Alaska: People We Met

Memorable persons we encountered in our travels. Most in a good way. Some, not so much.

---Our welcome to Alaska was done by Larry and Allen, proprietors of Wildflower Inn. They left us a nice note for when we arrived stating they were out to dinner, but to make ourselves at home (this being around 2130 at night when our flight landed in Anchorage). We didn't meet Allen until the next morning (and he was extremely quiet then, and busy with breakfast in the kitchen), but Larry chatted with us a few minutes while explaining the room, TV, etc. when they returned shortly after we'd lugged all our stuff upstairs to the room and sharply remodeled bathroom.

---Next morning all the guests happen to sit down to breakfast at the same time, which was nice and made all the prep easier for Allen. Larry talked about his job with the school system and flying by small plane out to remote Alaskan districts. All the rest of us talked about our trip plans. We were impressed with the couple (another Larry, and Judy from Cape Cod) who shared our itinerary for the next four days, and then planned to board an 85-foot fishing boat charter out of Juneau. He was being joined by a friend from Finland, and was celebrating surviving cancer. Even though we looked for them in Homer and Seward, we never ran into them again. Kind of surprising, given how small those towns were. We passed their car on the Seward highway on our return to Anchorage. Was the rest of their trip wonderful? Did they have good fishing? Judy didn't look too thrilled about the boat when the topic came up.

---Marcella, whom I had talked to the previous October when I booked the Cozy Cove  B and B. Just going it alone, with her teenage son in a gorgeous log home, taking in boarders and tourists. Tim learned she'd been widowed only 3 years prior. Never did figure out what her accent was, if it was German or Scandinavian. I'm terrible at that sort of thing, but I guess it really doesn't matter. The dynamic between her and her son (the one child she had left living at home) felt a bit like the 800-pound gorilla in the room at times, but that was hardly a surprise. How rocky is that relationship, how is he dealing with the recent loss of his father, and where are things headed in the future for them?

---The  very friendly and talkative guy who sold us our ulu knife at PW knives near Soldotna. My lasting regret is that I didn't get a pic taken with him. He had a great Ted Nugent look going on. I think his name was Bob McCusker the sheathmaker, based on their FB page. One starts to wonder how lonely people get up there, and if the ones good at making connections end up in jobs dealing with travelers/tourists/public. Because nearly everyone (except the silent woman intent on being buried in her book at the Tustumena Smokehouse store) seemed genuinely interested in making an immediate and positive exchange with us. I would have expected more obvious burnout at the end of the tourist season. Maybe they were happy because it WAS the end of tourist season, and a lot of them were shortly to be headed south.

---The even more friendly and talkative guy at the fish market in Seward who sold us frozen red salmon, halibut and smoked salmon. Him and mom in the same room? Unimaginable. We told him we were looking for something like we'd seen near Soldotna (that beautiful Tustumena smokehouse stuff). He didn't have anything like that, but he had some other stuff which he let us taste, and sold us 5 strips. He regaled us with tales of his mother passing earlier in the year, his family in Idaho, etc., etc. The alarm on the desk beeped when 10pm came and went. We finally wrapped it up and said goodbye. We didn't see him again when we stopped in again, but his wife sold us what we needed. And told us that smoked salmon had been reserved for another customer. Oops. How much trouble did he get into later?

---The limp-wristed, white polo shirt wearing guy who was hiking the Harding ice field trail. Wearing TENNIS SHOES and no other visible practical layers of clothing. He was with two other friends who looked almost as limp-wristed. They passed us going back down to the Exit Glacier parking lot while we were geeking out on our photo op at the point we decided to turn around. Which meant Limp Wrist and Co. hiked farther than we did, without hiking boots or proper layers. To add insult to this irksomeness, they stopped for a rest on the trail, and when we passed them, he stood right in the middle of the trail, hip cocked in a sassy, catwalk 'I'm too sexy for this glacier' sort of pose, forcing us to edge around him next to a very steep drop-off. In spite of all four of us saying 'Excuse me'.  Asswipe.

---We hatched a plan to make a 'home' cooked meal featuring local produce and fish for Tom and Josie upon their arrival in Seward, so Tim located a farmers' market in town. The Grazing Moose was a tiny, hard-to-find building on a residential street, but we found it and purchased beautiful kale, blue potatoes, sweet onions and tomatoes. Everything but the tomatoes was memorably delicious, including the cute shop in the building which was displaying a hodgepodge of jewelry (including fork and spoon bracelets), trinkets and local baked goods. It was being run by a beautiful middle-aged woman sporting long wavy gray hair. I vowed then and there to be strong in my resolve to refuse to color my hair and just keep on keeping it real. I saw a number of women in Alaska and on the cruise ship with varying degrees of gray, and appearing to be quite comfortable with their hair. This woman was appreciative of our interest in the market/shop, and told us most tourists 'don't get it': they stick their heads in, look around, and leave.

---The couple in the Vivaldi dining room who had a reserved table right next to a window. We got seated at the table next to them on both formal nights. She wore her white hair in a very short, chic pixie cut. He looked like he had a very hearty appetite (and we soon saw  he did, ordering two lobster entrees one night). She practically wriggled with excitement whenever an especially delectable course or dessert was set on their table. Her chummy banter with their waitress included a casual pat on the ass. Still, this sensuality about her was more irresistible than shocking. After polite greetings and a glass or two of wine, things warmed up to where we were casually conversing. I asked if they were German, and the woman said no, Belgian. Turns out they were from Vancouver, and he was an investment banker. I have no idea how much wealth we were rubbing shoulders with over the course of the 7-day cruise, but I got the feeling these people comfortably occupied some stratospheric tax bracket. They divulged that they had learned the best way to go about vacationing was to lease. Oh, they'd owned property in Hawaii and several other faraway places, but the expense of the taxes and upkeep and help... I simply nodded when she said the servants must be paid 25 dollars an hour these days. Yeah I know, but really: she didn't say it with the least bit of snobbery or condescension. They also told us they loved camping in years gone by, and that they love cruising. They were big fans of the Princess line. They were genuinely delighted when the waiters brought out our candle-lit anniversary cake. 'You're just baaaaaabies!!' she exclaimed when we told them we'd been married 20 years.

