I reach this point every year. I’ve written various posts with stories about our adventures in Alaska, but I’m left with a bunch of miscellaneous photos that didn’t really fit into any other post. And so I’ll share a handful of the leftovers here, with brief commentary.
In no particular order.
Augie mugging for his public, while Robbi does her best to keep a straight face.
Clearly, her best in not enough.
This summer, our resident electrical engineer Daryl installed a wind generator.
I managed to photograph it just as the sun slipped out from behind a cloud.
I probably don’t need to explain what’s happening below, but the detail minded among you might be gratified to know that it involves granola.
Driving the four wheeler in the wet sand gets the axle and undercarriage all covered with salt water. Which causes it to corrode. And so we drive it through the freshwater creek to give it a good rinse.
A boy discovers the pleasures of a life jacket that first just right.
A girl discovers the pleasures of sitting on an idling ATV and gunning the engine.
One day when we were driving along the bluff, a couple of foxes ran with us. They were utterly unconvinced that we presented any sort of threat. They were correct.
Eventually, the foxes ran off, and we had nothing to do but take this selfie.
I had to stop to appreciate the signage on the inside of the men’s room door at the local fish processing plant.
A girl and her ride.
Coming into Anchorage.
A couple of bears made a nightly circuit that cut right through our compound, down our road, and along the bluff below our property.
We awoke to fresh evidence every morning.
Most nights, the kids would tuck into their beds after supper and watch a movie on my computer. Apparently, on the night pictured below, the featured film was especially hilarious to August.
Or perhaps I’m reading too much into his expression, which seems not dissimilar to the one depicted in the scene below, which is exciting, but certainly not funny.
To each his own, I suppose.
After breakfast, we often walked along the beach, sometimes writing cryptic messages in the sand.
Inscrutable words like Alden…
…and Kato.
Our house has no electricity, and thus the only light we get is whatever streams through the window.
I made the stained glass in the upper middle panel back when I made stained glass.
We had an uncommon number of sunny days this summer. Most years, it rains 60 percent of the time and is overcast on 9 out of 10 days.
This summer, more than half of the days were sunny. So we took advantage of it.
One of the kids’ favorite pastimes is riding out into the tundra. Alden is already steering and working the throttle. She’s just not quite tall enough to reach the gear shift. But I suspect she’ll be driving herself in a year or two.
For now, she is content to leap across the holes in the tundra.
It is nice to be up there for a few weeks and really disconnect from all technology and the accompanying urgency.
There’re so much more time for just being and noticing.
Here is a tundra classic: a flounder-print t-shirt.
And here is the unfortunate flounder who volunteered.
We played a lot of Uno this summer. For any of you who loved Uno when you were a kid and wonder when your kids might be ready, Alden (6) and Kato (4), both love it and are able to not only play along but also beat me with frequency.
Here is the “after” picture from the day Alden and Raiden helped with the fishing.
One sunny afternoon, I climbed up on top of the shipping container that doubles as our pantry and lumber storage.
Here’s a view of the main house (upper right) and the Kumajo (with the boarded up window), the building where we store our nets.
Here’s a glimpse in the other direction. That road leads down to the beach. And that odd looking structure is a cabin that we inherited when our family bought the property 37 years ago.
Here is a view from the bluff. In the foreground is the net rack, where we stack the nets for cleaning and mending.
This is another of our handful of residential outbuildings. The ropes are there to keep it from blowing off the bluff.
One of August’s favorite Alaska activities was heading down to the shoreline and chucking rocks into the surf.
Big rocks, small rocks, it did not matter. The pursuit of the splash was the only thing that mattered.
If throwing rocks is your game, it’s awfully hard to fail.
Which means that the boy was frequently gratified.
Perhaps “frequently” is not adequate to capture the persistence of his good cheer.
The gratification was constant and unending.
Still, he felt obliged to approach his task with some degree of guile, as if the only way he would succeed in hitting the surface of the water with his rocks would be to sneak up upon it and strike it unannounced.
Eventually (though usually not before relocating a significant pile of rocks), he would tire of his industry and begin the long march up the bluff.
Did I mention that the march was also steep? What’s a small boy to do when he has so exhausted himself in the act of rock-chucking that he has nothing left to spark the journey home?
This, my friends, is where sisters come into the equation.
That’s all, I think, for this year’s Alaska chronicles. If you find yourself wanting more, take heart in the fact that we are scheduled to return in approximately 10 months.
Happy Monday.
