Reading to Squirrels in the Last Frontier

“I've been afraid even to go out in my snowfall, let alone my blizzard.” - James Michener, Alaska

I doubt many people have ever read Michener out loud, let alone to a group of squirrels barking their disapproval from the acorn gallery in the boughs of a Sitka Spruce. If idle hands do the devil's work, then idle minds read to squirrels in the rain.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. If there had been a brochure, this scene certainly would not have made the cover. Instead, a simple advertisement in the back of the college newspaper that spring, had made a modest but intriguing promise, 'earn good money in the fishing industry in Alaska. Send $5 to....  for a full catalog of work opportunities." Imagination took over from there, with Jack London fueling visions of adventure and fortunes to be made in the Last Frontier. Most bad ideas prove more fun with an accomplice. My college roommate, Mike, did not balk at taking the helm of the getaway car.  

With graduation looming like a well-marked cliff we were hurtling ourselves towards, mutual friends from more affluent blood lines arranged Euroail passes, plotted out hostels, and studied Go Italy. While they were devising how to spend even more of their parents' money, we pored over the pages of the Alaska Fishing Industry catalog; a cheaply bound siren calling out in black and white. The hubris of youth emboldened our folly and our plans were thin on detail. Mike would return from Nashville to Baltimore and I to St. Louis upon sweating through the hungover, cap and gown rigmarole. Mike picked me up at my house a few days later and we shared a laugh as I stowed a haphazardly compiled set of belongings of questionable utility for the environment or jobs we were seeking. With an out of date Rand McNally as our co-pilot, we complied with the admonitions of Horace Greeley to "head west young man".  We pointed towards Kansas in a vehicle that was soon to suffer the fate of similar corporate missteps; discontinued as a failure of imagination and execution like New Coke and the Sony Betamax.  With little fanfare,  our journey had begun.    The "luxury on a budget" Merkur Xr4Ti was even less sure about the merits of this trek, groaning concerns and signalling distress and doubt from the outset.

Our Chief Logistics Officer position was filled by a Ms. Mary Jane, a hire not well suited to advanced planning nor data analytics. She was, however, an expert at music selection and convenience store locating. The miles were punctuated by an awkward stay with an ex-girlfriend in Colorado, a dry run at camping outside Provo, Utah, and several hundred miles of pondering the purpose of angled wooden structures standing sentry along Wyoming's bi-ways. These were later determined to be snow fences despite being assured by a gas station clerk outside of Rock Springs that they were grandstands for the jackelope hunt. Mary Jane had allowed us to believe that.  

We crested what proved to be a false summit when we reached Seattle; taking a few days to camp outside Bellingham and to catch one of the last Grateful Dead concerts with Jerry still at the helm. Surely Alaska was just a stoner's throw up the road, we erroneously surmised. We jettisoned Mary Jane at the Canadian border and soon confronted the daunting epiphany that we were not even halfway to our destination; a destination no more specific than "a port town in Alaska". The Merkur took this news poorly. She vented her discontent, expelling fumes from her nose and refusing to go much over 50 miles an hour. Either Rand or McNally suggested we make for the coast which sent us along the scenic Skeena River and quite literally dumped us in  the town of Prince Rupert, the eponymous prince assuredly being the black sheep of the royals to merit such an honor. 

Like an older relative that holds onto this world to make it long enough to see the holidays or hold a new a grandchild, our gas-powered chariot must have sensed the end was nigh and she began to give up the ghost as we sputtered down what feigns as Main Street in that coastal burg. Our decision now made for us, we settled into a burger and several Raniers. As we consulted the ferry schedule, aging couples, each clad in matching track suits for shore leave from their floating prison, devoured the scenery out the window. Ultimately, our shrinking bankroll determined where we would disembark; the first stop. Ketchikan, Alaska.

As the ferry steamed into town just past the cruise ship terminals, we got an initial sense for our new home. It was a postcard day in late May. We were stuck by the severity and scale of the mountains launching themselves from the crystal waters, the stir of aquatic life, and the buzz of mechanical, marine machinery of all sorts. We were also confronted with some harsh juxtapositions. It was as if someone had taken one main avenue from Worcester or Akron and hurled it off the top of the mountain; the detritus coming to rest in the place that would be our address for the summer. "Quaint" is the backhanded compliment that comes to mind.

The Merkur miraculously coughed to life and limped up the sloped tarmac from the bowels of the ship.  An arbitrary left turn onto the sole road in town, led us out into the wilderness were we found a promising campsite on US Forest Service property.  Exhausted from our journey and with the hour getting late, we used the emergency credit card (paid for by mom) to secure the finest accommodations available at the Ketchikan Super 8 Motel. What was remarkable about that evening, besides being the last mattress I would sleep on for weeks, was that the three scrambled television channels were all broadcasting a police chase featuring a white Ford Bronco barreling down the highway at excruciatingly slow speeds. The signal was so poor we couldn't appreciate what we were seeing until returning to the lower 48 many months later.    

