Flew up to Anchorage to drive Brian’s truck down with him to Haines, then ferry down to Ketchikan and over to Craig. We shopped til we dropped in Anchorage. Well, Brian did, anyway. I just hit Costco and loaded up on dry goods like cases of Mama Lil’s peppers and Balsamic Vinegar and bags and bags of nuts and raisins and craisins. The DeBarr Costco store was hopping. Had to drive around to find a parking spot, and lines at every cashier and the self checkout. And this is October, no less! But we weren’t in a hurry, so just chilled in line waiting our turn. Oh, and the deal of the city is the $4.99 Rotisserie chicken in a handy take home bag. I ate a drumstick for lunch, then later trimmed off all the meat and used that for sandwichs with my favorite Costco cheese and mama lil’s peppers wrapped in a tortilla. We got to Craig yesterday, and I was still eating on it for dinner last night, and have enough for one more sandwich. I put the bag of chicken and cheese on the back of the truck under the cargo net for the trip down to keep it cold, then used ice while we rode down on the ferry. So good!
Nephew Sam is at UAA, and no one in the family has seen him from Juneau since his sister’s moved him into school in August. I checked in with him via text. Usually, a response is a word or two sent a day or three after I send it. My message said do you want to come over for dinner, and the response was immediate: yes. Brian brought down a box of crab and some shrimp, and we had a feed at my niece Melissa and her husband John’s, with the dentist she works with, and Lena, the dental assistant originally from Kotzebue. Sam was svelte in his white crew neck sweatshirt and jeans and bad haircut. His classes were going well, he said. College life looked good on him. And, he was now talking to me and the rest of the crew…..in full sentences!! Our lad is a young man. He said he didn’t care all that much for crab, but he joined in shucking anyway, and turns out, he does care for fresh crab. And shrimp. Quite a bit, in fact. He ate his share and shucked his share and we all had great conversation with him. I dropped him off early in the evening for college kids (9 pm) so he could get on with the evening with his buddies. I called his mom yesterday on our way to Hollis to let her know he’s doing great and all growed up.
The truck being in Anchorage was there from a number of circumstances. Brian, his brother Kevin, and another friend went fishing in the Yukon in the spring, and Brian drove on up to Anchorage, as he was plane shopping. Kevin and the other friend had a second rig and returned to Craig after fishing in that. Brian and Melissa listed the camper on the truck for sale on facebook, as the Alcan had too many dips in it for Brian to want to drive it again with the camper. They thought they’d listed it, anyway. When he went back up to get his plane, he and Melissa realized they hadn’t actually listed it when they thought they had. I told him that he and Melissa should stick to flying, and leave the buy-sell-trade to the trained professionals (namely, me and Brian’s son in law Erik). Erik chimed in that they stay in their lane! Once they discovered their error months later – just before we got there – the camper sold in a couple days. We were glad not to have that on our backs on the trip down to Haines, especially since there could be snow on the roads as it was October.
Brian and I met at Bass Pro right when they opened the next day. I wanted a telescopic rod like the one I borrowed from Jeff when I went to Ontario a few weeks ago, and Brian wanted a pack rod for the plane. I also got a snorkel and mask for an upcoming trip to Mexico. I stopped on the way back to Aim’s for some new wipers for the subaru left to the family by Leo, Sara and Ellen’s dad. Brian got another day of power washer shopping in. The next day, we took his topper to Wasilla to the buyer, and after an hour or more of technical difficulties getting the jacks down and the topper off, we headed back to town for Brian’s dentist appointment at Melissa’s office. Looky what I found, he said, when he reached into his pocket after a call from the new camper owner: the keys to the camper. Crap, a long trip back to Wasilla. When Lena heard the sad story, she cheered us up when she said she’s drop them off as she was going out to her brother’s in Wasilla that evening anyway. I told Brian that Lena needed to meet the 20 something oil field worker who bought the camper more than we did, and apparently, I was not wrong…..
We headed for the border the next morning. Out past Eureka, we were heading up a hill, and I could see a small lake way down below. Something was making a wake. At first I thought it must be a moose. Then no, it’s a small boat…. then nope, it IS a moose. A cow moose with her big ears and neck high out of the water. She swam about half way across the lake from the far side to our side, then sort of circled back around. We sat and watched her a minute or two, and she never did make up her mind for an exit location. We didn’t see any predators on the shore she apparently left, so thought maybe she was just out for a swim.
