Excerpts, and philosophy, from an Alaskan's journals

The comments below, from Richard Proenneke back in the late 1960s are astounding to me.
Building his own cabin in the Alaskan wilds with only hand tools, he kept a daily journal.
The fete alone is mind- bending, but then his writing is also magnificent, and his reflections on time and technology and work are more true than ever.

Philosophy from the wilderness. 

Enjoy.

• A man is on his own frequency out here. (about time of day)
• The lake was moon still.
• This country makes a man younger than his birthdays.
• Its ears worked like a pair of scissors and its nose twitched  as if with an itch it couldn't reach. (A snow hare)
• Strange to wake up at 3 in the morning and feel like daylight is being wasted.
• …but risk now and then is good for a man. Makes him come alive and tunes his body to a greater efficiency.
• There's no water in the world like that born in the high country.
• The gates of heaven are near. (In the mountains)
• ...took several sips  from the trickles that made music over the stones.
• I just season simple food with hunger.
• We have become accustomed to work on pieces of things rather than wholes. It is a  way of life with us now. The emphasis is on teamwork. I believe this trend bears much of the blame for the loss of pride in one's work, the kind of pride the old craftsman felt when he started a job and finished it and stood back and admired it. How does a man on an assembly line feel any pride in the final product that rolls out at the other end.
• At my pace, I can notice things... . Nature provides so many things if one has the eye to notice them.   A bubble on the water, an arctic tern's breast tinged with the blue reflections of the lake.
• News never changes much. It's just the same things happening to different people. I would rather experience things happening to me than read about them happening to others. I am my own newspaper and my own radio. I honestly don't believe that man was meant to know everything going on in the world, all at the same time…and the poor guy with all the immediate problems of his own life is burdened with those of the whole world.
• I don't know what the answer is. In time man gets use to almost anything but the problem seems to be that technology is advancing faster than he can adjust to.
• I don't like the look of progress, if that's what it's called.

Two month flurry of pages read--II

The flood of reading started earlier when Vargas recommended the book on beekeeping I read in spring.
I found the author Hanah Nordhaus, had also written a book about Santa Fe, American Ghost, about a haunted house owned by the author's great great grandmother.
I learned much about New Mexico history in this book, and have walked by that house several times, never knowing it. I also found that the story is fictionalized in Paul Horgan's Centuries of Santa Fe. I own that book, pulled it off my New Mexico shelf and read that portion. Ahem. I found an error in this book too. She writes that the Santa Fe Trail originated in Saint Louis. Nope. First trip began in Franklin, Missouri in 1821, and I've been there, when visiting son Derrick and family when they lived in Columbia. 
But still, a valuable read. She also quotes Oklahoman and friend David Dary, from his book Frontier Medicine. And he agrees with me the trail started at Franklin.
Others:
Deep South, Four seasons on the back roads. Paul Theroux. One of my favorite travel writers, especially about trains (The Great Railway Bazaar). This book is an eye opener at the abject poverty in several southern states. He gets off the interstates, meets all kinds of rural people, and notes since the advent of NAFTA, most of the jobs are gone. He's no fan of Clinton.  The poverty he sees ranks with what he sees in Africa. Yet the US gives millions to help those countries, and almost nothing to our own citizens. As a Southerner I had to read this, and its storytelling and facts in the four seasons he travels there from his home in Cape Cod, are deeply disturbing. Some of it is not too far away, because the last state he visits in Arkansas. The only thing I found missing was a mention of the Confederate soldier statues on every  courthouse square. I just thought that was a given.
Across the Cimarron. Jerry Wilson. From my friend and small press owner Jeanetta Calhoun Mish of Mongrel Empire Press. I got halfway  through this novel before being distracted by another book. So now I'll finish it. It's a novel of the Oklahoma land run, and gives you a great idea of what those early settlers' lives were like. And it's a good history book too. 

Me with authors Corbett and Marmon

Laguna Pueblo, a Photographic History. Lee Marmon, Tom Corbett. I bought this at the Western Heritage Awards at the Cowboy Hall in April, as it is the Wrangler Award for photography. Marmon is a 90 something year old Laguna elder who has been photographing that beautiful New Mexico place for decades, and Corbett worked with him. It's full of black and white photography from years back, with up to date description and narrative. Of course I met the authors and had them sign it, though Marmon uses a stamp of his signature due to his age. 
Broken Open. How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow. Elizabeth Lesser. Another book I have not finished, but I've skipped around in it, reading the chapters that most interested me. Much self help and understanding here. 

Reclaiming Conversation. The Power of Talk  in a Digital Age. Sherry Turkle. This book is part of a UCO book club, so I got it free. It's very scholarly and I won't finish it, but it discusses how digital phones are robbing high school students--an others--of empathy. I've read several pages. A recurring theme I just had a chat with our Uber driver this weekend.

