Basic Language Skills 101

In December of 1959 I enlisted in the U.S. Army. Shortly after arriving at Fort Ord, California, an NCO mustered all of us recruits in a loose formation. Because I had been in the Marine Corps I was instructed to join a separate assembly of those men with prior service. A second NCO then took charge of our group. He ordered us to state the branch and unit of the armed forces in which we had served.

One guy identified himself as a Navy Seal. He had “come over,” military parlance for having been released by one service so he could transfer to another. He had to drop several grades in rank-- he wanted to go Special Forces—to go to Vietnam as an adviser—a tour of duty unavailable to Navy Seals at that time. The Army NCO was obviously dismissive of this man’s prior affiliation. Another fellow had been in the U.S. Air Force. This was even worse. Then a stocky older man snapped to attention and said in a gruff German accent, “Eighteenth SS Panzer Grenadiers, sir!” The NCO looked up and asked, “British? Right?” Such linguistic faux pas were not at all uncommon at Fort Ord.

Basic training was followed by the Advanced Infantry Training course. One platoon of our AIT company was made up entirely of Eskimo National Guard personnel from Alaska. About half of these men spoke only Yupik, Inupiat or Siberian Yupik.

The company was assembled for a class in explosives one day. Before his introduction, the NCO in charge of the class addressed the company. “I’ve been told some of you do not understand English,” he yelled. “Anybody who does not understand English will stand up.” Nobody stood up. A few of the guys snickered. The NCO shouted even louder, “If you do not understand English, stand up.” Finally the Alaskans who did understand English told those who did not to stand up.

Later in the class the same NCO demonstrated several types of explosives. He inserted a blasting cap in a block of TNT and set it off. The blast blew a huge hole in the earth. He buried a cap in a ball of Composition C. It made an even larger hole. He explained the principle of the M16A2 Bouncing Betty anti-personnel mine and triggered one—the bouncing element shot up from the ground and at about chest-level sprayed shrapnel all over a sheet of plywood. He detonated Bangalore Torpedoes and anti-tank mines. Finally he showed us the M18 Claymore mine. “This one,” he told us, “will kill you the worst.”

The Hope and Anchor

When my wife and I traveled to London in 2004 we stayed in our daughter Neith’s vacant flat in Islington. Neith and her partner Steve met us at Heathrow and took us directly to the flat. Steve had to go back to work. Judith and I dropped our luggage, looked around the place once and started out on a tour of Islington with Neith as our guide. We walked west on St. Paul’s Road and south on Upper Street. The west corner of Upper Street and Islington Park Street was dominated by a mammoth four-story brick edifice. White lettering on the black marquee read, “Hope & Anchor.” The women turned down my invitation for a drink but I was ready for a beer.

A grey haze of cigarette smoke floated, slowly swirling, filling the murky barroom like a dense cloud. Thick hardwood timbers embraced the place in their time-darkened arms. A few people sat at tables, drinking and talking. Five locals stood at the bar, laughing and smoking hand-rolled cigarettes. I bellied up to the bar. A young blonde woman asked me in an Eastern-European accent, “Vhat vould you like?” I studied the long row of pump handles. “Stella Artois,” I said.

“Ah. A Canadian,” the guy at the other end of the bar called out. “Close,” I said. “Alaskan.” “A Yank!” shouted a man behind me. I turned to see a dapper older man sitting at a table—tweed suit, tie, vest and highly polished shoes--not a hair out of place. “I fuckin’ ‘ate fuckin’ Yanks!” The men at the bar laughed. “That’s Old Bill,” one fellow chuckled. “He fuckin’ ‘ates Yanks,” another howled. The other men burst into laughter. “He’s ‘armless,” one of them smiled. “He don’t really bite,” said another.

That is how I was inducted into the fellowship of the Hope and Anchor. For the next four and a half months it would be my home away from home. That may be why my wife calls it the Hopeless Wanker. Although Judith and I have spent more than two years of the past two decades living in London, this was the first time I had been accepted into the community of a “local”. While this is not the equivalent of an American being knighted, it’ll do.

