Category: My Photos

This morning, Juli and Keith left to return back to Portland. They took the ferry across to Ketchikan, which requires a very early departure from the house – 6 AM. Wayne drove them over there, and then went and did some of his river/estuary fishing, while Arthur and I stayed home. I went up the hill and tromped about a bit. I am trying to place some surveyors' string up along what I think is the south lot line so that I can maybe have more luck finding one of the the southwest corner stakes.

Wayne came back around noon. He had a lot of fish, which he took down to the dock to get cleaned.

In the afternoon, we went into town to run errands – Thursday is shopping day!

[daily log: walking, 2km; tromping, 200m]

We had a busy day with our guests.

In the morning, we went out fishing. The fish, however, chose not to participate. Here are three guests on the boat – Wayne, Keith, and Juli. Wayne is the person who originally taught Arthur most of what he knows about fishing. Wayne and Arthur are pretty good friends. Wayne is also Keith's brother-in-law. He lives on Vancouver Island (he's Canadian).

Later in the day we drove into Craig. There was an art show at the Tribal Council hall. It's pretty surprising the range of talent in such a small town – sorry, no pics. Of course, you know you're in a small town – everyone knows each other. 

Then we walked around town. We saw a lovely pastoral scene – abandoned house-boats.

We saw Richard's landing craft, which he is restoring (it's a bit derelict). He intends to use it to land heavy machinery on small, off-the-grid islands.

Finally, in the afternoon, back at the house, I searched again up the hill for one of the property stakes. I found one – the easy one, on the southeast corner.

[daily log: walking, 3km; tromping, 150m]

I had a rather busy day today.

First, in the morning, I tried tromping up to the southeast corner of the lot. I didn't reach it – I got about two-thirds of the way, which would be about 50m. But that's through thick undergrowth, ancient logging slash and up a very steep hill.

Then, I got back to the bottom of the hill and Arthur said, "Let's go fishing." 

So we went fishing. We didn't catch any fish. We also stopped and got gas for the boat, because we have guests coming.

Then we ran into town and ran a few errands, and then we collected our guests at the Craig downtown airport (float plane landing). 

Juli, Keith and Wayne arrived from parts south, via Ketchikan.

Here's their airplane, coming in to the dock.

[daily log: walking, 1.5km; tromping, 100m]

Art's friend and sometime service provider Richard came out today with his backhoe to start work on digging the new driveway for the western parcel. This was the project that Arthur had initiated back in May when he was trying to survey the parcel's property line so as to get the new driveway place properly – at which time he had his accident.

So I guess finally we're catching up to where he wanted to be at the beginning of summer. But with less fish in the freezer and with the driveway work only starting, instead of being finished.

Here is Richard's backhoe, chomping at the shrubberies and trees.

We also saw a bear today, when we went on our afternoon walk. It wasn't that scary – the bear just crossed the road. We waited a bit and went on our way.

[daily log: walking, 4km]

We went out fishing this morning. Arthur caught one fish.

In the afternoon, I went up the hill on what's becoming my daily trompabout. I still can't find the stake marking the southwest corner of the lot. Searching and sliding… 

[daily log: walking, 4km; tromping, 150m]

I went out tromping on the hillside again this morning. You'd be surprised to learn it's possible to get lost within 200 feet of the road – the brush is so thick, and the hillside is so steep and irregular. Anyway, I found myself again. I have GPS on my phone – there's no real danger, I don't think – assuming I can avoid conking my head against a branch or something, as presumably happened to Arthur in his accident in May.

The day cleared up nicely, though. We will probably go fishing again tomorrow.

Here's a picture from up in the shrubberies. The camera made it sideways – which is often how I was looking at the world, up there, so I decided to leave it that way. It would be nice if my phone's camera was smarter about this – it's a lot of work using my computer to get the pictures oriented the right way, and for now, I'm too lazy to do it, because I can use the disorientation of my morning's experience as a justification for the mis-oriented picture. Right?

