And then, amid all my frazzle today, comes some great great news via Athenae:

So there was a mix-up at the International Bird Rescue Research Center, and our pelicans couldn't be found. Turned out they had holed up in the back of the pelican pen and were discussing the world's affairs over merlot and M&Ms, hitting F5 on the crack van and one of them might or might not have started a dice game with some finches. When asked about it, he muttered something about "punch3 kitten chainsaw" and flapped off. Kids today.

In any case, the birds we adopted as a blog, way back in the early days of the BP Oil Spill, were located, tagged, and we have now been presented with evidence they exist...All our pelicans are here: LaDonna, Ashley, UncleSamRocks, FYYFF and Albert Lambreaux. And we even have pictures of the cute little buggers:

I feel much, much better now.

Been working away on the printed programs for this year's Rising Tide Conference so that I don't have to do much of it next week. Things are going to be crazy enough as it is, what with all the 8/29/2005 anniversary events happening...plus, I must save my energy to give all of you registrants and financial supporters of RT V some extra-special trivia questions every day of next week. So hey, pardon me if I bail out of self-imposed posting duties and indulge in some funny to pass the time:



The brilliant bits are coming up. Maybe. Hell, anything after that clip is going to be Palme d'Or material...

Just...do me a favor and register before the Howlin' Wolf gets sold out.

"Where is the oil?"

I'll tell you where the oil is. Via links on Twitter and through the Blog of New Orleans comes this study that says nearly 80% of it is still out there in the sea. The first few paragraphs of the report set the tone:

On August 2, 2010, the National Incident Command (NIC) released a report on the status of oil from the BP oil spill. The findings of the report are being widely reported in the news media as suggesting that 75% of the oil is “gone” and only 25% remains. However, many independent scientists are interpreting the findings differently, with some suggesting that less than 10% is “gone” and up to 90% remains a threat to the ecosystem. Considering the vulnerability of the southeast Atlantic coast to oil being carried our way by the Gulf Stream, it is critical that we determine which of these interpretations of the report is more accurate.

To address this issue, Georgia Sea Grant organized an ad hoc group of university-based oceanographic experts from within the state to independently evaluate and interpret the conclusions of the NIC report.

This group determined that the media interpretation of the report’s findings has been largely inaccurate and misleading. Oil that the NIC report categorizes as Evaporated or Dissolved, Naturally Dispersed and Chemically Dispersed has been widely interpreted by the media to mean “gone” and no longer a threat to the ecosystem. However, this group believes that most of the dissolved and dispersed forms of oil are still present and not necessarily harmless.

If you won't listen to the scientists, who will you listen to?

Actually, I don't think I want to contemplate the answer to that question...

Update, 3:11 PM: Another "listen to the scientists" report comes out on the safety of Gulf seafood, and the prognosis is not good.

And just when I started to wish that a scientific study quantifying exactly how bigoted and un-American opponents of the Cordoba Mosque near the former Twin Towers site would appear, something fairly close to that comes about. Do as Maitri says and show some respect for the real heroes of 9/11, who went into those burning buildings and did their best to rescue everyone without figuring out beforehand if they were Muslim or not.

A further note: I keep shaking my head over my Queens synagogue's listserve discussions about the mosque because of the particular synagogue building in which we worship whenever we go back to visit the old congregation. The place not only boasts classrooms for religious school students, it also has a gym, a weight room (outdated equipment, but still), and a swimming pool in the basement. Why put all of that in a synagogue? Ground broke on the place in the late 1940's, when the word of the day concerning Jewish people's acceptance into recreation centers, colleges, and even neighborhoods was "restricted". If you wanted to go for a swim back then, forget going to a Y or joining a country club if you were Jewish. Even some nearby beaches were off-limits. As a result, Jewish people took their recreation off to their own places, including the resorts in the Catskills upstate.

So if hysterical politicians manipulate enough people's fears and get this to die, this is just to let you all know where that road might lead...right back to the ugly places where we've all been before. I hope to God, Allah, or whatever being you might pray to if you're of the praying persuasion that that doesn't happen.

Anudder update, 8-18: Drake Toulouse's post on the unbowedness of the scientists and the Gulf fishermen & women in the face of the media's irresponsibility is a must-read.

