MEMOIR
Accidental Love
What would I find if I left the Grand Canyon for Alaska?
May, 1988
The ferry to Alaska was filled with summer workers. They called it the poor man’s cruise ship. The solarium arched over the back deck where we cheap travelers lay about on plastic lounges watching mountains and ocean recede in the wake of the ship.
I watched Canada scroll past in grey-green mists. The wind bit into my face with a light salt spray and the railing stung cold to the touch. I zipped my jacket up and looked down at the waves rolling off the ship. Normally I would be in the Grand Canyon now, escaping the heat.
It bummed me out to lose my Grand Canyon season after six years of building a reputation as a hard worker, competent cook, and trustworthy boatman; getting to know the camps and when they would have shade; learning all the hikes; knowing where to collect fresh water; and running the rapids without incident. Guiding in the Canyon was considered the pinnacle for North American river guides, and I had worked a full summer there the previous year, but, as a guide with low seniority, I got bumped when OARS was penalized for overbooking. It hurt to feel so expendable, when I had worked so hard to be indispensable.
No other river haunted me like the Grand Canyon. It had challenges, and not just the famous rapids everyone talked about, but the unbearable summer heat in all its forms: furnace-like in June, building into monsoons in July and August with thunderstorms unleashing fury one moment and peace the next in a crystalline washed desert with waterfalls streaming from every dip in the rim.
The heat was a whole other character to deal with, side step, avoid, or mitigate. The sun bursting over the rim in the morning with unrelenting heat. Heat lurking in the canyon walls to warm the night. Heat exploding rafts left taunt in the sun. Heat was a constant dance-partner. Hydrate! Hydrate! Electrolytes!— hike ’em, cool ’em, feed ’em. Drink beer ’til you pee clear. Soaking a shirt in the river before a hike and sleeping under a cool wet sheet only to have it dry within the hour. Drenching rapids so welcome in that heat. Yes! Hit me with that cold wall of water!
Blazing mid-day hikes up glorious side canyons into micro-climates of water and rock, telling an epic tale of erosion, with lizards doing push ups in the sun guarding thousand-year-old granaries. Canyon walls that stared back with faces that weren’t there a minute ago. The mystical significance of it all just out of reach, like handprint paintings where no one could climb.
The heat culminating each night with cool respite in the shadow of those great canyon walls, throwing us relief and giving us sweet, cool, purple-hued shade, away from the white-hot heat on the sand just a few feet away. I am safe here — these walls have my back now. I can relax and have a beer.
The sunset colors wiping themselves across the rock each night, cleansing the sky for stars. Moonlight bouncing off the cliffs, lighting the desert like a movie set. Dreaming of Hopi myths, reflections in the cold pools, and the sweeping curve of weathered sandstone. Awakening to once again ride that sinewy labyrinth of water.
Immersion! I felt that landscape through my being, breathed it and let it flow over my body.
Life was simple with my raft as home, everything neatly stored, decks clear. Five rafts tied together for the night, each with a guide sleeping or reading by headlamp on the back deck — a peaceful, floating family. Wild parties, roaring drunk, puking, falling in the river, returning for one more shot. Waking to a ringtail cat sitting on my chest demanding, Apples, please.
The guides formed a cast of characters like a gang of lost boys with secret stashes of beer, joints, and mail hidden in the rocks to pass between crews with news of the canyon. I had tied my fate to that band of brothers. They would miss me for a moment, but I would miss all the moments thereafter as they carried on down in the Big Ditch without me.
Each trip formed a journey, a memory, a complete world tied up with a bow and sealed every thirteen days and then traded in. May I have another? I am ready to trade this group in now. Efficient, but drunken, one-night turnaround in Flagstaff — then out for thirteen more days on the river and back again, and again; two, three, four trips in a row until that desert river was the only reality and the callous interruption of town a bizarre interlude.
