Earth, Wind, Air and Fire

Mountain that looks like a man lying down. His forehead is at the right. I looked at it every day last summer and never noticed it until it was pointed out to me this year.

...Just wanted to get the Fire part out of the way before starting the blog. There are several different housing locations for employees who don't choose to find their own place to live. One of them is MP2 (aka Mile Post 2 or the Shop House) which is next to the garage and the property where the coaches are parked. If you live there, you can pretty much roll out of bed and be at work. Here at the Westmark, we're about 1-3/4 miles from MP2 and the Westmark is NOT conducive to having a campfire. MP2 is a good place to have a campfire and one is built every few nights.

One night it seemed like a good idea to not sit in my room, watch TV, be a Facebook ho, play solitaire on the computer, read or write a blog. Having the pickup up here is a bonus because even if I wanted to walk out to MP2, it's pretty clear that late at night when I'm tired, I wouldn't want to walk back to my room. Thus, "fire." It's a bunch of folks sitting around with the usual chatter and this night, some hula hooping. It's how we roll. (All this being said, this whole talk about fire sounds totally out of the blue and irrelevant. However, the video I was uploading to show some hula hooping by a campfire wouldn't load. So there was A context. And that's how Alaskan internet rolls. Stinkily. I was e-mailed an 8:36 video that took 35 minutes to buffer.)

Mike left mid-day Saturday for Dawson, Whitehorse, back to Dawson and back home this coming Thursday night....or something like that. As always, I miss him when he's not here. But if he hadn't chosen to drive highway, we might not have returned to Skagway. He always likes new things and that's new enough.

At least, he hasn't had the misfortune one of our co-workers had on his first highway tour. First off, a rock hit and destroyed a windshield. When you're on highway, you are really far away from our mechanics. Secondly, he had just pointed out a black bear sow and her two cubs to his passengers when one cub decided that suicide by motor coach wheel was a good idea. Thirdly, he had a tour director with him who has a reputation of being one of the more difficult tour directors to work with. (The name will not be divulged, but Nathan would guess it immediately.) And thus it was for our driver guide friend on his first highway tour. It can only get better from there and we certainly hope it does.

So far, the scheduling has been that when Mike has been home from highway, I've been working. And I'm just completing two stunningly beautiful days off and he has been on the road. It is sadly my habit to just stay by myself if I don't get explicit invitations to join people. That's not one of the traits I'm proud of. It's just a pattern I've noticed. Happily the invitations to get out have been fast and furious the last couple of days. Like "Wind" the time off has flown by! Ok...so that may be a lame lead-in to the wind, but aside from the meaning of Skagway being "home of the north wind," it's the best I could do.

It was a very busy work week this past week. There are two days of the season when a corporation books a huge number of cabins on a ship and books a specific tour for all of the people traveling with this group. They are all scheduled to go to Liarsville for a salmon bake. On those two days, they feed 250 people an HOUR!!!!! It is a never ending line for the grilled salmon and crowd control is imperative. The people in this grouop were everywhere taking pictures of the littlest things: the buffet line, their food plates, the salmon being put on the grill, the salmon cooking, the men doing the grilling, the driver-guide who assists by putting sauce on the salmon once it's on the plate (me), a picture of themselves with any of the above people, etc., etc., etc. My tour at the time was enjoying the show and gold panning before being squeezed into the rolling tide of salmon eaters. Despite all the busy-ness of the day, it was my best day in tips. (Tips being those things we don't solicit, but are oh-so-grateful when they come our way.)

I also had my first tour up to the Yukon. Those are the more coveted tours in that they are more time with your guests...pretty much a 6-8 hour day. Thus, hopefully more tips. I paralleled with Teri and Brian. Brian has been with the company for a gazillion years and is one of my favorite resource people, not to mention my occasional beer buddy. So my first Yukon tour went pretty well. It was a sunny, but hazy day. The views were visible, if not stark against an azure sky. AND there were THREE bear sitings: 2 black bears and a grizzly. My narrative lasted most of the tour up and included gold rush history, geology, animals, life in Alaska today, how I came to be working in Alaska. In other words, the usual stuff...only expanded to fill the time. And we were able to make 6 picture stops. The tips? Fair at best. Then I dropped them off at the train station in Fraser and they got the scenic train ride back to town. When I dropped them off, I picked up a group who had come up on the train. It is considered just a transfer. But, they had no other tours scheduled, so I gave them a couple of picture stops and some narration. I got almost as much in tips from this group than the group I'd spent most of the day with. It is another example of never being able to tell.

