Five years ago when I started my blog on this lovely blockchain, I led off with a series of tales from my Alaskan upbringing. My dad was a wandering timber faller, so we ended up in some pretty awesome places, most of them more remote than even conceivable for many folks on this spinning rock we all call home.
This weekend I had a birthday party for my youngest. My baby gorilla turns fifteen today! As his birthday was on a Monday, he asked if he could have his party this past weekend, and being a somewhat accommodating parent, at least when it comes to celebratory things, I said of course.
Four family size Papa Murphy's pizzas, a triple chocolate cake, and gallons of punch devoured later, I sat at the dining room table the following morning with my daughter and her friend Emi. How in the world does this tie in with an Alaskan Bush upbringing you might be wondering now? Well, it was the conversation that follows which juxtaposed the two.
Both of the girls are in the thick of basketball season now, and this Friday they play a particularly tough team, the Native American girls from the Coeur d'Alene Tribe. The Lakeside team from Worley is legend for their style of playing. It's, well, a bit rough.
We moved to Prince of Wales Island in Southeast Alaska when I was ten. I started fifth grade in Craig, Alaska, and our island was the ancestral home to Tlingit and Haida tribe members. The girls of the Tlingit and Haida tribes were often over 5'9" by 5th grade and excellent basketball players. It was a good thing I spent one year in school with the girls because later when I lived across the island in Thorne Bay and played against them in basketball that association came in handy.
I was the point guard on our basketball team, a blistering 5'2" tall. We only had 8 players on our Varsity team, and Craig had a lot more. They also were all giants, and many of them had filed acrylic names and a hatred for colonizers. It was good times.
But it wasn't the basketball remembrances that got me really excited that day, it was how we traveled to the games. When we had a game we often had to fly to neighboring islands and stay in the school for the weekends. It was awesome and a bit terrifying, but what was more terrifying were the slow boat trips.
There is an inter-island ferry system in Southeast Alaska. It is known as the Alaska Marine Highway. I think it might be a bit misnamed, as the word highway implies speed. Anyway, once that section of my cortex was tickled by the remembrance duster, I proceeded to regale the children with tales of tumultuous seas and childhood mischief. One of my fondest memories is as follows.
To get from Prince of Wales to Ketchikan when I was a kid involved rolling onto the the MV Aurora, often in the middle of the night, and rocking, rattling, and rolling your way across Clarence Strait. It was the slowest forty mile journey of all time. Oh yes, and the weather often sucked.
One time I was watching The Sandlot, not really paying attention to my innards rolling about like a catnip addled feline in a five gallon bucket when for whatever reason I opened the very fashionable eighties blue curtain to the left of me for a look at the open sea. As I gazed out a wall of water rolled over the top of the blessed blue canoe I was currently adrift in.
You see, the ferries we rode on were small to medium cruise ship sized. So when your large ship's dishes all start flying out of their containers and crashing all over the floor, and the captain comes over the PA and tells everyone to lie down, well you start to think about things. You know, like being a cast of crab's Christmas dinner things.
Very few times in my life have I been as scared as I have been on the ferry in a storm. But then a strange thing happened. It was so common that I got used to it. And when you get used to things you often get bored, and then you get into mischief.
Example: My cousins, brother, and I were on the ferry one time, I think we were going to Ketchikan for Christmas dinner or to my Aunt's in Metlakatla (a neighboring island and Native American Nation). We entered into the Clarence Straight and sure enough it was all gale-tastic. Well, there was a long hallway between the tv room and the galley (kitchen), and we discovered that if you started running when the ferry started its descent into a wave trough that you could FLY!
By fly I mean that you were thrown down the length of the hallway when the boat smashed into the bottom of the wave. It was awesome!
Later, while we were all laying belly to the badly designed floral carpet in the lounge, I remember smiling at my brother and cousins. It was a knowing smile. The one you get when you've discovered something sacred and rare. There's nothing finer than the feeling that spreads through your fragile carcass when you embrace the moment. As a kid you really are in control of nothing other than what's right in front of you. Of course that could be an old concussion talking, but who knows?
Every time I talk about my Alaska adventures with people they look at me with their mouth's slightly agape. I swear some people think I am BS'ing them, but that's just it, I'm not. There is something larger than life about Alaska. I wouldn't trade any of the experience for anything. Just getting to see the looks on the kid's (and adult's) faces when I talk about the time I got chased by the bear, how I used to blow up icebergs with my 12 gauge, flying over a glacier the size of Rhode Island to get home, shooting the fuel plane with our bb guns because we were bored, the bears bouncing on our trampoline and popping all our basketballs because they got no skillz, the orca encounter, the tsunami imminent death experience, landing on islands, gravel, and snow in various models of airplanes, and the list goes on and on, is a priceless treasure that makes all the discomfort I felt while experiencing those experiences worth it.
And as not most of the time, the images in this post are from both Pixabay and the author's non-Alaska photo containing and rather deflated about it iPhone.
