Invasive Weed Counter-Insurgency and Other Insanities

Two weekends ago Andrea and the boys and I trooped downtown to assist with a local endeavor to help stem the ever burgeoning crop of bird vetch that is encroaching our public spaces here in town. The vetch, an invasive species introduced locally in an effort to provide a hardy feed stock for ruminants, used to only be on the other side of Arctic Avenue but has spread, as it is wont, to choke out the derelict train tracks where, otherwise, native fireweed would bloom. In an ironic turn, livestock don't even like the stuff. If the information presented to us by the organizers of the weed-pull is accurate, something like 2400 seeds can be produced by a single plant. Biology's fecundity is a hell of a thing.

The event was sponsored by Conoco Phillips, Alaska's Oil and Gas Company, and they had graciously provided reams and reams of industrial grade plastic bags in which to house the vetch once uprooted. A platoon of well meaning citizens, myself and family included, descended upon the weeds, bags in hand, and began to stuff them. Once completed, we stacked the bags with our catch to await hauling to the landfill for disposal. Something like 100s of bags were transported to the dump, taken in shifts, in the back of the chief organizer's older model pick up truck (Toyota?). We were only out with the weeds two hours, but we alone accounted for 33 bags of the quarry. Then came the raffle.

I've seen somewhere with G and K that the amount of water to produce a single, reusable cotton bag borders on 700 gallons and that the minimum uses for said bag reaches into the 5 digits before it becomes more sustainable than its plastic counterpart. The boys asked me about this and I attempted to explain the logistical chain of acquiring one of these fabric bags and how, it's likely, someone arrived at this figure. The raffle, such as it was for the few who attended the invasive weed removal, was chock full of t-shirts, gratis, and other items like gift certificates and free tours of farms and state fair tickets and sundry other items to incentive-ize the endeavor. I was grounding after a substantially altered weed pulling experience wherein the boys and I had talked about the absurdity of counterinsurgency operations and the inevitability of the vetch's resurgence despite our efforts. I don't know if they made the connection I wanted them to see, but such is parenting. 

Recently, our governor, who was elected on the backs of greedy fools who clamored for a 3K plus PFD (Bring up the idea of universal basic income with any of his voters and they'll be aghast at the concept.), endorsed a budget that eliminated funding for the Arts Council here in Alaska, making us the only state in the union without such a body. Hell, even Mississippi is doing better than us in that department. I'm not too worried, though, as the creative impulse is a thing that can never be squelched, regardless of how hard The Man and his cronies may want it to be. Someone is always going to be around who is willing and able to paint cave walls. 

After the weed pulling, we went to a strawberry festival at Pyrah's farm. Admission was 5 bucks a head and we labored about the farm grounds on which the festival was held under the overlook of the looming Talkeetna mountains. It was truly a grand time, one wherein I harvested kohlrabi and kale, collards and radishes, while the others of my party amused themselves with the diversions provided - forced air inflated plastic, pedaled carts, chickens, a calf. When I rejoined them, A and I took Uly to a vinyl sided swimming pool filled with feed corn so that he could play in the grains. He shoveled and dumped, shoveled and dumped, and the mystery of agriculture shook me, as it always does. I mean, people are dropping spaceships on fucking asteroids because of corn. 

I find myself increasingly unable to reconcile the world and its implications.

The Weeknd, on his track "Privilege", documents his recovery process after a failed love in that he'll "Drink the pain away" and be "back to his old ways" and that he's got "two red pills to take the blues away". Who knows if any of this makes sense?

The Inexorable Tourist Menace Is Upon Us

Summer in Alaska, like many places, sees the arrival of vast swathes of tourists engaged, as they are elsewhere, in a great orgy of entitlement, selfishness, and general ineptitude. When I used to give an "importance of the tourism industry to AK's economy" presentation in the classroom, I instructed the students that, per the AKDOC, for the summer of 2014, something north of like, 2 million mostly white and older people visited the state and dumped an approximate 4 billion dollars into the state's economy. While we are instructed to love our neighbor and give aid to the sojourner, my God, do I hate them, wandering around in North Face windbreakers and REI meshy hats with slack jaws, clutching their information guides and ruining the local establishments by dint of their presence alone. Here, where I write from my remote office at the Moosehead and in front of which I snapped a picture yesterday of this Albertan monstrosity, I would lay money that during my time here, a bevy of four of these visitors will shuffle in, inquire if there is food and finding there is none, not even have the common courtesy to order beers (the absolute cheapest in town) anyway before departing a door down to Klondike's for the fare offered there. Pathetic. 

Yesterday also saw us hiking in the Talkeetnas, April bowl in Hatcher Pass, one side of the road sloping down, westward facing out onto the vastness of the Susitna river basin, the other leading down into the Matanuska river valley of our home. It was me, the boys, Uly and A, trucking up switchbacks to the crest of the bowl. I had the fear in a bad way, and my mind was a cavalcade of irrational thoughts and images - Uly tumbling in a ragged mass down the slope, the rounded back of my oldest bobbing in the frigid waters of the bowl's pond, an earthquake landsliding us all into oblivion, K screaming in terror as a blast of meteor impact in the valley below reaches us with its scorch. Unnerving sights and sounds, all assaulting my mind's eye.

At work, I've been tasked with leading a "success skills" group for the students. It's a thinly veiled and mostly mandated class for anger management and I was recommended to lead this class by its previous instructor on the notion that she believed me to have "really good boundaries". The universe is archly ironic in her narrative, indeed. Anyway, the material of the course is not bad and while it centers on anger, it's really about the skills of emotion management for all of the turgid murk lounging in each of our souls. On the mountain, I had to employ these self-same skills to maintain, to persist. I only once flared up at the backpack for failing to disclose its final Clif bar that was the snack for the hike's final event pre-descent, calling it a cocksucking motherfucker, as I could hear the Mylar crinkling in the bag yet could not blindly procure it. A came close and hugged me, knowing of my fear as we'd discussed it on the ascent. The wind coursed across the bowl. The boys ate perched on a boulder. I could not bear the views from the bowl's rim of the valleys below.

On the driving descent back home, A and I talked about the experience in the front seat while in the back the boys tooled about the internet in their new and flashy phones. I related to her that, in the parlance of the success skills class, my anxiety about the hike reached a nine of ten when all three of my boys stood near the skyline of the ridge, the drop of which I was unable to approach but which she had assured me was smooth and not cliff-like. I spoke with the boys on the drive back about the necessity of doing uncomfortable things in life, and that while the hike and drive up to the trailhead had been agony for me, I did them anyway, and of the importance of taking the beach, whatever that sand happens to resemble. Who knows if they understood, but it reminded me of the lasting advice my father gave me as a young adult which was that since I was going to join the Marines, I needed to, "Stop being such a pussy."

Perhaps I've said this all before. Perhaps you're growing bored with the same shtick, the same bringing it back around to writing, but as I've likely quoted somewhere else on here (I have been grinding these out for no-one for the past 12 years), Richard Rodriguez said once that, "We are all circling our own obsessions." I suppose the point I was trying to make, keep trying to make, is that life is this bizarre swirl and for some reason, I keep trying to make sense of it with squiggles and jots, tittles and lines, and failing. Just Monday I received a rejection from the Southeast Review. This morning I queried literary agents about these insane manuscripts I keep producing. Does any of this matter? Objectively, no, but you get up and you get going, up that beach, regardless the cost.

Facebook told me that, two years ago yesterday, I had taken a similar picture of these three in the summertime hammock. Tourists, two of them anyway, in their own right, crowd this space of mine. I decided to recreate the scene, post-hike. They're huge. Please, make it stop. There is no stopping.