A blog finds its way home - The End of NinetyNineWeeks and 64 North

Ah, good friends, the time has come to migrate this blog back over to my home at www.timakimoff.com. I've long written a blog called Killing Ernest, and I always planned on Ninetynineweeks being just what it was, temporary. So, from here on out, I will be posting to Killing Ernest, which can be found at www.timakimoff.com.

I've migrated all the old posts to Killing Ernest, and I promise to continue to blog our Alaska adventures as well as my take on the media and the big events of our times.

Thanks so much for following me at Ninetynineweeks and 64 North. I really enjoyed the interaction, and I hope we can continue that at www.timakimoff.com.

Ciao!

Tim

The surreal life and the lunar eclipse

Just as the last sliver of what we call moonlight and what is actually reflected sunlight flashed silver in the deep black background of space, Carson asked me a philosophical question.

I told him that moon watching makes me philosophical too.

Carson is a scientist in a 9-year-old’s body. And as a journalist, I have a curiosity streak like nothing else. Whenever you find an odd or rare occurrence in the cosmos, it's likely the little man and I are outside with our eyes gazing up at the heavens.

When the moon was in a full eclipse, we danced a little pagan dance, whatever that is, and we reveled in the shadowy darkness completely enthralled by this element of space and time.

“Dad, it must be really difficult being God.” he said.

“Really, why do you think that?”

“Because He has to answer all these prayers and help people and take care of things like this,” he said, pointing to the orangy moon hiding in earth’s shadow.

We talked a little about how people perceive God as a person with the same limitations that we understand and the possibility that God doesn’t exist in the same time and space that we occupy.

Carson is a big idea kid, and when he hits on something that brings understanding, he is quick to move beyond whatever was hanging him up.

We stared at the moon for another 10 minutes and called it a night.

And then it hit me again as it has several times over the last few weeks, this surreal life.

I’m watching a lunar eclipse in the backyard of my home in Anchorage, Alaska.

What about this makes sense?

What if we hit the rewind button?

Four hours earlier, my wife pulled into our driveway where a rather large moose was eating God-knows-what off the trees in our front yard.

Three-days ago I was dancing salsa at a company Christmas party.

One-and-half-months-ago I took a job as digital director at a broadcast station in Anchorage, Alaska.

Two-months-ago we moved out of the first home we purchased in Missoula, Montana.

Three-months-ago I got laid off from my job at a small newspaper in Missoula, Montana.

This has been a surreal year.

There are these moments in your life where you try to pull it all together to create a framework for your life. But the corners don’t come together neatly.

There are times when you look out on some astrological entity like a lunar eclipse and think, where am I?

It’s the philosophical question, but in my case, it has physical implications. Where am I standing?

In ankle-deep crystalline snow in the backyard of a house I just moved into with a chunk of fence missing where a big, bull moose jumped over and broke a couple boards with his massive belly last week.

Where am I standing now?

In the backyard of our house in ankle-deep crystalline snow on a crisp December night in Anchorage, Alaska.

It doesn’t make sense, no matter how many times I say it out loud to myself.

But it’s real. As real as the cold air that chokes me up like the first puff of a cigarette when you don’t smoke. As real as the way your breath curls up into the still, frozen air like smoke with no wind.

And I think to myself, “It must be really difficult being God…”

What started like a bad novel has turned into a masterpiece

It started like a bad novel, on a dark and stormy night. It was December. And after all these years, I still don't know why we picked December.

She looked like a queen in a white dress with her hair done up in curls.

I remember that she looked so soft and like porcelain. Too valuable to be held. And yet all I wanted to do was grab her hand and run away with her.

There's a photo of my expression when I saw her for the first time in her wedding dress. It's completely true and honest if you ever have a chance to see it.

We met in 3rd grade. Well, I was in 3rd grade, I think she was in 5th. She tutored my brother in math. I don't think I gave her a second thought then. But I knew of her.

As we grew up together in a small school in the Oregon countryside, our paths crossed more frequently. When I could drive, in 9th grade, I gave her rides to school. In my senior year, we took a trip to the beach. She fell and scraped her knee on a rock, and I fell in love with her completely.

We dated for almost three years before we decided that our next obvious adventure was marriage. She planned it all.

I still don't know why, but we picked December 17, 1994.

It was a cold and stormy night...

Our families showed up and loved on us a lot.

I think about the person I've loved all these years. I worry about her wellbeing, especially as I've dragged her delicate heart all over the map in my mad quest to live this life and experience as much as I possibly can.

Do I believe there is one person out there made for us? Of course. How could I not? She is like a glove. The perfect fit for my heart. She is patient and demanding. She makes you love her and fights for what she perceives as justice.

If love is like finding a needle in a haystack, then my heart must have long ago been drawn to the right haystack in the right state, the right city and the right neighborhood.

So here we are, 16 years after we decided to formalize our love affair. It has not been easy, but it's been fun, and I don't think there is much more you could ask for than a life full of laughter and fun.

She has suffered every setback with me. She has forged ahead when I wanted to quit. She has loved me when I'm completely unloveable. She has weathered every storm by my side and given me the three most beautiful gifts a man can receive.

There are no words for the good love you find in your youth. The kind that sustains you and envelopes you. The kind that protects you and lifts you up when you fall down.

I only understand the great love stories through the life we've shared together these long years. And I'm enthralled with the possibilities in the years to come.

Beautiful, I can't thank you enough for 16 wonderful years together. This love affair was born in a storm to temper us for times like these. And when the wind howls and the rain pours down, I always know where my heart is safest.

Love you,

Me

The art of mushing

I think a lot about Hemingway's passion for bull fighting. He was an aficionado in an era when that meant something.

Sometimes I wonder what led him to his passion for the fights. Was it the Spanish countryside, the pace of life and the affinity that the people shared for what was then the national sport of Spain?

I've read and reread Hem's bull fighting material many times, but I don't live near enough to a bull ring to relate to the sport.

Recently I experienced, if it can be called that, a sport that I could very much find myself becoming an aficionado of. To Alaskans, it is the national sport. At times, it seems it's the only sport.

It has almost nothing in connection with bull fighting, but had Hemingway made it to Alaska, he might have found similarities.

Papa wrote a lot about the kind of man it took to fight the bulls. About the mental tenacity required to bring down such a large beast so delicately. But he also wrote about the beauty of the beasts and the role they played in what is essentially a death ballet.

Dog sled racing traces its roots to necessity, to survival. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that bull fighting can trace its roots back to something similar, to man's great dance with nature.

I have never been dog sledding before. My only exposure to the sport came from covering the start or end of the Race to the Sky, Montana's premier mushing event.

So on an extraordinarily cold December morning, I traveled to the home of Dallas Seavey to try my hand at a sport that is so much more than just endurance. A sport that just might be the most beautiful embodiment of man's great dance with nature.

There are no beautiful accouterments in dog racing. Survival clothing is very grounded in practicality and its most basic function.

The first thing you must know about racing dogs is that they bear very little resemblance to those massive huskies, samoyeds or malamutes you might think of when you imagine sled dogs.

Great sled dogs are not generally a single breed from what I can tell. The Alaskan Husky is not in fact a breed, but a category of dog.

And to look out on Seavey's racing dogs is to see what look like smallish, husky-esque muts.

The dogs spend their non-running hours in a pseudo pack chained nearby to one another on a large, flat pad. The snow is meticulously cleared of their poop, while the chilled air smells distinctly of their urine.

Their excitement reaches a sharp crescendo as they realize it's time for a run. Below the shadowed kennels is a large snow-covered marsh lit up like a concert stadium by a bright northern sun. When the teams are hitched to the sleds, they are run down a large shoot out into the open track.

I rode a trailer sled the first time around the loop. It's a way to let people experience the feeling of driving the sled, while an experienced musher guides the well-trained dogs. Sort of like parachuting for the first time tandem with an experienced jumper.

The low sun is extremely bright shortly after rising to its zenith in the northern sky, just a little over the tree tops. It will set by 3:05 p.m.

"Hike!"

Contrary to popular beliefe, mushers do not usually say mush. It's too soft a word to be an effective command word for these dogs.

We set off directly into the light with the dogs tugging and then smoothly pulling us out onto the track. I grab on to the sled hard and attempt to find something akin to sea legs as the sled shifts across the uneven snow.

