Proof of Life and the Promise of Summer

 May 12, 2024

Most of the snow is gone from the yard around our house exposing the trails of voles, scattered moose nuggets, and rabbit droppings. I have collected the bits of trash that blew through the winter and left the leaves, twigs, and cones cast off the trees for the last months. When the snow is four feet deep it appears that nothing is happening on this patch of ground but the evidence is clear that is not true. Obviously, the moose have wandered through on their way to the willow patch along the lake and many times this winter they bedded down next to our porch so that we had our heads on swivel whenever we ventured out. The snowshoe hare spent the winter transiting from the same willow patch to the woodshed and sauna. I think they may have winter under the hot tub deck. One day this March, Madelyn was shoveling snow around the hot tub when the snow berm exploded in front of her, and a hare leaped out of the cloud of snow and disappeared into the cover of the overhanging alders. We didn’t get to see the voles at all but it’s clear they had a comfortable time of it feeding on our sleeping lawn under their snow comforter.  

The migrating ducks are beginning to drop in and this morning we had the first swans feeding in the open water along the shore. The eagles are taking advantage of the exposed shore grass to gather lining for their nests and the elusive snipe is hooting in the wetlands every evening. 

The lake is breaking up now and the hummingbirds have been to the feeder so summer is coming, but it seems to be held up again this year for it was a wet and windy forty-one degrees yesterday. This time of year we’re always impatient for the return of the green rush of summer when plants are growing inches a day, and the alder, willow, and cottonwood create a verdant curtain along the lakeshore. For now, though, our setting is an ugly one strewn with dirty tired snow the color of used dishwater and skeletal willows reaching pathetically toward the sun that we know is there but not seen much this month. 

In the next few days we should be able to drag our kayaks over the carcasses of drifts left buy winter's many blizzards and paddle through leads in the fading ice for ice crashing. From the kayak, we can study the vagaries of ice from the slushy vestiges to thick plates that resist plastic battering rams or break away in great irregular platters. The most alluring of the lake ice phenomena is the chandelier ice, as my friend Tom Gillespie called it, composed of crystals about six inches long and an inch across. When the wind, or a kayak, creates waves the crystals begin to separate and jingle together like wind chimes. The lake ice won’t last long when things are at this stage.

    These cold days of early May are a wet blanket on our summer dreams but the endless daylight and the flurry of life around us reassure our pessimism. The green glut of summer is on the way. 

Big Bargain on Dan's New Book

I've got a birthday coming up and in celebration, I'm gifting you a chance to buy The One Man Iris Davis Fan Club at two-thirds the retail price.  That's right folks, you can buy for only $10 (retail price $15) from now until April 16. Here's the URL:  

Dan's Birthday Book Bargain

Don't forget, authors love reviews, Amazon or elsewhere -- even if the book isn't your cup of tea.

The One-Man Iris Davis Fan Club continues the adventures and challenges of Sam Barger, son of Alaska homesteader fishers and a serious headache to his now urban widowed mother. This time Sam is out of high school but not out of trouble because his girlfriend is pregnant and he's trying to figure out what's next.  Here's an excerpt from when Sam finally gets to pursue his dream of becoming a setnet fisherman. 

Peterson’s beach cabin was built of rough lumber with a door and three windows, one each north and south, and one that looked out at the water. The outside was battered and gray, but the inside was worse. In the back were two bunks heaped with dirty sleeping bags and old pillows. Raingear, rank with mildew and year-old fish slime, hung on nails by the door, and a dirty table with two folding chairs and a bench nailed to the wall sat under the front window with a view of the beach and the inlet. A bucket parked on the end of the bench, apparently to catch drips from the leaky roof, had caught four shrews, their bodies floating in the gray water. A woodstove made of half of a fifty-five-gal- lon drum stood rusting across from the door, and a shallow counter held a two-burner camp stove and a clutter of dishes crusted with eggs, beans, and dead flies from last fishing season. The cabin was so dirty that I left the groceries on the steps and started to clean the place instead.

