Rice Wars

The following piece was inspired by my cache-cleaning activities on the Tozi and written there in September, 2010.   I read it at the Fairbanks Arts Association Literary Program 10/2/2010 event featuring members of the Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival creative writing class.

Writing in the Summer House on the Banks of the Tozi

Rice Wars

    I am picking rice.  No, I am not doing whatever is done in a rice paddy in Southeast Asia or from a canoe in Northern Minnesota.  Is that called gleaning, maybe harvesting?  I am sitting twelve feet above the ground in the doorway of our cache with a view of the Tozitna river.  I’m picking, plucking maybe, slightly sticky grains of uncooked brown rice from within the folds of a roll of blue and green plaid wool fabric.  It’s a scrap from a project I can’t recall.  Maybe it's one my mother sent me back in the days when we lived here full time on the Tozi and I would sew clothes on my treadle sewing machine for my infant and toddler son as he grew up here.

Cache

     The roll of wool, neatly pinned, is one I’m trying, for reasons unclear to me except to avoid unnecessary waste, to salvage.  It is one of many less salvageable items -- hats, mittens, scarves, socks, long johns, shirts, pants, sweaters, parkas, fabric, yarn, Robin’s school papers, etc. -- stored years ago in our cache for lack of any of the more convenient means of getting rid of things a family can no longer use.
    Here, at our place on the Tozitna River in bush Alaska, there is no trash pick-up nor thrift store. Nor are there even less well off neighbors who might need a T-shirt I’ve outgrown or felt boot liners no longer needed by people who go south with the birds in winter. 
    We fly in and out by charter aircraft from Fairbanks for a month in the spring and another in the fall.  Weight is critical.  We must have needed these items when we hauled them in at a dollar a pound, but we surely can’t afford to haul them out now.  We were reluctant to burn them.  You never know when your home in the woods may burn down or a visitor may forget to bring long johns.
    But for the past several days, after years of poor cache security, I have been making my way with whisk broom and dust pan in gloved hands through piles of detritus left by squirrels and voles, and even a marten one winter, nesting among our poorly protected belongings now shredded and stuck together with stuff the origin of which one would rather not think too much about. 

    There were years when paper boxes and plastic bags of food were not stored in metal cans or hard plastic totes.  Once we no longer lived here year round, we were slow to learn, but eventually did realize it is not enough to store foodstuffs 12 feet off the ground in a cache you are not visiting daily.  One can only imagine for so long the daily life of a squirrel set loose to mingle macaroni, dried mushrooms, beans, yarn and tampons with spruce cone-scales and seed-wings, shredded fabric, paper, and plastic and rice . . .
    Oh yes, I was talking about rice.  I am picking or plucking grains of rice from this roll of wool and am reminded of Robin’s “rice game.”  At two and three he loved to experiment with the properties of water, pouring it from one container to another and sometimes outside of the container.  Water, when you pump it by hand from a well or haul it from the river, is too precious a commodity for a parent to tolerate such experiments for long.
    We read in a book of activities for pre-schoolers about “the rice game.”  I enthusiastically dyed quantities of rice with food coloring -- pink rice, green rice, lemon yellow and blue rice.  Robin helped me place each color in its own plastic container.  I provided him with a variety of measuring spoons and cups along with other containers of different sizes.  He was equally enthusiastic.  We found him a large metal tray to catch stray grains of rice that, unlike water, could be easily recovered and re-used.
    Even in those early days of our life here, we were starting to go South for a couple of months in the winter -- Mexico, Belize and the Pacific Coast of the US.  We were more careful securing food in the house than in the cache.  Entry to the house was less accessible to larger rodents like squirrels, but not to voles.  We expected voles in the house.  Food was left in metal containers, cans or cabinets. 

