I pack up my life and hit the road for a second time
Now it’s due West instead of East. In two weeks, we’ll start anew as raft guides in Juneau. I wasn’t even considered for the job until after Ashley nailed the interview and they discovered that I was part of the package. Before that, we had plans to work on a farm on nearby Shelter Island.
We pass through Vermont headed towards Tim’s place in Philly. Along the way, we witness the funky side of what New Hampshire calls “the Upside-Down State”. Roadside farms advertise things like organic pizza and acupuncture.
Tim is asleep when we arrive, and we help him speed clean before his mom comes home
A huge crate full of road snacks is our reward. We hit the city. He sends Ashley off on an hour-long massage, picks us up souvenirs, treats me to Greek, followed by a Philly, and then we all go out for sushi together. It’s a long, memorable night of catching up. In the morning, he tells us we can’t leave because our bike locks are missing. Luckily, we have a spare. Our hostage attempt is diverted and the show goes on.
Pennsylvania is stunning. As a descendant, we’re forced to stop upon seeing the Daniel Boone Homestead. Later, we meet another former colleague in Pittsburgh. She takes us to a playscape, and I immediately regret changing our original itinerary from a tour of Canada. Swinging on a swing, I imagine what visiting the traditional Mohawk community of Ganienkeh must be like.
Eager for a real travel experience, we forgo the suggestion to see the giant Transformer statue of Wabash, Indiana, and instead, push all night, past the foreboding Chicago skyline, and into the endless landscape of the northern Great Plains. Taking a break from arguing, we pitch our tent in the other-worldly grandeur of Badlands National Park.
We pass several prairie dog towns bustling behind bubonic plague warning signs
Despite them, I feel a strong attachment to the region due to a lifelong fascination with the resident Lakota tribe. We’re served by a lovely indigenous waitress at a restaurant nearby. When we tell her our story, she’s so happy for us that she begins to cry. She reveals the must-do route to Rapid City, and wishes us all the luck in the world.
Our progress is interrupted by the powerful spectacle of a lone buffalo in the distance. We stop the car, and to our surprise, the creature slowly approaches. We stare in wonder as it crosses our path, within feet of our vehicle, and continues along through the sea of grass.
Rapid City strikes me as a town stuck in the 1950’s
Dinosaur Park and the life-sized bronze statues of American presidents feel like over-the-top Americana, exactly like the hundreds of miles of annoying Wall Drug free water billboards we passed to get here. This tourism trap, packaged in patriotism like nearby Mt. Rushmore, is no coincidence to me considering the area’s oppressive history and significant Native American population. I’m not upset to leave.
All is forgotten in driving through the nearby Black Hills. It is undoubtedly the most spectacular part of the country I’ve seen so far. The peaks are dramatic, the forests thick, and wildlife abundant. Rounding a corner, we pass a collection of half a dozen wild bighorn sheep and buffalo.
Then comes Devil’s Tower
We’re treated to vast expanses of Wyoming wilderness, including Tensleep Canyon, yet deep snow blocks the entrance to Yellowstone. Detouring through the Tetons, we spot herds of elk among incredible views of snowcapped mountains. Dusk falls somewhere around Rexburg, Idaho and we finally cash in upon reaching Missoula, Montana.
In the morning, we meet up with a friend of Ashley’s. Relatives we planned on visiting ignore my phone calls, so we push on to Glacier National Park, continuing along the Going-to-the-Sun-Road to the border with Canada. There, we’re denied entry by a nasty official who insists on searching our car for drugs. We’re forced to backtrack and hatch a new game plan.
We drop $800 on a standby ferry ticket out of Bellingham, WA
The glorious scenery of Idaho’s panhandle is in sharp contrast to the landscape of eastern Washington. After a brief stop in Seattle, we make camp near the ferry terminal in Larabee State Park – where trains whistle us awake in the middle of the night, and racoons are mistaken for small bears.
From 8am to 5pm, all the next day, we wait at the terminal, only to be told that there is no room on the ship and to try again tomorrow. We return to camp in such a torrential downpour that we’re forced to sleep in the front seats of the car. The next morning we try again, knowing that if we miss this ship, it’ll be another five days before we get the chance to catch another one.
