Does the Sun Ever Shine in Juneau?

Juneau has the distinction of being the only state capital in the United States that cannot be reached by road. Alaska Airlines serves Juneau several times each day from either Anchorage, Ketchikan, Seattle, Sitka or Yakutat. Flying is the quickest way to visit this isolated city. Flying to Juneau may also be the most dangerous. Mountains on nearly all sides of Juneau add to its isolation and what makes it so dangerous to fly there. Final approach begins at nearly five thousand feet. Pilots maneuver skillfully between the precipices’ and hope that their instruments do not fail.  Even the slightest problem during an instrument approach is enough for a pilot to abort and go around for another attempt. The FAA’s rules for an aborted approach are also dangerous. Aborted flights have to make a steep turning climb out of Juneau. A steep turning climb between mountains.

There has been only one major fatal crash in Juneau despite all the dangers of flying there. An Alaska Airlines 727 augured into a mountain side during a tricky night time approach in the clouds.  This single fatal crash, despite all of the air traffic there, shows that pilots just do not take chances flying into Juneau.

My Alaska Airlines flight to Juneau originated in Seattle. The plane was half full, dinner was served quickly, after which the alcohol flowed freely. Sitting next to me was a commercial fishing captain from Juneau returning home from a business meeting in Seattle. He had moved with his family from San Diego, “in the Outside” fifteen years ago. He was making an awesome sum of money from fishing. I asked him how his wife liked living in Juneau.

Which one?” he laughed, as he slapped his right knee, “I’m on number four right now.”  Apparently wives are like recyclable aluminum in this part of Alaska.

“My first wife lasted two years and then went back to San Diego with our kids,” he said. “She liked the money and she liked the scenery, but the weather got to her.”  Between gulps of his beer he said, “She now has the best of both worlds; she doesn’t have to put up with the weather, and she still gets all the money. Ha!”  He slapped his knee again and gulped more beer.

He met wife number two on a beach in San Diego during a trip south to see his children. He described her as the quintessential southern California beach blonde. She was intrigued by Alaska and he invited her to come for a visit. She came in July when there is not much rain. She fell in love with the mountains and the glaciers, and the beauty. She also fell in love with him. They saw each other several more times that summer. He flew to San Diego in October and they were married. He brought her back to Juneau on Halloween day. Juneau was gray and wet and rainy in late October. It was not the place of warm summer sun. “She thought Juneau was like July all year long,” he told me. “She lasted until April and then left for the Outside.”

He met wife number three on a different San Diego beach while visiting his children two years later. Stories she had heard about the beauty and grandeur of Alaska had captivated her. She said she had always wanted to visit there but had never had the chance. They saw each other daily while he was in San Diego for a month. They married the day before his return north. Her first sight of Juneau came on Thanksgiving day after the plane circled the airport for ninety minutes waiting for a break in the clouds. They landed in a snowstorm with brisk crosswinds on November 25. Wife number three left for the Outside the following May.

Wife number four was a seat partner on an Alaska Airlines flight from Seattle to Juneau when she was coming north to work for the summer. They spent time together whenever he was not fishing. She was originally from Montana and was used to its harsh conditions. Yet after two years he could tell she was getting restless. The weather more than anything was getting to her. She was supposed to meet him at the airport when he arrived that night. Nobody answered the phone when he had called home the last two days and he now had a feeling that she may have left while he was in Seattle.

I asked why he didn’t find a woman from Juneau or a town nearby. If nothing else she should be used to the weather and the isolation. “Most of the women in Juneau are from somewhere else in Alaska. They’re only here to work for the government, sleep with some politician, and then they all leave too.”

We landed in Juneau at ten that night. His wife was not waiting for him at the gate. I walked with him to the baggage claim area. She was not there either. I walked outside with him to catch a taxi to my hotel and to take him home. Getting out of the taxi at my hotel, I asked if he was o.k.  He snickered and said, “oh well, fuck, I’ll just start over again.”

Three of my four days in Juneau were set aside to visit three different units of the National Park System: Glacier Bay National Park at Gustavus, Klondike Gold Rush National Historic Site in Skagway, and Sitka National Historic Site in Sitka. Each involved a morning flight out and an evening flight back. I chose to travel to Gustavus and Skagway first. Those trips required travel in light planes to small airports in an area renowned for gobbling up small planes in bad weather. Those two day-trips were pulled off flawlessly and gave me a historical and scenic overload.

