Did you ever wake up totally disoriented? I was pinned by gravity to the hull instead of my bunk and looking up at the opposite bunks rather than up to the bunk above. Was I still asleep and dreaming? Either gravity had shifted or my world tilted but if that were true we’d be taking on water. “What the hell?” I called out my husband’s name to clarify this puzzle.
He woke slowly as usual and looked around groggily.
Springing out of his bunk he tried the cabin door but couldn’t open it so he hopped to a top bunk and wrestled with a trapdoor opening to the deck above and the main cabin. Half of him disappeared into the cabin above and I climbed out of the bunk and threw on some clothes.
He looked down, “It’s O.K., looks like we’re grounded. The anchor must not have caught properly last night. That possibility hadn’t occurred to me. It explained everything.
Embarrassing as hell at the local pub tonight but it beats sinking I thought to myself. The Capt. was as unruffled as an old man who had been at sea half his life could be. He was old country German, heavily accented, who had come to the Pacific Northwest and captained municipal ferries and lumber barges in Puget Sound and Alaska most of his life. I spent hours on watch with him on our way up the inside passage to Alaska and listened to his tales of the early days on this waterway.
It had been quite an adventure coming through Queen Charlotte Sound, we took a log on the bow and it rolled the length of the Queen and ripped out one screw and damaged the other. All we had left to steer with was alternating engine power and the Capt. had managed an impressive docking in Juneau in that crippled condition. I got a few extra days off in Juneau while the Queen was being tended.
Big, celebratory, cocktail party in Juneau to applaud the owner’s intention to put the Good Friday Quake behind him and get on with his tourist Inn, restaurant, and Columbia Glacier Tour ship. Alaska would come back from the devastation of quake, tidal wave, and fire and the 95’ M.V. Gypsy Queen was a symbol of that determination.
As for me, I’ll never drink another martini again as long as I live. If gin were the only intoxicant in the world I’d be a teetotaler. The first day of the Gulf crossing was a head throbbing experience after that party. Alaskans could hold their liquor for sure. Of course, I was still very young so that I found it amusing to try to walk on ice after a bottle of brandy, or scotch, or whatever during my stay in Valdez. Growing up takes all kinds of avenues some of dubious value.
I’d forgiven Capt. for the Gulf Crossing. We had taken heavy seas on our bow for three days and the galley was a shambles. I hadn’t learned to handle a galley in motion yet and Capt. seemed to plot the direct route despite the seas but he made up for it by preparing supper for the two of us. Everyone else was in their bunk or leaning over the rail. Wonder of wonders I didn’t get seasick on the whole journey north from Seattle to Juneau and then across the gulf to Valdez. My first sea voyage. Must be because I cut my teeth on Howard Pease sea stories while growing up or I was riding the waters of the oyster pirate, Jack London.
How can I describe Alaska in those years? Before communication satellites, while she was still not dominated by the lower forty eight and the robber barons. Just a beautiful little town with wooden sidewalks and false front buildings set down in the most beautiful country in the world where air and water were still pure and fresh and there were no beer cans and McDonald’s wrappers littering the countryside. Good people who knew that when push comes to shove we all have to depend on each other but it takes a long time for push, to come to shove. We relied on strange bounces of radio signals to catch good music occasionally but there was always the Aurora Borealis our music of the spheres.
My husband took me hunting while we were in Alaska. I didn’t think a thing about it while we were planning the trip. We wanted to bag a couple of geese for Thanksgiving. It was fall and winter was coming on and the light was changing from summer’s crisp sunshine to the more lavender light of fall before the black of the long winter’s night was upon us. We walked into a beautiful area of the country with high wetlands offering resting stops for the geese. We waited in the silence and soon I saw a formation of geese circling the area and approaching the wetlands for food and rest.
They were majestic in their descent and funny as they landed on the water using their wings as brakes honking their raucous honks and breaking ranks. O.K., I actually caught one in my sites but I didn’t even try to splatter blood and intestines all over that lightly snow dusted flatland, instead I bonded with dinner and I’ve loved the glorious creatures ever since. It was a case of love at first sight and I’d simply never met a goose before.
I told my husband not to bring one of them home unless he wanted to clean it, cook it, and eat it by himself. As for me I bought the frozen variety turkey of unknown origin. No kin of mine. I could fish all day but I was not a hunter. I gardened and there were two full growing seasons in Alaska so I could trade produce for crab, salmon, halibut, and the occasional moose steak. Moose was better than beef and I could live without caribou.
No excuses from me about hunting I just happened to bond with the geese. Well, I did almost release the first salmon I ever caught. She was leaping, fighting and running on the surface of the sea and arching her rainbow colored beauty in the sunlight. A ballet in my mind to the sounds and colors of the sea. She was fighting for her life and with every brave dance move she made, I wanted her to win.
That didn’t keep me from skinning out something that was already dead. We came across a yearling bear that had been run over late that winter and I didn’t have a problem skinning it out and putting my hands in the intestines to keep them warm and pliable. I have to admit to having second thoughts about walking around the woods for very long smelling like mama bear’s dead baby. We took the meat to the mission for the Copper River Indians to feed their dogs.
I suppose I could have killed our maverick bear. She came down out of the wilderness into our community instead of going into hibernation. She must have been sick because she should have been plump and ready for a winter of living off of her fat; instead, she was thin and in town eating garbage. She finally ended up killing a dog and the community became alarmed that a child could be next so we hunted her down and shot her. I felt like Wyatt Earp with that 44 strapped around my hips but it was a community responsibility and I would have shot. I was good at blowing targets up and she was a target at this point.
My first big quake in Alaska felt and sounded like a train rushing by inches from my face. After the big one, right before we arrived, the drinkers repented and the teetotalers started drinking. It turned things upside down. One whole family of eight was killed by the tidal wave. After the quake knocked everything down the tidal wave came and pulled the town back into the sea and then the refinery oil fire defaced what was left standing in a burning inferno. The people suffered greatly from death, destruction and horror.
Alaska was bursting with life and when spring came you could almost watch the garden grow during those long days of light. From morning until the same night a zucchini would pop into being for dinner. A fertile, vital place abounding with life yet supporting an inner peace and quiet. No gun culture here just lots of guns. The last killing in Valdez had occurred when it was still a gold field and the next, while I was in Valdez, was the suicide of a terminally ill, elderly woman. More guns per capita and less violence than the big cities in the lower forty eight. Maybe we should take a look at the psychological effects of over-crowding. Didn’t God have to disperse us on more than one occasion?
Even my Siamese had an adventure as a ship’s cat in Alaska. Somehow she stumbled overboard while we were anchored in icy waters near Columbia glacier. Bumps and thuds on the hull alerted us right away and my husband rescued the freezing, terrified cat from the ice littered water. Her claws grew about an inch into my husband as he brought her to me and I loosened her claws, dried the baby off and kept her warm on the oven door for hours. The guys could wait for supper. She didn’t even so much as sneeze as a result of her icy bath and gave birth to a healthy litter about a month later. Missy flew back to California with me when my husband was killed in an accident on black ice. We buried him in his beloved, Alaska. I often wondered how my life would have differed if I had stayed up there on my own, because by then, Alaska had a place in my soul too.
(c) September 2013 Karen MacEanruig
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