I would miss the Grand Canyon like the greatest lover. I would always be on my way back to her. I had been reduced to floating some day-trip in Alaska. Oh well. It’s just one season and then I could cross Alaska off my to-do list.
I was disappearing into a fog, hoping to be reborn. What would I find? What would Alaska be like? Bundled up? Buttoned to the chin? How would I swim in that landscape?
I returned to the solarium and found a lounge chair for my sleeping bag. Some travelers were playing guitar, others murmuring low conversation, hiccups of laughter punctuated the calm. They seemed a happy group, more like they were heading to a festival than work. Their excitement was palpable. We must be going somewhere special if all these travelers are so happy. I put on my headlamp and began to read James Michener’s Alaska. Let’s see what this place is all about.
Haines stood on a narrow peninsula in the middle of an amphitheater of sea, mountains and sky, with a DaVinci sense of golden proportions.
We docked a few miles north of town. Two ther passengers were also coming to Alaska to work for Chilkat Guides. Sarah, Paul, and I walked up the metal gangway together as trucks, cars, and RVs lumbered along beside us to the dock. As we waited for the luggage cart to arrive, a stout young man with thick, dark hair and black-rimmed glasses hopped out of a van, walked over with a big smile, and introduced himself as Joe Ordonez.
We loaded our bags and bikes into the back of the van and piled in. As Joe drove to town, he shifted into tour guide mode, which seemed as natural to him as breathing. He filled the van with his sweeping gestures and enthusiastic voice.
“The Tlingit called this place Deishu — end of the trail where they portaged their canoes from the river to the ocean. For thousands of years, the Chilkat tribe guarded their trade route through these coastal mountains into the interior. They were never conquered. Nobody would mess with the Chilkats! But they heard that other tribes had a thing called a missionary, someone who could make ‘paper talk’ — teach them to read. Such a prize would not be denied to the powerful Chilkats. At their invitation in 1879, the Presbyterians sent a missionary to meet them and guess who tagged along on his first trip to Alaska?” Joe leaned towards us with a dramatic pause. “John Muir.”
Joe sat up straight and stared over the steering wheel like he was gazing into the past. “They were greeted like royalty and hosted to a grand dinner. Afterwards, the minister gave a long rambling speech about God and the bible. After he sat down, everyone looked to John Muir to give a speech. He had not expected that, but he rose and gave a short speech praising the great beauty and bounty of the area and why it was important to appreciate it.”
Joe chuckled. “The chiefs conferred and said they would like John Muir to be their missionary. The other guy talked too much. Of course, Muir declined and went on to explore Glacier Bay just over those mountains to the west.”
We drove through the small downtown area, which stretched for about five blocks — a bank, a pizza place, a grocery store, several bars, and some souvenir shops — past the harbor and on to the fort which had no perimeter walls like my cowboy fantasy of ‘forts.’ Instead, tidy rows of elaborate white Jeffersonian houses climbed the hill like silent soldiers. The Parade Grounds dominated a large sloping lawn in the center of the buildings.
“This is Fort Seward, the crown jewel of Alaskan forts, built in 1904 to guard access to the gold fields after Teddy Roosevelt won his border dispute with Canada.
In World War II, the army built the Alaska/Canadian Highway and punched a spur road through to here. After World War II, the Army decommissioned the fort, and five veterans bought it, sight unseen, for a hundred thousand dollars.”
Joe pulled in alongside the trailers, rafts, vans, and bus parked behind a little red building with white trim. “This was the telegraph office.” By the front door small sign declared Chilkat Guides around a rendering of an Eagle turned in regal profile.
Bart Henderson, the owner, popped out of the office. Bart had invited me to Alaska the previous winter when we were guiding in Chile. He said, “Grab your bikes. We’re going for a ride.”
We pulled our bikes from the back of the van and left our bags.
“Should we lock it up?” I asked.
Joe said, “No need. You’re in Haines!”
