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The third crane on the Fish Dock.

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My phone binged at me while I was stopped for an unloading school bus on Homer Spit. I watched the cutest collection ever of tiny-wee Xtra Tuff boots splash down into a puddle at the bus exit. I glanced at the console where my phone rested. “Third yellow crane in,” the message said.

YellowCrane

The flashing red lights eventually quit blinking and I turned left onto Fish Dock Road. I putt putted the overloaded minivan between forklifts hauling fish bins, hoses, and hairy-faced men in overall Helly Hansens. Their Xtra Tuffs weren’t particularly cute. My minivan rental did not match the lifted pickups parked all over the place.

There it was, the Puk uk.

Image by C. Haupert 5/7/2014.

Image by C. Haupert 5/7/2014.

I walked over to the skipper to introduce myself. “Hi,” I stood next to him looking down into the Puk uk. “I’m C….” I told him. He glanced at me. “I figured,” he said.

My logistics handlers were already loading the WeatherPorts, fuel, and other gear. The skipper craned the stuff onto his foredeck using the Fish Dock crane – you pay for the cranes in 15 minute increments. We weren’t in a rush, but time was money so no standing around chatting.

Image by C. Haupert 5/7/2014.

Image by C. Haupert 5/7/2014.

I unloaded 25 bins of food and science equipment from the beleaguered minivan to plastic lined brailer bags. Hopefully the many layers of plastic between our food and the Bering Sea/North Pacific will keep everything safe and dry. I don’t like to think of the oatmeal and rice swelling into a rancid mass in the coming days.

TotesAtDock

I hopped down onto the boat deck to help Paula the Deckhand guide the brailers and then unload loose bins and gear from a fish bin the skipper lowered onto deck over and over again. Paula made a European noise in her throat. “What IS all this?” she gestured to the lumber, propone tanks and dozens of plastic crates. “Life and science for 9 people for a month,” I told her.

Paula, left. WideEyedFunk, right. Image by C. Haupert 5/7/14.

Paula, left. WideEyedFunk, right. Image by C. Haupert 5/7/14.

It was over in two hours. I shook the skipper’s hand, “See you in a week,” I said, “Smooth sailing,” I told him. We’ll meet up again on Adak.

WideEyedFunkHomerAK

Indiana Jones may have been a little smelly.

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Think it through. He packs a gun and a whip in the smallest suitcase I’ve ever seen. There just isn’t room for spare socks and underpants.

He wears the same pants, shirt, and hat throughout every field expedition. That suitcase is too small for a couple of clean sets of clothes.

If you add it all up, he must have been really amazingly smelly. So smelly that it defies belief that he could sneak up on even the sleepiest, slow-brained guard.

I am speaking from a position of deep knowledge and experience here. I just packed up my gear for a field session in the far northern wilderness. Gun, whip, hat – sure they are in the bottom of the crate if you want to think so. Let’s say that the moment I learned the grant support came through I checked the loads on the revolver and tossed the whip into my packing crate, then finished off a couple of fingers of whiskey.

Or, you can picture me huddled over the computer monitor late into the night filling out over 100 forms for the university and the federal government so that I could legally perform the field research and justify spending the money. Exciting indeed. There may have been a couple of fingers of red wine involved.

IMG_0208The packing crate, duffel, and day pack are downstairs lurking in the front parlor. Hamish the Corgi doesn’t like them. Miss Tibbit the Useless carefully monitored each item as it went in. Wiggins the Ancient Cat is considering peeing in the duffel. Or the crate. He can’t decide.

Where ever Wiggins does decide to wee, he’ll be weeing on SEVERAL extra pairs of socks. I cut down on the collection this year and included only 16. So I like clean socks. I’ll be gone for a while.  I won’t provide details but there are also plenty of underpants. And some extras of everything else. Plus, my eucalyptus oil for dabbing on my belt.  I like to sniff eucalyptus all day and it aroma-protects me from colleagues who pack more like Indy. Way back in the 1990s, a colleague told me that they didn’t see the sense in bringing underwear to the remote field work because it just gets dirty anyway.