Confession time:

I'm a sucker for most of Athenae's Weekend Question Threads over at First Draft, and this weekend's question is no exception. Seems I've left many tidbits of my past lives over there in those threads, and here's another for you:

What a loaded question for me. Darn near any family gathering involving my grandparents has been fun. My parents used to throw some rip-roaring parties at their house where they'd serve fajitas - the meat of which Dad had had marinating all the day before - and, once they got hold of a Braun juicer, some killer lime margaritas. Just invite a bunch of scientists from the pharmacology and cell biology departments of Baylor labs & see what happens. A lot happened.

My wedding reception was a hell of a lot of fun. We got a band made up of guys from the American Legion Dan played in to provide the music, and they'd never played a Jewish wedding before. We supplied the music for the hora and they had no clue that the dance could go on for 30 minutes of more. They played the sheet music for ten minutes and stopped, and my family descended on the band and told them to keep it going. The guys shrugged and kept it going for 40 minutes more. They still talk about that wedding.

In recent times, some friends of ours hold house parties in which they send out invites titled "I Ain't Your Mama", followed by a bunch of enigmatic phrases which will only come to light if you "act right and bring something" and come to the party. Being a member of the Krewe du Vieux in New Orleans has been a blast, especially for the pre- and post-parade parties. We've got a pancake breakfast tradition we kick-started at our place Mardi Gras Day in which little slices of the party come to us - y'all come to Chez Liprap if you're in town at that time and need some food and a place to pee. Adrastos' Muses parties are a kick, too.

And I would be totally remiss if I didn't mention the best parties I've attended in recent years: the first Geek Dinner I attended (GD3) in which I met most of the New Orleans bloggers and some of the First Draft krewe for the first time, and the Rising Tide 2 pre-conference "meet and greet" at Buffa's Lounge.

There's been mucho naches for me at parties.

And I really want to spread it 'round in the next couple of weeks, so here's a heads-up on my second annual Rising Tide contest, in which, each day of the week before the conference (that's August 23 through August 27th this year), I ask a different trivia question, the answer of which could get you $5 off your conference fee from li'l ol' me.

First off, the money for this is coming from me and only from me. Do not ask the Rising Tide website, blog, facebook, or Twitter accounts for sympathy if you have any beef with this little exercise - just bring it on over to me.

The rules:

Ineligible participants are: the RT organizers, panelists, and speakers. Sorry, folks, c'est la contest.

• Register for and/or donate $10 or more to Rising Tide V.
• Check back on my blog each day for the week of August 23-27.
• There will be a new question each day for you all to answer. Leave your answer in the comments.
• First correct answer to the question each day gets a five-note from li'l ol' me. If there's more than one correct answer each day, the first one in the chronology of comments left on this blog gets the five bucks. There can only be one winner each day.
  
• If you have not registered or donated, there will be no dough for you, no matter how right the answer is.

So there you have it. Register now.

I was pleased to see that at least three more people registered and saved some Saints players' ACLs in the preseason game this past week. Let's keep the team in good health. Boost those numbers over at Rising Tide.

On our way to the Alaska SeaLife Center in Seward, I got a call from Edie.

"Drew Brees is signing his book at Borders, and I'm in the second group to get it signed. They're allowing three books per person to be signed by him. I can get a copy for you and you can pay me back when you get home. Would you like one?"

I suspected it'd be a fairly standard athlete autobiography, and I already knew a great deal about Brees' story anyhow (turns out there's a great deal of God talk in there, too, which I kinda suspected would be there as well), but I said yes. What the hell.

So I've traveled a lot this past summer. My entire July was spent in other places, but it's damned good to be back home. Even if home is over 100 degrees in the shade. Even if home arranges to have an outdoor music festival in the middle of all that heat. Even if school is starting extra early for the little guy. I mean, sure I felt like I was going to melt into a sinkhole that opened up on Urania Street when I walked to our neighborhood watering hole for a beer and then back to my house, but that's summer at home....and the hopeful autumn light at the end of the heat index tunnel was marked this year by a trip to the Saints' training camp out in Metairie.

Tips for visiting training camp:
Bring your sunscreen.
Wear a hat.
Bring an umbrella, but only use it if you're sitting on the top row of the bleachers by the field or if you're standing by the sidelines - it's not nice to block someone's view.
Bring a towel.
They sell water & other beverages at the field, but bring some in your bag anyhow.
Bring your camera so you can get your picture taken with New Orleans' latest treasure, the Lombardi trophy from Super Bowl XLIV:

The Lombardi it is and The Lombardi is what it will always be.

