OK….just got the call.
I don’t have to go to work.
They decided that it was too dangerous.
My Bad.
All that talk about how the USPS doesn’t care….how they don’t want me to be safe….no matter how many safety talks they give me or how many pages I initial….well…that was wrong.
I WAS WRONG.
The USPS loves me.
They really love me!!
At work, they give us “safety talks” ….to keep us safe.
They tell us things like, “ice is slippery” or “don’t walk up stairs if they’re icy”.
We listen….and then we initial the sheet to show that we internalized every word they told us.
This is to keep us safe.
Knowledge is power….and if we understand that it might be dangerous if a 3/4 ton truck with screaming and excited teenagers behind the wheel….a rebel flag stuck in the bed…that flag sagging under the weight of accumulated ice and snow….if that loaded truck comes screaming over the top of the snow-covered hill….with me, sitting in my snow-covered Mail Jeep, banging on an ice-crusted mailbox, trying to get it open so I can put the important ad for Viagra substitute into it…..when they come screaming over the top of the hill in 4-wheel-hi….never expecting anyone to be stopped anywhere on the road….when they come hammering over….in the ice and snow….well….the USPS wants me to acknowledge that I know that it could be a dangerous situation.
The USPS wants to have proof that they warned me about the dangers….and that I understood.
That’s what it means when I initial every page they throw at me.
Now, of course, I could avoid initialing all the papers….and get management upset with me….and have a bad day.
But, instead, I sign everything and try to stay alive.
I get the impression that I’m kind of screwed if anything happens, anyway.
I’m on my own.
I think that if some kind of Anti-Postal Kraken or big red devil landed in front of me….its cloven hoofs tearing up the asphalt….and then it shot fire rays out of its eyes….blowing me and the mail into the next dimension….the dimension…..somewhere “over there”….well, if that happened….the postal service would have me admit (before I was transported) that I’d signed safety talk 10231-43a and deny my surviving family members whatever surviving family members are supposed to get.
Safety talks.
Blehhhhh.
I work at being safe all the time….but I love it when somebody is sincerely worried about my well-being.
Take today, for instance.
Please.
Please …”take today”.
It’s snowy as heck out there….and, apparently, this is the “calm” part of the storm.
It’s supposed to get bad later in the day.
Later in the day is when the real snow is supposed to start falling.
So….I’ll drive around….hunting and pecking out a route that might be safe….trying to avoid danger….because, no matter what the USPS thinks, I have enough sense to know that no matter how much they cover their hind quarters with a safety talk, surviving is better than the alternative.
My goal is to get out and get back.
Snow is fun. Snow is beautiful. I love snow.
I just like it when the choice is mine whether or not to take a vehicle into some pretty wacky and steep places.
Put that in a safety talk if you want to protect me.
Save me, safety talk.
I got up really early today….after going to bed really early the night before.
The power went out yesterday after a light dusting of snow.
Someone must have hit a pole because the weather wasn’t the kind that would cause a blackout.
Something must have happened.
But….”something” always does….happen.
Anyway….there wasn’t a whole lot to do other than go to sleep…so that’s what we did.
I’m thinking about Idaho again.
When I was younger, I kind of mythologized Seattle….wanted to get back out to the Pacific Northwest…..get back out West.
I was born in Seattle….but was really young when we moved away….so my idea of “what Seattle was” was one that I’d been able to invent.
My mental picture of Seattle was one I’d only formed from….pictures of Seattle.
I didn’t know what it was, really.
Anyway….I’d formed this picture in my mind that Seattle was some sort of Mecca….better than where I was….better than my “now”….better.
When I finally got back out there, I realized that the place I was living was pretty good after all.
I guess that Idaho might be that for me now.
The reality of the situation is that we have a place we could go to….build a cabin….figure out a way to live there….figure out a way.
And…that’s a powerful draw.
It’s beautiful out there.
But….again, “but”…here is good, too.
Pick a place…any place….and turn it into something good.
That’s the best I can do.
Man, though….Idaho is so beautiful.
Here’s a video of a bunch of folks running around out in Colorado.
