June 13, 2010
There are too many going away parties in Alaska. We attended another one Friday night for friends who are moving to Australia. While we have made many interesting friends in Alaska, a significant number of the friends with whom we have regularly done things have now left. Many of the rest have contemplated moves so none of them would surprise me if they picked up and moved on to another life adventure. We could easily have wound up with very few friends still living nearby. Of course, we are moving on as well. It seems to be a very transient environment, although perhaps we have simply identified most closely up here with people who have a similar transient approach to life.
I am starting to come to grips with my new reality since failing to make it through the State Department hurdles on the first try. I am still OK with it, but I am now recognizing the difficulty in explaining this situation. I think I have explained to people that we would have at least a couple of tries to get in with a limitation of only one try per year, but it is a complicated story to tell when people ask, “what’s new?”. My ego does get in the way a little as it does appear to be a failure, but I don’t completely understand the recruiting process so how can I explain my failure to anyone. It is not a simple quantitative testing process, even though several of the steps do appear to be quantitative processes. I can’t even tell myself what I need to do better on the next try since the process doesn’t provide much specific feedback. My test scores were good. My essays seemed good. My experience and my personality are out of my control, although perhaps I can spin them a little differently to clarify their value. I don’t know why I didn’t get in so I don’t know what to do differently on the next try. To make matters worse, Kris has found anecdotes from people who have made more hurdles the first time than the second time, or made it through the second try with no discernible changes. Clearly any recruiting process has its variability that will produce inconsistent results, but I do wish I had a better answer.
Life has been a blur. Time is going too fast. Our short term goals and plans produce a stress that is reminiscent of work. Our ability to live in the moment has been severely hampered. To a minor extent, working within the vacation plans of our friends has produced a planning and scheduling that adds to the problem. The sale of the condo has been contributed timelines, requirements, and uncertainties. And now our dwindling days in Alaska produces a sense of urgency. None of this contributes to living in the moment. I don’t expect sympathy for our situation, but I can say that achieving nirvana, no matter how good your situation, seems hopeless. Stress results from concerns of the future and plans produce future concerns. I can’t see us going through this phase of life without plans so stress seems inevitable. It can be something as simple as a plan to be in Seward on a certain day or at a certain time. This future plan produces a sequence of events that has to occur in a timely manner and the efforts required to stay on plan are stressful. It has been an odd epiphany, but not exactly a welcome one. It is almost depressing to think that we can’t fully embrace these carefree days of our lives.
Kris and her friends competed in their traditional Eagle River Triathlon last Sunday. I was the usual team photographer. It is becoming a bit of a routine to the point that I even struggled to find new angles for photography. And this year was running behind schedule so I had lots of time to scope things out and contemplate my options. I did enjoy running into several acquaintances at the race. The team completed their race as always, not setting any records in the process, but beating their own previous efforts.
After the race, we headed down to Watson Lake where we managed to get one of the three free campsites. It was a beautiful evening. We built a fire with the firewood we had purchased at Denali and then failed to find an opportunity to use. As the fire wound down, Jim and I decided to head out on the lake with the kayaks to fish. We didn’t find anything larger than our lures, but it was a peaceful sunset out on a beautiful lake. We tried the kayaks again in the morning, but a strong wind had kicked up overnight. Joyce and I paddled upstream from the lake as far as we could, but the water eventually widened out into a swamp. Jim and I tried to explore the outlet, but by that time the wind was so strong that we couldn’t effectively fish and we were even dealing with some waves on the relatively small lake.
Watson Lake provided a chance to try a single night at a location with the trailer. It worked out well. We didn’t even unhook the van since the site was so level that we only used the jack to take a little weight off the van. This made for a quick departure as we left for Homer on Monday. We arrived in Homer and found a nice campsite on the spit. This provided us a great place to live for two nights. It was like living right in town with our portable living quarters.
On Monday evening, we all headed down to the fishing hole to see if we could find a king salmon. We fished for a few hours on the incoming tide, but only saw a few fish roll and jump, and none were caught.
On Tuesday, our friends headed out on a charter boat to fish for kings and halibut. We didn’t go with them since we can’t store much fish in our current life. Instead, we fished a little more in the morning and then hiked around the beach of the spit. We hiked from one end of the spit to the other, effectively walking the full length twice, a total of over nine miles.
That evening, Jim and I went to the end of the spit to try a little shore fishing. We caught the usual variety of fish expected from saltwater. I caught a pollock and a small flounder. Jim caught a couple of sculpin which are scary looking spiny fish that no one seemed to want to touch. I also seemed to have the right lure for snagging starfish as I dragged in about a half dozen of them.
On Wednesday morning, we caught an early water taxi to the other side of Kachemak Bay. We were supposed to be dropped off on a beach near a trailhead, but due to an unusual low tide, the boat ran aground quite a distance from shore. The captain was able to back out, but then ran aground again on some nasty rocks as he looked for a steeper shoreline. With huge tidal swings, it only takes a few minutes on an incoming tide to refloat the boat so the third time, he found a landing on the beach that was close enough.
Our hike was pretty exciting. We started with a dead seal washed up on a recent tide. A juvenile eagle was picking away at the nearly headless critter. I was cautious, expecting a bear to pop over the ridge at any point, pursuing the scent of death. Instead, we found a decent photography opportunity with a juvenile eagle. Our hike departed the beach and passed through a spruce forest that was sprinkled with regular piles of bear scat. We emerged into the scrub of the ancient moraine which took us down to the river. A hand tram provided an opportunity to cross the river, but the amount of effort required to get me across and the empty tram half way back convinced us that we weren’t all going to cross the river. Instead, we returned the tram to retrieve me and everyone else took a halfway trip out and back with all parties assisting in the rope pull.
