At the end of each year, we usually summarize it for our family and friends. This is it for 2013.

We had a couple of nice things happen to us this year, and a couple of bad ones, but we’ll omit both categories in favor of weather, which loomed large, since we were present in Alaska for two weather records.

This year, we got back to Alaska in March with the intention of renovating our kitchen before fishing started. Said kitchen dates from the seventies and is a teeny bit inconvenient. This is the British understated way of saying the damn thing doesn’t work. If I was breaking eggs into a skillet at the cooktop, I had to walk the length of the long narrow space to toss the eggshell into the trash and to rinse my hands at the sink. (I guess the work-triangle concept had not penetrated Alaska by the seventies.) The oven was not self-cleaning and would not hold a full-size cookie sheet.  I also had cabinets around three corners, which meant majorly - isn’t that a descriptive word? - inaccessible storage at three corners. Plus other less than endearing characteristics.

Anyway, I had talked for years about this kitchen update, but only talk. This was going to be the year. Alas, it wasn’t. I won’t recount the obstacles we met, but they were many and chafing. So we ended our stay in Alaska with the kitchen the winner. Maybe next year.

What getting up there well before the end of March actually did do was remind us of how unreliable an Alaska spring can be. Usually by the end of March, breakup is over, the roads are clear, the snow and ice are mostly gone, and transportation  of the sort enjoyed in the Lower 48 is possible.  This year, breakup started, but underwent a change of mind.

Thanks apparently to the North Pacific Decadal Oscillation’s taking a notion to go into a cold phase, Alaska had a very delayed spring. All told, we had more than a half-dozen March thru May snowfalls, some substantial. Nothing like waking on a late April or May morning to fogging snow. In fact, Anchorage set a record this year for longest snow season. The first snow of this winter of 2012-2013 fell on about 9/27 last fall and the last one at the end of May this spring. When, before that last snow, the meteorologists alerted us that, if the predicted fall exceeded one-eighth inch, we would set a new record, most of us were thinking that if we had to get snow at the end of May, we at least wanted the record, and planned to cheer the snow on. We need not have worried. Parts of town got six inches.

Worse than the snow was the eight inches of packed ice that topped all the parking lots and sidewalks, and all except the main roads. Since we don’t winter in Alaska any more, we don't have studded or even winter tires. Most Alaskans keep theirs on until all the threat is gone (which is usually about 1 May, though not this year) so driving was very dicey for us, especially when the temperature rose into the thirties at midday and the top layer of the ice started melting on the roads. We had to stay off the roads when we could, and creep around very tentatively when we couldn’t. Even when we started off very carefully at traffic lights, the wheels sometimes spun. Then, somewhere in there, we got a streak of four snows in about a week, the first one six inches, and even the main roads were back to bad. It took more than two weeks to get the roads clear again, and another week to get the sidewalks clear. But there was still snow everywhere else, all the yards, roofs, etc

While we were cowering under unending winter, John Back, a Kentucky neighbor, rubbed salt in the wound by calling to tell us Eastern Kentucky was having a great April morel (aka dry-land fish) season. I've hunted morel mushrooms once, and I quickly discovered that there's a knack to it. Dean kind of got the hang of picking them out of the forest-floor debris, but I never developed that sight trick. In several hours of staring, I think I found just one.

After our one expedition, a friend advised us to soak the morels in salt water overnight, and I was glad I did because the next morning there was about a three-inch worm floating in the water. It must have been sheltering in one of the hollow stalks. I fixed the dozen morels three ways, fried like fish with cornmeal and flour, sauteed uncoated in olive oil and garlic, and sauteed plain in butter, and I think I liked the last one best.

Our morel hunt mirrored our one ginseng expedition with another Kentuckian. He would take us within a few feet of a plant and invite us to find it, and I would consistently fail. I’m about as good at finding dry-land fish as at finding ginseng, and wouldn't want to depend on either for a living.

I can’t leave the issue of the no-spring without giving you the Alaska definition of the seasons. According to Alaskans, there are two in Alaska:  winter, and Damn-Late-in-the-Fall. It sure seemed like that. But the weather made up for the infernal spring in June. We had long sunny days all month. In fact, we set another record. We virtually leapt past the old record for number of June days over seventy degrees, and a lot of us were complaining about the heat. For some reason, the seventies in Alaska feel more like eighties or maybe nineties feel in the lower 48 (sun closer? atmosphere thinner because of the ozone hole?) and Alaskans aren’t used to those extremes.

The late spring did do us some favors. We got some wonderful video of a pair of trumpeter swans that also arrived in Alaska too early. They landed on the ice at Eastchester Lagoon near here, and since they didn't have any open water to use for take-off, they had to hang around on the ice waiting for a lead to open and give them a long enough reach of water to flap and paddle their way into the air. That happened after a couple of weeks of cooling their feet on the ice, and they went winging northwest toward their breeding grounds, likely with frostbitten feet. We were hoping they'd establish summer residence there, as some very occasionally do, but no such luck.

Fishing was a mixed bag. The first run of salmon had decent numbers, but the water was a foot higher than normal and the current horrendous. To wade out far enough to get at the fish was taking your life in your hands, especially on a bottom as unstable as the Russian River’s. Dean went into the river four times, and once you’ve done that, you can’t get out on your own. You just can’t get up with that icy current pouring over you and pounding you down. Fortunately, there was always someone around to help. He was not close to drowning any time, but there were several close calls in other cases. In one case, a man’s chest waders filled with water and took him under, and it was a near thing. We’re used to falling in the river, but it’s usually not dangerous, at least to the extent we experienced this year. I had a hard time standing against the current when I was out no further than my calves, so I took the coward’s path and stayed practically on shore. Dean, however, will get out there nearly over his hip boots, with the inevitable result.

