Alaska | Hawk Wakawaka Wine Reviews

And Now for Something Completely Different: Crazy Alaska: The Start of the Iditarod

Mar 2, ’13 1:48 PM

I got back from Sydney and went right into wine events with friends for a few days. Then I realized I was tired and decided it was appropriate to take the week off from posting. I’ll get back to a more regular schedule this coming week with write-ups from Victoria, Australia, Santa Barbara, California, and the world of Orange wine cycling through together. Since we’re in an interlude anyway, here’s a random tidbit.

The Start of the Iditarod

image courtesy of The Anchorage Daily News: the mushers and the course

In just a few moments… by the time I finish writing this post, Iditarod 2013 will have started.

Iditarod is a sled dog race crossing over 1000 miles of Alaska, traversing some of the biggest mountain ranges in the state, with temperature ranges going from well below zero F to well above freezing. Teams usually start with 12 to 16 dogs, led by a single husky and the musher, all moving a sled packed with several hundred lbs of supplies.

Mushers ride on the sled for portions of the race but during the final crunch when teams are pushing against each other to get or stay in the lead, racers will run behind the sled for hours to keep the dogs’ speed up. On downhill slides the musher must muscle the sled around corners to keep the team on trail. And in stuck spots the sled has to be pushed from behind as well. There are two long lay overs required–one of 24 hours, another at 8. Otherwise, mushers simply must check-in at certain points, make sure their dogs are healthy, and then check-out again. Many run for days on end. Incredibly, the race finishes now at just 10 days. All together it’s a seemingly impossible feat.

I grew up watching the Iditarod with dog mushing as a sort of normal option for people, even if only a few chose it. My dad’s close cousin used to race when I was little. Then my dad’s fishing partner spent a year training with the cousin and ran his dog team that winter, completing the full 1000+ mile course. That year I helped my mom sew a wealth of little booties to protect the dog team’s feet from ice and snow. I took up putting the booties on our dog too when I brought him out for a run. He always chewed the fabric off again.

In junior high, I volunteered at the Iditarod call station where people could phone in, the days before the internet or GPS tracking, to find out when and where a particular musher had last checked in along the trail, or who was in the lead.

By the time I went to graduate school in Montreal, life in French Canada was so foreign (tho loved) to me that following life in Alaska became a deep comfort. I’d grown up commercial fishing for salmon in Bristol Bay, which fascinated people, but when they asked me to tell them what fishing was like few people believed my answers. They’d tell me what I’d done wasn’t possible. (Strangely, my life in Montreal included a lot of hearing that my family’s daily reality wasn’t real.) The truth was too that much of the time getting through graduate school with a five year old also felt impossible. In the midst of that, somehow the Iditarod Sled Dog race became a symbol for me of how righteous people can actually be, of how much is possible simply by our deciding to get it done. It was a reminder too that none of us have to prove our accomplishments. Instead, we can just focus on doing good work, while we also celebrate what we love and what inspires us.

By the time I left Montreal fellow grad students that had entered the program believing dog racing was wrong were rushing into class asking me who was in the lead. The stories of mushers that had survived cancer then gone on to win; or the first woman to race; or the people that helped get the race started were inspiring to us all.

Still today, the idea that these people right this very minute are about to start the first steps of an impossible race… it still makes me emotional. There is such a concentration of intention and attention that goes into those early steps of an almost insurmountable task.

Here’s to all the mushers of Iditarod 2013. Run hard. God be with you and keep you and your dogs safe. I’ll be cheering for you.

***

Here are some great portraits of every musher all cleaned up before the race (you get a glimpse of how fancy Alaskans are actually able to get, though there are mushers here from all over the world): http://www.alaskadispatch.com/slideshow/iditarod-2013-musher-portraits

For regular race updates, including GPS tracking of mushers on the trail, and video interviews of these serious characters: http://iditarod.com/

The best news coverage of the race happens here: http://www.adn.com/iditarod/

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Alaska Holiday 5: Photos of Juneau

Jan 1, ’13 5:36 PM

The southeast portion of Alaska rises as a host of islands from the Gulf. In the midst of these rests the state capitol, Juneau, a town that booms in the summer with tourism, and in the winter with politics. The settlement wraps about the base of mountains diving into the surrounding bays and channels. It crosses too over Gastineau Channel onto the neighboring island of Douglas. My sister Melanie and her family live on the Juneau side.

