The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Hits: 44

I got a buddy who’s required to take a drug test before he’s hired on as a consultant for an oil consortium.  He worked ramrodding the construction site for the same oil companies for decades up at Prudeau Bay where part of his job was making sure the riggers stayed drug and alcohol free through long days and longer nights.  Sorta like Wyatt Earp asking the cowboys to stick with Coca-Cola Saturday nights, if they wouldn’t mind….

So now that he’s retired and going back for consulting, I guess the Big Boyz are worried he’s fallen into decadence and drugs along with the rest of us South Enders.  The required test is given in Bothell so my pal dutifully makes an appointment, navigates the I-5 bumper car gauntlet, arrives with a full bladder of freshly filtered latte which he desperately wants to unload ASAP, but, unsurprisingly, is told to wait.  Short time later, long past that anguished outcry of a Guernsey with 10 gallons of unpasteurized backed up past an udder while the farmer is out drinking with his Scandihoovien reprobate buddies, the secretary comes in with the bad news that the urinary nurse in charge of the drug testing doesn’t come in on Fridays.  Yah, shure, you guessed it — it’s Friday.  Can I leave you the sample? he asks through clenched teeth, bent over in pain and growing anger.  And … well, sure, you guessed right again and no, sir, that would be against the rules.

My buddy is almost 70 years old, drug free as a priest, a loyal employee and now he’s made to stand hunched over, practically peeing his adult diapers and trying to come to grips with What Is Wrong With This Picture?  Do they suspect him of Viagra dependency?  Do they merely want him to understand his real place in the corporate hierarchy?  Are they testing for latent homicidal urges, maybe see if he’ll snap in the lab offices where only a contract worker will be sacrificed, not a VP of operations?

All I can say is, my buddy must really want to avoid retirement to endure this kind of knee-jerk, low brow humiliation.  The rest of us on the South End … well, let’s just say the drug tests down here are only for quality control.

Hits: 131

Hits: 412

So okay, Sky Pilot Larry and I decide we’d run up to the Arctic Circle, take a picture at the 66 degree latitude, turn around and head back to Fairbanks. But … we thought, hellfire, we’re all this way north, we’d kick ourselves for not driving the extra 500 miles to Prudeau Bay, check on the drilling rigs, maybe see a few musk oxen, find out what the northernmost one third of Alaska looks like. The pipeline snakes alongside the highway, perched on steel platforms with gizmoes on top that disperse the heat of the flowing crude oil to keep it from melting the permafrost and causing the cradle to tilt. Pump stations come up every 50 miles or so, don’t ask me how they push this stuff down the line.

We crossed the Yukon River on its only bridge in Alaska, a wooden one no less. We got diesel at Coldfoot where in 1971 the temperature hit minus 82 degrees and froze truck tires so hard they became brittle and shattered, according to one old boy we talked to. At Atigun Pass we traversed the Brooks Range, an east to west mountain range that descends into a coastal plain of permafrost, tors and pings — these rock formations that look like hiding spots for Cro Magnons huntin g wooly mammoths tens of thousands of years ago — endless tundra, then a vast table top of low vegetation that runs to the Arctic Ocean broken only by the ‘Sag’ River that offers the only break in the topography.

We camped on its eastern edge and watched a herd of musk oxen forage in the delta the way our forebears did who knows how far back in time and memory. This, I’m telling you, is prehistoric land, cruel in the winter, harsh in the summer. It is barren and virtually devoid of life or traffic. And then we arrived at Deadhorse at Prudeau Bay, a surreal oasis of trailers, pumps, drill rigs, modules, caterpillar tractors, equipment of unknown use, airport, shuttles, trailer housing and hotel, an industrial complex the way one would look on Mars if we could mine there, alien in every possible way. It was 37 degrees with a stiff wind off the ocean. We tried to imagine winter — 24 hours of night, 60 below, a frozen hell. 3000 people work here. Good money, I guess. Very good money, I’m betting.

We turned around and headed home.

Hits: 469

Hits: 23

I haven’t done any serious camping since about 1976 when I spent a summer on the road and part of autumn living out of a tent. This month my road buddy Sky Pilot Larry and I are wending our way through the mosquito fogs of Alaska, setting up camp and cooking on campfires beneath glaciers, alongside salmon spawning streams and near tourist towns.