After playing around at the river, we headed off trail toward the glacier. It was easy to navigate, although in places the vegetation forced us to change direction. We came to the shore of a nice glacial lake with icebergs. The Grewingk Glacier was quite a distance away, but we were given a decent view as we walked the beach of the lake. We returned through a different trail to a more protected shore line for our afternoon taxi return.
We packed up quickly from Homer, dumped the gray water tank, refueled, and headed down the road to Seward. We found a nice campsite with water and electric with a view of Resurrection Bay. We took a late evening hike down to the marina.
On Thursday, we were booked on a small boat for a tour of Kenai Fjords National Park. We had been on a similar tour back in 1999 on the exact same boat. We had a nice tour, but I had a frustrating day of photography. I just couldn’t get the right subjects with the right lighting with the right background with the right lens. I think my photography has improved to the point that I now see the problems with taking pictures from a tour boat. The boat is never close enough, only has a limited probability of approaching a subject with the right lighting, and is trying to provide its customers with a chance to see the animals, not to produce spectacular photographs. In the end, I think I did alright for the conditions, but it was frustrating to have no control on the situations.
We did get to see all the animals expected of such a cruise, humpback whales, orcas, porpoises, otters, seals, sea lions, hundreds of different birds including my favorite puffins, and even some mountain goats. We ate lunch while listening to Aialik Glacier crack and thunder, hoping to see impressive calving. We did see a few ice chunks splash into the water, but it wasn’t the most dramatic show we have seen. The weather was reasonably cooperative with very calm water and a few splashes of sunlight.
That evening, Jim and I decided to try for some Dolly Varden. This time of year, they cruise the shore lines in and around the fresh water streams looking for young salmon heading out to sea. I picked a spot and we began casting. I quickly caught two tiny fish while Jim rigged up. On practically his first cast, Jim landed a 16” Dolly that got our hopes up. We fished for another hour with nothing more than a few small fish. We tried another spot where we caught some more small fish including some juvenile rockfish and a juvenile cod, but no more Dollies. It was still a great night of fishing with sea lions, otters, and some interesting birds visiting us at both fishing spots.
On Friday, we climbed Mount Marathon. This is the mountain that looks over Seward. This is the mountain that hosts the annual 4th of July race to the top and back down. We were curious about the race conditions and we were interested in the view from the top. We started climbing, but quickly ran into a scary problem. A serious cliff section was quite intimidating. I climbed through some dicey ledges and emerged on a safe plateau. Kris decided it was too scary. I had already decided that I wasn’t coming back down this direction. Down is always more difficult than up. Down is generally more dangerous than up. Unfortunately, this put Kris and I apart. She and Jim headed down to scout for a safer route while I waited above, looking for a safer route. Cell phones proved quite useful, giving us a communication tool that allowed Jim to find a better, but still unsatisfactory route up while Kris decided to bail out. Then she realized that she could take the non-race route up so she called to say that she would do that and meet us on our way down. After the initial cliff section, the route up was steep, but not particularly scary. Jim and I plodded along up the hill, above treeline, and into the rocks. Time was working against us and the cold wind was taking the fun out of the climb. With about three hundred feet to go to the summit, I decided that my blistering feet were the straw that broke the camel’s back and I turned back. Other climbers were on their way up so I told Jim to go ahead. Unfortunately, the next climber explained that the route down was different than the route up and I began to question my decision to turn back. The route down was full of loose small gravel that provided a cushioning skiing sensation with each step on the steep terrain. I was able to find some of this loose stuff going down the up route, but when I navigated out to the open slopes of the down route, I was regretting not pushing through to the top. It was a joy to descend with long sliding steps in the soft gravel. We were going quite fast on the way down.
We met up with Kris just below a small snow field. After slipping a little on my feet, and sliding a little more on my hands and feet, I gave up and glissaded down the snow even though I wasn’t wearing waterproof pants. A long stretch of loose gravel led us to more snow with chutes carved by previous glissaders. The chutes even had turns that made it feel like a miniature bobsled course. We slid our way down to a creek which forced us to traverse back to the uphill trail for the last few hundred feet. The experience was more enjoyable than I expected with a tremendously fun downhill and great views to take away the pain of the climb.
We grabbed a quick dinner in town and quickly loaded up the trailer. Kris and I dumped the tanks and headed back to Anchorage. We made it in time to get to our friends’ going away party. We had a good time at the party. Kris and I were both in good party form, going our separate ways and mingling with a mix of people we knew and people we didn’t. We both met some interesting people and we both had fun visiting with friends, even if some of them were leaving town a few months earlier than us.
Our cat is adapting to her new life. She still seems to object to riding in the van with a near constant yowling that she can maintain for at least two hours. Oddly, she seems to love looking out the windows and rotates around from lap to lap, up on the boxes, and up on the dashboard where a flat spot on the passenger side provides her a perch that does not block my view of the road. She has eaten and used the litter box in the van, but she hasn’t tried to drink water and doesn’t seem to be able to sleep. We think she is conflicted between the excitement of the ride and the discomfort of noise and movement. She also hops right into her crate. We can set the crate in the open trailer door and she will crawl right in. She almost seems excited to get going again, even though she vocalizes displeasure. She acts completely at home in the trailer which gives us reassurance that she will survive this new lifestyle.