We were out in the wilds for two months that year.  Yaaaah.

Think good weather thoughts in a northerly direction. Think good garden thoughts for the WideEyedSpouse as he is stuck here with my perennial beds and vegetable dreams. Talk to you on the other side – unless I manage dispatches from the far beyond.

WideEyedFunk, Buffalo NY, May 1.

Toilets, and I didn’t know my mom lurked in my head.

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I don’t know what it is about my neighborhood, but people swap out their toilets A Lot. At least once a month there’s a toilet sitting on the curb on our three block dog patrol. We’ve replaced a toilet or two around here, so I’m familiar with the brands and qualities of toilets on the market. I can tell by the empty new toilet box leaning against the old, abandoned toilet whether or not the home is 1) a rental, 2) being prepared for sale, or 3) a cared-for owner inhabited domicile.

If the toilet is a brand I’ve never heard of, if the flush rating is listed as 4 or 5 rather than 10 – it’s a rental. If it is a good brand but lower end model, probably someone did a quick refurb to put a place on the market – you get the name but you aren’t out of pocket too much. There are a bunch of older folks in our neighborhood and as they sell up after 40 or 50 years, their bathrooms always get a quick shakedown: new toilet, stick on tile floors, paint (as we well know around here having eradicated a perk up with great labor). If the empty box is a Brand Name, Tall, Flush Rate 10, High Efficiency, Dual-Flush, Piston-pump Toilet, we’re talking an investment in comfort and trouble free use. That’s a homeowner friends.

This all comes to mind because one block down, between our place and the park loop, someone has a toilet out to the curb. They’ve been in the house for about a year. I noticed that the old toilet is cracked on the base and is one of those old, small, low models. One of the ones that feel dangerously low once you are used to the Tall models. When out visiting and making use of the facilities, have you ever felt yourself dropping too far and panicked a little bit? Then you’ve got a tall boy at home and have run into an older low model. It’s uncomfortable and startling. I’m thinking of starting a Coalition to Remove All Potties that are Short (CRAPS) (heh.). Sorry.

The point of all this is that I thought nothing of the commonplace sight of the neighbor’s toilet sitting on the curb. Until this morning. The sun was shining on Miss Tibbit’s glossy fur and Hamish was prancing along with his tail stump and head held high on our way to the park. The daffodils and earliest tulips seemed extra perky. It’s Easter and I imagined all kinds of little kids and families putting on their Easter finery and posing for pictures (like we used to do when I was little). I figured that almost everyone in the Eastern Time Zone was sick on candy by now.

I saw the neighbor’s toilet and I heard my mind speaking in my WideEyedMom’s voice “Look at that toilet – and on Easter…” I even turned my head to roll my eyes at Hamish to share the disgrace. Trash the day before Easter, or say, the day after Easter, is just trash – not great but what are you going to do? On Easter? Crass.

Funny how these things sneak up on you. You think you are your own person, only to discover your parents living inside your mind.

Sweet Tibbit gets her money’s worth out of a jelly bean.

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Hamish the Corgi and Miss Tibbit can’t stop thinking about jelly beans.

DogsI’m looking at Sweet Tibbit now and she’s laying on the window seat gazing into the middle distance. She seems vacuous, blank-eyed, awaiting stimulus. I assure you she is thinking about jelly beans.  Hamish is lounged on the sofa, chin propped and contemplative. He is also thinking about jelly beans.

Because they are dogs, they both like, or rather, don’t dislike, every color jelly bean. I believe that there is a slight preference for pink, red and purple jelly beans over black, orange, and green. It is hard to tell with Hamish because he crunch-gulps so swiftly that the experience is over by the time his Corgi brain has the opportunity to form an opinion.

