That’s the most common comment from Deb as we drive through the snowy streets of Anchorage.  It makes me wonder if 1970s Anchorage had any establishments that were not strip joints.  Maybe some were just bars, which is why they’re out of business–they failed to offer the necessary entertainment.

To go out and about:  wade through the snow to your car, start it.  Don’t lock the keys in.  Go back inside.  Come back in fifteen minutes, and brush 6″ of snow (that’s about 10 cm for our metric friends) off your car.  Brush it all off, don’t just leave the roof covered in it.  Get the lights, breaking off the ice.  Lift up the wipers and smack them down hard enough to break the ice off.  Back out of your parking with a burst of speed, but do not do this when a road grader is plowing the street.  Get ready for streets narrowed by snow berms on each side.  The sidewalks are buried in the berms, so do not hit the young lady walking down the side of the road in her toque and bunny boots.

It is overcast, the daylight is dim to begin with, and powdery snow swirls through the wheel ruts on the main drag.  Visibility ranges from a couple of miles to a few hundred yards.  Most road activity happens with the slowed pace necessary when it’s possible to skid nearly anywhere.  Your wife (your chauffeuse) swears at anyone who blasts past her, appears about to pull out in front of her, straddles lanes, or commits some other breach of good driving etiquette in her estimation.  Corners involve a certain caution, plowing through churned snow.  Roundabouts, which I’m not sure really suit Alaskan conditions, need special care, especially those double lane roundabouts as macho road warriors skid around them and think it’s great fun.  In essence, there is a mudbogging feel about Anchorage winter driving from start to stop–just replace the mud with snow.

Deb felt strong enough today to get out and about, which was just as well because I broke Herb’s snow shovel early in the visit, and I was overdue to replace it despite his protestations that we didn’t need to.  That was a good excuse to go back to Title Wave Books, one of the great things about Anchorage.  Do you like travel books? Our Barnes & Noble in Kennewick has one section of ‘travel essays’.  Title Wave has six times that.  It has even more books about bears.  If there is anything about bears, from lies told to cheechakos (‘tenderfeet’…’Outsiders’…’people from the lower 48’) to authentic treatises on the habits of the grizzly, that Title Wave’s bear book section cannot answer, that’s because everyone who learned it got mauled to death before being able to put it into print.

I begin to think that Alaskan isn’t a state residency, but a citizenship.

Unfortunately, everyone but Herb came down sick last night.  Though, since Herb has battled two different kinds of cancer and is still trying to get off the feeding tube, I frankly would rather it were me than him that was sick any day.  I know it’s not dysentery, but the symptoms are about the same.  Last night was a bad night for Lynda, Deb and me.  I’m better today but still shaky, shivery and such; the women are both miserable and do not go too far from a bathroom.

It was necessary for us to run to the store to get them stuff like crackers and ginger ale, especially in Deb’s case as she must not let her sugar fall too low.  That meant we had to battle our way out into the night, neither of us at 100% but we’re what they’ve got.  Unfortunately the snow had narrowed the driveway, and Lynda’s car wouldn’t start.  We had to jump it with Herb’s truck, which due to the narrowed driveway couldn’t quite back out without scraping her car.  It took about an hour of hacking away at ice, jumpstarting, shoveling, and so on, but we did it.

(Ever wonder how someone could build anything out of snow blocks? When it accumulates, the stuff at the bottom is more like soft ice.  Just cut it up and start building.)

The point:  this is how they live up here.  This is normal life.  Cars don’t start, snow accumulates and narrows pathways, and people battle through.  This is Alaska.

And Fairbanks makes this look like cosseted, pampered living.

Today we went to our friends’ daughter’s home in Wasilla.  (Yes, that Wasilla.  No, we did not see Levi, Bristol or Sarah.)  You know the DEER XING signs in many states, depicting a leaping stag on his way to a party? Alaska has the same thing, but silhouetting a creature six feet high at the withers with antlers the size of large dogs.  Once again, that was my job:  keep an eye out.

