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All these characters could fill book By Paul Fattig Obviously, the Ashland Writers Roundtable group had run out of speakers. It was the last meeting of the year. Perhaps the group had writer�s block when it came to completing the speaker�s list for the year. Perhaps they merely wanted to write it off. Or perhaps they intended to close the Year 2000 chapter on an amusing note. All I know is that I found myself gobbling away like a nervous turkey in front of the group Thanksgiving week. Anyone who knows me can tell you public speaking is not my forte. Even when I answer the phone at home, the person on the other end invariably asks if my parents are around. Or they insist on talking to someone whose first language isn�t Mutter. Like the Texan who would be our next president, I need to ride close herd on my spoken words lest they gallop off and injure an innocent bystander. Yep, people can get hurt. The problem is that I sometimes put a little too much english on my English, spinning the words dangerously out of control. At the outset, I intended to caution the group to bear with me since I had a head cold and a hacking cough. But I am harassed by doubts. Did I really say I was a head case and a coughing hack? Yet the small group of novelists, technical writers, freelancers and editors listened politely and asked good questions. For me, it turned out to be a rewarding evening. After all, these were fascinating folks who love books, who love to read, who love to write. My kind of people. Give me a good book, a steaming cup of coffee and Spud the cat purring beside me as rain taps on the roof on a cold winter�s night. Life doesn�t get much better than that. Preparing for that night gave me the rare opportunity to reflect on my chosen profession. I�ve spent a quarter of a century making a living by writing for some 14 newspapers from Anchorage to the Bay area. I�ve met countless characters along the way. There was the ancient Buddhist monk I met in the city of Hue in Vietnam, Iditarod sled dog musher Susan Butcher in Alaska, a retired FBI agent who owned a rare-book store in San Francisco. In the late 1970s, I wanted to write about an old miner living as a hermit in the Siskiyou National Forest west of Kerby. His name was Bob Cutler. Word had it that he didn�t much like people. But he had a slightly younger brother named Abe. As a kid growing up in Kerby, I knew Abe, a gruff old gentleman with a lot of white hair and few words to spare. So I went to Abe. I explained that I was no longer a kid but a professional journalist, having earned a journalism degree from a full-fledged university. After I finished shoveling the horse manure, I admitted being a bit nervous about approaching his brother out of the blue. At that point, Abe asked me to take him to the liquor store. He came out with a bottle of gin. "Bob likes his gin. Tell him I sent it along," Abe said. Armed with the bottle, I hiked into Bob�s cabin in the Josephine Creek drainage the next day. As I approached his place, the old miner was peeking around the corner of the cabin. I couldn�t tell whether he was armed. That�s when I lost all dignity and yelled that his brother Abe had sent me with a bottle of gin. He took me inside the cabin, wiped off two chipped cups with an old rag and poured us both a slug. It was godawful stuff. But the interview was terrific. I recalled the week I spent in the village of Wainwright about 50 miles southwest of Barrow. My assignment was to write about the changing Alaskan culture. But the villagers were wisely reluctant to talk to an outsider. Finally, I went to a church to tell my problems to a local minister. He quietly listened. Then he told me that he had also yet to be accepted. He was from the village of Point Lay about 40 miles south and was suspect because he spoke a slightly different Inupiaq dialect. "And I�ve been here 27 years," he said. But I finally broke the ice when I met an old fellow named Waldo Bodfish, the son of a whaling captain and an Eskimo woman. He said he had once been the village dentist by virtue of having a pair of pliers. "I�ve lived in the old times and the new times," he said. "I like the new times. You could die from the flu in the old times." The life of a coughing hack hasn�t been too shabby. You can reach reporter Paul Fattig at 776-4496 or e-mail him at [email protected] Mail Tribune Home | Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. | Dow Jones & Co., Inc. | Privacy | Contact Us Copyright � 2000 Mail Tribune, Inc.