Vole Pancake Breakfast

     For years after the winter we failed to view “the rice game,” stored in Robin’s play area, from the perspective of a rodent, we’d find stashes of pink rice in a slipper, green rice under a sofa cushion, blue rice in the center of a roll of toilet paper.  The importance of taking a vole’s point of view was made most clear to me that spring when I had to clear pink, blue, green and yellow grains of rice from the oiled parts of my treadle sewing machine before I could sew.
    This fall I tackle the cache with dustpan and broom.  I pluck rice grains from salvageable fabric and yarn.  Then we will make one further attempt to thwart the entry of creatures into the cache by screening the spaces between the floor boards.  But I am seeing that these are just battles in which we struggle and strategize to hold back the forces of Entropy, however meek they may appear.  “The meek shall inherit the earth.”  We will not win the war.
   

August-September 2010 Tozi Time

     Our Tozi time this fall began with two beautiful days and my birthday to boot!  “View from the Outhouse” No. 1, taken 26 August, shows that autumn on the Tozitna River was late this year.  Flying northwest out of Fairbanks, we expected to see lots more yellow foliage.  The view from the throne here is still mostly green.

     All was blissfully as we’d left it in early June except for the welcome help from the BLM crew of our friend Seth, our Tozi neighbor, Tom, and their boss, Carl.  They'd hauled some items over from the airstrip for us -- including our new 60 hp Mercury boat motor. 

     It came out on the 11 August flight that picked them up after several days of breaking up the BLM fish-counting project camp that has operated each summer from 2001 just up river from our Tozi home.
     The motor weighs 250 lbs and we are extremely grateful to the three of them for hauling it over, putting it on the boat and covering it and its accompanying parts package with a tarp.
    We didn’t check out the motor until late in the afternoon 1 September.  Jack had been nursing some back pain for over a week. Taking it easy for four days after settling in had helped.  In the photo at right Jack considers what he’s gotten himself into with this new motor.                          

 
      I had been up around 6 A. M. that day and, on going out to the bank overlooking our slough and the forks where the Little Tozi marries Daglislahkna Creek, found a picturesque mist clinging to the bluffs beyond the mouth of Dag  (left).  The downriver view (below right) was equally awesome.

The “View from the Outhouse” No. 2 (below) taken on 5 September is a bit more autumnal, but we’d still had only one overnight temperature below freezing -- like 31 degrees F.






       We spent several days between 1 and 5 September getting the boat motor hooked up and positioned on the boat with the help of about 150 lbs of rocks on the bow of the boat added to my weight on the tongue of the trailer.                                                                                                                      

On 6 September, Labor Day, I walked to the Lichen Garden to pick low bush cranberries leaving Jack to figure out how to get the boat in the river.  Despite two days of rain, it was still low.  When I returned after an hour and a half, he had the 4-wheeler and boat trailer ready to go.  It only took 4 hours in all to float the boat, but once on the water, Jack was pretty pleased.

     We took our Labor Day holiday a day late on the 7th when we awoke to rain.  Jack’s back was improving.  But I’d injured mine in a fall down the half-stairwell from the main part of the house into the workshop-addition the evening of the 4th.  I was rushing to turn off our solar powered electricity so we could tune in Trapline Chatter on the battery-operated radio for messages.

    Grateful I didn’t fracture a hip,  I took a break from bending and lifting.  My photographic highlight of the day occurred when I spotted a dancing dervish leaf suspended on a spider web from my seat in the outhouse.  A still photo is at right.  I made a movie of it backed up with Leon Fleisher’s piano version of Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” that I'll try to post on Facebook when I learn how to do that.   A day of rest and recovery had its meditative merits. 
   

8 September - I was still babying my back, but Jack went fishing for our supper and caught an 8 lb. Northern Pike.  Having “lost” his net from the trailer en route to the boat, he had to gaff the fish, which destined it to be our supper rather than a fish of more desirable size that he released.
     For Jack’s fried pike fillet recipe -- yes, he removes the pesky Y-bone -- we prefer fish weighing 4 -5 pounds so inside and outside of the pieces are done evenly.  Still, this was our first pike feast in nearly a year, thanks to our new motor, and we won’t complain!  YUM!