The interior of Alaska (this part, anyhow, and at this time) in winter looks forested, frosty, snowy, hazy and chilly.  You know how some places don’t look as cold as they really are? Alaska looks even colder than it is, which is fairly cold.  I think this is because so much of it is unoccupied that anyone could walk a mile off a main road, ill-prepared, and choose to freeze to death if one failed to take the climate seriously.  Chances anyone would blunder across you are low.  If no one knew where you had gone, it would not be needle and haystack but needle and hayfield.  Snow tracks would be a factor–unless it snowed again.  I alluded to Jack London in an earlier post.  Come here, and you can see just what he meant about the darkness of the wild.  In fact I’d recommend a winter pilgrimage for any truly serious London enthusiast.  (You can hire dogsled rides.  That’s one way mushers pay to keep up their dogs.)

The road wasn’t bad, but don’t tell that to Lynda, my hostess.  Riding with one of the most terminally reliable and responsible men I know, her husband Herb, of 35 years, she was as nervous as I am when riding with a tailgater.  I don’t know how she survives six months of this, much less how she has done so since the Carter administration.  A very nice time, though, afternoon with children and a puppy plowing over, around and through presents.  Can you picture me helping a little girl assemble her Barbie Veterinarian Set? Hey, I had a meaningful role.  That stuff takes muscle to fit together.  I had to horse on it.  Perhaps the only more comical picture than me helping put it together is me barely having the physical strength to do so.

A wonderful time, all told, delicious dinner by niece Lisa (by mutual adoption), no one hit a moose and only one person got their vehicle stuck in a snowbank.  By Wasilla December standards, that’s all kinds of win.

To the faithful readership of the ‘Lancer, good holidays to you all in whatever form you may celebrate or enjoy them, whether they are solemn times of faith or just reasons to overeat.  Thank you for every single time you checked in, and as the year winds down I look forward to keeping the blog up in the coming cycle.

We have freezing fog here today.  Watching the hoarfrost build up on the trees in our yard this morning made me think of a funny story.

During my 5th year at UW, I was taking nothing but foreign languages, and leading the genteel, peaceful, burnout life of a gentleman drunkard in Hansee, one of UW’s quiet dorms.  The rule in Hansee was very simple:  do as you like, so long as you are quiet.  Make noise, and the math wonks will have you thrown out of there in days.

Seattle doesn’t get a lot of snow, but when it does, the city screeches to a panicked halt.  Three inches brings chaos, six brings paralysis.  We had 8″ of dry powder snow that November of 1985, with swirling winds blowing it off the trees (to our great enjoyment when some jackass pulled a false alarm and we had to turn out at 2 AM in the snow).  On the first evening, I was out with my crew messing around in it, attempting to have a snowball fight with the powdery snow.

My crew were serious game nerds.  We had Wade, a Japanese American from Spokane, plus his frat rat high school buddy Greg and the very large Chad, who looked a lot like the Abominable Snowman in Bugs Bunny.  We also had Ian, from Issaquah, the Hobbit (though he’s not really that short), and Jeff (also from Issaquah).  Jeff was interesting.  Bigger than me, but awkward, a good guy.  I was the only one who was even slightly athletic, so I was faring well in the snowball pitching and rassling.  We were out near a hedged area, and the idea was to try and rassle someone into the hedge.  Much snow would ensue, to great hilarity.

Then came the funny part.  I grappled with Jeff, hoping to chuck him bodily into the hedge, but unfortunately failed due to poor leverage.  However, he hove me into a very dense area of hedge, and I rebounded as if I’d hit a huge spring.  I got him in another grapple, and we strove with might and main for a few seconds, then he lost his balance.  I pushed off and sent him backward into the hedge, but I picked a better spot by happenstance.

Jeff backpedaled into the hedge attempting to regain his balance, but into a less dense part, actually a somewhat bare spot where a forked hedge bush was growing.  The fork was a flattened Y about six inches off the ground–the perfect place to catch both heels at once as you backpedal, if, say, some dude has just shoved you toward it backwards.  That’s exactly what happened to Jeff.  As he fell backward headlong, of course, in panic he grabbed for the hedge branches.  Not his ideal move.

