First We Quit Our Jobs Read online

  Word got around, and we received requests from others who wanted to be added to the distribution. Our address list grew. We began to correspond with people who had been mere acquaintances when we left home but became good friends as the miles went by. We shared our adventures with them, and they told us what was going on in their lives and in the business. It was so exciting to get news from home. There was even e-gossip: people changing jobs, having babies, getting married. We were thrilled to be in touch from our “office.”

  The other bit of necessity was laundry. We’d brought plenty of clothes, but underwear was running low. Since there was a large Laundromat on the premises and I was still limping a little and thought better of hiking, I volunteered to do the wash. Sandy offered to help, but I said I just needed a hand getting the stuff to the laundry room and back. There were at least a dozen each, washers and dryers, all with a great view. For some reason, something got something started in me. Although Valdez looks like Switzerland (peaky snow-patched mountains surrounding deep blue water), it brought out the Nashville in me. I’ll let you have it one time. Here goes. (The words fit into just about any country tune of your choice.)

  It’s a Man Thing

  It was a cloudy Wednesday morning and I had some time to kill,

  So I thought I’d do my laundry in the town of oil spill.

  My hubby is a gent and he agreed to help me out—

  He heaved the clothes, the Tide, the Bounce, even brought the Shout.

  The Laundromat the Laundromat, it’s the place to be—

  You can find out the weather, the road news, and have tea.

  The Laundromat, the Laundromat, it’s toasty here and dry;

  Outside the wind is howling though it’s the middle of July.

  There’s some kind of satisfaction, though not the kind Mick meant,

  When your clothes are done tumblin’, your quarters have been spent,

  To fold the shirts and towels, forming towering piles

  And the hubby comes to get you and offers up a smile.

  The Laundromat, etc.

  “But honey, where’s the laundry bag? I left it on the door.”

  “I swear I didn’t see it, wasn’t there anymore.”

  Now I get a mite impatient, start to twist my wedding ring,

  When the lady to my right says, “Honey, it’s a man thing.”

  The Laundromat, etc.

  “Honey, have you noticed that your husband or your man

  Will stand at the refrigerator lost as a lamb,

  Whining ‘Where’d you put the butter? where’d you put the jam?’

  But he can spot good knockers a mile away, goddamn.”

  The Laundromat, etc.

  How can you believe a man when he says he likes your looks,

  When he can’t see the laundry bag that’s hanging on the hook?

  When he’s got to walk right through it in order to get out?

  Then that gal reminds me, “Honey, it’s a man thing,” she shouts.

  The Laundromat, etc.

  Since quitting my job, I’d been concentrating on the idea of change. A lot of people say you never know when, where, or how that next career is going to strike. Now that I’d gotten over writing hit country tunes, I could move on to something else. And Trisha Yearwood could relax too. In the meantime my husband looked mighty good to me. I would learn something remarkable about him on this trip. Even if he couldn’t see the laundry bag in front of his nose, he could spot wildlife (one word, the furry kind) a half-mile away. Perhaps the hunter instinct is for real. It’s a man thing.

  Salmon 101

  I always thought of lox first. Salmon was an afterthought. Growing up in New York, bagels and lox took precedence over, beyond, and to the exclusion of actually fishing for salmon. At our campground in Valdez, I watched in awe as people came home with strings of freshly caught salmon, popped them into their portable smokers, and turned them into something that goes for twenty dollars a pound in Manhattan. Even though the exact process may be different, making lox was quite a new concept for me.