In the course of our few days it has rained, but even so we have watched whales breaching, porpoises swimming in massive pods, both sealions and seals, and a few eagles too–there is an eagle nest in my sister’s front yard. Here are some photos, sea life not included.

The city of Juneau from Douglas Island

Looking across Auke Bay from the North side of Juneau Island

Looking across Auke Bay from the North end of Douglas Island, towards St Terese Chapel on the island of Juneau

Looking up Mendenhall Valley and Glacier (on Juneau Island) from Douglas Island

the backside of Eagle Crest

Happy New Year, everyone!

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Alaska Holiday 4: Family Photos

Dec 30, ’12 2:56 PM

Most of my family lives in Alaska. My daughter Rachel and I are the only two that live ‘outside,’ as Alaskans call the rest of the United States. My sister Melanie though resides now in Juneau, in Southeast Alaska, with her family. With Alaska being a fifth of the size of the continental U.S., or, the same size as the province of Quebec (where Jr and I also lived for a time), travel from Anchorage to Juneau is significant. Most of the state is inaccessible by car. The point is, having all of us together–Mom and Dad, plus all three of their girls and their girls’ families, isn’t necessarily common. As a result, my mom makes sure we get family photos each time it happens, though she likes the photos taken as family sets. Here are ours from this year.

My dad is 71, and my mom 68. This year they will have been married 50 years. Over Christmas dinner my dad told us about how they spent their first Christmas dating apart and realized they missed each other. My parents had met at University in the center of the state, Fairbanks, but returned to their different family towns on the Western coast for the holidays. Fifty years ago remote Alaska didn’t easily celebrate phone technology. Most homes didn’t have one and villages might share one phone for all the residents. After the New Year they, as he put it, proposed to each other. My parents have been together since. It’s remarkable to think how much they’ve lived in those fifty years together. To talk to each other once during that first holiday apart my mom had to walk across the tundra to the one phone in her small town. Now they’ve raised a family that travels the world, returning regularly to all be together in the far North. Remarkable.

from left: Dad, Melanie’s girl Mari, Rachel (aka. Jr.), Paula’s girl Melissa, Melanie’s son Oliver, Mom, Paula’s girl Emily

from left: Melanie, Me, Dad, Mom, Paula

Paula is the oldest of three girls. Her family: Melissa, now a student at NYU, Emily, age 8, Paula, husband Kevin

Melanie is the middle of three girls. Her family: husband Tim, Oliver is 5, Mari is 11, Melanie

Rachel Marie and I. I am the youngest.

Happy New Year, everyone! Rachel and I have flown from Anchorage to Juneau now to spend the New Year with Melanie’s family on this mountainous island that hosts the state capitol. It’s all mountains and water here. There is a lot of rain today but I’ll try to get photos while we’re here. Like most of the state, it’s a region of vast and dramatic, gorgeous landscape.

Lots of love to all of you. I’m spending the day today reflecting on what I’m grateful for from this last year. There is so much.

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Alaska Holiday 3: Drive up the Inlet, A look at the Mountains

Dec 29, ’12 2:35 AM

I developed a yen for long drives from living so remotely here in Alaska, I believe. My best friend in high school lived in Girdwood, a town 30 miles South of Anchorage. The area was so tiny the high schoolers bussed in everyday to attend the same school I went to for 9-12 grade. It’s how she and I met. My senior year, when I had my own truck (real girls drive trucks growing up) I’d drive her home after running or ski practice and we’d hang out.

