Over time, and in the Christmas spirit, we've been posting past Christmas letters. This one is the 2011 letter.
Happy Holidays!
I’m not a great believer in exclamation points, but this seems like the right occasion.
We try to write about things that have happened to us each year, and this year it seems the answer is not much. We had the usual good summer fishing, but less company than usual. Dean’s sister Martha broke a string of 30 years of summer trips to Alaska. That’s a non-happening of some magnitude. Half of those years featured sleeping on a futon supported by an air mattress supported by our basement’s concrete floor. So far as we know, though, that’s unrelated to her failure to turn up. She says she sleeps on that futon better than anywhere else. Very cool, supremely quiet, peaceful.
She did have an adventure last summer that would have discouraged even the strong-hearted, which she is. She and our nephew were fishing some distance upriver from us well out of sight but near a group of three men. A brown bear/aka grizzly appeared below them coming upriver. This is worse than it sounds, because the only escape, short of scaling cliffs and bushwhacking through untrammeled wilderness without a compass or a GPS, was downriver through the bear.
We’ve been trapped in that situation before, and it doesn’t lead to anything good. One of the times we were caught, we were fishing on the Situk at Yakutat, a village on the Gulf of Alaska that is strictly fly-in and fly-out, and doesn’t – or didn’t then –have much in the way of population or tourists. We were about twelve miles east of town, maybe half a mile above the mouth of the river, and all by ourselves. Our car was parked where the road petered out at the mouth. An hour or so into fishing, a brown bear decided to become friends. He appeared upstream on the opposite side, coming down toward us. We very naturally retreated out of the river on our side. He disappeared. We waited maybe ten minutes, scanning for bear, decided he was long gone, and concluded that Dean could wade out and resume fishing (the deep hole full of salmon was on the bear side) while I stood watch. Dean waded about two-thirds of the way to the other side and cast, looking down his fly rod at his fly as it hit the pool. He also found he was looking along the rod right into the eyes of the grizzly, which had very silently insinuated himself into a deadfall right on the edge of the far bank. Which wasn’t very far. The Situk at that point was maybe thirty feet wide, so Dean was within ten feet of the bear. Bears are fast as lightning and good swimmers, so ten feet away was not a good location.
We retreated again with some celerity, but the bear held fast. We had a .41 magnum pistol, and we decided to shoot in the air to scare him off. We aimed maybe thirty or forty feet above his head (you could do that on the Situk and not worry where the bullet came down, because you certainly weren’t going to hit any human over there on the bear side). The .41 magnum makes a heck of a crack when fired and is a large caliber, big enough that it lopped the top out of a
sizable spruce on the other bank, but apparently not big enough. Instead of erupting out of the brush and hightailing it, the bear cocked his head with an interested look and sniffed a couple of time as if he rather liked the smell of gunsmoke. One of us asked the other what we should do next, and we decided the first thing to do was reload that bullet. While we were doing that, the bear got up and purposefully took himself downriver, where he proceeded to cross to our side and start up toward us.
With the bear athwart our only escape route, and possibly feeling revengeful for the bullet, what we should do next didn’t require debate. We certainly weren’t going to wait for him and serve lunch. We did the prudent thing – we retreated upriver and we kept retreating until we had put a mile or so between us and his last location. Then we huddled about what to do next. We knew there was a possible escape route upriver – another highway crossed the Situk at what was called Nine-Mile Bridge. But Yakutat is temperate rain forest, totally vegetated with devil’s club and similar evil if beautiful foliage, all growing higher than your head, deer moss hanging down into your face, and bear trails everywhere. We suspected night would come before we could bushwhack all those miles and reach the bridge, so we’d be spending the night in the open and, assuming we reached the bridge, there might not be traffic for days. So, eyes locked on our back trail in case the bear was really interested in us, we decided that we’d halt and hold for a few hours. Which we did. Then we started inching slowly and carefully down river toward our car, gun and bear spray at the ready, flinching at every intersecting bear trail, and jerking at every noise or wind-shivered leaf. Sort of a back-to-back progress as we held off imagined enemies.
