Fundamental Seriousness

So I'm about halfway through the second book of Livy, and am really starting to grok just how different the early Romans are from the silk-covered brats stumbling out of the vomitorium we're shown in popular images of the Empire.


No, this is the early Rome.

To set the stage - they've just said "enough of this 'king' horsepuckey," kicked out their king, and set up a Republic.

Said king goes and shacks up with some of the city's old enemies, and eventually said old enemies and their king come knocking at the Romans' door to make them proper royal subjects again. Bad example for the neighborhood, you see.

Now, the royals get spanked trying to take the city, but are too powerful to be driven off entirely. Stalemate. So they settle in for a siege, hostages are taken, and negotiations ensue.

Enter The Kid.

Kid goes to the city fathers and says "I'm just telling you this now so you don't kill me for deserting, but I'm about to leave the city. I'm going down there to kick butt. Bye!"

Kid walks right into the royals' camp, pulls out a sword, and stabs the best dressed guy there.

....crap.

Turns out that wasn't the enemy king.
That was just some well-dressed flunky.




So the kid gets himself captured, and is brought up in front of the real king.

Kid tells the king - "oh, it's not the armies you have worry about. You're a dead man."

King says he'll have the Kid killed if he doesn't spit out the plot.
Painful-like. Burned alive in the fire. 

Fire?

Gaius Mucius Scaevola

Kid says "F-U",  and sticks his hand in the fire himself.


... and leaves it there.



... while he's staring down the king.



Eventually the king jumps out of his seat, and has the Kid pulled away from the flames.

Impressed with his bravery, lets him go free, noble sacrifice, yadda yadda.



Kid says "Well. Now that we've proven you can't scare me, I'll tell you what you wanted to know. I'm the first of three hundred. We're coming for you. Personally. One at a time until you're dead. You won't know where. You won't know when. And every one of them is just as determined as I am."




...let's just say the negotiations went a wee bit better after that.







And that ethic, my dear friends and neighbors, is why whereever you go in this wide world today, two and a half thousand years later -  you will still find some legacy of that little band of outcasts in the Italian countryside. 


"What we do in life..."

Practice

So I ran into a fellow student of my fiddle teacher at lunch today, and we got to swappin' stories about playing some of the harder upper-position tunes. He said his "technique practice" tune was Sally Goodin, and repeated the instructions he was given - "always play it every day."

You skip one day, he says, you can tell.

You skip a couple of days - your friends can tell.

He didn't say what happened after that, but it didn't sound good. :)

Alaskan evening, take II

Good weekend. :)

Friday I got home early enough to do a woodswalk before it got too late. I brought along the Little Red Book which I've been picking through on and off this weekend - the first volume of Livy's history of Rome. I've just wrapped up the pre-Republic monarchic period - it's odd to think of Rome as young frontiering culture, all full of boisterous excitement and energy, but it was. A curious time.


It's also not hard to see where our Founders got the notion that it was virtue and the nobility of character that made a people strong.

In one of the lectures I've listened to lately, Professor Noble describes a Scholastic/Humanist era writer*, who had hoped that a people steeped in the deeds of the great characters of antiquity would come to emulate them.

I can't help but think he was right. Looking at our Founders and their writings, the influence is striking.

Defeat a monarchy, build a Republic... one rat maze of rewards and punishments modeled on the older - given the constancy of human nature, should it a surprise we face so many of the same problems?

-----------

Saturday we finished that outdoor oven - or at least got it closed up. We dragged in one of the guys from another group on the field, and the four of us squished mud and straw for hours. Once again - the work is in preparing the parts, not in the assmbly. Lesson learned  - Build the oven entrance first. Trying to adapt to the various courses of brick after the fact is a pain in the butt. It still needs the insulating layer of mud over the top, but the base of it's done:

The conversation was likewise awesome - more Hippocrates and Galen and Aurelius and and and..  I so need to find a Classics professor to chat with so this swimming mass of lectures and reading can come into some kind of order.

-----------

Sunday, while doing housework and doing some sewing (more on that soon), I let some of Prarie Wolf's videos play in the background. Particularly "Naked into the Wilderness" and "Primitive Shelters." Major lessons learned or reinforced:

• Teamwork, teamwork, teamwork. A small band of folks that can get on well together makes everything easier. Loup talked about this not long ago. The friends you have make a world of difference.
  
