ALCOHOL WAS A FACTOR: Weekly Newspapering in Rural Alaska

The Feltist Gives a Tour; Kenny The Fighting Fisherman Redux

So here’s one version of Frozen Hell.

You live in a small town in Southeast Alaska, one that’s so isolated that the ferry schedule — that proverbial boat to the outside world — is big news. And everybody likes to get in everybody else’s business, like goldfish in different living room bowls — a place where your neighbors don’t really give a rat’s ass what you do as long as they know you’re doing it.

In said town, one tends to keep running into one’s problems.

One simply cannot avoid them.

On Friday night, I had a pseudo-fight with Kenny the Fisherman in the Pioneer Bar. Kenny was drunk; I was less drunk but still buzzed. Kenny began picking on my friend Joe. Kenny hates Joe because Joe is vocal about a $34 million boondoggle for a new boat harbor that Kenny the Fisherman’s father, who is also a fisherman, and his friends, are ramming down the throats of voters here.

Kenny started kicking the stuffed animals Joe was about to use in a comedy act. I stepped in and told him to back off. Suddenly, Kenny was calling me a faggot like Joe was a faggot. I was cool with the misguided reference to my sexual preferences.

But I could not brook this. Kenny sucks at pool. And I told him so.

That got Kenny pissed, all right. When I wasn’t looking, he rushed at me with his forearms crossed, like a Seattle Seahawks lineman, and hit me with a move that would have brought a half-way-to-the goal-line NFL penalty.
I fell down; wasn’t hurt, bounced back up and traded a few more “Fucks You’s.”

Then I went home.

End of story.

Nope.

Not in Haines.

The next day, word was out around town that I had presented a rude and boorish gesture at a local hard-working fisherman. (Said gesture basically involved bearing my ass, though fully-clothed.)

I was kind of proud people were talking about me. Tom Morphet, the owner of the Chilkat Valley News where I am working as a reporter for a few weeks for only-God-knows-why, once got into a scuffle of some kind in the Fogcutter, the local fisherman’s bar.

Such mindless antics somehow go down into journalism legend; you laugh about them later.

I had the jump on legend; I was already laughing. Because I had a plane ticket out of town, which I kept in a safe, like a priceless ruby, so no one would try to wrest it out of my frostbitten hands.

Anyway, on Sunday, Joe Parnell, my local artist friend, offered to take me on an excursion up Haines Highway, which runs about 40 miles north out of town to the Canadian border. Along the way, locations are identified by what mile-marker they’re built at.

Joe offered to take me north for breakfast at mile-marker 33, just south of the border.

I showed up at 9 a.m., just like we agreed upon. Joe was still in bed, sawing logs in his loft.

He popped up and we hit the road.

He wanted to show me the sights: The Eagles domain. The place called the Funny Farm where his buddy takes in abandoned parrots. There’s The Farm, owned by a group of religious types who moved up to Nowhere Alaska to escape to a place where people all get along — except they took a wrong turn and ended up in Haines.

We drove up the icy highway and passed an abandoned truck, apparently owned by a local drunk who just got out bailed out of jail by his enabling mother. He was an out-of-work something or other who threw his empty beer cans out onto the highway here in the world’s most pristine place; which is a crime all by itself.

Well, apparently, the town’s recently released drunk, let out the day before, or not long before that, had already run his truck off the road.

People do that here. They get drunk, run off the road into a ditch and then have to sneak back home through the woods to avoid the resident state trooper, who if he catches you will pin a DUI, or sores, on your record. But if you can avoid him, you can deny you were drinking at all.

You can flat out deny the most-repeated phrase in all of rural Alaska.

Alcohol Was A Factor.

We stopped at an unfinished house where Joe is working construction; a handsome $600,000 rural castle owned by a rich guy who blows into town when he wants. Every time Joe calls him with some question about the ongoing project, the dude picks up in a different country, where he is hanging Bond-like with a different woman.

Joe wants to have a life like that one day, which is why he has become a weak shill who cannot pass up a chance to buy lottery tickets when he travels in the Lower 48.

The house-owner is so rich he leaves the heat on all the time, even when no one is there.

That, my friend, is the textbook definition of having made it in rural Alaska.
We drove further and saw a single moose standing alongside the road.

Joe turned around and went back, for my benefit, because in 30 years, Joe has seen more moose than I have eye-balled Vegas strippers. It was a teenager, munching leaves from a stubby tree.

I asked Joe about the moose and he admitted that his “mooseology” wasn’t what it should be.

When the antlerless moose spotted us, he hurried back in the cover of the woods.

I asked Joe if people here ever shoot moose from the highway.

He said no. That was a real scumbag thing to do, like stealing money from your grandmother.

