The most important word to teach a dog

"Come." I've done research, and that's definitely it.
While staying with my cousin Solveig and her husband, Jeff, I decided I could take all three dogs (Wes' 2 + their 1, "Silka") for a jog. Jeff thought it sounded a bit ambitious, but I forged ahead. All went well at first, all three dogs heeling at my left-hand side, matching my slow trot. We drank in the sights and sounds of the neighborhood for about a half-mile, at which point we were ambushed. Two tiny dogs yapping, followed by a big dog barking, followed by two humans yelling, came running out of a flanking driveway. Chaos ensued, and I emerged moments later with three leashes wrapped around my legs, two dogs still at my left side, and one dog on the other side of the street. Silka had used the confusion to her advantage and slipped backwards out of her collar. She pranced and mocked from the otherside of the street as I demanded, "Silka! Come!"
In response to my repeated demands, Silka repeated her mocking dance. I proceeded walking down the road, Silka skipping along about 10 yards ahead of me. Fine, I thought, be that way. I can just herd you all the way home.
After another half mile of this ridiculous parade, the largest bull moose I have ever seen stepped into the road about 50 yards ahead. None of the dogs even noticed, but I thought it just might work to scare Silka into running back to me. We would continue down the road until she took note of this gargantuan.
Only to reiterate my estimation of the moose's size, a super-sized soccer mom vehicle came up behind us and proceeded down the road to within a few yard of the moose. It towered over the Expedition: Ford's Soccer-game-on-a-mountain Edition. Again Silka grabbed a window of opportunity as the moose stepped out of the road to allow the SUV to pass. She shot between the vehicle and the large mammal and trotted off down the street. The Expedition drove down the road, and the moose walked straight towards myself, Wrigley, and Toby. Knowing the moose should not be trifled with, I edged myself and the dogs to the otherside of the road, avoiding the moose that had closed the gap to 5 yards. Hoping we were safely clear, I ran after Silka, who had disappeared around a corner.
The moose couldn't be bothered with anything but the suburban shrubbery, but Silka had disappeared. I frantically called for a few minutes, then called Jeff.
"I lost your dog." Isn't the greatest thing to have to say. Jeff sent Solveig to come help look. She shoved on her shoes and opened the front door. There on the front stoop, with a clever grin on her face, was a collar-less Silka. Wrigley and Toby and I trudged back, dragging an empty leash, thankful that Silka hadn't been hit by a car. "I killed your dog." would definitely be a more uncomfortable phone call.

One of the Alaska State Fairs

Alaska has some understandable “big state” dilemmas. (No, not like Texas… they’ve just had a Napolean complex since Alaska got its own two senators in 1958.) Alaska has problems like: “Where should the capital be, since every city is a multiple-day journey from the rest of the state?” (They settle that by choosing the city that is most inaccessible to the most people.) Also: “Which communities should we spend our billions building roads to?” (This was solved by halting all road construction and concentrating on maintaining the three short roads they’ve got.) Another dilemma was to figure out where to hold the state fair. If they hold it in the state capitol, as in most states, no one could go. So, many communities proposed they host the state fair and an all out Olympic bid war began. The result is more state fairs than you can count, most of then no more notable than a county festival in rural nowhere.
I’ve passed opportunities to see the “Tanana Valley State Fair” and the “Kenai State Fair” just in the last week, holding out for the state fair near Anchorage (the states biggest city, weighing in at 500,000 souls). The “Alaska State Fair” is held in Palmer, a nearby community. Solveig and I went to take in the sights and the food, and I realized how spoiled my fair tastes have been as a long-time attendant of the Great Minnesota Get-Together.
We ate cream puffs, tamales, cookies, garlic potato chips, dippin’ dots, chewy sweet corn, and free water. But, I missed my hometown’s Sweet Martha’s, pickle-on-a-stick, Wisconsin cheese curds, Minnesota sweet corn, and all-you-can-drink milk. However, the tamales at the Palmer fair were the best I’ve found outside Mexico- impressive considering Palmer’s distance from the Rio Grande.
The pig racers came up from the Kenai (some shows cannot pick their fair allegiance), and watching pigs ears and tails flop as they sprint around a track is pretty hysterical. Lumberjacks came up from Wisconsin to do a “lumber sports” show, but I was sad that Alaska didn’t have some cabin-building woodchoppers to throw into the mix.
The big pig wasn’t as big as the one in Minnesota, but it was actively in labor when we went by the pen—with a piglet-catching attendant and everything. The live infomercials were excellent enough for a man with a fake foreign accent to convince Solveig to buy a Magical Star Fiber Mop. And, perhaps the saving grace of the whole scene was a couple sixty+ pound cabbages. Texas has never seen that much coleslaw.

