Rod

In Seward for a few days. Happy wife is attending a conference. And I’m not! So out for a ride with Otis. But first, a trip into town for an espresso and breakfast sandwich, where I was once visited by a Raven. Those of you who know me well, know of my affection for Ravens. And few places in the world are host to Ravens as large as those in Alaska. Corvus corax is big of brain. This guy sure was fond of the few bits of my breakfast sandwich I shared with him. Photogenic too. Look at the talons on that bugger!

Larger plz.

Back at the beach house I changed clothes and set out on Otis, headed for Exit glacier, pushed along by a nice tailwind, one I knew I’d be fighting on the return. But what a day! About halfway down the dead end road I got my first glimpse of all that remains of the aptly named Exit glacier.

Larger plz.

As you get closer to the park entrance it feels like a graveyard march through time. Small signs mark the retreat of the glacier starting in 1815. A few hundred feet further, 1899, then 1912, then 1950, etc.. In a hundred years or so there won’t be enough left to cool a summer drink. I’m pleased I was here to see this old guy.

Had a short conversation at the park service information center with a nice fella visiting from Mississippi. He was looking over Otis pretty carefully, said it looked like a nice ride. I assured him he is, then added, “On a day like today I could get lost in my head and ride all the way to America.” He laughed and asked, and what is this? I asked him to pardon my Alaskan provincialism.

He told me he doesn’t ride too much anymore. He appeared to be in his late sixties, maybe seventy. Said when he was 52 years old he was riding in a fast pace line when all of a sudden a dog appeared among the bikes, and he went down hard. Took extensive surgery and weeks in recovery to put him back together again. Made worse by the fact that his doctors discovered he had osteoporosis, something he’d been unaware of. Not two weeks out of rehab and he was back on the trainer again. Typical biker. I wished him and his wife well and told them to enjoy Alaska. They boarded the park shuttle and down the road they went.

I followed shortly after, happy for my ability to ride here, on a day like this.

Larger plz.

Back at the beach house. 32 miles. Nice.

Webcams at Brooks Camp, Katmai National Park & Reserve, Alaska.

A so far unpublished letter I sent to our daily rag:

UPDATE: Until today that is, here.

Hi. Say an average human pedaling an average bicycle together weigh two hundred pounds. And say our average speed on a roadway is somewhere between ten and twenty mph. We are no match for two tons of glass and steel moving at 40-60 mph. The other thing is, when you’re bicycling, it can be very difficult to hear and understand what people are saying, even when they’re right behind you. Much less someone in a truck with their window down speeding by at 55 mph. So please save your breath, as we cannot understand what I presume are the invectives some of you shout at us, that we get off the $%#@%^ road. Please familiarize yourself with the relevant laws in Anchorage governing bicycles on the roadway (AMC 9.38.020(a)), where I will remind you we are legally permitted to ride our bikes, even when — yes even when — there is an adjacent path. It’s a very clearly worded law. We thank you in advance for sharing the road, and seeing bicyclists.

Like the first time, this is the second time in one year I’ve wanted to throttle Bill Maher.

Happy Wife welcomes the arrival of summer with a Sangria (or two). The first day over seventy in what has so far been a record setting cool July. While the rest of America swelters. Lending credence to my hypothesis that hot summer air is a zero sum game, it can’t be everywhere at once, there’s only so much to go around, and this year so far it’s all been in America. Until Tuesday.

Wednesday I arrived at the bank of the Kenai River at 8:30 am and waited for my nettin’ buddies, Mike & Greg, to arrive with the boat. Looking out on the day I was reminded as I so often am why I live here. Mt Redoubt looms on the horizon. She blew her lid the year I moved to Alaska, 1989. Covered my driveway and filled my gutters with ash.

I want to see a larger version of this picture.

Mike selected the inflatable boat (Achilles) for this trip. The strategy was to have Greg and I net from either side of the boat while Mike kept us positioned or moving slowly with the motor, depending on the direction and strength of the tide. Tide swings in this part of the world fluctuate from 14-22 feet. It can be tricky, especially in the company of hundreds of other boats filled with eager netters. I’ve never seen anything like it this year.