I found a big pot and shook out the dead flies, then filled it with water from a five-gallon jug under the counter and started heating it on the camp stove. While the water heated, I found a broom and swept a mixture of sand, dirt, and dead flies off the warped and stained plywood floor and collected food wrappers and cans into a bucket, then hauled them to the burn barrel nearly hidden in a tangle of pushki and fireweed by the outhouse. When all the dishes, the countertop, and the table were

scrubbed and drying, I brought in the groceries and stocked the shelves above the counter. Finally, I mixed a glass of Tang and built a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I lunched on the cabin steps watching the falling tide.

The waters had retreated down the beach nearly a hundred yards since we had landed, so the clam beds and sandbars were lying gray in the sun. I was reminded of a morning with Dad, watching him bring the skiff to the beach for the last time with the boat on the swell, and him all man and muscle and pride. Less than an hour later he was lying in the back seat of the station wagon on the way to a doctor who couldn’t heal his failing heart. I was back now to take his place on the beach and on the water. If it meant scrubbing a nasty old beach cabin or anything else Peterson wanted me to do, so be it.

Peterson didn’t show himself at the beach site until the next morning, and by then, I was restless and at a loss for anything to do other than clean, eat, and read from the stash of paperback Westerns I found in a box under one of the bunks. When Peterson climbed out of his 4x4 and stretched his back, my restlessness came to an end. “All right, Barger, I brought you a present there in the back of the truck.” He gestured with his thumb and walked off to the outhouse like last time.

The present was four sections of stovepipe and two rolls of tar paper roofing, a bag of one-inch roofing nails, and two cans of black tar-like roof cement. I looked from the gift to the roof of the cabin and put the roll of roofing on my shoulder. I had never put down roofing before, but I had seen it done when I was too little to help. I figured it was just a matter of keeping it straight, spreading tar on the seams, and using lots of nails.

By the time he came out of the outhouse and lit a cigarette, I had the tar paper unloaded and the ladder I found behind the cabin leaning against the north wall. “That’s a good start,” he said. “There’s a half-assed toolkit with a hammer and such under the cabin in a wooden box. You need to strip off the old paper first. Pull any nails you can and drive the others flush. Then roll this new shit out and nail it.”

I looked at Peterson with his meaty hands and his big belly, and I knew there was no way he was going to get that round body of his up a rickety wooden ladder. He must have weighed twice what I did. “Yup, Sam, I think you’re on your own,” I muttered. Peterson quickly confirmed my inference.

“I’ll be down here if you need anything, and don’t fall off. I don’t need that on my day.”

I laughed even though it wasn’t funny. “I’ll try,” I said. “I don’t mind falling. It’s the landing I hate.”

Peterson gave me a dirty look and shook his head. “I got nets to mend. You best get to it.” Obviously, humor wasn’t on the menu.

I put my head down and headed for the cabin and that half-assed toolkit. I found it where he said it would be, but it was covered in dirt and the mummified remains of a dead gull. Armed with a hammer and a pry bar, I scrambled up the ladder and attacked what was left of the shredded tar paper just as clouds passed across the sun, and the warmth of the day blew away on a southwest wind.

I had the old paper off when dribbles of rain began to dot the roof, and I rolled out the new roofing with rain running down my back. By then I was hungry enough to eat about anything and too tired to care what it was. Peterson had spent the afternoon stretching and mending nets, then stomped into the cabin. I hoped he was making something for us to eat, but when I climbed down the ladder for the last time and stepped back to admire the new roof, I could hear him snoring.

That’s how the first week of fishing with Peterson went. I worked on the cabin, dug a new outhouse hole, and scraped and painted the twenty-foot wooden skiff that I had ridden in on that first day. Peterson drove the 4x4 when we used it to flip the skiff over. Other than that, he came and went, seldom talked, and offered no pats on the back, small talk, or hints about what was to come the next hour or the next day.

I was getting a lot of reading done, and I had groceries and a roof over my head, but I wasn’t making any money, and I wouldn’t until the fishing started, and this setup wasn’t the way I imagined it. Every time I tried to talk fishing, Peterson just waved me off and mumbled, “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to. If the bastards let us fish at all.”