  Fishing is a megasport in Alaska. We had seen people standing shoulder to shoulder, tossing out lines. They were engaged in what we later found out was called combat fishing. It seemed that everyone in the state except us, and maybe every fisherperson on the planet, knew the salmon were running. We asked someone what the story was. The reply was partially in English. “The reds are running, but you gotta use flies. The silvers haven’t started yet. Kings are off limits in the Russian, but you could go for them with spinners in the Kenai. Pinks are on even years only. Dogs is dogs. If you can’t find a good place here, go downriver and play catch and release with the rainbow. Or try for Dollies with a spinner, winged bobber, or small weighted spoon.” And all my life I’d thought salmon came two ways: poached or smoked. Turned out there were five kinds of salmon in Alaskan waters, and each had at least one other name: king (Chinook), sockeye (red), silver (coho), pink (humpback), and chum (dog). Each could be caught with different lines, at different times in varying locations. All would eventually be canned, most were smoked, and some were shipped out frozen. The local preference was clearly for king steaks. They were the tastiest fish, in my opinion, because they were flush with fat, often three times as much as chum. The largest reported king weighed in at 126 pounds. This time of year there were salmon derbies everywhere, and the purse could run into thousands of dollars.

  * * *

  Another of the many things that continued to surprise us about Alaska was the roads. The state is over half a million square miles, twice the size of Texas, yet there are fewer than three thousand miles of mapped roads. There is a cluster of roads in south-central, of which about half promise to be paved. Only one road runs north-south through the central portion, a thousand miles from Prudhoe Bay to Seward. Only half of that is paved. I transposed that in my mind to the East Coast. The equivalent would be a smooth ride from Columbia, South Carolina, to Washington, D.C., then dirt roads to Augusta, Maine. Amazing. The rest of the state is as reachable as it has always been—by river in summer, by dogsled team in winter. And there are planes. Almost everyone seemed to have a little something out in the yard. Most of the planes were single-engine privately owned, though many were for hire for “flightseeing.” It seemed wild to us that Juneau, the capital, couldn’t be reached overland, only by sea or air. So many places are inaccessible by road that the state has created a very extensive Marine Highway System. Eight ships traverse 3,500 miles of the state’s 47,000-mile coastline. In order to avoid backtracking and continue on new paths, we’d booked passage on the ferry from Valdez to Seward, a twelve-hour trip. We wondered how they would accommodate the RV, but when we saw the ship, we realized immediately how foolish we’d been. These boats are the lifeline for many communities. Food, fuel, and the trucks they came in were transported this way every day. One thirty-foot RV was more or less a drop in the old bucket for these ships. Another thing we hadn’t anticipated was having a tour guide onboard: a park ranger and her good pal, Smokey the Bear. The ranger pointed out Columbia Glacier, blue with light trapped in hundreds of feet of ice. She called our attention to whales, dolphins, common murres (a penguin look-alike), seals, otters, and puffins. Puffins, small black and white birds with overlarge, cartoonish orange bills, are goofy-looking. If they didn’t exist, Disney would have invented them. In the meantime the poor things are widely pictured throughout Alaska in the middle of the international “no” symbol as a sign not to smoke. No puffin. Cute. This is the only thing about Alaska that qualifies as “cute.” This is the last frontier, the Great Land. It’s a rugged place: you can die of exposure here in August. No puffin? It must have been thought up by someone from out of state, we decided. Smokey posed for pictures with the kids. And Sandy.

  While we cruised along, we realized we had to adjust our habits for my dad’s upcoming visit. As game as he was to come out, our totally winging-it lifestyle was not quite suitable for an eighty-year-old gent from
the old country. I doubt he’d ever been on a vacation without making reservations. We thought about what he might like to do, took note of things we could do together, and knowing how much he loved to eat out, read up on restaurants we might try. We also wondered how his two-week visit would affect us. Could our boat float with fifty percent more personnel?

  * * *

  We explored the Kenai Peninsula, the scenic area that juts into the Gulf of Alaska just below Anchorage. We hiked when the mood moved us, camped when we got tired, and drove on when we wanted to see something new. Towns, for the most part, were beside the point here, we concluded. They were service hubs, only somewhat expanded from the old days, which meant you could now rent a video when you picked up some supplies. These days there were plenty of auto and windshield repair places along with the dry goods and grocery stores. In case we got a sudden urge to go fishing, many places—drugstores to gas stations—stocked fishing gear. I saw more varieties of lures than I’d ever imagined existed. My favorite was the Pixie—a gaudy pink and silver thing designed to attract salmon. What did they use for cream cheese? I wondered.

