As she takes her morning bath, Ada Lakshmi is adored from half-a-world away; Vasanthi's wonderful coffee; Suji's first wedding gift

All those gathered around grin in adoration as they look at the computer screen... Bhanu, Ravi, Sujitha, and Murthy. Bhanu and Ravi are Sujitha's parents, Murthy her uncle. 

The unfinished tattoo on Sujitha's arm contains the names, "Anil" and "Soundu," framed between angel wings. When finished, a portrait of Soundarya and Anil will also be framed within.

And this is who they so adore - Ada Lakshmi, the daughter of Murthy and Vasanthi's son, Vivek and my niece Khena - the two people who took an American family and an Indian family and with their love made us one family - that family love extends also into Apache and Navajo. Although they have not met, Sujitha has connected with Lavina and everybody on Facebook.

Ada is taking her bath at the family home in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Every day, Murthy, Vasanthi, Ada Lakshmi, Vivek and Khena get together like this over a Google connection.

Khena and Ada Lakshmi, after the bath.

Have I mentioned Vasanthi's coffee? If you have never had south Indian coffee prepared by one so skillful as Vasanthi... it is... wow! I just cannot come up with the proper adjectives to do it justice. She does not make it with water but with milk. It is smooth, it is rich, it is... wonderful.

Ganesh, son of Ravi and Bhanu, makes a coffee toast.

The little girl in the picture on the wall behind is Vaidehi, Vasanthi and Murthy's other granddaughter, from their son Vijay and his wife, Vidya. We had dinner at their house a couple of nights ago. As soon as I get the chance, I will make a post and all who view it will see that Vaidehi is an energetic, enthusiastic and mischievous girl.

Truly, she is.

Suji and her coffee. People here have their coffee in tiny cups... usually even tinier than this one. Last time I was here, Murthy gave me a set of tiny Indian cups. When I am home, I usually have my morning coffee in a tiny Indian cup - both because I love the cup and to help keep me from drinking too much.

Here, Vasanthi keeps a larger, American cup, just for me, and fills it at least twice, maybe thrice, each morning and then again in the afternoon and also at night. I drink every drop.

To drink Vasanthi's coffee is kind of like taking a short trip to heaven.

After her trip from London to Mumbai, Pune and then here, Suji was left a little tired. Her brother gives her a place to lay her head, but, being a brother, teases her a little bit.

After I returned to the US following the wedding of Vivek and Khena, Soundarya sent me a link to an online album she kept of pictures of family, friends, cows, puppies, dogs and bugs. I was taken by that album. There was tremendous love in the photos... so much love... plus a good dose of fun and mischief.

Right now, the groom, Manoj, or "Manu," remains in Pune. The bride and groom will not see each other again until the wedding, which will begin March 12 and continue on into the afternoon of March 13, with many rituals to follow over the next week. It is customary for an aunt to give the bride her first wedding gift.

So Aunt Vasanthi does just that.

Then all present followup with their blessings and well-wishes.

Among her gifts - what will be a most beautiful saree. After I spend a little time in India and then return to the US, I kind of miss seeing the beautiful clothing Indian women adorn themselves in every day. 

During my first two visits here, no one in the family had a car - they all got around by motorbike, bus, taxi and auto-rickshaw. Now Ganesh has a car - a cute one, made by Tata. At $4000, it is billed as the cheapest car in the world and it gets better than 60 miles per gallon. Ganesh just got it. Tiny as it is, even the back seats have more leg room than many American cars I have ridden. There is not much room for luggage, though. Like a Volkswagen Beetle, the engine is in the rear.

I love it. I want one. But they don't sell them in the US.

I want one!

Ganesh drives off with his father and sister and mother, Bhanu, who waves from the back seat.

Tonight, I will shift from Murthy and Vasanthi's house to Ravi and Bhanu's.

I should note that I am keeping this blog on Alaska time. So, this will post at 6:10 PM Sunday, but here in Bangalore it is 8:40 AM, Monday.

Popanna - the cat who sealed our friendship

As I have noted, when Soundarya and I first met, the bond between us was instantaneous. I felt it just like that. But to feel a bond upon meeting someonbe does not necessarily mean that you will then move on to strike up a friendship that will last and keep you together in regular communication for all the days that both of you live on this earth.

Perhaps that would never happened, had it not been for this cat that we happened upon after Sandy asked me to walk with her following the wedding feast of Vivek and Khena. I won't tell the story again right now, because if you are not familiar with it and want to know, you can read it right here.

So, I was wondering how the cat in the linked story was doing these days. Was it even still alive?

I wanted to know, so I set out to see if I could find it again. I wasn't really quite certain where to go, as I had never before been through the neighborhood when Sandy walked me through it and I had just followed where she walked without imagining that I would ever have any need to retrace our steps. So, believing I would recognize the gate and the house, I set out into the general area where I figured it had to be.

