Belly of the Beast
My head is full of images of old growth trees with ferns and skunk cabbages growing by their trunks, degraded roads and clear cuts along with the words of people we interviewed in the last days in Ketchikan and Prince of Wales, communities south of Sitka. "We're in the belly of the beast," said one woman, referring to the logging and road building that just never seem to end, even when neither seems to make financial or environmental sense.

I've just come back from working with the National Resource Defense Council. The goal of the NRDC shoot was to show how people's tax dollars are being used to help destroy the Tongass National Forest and to put a damper on an amendment/rider Senator Ted Stevens is pushing that will limit litigation against timber sales in National Forests.

In our travels, we heard about people speaking out to question road building, subsidies and logging and losing their jobs in the process. We talked with people who beach log and mill wood, fish and hike the mountains here. We saw monster cruise ships docked in the town of Ketchikan, where hoards of passengers clutching purchases walked in and out of jewelry and trinket shops, that will be soon be boarded up when the summer season ends. We struggled to find good local food and saw a strangely glowing green hill by the closed pulp mill, remnant of toxic times.

Ugly images. Wild beautiful images. My job was to help capture both. Ketchikan and Sitka and Prince of Wales are both surrounded by the Tongass, a National Forest. At 17 million acres, the Tongass is the largest national forest in the U.S. and the largest remaining temperate rainforest in the world. The Tongass, which is includes about 85% of Southeast Alaska, is managed by the U.S. Forest Service, but it is owned by all U.S. citizens.

Those crowds of folks on cruise ships shopping for souvenirs and all the people who book fishing charters and stay in lodges get to see the beauty of the Tongass everyday they travel or catch a salmon or halibut in S.E. Alaska. I wonder what they think when they see a clear cut or if they tried to read up on the issues of managing the forests. I assume that as they collect their boxes of fish or bags of gifts they’ve valued being in a place that isn't completely paved over or clear cut.

08.24.07 @ 17:08PST Friday, September 22nd

Death Row Lessons #1
I didn't know much about the death penalty nor had I ever heard of a mitigation investigation. Joining an attorney and social worker on a post-conviction investigation changed that. I flew away from my calm studio facing a mountain and immersed myself into a world of testimonies, affidavits and compassion.

This story starts with a boy named Shawn born in New York City. His parents were Barbadian/Bajan, young immigrants in a foreign land. The mother left the baby with the father. The father sent the boy back to Barbados. "Child shifting" is not uncommon especially for immigrants trying to get ahead. Yet, Shawn gets passed around more than usual and eventually lands back with this father and a stepmother in NYC. Shawn has trouble in school. By the age of 15, he is kicked out of the house and in his mid 20's Shawn is part of an armed robbery. He is the "undisputed lookout "in the hold up of a rural convenience store. A clerk is killed. Shawn doesn't pull the trigger, but in North Carolina that doesn't matter because the law says he is part of the crime. He ends up on death row in lockdown with one phone call a year (if no one answers the call it is still counted as the one call), visitors only on the other side of glass, no classes, and about one hour outside his cell a day. The actual shooter gets life without parole. Yet, Shawn didn't kill anyone.

Ten years after Shawn's sentencing, I find myself meeting two women, strangers except for e-mails, faxes and calls, in Barbados to look into the social history of his life. According to a Supreme Court case decided in 2003 called Wiggins v Smith a criminal defendant's attorneys' failure to investigate a client's background and to present evidence of a difficult life history during the sentencing means the defendant wasn't fairly assisted. The attorneys didn't do that for Shawn the first time around. We're looking for mitigating factors, reasons Shawn won't be executed. Life without parole vs. death is the goal for now. One hope too, is that we can prove that he is mentally retarded, because you can't execute someone with an IQ below 70 anymore. The catch is the IQ needs to be assessed at that level when the defendant is less than 18 years of age. Barbados didn't do IQ tests when Shawn was small, bouncing around with multiple adults passing through his life.