The bears made up for mixed fishing. We saw a lot on the river, and captured some very good footage, especially of a huge, blonde-colored brown bear (coastal grizzly) sow with a very tiny brown cub. He had a struggle following her around the river, but he was dauntless and plugged along.

Have a very good 2014.

Dean and Nina

Over the last hundred years, coal has created three major upheavals for Appalachians The first was when coal began to be exploited by outsiders. Its presence in Appalachia had been known for basically the whole of the 19th century, but exploited only locally. Many small-farm Appalachians, if they lived in coal country, had outcrops of coal on their land, and supplemented or replaced wood with coal for heating and cooking. If they needed coal, they went to their own coal bank, and dug out what they needed at the time. A few of them took advantage of the available coal to stoke local furnaces to smelt iron or for similar purposes. 

 It was not until aruond1900 that rich outsiders began to exploit coal. Industrial titans like the Rockefellers, Roosevelts, and Deloanos began to send representatives into Appalachia to buy thousands of acres of land and of mineral rights - the latter often at fifty cents an acre - and began to open coal mines on a large scale.

When these caol magnates established a coal mine in the Appalachians, theygenerally  built a town to go with it, including all the dwellings and businesses. The town would be established to a pattern, and everything in it, from the stores to the recreation facilities, and from the scrip that served as currency to the houses the miners occupied, belonged to the coal company.

If the town had a medical clinic, it belonged to the company. If it had a constable or a mayor, that person, if not actually appointed and paid by the company, served at the sufferance of the company, company-owned in a different way. An official who stepped out of line would find himself no longer constable or mayor. Until the union wars of the twenties and thirties wrested some independence for coal miners who essentially had been serfs, the companies often also controlled how the miners voted. If it was known that a miner had voted “wrong,” he was likely to lose his job.  That meant he also lost his house. The houses were there for coal miners; if you were no longer employed by the company, you could no longer live in the town.

The company-housing model that coal towns brought to Appalachia was a departure from traditional Appalachia in a deeply fundamental way. The small-farmer Appalachian family had always had its own house. My husband Dean’s family lived that traditional Appalachian life. His father was an accomplished farmer who carpentered on the side for cash income. His family, for generations back and as wide as the family tree spread, had always lived on their own land, and anyone who had land and trees had a house. If not, the family threw up a log cabin to live and raise a family in. Dean’s sister Martha once described to me her first exposure to the concept of renting a house: “I was flabbergasted. In my world, you had your house. It was just there. I could not grasp the concept that someone else owned the roof over your head.” To those of us brought up in coal camps, though, renting was the norm, and a house was tied to a job.

That house-sufferance applied to more than voting wrong. If a miner was injured and could no longer mine coal, he not only lost his health and his income, he also lost his shelter. A widow whose husband was killed in the mine could find herself, her children, and her household possessions deposited by the side of the road well before the ground had settled over her husband’s burial mound, or even before the grave flowers wilted. Companies usually owned all the land the town perched upon, and they brooked no competition with their rule. In our coal camp, the only non-coal-company structures I ever saw were the post office and the school, and I can’t swear to the school.

Coal camps worked under a different economic system as well. The economy in a coal camp was not the subsistence economy of traditional Appalachia, but it wasn’t a cash economy either. It was an economy  based on scrip. For those who don’t know about scrip, scrip is exonumia. That is, it’s coinage minted outside the legal tender of the United States, It was the lingua franca of financial transactions in our coal camp as in most of them. In the beginning, scrip’s purported purpose was to alleviate shortages of U.S. legal tender (coins and bills) occurring in coal camps because of the camps’ alleged remoteness. Coal companies were quick to see the monopoly value offered by controlling a town’s currency, though, so in actual use scrip gave the coal companies a virtual stranglehold on miners. Company stores were able to add huge mark-ups to the goods they sold miners, and the miners could pay those inflated prices or travel substantial distances to buy the goods they needed, and few miners then had cars.

            In addition to the impeditments that blocks the miners from leaving the coal camp to shop, another factor kept miners shopping with the company. If a miner was paid in scrip, no place besides company facilities was obliged to accept it. Some nearby towns might, but never at 100 cents on the dollar. Generally, a miner or his family traded scrip for cash or for goods bought outside the company store at seventy or eighty cents on the dollar, and the price might be as low as fifty cents.

Scrip began to lose its power in the post-war years. After the success of some of the union wars of the thirties, followed by the boom times of World War II, miners both gained more power to negotiate with coal companies and found themselves more flush with money. They could begin to afford cars, and that mobility to shop outside the company town began to affect the success of the scrip-and-company-store regime.

            Traditional Appalachian culture differs from mainstream American culture and even from historic Anglo-Saxon culture in significant ways. Language is one. Mobility has always been another.. Many traditional southern Appalachians have lived in the same small area--in the same county, for instance, or even on the same creek – for all their lives and the lives of their ancestors before them. In many areas of southern Appalachia, there are people who live on the same plot of land their ancestors took up two hundred years before. The old joke about Kentucky, “Two million people and sixteen last names,” has a basis in fact. Families came and stayed. In traditional Southern Appalachia, still today, any conversation between strangers is likely to start with, “Whose boy are you?” Placing people into a family is as natural as speech to an Appalachian. But that depended on the came-and-stayed factor. In coal country, you didn’t hear that. It made no sense to ask whose boy you were, because the response would have had no meaning. Everybody in a coal camp was from somewhere else.