Martha’s experience was similar but wetter. The bear had them blocked and was moving upriver on their side. The factor in their favor is that a grizzly has never been known to attack a group larger than four (they say). So the five of them would still have been okay, if the party of three had not taken it into their head to cross the river to get away from the bear. Pointing out that this was a bad idea did no good. That left Martha and Don by themselves and well short of the magic won’t-attack number. Their choice then became to stand their ground on a narrow, shaly path between a cliff and the river, or cross. There are places where you can cross the Russian river if you don’t mind wading across hard current that comes well up your thighs. But that was not one of them. I’ve gone out a little too far to fish a few times and been swept away by that force of current. And Martha is short. But she gamely tackled the river. When she got about halfway across, water over her hip waders, holding on to Don for dear life, the men ahead suddenly reversed course and came barreling back toward Martha and Don, shouting, “#%$@&&%#, the bear is crossing!!!!” And so it was. So Martha and Don had to turn and struggle back to the original side in 35 degree water, sloshing and freezing. You’ve heard the expression tight-jawed? That would describe her when she related the incident. If she’d had a gun, I swear she would have shot, not the bear, but the three men.
I don’t know if this incident had anything to do with her breaking her streak, and she swears it was just coincidence, but it does lead to speculation.
We are well. We have made several videos this year, including one on making molasses and one on a visit of a college group interested in sustainability during which we made soap, made hominy (both using lye), strung green beans on twine to make shuckey beans, caned a chair seat with hickory bark, shucked, shelled, and ground corn to make cornmeal, and used the corn shucks to make a shuck mattress. We have a couple of parts done of a video on hog killing, with at least one part to go, and are interviewing people for a proposed video on timber theft. Our other accomplishment this year was a web site on our doings called Cornett
Media, thanks to a lovely tech person called Julia, who set it up for us, and trained us to use it. She did such a good training job that we have since set up two more sites, one for the non-profit we’re allied with, Eco-Outpost, Inc, and one on timber theft. You can find them respectively at http://www.cornettmedia.com, at http://www.ecooutpost.org, and at http://timbertheft.weebly.com. The videos mentioned above are on one or another of those sites, along with many more.
For those of you who are just learning of them, or haven’t checked them in a while, take a look. And have a very merry Christmas and a great 2012.
Dean and Nina
Update: Martha didn't make it to Alaska in 2012 either, so our suspicions are growing.
Happy Holidays!
I’m not a great believer in exclamation points, but this seems like the right occasion.
We try to write about things that have happened to us each year, and this year it seems the answer is not much. We had the usual good summer fishing, but less company than usual. Dean’s sister Martha broke a string of 30 years of summer trips to Alaska. That’s a non-happening of some magnitude. Half of those years featured sleeping on a futon supported by an air mattress supported by our basement’s concrete floor. So far as we know, though, that’s unrelated to her failure to turn up. She says she sleeps on that futon better than anywhere else. Very cool, supremely quiet, peaceful.
She did have an adventure last summer that would have discouraged even the strong-hearted, which she is. She and our nephew were fishing some distance upriver from us well out of sight but near a group of three men. A brown bear/aka grizzly appeared below them coming upriver. This is worse than it sounds, because the only escape, short of scaling cliffs and bushwhacking through untrammeled wilderness without a compass or a GPS, was downriver through the bear.
We’ve been trapped in that situation before, and it doesn’t lead to anything good. One of the times we were caught, we were fishing on the Situk at Yakutat, a village on the Gulf of Alaska that is strictly fly-in and fly-out, and doesn’t – or didn’t then –have much in the way of population or tourists. We were about twelve miles east of town, maybe half a mile above the mouth of the river, and all by ourselves. Our car was parked where the road petered out at the mouth. An hour or so into fishing, a brown bear decided to become friends. He appeared upstream on the opposite side, coming down toward us. We very naturally retreated out of the river on our side. He disappeared. We waited maybe ten minutes, scanning for bear, decided he was long gone, and concluded that Dean could wade out and resume fishing (the deep hole full of salmon was on the bear side) while I stood watch. Dean waded about two-thirds of the way to the other side and cast, looking down his fly rod at his fly as it hit the pool. He also found he was looking along the rod right into the eyes of the grizzly, which had very silently insinuated himself into a deadfall right on the edge of the far bank. Which wasn’t very far. The Situk at that point was maybe thirty feet wide, so Dean was within ten feet of the bear. Bears are fast as lightning and good swimmers, so ten feet away was not a good location.
