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The Alaskan hippie in its native habitat
I've been looking for reference photos for "Freebird" (of 1970s Alaskan hippies) in my family photos.
There aren't very many pictures of us; most of them burned up in the Great Housefire of '77. And there weren't even that many of them to begin with. It was the 1970s; most people didn't take 15 billion pictures of their kids, at least not people living in the middle of the woods.
Nonetheless ...
My mom, my baby sister and myself on the porch of our new-house-in-progress. Holy moley, I was a blond kid. The blondness went away quickly, as you can see from my standard LJ icon, which is me at about age 5.
Let's make little Layla happier by making her kiss her baby sister!
We are now sitting in Mama's garden with the house in the background. This is the house that my dad built, more or less single-handedly since my mom was in a state of perpetual childbearing, after the old house burned down when I was 8 months old. I would give my left eyeball (well, almost) to get my hands on a picture of that house. I was born in it. It was a trapper's cabin from the 1940s and, when they first moved into it in 1975, the year before I was born, it was 4 feet high with a tree growing out of the chimney of the stove. Alas, any pictures that may once have existed burned up in the fire.
The fire occurred because the house had a blanket for a door, and the blanket blew against the stove (which was right next to the door; the "house" was only about 8x12 feet large).
You know you are truly badass when you go through an Alaskan winter with a newborn baby and a blanket for a door. Although burning your house down in the process is not really the greatest thing.
Another interesting thing ... you can see in the background that the new house has only Visqueen (a sort of industrial plastic wrap) for windows. We went through several winters with Visqueen windows; I remember it. And Southcentral Alaskan winters, while not particularly cold -- oh, 0 degrees or so -- are very snowy and VERY windy. A typical November would involve the wind blowing out the windows and the house turning into THE FROZEN PITS OF HELL, which ended up with us little girls snuggling under the covers in the big bed with Mama for a while, until she went and fixed the Visqueen. If we had any Visqueen to fix it with. Otherwise, we would just be cold for a few days, having no windows, until Daddy (who was usually working in town at that stage of our lives) would send materials for house-fixing.
Me playing on the dogsled, surrounded by the patchy snow of either very early or very late winter. I don't seem especially bothered by it.
My parents had a dog team. Before I, the oldest, was born, they did a lot of dog mushing all over Southcentral Alaska. I don't think either of them had ever touched the hand controls of a snowmachine* before about 1988. The sled dogs died when I was a kid...
*Snowmachine- Alaskan for snowmobile. That is what everyone calls it here.
There aren't very many pictures of us; most of them burned up in the Great Housefire of '77. And there weren't even that many of them to begin with. It was the 1970s; most people didn't take 15 billion pictures of their kids, at least not people living in the middle of the woods.
Nonetheless ...
My mom, my baby sister and myself on the porch of our new-house-in-progress. Holy moley, I was a blond kid. The blondness went away quickly, as you can see from my standard LJ icon, which is me at about age 5.
Let's make little Layla happier by making her kiss her baby sister!
We are now sitting in Mama's garden with the house in the background. This is the house that my dad built, more or less single-handedly since my mom was in a state of perpetual childbearing, after the old house burned down when I was 8 months old. I would give my left eyeball (well, almost) to get my hands on a picture of that house. I was born in it. It was a trapper's cabin from the 1940s and, when they first moved into it in 1975, the year before I was born, it was 4 feet high with a tree growing out of the chimney of the stove. Alas, any pictures that may once have existed burned up in the fire.
The fire occurred because the house had a blanket for a door, and the blanket blew against the stove (which was right next to the door; the "house" was only about 8x12 feet large).
You know you are truly badass when you go through an Alaskan winter with a newborn baby and a blanket for a door. Although burning your house down in the process is not really the greatest thing.
Another interesting thing ... you can see in the background that the new house has only Visqueen (a sort of industrial plastic wrap) for windows. We went through several winters with Visqueen windows; I remember it. And Southcentral Alaskan winters, while not particularly cold -- oh, 0 degrees or so -- are very snowy and VERY windy. A typical November would involve the wind blowing out the windows and the house turning into THE FROZEN PITS OF HELL, which ended up with us little girls snuggling under the covers in the big bed with Mama for a while, until she went and fixed the Visqueen. If we had any Visqueen to fix it with. Otherwise, we would just be cold for a few days, having no windows, until Daddy (who was usually working in town at that stage of our lives) would send materials for house-fixing.
Me playing on the dogsled, surrounded by the patchy snow of either very early or very late winter. I don't seem especially bothered by it.
My parents had a dog team. Before I, the oldest, was born, they did a lot of dog mushing all over Southcentral Alaska. I don't think either of them had ever touched the hand controls of a snowmachine* before about 1988. The sled dogs died when I was a kid...
*Snowmachine- Alaskan for snowmobile. That is what everyone calls it here.
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PS, do you have a phone in the modern tundra? Some of us (me) would like your new number.
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