Looking for Alaska (3 page)

The mountains, sharp as a scalpel, that rise on all sides make us feel secure some days, trapped on others, and when the sun, clouds, and glacial mists co-operate, extremely inspired. Sometimes the mountain walls can be seen so clearly that their grandeur can almost knock you over. When people from Outside, which is what Alaskans call the rest of the United States, hear that Mount Alice, directly to our east, is just 5,265 feet in elevation, they act disappointed. People are looking for big numbers, but numbers can be deceiving. The mountains all around us rise up from sea level. The mountains I've walked over in Colorado start at eight or nine thousand feet, and the grandest rise to something over thirteen thousand. Here what are called hanging glaciers are suspended in among the surrounding peaks; they were like blue mirages floating inside openings in the clouds. There just is no easy way out of Seward, and there had been no easy way to get out of my stagnation, a feeling I'd felt for a few years, until coming here.

A bull orca surfaces near us in Resurrection Bay, Seward.
P
HOTO BY
P
ETER
J
ENKINS

Seward is one of those rare communities where you can turn your kids loose and let them roam around town. People don't have to worry about not being able to find husbands or wives. Turn them loose. Even if a husband is prone to hang around at bars or other places he shouldn't—which I am not—he can be found quickly. There are only so many bars and only so many streets. Many people think that Alaska would be a great place to disappear to or hide out, but that's not true in Seward.

I rode Joe's bike across the main street, which is called either the Seward Highway or Third Avenue depending on where you are, and headed toward the city docks. I have always loved hanging around boat docks. By Icicle Seafoods, a cannery, there's a railroad car or two set up with shops in them. One corner is the bike shop, where fourteen-year-old Joe Tougas got his really advanced new mountain bike, the yellow and black one, which is why I was riding his old one. Redheaded, shorthaired Joe is a hard worker, and he pays for his bikes with his own money. He even put studded tires on his new one for winter. I watched the way the teenagers rode their mountain bikes, down the stairs and up the stairs. They would ride up a couple stairs slowly, almost coming to a stop, fighting for balance. I tried to do what they did.

The guy who runs the bike shop and his family spend the summer here and drive to Mexico in their camper and live there after tourist season. I was always seeing him in the bay in his kayak or riding fast around town on one of his bikes.

I pedaled over to Captain Jack's. Captain Jack is Jack Scoby. Several years ago, he and his wife, Sheila, and some other pioneering Sewardites started taking visitors on their boat into the bay to see the orcas and humpbacks and Steller's sea lions and bald eagles and Dall porpoise and peregrine falcons and mind-blowing glaciers. They then sold out to Kenai Fjord Tours, who continued their tradition and added more boats to their fleet. At Captain Jack's, they process the fresh salmon and halibut tourists catch each day on the local charter boats. Our sons Luke and Aaron would have summer jobs there cutting up and vacuum-packing the fish, then shipping it FedEx frozen back to the fisherman's home. If you caught an eighty-pound halibut and six silvers, you could send sixty to seventy pounds of fresh fish back home.

Part of the reason I was not jumping face first into Alaska was that I wanted to make sure the family was settled in. Our other son, Jed, sixteen, would work at the local Helly Hansen store. They sold the kind of high-quality wet-weather gear favored by commercial fishermen and outdoor gear that was quickly being discovered by adventurers and outdoorsy people.

It was about four o'clock and getting crowded on the docks, since many charter-fishing boats come in around this time. They say that late in the afternoon in summer you can climb to the top of Mount Marathon, one of the thousands of mountains around Seward, and see the whole fishing fleet heading home, making white wakes in the turquoise-blue-green ocean.

I took off again, past Miller's Daughter, where we went for homemade bread and soup. I loved being able to eat hot soup in the summer. I rode through a parking lot and around the corner to two old school buses that were sort of pushed together. Inside the small one was Red. He sold the best hamburgers and fries in town. He'd set up a soda machine outside and kept a few picnic tables for his customers. Everyone said that Seward in the summer and Seward in the winter were two different cities; we would find out, they'd tell us, and watch for our reaction. I had none. I had no idea what an Alaskan winter was like, and I wasn't quite ready to learn yet. I was still getting my feet wet.

Leaving Red's gravel parking lot was a man in a motorized wheelchair. He pulled out onto our main street and headed down the road, out of town, at about five miles an hour. He didn't drive in the main car lane but just to the side. I was headed to our little bitty movie theater to see which kids we could take to the movie, which we would do once a week all summer, but I turned around and pulled alongside the man in the wheelchair. When he saw me, he pulled farther over so I wouldn't be nailed by some of the traffic. He said he was headed to Eagle, a grocery store on the edge of town just before the huge metal coffee cup called Espresso Simpatico. A guy named Darien sold Americanos and lattes and all kinds of other fancy coffee there.

I must have registered surprise on my windburned face because he said, “That's no big deal. I've taken this wheelchair all the way to the Pit Bar.” The Pit Bar stays open until 5
A.M
. and opens again a few hours later. It's a few miles out the road.

I told him to have a nice ride, he wished me the same. I rode past Terry's Tire and Lube, a gas station right out of the fifties, where Terry and his wife repair tires and change oil. Before Terry's on the left was National Bank of Alaska. It had small plots of ground by the side road entrance where people tend little gardens. After we'd been to the bank once, Cheryl, at the far right window, knew our names. She lived about halfway up our hill in an apartment complex. We'd run into Cheryl all over the place, as you do everyone you love, hate, or are indifferent about in a small place like Seward.