The year after I graduated, unfortunately, turned out hard as two different friends died in horrible ways–one from hypothermia after missing for 6 weeks, the other killed by the cops after a psychotic break. In the first case, I was away when told the news. In the second, I was at someone’s home for dinner and found out the tragedy by watching my friend get shot on the evening news. (Not my best friend, another friend.) It was unbearable. The long drive out of town towards Girdwood, with such massive mountains–so much bigger than me, so much older than me–turned into my respite when I needed the space to deal with grief. I’d set off in silence heading South and drive along the Turnagain Arm till my feelings had adjusted enough to turn around and head back home. Sometimes it was a long long drive before I hit that point.

Now, decades later, there is still a comfort for me in the shape of these mountains. They still look the same. I recognize the peaks, the saddle between two mountaintops, the slopes along the roadway. And the water, exactly how it looks when it is rushing in versus moving out. Whenever possible I make a point of driving out the Turnagain Arm at least once on a visit back to Anchorage.

These photos might show you why. Taken from multiple points on the drive towards Girdwood.

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Alaska Holiday 2: Family Photos, Visiting my Uncle and Auntee

Dec 28, ’12 3:02 PM

My father’s family is Inupiat from the Norton Sound area of Alaska on the Western Coast, just below where the nose of the state, the Seward Peninsula, stretches out towards Siberia. My Uncle and Auntee come down from Unalakleet in the winters now to spend the cold months with their granddaughter outside Wasilla. We were able to drive out this past week to visit, and left with beluga muktuk, and hard-smoke salmon. What a treat!

I’m the youngest of three girls. My father is the youngest of three boys. My birthday is the same as my cousins, but I was born the year after he died in an accident. As a result, my Uncle and Auntee have always called me “Baby girl” in honor of the day I share with their late son.

Here are photos of our family. My Auntee is Athabascan from Interior Alaska. She is about to turn 82!

two brothers–my dad is on the left

Auntee Mary and I

Auntee Mary and Jr

Jr and Uncle Leonard

Uncle Leonard and I

my Dad and Uncle Leonard

from left: Jr and I, Mom and Dad (in the back), Auntee Mary, Uncle Leonard, niece Mari, and sister Melanie

Happy Holidays!

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Alaska Holidays 1: Walking the Frozen Inlet

Dec 27, ’12 10:09 PM

My parents’ winter-house rests along the Turnagain Arm of Cook Inlet in Anchorage, Alaska. The water way hosts the second largest tidal range in the world at 38.9 feet, with tides rushing to cross the distance at 15 miles per hour. The water speeds in so quickly it creates a wall of water several feet high speeding up the Arm to bring in the tide. These walls of water are called “bore tides.” Anchorage, Alaska carries a record bore tide fifteen feet high.

My sister Melanie and I awoke this morning, bundled up for the frozen air and walked the grasslands along the Arm in front of my parents’ house as the sun came up slowly. Living this far north the sunrise lasts for an extended period of time in winter.The Turnagain Arm splits us from the mountains in these photos, with the tide carrying ice flow tens of miles as the water flows in and out twice daily. (The rough ground in the distance of these images is broken ice flow several feet tall resting on the mudflats at low tide.)

Here are photos. Melanie snapped the picture that includes me, the rest are mine.

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Reflections on a Tasting with Abe Schoener: Dancing through Family, Nietzsche, and Tragedy

Jul 14, ’12 7:28 PM

Abe Schoener and I had a conversation about tragedy.

My senior year of high school, my uncle Jay died of pneumonia. It was September. I had a cross country running race and we had to dress up for such days. I was up earlier than usual to put on an outfit I was uncomfortable wearing when my mom knocked on the door. She said my uncle was in the hospital. His friends had rushed him to the emergency room, then knocked on her window in the middle of the night. As a result, she was with him when he died. It took a while, but weeks later she told me the receptionist had brought her directly back to my uncle’s curtained room in the E.R. He couldn’t speak with his lungs too full of fluid but when she entered the room he turned towards her and cried. Within a few minutes he entered cardiac arrest, and in twenty minutes he had died.