Bostwick Inlet 1975 Part Deux

Soon after I had moved into the cabin at Bostwick Inlet, I began making improvements. Every time I flew into Ketchikan, in addition to picking up staples, I purchased a few items to spruce up the place. I stretched clear 5-mil visqueen over the window frames and hung curtains in the windows. The curtains were not cosmetic—even though the cabin was set behind the tree line, the midnight sun easily found all the openings, even the chinks between the logs. These I filled with a combination of hot pitch from coniferous trees and moss from the bases of deciduous trees. This mixture filled the holes and acted as insulation. I brought a mattress and bedding and put them on one of the steel bunks the miners had left behind. I built a table and chair out of local materials. It was beginning to look like a home.

The most ambitious project I undertook was the construction of a fireplace and stove pipe. Up until this time I had been cooking over an open campfire a few yards from the cabin. Local rocks seemed the ideal material for the fireplace. All I needed was mortar to bind them together. Mortar is a simple mixture of lime, cement and sand. I had plenty of sand on the beach. I could get cement in town. I remembered having read something in Thoreau about making lime by burning the shells of mollusks. The beach was a renewable resource of clams and cockles. I had to try it. It takes a lot of white-hot fire to reduce seashells to lime but it works great. The fireplace was a solid piece of work with a fire box, a 3/8" solid steel cooktop and a crude oven, regulated with a simple damper. The oven baked perfect bread.

I had to cut a hole in the roof for the zinc chimney. This was separated from the cedar-shake roof by a galvanized metal flashing. I was burning driftwood. I’d saw large rounds off beached logs and chop them into firewood. Now, as wood burns it produces gases that are released in the smoke and when the smoke cools to 250 º F the gases liquefy, combine and solidify into creosote. Since driftwood contains more water than dry wood, burning it produces steam. This steam cools the stove pipe and chimney. Creosote quickly built up in my stove pipe. Creosote is highly flammable. One day I returned from a water run to find part of my roof on fire. I had two buckets of water. I threw both of them up at the fire. The fire continued to burn. The tide was out. Probably more than 50 yards out. No chance of getting any water from the inlet. I couldn’t call 911. I was gripped with an almost crippling sense of panic. I had to settle down and think. Think!

Instinctively I scooped up a bucket full of earth and threw that at the fire. And another. After a dozen or so buckets the fire fizzled. It seems in retrospect I continued throwing dirt on my roof for an hour. I sometimes have dreams about chucking buckets of dirt at a fire. When I thought it was safe, I went in the cabin. The fireplace and everything around it was covered in a thick layer of dark soil. Up until this time I hadn’t really had much use for the broom I had bought on my first trip to town.

Kabuki Politics

My wife has counselled me several times in the past few weeks to treat politics the same way I would treat Kabuki theatre--as an audience member--separated from the players--forbidden from shouting loud and obscene comments while the performance is in play. To be fair to her, she is offering me this advice, at least in part I think, for my own good. When, as inevitably happens several times a day, George W. Bush’s twhine issues from the radio or TV, I immediately explode into an apoplectic fit of cursing in tongues. Every time another boob announces his or her formation of a presidential exploratory committee (doesn’t that sound a whole lot better than, say, pimping for myself?), I scream bloody ephithets. My political seizures exhaust me and annoy my wife. She wants to hear what Bush has to say. She wants to hear those nuts crowing while throwing their hats in the ring. She came to the Kabuki and she wants to enjoy the Kabuki.

The history of kabuki is fascinating. It dates back to 1603, when Izumo no Okuni, a young Shinto shrine attendant, assembled a company of pariahs, known as kabukimono, on a dry Kyoto riverbed. She taught them acting, dancing and singing, set up a theatre. She was a 17th century social worker who gave a bunch of misfits a break.

The plot of Kabuki, as they say, thickened. With time. The earliest style consisted of little more than song and dance. Soon the plays dealt with ordinary life. By the early 18th century, elements of stylization had largely been determined. Character types and elaborate make-up designs were established. It may have been at this time that shouting at the performers during a performance became to be regarded as rude.

I don't mean to be rude to George. It just sort of happens. It's not unlike shivering when the temperature drops below freezing. It's a natural reaction to a particularly annoying stimulus. I loathe George W. Bush. I know, through divine revelation, he is the son of Satan. The spawn of evil. He looks like a retarded chimpanzee. He talks like a retarded chimpanzee. The sound of his voice drives me up the proverbial wall. I want to scream. And I do. I mean I did.