We pedaled uphill through the fort to the other side of the peninsula, where we sped downhill into a broad valley and along a river delta. After a few miles, we left our bikes and hiked through a lush forest to a rounded mountain peak with views in every direction.
To the northeast I could see our ferry heading to Skagway, splitting the green-grey ocean into chevrons. To the south, the peninsula narrowed and broke into islands like dripping cake batter. To the northwest, a ridge of mountains circled in a great arc up the river valley. Across from us, a glacier of blue ice hung above a waterfall that spilled for hundreds of feet into a basin of snow.
I had to admit that the scale of the scene, with mile-high mountains rising straight out of the ocean, rivaled the Grand Canyon.
“Welcome to the Chilkat Valley,” Bart said with a crooked grin.
“I first came to Alaska a decade ago to run the Tatshinshini River for Sobek. Every time I returned, I fell more in love with this place until I made it home.”
Bart looked up the distant valley, “When Haines lost its timber industry, I urged them to develop tourism, but nobody believed it would work here even though they have greatest congregation of eagles in the world just twenty miles up the road.”
“After years of talking about it, I finally started a small rafting company that floated passengers through the Eagle Preserve, almost as much to make a point as anything else. It’s proving popular, especially with the few cruise ships that docked in Haines. But the big cruise ships all dock in Skagway. So this year, besides running our usual float tour, we’re operating a fly and float tour from Skagway.
“L.A.B. will fly them on a scenic tour over glaciers and mountains landing in Haines, where we will take them on a one-hour float through the Bald Eagle Preserve. Then they’ll fly back to Skagway. It’ll be the second most expensive tour in Alaska.”
Upon returning to town, Bart went to the office, while Joe showed us the barracks. A long white three-story building, largest of the fort, stood facing the parade ground. Rows of tall windows looked out from the upper stories, some broken, most not. Chest-high rose bushes separated a deep front porch from the sidewalk. We climbed the steps and met Lee, Lorin, and Russ, who were painting first aid boxes.
Inside the barracks, a cavernous stairway led up to a cold echo of silence — a silence of ghosts, of events and lives long passed. Joe showed us a broad second-floor room amongst abandoned furniture where we could sleep temporarily.
He said, “You’ll have to get up early and stash your gear in the storeroom. Living in the building is not allowed, but police only come around if there’s a ruckus. Find in a spot without the plaster and dust falling from the ceiling.” After stashing our bags, we set off across the the Parade Grounds for drinks at the Halsingland Hotel.
Joe called out to the others, “Put away your work. Company meeting at the Gland!”
I walked with Lorin, who loped his tall lanky body up the grass while smiling so hard I thought he would hurt himself. He was “STOKED, man!” to be in Alaska. I found his humor infectious, and I smiled right along with him.
The Halsingland Hotel had the musty feel of an antique shop with its wainscoting and old carpeting. Grainy smudged photos of this place only eighty years ago lined the walls— soldiers on the parade grounds, horse and buggy next to a giant snow drift, steam ships in the harbor, and Chilkats in great robes emblazoned with clan symbols.
We sat around a table by a row of large windows in the bar. Arnie, the Owner, a big man with a loopy grin and soft eyes, set out glasses and pitchers of beer. “These the new recruits, Joe?”
“These are the guides that are going to make Haines famous!”
Arnie smiled. “I give all Chilkat Guides half off meals except the Crab dish. Welcome to Haines.”
I gazed out the windows over the parade grounds to the ocean and mountains of the Lynn Canal, quaffing my beer while these young enthusiastic new guides rattled off their tales of how they came to be here. Russ and Paul knew Joe from a Dojo in Bellingham. Lorin had met Bart mountain biking in Hawaii. Lee and Sarah were skiers picking up summer work. All of us were new to Alaska, except Joe.
Having worked for cruise lines, Joe had a vision for Chilkat Guides. For the next week, he planned to choreograph every step of our tour from getting clients on the bus, driving to put-in, the float, the lunch, and the ride back to town.
