Looking for Alaska (29 page)

Per Nolan in Cordova.
P
HOTO BY
P
ETER
J
ENKINS

Rebekah, Per, and I took the king salmon down to the other end of Cordova where Per said he could have it smoked. Pip and Scott, a partner, smoke, can, and sell some salmon every season. Neva works for them. A few years back, Scott almost lost his life when he was thrown out of his boat. The breakers hit the stern and flipped it over bow first. The cold water can numb your body and hands and arms, depriving you of the strength to hold on. If he hadn't wrapped himself up in the corkline, he would have drowned. And he'd only wrapped himself in the corkline so his loved ones would find his body and not doubt what had happened. But he was rescued. We'd get the salmon smoked at their facility, in an old cannery building built over Orca Inlet, looking out toward Hawkins Island.

Neva had said there were few sights as inspiring as six killer whales coming through here on their way in or out of Prince William Sound, especially with the sun setting in the west and lighting up their exhaled breath and their dorsal fins in silver and gold. They swam through the channel slowly, unless they were hunting. Looking for whales, I spotted instead an older bow-picker coming toward Cordova with a surfboard strapped to the roof of the cabin. The surfboard was creamy white with orange striping—it was Andy Johnson, the fisherman, the world-class extreme snowboarder, the surfer returning from his place of worship, where the ocean and mountains and snow and ice and water all meet.

I told Per I'd had about all of him I could stand and that he needed to go be with his wife. I would hang out with Andy, if I could catch up with him. While we were gone Rebekah opened some of her own doors.

FROM REBEKAH

Hippie Cove

Cordova is the place, Alaska is the country. I am near twenty the first time I visit Cordova with my father, and out of all the places my father has taken me or sent me to visit, Cordova remains my favorite. I know picking favorites is absurd; perhaps the best way to put it is that Cordova is the place in which I would most want to live. Why? Because of the countryside, the peaks and skies under which it sits, the hollow little corner of the world that it claims, and the people that attract me so, because they live out their lives, day in and day out, in their own little corner of this magic land.

Cordova is both bitter and sweet, but more sweet than bitter, the more “offbeat” you are. I love its roads, the way they all seem to have a part that moves uphill. I love Cordova's houses; the big furry dogs tied up to their front porches that never bark. I love the Russians who live in that hole over past Per and Neva's trailer park, and how the Russian women keep their heads covered in white, probably hand-stitched bonnets, and how these women all drive the nicest Ford and GMC trucks in town. I never saw any of the other locals talk to the Russians. I did, though, drive into their hole on one of my many Cordovan drives. The hole was really a fenced-in cemented RV park housing expensive RV after expensive RV. Neva let me take her old beat-up Sentra around town a lot. I would drive the back roads and then get scared and turn around because all of a sudden I would realize that I was out by myself and I knew nothing about how to come face-to-face with men like Wild Gene or wild bears like I'd seen on TV.

I love Cordova's baseball field and the view from the bleachers. I wonder if Neva even notices the mountains in that view anymore, just as I hardly ever notice the rolling hills and green flavors of my own state anymore. When is it that we actually stop looking out the window—when our eyes see nothing but road and the endless yellow and white lines on the pavement? It's sad. I know that's why people move, for the views of mountains and hills or lakes, but once they settle in and the years start to roll by, the wonderment finally wears off. Where do all of these magnificent views go, when exactly is it that the damn road becomes the only object of our stares? Thank God people have kids and the world hasn't exploded yet because in those kids' eyes, hope exists for reclaiming the view.

Cordova has a certain “air” to it that I have not found in any other Alaskan town, or anywhere else, for that matter. This air seems to represent all things reflective and deep. The people carry this air, as does the view. It made me want to look as far into the water as I could and keep the feel of the breeze that blew on my forearms while I stood on Per's boat on my skin forever. It made me want to climb a nearby mountain despite my fear of encountering that one pesky bear that Neva and the boys kept reminding me about. This air of reflection made me want to sit in the Orca Café and drink endless cups of coffee and write, my colored pencils at hand, and plunge into these new people I'd met. It made me want to never stop looking out the windows of Cordova, no matter whether they were the windows of the café, the windows of Per and Neva's home, or the windows to the world that are my come-with-me-everywhere eyes, windows that lead to the very essence of my soul.

*   *   *

“Hooch” was his name, and Andrea was hers. I had encountered people like this before, the lone-wanderer types who can find a home no matter the weather or the town. She reminded me of Alanis Morissette, with her long, nearly black hair falling to her ass, and she had these hands that were perfectly traveled and beckoning to the next best thing. They were the kind of hands that were made for acoustic guitar playing. Andrea and Hooch had dated, been together, whatever you want to call it, and I met her at the Orca Café. She was working the deli and coffee counter hidden in the back of the store behind all the shelves filled with books and trinkets. I was alone and shy and new in town, and I guess that was written all over my freckled face. She was kind and sweet-spirited, and she reached out to me, inviting me down to her place—Hippie Cove.

Hippie Cove is a piece of land inhabited by old rusted vans and school buses and people who need nothing but food, love, and liquid for the day. Thus the name, I suppose. All around were tall pines, pebble streams that you could either hop over or walk through (nothing wrong with getting a little wet, right?). The sound of small water-falls, a sound that seemed to me to be the marriage of silence and searching, filled the air. It was about three acres of land with a dozen or so buses and vans and a banya, so to speak. The banya lay past all the buses and vans and was for steaming and scrubbing and getting naked.