9 September  - In “View from the Outhouse” No. 3, it is getting to look a lot like Autumn.  We had the most sunshine we’d had since our two beautiful first days here, and we took good advantage of it.  Each of us got a few little chores done inside and outside the house.  I took a lovely nap.  Then we spent a warm sunny evening in the Summer House playing gin rummy and watching the Tozi flow by.  We had some help with that from a fledgling eagle trying out its wings.

     I have “built a better mouse trap!”  The photos at right were taken here in May.  We’d had rice cakes one morning, and I’d left the unused batter in one of those Tupperware bowls with separate lids for the bowl proper and for the spout -- the kind you can only find in second hand stores and at yard sales anymore.  The little lid for the spout of my bowl went missing some time ago.
    A couple of mornings later, thinking we’d have rice cakes again, I picked up the bowl, removed the lid and let out one of those “Eeek! A MOUSE” screams we ladies are supposed to perfect in childhood!  Personally, I think voles are way cuter than mice and have even had them as pets when Robin was young, but these days I prefer them outside.  So, this was one of those “out of context” screams.
    Anyway, Jack had seen a vole in the kitchen a few nights ago and decided to set a trap.  We happened to have rice cakes that morning and had some batter left over.  Remembering the incident of last May, I poured the batter into a container with a cover and refrigerated it.  Then I thought, “I’ll put a little water in this bowl, scrape the batter still clinging to the inside of the bowl down into the water, put on the lid with the missing spout cover and catch that vole.  As I placed the bowl on the floor a few inches from Jack’s conventional peanut butter-baited mouse trap, I challenged him to a vole patrol duel.
    This Thursday morning, Jack’s trap remained empty and my bowl looked like the one in the photo except the “batter” was more watery.  I hope I can convince Tupperware to start making those bowls again so we can split the profits on “The Vole Bowl.”

11 September - Nine years ago today, Jack was on the Tozi hosting two hunters from “Outside,” friends of our friend and occasional pilot, Charlie McMahon.  It was a stunning day with nary a cloud in the sky.  They’d seen a small plane flying north turn abruptly overhead and head back south in the direction of the village of Tanana early in the day and then noticed no more planes for the rest of the day. 
     That evening Jack was puzzled by a reference made in my Trapline Chatter message that I may have returned to Fairbanks from Bethel on the “last flight” into FAI International the night before.  But they caught the news the next day and learned “September 11” had happened and that their expected flight with Charlie on the 13th might not happen -- not until planes were allowed back in the air.

      This day, nine years later, faithfully replicated the sunny blue-sky warm day of that day, but only in the weather -- as shown in these photos.  And we are thankful for that.  We were also thankful for the opportunity this day to motor a short ways up the Little Tozi before encountering a riffle Jack decided not to navigate.  On our way back downriver, he was able to negotiate the one remaining possible channel up through the mouth of Dag Creek.
     We spent the next couple of hours wending our way up the meandering creek.  We made it well past Moose Slaughter Slough before encountering another narrow, shallow riffle and turning back.

     I wish we had photos of me running in the muck of the shoreline of the gravel bar across from Moose Slaughter Slough looking for water deep enough for Jack to beach the boat -- or at least photos of the ubiquitous tracks of a variety of sizes of bear that had traveled that bar since the last rain a couple of days before.  Jack, who drifted in the boat down stream as Butter and I ran ahead on the beach, was finally able to pull the boat into a small cove at the bottom of the bar.  We stayed there a while to rest, eat our lunch and to enjoy the SILENCE.

     Butter explored the beach while we ate our lunch.  Then Jack collected some grass for seeding our yard in Fairbanks.

     After our lunch of of ceviche and chicken salad on crackers, we motored downstream with the sun in Jack’s eyes and the current at our back.

     Jack had told me to “fix up the bow of the boat however you want it if you get thrown up there.”  I’d placed a couple of cushions there on the seat and on the floor.  As we approached the wide mouth of Dag Creek with mostly gravel bar tongue and rocky teeth in sight, Jack did his best to aim for and turn sharply left into the narrow channel of churning water up through which we’d made our entry a few hours earlier.  

