Alaska

It is 1:21 and Cindy and Kate and I are sitting here watching Anthony Bourdain ride a horse (or a jeep) around Livingston, Montana and he is eating good food and catching trout and throwing them back (by mistake) and talking to artists and writers and old railroad men. I watched this last night and wished I was there.

I have already got tourist vacation pamphlets and maps and something about Yellowstone, which is in Montana and Idaho and Wyoming, so I am ready when I get the time and the money to get out there and rent a car and drive from Billings to Livingston and find a place to stay for a few days and drink and eat and walk around and maybe ride a horse or go fishing and enjoy the big sky and the the open land, which is somewhat of a laugh, since so many outside people who have moved into the area have fenced it off and built big houses with big glass windows to see the country in such a way that you don't have to get out into it, which is ridiculous, since the whole reason to go to some place like Montana and Livingston and Yellowstone should be to get out into it, and get wet and sun-burned and tired and be able to go into some place at the end of the day and drink a beer or two and eat a good, simple meal and feel like you were going to sleep soundly during the night, without a care or a thought of the world you left behind that you will ultimately return to anyway, so why worry about it now.

That is what Alaska was like when we went out there with dad several years ago. You would fly to Seattle, then fly to Ketchikan, then fly over to Craig on planes which were gradually getting smaller as you went. The flat rolling hills of the Piedmont of Central Georgia and the soft foothills of North Georgia and all the urban sprawl of Atlanta were so far behind you and it was just a big series of island-mountains covered with trees and bears and moose and elk and little cabins with tin roofs and rough, dented old pickup trucks parked next to them and the sun peeking through the clouds would catch the tin of the roof and make it glow like silver and then you would drop down on the other side of the mountain and come down onto the surface of the water like you were diving into a lake and just as smooth and some rough-looking woman would come out and grab the rope attached to the float plane and pull it over to the dock and you would step gingerly down to the dock and pick up your bag and walk over to the lodge where the fishing guides were located and get settled, then go eat supper before you went to bed in the twilight of seven o'clock in Alaska, which was eleven o'clock our time, but you closed the drapes and opened the window and slept until early in the morning rolled around.

Then you were shuffling down the hallway to eat a little something and watch the fathers drinking their coffee and talking softly as you stepped out of the room and walked down the metal gangway to the dock and greeted your guide as he readied your boat for the day and it was still pretty dark for five o'clock and by the light of the one streetlight out on one of the little islands in the bay you could see the boats and the abandoned old houseboats and the detrius left behind by some former occupants who probably went back home to the lower forty eight or found another place to sleep and work because the salmon cannery was gone and the salmon fishing commercially was not that good but there are still enough fish out in the water.

Finally the engine caught, and we were all inside the boat, facing each other and the lines were released from the cleats and you were backing out of the dock and swinging around and heading out over the glass surface of the water, with just the touch of light blue on the eastern ridge of the mountains on the island, and sliding out toward the rougher water and the bald eagles in the trees, waiting for a supper of salmon innards thrown off the side of your boat by your guide, while you ran those herrings up and down and tried to get some good action off that bait until the guide saw some shadows on the depth finder and you were doing everything you could to get that silver fish up in the boat and you might find yourself with four fishermen, all with fish on the line and the guide scrambling between the fish box and your legs gaffing the fish and popping them in the box and attaching a herring on your hooks so you could get them back in the water and take advantage of such a run.

By the time you were finished you had caught your limit and you were heading out in to deeper water to find some halibut, which is dumb fishing, dropping a big old circle hook with the lungs of a salmon attached to that surgical steel and you were letting the big old ball of guts ride about three feet off the bottom of the ocean, three or four hundred feet down, until you were lucky to feel something heavy pull on it and you pulled back up on the stubby little rod and felt a quick, heavy second tug on the line and then it was pull, wind, pull, wind, pull, wind for anywhere from ten to thirty minutes until that big ugly grey piece of piscine predator showed himself in the water and you were amazed at how big they could get and your guide was popping him on the head with the gaff, hoping to stun him and not wake him up to set him diving back down toward the bottom where he lived, back into the brier patch, so to speak, and then cause you to have to pull, wind, pull, wind, pull, wind until he showed himself again and you could allow the guide to secure him and slip a line through his gills up into and out of his mouth, and pull him back up onto the back of the boat where he would lay hog-tied until you got back home to have your picture taken with one hundred plus pounds of big, ugly, grey fish, which of course, didn't reveal the beautiful white fish steak beneath that ugly grey surface, but it still made a pretty picture on the mantle in your office.

All along while you fished, you got to catch a brief glimpse of the majesty of the place, tree-bedecked mountain-islands sitting in the cold blue water, the sun glinting off the waves and unbelievable blue skies with soft fleecy white clouds floating on the air ocean above us and every so often the white head of a bald eagle sitting in a dying tree somewhere off shore on one of those islands to give you something to focus on and remark that you hadn't really seen anything like that other than in a zoo or aviary, but here they might be just sitting on a telephone pole in town, like a pigeon, looking for scraps, but this is the symbol of our country and so large and powerful there in the tree or on the pole, or you might catch a large grey whale jumping up into the air from below, like it was trying to catch a breeze and fly into the ocean of air above and become a creature of sky, rather than sea, crashing back to the surface of the ocean, causing a large splash of water to pop up above the surface like a young boy doing a giant cannonball, jumping and diving with pleasure and glee like that same young boy, and finally returning to the sea beneath us.

And at the end, you sat down on a picnic table and watched the teenaged girls filleting the fish and popping them in plastic tubs for freezing for your journey back home and you drank a cold beer or maybe ate a left-over cookie or sandwich and laughed with everyone else there and enjoyed sixty degree weather in August and wondered how it could get any better.

The last, best sight was set in my mind when we were all working our lines, trying to catch the attention of some pink and silver demi-god of the ocean, when suddenly, a coho was spinning and jumping and diving and flipping across the water, like a young colt, across the blue surface of the water and it just looked like joy personified and it seemed a shame that one of us had caught him by the mouth and we looked at each other to see who among us had hooked him but obviously no one had because no one was reeling anything in at all and so the last image of Alaska had to be that happy silver salmon, jumping and flipping joyfully across the cold water, laughing at us, or so it seemed, as we watched his play.

At play, at rest, at ease in my mind, forever.