On walking through the tent that contained a signed Hall of Fame helmet with Rickey Jackson's John Hancock prominently featured, the Halas trophy from the NFC Championship game, a set of the baseball bats Payton gave to the players before the big games last season to help fire 'em up, a championship ring, and the Lombardi, I was relieved to note that not a single fingerprint of the coach's was in evidence on the Lombardi and that he was out on the field in long sleeves doing what coaches do. I hope he never buries even replicas of the past season's trophies.

Watching the Saints train is an even greater exercise in "hurry up and wait" than the average NFL game is. It's also the closest one will get to an NFL 50 yard line without having to pay out the nose for it. Veteran players' moves were checked out, rookies were noted and commented upon, and some wan cheers were actually mustered when Tom Benson & his spouse tooled around on the sideline in their covered golf cart and showed off the championship bling the team earned on their fingers. No one forgets that the man in the cart was ready to schlep the franchise elsewhere not too long ago. I suspect the cheers were for the stylin' ring.

So we sat in the bleachers and sweated out puddles for an hour and a half. We watched the frequent Gatorade breaks. We wondered why we weren't seeing some players in action (talking to you, Shockey and Colston). I finally went to get a players' roster when Edie was mistaking every receiver for Reggie Bush and witnessed a spectator nearly collapse from heat exhaustion. I went back to my melting spot next to Edie in time to see Morstead pop off some punts. The end of training that day was marked by the players heading to the sidelines to sign for the fans in the heat. God bless us all. We love these guys.

Of all my trips this summer, that was the sweetest.

In the next few weeks, we come upon some fateful national anniversaries. And, for me, some spiritual ones.

I spend the one closest to my secular heart among people who have become good friends, and I spend a great deal of time beforehand encouraging potential new friends to come and to enjoy, to look toward the future with one foot in the past and one's being wholeheartedly in the present. Anyone who's read this blog for any length of time knows what I'm talking about.

This year, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are "early" by the solar calendar, but right on time by the moon's movements, as always. Those days will be spent with my spiritual family in the synagogue. We will listen to the sounding of the shofar, awakening us to our best and strongest possibilities as a community upholding halakhah while at the same time reminding us that life is short, and that, as a community, we can atone for our sins against God but we must constantly keep the work going when it comes to our sinning against each other. It's easier to ask forgiveness of an invisible-to-the-eye deity in shul as a "revolving door" Jew (in the synagogue on Rosh Hashanah, out of it on Yom Kippur 'til the next year) than it is to look one's friends and family in the eye and ask forgiveness of them. Studies of how to keep these people coming to synagogues and becoming active members can miss that important point, in my opinion - but it is very hard work, and it's something I can always use pointers on.

And then there is 9/11.
And the lessons we are still learning from it.
And the ones that seem to go horrifically unheeded.

I was alerted to the Anti-Defamation League's statement on the controversy surrounding the Islamic community center seeking approval for its construction at a site near where the Twin Towers once stood through Adrastos' post on First Draft. There had been many debates about this going on on my Queens synagogue's listserve that I hadn't really paid attention to up to that point, as the ones most engaged in the arguments started to get into city zoning laws and property rights in Manhattan. I brought the Daily Beast article about the ADL's statement up to the folks on the listserve and was directed to the ADL's actual statement....

Proponents of the Islamic Center may have every right to build at this site, and may even have chosen the site to send a positive message about Islam. The bigotry some have expressed in attacking them is unfair, and wrong. But ultimately this is not a question of rights, but a question of what is right. In our judgment, building an Islamic Center in the shadow of the World Trade Center will cause some victims more pain – unnecessarily – and that is not right.

I once spoke of being disgusted at my grandparents' then-rabbi's insertion of the deaths at the Twin Towers into a High Holy Day prayer emphasizing how much repentance, charity and prayer can avert the severest decree of all - even who would be on a higher floor of the towers and perish and who would be on a lower floor and live. I still think it is a damn harsh way to look at such a terrible tragedy, and I still fill up with anger for the ones left behind who lost people that day. Throwing that kind of thing into the Unetaneh tokef so casually was too much of a hurtful act. It fed into a perversity of the main idea that motivated the terrorists: that Allah had dictated that they make their point against people they thought were infidels, so they had to drive that home by hijacking planes and ramming them into what they were taught were the biggest symbols antithetical to Islam on earth, and forget the people who died as a result, because they didn't matter in that scheme of things. A year after the towers collapsed, the Pentagon burned, and the remaining plane nosedived into the ground near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, I didn't think the families and friends of victims would appreciate the personalizing of such a metaphor.