We got to the border, and Brian went into the US side to get the proper paperwork for taking the antlers from the herd bull elk he got on Afognak a few weeks earlier. One of the agents came out for a long look and asked Brian lots of questions about how and where he got the elk, blah blah blah. These were hunter to hunter questions, and not agent to traveler question. The agent had had a tag for Afognak with another hunter, but the other hunter couldn’t go and so they called off the trip. So the agent was more than casually interested in Brian’s story. We were soon on our way, and had no problem on through the Canadian border. We made it to Destruction Bay in the early evening after 11 hours of traveling. We watched the post game stories on the Mariners-Blue Jays Game 1 on Canadian television. The Mariners had won Game 1 of the American League playoffs over the Blue Jays, and the Canadian sportscasters, to a man or woman, all second guessed the Blue Jay manager decisions and how it was the wrong one for this or that. So another commonality among US and Canadian sports casters!
We had breakfast at the restaurant the next morning and were on our way to Haines. We fished a couple creeks for grayling with our new rods, but the fish seemed to have moved to their fall / winter waters- maybe the lakes the creeks fed into. We didn’t see one or have a follower or anything. I was happy with my new rod, though, and satisfied it’s just what I needed.
We had to make the US border before it closed at 10 pm, as it didn’t reopen til 7 am and our ferry was at 615 am. From Haines Junction to the Haines border, we passed truck after camper after boat heading north. Did we miss the ferry, I kept thinking? Even after I checked again that the Columbia did not sail until the next day, I was a bit concerned. There was no other place these travelers could be coming from except Haines.
The agent at the Haines border was less interested with the antlers and their story of acquisition than the US agent at the Yukon border, and much more interested in Brian’s paperwork, which was in order. After she welcomed us to continue on to Haines, we asked her about all the traffic north we’d seen, and found out they were Yukoners and BCer’s down in Haines for a long weekend of coho fishing in the Chilkat River over Canadian Thanksgiving! Who knew!! Nice to see so many of them willing to come down to Alaska with all the trouble the US – our Congressmen included – have caused our friends there recently.
We got to Roy and Brenda’s well before dark. Roy said I could pick all the crab apples left on his tree if I wanted, which is his way of saying would you please pick all the crab apples on my tree. He’d gotten in what he wanted. I tried one. WOW. Tart and just a tad sweet, and you can eat the whole thing- core and all. So I got to picking. And picking. Till I overfilled a gallon bag, then stuffed the hand warmer pouch on my sweatshirt. Then Brian picked more for himself and Ellen. Brenda and Roy then got Brian’s story, and now they’re all friends, too.
We were up at 330 am the next morning and off to the ferry about 415 am to get in line. I got a state room for us. One with two bunkbeds, so neither of us had to sleep on a top bunk. Kind of spendy when we were younger, but we’re old men now and don’t do that well on a recliner chair on the top deck in the screaming fall wind, nor sprawled out in some chair in the lounge. We were both were out like a light when we hit our bunks.
We got up shortly before arriving 5 hours later in Juneau. I had a pile of stuff I wanted to take with us to Craig, and arranged for Kurt to drive out with them while the ferry was in port. Spare fishing rods, a propane heater for the skiff, a gas pot puller, a floor lamp for the little bedroom, and some huge sausage shaped buoys I had that Brian can use for his new dock. I am so lucky to have such good friends in so many places. Hopefully, Kurt will be down to Craig deer hunting in November, and both he and Roy down next summer to fish for salmon.
As we ferried further south to stops in both Petersburg and Wrangell, we began to hear of the destruction out on the Kuskokwim Delta and River area. Houses in Kipnuk and Kwig and Napakiak floating away with their families inside with the remnants of a typhoon that came across the Bering Sea from Japan. The more news we got, the worse the news. I got ahold of our friends in Bethel, where the first from the disasters were moved to, on how we could help, and I soon sent off a donation, which always seems like such a drop in the bucket for the destruction there. My niece Aimee started collecting money in Anchorage and did a Costco run of dry goods to send out on the barge, where her sister’s husband’s family help run. I feel guilty sitting here warm and dry and well fed thinking about what those folks are still going through out there. The National Guard has airlifted many to Anchorage and maybe Fairbanks, as Bethel doesn’t have the capacity to take them all in and take care of them.
