Home and Family Anchors for the Spirit

Returning to Bear Lake is always a rich homecoming, regardless of whether we are coming back from a week of work or rich days on holiday.  The lake views from our porch, the mountain vistas, and the comfort and beauty of our house all contribute a an environment that we are never eager to leave.  What luxury to have all the personal amenities one would want coupled with solitude and wildness to enrich our spirits.

Today, I return as I do each time by turning left into the grave drive and looking for hints of change such as uncut blankets of snow or the trace of a moose or bear left in the driveway to puzzle me.  First I see the guest cabin on the right, dark and shadowed with its fat gables and full woodshed catching the edge of the truck’s headlights.  Just past the cabin the house comes into view where a porch light invites me home.  The compact, cottage sized house sits above the yard so one looks up at it and even in the bitterest storm the house is solid and safe looking like the cottage at the base of a storm-swept lighthouse.  Today, as often the case this time of year, the wind assaults me as I step out on the driveway.  The front patio will be clean and tidy unless the big winds have cleaned the north and west porches and swept the debris around the house to this side.   I look to the dog kennel where my dog sleeps, usually undisturbed by my return.  If I am lonely, I know that I can call Snape, and he will stick a sleepy nose out into the lighted yard and wag a tag in greeting. 

In a few minutes, I am standing on my porch sipping bourbon and toasting my good fortune to live in a place that gives the peace that most people go on vacation to find.  This time I am back from visiting family, and I am moved to think that the time we spend with family is a form of going home.  Whether we drive the four miles to visit our grandchildren or fly1500 miles to visit Madelyn’s dad, we journey to place ourselves amid those human features of home: relationships, rituals, and people.  This is not the same as the bonds of friendships we might have with our neighbors and others in our lives.  And, contrary to Facebook philosophers, friends are not the same as family.  Regardless of how we might wish it was different, friends are friends and family is family, and at least in my world, the people of family are intimate, more demanding, less fun, and arrive with more luggage than any friend we could imagine.  But family and home are inexorably bond together and to us, so we cannot remove them from our life without significant strain on our internal system. 

We can in fact imagine perhaps two concepts of home, two ways of viewing a similar bond for there is home as that place where the family gathers and reinforces or mends the bonds of familial relations.  In this case, home is less of a place than it is an experience or a gathering. There is also home where the body and soul find peace and oneness with the surroundings, a habitat fitting our psyche’.  I can remember places I have lived, and they have all had some semblance of home though they might not hold the ambience of my place at the lake.   This is home which is both inspiration and refuge, both shelter and showroom, a center of labor and of rest.  They say, home is where the heart is, but it is also true that in the heart is where home is for here one’s center, one’s spirit or Chi’ and here that spirit can come to rest and be the strongest.  Here is home.  As one who works from home, I find it interesting that at home I do my best work and get my best rest.  I can only reflect on my own experience when I say that this relationship with place is not always idyllic and few of us are always content with the flow of energy and joy anywhere twenty-four seven.   But if I were to be sad or mad or frustrated, I would prefer here than anywhere else to feel that way. 

Like home, family gatherings are not always warm and comforting.  In fact, family makes us suffer, but it also make us complete because through family we are  connected to our past and to our gene pool.  Without people and stories, without family, we are only names on a list without ties with any history.   Family grounds us in dna, in tradition, and connections to place and experience.  When we sit with family and share stories of back when, of the good ol’ days, of Uncle Charlie and Aunt Lou, we are making ourselves bigger than a single organism, more than just one person.  Family makes us immortal.  Home makes it worth the trouble. 

The Ultimate Terrible Choice

When someone dear to our family looses a loved one, my wife makes them a lap quilt of colorful, soft fleece.  The blanket is usually patchwork from remnant of sewing projects and serves as the old-fashioned name implies, a comforter.  Unfortunately, when a place like Hooper Bay looses four young adults in ten days, I am overwhelmed.  How does one make a comfort quilt for a whole village?  

That thought kept scrolling through my mind last week as I flew to Hooper Bay where suicide struck like virulent and deadly plague.  One after another four young people have killed themselves.  Those left behind are scared, confused, angry and grieved.  I can see the anxious faces on the school staff and see the tension that children express in ways as varied as their personalities.

I started writing about the suicides in Hooper Bay when I visited this wounded village on the shores of the Bering Sea.  I managed to write a paragraph and stalled.  Each day since I have looked at this unfinished page and tried.  I’ve even written some stuttered sentences.  Some I erased; some reside here. I think I am blocked by this topic because such topics deserve so much respect.  Life and death topics can’t be dealt with lightly or made a part of artsy word play.  We must be probing and thoughtful when we write of suicide and do so with the delicate touch of the egg juggler. 