A salty Kodiak fisherman tries cutting us in line as the final hour draws near
Thankfully, there are enough openings for all of us. We drive aboard and pitch our tent on deck. The engines start, and the coastal mountains slowly roll on by. Relief becomes exhaustion, and we fall asleep to the rumbling of the ship.
We wake up around dinnertime, stumbling into an onboard bar decorated like an old western brothel. A chandelier hangs from the ceiling. We meet a couple of Alaskan research biologists, returning from a project in Chile, while a young Russian passenger plays the piano in the background.
Whiffs of cannabis crop up regularly around the solarium, and people in sleeping bags can be found just about everywhere except the bathroom floor. I make the mistake of befriending a Haida with an ‘I’m With Pedro’ shirt, who’s condescending tone irritates me almost as much as his endless pictures of Las Vegas car shows.
Other notable passengers include a hot air balloon guide from New Mexico, and a rough-looking lady, dressed like a gold miner, who walks around with a malamute that seems to be recovering from some kind of operation.
Upon reaching Alaska, we’re nearly left behind at a brief stop in Wrangell
Somewhere around Petersburg, against a backdrop of endless jagged peaks rising from out of the sea, a bald eagle rests upon an iceberg, while whale spouts erupt in the distance. I’m filled with the true spirit of raw adventure for the first time. Wilderness extends to the horizon in every direction, and it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
That night I can hardly sleep. At 4am I feel all forward motion coming to a halt: we’ve arrived! I unzip the tent flap, staring up into the sky at the nearest peak like a newborn to its mother. We prepare to unload and my giddiness borders on hysteria.
Our new boss welcomes us by saying that one of our roommates has a face tattoo
He and his buddy are from Arkansas. “A little rough, but they’re nice”, he says. We find them asleep in the living room when we make it home. I fantasize about what we’ll see in the morning, as we fall asleep on the bare floor of an empty room.
Deep, booming laughter awakes me. As I walk towards the kitchen, a wild-eyed man named Nate suddenly pops out from behind the corner, practically yelling, “You want some coffee, brother!? This stuff’s so strong it’ll make your hair curl!”. John, the man with the face tattoo, comes rushing in behind him, shakes my hand enthusiastically, and says that they really tried to stay up for us.
They’re headed shopping, but promise to take us to the glacier afterwards. John tells me he’s having a great time now that he left his wife and kids at home, especially since weed is pretty much legal. While smoking cigarettes out of the open front door, he tells me that they wound up in some sort of crack house before settling into employee housing here.
The little neighbor boy pours gasoline over a fire he started with trash from their front yard
He introduces his mom as a bitch. It starts raining when the Arkansas boys return. They show off their new clothes by throwing them down on the filthy driveway. They spray their softshell jackets with a waterproofing agent before we leave for the glacier. As we ride our bikes down Tongass blvd, Nate blurts out ,”Tongue-ass!”. He laughs out loud and his chain falls off.
We round a gentle curve as a giant spellbinding wall of ice suddenly appears. It’s a sight made even more impressive by the bear we spot in a nearby tree, and a pair of mountain goats up above the waterfall. We return home, cold and wet, after a short hike. Another roommate, from Wisconsin, is disgusted to find John throwing dinner scraps out in the backyard as bear bait.
The juxtaposition of Alaska’s miraculous nature and her reprehensible residents, leaves me in a state of permanent cognitive dissonance. The company owner flies up for two weeks, from his home in Seattle, to jury-rig a seasonal tourism operation with staff that includes sex offenders and drug addicts. Our job orientation is him telling us that there are two rules: no jacking off and none of that macho man bullshit. Afterwards, John searches for a place to hide and sleep.
I join the sea kayak operation, while sharing locally harvested venison with the manager Joe
Meanwhile, our home becomes a hovel. John lives on the couch and Nate in a storage/smoking room in the garage, where months’ worth of trash accumulates. I go swimming with porpoises the day John steals a tub of glassware from the Salvation Army, and tries burning spare tires on our front lawn. An attempted stabbing occurs the same day an orca and her calf dive underneath my boat. Employees, and their possessions, move around like musical chairs.