Tibbit (2)Sweet Tibbit, she savors a jelly bean. She snuffles the bean with her strangely mobile little black nose.  If it proves acceptable (and it always does but certain colors are approved more quickly), if acceptable Sweet Tibbit takes the bean with her tiny front nibble teeth and pursed lips. It disappears into her maw. Her catfish-like whiskers twitch as she repositions her prize to her molars. This is a mistake Sweet Tibbit makes every time. Really, every time.

The bean embeds into Miss Tibbit’s molars.

We all watch Miss Tibbit make rictus faces and chew with great exaggerated jaw movement. Her awkwardly too-big-for-her-mouth tongue flaps around. She pauses and looks at us. Makes a little test chew. Nope, not done. The rictus, chewing, flapping tongue scene starts again.

Hamish feels an injustice has been perpetrated. He glances from Sweet Tibbit eating her jelly bean to me to the jelly bean bag. His meaning is quite clear. Miss Tibbit’s jelly bean was obviously better than the cheezy little one he got.

As I reach into the jelly bean bag for another one, Miss Tibbit abruptly stops chewing and looks pointedly at my hand. She is trying to demonstrate that she is ready for another bean.  I hold my hand in the bag for a moment. Tibbit stares. I wait. I can see her lips trying to pull back into a rictus for more chewing. She is forcibly restraining them. I wait. Ricuts, flap, flap flap of the tongue.

Miss Tibbit gets more out of a single jelly bean than anyone I have ever seen. Sweet Tibbit, so simple, so sweet.

My heart is a like a neutron star, dense and heavy.

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My heart is like a magnetar, dense and heavy and a thousand times magnetized.

Four weeks from this day I will board a flight to the far away field location. I will have no phone, no lights, no motor car – ok, we do have a satellite phone for emergencies but not much else. Our sole luxury is the outhouse we are taking with us. Stacks of long underwear, socks, field pants, and equipment are growing in the front parlor. This is remote field research.

My heart is heavier every hour. I look at the WideEyedSpouse and I think, I won’t see you for weeks and weeks. I pet the dogs and I worry – will you be ok while I’m gone? Wiggins the Ancient Cat creaks by, I fret, will you be alive when I come home?

The weight in my chest is a coalescence of the open wide joy of learning that I was going to have a funded research program this summer. As the time for leaving grows closer, the plane tickets purchased, the boat charters paid, my happy heart tripping transforms to a sullen, weighty thunk.

I know from past summers that this heart weight will increase. That I will be walking and talking and acting normal but this density lump in my chest will work to hold me in place. I’ll feel it sagging in the pericardium, threatening to rip through and plummet past my stomach to my knees, my feet, the floor.

When the WideEyedSpouse drives me to the airport, the Pathfinder loaded down with crates and duffles and neutron star hearts, I’ll feel breathless. When I turn and walk into the airport, dragging my burdens with me, my magnetar heart will strain toward its lodestone as he drives away. When the plane takes off, I’ll feel it struggling, pulling to the ground, desperately reaching, trying to keep me home.

Then…snap. The plane will level off and there will be no turning back. Magentar heart changes to neutron star heart, becomes tripping wide open joy heart and the pericardium can’t hold in the radiant glow of a well loved job. This transformation is heart denial, and a simple, true trust that I’ll head back to the lodestone in the coming months.

The little table asked to come home with me.

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We meant to get to the estate sale earlier but the lure of sleeping late on Saturday morning proved too much. As it turned out, we got there in time. This estate sale was 4 stories of furniture, rugs, leaded windows, and interesting heaps of stuff. It was in a partially converted industrial warehouse in downtown Buffalo and I can’t figure out what was going on. Maybe some living space, maybe some packrat issues, maybe a business?  Wasn’t clear.

SoldSignThe stuff was arranged on raw cement floors flea market style on the first and fourth  floors, stacked warehouse shelving on part of the second, and weird decadent lounge on the second and third with little side rooms of warehouse chaos. Everything was tagged twice. Black price was Friday. Red price was Saturday morning.  Everything was at least half off the red price and we were told by another dusty scrounger that it was best to just talk to Andrew (one of our local estate sale moguls) for the best deal.