I dug into my Fish and Chips with fresh halibut. The fact that the owner of the best hotel in town gave us discounts reminded me of Zambia in the early years, when locals were cheering for us to bring tourism back to Victoria Falls.
Joe introduced us to a pair of young pilots that came in. Bart’s partnership with L.A.B. (Layton A. Bennet) Flying Service had been a boon to Layton’s business. He bought extra planes and hired hungry pilots that needed hours for higher certification. They earned a flat $500 a month and most lived nearby in a house they called The Swamp.
After dinner, Russ and Paul left with Joe. Lee slipped off to his cabin. Lorin didn’t drink liquor and left for another bike ride. The thought of curling up in the dusty warehouse didn’t appeal to Sarah or myself. The Halsingland proved a welcoming place. Fishermen and travelers crowded into the small bar and the night grew more rowdy with each hour.
Joe had warned us about the heavy bell that hung by the door. “Ring that and you have to buy everyone in the bar a drink. It’s an Alaskan tradition.” Sure enough, as the evening progressed, somebody rang the bell, and we all got free drinks. After midnight, the bar thinned out. Sarah and I biked downtown, where music spilled from The Fog Cutter. We danced wildly until sweat poured off us, laughing and yelling short comments to each other as a token form of communication.
When we left, I had to don my sunglasses. Daylight was already breaking at three in the morning.
Back at the warehouse, we played music in the storage area and danced until it evolved into some slow dancing and kissing, which ended when Sarah came to her senses and called it a night. We crept upstairs to the open room with a few sleeping forms scattered about. I laid out my sleeping gear and sacked out.
For the next week, while Layton was showing his new pilots how to navigate the peaks and glaciers between Skagway, Haines, and Glacier Bay, Joe took us about town to steep our minds in the history of the Chilkat Valley.
We spent a morning at the museum with Libby Hackem, learning about her life as a little girl at the turn of the twentieth century, about the gold rush and infamous Jack Dalton, who established the Dalton Trail to the Klondike. She praised Jack, who used to come to dinner at her family house as “a real gentleman.”
“But didn’t he kill a man?” Joe asked.
Libby thought about that for a second before she looked at us through her sweet granny glasses and said, “Well, if Jack killed them, they needed killin’.”
We spent an afternoon with Jo Jurgulit, a rugged old woman who ran a mining claim. When some Cheechako had blocked her passage to her claim and waved a gun in her face, she socked him so hard she broke his jaw, and he was laughed out of out of town.
Lee Heinmiller gave us a tour of the Alaska Indian Arts building, where they were carving totem poles from cedar logs with an adze. He was the son of Carl Heinmiller, who had organized the purchase of the fort. Together they had spent many years working to resurrecting native arts after years of suppression. They also help revive native dancing and the Chilkat Dancers had received national recognition. To honor him for his contributions, the Chilkats had adopted Carl into their tribe.
Charlie-Jimmy gave us the tour of the Tribal house, which sat on the lower end of the parade grounds. He led the Chilkat Dancers’ show for tourists while they dined on barbecued salmon. He taught us to pronounce ‘Tlingit’ with our tongues in the back of the mouth — a sound foreign to me.
By the time facts were spilling out of our ears, we went rafting through the Chilkat Bald Eagle Preserve, twenty-five miles north of town. Forty-eight thousand acres of the Chilkat Valley, where the Klehini and Tsirku flow into the Chilkat River, were dedicated to the preserve because of its unique geological features. In the large gravel bars of what is called the Council Grounds, warm upwellings kept the river free of ice well into November when thousands of eagles congregated to feed on late runs of salmon. As many as sixty nesting pairs lived in the valley year-round and fished the waters of the Council Grounds regularly.
The Tsirku River braided through the Council Grounds with a swift current. Although there were no rapids, I had to stay alert to navigate a maze of channels in the vast gravel bars where the eagles fed. Some of the guides rowed into different channels with varying results.