"Bad news is good news," Stephanie, Shawn's social worker tells me. She explains that her uncle was murdered when she was 5 years old. What left a lingering impression on her was not the murder, but the fact her family didn't want the murderer to get the death penalty. Not yet 30 years old herself, Stephanie held the hand of a man on death row as he awaited the lethal injection and joined his family at a dinner after his death. She goes into the prisons two-three times a week. Her world, not to mention the world of the clients, is as far from mine as I can possibly fathom. I ask her if she continues to feel a sense of what I call "awe" at her freedom when she leaves the prison each time. She says "yes." I wonder out loud if that when that awe stops, it means burn out, something dangerous to both herself and the men and women she visits with behind glass.

Elaine, the attorney with the Center for Death Penalty Litigation in Durham, North Carolina has been involved in Shawn's life for over seven years. Her husband also works in this death penalty world as the state's capitol defender. My name was passed onto Elaine, as a filmmaker with a bit of cross-cultural experience and what amounts to about two years of fieldwork, photography and video making in the West Indies.

In preparation for five days of investigating and filming in Barbados, I head to the public library and search the internet to learn what I can about the death penalty. The leading states in executions include Texas, Virginia, Oklahoma, Missouri and Florida. California, Texas Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio keep the most people on death row. (see Death Penalty Information.). The criminal justice system becomes something starkly different than what my husband and I watch on those dark Alaskan nights when we shift our garage sale easy chairs in front of the monitor, click on the television and watch a crime drama. In one sitting the story progresses, the guilty are caught and the mystery is solved. The reality is nothing so tidy with the death penalty given out wrongly based on everything from sloppy forensics, snitches, deals, the unreliability of eyewitnesses to false confessions and the way juries are selected. The statistics and stories of racial and ethnic bias provoke me to vision the Statue of Liberty lowering her torch in shame. Elaine, patient with my hunger for the story framing Shawn's, tells me if the victim is white, the likelihood of a sentance of death vs. life imprisonment goes up. It is a need for justice in the form she explains that is much more like revenge. The clerk who died the day Shawn took part in the robbery was also, white.

Each morning Elaine and Stephanie wake up in a place most visitors come to laze on the beach, drink rum and relax and instead pull out the laptop, pick up the phone and start planning the day. I'm awed by their devotion and their excitement as we meet family members and learn more about Shawn's life. No tears are held back when a woman, the mistress to Shawn's grandfather, who raised Shawn from when he was about six months to six or seven years, hands us a pile of images of him as a young child. He holds a puppy, poses in front of a Christmas tree, smiles with family members. He looks just remotely like the current image you can find of Shawn on the North Carolina's Department of Corrections list of 167 offenders on death row. What happened in the years between images? What about his family, many of who live in Barbados, with college degrees, professional jobs, families and lives as far from Shawn's as mine? And why didn't the original attorney's on Shawn's case contact his family here?

(to be continued)

09.22.06 @ 19:30PST

LETTER TO THE EDITOR OF THE SUN MAGAZINE August 9, 2006

This is an unpublished letter to the Sun Magazine. I did get a response, from an administrative assistant, who wrote "Thanks so much for your beautiful letter. Here is the June 2006 issue that you requested. Please don’t worry about the payment. This one's on us. "

I wrote this letter a few days ago and it melted. So I will try to reconstruct it from memory, not on a soggy pad by a fire in the middle of the wilderness, but inside, dry, in town on a computer:

The rain is relentless. Drips are falling onto my words almost faster than I can write. My June copy of The Sun is so wet to read it I peel each page a part from the next and hope I won't tear a page in the process and lose some words. As usual the first section I go to is Readers Write then I read "Where The Water Is" By Jan Shoemaker. I frankly can't tell if my tears are from the honesty of the writing or from smoke in my eyes. I'm taking a turn keeping a fire going with what we could collect, wet wood and dead alder bush branches. Meanwhile, the other women I've come on this adventure with are curled up in their sleeping bags, napping and waiting in a damp tent.

After living in Southeast Alaska for over ten years, I'm working on a quirky documentary film about women, wilderness and food. It is film about connection to place and the choices we make about living deeply where we have roots or where we pick to live and make home. Two of the women in the tent are trying to hunt their first goat, the other has come up to Alaska to help me film. The interview with Barry Lopez couldn't be more relevant. I feel like he is talking to us from a far, though he absolutely couldn't reach us on a cell phone or drop by.