Soon the sled starts to circle the wide marsh, and we turn our backs on the sun and gaze at its blinding reflection. I can sense the dogs' anticipation of a good, hard run as they surge forward. A fork appears in the snow, demarcated by a slight shadow.

"Gee!" the driver shouts and the dogs veer right. I attempt to shift my weight to the left runner as the driver does. Because of the full circle of the track we were running, we don't here the command for left, Haw!

The driver asked if we thought we could handle a thousand miles of this. I gazed out across the sun drenched snow-palace marsh and briefly thought, "yes." But the penetrating cold physically hurt my toes, which were encased in boots advertised to be comfortable to 40 below. The sting of cold on my face numbed me to the point where it was difficult to sound coherent.

The driver explained that he frost-bit his toes a week ago after taking the dogs on a run in something other than his normal boots.

Shortly after this, I fell through the ice into a small creek. I soaked one leg good, and I was at least a quarter mile from the house. I took off running, the slosh turning to slush in the -7 degree air.

Dallas Seavey, the youngest person to ever run the Iditarod, and whose dogs pulled me around this marsh, looks young. To know that he's finished one of the most grueling races in the world is enough to respect him. To know he finished in 6th place in 2009 is astounding.

After running the dogs, we sat inside his yurt, which is outfitted like an Ikea catalogue. Three Alaska husky pups are receiving a king's pampering in the arms of visitors. But they're soon put back out into the cold they are bred for.

Seavey talked about his grandfather, who raced in the first ever Iditarod

His wife, Jen, sits on the floor and cradles their young daughter. Jen ran the Iditarod too. It's what they talk about in the summer when they're not racing. And in winter they're living it every minute of every day.

Mushers don't live on a schedule like normal people. They work always and always in increments. Six hours of running, four hours of feeding and resting the dogs and then another six-hour run.

Even when they train, they keep to no schedule but the pull of the dogs on their harness.

"Hike!"

Riding the last great whistle stop train

The pleasure in riding trains is derived purely from the physical experience of riding on trains. I can only imagine how good it must have been when the herky, jerky steam engines ruled the planet. But even the smooth-running diesel engines of today with the beshocked cars still give pleasure in the way they yaw and chuck along their way.

On Saturday I rode the Alaskan Railroad 100 miles north to the town of Talkeetna. The journey, while short, is a phenomenal experience in an increasingly rare form of travel.

The conductor pops his head into the station and yells, "Goooooooooood, mooooooooorning," to a sleepy group of passengers. He barks out a series of instructions, and like good farm animals, we corral ourselves through the doors toward assured shelter.

He's done this, this railroad, for 40 years. It's his life. He checks his gold pocket watch regularly to make sure the train is slightly behind schedule. For people who rely on the train as a way of life, it wouldn't be a good idea to be right on time or, God forbid, early.

This is the last whistle stop train in North America.

A whistle stop train is a very particular form of transportation for a very particular person. The kind of person who wants to live out in the wild. A wild so wild that only a railroad passes nearby. These people ride many miles on snow machines to catch the train into town or down the tracks to a neighbor's house to fix a problem.

Along the way, the conductor tosses a newspaper out every once in a awhile when he knows someone will find the orange bag containing this week's news updates along side the tracks.

Along the way he welcomes passengers for whom the train is no novelty. Their belongings are not tourist bags or traveler's packs.

As we disembark the train in Talkeetna, he wishes us a fond farewell, by name, each of us, with a smile.  As we walk away from the train into the quaint little valley town, he checks his pocket watch and hops aboard the train for the nine-hour journey to Fairbanks. Into the cold, cold north. Chugging along and telling stories and hearkening back to a better time when travel was as simple as the monstrous engines that carried us here and there.

One Month in Anch!

Who moves to Alaska in the winter? November isn't exactly the heart of winter, but it's close enough. The lack of a sunrise before 9:30 a.m., the strange, heavy snow followed by a fast melt, the way the air takes your breath away when you first step out a door, this far north is exactly what you'd expect it to be this time of year. 

In the month since we ran to catch our plane at PDX, we've done a lot and a lot of nothing. Downtime after a huge move is good, and we've taken the cold snowy nights to watch movies, eat around the coffee table, learn how to tiptoe around the apartment, enjoy chilly walks down the Park Blocks after dinner and walk downtown to have coffee or watch the lighting of the Christmas Tree.

Call us cautious, we've made new friends, but good relationships often grow slowly, developing deep roots, so we're not in a hurry. We've learned to like each other in cramped quarters. We eat dinner in shifts, because our dining room table is a green fold up for two. 

We share a bathroom, which is decidedly tough with a nearly teenage boy who likes to shower every day, a younger brother who'd rather not shower at all, and a little sister who seems to have to go pee every 10 minutes or at least every time I am in the bathroom. 

Because many people rent these fully furnished apartments by the week, we've had a lot of neighbors we never get to know. The good news is that after a month, Cheryl finally found out that there is a laundry room in the building, and she got the lock code. No more long nights hanging out in the green fluorescent light of the laundromat up on Fireweed. 

We've seen many moose since we saw the big mama moose eating leftover pumpkins on our first weekend in town. Cheryl saw a huge bull moose in front of the library in midtown last week, and we saw another big cow and her baby on the way to visit Portage Glacier with a visitor. 

We've been ice skating with the kids on the oval at Cuddy Park as the sunset just after 4 p.m., casting an orange-creamsicle light over the midtown oil buildings. And we've spent an afternoon sledding and cross-country skiing at Kincaid Park, with a stop for hot chocolate on our way home. 

Saw the Nutcracker ballet and enjoyed evenings out and about at clubs and pubs.

Life is not perfect, but it is good. The adventure of Alaska is in the daily experience of living here. You don't have to launch an expedition to go and find it. In a place so beautiful, danger is an overabundant commodity in Alaska.

On a long-enough timeline, Alaska will kill you. I can attest to this just in the news reported every day on our station and in the local newspaper. Living here is surviving here. Even in the crowded metropolis of Anchorage, death isn't very far away, be it bullet, cold, car or plane crash. 

The dark won't kill you, but I can see why so many give up and go back south where the dark hours play more fairly with the light. There is a certain anxiety until the solstice comes around and the simple knowledge that the days are growing longer brings those first hopeful thoughts of spring around again. 

My claustrophobia gets the best of me occasionally. I wake up feeling a bit stifled, but I know that is a product of the fact I haven't driven much farther than the 45 miles it takes to get to Girdwood. I haven't been to the valley yet. I haven't been to Homer. Until I get a sense for the bigness of the place and the few roads that take you anywhere in this state, I'll wake up feeling a bit stifled, or I'll look out my window at work at the Chugach Mountains and wonder what is behind them and behind that. 

One month and so much to look back on already. The adventure has good start. 

"What's so civil about war anyway?"

I'm a Duck. My brother is a Beaver. And today we engage in the seventh oldest college football rivalry in the United States.

We're not a football family. We didn't grow up passionately cheering on our teams. Even in high school and the years between that and college, I never really cared about the Oregon rivalry specifically, but then again, there wasn't much to celebrate in those years.

I remember walking around on campus and seeing Joey Harrington  in between classes during his final year there. Later I had a class with Kellen Clemens. Something about collegiate football grows on you. By the end of my two years at the University of Oregon, I was a full-fledged Duck fan.

Early in my awareness of football as a national sport in the United States, I was under the misguided notion that your team somehow defined you. I would pick the best team and claim that I was there number one fan. My first was the Dallas Cowboys, a team I picked after watching them destroy the Washington Redskins on a Thanksgiving many, many years ago.

Years and many teams later, I watched a Super Bowl with my father. That year I was a fan of the Cincinnati Bengals because they were beating everyone else. I was a candle in the wind fan if ever there was one.

My father had sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge into a new life in America as a young boy. Into one of America's greatest cities. As a San Franciscan, he loved Bay Area football. Having been born in the Bay Area but never having lived there long, I did not inherit his love for the 49ers. Not until that game.

Watching Joe Montana and Jerry Rice march down the field and a John Taylor touchdown with 35 seconds to go was pure, unadulterated football beauty. And I was hooked. I have been a 49er fan ever since.