I was also scheduled on wash crew ("water") twice this past week. Being scheduled on that means you have tours or transfers in the morning, get your coach washed and clean the interior. Around 3 p.m. you go help out in washing coach exteriors for the rest of the day. You do get to go in jeans or shorts and a t-shirt and not your uniform. Speaking of cleaning coaches, it is something that is done EVERY day. I would rather clean 22 exteriors than one interior. It's just such sweaty work! I had already been taking a t-shirt to change into before cleaning. Finally on Saturday, I wore a t-shirt beneath my uniform shirt in an attempt to make the uniform shirt last for more than one day! I used to go three days last year on one shirt....show you how little activity I had while working last year!

Uh-oh! It just occurred to me that the three-bear day was NOT the day of my Yukon tour. It was when I drove up to the Suspension Bridge the previous day (Thursday). This is an example of a major obstacle in my tours. The days and tours run together. There are many times on a tour that I cannot remember if I told THESE people something or did I tell this information yesterday or the day before. Yeesh. That's a tip killer right there.

Again it occurs to me that last year I so underappreciated how tiring being a driver guide can be. You're "on" with the people, concentrating on driving, managing logistics, timing and people management. I am nothing but a limp noodle at the end of the day. I was so happy to have Sunday and Monday off this weekend. Saturday night I had dinner with a young friend with a broken heart. She will heal, but it will take time and it was hard to see her hurting. I'm glad we could spend that time together. She went on to hang out with a bunch of young people which I think is essential to her getting back to enjoying her summer. It's always hard when what we expected turns out to be so far off from what is presented.

Brenda, Stanley and Teri in front of Captain William Moore's original cabin.
Moore was the founder of Skagway.

Sunday was the 25th anniversary of Brenda's 34th birthday and we ended up celebrating just about all day. A bunch of us went to Glacial Smoothies and had breakfast sandwiches, veggie quiche and/or scones. It had started off as a cloudy day, but the clouds burned off and it became one of the most spectacular days we've had up here. Then I introduced Brenda, Teri and Stanley to geocaching. They really seemed to enjoy it. But I have noticed that so far, none of them have asked for instructions to the website to log their finds. Introduced them to the hobby, but maybe didn't convert them. Still, it was fun. We found three caches that I'd found last year...both in town and on our drive out to Dyea.

Stanley, Teri and Brenda: newbie geocachers!?!?

Pilings from the 1898 pier built during the gold rush near the ghost town of Dyea.

On the drive we had two animal sitings. The first was a sea otter. Photo attempts resulted in that "see the dark spot in the water...that's a sea otter" quality of photo. We had gotten out of the car and did our best with various cameras to little avail. So, it was best we just enjoyed watching it. On we drove and came upon a stunning bald eagle in a tree and a nearby buddy of his. Just gorgeous!

A bald eagle on Memorial Day weekend.

We drove on to the Slide Cemetery where the victims of the April 3, 1898 avalanche are now buried. Hemlock and spruce grow in the moist soil. The smells of the woods and nearby tidal flats are such a marriage of the "earth" and the sea. Those primal scents make you feel at home wherever in the world you find yourself. But then we found a depression near a grave and became a little...ok...very irreverent:

Stanley is such a good sport. She'd already had one huge spider crawl on her. I didn't have the heart to point out the nearby webs in her pseudo-grave.

We drove to the footbridge where Mike and I had had our close encounters of the bear kind last summer. No salmon running yet. No bears. But it sure looked like there was gold in the creek! Glistening on the bottom were all sorts of shiny dots. Fool's gold if ever I've seen it! Brenda waded in the very cold creek just to check it out. After that we drove out onto the tidal flats as far as it felt safe to do so...out to the pilings.

Brenda and Jazz

Upon our arrival back to the Westmark, Jazz had made good on her promise and had made not one, but surprised Brenda with TWO birthday cakes. She said she didn't know which one she would like, so she'd made one that she liked and one she thought everyone would like. As far as I can see they were both winners. There was no cake left by morning! If I'm spelling Jazz's name wrong, I do apologize!

A late night watching some t.v. and reading and then I slept in until 7:30 a.m. That IS sleeping in when you're getting up at 4:45 or 5:30 a.m. every day! Brenda stopped in for a cup of coffee that evolved into one of those conversations where you really get to know another person on a deeper level.