We are camped by a lake in the Tongass National Forest, one of the last remaining intact coastal temperate rainforests in the world, 1800 feet above sea level, miles from town. We traveled in by float plane days ago. Now, there is too much wind and too little visibility for a plane to pick us up. We don't know when a plane will come and we have no idea what are families are thinking. Bushwhacking out is not a safe or sane option in this weather. We're stranded, surrounded by rugged peaks with rocky inclines, crusty snow packs and burgeoning streams. A waterfall near us grows stronger and louder every minute. I don't think any of us has ever been out in the rain this many days in a row. While we can't communicate out, we can listen on the handheld VHF marine radio to the weather updates for more rain, gales and small craft advisories.

I grabbed a copy of The Sun before we left town. This is one of those places, with no phones and no one coming to the door that allows me to appreciate the words I read and see the relevance to both the projects I'm working on and every day life. Another place I recall feeling that deep appreciation was on a 20-something day South Pacific ocean crossing in a small wooden boat. I opened a copy and in the midst of reading, as we bumped over the ocean 1000 miles offshore, I was startled and thankful too not only read, but to see one of my images printed in the magazine.

What I was wondering though, can you send me another copy of the June edition of The Sun? Then my husband can read it and I can file it away with the other Suns I can't quite add to the recycle pile and that I also use when I teach film or photography to kids, letting them study and contemplate the black and white images, and catching them at moments reading the words too.

09.22.06 @ 19:18PST

Friday, June 30th

The "Rescue" Dilemma
This fall, some months ago, I threw my two cents into a discussion about the issues the documentary "Born into Brothels," raised for the youth media field. In this well known documentary British-born photojournalist Zana Briski immerses herself into an impoverished and illegal neighborhood in Calcutta, India. Briski befriends the children of Sonagachi (the city's red light district), starts a photography workshop for them and equips them with cameras. As the kids grow with their new found art, the filmmakers struggle to help them.

You can see what other people who have handed cameras to kids say on the Youth Media Reporter site.

As one respondent wrote "anyone who has worked with young people at the 'sharp-end' of life will know how easy it is to become embrolled into thinking we can 'save' them. And a harsh and necessary voice wrote, "Zena'a (the film maker) racist behaviour is masked by her liberal white guilt." While another wrote "I don't think you throw out the baby with the bathwater: meaning, yes, we need to fight to end poverty, racism and sexual exploitation of women in India and throughout the world. But that's a tall order to wipe out thousands of years of oppression. Meanwhile, do we leave kids to languish in despair for a larger cause?"

Here is what I added:
Last week I ambivalently joined Netflix (unsure what it will do to small less "popular" documentaries and the use of media with educational audiences and as an activist tool) and put this movie at the top of the list. I bookmarked Ken's article and was glad to read it after seeing the film, which made me rather uncomfortable. I wish the movie could have raised, within it some of these issues this discussion is raising so well. I've spent a lot of time doing video and photography with teens in Los Angeles and Alaska. I too am a white artist who, as an Alaska Native activist I worked with told me pointedly and often, comes from resources. I’ve also worked in an Alaskan village and had a non-Native school superintendent say something to me like “don’t think anything you do with these kids will change their lives…they will never leave this village.” I guess I never thought I’d save the kids, push them to go to Stanford or Yale, or run for president, but I watched the students see their own potential and see that they had a voice. They taught me a lot too and so did their families. How to evaluate the results (another issue that youth workers and project coordinators run into) I’m not sure, but the dialogue about doing this work needs to continue. Documentaries like "Born into Brothels" are something accessible to the so called mainstream, or to the folks who might watch a well-marketed documentary in a theater or rent it from Netflix. So a film like this could be a tool to raise awareness that can perhaps provoke people to change their personal behavior and challenge their government. I don’t think it was crafted or distributed in a way to do this, but it could have been.

06.30.06 @ 19:06PST

From Walmart to Banana Slugs and Brown Bears
Walmart announces they're selling "organic" foods. The epidemic of diabetes and obesity threaten the longevity of the next generation. Scan the reviews, check the new releases and top sellers and you'll find books critiquing the food industry and exploring ethical eating and eating close to home. Open Arms is a film (in progress) about making sense of what is on your dinner plate and how it got there with a twist. Here's the angle: modern women in the Alaskan wilderness taking part in an ancient food chain stalking wild deer, goat and caribou to put clean, local, safe meat on their families' tables.

