I have a scoop “grain” shovel and a sleigh push shovel for moving snow. I mostly use the scoop shovel since you can’t throw snow with a sleigh shovel. Roy was here from Haines, America on his way to Florida and a new hip. He and Brenda got stuck here with us in Juneau for several days during a 4 foot dump of snow. He helped me shovel off the roof, and both of our shovels broke in the process. We repaired them, but I knew I’d better get another set because winter is just starting.

Every store in town was sold out of shovels. Home Depot said maybe they’d get some in at the end of the week, but they weren’t sure.  So I thought I’d better airfreight some down from Anchorage, as another foot of snow was on the way. I found Home Depot there had plenty, so I asked my nieces and nephews and Peace Corps friend Roxanne in Anchorage if they could pick them up for me and get them to Alaska Air Cargo, and all said yes. Since there’s minimum freight charges for freight (e.g., you get charged for 50 lbs whether you send a pound or 50 lbs), I thought I’d put a post on Facebook and Craigslist saying I was going to bring some shovels down and see if anyone else was interested so we all could share the freight charges and make the freight cost per shovel manageable. I looked on Alaska Air Cargo’s freight cost estimator, and, as best I could, guessed what the costs might be based on shovel size and weight. The sleigh shovels were $50 at Home Depot, to which I added $25 in freight cost, and the scoop shovels were $44, to which I added $16, so the totals would be round numbers of $75 and $60. Hopefully I wouldn’t lose my shirt on this.

I put the posts out and the phone started ringing. Immediately. Whenever I post for something like this, I clearly state to call me, and many today just can’t. They’ll send me a message. Which I don’t respond to, because I’ve found over the years that many of those that message don’t follow through. Some people tried messaging first, but then started calling when I didn’t respond, while others followed the directions and called straight away.  In 20 minutes I had orders for 22 sleigh shovels and 5 scoop shovels. I took the posts down as soon as I could – while I was still on the phone with the last caller. I did not expect there to be that many, that quickly, and I didn’t know if the Anchorage family could handle so many shovels in their vehicles, etc.

I put my order in to Home Depot for the shovels, along with a roll of Gorilla Tape to tape shovels together if necessary. The kids could get the shovels right then (Sunday) but couldn’t deliver to air cargo the next day til after work. Roxanne, who just retired, said “I’m Retired”, and said she could get the shovels right now and take them to air cargo the next morning. She won.

She called the next morning from the terminal to say that the agent said if I shipped “General” freight, that it might be 5 to 10 days for it to get on a jet from Anchorage to Juneau. Huh?  I’ve shipped moose meat from Bethel to Anchorage to Juneau, and it has beaten me home!  How could it be this long?  Then I figured – must be others doing what I’m doing. The agent said if I shipped “Priority” it SHOULD go out sooner, but could also get bumped. Again, huh??? Why is the fee 30% more and might not matter?

Roxanne then asked for a manager. Roxanne told the manager she was shipping the shovels to me and a bunch of other Juneauites desparate for them – and not to a business. We needed to get down the shovels down here as we already had 4 feet of snow and another foot was on the way. That was all it took!  The manager was originally from Juneau!  So I paid the Priority rate for the shipment and hoped for the best.

I’d taken everyone’s name and phone number down and told people to expect the shovels Monday night or Tuesday morning, depending on if flights made it in, etc. We got another foot of snow on Monday, but the shovels made it in on the morning flight on Tuesday. Bless that manager!  I’d put chains all around on the truck tires and plowed the driveway so I could leave for the airport. Then I texted the group and said I’d be at airfreight in about 45 minutes if they wanted to get their shovels there, or they could pick them up at our house on Douglas Island when I returned, and took off. It took the full 45 minutes to get to the airport, as I only travel at 30 mph max with chains on, and I ended up taking off the front chains as soon as I got over the bridge into town, as tires on all four chains was too much on the mostly snow free Egan highway to the airport.

When I got to air freight, it was a mob scene. All the head-in parking was full, and now there were trucks parallel parked on either side of the roadway in front of the freight office. I thought, crap!  Everyone is here picking up freight like me, and there is going to be a line out the door. But when I got inside, there was no line. Just one other customer. As I waited with my agent to pull up my order, a man came in and asked, “Are you Mark?”  “Yep”, I said. Then it hit me: all those people lined up along the road were there to get their shovels!  All but one of them beat me to the airport.

I paid for the freight and pretty soon, people were helping me open the boxes and then throwing cash at me or taking down my venmo information until I finally took a breath and realized I better start keeping track of all this. I stopped handing out shovels for a second until I got everyones name and their order and marked down if they gave me cash or venmo. Within a few minutes, everyone had their shovels and it was like it was Christmas and I was Kris Kringle. People seemed so relieved.

