Latest Update: July 31, 2001 by Ben Marcus

11:10 PT TUESDAY JULY 31, 2001 MUNICIPAL CAMPGROUND, SMITHERS

ODOMETER
TRIP METER

MONEY
Cash withdrawn from ATM: $200
Soaps from Mountain Eagle Books $ 14
Three Russia books from MEB $ 3.74
Cash remaining: $175.00
BC WEB (MASTERCARD) $13.52

Okay, I feel a little better. Got oatmeal in the pot, CBC on the radio, money in the bank and people seem to know what is happening. This morning I managed to have faxed to me the official invitation from Wild Russia. They sent it to BC Web, the internet cafÚ in Smithers about half an hour after I'd e-mailed them the fax number. So that worked.

That means we can start the Visa application process. I asked George Nikitin if we could Fed Ex all the passports and such to him. Hopefully he'll agree and he'll be our guy in San Francisco dropping it all off and picking it all up and handling any snafus, then Fed Exing it all up to Alaska.

Yikes.

Ike is missing. Off running around somewhere. I finally have money to pay the campground guy who has been nice but maybe wondering if I was going to skip. Evan deposited a check for me yesterday, so I'm financial again. I tried to pay for those two Garmin GPS this morning with PayPal but it didn't work for some reason. I also need to pay for the Russian/English dictionary.

I'm going to spend today putting together an expense report for all the expenses on the Jay Moriarity story and anything I've run up on Russia so far. I have to get some passport photos taken which means I need to shave and shower, but I think that will be survivable.

And if I get all that taken care of and get the Visa process started, I'll head up the road toward Kitwanga and Dease Lake. There's a pink salmon season opening on the Kitimat River and also a sockeye salmon run on the Nas, so I might check that out. Most likely I'll just keep going up into the Cassiar and then the Yukon. I have about two weeks to go through Dawson City and Fairbanks and up to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. I think I can make it.

Lots of other stuff going on, but that will do for now. Don't want to take all the mystery out of life, eh?

20:58 PT TUESDAY JULY 31, 2001 THE MUNICIPLA CAMPGROUND, SMITHERS

ODOMETER 59630
TRIP METER 4552.9

MONEY
Cash remaining $175.00
BC web $ 12.13
BC web $ 9.63
Phone card $ 22.80
Sausage and jerky? $ 18.10
Stuff from % and Dime $ 7.76
Other stuff from 5 and Dime $ 8.96
Tweezer???? $ 2.80
Floppy discs and 3 pens 14.52
Camping fees $32.00
Lemonade, plastic thing, etc $15.65

At the end of another long day, a light meal of caribou smokies and sauerkraut, and some light reading: The Gulag Archipelago Two, by Alexander S. The caribou sausages were good and went down easy. Solzhenitsin does not go down as easily. I doubt I'll make it through that book, although I did see a map of the Gulag Archipelago, which extended all the way to Kamchatka and Petropavlovsk. I'm going to read what I can and try to steal a few quotes to throw into the Russia story, to make me sound like a proper, well-read intellectual. I already got one, in fact: "With one gulp one can know the entire ocean."

I'm in the driver's seat, listening to the CBC. Ike is running around looking for a few more people to charm or mice to chase before the sun goes down. The weather is threatening rain, but most of the perishables are in. I need to take the van to a car wash before I go and vacuum out all the kitty liter that spilled in the back. I've given up on having a cat box in the van. Just doesn't work. All the cat pee forces me to do my laundry more often.

I just downloaded all the JPEGS that had been mounting up since my floppy disk drive jammed a week or so ago. One of the metal clips from a floppy came off-for the second time-and today I got around to fixing it. This was major surgery, which involved taking the floppy disk out and halfway apart. I had to drive into town to get some tweezers, but those didn't work. I did a lot of poking around in there, certain I was permanently damaging something delicate. But after a couple of hours I got the clip out and the disk drive back in, and it works. Yeah for Gateway. I'll start sending photos again. I've been lagging. I don't think I took one photo of Dano's house or people in Whistler.

Today I bought two boxes of 10 floppy disks, so I'll get back in the shooting frame of mind. I bought a lot of stuff today, looking for my immediate needs and also to the needs of the fine people of Kamchatka, if indeed we actually go there. I bought some lipsticks and safety pins for the good women of Kamchatka. Also bought another plastic thing for carrying oatmeal, in memory of the one that got crushed in Valhoof, or wherever that was.

t's now 22:22 and almost dark. I had to put Ike in the van after he took off after a trio of foxes playing in a corner of the park. I had been watching them through binoculars with the park supervisor: two white-tailed males and a female running back and forth, probably hunting field mice. It was fun to watch them until I thought of Ike getting hunted down by three foxes. Ike was doing his own hunting. He'd found another unlucky field mouse and was toying with it, throwing it around and running after it. The field mouse was actually putting up a fight, the equivalent of a human squaring off with a playful T Rex. Weird. We watched that for awhile, and then Ike lost interest in the mouse when he caught a glimpse of the foxes. His night vision must be unbelievable, because he saw them clearly from 50 yards away, at ground level, in the dark. Well of course he went running over to check it out, expecting the foxes to love him like all the humans do. I followed him to the edge of the park, then picked him up before he could run off into the bush and get triple-played. This must be what it is like to have an irresponsible teenager. You are in a constant state of worry.

Anyway, it's raining now and I'm inside and so is Ike and we'll just have to keep each other company. He's not going out again.

Today I started nudging the visa process along. George Nikitin is going to take all the applications and passports and take them to the Russian consulate in San Francisco and sweet-talk them. That will help.

We're having photographer problems and that may result in the trip getting pushed up a week or so. As long as we go, I don't care.

Went back and forth from the park to town several times today, feeling better because I'd taken a bathe in the river this morning. Cold, but it felt good to be clean.

In retrospect, I should have bought a $25 "Frequent Flyer ."