Obscured by Fog

Charleston, Oregon

The fog hung around all day today. Here on the coast the high was 55 degrees F. I went for a walk on the beach at 6 AM and found it difficult to find the path back to the RV park. The visibility has been about 50 feet all day. This is a picture of the halibut I cooked for Mrs. Phred yesterday.

We went to the Cape Arago State Park in the morning. At an overlook, we could hear herds of seals and Steller's sea lions arfing up a storm, but the fog obscured the rock that they like to rest on.

The cove at Cape Arago was free of fog. There were tide pools but the animals were not as colorful as the ones we saw yesterday. The sea anemones mostly looked like little mud donuts.

We did see one starfish. We also found a chocolate muffin and some birthday candles for our Skype session with grandchild # 4. Today is his birthday. He is six. We talked him and his little brother into blowing out the candles and they both blew so hard that little globules of spit appeared on the camera lens.

The Gold and Silver Falls State Park was a 40 mile drive into the interior. The temperature went up 20 degrees as we left the coast and hit the one-lane winding roads into the park.

Both falls were about a 1/2 mile hike.

Yesterday I got a haircut by a Vietnamese woman about my age. She told me about her recent five-country, five-week vacation to Asia. She booked the whole thing herself and took her husband. It was strange how many of the same places we had been...Da Nang...Saigon...Qui Nhon...she was a good barber. She didn't like L.A. so she moved to Oregon and met her American husband.

The Gold and Silver Falls State Park would have been hard to find without a GPS...the two falls each require a 1/2 mile hike. Mrs. Phred was ready to strip down to her panties and frolic in the waterfall...

I think our next stop, going North, is Winchester Bay.

A Dog Named Pat

Valdez, Alaska – July 9, 2007

On the way to Valdez, we meet a lady in Slana. She is about 75, we guess. Her art is done with bits of elk and moose antlers. Her dogs are all dead and the three log cabin dog houses stand empty. I imagine them chained up in the deep snow and huddled inside on the straw. The rusty chains and straw are still there. A nameplate says that one dog was named Pat. Pat was probably a Husky.

The lady has outlived three husbands and many dogs in this place over a fifty year period. She collects camping fees at the nearby State campground and tries to operate a lodge and RV park by herself. She also operates the Slana Post Office. She makes the beds, mows the lawn, burns the trash and cleans the salmon that she catches in her fish traps. She seems lonely now. Everything is hard. It's a 100 mile trip in to buy gasoline for her generator so she can have electricity.

She no longer has time to sell the art that she makes in the winter since she has no help. We are her only guests. It's a slow summer. She built the lodge with her own hands. There is no Home Depot here, but I see three trailers to haul things in the yard. She talks to strangers like us. Mrs. Phred feels sad for her. I tell Mrs. Phred that there are a million stories here and we can't even change the outcome of our own.

The drive into Valdez is though jagged mountains capped with glaciers that come down to the road. We go fishing for pink salmon and catch eleven that are about four pounds each. We eat one for dinner and freeze the rest. The bay is surrounded by snow-capped mountains. You can see bears in the meadows with binoculars. We see a seal next to the boat catch a salmon for lunch. The fish here are released from a hatchery and have no place to spawn. They just mill around in the bay looking for a stream that doesn’t exist.


We see a purse seine boat catch about 15,000 pounds of salmon in its net. The sea otters and seals on buoys float in front of the oil tankers next to the refinery tanks at the end of the Alaska pipeline.


This morning we will take a water taxi for a two hours ride to kayak under a glacier in the icebergs.