            Coal camps also differed in the makeup of the population. Traditional Appalachian was almost solidly white Anglo-Saxon Protestant – English, Scottish, Irish. But coal camps attracted a lot of the Ellis Island immigrants coming into the country in the early years of coal, so there were Italians,  Hungarians, Slavs, many middle Europeans. In a coal camp, you might come on a road called Hunk Hollow, now full of  assimilated Americans, but originally named for the influx of job-seeking Hungarians, or perhaps other people from Mittel Europa lumped under that general name. Coal camps also attracted blacks, who, while they still were segregated from whites, worked in the same mines at the same jobs, and were part of the culture.

            Another cultural difference related to the land and to primogeniture. In spite of a strong Anglo-Saxon heritage, the principle of primogeniture never took hold in the mountains. There, the custom frequently was that the older children, as they reached adulthood, established new households, usually close by and often on land deeded by the parents. As my father described it, it was the youngest child whostayed at home, took care of the parents as they aged, and inherited the house and land when they died. that heritage and that expectation still survive today among some. Rcently, the wife of the elder of two brothers complained bitterly to me that the younger son had got the family homestead, which she felt should have gone to the older son, her husband. But those parents were following well -established custom.  but there is a third twist to this story. How land was passed on in families was another dividing line between traditional Appalachia and coal Appalachia. Attachment to the land was irrelevant in coal Appalachia because people living in coal camps had no land. And therefore primogeniture, whether in the traditional or upside-down version, was rendered irrelevant.

            Another difference between traditional and coal Appalachia was land use. Touring traditional Appalachian roads, you find that a high proportion of houses are built on steep hillsides. The main floor will often be level with the hillside in back, while the front of the house, facing the road, will be story or higher off the ground. Many graveyards lie on steep hills as well. There was a reason for that. Good arable land in the Appalachians – good bottomland in Appalachian parlance – had to go to the highest and most economic use, and that was for producing food. So the flatter land along the creeks often held the gardens and fields, and the houses sat above them on steep hillsides. In coal camps, which were designed from the beginning for coal extraction as opposed to farming, there was no reason not to take the less expensive and less complicated path and build the houses on the flat land along the river bottoms. We raised a garden when I was growing up, but we went up on the side of the mountain to do it, because the flat land and the best soil was covered with houses, including ours.

            Coal Appalachia was different, too, in population density and social structure. Coal camps were dense with cheek-by-jowl-houses, unlike the scattered small farms of traditional Appalachia. They were also full of children. One-room schools, like the one Dean started in, and later taught in, were still found in traditional Appalachia, but had never been a factor in coal camps. We went to a big brick edifice that needed three stories just to accommodate the first six grades. After that, we were bussed to another big brick school for the next three grades, and then a third one in a third town for the three grades of high school.

            But that population density was about to change. Around 1950, the coal mines began to mechanize and slash jobs with the brutality of a machete felling cane, casting tens of thousands of miners adrift. In 1970, the nation produced 17% more coal than it had produced in 1950, but with only one-third of the work force. Two hundred and seventy-five thousand mining jobs had disappeared. Considering that families then might commonly have four or more children, millions of people were affected.

Those changes hit Appalachia particularly hard because, except for resource extraction industries like coal mining, there were few industries in Southern Appalachia. Even when the nation as a whole was booming, Appalachia was a one-trick pony and that trick was coal extraction. When mining jobs disappeared, there were no others to seek, nor likely to be anytime soon. The difficult terrain and lack of decent transportation almost assured that.

By the time John Kennedy made a campaign stop in Welch, West Virginia while seeking the 1960Democratic nomination, businesses were struggling all over my county,  McDowell County, West Virginia. Kennedy later that summer said of the cataclysm hitting the coal fields and southern West Virginia, “McDowell County mines more coal than it ever has in its history, probably more coal than any county in the United States, and yet there are more people getting surplus food packages than any county in the United States. The reason is that machines are doing the jobs of men and we have not yet been able to find jobs for those men.” In 1961, the first food stamps ever issued went to a family in McDowell County.

Kennedy was right. In West Virginia, which had led the nation in coal production for decades, McDowell County had not only led West Virginia but had decade after decade produced more coal than any other county in the United States. In 1960, it still led, but for the people who lived there the world had changed in unimaginable ways. The county seat, Welch, which had 6600 people in 1950, lost a fifth in the ensuing decade, and another fifth in the next ten years, a trend which continued until, in 2000, the population was maybe a third of its heyday in the fifties.

War, where we shopped, fared worse. In 1950, nearly 4000 people lived in War. Between 1950 and 1960, it lost 25% of its population, and in the next ten years another third. Business activity fell even more, because much of that business had come from the coal camps, and they too were suffering. The drop was felt in a variety of ways. With its 1950 population of 4000, War had supported numerous churches, restaurants, pool halls, and stores, and even two movie theatres. By 1970, the customers for those businesses had transferred themselves to Detroit or Cincinnati or Baltimore, and War was dying. By 2010, at the end of sixty years, War’s population stood at roughly 20% of its high-water mark.