  I needn’t have. There was any kind of cheese, from cream to cheddar, blue, Brie, and more, in Alaska. Ripe pineapples, avocados, and mangoes seemed easier to find here than on Broadway. Life, and the people living it out here, was far more sophisticated than I could ever have imagined from my catbird seat in Rockefeller Center. We had expected to be “roughing” it, but food tastes were hardly primitive. Olive oils, balsamic and raspberry vinegars, all kinds of mustards and barbecue sauces lined the shelves. Then came enormous international sections with complete lines of Thai, Chinese, and Indian goodies. We felt pretty stupid having toted all those condiments up from New York.

  In the meat department we found anything we wanted, except yellow chickens. We’d noticed early on, beginning in the plains, that the chickens were white. They looked pale and sickly to us, so we avoided buying them. Eventually as the desire for grilled chicken nearly overwhelmed us, we asked a butcher what the story was. Evidently, we were naive victims of geography: in some places, chicken feed contains more corn giving the birds’ skin a robust glow. Over the years we had become as accustomed to these blond birds as, say, to orange cheddar. Realizing our error, we were surprised to find the white birds tasted “regular” in every way. I guess they would need a little extra sunblock at the beach, but on the grill they were every bit as tasty as their brethren back home.

  Bakeries offered all kinds of tasty temptations, from sourdough breads to enormous cinnamon buns. Then there was all the fresh fish, shrimp, and crab that came in daily. It was clear we could forget about subsisting on macaroni and cheese.

  * * *

  Our education in fish continued one afternoon as we strolled down a quiet dirt road. We came to a little bridge. All around, fishermen were casting and reeling in, casting and reeling in Dollies—Dolly Varden, a fifteen-to-twenty-inch fish that was abundant in the area. It was a calm spot, not a combat zone, surrounded by piney woods, men, women, and children. It was an almost idyllic scene of summer. Then we noticed The Man. As if this were an old Western movie, people started edging away from this guy. We sensed tension in the air. He went over to question one of the fishermen, who showed him his license. The lawman nodded, then looked around. People had vanished, it seemed, into the forest. The crowd had definitely thinned out. What was going on here? we wondered. It was explained to us later that long before Seward bought the place, fishing had been a way of life and livelihood in Alaska. As a natural resource, fish were closely watched. Fishing was strictly regulated and monitored as to time, place, and what was used to catch the fish. Some individuals clearly did not want to be told what to do. We’d never before seen a fish and game warden who wore a bulletproof vest and carried extra rounds for his nine-millimeter. The gun might have been bear protection, but somehow I doubted that the vest was. We watched the fishing for a while. Maybe we’d have to give in and try it before we left. Our first order of business just then was to find a place to spend the night.

  On the shores of Kenai Lake we found “the best campsite in Alaska,” according to the two disappointed silver-haired couples who arrived from Anchorage just after we had settled in. They came down to camp at this exact spot at least once a year. Since sites were spoken for on a first-come-first-served basis, they were a little hangdog about the fact that we’d gotten there first. Even after forty years of living in Alaska, they said, they still couldn’t get over the beauty of it. We promised we’d give them first crack at our location when we were ready to leave, but we weren’t about to vacate for anyone or anything. For seven dollars a night, we camped directly on the emerald-green glacier-fed Kenai Lake with a terrific view of the mountains. In our woodsy space was a picnic table, a fire ring, and a path leading to the beach. We brought our new neighbors some firewood as a sort of peace offering or consolation prize. They gladly accepted, and we chatted for a while as the two men took turns chopping some of our logs into fine kindling. It occurred to me that I’d rarely seen such fit senior citizens. They told us they’d come to fish and would be off early in the morning.