That’s putting it lightly.
And….here’s the answer to the Bizarro question “how you gonna keep them down on the farm….after they’ve seen Pareeeeeeeeeee”.
My wife grew up in Colorado.
How am I going to be able to help her sustain any interest in the Carolinas if I keep letting her see videos about places as beautiful as this?
“Letting her see”.
Hah….”letting”….she’ll like that.
Hardrock 100…big race…out in the mountains….Silverton, CO.
I’m not running right now….and I never ran like these guys are running….never did huge distances….but this looks pretty good….fun.
Dang hard to run a 100 miles….fun to be out in the mountains.
Awwwww…..what the heck? Here’s a taste of some of the kind of trail running we have out in North Carolina….
Wherever you are….wherever you go…you can find beautiful places to celebrate.
It’s just that out in Colorado, the beauty gets right in your face whether you’re looking for it or not.
Funny how you end up being a mailman in the Carolinas.
I had a dream last night that the pond was filling up with water again.
The property looked like a park….beautiful and green….and the pond had a clean, sandy bottom…..great for swimming….great for anything, really.
The water was coming up…..and I pointed out the fish to Jenny….3 feet long and golden….koi.
The koi part didn’t make any sense….but I remember pointing them out to her and saying, “See!! The fish didn’t all go downstream when the dam broke!!”
“And….look how beautiful those grass carp are! I didn’t know they’d turn that color!”
It was peaceful….and we walked along together….imagining how nice it would be when all the water had returned….walking on the paths I’d built around the pond’s future edge.
That was when the snakes started to chase us.
Jenny ran….but I was slower….curious….curious about why these snakes were chasing us.
It was a whole family of ringed snakes….poisonous, probably….chasing…chasing….and then I was running, too…..and right before I woke up, a flying brown snake launched itself at me….snapping its jaws at the air…..trying to bite me.
Man.
A good thing can turn weird at the drop of a hat.
That can happen in dreams, too.
That pond did look a lot better with water in it.
I’ll never know what it must have been like.
I don’t have any battles to fight like that.
I don’t really have anything to “overcome” ….or to change in my life.
The changes that I might want to make are changes that are my choice to make.
This day is another holiday for me….another reason not to deliver the mail…but this day is a big deal.
Happy Birthday, Martin Luther King, Jr.
Thanks for stepping up.
happy birthday (Stevie Wonder)
Checking Craigslist for guitars this morning.
Again.
That’s just about nuts.
Another guitar is something that I don’t need….it’s just a weird habit.
I guess I think I’ll see something amazing and cheap….and have the time and money to go get it….and lean it up against the wall with all the other guitars that I don’t have time to play.
I’m just window shopping….staring into a computer monitor….waiting to go make my coffee now that the water in the kettle is boiling.
I have a pretty high capacity for wanting….I’ll shop as an amusement….I’ll waste a lot of time conjuring up need….creating desire in an already saturated material world…manufacturing desire.
Manufacturing desire.
Yuck.
I told Jenny that I’d be happy with a pair of flip-flops, some board shorts and a couple of t-shirts….and she laughed at me.
She knows what a pack rat I am.
But….still…I wonder if I wouldn’t be better off if I settled down and got rid of a lot of this collected stuff I’ve accumulated?
Letting loose of something that you convinced yourself you needed is a lot harder than dragging it into the house in the first place.
It is a lot faster, somehow, though.
We rented a dumpster to start cleaning up the property we bought down the road last year….and filled it up pretty quickly.
I think it filled up more quickly when we were getting rid of someone else’s trash, though.
I shop for amusement.
That’s crazy.
Treasure hunting without the adventure.
Maybe I just need a good parka….a pair of snowshoes…a good pair of boots….a nice truck with an automatic transmission….a chainsaw…..comealong…..
Awwwww….it doesn’t matter where I go or what I do….I can figure out a way to need stuff.
I need to read some more Thoreau….read some more of Helen and Scott Nearing’s books…read some more of my giant “simplicity book” collection.