McDowell County’s overall population also kept on dropping. By 2011, a county which had fed and sheltered almost 100,000 people sixty years before, had lost population until it was almost down to its level in 1900, before coal became a factor. This drop-off -the-cliff change occurred at a time when the nation as a whole was growing four-fold, from seventy-five million to more than three-hundred million.

Comparing that coal-country out-migration to what is generally considered our greatest national displacement--the Dust Bowl of the 1930s—the numbers are stark. As McDowell County was the epicentre of coal mining, the federal government had defined Cimarron County, Oklahoma as the geographic center of the Dust Bowl. Both suffered a decline in population, but to a very different extent. Cimarron County dropped 32% between 1930 and 1940. That was seven percent more than the 1950-1960 drop in the population of McDowell County, West Virginia, but it falls short of telling the whole story. Another ten years on from 1940, the Cimarron County population had rebounded by 25%. McDowell County, in contrast, lost another 32% of its people in its second ten years. As Cimarron county continued to recover, McDowell County continued to bleed. Sixty years out from the onset of the dust bowl, Cimarron County population was a fairly robust 61% of its 1930 level, whereas, sixty years out from 1950, McDowell County’s numbers stood at 20% of its apex. The coal fields’ scale of loss, unheralded, almost unrecognized, occurred on a magnitude that makes a piker of the well-documented and often-studied Dust Bowl migration.

In McDowell County, my siblings and I, like almost every other young person, left after high school or college. All those big brick consolidated schools began to empty and close, as the towns and coal camps had. The scale of the outmigration was stupendous, and the impact on those left behind more stupendous still, both economically and socially. Like the chestnut blight, the coal companies had begun the destruction of traditional Appalachia when they bought the land and minerals, built the coal camps, and lured so many formerly independent Appalachians to mine “their” coal by the promise of a better life. Now they drove another upending of the Appalachian world and culture by taking away the jobs that, for miners, had replaced the land as their source of survival.

                Now, what you see is towns not dying but virtually dead. Welch, county seat of the richest county in West Virginia, coal's counterpart to Virginia City, Nevada and the Comstock silver lode, but longer lasting, now has street after street of empty brick-and-glass storefronts, studded here and there with the type of businesses that support the moribund or nearly moribund: funeral parlors, florists, drugstores, and medical supply stores.

I’m not sure where Appalachia is going from here. A lot of people believe coal will come back in Appalachia, but I would not put my money on that. The problem with coal-country Appalachia, at least, is not mechanization, or EPA rules, or the so-called Administration’s War on Coal. The problem is markets and supply. Coal is not a renewable resource. And coal is nearly mined out in much of Appalachia. What’s left is found in small seams in hard-to-get-to places. Extraction costs are very high. High-cost coal cannot compete with western coal. The CEO of Arch Minerals, the largest mining company in the US, says that regulations, while cumbersome, are not the problem. The problem is the market. Arch cannot find buyers who will pay as much as it costs to get the coal out. The CEO of Alpha Resources, another big coal company, has said the same. No change in political leadership is going to change that factor.

So Appalachia, especially coal-country Appalachia, is in flux again, as it was in the early nineteen hundreds and in the 1950s to 70s. The likelihood of replacing coal with something else that will support as many jobs as coal did is unlikely.  My coal camp probably had a population of 3,000, and there were coal camps like that all over McDowell County. It’s hard to believe that population density will ever again be seen in the Appalachians. So my bet would be a fifteen or twenty year period of extreme difficulty, and then perhaps a slow growth again. But that’s something else, like coal coming back, that I wouldn’t risk my money on.

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.

A while back, I started running past Chirstmas letters because they often highlight the sharp differences between life in Alaska and life in Kentucky. The last one featured Kentucky, so this one returns (mostly) to Alaska.

"We were blessed with a lot of wildlife around our house this summer –  parka squirrels, Steller’s jays, ptarmigan, spruce grouse, moose, bears, and no doubt others we can’t remember.  They were a diverse group, but they all had one thing in common – they all resented us.  They come here in early spring, settle in before we arrive, and never adjust to our being here.  The fact that we own the property doesn’t weigh with them in the least.  Any time we leave the house, two Steller’s jays hop along behind us screeching all the way, and a parka squirrel climbs to the top of the carport and curses us until it is exhausted.

The bears and moose are mostly indifferent so long as we stay out of their way.  On 28 May, two baby calves were born in our backyard and we were able to watch them through their first few days as they learned to get up and, eventually, to walk in a straight line.  Once up, they had a particularly difficult time getting back down.  They would lurch around in a circle a couple of times and then, giving up any hope of getting down in an orderly fashion, just collapse, hitting the ground so hard they bounced.  They became agile after a few days and wandered away following their mother, but they visited a couple of times
afterward.

Another moose cow with a single calf came several days after her calf was born and just sort of took up there.  She spent several days alternatively sleeping in the front and back yards.  The two moose mothers had very different personalities.  The younger one with the two calves was very wary when we came out and would either watch us carefully or retreat, but the older one with the single calf didn’t put up with that at all.  If we stuck our head out the door, she’d make a blowing/snorting noise the way a horse sometimes does, and we’d retreat back inside.  One Sunday we were pinned in our house all morning; it was noon before we could venture out to pick up our Sunday paper. In both families, the calves always studied us with great interest and would watch us over their shoulder as they were being led away.