Watching the Ducks dominate this year has been a pleasure. The pure machine that is their offense is so fluid and fast, one can't help but enjoy it. Well, unless you're my brother. He tends to think that the coach is a classless lout and that the Ducks cheat at every available opportunity.

But I also find myself falling back to something that my dad taught me along the way. A close game is better than a blowout any day. In every high-scoring game this year, there came a moment when you'd just know there was no way the tired opponents could stop the Ducks. You'd watch the defense give up, and the Ducks would reach for 20 and 30 point leads.

After spending three years in Missoula, Montana, a place where the football team's unbroken streak of conference titles is the second or third thing you'll hear when you arrive, I've grown a little tired of college football state rivalries.

Facebook is full of Beavers complaining about a surge of "new" Duck fans that seem to have come from nowhere and Duck fans taunting the Beavers about their lack of ability to find the goal line. It was the same in Montana with Griz fans mercilessly taunting the beleaguered Bobcat fans in the windup to the Brawl of the Wild.

I'm going to be very happy if my Ducks beat the Beavers today and go on to the National Championship. That can almost go without saying. A big bowl game and a national title would be incredible, if not tainted by the fact that the BCS is so corrupted and the two best teams may not even be playing in the final.

But if the Ducks happen to drop the ball today and the Beavers win out in a hard-fought game, I'll be all right. I'm a Duck, but their football team doesn't define me. I wish I could say the same for my kids, three kids bedecked in green and yellow and as rabid as any fans I've ever seen.

Go Ducks!

Posers and red diamonds

Confidence is rare like painite or red diamonds. It seems to me we start with an amount and lose it at times. A little goes a long way, and maybe it gets stronger if you feed it. I don't know.

All I know is that getting laid off can take away a lot of confidence. Getting laid off when you're a professional in a hot field like digital can cut away confidence like tearing strips of skin off you. I don't need to say it's painful.

I've struggled with many questions about why I got laid off. I spent a lot of time succumbing to lack of confidence and beating myself up over the mysteries. I kept asking who, what, when, where, why, as if I could craft an inverted pyramid that would reveal, quickly, what happened.

Turns out I had a bit of a narcissistic view of my situation, which, ironically, is the plague currently infecting media and that which likely led to my layoff.

You see, yesterday I found out all about posers and professionals and the abundance of the former and lack of the latter in the ranks of our esteemed Fourth Estate.

A poser, by this definition, is someone skilled at posturing, which is like putting yourself into a position where you are able to claim adoration and accolades for the work of others. Anyone know of people like this in the media? Reporters? Editors? Publishers? How about ad directors? Middle managers? Art directors?

What about online people?

You betchya.

Posers know how to worry about themselves. They know where the bottom line is. Priority number one is not often the business they are there to enhance, it is the business of self interest. Posers will infect the workplace with enough venom to nearly immobilize the work environment.

Sound familiar? According to a behaviorist I spent some time with recently, the media, among other industries, is rife with posing and posturing.

In the online world, a world that is about as whole and mapped as the world in "The Never Ending Story," as it breaks up into particles in space, there are those who proceed into the abyss and those who stand at the edge and theorize. The latter often takes credit for small advancements made into the abyss. Little stepping stones and bridges to nowhere become victories claimed for initials higher up the food chain.

This is not new.

Posers have been claiming the successes of others since the others started succeeding.

But there is irony in the mix too. I once had an editor tell others that I was vainglorious for posting my stories to Facebook. This was a year before a mandate came down from corporate for more push strategy. Was I an innovator? By no means. I'd seen other reporters doing it with great success, and that made a lot of sense to me.

Working in the abyss, one can see the shiny metal parts that constitute posing. Through the old diver's helmet of online work, the drop offs loom like dark despair, while the lifeline to the boat above and laying claim to the little gems found by others below must surely be a better place. Right?

What bothers me most is that posers don't inherently care about the future of journalism. They're so caught up in their own reflection they wouldn't care if our Fourth Estate looks like whatever is beyond thunder dome.

I don't think you get confidence back. I think the remaining painite in your system is bolstered by knowledge, revelation, the 5,000-foot-view, shaking off the detritus, one victory after a thousand failures.

The truly beautiful thing is that journalism won't be destroyed by posers. If even a few professionals remain, and I have worked with more than a few professionals, our future is safe. Posers won't save journalism either. Oh, they'll try to claim it, but at the point where journalism plunges into the abyss and comes out the other side, there are going to be an awful lot of people in old divers' helmets walking it out on their backs.

Pose and posture all you want. You'll be high and dry.

Things you do for love

It used to be that I considered ice skating the romantic equivalent or substitution of buying a dozen roses. Such is my wife's love of the fairy tale sport.

For my wife, the Winter Olympics are nothing until the pretty girls and boys take the ice. There is no substitute for the thrill of watching the skaters strive for a clean program. No feeling more crushing than watching a hard fall on a quad attempt.

Anniversaries past were spent driving to Portland for an evening dining out and then a skate in new sweaters under the lights at whatever mall then held an ice rink.

In my mind, I had scored the ultimate romantic points. In reality I stumbled clumsily on the ice along the walls of the rink as figure skaters practiced salchows in the middle.

Had I been able to skate around the rink hand in hand with my wife, the false wind blowing through our hair, the classical music settling over the ice chill like lace, I might have achieved my goal.

I hate ice skating. I, being built not as a pear or even an apple but more like some unnameable fruit that is round in the middle and slender at the bottom and top, have not the ankles to support myself on skates.

Standing there laced midway up the calf in figure-skating boots, I wobble, unable to find balance on the thin blades beneath me. The ankle cracking that ensues is enough to cause people to wonder if I'm not slowly crumbling, bones crushed to dust as I teeter and totter.

But I grab the wall and ease along, one foot in front of the other attempting to slide. Soon it gets a little easier, and I step away for a moment. The next I'm turning circles on the ice flat on my back. The toe pick having done its job of instantly stalling my forward progress and dropping me to the hard ice below.

This is the same the nearly half-dozen times I've attempted to ice skate.

Somewhere in those years, my wife gave up on me. I would/will never be the strong partner for lifts or catches. Nor will I likely be sailing smoothly, romantically around the rink hand in hand.

On Sunday, we attempted to ice skate with our youngest kids. Carson would like to play hockey, and I told him he at least needs to learn how to skate before he tries hockey. Seems logical to me though not to him as he picks out sticks and pucks and padding.

I thought maybe Gabrielle could vicariously fulfill that long-ago wish that my wife had to sail through the air over smooth ice and land delicately on a knife's edge before gliding away, arms outstretched.

So in the twilight of an early winter Alaska afternoon, we made our way to the oval at Cuddy Park. We laced up our battered used newly purchased hockey skates and gingerly stepped onto the snow-dusted ice.

I walked Gabrielle around the rink hand in hand while Carson flopped around on the ice in a hybrid of skating and ice running. As the sun sank west of the city and outlined the midtown towers, we increased our confidence away from the mall eyes at the formal rink.

Hobbling at first, I stayed near the edge where the invitingly soft snow piled up like safety bales. Then moving out onto the smooth ice, I stretched my legs and put my weight into the blades to glide. Two quick steps and glide, a step and glide. Arms like airplane wings or stabilizers, hips burning from new motions, I made a lap around in what constitutes record time for me.

It wasn't like I ever pictured it, but we made a long, slow lap around the oval hand in little hand in big hand. Gabrielle in between Cheryl and I stepping and skating together, the real wind in our hair and smiles on our faces. Rediscovery and late-attempts at dreams are like the surprise blossoms in early February. They keep you going forward.

Something to be thankful for

I peeked out through the shades in the living room to see giant snow flakes falling softly in the early morning light. It felt like a holiday, but I missed the smell of food cooking so familiar at my parents' house.

I decided to remedy that. Perhaps it would wake up the sleeping beauties in the darkened apartment.

We haven't been home for Thanksgiving in three years. That's partly because it's a tough holiday to split up between our two sets of in-laws who live just a few miles apart from each other. 

It still never fails that I miss spending these special days with my family. The food, the conversation, the hours and hours of catching up around the table.

Try as I might, I cannot recreate the experience, the warmth, the feeling of the larger family group gathering on these days.

We have little traditions that we hold on to. Mostly food related. On Wednesday, Cheryl picked up some  aged cheeses and a bottle of wine. Around 10 a.m. on Thursday, we Skyped my sister Aimee, who was holding the annual Akimoff Cheese Competition at her house this year. 