If you get a big enough collection of books about simplicity….how could you fail to hit your mark?
This is a picture that my daughter took from the window of our Dodge Caravan…..cruising down the highway at 70 miles an hour….out West….out West….out West.
“From the window”…..
Out the window…..
What was I doing when she was taking the picture?
Probably driving….thinking about where we were going….trying, like my father used to tell me, to “keep it between the fenceposts”.
Keep it between the fenceposts…..
The picture is from a trip we took to look at some land that I inherited when my father passed away….land “out West”…..
Good grief….it’s beautiful.
I wonder how many scenes like this I’ve seen in my life….a lot of times through the window of a moving vehicle….glanced at and appreciated….but never really completely absorbed….because I was moving….trying to “keep it between the fenceposts”?
What am I missing?
What am I missing because I’m pondering “what I’m missing”?
What am I missing because I concentrate too hard on the cost of movement…..and not the adventure?
If it was up to me, I’d never miss an opportunity to either say or respond positively to the short and potent admonition “LET’S GO!!”.
I would be braver….and less worried about things.
Of course, that’s a hypothetical “if it was up to me”, anyway.
(Of course, it is up to me. Who else would it be up to? It’s up to me.)
My reality is one of nervousness and marginal preparation….wondering when the car will blow up or the money will disappear or some weird glandular condition will strand us in the middle of the Badlands.
I’m kidding about the glandular condition.
You can’t worry about things like that.
That would be nuts.
There’s a surfer named Eddie Aikau who passed away a while back, back in the late 70’s.paddling to get help for a group of sailors he was a member of who’d become stranded when their boat was disabled.
He was a pretty legendary and important figure in Hawaii….a surfer and lifeguard who saved over 500 people.
He told the people on the boat that he’d paddle back to the island of Lanai on his surfboard and get them some help.
They never were able to find him.
Lost at sea.
Anyway….the saying, after his death, was “Eddie would go”.
Dropping into a big wave….or saving his friends….”Eddie would go”.
“Eddie would go”.
I don’t often bump up against dire situations.
I don’t have reason to paddle out into the deep blue and unknown.
I don’t know if I’ll ever have a chance to save anyone.
I guess that I’m like everyone I know….wondering if I could be brave when I needed to be.
I should respond more favorably when the words on the table or hanging in the air are “let’s go”.
What a fine thing it would be if, when my time was done, people could say about me, “Peter would go”.
That would be pretty cool.
“Peter would go”….I like the sound of that.
I should go more.
I don’t get a whole lot of comments on this blog.
I tend to fly under the radar……whispering into the wind…wondering where the words fall or if anybody reads them….
One of the posts that I wrote a while back (I’ve been getting up early and drinking coffee ….and writing this blog…long enough now that I can say YEARS AGO….that’s kind of cool….anyway…) was a post about a movie called “Sourdough”.
Alaskan bush life….recorded by a man named Rod Perry and starring his father, Gil.
This was a really good movie…different from the bulk of the movies “out there”.
Here is what was in my mailbox this morning:
It’s so awesome to finally here more about this movie. Watching it years ago as boy who grew up in the woods of BC totally changed my life. I went on to start a wilderness school from the inspiration this movie gave me. I looked for years online to find it in VHS. I finally found a used copy on Amazon. It arrived broken to pieces. I took a brand new blank VHS tape and exchange the shell with the broken one. I watched it once. It didn’t work very well. It got all jammed it the VCR and that was the end of it. I wanted to have it put on DVD but it got ruined before I could get to it. I guess I have to just remember it from memory. Which BTW that movie have a couple lines that I could never forget. Lot’s of wisdom in the writing. Thanks Rod and thanks to your dad. Thanks Peter.
John
Cool to get a comment…and cool to know that the movie mattered to people.
It’s a hard one to find and to see now….and I don’t really know how to change that.
You shouldn’t have to try to repair a broken tape to get a chance to see this movie!
(I understand the creativity behind your efforts, John! I would have done the same thing….)
Anyway….Sourdough !!
That’s a good movie.
I hope that you get a chance to see it someday.