Well rested and buoyed by beautiful whether and sense of a new chapter unfolding, Mike and I set about making our homestead at Signal Creek campsite, just north of town, overlooking Ward Lake. Featuring 24 campsites nestled along a serpentine roadway that traced the water's edge and culminating in a series of arboreal cul-de-sacs the place looked idyllic. We secured a spot close to the water complete with a fire pit. A dense copse of trees provided a modicum of seclusion. With a large blue tarp secured from the branches and spanning what would become our living and dining room, Mike and I assembled our separate tents on opposite sides of our new domicile with surprisingly little frustration.   The respective egresses of our nylon shelters faced each other looking onto the concrete tarmac upon which the provided picnic table sat; now laden with all sorts of critical and superfluous accouterments that made the journey with us. A short walk down the path revealed a pit toilet structure and a communal water pump, wisely segregated by enough distance not to conflate their source in one's imagination. 

The interview process at the canneries proved to be not terribly exacting nor selective. "Do you have a pulse and are you aware you could die" were the toughest and perhaps only questions we faced. As we would later learn, criminal backgrounds, drug history, belief that the earth was essentially round, and immigration status were not disqualifying criteria in Ketchikan. History majors were appropriately undervalued.   With work secured, but not beginning for a few days, Mike and I settled into the neighborhood. The Merkur convalesced adjacent to our campsite, too sick for additional duty. Despite the the allure of wilderness, we were somewhat tethered to the confines of Signal Creek. Surveying our realm took precious little time, and we soon met the menagerie of characters who had descended upon this neck of the woods to serve as our temporary neighbors. The lake and environs were breathtaking, but the cynicism of youth won out against the marvel of nature and we soon found ourselves retreating to the relative comfort of our modest expanse.  

With the aid of an approaching summer and the hint of midnight sun, daylight stretched into evening.  We spent our first few days and nights playing gin rummy.  With an unknown end date, the winning score was set at 10,000 points. The ensuing multi-day contest featured massive point swings and amiable banter, but that soon devolved into scoring disputes and bickering normally reserved for domestic partners arguing over dishes, laundry and finances.   

The first real test of our cohesiveness led to a silent dinner of ramen noodles under the tarp. We stormed off to the respite of our respective tents, followed by emphatic zipping of our entrances, as if that gesture would block out everything that annoyed us about the other. The relative silence of the woods and the thin, fabric walls of our temporary structures conspired against achieving any true isolation. Each tussle of the sleeping bag, cough, or jostling of any kind seemed to amplify itself between the two tents that stared at each other with cold, closed eyes. Sleep being our only escape, I, at least, quickly slipped off to solid slumber in the embrace of my soft sleeping cocoon.    

Something awoke me from my slumber the next morning, although I had the sense I had slept longer than normal. A chill and a darkness had set in not yet experienced in our tenure there. As my wits revived, but bereft of the ability to peer outside, my senses focused on a new stimuli. A steady and staccatoed, "pfff, pfff, pfff".   I pictured a wax candle dropping molten globules onto a hollow cardboard box.  

If either Mike or I had done more due diligence, the arrival of the rain would have been no surprise. Rather, it was the lack of precipitation to that point that should have been alarming. The Tongass National Forest is the largest forest in the United States and is actually a temperate rain forest, covering the bulk of southeastern Alaska. 172 inches, of what the locals call, "liquid sunshine" descends upon this area annually, making it one of the dampest locales in North America. As I unzipped one of my window flaps, facing away from Mike's tent, the change was obvious. The rain had moved in overnight and everything was already soaked. With the motley canopy of white spruce, quaking aspen, paper birch, balsam poplar, and larch providing shelter, the rain itself was not evident. The branches, leaves and needles only served to delay the delivery of moisture, gathering its wetness in fronds and small pools that would periodically succumb to gravity and their own weight. The second hand rain poured down erratically and more dramatically with its acquired mass, resulting in the periodic "pop, pop, pop" that resonated off the unnatural surfaces of the tarp and tents like a muffled drum.  

I eventually summoned the courage to brave the hazy chill to make coffee and a grab a granola bar under the protection of the tarp. In the few hours that the weather had turned, and despite the blue tarp serving its sole purpose well, everything was soaked and dripping. The unoccupied surfaces of the table suspended small beads of water, the cardboard cereal and cracker boxes were mushy and soft to the touch, and the notebook used to score our ambitious card game, left abandoned in our mutual spat, sat morosely with pages sticking together and inked numbers bleeding on one another. Mike joined me in assessing our new reality, both of us quietly embarrassed about the chasm that ruptured the evening prior, over matters now well trivial and forgotten. We silently set about securing vulnerable items from the water and moisture, periodically offering unanswered, and even less informed, opinions of how long the rain would last.