I have a nightmare that this is all an elaborate plot of the Marzelli’s to send me sleeping with the fishes. I catch a bullet in the living room, get wrapped in plastic, and feel my body slowly sinking into the icy depths of Alaskan waters. I wake up in a cold sweat to find Nate wide awake. It’s not even 3am, and it’s getting light out already. Apparently, John caught a taxi from the bar and ran the last block home without paying. When the driver showed up at the door, Nate suggested he take the loss and keep moving.
A Jökulhlaup event, or glacial outburst flood, occurs the following day
This coincides with the purchase of a diver’s drysuit, which we take swimming in the Mendenhall lake. We all meet at the bar later, where John mysteriously disappears. He pulls up to the house that night in a company vehicle, drunk, with a bike he stole from the bar atop the roof. Ashley chases him down as he peels out to do doughnuts in the neighborhood. In the morning, he calls out of work by saying that he’s naked and doesn’t know where he is.
He takes his shenanigans with him to a local beer festival, where he gets a ride back to camp, after cutting a hula hoop in half and pretending to be blind. The driver didn’t believe it, but was amused enough to oblige. We know he’s back when we see the neighbor’s lone red high heel in her driveway. I find him the next day after work, in our driveway, just staring blankly up at the rain.
The next night, I see him lean backwards, as far as he can, from a loose second story railing
The same guy as before is threatening to use his knife, so I start home. Just then, John begins shaving, and I think I see him going for his eyebrows.
Later, I’m jolted awake to pounding on the front door, as well as lights flashing through the windows. It’s the police. Reactively, I yell, “Nobody open the door!”. I hear them reply, “We just want the man on the couch!”. Our Midwest roommate later said that if he knew from the beginning that they just wanted John, he would’ve let them in right away. I fall back asleep.
I can’t help but feel like this is karma for my behavior in Bear Brook
John is gone but tensions are still sky high, especially after Ashley asked Nate why he doesn’t cut his toenails. I feel a void remembering how John always used to hum, “Don’t touch me….there”, and joke around about chloroforming people by asking, “What’s this smell like?”. At work the safety skiff is saved from sinking, without anyone else noticing, by the bus driver who doesn’t even get his shoes wet somehow. It would’ve otherwise been the 2nd skiff we lost that year, but I’m too bummed to really care.
Yet when I come home, the man is on the couch again! Without eyebrows! He looks like an alien! He tells me that he accidentally passed out in the garage on the neighbor’s sports car. When they came down and found him, he was so startled that he jumped through the wall, back into our garage, barely missing the tub of stolen glassware. Unfortunately, in going back to the couch, directly in front of the windows, he was clearly visible from outside, or else he might’ve gotten away with it.
The first thing he did in jail was pee on his sleeping pad
Then, realizing he needed to sleep there, he turned it over, and began singing things I’d rather not write down here.
There’s commotion the next morning. I try sleeping it off, but Ashley repeatedly shuffles in and out of the room, muttering things. I find her in the kitchen cooking breakfast. She tells me that she asked Nate why he’ll drink coffee out of a glass, instead of washing and using a mug, to which he threw a pan across the street and onto the neighbor’s roof. I try and help, but she starts yelling at me, so I tell her that I’ll throw the breakfast she made out the door too, if she wants. I’m not going to eat it.
She leaves to take a shower. A short while later, there’s a knock at the door. Sensing trouble, I don’t answer. Instead, out of curiosity, I go for the breakfast plate in the kitchen while Nate answers the door. Then, as I’m coming back around the corner with the plate in my hand, I hear the door swing open just as an incredible force knocks the plate out of my hand, and smashes straight into my nose. Scrambled eggs and potato wedges go flying.
A spray of ketchup and blood splat against the wall, as I turn to face a cop in the doorway
It’s Ashley, whos towel fell and is standing there naked. John is awake, on the couch of course, but I can’t tell if he’s shocked or not because he doesn’t have any eyebrows. He lets out a long “eeeewwwwwwwww!”, as she retreats back to the room with her butt jiggling. A little while later, she’s escorted out in handcuffs.