[daily log: walking, 4km; tromping, 150m]

Arthur found a rainbow. He wanted to clean his boat, so he got it out of the water. I let him do his thing, although of course I watched and worried. I think it's important for him to not feel micromanaged.

I spent most of the day sorting some boxes. It will be a long project.

[daily log: walking, 1.5km]

Just in case I was running out of books, someone generously mailed some books to me from Korea.

Oh, wait. That was me. They took a while to cross the Pacific in a boat. Yay! More books.

In other news, Arthur and I made a truce. I gave him a kind of ultimatum: I've committed to not stopping him from doing stupid stuff, in exchange for him not hiding the fact that he's doing stupid stuff. I figure it's a sort of compromise, and hopefully if he's committed to telling me about it, he might think about it more, too.

Such as it is. We went out looking fish this morning, but none were interested in joining us on the boat.

We went into town to go shopping (Thursday is seniors' day at the market). That's when I got my boxes.

[daily log: walking, 2km]

So today was a hard day. It started with heavy rain, which perhaps annoyed Art because he'd ideated going fishing again. When the rain cleared in the afternoon, we took a walk down to the bridge (which we're trying to do everyday).

But then he insisted on going out this afternoon to try to finish the survey project that was what he'd been working on when he hurt his head in May. I happily went with him, figuring that it needed to be done. I'd try to make sure it went safely. Mostly tromping through the brush, climbing steep slopes strewn with ancient slash… that kind of thing.

We managed it. We measured between the waterline and the road, and we got the half way point flagged, so Richard can know where to put the new driveway through. I suppose during this "surveying project" I felt some apprehension, or anxiety – after all, this is where he'd fallen before. And the trail is pretty damn precarious, even for me, with my somewhat more agile body. Lots of slippery logs, holes through rotting material, broken branches sticking.

We get out of the trail up at the road, and I felt relieved. I said, as some offhand remark, "Well, now you've retraced your steps."

Just as offhandedly, Arthur said, "Oh, well, I already went down there myself the other day."

I felt suddenly sick to my stomach. And on the verge of tears, swallowed down because there would be no point in such an emotional outburst, would there? No doubt, he'd done his little walk during one of those times when I was unloading the trailer and he'd said he was going to take a walk on the road.

I guess, now, I feel really pissed off.

Why am I even bothering to try to keep track of him? He's going to do what he wants, anyway. I'm not going to monitor him 24/7.

And I've got these concerns, moving forward. He's made a commitment to tell me when he's going to do something risky. But his risk assessment ability is so clearly broken.

I know he's been contemplating taking the chainsaw and clearing brush in anticipation of Richard coming some day soon. I've said, several times, that I'll happily help him… but how can I prevent him from deciding to do it on his own? Or any other of the many dangerous things he might choose to undertake on his own… Do I need to hide or disable the chainsaw? I don't want to treat him like a child. An obstreperous child.

Some pictures follow – mostly of the path he'd cleared before the accident, that we measured along, today. They're in order from the road (top of hill) to water (bottom of hill). You can see the little pink flags he tied – most of those flags were tied already – he'd done them before his accident. Or who knows – maybe he stumbled around, bloody and brain damaged, and completed his project after his injury.

A lonesome blueberry.

[daily log: walking, 5km]

Finally, there was a non-rainy day that could make it possible for Arthur to fulfill his long-felt destiny: going fishing.

We got in the boat, and got ready. It's an odd experience – I am relying on him for his expertise and knowledge on this undertaking, because I know nothing about it. He has to be the safety officer, yet there are concerns over how well he can plan for and anticipate problems, in the wake of his brain injury. So I have to be very alert, yet not do much. Just watching and hoping he knows what the hell he's doing. 

In fact, there was one aspect where his planning was a bit poor. He didn't check out the engines, etc., very well. And there was a problem: one of the two batteries (there's a backup) was completely dead, and not recharging on the engine. This, of course, was a bit worrying. More worrying was when we parked in the middle of the inlet, with the engines shut off, while he attempted to diagnose the problem. What if both batteries ended up dead? I pondered.