     He yelled a warning seconds before I found myself thrown to the bow of the boat.  The cushions there were handy, but handier yet was Butter, whose 30 lbs of flesh and fur I’d pulled to me as we headed for the mouth.  I had to laugh at my unexpectedly soft landing even as Jack cut the motor and we foundered on the slippery rocks at the narrow channel’s edge on our right. After telling me to get out on those rocks, Jack said, “Wait, I think I’ve got us loose.”  Sure enough, his rocking the boat a bit slipped it off the rocks.  The roiling current spun us gently around backwards so our new motor, christened “The Black Knight,” entered the Tozi first. 

As the bow swung down river, Jack fired up the motor and we were off down the Tozi to explore a bit more before returning home to enjoy the remains of our lunch with a beer in the Summer House at sunset followed by a campfire, coffee and s’mores.

Home Sweet Tozi Home and the Summer House are pictured above and to the left. The latter has been moved out onto the bank of our slough and remodeled since Robin’s birth within 34 years ago.

12 September - The Summer House performed one of its most important functions in the two hours before sunset.  Note the way the sun setting in the west shines on its front bringing the inside up to a comfy temperature for showers. Having completed my ablutions I’m pictured eager to help Jack match my cleanliness.  Photo below-middle is from outside through plastic window. 

                                                
  

 13 September - The tipping point of Autumn must be when the number of leaves carpeting the path and trails exceeds the number still clinging to the branches of aspen and birch.  We’re almost there in this “View from the Outhouse” #4 taken by Jack.

14 - 15 September  - What prescience!  I decided to use up some fruit that was getting soft by baking in our stove-top oven a ring of banana-pear-apple-nut bread.  As I took it out of the oven around 2:30 p. m. on Tuesday the 14th I told Jack, “I hear a motor -- either a plane or a boat.”  He went out to check. 
    Our downriver neighbors who bought the Fliris home site had pulled up on the tip of the gravel bar where our slough drains into the Tozi in their hovercraft.  When Dale and Cynthia Erickson walked into our yard a few minutes later with their 1 1/2 year old yellow lab, Tucker, I met them with my nut-bread ring on a plate and asked, “Coffee, tea or Crystal Lite?”
    We had a pleasant afternoon sweltering in the sun as we visited on the bank of the slough outside the Summer House for the next several hours.  Mid-way through the visit, I brought out left-over cold fried pike and homemade tartar sauce (Joy of Cooking) along with ceviche and crackers.  It was a fun, spontaneous break from the work we’d planned; a break for them too as they’d come up Saturday the 11th from Tanana where they’d left their oldest daughter minding the store and Dale’s brother-in-law in charge of their fuel operation, to take advantage of the unusually temperate weather to get some work done on their cabin and property.
    I guess we were so busy enjoying company that we forgot to photograph that event.  That’s too bad because Cynthia, always vivacious and animated as she tells stories of growing up in the village, was especially pretty in the sun.  But we’d have another chance on Wednesday, the 15th, as Jack arranged to go pike fishing with them and bring them back here for lessons in removing the Y-bone from a Northern Pike and in his special recipe for preparing it. 
    Jack didn’t get any photos of Cynthia catching the exact size of pike desired to add to a smaller one Dale caught.  But I caught them on camera when Butter and I met them at the boat on their return.

Butter, normally a people dog, enjoyed having a canine companion with whom to explore and romp on the gravel bars.  By the time we got around to cooking and eating, however, Tucker and Butter felt left out and let those of us inside with the food know about it!







     It's not just about the fishing and the filleting.  There's a method to Jack's pike "madness" when it comes to the breading and the frying as well.  Cynthia and Dale were an eager participants/observers in all the stages from catching the fish to the filleting to the breading and to the eating!

I 

             The party ended as darkness threatened to impair visibility on the river and Jack took our guests back to their Tozi home.