Although we never saw it, we had a big grizzly living in our neighborhood and visiting the houses.  One night, our neighbor Catherine woke to a noise and found it peering in her bedroom window.  The noise was apparently from a garbage raid, because she later discovered the bear had been in her cans.  After it left her place, it went next door to visit Ken and Katie’s garbage, and from there to a third house where it made a similar garbage raid and tore into a greenhouse.  That was apparently the end of its forays for that night, but Paula, two cabins down, found bear prints in her yard one morning, and Mike Gould, a little further down, found his garbage can opened and flattened (or vice-versa).  To me,  the most surprising thing about all this was not that the bear was raiding
garbage – garbage is their favorite – but that so many neighbors had stored their garbage outside.  Alaskans, even those in the big cities, generally know better than to do that.  We keep our garbage in the basement, and try to make the trek to the transfer station before it becomes so smelly it drives us out of the house.  We never put out bird feeders, either, because they are bear magnets.

We drove last week to Girdwood, a town about 60 miles from the cabin and about 40 from Anchorage.  Although it’s very close to Anchorage, Girdwood’s climate is drastically different.  While Anchorage gets maybe 60 inches of snow in a winter, Girdwood gets maybe 600 inches.  As a result of the amount of moisture it gets, it hosts a world-class ski resort.  Even in Alaska, where you can often ski into June, we were too late in the year for skiing (and don’t ski, anyway).  Our purpose in going was to hike the Winner Creek trail, which winds through a lovely rain forest of Sitka spruce, ferns, and Devil’s Club.  Sitka spruce trees grow mostly in the Southeastern Panhandle of Alaska and barely penetrate the Alaska mainland.  We were hiking through the very northernmost edge of their range that day.  Besides the ferns and Devil’s club, there were thousands of wild blueberry bushes, offering a berry picker an orgy of picking once they
ripened.  The trail reminded us of walking in the redwood forests of northern California.  There are no under-story trees, just the ground cover  of ferns, blueberries and Devil’s Club, and these tall straight trunks rising from that low ground cover.  The trunks are branchless for a large part of the tree’s height, giving that cathedral look and deep, sun-speckled shade of  northern California's forests.  The trail leads to the Winner Creek gorge, a spectacular and beautiful narrow gorge with high rock walls that compress Winner Creek down to as narrow as five feet in places as it thunders over the boulders in the gorge.  We stopped at the beginning of the gorge, although some other hikers tried to entice us a mile further by describing a hand tram that you can use to pull yourself across the top of the gorge and back.  As a special inducement, they promised we could stop the hand tram above the middle of the gorge and take pictures of the river way below.  I didn’t tell them what I was thinking, which was “Wild horses couldn’t….”, and “When pigs....”  We just wished them good luck and waved them
on.

We had a really good summer – much cooler than the last 4-5 years and with a lot more rain, which we like a lot.  Lots of times when we came back from fishing, we'd turn the heat on and it would be really cozy and pleasant.  We ran into several people from Kentucky this year, one from Pikeville, one from Lexington, and a couple from Richmond, one of whom grew up in Letcher County on Pert Creek and went to Whitesburg High School.  In every case, they had good fishing and lucked into seeing several animals,  including bears.

With all the animals, we accumulated some good video. Some of it is on this web site, or at the web site  http://www.ecooutpost.org. Any that isn't, we'll be glad to share with anyone  who is interested."

Update:
No neighbors were attacked by bears, nor have we been so lucky as to have  resident moose again, much less calves born in our yard. On the plus side, two years after this letter was written we made friends with our Stellar's jay by  satisfying his insatiable appetite for peanuts, and now he shows up the minute  we open the cabin and stridently demands his peanuts. He eats more than we do,  so we are thinking about filling coolers with peanuts to take up with us. That  way, we'll have a paying crop of peanuts on the way up, and of salmon on the way down, so we won't have to deadhead either way.

Originally  posted 12/06/2011

As I said earlier, a life which is split between Alaska and Kentucky often involves sharp differences in experiences. Those sometimes show up in our annual Christmas letters, which don’t usually focus on what we’ve done (won the Nobel prize, walked on the moon, are the parents of not one, but three little geniuses, etc), but on what happens to us. With Christmas approaching, I’ve been rereading past letters, and thought posting one of those a week would be a nice lead-up to the holidays. The past two I posted were about Christmas in Alaska, so I thought it might make a change to tell you about Christmas in Kentucky, particularly Old Christmas, a tradition still alive in the area. That letter follows:

"Christmas is rushing down on us, and we seem to be in contention for the “Least-Prepared” Award this year.  We’re both fine so we can’t excuse ourselves by blaming health problems.  We just haven’t gotten to it.   I’ve bought a present
for exactly one person so far, and have 8 days to remedy that.  By necessity, this year Dean and I may switch our celebration to Old Christmas and exchange our gifts on January 6th.  

 Old Christmas is still a remembered tradition here in Eastern Kentucky.  I don’t know many other places where that is so, but here traditions are slow to die.  When Dean was growing up, they received presents on Old Christmas as well as December 25th – not as many, but otherwise just like Christmas.  Furthermore,
Christmas and Old Christmas each had their own traditions.  

Modern Christmas in this area was not so much a religious holiday as a festivity: it was was more closely associated with alcohol than with religion.  In fact, Christmas was a real boon for moonshiners, because businesses bought moonshine  and passed it out to employees.   On Christmas Day, the men in the
house drank moonshine all day long, and expected every visitor (or at least every male visitor) to partake.  Then and now, everybody shot off guns to mark the occasion.  Dean says that along Mill Branch, where his grandparents lived, gun shots echoed all day long on Christmas.  