I’m trying to follow my wife’s recommendation. It’s all Kabuki to me. When George Dumbya mounts the podium, stumbles and bumbles through his "2007 State of the Mess I Got YOU Into" speech, I’m gonna sit there in my easy chair, laid back in the realization it is just a show. "Look at that elaborate make-up," I’m gonna say to myself. "The traditional stylization is breathtaking." And, "Boy howdy! That Karl Rove is one hell of a writer/director." I'm sure as hell gonna be a happy man when the curtain goes down on this show.

The Sacred Pat Nixon Camellia

Back in the ‘70s, while Dick Nixon was swimming in Watergate, California Governor Ronald Reagan invited the president and his wife to Sacramento for the annual Camellia Festival. It might not seem like a big deal to you, but when you’re drowning in the middle of a lake of shit, an invitation to be the star of a greased-pig-wrestling contest looks good.

Pat Nixon dedicated the festival at the Municipal Auditorium and the celebration then moved on to Capitol Park. There, scored with typical Reaganesque fanfare, the crowd watched breathlessly as the Pat Nixon Camellia was planted. There was a parade. The sun went down.

Meanwhile, a friend of mine, Barefoot Larry, tiptoed around the trees and bushes of Capitol Park right up to that Pat Nixon Camellia. And he dug it up, stuffed the roots in a burlap bag he had thoughtfully brought with him and took it home. I suppose you could say it was an act of urban guerilla warfare.

The next day a gardener found the hole which had embraced the roots of the sacred Pat Nixon Camellia. I imagine screams issuing from the State Capitol. Quickly, silently, before anyone else could notice, a new Pat Nixon Camellia was planted in the same hole. Later that day Ronald Reagan is rumored to have hand-picked a squad of state capitol police to guard the new Pat Nixon Camellia around the clock.

The City of Brotherly Love

In the late ‘80s, toward the end of the Reagan administration, I traveled to Philadelphia with my wife, who was attending a seminar at the University of Pennsylvania. We lived in a dorm room just a couple of blocks off-campus. At the time the area directly adjacent to the university was a ghetto populated largely by low-income, no-income and homeless folks. I was not prepared for what I saw there. Whenever we walked in the business district, especially in the mornings, we had to step around people sleeping on the sidewalk. There were usually 8 to 12 men and women asleep on a typical city block. A few had sleeping bags, some had thin blankets and several had only newspapers for cover. Bullet-proof windows reinforced with iron bars separated customers from clerks in liquor and convenience stores. The price of any given item at the single neighborhood supermarket was 25% to 35% higher than the same item in suburban stores.

There was a film festival at the Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank while we were there. We mistakenly went to the rear colonnade first, as opposed to the front, where the main entrance was located. The entire area--all the steps and the landing itself, was literally packed with homeless families, most with open cooking fires and small bundles of possessions. I was shocked. I couldn't believe it. The Federal Reserve Bank? A leading symbol of our nation's economic power? In the city of brotherly love?

I was homeless for part of the second and third years of the Reagan presidency. I can recall it as if it were yesterday. It’s an experience that becomes seared into one’s psyche. At the time I had a part-time job in a bindery and was studying full time at the University of Alaska Anchorage. I had been living in an apartment in the Fairview District of Anchorage and came home one winter night to find all my possessions on the sidewalk, two policemen standing over them. My rent had been due the previous day. I hadn’t seen the landlord for several days. The rent money was in my wallet. The cops informed me they were assisting the landlord in my eviction. I told them I had not even been given an eviction notice and they said under the law the landlord was not required to give me a notice. I knew that was not true but try to explain the law to a cop. Through Legal Aid I later sued the city and the landlord for an illegal eviction. The judge ordered the police department to train their cops to never assist landlords in evictions again—that it was illegal for them to do so.

I had a locker in the UAA sports center. I lived out of it. I used hot water from bathroom sink spigots to make instant coffee. I survived. I saved money from my job and rented another apartment and I continued to work toward my MFA at the university.

In 1986 I met my wife. We got married in 1987. She literally saved my life. Her love and encouragement have been vital to my development as an artist.

Late in 2005 I was fortunate enough to get a commission from Catholic Social Services to design a donor wall for the new Brother Francis Shelter in Anchorage, a shelter for the homeless. It was a labor of love. The woodwork and engraving on the wall was done by homeless veterans at the Veterans Domiciliary in Anchorage. What could be more perfect than that? I feel the circle has been closed for me. What can I do to close the circle for other homeless people?

