Who's Driving

by Mary Odden

  The situation was delightfully topsy-turvy, as the young people were gracious hosts and I tried to put myself at their service as their guest—a parent, yes, but not Momzilla.

  Luckily for them, I was operating with a severe handicap. There was no phone book. In fact, there was no phone.

  There were plenty of cell phones in people’s pockets, but how do you find out who you need to call?

  Suppose that a person, new to this small city, would want to buy a bike light to lessen the chances of her daughter getting run over in the dark by a careless bus. That person would have to borrow a young person’s computer with its mysterious Apple operating system. Then that person would get on the internet, look up the city and its bike shops, then borrow a cell phone to call one of the shops. Okay, I got that.

  Supposing that a person wanted to find out how to get rid of a pile of leaves, buy a pumpkin, mail a letter, replenish the macaroni and cheese supply?

  Starting with the world wide web to find out how to take out the garbage located 20 feet away in the garage seemed like a bit of overkill.

  Driving around the city, trying to stay headed the correct direction on the one way streets while looking for a bike shop, a post office and a grocery store did foster a certain sense of adventure. I was Christopher Columbus trusting the trade winds.

  When I tried to explain to my young hosts why zeroing in on a bike shop starting from the level of the universe, or crawling around one way streets until I found the shop by Braille seemed backwards to me, the three of them gazed mildly upon my point of view.

  I was an interesting artifact.

  “You can use the internet anytime you want,” they said.

  “No, that’s okay,” I said.

  At that point, what I wanted to find on the internet was a local phone book, one made out of comforting white and yellow paper with lists of pizza joints and hardware stores and dentists and donuts and doohickeys and bike lights, all within reach and all with local addresses.

  I wanted to nestle my daughter’s house inside a touchable geography of stuff and services and neighbors with local phone numbers. I wanted to start with a map and a phone book like any normal parent exactly like me would want to do.

  I start everything I do from a certain location. It has an X axis and a Y axis that places me on the surface of the planet. It empowers me to start from that location to look for goods and services. With a map and a phone book, I could have been dangerously, geographically resourceful. I probably would have gotten those kids a plumber for their annoying leaky sink. I might have replaced the drapes.

  As it was, I stayed put after they all went off to class. I raked leaves and got stung by yellow jackets. I clipped bushes around that ancient but charming old rental with its neglected yard. I did some visual archeology to figure out which foundation and which ship lap siding was added on to which other one in which era since 1908 when the house was built. I found out when the house was built by talking to a neighbor, in person. There would have been a time when that house was owned by somebody, when it was the center of a little farm whose people knew everyone and everything around them for miles and miles.

  I still had “get phone book” on my list but in my occasional vehicular wanderings around the city, I never ever stumbled on the phone company.

  My brother drove over from a couple of hours away, helping to make the yard look so nice that after I went home my daughter told me the neighbors visited to introduce themselves. They said they were glad someone was living in the house who would care about it. They exchanged hydrangeas and forget-me-nots with my daughter and her cohorts, which suggests that they are likely to look out for each other.

  It may even raise consciousness about neighborhood expectations that will result in kid-initiated yard work.

  And the next time Momzilla shows up, she’ll know where to borrow a phone book.

  SIMON SAYS TECH HELP

  I received the most wonderful Christmas present from our friend Mike: a wood-splitting ax, specifically made for splitting kindling. It was made at a Swedish forge by a blacksmith who signed his name. It is a beautiful tool.

  I will take it outside the house soon. But at the moment I have put it where my computer can see it.

  Right before I download an attachment from email, an extremely necessary but recently problematic operation that has slowed down the newspaper production, I look meaningfully at the ax and then back at the computer screen, and I say, “Strike any key.”

  It only works sometimes.

  It was on a bad day in the week before the Christmas issue that my Yahoo business account tried to prevent you all from getting your papers, but it was also the day I met Simon, who used to be a chef and had a bad cold.

  That’s what I learned about him while he was trying to figure out why I couldn’t read email attachments on the precise day when advertisers, photographers, story contributors and others who communicate with the paper were trying to send me their stuff.

  Simon, as he worked on my computer, mercifully did not ask me about Sarah Palin or Snowzilla the Illegal Anchorage Yard Ornament—the only things lower 48ers knew about Alaskans that week. Simon did volunteer that he was tired of hearing about the national economy and how bad it is. I didn’t ask him if the economy had anything to do with him not being a chef anymore. I think he was about to offer that up, but my computer problem was getting more mysterious and therefore more fascinating for him.

  What we arrived at, on that dark day in December, is that Yahoo engineers would have to fix the problem. Simon said my computer problem was strange enough and difficult enough that they might name it after me. And then he forwarded all my mail to another mailbox, and for about an hour and a half the only person who could send me an email was Simon.

  He proved this by sending me everything on his tech help computer except for proprietary secrets of the Yahoo engineers. If anyone wants to know how to open their garage door with their iPhone or wants a cheese-cakey looking photograph of a guy named Ray, just ask me.