During my third night in Juneau a tremendous wind began to blow about 9:00. It blew hard with driving rain all night. Rain cascaded down in bucketsful at dawn. The wind was relentless. Alaska Airlines’ 9:30 flight to Sitka arrived from Anchorage on time. I had reserved a flight to Sitka this morning where I would visit the National Historic Site and then catch the 5:15 p.m. return to Juneau. The wind and the rain did not subside while we waited for the inbound passengers to disembark. We boarded the flight and waited for departure. The departure time came and went. We sat at the gate and were rocked by forceful, relentless wind. Ten thirty came and went. We continued to be rocked by the wind. Finally, the pilot came on over the intercom to explain our predicament.

Something had happened to the plane’s navigation system when it landed in Juneau. The pilot was trying to fix the problem and needed to punch some precise numbers into the computer to make the navigation system work. With the low clouds and high mountains that surrounded Juneau there is no room for a navigational mistake. His problem and therefore our problem was the howling wind that kept rocking and shaking the plane. If it persisted, he could not recalibrate the computer.

The wind howled and the plane rocked and at 11:30 we pushed back from the gate. A loud applause went up. It died quickly as the pilot explained that we were merely moving to an area behind the terminal and away from the wind to reset the computer. We sat behind the terminal and the plane continued to rock and shake. They pulled the plane to within a few feet of the terminal and it continued to rock.

At one that afternoon, after sitting on a rocking plane for three and a half hours, the pilot announced that he was giving up. We were going to be pulled back to the terminal, offloaded, and there we would wait until the wind relented and he could reset the computer. The flight to Sitka was only thirty-five minutes long. My thinking was that if we left by 3:30 I would have enough time to reach Sitka, take a taxi to the National Historic Site, get my Park Service Passport book stamped, return to the airport, and make the 5:15 return to Juneau. After 3:30, though, I would be the owner of a wasted, non-refundable ticket.

At 2:50 I was starting to get nervous but at 3:00 the wind suddenly died. At 2:50 we had a 40-knot wind and at 3:00 there was a gentle breeze. Alaska Airlines hurriedly re-boarded the flight, we backed away from the gate, taxied into position and were airborne at 3:30, only six hours late. I followed my early contingency plan when we arrived in Sitka and returned to the airport at 4:45. My return flight to Juneau was parked at the gate. We boarded on time, lifted off a few minutes late, and arrived in Juneau at 5:55.  There wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

I drove east along Auke Bay at dawn the next morning. I was searching for two species of birds that I had not seen on my Alaska list yet. Several miles west of the airport I found a Black Bear sitting on its haunches in the right-of-way watching cars go by. I pulled to the side and watched the bear watching cars. Like a dog waiting for the next car to chase, the Black Bear sat and waited. He would hear an approaching car and look in its direction. His head would follow the movement from left to right and right to left. He sat there for fifteen minutes watching cars. Tiring of watching this parade of technology speed by him, he stood up, shook himself, and disappeared into the forest.

A large Wildlife Management Area abuts Auke Bay near the end of the road. Extensive mudflats here looked like the perfect place to search for any late migrating shorebirds. As I passed my binoculars over the flats and the edge of the water, I saw a Harbor Seal leap out of the water like a porpoise riding the bow wake. Several more seals joined the first one. I had never seen this behavior in seals before so I kept watching. Suddenly the water where the seals had been began to boil like a geyser ready to explode and from this boiling water I saw a huge black object erupt. Two more huge black objects erupted behind the first one. The huge black objects had a trailing patch of white down most of their left side.

Finally, after searching so many places for so many years, I was looking at three Orcas. The seals had been leaping from the water trying to avoid the certain death below. One seal wasn’t so lucky. It was last seen in the mouth of an Orca. The huge cetacean grasped it in its mouth, twisted his head from side to side, and then dove. The two other whales followed it to the depths.

I had come within one mile of a pod of Orca on a trip to Kenai Fjords National Park near Seward one summer. The other boat had them playing in the bow wake, but the boat I was on didn’t get there in time. Returning to Seward a few years later after a meeting in Wasilla, I took another trip on Resurrection Bay at Seward specifically to see an Orca. The boat captain served us an incredible spinach quiche but he didn’t find us a whale. I had searched Puget Sound in Washington several times and never saw an Orca in an area reputed to be a “sure” place to see them. When living in Ventura, California, I made twice-monthly crossings of the Santa Barbara Channel to search for Orcas. I saw Blue Whales and Gray Whales in Channel Islands National Park but I never saw an Orca. I was beginning to think the only Orca on earth was freed in a movie. The summer before my trip to Juneau, my oldest daughter Jennifer had talked her way onto a boat trip on Resurrection Bay in Seward. When I asked her about the trip, she told me about the pod of Orcas that stayed with her boat for fifteen minutes. Everyone I know had seen an Orca. I had tried maybe fifty times and never saw one. Today, without looking, I saw three.