  Yeah, I feel pretty lucky on that front, by the way. :)
  
• How to open up a fresh spring in a swampy area,so as to get fresh water. I so need to find a spot to try this up here soon. Also, I can't help but wonder how many of those mystic wells in old Britain were improved by some Neolithic (or earlier!) hand in a time now past all memory.
  
• After a heavy rain, all is not lost on the fire front. Crack open a larger piece of wood to get to a part that may not have been soaked through.
  
• Thatch roofs will let smoke out through the thatching, though it holds it up a bit. A high roof lets that smoke collect well above head height, so it doesn't bother anyone in the home. All of a sudden those high-roofed old Irish cottages make sense - the pattern must predate chimneys and hearths, I'm thinking.

About dinner time, Miss D comes rolling up with SWAT Guy (is this town cool or what?) - and after chatting a bit we go out for dinner. I've et like hardly a thing all day, so it's hamburger time.

SO noms.

On a whim we go to check on that Devil's Club we saw on our last outing. Most of it looks to have been picked over, but we got a few pieces, along with some spruce tips for tea. Also a chunk of that horse-hoof looking tree fungus to try out as tinder. Thanks Loup!

We also saw those fiddleheads were starting to grow tall. It's always cool to have a regular spot to come back to over and over, and watch how it changes through the weeks. Lots of moose-munched browse this time!

Oh yeah, the Devil's Club? It's going into chocolate. :)








======================
* I fear I forget his name, I'll update this post when I come across it again

Edit - found it!!

Guarino da Verona

"..Guarino had a kind of a deep faith in the idea that if people read and read and read again Classical literature they would almost as if by habit emulate the values they found there. It's as if this literature and the values that permeated it would permeate the character and quality of individual people They would become like the people about whom they read... "
Disc 21, Track 10.
Prof. Thomas Noble, The Foundations of Western Civilization

I can't recommend Professor Noble's "Foundations of Western Civ" class highly enough. He is a superb communicator and really brings the long legacy to life.

City lights

The water is warm on our hands.

"I've done this before," she laughs.

I can imagine. The chore of mixing clay from the inlet with straw into a squishy muddy daub would have been torture in cold water, especially as the Alaska evening drew on. There are three of us working in the evening light, preparing a brick oven for her wood-fired baking demonstration coming up. It's some time after nine, and the sky is still bright. A beautiful soft blue, with a few clouds streaked across the northern sky.

We're in town proper still.. not the center of town, but a commercial district nonetheless. However, someone had seen a young bear sniffing about the camp at one point during the week.And where kiddo is, momma might not be far behind.

Anchorage is a funny place.

We live alongside each other, the city and the wild. Usually without more incident than a moose darting across the traffic corridors.

Usually.

Our companion is wearing a pistol.


These are good companions - the work goes swiftly as the conversation meanders from local gossip to medieval surgery.Yes, people were just as gadget happy six hundred years ago. No, you wouldn't have wanted to be on the receiving end of those gadgets. (ouch!)


By midnight, we've mixed a good batch of daub and gotten the first few courses laid. There will be time enough to finish it soon.

The bread is gonna be extra good this year I think.

Cultural marker

On the one hand, I'm a little surprised that at the coffee place w/Paul last Saturday, for the first time ever that I can recall, amongst all the generally-leftish flyers and posters and books and newsletters one expects at a coffee shop, there was a little twelve-page newsletter entirely based on Randian Objectism.

Hunh.
Sign of the times I guess.


.....though I'd probably feel better about that if it didn't have an ad for a book on how to run one's love life "inspired by the ideas of Ayn Rand."

Fiddles of the Forest

So Miss D is back in town to polish up her baby and take it home.

In the mean time, her friends up here get to waylay her for company, and tonight after work - Goat Coffee! As we're sitting and chatting, she up and says "I have a present for you."

Present?! *hop hop*

And out of her awesomely cool canvas Cessna airplane bag, she pulls a plastic grocery bag of...

little...curled...up..plant....things.

"Fiddle heads!" she says. "Good eating!"


And so the conversation turns to foraging for wild foods.


Now here is where I stop for a moment to explain one of the reasons I love Miss D so very much. She is almost always up for a neat adventure.



"Cool! Let's go do it now!"


"Well it is still gonna be light for hours...."




A bit of route planning, and soon enough we're tromping along the moose paths through Undisclosed Location.