That's the latest intro on the latest version of a proposal for a documentary film, Open Arms.
In preparation for continuing this film, I went for a two or so hour hike this morning on Gavan Mountain. After all, these women hunting are not only able and willing to use guns, but they are athletic and fit. Hunting in the Alaskan wilderness is no matter of drive by shooting (ouch). I on the other hand, have to admit to a bookish and film watching tendency and a real need to be provoked to "exercise." So the unfunded project got me out the door into the foggy moist morning. However, if I was following the hunters, I might not have stopped to look closely at an albino banana slug, a curious red squirrel and what might have been a red-breasted sapsucker. I'm no naturalist, no bird watcher, I just want to live deeply in the place that goes in the address slot on film proposals, tax forms and what seems like for now, the occasional invoice for work for others. Furthermore, what I see out the window, where that slug is and the mail comes, is in or minutes away from the Tongass, the largest, most untouched national forest in the United States. We live here on an island where there also may be between 2,000 to 4,000 brown bears.

I also want to keep making films that provoke thought, trigger discussion and help me and perhaps a few others make sense of the world (I'm writing that because some moments I'm not so sure). "You'd say you were on the lower end of commercial spectrum?" a U.S. Forest Service Rep asks. "Yes," I say, happy that the Forest Service sees this project as away to give off a positive message about using and respecting the wilderness versus a high budget film shooting in the woods. No, my crew won't be creating a set, doing pyrotechnics or making much of an impact. In fact my characters don’t give me a chance to reshoot, or ask for another take either. And I've always felt uncertain, a kind of ambivalence about filming in the wild. It seems bigger than the frame, more awe inspiring, and multi-dimensional than I can do justice to. I feel content, but small in the wild. Somehow when I was busy doing street photography in Los Angeles, or in the heavily populated and deforested islands in the West Indies, I felt oddly more comfortable with a camera, more at home in the man made, human dominated environment. Or maybe for some odd reason it felt, at the time, more intense and less recreational. So once again, picking a project leads me and maybe a few viewers to shift a little and rethink.

06.30.06 @ 15:13PST

Friday, December 23rd

Bread Bag
On the way to the garbage can, pass the fresh pile of wood for the stove, I find a Western Family white bread bag. Forlorn. Trash that didn’t make it or stay in one of the cans across the street.

There aren’t many bread wrappers in our garbage. I use a bread machine, eat whole grains and live across from low cost housing. The place is called Paxton Manor. The name sounds regal, well tended, as if someone from the ownership or ruling class would live or go on holiday there. I like where we live, close to town, not surrounded by trophy houses or in a simulation of a suburban neighborhood (after all Sitka has a population of 8,500). But the daily garbage on the ground, the smokers puffing on the hour are kind of sad. These smokers have names; I know them for the most part. I hear their voices, sometimes shrill, raised at their kids who might not have gotten in the door fast enough or have wandered down the road. I can’t help but read a bit of anger, disappointment and exhaustion into those voices. Perhaps there is a lot of joy behind the row of front doors that face us (when the “manor” was demolished and rebuilt several years ago, the new units lost their second doors and all the front doors now face us. See the film clip for Demolished
on this site.)

As I look across the street, think about the voices, the garbage, white bread and nicotine addiction, a car drives up and out comes a man carrying several pizza boxes. More potential trash. For the kids who will eat the pizza, whose voices I love to hear when they play together or cross the street to show us their bikes, throw a snowball and smile-- I hope there is hope, joy and a glimmer of a calm future. Besides, then when they grow up the woman across the street won’t be saddened by the sound of their voices, and maybe won’t be picking up bread bags and other garbage off the ground.

12.23.05 @ 13:59PST

Wednesday, December 21st

Season's Greetings
It is solstice. 7:30 A.M. Dark and quiet on the street outside.
At the post office over the last days the pre-Christmas tension increases daily as I look forward to the light doing soon. I wait in line to mail some tapes and DVDs at the P.O. where we get our mail. As yet another customer asks for tape to close a parcel, I wonder what is in all the envelopes and boxes in the piles behind the counter and in the hands of other people in line. I’m feeling slightly grinchy as I do when the generic letters or cards documenting peoples’ lives come in the mail. At least the cards and letters do come in the mail and don’t add another e-mail to delete, file or deal with later.