It was nice to see everyones' face and enjoy a glass of wine together through the digital avenue of our computer and an Internet connection. But it wasn't the same as being there.

My brother Mark won this year with an aged Brindisi from Willamette Valley Cheese Co., and I could only imagine how good it tasted. 

I spent a good portion of the morning cutting up root veggies for my roasted root veggie medley that has become our own little Thanksgiving tradition, and once it started to roast, the smells of caramelizing rutabagas, beets, parsnips, carrots, garlic and other goodies right out of God's green earth made the house smell like heaven.

The snow piled up high by midday, and it made for the best driving in nearly two weeks. Intersections were far more navigable, and traffic seemed to flow without the nerves of the ice driving we've been doing. 

We made our way through the quite, billowy winter wonderland to the home of the Boots family, where we were invited to spend Thanksgiving dinner. I found it absolutely brimming with the smells I usually associate with home and mom.

It's not always easy to fit into a new place, especially on the holidays when you're far from home. And yet every family has traditions that you can see and share. I found myself focusing on the similar traditions that my family holds and the similarities at another house a million miles away.

We had  beautiful day with new friends. I spent an hour watching their old home movies just to get a sense of who they were in this place. We ate and ate and drank good wine and beer and talked all afternoon.

It wasn't a whole lot different from what I love about hanging out with my family. It was just a different cast of characters.

I wondered how difficult it would be to get through the holidays in this new place, new job, new faces, new streets, new sky, new life. Thanksgiving was the litmus test, and from what I can tell, everything turned out well, which means the rest of our holidays may turn out. And that bodes well for life in general, does it not?

Icepocalypse 2010 - Our weather curse continues

I know I don't have any direct effect on the weather. But you know how people often say, "Did you bring that rain (or snow or sun) with you?"

I will say that the last few moves we've made happened to coincide with very strange weather patterns, and I'll give my conservative friends a break and not mention that-which-must-not-be-mentioned, but I'll give you a hint, it starts with a global and ends with warming.

For the sake of peace and harmony and glorious ignorance, let's just say that weather and rare-occurring phenomena seem to follow us from place to place.

I can't really explain it other than to say we're blessed?

We moved to Missoula in the summer of 2007. I moved over a few weeks before Cheryl and the kids joined me. All was fairly normal, or so it seemed. I ran into typical Montana summer weather in some big thunder boomers crossing over McDonald Pass to Helena. And back in Missoula I found the late-afternoon rain showers refreshing.

But then the mercury began to rise. By the time Cheryl and the kids showed up on the scene, the temperature hit 105, and it didn't back down for 10 days. It was, in fact, the longest stretch of hot weather to hit the western part of the state in recorded history. If I'm not mistaken, I believe Montana reached its all-time high temperature that summer.

Needless to say, we sweltered in our welcome week in Montana.

There were other strange things before that. I once flew into Nadi Airport in Fiji a day before a powerful Typhoon brushed the northern part of the islands and devastated a few villages that we helped clean up after.

We ran into record-breaking rainfall in a move to Hawaii many years ago and watched streams rise over their banks and flood parts of town at the same time that the Pacific Northwest was inundated by what meteorologists started to call the Pineapple Express at the time.

Of course moving to Anchorage I assumed we might see some sort of blizzard for the ages, but no, our weather streak continues as the state is gripped in what people on Twitter are calling the icepocalypse, what in some places has been called an unprecedented weather event.

We've been here a little under a month now, and it snowed once in any concentration. I think it was about 7 inches, about half of which remains dank and dirty encased in layers of frozen rain.

I believe there is a collective cry for snow reverberating around the state, as outdoor enthusiasts and commuters alike, dislike the current state of the weather in the state.

I know it's not us, it's the unpredictable nature of weather and the effects of the thing-which-must-not-be-mentioned, but which clearly has an impact on our weather, whether or not we (humans) contribute to it or not.

Weather, like sports and Sarah Palin, gives us something to talk about around the Thanksgiving table. And on a day like today, with the sky dripping down over Anchorage, freezing in spots or splashing into slushy puddles, I'm grateful for neighbors who keep their apartments so hot that I don't have to and hooded parkas and working indoors. And for probably the first time in my life, I'm actually praying for snow.

The truth about light

Sometimes you don't notice the qualities of light until you don't have it any more. The way it bends things in the late afternoon or freezes life like colored-stone sculptures in the early morning.

I remember growing up in the Willamette Valley with that miniature Mt. Fuji called Hood towering over the Cascade foothills and making me dream of walking up its whipped-cream slopes.

Some days it seemed like it was in my backyard, as if I could spit and reach its summertime Appaloosa appearance. And other days it receded into the haze or fog or clouds as if in a fit or mood or tantrum.

A trick of the light brought the mountain to my doorstep and pushed it away into the far distance.

The night light is a beast of a different dimension altogether. It makes you work harder, and like all hard-gained rewards, it is sweeter.

I once saw stars of various colors at the top of a very tall mountain in Hawaii, in a place where there were no lights and where you felt like you could step off into outer space. Blue giants, red dwarfs, the heavens looked like a celestial pinball game.

Man-made light will never surpass the intensity and life-giving aspects of natural light, but there is something intensely beautiful about the way we try. Our tower-of-Babel attempts to mimic the creative force of the Big Bang light show hurtling us through the universe.

A few blocks east of where we live, there is a building with a staircase in the middle that zig zags like a lightening bolt. Each floor is lighted a pastel hue that colors the building like a bright marker stroke on a white sheet of paper or a rainbow sand stick.

In the darkness of morning, a time when all light seems to have disappeared completely, this building makes me stop and pause. In the hours of early afternoon, when the winter sun is at its most intense, I notice the Chugach Mountains draped in billowy folds of creamy snow reflecting the sun like a jagged-edged mirror. But driving through town, I notice the oil buildings shining in sun-beat copper-tinted blasts of four-sided prismatic decadence. You can't help but notice.

At this time of year, when the sun begins to settle low on its already low northerly arc, the soft, warm rays color snow like through rose-tinged water and wash dirty snow streets with an East L.A. hazy look of late August and smog you can just see through to the brown-washed San Gabriel Mountains.

Then it's gone again, the light. It fades quickly to salmon-pink streaks in a slate-blue sky I've never seen before in the Lower-48.

Murky light moving in twin beams of headlights zooming through town and red lights like all the bad connotation of the districts they've come to represent make the computer-weary eyes wearier still.

I've never thought about light as much as I've thought about it here in Alaska. I'm conscious of when the sun rises and the games light plays on morning windshields and distant mountains, making Sleeping Lady look like a white-robed starlet stretched out on a white animal skin.

I'm aware of the loss of light in the late afternoons. Watching through floor-to-ceiling windows in my office as the light fades fast like before a movie starts.

Light is an individual experience. There are those who live without it in the heart of the cold, cold winter. There are those who may never notice it in the overwhelming warmth of the tropics. Some are sad as soon as the sun sets and others are restless in the midnight sun, unable to feel the natural rhythms in the blinding 20-hour daylight and four-hour twilight of July.

Light is always. Even in the dark, our eyes adjust to soak light out of nothingness.

And I'm comforted by the light on snow in the darkest dark and in between the sunsets and sunrises. I'm grateful to be aware of the light as I've never been aware of it before.

Even the Big Dipper and the North Star on the deep blue backdrop of the Alaskan flag speak of light.

It's not the dark that gets you in Alaska, it's the light.

A prayer for the disaffected, the unencumbered of employment and the aimless wanderer

I started working a "real" job when I was 16. I worked most of the way through high school and began full time work in the summer of 1994, when I took a job with a construction company in Salem, Oregon.

There have been a few gaps in my working life since then.

The last six weeks have been the longest and most stressful moments I can remember in recent history.

Of course that's not saying much. My memory lives in a Google search algorithm now.

On Friday I'll get a paycheck for the first time in six weeks. To go back, we didn't really have a nest egg or an emergency plan in place since we purchased our house a year ago and it ate up anything we did have saved up.

In six weeks we lived off Cheryl's earnings at Applebees until she left at the end of October. We lived off the sale of various household items we needed to get rid of for our move to Anchorage, and we lived off the sale of our second car.