Anchorage Daily News published a review this week by David James. Here's a quote: 

"The political themes that were prevalent in the previous two novels are found here as well, although they’re more subdued than in “Coming Home.” This book is set in 1969. Vietnam is still raging and Sam faces the possibility of being drafted. But for an 18-year-old with a pregnant girlfriend, those have become secondary issues. Walker does a good job of showing how the world can intrude on people’s lives, and also how people’s immediate needs can push broader realities aside. Sam periodically stresses over his near-term future and what it will take to avoid being caught up in the war, but mostly he is thinking about reclaiming Iris and preparing for fatherhood."  Book review: In series’ final installment, author Dan Walker’s story accents the personal over the political

The Education Governor

 Trigger warning: the following contains political commentary.

🏫🏫Governor Mike Dunleavy wants to position himself as the education governor but has failed miserably on all counts. He claims to be an expert on education because he was a teacher –so was Don Young– but as the saying goes, building one bridge doesn’t make you an engineer. He claims to have worked in bush education for twenty years, but according to his bio, he wasn’t certified until 1991 and moved to Wasilla in 2004; you do the math. While in education, he taught for a few years. He quickly worked his way up to superintendent, never staying in any job long enough to create any impact on student learning or educational programs. As program manager for the Statewide Mentor Project, he was just that, a manager. He walked into a well-developed, cutting-edge mentoring program for new teachers, the strength of which derived from master teachers in the program, not him. 

👜👜As far as I can tell, Dunleavy has been governor longer than he has held any other job. As governor, Dunleavey has vetoed funds for schools, blocked attempts to increase the base student allocation, and denied attempts to provide defined-benefit retirement or social security contributions for teachers. His reading program is a paper tiger. This program merely identified educational elements that already exist and should or already are part of the Department of Education or school district programs. What it doesn't do is solve the biggest problem in Alaska education, a lack of experienced highly qualified teachers– more on that later.

📈📉📊Dunleavey recently cited a research study of charter schools, claiming that Alaska’s charter schools are the best in the nation. First, that is not what the study tells us, and it’s just one small study. Secondly, if our charter schools are doing so well why does he want to wrench their control from the districts and put it in the hands of his administration, which has shown no acumen for educational improvement? While it is true that charter school students perform at a higher level than public school students. There is a reason for that. Generally speaking, charter school students and their families are more invested in student learning, and charter schools attract some of the best teachers because teachers like working in the charter school environment with motivated kids and families and more professional control over instruction. 

📚📚📚What Governor Dunleavy should do is look at the plethora of research into how best to improve student learning. He would find that the best way to improve student achievement is to provide each student with a highly qualified, experienced teacher. – Actually, he probably knows that, but it doesn’t match his agenda. Yes, research shows this over and over. Students who are placed in a classroom room with a well-trained, skilled teacher perform at a higher level than students with inexperienced, underqualified teachers. This is the greatest impact on student growth over anything else done to improve schools.

👫👫👫👭👬What should be obvious then is that what Alaska needs to do is recruit, train, and retain more highly qualified, experienced teachers. Recruitment is a challenge because teachers are expensive and in short supply. Yes, there is a national teacher shortage and a good teacher has lots of options many of them better than Alaska. If you want the pick of the litter you can’t be last in line, and compared to other states, Alaska is in the back of the pack for salaries, retirement, and benefits. Once we recruit teachers, we have to keep them – the good ones at least– and that means good retirement pay and benefits. Until we become more competitive, we will have trouble recruiting new teachers and will lose good teachers to better opportunities elsewhere.

💸💸💰The first step toward being more competitive is the proposed defined-benefit retirement program, which Dunleavy opposes in favor of a one-time teacher bonus. His proposed teacher bonus will do little except fund a spring break trip to Disneyland or pay moving expenses after the obligatory time commitment expires. We have to do better or success will continue to be out of reach. Little bonuses and redundant reading programs won’t fix what ails us.

📜📜📜📜📜I know it sounds like I think I’m some kind of expert, but I’m not. I would put my education credentials up against the Governor’s any time. — Raised in Alaska, Master's degree in Education, twenty-two years of classroom experience, Alaska Teacher of the Year (1999), ten years working in bush Alaska as a teacher mentor. 

I Hereby Resolve . . . .

 Yesterday, I started writing a blog post about New Year’s resolutions 🎊🎊 because it’s the turn of the year, and I hadn’t written a blog post for quite a while. Unfortunately, the writing stalled after two paragraphs of drivel, and by then I had the excuse to do something fun like go to the dump where I had to wait in line because it was the day after Christmas, and people were throwing away all the old stuff that got replaced by with new better stuff brought by Santa. 

