Hi everybody,
It’s a beautiful sunny 14 degrees here at Spring Lake Minnesota, and I’m itchin’ to get outside and see what critters have been leaving tracks around the parsonage and church property. I’m slowly working through Martin Luther’s commentary on the Magnificat, and it’s wonderful reading… any time of the year, not just when the text is coming up on Sunday.
Saoirse and I spent the day together yesterday while Momma was in St. Paul chislin’ away at the last few days before her well-earned Christmas break. We’re lucky to have a 2-year old that seems to love being outside regardless of the conditions (although, like her folks, she’s not all that keen on 40 degrees and pouring rain!). Krista and I got new XC ski setups from her folks this year for Christmas gifts, and I think we might give ‘em a try tonight or tomorrow in the moonlight (just like old times at 471 Jefferson St in Mondovi). We even found a set of plastic step-ins for Saoirse, and I’m looking forward to teaching her how to ski like my folks taught me.
I hope you’re all getting some good opportunities to be outside during this time of the year. I love it when all the swamps freeze over and open up to some pretty decent exploring where they’d be near impassable but for the sub-zero temps.
Bristol Bay, Alaska was home for about five months for me during the summer and fall of 1997. Lots of what Dillingham had to offer had to do with some of the stuff we all enjoy about being outside, but on a scale unimaginable here in the “lower 48″ (I hardly believed most of the stories I heard about AK ’til I lived there). I watched executive “sportsmen” fly in and out of the bush on these wonderful Grumman seaplanes parked next to the hangar I worked in at the airport. They’d fly in carrying all the latest high-tech equipment, most of which they’d just leave behind at the outfitter (saw an Orvis flyrod that went for about $1500 just sitting in the office there that some guy had left as a gratuity). Many of the folks who grew up there made their living on salmon fishing the way my people back in Mondovi made theirs on dairy farming, trapping, raising crops, or working in the countless industries that surrounded those trades. I was having beers one night with a 22 year-old fisherman-captain who offered to buy, and when he opened up his wallet he discovered a tattered check for what looked like around $200K. He owned two commercial boats and had forgotten to cash his biggest check. …Never knew if it was another gag though, and most of you know how gullible I can be!
I just got wind of a decision made by the BLM in Alaska that will affect Bristol Bay and its fisheries forever. If you haven’t heard about the Pebble Mine operation, it’s something that’s been in the works for a while. But this particular decision to open certain river systems right around Dillingham to exploration for minerals and gas and oil really struck me. I think it’s one of the wildest places (with certainly some of the most memorable characters) I’ve ever lived in. Many of the most important things I’ve learned have come in the times and places when I’ve felt very far away from what I’m accustomed to… and that was certainly available in Dillingham!
Please have a look at this link if you’d like to know more about the story I’m referring to:
http://www.adn.com/money/story/592844.html
Krista, Saoirse, and I, (and ???… due June, 2009) wish you all the best.
“… We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.
- - From The Sound of Mountain Water, Wallace Stegner, 1969.
