ALCOHOL WAS A FACTOR: Episode 3

Coming Into The Country

I hopped down from the small propeller-plane after it fast-taxied to a stop at the Haines airport.
The short trip from Juneau, the Alaska state capital, was both awe-inspiring and stomach-churning. I swallowed a lot — and prayed to the malevolent journalism god that the plane stayed airborne.
A few years ago, I wrote a story about a veteran float plane pilot in Southeastern Alaska, who flew out of Ketchikan. These pilots are non-nonsense characters who know that the Alaska weather can change within hours, if not minutes.
They perform a dangerous job in one of America’s most uncharted places. Throughout Southeastern Alaska, with its countless bay-locked burgs and rough-hewn homesteads, float planes play the role of taxicabs, ambulance, mail carrier and supply truck, touching down in narrow causeways and turbulent inlets far from any tarmac.
And accidents happen — a lot. Like every couple of months, it seems.
My commercial propeller was run by an outfit called Alaska Seaplanes plane had wheels, but felt as vulnerable as a bike on training wheels.

We flew over white-capped mountains, the wind blowing across the peaks. We passed nameless glaciers, making their slow, inching agonizing retreat in this era of global warming.
The plane was insanely-loud and we all wore squishy orange earplugs, except the pilot, who had on a seat of headphones. The little craft bobbed, lost elevation, re-climbed and slowly made its way toward Haines, making the 100-mile trip in 35 minutes. A ferry on the Alaska State Highway system takes four hours to make the run.
There were four of us passengers. Nobody said much, it was too painful to shout over the noise anyway. I sat in the middle seat, next to a guy who had decided on a whim to fly to Haines and see the seasonal Bald Eagle convergence.
I didn’t know it then, but the woman behind me was the wife of Russ Lyman, the ad salesman and copy editor at the Chilkat Valley News where I was headed off to work. A San Diego native, she couldn’t take long stretches of Alaska’s winter cold and dreariness and was returning from an emergency run to Hawaii to regain her more-sunnier bearings, not to mention her sanity.
For long periods, I looked down queasily onto the gray-blue waters of the Lynn Canal, which is not a canal at all, but a fjord stretching its fingers into the mainland of Southeast Alaska; second only to passageways in Greenland for depth; one of the longest and deepest waterways on the planet, with an earthquake fault center for a bottom.
There would be no return from a plunge into those bottomless depths.
In fact, the worst maritime disaster in the history of the Pacific Northwest took place here. In October 1918, the USS Princess Sophia, chugging south out of Skagway, grounded on the Vanderbilt Reef and sank, with the loss of all 343 passengers and crew. The only survivor was a dog that swam to shore and later turned up in Juneau, 35 miles away.
OK, it wasn’t the Titanic, but those waters still looked painfully cold, deep and treacherous.

Haines finally came into view, nestled between numerous waterways and we banked in for a bouncy landing. I jumped out of the plane and grabbed my bags, looking for the welcome wagon.
And there he was; standing on the far side of the fence. He had receding white hair and wore glasses in front of eyes that seemed to bulge in perpetual surprise.
His name was John Stang and I was his replacement. He looked anxious to leave, to pass the baton and get the hell out of town.

John was 60, a veteran freelance government reporter from Seattle who had worked two gigs for the newspaper for a total of ten weeks.

Now he wanted to head home for the holidays and see his sister and nieces and nephews.
John said liked Haines; that he wasn’t chomping at the bit to get out.

But I knew better.

I felt like a foot soldier arriving at a war-torn jungle outpost, where the outgoing troops take one look at my sorry newbie-ass and laugh, because I had absolutely no fucking clue what lay before me.
Actually, I didn’t feel like that.

I felt worse.

But John tried to soothe my jitters. He said anybody could survive a few weeks in Haines, even in the dead of winter.
You just didn’t want to live here.
Unlike nearby Juneau, which is home to 30,000 people and has a daily newspaper, the seat of state government and a university, Haines has three or four bars, three grocery stores, no stoplights, no box stores and no movie theaters. There is only one school. The town center is four blocks long and just two blocks wide.
Summers in Haines were marked by long days, endless outdoor opportunities and the occasional docking of cruise ships, which breathed new life into the old cast of 2,200 year-round characters.
Come winter, the only outsiders, apparently, were people who came in to heli-ski.
And then there was me.
We approached the slouching beat-down pathetic thing John introduced as the company staff car. The right side view mirror of the rust-bucket was broken off. There was no back seat and the tires bald. John said he rarely drove the thing because it was dangerous and far from road-legal. There was a hole in the floor on the drives side and your pants leg got wet if you plowed through deep puddles. The old glue horse turned over after several tries, and as we moved along the road, its chassis shuttered and complained. The gears kept grinding. The brakes were slippery.