Waiting in line is part of the holidays and some of us don’t do that well. I see people waiting in line at the post office as if they had come at noon just so they can visit with all the other people waiting to pick up or mail packages. 💬💬💬 That’s not me; I don’t like queuing up and am lousy at small talk. Waiting in line at the dump isn’t as bad because we’re all sitting in our cars with the windows rolled up against the damn wind, so no chitchat is possible or expected just a head nod at the driver pulling out of the offloading zone when it's my turn is enough.  Anyway, I was watching the ravens squabbling over dump treasures when I realized that the reason I couldn’t write thoughtfully about New Year’s resolutions was that I had never really made one, and I don’t set much store my them. At the same time, I don’t hate the idea enough to write a rant about resolutions and how they are a big silly waste of time. ☃☃

I know it’s traditional for some people to make promises of self-improvement on the first of January, and the Christmas wrapping wasn’t even off the living room floor before folks were talking about New Year’s resolutions, “I will stop drinking”, “I will go to the gym three times a week”, or “I will volunteer every month at the animal shelter”. These promises are well intended but most of them won’t last to Groundhog Day — a great holiday because it requires no gifts, costumes, cards, or overeating😎😎. Most people don’t stick to their commitments, and if they do it’s because they picked something easy that they wanted to do anyway like swear off eggplant, or quit eating canned spinach. Face it, most of our New Year’s resolutions are low-hanging fruit that make easy pickin’s, and we still generally fail to follow through, letting the fruit rot on the ground. The whole resolution thing is just our way of admitting that we are selfish sloths, but we can change. Hah! A society that needs the GOLDEN RULE to remind them to be nice to each other is pretty insincere about being better any time of year. 

I guess I did write a little bit about resolutions, but that was too short for a blog post, and I need to be more in the swing of this social media thing to promote my books – or so they tell me. As I consider my social media presence, I think I should be a content creator, and start a podcast. Madelyn and I talked about doing a podcast about our small town. The format would be us driving through town discussing and critiquing everything from Christmas lights and Halloween lawn art to the driving habits of people on the street. Imagine the lively banter about so-and-so who just ran that stop sign and old what’s-his-name who pushes his snow out in the street when he plows his driveway. Yes, winter podcasts might be a bit slow, but summer would bring a whole raft of subject matter to town, tourists, Campers, and snowbirds. They’d all be victims of our sharp wit and lively repartee. No town is too small to have people to make fun of or criticize.

Don’t worry, as tempting as it is, I doubt we’d ever follow through. For one thing, Madelyn has told me many times that I am not as funny as I think I am, and in fact, I’m being quite a grump of late. This suggests that some of my humor I might be mean-spirited. Humm. Maybe I should make a New Year’s resolution🎉🎉🎉 to be nicer, to try and see others as good, well-intended people. Maybe I should do unto others as I would have them do unto me. It’s worth a try. 😇😇😇 Care to join me? Get in line!👯👭👬👫

All it Takes is Money, Time and Expertise, and a Story of Course

With the December release date of my new book coming up, I thought I would share with you what’s involved in bringing a book to print. It’s a piece of cake really; all you need is time, money, and expertise. Oh, and a story to tell. In fact, let’s start there with the story. 

        When I finished Back Home, several months passed before I started thinking of more Sam Barger stories, but I knew that his tale wasn't complete. I decided, what the heck? Let's make it a trilogy. I was kicking around story ideas when it came to me. Sam should get together with Iris, the girl from Back Home, and Iris gets pregnant. No spoiler here. This is the opening line of The One-Man Iris Davis Club, literally. Here it is:  “If you paid any attention in biology class, you know how I got Iris pregnant, so all that’s left is when and where, and what happens after because that’s the real story.”