Bostwick Inlet 1975

After my second year of purse seining, I was flush. I banked the majority of my money, borrowed a skiff from a friend and did a little subsistence fishing. I was putting up Nichols Passage, adjacent to Ketchikan, and ducked into Bostwick Inlet on the northwest corner of Gravina Island. (You may recognize the name of the island from the recent "bridges to nowhere" controversy. One of the bridges was supposed to span the distance from Ketchikan to the Ketchikan International Airport. The airport is on the southwest corner of Gravina Island and two mountain ranges and many miles from Bostwick Inlet.)I passed a lovely little white-beach-lined depression called Seal Cove on the chart. I thought I'd put in there on my way back out the inlet. About a half-mile further in I discovered a small estuary that had no name on the chart. I beached the skiff there. My dog, Isis, a Malamute-Siberian Husky mix, jumped out and ran off into the woods and I began exploring. The place enchanted me--it was love at first sight. A wide beach protected by a couple of sand bars spread out on either side of the mouth of a brush-choked creek. Further inland a broad field of goose grass and Eskimo potato sprawled from one hemlock-and-Sitka-spruce-covered knoll to another. I gathered some Eskimo potatoes, laid a camp fire and cooked a small cod. I et. I sat and contemplated the beauty of the place. Then I put out the fire, called the dog and boogied back to Ketchikan. Within a week I had put together a plan to return to my new-found paradise for at least a few weeks. A friend lent me her tent and I gathered some staples and tools together. I dropped by my favorite air taxi service (the sign over their door read, "They who pass through this door will soon be there.") and made reservations for bi-weekly day-trips out and back to town to re-supply staples and get drunk. A couple of gill netter buddies ferried me over there. (I couldn't have gotten all my gear in the skiff.) I set up household in the field.

The beach turned out to be rich with clams, cockles, dungeness crabs and scallops. I learned 100 different ways to prepare them. The tides in southeast Alaska are phenominal. The difference between high and low tides during full and new moons can easily reach 20 feet or more. My beatiful field turned out to be a tidal marsh. In the middle of the night during the first full moon I had to gather my soaked possessions up and get to high ground fast. Want to hear God laugh? Just tell her your plans.

One day while walking through a section of woods I had traversed almost daily for several weeks, something strange caught the corner of my eye. It was a log cabin I had never seen before. It turned out to be a bunk house for a zinc mine that had been active around the turn of the century and with a little fixing up it became my new home. You know--like Igor in Young Frankenstein said, "A little wall paper, some flowers . . ."

I spent the majority of my time in that place cutting firewood and carrying water. For cutting the wood I used a simple Swedish saw, a splitting maul, a wedge, an axe and a hatchet, in that order. For the water I fashioned a yolk out of alder and hung two buckets off it. I discovered what I call the principal of cumulative awareness. For about the first month or so of my tenure, I got my water from the creek that fed the estuary with no fanfare at all. After that brook dried up (a seasonal thing) I trecked up the inlet to the next stream. Because it was a good distance from the cabin to the creek, when I arrived I sat down to rest before I filled my buckets. During that time I almost unconciously studied the bottom of the creek. I began to see tiny life forms; periwinkles and other little creatures. By the third month I was observing the critters those tiny ceatures were dining on. And by the fourth month . . . well, you get the picture.

After the fifth creek had dried up I went further up the inlet and found a vertical granite wall, some 30 feet across and twelve feet high, over which a waterfall spilled. I climbed the earthen steep on the side of the wall and was overwhelmed. There, behind the waterfall, was a broad pool covered with a high arch of branches. It was dark and cool inside this grotto. I took out my drawing pad and began sketching. From a tree on the opposite side of this vault an adult eagle swooped down and over my head. I took it as an omen. I had just been welcomed.

Once in a while some fellow fisherfolk would drop by to visit. One morning, about 4, I heard a commotion out on my porch and figured it was some of these rascals come to mess with me. So, in a sleepy haze, I picked up a bucket of water and threw some of it out the door. My visitor turned out to be a young black bear sow. From that time forward she came by every morning to get her bath. A couple years later I returned on a nostalgic day trip and discovered she had cubbed. She was no longer my buddy. She even rudely mawwwwed at my dog.

When I finally returned to Ketchikan, the friend who had lent me her tent was going out of state for a while and she begged me to housesit her cabin. She didn't have to twist my arm very far. Her front window looked out across Nichols Passage. I could sit there, emotionally and physically drained, and see the place where I had spent the most wonderful days of my life.