What amazes me is the fact that we made it through a very rough spot. Families are like small countries. They're not easy to run, and they cost twice as much as you think they should to run.

But it wasn't the money that helped us get through. It merely smoothed out a rough road. It was the friendships, prayers, thoughts and words of wisdom provided by some very dear friends and family.

And I mean those who really understood how hard it was at times.

It's very easy to say, "I knew things would work out for you," from the comfort of your reinstated 401k, salaried and glass-enclosed comfort zone.

I know it's difficult to empathize with people in difficult situations at times and that it is sometimes hard to know what to say. But saying that "you're so talented, I knew it wouldn't take you long to find a job," has all the Halmark ring of a belated get-well card when you're trying to figure out how to make a $500 stretch for you-don't-know-how-long.

And I'd be over it, but I have a few friends who are still in the same boat I was rescued from recently. Adrift with few prospects, it's easy to throw them an, "I know you'll find something soon," as you walk up the gangplank of your hallelujah boat.

Lord, help me to remember what it's like to walk through the dark times so that I may never forget those who are walking the same pathways today and tomorrow. Help me be a light to those who are downtrodden and suffering. Let me not look over the edge of dispair and offer nothing more than words with half meanings. Let me remember the dark places so that I may be used to help guide others along the way. Make me a mapmaker, a cartographer of sorts. Let my experiences, both good and bad, serve as a book, a story, a route to follow. As much as I prayed for guidance and the clean foot prints of others to follow. Let me leave my own behind.

Amen

Montage of a Sunny Day in Anchorage

Cheechako in Alaska

When you travel, when you live in many places, you remain forever a newcomer. In Hawaii I was a Haole, in Fiji, a Kavalagi, in New Zealand I was Paheka.

Now I'm Cheechako in Alaska.

I talk to people who've been here in Anchorage for 25, 30 and even 50 years. I see advertisements for businesses that were started by gold prospectors 100-years-ago.

I hear talk of the Sourdoughs, those who've been around for a while.

Seems you have to put in a hard winter or 10 before you become a Sourdough. The winters today don't count for much.

Meanwhile, I'm a Cheechako.

And like nowhere else I've ever been, I feel like one.

This morning I followed two cars down a side road leading away from my son's school. I thought maybe I'd find a shortcut to C Street, a major thoroughfare that takes me to my job in Midtown.

It worked. I learned something. Institutional knowledge gained by exploration.

Yesterday Cheryl found a free clinic so Carson could get two shots required to enter the Anchorage school system. She noticed it when she turned down a one-way street near Benihanas in downtown.

On Sunday we found a local, favorite sledding hill that we plan to get back to now that the snow is falling hard.

In a week, I've been part of the coverage of one of Alaska's biggest election cycles in many years. At stake: a Senate seat and all the unanswered questions of the Tea Party Movement, traditional state politics, pork barrel spending, taxation, native affairs and numerous other complex issues important to Alaskans.

I'm reading as fast as I can, and yet I feel like it will take me years to understand this. There is no "Alaska for Dummies."

So I hang out with our news director Steve Mac Donald whenever I can. Institutional knowledge gained through questioning the locals, especially newsies who've been at it for a while.

After his first day at school on Tuesday, my son Cole told me Alaskans are too nice.

"How so?"

"When I tried to sit out of the indoor hockey game because I don't know how to play, they kept giving me the stick and telling me to take their place."

Yesterday a local realtor took my wife and daughter on a tour of the city's neighborhoods and explained a little about each place. The demographics, the schools, the age and general condition of the housing.

Institutional knowledge gained by experiences.

I am a Cheechako here in a dark, cold place, but if you put a heat map over the city of Anchorage, you'd find a red-hot glow in southwest Alaska, and I'm guessing you'd find a lot of red-hot dots all over this land.

Tim

Losing my religion and other compromises

We've converted. I'm not sure what we've converted to. All I know is my wife signed a religious waiver regarding child immunizations in order to get our son Cole into school. I should probably do some research into whatever it is we now believe about health care and our children. Don't want to be a hypocrite after all.

As adventures go, the horizon is never visible for long. Unknown mountain ranges or fog banks inhibit your view, and you may find yourself in a box canyon or an impassable drainage.

But you reroute, you explore, you climb the high ridges and get your bearings again.

Modern-age adventure isn't much different. In trying to lead my family through the hoops of relocating to a new city in what might as well be a new country, I've discovered that there are an inordinate amount of box canyons and impassable drainages.

We're living in an executive apartment in downtown Anchorage, which has its perks, including proximity to some of the great Anchorage night life. And I'm not talking about wolves and bear.

There are couches and chairs and a little plastic table in the kitchen. We have knives and forks and glasses, and our refrigerator is starting to look like we're more than just on vacation here. There is a television, and I signed up for high-speed Internet for a month so we could stay connected.

We keep the heat at 55 degrees, but our neighbors seem to like the nuclear setting and keep theirs set to hotter than hell. We walk around in shorts and t-shirts while inside and sleep with only a sheet over us.

Cooking meals for five in small pans is incredibly frustrating and funny at the same time. Trying to make a salad is a four-part process, which requires cleaning the kitchen and washing dishes in between each stage. We eat in stages.

There is no dish washer, per say, so the boys are getting a little lesson in the old art of hand washing.

The biggest challenge is keeping Carson, who really likes to bounce a lot, from tumbling around the apartment sounding like his nickname, Hurricane Carson. He seems to forget that we live above someone. In exchange, I let him bounce on the beds to get some of that energy out.

We got 7 inches of snow yesterday, which is almost enough to lose Carson in, so he's been home bound and unable to attend school because of our lack of a permanent address.

Many schools in Anchorage, especially the good ones, are on a lottery system, and many are closed for the year. But they are taking applications for next year.

We are not the homeschool types either. In fact, we hate homework almost as much as the kids do. So far we've been lucky to have good friends and neighbors to handle math and other subjects that I'm not very good at.

Sunday afternoon offered more fat snow flakes and slick roads as we drove around Anchorage looking for a place to live. In one neighborhood we happened upon the largest moose we've ever seen. It was munching leftover pumpkins in yards as a calf explored front porches in the Turnagain neighborhood.

And last night we ran out of clean clothes and visited a laundromat for only the second time in our 17 years together. We deposited what seemed like the remainder of our bank account in the form of quarters into 4 commercial washing machines and people watched for the next couple of hours.

The laundromat was full of Samoans and Tongans with little kids running around and lots of food and conversation in the background. It's a sight I haven't seen in a long time, and it made me feel good to be in a different cultural setting.

We finished drying and folding our laundry at 11 p.m., just as the owner was sweeping out the shop and getting ready to lock the doors.

Today we pushed the issue of getting the kids into school, and Cheryl signed a religious waiver to get our son Cole enrolled at Central Science. She'll spend the rest of the day trying to get Carson enrolled at Inlet View. I'm left wondering why there is no consistency between states and school systems. One state wants birth certificates, another state wants proof of immunization. I want an easier way to navigate the bureaucracy behind my headache.

As sometimes happens in an adventure, my wife is left with the brunt of a lot of the navigation, while I'm learning my new city through the eyes of the local broadcast station. I'm already well into the challenges of work and enjoying my job very much, while trying to support Cheryl by phone, E-mail and text message.

Yesterday she found the perfect house. Too perfect. It's a nice suburban single-family home in south Anchorage with new cherry wood floors, granite counter tops and a yard the size of a small eastern state.

The rental price was ridiculously low, which caused me to think twice. Still, I E-mailed the contact on Craigslist with the hopes that there was some explanation of why the price was so low.

Indeed there was. Turns out Mr. Harold B Richardson has moved to Spain with his lovely wife. They must rent their home here in a hurry and though they know the price is low, they would love to have a good family in there.

All we have to do is send them our bank info and they'll send us the keys.

The telltale sign in all of this was the return phone number with an area code from Lagos, Nigeria, which my friend Michelle graciously pointed out.

The disappointment Cheryl felt clouded much of Sunday for us.

But today is a new day with a few more listings on Craigslist. I'll be wearing a KTUU Channel 2 NBC vest in hopes that someone out there wants to rent to a news guy with a nice little family.

This post may sound depressing, but it's really not. We're adjusting to all the new challenges, and the kids are starting to get their bearings. Cheryl and I will start to find ours soon enough. Then it's onward and upward.