The problem now is that, after all this time, we are still thinking like the terrorists, mistaking a building for extremist views - and this time, that building is an Islamic community center. The ADL tried to straddle the fence between the victims' feelings and the principle of freedom of religion we at least claim to subscribe to in this country and ended up impaled on a post of its own making. This is a far cry from the days when Leo Frank was framed for the murder of Mary Phagan and then, despite a governor's commutation of his sentencing, lynched by an anti-Semitic mob. This is a league founded on upholding the greater good against all odds kicking sand in that greater good's face. All of this does a huge disservice to the victims in whose name the ADL purports to speak.

This message can be turned about for my people who feel this way. It's the perfect time. We say it in the Vidui Ashamnu that is added to the Amidah prayer during Yom Kippur. Only we should take its lessons and turn to those wanting to establish a community center in the name of their faith and recognize these people for who they are and not for what others have turned their faith into.

Those terrorists nearly nine years ago did not speak for them.

Once we grasp that idea, all it takes to put it into action are seven words from another High Holy Day prayer - from us to the Cordoba Center's members, forgive us, pardon us, grant us atonement.

______________________

Big thanks also go to Coozan Pat for his many alerts and thoughts on the controversy.

So the organizers of Rising Tide - the men in the group - have been going gaga over this video of our keynote speaker Mac McClelland. I personally think this ought to have been the one they go nuts over, but I guess the guys wanna save it for when she actually comes to Rising Tide V:



So what are you waiting for? Register today. There's only 22 days 'til the conference. The cost is $5 more at the door. Save some money and head to this link. Now.

Our exit from Alaska was a whirlwind. We squeezed a visit to the University of Alaska - Fairbanks' Museum of the North the day after we got into town, then hauled everything into a cab to the airport and flew our separate ways - Dan to New Orleans, the little guy and me to Silicon Valley to be with my in-laws for a couple of weeks.

What follows is my last journal entry, written in No-Cal after the little guy woke me up impossibly early, delighting in playing loudly with toys he hadn't seen in many months.

While we were in Alaska, the first thing residents wanted to ask us about were the drive-thru daiquiri places. Our driver to Anchorage regaled us with her tale of her and her husband's quest to get one that was thwarted the first time around because they were in an RV supplied by Holland America cruises, which was great for their promotional trips, but not so good for getting an alcoholic beverage on the fly. The second time she was down south, she and a friend went for it in a rented car supplied for them while the RV was parked in a floor show and found that a daiquiri from the greater New Orleans area wasn't such a frou-frou drink.

On telling people here that we'd just been to Alaska, the first thing people here wanted to ask us about were the short summer nights and the midnight sun experiences there. I sleep through anything, so it didn't affect me much, but it had Dan regularly waking up thinking he'd overslept and started to fall behind his schedule, only to take a glance at a clock and realize it wasn't ten in the morning but 4 AM, despite the daylight shining through the window at that early hour.

At long last, everyone's imagination concerning travel is all about the perks and the quirks.

Alaska Journal
7-16-2010

Change and Alaska haunt me still.

Somehow our cell phone service had changed and was putting out loads of entertainment that was annoying, unnecessary, and not part of our contract. No one, not even newfound friends, had been notified of the change. Initial panic gave way to acceptance of the new - and then Dan informed me that we were moving to Anchorage. I was angry, demanding to know why he'd sprung that decision on me.

"Didn't you listen?" he asked with a smile. "I told you seven times before."

Chastened, I set about tidying a lawn nearby at what I thought would be our home: a sprawling place that was not unlike the 7 Gables Inn in Fairbanks, in which we'd stayed a night before heading back to the lower 48. Local people thought I was nuts, as there were no guarantees that we'd end up in the place, but I had to do something.

I had to wake up from this. And I did, in the early afternoon on my in-laws' living room couch.

