're different films, composed as a unit but stylistically separate. As usual Tarantino includes many homages to various cinematic and television styles and themes, by means of scriptwriting, shooting, backlighting, music, and blocking. It's like James Joyce leading his readers through a history of English writing style within a single book, varying his diction systematically as he goes. Tarantino varies his cinematic style as the movie goes. I find the Bride's fight against the Crazy 88 simply spellbinding. Campy and nakedly choreographed at moments, but always self-consciously so; swift and powerful at others. It's a tour de force.

The end credits state that the character of the Blood-Spattered Bride was created by Q&U. Of course that's got to be Quentin (Tarantino) and Uma (Thurman). It leads me to wonder about the genesis of this film...perhaps over martinis at a Hollywood party, as the two shared some of the sillier ideas for characters they'd like to place or act in a film...and after just few minutes, realized they were really on to something, and began working on it. Kate is very impressed, as I am, at how completely Uma fills out that role, in both films. I wholly agree. And I think, vaguely like in Friends In Good Company, it's because, that character, at least her dominant traits, are Uma's. The circumstances are far more extreme, of course (after all, Uma went to college here in the States just like most of us did), but Uma really built that character around things she saw in herself. And Quentin helped build the film around the character...at least, that's how I imagine it. I've heard bits of interviews where Quentin describes the input David Carradine had into the character of Bill, adding the pan pipe, for example, a brilliant touch. With that simple instrument Bill becomes even more mythical, and takes on a shamanistic aura he otherwise wouldn't've had.

And Uma, when she wakes up from her coma, feels her belly and realizes the child is gone, and then cries crazily for several minutes, the green lighting, deep shadows and her moans make her more deathlike than anyone else in the film. (And true to her character as Black Mamba, she quickly realizes where she is, intuits her vulnerability, and acts out a plan. A grisly and effective plan--this is Tarantino, after all.)

I'm not trying to summarize the film here. My point is, Kate and I both are fascinated by the whimiscal horror of it, the style, the drama that the characters sustain even throughout such comic-book circumstances. A very real drama of betrayal, vengeance and retribution plays itself out between Bill and Beatrix Kiddo, eventually involving their daughter BB, and is never lost throughout the campiness and virtual fantasy of the rest of the film. And it fascinates and enchants both my bride and me. (And yes, we're going to do that Kill Bill dance someday...maybe using wooden samurai swords, what do you think, babe? You might have to go a bit blonde to complete the image...guess I'll have to grow my hair a little longer, and put in more of a dash of gray, to pull off Carradine...)

I needed it, frankly. I needed a dose of stylish, well-executed fantasy to bring me out of my brief depression and give me something to be happy about. And later, as I continued to think about the film, to look on Tarantino not as any kind of rival, but as an inspiration...there's no reason I shouldn't be doing work as well-composed and memorable as his. (I'm a geologist and an historian, and he's a filmmaker, but still.) Basically, enjoying that film was my sign to get off my duff.

Thanks, Q&U. I needed that.

Frozen Alaska

I may not be with my wife or daughter, and I may not be earning enough to support us right now, but hey! I can still blog, so let's get to it.

I didn't bring my camera this time around, because I thought it would be too snowy and dark to be useful, and besides, I took like 1500 photos this summer. How many photos of the Chugach and Talkeetna can a guy take?

Well, I forgot about the snow, and the increasing presence of the moon as night itself lengthens, and about the long orange dawns and purple evenings in this slightly moist air. Suffice it to say, I've seen enough full-moon-rising-over-the-snowy-mountains-made-pink-by-sunset scenes to recognize my failure. Alas...of course, the moon and the mountains aren't going anywhere soon, so it's just a matter of whether I'm on had at some later point with a camera to show an image or to the rest of you. But suffice it to say, even in the mid-to-low 30s, or cooler, Alaska's beauty is undiminished.

The survey season in Alaska is, for all intents and purposes, over. As I write this, I'm in an 85-foot boat, the Dream Catcher, steaming back southwest through the Inlet coming from an ADCP (acoustic doppler current profiler) survey near Nikiski, for another tidal energy project--this one potentially to power one of the oil platforms. We dashed out between spates of bad weather, surveyed as long as we could, and are now heading back to dock, as the winds rise and hopefully before they reach gale force. But little jobs like this are very much the exception, and will soon cease altogether in the inlet, as ice will become a much bigger problem than it is now (and the Nikiski area can be entirely iced over during an especially cold winter).

So far, the weather in Palmer and elsewhere has surprised me for its mildness. I'm hearing that, like the summer, this winter onset season has been very warm. Many days it was over 40 when we in the TerraSond house would go to work at 8 AM. Only on three or perhaps four days was there any frost. My insulated bomber jacket and sometimes a wool cap are all I've needed to stay comfortable.