Tim

Talking Story

This whole journalism thing started out with a desire to be a storyteller. My dad is one of the best auditory storytellers anywhere, and I wanted to be just like him.

I remember writing poetry and short stories many years ago. I have numerous journals filled with my notes and stories from childhood. I never made a big deal about it, because it was a compulsion I didn't really understand at the time.

But I remember my brother wrote a story about fighter planes and dog fights that really captured the interest of my parents. They lavished praise on him, and rightly so. He wrote an exciting story that had a beginning, middle and end with an exciting climax and lots of action.

I remember feeling really jealous of the attention he got for that story. I felt that I was the writer in the family and that he was good at so many other things.

Eventually I realized that he wrote that story from an interest in planes and dog fights rather than any interest in being a writer. My brother has a very scientific mind that relates to complex ideas in a way that breaks them down into usable chunks.

His story fascinated me because of the way he used his own words to relate what he understood about airplanes.

I wanted to tell stories like that.

Print journalism seemed a natural fit for me with its adherence to form and style. But early on I realized that print could only tell part of the story based on the audience.

I knew that many people glance at the newspaper and maybe read the headlines or view the photos. A smaller percentage actually read the front page of the newspaper from top to bottom, and an even smaller minority read beyond the front page.

And yet news still is disseminated. Some of it is word of mouth or water-cooler conversation. Sometimes articles are clipped out or forwarded via E-mail. Little bits of information get out into the wider population in spite of newspaper reading habits.

One of the reasons I gravitated toward online journalism is because of a desire to tell stories and reach people where they are at. I always felt a little useless writing stories about the county that were read by county workers and subscribers over 65 who still had the habit of reading every story in the paper.

Videos and podcasts and multimedia Web stories fascinated me in their ability to reach a wider audience, and I quickly realized that online storytelling could erase the boundaries and stretch the canvas of storytelling to infinity.

People often ask me about why I chose online journalism instead of sticking to writing stories.

Stories are pieces of life that when put together artistically form our collective history. More than that, good stories become part of the fabric of society upon which we build our empires.

Stories are pieces too, and most storytelling today puts the pieces together quickly and tries to distribute that story to as wide and audience as possible. But so many pieces are missing still.

A good story teller uses many tools. If an elder telling stories wants to capture his audience, he uses the inflection of his voice and hand movements. He makes himself small at times to emphasize the vastness of his tale. The visuals of his storytelling are as important as the words he uses to tell the story.

That has remained the same since the beginning of time. The printing press changed that somewhat as text dominated illustration.

Today a good storyteller has options well beyond a text-based story. In fact good storytelling includes many elements beyond text.

I think of how many stories were written during the recent election about the impossibility of winning a write-in campaign. Text-based stories sought to explain that certain sections of Alaska's interior were united in their support for one candidate, while other enclaves in larger cities supported another candidate.

It was all very confusing to try and read between the lines to see where the state of Alaska actually cast its vote.

Good storytelling finds the best tools to tell each story.

So in yesterday's news meeting, someone suggested making a visualization of how each part of the state of Alaska voted for the contentious U.S. Senate seat held by Lisa Murkowski.

I came back to the Web team and asked the designer, Jeff Rivet, if he could cannibalize another flash map he'd made of the state and show us how each section of the state voted in what could be a historical win for a write-in candidate.

It's not the whole story, but it's a piece that contains elements of the whole story, and it's both visual and text based with moving parts.

I love thoughtful storytelling. I love when a visual can replace a bunch of text in explaining a complex idea.

Journalism is far from dead. And as storytelling has evolved from the beginning of time with small changes and history changing movements, we are in a transitional phase where the art and craft of story are moving beyond older technology on the shoulders of new technology.

Tim

It's too hot in Alaska

I have now spent a total of nine days in Alaska, if you count the interview trip a month or so ago, and I have yet to see any wildlife. If you don't count the election of course.

But that's neither here nor there. I'm sure a few months from now seeing a moose on the coastal trail will be old hat.

Observing the kids has been interesting. My 12 going on 45-year-old son Cole is already adept at Alaska things. Like navigating us around town using his mom's new iPhone. He's also schooling her in the art of setting up E-mail, downloading apps and otherwise giving her dozens of other reasons to pay less attention to me. Of course, if you ask her, I deserve it for having my eyes glued to a computer 18 out of the 24 hours in any given day.

The darkness is interesting thus far. For example, it's 8:33 a.m., and I'm sitting in my office waiting for some IT help. It's pitch black outside, and yet I can hear the crunching sound of car tires on ice. It will remain this way for another hour or so. But in the evening, the darkness falls around 5:30 p.m., which is not all that different from Oregon at the solstice.

Carson asks about our container of household goods every day. "Dad, is our stuff here yet?" "No, Carson, why do you ask?" "Because I want some toys to play with."

I thought it might be a brilliant idea to buy the boys each an iPod Touch to ease the pain of transition and as a way for them to communicate with their friends back in Montana. For Cole it has been such. For Carson, not so much.

Carson is, after all, a boy in all senses of the word. He lives in his imagination like 90 percent of the time, dreaming up all kinds of scenarios mixing "Star Wars" and "Lord of The Rings" at his will. But he is also in need of props to live out his dreams. The best being a set of Legos whereby he can invent worlds, break them up and reinvent new worlds on a whim.

Gabrielle, somewhat surprisingly, has cried for home more than the others. When I ask her about why she is sad, she says she misses family in Oregon. Her grandma and grandpa and nanny and papa. She was so small when we moved to Montana, I would have thought her affinity for Oregon would be less than the boys.

But it's her affinity for our families that causes her to be sad when she spends too much time thinking about it.

I'm happy to report that Morris the gecko has not only survived a harrowing trip across four states in a U-Haul truck and then an embarrassing inspection by airport security and a bumpy flight to a climate that is nothing like that of his desert home, but he he thriving on mealworms and crickets once again.

We all noticed he got a bit skinny during this whole adventure, but his fat tail is slowly getting fatter once again, and he's happy sitting on calcium sand warmed by his heat pad and his heat lamp in a comfortable 88-degree glass aquarium.

My only complaint so far has been the fact that at night when I return from work, I must dress down to shorts and a t-shirt to survive the balmy temperatures in our apartment. We keep our heat at 55 degrees, because we are warmed, I assume, by the ridiculously high temperatures coming from the apartments below and to the sides of us. It averages about 75 degrees in the apartment, and last night I had to open the windows to allow some of that frigid air inside to scour things out a bit.

Things are about as far from the familiar as it can get right now, but the newness of everything makes it all interesting and fun.

Tim

Be careful not to break your legs when you hit the ground running

There is a real sense of being in a foreign country once you touch down here in Anchorage. Sure you have the familiar fast-food chains and huge oil company buildings. The roads are familiar and everyone drives on the right side of the road. But the feel of the place is different than the interconnected towns and cities in the Lower 48.

I woke up this morning at 5:30 a.m. to the sounds of apartment dwellers bustling about in the dark getting ready for work. I fell asleep again and woke up to just a faint hint of dawn. I yawned and stretched and rolled over to find my phone charging on the ground next to the bed. 

9:01 a.m. What? 

I scrambled for the shower and dressed in a few minutes and dragged my wife our of bed to drive me to work. 

The dark mornings are a blessing and a curse. I like the quiet pre dawn darkness. It's one of the best times of day to really focus. But curled up in bed with sweet darkness all around, it's tempting to just close your eyes and drift off again, especially after getting home at 2:00 a.m.

Election day is a sacred day for journalists. The excitement is palpable in the frenzied way newsrooms get started as counting begins in earnest. Broadcast stations are dead in comparison. Mostly because our entire operation moved off site and into the Egan Convention Center, otherwise known as Election Central. 

Anchors worked a live set while producers and reporters wrangled candidates for first interviews after initial results. The Wall Street Journal, L.A. Times and other national media outfits made an L-shaped army with computer shields around the back wall of the center.

I haven't really worked an election since Obama was elected president, and the sights and sounds got my journalistic juices flowing. I followed Kortnie, one of our web team members, around to some of the different candidate parties, and all I wanted to do was pull out a notepad and start collecting quotes and color for the big election story. 