We only had a small taste of Alaska, I know. It's a huge state...and the engines of tourism have been churning there for quite some time. Our travels were chock full of fellow travelers, and of residents who were born and raised elsewhere but call the state home now - and our brushes with native American - Alaskan tribe members were at the Heritage Center in Anchorage and in one reeking-of-cigarettes cab in Fairbanks we took from the train station to the 7 Gables. To really get Alaska, one has to read and read and travel and travel some more in the state. As it is, Dan's plans were a much-abbreviated version of his first-ever wishful experience of researching a trip: he's wanted to go this far north and west since his high school days. The kiddo now wants to come back in winter to see the aurora borealis...but I personally haven't much hope for revisiting Alaska unless it's between the pages of books.

Couldn't resist getting a few:
Walking My Dog, Jane - Ned Rozell (more on Rozell here)
Amazing Pipeline Stories - Dermot Cole

Others of interest:
Shopping for Porcupine - Seth Kantner
Mind of the Raven - Bernd Heinrich
Saving for the Future: My Life and the Alaska Permanent Fund - Dave Rose, Charles Wohlforth
Not One Drop - Riki Ott: an important one in the context of the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, as it examines the ongoing trials of Prince William Sound residents in the decades after the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

So our travels ended in a flurry of plane trips - Fairbanks to Seattle, Seattle to San Jose for the little guy and me - and on to New Orleans for Dan. Two weeks in No-Cal are ahead for the kiddo and me. Right now, I have no problems sitting still. None at all.

But I do know we're not moving to the 49th state anytime soon.

Alaska Journal
7-13-2010

Swaying gently on the train to Fairbanks right now, so I'm stealing some writing time while Dan and the little guy are back in the dome car. Once again, we are in the "C" class and cannot go past the cafe car to the "Gold Star" oversized double-decker car. Not a problem, even despite a couple of queries from the little guy asking when we'd be in the "A" class. Not this trip.

Not many sights out the windows between Denali and Fairbanks - not like between Anchorage and Denali. On our way into Denali the other day, we passed a bright blue homestead close to the tracks, located in the tiny community of Sherman. The house had been whimsically painted that color with a big yellow "CITY HALL" on the outside - and, as it turned out, the owner of that house, Mary Lovel, was signing her second memoir at the bookstore in Denali. Also, we got on the train today to find that we have the same host that we had on the train on Sunday. We keep coming back into contact with the same people again and again and again...but of course, there are the ones we could live without.

Dan's biggest sources of frustration, aside from the little guy's behavior on occasion, have been other tourists, for the most part. Like some Chinese folks on the train to Denali who loudly and kind of rudely demanded and got an upgrade to Gold Star. Some guys on the same train who thought kids would stay quiet if they were taught to read; who wanted to prospect for gold, thinking it was easy money; and who thought there were no bugs in Alaska.

(Dan at dinner last night: "I haven't seen many mosquitoes at all here."
Me: "I've seen a couple, but not like I thought I'd see."
Dan: "Wait, there's one on your forehead.")

A few people on the bus back from the Eielson Center with strong Nu Yawk accents were also in that annoying number - they couldn't conceive of a trip without any shopping involved and they acted like they were entitled to see wildlife up close and personal while they were in the park (No guarantees there...really. We were lucky yesterday.). But the worst as far as we were both concerned was the cigar-smoking hiker at Exit Glacier. One whiff of that on the trail had us incredulous, curious, and, once we saw who was doing it, it had us running the other way from it. Ugh.

The thing that appalled me the most was hearing about an ATV tour that retraced the route the ill-fated Chris McCandless took to live in the abandoned bus in which he was found dead in the wilderness outside Healy, Alaska - a story told in Jon Krakauer's Into The Wild. My gut reaction was recoiling at the insensitivity of such a tour, and I wondered if his parents knew, what they thought of it.* The gist of the tour is, apparently, to discuss what McCandless did wrong...which seems to be a cottage industry here, judging from the loads of books available about surviving in the remote areas of the state. The books reinforce many truths and many myths about Alaska as a whole, I think...but then again, I'm judging most of those books by their covers having never cracked many of them open. From what I've seen of Alaska, though, one doesn't necessarily need extreme survival knowledge to live everywhere in the state.

We're coming up on Fairbanks. More to tell later.