The Krasingers

The Western Cattle Trail. Gary and Margaret Kraisinger. Ok, I haven't read much of this handsome book, but I and two other judges picked it as the best non-fiction work for the Wrangler Awards. Benefit of being a judge gets us into the back tie dinner and ceremonies. And we ended up sitting with the authors, two former Kansas school teachers who have devoted their lives to tracking, photographing and mapping, segment by segment of the historic cattle trails. Wow. So I also got their signatures.

The Wrangler winners

Not read, but pictured, Cimarron Crucible, Barbara James Fretwell. I bought this novel becuase it is set in Cimarron county at the far end of the Oklahoma panhandle. It is about a crime and murder of a little girl, and I'm not quite ready to tackle that subject yet.
Except for the gifts, the cattle trail book and the UCO conversation book, I buy all my books at either Full Circle Bookstore, or Best of Books in Edmond.

Two month flurry of pages read-I

I won't ever eat octopus again. 
Actually I've only recently tasted it, but after reading the Soul of an Octopus, sent by my friend and former student  Lauren Vargas of Boston, I discovered a new world of intelligence. Editor that I am, I discovered one small error in it. The author refers to a boat going so many "knots per hour." Ahem. knots are nautical miles per hour. But this is a book of discovery about life on this planet. Some things should not be human food.
That book was one of ten I've completed, two sampled and one half finished in the last two months, bringing my total read so far this year to 13 plus-surpassing my goal of one a month.
I usually read and write reviews of these, but blogging has been blocked, but books have not since early April.
I'm not inclined to comment much on each of these, but you'll note all but three are non fiction, and one of the others is poetry.
Notes:
Coyote America, Dan Flores, "a natural and supernatural history." If you're a Westerner, you know coyotes, but there's more information here than you ever imagined. They're the oldest deity figure in the Americas. they originated in America. They now inhabit all major cities east to west. In spite of man's best efforts, you can't wipe them out. In fact, we're responsible for them spreading everywhere. Lots of science and history here, plus a naturalist's viewpoint.
One Man's Wilderness-An Alaskan Odyssey. Sam Keith/Richard Proenneke. From the journals of a man who built his own cabin with handtools, telling how he built it a step at a time. He  lived alone in the Alaskan wilderness beginning in the late 60s. With his color photographs. He died in his 80s in 2003.
The Highwayman, Craig Johnson. A Longmire novel, set in the Wind River canyon in Wyoming, a ghost story involving highway tunnels. Shorter than most, also. A two-day read. You can look the setting up on Google maps.
The Great Spring. Natalie Goldberg of Writing Down the Bones fame (I have a signed first edition). Lives in New Mexico, a follower of Zen, teaches writing. This is one of those books I like because I can skip around and read the chapters I want first.  About writing, living, and more.
Woe to the Land Shadowing. Red Shuttleworth of Washington State. Won the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum Wrangler Award for poetry this year. I got to meet him and he signed it. It's my annual tradition to buy these books of Western poetry. He and his wife are real westerners, but this book stretches the mind with his sparse views of life in the modern west. 

Out here there's the sky...West Texas

Other people faced long security lines during the weekend of heavy traffic. Not me, near Dickens, Texas, Republic of.

Memorial Day weekend trip to see my brother...the wide open spaces of West Texas...even when it's flat, it's not boring. "Out here there's the sky," Willa Cather.
We had thunderstorms, a cold front and Haboob sand storm, and more thunderheads. Love it.
"I will lift up mine eyes..."--Psalms 121.

Walking with giants...an old newspaperman's and prof's honor

"There were giants in the earth in those days..."   --Genesis 6:4

There still are, and I am pleased and honored to be asked to walk with them when I receive the Milt Phillips award a week from today at the annual Oklahoma Press Association convention in OKC.

Not much of a giant here, just an aging former weekly newspaperman and college professor, who has been blessed.  I am proud to be a newspaperman, a journalist, and blessed to know these Oklahoma journalists, and thousands of students  at OSU and UCO in more than 30 years who have inspired me and kept me thinking young.  It's been my pleasure and fortune to combine newspaper work with teaching. The experience is a two-way street that makes me a better teacher, and a better journalist.

Literal translation of "giants" in the King James version is more like "people of renown, of power, of influence." When I got the phone call from friend and OPA president, and UCO alum Robby Trammell earlier this spring, I was dumbfounded. 

The Phillips award is OPA's highest, and in its long history since being founded in 1979, I will be only the second college professor to be so honored. Previously it went to my last mentor and friend Harry Heath at OSU, who forgot more about journalism than I know. I never dreamed I'd walk in that company.