My small contribution to the overall newscast on election night was staying in touch with our web team members manning the station at KTUU and checking to see when our updates were coming through on our mobile sites. And I just can't wait until the next election. I want to be right back in that journalistic mess that is election night. Because on the other side is a beautiful thing.

As usually happens, the day after election day is a big come down. The journalistic adrenaline that surged the night before starts to leave your system, and you feel the tiredness of having stayed up until 2 a.m.

The gloom of the north doesn't help either. The sun just doesn't have the strength it has at lower latitudes. 

When the sun does shine, it reflects off the Chugach range like a giant mirror. The saw-toothed tops remind you of what beckons beyond. Alaska. 

I am happy these first few days in Alaska. Now it's time to get the family settled, back in school and on with life. 

Tim

A day in a zoo of dead animals

I finally caught my breath next to a large brown bear chasing a rather panicky deer. The Ted Stevens International Airport in Anchorage is like a great zoo for dead things.

There are polar bears, mountains goats, Dall sheep, numerous brown bears, ptarmigan, caribou, moose and many other northern creatures mounted in life-like poses in large glass enclosures.

The Chugach Mountains glisten under bright sunshine to the east and out the large glass windows of the airport.

If you have to be stuck in an airport, this is the one to be stuck in.

The wake-up call came early this morning. It seemed like I just put my head to the pillow when my daughter jumped into bed with us at 3:45 a.m., just a few seconds before the alarm went off. Turns out all of our packing the evening before and a plan to leave for the airport an hour before our goal of being there an hour before departure was a great failure.

Mondays are terrible days to travel. Period. Dozens and dozens of suits lined up against the wall waiting for an automated check-in machine. Traveling with Morris the gecko meant we had to check in at the agent desk. The line moved like people waiting for an Eastern European toilet.

The ticket agent was a peach. She told me no less than four times there was no way we'd make our flight as she happily charged my Visa $100 for a pet that cost $39. Not to take away from the intrinsic value of an animal aside from its pet-store price.

She refused to check us all the way through, because she was convinced we wouldn't make our Anchorage connection in Seattle.

We ran carrying heavy bags on our shoulders and wheeling the rest of our belongings behind us. Morris stood on all four legs with his belly high off the ground as if trying to find balance or meaning in the terrible commotion.

The TSA agent at security was the nicest I've ever met. She inspected Morris and instructed Carson to take care of this good-looking little guy. We put our shoes and coats on, repacked and ran down the people movers looking for gate A.

The ticket agent at the gate was a real peach. Oh, wait, I said that. Turns out there is a pattern with Horizon ticket agents when you're late. They have no patience at all. After a good tongue lashing about causing other passengers to be late, we climbed aboard a very crowded Bombardier bound for Seattle.

I smiled at Cheryl as the sweat dripped off my head like it did the last time I had a good sauna.

We made it.

Upon landing in Seattle, we found out our connecting flight to Anchorage was about as far away as you could possibly be in the airport. So we ran to catch a train to catch an escalator to find a friendly Alaska Airlines ticket agent waiting for us with five tickets in hand.

"You must be the five people from Portland without boarding passes?"

"Yes, we are. I'm so sorry."

"Nothing to worry about sir, we'll get you on board soon."

I collapsed in my seat dripping sweat once again and slept on an off between having to tell Gabrielle to stop kicking the seat in front of her. I set up some videos for the kids to watch, played Angry Birds for an hour and dozed until the bumpy landing in Anchorage.

If you know anything about me by now, you know I'm not a detail person, preferring instead the bigger picture. If I had lived 100-years-ago, I'd be traveling always with an assistant.

I neglected to tell our housing organizer that we were arriving Monday, substituting Tuesday instead. So here we sit in the Anchorage airport from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. waiting for a shuttle that will take us to our hotel where a 3 p.m. check-in time awaits us along with a good swim, a shower and an early bed time.

There were plenty of negatives this morning. The good thing is we're together here in Anchorage, our new city. We took a walk to the other side of the terminal to look at downtown and then a peek at midtown. Somewhere out there we'll find a new home, and these mountains will be our backdrop from now on.

The future is looking good.

Tim

Anchorage or bust!

Our plane bound for Seattle then Anchorage departs in a little over six hours. Our bags are packed, Morris the gecko has a travel home fit for a king, and though we sent the kids' birth certificates on ahead, we found that the airlines will not require them to have identification.

And yet I'm awake and stressed to the point of breaking. Could be the the fact that our house in Missoula still is not rented out or the other fact that I accidentally told our facilitator in Anchorage we'd be arriving on Tuesday instead of Monday, and now we don't have a place to stay tomorrow night.

Little details.

I'm sitting here reflecting on all that's familiar about being home. We ate a huge breakfast of varenyki this morning. They are Ukrainian dumplings boiled then fried with caramelized onions and smothered in sour cream. For a Slavic boy, they are as comfortable as comfort food gets.

This evening, we crowded around the television set to watch our San Francisco Giants win their third game in this year's World Series. I spoke briefly with my 88-year-old grandmother, who lives in the Bay Area, and sure enough, she was watching it too.

As I've said before, the Golden Gate is our Ellis Island. The San Francisco 49ers and Giants are our teams. They have always been.

The familiar helps me deal with the unfamiliar. A few of my favorite things make the looming storm of moving to a new city a little easier to face.

These last few hours in the home I grew up in have been healthy for me. In these walls I feel safe and welcome.

Here, surrounded by family, I feel as good as I think I'm capable of feeling right now.

I'm excited about the job and starting something completely new. I'm excited about moving to a new city and meeting new people. I'm thrilled to be exploring such an amazing place like Alaska.

But the trepidation is there under the surface. I feel it for the three little ones in my care. How to make them secure and warm and comfortable amidst a lot of change and chaos. Already they're starting to feel the bigness of this move. Little questions like: "Daddy, are airplanes scary?" and "Where are we going to live when we get there?"

They are their father's children. Adventure beckons, and they rush toward it. But the emotional heavy hitters like leaving behind best friends and moving far enough away from family that you can't drive it in one day are sinking in.

Well, tomorrow is upon us. It's time to rest for a few minutes and begin this journey in earnest.

Tim

A day in the city

I spent Thursday in Portland hanging out with some really good friends. Some are long-time city dwellers like Jason, while others are newbies to the big canyons of concrete, glass and steel.

It was a rainy and damp trip up the I-5 corridor. The perfect drive for contemplating the future. The drizzle melts everything into a boring turn-of-whatever century Dutch landscape, so you can focus on anything other than the scenery.

I found a parking spot on 4th and Couch and walked the half-a-block to my friend Jason's studio. One of dozens of artist dens in an artists' collective building, I could tell his distinctive touch on the wall outside his suite.

Surrounded by SUGs and other collectible plastic figurines and bottles of Schlitz beer, and in a veritable shrine to Apple computers, Jason is about as at home in the city as anyone I've ever met. He fits into the mess of humanity as well as anyone and yet stands out as an artist in a city full of wannabes.

We walked six blocks in a heavy drizzle to The Roxy. It's not great food, but it combines two of our favorite things, breakfast and Steve Buscemi. We've been fans for a long, long time.

He drinks coffee and I drink green tea. We both ordered the Steve Buscemi, a wood chipper's favorite of corned beef hash and fried eggs.

He's disappointed I'm moving to Alaska, and I don't blame him. We've been best friends since fifth grade, and our families have vacationed together in Montana the last few years.

But our conversation runs to other matters and the grittiness of city life in a town known for its roses.

We walked off the Steve Buscemi in a hard drizzle that was trying for rain. Downhill and across Burnside to the south end of the Pearl, a haven for hipsters and artists who are sometimes one in the same.

I told him we'd see them every year still, we hugged and I drove to southwest Portland.

Jordan is a lot younger than me, but we've been friends for many years. He suggest we meet for coffee at 5th and Stark. He suggests we meet in half-an-hour. I don't want to wait that long, so I go on a wild goose chase looking for his apartment off Barbur Boulevard.

We venture back downtown to Stumptown Coffee and sit in low-back chairs and sip on large cups of coffee and tea as the rain falls in earnest outside. These new Portlanders show up one by one and we chat about life in the city. Having all come up in Salem, a mere 45-minutes and a world away south of Portland, we're fascinated by life here.

Anya rides up on her bike and takes off her skater helmet and shakes out her long blond hair as the boys tease her about tire spray.