I found it, just like that. The house and gate had been painted, the "no parking" sign had been removed and some iron lattice work had been added to the top of the gate, but still when I saw it I felt certain it had to be it.

Then, in conformation, the door to the house opened and the woman the cat had been with stepped out. I recognized her instantly. I asked her if she remembered me coming there in 2007 with a young woman who she had let hold her cat? She frowned, and said, "no." Then, the cat stepped through the door and came alongside her.

"Yes!" I said. "That's the cat! It was 2007! We came in 2007!"

No, the lady shook her head emphatically. Sometimes, in India, it can be a little difficult to know if someone is shaking their head "no" or if they are agreeing with you and saying everything is good, but this time I knew she was shaking her head "no."

"Yes...." Then she let me know that she did not speak English. She looked a bit frightened, so I left my camera hanging. I did not want to frighten her worse by raising it.

The next afternoon, Sujitha, her parents Ravi and Banu and her brother, Ganesh, came over for a mid-afternoon lunch and then stayed late into the evening to visit and socialize. I led Sujitha to the house, so that she could talk to the woman for me.

Once spoken to in her own language, the woman became very friendly. She got the cat - Popanna, who wanted only to run and hide. So she held it for just a few seconds on the motorbike.

We visited for quite awhile, me understanding none of the conversation, but afterwards, Sujitha told me that the woman, whose name I never did get, was like Soundu in that she was always rescuing animals in distress.

Now, although I had a 12 image post planned for tonight, I must stop. This intenet connection I have makes wild swings. It took 17 minutes to load the first photograph - about one to load the second. In the meantime, my battery had gone just about dead. I cannot get to the charger at this moment.

I must go to bed. After I get up, I will get the charger and see if the upload will go fast enough for me to post the remaining images in a new story.

The battery did not die yet, so I decided to see if I could get the cat from across the street up. Sure enough, I did. This is Sheila. Her people thought he was girl when they got him as a kitten eight months ago, but he turned out to be a boy. They did not want to confuse him by changing his name, so he remains, "Sheila."

A Boy Named Sheila. I think Johnny Cash wrote a song about this cat, once.

Logbook entry: Phoenix to Bangalore - the LAX-Dubai leg: faces float before me, Stewardess Jennifer

When the life of someone you love and care deeply about is suddenly taken, you find it impossible to believe. You know its true, but even so you do not believe it. Then you go through a hard but necessary process. You gather with others who loved this person and together you mourn. You view the body; you attend the funeral and the burial, or the disposal of the ashes.

Finally, you not only know, you believe it.

When Soundarya followed the death of her husband Anil with her own, I did not get to go through that process. Despite my knowledge, I never came to believe that it actually happened. I knew it, but I didn't believe. There was a certain part of my mind that steadfastly held to the notion that, somehow, she would become whole and real and physical and would once again walk upon the same world as do I. I saw and experienced nothing that succeeded in fully dispelling this notion from my soul.

I come to India this time with three purposes. It is far too late for me ever to attend the funeral or observe the return of Soundarya's ash to the sacred waters into which she followed Anil, but something inside me needed to come back to this place where I first met her in 2007, then returned in 2009 with Melanie to attend her wedding to Anil. At the very least, I need to at least look upon those waters.

Then, maybe, I will not only know but believe.

The second purpose is to attend and document the formal Hindu wedding of Sujitha to Manoj. Regular readers know Sujitha, Soundarya's sister and Aunt to my three grandsons, whom she loves so much that at Christmas she sent the money that purchased the electric, HO scale, Thomas the Train, that has appeared on this and my original blog.

Sujitha especially loves little Jobe.

Over the past 16 months, despite the fact that half-a-globe curved away between us, Niece Suji and I have closely bonded and have been there for each other.

So I wanted to be in India now for her and Manu, when they, literally, tie the knot - part of Hindu ceremony.

The third purpose is to become just a bit more familar with and to better understand this complex and incomprehensible place called India. I never imagined I would have any kind of attachment or relationship with India at all, until August of 2007, when my niece Khena, second daughter of my sister Mary Ann, married Vivek, cousin to Soundarya, Sujitha and their brother Ganesh, here in Bangalore.

From the day of the wedding forth, they, and all their family in India, have become my family and I have felt a continual connection to them. So, after the wedding of Manoj and Sujitha, scheduled to take place in Pune on the 13th, I will go touring with Vivek's parents, Murthy and Vasanthi, who never give me a chance to get hungry. If she were to move to Anchorage and open a South Indian restaurant, I believe Vasanthi would be an overnight hit and could grow rich, because that is the kind of cook she is: Superb!

