For y'all who care, I am an artist in my spare time and will be adding my portfolio here at some point in the future. Right now you can enjoy my coloring book.
I began life as the son of a poor sharecropper, er, uh, I mean a young newspaper reporter. I was born in Livingston, Montana which is very close to Yellowstone National Park..
My father had dropped out of San Diego State University to become a reporter, and my mother had graduated with a teaching degree to her credit. They decided to go to Montana because of the great adventure of the outdoors (and because my dad got a job there).
We lived there until I was a little more than a year old (which means my parents lived there for almost two years). And then we were off, back to California.
My dad changed jobs quite often in my life, and in the newspaper business that meant moving. I believe that we usually didn't stay anyplace much longer than a year. There were a couple of special places where we were able to stay for several years, but those were the exceptions. I always thought my dad and mom were part gypsy to want to move so much.
I remember as a young kid it was kinda fun to be moving all of the time. When I was in the second or third grade, the experience started to change. That was the first time I had to say goodbye to a really close friend. My next door neighbor (I think her name was Jenny) was my best friend. When my dad told us we were going to move to Alaska (I had no idea where or what "Alaska" was).
The excitement was short lived, as I realized that I would be moving away from our next door neighbors. I remember the sadness that I felt when I heard the doorbell ring, and saw her running away from the door after leaving me a goodbye note ("Rob I love you..."). I really didn't want to leave anymore.
But off we went to Fairbanks,Alaska highway through Canada on dust and snow. Learning that windows (not Windows) shatter after a certain point below zero. Putting plastic bubbles on the windshields so that they wouldn't break in the freezing cold. Ending up in the snow bank as the Volkswagen van (pre-Fahrvegnuhgen) decided it wanted to follow the pitch of the road instead of the ruts left by the snow plows.
Alaska was a wonderful place to be a young boy. I was in third grade, I got to walk to school unless it was colder than 30 below. I remember they closed the school a couple of times because it got too cold (I think it had to be below 50 below). I also remember going to school when it was dark, and coming home when it was dark. I remember being upset that we couldn't go play outside for recess because it was colder than 30 below.
I also remember the sled dogs, and the sled dog races. We got a husky puppy from one of the racers, and that made us feel like real Alaskans. We named our pup Rusky the Husky, and he was a typical sled dog: malemute, half wolf and half crazy. We raised him through the winter in our house with several of his brothers and sisters all of whom were suffering from distemper. Quite a few of them died, but Rusky made it and grew up to be bigger than me very quickly.
Then I remember the break-up. That was when the ice started to melt on the river. They had a huge pool on when the first ice would start to move, and everybody sat and watched to see who would become rich.
I remember getting my first paper route. The newspaper wouldn't let me have one, so I sat down at my Dad's typewriter and wrote them a letter telling them how I would be a good paper boy. They thought my Dad had sent in the letter as a joke, but eventually I got to deliver papers. I think the paper bag was bigger than I was.
I still remember what an adventure it was to deliver those papers. I met some very odd people. There were these really nice old ladies who picked wild mushrooms and made great cookies ... There was one house with what seemed like about a hundred Chihuahua dogs who would bite your ankles ... And then came the earthquake ...
Fairbanks is right next to the tallest peak (from base to peak) in North America rising from almost sea-level to some incredible height. It is the only mountain in the entire interior region of Alaska, and is the result of a steady fault activity. One day we were having breakfast and the whole world started to shake. I remember that it was very scary. I was from southern California, so I knew that earthquakes were just supposed to be these little rumbles (everybody would say "was that an earthquake") that really didn't do much. This quake threw me out of my chair and through the kitchen door.
The quake was (I think) a 6.7 on the Richter scale. It was followed by aftershocks which were larger (6.8 then 6.9). By the time the aftershocks were hitting, we were out in the street. The telephone poles were swaying back and forth about 30 degrees from vertical each way. I could see waves in the ground, I looked like the earth had turned into an ocean, and all of the houses were houseboats. The chimneys started falling off the houses, and somebody yelled at us that we should stay inside the houses. Well that was about it, no major damage that I remember beyond a few chimneys. Most of the structures there were old wood frames, so they just swayed with the earth and didn't sustain any major damage.
After that the summer was normal until the flood. I remember going to the store with a note from my Dad to get him some cigarettes, it was daylight out, and it was 11PM. There was one day where the sun didn't set, it just dipped toward the horizon on each end of its' lazy circle around the sky.