That was the first element of the story, and to make it work, I wanted Sam out of high school, and he needed to leave the state. I wanted him to go on a quest in classic hero style. This was enough to start with, supported by the backstory created by the previous books, Secondhand Summer and Back Home. In a couple of months, I had a story built that I was happy with, so I started revising and editing it, which is a continuous process that can go on indefinitely. TIME

        So, after a very long months of writing and editing . . .and editing, I had some trusted people read the story and give me feedback. Then, I
sent it on to the publishers of Back Home and Secondhand  Summer, full of optimism that they would be interested in publishing. No such luck. They passed on the project. Once I finished pouting, I decided to publish the book myself and have total control over the story. That’s where money and expertise comes in. MONEY

I had to hire an editor to polish and correct my work; a proofreader to make sure the grammar, syntax, and spelling were correct; and a book designer to help me format the book so it has a professional look to it. I found a local art student willing to design my book cover as part of her student portfolio.  I’m sure you’ve seen self-published books that had the thrown-together look. I didn’t want that, and a quality finished product costs money. Next time, I might need less expertise as I have learned to do some of this myself. But good art, editing, and proofreading are always critical. EXPERTISE

         Once I had a finished document, I purchased an ISBN number and uploaded it to Ingramspark, a company specializing in printing and distributing books and ebooks. As a distributor, this company will deliver my book to bookstores and online sellers like Barnes and Noble and Amazon. So, I am proud to announce the release of this adventure-romance historical fiction. I know that title, The One-Man Iris Davis Club, is a mouthful, but it should be memorable when you're in the bookstore wanting to buy it or you’re telling a friend how great it is. The original title was Do the Right Thing, but that’s a pretty common and vague title. This title came to me when I was writing the book's last chapter. 

        In this Sam Barger tale, he is fresh out of high school and thinks the world is his oyster. You can probably guess that things are not that way at all. Join Sam as he begins his journey into adulthood and faces unexpected challenges along the way. Here's a sample:

 “Holy shit!”

        That’s what I said when Iris told me she was pregnant. I didn’t say, “Holy shit, that’s amazing!” Or “Holy shit, that must be scary for you.” Either of those would have been a good choice, but I just said, “Holy shit!” and let it hang in the air like a giant voice balloon from some cartoon.
We were sitting in my pickup at Earthquake Park, making out and talking while we waited to see the sunset. I was seriously into making out, but Iris was more interested in talking. She was tense and didn’t seem to want to be touched at first. I tried putting my hand up her shirt but, she took it and slid it down to her knee and held it there. First, she talked about school and the war, chasing topics around like she was trying to grab soap in a bathtub. Then she asked, “So how was fishing? Was it all you wanted?” “Yes and no. There’s lots of downtime. I don’t handle that well. I think I’d like to go to college and be a lawyer and spend my summers fishing. Mom wanted that, the lawyer part anyway, and I think I did too. Now that I made a stab at fishing, though, I think I want more. It might fit for a couple of summers, but I ain’t going to make a living at. I learned that much. I’m not good at waiting, and fishing has lots of waiting.”

“Yeah,” she said, “I’m thinking this is my last summer at fish camp.

Dad’ll have to find a camp monkey.”

“Really? Is fly fishing losing its glamour?”

“You might say that. Then she sat back against the passenger door and took a deep breath. “Sam, I think I might be pregnant.” I jerked my hand away from her leg like I was touching a hot griddle—another bad move—and that’s when I said it.

“Holy shit!”

What followed was a long silence during which I rubbed my hands up and down my arms as a fever ran up my spine and my tongue became a thick ball of wool. Suddenly the truck felt small and cold.

“Is that all you’re going to say?” She slugged my shoulder. “Did you even hear me? I’m late, you know what that means, right?”

“I get it.”

“I stopped having periods, Sam. You don’t have to be Dr. Kildare to know what that means.” She leaned her head back and closed her eyes. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure, like 99 percent sure that I’m pregnant.”

I reached out to pull her close to me. Searching desperately for words, not just any words but the right words for such a moment, the right words for all the ideas racing through my head. She sat up straight and looked me square in the eye. “And don’t you even ask, Sam Barger. I know what you’re thinking.”

My hands came up instinctively to block any blows to follow. “Ask what?”

Finally, she smiled and faked a punch at my face then hit me on the thigh. “Don’t even ask if it’s yours!”

“Of course it’s mine,” I said, sounding more confident than I really was. “Wow, this is big. We’re having a kid.”

“Not so fast, Hotshot.” Iris reached down and grabbed an Oly from the six-pack on the floorboards and held it out for me to open.