When I got home, I contacted those who wanted to get their shovels at the house. They, too, showed up within minutes. Pretty soon, all the shovels were gone, except for one I delivered today to a woman who didn’t dare drive her little car out the snow covered North Douglas highway.

I added up the cost of the shovels and the freight. I collected $1,320 for shovels and an additional $614 for freight. My freight charges were only $600, so I thought- crap, I’ve got a surplus of $14. I sort of felt guilty about having $14 extra dollars. But WAIT!  The gorilla tape was $12!  I can live with a $2 surplus. Which, of course, won’t be at all once I compensate Roxanne with some kind of gift, as she’d never take money.

The most gratifying part of the whole thing was that one of the new shovel owners sent me a message later thanking me for getting the shovels down here, and especially thanking me for not taking advantage of the situation and gouging people with the cost of the shovels. Nice.

Now, time to get back to the shoveling.

Today I’m enjoying one of the things my Dad passed on to me, and that’s putting up firewood. It’s a year-round, part-time commitment to buck and split wood (still by hand in my case, for as long as I can), then stack it to dry. I like to get at least a 2 or 3 year dry on our wood here, since it’s so damp all year. Part of the satisfaction in the process is when I start pulling firewood sticks off the pile at the start of woodburning season and it’s nice and dry. I could probably get away with a 1 year dry, but then I wouldn’t be out cutting wood as often, and that’s part of the addiction, I guess.

I remember when my Dad started getting firewood. He’d started a new job in his 50’s that didn’t require him to be at work all day, everyday, like it did when he owned the Olean House Restaurant for a couple decades. I was about 13 I’d guess. Like most of the old houses in Bolivar, ours was about a century old, big, poorly insulated, and heated by natural gas. Mom and Dad had insulation blown into the walls and the attic to better hold the heat in. Then Dad had a double 55 gallon barrel wood stove built. The stove was in our dirt floor basement, with a chimney going up the side of the house, and the heat from the stove simply went up the ducting already in place for the gas heat system in the house.

Dad loved getting firewood. Mainly because it got him into the woods again, where he hadn’t spent much time since he was a kid growing up hunting and fishing in Blasedell. When we co-owned the restaurant, he might get in a fishing trip to the Georgian Bay in Canada once a year to my Aunt Ruth and Uncle George’s cabin, but that was the extent of his outdoor fun. Now he went to the woods every chance he got. He also formed new friendships with it – all of them outside his earlier circle of mostly restaurant folks and AA. He traded firewood for a new chainsaw from Dave Sisson, who had started a Stihl chainsaw dealership in town, and went is now one of the biggest dealers of all kinds of small machinery in the whole area. Then Dad became friends with a small time logger, who would sell Dad the tops of the hardwood trees he harvested for $25 each. After my brother and I grew up and left the area, he got a firewood cutting buddy close to his own age and they helped each other.

Early on, we split wood with a “sledge and a wedge”. It was kind of tedious work but satisfying, and I liked it. Dad eventually got a wood splitter, which was much easier for him to use, and allowed him to split enough wood to sell to pay the expenses for getting in his own wood. That lead to more friendships with those customers. If I was home and splitting wood for him, I still split by hand, as I found the wood splitter too tedious and slow, even though it may actually have been faster than splitting by hand. And of course, could split all day. I don’t get the same satisfaction using a wood splitter, and still continue to split by hand. Splitting by hand makes the whole process last longer, and that’s a good thing. I’m not in a hurry to get it done, and it’s satisfying to see this year’s wood stack get a little higher and deeper each day. My right shoulder is starting to argue with me about splitting by hand, so I’ve learned to split with my left shoulder in the lead, and I’ll keep at it as long as I can.

Like my Dad, firewood has spawned friendships for me, too. Several years ago, a  neighbor down the road – in his 80’s at the time – had a load of rounds dumped in his driveway, awaiting splitting. I had a full woodshed, and I was still itching to split more wood, so I asked him if he needed his wood split to keep me in a favorite exercise. He said “Mark, I can’t believe you just asked that. I recently had my shoulder repaired. When the doctor said what are you going to do now that your shoulder is repaired and rehabed, I said split fire wood!  The doctor replied that you can never split wood with that shoulder again.”  The surgery may have made his shoulder better, but the shoulder could not withstand wood splitting.  So, now I had more firewood splitting to look forward to. Splitting is by far my favorite part. Bucking up rounds to split and stacking the split wood are just necessary evils to allow me to do the splitting. So when my neighbor said – “all I want you to do is to split the wood – I’ll stack it”, well that just made the job all the better for both of us. It would usually take me 3 or 4 sessions of splitting to finish all of his rounds, then I’d be done til the next year.