If I remember this in order, there was a flood at the end of the summer. The river just started rising and never stopped. I remember we got evacuated to some people's property outside of Fairbanks. The entire interior of Alaska is almost flat, and is very desert like. So when an unusual amount of rainfall occurs the flooding is quite extensive. I don't remember it being that big of a deal to me, but I do remember the sense of adventure.
I remember that we got lots of help from the Salvation army, and that was the beginning of my understanding of how disasters work. The Salvation Army came in with supplies, food, and help first, followed by all of the other disaster relief organizations. The other organizations showed up after the whole thing was over. Every disaster I've been through has been similar, the Red Cross always gets the press, but the National Guard and the Salvation Army are there first.
Anyway, something happened at my Dad's job and he had to get another. He took a job as the editor for a small newspaper in the southeastern part of Alaska. We were on the move again to Wrangell, Alaska.
Wrangell was a beautiful place, and we stayed there for a few years. I learned many hard lessons there. The worst was watching Rusky die because somebody decided to put poison out for dogs (in Alaska everybody lets their dogs run loose, and people are quite used to it). I still don't understand why anybody would do anything so terrible to a poor dog. He cried through the night, and we laid him to rest in a beautiful pine grove.
I also learned about what it is like to be the new kid in a small town where most of the kids had lived their entire lives. I learned how to run very quickly because I was little, and didn't know how to fight very well.
But I also learned to be with myself. I learned the joy that comes from sitting on the dock on a day where the water shines like glass, and you can watch the fish thirty or forty feet below you as if they are flying beneath your feet. I learned how to commune with all of the wildlife, how to watch the eagles, the birds, how not to be afraid of the bears. I learned how to survive in the woods.
I had (and quickly lost) my first girlfriend in Wrangell. My parents thought I was too young, and so when I asked about going to the movies with her, they went off the deep end with some story about dating being something you did when you were ready to get married. Pretty wild, all I wanted to do was go to the movies. Oh well, live and learn.
After a while, my dad graduated to another small newspaper in a slightly bigger town. So we moved again, this time it was just a jump to another island (Petersburg). Petersburg was a whole new experience. I think by this time I was getting pretty used to moving about, so I had learned the tricks of pretending to be shy and not remembering names until I could identify the key players.
I still wasn't very good at it, and I was still being picked on. I was in the fifth or sixth grade by this time, and I was at least a year or two behind in my physical development (and a year or two ahead in my mental ability). This was not a good time to be the runt. For the longest time (in fact still sometimes) I could identify with the poor geeky kid who never got picked for the baseball game until everybody else was teamed up. I was just too small, too picked on, and too uncertain to be very good at much.
I was very good at the school stuff, so I was very quick to show that off. Unfortunately, that only added to the trouble I already had with the town bullies. I found myself aligning with the outcasts, but never really being part of their group.
Petersburg was also where I joined the Boy Scouts (I had been a Cub Scout in Wrangell, but Boy Scouts were the real thing). We went on twenty mile hikes. We went camping in some of the most beautiful country in the world. We learned how to build fires in the soggy forest (it rains almost 300 days of the year in southeastern Alaska) and to bring a can of kerosene and some parafin to make sure that it would start.
We laughed at the scoutmaster from the lower 48 who told us not to build our fires under the trees "because of forest fire danger", knowing it took hours to get even the smallest fire going.
I saw a bald eagle die on the porch of my house in a senseless killing by a fisherman who simply shot the eagle because it was eating salmon. The size and grandeur of the bird were never more apparent than when I looked outside our window at the poor wounded bird. It died quickly, but his mate circled our house for over a week after he died. They mate for life, and she wasn't going to give up easily. It was the first time I think I ever saw my dad truly upset, and he wrote an editorial about the insanity of the killing. For such a smart species we sure do some stupid things.
In case you are relatively new to the World Wide Web, you may wish to read the NCSA Mosaic Demo Document.
There is also the Suggested Starting Points for Internet Exploration.
You may wish to use the following resources to keep track of the evolution of cyberspace and to find information on the Internet:
What's
New with NCSA Mosaic and the Internet.
Internet
Resources Meta-Index at NCSA.
The
Excite stock report
from Data Broadcasting Corporation
Again, thanks for visiting the Excite connectivity on-line WWW server. We hope to hear from you again soon. If you have any problems or suggestions, please feel free to contact me at:
Rob.Weaver@excite.com
Rob Weaver
Excite, Inc.
1091 North Shoreline Blvd.
Mountain View, Ca. 94043
Telephone: (415) 943-1200
Fax: (415) 943-1299