Besides the letters, we now have a row of photo cards among the holiday greetings we put up every season. There are few words like “Peace” and “Joy” on these cards and an image of a single child. The kids look alone and almost stoic. Orphans in front of the camera. The family is not in the frame. There is no visual sense these solitary children have parents. I pause, stare at the faces. I can almost hear my friends, in their parental voices asking their offspring to stand still, to stand somewhere so they can snap a photo. Maybe there is a discussion about hair, clothing, maybe some stress, maybe not. I grinch, but I’m content too, to hear from friends and families knowing their lives are filled and appreciating that we are still in touch despite the chaos and details of our lives. Then I check my e-mail and there is one from a friend, with one child. In a p.s. he asks for my spouse’s Spencer’s last name (a common request for invites and cards since Frankenstein kind of overshadows Severson) so he can correctly address the holiday card he and his wife are sending. I look forward to seeing what their daughter looks like this year, where she will be posed and I suspect I won't see the parents on the card.

12.21.05 @ 11:30PST

Friday, October 21st

Open Arms: film in process
Several years ago a local friend told me about a moose hunting trip she made with two other women. Women hunting together. Women, mothers, you wouldn’t expect out in the wilderness trying to bring home food for their families tables The images struck me, played with my discomfort with firearms, stereotypes of men on opening day, and my time as a tofu and sprout eating vegetarian.

This spring I decided it was time to turn the idea into a documentary film, with the working title, Open Arms. I shared my ideas and more ideas bounced back at me. Now we have some footage, a pile of books, notes and research and a need to hone the ideas into something sharper and clearer.

It isn’t just a film about women with guns or women hunting per se I am after. It is like many of the other works I’ve spent years on, about connection. How do we connect to what we eat? How does that connection to what we put into our mouths link to the way we live in a place, relate to our environment and to what is wild? The project is about food, sustenance, the effort to eat sustainably and connect to our families and others in the process. It is about trying to eat healthy safe food too.

I’m thinking now about anthropologist and nature writer Richard Nelson described to me yesterday. He said even if people say going out hunting is more about being in the outdoors than getting meat (especially when they have gone out and come back empty handed) the reality is otherwise. The meat is essential. The process of getting your own food has some kind of deep meaning, a pull that we can’t get from packaged and labeled foods from the supermarket shelves.

The idea of hunting is repulsive to some. It is almost a divisive topic. I have this hope of taking viewers on some kind of intriguing eye opening journey, both the ones who grew up with hunting families and those who grew up like I did, driving to the supermarket, grilling steaks on the summer barbeque and perhaps becoming a vegetarian. Statistics show less people are spending less and less time outdoors explains Alaska Field Representative to the National Rifle Association, Eddie Grasser. I interviewed him when he came to town last month for the Friends of NRA Banquet. As Eddie talked about the meaning of where he lived and being outdoors, he sounded less like what I might stereotype a representative of the NRA to be like and very much like the kayaking, bike friendly and backpacking environmentalists I know from Alaska to Los Angeles. He says the number of hunting licenses applied for has decreased, but the percentage of women applying for them has gone up. Why is this happening? Meat, food, women, outdoors, guns, connection, wellness. The themes will slowly sort themselves out and a film, hopefully, will come out of it too. Meanwhile I wonder if I should make tofu, or thaw and cook venison or salmon we got for dinner.

10.21.05 @ 15:58PST

Grizzly Man and Poachers
Bears aren’t just images on postcards or nature films, they are part of our lives here. Farther out the road bears accustomed to human food sources are known to help themselves to greasy grills and the food left in garbage cans. They don’t usually walk up to our house in this neighborhood so close to downtown Sitka. Though, several summers ago, Willard Jackson, who is from a community south of Sitka and is member of the bear clan (Teikweidee) reported seeing a bear nearby. The bear was one of his relatives coming to visit, he said with a twinkle in his eyes.

Last Friday hiking up Gavan Mountain with some friends, we noticed bear tracks on the trail. A dog with a bell on her collar ran ahead. The bell is a warning device, reminding the bears we are just passing through, visiting their territory or sharing it. I like to joke that the only time I sing is when I am either a thousand miles off shore or to let bears know there is a human passing by, with no ill intentions.