"So start by looking for this," she says, "and track it back to its source, and you'll see..."


The lesson goes on bit by bit, some piece of identification advice or herbalism lore intermixed with gabbing about airplanes and flying weather and sweethearts and gossip and whatallelse.

The human mind is an interesting thing. At first I could look out over the tangle of green and brown, not seeing a thing and knowing I must be looking right past the little things. Within an hour or so of hunting and chatting, your eyes start being drawn to where you just know they'll be. This curve of the land, that stump, in the sun at such and such a way.... and presto! There they were!

Neat!

No wonder she finds this fun. :)

Eventually the day starts to wear on - though it doesn't look like home time yet, we know it's starting to get late. Time for home!

I'd been planning on saving our little catch, but by the time I get back I realize I actually am getting kind of hungry, so - no time like the present!

Upend the bag, and go to town.

Oh - in case you're wondering why they're called fiddle heads -

I quickly see what Miss D was talking about - there is a sweet spot in their development. Too young and the "paper" doesn't easily rub off the stalk. Too old and...well, we didn't get any of those, but she says they're kinda nasty.

Anyhow - preparation.

The first part was getting the "paper" off. Miss D said the best way was to rinse them and just rub them clean - I ended up just floating the mess of fiddleheads in a pot and cleaning them that way. 

Once that was done, I gave them a quick boil, and stir-fried them up with a tomato in the last of my sesame oil.

I like!

They definately taste.... wilder than green beans. But good.

Thanks for the trip Miss D!

Now... what's out there next? :)

Givin' the Yankees their due

I know I've pushed Albion's Seed before, but I'm doing it again. It remains the singularly most comprehensive yet digestible book I've yet come across for puzzling out what made us who we are.


So, apropros of nothing, here's another little distinction that came to mind of late.


See, the founding lights of the New England colonies back once upon a time were the religious nutjobs that wouldn't shut up - a goodly number of them also being also the "yuppies" of their day. Craftsmen and professionals, sometimes quite well educated - but of no great means or estate.

Contrariwise, the grand folks in the Chesapeake and points south tended to be of the noble caste - younger sons that wouldn't inherit the family estate and so forth. They uprooted for America so as to continue the grand life of nobility on fresh soil.

So ... yeah. It's a gross generalization, but broadly speaking the religious nutjob rabidly dour Puritan Roundheads went north and the Royalist Cavaliers went south. The latter even made a point of importing people from Africa so as to have the requisite number of forelock tuggers and ego polishers so as to befit their proper station.*


Fast forward a century or two, and amongst the other...um.... highlights of the southern aristocratic class comes this pleasant distinction from their northern neighbors - the entitlement of nobility.

The diaries and commonplace books of Anglo-American gentlemen often recorded a complaisant and even jocular attitude toward rape that differed very much from prevailing mores in Puritan New England. The founders of New England made rape a hanging crime. In the courts of the Chesapeake colonies, it was sometimes punished less severely that petty theft..."
 Albion's Seed, p. 304

In that odd time between the Founding and the Civil War, deTouqueville wrote his meditations on the comparative natures of an aristocracy as opposed to democracy. In that era, the unquestioned superiority of the one over the other was hardly the received wisdom it had become in our own era. The defenders of the former - with some justification, it must be said - maintained that an aristocracy allowed the cultivation and full flourishing of the higher arts in a way democracy did not. It allowed the grooming of people to handle the important affairs of the body politic from birth - a caste dedicated to the mind. It allowed the best to serve for the good of all.

At least, that was the idea.

Those dour Calvinists up yonder tended to be a bit less harder to convince that man's nature was so easily groomed into paternalistic love - and harder still to restrain from its base nature, given the opportunity to treat human beings as chattel.

They held I think that there is nothing quite so perverting to the human soul, so appealing to our worst natures, so easily setting us up to consume the lives of others and cripple ourselves -  as to be one of the Only Ones.



Of course, a New Englander would probably put all that much more succintly. Something like..oh....

.... Rope!



;)




















=============
*That's right - while he may have been stretching the question by laying the mess at George's feet, ol' TJ wasn't entirely offbase blaming the crown when he tried to slip that little anti-slavery charge into the DoI. Fischer also mentions that in the early days the enslavers made a decent effort to teach the enslavees how to act like properly subservient English peasants, down to clothes and speech patterns.