  We were beginning to understand the passion people felt about fishing, though we were not yet moved to do it ourselves. Instead, we set off on our bikes—a much more intimate way to see the world than from the Sue. Pedaling along the dirt road, we noticed a smaller road leading off this one that we’d missed from the altitude of the RV. We followed it to find a small grassy strip. There was no terminal, no building or equipment of any kind. Not even a windsock. Just a relatively flat piece of land with eight or ten small planes parked at one end. We snooped around a bit, peeking into the planes. One five-seater was littered with the everyday detritus of suburbia: a football helmet, several coloring books, a couple of plastic water bottles, and sweaters. The station wagon of the North. We hung around awhile, hoping to get someone to take us up. As we waited, a plane landed, letting off several passengers who were guests at a nearby lodge. The pilot chatted with us a bit but said he had just about enough fuel to get him back to Seward and couldn’t take us. We waved as he drove off along the grass and popped into the sky. Just as we were about to give up loitering, someone pulled up in a car. A tall slim gentleman with salt and pepper hair peeking out from the edges of a baseball cap came over toward us. We introduced ourselves. We asked Lyman Nichols if he had a plane here that he’d be able to give us a tour in. The good news was he had a plane; the bad news was it had only one passenger seat. He was free-lancing for fish and game and had to go up and count sheep. A dream job? We watched Lyman and his little plane bounce down the field, bobbing as it lifted across the lake toward the mountains.

  * * *

  The next day we lounged in our lawn chairs by the lake. I’d learned to combat the pervasive chilliness with ski pants, turtlenecks, and warm boots, refusing to be forced in out of the cold. It drizzled often, and we were quite content to be out and about in Gore-Tex gear. Although it wasn’t the kind of shorts and T-shirt, baking-in-the-hot-sun summer weather we were used to, we accommodated easily and gladly for the chance to take in the scenery. I became deeply engrossed in Wilderness Seasons, the book Sandy had just finished reading. It was the story of a young Vancouver couple who spent fourteen months in the British Columbia outback. Wayback. They had chosen their spot because it was remote and on a lake. They had been airlifted in with a load of supplies. They built their own cabin, felling and stripping every log by hand. When their second airlifted load of supplies failed to appear, they learned to track, kill, and butcher their first moose. Their communication problem was even worse than ours: Their radio failed to work entirely. In winter they often woke up to temperatures below freezing inside. Somehow we both loved reading this story and related to it as a distant, far braver cousin of our own trip. Grilling up a skirt steak marinated in garlic, chili paste, and soy sauce, I wondered if this would be good on moose. That night as I took a nice hot shower and blow-dried my hair, I realiz
ed, with something of a shock, that living in the Transue, with propane heat, a roof that didn’t leak, a microwave oven, and a refrigerator freezer, was the height of luxury. What a difference in our perspective one month had made.

  As I was getting dressed the next morning, a car drove by our site very slowly. Since we knew lots of other sites were available, this seemed odd and somehow threatening. Our city antennae went up. “Intruder. Intruder. Intruder,” a little electronic voice in my head said. At least it was daylight, I thought. Then again, it was light around here about twenty hours a day. Crime must go way down here in summer, I hoped. I scrambled to get my layers on. Sandy went out to investigate. I wondered whether I would be able to load the rifle if I had to. Unlikely. Maybe it was someone else who wanted this campsite. No way. We’d promised it to the people across the street. I speed-laced my boots and went out. There was Sandy having a chat with Lyman, the pilot from the day before. It seems he felt so badly about not being able to give us a ride in his plane, he came back to ask us over to have coffee and meet his wife. I felt just a little like a giant jerk at that instant.

  Lyman and Gladys Nichols, originally from Louisiana and New York respectively, met through the mail thirteen years ago. He was living in Alaska, was divorced, and had raised his son Robert and daughter Jody. A friend suggested he might want to correspond with a woman he knew back east. Gladys, divorced and the mother of a ten-year-old girl, was working and living in Pennsylvania. The correspondence went on for eighteen months, at which point they agreed on a visit. Gladys would fly up to Alaska, and if she and Lyman hit it off in person as well as they had in writing, she would stay. It was a lock. Gladys and her daughter, Kim, moved to Cooper Landing, population 386. The wedding took place in Seward. As all the kids in small towns in Alaska did, Kim boarded with a family during the week (between Soldotna and Kenai, forty-six miles away) for junior and senior high. She came home on weekends. After attending college up in Fairbanks, she settled there with her husband. Her parents couldn’t understand why they wanted to live in such a cold place.