“You better hand me one too. I’m going to need it.” I opened the truck door and used the latch to pop the caps off the beer bottles. I took a deep drink and looked out the window and then looked into those brown eyes and said, “I want to do the right thing.” I braced myself as Iris shook her head. I was on thin ice.\

“The right thing?” I could feel the ice cracking under me. No, I wasn’t ready to be a father, but I was crazy about this girl, and what the hell. Sure, I’d marry her. “The right thing?” she repeated. “What the hell does that mean? Does that mean you’ll pay for the abortion?” The ice was breaking under me now. “You’ll drive me to the airport and pay the doctor bills? Sam, are you that shallow?”

The ice was gone. I had sunk into ice-cold water and was drowning. “Iris, don’t. I’m right here. I’ll be here however you want me to be. I want to be part of this. You know how I feel about you. Shit, we can get married.” I downed the last of my beer and thought about another.

“Well don’t act like it’s a job, some chore on your daily checklist,” she said. She scooted away from me, putting her back against the door again and her feet up on the seat creating a wall between us. She sipped her beer and looked past me through the window to the horizon of mountains across the water.

“What did I do wrong? What did I say?” I asked.

“You just sounded so flat, like you don’t see just how big this is. Shit, I wish I had some weed. I have to walk.” With that, she bailed out of the truck, and I followed. We walked away from the other cars steamed up by couples with their heads together and moved down toward the crumpled chunks of earth left from when the shoreline collapsed after the ’64 earthquake. Five years later it was still a jumble of giant slabs of mud and dead trees.

“Do your parents know?” I asked, taking her hand. She didn’t pull away, and I realized that her hands were so small and mine so broad that we couldn’t lace our fingers like lovers usually do. It felt like a child’s hand I was holding.

“Are you kidding? Not yet. Dad will kill me—and you too. Mom’s going to cry for a week and tell me how I ruined my life.”

We were surrounded by the near-dusk light of late summer, and I searched the reddening sky for an answer. “They might surprise you, you know. Sometimes parents get it and actually act like they understand."

Boy, did I have that wrong.

Fall Comes Early in the North Country

To paraphrase the old radio show, it's been a quiet week in Bear Lake. . . 

Fall has established itself with falling leaves and cooler temperatures. The alder leaves are turning brown, and everything in the garden except the kale has surrendered its color. Fewer people venture out on the lake and we've heard the cranes holler goodbye as they head south. The woodshed is full and there are few fish frozen in the freezer, so I guess we're as ready we'll be. 

There's an old sourdough saying that used to make the rounds in Alaska: On the Kenai, the four seasons are winter, spring breakup, and road construction. Never is that more true than this year. The other day, on the way to Anchorage, I hit a two-mile stretch between Seward and the Y that wasn't under construction, and it should have been. This week, the average spend on the road from my place into town was about twelve miles an hour, which is the same speed as my grandson on his scoot bike. 

This kind of traffic fowl-up in our little town is making people grumpy and has somehow caused a suspension of traffic laws and good manners. For example, I have noticed that stop signs are merely suggestions and yield signs are an opportunity to piss off other drivers. Speaking of signs, we get plenty of warnings in the construction zones that motorcycles should use extreme caution. I've ridden a motorcycle and that seems like a good idea regardless of the road conditions.  Last week people were laughing at the thirty mile an hour speed zone through gravel/mud/pothole stretch that was tough doing twenty.

If the nasty state of our roads wasn't enough, summer was just one long,, wet spring that had moss growing behind my ears. Those of you who don't live in Alaska don't realize that we Alaskans count on one nice three-day period between Memorial Day and Labor Day when the temperature rises above seventy, and the wind stays below ten miles an hour. We call that summer and anything more than that is a bonus. I don't think we got this year. In fact, we had so much rain that there was a pair of black bears at the boat harbor this week looking to board the ark. 

The real bummer of this nasty summer is that we didn't get any berries to speak of; just ask the bears raiding the town garbage cans for leftover Red's burgers. Bears eat a lot of salmon, but they also rely heavily on berries to give them a balanced diet. Face it, a diet of spawned-out humpy needs a little sweetener, and blueberries are just the ticket. Lacking the berries, the bears are stuck eating takeout, or should show, I say, leftout. That's the garbage that is left out by people who think a Hefty Steel Sak is bear-proof. They got another think coming. 