*yawn*

.. back in after dozing a few hours outside.

I'd done a couple hours of fiddle practice, was terribly tired, and figured "nothing like being about ready to drop off anyway to make the night comfy" - so I picked up my blankie and a piece of canvas and trotted out to the back yard.

So far... just flopping outside with nothing more than that is tolerably comfy, even up here. But I'm seeing why bedmaking - and timing - is so important. Mostly spring blooms triggering a bit of asthma, along with a hard spot of ground making it hard to breathe. So next time, bring medicine. And maybe gather a few boughs to soften the spot.

Still... not terrible. Slept a couple hours anyhow. I'll work up to making it to morning some not-work-night soon, wussy ol' me. :)

After a nice 2AM bath, I poked through Aurelius' Meditations some more - it makes a wonderful bathroom book,   being just little bits of ol' man HardKnocks giving you a sentence or two at a time.

What's most curious from a vantage point on the far side of almost two thousand years of Christendom from a pagan Roman is how many much of the... I want to say "zeitgeist" of what became Christian thought was very much in the cultural water already. Forbearance, forgiveness... all those Sunday School virtues - sometimes expressed in nearly the same language - coming from a man who did his share of supressing the early Church is worth reading for a dose of humility.

I don't expect to be jumping on the Sol Invictus bandwagon anytime soon, but I'll not pretend the ground wasn't well watered by the time Jerusalem arrived in Rome.


On the other hand, there is that most striking of differences - there is no promise of a Happily Ever After. The term "stoic" is well deserved. Paraphrasing from tonight's bit  -

"Hey, why complain? God made you strong enough to handle whatever you have to bear. And if He didn't, well... it won't be a problem after it kills you, now will it?"

whoof. They made 'em tough in those days.


*yawn*

time for the comfy bed. :)

Memory lane.

It's the couple blocks in between that's odd.

My little cottage is filled with books and instruments and quaint little toys - not far away, a little patch of forest on the edge of town stands calm and inviting. And in between -  a gas station, a restaurant -  kids dressed in what looks to my eye like SoCal gangland chic. Side by side, we all live in different worlds. What a time and place this is.

The calm comes back as I duck into the trees, abandoning the paths for the little game trails. There's not much undergrowth, so the walking's easy.

Note to self - look up what kind of mushroom that is on the trees, they are all over...


A friend of mine has excitedly called to tell me of her neighbor in the woodlands, offering to rent a plot there for... well frankly an incredibly low rent. It would mean digging in and going primitive for a season, but I could do that, I think. It wouldn't be my first choice for my next step into the future, but it is an idea with its own charm, and she'd make a good neighbor.

"Two roads diverged in a yellow wood..."

Is it true that every possible outcome exists somewhere?

That in some distant whispered corner of reality I'm heaving a tired kiddo onto my hip,  in another I'm some long forgotten traffic fatality - and here in the middle, alone in the woods, I'm passing by a stand of subarctic conifer? These trees here would make nice lodgepoles...


"... as way leads on to way."  

I come upon a poor birch, viciously girdled, and look up - I'm a little surprised to see it coming into bud right alongside its neighbors. Good, I think.. not so deep... still alive.

I continue my walk through the little stretch of forest, and find several more likewise cut - a girdle a foot or two high, and a long vertical gash. Someone collecting the sap for syrup, I assume.


Birch syrup.. milk, and fresh-fallen powder... the best snow ice cream you'll ever have. 

But the trees look savaged.

...Everything costs.






I can't find my little evergreen bough nest of last week, but do come across the remains of an old fire. This year's already? It doesn't look like it's spent a season under the snow - but the summer's encampment of human cast-offs hasn't moved in yet. Curious.

Moving on, I shift the weight of my bedroll on my shoulder. I still don't intend to stay here myself, but it's a nice easy walk to get used to the weight and feel for what works. My meal bag rides alongside a leather pouch strapped over one shoulder, and my bedroll rides over the other. It's comfortable enough, but I feel rather garish, my breasts framed between the two crossed straps. At least I've my shawl over it, I find myself thinking .. and maybe Loup was right about a knapsack. The mental catalog of evaluations goes on for a bit..


..I need to replace that buckle on my pouch strap with a lace, or just sew it. I don't think I'll be adjusting it, and there's no reason leaving something there to gall me or wear the leather , and ... 