Other than the stratospheric tax bracket, could that be a version of us in another 15, 20, 25 years?

---The couple on the other side of us in the same dining room from the San Francisco area. Roy and Julie. They brought in their own bottles of high-end looking wine both nights to dinner. When I first heard her voice (edging toward sharp and nasal), I though gawd, this is going to be obnoxious. But it turned out they were both pretty cool. We talked with them a good while, too. I noticed them slumming it in casual clothes one day in the Horizon Court buffet later.  And it turned out they were friends with another memorable soul, the tall, slim, pushing 90-something we saw leaving absolutely everyone in his dust while walking laps on the promenade deck.

---This chick with a pink tablet who rushed off one of many diesel fume-belching tour busses at Emerald Lake, and pretty much elbowed me aside to get a picture. That was the day I was feeling nauseous and almost narcoleptic-tired. I should have barfed on her.

---Mike, our bear viewing guide with Island Wings out of Ketchikan. A former fire-fighter out of Los Angeles, he gave us candid instructions on what to do and what NOT to do on our outing, and where to find his satellite phone in his backpack if something happened to him in case of an attack. In addition to the scenery and the bears, he wasn't too hard on the eyes either. He also gave us candid accounts about obnoxious and ill-dressed customers, including the 10 year-old boy who went on several trips, insisted Mike was/should be a naturalist (which he was not) and rudely informing him he 'knew his ABC's' when Mike explained the locations of black and brown bears on all the islands. Yes, the verbal filters do indeed start to wear thin at the end of tourist season.

 

Yep, that's pepper spray and a .45 pistol he's wearing.

 

 

---Bruce and Adele, the couple from Brisbane Australia who shared our bear-watching expedition. They were cruising on the HAL Zuiderdam, also in port in Ketchikan, and had booked this outing with Scenic Tours in Canada. They were on a 28-day trip through Canada and Alaska. Since there were no bears to be seen at the viewing deck, I spent quite a bit of time chatting up Adele about camping (or caravanning), the hazards of hitting deer vs. kangaroos on the roads, and dangerous poisonous snakes one encounters in the outdoors. Adele got some great video of the big male black bear fishing in the stream on her little Sony camera. As the outing went on, she became increasingly fretful about getting back in time for their ship's sailing. 'We're going to miss our boat,' she fussed while Mike and the pilot Michelle were checking the crab pot. Despite the fact that these people have never caused a customer to miss a sailing yet, and seem to completely know what the hell they're doing. Bruce kept sensibly silent.

---When I mention Jesus, our steward, it's also a nod to the gazillion crew and staff whose largely mocha latte faces all ran together in a bewildering, unfortunately unmemorable throng. I must sadly admit that so many of them looked alike to my Caucasian American eyes. But they were everywhere and immediately and willingly did whatever was asked of them. There were none from large, developed industrial countries (their home country was on their name badge), and I'm not sure what to take away from that. We naturally saw the more of Jesus than anyone else, because he seemed to be always there when we opened our cabin door. Morning and evening, there he was in the hallway busy doing something. Tim's idea of booking a regular cabin right next to the suites apparently was spot on, because we got plenty of attentiveness. We finally took to putting the 'relaxing in progress' sign on the doorknob just to keep him from constantly tending to our room. We appreciated the speed of which the things we asked were done (pillow-top for the bed, info about room service champagne breakfasts), but for the most part we hate being incessantly waited on. I guess we were looking for signs that the staff were happy to be doing their jobs, and nearly every single one of them seemed to be.

---The guy wearing a T-shirt that said 'Train Wreck' who sold us the beautiful maple flower honey at the Anacortes Farmers' Market. He started out with an excited description of how they make it and happily gave us samples to try. We were blown away by the floral notes and the endless finish. Then he seemed to suddenly run out of steam and sat down in a chair, asking a younger woman to take over. He reminded me of Bryan doing one of his comic imitations of someone excitedly chatting then ending with an exhausted 'whooooooooooh'. Was he the Bruce of Bruce Bowen's Bees of Mount Vernon, WA as the label on our honey states? Was he living with some kind of chronic disease? Did he buy that shirt himself, or did someone get it for him as a joke? Was he really a train wreck? Is he OK?

---The guy on the street in downtown Vancouver near Canada Place and the ship disembarkation area. He first struck me as handsome, in an shaggy-haired 80's Canadian sort of way. Turns out he was trolling for tired, semi-lost baggage-laden travelers like us on which to practice his panhandling skills.  I thought he was just walking down the street, but we turned to see him walking next to us. He asked us if we were looking for the train station, and we said yes. He then parroted the instructions he'd heard the underground/subway employee give us to find the nearest station, and then asked us if we had any spare cash for a bed for the night. I lied and said I didn't have any cash on me. He made a disgusted sound and walked off. Sorry dude, but how lame. Still, it was interesting that he didn't say he needed it for food. And I haven't researched Vancouver homeless shelters, but it seems odd that he would need cash for that. I still felt bad for him. Obviously he's still on my mind all these weeks later, and I hope he's OK.