  Simon may have sensed that the dangerous emotional state of transference was taking place between us as I helplessly turned over my passwords to him one by one. In sending “Ray,” perhaps Simon was trying to hold me at tech help arms length. He knew I was falling for him as I listened to his deep sympathetic mellifluous voice and his ready explanation of every dialog box on my screen.

  He did say, as he explained finally that he couldn’t fix my email problem, “well, we’ve been together for nearly two hours.”

  “I know,” I said. “I feel like I should ask you for some recipes.”

  “I have some good ones,” he said.

  We had to leave it there, in spite of the fact that he knows my date of birth and my high school mascot.

  But my email stayed broken all the way through the Christmas issue of the Copper River Record. I got really tired of throwing salt over my shoulder, doing the hoochie coochie, and standing on my head every time I needed to open an attachment.

  After Christmas I called Yahoo back.

  If you’ve ever called Yahoo, you’ll know they think it is very clever to yell “Yahoooooooooooooooooooooo!” in your ear like Tony Curtis blowing the lonesome Viking horn at a dead departing Kirk Douglas on his way out at sea in a burning dragon boat.

  I rubbed my ear.

  Next, in spite of the fact that Yahoo employs hundreds of people to not quite solve your computer problems, I got Simon.

  “Simon Johnson?” I asked.

  “How did you know my last name?” he asked.

  “My email box is full of messages from you,” I said. “You used to be a chef.” And because I cared about Simon, I said, “And your cold sounds better.”

  He remembered me then, and looked up my ticket number and apologized profusely when he saw that the Yahoo engineers had marked me “resolved” when I wasn’t solved at all. He promised me that the engineers would make my email work as it was supposed to again—immediately.


  And he made me promise him that if I ever called tech help again and he answered—that I would pick out some lottery numbers for him. It was kind of romantic.

  Well, I’m a happily married woman and he has Ray, so I wouldn’t want fate to throw us together like that and screw everything up.

  So if the engineers don’t fix my problem soon, I’m going to get a bigger ax.

  INSPIRATIONS

  GOODNIGHT GORDON WRIGHT

  Everything that is done in the world is done by hope. – Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Jim and I didn’t know Gordon Wright, retired conductor of the Fairbanks Symphony Orchestra and founder of the Arctic Chamber Orchestra who died last week in his cabin south of Anchorage. But we saw him in action once, and what he did is an important memory of ours.

  We were working for BLM near the village of Kobuk in the Brooks Range one summer in the late nineteen-seventies. Someone from University of Alaska Fairbanks got word to us that a group of musicians would be flying into the airstrip at Dahl Creek, a longer airstrip than the 1400 or so feet at Kobuk. The university wondered if we could help transport people and instruments down to Kobuk for an afternoon concert.

  Kobuk, an Inupiaq village of about 50 people at that time, featured a school for 25 kids, a store, and a small village hall. Television would not arrive until 1980. The postmaster, Guy Moyer, had come up to Alaska to mine gold in the 1930s only to be dropped off on a different lake than he’d intended. He had settled in the area anyway to eventually become a loved grandpa of the town.

  Kobuk elders remembered first contacts with whites and had been in front row seats for the dawn of aviation and mining in Alaska. There were people who knew dancing and stories from the mists of time, plus miners’ tunes from the turn of the century. Appalachian hymns rose in Inupiat tongue and voice every Sunday on the CB radio from downriver.

  The Kobuk country held startling contrasts. But there had never been a classical chamber orchestra in anyone’s memory.

  The weather was beautiful, and that was good, because the twenty or so members of the orchestra, complete with violins, violas, cellos, a gigantic bass fiddle, and great copper kettle timpani were all that would fit in the small plywood hall. Kobukians and the rest of us who came down to town—because the news of the concert was all over the marine radio channel—crowded to listen outside, around the one doorway and the several open windows.

  I’d like to say that I remember what they played, but I don’t. Maybe it included Haydn, because I heard Butch Thompson say on Prairie Home Companion last night that Gordon told him the audiences in the small Inupiaq villages loved the Haydn.

  What I remember was straining to hear classical melodies I’d never taken in to myself before, played by real people, on instruments I’d never seen with my own eyes. So it turned out I had come all the way from eastern Oregon to see and hear a chamber orchestra on the banks of the Kobuk River.

  After the performance of maybe an hour, the performers loaded themselves and their instruments in riverboats owned by the local people and headed downriver for Shungnak, ten twisting river miles away. After that, I heard they traveled by boat or plane to Ambler, to Kiana, and on down the river to Kotzebue.

  The last thing I remember of that day was a musician crouched in a johnboat, cradling his bass fiddle against his chest, its long neck extending way above his head. That neck was a prominent mast as the boats motored away from the gravelly bank.

  We’ve talked about it over the years, how incongruous it was to hear that music in that place, how it somehow joined the music that already lived there and the hunger for music that seems to live in all people. We are reminded of that day by the death of its author, Gordon Wright.

  May generous music travel the wide world forever.

