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.