In his book, Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche builds on his ideas already explored in his earlier text, The Birth of Tragedy. There Nietzsche considers the painful revelry he sees as peculiar to the phenomenon. In Nietzsche’s view, the pain of tragedy reveals to us our own limits. It is in losing someone we feel attachment to we come to recognize the finite nature of our power and our lives. We cannot save them. In the same moment, we are forced too to see we cannot save ourselves. We will die. For other philosophers, the reality of our mortality brings with it a burdensome pessimism. Schoepenhauer treated the negative as defining human life. Earlier in the history of philosophy, Aristotle took tragedy in art to be a kind of therapeutic for our countenance. In experiencing second hand feelings of grief, fear, and terror by watching the tragic hero (like, Oedipus or Agamemnon, as in the case of Ancient Greek tragedy), we are cleansed of some tumult associated with such feelings, and thus find ourselves more stable, and stronger after. For Nietzsche, such a view is naive, perhaps even damaging. Instead, the all consuming pain of loss, and fear of our own mortality found in tragedy reveals to us a strange duality. It is in facing the stirred up feelings experienced in the death of another that we discover reason cannot provide all answers. Some things are simply unexplainable. The sensuous pain of loss dominates us and we must face an inexplicable edge that defines the limits of human existence. At the point of death we have no knowledge. What is interesting in all of this, is that, for Nietzsche, it is precisely when we allow ourselves to go into these feelings that we come to recognize our own brilliance. Tragedy, for Nietzsche, carries in it a two-fold experience. We are thrust into a horrible pain, and find through it a defiant pleasure. Tragedy forces us to recognize the limits of our own powers, and yet in entering that feeling we come to see our own power of persistence. We will die. Surely. Yet, here we live our human lives, demanding they be more than our own mortality simply by persisting. This two-fold experience is the source of Dionysian revelry, for Nietzsche. It is only in our facing the realities of decay, and decomposition that are the death cycle, that we see then too how life is a perpetual process of defiant transformation.

The family I was born into was four generations strong into my early 20′s. My great grandparents raised us through their simple constancy. We were lucky enough too to have grandparents, my parents, my sisters and I. My senior year in high school, when my uncle died, began a five year period of dismantling what my family had been. He died, unexpectedly, followed by my grandmother, my great grandparents, my other uncle, and finally my grandfather–more than half those deaths sudden. Two generations gone from us, and half of a third also lost. In that same time period, my father’s brother, other more distant extended family, and two of my own friends all also died. Those five years marked what my mother calls a stripping to the bone. Any pretense, or room for drama was lost. In the midst of so much grief there is room for little else. In the same time period, my oldest sister was diagnosed with what was supposed to be a lethal brain tumor, given eighteen months to live. By god’s grace she is still alive, so beautiful. It’s been eighteen years. In the same time period my oldest niece, Melissa, was also born, my great grandparents, then, witness to the wonder of five generations–a family they put into bloom. One of the gifts of simply persisting.

Abe Schoener and I had a conversation about tragedy. It started over a barrel of botrytis infected petite sirah. The year had been suddenly wet, in the end, and the clusters were covered in mildew when harvest time came. It was a situation many faced by throwing out fruit, but the berries revealed there was still juice in their meat. So, Schoener and his team foot stomped them. The vats after were slicked by a film of off-white growth on top–the mildew pushed off the skin. The wine now carries the smoothly tannic balance possible with a petite sirah, alongside concentrated fruit and spice notes associated with a late harvest wine, both without sweetness. It was a wine I’d heard Schoener was working on and I couldn’t wait to taste it. Then, there we were meeting in person for the first time (both of us careful in selecting our outfits for the occasion hoping to impress the other), tasting from barrel a wine that was strange in its brilliance. It’s been two weeks since and from a set of around twenty wines, the petite sirah is the one I crave. It drinks like its been touched by the edge of spoilage and come back to tell its story. Like its structure is more than the damage it could have endured. The acidity knows what its capable of being, so it just goes ahead turning in the barrel. The fruit dances through stages of vibrant and concentrated, dusty and fresh somehow all there together. The wine is not sweet like sometimes associated with late harvest grapes, but it is deepened, darker, and more raisined than it would be otherwise.