In the end, luck was with us, and we restarted the engine on one battery, and drove out to his fishing spot. And we got one fish. Just one. But for a short time, Arthur seemed genuinely happy.

[daily log: walking, 3km; boating, 20km]

I have a lot of stuff, there's no denying that – now that it's put all together, and nothing is in storage any more. 90% of it is cellulose, meaning, obviously books, but also a vast packrattery of files and a smattering of wooden furniture. So I have dubbed it "my kingdom of (mostly) cellulose."

As I was moving the last of my book boxes (there are still many other non-book boxes to be moved) up to the attic, I had a sort of epiphany about Arthur and "stuff."

Arthur does not, in fact, perceive his house full of stuff as being "his" stuff. Rather, in his own mind, I think he believes that he has built and now maintains and staffs a kind of hotel for his extended family and friends. Thus he can self-honestly claim that he has almost no possessions, all while keeping his vast, well-apportioned "Rockpit Estate." 95% of what's in the house and on the property is not his, but rather, the "house's."

Because of this, he can't in fact relate – at all! – to my rather baroque collection of personal effects: knickknacks, mementoes, files, old gadgets, books… he sees the whole mass of it as excessive and unnecessary, because it is so clearly "mine" – unlike his collection, which is maintained "for other people," and which he simply makes use of, as the proprietor and sole staff member of his "hotel."

On the one hand, this is a great reflection of his core generosity of spirit. On the other hand, it means he lacks empathy, in the extreme, for my state of mind and my needs.

Everything up to this point has nothing to do with his recent traumatic brain injury. It's an aspect of his personality which has always been in play. What's changed is that he is now much less tolerant of deviations from what he expects, and he is frustrated and confused by the inaccessibility of other people's states of mind instead of seeming merely benignly uninterested, as has been his baseline behavior.

Thus he seems utterly bewildered by my desire to keep these things of mine, and by my interest in being surrounded by them. For me, having this kind of "nest" populated by my things is essential to me maintaining my sense of self. All the years in Korea, I was separated from a great portion of it, yet I was constantly adding to the collection, and defining my personal space by the objects that filled it. I could certainly survive that way. But I'm not ready to let go of all the things I'd set aside when I went to Korea – they always occupied not just the storage unit in Minnesota, but a substantial back room in my core identity. I don't know how to solve it.

I hope as he recovers, he can at least return to his benign ignorance of my otherness, instead of seeming to feel threatened by it. But meanwhile, we're having a bit of a struggle. Of course, I expected some aspects of settling in together would end up a struggle. But I didn't realize, I guess, that it would take this form.

[daily log: walking, 3km; boxes, ∞/4]

I woke up before dawn. This was the Sunny Hay, shrouded in clouds across the water.

We went into town in the morning. Arthur was confident at the bank, but confused at the library. That's because he was thrown off because the library employee wasn't who he was expecting. New things…

My move became a concrete reality because my container was delivered in the afternoon. Rather than having to unload it all at once, they are leaving the container over the weekend and will take it back Tuesday. This gives time to unload it.

For Arthur, the whole reason for wanting to come back to Alaska was made a reality later in the afternoon, as we got the boat out of its hidey-hole (the "boatshed") and launched. Arthur has designed this process so well, that it's easy to do – I just stood around making sure things were safe, and lifting heaving things a few times. And it was launched.

[daily log: walking, 4km; carrying heavy stuff, yes]

We flew up to Klawock (Craig), Alaska, today.

The trip was divided into 3 legs: Portland to Seattle, Seattle to Ketchikan, and Ketchikan to Klawock. 