Two hours later...the fire alarm in the Westmark went off. It did that quite a bit last year and was never anything. Ditto for today. It was just the right signal to get us going on one of those things we'd told ourselves individually that we would do more of this summer: hike. The short story is that we hiked up to Lower Dewey and back. The long story....did you really think you'd get off with the short story? Really?

Brenda has asthma. I'm still recovering both from breaking my ankle which is not 100% back to strength and flexibility and also beginning to deal with the fear of having done so. Steps that I used to take without much thought have become challenges. Oh so cautious. But we did it, chatted along the way, enjoyed the lovely day, chatted with people who passed us by. At one point we were at an overlook and a man we know came by and we chatted with him. He went on up and met up with others and hiked a different trail. We went to the lake and back down and were at the very same spot when he and the others we work with hiked back down. He said, "You didn't get very far!" We were falling all over ourselves to convince him that we had, indeed, hiked up to the lake! Laughter all around!

Brenda and I went our separate ways when we came back. She went in search of gold. Well, hopefully, maybe gold. She had toured a group out to the dredge last week and helped her guests pan for gold. One couple found a total of $28 worth and were effusive to her in their thanks and enjoyment of her tour. They came up to her with the little film canister that the dredge attraction uses for people to put their panned gold in and said they wanted to give it to her as a token of their appreciation. She shook it and joked that it sounded like rocks. The man made her promise not to open it until she got home at the end of the day. They shook her hand, but did not tip her when leaving her coach for the last time of the day. Later at the Westmark, she partially poured out the contents....and she had been right. Only rocks. So the story has been passed on that this was a truly mean-spirited act on the part of this couple. But today she told me that she never poured ALL of the rocks out. I told her that, in fact, he may have added pebbles to his poke of gold and had given it to her to pan for her own treasure. Now she cannot find the film canister. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!! It then becomes an ethical question on whether he was mean-spirited, joking or truly creative in his giving. Personally, I like the idea that she cannot find it. It allows us to think well of him instead of negatively.

We are enjoying our CSA boxes of vegetables from Jewell Gardens. I'm eating more salads and the fresh herbs are delightful. And then there is the ever present rhubarb. Because of the Kuroshio Current out of Japan (similar to the Gulf Stream on the east coast of the U.S.), Skagway's climate is milder than the interior. The long growing days of the summer, the warmth provided by the current and soil containing glacial silt combine to create an environment suitable for a gardener's paradise. Most fruits don't do all that well here because of some cool temps at night. However, rhubarb thrives. It was grown in truck farms here prior to WWII. With the influx of men and material stationed in Skagway to become part of the building of the Al-Can highway, many of the farms were broken up. Rhubarb was transplanted all over town to preserve it. So, we will get rhubarb a lot this summer. A lot. I don't really like rhubarb. The first week I made rhubarb-apple crisp. This week we combined our rhubarb and Brenda is making rhubarb crisp. Rhubarb is like cranberry. Any fruit that requires that much sugar to make it palatable might not be such an enjoyable fruit at all.

I spoke with Mike tonight. He is in Dawson City with a day off. The driver housing in Whitehorse and Dawson City barely qualify even as substandard. No room darkening curtains, showers that are iffy, no delivery on promised internet. Rooms sleep two to three people to a room. And he has been there alone until after he'd eaten dinner and then saw a few drivers he knew who had arrived this afternoon. I am hoping things improve for him and that he can enjoy the downtime out of town that is part of being a highway driver. As long as he is touring people, he's happy. It's just the nights that are unappealing.

Mike informed me that a few people are sick with Norwalk virus on the highway trips. We had already read on dispatch for tomorrow that this was something we were to be hyper-cautious about. Norwalk virus is a nasty gastrointestinal virus that has you expelling in both an upward and downward fashion. It is said that you will have no doubt that you have it when you get it and that you will never forget it. I never want it. So we will all be wiping our coaches with Virox and taking extra Extra EXTRA precautions. I will not have any highway arrivals on my coach tomorrow. For that I'm grateful. I will be doing a tour called a TBD: train-bus-dredge. This means a ride on the White Pass & Yukon Route railroad; ride on a coach down the South Klondike Hwy. and an hour and a half at a gold dredge exhibit (to look at a real dredge) and panning for gold. Short day. I am not complaining. Wednesday will be the second of those very busy corporate group days. I ought to be sleeping and storing up sleep for Wednesday!!!!!