And the shortness of the days is pretty amazing to me. I haven't found myself thirsting for sunlight--though, of course, daylight will keep shrinking until late December, down to about 3 hours--so much as enjoying the dark mornings, and the closeness and solitude they bring to starting the day. (It's also a nice feeling, getting up even at 7:30 and still having the impression that I'm up extremely early and being highly productive.) Darkness is like a soft snowfall or a steady rain outside, a kind of comforter wrapped around the building and covering the windows, cutting off me and the others inside from everything beyond our view. And I love that feeling.

A few weekend mornings, when I go to the gym at 8 instead of to work, when I head to the coffee shop at 9:30 or so, the sun's just starting to rise over the Chugach to the southeast, and the stillness is like pre-dawn of a Sunday morning in the country. I'm awed by the stillness. It brings stillness to me, and at times like now, that's a great thing.

But a few things have really surprised me. First, the dust. I'd heard that Palmer especially, in a flat river valley between the Chugach mountains to the southeast and the the Talkeetna to the north, is subject to very high winds through the pass, coming from the Alaskan interior to the northeast. One day last week, before motoring down to Homer, I was treated to my first glimpse of Palmer in winter's grip. It was below freezing, and the wind was strong enough to push me as I walked. I went to the post office and the sky looked slightly brown, and smelled dry, almost as if something were burning. I turned around to the south and saw this slight orange-brown haze, everywhere. Smoke, I wondered, or dust?

It's dust. I've studied glaciers, and I know that they generate, among other things, a fine powder called rock flour, by abrading bedrock as they travel. Alaska has many glaciers, and has had many more in colder times past, and when the wind grows intense, it picks the dust up and blows it around. When the dust hits the the ground again we call it loess, and in some parts of the state it's 60m thick (it's almost that thick in parts of New England too, though we don't have glaciers any more--the loess is several thousand years old). I'd never seen this aspect of a glacial, or periglacial (to be picky) environment before.

It's like I was in Egypt! The brown dust rises above the height of the mountains, fills the entire valley, and hangs in the air for days. It colors the sun ever so slightly, and you can practically feel it on your eyeballs and face. I've always wanted to go to Egypt, and I hope to work there someday, but for now, this is a decent pre-taste of what it's like with billions of tiny pieces of sediment in the air.

We're heading back to Homer now, a small fishing city on the southwestern tip of the Kenai Peninsula, which is southwest of Anchorage and one of Alaska's most popular hunting and fishing areas. As we drove down Route 1 toward the city, the area's similarity to rural populated Maine was overpowering. A narrow paved road curved through the hills and valleys. Spruce, often showing the effects of high wind, surrounded us, and we passed the occasional town center but more often, isolated homes, usually looking somewhat ramshackle. One or two newer vehicles might be in the driveway, three or four more dead ones might be scattered around the yard, and nearly every house sported a satellite dish.

Homer itself lies at the base of a gigantic bluff, built by hundreds of thousands of years of glacial activity, at the mouth of Kachemak Bay. Most of the city is on the bluff or at its base, but the marina and restaurants are at the end of a 4-mile-long spit of gravel, sand and mud, which sticks straight out from the coastline into the middle of the Bay. I haven't been able to find any specific writing about it, but that spit just has to be a glacial deposit, whether a lateral or and end moraine, or possibly something else.

But the bay location of Homer itself is stupendous. Pacific ocean to the west, into which the sun sinks at night. Kenai Mountains, now mostly covered with snow, to the south, glowing either white, or pale blue, or pink in the dawn and sunset. Massive bluff, mostly sand and gravel, to the north, dotted with houses and buildings all the way up to its top, many hundreds of feet above the water. The flat water and bordering lowlands, hemmed in by such steep verticals to north and south, is not the kind of place we'd find in New England, or many other places at all. The mountain ridge and bluff give the flat water and adjacent lowland a feeling of security and shelter that it wouldn't have if more exposed on a totally flat coast.

And the eagles! They're all over the place here. Bald eagle here, bald eagle there, bald eagles all over the freaking place. I joked on the drive down that eagles are Alaska's version of seagulls, but that's no joke. They kind of are. They're still beautiful and all, but when there are so many, and you see them picking along the shoreline for things to eat, well, it kind of diminishes their grandeur a bit. They're not as common as seagulls elsewhere, of course, as they're not gregarious birds, but they're also not at all the oh-honey-stop-the-car-there's-an-eagle kind of event, either. They're just around. I've heard the story about how Ben Franklin wanted the US official bird to be the turkey, because it's smart, tough and a survivor (why not the crow? They're all that, and even smarter), and disdained the bald eagle because it's a scavenger. Well, we wound up with the bald eagle, and on the temperate coast of Alaska, they might be considered borderline pests.

Alaska is a great place to be an earth scientist. Geology, biology, ocean and weather are inescapable. Their presence is powerful and immediate (anyone who's greeted a moose while walking outside at night--as I have--can attest to the biology part). I might still be heartsick, but Alaska itself can at least partly assuage the regret.