Rebecca Writes

As promised, here’s the photo of my Grandpa Vogt dressed up for Pioneer Days. I think he grew the goatee just for this occasion. I have this hung on my dining room wall, along with the photo from last week. This picture, like the previous one, was probably shot in the sixties.

Unfortunately, when the kids were little, one of them touched this photo with a very dirty finger and that bit of our family history is there for you to see, too.

Photo by Andrew Stark 

I scanned this photo to use yesterday and then decided I was too tired to finish things up and actually post it, so I’m posting it today. This is a photo of my Grandpa Vogt, done a little bit like the more famous photograph, Grace. I posted this once a long time ago on the old blog, but I didn’t have a scanner then, so I took a photo of the photo. Using a scanner works a lot better.

I have this photograph framed and hanging on my dining room wall along with several other old family photos. My grandpa was a Kansas wheat farmer; notice the working-man hands. Next week I’ll post another photo of Grandpa Vogt, one showing him dressed up for Pioneer Days.

 
Until I came north, everything I knew about ravens, I learned in Sunday school. (Okay, in Sunday school and from Edgar Allan Poe.) We had their close cousins, the crows, where I grew up in Minnesota, but I don’t remember ever seeing a raven. According to this map, there should have been some there, but I guess I missed them. 

It’d be impossible for a child to grow up in the Yukon and not notice the ravens. They are here and they are not silent.

Northerners tend to have a love-hate relationship with these big black birds. If we don’t lock the lids tight on our garbage cans, the packaging from our food waste will be spread all over the neighbourhood by trash-picking ravens. Can you see that the one in the photo (above left) is carrying a scavenged treasure? Once I saw a raven fly off with a whole package of cheddar cheese from a bag of groceries left in the back of a pickup truck in the supermarket parking lot. I’d like to have heard the conversation in that kitchen when it came time to make the grilled cheese sandwiches for supper.

 
It’s because ravens seem to relish life that we love them. When it comes to ravens, bird-brained isn’t stupid, and some of that raven brain power is used purely for amusement. Ravens love to swirl and roll in the air currents near the edge of the escarpment rimming town, performing stunt-pilot-worthy aerobatics displays. I have it on good authority that ravens have been seen sliding down snowbanks just for the fun of it. Another favorite pastime is playing “Nonny-nonny-nonny, you can’t catch me!” with my dog. Frankly, in an I.Q. competition between my dog and a raven, I’m not sure my dog would come out on top.

Their extreme cleverness shows itself in their hoarding behaviour. Sometimes ravens will store bits of stolen food in little caches so they can come back for it later, and studies have shown that they find their stockpiles again because they remember where they put them. They also spy on other ravens to see where they are burying their goodies, so that when the opportunity arises, the neighbour’s stash can be raided. Sometimes a hoarding raven will only pretend to bury food in order to throw the thieving spies and raiders off the trail. You might say that ravens are the greedy geniuses of the bird world.

But let’s get back to what I learned about ravens in Sunday school, way before any real-life raven encounters.  I learned, first of all, that it is God who feeds them.

Who provides for the raven its prey,
when its young ones cry to God for help,
and wander about for lack of food? (Job 38:41)

That’s a rhetorical question and we’re supposed to answer, “God does.” If you need further confirmation, see Psalm 147:9 and Luke 12:24.

God intentionally provides prey and other goodies for the ravens. Yes, they dumpster dive and trash pick and forage for berries and scavenge for carrion and hunt small rodents. They even eat carcass-feeding maggots and beetles. (How’s that for opportunistic snacking?) And this is how God  feeds them.

According to Wikipedia, the raven’s “diet may vary widely with location, season and serendipity,” which my dictionary defines as “the occurrence or development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way.” It’s not quite serendipity, of course, if God feeds them, is it? But if we changed “by chance” to “by God’s intent” in that definition, we’d have a fairly good definition of providence. God intentionally controls the occurrence and development of events with a happy and beneficial result for the ravens.

So by providence, it is, that the ravens are fed. I leave the lid on my garbage can unfastened and it is God’s provision for them. The unguarded bag of groceries in the back of the pick up? Providence for the birds. Road kill? God’s good gift to the hungry young ones. Ravens have enough brain power to devise clever schemes for keeping their food finds all to themselves. This, as well, is God’s providence for them. All these things are good gifts from God who feeds the ravens.

Now Elijah the Tishbite, of Tishbe in Gilead, said to Ahab, “As the Lord, the God of Israel, lives, before whom I stand, there shall be neither dew nor rain these years, except by my word.” 2 And the word of the Lord came to him: 3 “Depart from here and turn eastward and hide yourself by the brook Cherith, which is east of the Jordan. 4 You shall drink from the brook, and I have commanded the ravens to feed you there.” 5 So he went and did according to the word of the Lord. He went and lived by the brook Cherith that is east of the Jordan. 6 And the ravens brought him bread and meat in the morning, and bread and meat in the evening, and he drank from the brook. (1 Kings 17:1-6) 

Need we say more?

The snow is gone from almost every lawn and roof in the city. The river ice is breaking up. The sky is a brilliant blue and the air, though still brisk, is fresh and clean. After a long and dreary winter of asking ourselves why we’re here, a day like today comes as a shouted answer to that question. This picture of Becky Stark and her two children, Andrew and Libby, walking in the sun near their home today is a more eloquent evocation of spring, youth and hope than anything that could be written here and so we will leave today’s editorial comment up to it. Welcome back to live, Whitehorse.

