C M Brophy

Dirty Weather & Other Nome Stories C M Brophy

Publisher Marketing: These gripping, dark and funny character driven short stories depict the crazy people who inhabit the under water gold mining world of Nome Alaska. With sardonic wit and unique voice author C. M. Brophy describes in 14 short stories the madness at the end of the Iditarod trail; the same people and scenarios, flora and fauna as seen on the popular Discovery Channel TV show BERING SEA GOLD... The following blog post is not in the book but indicates the tone and locale of this fascinating and surreal quick read.: I will be leaving Nome after 86 days the day after tomorrow forever most likely. It's been an unprofitable venture financially but not as bleak as for some, many, most first time miners. Yes, gold mining didn't pan out. Surprise. The amount of creative writing I've been able to produce is rewarding and the unique experiences will stay with me forever probably, the negatives falling away as the positives become enhanced in my memory. Adventures aren't supposed to be fun while they're happening. I recognize the folly some people back home consider this trip to be, and actual miners and locals are right to observe that I'm not really a miner either. Nomeites and Alaskans in general enjoy and suffer under the belief that they are frontiersmen and free to do as they please and that this is a vast open land of opportunity. Environmentally it is hard for them to see what they are doing as disastrous as lower 48 southerners readily remark. A local bumper sticker reads, "Mining: the family farm of the north." Another argument goes: us miners make wealth from the dirt, we, with our toil feed the economy, producing something from nothing. The dredging operations I was directly involved with here in the Bering sea on D. N. R. controlled leases and recreational areas work alongside commercial fisheries and indigenous fishing hunting grounds as well as sport hunting and fishing grounds. The bottom minerals that are are sluiced up and re deposited are monitored for effluent plume debris readings/ turbidity- and there is a lot of reworking of others tailing piles. It is not a coral reef. Jellies, starfish, crabs, eels, bullheads, whales, seals, orcas swim right around the greasy noisy dredges and multi varieties of salmon spawn in the rivers. Caribou and musk ox have been re introduced since being all eaten up during the original lucky swedes gold rush of the late 1800s. There never were any trees or amphibians in this part of the Seward peninsula. The thawing permafrost is probably a global warming thing but this is a region where disbelief or ambivalence over man made world temperature change is prevalent. Compared to the oil industry it appears to me and the locals that gold extraction as practiced in Nome is nominal and there is much federal government animosity. My take on it is that if the feds think Alaskans shouldn't be allowed to take a shit in Alaska they either have the juice or don't to stop them, but without experiencing what is happening here, on the ground, culturally, economically, grassroots, they will never be able to effect any change here. Go piss up a rope, Washington, as the saying goes. As for being complicit myself I take no blame, we are all complicit driving our cars around to the wal mart for polyester toys made by chinese children- etc. etc. I am happy to have immersed myself in this world fully, it's not any worse than any other place, just different. I'm off to San Francisco for a little post deprivation rum and buggery decompression therapy before re entering life as a suburban dad and husband. I was supported by friends family and strangers all the way down the line on this experiment and am thankful. Life is the only thing worth living for. We all can and should do whatever the fuck we want to do, try whatever strikes our fancy, check out where it all breaks down, improvise, reflect, rinse, repeat. Contributor Bio:  Brophy, C M About the Author About the author: Born in New York City in 1959, C. M. Brophy has written, directed and acted in plays and films in New York, San Francisco and Canada. Founding member and artistic director of Dude Theater Frisco, Bindlestiff theater of 6th st. and Splanchnic Theatricals international as well as many other Union and pirate theater houses and film production projects as collaborator, hired gun and featured solo artist. He was impresario at Random Ax guerrilla arts. He was songwriter and bass player in the Scropes, a 1980's S. F. musical ensemble. He built, operated and sold a little pizza parlor outside Washington D. C. He works as a plumber these days and has been a cab driver, short order cook, tradesman, clerk, miner, lookout, mover, driver and decoy. He's done some modeling. He ran for Mayor on the platform that if elected he would not serve. He's run a marathon. He paints and sculpts and can dance and sing and swim. His opus for solo piano, "Roommate Torture" is almost finished, so yes, he is also a composer. He is full of love- and hate. Adventures, which he believes are not meant to be fun while they're happening, have taken him in small boats down rivers and across vast bodies of water, in trains, old broke down cars and commercial jet airliners. Brophy has traveled to the Arctic Circle, Mexico, South America, the British isles, Ireland, Europe and the middle of the desert. He has walked upon a frozen sea. He has a home in the suburbs, sons and a spouse, 2 dogs and a mortgage, has rolled in the gutter, been bloodied and blotto, tattooed and transformed, redeemed, broken boned, stitched back together, honored and ignored. A college dropout, he writes in bed or standing up, most prolific away from home. C. M. Brophy is a boxer and a poet. He is destined to continue to write outside the confines of commerce, fully field testing the experimental theory, "Perfect is the enemy of done.." intending to complete volumes of plays, novels and stories before he dies, hoping one day an editor will come along to help make sense and dollars from the rough concentrates of raw material, refining and extracting punctuation, spelling, formatting and structural contradictions into a slim faultless volume. Posthumously would be fine with him. Christopher Michael Brophy is very busy living.