18 September  - Jack’s birthday.  Turning 70 last year was a novel idea, but one more year may have been anti-climactic.   The weather joined in the celebration, however, with the 7th straight day of unseasonal warmth and lots of clear blue sky and sun.   Jack hung out in the afternoon sun, while I, after baking a loaf of bread, took a walk with Butter up river through the woods and back down on the gravel bar.  We saw lots of tracks from the past week -- grizzly and black bear, wolf and mink -- upstream, but none downstream from our place.  Guess they were avoiding us.  It’s a good thing we were not hunting this trip as we saw little sign of and no actual moose.  We went 29 days sighting no earth-bound animal life, unless you count squirrels which occasionally traverse the forest floor for a minute or two at a time. 
    On the avian front, our eagles kept watch over us from the air.  Ravens and gray jays were out in force scrounging for any edibles we might leave lying around the campfire on the bank, the fish-cleaning stand or the gravel bar out front where Jack tosses pike skins, heads and innards for them.  We heard our “Oscar,” the lone offspring of our resident owls, screaming in the night for dinner to be brought.  One evening we even got to watch him/her doing that and trying out his/her ungainly wings.    The occasional ruffed or spruce grouse flushed in front of one of us as we walked the trail to the outhouse or drove the four-wheeler through the woods.  Our juncos fled along with the red-breasted mergansers we'd enjoyed seeing splashing at the mouth of Dag Creek and floating down the Tozi.  The last of the sandhill cranes flew south cackling overhead the second week of September, too late for the Crane Festival at Creamer’s Field in Fairbanks.  They too must have been enjoying the reprieve of Global Warming that made this fall’s Tozi trip unbelievably fine for us.  We saw a kingfisher dining on the fry in our slough on the 14th.

Speaking of dining, we celebrated Jack’s birthday with one of his favorite meals for which he does none of the preparation -- pork roast, sauerkraut, mashed potatoes and gravy with corn.  One of our favorite Tozi recipes is a creamed corn casserole baked with green onions, sweet peppers (both chopped), a beaten egg and a little milk.  Canned cream corn is one vegetable that can freeze and re-freeze in our cache year after year and still be enjoyably edible, especially prepared this way.  Here’s to more birthdays!

19-20 September - Jack decided he needed to go fishing one more time to catch a pike he might keep alive for 4 days and then take home so we could have fried pike in town.  While he motored on down to his favorite slough, I filled all our empty water jugs about 3/4 full anticipating most of them would freeze over winter and be here when we come back in May.  Butter and I hiked back to the house where I found myself exhausted and needing to rest up for the rest of our plan for the day, which was to get the boat up onto the trailer and tow it to high ground where we hope the high water and ice of break-up won’t reach it.  Thank goodness, Jack called me on the hand-held radio a few minutes after I’d stretched out on the couch with my feet up and told me we’d put the boat off until Monday. 

    We had taken advantage of the clear satellite connection on the river bank by the boat to call Seth, Kim and Robin on Sunday, the 19th.  One must admit it’s a great location for a phone booth.   On the 20th when Jack had spent the better part of the afternoon getting the boat ready to haul, he called me on the hand-held Cobra two-way radio and asked me to bring the SAT phone down with me when I went to help with the final stages of taking the boat out of the water so he could call grandson, Brian.

Tozi Phone Booth

Then the fun began!  One can see the major issue:  no water deep enough to back the trailer in while hitched to the 4-wheeler and float the boat onto it.  Don’t ask me how he accomplished the set-up in the photo below.  Stage 1 was ready for me to help by driving the 4-wheeler while he made sure the boat and trailer followed along as planned. 

Stage 1

Stage 2 involved removing the rope extension and hooking up the trailer to the 4-wheeler.  However, once Jack got the rig backed up to the trailer, we discovered the weight of the rocks required on the back of the 4-wheeler to get traction, precluded any meeting of the ball with it’s mate on the trailer hitch.

Stage 2

                                                                  


Jack’s solution was to chain the two together, creating a rather loose connection that required me to run alongside the bow of the boat and make sure the trailer hitch didn’t swing and jam into the tires when Jack turned or stopped the 4-wheeler.  That would be Stage 3, but with me running with the trailer and Jack driving the rig, we didn’t have anyone to photograph it.

