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.