One  of the big Christmas traditions was to make carbide cannons, which made
wonderful and very loud fireworks.  Dean remembers walking past one house that had shot off so many carbide cannons that the valley was filled with smoke.  You don’t see carbide cannons anymore, at least to my knowledge, but I suspect the fading of that custom has more to do with the advance in underground mining technology than with anything else.  In the old days, miners had carbide lights in their hardhats, so carbide was readily available.  Today it is not.

There were other traditions.  One was to write notes to Santa Claus and send them up the chimney.  The scientific explanation may be that the draft carried them up, but the traditional lore was that it was fairies.  

Christmas dinner was different, too.  Few kept geese, and most were not that crazy about turkey, so Christmas dinner was always chicken or ham.  Everybody had chicken and pigs.  In fact, in Appalachia, pork was the staple meat.  People might have a milk cow, but very few raised cattle for meat.  Steak to Appalachians was cubed steak, floured and fried like chicken.  I was an adult before I ate what most people think of as steak.

People around this area of Kentucky ate black-eyed peas on New Years, something we never did where I grew up in West Virginia.  I think of black-eyed peas as a southern tradition.  But of course this county in Eastern Kentucky was a Confederate-leaning county (Kentucky was a very divided place in the Civil War), whereas West Virginia was determinedly Union, which may explain that difference.  Civil War memories and attitudes linger as long as other traditions
here.

On Old Christmas, Dean’s grandmother always baked a big flat cookie that she produced only on that day and that verybody shared.  And there is of course a legend that animals are gifted with speech on Old Christmas.  There’s a song that goes, “On Christmas Day, The Animals Pray, On Christmas Day, So They Say.”  That "Christmas" is Old Christmas, of course.  I’ve heard that saying all my life, but never been in a barn or manger at midnight to test it for myself.  Dean says he once tried when he was little but fell asleep before Old Christmas arrived.  On Old Christmas eve, instead of hanging stockings as you did for Christmas, you put your shoes beside your bed the night before and woke up on Old Christmas to find  them holding candy or other goodies.

Another Christmas tradition was  “Christmas Gifting.” If you encountered another person, you tried to yell “Christmas  Gift” before they did. If you struck first, they had to give you something –  nothing very big, but something. Although I grew up in Southern Appalachia only about 120 miles away from Dean’s home, I had never heard of that. I learned fast, though, out of necessity. I particularly learned to answer the phone on Christmas with “Christmas Gift” instead of “Hello,” because if I didn’t I would hear “Christmas Gift” barreling down the phone line at me from Dean’s brother or one of his sisters on the heels of my hello. In the days before caller ID, it caused me  some embarrassment to find that I’d greeted a total stranger with “Christmas Gift,” but that was better than being caught myself, especially because I felt so triumphant at having got in first. Dean’s sister Martha is particularly good at “Christmas Gifting” people. Over the years she’s caught me so many times and I am so far in arrears that there’s no hope of ever catching up.

We don’t observe Old Christmas any more, unless it happens by default this year, but, whatever your customs, tradition, and religion, we want to wish you wonderful holidays.  We also fervently wish that our servicemen and servicewoman on deployment have as good a Christmas as one can away from home, and one and all get back from their deployment safely.

Happy Holidays,
Dean and Nina"

Update: I thought it might be  helpful to explain Old Christmas to those to whom it is an enigma. In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII issued a decree switching the Christian world from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calender to bring the calendar more in line with the
actual length of the year. Some countries adopted the new calendar immediately, but not all. Since the decree was issued after the Protestant Reformation of roughly sixty years before, and around 50 years after Henry VIII had had his little contretemps with the Pope and the Catholic Church, Great Britain was one of the laggards. It didn't adopt the Gregorian calendar until 1752, almost 200 years after Gregory's edict.  Since most Appalachians came to America (then still part of Britain) well before that 1752 change, they had always used the Julian calendar. By the time the change was made from the Julian to the Gregorian way of counting, the calendar difference was twelve days. So, in 1752, twelve days "disappeared" during the adjustment. That disappearance made Christmas leap twelve days forward from its accustomed place, and shift two days of the week. Not everyone accepted that, so they simply added twelve days to the new December 25th, and celebrated Christmas on the day it would have been celebrated before the "disappearance" of those twelve days, and that day, of course, was January 6th. 

An interesting sidelight of this calendar change was that Alaska was still part of Russia when Great Britain and English America made the change. Russia, like many eastern orthodox churches, was one of the laggards and had not adopted the Gregorian calendar before the sale of Alaska,  so Alaska didn't make that adjustment until Seward bought it from Russia.  That was in 1867, at which point Alaska "lost" even more days than the twelve lost in 1752. When I
mull over the fact that for 300 years, countries that were cheek and jowl with each other observed calendars that were roughly two weeks apart, I wonder how those who went to, or did business with, other countries, coped with that problem. It must have led to a lot of arithmetic and a lot of headaches.

I am a beginning writer, at least insofar as today's publishing business is concerned. 

Although I am a published author, the book  that earned me that distinction was published in the 1970s. I wrote it in  longhand and then typed it on a rented typewriter. The writing world, technical  and business, has been flipped over and shaken out since then, so I am starting  again at square one, or ground zero, or… (insert your own trite phrase here).  No, wait – I’m starting earlier than square one, because I have skills to  unlearn as well as skills to learn, and I am finding the former a lot harder  than the latter. 

