Wilderness Blues- Ramblings from the Great Land

     Years ago Timex watches came out with various commercials showing their watches being abused in assorted situations - people skiing down a slope and falling or a guy using a jack hammer or something along that line to show how tough their watches were. The announcer would come on and say - Timex watches, they take a licking and keep on ticking. Well, Jan and I celebrated our forty third wedding anniversary recently and I'm pleased to say, we're still ticking along. I didn't say tickling, I said ticking, like a watch. I didn't include any pictures of us as we look now, the contrast is so great, that you probably wouldn't believe that it was the same two people. It's amazing what time does to a person. I wish I weighed now what I did in these pictures. I think I had a 29 inch waist then. Heck, my head probably wouldn't fit into a 29 inch stocking cap right now. I can't recall when the last time was that my hair was anything ...

   Years ago, when I was still a kid and my interest in fishing was starting to rev up, I would go to the Super X drug store at least once a month to see if the latest copy of Field and Stream or Outdoor Life  or Sports Afield had come out. I devoured them, hoping to glean some secret to catching more fish. No doubt fishing someplace other than the local mud filled streams and ponds would have been a good first step to catching more, but you have to do the best  you can with what you have. Anyway, while I was perusing the magazine isle, I always passed by the ladies section of magazines- Better Homes and Gardens, Ladies Home Journal,  Fashion, stuff like that. Then, at the end of the section would be the more risque publications, Cosmopolitan and True Confessions and whatever other titles there were. These magazines were designed to titillate their readers with scandalous articles about illicit affairs or whatever other shameful or disrepu...

\   A few years ago I was working at the boat haul out getting some plank work done, when the shipwright, John Kveum, mentioned the location of an outhouse across from the haul out. It was tucked away in a little bit of an alcove under the towering rock wall of what we here in Hoonah know as the tunnel. There were rocks all around the base of the outhouse, and of course I had to do a blog post about it. The idea that people would get beaned while on the way to a porta-potty kind of tickled me. I have a strange sense of humor. Anyway, the next year, they moved the potties. Probably wisdom to do so. I spotted some fairly good rocks where it had been residing, and if one of those had hit the outhouse when you were in there, if you didn't have to crap when you got there, you'd probably have to afterwards. I guess last year there was a few more rocks falling off the face of the tunnel and there was a fear that a tourist might get hit by one and of course ...

   Jan and I grabbed up Jen and Kaylahni  and made a mad dash out to Freshwater Bay last Sunday. We wanted to take advantage of the sunshine. There has been darn little of it this year, even though the winter has been exceptionally mild. It was almost fifty degrees in the sun, so it felt great. It's hard to imagine the East coast suffering through record snow and cold, while here in Alaska, we hardly have enough snow for the Iditarod dog sled race. Simply amazing, but I'm not going to complain. The road out is all gravel and narrow with lots of blind spots and hills, to say nothing of potholes, so you can't really drive all that fast on it. I think it's about twenty seven miles to get out there, but it still takes over an hour to get there- sometimes longer depending on the condition of the road. When we got there, Jen wanted to build the fire. She had been out to Long Island the day before and had built a towering inferno, so I guess ...