The deepest channels flowed several feet below the cut banks of the alluvial plain. When Lorin took a different channel, the raft was below the cut and its passengers appeared to be scooting along the gravel on their butts at twenty miles an hour. Lorin’s channel bled off until it was too shallow to float. We stopped and carried his empty raft across the gravel bar to a deeper channel.
Except for Lee and Joe, no one on the crew had any rowing experience, so I felt like a high school kid attending kindergarten. I got testy when Joe asked us to spend our afternoons patching the old rafts. “I am here to row, not patch rafts.”
Joe snapped back, “There are no Prima Donnas here. Pitch in or go home.”
I acquiesced and eventually felt ashamed of my prideful outburst. I made it up to Joe by helping tutor the others to read water and row.
We began running tours the next week. The first tours of the season were critical. We needed to impress every Shore Excursion Manager that our tour was worth promoting. Clients would take a scenic 20-minute flight over the peaks between Skagway, Haines, and adjacent Glacier Bay and float the river for only one hour of the four-hour tour. The weakest link in the tour was the forty-five minutes drive to the river from the airport, the last half of it on a bouncing narrow dirt track through thick stands of alders.
Joe escorted the bus tours for the first weeks, and I rode along. He was a natural entertainer. He was so enthusiastic pointing out a moose or and eagle that his audience almost broke their necks to get a view. He was a tidal wave of happiness, with a rambling discourse on everything and anything, with jokes about bears and moose sprinkled in. He called it the spiel.
The area was rich with stories. Joe urged us to shape the barrage of information into a cohesive tale — from geology to natives to missionaries to gold miners to soldiers to loggers to fishermen to salmon and to eagles.
On small trips, each van needed a guide to spiel. I took all the books and pamphlets home with me to the small cabin Bart had helped me find. I laid out a list of each of the features to be found along the drive and found corresponding stories to tell for the locations. I practiced, but the real thing proved more challenging that talking to myself in a cabin.
In the van I had to crank around from the front passenger seat to entertain the clients with my rambling discourse on everything we passed — Fort Seward, downtown, airport, grave of the last Chilkat shaman, moose pond (tell the moose joke), big slide area, Klukwan native village, dilapidated (Honeymoon) cabin, Chilkat River, Brotherhood Bridge, the Klehini tributary, the communal farm, and then into the alder tunnel where we would all have our teeth rattling from the washboard ruts and the poor passengers in the rear of the van would be bouncing into the roof.
The first time I gave a spiel, I had too many dead spots in my lecture where I just scanned the trees trying to find a subject. I learned to get the audience involved and banter with them about their cruise until the next feature came by.
My spiel improved on the bus, because I had a microphone. I no longer had to shout to the back of the van while in a yoga twist. I had the power of electronics. I could woo my audience, establish eye contact, and reach out to those that weren’t engaging in my talk. My years as an actor paid off, and each tour became another rehearsal for my spiel.
The part that became the hardest to fill was the ride back to town. Although it only took twenty minutes to return, it felt anti-climatic. That’s when I discovered the power of Robert Service poems. I found that if I recited The Cremation of Sam McGee and timed it so I ended just as we rolled to a stop at the airport, everyone broke into applause and tips tripled. When the bus stopped, I would station myself at the bottom of the steps, shaking hands as the guest descended. This gave the impression everyone was tipping me, and allowed those jammed up in the bus time to dig out their wallets.
Our guide training and diligent attention began to pay off in June. We rowed morning and afternoon trips on busy days. Guide complaints about too little work soon turned to pleas for a day off.