The ADA (and other camping hazards)

We decided to take a break from our quest to have a relaxing weekend in Chugiach State Park with Gustaf and Ginger. Gustaf was keen on climbing a moutain. The smallest one we could find was one "Goat's Head Mountain," 5000 some feet. Now, it should be clear that sitting in a car for a month eating doritos and reading Harry Potter does not condition you for moutain climbing. We weren't even halfway before Ginger was skipping up ahead and Gustaf was all but dragging me to keep up. Toby and I, both creatures that see the value in a nap over exercise, would have been content to have a sit and wait for the rest of the group to notch their belt with this "accomplishment." But, good sports that we are, we hauled ourselves the 3 miles of ridiculous uphill and were rewarded with beautiful views and loads of blueberries. (Toby proved the more efficient blueberry picker.) Gustaf and I flew his kite in the breeze.
We spent and hour or so catching our breath, and with a Nalgene full of bluberries, headed down to camp and dinner. One third of the way down, we came upon a pudgy man carrying his pudgy dog that made Toby and I look like Olympians. The man's dog, Dixie had collapsed and the owner was alternating between carrying his dog and carrying his pack, shuttling up and down the hill for each, on the verge of cardiac arrest. I grabbed the pack, and Wes took turns carrying the dog (estimated at 100-lbs of sweat and smell and fur) the last two miles of downhill.
Dixie and owner safely returned to their family, we returned to our campsite and threw ourselves into dinner. Wes and Ginger were making ice cream, Gustaf was stoking the fire, and I was chopping vegetables, when a ranger walked up and told us we were in a handicapped camping site. After talking with the ranger, we discovered that though it wasn't obvious, if you had a doctorate in encryption, you may have been able to DaVinci Code-out that this was, in fact, a handicapped reserved camping slot. No, the ranger explained, no one needed the site YET (it was 9:30pm), but we needed to move to the one other open campsite in order to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act. OK, we'll move.
But actually, we already have our fire lit, our tents up, our dinner half-ready, and we've been here for two days without incident. Would it be ok if we stayed in the site, (leaving the empty site available for another group) and if anyone came who needed the site (it's now 10pm), we would pack up straight-away and drive back to Anchorage... even if it's 3am? At this point in negotiations, the "camp hosts" (old people who live in an RV for free all summer in exchange for selling firewood and watching the campground) drove up, claimed they had been "looking for us all day", and accused us of "conveniently overlooking" the handicapped sign (which there wasn't one). Well, they poked the wrong bear: Ginger's mom has MS, Gustaf and I have a blind parent each, and Wes' best friend is a quadriplegic: accusing this group of intentionally taking advantage of the disabled just wouldn't sell. Wes pointed this out, said that was an unfair accusation, and explained that WE had been looking for the camphosts this morning, perhaps THEY need to be at their posts more frequently. The ranger, offended at any suggestions of change in HIS campground adminstration, skipped over strikes 1 and 2 and sent us packing. He saved the other open campsite until 11pm, waiting for us to apologize. Then he came over, yelled at us again, and shut down his "full" campground with two open sites and our $10 camping fee in his pocket. We rolled back into Gustaf and Ginger's in Anchorage at 12:30am.

Toby's Nose

We thought it was a foxtail (a common Alaskan weed), so we let him sneeze for two weeks in good faith. Don't get me wrong, we would look up his nose every few days and then argue about whether it was further in or out. We also spent a good two hours feeding him valium and then using six people to pin him down and pick his nose with dental tools.
Finally, we broke down and took him to the vet. Their drugs worked better than our valium-- he was a noodle within minutes, no holding necessary. Though the vet was cheating with her fancy drugs, it was quite exciting when she extracted a large chuck of hard plastic from the noodle-dog's nostril. The whole office got toogether and decided this item was something Toby had chosen to snack on, but instead of down his throat, it went up his nose, though this probably hurt even more than when you are laughing while drinking Coke.

Nature in Kenai Fjords National Park

Wes & Steph in Alaska Update

by Wes

We went to the bluegrass festival in Anderson, AK. I don't know what you think of as a bluegrass festival, but I was under the impression that there would be a lot of country folk with corn cob pipes strumming on the washboard, keeping time with two spoons taped together while a banjo plays and people dance the softshoe in the dirt. In reality, a bluegrass festival is a grateful dead concert....with country music. It's composed of rather dirty groups of teenagers, varying in age from 14 to 68, wearing lots of tye-die, and doing lots of drugs. When the fireworks at the end of the music went off, a full 75% of the crowd was giggling at what they thought was a great, but private, hallucination. Now, you must realize that it never really gets dark here, which helps the all-night party to go on at full speed and full volume. We set up our tent in the "quiet" area, but it really didn't get quiet until around 6:00am, when it started to rain, although you could still here the occasional group of people reliving the woodstock mud experience. Then another phenomenum erupted: the older RV'ers who could not sleep because of the noise, decided to exact their revenge on the passed out revelers by leaving early and blowing their horns while driving all the way through the camping area. Note to self: pass up the next opportunity to go to a bluegrass festival.

From there we travelled down to Talkeetna, the center of aviation for the Mt. McKinley flying tours. We met the owner of one of the operations that evening, he listened to our qualifications, including our hours of flight and told us: "You are in the right place at the right time, we need pilots!" He asked us to stay around til the next day to get a check flight with him, and we would have a job. Yay! We stayed in a B&B to the tune of $170 and dinner for $100 (Alaska is really expensive). We arrived early, studied the airplane manual, sat in the plane to familiarize ourselves with it, and then waited.... This lasted until 2:00pm when the owner's wife came over to tell us we didn't have the minimum hours for the insurance...good day. ARGHHHHHHH!!!!

Now we are in Anchorage, we had a very succesful interview yesterday, and were offered jobs flying freight and mail out of Bethel (a fly-in community with no road access) into the native villages, pretty much the kind of flying we are looking for. However, after looking at the cost of living in Bethel: milk at $6.50 a gallon, cell phone service at $1.00/mn and rent at $1,600 per month we calculated we would be living at a net loss. So, the adventure continues....