So we are going to roam about Western India for a week, where we will have to substitute restaurant cooking for her cooking. I don't think it will be quite as good, but I still believe it will be excellent. And I know that Vasanthi will still make certain that I never get hungry - no, not even for one minute. 

And yet, full though I always am when I am with them, when the food is placed before me, I say, it is too much, but then I eat and cannot stop myself from eating even more.

This is the route the Emirates Airlines jet followed in the 15 hours plus that it took to fly me on the Los Angeles to Dubai leg of the three leg trip from Phoenix to Bangalore. Throughout every minute of the flight, whether I was wide awake, hardly able to keep my eyes open, suspended between wake and sleep or actually into a dream, I continually saw the face of Soundarya and also that of Anil passing before me; sometimes separately, sometimes together.

Continually. Soundarya - her vision face so filled with the same eager zeal for life, tinged with deep hurt, that it expressed when it had existed in flesh. Anil - his vision face appeared somehow sweet, innocent. In life, he had a handsome, rugged, look about him and he could sometimes lose his temper, but there was something sweet and innocent about him.

All three legs of the flight would add up to over 25 hours - then add to that the three hour drive from LeeAnn's home in Hon Dah, nearly three hours on the ground in Phoenix and a good three hours from the time I landed in Bangalore until my head hit the pillow at Murthy and Vasanthi's house and it was a pretty long day.

And now that day is now more than three days past. For reasons that would take too much time to explain, I have not been able to blog until now. I thought about just skipping any account of the flight altogether and instead to jump right into the present, but, this is the "Logbook" and the whole idea is that when I travel, I make a Logbook entry.

So this is it.

This is Jennifer of Ghana, stewardess. We spoke for a few minutes when we wound up standing beside each other as we waited for the doors to open so that we passengers could debark in Dubai. She has a friend in Ghana who lived for a time in Alaska.

I did not ask her where, because I have discovered that sometimes when you meet people far from Alaska, they do not know the answers to this kind of question. Alaska is Alaska, and sometimes, when you travel in this part of the world, people have only the vaguest idea of Alaska, if they have any idea at all.

I wondered how a woman from Ghana got the name Jennifer, but I didn't ask.

Joe and Mikayla in a tree

I am too exhausted to blog right now. And in just eight hours, I must get up, drive away from this house, head to Phoenix and board a plane that will take me to Los Angeles, from where I will fly to Dubai and then Bangalore. I will set this to post at 10:00 AM tomorrow, Alaska time.

It might be awhile before I blog again, because I am going to be traveling for a long time and then I hope to do some sleeping. I do have at least three picture stories I shot here within my wife's White Mountain Apache Reservation that I plan to post - maybe when I am in India. Maybe not until I get back. 

This is Joe and Mikayla at the beginning of the cookout we had up Carrizo Canyon today. I am still downloading the disk, I'm too tired to edit it, but this was right up front, so I grabbed it.

CUL8R!

The movie Big Miracle and what I witnessed in real life, part 15: epilogue: Malik finds two carcasses upon a beach; gray whale flukes; even as he lived, so departed Malik

The following summer, a number of gray whale carcasses lay on the beaches north and south of Barrow. About twenty miles to the southwest, Malik found two together and believed these might be Crossbeak and Bonnet. He reported his find, then returned to the site with NSB Wildlife biologists Craig George and Geoff Carroll, Marie Carroll and the Carroll's one-year old son, Quinn. I came along. One carcass lay on the beach, completely out of the water. The tail of the second lay on the beach, its body extended at an angle outward into the water. The biologists took measurements and studied the condition of the whales. The one lying on the beach measured twenty-six feet in length, seven inches off of the in-water length estimate they had made for Bonnet. Malik knelt at its head. A fond smile crossed his face as he gave the dead whale a pat.

After comparing the skin damage and noting the distance the carcass had been pushed up the beach, the biologists concluded this was not Bonnet, but rather a whale that had likely died the year before the rescue. The other dead whale measured more than forty feet, compared to the thirty-foot estimate the biologists had made for Crossbeak. Here Craig George measures the bigger whale.

Many whale watchers venture each winter to Mexico's Sea of Cortez to observe gray whales. Following the rescue, the call went out for people to look for Crossbeak and Bonnet. The wounds they had suffered in Barrow would have turned to scars that should have been easily identifiable to those who knew what to look for. No sightings were ever reported.

Some people have told me that the observations in the Sea of Cortez are thorough enough that if the whales had shown up there, they would likely have been spotted and identified.

Still, the ocean is a big place and as big as whale is, by comparison it is a small thing. So, when it comes to the two gray whales, people are free to believe whatever they want: the whales swam free and lived; the whales died, if not at Barrow, somewhere enroute.