Before a beginning writer like me can  master plot and characterization, it helps to master the mechanics – the tools  and rules.  A CNN video director, who was offering valuable tips to video amateurs, started with advice on how to coil up or toss out a camera cable. My own seven equivalent basic tips for the prose writer, as I have painfully learned them, are  these:

 1.      At the end of a sentence, the period is followed in the modern world by one space, not
two. I’m sure you know that but I didn’t. I’m equally sure I looked at the woman who shared that with me as if she were a little askew.  I read voraciously, and I had never noticed, in any book I read, that one space  had disappeared for every one sentence that appeared. When I took a close look at the book right there in my hand, though, I saw that it was true. I don’t know when this change took place, but obviously after the seventies, since it came to my attention only recently. I also don’t know why it took place, or where those spaces went, but out there somewhere is an author who will write a wonderful book unraveling the Case of the Kidnapped Spaces.  
 
2.     Learning something and applying it are two different things.  I don’t know when I will master this  new one-space rule, because I am finding that, as I reach the end of a sentence,
 muscle memory trumps brain memory nearly every time. I am tired of exclaiming “bad” as I slap my hand, and I’m tired of the bruises too, but I still have a ways to go.

 3.      That’s why (unless you still write with a quill pen on quarto sheets, or the pencil-on-lined-pad equivalent) you need more computer skills than it takes to send an email or write a letter. One of them is to become familiar with the “find” command in your chosen word processing application. If, like me, you are still inserting two spaces every time your fingers take over from your brain, you can call up “find”, enter two spaces in the “find” box, and (you guessed it) find all your offending double spaces.

 4.     Somewhere along the way, the possessive case was kidnapped along with one of the speaces that used to belong after a period. At least, the kidnapping took place with gerunds. Once, if you grabbed a verb which ended in “ing” and used it as a noun,  the “ing” verb then was known as a gerund and someone had to own that gerund; a gerund always boasted a  possessor. That is, if you offered that, when you wrote your mother, it assuaged your conscience, and you used the gerundial form of the verb, you once would have said, “My [possessive case] writing [noun form of“ing” verb, therefore gerund] to my mother assuages my conscience.” These days, even some of the best writers seem to say, “Me [object] writing my mother assuages my conscience.” Or perhaps, instead of “John’s leaving put me in a bind,” one of the following: “John leaving put me in a bind,” or “Him leaving put me in a bind.” I know this kidnapping took place some time back because I’ve been missing victims for a while and I’m missing more of them all the time.

5.     “Pretty” should be used as a descriptor only when followed by “Woman.” If you review your manuscript and find that you are saying “pretty tired” or “pretty frustrated” or “pretty desperate” every few pages, as I sadly found I was when I reviewed the first draft of my memoir Faultlines and Fractures, try to control yourself. But don’t take this a warning specifically against “pretty.” Your sin may lie in overdoing another word, maybe “maybe.” The lesson is to strive not to overdo any word or expression, especially when, as with me, there are better substitutes out there. (Almost anything is better than “pretty” as I was using it.) That “find” function comes in fairly (notice I restrained myself  from saying“pretty”) handy here as
well.

 6.     Exercise some self-control and organization on changes. Every time I looked at my MS, either in its official form or when I included a piece of it with a query, for instance, I saw something I wanted to change and I changed it on the spot.The result was that good changes not only were often lost, but I ended with a jillion versions with only tiny differences, and no
idea of which version was real. If a change is good enough to make in an email,  or a submittal, or a backup, bring up the “real” MS version side by side with the one you want to change, and change them both. Otherwise your computer and your mind will sue you for divorce and the stated cause will be cohabitation with a horde of co-respondents.

 7.     Most of those six things I’ve learned lead to the seventh and final lesson: Unless you are an undiscovered genius, it is absolutely and irrevocably true that you need to revise your first draft, and you need to do that literally line by line.  It may not move you a fraction further
toward being invited by an agent or publisher to send your manuscript, but it might keep that agent or publisher from tossing said manuscript off the bus it arrived on.

As I said last week, a life which is split between Alaska and Kentucky often involves sharp differences in experiences. Those sometimes show up in our annual Christmas letters, which don’t usually focus on what we’ve done (won the Nobel prize, walked on the moon, are the parents of not one, but three little geniuses, etc), but on what happens to us. With Christmas approaching, I’ve been rereading past letters, and thought posting one of those a week would be a nice lead-up to the holidays. This letter follows in Christmas sequence the one posted last week:  

"This winter has been much more satisfactory than last year’s in that we’ve had
less cold and more snow. Four and a half feet as of 1 December, and smaller
amounts since then. The snow falls a lot like the rain does in summer- slowly and steadily, never with much intensity, and mostly at night. Like Camelot’s rain, it tends to start in the evening and stop in the morning. (Of course, evening  here in the winter is 3 p.m.) We’re looking forward to a lot more snow since we have a long way to go on our winter’s allocation.

Not so on winter excitement, however. Usually, not a lot happens here in the winter, so we think our excitement allocation was expended early  when, last week, five comely young ladies marched through town clad only in Santa Claus hats, booties, and a shared banner. They were from People For the Ethical Treatment of Animals, and they were chanting that they would rather go naked than wear fur. Since it was eight degrees outside, their march was as abbreviated as their  clothing, but it was greatly appreciated and approved by both the anti- and pro-fur factions and by some who were indifferent to the cause but 
appreciated the method. There’s been some talk among the pro-fur folks about a similar parade with local trappers doing the marching, although one columnist fears that our trappers are so ugly the police might shoot them on sight. And so hairy they wouldn’t meet the “naked” standard.