HeaderThe WideEyedSpouse and I both have wicked colds but we girded ourselves and tromped through the levels twice, three times. Second floor: antique leaded glass window: $20. Second floor, loft: mahogany mini side table $20. Not veneer. First floor: bureau with bookmatched drawer veneer $30. Fourth floor: two ironstone platters: $10 and one leathertopped side table: $20.

ChairI was running my hand over the veneer on the bureau when I saw the little maple kitchen table and chairs. My breath caught. It was weird how my breath caught. I saw like it had happened, was happening, would happen again and again – I saw myself sitting at that table in my bathrobe drinking coffee and reading the paper in the morning sun. The table and chairs aren’t anything special. They’re probably c. 1920s, hard used, and one chair is sort of broken. They were dirty. Didn’t matter, they were already mine.  I looked at the price tag. Red price said $100.

The sharks were circling tighter. I felt a little thrill of fear. I needed the floor person who established prices and marked items sold – ah! There she was about fifty feet away with people walking toward her. I made eye contact and smiled big, bright, like she was family I hadn’t seen in years. She started for me and ignored the other people. The power of positive feelings! The little kitchen table and chairs were mine. Er, ours. The WideEyedSpouse is welcome to sit there with me.

BureauThe people milling and swirling around the sale were getting increasingly desperate while we loaded our loot. “You want to sell that?”  an older couple asked when we walked by with the bureau. I thought they were joking but maybe not. “How much did you pay for that?” a chic blond asked us moments later, her eyes were running over the intact drawer fronts. “Thirty dollars,” I said. “You done good,” she told me and broke into a stiff jog toward the building entrance.

The little table is all set up in the kitchen. I scrubbed it and the chairs with a vinegar and water mix. The Spouse tightened some screws. I sat at it to clip coupons and shuffle through the Sunday paper. After three years living here, I felt warm, and safe, and settled.

InKitchen

Desperate times, moldy (delicious) measures.

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The time comes in every household when there’s nothing to eat. Just now, right this minute, it came to the WideEyedHousehold. The Mini and I splashed home from the Bug Lab and the Dry Cleaner through slush and muck and I was starving. The Mini wasn’t starving, it has a nice, expensive full tank of premium in the belly. I was STARVING.

As I steered around interdimensional pot holes, I worked my way through the cupboards and fridge in my head. Chips, gone. Cheezits – a stale two or three rattling in the box. Cookies. Nope. Chocolate. Nope. Ice cream. Nope. Nothing. Sure, I was shoving ingredients out of my way (in the cupboards in my head) but there was nothing to eat. It doesn’t have to make sense. When a person is feeling peckish only certain eats will fix it. None of those eats were in my house.

I got home, hung up the dry cleaning, said hi to the dogs, and hit the fridge. Nothing. I dangled there in the open door. Milk. Eggs. 57 stale bread ends each in their own little bag. A couple of lumps of dryish, greenish cheese. Ketchup, and three kinds of French mustard. Chutney. Jars of bacon fat. Because Grandma D always saved hers and I figured there must be a reason.

And, oh, a treasure – one lonely English muffin with a thin skim of bluey-pink along the edge.

Ahhh, yes. From the fridge dregs of rejected bits and things I forgot about I found something to eat. Toasted slightly moldy English muffin, buttered. Topped, while still warm from the toaster mind you, with sweet English cheddar with the green parts scraped off and a dollop of precious green tomato chutney we canned last fall. Crunchy. Sweet. Salty. Greasy. All the (important) food groups represented.

I’m just swallowing the last bite, well, Miss T and Hamish are actually having the very last bites, and I’m here to tell you – aside from the faint whiff of decay and old fridge, my desperation eats were really good. I want more. I wonder if that rock hard butt end of a sourdough batard would toast well? The dogs and I are going to go check.

I think I’m doing adventure wrong. Or at least wearing the wrong clothes.