On the second leg, the 737 landed at Ketchikan, and the pilot turned off the "no seat belts" light and everyone stood up. Then the pilot came on the intercom and said: "Sorry everyone. I screwed up. I pulled up to this jetway, and I went 6 inches too far. And this jetway here in Ketchikan [there is only one jetway] doesn't move. So I'm going to have to back up the plane six inches. Please grab a seat." The flight attendants had to close up all the doors, all that stuff… the pilot had to fire up the engine. It was funny. Just to move 6 inches backward. We couldn't even feel the plane move. And it was done.

Then we waited around for a while and got on the small plane, over to Prince of Wales Island, where Arthur's house is.

Countdown to Craig, Alaska: zero. Arrived.

[daily log: walking, 3km in airports]

Juli's garden is producing immense numbers of home-grown tomatoes. We might have to eat some.

Countdown to Craig, Alaska: 3 days.

[daily log: walking, 3.5km]

We drove up the road.

But first, we had some breakfast with Barb and Tom Peters, in Eureka. These are old friends of my mom's and Arthur's.

Their house is charming.

Across the street is a high school my sister attended, though I never did.

The Oregon coast was photogenic.

Countdown to Craig, Alaska: 5 days.

[daily log: walking, 2km]

I did a lot of exploring of old places today. The town, the beach, the university, the park. I took photos. I'll add more photos or commentary later.

[daily log: walking, 7km]

I'm staying at the first house that I ever lived in, where I spent the first 17 years of my life (with some interruptions).

I'll not provide much narrative. Here are some pictures, with a few comments. I had put these pictures on facebook too. 

This is the house. It has changed a lot, but it's still the same house. Peggy and Latif live there now.

This is the park 2 blocks from the house, where I went an infinite number of times as a child.

This is my high school, where I graduated in 1983. Children are still suffering there now, I imagine.

This is me with Peggy, my de facto godmother and once-upon-a-time 6th grade teacher.

This is Arthur sitting by the window in the dining room, in a spot he sat many times during my childhood. It's strange – all the furniture has changed, the house has been remodeled, but the space still feels the same, and the Humboldt overcast waits outside.

No visit to Arcata is complete without a trip to the Arcata Co-op – the biomagnetic center of the People's Republic of Humboldt.

This is a view from the street of the house on L Street in Eureka, where my dad and stepmom lived during my high school and college years.

This is the Helliwell's house, where David and Vivian live. David was very generous with me (in spirit) during the early 1990s, and I spent some time here.

A salmon we prepared for dinner – David is a fisherman and has ways to get fish.

This is David with his dog, on a redwood stump of a newly cut tree. He is logging some of his land up behind Eureka.

Here is a broken-down excavator (cat) parked where some of the logging is going on.

Arthur brought in the big fish from the barbecue.

We ate the fish. Here are the Helliwell siblings (center two, David and Peggy's kids), Erilynn and Dustin, with their spouses, eating dinner.

That's my visit to Humboldt so far. 

[daily log: walking, 5km]

No, that's not a typo in this post's title. It's drawing on the two meanings of "can", one as an auxiliary, one meaning "to preserve food". 

Juli does a lot of canning. Her pantry is full of jars of preserved foods, and as the late summer fruit harvest appears, she cans applesauce, blackberry preserves, etc. I took a picture of her pantry wall.

Another notable bit of news, today: my container of personal effects, shipped from Eagan, Minnesota, has arrived on the dock at Craig, Alaska. It has beat me there by a week. This is pretty amazing, as it was originally supposed to take 4 weeks. My representative at Alaska Marine Lines was very generous and kind, looking out for me. I'd told her I specifically didn't want it to arrive too fast. This might not be a common problem for people shipping to Alaska, but she'd been understanding, and had put a delivery date of September 1st. So the fact that it got there early means that normally I'd have to pay "storage" fees for the dock in Craig. But because it's early relative to the promised delivery date, she has waived this storage fee. I was very pleased about this.

Today we drive down to Arcata, California. This is the town where I was born and spent my first 17 years (with quite a few interruptions, but more-or-less). 

