Looking for Alaska (2 page)

It was early June, yet I had on a black fleece vest, blue cotton sweatpants, and Adidas cross trainers. On our farm in Tennessee, where we normally lived, it was hot and humid in June; wearing fleece would be impossible this time of year. As I sped down the hill, Alaskan air flavored by glaciers and the sea blew hard in my face. To be able to dress like this in the summer was a simple yet surprisingly profound pleasure, especially because the daylight stayed out to play until 2
A.M
. Oh, to be away from the shriveling humidity.

Some of our friends thought we might be moving here forever, but Rita and I had made no plans to stay longer than a year or so. Rita and I and most of our children had been living in Alaska for only two weeks, and I hadn't traveled anywhere yet, except around and around this coastal town, really a village walled in by jagged mountains and otherworldly blue glaciers on three sides. The road to Seward ended in the sea; “downtown,” where the city hall, library, and movie theater were, this town was not even three-quarters of a mile wide. In 1964 much of it had been destroyed by one of the ten worst earthquakes in the world in the last hundred years—three of the ten worst have occurred in Alaska.

I know people who travel across several countries on their two-week vacations, but this was not our vacation. While we were in Alaska, we had decided to settle down in Seward (pop. 2,830), about 130 miles south of Anchorage, on the Kenai Peninsula. I'd heard the name Seward—he was the man who “bought” Alaska for two cents an acre. But I'd never heard of Seward the city until my friend Ben Ellis told me about it. Ben, a former newspaperman, worked at the Sea Life Center there.

I didn't know where to begin this odyssey. I'd fought the feeling these two weeks that I was wasting priceless time. I was not burning up the roads headed for some Eskimo village, nor was I making any lists or filling up my calendar with interview dates and visits. Fortunately, I have a wife who understands that some people, including her husband and her father, a farmer, don't work like many people do.

Different seasons of the year, of life, demand different kinds of output. There is a time to sow and a time to reap. Sometimes it's more mental, sometimes it's almost purely physical. And at times your heart and spirit rule. There are similarities between writers and farmers; you prepare the ground, then plant the seed. You patiently allow Nature to do as she will. You take away the weeds, you allow the sun to shine and the rain to fall, then you harvest what is there. Alaska seemed too big of a field to harvest. People I respected said, though, that Alaska was more like a big small town. Everyone knew everyone. That was easy for them to say.

I did not feel at home in Alaska yet. I wondered if I ever would. But on these journeys, I always feel this way at first. It's part of the pressure of adjusting to a new place. It might take me a while to feel comfortable. I learned a long time ago that it's best to allow myself to be reprogrammed to the pace of a new place. It's better to relax and respect my way into a new world than to force myself on it.

And there is always sadness about what we've left behind. If it hadn't been for our friends Nona and Rusty Jones, we would probably not have been here at all. Certainly we wouldn't have relocated as a family, and then the adjustment would have been much more wrenching for me. In my life, tiny, apparently unrelated moments have had great influence. This whole trip had started with a simple introduction over lunch.

Over the last few years Rusty and Nona had become two of our closest friends. In the fall of 1994, Rusty invited me to come for lunch in Nashville to meet one of his clients. Rusty's an entertainment attorney and represents me when I do something entertaining. Lately I hadn't been doing much. I was prepared to accept that now that I was older, and like other adventurers, whether they be explorers or athletes or entrepreneurs, my best adventures in life were over. Leave the intense challenges for the young. But I didn't want to give them up. I like to compliment Rusty and tell him he is the lawyer with half a heart; at times he really seems to care about people. For months, he'd been telling me I needed to go somewhere, take off and explore, so that I would have something to write about. He knew how I was feeling and what I needed. Although he tried to make a joke of it, he knew my situation wasn't funny.

The client Rusty wanted me to meet was an Alaskan folksinger, songwriter, and true eccentric named Hobo Jim. Hobo's given name is Jim Varsos. He's actually not eccentric, just ferociously himself. He has carved out his own kind of life; he's the kind of guy who has never worked in a cubicle. In the seventies he hitchhiked to Alaska with two women from Texas. They landed in Homer. Rusty had been itching to introduce us to each other. He was fond of saying that Hobo was his favorite anarchist. And, based on some comments I've made about politicians and the government, Rusty seemed to think that Hobo and I might share some views. Hobo is no anarchist; it's just that Rusty's a liberal democrat.

After lunch Hobo invited me to come visit him and his family in Alaska. I decided to take him up on his offer; about six months before I was supposed to leave, Rusty's wife, Nona, stepped in. The Joneses' youngest daughter, Grayson, had become our youngest daughter's good friend; they were both seven and
loved
the Spice Girls. Usually I did all I could to avoid hearing their music. One day, however, Rusty and I took them to a Spice Girls concert. While we were at the concert, Nona and Rita were going to see
There's Something About Mary.
(They thought it was a chick flick. Whoops.)

Nona is the kind of woman who makes things happen. She's from Memphis and she could probably run a small country. She is
not
your image of a shy and subtle southern girl. Rita fits that description more, except she's from southern Michigan. When the movie grossed them out, they went for coffee. When we all met back at the Joneses', Rita and Nona were ready for something.

“You guys, sit down,” Nona commanded us, as only Nona can do.

Nona is forceful but only when she thinks there is something good for you involved. You can't help but love her because you know she loves you, even if she's a bit dominating. I am used to Nona's type of personality; my father was just like her. My dad expressed his opinion about
everything
we did—everything that he knew about, anyway. Somehow he seemed to know much more about what we did than we thought he did, almost as if he had done the same things when he was young. I used to think he wanted all of his children to do just what he said, but I learned that he expected us to respect his opinion and then make up our own minds.