It rained a bit most days, but living and working in the rain was no big deal. Dry and warm inside my rain gear, what did it matter if the world around me was wet? We lived in our XtraTuff rubber boots, rowing, hiking, dancing, rolling the top down for a little ventilation occasionally, in and out of the water, into the boat, stand in the bilge, whatever. It gave me a feeling of casual invincibility. One raft trip became another and another and another until they all seemed like one scrolling montage:
As I offered my hand to the last guest boarding my raft, I heard Joe loading his clients. “That’s right. Sit and spin. You didn’t think you would be break dancing today, did you?”
One by one, our rafts pealed off downstream. I introduced myself and got everyone’s name, as I stroked to the center of the current.
In minutes, the river broke out of thick forest onto miles of gravel shoals filling a broad valley.
“Look for white golf balls in the trees. Those are mature bald eagles.” My passengers swiveled about in their ponchos, raising their heads in an exaggerated tilt to clear their view. Straight ahead, the river curved toward a nest in a dead cottonwood.
“There’s one.”
“There’s another!”
Snags of ancient timber roots lay scattered across gravel bars. We floated past eagles congregated on a kill. More eagles watched from a log while others circled until they made a challenge on the carcass. Their shrill staccato whistle pierced the air over and over.
Cameras came out from the folds of ponchos and the clicks of cameras applauded the show. Eagles soared on thermals gracefully circling the river. Ravens chased eagles with accusing caaa’s.
“There’s one diving for salmon.”
An eagle flew overheard hauling the fish in its talons.
We passed under an eagle perched on a branch. He regarded us with one eye with curiosity, then the other eye with suspicion, then the full double eyed stare like an accusation. He returned his gaze to the sky as if in contemplation. As we were about to float under his branch, he leaned forward, squirted a poop, and took flight with a few laborious flaps of his wings.
The Alaskan summer hit hard and fast. Each week a new array of flowers bloomed, while the old ones blew puffs of seed into the wind like little parachutes of hope. Every few weeks a new variety of salmon broke for the ocean or returned to spawn and we could see dozens of eagles in an hour — some soaring, some perching atop giant nests tearing up salmon for their young, many whistling to each other and others swooping onto a branch flaring their great wings to land with grace and control. Except one young eagle that landed on a sapling and rode the swinging branch like a rodeo star hanging on, almost upside down, before he recovered his perch and dignity.
One evening, we floated toward a bear that was splashing into the river chasing salmon. An upstream breeze masked our sound and scent. The lowering sun backlit us, so the bear would have only seen an outline of large blobs floating on the river. I pulled over to wait for her to move on. Although the current was swift, a bear could charge through the shallow channel. The bear walked upstream along the shore towards us. Cameras were clicking, and I was getting nervous. When she was thirty yards away, I rowed the raft into the current. When we floated past, she looked at us quizzically, tilting her head this way and that. But when she caught our scent, she bolted, crossing a quarter mile to the trees in seconds.
“It’s just like Wild Kingdom!” said an octogenarian with the enthusiasm of a teenager.
Eagles and bears followed the salmon. The drive for sex and food set this world’s rhythms. There was almost a gaiety in the air, an excitement of feasting. And for added entertainment, eagles locked talons and fell hundreds of feet separating just before the ground like a daring trapeze act.
This was a new kind of guiding for me — instead of rowing rapids, I spotted hawks, eagles, bears, and moose. It forced me to observe the landscape and catch the drama on shore, which showed me how quickly things evolved as the hours of each day passed. A float in the morning became a different world in the afternoon as the river pulled at the gravel and cut new channels to explore.
The landscape danced burlesque, accompanied by rain and wind, revealing a little at a time — a shoulder here, a hip there — clothed in clouds and misty skirts, until one day her veils vanished and she stood shining in the sun, a different creature all together. On days like that, I could almost hear a symphony playing somewhere behind her jagged peaks.
“Look Ma. Everywhere you look, scenery!” shouted one New Yorker. Our passengers were the most adventurous of the cruise ship clientele and, finally released from their cocoon of endless meals and Vegas style entertainment, they were seeing the Alaska they dreamed about. They seemed deeply appreciative at the end of our little tour. In the reflection of their thrill, I learned to appreciate what I saw with a more innocent wonder than I had brought to Alaska.