Another important relic to Hippie Cove is its “birdhouse.” It's really a tree house that was built long ago by some hippies. It has a stove, tall ceilings, a porch filled with bongo drums, guitars, torn upholstered chairs, and candles, and shelves and shelves of books from backpacks and knapsacks off the backs of the hippies who have visited this place. They were all books about adventure and dreaming and bums, all the things near and dear to these bearded and long-haired young people. Although there was an old man or two, as there always seems to be an old man or two. The one I was introduced to had a long gray beard and glazed blue eyes, and he talked about how the land they all lived off of was going to be taken away because the people who owned it were tired of all those “squatters.” Andrea seemed to think of this old man as her father figure, her protector. But then again, she seemed comfortable, despite its lack of skyscrapers and suits. It was all about “love” and “listen to this song,” and “hey, man, check out that eagle over there!”

In some of these people's eyes I could see desperation, addiction, longing. It looked as though some of them were on the run from something or from someone. But not everyone—in Andrea I saw a peace and in Hooch I saw energy. He had “that look.” It seemed everywhere I turned in Alaska, whether it be the airport or some tourist-filled street in Anchorage, there were men who wore beards and who had “that look” about them, the same “look” my dad wore once upon a time, when he was their age and of their build and of their hope. Hooch had all this. He was lean and tall with a brown/blond beard that ran to the middle of his chest. He had dirt under his fingernails and holes in his clothes, but he always seemed to wear a smile through all the muff and gruff. He was in his twenties, like most of the people who made up Hippie Cove. They came, Andrea and Hooch and all the others, I suppose, for the view—the mountains, the water, the isolation, and the assurance that no one whom you didn't want to find you could, way up here in this little hollow corner of Alaska.

Andrea lived alone in an old, multicolored school bus equipped with a stove, sleeping space, books, and other stuff that seemed old and worn-out, as if it had been dragged all over the world. Hooch lived in another bus with another girl. A new fling had begun for him, and he was riding it. Andrea didn't seem to mind that he was with someone else. Rather, she was working on “soul stuff.” She was learning how to fight her fear. She told me about how she went on daily walks in the woods behind the cove, how she'd been scared to go “out there” because of bears. But in her fight she had come to a place where she could “trust the universe.” She said, “If the universe wants to take me, then it will.” It was such a strong, confident statement, I will never forget her saying it to me.

THE SNOW GHOST

Andy lived alone somewhere off the road to Nirvana Park, where he rented the downstairs of a wooden, two-story house from a fellow fisherman. On a light trailer at the side of the house was Andy's flying machine, an ultralight. He's trying to figure out how to fly to the top of the local mountains that only he and one or two others dare to snowboard down. Once he figures out how to fly to the top, he'd like to have someone fly him up there. Then he could leap off into four feet of powder and snowboard down without having to spend three to four hours hiking up for a two-minute ride down. That's how long it takes to go up and come down Queens Chair, Andy's favorite mountain in the world. You can see the mountain face from town. There are fewer ways to die hiking up, such as getting swept away in avalanches, than by coming down, when at these incredible speeds you can hit a surface that once was powdery snow but has been melted by the sun and refrozen icy hard. At those speeds, you can slide off cliffs or skid into unmovable trees or boulders.

Andy understands he can't fish or fly all the time, so he would like to write screenplays someday, and be a stuntman. He told me about fishing and flying, and I talked to him about writing.

Hung on the front door of Andy's place is one of his old license plates: “Boardom.” That was the name of the snowboard shop started by Andy and his best friend Teal Copeland when they were in high school. Small towns anywhere can breed boredom and give added meaning to the teenage mantra that there's nowhere to go and nothing to do. Especially places of deep snow with no road in or out. In Alaska's small, isolated communities, more or less all its towns except Anchorage and Fairbanks, making your own fun can take on a radical and sometimes extreme definition. Andy had just one comfortable-looking chair; he offered it to me. Playing on his TV, in what seemed like endless loops, was a video of some outrageous snowboard runs down what appeared to be an almost vertical mountain face. I would later learn one of the people going off the mountaintop was Andy, at an event in New Zealand.

A poster for Glissade snowboards hangs on the outside of the front door and one of Laird Hamilton, famous megawave surfer riding a wave called Jaws, on the inside. Jaws was perfect, the one God would show under the word
wave
in a dictionary. Another poster that read “The Beauty of Gray” hung by a logo for Smith, a snowboarding goggles and glasses maker. There was also a poster of Andy snowboarding down some insane-looking run on Mount Baker, near Bellingham, Washington. In the winter of 2000 it took away from Mount Rainier the world record for a winter's snowfall, more than 1,133 inches, or 94 feet. For people like Andy who like to fly over and through the snow, Mount Baker is a “sick” place. (
Sick
means “really good.”)

On the windowsill was a primitive carving from Costa Rica of a man carrying a surfboard. Last winter, Andy spent a couple months down there surfing right before fishing started. He surfed, did yoga, ate super healthy, and adjusted for the first time in his life to a tropical place with bugs, snakes, and lizards. When Andy surfs the breakers off the Copper River delta he's got to watch for salmon sharks, Steller's sea lions, and humpback whales. He said he preferred Alaska; he'd rather worry about big predators than bloodsucking insects.

Also on the sill was a hand-carved, deadly looking piece of curved wood. It looked at first like a horn from some animal. Andy told me it was a spike for killing vampires. He does not care for the “users” in this world who suck the life out of you, who take your heart or spill your blood. He doesn't think they deserve to “be around,” he told me in a voice heavy with experience, so he's ready for them. Obviously, he had met more of these people than he would have wished, and this stake is symbolically about warding off anymore “injuries.” Andy's life is about the heights of sensation found in the extreme natural world. He reaches those heights by surfing on top of the deep powder or riding the curls of the waves or flying through the sky on his ultralight. All the while, he fights to control his gifted body, to keep from being injured or wiped out, to keep feeling as alive as possible.