We retreated again with some celerity, but the bear held fast. We had a .41 magnum pistol, and we decided to shoot in the air to scare him off. We aimed maybe thirty or forty feet above his head (you could do that on the Situk and not worry where the bullet came down, because you certainly weren’t going to hit any human over there on the bear side). The .41 magnum makes a heck of a crack when fired and is a large caliber, big enough that it lopped the top out of a
sizable spruce on the other bank, but apparently not big enough. Instead of erupting out of the brush and hightailing it, the bear cocked his head with an interested look and sniffed a couple of time as if he rather liked the smell of gunsmoke. One of us asked the other what we should do next, and we decided the first thing to do was reload that bullet. While we were doing that, the bear got up and purposefully took himself downriver, where he proceeded to cross to our side and start up toward us.
With the bear athwart our only escape route, and possibly feeling revengeful for the bullet, what we should do next didn’t require debate. We certainly weren’t going to wait for him and serve lunch. We did the prudent thing – we retreated upriver and we kept retreating until we had put a mile or so between us and his last location. Then we huddled about what to do next. We knew there was a possible escape route upriver – another highway crossed the Situk at what was called Nine-Mile Bridge. But Yakutat is temperate rain forest, totally vegetated with devil’s club and similar evil if beautiful foliage, all growing higher than your head, deer moss hanging down into your face, and bear trails everywhere. We suspected night would come before we could bushwhack all those miles and reach the bridge, so we’d be spending the night in the open and, assuming we reached the bridge, there might not be traffic for days. So, eyes locked on our back trail in case the bear was really interested in us, we decided that we’d halt and hold for a few hours. Which we did. Then we started inching slowly and carefully down river toward our car, gun and bear spray at the ready, flinching at every intersecting bear trail, and jerking at every noise or wind-shivered leaf. Sort of a back-to-back progress as we held off imagined enemies.
Martha’s experience was similar but wetter. The bear had them blocked and was moving upriver on their side. The factor in their favor is that a grizzly has never been known to attack a group larger than four (they say). So the five of them would still have been okay, if the party of three had not taken it into their head to cross the river to get away from the bear. Pointing out that this was a bad idea did no good. That left Martha and Don by themselves and well short of the magic won’t-attack number. Their choice then became to stand their ground on a narrow, shaly path between a cliff and the river, or cross. There are places where you can cross the Russian river if you don’t mind wading across hard current that comes well up your thighs. But that was not one of them. I’ve gone out a little too far to fish a few times and been swept away by that force of current. And Martha is short. But she gamely tackled the river. When she got about halfway across, water over her hip waders, holding on to Don for dear life, the men ahead suddenly reversed course and came barreling back toward Martha and Don, shouting, “#%$@&&%#, the bear is crossing!!!!” And so it was. So Martha and Don had to turn and struggle back to the original side in 35 degree water, sloshing and freezing. You’ve heard the expression tight-jawed? That would describe her when she related the incident. If she’d had a gun, I swear she would have shot, not the bear, but the three men.
I don’t know if this incident had anything to do with her breaking her streak, and she swears it was just coincidence, but it does lead to speculation.
We are well. We have made several videos this year, including one on making molasses and one on a visit of a college group interested in sustainability during which we made soap, made hominy (both using lye), strung green beans on twine to make shuckey beans, caned a chair seat with hickory bark, shucked, shelled, and ground corn to make cornmeal, and used the corn shucks to make a shuck mattress. We have a couple of parts done of a video on hog killing, with at least one part to go, and are interviewing people for a proposed video on timber theft. Our other accomplishment this year was a web site on our doings called Cornett
Media, thanks to a lovely tech person called Julia, who set it up for us, and trained us to use it. She did such a good training job that we have since set up two more sites, one for the non-profit we’re allied with, Eco-Outpost, Inc, and one on timber theft. You can find them respectively at http://www.cornettmedia.com, at http://www.ecooutpost.org, and at http://timbertheft.weebly.com. The videos mentioned above are on one or another of those sites, along with many more.
For those of you who are just learning of them, or haven’t checked them in a while, take a look. And have a very merry Christmas and a great 2012.
Dean and Nina
Update: Martha didn't make it to Alaska in 2012 either, so our suspicions are growing.
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