Did I mention the cracked windshield?

“Don’t drive this car if you don’t have to,” John advised. “It’s not road legal. It’s a death trap.”

We followed the main road called the Haines Highway into town. Going north the other way was a 30-mile slog to the U.S. Canadian border and the Yukon. The nearest town was Whitehorse, but just having a road out for many people made Haines seem less like Alcatraz, emotionally speaking, come winter and the gloomy months. Still, the road was often snowed in and they couldn’t get out anyway.

But sometimes just the thought of a way out is enough. In the weeks to come, I would dream of barreling up that road, out of Haines, back to civilization — even if it was Canada.
It was a blustery Tuesday afternoon and we stopped by the paper.
The newsroom was straight out of the 1970s. The coal-fired copier was smoke-signal slow and you had to take out the ink container and give it a shake to get enough resolution on your prints. The phones were yellowed relics of journalism’s Front Page era. The contraptions lacked earphones, so you had to do interviews holding the receiver between your head and shoulder, like they did in the 1940s. In a matter of a few days, my neck would start to ache whenever I did interviews by phone.
The Internet service was slow and unlimited data is nonexistent here. You paid for every clock, every video stream. The paper monitored data use. That meant no YouTube scrolling unless it was work-related.
This being the 1970s, the weekly’s focus was on the print edition. The paper is delivered each week to the post office boxes of 1,500 subscribers. Hundreds more are placed at local retail outlets. Then, a few days later when the owner has time, he places the week’s offering online.

But there’s a pay wall.
When you’re running small weekly in the middle of the white wilderness, every cent counts.

The walls of the newsroom were filled with strange art — all of it made out of felt. There was one explainer on the different kinds of salmon, and another that celebrated both Haines and the Chilkat Valley News.

They were signed by a strange hand: the Feltist.
I took John to dinner at a local restaurant right on the town’s picturesque harbor. I ordered an Alaskan Amber out of a bottle. He had a hot chocolate. John was an atrocious eater. He survived on potato chips and peanut butter sandwiches and Coke. His idea of a health precaution was diet Coke.

We went back to newspaper-provided basement apartment, lodged in the ass-end of the newspaper building, a dark shotgun den with fake leather furniture and a table with three legs. The curtains were kept perpetually closed or else you risked the somber men with beards and German shepherds peering inside when they want to start up their hulking pickup trucks each morning.
It was like sleeping in a gas station men’s room.
John gave me the bedroom and the single bed. He’d graciously allowed me to stay with him for his last two nights before he headed back south to the Lower 48.
He slept on the couch, on his back, hands folded over his chest, like a corpse or a white-haired Vampire. His greasy white coat was his cover, a pair of pants his pillow.
The place was not Trump Towers.
Two days later, after my first 16-hour deadline day, putting out the paper and sending it on its merry way to the printer in faraway Petersburg, I sat in the passenger seat as John drove to the ferry station for the boat to Juneau.
This was it. He was leaving.

I was on my own.

I handed him his backpack and for a moment wanted to hug hum, get on my knees, burst out crying and plead with him, “Don’t go! Please don’t leave me here!”

For a moment, I considered buying another ticket and going with him.

I had a self-protective urge to flee this dark and icy outpost.

“Sweet baby Jesus,” I thought. “What have I done?

I had traded warm and sunny Las Vegas for what a friend would later call “Rectal, Alaska.”

There were more surprises to come.

I had not yet met the paper’s hard-driving owner, who was in Anchorage that week.
In two days, I would meet the tough-guy himself: Tom Morphet, the award-winning, most-bad-ass, wildest and woolliest weekly newspaper editor in all of rural Alaska.
My stomach churned.

If I was a smoker, I would’ve lit a cigarette, maybe the entire pack.

TOMORROW: Meeting The Boss