I went to the dining room as we steamed towards Petersburg, and saw a melon with white hair and plastic spectacles that could only belong (thankfully) to one person…. Peter K! He was just finishing up and stayed on to listen to my stories of our trip. He was bringing down a car they’d bought in Juneau awhile back. It was great to catch up with him. I had a shrimp cobb salad. An oval plate with a bed of greens with bacon bits, sliced avocado, shredded carrots, blue cheese and 4 or 5 shrimp on top. I got the balsamic dressing. Fantastic! Always decent food on the Alaska Ferry in my travels.
I was dismayed when I got up today and saw that the ongoing disaster out in Western Alaska was already out of the headline stories of my local public radio’s online website. I sent them a short note noting this. Bad move, Mark. Really bad move. The reporter there had been working round the clock trying to keep up with the news out there and then get the story out, as well as do the jobs of other staff not there now as a result of the recent cuts approved by our congressional delegation back in Washington. I sure hope it costs them all their seats in the next election. The reporter gave me a short and to the point reply that she had just put another story out and doing the best she could and I sent an immediate apology and felt like a heel. You really aren’t helping here, Mark, I told myself….right after she did. The public radio station out there – KYUK- in Bethel – was the hardest hit station in the state by the cuts our Congressmen voted for. KYUK broadcasts over thousands of square miles, in English and in Yupik, to dozens and dozens of villages not connected by road. You’re just not going to raise the money on your own that it takes for towers and equipment to broadcast to such remote places where only a few hundred or less people may live in each village, but which people are Americans nonetheless. And now, it’s the only means of communication many may have out there if they are lucky enough to have salvaged a battery operated radio. I mean, their village is just gone.
We got to Ketchikan yesterday morning in plenty of time for the 330 pm daily ferry to Hollis, from where we’d drive the road back to Craig. However, the ferry was booked full, and a certain someone had not made a reservation. I quickly called the ferry, and they said to be over to the Ketchikan desk in 15 minutes when it opened to get on the standby list. We were right across the street eating breakfast at the Landing, so finished and walked over. I wasn’t hopeful we’d get on, as we ended up being 3rd in the standby list. Did I mention the great friends I seem to have everywhere I go? Brian’s cousin and her husband said they’d put the truck on the ferry for us if we didn’t get on today. We spent the morning and early afternoon yakking with them. Brian’s brother Kevin joined us in Ketchikan for the ferry ride to Hollis, coming down on the jet from visiting his sons in Juneau. He had his truck on the Hollis side, so if we didn’t get the truck on, he’d give us a ride to Craig. Did I mention- yeah, I did. Great friends everywhere.
Kevin and I walked on to the ferry, and we could see Brian in his truck in line to get on. As 330 approached, Brian was still there. Our order from the ferry cafe arrived and we dug in. When I looked up again, the truck was gone. And, I didn’t see it parked in the parking lot for Brian’s cousin to pick up, either. Then here comes Brian to have lunch with us. They wedged the truck in there! Had to take the two luggage carts apart to make room, but they did it! Our luck held out right to the end.
I slept hard last night in the container with pouring rain beating on the metal all around. This morning, I checked on the boat, started it to charge the batteries, and got my walk in. Half of the walk in before it started pouring again, and the other half when it quit. Everything was great on the boat. Batteries were at 11.80 before I started it, the bilge was dry, and now I sort of know now how long I can leave it without shore power.
I collected my mail from Ellen and my totes from Brian’s truck on the way home, then got to work pickling the crab apples. I followed the Univ of Georgia instructions, except I didn’t first simmer the apples in the pickling solution because I figured I was going to cook them 20 minutes in the boiling bath and didn’t want them to be too mushy. Bad move again, Mark. Well, not bad so much as could have been better. Just like my experience pickling rhubarb, the apples shriveled up a bit with the cooking, so a fully packed jaw of raw apples at the start turned into a 2/3 filled jar after the boiling bath, but they’ll still be good eating. Now more projects to tackle – a new heater for the truck cab and then dirt work on the lot below. Good to be home.