We're putting away the SUP's and Kayaks this month and putting eyes on the snow shovels and sump pumps because we're bound to get snow or more rain than we know what to do with before Halloween.

 

Never too Old to be Stupid

 It’s been a crazy summer in many ways, but Madelyn and I finally made it out camping. I can’t believe it took until the middle of July for us to get away for some nights on the road in our little camper. While I was getting everything ready I thought how lucky I am that I have time now to get ready properly for a getaway. Back in the days of my youth, I was always throwing things together at the last minute because that was the only time I had. When I pack in a rush at the end of a long work day or early in the morning because I was too tired to do it the night before, something invariably gets left behind, something gets lost, or something nasty happens like poorly lashed boats coming off the top of the car, life jackets flying out the back of the pickup, or we get pulled over because the trailer lights aren’t working. But now I’m retired, and I can spend a whole day getting ready to go on a trip and that’s what I did. 

I changed the oil in the car, checked the tire pressure on the car and trailer tires, and charged the auxiliary battery on the trailer. I rinsed and filled the water tank in the teardrop and made sure that the cook kit was complete, both camp stoves were clean and supplied with fuel. Madelyn cleaned the trailer and inventoried the first aid kit, pillows, blankets, and spare clothes. We were ready. We had a cooler full of food, a tank of gas, and decent weather for driving. By Monday noon we were on the road. 

The first night we found King Mountain State Park with plenty of campsites and enough wind to keep the bugs down. The dogs got a walk and settled into camp mode, which for them involves lying under a tree waiting for a treat. The next day we were cruising in warm sunny weather in light traffic and glad to be away from the hectic traffic of the Kenai Peninsula. We scouted the campground at Paxson Lake —what a lovely spot that is, also very quiet. We were tempted to stay but elected to press on another hour to Tangle Lakes. We were eleven miles down the Denali Highway when I looked in the side rearview mirror and saw the right tire on the teardrop trailer leave us, roll down the hill we were climbing, and disappear into the brush along the roadside. Almost immediately the bare axle end hit the pavement and I hit the brakes. 

I didn’t even have to get out of the car to know what had happened, and worse than that I knew whose fault it was.  

We were only a hundred feet from a scenic pullout with a paved shoulder, so I moved the car and crippled trailer off the road and spent ten minutes looking for my tire in the waist-high willows and dwarf birch. After a brief board meeting which included my mea culpa and hugs all around, a couple in a Ford Pickup stopped to check on us and told us that one of the lodges at Tangle Lakes was open and had a phone. 

It was an interesting challenge to pack everything we needed from the trailer into the car already loaded with two kayaks, two adults, two dogs, and too much gear. We managed. And yes it was a glorious clear hit day. Within an hour we were checked into a tidy cabin at the Tangle Lakes Lodge, had scheduled a tow truck from Glennallen ($$$$$$) to fetch the trailer, and had borrowed a cooler to store our food in since the trailer has a built-in cooler and we never thought we’d need more. 

Dave, Trek, and Tawnie at the Tangle Lake Lodge were great hosts, and we salvaged our trip by staying there for three days hiking, kayaking, and relaxing. Of course, we were hopeful that the stars would align and we’d be able to pick up the trailer on our way home on Friday. No such luck. We were not the only people having trouble on the highway, and the mechanics in Glennallen were backed up for several days on ‘emergency’ repairs. 

It was highly likely that when the bearings went out on the trailer the axle was damaged enough that it has to be replaced which means ordering a part from Anchorage and then the mechanic having time to install it. We left the trailer in Glennallen and drove home trying to remind ourselves that we actually had some fun during our little getaway. And now, we wait for the call telling us it’s time to drive to Glennallen and bring the trailer home. 

You might be asking, How does this happen? and how was it my fault? Well, that’s where stupid comes in. Back at the beginning of the story, I bragged about how thoroughly I was prepping my vehicles for the trip. Well, I was thorough but stupid. I didn’t grease the bearings on the trailer. Heck, I didn’t even inspect them. I’ve had the trailer for three years and it’s over ten years old. How stupid can you be to never in that time to inspect or repack the bearings? At seventy years old I should know better. So, yeah, I guess you're never too old to be stupid.