Suicide, it seems, is a powerful act of weakness that must require an unmeasurable strength of will.  This is a selfish act that requires an abandonment of self, for how is it selfish to end the “self”?  And yet, how is it not selfish to punish others by ending one’s own pain?  These are just some of the questions that we raise when we examine suicide.  How does a child, a young man,  or a young woman know pain so intense, lose so great, and prospects so empty that to end life is the only choice.  We can imagine the acts of a sick or dying person choosing to end their life.  We can imagine a person choosing death over a life of unbearable pain or rapid declining health, but in Hooper Bay and other tragic cases of Alaska suicide, we must image a healthy young person with potential and future choosing at some hard moment the ultimate terrible choice.  But is this all we have?  Is this all we know?  Do we have nothing more than questions and imaginings?  Can we imagine more? 

I would like to imagine we are looking for a way to treat, avoid, deter adolescent suicide.   I would like to imagine that there are questions we could ask survivors of suicide attempts and suicidal thoughts.   I would like to imagine we could act together to fight this killer of our children.  I don’t think mourning with Hooper Bay is enough.  I don’t think feeling their pain is enough.  A comfort blanket isn’t what Hooper Bay needs.  It isn’t what Alaska needs.  We need to treat suicide as the public threat that is.  It will take more than a village; it will a take the whole damn state. 

Hot coals and Dutch Ovens

We were up at the cabin on Pear Lake last week cutting back the jungle of elderberry, dwarf birch, and devils club that wants to win back the yard there.  With the recent fires in the area we are more aware of defensible space and started looking at trees that might need to be eliminated.  All this work puts on an appetite so I put the Dutch oven to work.  This is a good option when we want to avoid heating the cabin on warm days, and a birch campfire makes a good bed of coals for cooking.   The key to good open-fire cooking is a nice bed of coals rather than a bunch of flames.  

Last year, I realized I needed a smaller Dutch oven than the twelve incher I had, so I got a dandy little two quart for making meals for two.  I had good luck braising a chunk of beef in it and then found an old Dutch oven under the cabin that had been left full of water and cracked when it froze.  This makes a great fire pan to hold the coals for the smaller oven.  This browned meat for tacos and then I baked biscuits that way.   

I salvaged the old lid from the broken oven as a griddle.  Most Dutch ovens are designed so the lid can be inverted used as a grill.   I used it flat on the coals and inverted on the cracked oven fire pan.   

Dutch oven cooking is getting quite the attention lately, and if I lived in a hot place I would find lots of excused for not using the oven or cooktop in the house.  

A Dutch oven can be used in a BBQ too.  Last night I made pork ribs, which I cooked slowly with indirect heat (charcoal) for two hours and then put in an old enamel Dutch oven to finish off for an hour. This worked better than wrapping the ribs in foil.  I just put the ribs in the pot set it on the grill and covered it.   With the briquette running out of steam and the vents closed, the covered grill kept the temperature low. 

Pan Roasted Salmon Steaks -- Why Not?

Just this once I thought I'd do food thing on my blog.  Food blogs are the big thing now, but I read them for the recipes, not to read the long story of how they got to the recipe.  With that in mind we will go directly to the food.   I love fresh salmon steak, and I find that most people make cooking them too much work.



Try this:

Pan Roasted Salmon Steak

2 salmon steaks or fillet cuts, skin on!
  1 teaspoon  Susitna River Blend  seasoning (Susitna Sugar and Spice) or salt pepper garlic & dill.
 2 lemon slices
 2 teaspoon butter
1 Tablespoon oil

Put the oven on 375 degrees or you might already be roasting vegetables there anyway (see below).  Heat a cast iron, or other skillet with a tablespoon of oil.  Season salmon steaks (mine were fresh sockeye cut from fillets with the skin on) with dill, garlic salt and pepper or my favorite fish seasoning  Susitna River Blend.  This great spice blend is made by a gal with a magic touch up in Willow, Alaska.  When skillet is hot place fish in skillet (skin down if a fillet) and add a teaspoon of butter and a lemon slice to each piece of fish.   Use a spatter screen if you have it.  After three - five minutes slide skillet in that hot oven for about 4-5 minutes.  Time it right and the roasted vegetable will come out at the same time.  You will probably wish you had cooked more of this and don't be afraid to eat the skin!    Off course this will also work on your BBQ grill –– hot direct heat with a hood!   Do not over cook!

Roasted Vegetables

Set oven to 375 degrees or fire up the BBQ grill.

three cups  Summer squash and/or zucchini, tomato, peppers and onions.  large dice, about one inch
1/4 cup olive oil
1  crushed garlic clove
1 Teaspoon italian seasoning  (oregano, basil, rosemary) or try one of the other blends from Susitna Sugar and spice.

Toss together in a bowl.  Then put in a roasting pan.  I like to use a round cake pan for this, but a pizza pan cookie sheet or foil will work.  Roast for 20-30 minutes.   If you have a grill pan for your BBQ  these veggies are great grilled.  Feel free to sub in your favorites like cauliflower or broccoli.  Potatoes are good this way but may need longer to cook or they could be parboiled first.

Enjoy!