Schoener’s wines are seen as strange for the American palate. Even if his wine making techniques have their analogues abroad–with the oxidative elements purposefully done in Jura, or traditional Rioja, as examples–still, Schoener’s wines work against what’s more common for the mainstream–fresh fruit, or fruit jam presentation–of a still young U.S. wine industry. I ask him to talk to me about his wine making choices, so he explains. He wants his wines to be a pleasure to drink, he says, but he also wants them to make you think. He’s unclear how to accomplish this purposefully, yet, sometimes by intention alone the motivation succeeds. He wants his wines to go ahead and get right to the edge of what it is to be wine–a way to prove they are no longer fruit–then, to find their way back from it. What he’s learned from wine making, he says, is that if you start with a healthy vineyard, and then give the wine its own time in the barrel, it will self regulate. It will have moments when you think it is undrinkable, and, from the perspective of a more traditional wine making style, when you think it may be flawed. But if you let it persist, on the other side you’ll find a wine ready to bottle that is still marked by that edge, yet full of pleasure. I ask him about that idea of the edge again. That edge, he tells me, that’s the analogue to tragedy–where the wines have come right up to the border of something, and shown they are more than it. In this way, he wants his wines to cause pleasure, to be fun to drink, and at the same time, he wants them to make you think, to make you think of tragedy.

***

Thank you to Burt Coffin, Paul Sutton, and Aaron Pinnix.

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Last day in Alaska

Jul 13, ’12 6:21 PM

The drift fisherman were busy on the water through my time in Bristol Bay. So, no visits, and no pictures with them. Fishing works that way.

My uncle Smile and I hadn’t seen in other in at least eight years so on my last morning he docked the boat, raced to the airport and visited for five minutes before I had to board the plane. He brought with him a bag of Native style smoke fish, right from the smoke house. It takes about a month to make, and is so rich I fall asleep from just a few pieces. The bag I carried it in still smells of it.

Driving through California now trying to adjust to so much plant life after ten days in Arctic desert. Tonight I arrive in Sonoma for ten days in the extended area meeting with people in wine. Next Friday I also have a special media event to attend–hee hee. Can’t wait.

Love you, Smiley.

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Turning Home 9: The Vehicles of Bristol Bay, for Cathy

Jul 8, ’12 11:39 PM

Cathy asked me to do a series on the crazy vehicles of Bristol Bay.

Getting any cars, trucks, or work equipment to the area depends on the machinery being brought across the ocean by enormous barge. As a result, people put a lot of effort into keeping cars and trucks running for extended periods. The unique work of the area also demands a big range of equipment so that between the older cars, and the enormous cranes, you end up encountering a huge range of vehicles.

For Cathy, here’s a selection. They give an interesting picture of the place.

Some of these cars start with a push button rather than a standard key ignition. Many are held together in places by rope, wires, or clamps.

the truck I learned to drive on. A 1976 F-250 converted into flatbed.

cork toothed stationwagon, sometimes also wears moose antlers

the fishing crew calls this the chicken wagon

the local fire truck, sourced from the old Air Force base

they honestly still drive this thing

this volvo is attached to a massive trailer for towing boats

this stationwagon has the back door torn off and the backseat plexiglassed in so that it sits like a car but can be loaded in back like a truck.

this is the only vehicle in this series not still actively running and driven

these dump trucks are used to pick up salmon from the set net sites

Melissa, Cathy, and I had a great time looking for vehicles together one day. Melanie and I the day before. Thanks!

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Turning Home 8: Family Photos

Jul 7, ’12 5:54 PM

Life Long Friends

Cathy, Melanie, and I have been lucky enough to grow up together, and grow up together fishing too. Commercial fishing is such a peculiar way of life, there is a kind of relief in being close to others that have shared in it while also experiencing life else where. Cathy went to high school in Anchorage, and started fishing with our family around her sophomore year. We all grew up cross country running and ski racing together too.

little man, Oliver, took these two pics of Cathy, Melanie, and I

Family Photos

We haven’t had all the grandkids with each of the three sisters together out in Naknek ever–two of the grandkids are younger than the time since my last visit out here. So, we made a point of getting family photos. Hopefully some with my mom and dad later too.

The Grandkids