We were all discovering Alaska for the first time and learning about it together. The seemingly mythical world of Jack London and Robert Service surrounded us. It was easy to imagine life a hundred years before because, except for the little town with its ribbon of highway north, everything was the same as it had been for thousands of years. We were small players in a much larger display. There was so much more going on around us than the little lives we enjoyed, and sharing that big world with cruise ship passengers was a revelation — to them and to me. Every day we discovered what there was to see in the Eagle Preserve.
A client exclaimed, “Look! A wolf fishing for salmon!”
A young grey wolf looked up with a salmon wriggling in its jaws. What are you doing here?
Just floating by — don’t mind us.
We were like a gang of kids, riding our bikes around town, rowing trips in the Eagle Preserve, dining at the old Halsingland that overlooked the parade grounds and the Lynn Canal which didn’t even seem like an ocean it was so calm and cool, sliding up the banks for twenty feet at high tide and disappearing from the river mouth at low tide. I was living in a dream — in a little dream town — with a little dream job. I was off every Friday and while it was a bit rainy most days, every Friday it was sunny — like on command. I stayed in a small cabin — no running water, just a room with a loft and a door and a window. It was all I needed because I was hardly ever there.
Mountains towered above, guarding our little dream world; framing it in jagged whites and greens and grays sliced by a slate ocean — all perfectly arranged. I lived in a painting and I was happy.
I felt like I had found a tribe, all of us on equal footing, just guides with no seniority because the company was so new. We did everything together. If one of us had a friend in Skagway, we all went to visit. We had vans and planes and pilots at our command.
Haines was a social whirlwind — every night something happened. It usually started at the Gland and often ended there. Someone would get the big round table by the window and wave the other guides over as they came in the door until we had a critical mass for mischief.
“Hey, let’s go look at bears. I hear they’re feeding near Chilkoot Lake.” Boom into the van, off to find bears.
Or — “Hot tub at Marla’s house.”
Or — “Horseshoes at Guy’s house.”
Or — “Salmon feed at Deena and John’s house,” where you had to climb a trail to their eagle nest type cabin overlooking Mud Bay.
Or — “Let’s bike the loop around Sawmill Road,” where Lorin led the charge with his rally cry, “Keep going!”
Or — “Let’s go up Chilkoot inlet and watch the whales feed on the Hooligan run.”
Or — “Northern Lights!” and we would all spill out onto the parade grounds to lie on the grass and watch the sky like it was the best movie house in the world.
Back to the bar, now past midnight, standing around getting drinks from Arnie. Someone rings the bell! Drinks all around. Boom, can’t go home yet. By three in the morning, it’s raging. The bar is three deep. Arnie makes his way to the office through the crowd who starts to chant, “Arnie! Arnie!” They scoop up the big Swede, and carry him like a battering ram toward the bell. He writhes and bucks. He is strong even against the dozen guys wrestling him. Arnie, with a burst of pent up vigor, breaks their hold and falls to the floor. A shocked silence passes through the crowd. Arnie struggles to his feet, breaks into a grin, and RINGS THE BELL!
When Arnie closed the Gland, we could still drink and dance at the Fog Cutter or the Harbor Bar or the Pioneer; but eventually I had to face the uphill ride to home on my bicycle — a leg burner. For quite a while I had to walk up a portion of it, the irony of its name taunting me — Young Road.
I slept hard, woke up, and watched moose prowl about while I peed in the woods. I flew down the hill at thirty miles an hour on my bike; past the alders, skunk cabbage, devil’s club, and houses ringed by log fences; merged onto the pavement; peddled through town; turned left at the only four-way stop; along the harbor with morning light angling through the masts of sailboats and fishing crafts to the big dock and the little red Chilkat Guide office where I dropped my bike, got my schedule, and let the fun begin.