What's in a Name? Much I'd Say or Nothing

One can easily get caught up place names and I find myself often lead astray by them.   As a young one, I lived in a farming hamlet call Sugar Tree Ridge and found the name defining of a place, bucolic in nature, with an old timey charm where no bad could come.  I moved from there to Happy Valley, a place named so optimistically so fraught with expectation that one feels ashamed to have a bad day.   “How bad can it be for Christ’s sake; you live in Happy Valley.”  Such names are evocative and stimulate the emotions and imagination as places named for people cannot. Cape Woronzof comes with no image, but imagine having Dangerous Cape finally behind you and Cape Fairweather ahead.  How small would your boat feel entering Icy Straits or what could be less attractive than a trip to Mud Lake.  In Day Harbor, boaters can choose to anchor in sinister Killer Bay or cruise just a bit farther to the comfort of Safety Cove.   In Alaska, we are surrounded by clever and stimulating place names that draw us to or keep us from them with names like  Paradise or Majestic Valley, Poorman or Wiseman, Dead horse or Troublesome Creek.   I’m sorry, but unless a place is named after your grandfather something named after a person doesn’t have the impact of lively names that evoke a story, an emotion, or suggest some great adventure.  In Kentucky, my mom was born near Cut-shin Creek, named for a mishap by my great-great grandfather, a much better name than if they named it Barger Creek after him.   

Some names are so over-used that are merely the hand-written name tags at a conference full of strangers.  Bear Creek, initially a name fraught with threat and wildness, has been so over used that it might as well be “Bob”.   And most places named for people have that unemotional emptiness to them.  Frazier River, Johnson Pass impart no drama unless some one has a personal story that lights up the neurons.  That’s the problem with Mount Mckinley.  For the geographic novice this might be a lowly hill in Ohio and not he highest peak in North America.  Denali, however, has that one name ring the honors things that are so unique so special that no clarification is needed.  Like Elvis, Madonna, and Manhattan one name is enough, Denali.  

My friends on the West Coast of Alaska where rich Yupiik names make music with the language, the landscape is dotted with the names of dead white men.   The census district that Includes Hooper Bay, Chevak, and Scammon Bay in Kuskokwim Delta is named for a South Carolina governor and Confederate war hero, Wade Hampton.  Where does that come from?  When it comes to place names, its not who you are but who you know I guess.  Too bad. Hopefully the campaigns to fix problem place names like this will be successful.  Unfortunately, people seems to be willing to fight hard to keep ancestors alive by using their names.   Until things change look for me along Bear Lake or Pear Lake –– I have property on both.  Pear is found down Oilwell Road with no oil well and Bear Lake is on Old Sawmill Road with no Sawmill.   Have a great week no matter where you are.  

Trekking the Alpine Sea

Just back from a visit to Sitka, part work part play, and seeing old friends along the way.  Sitka lures me on a sunny day with its mountain peaks, blue bays and and green isles and islets.  The cloudy days aren’t bad either though the moss and the weathered wood  and rusting metals tells us this damp climate is one to be reckoned with.   This is not a place where it rains often; is a place where it rains consistently for long periods of time, which is hard on structures, tools, and psyches.  Maybe this is why the personalities we encountered were strong, rich, and varied. Natural selection. Sitka is place where only the durable can truly thrive.  

Sitka, once Alaska’s capital, is perched on the beach of Baranov Island facing Sitka Sound, rich in sea life and partially protected from the storms of the gulf by Islands like Kruzof with it’s extinct volcanoes.  Here the salmon trollers spread their fishing gear like the wings of great water bugs crisscrossing surface of the sea and long liners plumb the deep.   The history is extant here, brimming with tlingits, Russians, rogues and warriors, while the modern day streets and paths are littered with tourists, artists and classical musicians packed in this fishing town on a beach already crowded with salmonberries and trees squatting in the moss like giants. 

 Sitka sits where the mountains and forest hug the sea like walker’s sharing an umbrella.  Like Seward, these coastal mountains rise out  the ocean with the abruptness that has made visitors disembark from cruise ships and ask what the elevation is.  For our part, the mountain-perched houses gave us a view of Sitka Sound nearly everywhere we went, and on the water we could truly see the mountain vistas.   When one lives where I do, it takes a pretty dramatic view to turn my head, and Sitka Sound has that.  One day we toured an island home and sailed, wing on wing, across the sound, the next day we disappeared into the towering forests of spruce and hemlock to up the mountainside where the alpine vistas called.  We were turned back by time, knowing there is always more to see, leaving trails unfinished to lure us, as the people do, back to Sitka on alpine sea.  

The Lake of Reflection

After a long trip to Colorado and then to Soldotna and Ninilchik, I was relieved to be home on my lake.  In the evening, we watched a pair of new moose calves and their shiny carmel coats.  Their mother was a shaggy contrast with the last of her winter wrap hanging in shreds off her back and withers.   Later I paddled out on the placid water after the evening winds had died.  I was able to find and observe a loon nest with the mother loon lying low and well camouflaged on her nest.  The male escorted me closely as I approaching, shadowing me moved with in ten feet of my boat.
Again I saw the moose family feeding along the shore in my neighbors yards.  Such times as this on the water or in the woods are healing resting events for the soul, an outward looking meditation that calms the mind by reaching into the surroundings instead of into the inner space of a tired mind.