Photo by Andrew Stark 

Photo by Andrew Stark 

King’s Throne in Kluane National Park, with the Kathleen River Bridge in the foreground, in early spring two years ago.  This is my current desk top photo.

Oldest daughter was a doer and oldest son a thinker. As a toddler, she was always in motion, flitting here and there, but I could sit him in the sandbox and he’d play happily for an hour or two, digging and pouring, never moving from the spot I’d plopped him in.

In this photo oldest son is seven and he is taking apart his “very own chainsaw”, which was scavenged from the dump. 

His school journal from this time has many pages concerning dump trips and “his very own chainsaw”. Unfortunately, I cannot find his little journal, so I am reproducing a sample from memory:

You get the idea.

He managed to take his chainsaw apart on the basement floor, clean it up and put it all back together again. You’ll notice that he is looking, sort of, at the camera as the picture was snapped, but his eyes are a little unfocused. That’s because his brain gears are still stuck in chainsaw mode. He is looking at the camera, but thinking about his chainsaw.

See how he is holding his left hand up under his chin? He still sometimes does that when he’s deep in thought. 

Watching him work is his little sister, who was his persistent shadow. Back then, he wanted to be left in peace to work on his projects, so he considered her annoying. Now his pesky little sister is his very good friend.

The basement was a mess then and it still is. It’s just messy with different stuff.

Well, three photos, actually.

Having oldest daughter back with us has reminded me once again that while the rest of us are gentle summer breezes, she is a whirlwind. From the day she was born, she has never stopped moving—unless she was sleeping or reading a book—often leaving chaos behind her. When she’s not here, we settle into a calm routine that suits the rest of us just fine, and when she comes back, we all have to readjust.

When she was a child, as long as she was awake, I couldn’t relax, because, for one thing, at any moment I might need to make a trip to the emergency room. At two, while I showered at my parent’s home, she went out the unlocked screen door and ended up standing in the roadway with a steam roller bearing down on her. That summer, she also rode her tricycle over a two and a half foot rock wall. Somewhere, there is video of her at fifteen, standing on the seat of her bike as it travels across the lawn, then flying headfirst over the handlebars as the bike tire hits a tree root.

There’ve been finger stitches (uneven parallel bars), toe stitches (mini-trampoline and balance beam), several dislocated knee caps and a few pieces of furniture destroyed, but no broken bones until she broke her toe performing that same aerial cartwheel shown above for the wee ones at the children’s home in South Africa.

While in South Africa, by the way, she did the world’s highest commercial bungee jump, amazingly, without incident.

In this photo she’s jumping rope while jumping on the pogo stick. If you could hear her, she might be counting “257, 258, 259…” or something like that as she jumped. Yep, she was always driven to do more and better.

When she was four or five, she and her younger brother rode in the car somewhere with my husband. He told me later that in the course of his conversation with them, he’d said, “If I hadn’t married your mother, she’d be a librarian somewhere.” Without skipping a beat, oldest daughter responded, “Well, if she hadn’t married you, you’d be in jail.”

Which is why I love her even if she sometimes turns my tidy world upside down.

[In one of life’s little ironies, I have recently become the librarian for my church. That explains, in part, why I’ve gone some days with very little or no blogging. I’ve been busy  reorganizing and cataloging.]

That’s what you’d call a big hauler. Don’t ask me for specifics; I think it’s a Caterpillar. [Update: Silly me. I know nothing. The photo above is the kids playing on some miscellaneous piece of mining equipment. Okay, it’s a giant loader.] The littlest guy at the bottom is youngest son; climbing the ladder is youngest daughter; and on the platform are their two cousins and uncle.

[The big hauler is below, and it is, as you can see, Lectra Haul. Unfortunately you can’t see the whole thing because the photo was taken indoors and up close.] At the time this photo was taken, it was the biggest dump truck anywhere except for a few used in Russia, but it has since then been surpassed a few times over by others.

Uncle Greg works as a mine electrician for what was, at the time of the photo, the National Steel Pellet mine in Keewatin, Minnesota. Since then, another company’s taken it over, but I know less about that than I do about the truck. All those years when I knew my brother-in-law worked as an electrician at a mine, I didn’t understand that this meant he worked on these trucks. After all, in my experience, electricians wire outlets and change breaker boxes.

On that thrilling evening ten years ago or so, Uncle Greg took us on a tour of the open pit taconite mine where he worked. Not many people get to tour (It takes special arrangements.), so even his own kids were getting their first—and only, I’m betting—tour of their father’s workplace.

What we didn’t know (and neither did Greg) was that his boss and the drivers of those big trucks had planned a surprise for us all. Greg and his visitors got rides in the trucks, two at a time, around to pick up a load and back to dump it.

My husband was more excited than anyone. Kids take experiences like that in stride; so many things are new to them that they can’t distinguish once-in-a-lifetime from just-for-the-first-time. Youngest son was as pleased to be wearing a hard hat as he was to ride in a big dump truck, I’d say.

And the drivers!  There aren’t many men who do what they do and these aren’t the sort of trucks you drive in parades, so they were tickled pink to have someone—anyone—to show off to.

Greg, by the way, is the uncle we all think looks just like Jim Croce. I know you can’t see well enough to judge, so you’ll have to take my word for it.

And the Mesabi Range where Greg’s mine is? It’s important for a few reasons. There is, of course, all that iron ore; but it’s also the place that gave us two other good gifts: Bob Dylan and the Greyhound Bus Line.