Whatever happened, it does not seem that there will ever be any way to verify it.

At the moment, I have no further funding to continue Uiñiq. It feels to me like my days making that magazine are over. So far, the magazine has had three incarnations, so I can't say for certain. I have thought this before and then, sooner or later, I have been asked to do an issue, or a few issues. Maybe at some, someone with the authority to fund it will want me to make Uiñiq again and if that should happen, I think it almost a certainty that I would - provided that the opportunity came with the necessary amount of freedom.

Uiñiq is one of the great loves of my life - not because of the paper and ink that it is made of, but because it has given me the opportunity to become somewhat familiar with a climatically harsh but fantastic piece of the globe, and to walk and boat and snowmachine among rugged, smart, and good people who have allowed me to document their way of life and who I have been fortunate to have been befriended and even adopted by.

The first incarnation began at the end of 1985 and lasted through the third quarter of 1996, when circumstance forced me to walk away from Uiñiq, and not without tears.

My love and ties to Barrow and all the villages of the Arctic Slope remained strong and the following summer, 1997, with a little help from the school district, I found my way back for a short visit. During that visit, Roy Ahmoagak invited me to go on an ugruk (bearded seal) hunt with him and his cousin, Richard Glenn. 

As we motored through the July icebergs of the Chukchi Sea, a gray whale suddenly lifted its flukes up in front of us...

...

... please note the scars on the tail... many of these were likely made by the teeth of killer whales, perhaps some by the claws and teeth of polar bears, others by sharks - all members of the gantlet that Crossbeak and Bonnet would have had to swim through...

...

In early October of 2002, I received a phone call from Roy Ahmaogak, who spoke in a subdued and hurt voice. He informed me that  a bowhead had been taken near Barrow. As always, the hunters attached a line to the whale and several boats hooked up to tow it back to shore. Somehow, the boat that Malik was in got in a tangle and flipped upside down. The others in the boat escaped, but Malik got trapped beneath. Before his fellow whalers, Roy included among them, could right the boat and save him, Malik drowned.

He died as he lived - whale hunting. Shortly afterward, I was contacted by the Arctic Slope Regional Corporation and asked to make a large, framed, print of this photo for display at the funeral. The photo now hangs in the Iñupiat Heritage Center - Barrow's museum. I badly wanted to go to the funeral, but it came at one of those moments of famine in the feast-and-famine cycle that I live through as a freelance photographer. I did not have plane fare. The fact that I missed the funeral is one of my great regrets. Normally, a body will be transported from the funeral site to the graveyard in the bed of a pickup, but little Malik - the Little Big Man, Ralph Ahkivgak, was so beloved by the people of Barrow, whom he had served, taught and helped to feed throughout his life, they spontaneously hoisted his coffin onto their shoulders and carried him to the cemetery, where he was laid to rest in the permafrost.

Malik - the man who could watch a whale dive, then direct the crew to a certain spot and that is where the whale would rise. Malik, who befriended three gray whales stuck in the ice off Barrow and became instrumental in the effort to rescue them. Craig George said this about Malik's role in the rescue:

"Malik seemed to have a rapport with the whales. I can tell you one thing I learned. We had gray whale biologists here, all kinds of people, but Malik was the one to listen to.”

"He was looked up to as a man with great knowledge and he taught a lot of young guys," said Roy Ahmaogak. "He meant a lot to Barrow and a lot more to me, because I knew we were in good hands when we were with Malik. We didn't need any gps or technology, because he knew the ocean very well."

One day in the summer after the rescue, I stopped by Malik's tiny house in Browerville for a visit. He told me that when I had seen and heard him talking to the gray whales during the rescue, what I hadn't heard was the gray whales - but he did hear them. Just as he spoke to them, they spoke to him. “‘Malik, we’re scared,’ they tell me. ‘Malik, we’re scared. Help us, Malik. Help us.’ I tell them, ‘Don’t worry. It’s going to be all right. We’ll get you to the lead. You’ll be safe there.’”

And in the eyes of the late, great, whale hunter and whale rescuer, I saw tears.

Complete series index:

Part 1: Context bowhead hunt

Part 2: Roy finds the whales; Malik

Part 3: Scouting trip

Part 4: NBC on the ice

Part 5: To rescue or euthanize

Part 6: Governor Cowper, ice punch, chainsaw holes

Part 7: Malik provides caribou for dinner

Part 8: CNN learns home is sacred place

Part 9: World's largest jet; Screw Tractor

Part 10: Think like a whale

Part 11: Portrait: Billy Adams and Malik

Part 12: Onboard Soviet icebreakers

Part 13: Malik walks with whales, says goodbye

Part 14: Rescue concludes

Part 15: Epilogue