Stage 3 (Note the chain.)

Stage 4

Stage 4 shows a happy Jack walking away from the boat in its winter location and toward the 4-wheeler  bereft of the 150 lb. of rocks I’d tossed off the back end, but still weighted down with batteries on the front end.  He hitched our wagon back on and met me at the river where we loaded up all the gear needed to make the operation work. 
     There was just one more chore to do besides drive the 4-wheeler and gear home.  Someone needed to walk the pike Jack caught yesterday up the slough to tie it up in the water below our bank to keep it alive and try to remember to take it home with us on Thursday.  Since I never had to put my hip boots on, I opted to drive and let Jack walk his pet fish home.

     It was a huge relief to get the boat and motor taken care of!  Of course, a celebration was in order.  Jack grilled himself a double burger and a hot dog for me.  A man with all those bruises and band-aides on his fingers deserves as big a burger as he can get his mouth around.  My hot dog wasn’t worth a photo, especially with its rather flat home-made bun.

21 September - The last day of summer’s “View From the Outhouse” #5 put us in gear for southward flight.  When you sight a red-hooded wood-carrier in the morning in the Alaska bush, it’s a sure sign the weather is a-turning.

     I spent several days working on the cache cleaning out the debris of several years’ of nesting by squirrels, voles and, one winter, a marten, since we’ve not been living here full time.  A few years ago, Jack covered up a lot of the open spaces in the floor and walls that allowed the varmints’ entry, but it was left to me, with some help from Erin Butts in 2008 and Kim in 2009 to clear out damaged items, sweep up and burn debris and re-organize food, supplies and winter gear.

Only those who’ve visited and made a trip up the cache  ladder in the past decade will full appreciate these photos taken from the cache door.
 

23 September  - Departure Day!  This photo at left is of ice crystals remaining on top of a water jug after I poured water from it.  The temp dipped to 19 degrees F. overnight.  Our weather took the calendar seriously this year. The high on the first day of autumn was 50 degrees despite a continuation of the clear skies into a third week of “Indian Summer.”
     We'd worked hard for three days preparing for leaving our bush home to the whims of winter.  We had the windows shuttered, the propane turned off, the bear fence activated and were at the airstrip before our charter aircraft arrived.
     Our departure and the drive on the 4-wheeler to the airstrip deviated a bit from the usual in that Jack pulled his 4.5 lb pike out of the slough as I filled a cooler perched on the front of the 4-wheeler with water to keep it alive if not comfy on the trip to Fairbanks.  Somehow we neglected to take any photos of that or of the excitement of one of the ramp attendants in Fairbanks over the opportunity to see a live Northern Pike up close and personal.  The ramp was crawling with unshaven hunters in camouflage while moose quarters on carts and racks of antlers littered the area -- and this kid ran for a roll of duct tape to replace the tape we had sealing the cooler (so our fish wouldn’t slosh water in the plane) after he opened it to see and hold up our fish.  What a missed photo op!

 24 September - The next evening we got our camera back in gear for the sharing of our fish with Seth, our house sitter.  Seth contributed moose tenderloin for pepper steak so we could have a “surf ‘n turf” welcome home dinner for us and a fitting farewell to Seth who’d be off to explore the Grand Canyon and Antarctica.

     Jack filleted the pike.  Seth and he did the breading.  Then Seth documented the unusual event of Jack and Karen actually sharing space at the stove as Jack fried the fish and Karen made the pepper steak and corn.

                                                                                   Our meal was a fitting end to a month of spectacular weather and productive joint efforts in the struggle against entropy on the Tozi.  Now it’s back into the Fall Social Season of Fairbanks and preparations for a flight to Arizona 2 November.

For the curious, "Keebler/Beaver" is from our handles "Keebler Kookie" and "Big Beaver" that date back to our first use of short-distance radio devices when Karen's Parents, "One Elf" (Mom's name was Elfie) and "Two Elves" (Dad was taller) visited us on the Tozi in 1975 and stayed in one of our camps, North Peaks.