Then, one year I saw the rounds and told my neighbor I’d be down to split, and forgot about it for a few days. Next thing I know I see him down there splitting wood!  What are you doing, I asked?  You know you’re not supposed to split wood with your repaired shoulder. “I figured out how to split one handed with my other arm!” he said. And I totally got it!  I left him to his devices. Now he uses a wood splitter, and still putting up his own firewood. I see him at the pool now that I’ve started swimming over the past year, and he’s sort of my model of how to take yourself into your 90’s and still get after it.

We’re in a real doozy of a cold snap in Juneau. The coldest for the longest period I can remember. There’s not many things as satisfying as sitting next to your wood stove with the fan on top going full speed and lots of dry firewood next to it, at the ready when the stove runs low. When I come in from the cold at 0 degrees with the wind blowing and that blast of heat hits me when as I walk in the door, it’s a good feeling. I’ve often wondered how I’d fare if I had to live in a warm climate or I was unable to get in firewood the part of the year when I’m not hunting or fishing or trapping or berry picking or putting up kelp or sea asparagus or smoking and canning stuff. Hopefully, I won’t get to find out.

Well, I thought things might go downhill this morning. I loaded the truck before dawn and was pulling up onto the road so I could turn around when the boat trailer came off the truck. Huh. I thought maybe the ball hitch popped off, even though I have a security pin in place for it. Nope. The pin holding the 3 way ball hitch into the receiver was gone. Not sure how that happened. Looked all over for it and could not find it. I was about to head to the shed for a bolt when I thought – look around the truck. Maybe you gotta spare. Yep!  Right in the door pocket. I put the hitch back in the receiver,  slid the blot through, and used a zip tie for a security pin as I didn’t see an extra one of those. I got hooked back up to the boat, loaded up, and drank coffee til I could see dawn coming before I headed the short drive to the launch ramp.

Not a single boat at the launch ramp. I launched the boat, and as I idled out, I realized I forgot to take out the shock abosorber under the engine. So, back to the dock and reach down and get it off. Then, off we go.

I talked friends at a birthday party last night, and they said 4 boats had been hunting one of the islands I’d thought about going to, so I decided to go to a nearby island to a spot I’ve not hunted yet this year, but a place where I’ve taken several deer in past. Charlie got a nice deer here, too. I arrived not too long after sunrise. I anchored the skiff in the kelp. I’ve had the anchor drag in the sandy bottom closer to the beach outside the kelp and then come back at the end of the day with the boat beached, more than once. I also used a 10 lb cannon ball tied to the anchor line just after the anchor chain to provide more drag. I launched the porta bote and rowed to shore.

Once on the beach, I offloaded my ditch bag, gun case, pack and cork boots.  I pulled the skiff up above the tide line and tied it to a snag, then took my gun out of the guncase, unhooked the sling from the gun case, ran it through my life jacket and under a boat seat, rehooked it to the eye. I walked over to the bank and swapped out my regular xtra tuffs for the cork boots – which are xtra tuffs with golf spikes on the bottom. I stashed the regular boots under a log to keep them dry. Next, I got a compass bearing from my Onx app to my first hunting spot, and then pulled out the magnetic compass around my neck and lined it up with the bearing. I put my deer call round my neck, and off we go.

I was up and over the first hill, across the creek, and up the next little hill in no time. This used to take my maybe 30 minutes with my bad hip. Now it was more like 15 or less. As I crested the second hill, and about 20 yards from my first calling spot, I look to my left. And 10 yards away, all I see is a deer head and horns. I try to non-chalantly chamber a round and pull of the scope covers while watching the deer and the deer watching me. All that did was bring the deer in closer to me. He was waiting for me and now coming at me, perhaps to see if I was another buck he needed to run off, or a doe needing his services.  What happened next I don’t exactly remember. I know I fired and missed. The big buck took a couple high bounds away from me. I whistled, and incredibly, the buck stopped and turned broadside. I squeezed the trigger. Nothing. I worked the bolt to discharge the spent shell and chamber a new one. The buck was still there. I aimed again and down he went. A perfect shot, right under the chin. He was gone before he hit the ground. No time for me to think.  I blew the call again to see if any more bucks were closeby, and waited a short time to catch my breath. Then I walked over to the buck. Wow. A four point. I didn’t know that til now. I think only my second one ever.  Surprisingly, the body wasn’t as big as the big fork horn buck I got on Prince of Wales Island proper several days ago. It was 920 am.