Ah! A place to stop.

I settle in against a little rise in the earth. After sitting a while, I pull out my old wooden recorder. It was a gift ages ago from my grandmother.. once upon a time you could read "Made in West Germany" right above the thumbhole, but that wore away years ago. I treasured it in my "all things medieval and fantasy" phase once upon a time. The SCA romance had faded before I even left my middle school years, and my grandmother herself has since passed on - but that recorder has been a constant companion whereever I've moved. In hard times especially, it's always been a comfort.

For a moment, I was back in the morning mists by the lake at college, off near the patch of woods I called home in those distant years. I was entranced with R Carlos Nakai at the time, as I remember -  and not being able to afford a real native flute to play with, I just learned to mimic the sound with what I had.

... it works much better than you'd think.


Maybe I should make a little case for this, I think. It's nice to have with me.

Ah! The mosquitoes have woken up. Our state bird come out to play - Ouch!

I wasn't much in a reading mood anyhow, so I start to pick up for home. I pass another little abandoned firepit on my way back out - this one frightfully amateurish. Amazing how even a short season of fireside cooking makes such things stand out. Airplanes and cookpots, I've learned so much here.

Ahead, I see the light of the world outside.



I emerge from the canopy, and remember another exit from another wall of trees - years ago and hundreds of miles away.  I was steps behind my first teacher of the old ways, wandering the north Idaho woods. Sometimes he let me take respite in those hills with just his sweet ladydog for company and a called warning to look out for bears. This time he was leading the way himself, his old flintlock riding easy in his hand.

Across the little clearing, my dear hippy friend looked up. She'd been waiting for us to get back, resting near the house. I remember her describing us like a scene from film, shadowy figures breaking from the cover of trees.

Is that always what it looks like? A normal homecoming shaped into something archetypal, just by virtue of the framing? Or are some moments just... special that way?



It's been a long time since those Idaho woods. Longer still since that Southern lake.


Lots of faces between then and now. Lots of friends made, lots of country seen, lots learned. Laughter and tears.

You play gypsy enough in one lifetime, and you get to where you can hear the wind when it calls. Cool on your face, like a promised rain moving in.

I can't say as when. Or where.
Too many roads in this little wood to say for certain sure.

But those little leaves are starting to flutter.

Lay me down

Mark Thompson at Bloggin fae the 'Burn just put up a post on Settle Beds. And I knew I'd seen one before....

Last summer my father and I had the chance to visit the Frontier Culture Museum in Staunton Virgina, where they have not only restored American cabins, but bits of our respective heritage countries shipped over as well!

As homey as the 1820's farmhouse was, I have to admit falling in love with the Ulster farm. It was shipped over here, reassembled, and fitted out the way it was once upon a time - to include the chickens!


(Don't worry too much guys - I think you have one of our old houses to. Lordy, the 30th c. archeologists are going to have fits!)


So anyhow - Settle Beds. Really neat little things - sort of the hide-away guest beds of once upon a time, as our guides explained. We didn't get a chance to see the one they had open though, like the one Mark found:

image from Mark's site - thank you!

hunh... neat!
.. though now I'm wondering if they were used as playpens as well. It seems the perfect place to set a wee bairn l'il rugrat or two in to keep out of trouble while you're working at the hearth. Mark, any idea?


Now that wasn't the only bed of course - there was a another set up right by the hearth - I'm afraid I can't recall if it was meant for granny or mom and dad -

Likewise, in the back room by the loom was another bed - I want to say they figured for an elder son or hired hand. All of these beds look to be the standard frame and rope construction that goes back ages.






Someone, of course, will always find the best place in the house:

Food Quiver, Take II

So after sitting with my last go round making a victuals carrying pouch, I decided I'd entirely missed the point. It was just way too big. Don't get me wrong, it's still something I'd be quite happy to toss in with the other goodies on a trip to Valdez as a "just in case" thing, but for a quick walk of a day or so it started to seem overkill.

So back to the original idea - a long pouch about 4x14 or so, with a strap on either end. Mr Baker spends some time on the construction on his Longhunter Series (vol III) [buy][rent], and I followed a similar idea, albeit a little more "seamstressy" what with a proper lining and cleaner stitching.