The next night, with the image of local bear tracks still present in my mind, we watched Werner Herzog’s film “Grizzly Man.” The film provokes a lot of thought about man’s relationship to the wild. Most people I’ve spoken with agree that Timothy Treadwell crossed some lines. He seems delusional. Treadwell repeatedly talks about taking care of the bears. "I will protect these bears with my last breath," he says. It is hard not to question how a man, who was ultimately eaten by a bear, could protect wild creatures in an area that is supposedly a sanctuary. Treadwell mentions poachers, but there is no elaboration on whether they are a real threat.

The other night Spencer mentioned a friend involved in the production of show for a Paramount series called “Wild Things” in the same area, northwest of where we live, where Treadwell “worked” with grizzlies. The friend said that an agency, probably US Fish and Wildlife Service, had said told the producers not to mention where they were filming because it would encourage poachers. The friend indicated poaching was an issue in the very same area where crazy Timothy set up his camp, stroked and named bears. The price tag of $13,000 per bear poached was mentioned too. It seems that top dollars are paid for elixirs extracted from bear organs and soup made with bear paws Despite the fact that Alaska has a ban on the commercialization of bear parts, poaching occurs because bear parts can be smuggled out of the state and sold in other states or countries fraudulently. Alaska’s Representative in the US Congress, Don Young, has been largely responsible for ending the progress of the Bear Protection Act to prohibit trade in bear viscera. The act without affecting a state's right to allow a legal bear sport hunting season would deter bear poachers and profiteers, while facilitating state law enforcement.

Herzog didn’t have a mission to talk about poaching or small pieces of Treadwell’s life that touched on something not so freaky or delusional. The director uses the film to contrast his harsh view of the world and nature with Treadwell’s sentimental idealistic perspective. Herzog comments with bleakness on the soundtrack: "I believe the common character of the universe is not harmony, but hostility, chaos and murder." I wonder about the proverbial "happy medium..."

10.21.05 @ 12:46PST

Tuesday, October 18th

Wild Stocks and Wetsuits
There are at least two things I never anticipated. One is living in Alaska and marrying a commercial harvest diver and the other is the endless preparation of letters and comments to protect forests and coast lines to stop the building of roads and leases of publicly owned coastlines to farmers.

I live with what some call a “resource extractor.” Spencer dives for the wild stocks of sea cucumbers and geoduck clams (pronounced gooey duck) and trolls for salmon. He and others also used to dive for abalone, but it seems like a combination of the reintroduction of hungry sea otters and over harvesting closed down that fishery. Spencer also happens not only to harvest wild foods to sell, he hunts and fishes for home use and writes more letters and makes more comments about the enviroment than I can keep up with.

Last week we had a public hearing in Sitka hosted by the Alaska Department of Natural Resources about the leasing of sites for aquatic geoduck farms. This comes in the wake of lots of fighting to keep out fish farms and to try to protect the wild stocks of salmon and other seafood in Alaska. I wrote my comments out but preferred to hear others share their views out loud than speak myself. But given this blog and the potential that it just might get read, here is what I am submitting in writing and did not say in public.

I do not want geoduck farms in S.E. Alaska and am against this privatization of public resources. This past summer I happen to go snorkeling at one of the proposed sites on Krestof Island around Robb Point/Hayward Strait. At the time I was in awe. I had never seen such diversity of life like fish and eels, shellfish and more as I snorkeled along the shoreline. I know in the proposal to use this site for a geoduck farm the applicant says they will not disrupt use or access to this area for subsistence, recreation, tourism or other commercial use. These rights are supposedly protected. They also write that they will not disturb wildlife such as deer and bears. I find this hard to believe given what it entails to maintain and protect an aquatic farm. If the operation is successful it will grow and that will require additional infrastructure and more use of the area around the site. Then will it be accessible or not? Will the owners or workers at the farm be happy to see me arrive in a wetsuit? Will they welcome a hunter anchoring nearby to hike the shore? Will the operation of the farm impact wildlife and wild geoduck stocks? In addition and unfortunately the reputation of geoduck farms elsewhere is one of greed and poaching wild stocks. The proposal claims benefits of possible employment and income to the state. Yet, I’m not sure what benefits the citizens of Sitka and the state truly get from private farms and if we too will experience the reality of this not-so-good history of farming. This particular site I mentioned seems better left to the public. Is setting it aside for an aquatic farm, as the proposal quotes from the Northern Southeast Area Plan in the “best interest?” It may be for the farmer and a handful of individuals, but I don’t think it is for the public.

