Things were a little out of whack this year. For one thing, the most interesting thing that happened to us was snow. Not, I hasten to say, everyday snow. At the beginning of March, Kentucky was hit by a snowstorm that started on Wednesday night and poured down on the state through most of Thursday. By the time it finished it had dumped 17.1” on Lexington, and about the same on us here on the Virginia border. It totally blew away the old Lexington record of 10.3 inches set in 1902.
A problem for Lexington, of course, but not nearly the problem it was for us. Our dump started with freezing rain, which left a nice thick undercoating of ice beneath the snow. We live well up on the side of a mountain and have a corkscrew driveway that bears a remarkable resemblance to Bright Angel Trail down into the Grand Canyon, except just wide enough for a car instead of a mule. Not quite as long, but every bit as vertical. It’s so steep that Dean’s sister, when she visits, stops down on the level and calls us to come down and ferry her and car up, and his Aunt and Uncle flatly refused to visit.
A friend with a tractor tried to clear it for us, but even a tractor couldn’t grab a foothold on the ice under the snow, and failed ignominiously.
We also discovered to our horror that, while we had plenty of food, we were perilously short on beer and wine. After a few days, the road at the bottom of the hill was plowed but that did no good, alas, because while we might be able to struggle down to the road, we’d have no vehicle to cover the many miles to a package store. We sent out an SOS, and Dean’s brother responded with a couple of pack of beer, but flatly refused to essay the hill. So we grabbed walking sticks and post-holed perilously to the bottom of the hill, only to find that he had brought light beer. I am not a beer drinker, so I don’t understand these nuances, but Dean has standards. He also has manners, so he held his thoughts, paid his brother and thanked him, and we post-holed back up the driveway, a trek of probably a good thirty minutes in the plunge forward/slide back gait we were forced into, not to mention toting a 24-pack of the undrinkable and sucking in gasps of icy air with every upward step.
Later that day, we shared our chagrin with a flat-ground neighbor, not intending anything but a funny story. But the good man drove out and bought us real beer and essayed to bring it up to us. He was able to get about halfway up before his four-wheeler spun out. We spotted him slogging the remaining distance, and went out to meet and relieve him of the beer. Let me tell you, if anybody chooses neighbors for All-American distinction, we nominate Bill. Dean was mighty grateful.
After that, we settled in to wait out the snow. We had power and heat, so it was just time we needed to overcome. In the end, we were marooned just short of two weeks. A widespread bunch of friends quickly became aware of our plight, and we entertained each other by trading poems on Facebook about being snowbound with no potables.
By the time the vehicle could essay the driveway, I had run out of verse, read all my library books, made substantial inroads into my stockpile bought from Amazon and Edward R. Hamilton, Booksellers, and was mighty glad to enter a library again.
That wasn’t the only odd event. The other was that, for the first time in 35 years, we missed the second run of sockeye salmon in the Russian river, and it has left us feeling disoriented. Old habits are hard to break faith with. But this year we had to head down to Kentucky because our twelve-year effort to get justice in the courts for our Kentucky timber theft was allegedly going to culminate in a trial in the fall, and we needed to be in Kentucky for the run-up, so we left Alaska about mid-July, a week or two ahead of the second run’s usual arrival in the Russian River. (Most of you know that the Russian River is on the Kenai Peninsula southwest of Anchorage, near our house in the Chugach National Forest, but for those who don’t, it’s a great salmon river in a beautiful place.)
As it turns out, the trial was delayed for the oddest of reasons. Our Judge was under investigation for misfeasance and on hiatus from the bench. How long the delay will be we don’t know, because we don’t have a new date.
Because we knew we would miss the second run, we had to bear down during the first run (June) to get our winter’s supply of salmon. I think we landed enough to last the winter, but it may be nip and tuck. (Isn’t ” nip and tuck” great? Someday, I need to look up those old expressions.)
I got to thinking about working to catch fish, and about subsistence, which is part of most Alaskan’s lives in some way. Not that different from Appalachia in the old days, when nearly everything people ate or used was raised or made. It reminds me of the old mountain philosophy: Use it up; wear it out; make it do, or do without. Appalachians did a lot of “make do” in those days, and we all had our share of “do without.” Dean and I no longer have to depend on subsistence, having more money now than then, but it’s a tradition I hope is never entirely lost.
Of course, subsistence foods in Alaska lean heavily toward salmon, moose, caribou, and wild fowl while subsistence foods in Appalachia tilted heavily toward garden produce, but the principle was not much different. Dean and I still eat subsistence to a large extent. We catch salmon, friends and relatives give us venison, a friend recently gave a generous gift of Colorado elk that, with occasional chicken, provide pretty much all the meat we use. We appreciate that, because we don’t like ingesting all the antibiotics and hormones that go into commercial food.
Although we don’t raise a garden, we have Kentucky friends who are generous with their greens of all varieties, and I buy green beans to dry into shuckeys, when I can find green beans in a store with full beans in the pods. If I can’t find the right beans, I buy home-grown, already-dried shuckey beans (which my father always called leather britches) from Lee and Opal Sexton. Lee (known around here as Lee-Boy, as most Lees are) is nearing ninety, and single-handedly raises an acre of garden. Opal “puts up” the result of Lee’s effort, and they grow enough to sell to others as well, thank goodness.
Lee is a well-known folk/bluegrass banjo player who still tours regularly, but I think he puts a higher value on growing food than on all his musical fame. Early this year, he told us he had been invited to play at the Annual Family Life Festival in Hindman, Kentucky. When he went, he went with not only his banjo but also a truck full of produce. He’d agreed that he’d appear if he was allowed to go first, and after performing he sold produce. He told us proudly that he sold to people from California to Minnesota, and could have sold another truckload if he’d had one. He clearly was prouder of that than of any musical achievement.
That reminded me of the answer Loretta Lynn gave on a talk show one autumn at the apex of her career, when asked what she’d been doing. She said she had been in the kitchen canning most of the summer, and had put up hundreds of quarts. When the host expressed surprise, she said something along the lines of, “Anybody’s career could end tomorrow, but if you raise a garden and have a full cellar, you won‘t starve.” People like Lee and Opal and Loretta, with their feet firmly on the ground, are remnants of the old Appalachia, and it will be a sad day when the last of them is gone.
One more Lee vignette: A couple of years ago we ran into Lee at the local post office. He told us he was looking for a good settin’ hen, and asked if we knew where he could get one. We regretfully told him we couldn’t help, but he found one or more somewhere and we now occasionally buy eggs from Lee when we’re in Kentucky.
I’ve been trying my hand at painting (acrylics) this fall. I do that sporadically, and in the last month I’ve done two paintings. I save photographs that I think I’d like to paint from, and I have hundreds now, most of which I will never tackle. I take these periodic spells, and I try to advance my knowledge a little each time. I hope to get one more done before Christmas.
Dean has been spending a lot of time on video. We’ve started a video-documentary on caning chairs, and have the first part (finding the tree, felling it, and harvesting the bark) done. We hope to get to the next step soon. Meanwhile, he’s documented the performance of a local band for Facebook, Youtube, and cable, and it’s getting a lot of attention.
We are both well. The standard Appalachian answer to “How are you?” is “Middlin’,” but I can fairly say we are better than middlin’. We’ve had an amazingly mild fall (it’s in the sixties today) and are hoping it will last through the winter. We’re also hoping for good water levels in the Alaska rivers in 2016, and good salmon runs.
And we hope for a similar good new year for you, whatever your own definition might be.