I marked the deer on my Onx, duffed my pack, and eased down another 20 yards to my calling log – my original destination this morning. I called there for 40 minutes. The first call, a doe came in silently behind me. She stopped for a short time, then kept going downhill behind me. She didn’t seem nervous. That was the only deer that came in. I think she was the girlfriend of the buck. The buck was pretty odiferous and definitely in the rut.

About 10 am, I got to work. There was a nice tree to hang the buck nearby. I got my homemade hoist out and tossed it over the tree branch. I dragged the buck up to the tree and was about to tie the antlers to the hoist when I realized – whoops. Need to remove the innards first. I took the buck back down hill a tad to a hummock I could put the middle of the deer on so the guts could gravity-fall downhill. First, I cut off the tarsal glands at the hind leg knees. I do this so I won’t grab it otherwise and get the stink of the gland on my hands and transfer it to the meat. And this boy was stinky. I got out the butt out tool to free up the intestine at the anus. Then removed the insides. I found the heart and removed that, removed the membrane around it, and put it on some clean forest duff to cool.

I’ve been having such a hard time trying to use my hoist. The hoist works great – halibut ganion is the ticket for being able to grip the line, and the stiff ganion line holds a knot well because it’s course, but it still slides through the pulleys great. The problem was pulling up the deer from the hind legs by using a stick between the hind legs to pull it up. The stick would either break or slip out and I’d have to start over. If I had the hide part way off, I’d also  have some forest duff on the meat. As I get older, sometimes simple things I should have thought of don’t come to me so quick. And this was one of them. After the last deer fiasco, it finally struck me: hoist from the head, not the hind legs, you Dumb Ass!

Oh, did it work so much better. I lowered the lower pulley of the hoist to the ground, and tied on the antlers. Then up the deer went. I made a cut under the hide all the way around the neck, then pulled the deer up a bit higher. I removed the lower hock on each leg. Then made a cut under the hide from the neck all the way down the spine to the butt, then a cut from the neck down the belly to the sternum opening, then made cuts from the front knees to the belly cut, and from the hind knees to the tail. Now I started to work the hide from the neck downward. It took a bit to free up the hide around the neck, but once I got it going, it all was off in a few minutes. And the deer rotates so much better on the line from the head than the hind legs.

My old friend Pat in Kodiak showed me that as you work the hide away from the body, to cut holes with your knife in the hide right next to the meat, and then put your thumbs in the holes for leverage to pull the hide down further, then repeat. That was my first deer hunt. On Kodiak. Seems like last week. But it surely wasn’t. Pat and I are the last living friends from that trip.

Now for the real magic with the head up technique. I unfurled a full body deer game bag from my pack, and brought it up under the hind quarters of the deer. When I got to the front quarters, I tucked those into the bag, and pulled the bag as far up the neck as I could. Then I put my pack under the deer and got the deer started into the pack. I let the hoist down a bit and got more of the deer into the bag so now the bag would stay vertical on its own. I let the hoist down more, and now the whole deer was in the bag. I used my new “pelvic” saw to cut off the neck just below the bullet hole, and cinched the top of the pack lining over the deer. I untied the head from the hoist, and set it under some brush, near the hide, as a respectful final resting place. I’m not much on taking the antlers. A picture works for me and doesn’t add any weight to my pack.

Now it’s after 11 am. It hasn’t rained all day, and is just plain pleasant out. I’ve got the rest of the day to get to the beach. I take a compass reading on Onx, match it to the magnetic compass, and start down. This is where I’ve spent some unnecessary time getting back to the beach with a full load of deer on my back, wanderng off the route, and I didn’t want it to happen again. I checked my compass regularly and stayed on route. I did fall a couple times, got turtled, and had to get out of the pack, hoist the pack up on something about waist high or higher, and then shoulder it again. One time was because I sank down into some muck, couldn’t extract my foot in time to catch my balance, and tipped over. The second time I was moving downhill, and the big tree I was planning too much on to be my hand hold to steady me was rotted, my arm went right through the side of the tree and into the trunck, and down I went again. Otherwise, I actually made a straighter shot back to the punt than when I went in, and came out right where I needed to. It was 1230 pm.

I walked to the water’s edge and duffed my pack. Then sheathed my gun in its case, and took the gun case and ditch bag down and put them next to the pack. I changed out my boots, and dragged the punt down to the water, put in the gear, launched the boat, and it was an enjoyable row back to the boat. What a day.