The Aleut visor is one of those marvelously ambidextrous Native traditions that work on both a practical and an aesthetic level. A wooden cap with no crown and an extended bill, a visor protects the hunter from the glare of the sun, the splash of the sea spray, and by virtue of its acoustical construction…
I wanted the gold and I sought it, I scrabbled and mucked like a slave. —Robert Service MY GRANDMOTHER GAVE ME a copy of Robert Service’s The Spell of the Yukon when I was ten years old. He is better known for Sam McGee and Dan McGrew but I loved the title poem best, with its…
Read more Dad said it was a wet, dirty, dangerous job for which nobody ever paid him enough money.
Meanwhile, back up on stage…Keys in top hat, tails and aloha shirt at the keyboard is joined by Alice Welling on the lungs, Mike MacDonald on the drums, Ed Bourgeois on the channeler, and Jelly Roll Jim on the bass. Also Martha Stewart (And you’re not, which must suck), Sourdough Mike from Egegik, Yukon Jacques,…
I RODE THE ALASKA RAILROAD from Anchorage to Fairbanks in the early Seventies to get to the University of Alaska. It took a minimum of twelve hours, because the train would stop what seemed like every five minutes to let off a hunter, or pick up a fisherman, or drop off supplies for a homesteader,…
…almost seventy feet of snow fell on the summit of the Chilkoot that winter… —Pierre Berton, The Klondike Fever FIRST LIGHT AND FEAR jerked me awake at four-thirty. I woke Sharyn and Rhonda, thinking to get a really early start on the day, but Len’s group was up before us. The Belgians of course had…
Read more First light and fear jerked me awake at four-thirty.
What the HELL was I thinking? —entry from Happy Camp log, Chilkoot Trail I WASN’T GOING TO let anyone rush me. I wasn’t going to let me rush me. I was going to take it one foot at a time, one boulder at a time. I was going slow, I was going careful, I was…
I’M AN UNHAPPY CAMPER. Where I grew up, when you didn’t get your moose, you didn’t eat meat that winter. If you wanted meat to eat, you went hunting in Kamishak Bay. If you went hunting in Kamishak Bay, back before statehood, when Alaska was one gigantic national unPark, perforce, you went camping. In tents.…
MY FIRST JOB WAS working for an air taxi, Cook Inlet Aviation in Seldovia in 1965, the summer I was thirteen. I was unquestionably the worst employee Bob Gruber ever had, but since my mother was his bookkeeper-slash-ground support, he couldn’t fire me. Which was why I liked the idea of buying a house in…
THERE IS A CERTAIN subspecies of the human race known to Alaskans as Homo Sapiens hospesdomus exhades, perhaps more familiar to you as the Houseguest from Hell. These people show up as early as March and eat all your food and drink all your beer and run your car out of gas and marvel at…
Read more Homo Sapiens hospesdomus exhades, perhaps more familiar to you as the Houseguest from Hell
[published in Alaska magazine September 2002] I’ve been thinking a lot about freedom of late, particularly when I went home this year for the Fourth of July. Home is Seldovia, a village of about 500 people on the southern shore of Kachemak Bay, a place of heart-stopping beauty built on the precarious edge of a…