  ME ’N THE CAT MAN

  I’ve never seen so many people at the Alaska State Fair. This is not an objective fact. But the hours I spent waiting for my scattered relatives, watching humanity in all its forms skip and waddle and saunter past followed by the late evening hours spent wedged between irate drivers in the RV Parking lot who were all trying to leave the fair at once, all convince me it must’ve been a prize-winning turnout.

  I don’t go to the fair to ride the twisting turning upside-down bullet anymore, or to hand over ten dollar bills to carnies. I don’t buy much in the shops, though I like to look at the wood and glass and fabric and metal objects real people have made in workshops around our state. I munch my way through the fair, topping off cream puffs with corn fritters, occasionally filling out free drawing cards that will later bring me annoying emails. Mostly, I like to watch the rivers of fair-goers flow by.

  Somewhere at the fair, cousins and in-laws were wandering like caribou. My nephew Doug and I took turns waiting for them, hoping they would sniff each other’s footprints and be mysteriously led to what seemed to me to be the hub of the fair: the big blue metal ball filled with screaming motorcyclists miraculously not crashing into each other.

  But our clan members avoided finding us. About mid-day, after what seemed hours on a green bench, I feared sunstroke and had to go get more ice cream. When I came back, there was a man with an amazing cat face sitting on the bench—a silvery blue face with black radiating stripes and whiskers drawn onto his eyebrows. He sported painted lips that incorporated his own neatly shorn facial hair. It was an eerily real fake cat face.

  I sat down next to him and admired him like the work of art he was until he got uncomfortable and said “hi” to me.

  I asked him how he felt.

  “Like a cake covered with icing,” he said. “It itches and I feel like a spectacle.”

  “Well it’s beautiful,” I said.

  “I haven’t seen it yet. I’m waiting for my daughters and their grandmother. I did this for my oldest daughter—she wanted us to have cat faces.”

  We talked about daughters then, mine and his. He was a single parent at a loss about expensive and disturbing fashions, peers, puberty, and attitudes. I’m a double parent at a loss about expensive and disturbing fashions, peers, puberty and attitudes.

  We talked about the various ways a teenager can express hostility in the word, “whatever.”

  We had a lot to talk about. I told him to celebrate the changes and fight all the necessary battles and make all the necessary mistakes—just be there and do it with love. I was trying to channel the Norman Vincent Peale of parenting.

  He was more honest. “A lot of the time, I just don’t know what to do,” he said.

  I looked at his painted whiskers and said, “Well I don’t know you, but it looks like you are doing pretty good.”

  His relatives arrived before mine did, and his daughters were delighted with his face—the very first cat face in their family.

  NEVER STUMPED

  Yesterday, Bob was over here with his Hydra-Mac—a little tractor on steroids. It can lift loads it shouldn’t be able to lift. That made it just right for what we needed to do—because we probably shouldn’t have been lifting a 19 foot long section of six bolted-together eight-inch spruce logs up far enough to set them on the top of a 14 foot high log wall all in one piece.

  You would have to know Bob to know that every time we’ve gotten ourselves into a project that is a wee bit over our heads, he’s been here to help us. Sometimes the job requires a cement mixer. Sometimes it requires a transit. Sometimes it requires a dozer. Sometimes it just takes a little more experienced builder’s brain than we have on site.

  You also need to know that Bob thinks that people who build things out of logs are insane. He has done it himself and it turned out beautifully, but each night during that project he tossed and turned, longing to resume use of the 16th inch marks on his tape measure.

  Every log is like an “Ent” from the Lord of the Rings—a tree thing with its own ancient and contrary personality—ready to split and turn and ruin everything you did yesterday. That Bob is willing to come within five miles of our log hangar to-be is a mark of sincere
friendship.

  Enter Jim and Mike.

  Jim, my husband and co-dreamer of log buildings, is handy in the woods and “hell for stout” when he builds anything. Jim will never cut two pieces of material at the same time to save something as trivial as minutes, because he is accustomed to logs and he knows if you cut two logs the same length, one of them is going to shrink or grow or twist while you are looking the other way.

  Our friend Mike has been with us since the beginning of the project. He can dig or cut anything with a machine. He looked at our hangar plan and converted it from a log stacking operation to a log-fitting jigsaw puzzle that we all expect will still be here in 300 years.

  With his very accurate Logosol mill, powered by chainsaw heads but in no other respect resembling a chainsaw mill, Mike has spent countless hours in two summers to tongue and groove the giant logs. He and Jim have used dowels and screws and a come-along to convince the stubborn twisted ones to behave, and Mike has never once complained that we dreamed up something difficult.

  About the “we”: although part of the dreaming, drawing, log-ordering “we,” and sharing an enthusiasm for building anything, my own part of this particular construction has mostly been the production of sandwiches. Oh, and I’m supposed to be working on the newspaper.

  But I had to see how that ton of logs was going to settle in above the future vehicle door. The dogs and I snuck out of the office to a good vantage point on the header-lifting operation. I started painting something with a 1.5 inch angled brush that should have been done with a roller. Spending two hours on a 15 minute project let me hear everything that Bob, Jim, and Mike said to each other.

  The dogs put 30 yards between themselves and the action and went to sleep in the sun.