When we came in from the concert, Rusty went to make us each a mint julep, but decided to wait when he discerned Nona and Rita's seriousness. Rusty surely knew something was up. Being an attorney, he is used to being thrown any kind of pitch, so he smiled comfortably as if nothing were out of the ordinary. Maybe he was still thinking about Posh Spice.

“Honey,” Rita said sweetly, “Nona and I have been talking and she has something important to say for me.”

My brain dashed around in search of places of difficulty in our relationship, but before I could find any, Nona took over.

“You're going to Alaska, going there to work on your next book. Well, why not take the family with you? Rita wants to move up there with you, no matter how long you plan to stay. You can take Julianne, she can go to school up there somewhere, and the older kids can come up in the summers. What do you think?”

Rusty looked as if he'd swallowed a law book. Rita watched my face and smiled one of her “this is going to happen” smiles. I felt sick just attempting to work through the logistics, and aggravated with Nona for putting me on the spot.

“That would be nice,” I said, and I was only sort of lying.

It would be nice, but finding a place for all of us to stay and then moving at least the three of us up there would be difficult. Finding places to rent in the summer is hard to do. It would have to be big enough for all the kids to visit, and Alaskans as a rule don't have large homes—too much to heat for too long. Plus, every Alaskan told me that when you live in Alaska, suddenly friends and family remember you and miss you and can't wait to see you—that is, as long as you're willing to be their personal tour guide. Then there was the thought of bringing our other five children, ages fourteen, sixteen, eighteen, twenty, and twenty-three, up for the summers. Quite a frisky bunch they are. My mind raced—finding jobs for the older ones, paying for all of it, the travel, the expenses. But what Nona and Rita were suggesting did sound wonderful, and suddenly I knew that sharing Alaska was the right thing to do. Could we pull it off? Did the kids even want to?

The logistics made my brain want to burn some wires and short-circuit. It wasn't just getting them to Alaska; it was the wanting everyone to be happy and fulfilled by it. And of course there was the major challenge of truly discovering Alaska. In twisting my arm, Nona said that our children could be a big part of our Alaskan experience, that their enthusiasm would be a bonus for me. We talked with our children, and to our surprise they all wanted to experience Alaska too. They were willing to make the sacrifice of us being away from home for the time we would be together in the last frontier. Alaska was so enormous, so distinct; it had such an unusual presence. I hadn't been this overwhelmed since I began my walk across America as a twenty-two-year-old. Could I possibly handle the plate I had set for myself and now serve it up successfully to our whole family?

Rita, Julianne, Luke, Jed, Aaron and I arrived in Anchorage on the plane with one duffel bag each in late May. Rebekah and Brooke would be here soon. The duffels were huge black things with wheels on one end, made by JanSport of ballistics cloth. Each one holds over ten thousand cubic inches and weighs six pounds eight ounces empty. As big as they are, they didn't hold chairs, sofas, beds, a TV, the kitchen sink. We did bring six sleeping bags. Rita brought her set of linen napkins. She'd set those napkins up on top of a cardboard box, covered with some lovely tablecloth she had found buried at a garage sale with a vase filled with Alaskan wildflowers if she had to. She has a way of making things beautiful. That spirit of hers has even softened me.

Somewhere along the road to Anchorage from Seward.
P
HOTO BY
P
ETER
J
ENKINS

Rita did pack a Krup's coffeemaker, which she wrapped in mismatched sheets. One essential piece of our life we made sure followed us to Alaska was our monthly delivery of coffee. Starbucks sends two pounds of coffee beans every month to our farm, usually French roast. Rita had it forwarded to Seward. There is no door-to-door mail delivery in Seward; everyone picks mail up at the post office. Our address was P.O. Box 761, zip 99664. I never thought I would have a zip code that began with a nine, much less a double nine. Where I was born, it begins with zero; where I have been living since the early eighties, it begins with three.

The street where we lived in Seward went another hundred yards or so and intersected with Seward's main street, which was the one and only road out of town. Go left to Anchorage and the rest of North America; go right about a mile to downtown Seward and the ocean.

I rode my bike on a path that paralleled the road. After two weeks I could fly down it. These horses seemed to know not to come toward the main road. Somebody's horses had been running around on Seward's airport runway, where they had to compete for grazing with the moose that lived off in the willows by the runway.

Being surrounded as we are here by the wilderness, endless mountains, water, and glaciers, with only one road out, Seward has little crime, even though most of the worst criminals in Alaska live here. On the other side of Resurrection Bay by Fourth of July Creek and Spring Creek is Alaska's maximum-security prison. It sits alone crammed a long way down a closed mountain valley.

Seward's only recent bank robbery took place in the seventies. To rob a bank in Seward, where the road dead-ends into the ocean and goes for sixty miles north with no outlet, is not going to get you listed in the who's who of successful bank robbers. A bank robber trying to escape would not park a getaway car and attempt to climb over the mountains and glaciers that hem us in. These glaciers have carved out the bit of flat land that Seward perches on by the sea; these inspired sculptors have carved much of Alaska and are still grinding away. Sometimes the glaciers look silver, sometimes ice blue; sometimes they are immaculate, covered with snow. They keep us in on the east and the west and stretch for miles and miles to the north. There are only narrow passageways out of town, some blasted by man and others created by the glaciers' flow.

The ocean waters of Resurrection Bay, which flow in from the Gulf of Alaska, block us, except of course for boats. The waters bring to within view of town pods of orcas, several salmon runs a year, sea otters floating on their backs. Even a humpback can sometimes be seen breaching a mile or more offshore.