For you retired backpackers and tent pitchers, you’d be surprised and maybe saddened by how things have changed. We just drove through a Forest Service campground of 59 units, all full, no tents, just 30-40 foot mobile homes with steering wheels, dish antennas, generators, full kitchens, baths, 3 bedrooms, walk-in closets and a rec room. Hardly a soul was outside by a campfire even though the skeeters aren’t bad, the sun is shining and the nearby stream is drop dead, picture postcard, write-back-home gorgeous. I mean, are you kidding me here??? They’d rather sit inside their drag along home and watch TV beneath all these mountains and glaciers?

Maybe there’s too much beauty to take in all day long for these adventurers. Or maybe TV has stolen their brains. Hell if I know.

I do know the drone of the generators running across from us drowns out the babble of the brook and the sound of the wind off the glaciers stirring the spruce and the fir and the cottonwoods. So okay, we can’t hear the mosquitoes either, but not our idea of a fair trade-off. It’s a free country and those with the most money apparently are the most free. No law that says you have to come to the great outdoors and enjoy it. At least not when you can watch Wheel of Fortune in the comfort of your livingroom with all your neighbors in the ritziest ghetto outside marinas filled with yachts.

Sky Pilot Larry and me are going to head backcountry soon, not so much to adventure in the wilderness as to escape the one here. Most of these humans in the 21st Century must think wilderness is just a place they can’t get TV.

Hits: 51

Hits: 416

We’re up on a job in here in Alaska putting glass in a fire station headquarters and another in a University of Alaska Science Building. We’ve run into some obstacles, some not worth mentioning and some that would have been potentially fatal to the project. Or me personally. Except … we’re in Alaska. These folks don’t shrug their shoulders and say good luck. They don’t cite union rules or insurance liabilities as excuses to help. They don’t see just their part in the big scheme. Naw, they say ‘we’ll get her done.’

I hate to extrapolate from a couple of incidents the entire ethos of the North Star state. But I’m going to hazard a guess that living on the frontier in a frozen tundra with a winter that must seem endlessly dark makes these folks as communal as an Inuit on a lot of levels. It’s like the South End that way — we’re all in this together even as we treasure our independent pioneer ways. We’re connected.

I had a neighbor once, a second father really, who would drop whatever he was doing when my truck broke down or my outhouse needed repairs or the firewood ran low. Me, I was just a wet behind the ears pup who thought he could go in-country and make a fresh start. Any interruption in MY day was a major annoyance, but Eddie, he’d flow out of his current task knee deep into my dilemma. Life wasn’t some straight line serious drive to go from A to B ASAP, it was all those turns and wiggles, those surprises and setbacks, those detours and backroads.

Eddie taught me that B wasn’t the destination at all. B just made any change of plans a total aggravation instead of the natural meanderings of a happy and curious traveler in this world. When Eddie died years ago, I would’ve liked him to know that he made a huge difference, no doubt to more folks than just me.

So when folks need help now, I hope there’s nothing I’m doing that’s more important, nothing that can’t wait until we fix whatever problem needs fixing. The best trips by far are the ones that go astray often. The best lives are too.

Hits: 154

Hits: 821

I guess the sun sets up here, but we don’t see it if it does. Just the opposite of my years on the graveyard shift. Go to work in the dark, get home in the dark, live like a mole or a miner. Up here the dawn merges with dusk and it’s definitely disorienting. Maybe if I was a plant I’d love it, but I feel sorry for the owls who have about 30 minutes to catch dinner or go hungry.

I’m still trying to adjust to exactly when to eat my own dinner. The other ‘night’ is was 11 pm or so when we put on the feedbag, thinking it must be about 7 or 8. Lots of folks are wandering the streets at 2 am, but I’m sure they’re not up early for breakfast. Me, I never know when to get up. All I know is, it’ll be light out.

Frankly, I’m not sure I like this. I know I wouldn’t like winter up here, probably explains why they don’t call it the Land of the Noon Moon. Today I woke up at 9 am. I think it was A.M.. Since I don’t carry a watch or a cellphone with one or a laptop with the time, I’m working on how high the sun is. Outside on the highway near our room-by-the-week, the motel sign has a red digital time readout. I think I see why now. Folks who park here probably can’t afford their own clocks.

If environment is culture — and it must be to a large degree — this seasonal tilt might explain why Alaskans don’t consider themselves a true part of our stateside America. They’re not just a completely different time zone, they’re operating in a twilight zone. Einstein was correcto, amigo — time is relative. I figure he must’ve vacationed up in the 49th where everybody knows this, they just didn’t work out the equation….

Hits: 1504