______________________

*Truth is, I haven't read Into The Wild in a long time, and I haven't seen the movie - but some current reading of mine gives a clue as to what McCandless' family might feel:

There is now a bronze memorial plaque in the abandoned junker bus where he died...on that washed-out road thirty miles from anywhere. It memorializes him as a beloved son. When his parents hiked in, or maybe four-wheeled or snow-mobiled in, to see for themselves where their boy died of starvation, they brought the plaque with them and installed it there in his memory. His mother left something else behind, too: a small suitcase of survival gear so this would not happen to another woman's son who for whatever reason may call that bus home or stumble on it during a wilderness trek. She put a first-aid kit, map, blankets, and a can of tuna fish in the suitcase. To the first person who needs it, that suitcase will be like a gift from God; the divine in her will meet the divine in a stranger.**

It's important to keep such lessons in mind. I hope the teachings from the ATVs are done with as much sensitivity.

**Heather Lende, Take Good Care of the Garden and the Dogs

It's incredibly stupid and idiotic that the following must be said, but here it is:

The oil in the Gulf of Mexico is most definitely not gone.

Just accept it. It is fact.

While trolling a bunch of Alaska-based blogs last night, I found this one that is a must-listen despite its dating to the time of charter boat captain William Kruse's suicide at this time last month. What is also fact is that the implications on the individual and collective psyches of Gulf coast residents will be quite damaging for possibly longer than the oil will be in the Gulf waters. On slowly making my way through The Spill, a book of personal accounts of those involved in the Exxon Valdez disaster, I am sadly reminded of how little things have changed in 21 years. And even with the residents of Prince William Sound taking matters into their own hands despite Exxon and saying, "Screw this, we'll pick it all up in 5 gallon buckets if we have to," there will be many more years of eviscerating emotional disasters to come:

On Thursday, May 20th 1993, Bob Van Brocklin left a suicide letter.

“The stress from Exxon which brought about my financial stress, was too much to deal with alone. The end should be good and maybe my spirit will live. I have a lot of fear right now, but faith is all that is left. I wish I could have done more good for others but I guess my time is up.”

He was the former mayor of Cordova, Alaska. He shot himself.

He sat in Cordova High School on the 28th of March 1989, four days after the spill. Don Cornett had been sent by Exxon to talk to local fishermen and families.

Mr. Cornett lied to Mayor Van Brocklin and everyone else that day.

....Domestic violence, bankruptcy, alcoholism, and collective depression washed up for years following the Exxon Valdez crisis. Twenty one years later, the herring fishery in Cordova is still decimated – genetic lines of fish erased.

This is only the beginning. Being a fisherman isn’t what you do, it’s who you are – the Gulf of Mexico or Prince William Sound is just geography. The toughest fishermen can’t win; they drown in court. The erosion of identity is invisible compared to the black wake of an environmental oil disaster. My father told me suicide was a permanent answer to a temporary problem. The BP disaster isn’t temporary though. There is no end in sight.

Take care of each other.

Indeed. It is all we have left.

_______________________

I'm proud to announce, in close proximity to the anniversary of 8/29/2005, an anthology representative of the hope many local writers and bloggers kept alive in those trying times after the storm and the Federal Flood is being published. Details of the reading are below:

Gallatin & Toulouse Press announces the publication of A Howling in the Wires: An Anthology of Writings from Postdiluvian New Orleans. This collection combines the vivid post-Katrina experiences captured by the best New Orleans bloggers with the work of traditional writers from the same period, cataloging some of the best-written and most powerful reactions of the people who experienced Katrina.

The book launch reading will be Thursday, Aug. 26 at 7 pm, upstairs at Mimi's in the Marigny. Open to the public.

Proceeds from the book will be donated to Hana Morris.

Cover image by graphic artist Greg Peters.

Alaska Journal
7-12-2010

We are the ones the people like the lady driving the shuttle bus to the Denali Princess were warned about.

We aren't signed up for a cruise, and so we're not folded into any package tour deals...and even if we decide to sign up for something involving a guide, it's not going to be a deluxe operation.

What do we do? We stay in the lodge on our own reservation, and we call up the National Park Service and reserve space on an early morning shuttle bus to the Eielson Center located three-quarters of the way into Denali Park. We get ourselves up at the crack of an Alaskan summer's nearly endless dawn to get on that shuttle bus. And so it goes.

The shuttle to Denali's Wilderness Center had us stopping for a moose mother and her baby. We switched over to the Eielson bus, driven by a fellow who was initially a reticent sort - but he loosened up a little as we went along. It was a fantastically sunny day that caused us all to shed our jackets after our first bathroom stop. We passed over braided rivers, drunken forests, and on to the mountainous tundra. It was when we were making our way just past Polychrome Overlook when things took a whole 'nother turn.