First, a simple size comparison:


Top is the new bag, bottom the abbreviated "snap sack," mostly filled at the moment with dried peas and rice. Both are made from rough natural linen shells, with a lighter linen pillow ticking lining, flat felled together. (Note - start sewing at the bottom, and do the flat fell seam as you move up, otherwise you'll never have room to work way down in the bottom once the first backstitch is done to the rim. No, don't ask how I know this. :p)


For the new bag, I used some strips of leather I had left over from a previous project, treated simply with that same neatsfoot oil and beeswax mix. I'm really starting to like that approach!

The tail end I finished more or less as Mr. Baker did, albeit with a bit more quilting to tidy it up, and since the leather was comparatively thin a second piece "sandwiching" the fabric tail. I imagine back in the day if someone had made something similar they'd have used an old piece of bridle or rein or other harness-weight leather, but I used what I had, and honestly rather like the lighter weight.

Presently it just ties around the waist (or wherever). Eventually I might find a little buckle for it, but for now it works just fine as is. As I mentioned though, with a blanket roll tossed over the shoulder it tends to be forced down,so I think next time out I'll wear it cross-ways. 



Mr. Baker didn't go into how he secured the top so as to prevent its pulling out under use, but this is how I tackled the problem - I tacked a folded-up pad of linen inside the mouth of the pouch, and the stitches holding the strap on go all the way though it - effectively through five layers of fabric (the outer body, the liner, and the rolled under edges of the pad.)


You'll also see a folded up linen napkin down in there. That's partially to serve as a bit of padding to make sure the corn meal don't start running out the edges once it's all tied up, but it's also nice to have in its own right. I might one day need to find a red and white checked kerchief instead, so I can have a proper tablecloth. :)



On the back, I left a channel in my stitching to run a leather tie through - this just ties around the mouth of the bag a few times to keep everything tied up. If there's a failure point, this is it - once this weight of leather gets that thin it can snap. I prolly should at least have a spare tie, or just braid a cord of some kind. The other bag uses linen "apron string" ties, which while not as pretty looking are probably sturdier.

Tucked in under that folded up kerchief linen is a small wooden spoon, just a few inches long so as to not be a bother* - you don't even notice it when everything is packed up. The bag is mostly full of polenta yaller grits. Since of late that's my normal breakfast, it's fair homey. Not to mention if I'm lazy about getting to the grocery store, having several days of breakfast hanging decoratively on the wall is nice to have.

I'm thinking the next step is to try drying out some cheese to stir into the mix, along with some salt and such. Something that will melt into a bit of fat when it's boiled, but not be prone to spoilage if it sits for a while. It wouldn't be quite the same thing as grits dripping with fresh butter, salt, and pepper, but it'd help**

Oh - did I say several days of breakfasts? Funny thing, yes - for such a little bag, it holds a surprising amount of victuals:

#include Williamsburg tavern joke.  ;)



Oh, and fair warning- this is nice and rustic and old-timey, but farby as all heck. Use with discretion, and only if you don't mind the proper folk pointing and laughing. Still it seems fun to play with a bit and see how it works. :p











=====================
* Presently just a whitewood one from a sutler house. One of these days I need to find a friend to make me one from fruitwood I think. Pretties are good, but pretties made by friends are better. It's like having company whereever you go!


** I hear tell some heathens take sugar in their grits. That's an abomination unto the Lord, I'm telling you. It's in the King James somewhere. Really.

Backyard ramble

In case a didn't mention it, the six months of "outside is painfully cold" tend to make at least those of us transplants awful stir crazy come spring. I'd already been out a bit this morning, but I was itching to be outside a bit before dinner. On a whim I picked up my blanket roll, leather satchel, and meal bag before heading out the door. I'm still a month or so out from my first real overnight with old-timey stuff, but I thought I'd at least see how everything carried while I was close to home before actually trying it somewhere it mattered.

Woobie was surprisingly comfy, settling into the curve of my lower back, all soft and fuzzy. Everything else was okay, but the meal bag tied bumroll-style around my hips was getting shoved down by the blanket and satchel. That's gonna take some adjustment I think.

The walk itself was kinda neat - normally on evening walks I'll stick to the regular trails, but this time I just cut into the woods themselves to see what was what. It was a good time of year for it - the weather's warmed up enough to be cool but comfortable, and yet the place hadn't yet filled up with mosquitos or the now-regular seasonal homeless camp. Ugh.