We stopped in Klukwan, a Tlingit Native Alaskan village build on the confluence of three rivers.

As Joe explained, the elders built the town where the fish were. They were Raven Clan men and their Eagle Clan wives.

In the native tongue, Klukwan (Tlakw Aan) means “Eternal Village,” and the place has lived up to its billing. Some 150 people still live there.

Klukwan has a museum where residents display some of the finest Native American art in the nation. An artist from farther south in Alaska created the four house posts in the Whale House collection — the Strong Man or Black Skin Post; the Wormwood Girl; the Sea Creature Post and the Raven Post.

As the story goes, the art was stolen by some businessman back in Haines, who claimed some twisted and misguided story of ownership and the art remained in Seattle for years until the Tlingit sued and finally got it back. And they’re not letting it go again.

We passed by one house. Joe said he had stopped by there one summer du looking for a native guy to help him with his truck.

He knocked on the door and heard a voice from within.

“C’mon in.”

Joe walked in to find a guy sitting in his way chair smoking weed.

They smoked some together and finally Joe said, “Can we go fix my truck?”

“Sure,” the native guy said. “Let’s go.”

Joe said that was the kind of life he liked — where you smoked weed whenever you wanted; and then got up to fix the truck.

But Klukwan was closed for the winter. It was a quiet weekend morning and other than a teenager, a black dog and the smoke rising out of the chimneys, there was so sign of life there.

So we moved on.

Our next stop was the restaurant at Mile Marker 33.

When we pulled up a small brown-and-white dog ran up to the van like he’d been waiting for us all morning. He was a friendly pooch and we opened the door so we could pet him.

Joe walked inside while I petted the dog a bit more, wondering if he had a home.

I walked in and Joe had taken a seat at a four-top next to a window that looked out over a winter wonderland of snow piled in tree leaves, with white mountains holding court in the distance beyond.

We ordered coffee and started shooting the shit, which for me centered on Friday night.

I took out my iPhone to read Joe a couple of texts I’d gotten from my friend Ed Komenda in Chicago. One of them involved what a wuss Kenny the Fisherman, who I watched miss ten straight poll shots in a row.

I read the post out loud and Joe immediately shushed me up.

Kenny was there, over at a large table with six or so other people, including his brother who told me Friday night he was going to kick my ass because he was you and I was old.

Fuck.

It’s called living in Haines, Joe said.

And so we ordered omelets and I snuck a couple of looks over at Kenny and his brother, wondering whether Round Two of Haines Professional Wrestling was about to kick off.

Frankly, I was hardly ready to rumble.

And either was Kenny; or his brother.

We ignored each other, which is the kind of thing you do in Haines, I guess, after a wild drunken night out on the town, when personal feelings and wallets get wounded.

Finally, they left.

When I paid the bill, the waitress asked me if I knew Joe and whether I was his father.

His what?

Oh, I’m sorry, she said. I shouldn’t have said that.

I should have told her the comment hurt me far more than Kenny’s Friday night sucker hit.

But I didn’t. I liked her.

I had edited a story weeks before about her daughter, who had won a high-school essay-writing contest about electricity.

Life in Haines: No degree of separation.

Joe took me other places. We saw a few more moose and I took pictures.

Joe pointed up at a cabin he built years ago. It was a three-mile walk, up a hill and down the other side and up another, to get there. Joe paid a few thousand dollars for 20 acres of land years ago and built his dream castle.

When he got done, he realized that it was cold there and too far out of town.
Apparently, living off the grid is another man’s dream.

Joe rarely goes there anymore.

We drove past the Mosquito Lake School, which closed because they could not round up the ten students necessary to receive state funding. Now the place is a community center.

In case you were wondering, Mosquito Lake, by the way, is named after the black swarms of insects that plague residents here all summer.

Joe once talked to the schoolteacher who worked there before the school closed. She said one student rode her horse to class and that a wolverine once took a slide down the children’s slide.

We passed a farm where a local man keeps wild animals to show off to tourists in the summer. There are bears and reindeer there, and some other animals.

Joe wanted to take mu up there but the gate was closed and you weren’t supposed to walk up unannounced — something to do with upsetting the animals — and even though Joe knew the guy, he decided caution was better than being rude and breaking the rules.

We pulled up in the driveway of a house Joe had told me a lot about — where his buddy keeps his menagerie of pet parrots in winter Alaska.

I was looking forward to this stop. But when Joe eased up the driveway, he stopped.

There it was: Kenny the Fisherman’s truck.

He’d apparently come here after breakfast with his group of friends. Joe says his buddy has a son about Kenny’s age and lets the kids party up there.

We thought about it and finally decided not to go inside.

We drove back down the icy road; foiled, disappointed.

I guess Kenny the Fisherman kicked my ass after all.