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Published: September 16th 2008
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Pee Wee Log Hauling
This little guy almost won. Survival is a state of mind. Taking that comment into account, we can argue the pluses of having proper tools or gear while in a survival situation if one should find themselves up a creek without a paddle. However, survival, as many analysts or behaviorists have discovered, is an inward preparation of the mind. Staying calm and collected in a dangerous situation is difficult. Many admit that the best medicine for dealing with an incident is keeping a positive outlook. Sailors from shipwrecks or lost hikers generally survived due to an inward determination to live.
With all this said, I find Fairbanks locals filled with an inner determination and craftiness unique to the rest of the US (however I may be somewhat of a poor judge not having personally visited all fifty US states). Though none of these people have necessarily been lost while hiking or sailing (somewhat difficult in a city 350 miles from the nearest large water source), most of them exude a characteristic of forethought.
After attending Farewell Ave Church and adding ten of my military friends to the Iraq-deployment prayer list—not to mention a long drive out Chena Hot Springs road to drop a friend
Aspiring Masuse
Dean gets a shoulder rub from Josh, a Pee Wee lumber jacker in training. back at his car—I found myself toodling up and down Geist Road searching for a BBQ. I wasn’t searching for just any BBQ, specifics were involved, and after several wrong turns I arrived. After an awkward appearance on the lawn where I interrupted a volleyball game, I was finally reunited with my friend Joe and a plate of hotdogs. When I was in Mexico at a much younger age, I remember eating hotdogs with ketchup and mayonnaise fromstreetvenders. I squirted a dollop of the white substance on, just for memories sake.
In Fairbanks, Sunday afternoons are open to invitation for dinners, lunches, matinees, and Frisbee sessions. Somehow, in a period of two hours, I went from eating hotdogs to judging a lumber jack competition. Schaeffer Cox, a long-time resident of Fairbanks, and his wife Marty, staged an afternoon of axe throwing, wood splitting, log hauling, and pancake eating contests in their yard. The participants, five gentlemen from their church and three small boys ages seven to about eleven, competed for the title Lumber Jack of the Year, in addition to a green thermos and a new axe.
Other than Marty, who stayed inside most of the time with
Moose Macabre
Looking into the eyes of death. their newborn, I was the only walking form of estrogen present. I pride myself on being somewhat rough and tumbly, but in the midst of five axe-toting lumber jacks I held back and watched, anxious not to make a fool of myself. To console my insecurities, I kicked off my Sunday heels and walked around in the yard barefoot, letting the leaves and wet grass cool my soles.
Joe brought his friend Lyle to Schaeffer's after loading six weeks worth of gear and several Moose skull/antler sets into Lyle's truck. Lyle, a resident of Anchorage, spends several weeks in the bush guiding clients on game hunts. The antlers were too heavy for me to lift. I tilted the skulls jaw down, letting the fronds cup the sky, as I kneeled behind in the typical "hunter and dead animal" pose. Someday, I would sink my fingers into the fur of my own kill and tell stories about the woods.
The crew, about twelve of us total not counting the four kids, laughed and ribbed each other from one event to the next. Hands and heads were nearly hit with axes, knives were thrown, wood shards went flying at the
Kicks and Giggles
No one could keep a straight face. slice of an axe. The young boys, hitting that particularly annoying and hyper stage that most young boys do, yelled and screamed and ran around the legs and arms of everyone like escaped puppies. I like children, there is, however, a point that children reach where their voices raise to too high a pitch and their flailing arms and legs whirl in an ascending cacophony of madness that makes me want to pull out a roll of duct tape and strap their entropy to a tree. The thought of potential lawsuits kept me frowning and flinching at the sidelines and doubting a future of motherhood.
As the afternoon turned to evening and the leaves fell like snow, people tired while I grew cold watching the events. The temperature was only fifty degrees, but I am piteously vulnerable to low temperatures. If a room is cooler than sixty-eight degrees my fingers become stiff and numb and all I can do is hold them in my lap for warmth. My hands cannot hold books, or grasp things tightly, like pens and paper for keeping contest scores. By the end of the day my writing deteriorated to that of a three-year-old. I
Round Splitting
First, second, and so on... realized that Sunday, as people around me inhaled up to twenty-five pancakes, chopped 62 pieces of firewood in sixty seconds, and carried two forty-pound logs up a hill, that people in Alaska are pretty tough, even though we are unique just like everybody else.
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