 It’s beautiful here now. The spruce trees are all covered with snow, and the Christmas lighting is like nothing we’ve ever seen before. Our mayor’s main interest, perhaps his only interest, is Christmas lighting, and we support him in this. Anchorage in the winter needs all the light it can get. Those other things,
like school budgets and city salaries, are largely boring and don’t affect us anyway.

 This is the time of year when people get a little peculiar and start fighting over utility rates, school boundaries, the cost of telephone calls, sin taxes, whatever. This contentiousness increases geometrically through to spring break-up, by which time it has escalated into a city-wide free-for-all. On the theory of “When in Rome…” we have joined right in, and spend most of our time firing off letters and faxes. We decided today that we need to keep a scorecard because, with so many things going on, we’re afraid we’ve come down firmly on both sides of some issues.

 Elections are also very intense and interesting. Most of the losers have conceded by now, but some vow they never will. There was a case last year of two people filling one seat for several weeks. This year, the Democratic Party‘s Senate candidate* had only one plank in her platform: her husband had failed the Alaska bar exam twenty-one times, and that wasn’t fair. She was the victor in a
primary-election field of seven so strange that the film of their debate has become a cult video classis.

Merry Christmas,
Dean and Nina

 *She got our vote. When she was a member of the local school board, she regularly defended her stands to the point of fisticuffs, and she has the advantage of having a voice that will cut glass. We thought she would be truly representative of her constituency."

Update:
1. Her opponent in the Senate  race was Senator-for-life Ted Stevens,who of course won, but who defied his long-time nickname and tenure by losing his office in 2008 in the midst of a graft scandal, and his life not long after in a plane crash. She is still around.            
2. Reading about the Christmas lighting makes me wish I had a photograph of some of it to post here. One building, a midrise of five or six stories in downtown Anchorage, offers the most stunning display. Strings of small white lights descend from the roof a couple of stories, so close side-to-side and top-to-bottom that they almost touch. It has the effect of a lighted
waterfall - a not quite solid blanket of light that is staggered at the bottom, like the edge of a dentate leaf, and spans the width of the building. So serene, stunning, and beautiful, and so lacking in gaudy, that it puts every other display I''ve ever seen to shame, including the "exploding" Christmas trees in Rio.

A life which is split between Alaska and Kentucky often involves sharp differences in experiences. Those sometimes show up in our annual Christmas letters, which don’t usually focus on what we’ve done (won the Nobel prize, walked on the moon, are the parents of not one, but three little geniuses, etc),  but on what happens to us. With Christmas approaching, I’ve been rereading past letters, and thought posting one of those a week would be a nice lead-up to the holidays. This  one was written  in the nineteen-nineties, and gives a real feel for a Christmas in Anchorage,  Alaska, at least that year.

 “It’s been very cold here – ten to twenty below. The Christmas lighting is
spectacular, but we still don’t have any snow. Vapor from the creeks and the extreme cold have coated the trees and shrubs with a heavy layer of white frost, though, which has given our surroundings a very winter-wonderland effect. There’s not much activity; everything is very quiet. We can hear the  crunch, crunch of footsteps as people walk by on several inches of sidewalk  frost seven stories below. The whole thing is very  Robert-Serviceish.

In spite of the cold, the weather has been lovely. We’ve seen Mount McKinley
almost every day on the northern horizon.  There are still eagles and ducks flying around the city, and the ice in Cook  Inlet is a never-ending show as it shifts with wind and tides. The light is  another source of fascination. The sun came up on the very tops of the mountains  at 10:30 a.m. today, and got down to the houses at about 10:45. Every dawn and  sunset there’s a rosy glow around the sky about 20 degrees above the horizon.  The Chugach, Talkeetna and Alaska mountain ranges are visible along with Mountain McKinley, but the lights of the city dominate now that the days are so short. The view from our windows is beautiful. We’re under six hours of daylight now, and dropping fast. The sun never gets far above the southern horizon in its abbreviated journey, and at
midday autos cast a shadow three  times their length.

It’s been a long time since we spent a winter in Alaska, and we’d forgotten about the wonderful atmospheric effects here. Night before last, the moon not only rose full and clear above the Chugach mountains, but was preceded by a paler image that stayed just above and to its right. We’ve seen reflections  of mountain ranges on the opposite horizon, and incredible rainbows. Winter is  also the time to see the fata morgana. All in all, it’s something not to be  missed.”

The letter sounds idyllic, and in many ways it was, but trouble has a way of intruding, and it showed in the new year. Because of the lack of snow, the  ground had no insulating cover, and the frost kept driving deeper and deeper. Eventually it drove past ten feet, the depth at which city water lines are buried, and pipes started to burst all over. Since the ground was frozen, the water, which had to go somewhere, would travel along just under  the frost line and would pop up in unexpected places, like a suburban basement. Tracking these burst pipes was a challenge for the city's utilities department, but excavating down to the break was even more
challenging. Driving around town, you’d see a steam thawer at work somewhere and know it was being used to thaw the ground for  excavating down to the (one hoped) break that might be there. It was a miserable  time for those affected; a basement full of water with
temperatures below zero  will depress your spirits, to say the least. So, as life often falls out, a few of us - notably the city utilities department people who had to work out in the extreme cold -  paid for the Christmas  the rest of us enjoyed.