All the other awards have gone to newspaper people, except one--to the late great Ben Blackstock who built OPA into the national model of press associations, and who was responsible for me coming back to Oklahoma years ago.

I've gone through the list of previous honorees, and know or have met about 25 of them. Many are friends. I am humbled and honored...walking with giants. I'm in tall cotton. 

"My people"

I do know, as I tell  my wife, that I'm most at home at OPA conventions, talking with newspaper people. I tell her, they're "My people."

I didn't know Milt, though I was newspapering (that's a Clark verb) here when he was alive, but I know his son Ted and his grandson Stu, who publishes the only all local news daily in the state. 

It's many miles and years from walking the sidelines covering high school football for the Waurika News-Democrat, and there are too many people to thank. I'll mention only my late partner Donald J. Morrison of Waurika. And obviously my families, who are my main strength, and who are most important.

                   Here's the scoop on the Phillips Award, from the OPA website.

Milt Phillips

The H. Milt Phillips Award is the highest honor given by the Oklahoma Press Association. The OPA Board of Directors selects the recipient based on publishing a high-quality newspaper; contribution to the profession and the newspaper industry; years of service to the community, state and nation in a variety of volunteer activities and strong love and dedication to the family.
The award was established in 1978 by the OPA Board of Directors to recognize those they felt gave the same quality of service to family, community, country and newspapers as had H. Milt Phillips.    
"Honored by many, regarded by others, feared and disliked by the crafty and corrupt," is the way ‘Cluttered Corner’ Phillips was described by those who founded the award.   
"Phillips was the kind of editor all editors should be," they wrote. "He was involved. He gave freely of his love and concern..."   
H. Milt Phillips purchased the Seminole Producer in April 1946. Prior to beginning his newspaper career, he served as department adjutant of the Oklahoma American Legion and as editor of the Oklahoma Legionnaire.   
He served for two years in the Navy during World War II and, after returning home, was appointed by Gov. Robert Kerr to reorganize war veteran services in Oklahoma.   
Phillips became general manager of the Seminole Producer in 1946. In 1950, he and his brother Tom purchased the two newspapers in Wewoka and merged them into one publication. When Tom Phillips was diagnosed with cancer in 1955, the brothers sold the Wewoka paper. Milt Phillips and his son, Ted, then consolidated the two Seminole papers to form the Seminole Daily Producer.   
Phillips was active in the Oklahoma Press Association, holding several offices including president in 1954.   
He was widely known as a civic leader and statewide industrial booster. Phillips was a long-time member of the board of directors of the Oklahoma Historical Society and was the moving force in the historical society’s efforts to microfilm all Oklahoma newspapers.

And here's the list of previous honorees.

2014     Joe Worley, Tulsa World


2013     Ray Lokey, Johnston County Capital-Democrat


2012     Willis Choate, Marietta Monitor


2011     Tim Schnoebelen, The Mooreland Leader


2010     Gloria Trotter, The Countywide & Sun


2009     J. Leland Gourley, Oklahoma City Friday


2008     Tom Muchmore, Ponca City News


2007     Wayne Trotter,  Tecumseh Countywide News


2006     Joe Hancock, Hobart Democrat-Chief


2005     John D. Montgomery, Purcell Register


2004     Ken Reid, Weatherford Daily News

2003     Bob Peterson, Durant Daily Democrat     


2002     Robert E. Lorton, Tulsa World     


2001     Don Ferrell, Lincoln County News     


2000     Dave Story, Claremore Daily Progress     


1999     Jim Mayo, Sequoyah County Times     


1998     Ted Phillips, Seminole Producer     


1997     Ed Burchfiel, Cordell Beacon     


1996     Larry Hammer, Cherokee Messenger & Republican     


1995     Larry Wade, Elk City News     


1994     Joe W. McBride, Jr., Anadarko Daily News     


1993     Francis Langdon, Tonkawa News     


1992     D. Jo Ferguson, Pawnee Chief     


1991     J. L. Jennings, Donrey Newspapers     


1990     Jenkin L. Jones, Sr., Tulsa Tribune     


1989     Dr. Harry Heath, Oklahoma State University, Journalism Professor     


1988     Jim Bellatti, Stillwater NewsPress     


1987     Ben Blackstock, OPA Manager     


1986     Jim Pate, Madill Record     


1985     Bill Ansley, Elk City Daily News     


1984     Milo Watson, Perry Journal     


1983     Bob Lee Kidd, Jr., Poteau News & Sun     


1982     Charles Engleman, Clinton News     


1981     Allan W. Muchmore, Ponca City News     


1980     Ed Livermore, Sr., Sapulpa Herald     


1979     James C. Nance, Purcell Register