Looking for Alaska by Peter Jenkins Page B

they’re in certain places in Anchorage or their boats are lined up outside the cannery to off-load their catch of salmon. This summer day I was standing in line in the Ketchikan airport, about as far south in Alaska as I could be. Another fifty miles and I would have been in British Columbia. Just one other person was in this little line. She was in her twenties, dressed in blue jeans, frayed; a blue jean shirt, with holes; and a blue jean jacket, with two different Harley-Davidson patches. Her only luggage was an oil-stained, orange plastic case, and inside it was a chain saw. She was flying out to a fish camp to meet her boyfriend (in Alaska the word is often partner ). I didn’t ask her what she was doing with the chain saw.
    Earlier she’d mentioned that she, but not her boyfriend, belonged to a bikers’ club in town, the Ketchikan Harley Riders Association. She said her boyfriend, who was from California, did not own a Harley since the main road to ride was just twenty-something miles long and there was no road that could get you “the hell out.” The road that leads out of town is only twenty-six miles, and then it ends. There is no way to drive away from Ketchikan, or from most Alaskan communities, even the capital city. This doesn’t stop thirty or forty riders from getting on their Harleys and running out the road just so they can come back, screaming through town, those beautiful motors rumbling.
    â€œThere are forty bars and forty churches in Ketchikan,” she said from out of nowhere. Her statement was thrown at me aggressively, like a punch.
    That seemed to me to be about right for Alaska, keeping heaven and hell right across the street from each other, nothing hidden, one Alaskan convinced heaven is here and hell is there, the next Alaskan having the opposite opinion.
    The girl and I had all kinds of time to talk because we were waiting for the fog to lift and the weather to improve, something Alaskans must be willing to wait for or to risk dying. The fog lay on the water and moved like liquid mercury; it sifted through the needles of the spruce trees; it hid killer mountainsides. The list of people who have died in small-plane crashes in Alaska is filled with far too many pilots who thought they could fly through, over, and around the low clouds, the fog, the curtains of gray.
    Here the clouds in the sky and the fog blowing off glaciers, sea, and land merge and make landscapes deceptive, a world sugarcoated in soft-as-cotton-looking clouds. It becomes moisture-laden, seductive fluff hiding a cruel, hard death. The clouds and the fog are as much a part of southeast Alaska as sunshine is part of Arizona. Some pilots, with too little Alaska experience or too much, pilots who just once get a false sense of their abilities, are sometimes tricked by this shrouded world and end up running into unmovable mountains or the tundra. Some people I met won’t fly with any pilot who doesn’t have ten thousand hours of flying in Alaska.
    Right before we stepped up to the counter, the chain-saw-toting biker woman stuck out her square jaw and said, “We get a hundred and seventy inches of rain a year here too, and that doesn’t keep us from riding.” The more intense the environment, the weather, and the wilderness get, the more some Alaskans enjoy not being intimidated by it all.
    A cargo guy strained to push a cart by us; it was loaded to well above his head with Styrofoam boxes filled with vacuum-packed salmon from some sportfishing lodge.
    â€œHi, where you headed?” the surprisingly young, black-haired woman asked me. She clearly worked for Taquan Air, though she wore no uniform.
    â€œI’m going to Prince of Wales Island, to Craig.”
    â€œOkay,” she said, “what’s your name or are you just a number?” She had a playful personality.
    â€œMy name is 1 … 2 … 1 … 2.”
    In response she began doing jumping jacks