10.18.05 @ 09:00PST

Tuesday, October 4th

Appointment Cards/Aging with Grace?
“It is the stress of dealing with people I don’t know, “ my mom explains. She groans. Tomorrow a visiting nurse stops by to see how she might integrate in with my mom’s needs. Then a new physical therapist makes her first home visit. Next, we drive to the office of the orthopedic surgeon who repaired her second hip fracture. “We’re really not seeing the doctor,” my mom says. A nurse practioner calls from the surgeon’s office to tell my mom to hold off on one of her meds. “Mabel,” a voice says on the other end of the phone, both questioning and instructing. “Anabel,” I correct. I think protectively and insecurely to myself “if the meds are going to be changed and you don’t know the patient, could the caller perhaps get the name right?’

I write on a lap tap next to a pile of appointment cards stored neatly in my mother’s blotter.

This morning, a little before 9 a.m. still wearing what I slept in, I wondered about the stress of the people she does know, as well as the new ones, as three people tromped in to do the annual cleaning of her apartment in this retirement community. We called and tried to postpone since my mom just got back home after surgery and a month of rehabilitation in what is called the “living center” here. “No,” I’m told by a warm woman with a cleaning cloth in her hand, a smile, and a cart of supplies behind her, “this only happens once a year and can’t be rescheduled.” Two men follow her in with a vacuum cleaner in hand and begin to take out the screens in the windows and move furniture around. I stayed up late the night before writing and woke up to my mom calling out a little before 6 a.m. with news of a dream that didn’t make sense to her. It didn’t make a lot of sense to me either, but we both knew the painkillers were doing more than just softening the hurt.

The other residents are warm, like the woman who comes each Tuesday to do a little cleaning. “I moved in the day after the carpet was put down, “ a white haired woman in a neat khaki outfit proudly tells me, as she checks her mail and walks back to her motorized chair. “Your mom and I were some of the first people here.” Another woman, waiting for her turn outside the nurse’s office, laughs about saving her husband's walker and pulling it out from behind the couch when she needed it. “My spine is disintegrating,” she tells me, almost with a chuckle. I’m tired, worried about leaving my mom soon and at times exhausted by seeing her pain and frustration. I cringe at times waiting for some kind of critique or negative remark to come out of my her mouth as it has so often in the past. In the meanwhile, my mom isn’t being negative and these women both cheer her on, offer support, tell her not to fall again and look me over like a sample of what is strong in her.

10.04.05 @ 21:51PST

Noatak River/Suburban Crosswalks
Layers of contrast. Last week on the Noatak River looking for caribou. Today I drove to a mega size grocery store, past a sprawling mall in upstate New York. I tripped a lot walking in the bumpy tundra outside Kotzebue. The silence was amazing. The vast openness. Sam, our guide shared smoked salmon strips, caribou jerky as well as store bought beef jerky as we traveled. I kept saying or chanting as I looked around, amazed, “we are in the Artic.” I can still almost taste the wild low growing blue berries and cranberries. I need no digital reminders or fragments to call up images of the river and the hills, the lichens, the antlers left behind by local hunters who wanted meat and did not care for trophy-like reminders of their kills.

I get out of my mom’s car, in the seemingly endless parking lot, and wonder if I should lock the car or not. I am not cued in. The cars whiz around the mall lot with such purpose, such cause. In the store, remodeled and expanded multiple times since I was a teen, the piles of fruit, the rows of vegetables, the intent of shoppers behind their carts unsettles me. And I am unsettled again as I drive back to my mom’s and pause ten seconds or so too long after a light turned green (I was noticing a young woman with her back turned, standing at a bus stop and wondering about her story). A woman in a red SUV behind honks at me. I have wasted her time; I have slowed her progress. Not long after I stop for some pedestrians in a cross walk. The car in front of me has hurried past them. Maybe laws don’t apply to people in a hurry, A young man sticks out his hand to remind me of his right as they venture into the street. I lean out the window, again holding up the red SUV, and shout, needing somehow to vent my discomfort with a cheer, “pedestrians rock.”

10.04.05 @ 07:14PST