Old hippie friend of Lyndon LaRouche stands up to hostile Alaska and pleads for a peach; five other Alaska - Wasilla roadside stories, shot through the dirty, cracked, windows of the Ford Escape

This guy shot past the Ford Escape in a flash. This one was through the open window, on the Parks Highway, pointed toward Anchorage. All that follow are through the cracked and dirty windows, in Wasilla.

As I approached Wasilla Lake, I was shocked to see this sign ordering the great AK (Alaska) not to feed old hippies. Some of my readers may not know this, but there was a time when I believe I had the longest head of hair of any male student attending Brigham Young Unversity. This was in the days when cops would pull you over for having long hair, hamburger/soda shop owners would come at you with a baseball bat to drive you out of the friendly gathering places they had created for upstanding youth with short hair (yes, I did experience these very things and, in its way, it was fun) and Mitt Romney would lead a posse gang and forcibly cut the hair off a fellow student who had long hair and was rumored to have been gay, too - although in those days, they would not have called him "gay." They would have called him, "queer," and other epithets I do not care to repeat here.

So, in a way, that experience at BYU makes me an old hippy - and now someone had posted this sign here, telling Alaska not to feed me. Boy! Was I angry! Hungry, too. Angry and hungry.

I should add that one day I got called into the office of one of the BYU deans, who warned me that if I did not get my hair cut within 24 hours, he would expell me from BYU. I can't remember for sure, but I believe his name was Dean. Dean Dean.

So I got my hair cut.

But I grew it back out again, just as fast as I could.

Which wasn't all that fast.

And then I went on a mission and got nearly all of it cut off.

I looked pretty respectable at that point. You would have never known I was a hippy.

I was very pleased to see that this old hippy had seen the sign and then positioned himself right beside it so he could defy it. He even had a pretty good sign of his own made up, asking Alaska passersby to feed him a peach. If you could see all the lettering, this is what you would read:

"This old hippie says AK feed me a peach." A bit more follows of course, but that was the basic message. This guy wanted a peach. I don't know why he wanted a peach and not a chunk of moose meat or salmon, but a peach was what he wanted.

I would have given him a peach, too, but I didn't have one. I did have a bean burrito, but he didn't want a burrito - only a peach.

He claimed to be a friend of Lyndon LaRouche, who apparently backs up the quest of old hippies to be fed by the great AK! It is nice to know there are still compassionate people in this country, state and town.

As for the focus, in this kind of situation I must let the camera decide what it wants to focus on and it chose the mountain.

I saw walkers, walking.

Next I saw a family out for a pleasant Saturday afternoon outing in Wasilla.

These two played, "caboose."

The heat was searing - maybe 52 degress F (11 C) under cloudy skies and soon I was parched. I went looking for a Pepsi and found a truck load.

I drank it all, but was still thirsty afterward.

Did you notice how green it suddenly is around here?

Isn't it amazing?

I fall off schedule, so, here is springtime Wasilla: backyard moose, I stop to photograph a train before pulling into Dairy Queen and wind up in line behind "Tripp"; dog, boulders, fourwheeler

At a certain point this evening, I realized that I was not going to be able to make my goal of editing, preparing and posting my final Sujitha-Manoj wedding take tonight, so I decided to throw in a few Wasilla pictures - starting with this moose, who I found in our back yard. I will finish the wedding tomorrow.

As you can see, it is truly, finally, spring. The snow has mostly melted. Not completely - that's melting snow hanging from the moose's belly hairs, but it's mostly gone. Soon, it will be all gone.

A little before 9:30 PM last night, I felt like I just had to have a Dairy Queen ice cream cone, dipped in chocolate. Margie's sugar count had been high, so she declined to come. As I pulled into the turn lane off the Parks High to go to Dairy Queen, I saw this train coming down the tracks. There were no cars in the turn lane behind me, so I just stopped, waited for it to draw a bit closer, and then shot.

I was thrilled - overjoyed, you could say.

Damn! I just love trains!

And yet, I have never ridden the Alaska Railroad. I have now ridden the train in India, but not the train whose whistle I often hear from my bed at night, when air conditions are just right to conduct the sound from the tracks to our house - the train that traverses some of the most beautiful and grand country on earth.

Here is that train, right here, passing by me - and I have never ridden it.

After the engine passed, I looked in my mirror and saw a car pull into the turn lane a bit behind me, so I didn't stick around to photograph the freight and tanker cars that it pulled. I turned straight into the Dairy Queen drive-through lane, where I found myself behind a big, shiny, black, pickup truck with the word, "Tripp," emblazoned on the vanity license plate. The face of the driver was perfectly framed in the side rear view mirror. It was a pretty face, young and looked a bit familiar.

I thought about taking a few photos to show the truck, the license plate, the pretty face in the mirror and then the hands and face of the Dairy Queen girl as she reached out to serve her. There could be money in such a picture - and it is not as if the young lady who I figured was likely behind the wheel is not used to having people take her picture all the time, anyway, wherever she goes, her image being plastered on magazine covers and TV screens. Being a public figure, she is considered fair game and could not have legitmately protested - and probably wouldn't have, anyway.

Maybe she would have even been glad.

But damn! I'm not a papparazi!

And, with a few minor lapses, I have kept myself out of this absurd game - although one cannot live in Wasilla and keep himself completely out of it - or, indeed, the United States - and Barack Obama himself got drawn into the game a bit last night during the President's annual press dinner when he said pit bull's are delicious.

Yet, I figured maybe, at this moment, it was just possible the driver might just like to sit there in her truck and be served ice cream in peace. So I, who photograph damn near everything I see and mostly for free, laid my camera down upon the passenger seat and let what could possibly have been a money image - something I sure need right now - pass untaken.

Oh, well.

I saw this dog as I walked up Wards today. Look closely, and you can see the last remnants of Wasilla's dying snow.

Charlie came out today and brought 25 raven photos he had taken on a disk in CR-2 format. He has been invited to hang a selection of raven images in a raven First Friday photo show at the Midnight Sun Brewing Company in Anchorage. He figured he would hang about 15 and he wanted me to help him make the final edit and also to process the CR-2 RAW files.

I figured he was probably optimistic to think that 15 of the 25 would good enough to hang in the show. Maybe 8, I thought, ten if he had really done good.

Damn! We only removed two.

He did damned good.

Damned good!

I could not have put together a raven show like Charlie's!

A while back, he made it a goal to photograph a raven everyday.

The show goes up Friday and will hang for a month. Any reader who finds themselves in Anchorage during that time period and likes photography and/or ravens - go see it:

Midnight Sun Brewing Co. 8111 Dimond Hook Drive, Anchorage.

After we finished the photos, Charlie treated me to a coffee. Along the way, we passed by these boulders bordering this puddle coming and going. Somebody took a lot of trouble to do this.

Just beyond the boulders, we passed this guy on a fourwheeler, kicking up dust for people to eat.

In the dry periods, we eat a lot of dust in these parts. Outside, few people think of Alaska as dusty, but it is. Glacier dust - mixed with fine volcanic ash - the worst kind of dust you can imagine.