I try not to hate anyone, but there is an occasional person in life that you just don't want to see, and that is what's bad about Seward's post office. I pedaled there before checking into the movie playing at the Liberty Theater. Everyone in Seward has to go to the post office every day to get mail. Eventually you notice who gets their mail at what time of day, and if you want to see a friend or meet someone or avoid someone else, you know when to go. If you hate people in general, you could go to the post office at 3
A.M
. If you had a big package, they'd put a key in your box that fit a larger box and keep your big package there. If you love most people and have time to spare, you could hold the front door for people and strike up conversations. Just as long as you didn't get in the way of the people who hold their eyes straight ahead and are in a hurry to get back to work. Though there aren't many of these types in Seward.

I often volunteered to stand in line at the post office to buy some stamps for the family just to check out the platinum blond window clerk. One day I had mailed a package and noticed she wore yellow contacts that made her eyes look like snake eyes. A few days later she wore red ones that made her eyes look like the devil, someone you wouldn't expect to see working at the post office. The next week she wore purple ones because they matched her sweater, or black ones because she'd ridden her Harley to work and they matched her leathers. I told her I liked the statement she was making; she said thanks, that at least half the people didn't look her in the eye.

A few blocks over and down, getting closer all the time to Resurrection Bay, was Liberty Theater. I rode up and stopped. I stared through the glare on the glass at the movie posters. This week
The Mummy
was playing, and coming soon was
A Simple Plan.
The Liberty is almost exactly like the first movie theater I ever went to, back in Connecticut in the early sixties. I remembered having my father drop me off a few blocks away on my first date so that Kathy Flanigan wouldn't see me getting out of our old car. We always seemed to have cars that were ten years older than everyone else's. It took me at least half the movie to put my arm around the back of her chair. My knee touched hers, I forget if it was accidental, what a surprising thrill. I don't remember what was playing—it didn't matter.

I do remember another night in that theater in Connecticut, a night my life was altered, seriously and profoundly. It was a couple years before I put my arm around Kathy. A few hours in the dark being consumed by what was happening on-screen had actually influenced this moment on this borrowed blue bike in Seward, Alaska. The movie I saw that evening, over thirty-five years ago, would crawl deep into my subconscious to the place where my dreams were born, where my fears originated. The movie was
Lawrence of Arabia.
I saw it when I was eleven or twelve.

The opening scene from
Lawrence of Arabia
has haunted me on and off all these years. It gripped me like a prophecy that would someday come true. I had this feeling, even then as a sixth-grader, that sometime much later in life I would die, like Lawrence, on a narrow country street surrounded by green fields and contented, quiet people.

Why would that scene, a scene about an adventurer's death, haunt a sixth-grader? I'd not known anyone who'd died, I'd never feared for my life. I loved life. In the opening of this movie, which won seven Academy Awards, T. E. Lawrence is done with the desert and done with Arabia, where he had led a rebellion, and he heads out for a ride on a powerful motorcycle away from his cuddly, tree-shaded, petite cottage in the English countryside. The walls of his cottage must have become so confining. He fuels up his Brough motorcycle, wipes up some spilled drops, and takes off, shifting rapidly, gaining speed. His goggles keep the bugs out of his eyes. The road is not smooth; he bounces with the thrill of the ride, he feels it. He is going too fast but he must go faster. After all he's done in Arabia, to feel anything takes more and more. T. E. Lawrence needs to be thrilled again, even if it's just for the few minutes of the ride. He needs to risk something. Some unsuspecting bicyclists, meandering in the countryside, are in his lane; he is going far too fast, he's on the edge of being out of control. Still, there is life in his eyes, concentration. Then he begins to skid, then he slides off the road, then he is dead.

I got a Mustang GT right before I turned forty. Every time I'd get to going outrageously fast in it out on some country road near our farm that used to be only wide enough for a wagon, this scene from the movie would come up in my mind. When I got my hand stuck between two logs, attached to a logging chain, attached to my Ford 5000 gas tractor, and was trapped there for three hours, I thought of this scene. I did not really think I would die but wondered if I would lose my right hand if no one found me until nighttime. Finally, my neighbors Cindy and Ray Williams heard my screams, and Ray released me. That hand still goes numb. Whenever I pull out onto the main road near the end of our gravel driveway and about get smashed by a concrete truck because I am preoccupied with something stupid or silly, I think of this scene.

I'm not sure why it has been so hard for me to leave home for the last several years. The kind of writing I do, if I don't leave home, I don't have anything to write about. Part of it may be that I've always yearned for a home and never really found one until I moved to this farm. Growing up, we lived in a federal housing project. Now I know every square foot of these 150 acres of farm; it is my island, our peace. I know where the coyotes crawl under the fence to get to the back hayfield, where recently one tried and failed to haul the leg bone of one of my neighbor's dead cows underneath it. I know where the flock of wild turkeys scratches in the leaves of the forest around the straight red oaks looking for acorns and bugs. I have seen where springs bubble out of the ground in April after heavy rains. For the last three years a great horned owl has nested, first in a half-dead oak a hundred yards from our front porch and then in an oak thirty feet from the back door. Last spring one of the baby owls blew out of the nest into the yard; somehow it flew back. I've seen the spot where red-tailed hawks have killed cottontail rabbits. I know each cow and who her father was.

When I take walks to the larger half of the farm, back to the woods, I always look toward Kedron Road and see the dream home that my ex-wife, Barbara, and I built, just a few hundred yards from where I live now. Barbara owns it now and rents it out to strangers. She lives up the road about thirty-five miles with our three children. We restored a 1901 farmhouse, added on an oak timber-frame structure, put in a hot tub, and thought it would be perfect. I found a great deal on walnut lumber at the sawmill in Culleoka, when no one wanted walnut. I had gorgeous tongue-and-groove flooring made, cheap, at some guy's shop behind his house in Lewisburg. Part of that dream, the part with our children, has been put back together, albeit imperfectly. The other part, about Barbara and me, is focused on our children and it works well because we love them so much.