Laotian mud flap

In a part of the world where women's fashion gets high marks only if it features Micky, Mini, Pooh Bear, or a Playboy logo one would expect the mud flap fashion to consist of Taz, Yosemite Sam and the female silhouette. Truth is you won't find any of that, but you'll find plenty of mud flaps featuring Al Pacino as Frank Serpico. The top of the flap reads "SERPICO" while the bottom reads "HERO." I'd like to know if these same mud flaps were popular in the US back in mid-'70s and have since been shipped over Asia-way.

Sometimes I find I get to thinking of the past.
We swore to each other then that our love would surely last.
You kept right on loving, I went on a fast,
now I am too thin and your love is too vast.
But I know from your eyes
and I know from your smile
that tonight will be fine,
will be fine, will be fine, will be fine...
for a while.
~ Leonard Cohen "Tonight Will Be Fine"

Today as I prepared my backpack for my trip to Laos I decided to leaved my music behind me which means I'll be doing without my prefered tunes for the first time in 4.5 years. This could last as long as a month, and that's a long time.

2007 saw the end of two of my heroes: one of Italy's most impressive directors ever, Michelangelo Antonioni, and, not even one week later, one of America's quirkiest country songwriters, Lee Hazlewood.

My big disappointment in Alaska

From late August to late September I watched the salmon spawning in Pullen Creek die off a few at a time - a sign that my time as a seasonal worker was also coming to an end. But watching the salmon was as passive as simply watching the big clock on the wall at work ticking steadily forward to 5 pm. A felt a sense of competition with the fish as if we were in some kind of race, or maybe it was a competition with Father Time himself, embodied in the fish. I'm not sure what I could have possibly gained from winning the race - I wasn't going to get paid overtime for it - but I wanted to last long enough to see Pullen Creek devoid of living salmon. Everyday as I hurried over the bridge to and from work I would quickly count up the remaining fish and feel ahead whenever the numbers had dropped, until finally there was just one fish left in the river. One silly salmon that swam in place hour after hour, day after day. After about four or five days I expected it to be dead and for me receive my reward, but alas it lived on. Some times I'd stand on the foot bridge and watch its tail stop moving and the current would push the fish back down towards the mouth of the creek, but then life would come back into the tail and the fish would regain its ground. I'd note its skin being stripped from its body a bit everyday and think "It hasn't got long. Maybe it'll be gone this afternoon." After a couple of weeks I began wondering if this was the same fish or if a new one had accepted the baton and took over the race. Weeks past. My time to leave Skagway arrived. I made one last trip to the bus yard to fill out my time card. And check on the salmon.

Chopoff

I thought I might manage to go a full two summers of tour bus driving without ever having to use a wheelchair lift but I was wrong. Yesterday I was assigned a tour with a wheelchair confined individual by the last name of Chopoff. If this 80-year-old woman had actually been an amputee that would already be the end of a great story. Ms. Chopoff and her daughter had apparently been planning their trip out to Skagway, Alaska for quite some time. Having made numerous inquiries by phone to many of the local vendors about their wheelchair accessibility, they chose to pan for gold in Liarsville where each pan of gold is salted with a few flecks of Canadian gold. Ms. Chopoff, however, had not managed to inform herself on the fact that the value of gold to be found was limited to probably no more than a dollar fifty. Her daughter excitedly had me wheel Ms. Chopoff to the panning trough, we both helped her rise from her chair for the occasion, she attempted to find the gold only to hand the pan to me, and then, when I showed her the gold in her pan, she spoke. The translation soon followed (Ms. Chopoff spoke something I assumed to be Chinese), "This is ridiculous! You can't even make necklace or anything with this much gold!" The daughter then explained that all night her mother had been dreaming of all the gold she would find and what she would make out of it - rings, bracelets, necklaces, etc. While this seemed to me the greatest disappointment of one woman's eighty-year life, Ms. Chopoff seemed less than phased. Her daughter on the other hand kept repeating the expressions of disappointment supposedly coming from her mother. I loaded her and her wheelchair back onto the bus for the short drive back to the cruise ship and there on the dock the dream ended, as did my experience with the lift.

Perpetual autumn

One of the best things about 2007 is that I will be experiencing Autumn three separate times. My first began way up north in the Yukon Territory sometime around mid-August and ended when I got stranded in Skagway, Alaska on the 3rd of Sept. Now, nearly two weeks later, I'm enjoying watching the summer foliage of Carcross, YT and Skagway bleed out their green and come ablaze in yellows and reds. Today was perhaps the best Carcross had to offer, and Skagway should follow suite soon enough. My third autumn begins when I fly back to Utah on the 25th. Hopefully I won't be too late.