Jordan sips an Americano while David drinks tea. Jordan check his iPhone while I ask David about the new ink on his wrist.

They are young and in the heartbeat of society. The big city is their playground, their backyard and their workplace.

I'm envious in the tall foyer of Stumptown Coffee. The smells of coffee and leather and maybe a little cigarette smoke and patchouli oil on the dress of the girl who brushes past me. I love the smells and sights and sounds in the big city. The traffic moving by and the way rain coats swish and heels sound on metal grates.

I love the way they relax in too tight clothes and plan their next social interaction. They've been friends for a long, long time, and it reflects in their gracefulness. It's a city dweller's peace in the chaos, and I'm forever hoping to experience it someday myself. I get a taste now and then, but it's in these moments that I live vicariously through their innocence and exploration.

There is nothing like a day in the city. Sure, throw in a visit to Powell's City of Books and a late-afternoon beer at Henry's, and you'd have the perfect day. But a Steve Buscemi and a few cups of green tea and hours of conversation on a rainy day are just as good sometimes.

Tim

Hitting the reset button at home

Home is a feeling, a state of being.

My mother is the queen of hospitality. After just a few days in her care, all troubles seem to melt away as the good food, fellowship and rest start to brighten one's outlook and revive the soul.

Home is a familiar place where dark troubles in the distance, the great unknowns are reduced to a light drizzle on the windows rather than pelting cold that doubles you over in fear and confusion.

My family is a family of wanderers and virtual vagabonds, resistant to a lax existence tied to place. But we have a home, at least a place of congregation where we've gathered for many years.

In driving up that familiar, deeply sloped driveway lined with pine needles and oak leaves, I am aware of where I am. But its warmth and welcome are experienced only when occupied by the members of my family.

This week my little sister Aimee is traveling the Middle East for work, and though our dinner conversations are alive with stories and fellowship, it's not the same without her sitting at her familiar place at the table. My brother-in-law is away as well, and his conviviality is missed.

I've often thought about how one creates that sense of home. Especially in light of moving my family around as much as we have these last 16 years. My mother, as I've said, does this with an unswerving sense of hospitality and care. My father is the patriarch, the storyteller, the passer on of wisdom. Together, they are the sense of home I most want to emulate.

As places go, our little enclave along Battle Creek Road is not the quaintest old building or the most pristine hillside. The one-and-a-half acres are slightly overgrown, and the tall pines block the view for the most part.

It's a place created and recreated as our family grew. A hillside manor, of sorts, a place we come to gather where the marks of our former existence make us feel welcome but which do not hold a candle to the necessity of having family present. Without the players, this little world would not matter at all. Except to my brother, of course. His penchant for place is perhaps far more developed than the rest of us. His handy work is seen in the jungle-like back yard, where a fish pond and cold-hardy palm trees soak up the rain showers like sponges.

The old tree fort my dad built for us has been replaced by a new tree fort named the Dawn Treader in honor of our love for C.S. Lewis' famed children's books "The Chronicles of Narnia," but mostly because a tree fort in the imaginative state of being a ship is the most fun a kid can have. I think.

Life in our house happens around the dinner table, where we sit close together eating from myriad dishes like a tasty carousel circling in front of us each night. We spend long hours sitting and talking, going from dinner to late-evening tea and cookies through dozens and dozens of conversations.

It has always been this way. Only today there is more laughter and mirth as the house is filled with grandchildren running and playing as we fellowship.

The remnants of our attempts to farm the land are evident in the old chicken coop falling into disrepair, the old goat fences clinging to rotting posts and a rabbit or two eating grass on the lawn. We are not farmers, though I believe we're nostalgic for some trace of it in our history.

My mom travels the world with my father, she is savvy about the bigger picture and can converse about almost any topic with ease. But her pioneer roots are evident in the ceiling-high shelves full of canned goods in the garage. I don't know when she has the time to accomplish these things, but over the last few days we've tasted amazing brined pickles and fresh horse radish as well as dried peppers and other examples of her harvest.

There are many reasons to love the comforts of home. Mine are nearly all found in the individuals who make up my family. But we've carved out a bit of a comfortable Hobbit hole here on this hillside. When we're not adventuring around the world, we gather here and fill it with warmth and the smells of good food and conversation that resounds for me like cathedral bells long after I leave.

In moving to a place that is as far away as moving across the sea somewhere, I feel a sense of loneliness already, and it makes me want to grab up every last moment here as if I won't be back for some time.

Home is the place you come to reset all the settings. As I revive here with all that I love, I realize that this is what I will need to create for the next generation of us. Place is only as good as those who inhabit it.

Tim

The hardest drive

I wrote this in my head as I drove today.

That will have to serve as an apology for what follows.

I sat in the cab of the big U-haul truck and wondered how many emotions had bounced around the interior during the course of its life.

We pulled out of a cold and rainy Missoula at noon. Carson rode shotgun with his leopard gecko Morris. Carson cried for the first twenty minutes or so, especially as we passed through the neighborhood.

My closest friends came by to see us off, and it was all I could do to hold it together to keep thinking about what needed to go in the truck next.

I don't cry much. In fact, I shed tears so infrequently that my wife freaks out a little when it happens. All I wanted to do today was find some quiet place to be alone and think about all I was leaving behind. Instead I fought wind and rain behind the wheel of a big orange and white truck, stacking emotions like clothes in my suitcase.

The cab was a cathedral of sorts. A noisy, bumpy place to try and reflect on the events of the last two months. Carson and I tried to chat off and on, but we were both aware of how easy it would be to totally break down.

Missoula is apparently located in some state of mind people call the last best place. Sometimes I think certain situations are the last best...

Our goodbye get together on Friday served as a last chance to enjoy a beer with good friends. A last best party. Saturday evening was an impromptu last best dinner with a few close friends who had helped us move the detritus of our Missoula existence into that U-haul.

This morning when we were packing, I just wanted to be done and on the road. I knew that if I stopped long enough, all the emotions that have been building up would come pouring out, and that wouldn't be a pretty sight.

And still, in spite of keeping my mind focused on my task like a brain surgeon must, when my friends showed up for one last best goodbye, I felt myself slipping into that familiar pre-cry moistness. I looked the other way instead of making eye contact, and when I'd catch my wife losing it after hugging our neighbors goodbye, I had to start talking to myself out loud to keep from going there.

I wanted to harden all the soft parts and numb anything that felt sharp and uncomfortable. I don't have time to grieve right now. The hum in the cab of the U-haul was cathartic in a way. Like monks chanting. I started to try to match the tenor, but I found myself easing into memories too swiftly when I wasn't focused on something other than everything cascading into whatever pit that is within me that collects whatever fuels those stormy emotions.

Eastern Washington is cathartic too. Something about the way it has been scoured out by the many Glacial Lake Missoula floods stirs up sediment in my soul that keeps me from feeling much. I think about ancient floods and how so much land owes so much to such powerful forces of change outside of its control. I thought about Lewis and Clark and the fact that I've spent much of my life along a big portion of the trail they carved across the country. I thought about adventure and overcoming adversity, but too much thought like that shrinks you next to the giants of the past.

 Somewhere along the way I tried to cap the bottle by making notes about the future. This is what needs to be done by tomorrow. I need to finish this task by Thursday.

Then I got a text message from a friend in Missoula, and my world tilted a little bit, loosening whatever fastener I had tried to seal in those emotions with.

The kids all cried their little hearts out in the morning, and by late afternoon, they just wanted to be somewhere familiar. By the time we rolled into the driveway at grandma and grandpa Akimoffs' place, the kids were onto something new.

The sadness of leaving people you love is a very individual emotion. Everyone suffers something privately. There is no collective feeling that can be understood. For some it's visible, like tear-stained cheeks. For others it's a very personal piece of heart luggage with few visible signs of existence.

Long drives are good for sorting out thoughts and feelings. I've always felt collected after driving. Today was different. I should have let that U-haul-cab cathedral be my confessional, but I'm not quite ready to suffer. I know that will come. Like a good journalist, I like to put off the suffering until right before deadline. Somehow it sharpens the wit and creates beauty.

But my heart still hurts tonight. My longing for what used to be kept me from listening to certain songs I knew I would feel too much.

Ah, I miss you!

Tim