A Whale of a Tale
Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.
Robert Frost
Son #1 says when he was 18, Daughter #1 woke him up in the middle of the night and asked him if he wanted to go to Alaska for the summer? He had been dead asleep, but he came to consciousness enough to say, “Sure.” Then went straight back into deep slumber. And so began the adventures of a lifetime.
My kids had a friend whose grandparents lived in Valdez, Alaska. They had offered to lend their grandson their travel trailer as cheap housing if he and his friends wanted to work in a salmon cannery in Prince William Sound (yes, the place where the Exxon Valdez spilled 11 million gallons of crude oil into the Sound a couple of years later.) Daughter and Son #s 1 jumped at the chance to “slime salmon” all summer as visions of boat-loads of money for the next year’s college tuition swam through their dreams.
It turned out to be a good gig. The work was arduous and grueling, but the sun only went down for a couple of hours every day during the height of the salmon run, and the four of them met their 40 hour-a-week requirement by Tuesday, so they mostly earned time-and-a-half for the other five days a week they worked. The job was freezing from the ice the salmon were stored in and disgustingly messy because every worker was covered with the fish guts which had to cleaned out before the salmon was crammed into a can on the assembly line. I have pictures of their “work” gear—very like a hazmat uniform with heavy-duty rain boots but without the astronaut headgear. In the pictures, all four of them were grinning from ear to ear.
The second summer, Son #1 headed to Hungary on a mission, but Daughter #1 had bonded with two “cannery” friends who lived in Alaska. The three of them bought a school bus from a used car dealer in Wasilla—a sort of “suburb” of Anchorage where her friends were from. (I’ve been to Anchorage—suburb might be an exaggeration.) The bus was already stripped of seats, so the three girls and another friend–the carpenter for the cannery–built three sets of bunk beds along one side of the bus, three long shelves for storage alongside the other, up front a kitchenette with a sink which they hand-filled with water for dishes but had a convenient drain to the outside, and a stack of cushions in the back end for throwing open the emergency doors to lounge and watch the Northern Lights in the wee hours of the morning. With showers and food available at all hours next door at the cannery, six girls lived in cheerful, if Spartan, comfort from May to September. When they headed home, they sold the converted bus to other workers for a profit. Bonus!
The next summer, Daughter #1 went to Sweden on a mission, but Son #1 was back from Hungary, so he and a buddy headed to the cannery. He tells me he spent the entire summer, sometimes working 20 hours a day, sharpening knives and cutting the heads and tails off salmon. When the fish were running, he and his buddies could reach down into the river and literally fish with their hands—no poles needed.
That year the boys lived in the dorms provided by the cannery, but it was their trip home that made it a legend in our family. Son #1 and his friend had driven 56 hours straight through on their 3100 mile trip from home to the to the cannery using Daughter #1’s Nissan Pulsar. Why not? She couldn’t drive it; she was in Europe.
At the end of the summer, Son #1’s buddy invited his 12 year-old brother to fly up to Valdez and meet them for a few days of sight-seeing before they headed back to school in the fall. In addition, a girl from Salt Lake had begged to ride with them so she didn’t have to spend hard-earned money on a plane ticket. The four of them loaded up the car and headed south.
When he wasn’t driving, Son #1 had a CD player on his lap and the kid’s backpack under his feet; his 6’ 6” knees were rammed against the dashboard. The back seat had three rolled up sleeping bags, two blankets, a 40 quart Coleman cooler, all wedged up against the driver’s seat, with the girl and the twelve-year old cuddled alongside the pile next to each other. But it wasn’t long before none of the passengers even noticed the tight-squeeze. They were far more concerned about the car actually moving.
Somewhere in the middle of the Yukon Wilderness, the Nissan transmission gave up the ghost. There was some hellish clanging and banging, a series of “poppings and metal grinding,” and the car refused to move except in fifth gear. The kids managed to wave down a natural gas company truck guy who towed the car many, many miles down the road to the next town, Fort St. John, where a mechanic diagnosed the bad news. Hundreds of dollars and more than a week of delivery for a new transmission.
Their alternate solution? Drive. Very fast. They asked the guy who had towed them to pull the car up to the top of the next hill. They rolled over the edge and about halfway down had enough speed to jump start the car into fifth. They were moving fast to tackle the uphill stretches until they happened upon construction. Cars were lined up behind a flagman while they waited their turn. Son #1 walked up to the drivers in front of him and explained their situation. Would the drivers let them push the car past them and get a run at the hill up ahead? No problem. Son #1 and the boy pushed as the buddy steered. They barely managed to crest the hill; as they headed down the other side, they heard cheering from the drivers behind them.
Fortunately, Alaska/then Canada doesn’t have much traffic. Sometimes none at all for hundreds of miles. More than once the kids pulled into a gas station, filled up the tank, and then pushed the car around and around the pumps until they could get enough speed to lurch the car into fifth gear. When they reached the Canadian/US border, they told their story to the border guards who laughed hysterically, but obligingly ordered all the motorhomes, cars with travel trailers, and even trucks loaded with goods to move aside to make room for the Nissan to circle the station in preparation for making it up the steepest hill of the 3,000 mile drive. “Parents grabbed their children and moved them to safety. The five border guards chanted rhythmically, ‘go, go, go’”. The car jumped into gear and attacked the hill, but the little vehicle with the big load slowed as it neared the top. The engine whined because of its low rpm. Son #1 was patting the dashboard and whispering words of encouragement. “The car started to gain speed. I looked back and the guards were cheering, the people in the motor homes were clapping and waving. They were more excited than we were,” according to his journal. “Three hours later people would drive past us and honk or wave and give us thumbs up!”
In Montana they got their first speeding ticket: five dollars, paid in cash. When the highway patrolman heard their story, he radioed ahead to all the other police along I-15 and warned them the kids were coming–sometimes at 90 miles an hour to make the next hill. “Don’t stop ‘em. Just wave them through.” And every officer did, sometimes escorting the Nissan through traffic with their sirens screaming, clear through Montana, Idaho, and into our Kearns, Utah, driveway.
So that is the true story of how four kids in a little Nissan drove from Valdez, Alaska, to Salt Lake City, Utah, in fifth gear; and how good people watched out for them at every turn as they pushed their car in circles round gas pumps and traffic jams and mountain passes to get enough momentum to keep moving. And how those good folks in two different countries cheered the young strangers as the four adventurers sped downhill, straight for home. It just doesn’t get much better than that.