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.
Showing posts with label living in alaska. Show all posts
Showing posts with label living in alaska. Show all posts
Friday, November 19, 2010
Thursday, November 11, 2010
Cheechako in Alaska
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
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
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
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
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