Before we even got underway we discovered the bow of the Achilles was flaccid. Hole or bad valve? A Viagra joke was uttered. Either way, unfortunately the pump had been left behind, so Greg and I stayed with the boat riverside and chatted while Mike went to fetch the pump. About an hour later we were underway with a firm bow. Only to watch it go flaccid again within fifteen minutes. Oh well, other than annoyance of having to repeat over and over again to other boaters — “Yes, we’re aware it’s flaccid” — it was no big deal, being it is unnecessary for flotation.

Expectations were high when the tide finally turned, and water started pushing back into the river. Typically, this is when the salmon make their run into fresh water. We’d only landed one Sockeye before the tide turned, but a really nice one, a male, probably 12 lbs or better. The Kenai River is known for big Sockeye. On the day we came away with about a dozen fish, well short of what we expected (>25). Nobody else appeared to be doing much better. But what a fantastic day on the water it was.

From the killing fields into the coolers they went. The three of us cleaned and filleted ’em riverside.

Later, today, at home, I vacuum sealed my take and introduced them to our freezer. Save one fillet, which I will grill tonight. Life is good.

Sockeye are hammering into the Kenai River, like NOW.

>12K by sonar yesterday. I’ll be on the river tomorrow, dip netting.

Some nice photographs taken at the Tour de France.

As a Libertarian I am sometimes criticized, or envied — most often the former — for having a political philosophy that allows me to criticize the Left and the Right. I concede it does confer a certain flexibility at cocktail parties, where party goers often segregate into cliques along political ideology. I’m welcomed in all of them, especially when the dialog turns to carping about the policies of the Other Side. Carping comes easy to libertarians, mostly because government policies continue to provide us such a fertile substrate for our complaints.

Anyhoo, this morning I’d like to add my voice to the complaint concerning the oft-heard shibboleth from the Right, namely, “Obama is a socialist.”

As the director of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest reminds us, you think Obama is a socialist? You ain’t seen real socialism dude, like, for instance, twentieth century Czechoslovakia.

It’s like people who point to real bad poverty in the Ozarks, and you want to ask these people if they’ve ever been to, say, the slums of Guatemala City. Or the hills outside Port-au-Prince. I admit no familiarity with the former, though a friend of mine has multiple times gone to lend his assistance rebuilding the latter, and confirms the deprivation there.

Back to the POTUS being a socialist, consider this from another (nominally libertarian) voice, Fred Reed:

Next, why do the cognitively challenged say that Obama is a socialist? The man is an arch-conservative. (I’m not sure what arches have to do with it, but never mind.) He bailed out Wall Street, the beating heart of predatory capitalism, and then carefully didn’t prosecute those who masterminded the sub-prime scan. Socialists hate Wall Street. Obama breast-feeds it. And he sends the military to bomb every country he has heard of, which is very conservative. He is ideally qualified to be president of Guatemala.

Seen while walking this morning with Lucy at Kincaid Park. A Devil’s Club bloom emerges.

And the reason its species name is O. Horridus

Many of our mountain bike trails here are lined with O. Horridus, an incentive to avoid falling if ever there was one.

Wait a minute, wasn’t it during the Clinton era that people — mainly Clinton supporters — claimed that the many accusations of marital infidelity Clinton was defending himself against, even if true (many turned out to be true), would be irrelevant to his capacity to be a good president? They said that was a “private matter” between him, Hillary and his family. So why is the Left now demanding that Mitt Romney fully disclose his private finances? How he chooses to manage his “private” portfolio should have little predictive value in how well he’ll perform as POTUS, right? Not that I’m a big Romney fan, just saying.

Actually, I might argue that cheating on your wife multiple times should raise more concern about your character (lack of it actually), and how it might carry over to your professional judgement, than multiple savings accounts in a Swiss bank.