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A spring Orvis catalog came in the mail yesterday. Usually print catalogs are trash carefully delivered to my door – from the mail carrier’s hand to my recycling bin. This time the economically-advantaged adventure vibe sucked me in. Vests with useful pockets. Ripstop trousers. Manly jewelry that signals rugged adventuresomeness. I’m trying to decide if men buy that for themselves or receive it as gifts.

Okonijima Game Reserve as pictured in Orvis March 2014 catalog, page 16.

Okonijima Game Reserve as pictured in Orvis March 2014 catalog, page 16.

Page 16 stopped me dead. Above the expedition pants and vintage military belt there’s an evocative picture of a luxury lodge at a game preserve in Namibia. I can’t take my eyes off of it. I can see a comfy bed, white pillows, chairs, reading lamps and I think I see a bathroom tucked discretely in the back. I bet there’s staff, too.

I live in the wilds for weeks to months most summers. My expedition pants are ancient Carhartt’s (because I think they stopped making women’s work pants) and WideEyedSpouse’s old khakis. My belt is the same leather belt I’m wearing right now, but soaked with eucalyptus oil so that pleasant smells waft from my always-on rain gear.

My lodge is a battered Eureka bombshelter tent. It has a thin insulated air mattress, a cleanish sweatshirt as a pillow, a flashlight, and no toilet. My lodge does have a spider bat – my trusty halibut knocking stick that’s like a tiny baseball bat. I use it to take out the monstrous subarctic spiders. On rat infested islands it is also the rat bat. Unless they chew through my lodge floors I consider the rats to be warm companions, but sometimes the squirming and squeaking gets annoying and I need to administer warning knocks in the vicinity.

I am sitting here at my kitchen table staring at this lodge picture. Staring at the fancy pants. Thinking.

Dear Orvis, I am writing to ask if you are interested in sponsoring…

Jeans Requiem

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My favorite jeans became disreputable approximately one year ago. One week ago, 50 weeks after they had moved from faded-but-tidy to holey-and-disreputable, two separate incidents forced me to recognize the end may have come for the favorite jeans.

Incident 1: Mel and I were scoring targets at the archery range. I held the clipboard with the score sheet, pencil poised. Mel said nothing. I waited. Still nothing. I glanced up. Mel was looking at my jeans. Or rather, he was looking at the holes. Each knee was exposed, with rips running about 5 or 6 inches north and south of the rip epicenters. In that area of my pants, there weren’t so much pants as knees with flaps of pants framing them. “Looks like you’re falling out of your jeans there,” Mel gestured at the place where my jeans should be in case I wasn’t aware of the areas of offense. “Huh,” I said. I cavalierly dismissed his concerns because Mel is Methuselah and may have conservative notions of appropriate attire.

Incident 2: The WideEyedSpouse and I were selecting new spectacles at the Optician. Expensive process. We take our time. Try on everything. And why not? I thought I looked cute as a button in my Joan of Arctics, little blue blazer and favorite jeans. The Spouse said to me, “Man, you really need a new pair of jeans.” I peered at him through the Kate Spade frames I was trying out. I opened my mouth to say something rude but the Optician from across the room beat me to it, “Yeah,” he agreed with The Spouse, “when they get that bad you have to be careful about bending over in public.”

Jeans2Slumped on the sofa with a glass of wine that evening I picked at the fringes of denim along the tears in my jeans. I thought about all the places, all the countries we’d been to together. Reviewed all the really fantastic outfits we’d made together. I’d given professional papers in these jeans. Taught in them. Worn them for uncountable hours of research and writing. Flip flopped through summers in them.

I am now wearing a new pair of jeans. They are awkward and stiff. I look like someone else in them. I feel like I am wearing someone else’s pants. The waist feels funny. It is distressing and I keep thinking about my favorite jeans, washed and carefully folded in the bottom of the pants drawer of my bureau. Are they lonely in there? Will the new jeans gloat about our forthcoming adventures? I want to go put them on. But I can’t, I mustn’t. The much loved, favorite jeans can only be worn in memory now.