I watched in delighted astonishment as the equivalent of a snow artillery shell detonated where Jeff had been.  For a couple of seconds I couldn’t even see him through the floating powdery snow, then it dissipated.  He’d fallen with his mouth wide open, saying something, so he got a mouthful of it.  Probably inhaled some.  His thick glasses kept some of it out of his eyes, but he was fully covered in the white dusty snow, spluttering it out of his mouth and flailing to begin digging out.

When I was sure he wasn’t actually hurt, that’s when I started laughing.  I doubled over.  It’s a good thing it took Jeff so long to get out of it, because he could have pushed me over with Newt Gingrich’s heart.

That’s the best description I can give of the experience of watching Korpiklaani.

I went with a good friend and fellow Nordic metal enthusiast, Debbie (not Deb my wife; she’s in DC setting Uncle Sugar straight).  Our first surprise: just because the gates opened at 6 PM didn’t mean Korp was on at that time.  Nope, had to wait out a couple of crappy local metal bands, though we had some good conversations with other people waiting around.  We weren’t the oldest people present, but we were in the 95% percentile.  First observation:  if you are not a youth, yet you like this sort of sound, you should not feel shy because you are a) old enough to be the kids’ parent; b) lack a bunch of metal embedded in your face; c) unwilling to go full freak.  We really enjoyed the people we chatted with, and no one hinted that we were interlopers.  It’s a case where you get what you expect, I think, as in so many life situations.

This venue did take security seriously.  Debbie didn’t get patted down, but I did.  That said, though, they were polite.  They did sniff her smokes for pot.  Some other people got searched rather more thoroughly than we did.

Evidently one of the warmup acts got booed off while Debbie was on a smoke break, so we had to hustle into the music area as Korp started early.  They all have serious hair, well down to the armpits.  Jonne, the main vocalist, was good at working the crowd as was the guitarist next to him.  I had brought earplugs in case, but while it was loud, it wasn’t painfully so.  I was there for partly anthropological reasons anyway (and partly just to have a good time with a friend from college).  Impressions:

• Watching them live you trade some of the actual music nuances of CD for the visual spectacle.  I couldn’t recognize most of the songs they played.  The bagpiper was my favorite instrumentalist; the big dark-haired dude on guitar was really into the crowd.
• The place vibrated, literally.  It felt exactly like standing on a drum while some giant is playing it.  I’d give it a 4.8 on the Richter scale.  I was surprised the whole place didn’t come crashing down.  Those floors must be made of 6″ thick maple timbers.
• I’m not sure all metal bands with long hair do the hair swirl, but quite frequently the band would play guitar while leaning over and sort of swirling their heads to make the hair whirl in kind of a figure 8 pattern.  Kind of a neat trick, when you consider they were still playing their instruments while doing it.
• Lots of people did a hook-em-horns Texas football gesture, evidently a symbol of metal fan solidarity and approval.  I didn’t do it, but you can get caught up in situations like this.  I confess I was tempted.
• During the first number, what looked like rugby broke out in front of the stage.  I learned that this is called moshing.  It got pretty rowdy, and at a couple points I decided I’d better kind of stand in front of Debbie in case it got out of hand.  We stood back far enough that we didn’t end up playing rugby, though ironically enough, she used to play rugby for real.

It wasn’t a very long show, a little more than an hour.  From an entertainment standpoint, it didn’t come close to Weird Al Yankovic, but I’m glad I did it, even though it required a hell of a lot of driving.

Edit:  okay, this is how dumb I am.  Come to find out later that what we saw wasn’t actually Korpiklaani, but Arkona, a Russian band.  How pissed the real Korp would be to find out we mistook Russians for Finns!  Instant death.  I guess that explains why I didn’t recognize hardly any of the music.  I was mightily tempted to just delete this whole post, but when you mess up, you have to own up.  I was wondering about the discrepancies and timing issues, but I assumed that such haphazardness was just the way shows worked.  So a total of ten hours with me driving, and three with Debbie driving, and we didn’t actually see the band we came to see.  Ouch!