Anyhow, a couple game trails meander through the woods, so I was mostly just exploring those. I saw a bit of fresh moose poop, and - oddly enough - in a couple spots, dead center of the trail - a shiny new 1" hex nut. Weird, hunh? I figure maybe a raven though "ooh shiny!" and stole them, but you never know. Maybe the robots were playing Hansel and Gretel after all. ;)

I didn't intend to spend the night, but wanted to sharpen my eye for places that would be good for a stay. The birch and evergreen are all too narrow around here for a fallen tree to make a good windbreak, but every now and again you'll come across a nice rise in the earth. Or - as luck would have it - I came across a pile of pine boughs left over from trail clearing the city had done.

Neat!

It wasn't a place I'd spend the night it (city park and strangers and all after all) -  but it was a dandy place to lay out my shawl and settle in with a book for a while. I'm leaning back against the bedroll, looking around at the trees and am starting to think about heading back when .... God I love the early 21st century ... in the middle of all these Alaska woods my telephone rings.

The next thing I know I'm cuddled up in my woobie, laying on the pine boughs - lazily watching tree tops sway back and forth in the evening breeze. There's a brief spit of not-quite-rain, and I cuddle in deeper. The birds have settled in for the night, and a single moth flutters about overhead.

What a world - when you can be settled into wild space, surrounded somewhere in the dusky gloom by moose and whatallelse - all in the nominal borders of a city, and having a conversation with a friend hundreds of miles away.

What a curious juncture of time we find ourselves in.



Eventually we say our goodbyes, and I gather myself for the walk back through the soft gloom to a late dinner. The blanket roll nestles against my hip again as I find the trail back home.



These woods are starting to feel different, I found myself thinking. I don't know whether it was the comfortable bough bed, the pleasant conversation, or if just sticking to the very basics just forces you to watch out for those homey spots along the way, but for whatever reason, it felt surprisingly like ..well... home. It was nice. A good evening.


.... of course, now it's time for a bit of hot stir fry and a bath. I don't feel like trading in a proper home yet. :p

Anchorage Ramblings

Pretty pleasant day all things considered. Friends were off on their own errands happy and mournful*, so it was a day on my lonesome. One I really needed, I think.

This last couple weeks have had Anchorageites out in full force, now that it's finally blue skies and outside weather. One of the curious juxtapositions in town you'll find in town is that our one surviving big chain bookstore is right next to a gym. Makes for a fun combination.

Anyhow, driving into town proper for coffee afternoon I saw a tent up in their parking lot, along with a couple Humvees and a big inflatable National Guard dog. "Hrm, this should be interesting," I think, deciding on a whim to stop in and see what the fuss is.

Turns out there was a contest the gym is putting on. Some of their guys are heaving weighted kegs to a plywood shelf in a contest of strength, each apparently heaver than the last. "That heaviest keg is 270 pounds, just so you know.." says the sweet-faced blonde MC.

"Make [your girl] proud!" she yells, as the crown cheers on a buff young man straining to pull the heavy keg onto the rack. He lifts every one, and the crown gives him a yell and applause. Grinning, he pulls off his weight belt, going to chat with the other men waiting their turn.

It was just so delightfully human. Beautiful. :)

After that little stop and some coffee, it was off to the greenbelt.

If you ever fly into Anchorage, you may get to see an interesting little spit of land between the Int'l airport runways and the inlet. Once upon a time there were houses and such there - that was, until the earthquake.

A goodly part of a neighborhood fell into the sea, and was never rebuilt. Today it's a park. It's a surreal landscape even now - forty-odd years have weathered the rent earth into the strangest ridges and grooves, as if some giant fourth grader had just reached down and just pinched it into being. The hollows have filled up a bit at the bottom with water, and the ridges have faint paths stamped into them here and there where creatures on four legs and two have tromped over the weird landscape. Moose pellets sit in piles here and there, and as I settle in, over one little branch I find a single blonde hair. Hrmm.. interesting. :)

I sit with a book of rhetoric and my tinwhistle, every now and again pulling out an old rusty tune, trying to remember this piece or that. Cessnas and the occasional Cub zoom by barely a hundred yards overhead every now and again to break the solitude.

Eventually it was time to head home, and the few tasks I'd promised myself I'd do that evening.

So yeah... good Saturday I think. Hope y'alls was well.



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*If you've not spared a prayer for Paul and his family, I'd sure he'd appreciate it. :(