We'd made it past most of the hairy, cliffhanging turns of the overlook (also nicknamed "Poison Point", as in "one drop'll kill you") despite the gasps of the girl sitting behind me. The tiny, moving dots of grizzly bears had been spotted across the valley - and it was then that the driver discovered the bus' left front tire was flat. Twenty minutes of waiting ensued for us until we could hitch a ride on another Eielson shuttle going our way. We may have gotten another set of wheels to our destination, but we'd also gotten a new driver who was condescending and not a little misanthropic in her tone. Thank goodness we were only going another 19 miles or so...those miles passed quickly despite stops for a wolf sighting and a caribou and calf in the road approaching the shuttle.

A quick attempt to hike to the outwash plain in the shadow of Mount McKinley/Denali led to a frustrated little guy, as he'd wanted to throw rocks into the river there just as he'd done at the Toklat River rest stop earlier in our trip. We turned him back to the environmentally friendly Eielson Center by convincing him that at least he'd seen a ground squirrel on the trail. Don't judge us - it helped get him on the shuttle out of the park.

Maybe it was the fact that the bus was going in a different direction, or the way our third, very sweet grandma of a driver was edging a tad closer to the steep drops of Polychrome than the first driver we had, or, probably, I was just paying more attention to the road now that I'd seen a lot of wildlife, but I was beginning to wonder if I shouldn't start gasping like the girl behind me had been doing on the trip into the park. The way down was indeed quite long - a film we saw when we got back to the Wilderness Center let us know Polychrome had been that way since the 1920's, when it had scared visitors so badly, some of them preferred to walk up rather than drive up that stretch of road. Thankfully, we passed through it without incident.

So we weren't a part of any of those fancy, overpriced package deals. Big deal. We still got to see caribou, ground squirrels, ptarmigan, moose, snowshoe hares, a fox, a wolf, and miniscule moving specks of bear and of Dall sheep on a gorgeous day that revealed the peaks of Denali to us, which is more than most park visitors get to see.


Who are we? We are "independents". And that's the way we like it.

______________________

All the pictures of our Denali jaunt can be found here. Click on the photo above to see a larger view.

Alaska Journal
7-11-2010

Ah, the traveling family - we drive, we take a train, take some pictures, take in the sights...and then, when all is said and done at the end of each day away from home, we're all in our reserved-for-the-night beds watching Discovery Channel shows. Last night, it was Dirty Jobs; tonight, it's MythBusters. Now Dan wants to try to light up powdered non-dairy creamer as a direct result. Must keep him away from that stuff - which won't be too much of a problem, as he drinks his coffee black.

Yesterday - a drive and a trek to Exit Glacier, an icy finger on the Kenai Peninsula, where a gray, rainy day still yielded an incredible look at the bluer-than-blue veins in the glacier's receding mass. There was also a sighting of moose poop along the trail.

We went further south to Seward and saw a lot at the aquarium there. However, a large Steller sea lion, some harbor seals, a preserved giant squid, and lots of Arctic waterfowl couldn't quite erase the memory of the terrible all-beef hot dog we'd ordered for the little guy to have for lunch. We should have ordered three reindeer dogs and passed one of those off to him as a beef dog. Just a spectacularly bad food item. That abortive attempt at lunch was remedied by a great dinner at Jack Sprat's in Girdwood on the way back to Anchorage (What I didn't know until later was that this place was also in Girdwood, its claim to New Orleans fame being that Dutch Morial loved the food - but we didn't come to Alaska to eat Cajun cooking). A quick hotel switch after a look at the cost of the Sarah Palin coloring book ($12! Ummm, no thanks) ended our day.

Today - an exit from the new hotel room was accelerated by the fact that there was only decaf coffee available in it. We were headed for an early morning rendezvous with an Alaska Railroad train to Denali National Park. The ride was quite smooth, the conductor's Scots accent was quite strong, and, despite some more gray weather, the sights out the train's windows were well worth the trip.

Where we've ended up is the Denali Princess Lodge, across the way from another Schlock Street that Dan is convinced was imported from a similar strip outside of Yellowstone National Park. Tomorrow is another early morning as we kick off a tour of Denali Park. Dan is incredulous that a hotel like the Denali Princess doesn't have the Travel Channel on its TVs. I hope that the little guy and Dan don't catch cold from being in and out of the hot tubs that are all the way at the other end of the lodge complex. Ahhh, our traveling family...