Here’s a letter that Rod Perry wrote to me after the initial post…..that answers some of the questions about the movie that I had.
(Rod’s website, where you can read his blog and order his books, can be found at rodperry.com)
Hi Peter,
That blog entry on my film Sourdough was a very nicely done piece and I thank you for your kind words. Back in the 70s when Sourdough showed in theaters around the globe, and afterwards when it was shown to regional TV audiences and printed for the VHS market, the film gathered quite a loyal “cult following” that to this day persists. Like any older film, it faded out and became almost impossible to find. Then maybe 15 years ago, Blockbuster brought it out again as a “new release” and once more it could be easily come by. Now of course, it has declined and again become hard to find.
As a filmmaker, I tackled the project with no background whatsoever even in photography, much less cinematography. What I did have going was a art background and innate ability as a storyteller. I thought that if I could but master the film medium I could express myself. I also had an idea for a story I was sure would resonate, a picturesque father who believed in me and agreed to play the part, and (between us) probably many times over a greater volume of expertise as outdoorsmen than all of Hollywood’s technical advisers combined.
By the time it was over I was viewed by many as Alaska’s foremost outdoor cinematographer. But for various reasons, I put down my camera never to pick it up again, a case if there ever was one of burying one’s God-given talents. Just this last year, however, after 35 years, I have the film bug back, with a couple of documentaries and a reality show in mind. Whether or not those dreams gain traction will be a matter of finding backing, and that’s seldom easy.
I can tell you that anyone who’s attracted to my motion picture will be as attracted to my books TRAILBREAKERS Pioneering Alaska’s Iditarod. Volume I, about how the old gold rush trail was born, quickly sold out. I’ve rewritten and greatly expanded it, and it should be back in print before next summer. Volume II is about birth of “the Last Great Race On Earth”, the daring 1973 run that founded it, of which I was was one of the pioneering drivers.
Back to Sourdough and my father, I recall telling my mother as we laid him to rest, that I felt so fortunate to have been gifted his final years sharing hardships of the trail and grinding it out against all odds in our belief we could bring off the impossible. I talked to her about how wonderful it had been to have my dad at my back when virtually everyone else out there seemed to dismiss our efforts as those of deluded, naive fools, and rate our chances, at best, to turn out an amateurish flick that might, sponsored by the county rod and gun club, show once down at the local high school auditorium then be forgotten. And then I expressed to her how enriching it was for posterity to have a full-length film featuring my father in his element, not only for me but for the children I hoped to have some day, as well as future generations who would never otherwise know him.
Again Peter, thank you for your glowing assessment of Sourdough. And best wishes to you as a blogger. I look forward to following along.Rod Perry
(I pulled the trailer for the movie off of YouTube….and, like everything I do on this blog, don’t really have permission to use it…but….IT’S SO GOOD!! The weird voiceover on the trailer isn’t something I remember from the movie… kind of strange. The movie is a lot better than the trailer….but this gives you a taste of what it was…..Maybe you need to watch it with the sound turned down….just watch Rod’s cinematography?)
YouTube is pretty strange.
Some mornings when I don’t feel terribly inspired, I’ll get on YouTube and pick out a video to feature and write a quick blog post about.
This morning it was a toss-up between this video and one that was captioned “Please Amputate My Size 16 Foot”.
This was the one that won the competition.
Check out this house in a cave!
Pretty cool.
You can make just about anything livable….and nice…if you’re willing to work hard at it.
Awwwww….what the heck?! I CAN’T RESIST!!!
Here’s the “runner-up”…..
That’s rough.
I should have skipped that one before breakfast.
(I couldn’t do it….it was too rough. I switched out the video for a flower picture. That poor guy. Search YouTube if you want to see it….)
Here’s the video that came on after the “foot one”.
In the foot video, you had a sweet guy with a disfiguring condition….who was seeking help after a lifetime of pain.
It was hard to watch.
The disfigurement was pretty jarring and….pretty obvious.
It was an external disfiguration.
There’s something kind of disturbing about this one, too.
People are strange.