Countdown to Craig, Alaska: 7 days

[daily log: walking, 3km] 

So this morning was Arthur’s last VA appointment. They’ve released him into the wild, such as it is, and he’s free to return home to Alaska.
We’ve bought tickets for next week. Meanwhile, we’d planned a small road trip down to Humboldt (my hometown where I grew up, and where he lived with us for many years, during my childhood). This was planned when we still weren’t completely certain of when we’d be able to go to Alaska. Now, we’re squeezing it in before we depart for the north.
Today, to celebrate the end of the infinite series of doctors’ appointments, we went to a Korean restaurant called Nakwon (Paradise) over in Beaverton – about halfway between the VA hospital in downtown Portland and where Juli and Keith live in Forest Grove. We were joined by Juli and Keith’s daughter Jenna, who is visiting with her husband up here from where they live in Southern California.
Here is the lunch. Arthur is looking angry because I said “smile” before taking the picture. That’s Arthur’s personality – if you say smile, he puts on a grump face.

[daily log: walking, 3.5km]

Just for the sake of recording for posterity (as if that was necessary), I will show my move-out process from my storage unit in Eagan, Minnesota. After spending a week sorting out my stuff, dividing it into "keep", "throw away" and "maybe piles", the day of reckoning came. Last Friday, I had an appointment for the shipping container to arrive, when I could then send my stuff off to Alaska, where I'm moving.

I got all the stuff out of my storage unit, "staged" and ready to load. My friend Bob arrived to help me load. It was a very hot day.

When the truck came, about noon, they had the container on the back of the truck. The truck backed down the driveway of the storage place, but we still had about 25 yards across which we had to carry everything. So we got everything at the back of the truck.

We got it all loaded. The driver and his wife (they were a husband-wife trucking team, which are very common for long-haul truckers in the US), were extremely friendly and helpful. I felt very lucky. They helped us load and gave us good pointers on how to secure stuff too.

So we closed up the truck and sent my stuff on its way. It will arrive in Alaska before I do. The container will have to sit and wait for me on the dock in Craig.

Yesterday (Saturday), I went back and paid some junk guys to come and take away all the "throw away" stuff from my storage unit. They were very efficient and did a great, fast job cleaning everything out.

Then I told the office at the storage place that my unit was empty. They inspected it and pronounced it clean.

And now, after 20 years, I have finally managed to get all my possessions out of storage. I feel like a great burden has been lifted from me.

Today I flew out from Minneapolis back to Portland, and I'm back with Arthur, Juli and Keith. I'm very sore from moving all the boxes, and sleepy from taking such an early flight. 

Here are some volcanoes I saw from my airplane window as we landed at Portland.

They are, from left to right: St Helens, Rainier (farthest away), Adams.

[daily log: walking, 2km]

I drove out to White Bear Lake this evening. That's where my best friend Bob's parents live – where David, who is Bob's dad, grew up. Bob has Minnesota roots.

Bob and his two sons drove up from Wisconsin (near Madison) today. I will be staying with Bob in White Bear Lake for the rest of my stay in Minnesota, because Mark and Amy are hosting a big family reunion type event in their house, so I wanted to not be in the way for that. It does mean a bit more of a commute to my storage unit, which is in Eagan just a few miles from Mark and Amy's while it's about 30-45 minutes' drive from White Bear. But it's OK. And I'm happy to see Bob, his parents, and his sons. They are my midwestern family, in many respects. I met Bob my first day of my first year of college, and we've been best friends all these long years.

When I drove out to White Bear Lake, I was just a bit early, and so I waited for Bob to call me and let me know where to go. I stopped next to the lake that gives the town its name. I took this picture of the boats and the summery lake.

[daily log: walking, 3 km; moving heavy things, a lot]

We drove down from Olympia back to Forest Grove today. I don’t have anything really prepared to post on this blog, but I spent time going through some old photos, and decided to post a few.
This is a picture of me in 1972.

This is a picture of me an my sister dressed up for Halloween in 1974.