Wordlessly, we each sought refuge in the confines of our tents, praying to Hypnos for a few more hours of sleep in lieu of any other feasible alternatives. Expecting the warmth and comfort of my tent and down bag, I was dismayed to discover that the dampness had already infiltrated everything despite no direct contact. Wetness descended from above, creeped from below and pressed in from all sides, like a deadly fog in a Hitchcock film, never seen but somehow in my brain.   Additional sleep was not to be had. The pleasant rhythm of rain people speak of, and expensive sound machines mimic, became like the chirps of a smoke detector or the stone on the bottom of a shoe scraping against a tile floor. The liquid cacophony bore a hole into my sanity in short order. Staring at the pitched roof of my grey tent, the colorless sky further blotted by sagging limbs of trees, I felt as if I was living inside an elephant.  

Just as my mind began to wonder if my parents would fund a one way flight home, a voice broke the silence. It sounded Australian, English and Indian all at once. I unzipped my tent's aperture to find the source and could now make out a more elfish voice declaring at a near shout, “You and I, Sam, are still stuck in the worst places of the story, and it is all too likely that some will say at this point: ‘Shut the book now, Dad; we don’t want to read any more.’”

Mike's tent door was secured tight against the elements, but it was clear the voice, or voices emanated from within. "Mike, what are you talking about? Are you alright?" I inquired over the patter of the continuing rain. The response, now more kiwi perhaps, came back, slightly delayed, “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

"You're starting to worry me", I shared back, sitting cross legged now in the mouth of my tent and staring at the door of his across the concrete apron of our campsite. "Did you keep a little stash we were supposed to throw out at the border"?  

My ears more attuned for the weird response I now longed for, I heard some pages turning, and eventually a new voice, like a reluctant actor finding his confidence, “This is the hour of the Shire-folk, when they arise from their quiet fields to shake the towers and counsels of the Great.”  Now the game was afoot. Mike had not only been reading the Lord of the Rings on our journey, but taking notes and highlighting favorite passages. I realized he had made more progress under the electric lantern in his tent than I thought. Organically, we were conducting a broken conversation, with Mike selecting dog-eared sections as his non-sequitur replies to my every inquiry. I began positing questions I didn't care about, like "are you hungry for breakfast?".   Occasionally the wizard behind the curtain would luck into a reply apropos to the question, shouting an answer in an absurd facsimile of middle-earth elocution, “You have shown your usual cunning in getting up just in time for a meal.” Mike's theatrical retorts were often delivered at volumes that likely caused neighboring campsites to wonder what in the world was going on at site #5.

We continued on for what felt like a long while, both repressing occasional laughter at Mike's pitiful new accents, but neither daring to acknowledge the game for fear it would shatter the illusion. Eventually, Mike exhausted quotations he had marked and simply started reading from where he had put down Tolkien's work last. I stayed quietly fixated at the edge of my shelter, legs crossed and transported like a child in a library at reading hour. His voiced assumed the mid-atlantic intonation I had known for four years, only occasionally dropping back into character for effect. 

After a time, Mike's energy ebbed and the reading trailed off. In the absence of his voice I noticed the rain had ceased being annoying and was now a welcome underpinning for our odd, arboreal outpost. Both now quiet with our diverging thoughts, I broke the silence with one last question, "Are you glad I talked you into this or are you wishing you were home in Baltimore?" . The question was meant for Mike, but answered by Tolkien. He had been holding onto an ace in the hole, “He loved mountains, or he had loved the thought of them marching on the edge of stories brought from far away; but now he was borne down by the insupportable weight of Middle-earth. He longed to shut out the immensity in a quiet room by a fire.”  

"I'll take that as a maybe", I replied, quietly worried he did hold some anger for me setting us on this path. As it turned out, when the rain starts in this part of the world, it doesn't stop. Never a heavy deluge with gusty winds, but instead a constant drizzle like water from a faulty tap. That afternoon we heated a can of chili and some hotdogs over the campstove and tried to adapt to a world of ubiquitous sogginess. Shortly after retreating to our tents yet again, I picked up the creatively titled and partially waterlogged Alaska by James Michener. I found my place on page 987 and with no prelude and no need for silly accents, started to read aloud, "“I've been afraid even to go out in my snowfall, let alone my blizzard. She grabbed the magazine, brought it to her lips, and kissed the little eskimo girl in her heavy clothes edged with fur. You've saved my life, little one. You've given me what I've never had before. Courage."