This is a picture of me dressed up as a mummy for Halloween in 1976. As some of you know, that is not the last time I ended up dressed as a mummy.

Finally, my favorite picture of my sister, on a horse, in 1976.

So that’s pretty interesting, maybe.
[daily log: walking, 3km]

When I was a young child, every year around Thanksgiving, my family and various friends would travel from Humboldt down to the Bay Area to stay with other friends in a little town called La Honda. At that time, La Honda was quite rural, nestled up among the redwoods at the center of the South Peninsula, and felt quite remote from Palo Alto, just down the hill. Nowadays, of course, La Honda is fully overtaken by Silicon Valley bazillionaires and quite uninhabitable by air-breathing folk. But the tradition, back then, was to have a kind of extended, hippyish get-together with lots of guitars and good food and hanging out. It wasn't always just Thanksgiving – there were summer reunions, too.

Well, that tradition has drifted around, geographically, over the intervening decades. Mostly, I haven't made it to these reunions. A few times I made it at Thanksgiving, because it was typically hosted at Juli and Keith's in Oregon. But the summer gatherings were not something I ever made it to. Many of these have been hosted at the Hohstadt's property in southern Humboldt, but as the generations have shifted the location has relocated north to Olympia, where Sherry and Greg live.

Anyway, all these years later (I guess, about 40 years later relative to the last time I was part of this), it's still happening. It ends up a very nostalgic time for me. The oldest generation are often people I knew who were young adults when I was a child – people like Juli and Keith, David (who is now with Vivian), Pat and Steve. They remember me as a 10 year old boy. Subsequent generations are not so well-known to me. I know about them but in many cases have never met them before. Anyway… 

Here's a picture of Pat and Steve. Bear in mind that I remember these as a young adult couple, parents to a boy a year older than me who I often played with. They're maybe a few years younger than my parents. I remember them playing guitars and singing old folk songs, back then. And they still are, all these years later.

Arthur attended these gatherings too – much more than I have, over the years. So having him come has been good for him, I think. It ties into old memories, he knows most of the people, and he can feel comfortable in a larger social setting. I tried to get a picture of him – this picture is a bit low-resolution, because it was dark, but he's there.

When we drove up, we didn't go through Portland. Instead, we went up west of Portland and crossed the Columbia River at Kelso. Arthur managed to figure out how to take a picture of the rather old-style, very high bridge with my phone, while I was driving.

[daily log: walking, 2km]

I caught my uncle smiling.

He hasn't been doing that much, these days, so I felt very lucky. I don't even know what I'd said in that moment – something about replicating the custom of photographing food. We were having a dinner out at the King's Pub – the restaurant that my cousin owns in Forest Grove. It was a pretty good dinner, anyway. And Arthur smiled – the photo was pure luck, since I didn't realize he was smiling until I was looking at the photo I took later.

Today, we're driving up to Olympia for the weekend, to visit old friends as a sort of large gathering up there. I may see some people I haven't seen since I was a child. It will be interesting. I think Arthur's up to it – he gets tired easily especially in social situations, but he'll be able to just stop interacting if it gets to be too much, I reckon.

[daily log: walking, 4km]

The Minneapolitan rainbow monkey is trying to enjoy his retirement, but sometimes he experiences boredom or loneliness. The work at Karma was difficult, with those children throwing him all the time. But it was fun, too.

[daily log: walking, 2km]

In the mornings, before it gets too hot, Arthur makes a walk up to the "tree farm," which is basically the end of the road out here in Cherry Grove. It's all uphill walking up the road, and it's therefore all downhill walking back. It's good exercise. The road continues after the top of the hill, but he stops at the top. Perhaps oddly, there don't seem to be many trees on the tree farm – that's because, as a tree farm, the trees have been harvested and there are only very young trees growing for now.

I walked up there this morning with him. When we paused at the top, he took a picture of me.

There are many wild blackberries growing in this part of Oregon.

Here is the gate to the tree farm, with a sign on it. The gate is always open.

[daily log: walking, 5km]