I have now been to Juneau seven times. The only time I have seen the sun at Juneau was after the plane I was on broke through the clouds at 20,000 feet.  On a positive note, I have seen Orca every time I have been there.

 

Black-eyed Peas for Lunch

This story unfolded 40 years ago today in a South Alabama truck stop.

Spend the first 25 winters of your life in northern Wisconsin and you quickly acquire a fantasy-filled lust for anywhere south of the frost line. Add to your total six more winters in North Dakota and soon despite being an atheist you begin to believe that if there is a heaven its somewhere along the Gulf Coast of the United States. Sitting in a bare-walled one-bedroom post-divorce apartment in Jamestown North Dakota one December night I watched the latest in a seemingly endless parade of blizzards blow through town on what local meteorologists called an “Alberta Clipper.” A clipper is just that – a fast moving system of fast-moving wind and fast-moving snow and quickly plummeting frigid temperatures that were probably in Alberta an hour earlier. 

As the night dragged on and the snow blew sideways I watched a news story about the United States invading the tiny island of Grenada in the southern Caribbean. All the video showed was palm trees and tropical beaches and tropical heat and most especially not one scintilla of a smidgen of snow. I looked out my living room window and saw leaf-less aspen trees and Arctic wind and snow drifts and I knew that something had to change and it had to change before another Alberta Clipper glued me to my apartment for another excruciating year.

That change came several months later when I was selected for a position in Athens Georgia on the campus of the venerable University of Georgia. I had several misgivings about living in Georgia and they all centered on the fact that people there are still upset that Civil War U.S. Army General William Tecumseh Sherman turned Atlanta into a bonfire as he rode through town on his way to Savannah. Still, despite its societal shortcomings Georgia was much warmer than Jamestown, North Dakota. I hurriedly and excitedly accepted the position.

The research I was expected to conduct would begin in Michigan in June and I arrived in Athens in early May and for a month I had little to do but open my pores and let in the warmth. My supervisor, a man named Don who grew up in North Louisiana and said that squirrel brain was his most favorite meal as a child, was conducting a research project on Yazoo National Wildlife Refuge in Mississippi and he asked me to join him for a trip to the Delta. Having never seen Alabama (through which we would have to travel) or Mississippi I quickly accepted Don’s offer.

Don had received his PhD from the University of Arkansas and was as fervent a fan of the Razorbacks as I am of the Wisconsin Badgers. I first noticed this as we drove into Greenville, Mississippi on the banks of the Mississippi River and saw a sign for the bridge to Arkansas. Don saw the word “Arkansas” and broke into a perfect “Woooooo-Pig-Sooooooie” chant. Personally, I prefer the more civilized “Fuck ‘em Bucky” chant of the University of Wisconsin but that is just me. Don and I spent four days in and on Yazoo National Wildlife Refuge collecting bird eggs for pesticide analysis and then began the long trek back east to Athens.

The University of Wisconsin's very own badger, Bucky!

On our return we traversed the center of Mississippi and intersected Interstate 20 near Jackson.  We then followed it east and crossed the border into Alabama at about noon just in time for lunch at Billy Bob’s Bar-b-Que and Bait Shop at Exit 5 near Cuba, Alabama. That is not the name of the place but it should be. Don was attracted to Billy Bob’s because a freeway billboard announced a “down-home southern buffet lunch” at Billy Bob’s every day but Sunday. Don, in his perfect Southernese accent pronounced “buffet” as “buff-aaay.”  It was imperative that we stopped for lunch here because as the billboard said in a small reminder at its bottom, it was closed on Sunday’s because “the Lord wants us to rest and he wants y’all to rest too.” 

Billy Bob’s had a huge spread of food laid out and being a truck stop the restaurant lacked any semblance of ambiance. Its walls were bare of any artwork except pictures of Peterbilt trucks (one sign said “Old truckers never die. They just get a new Peterbilt”), the stench of diesel fumes was everywhere and Willie Nelson crooned loudly and hoarsely through speakers that must have been placed every eight inches along every wall.   This certainly was not the restaurant in the Plaza Hotel in New York City. In fact, it wasn’t even the Country Kitchen in Grand Island, Nebraska. It was Billy Bob’s and there was no denying that fact.

Before this trip, my total experience with eating southern food had been restricted to two incidents that are indelibly etched in my brain. The first was my only-ever meal of biscuits and gravy consumed in a truck stop restaurant near Paducah, Kentucky. The name on the menu sounded inviting and given that almost everyone anywhere south of Indianapolis eats biscuits like they are popcorn, I had to try it. What the waitress placed in front of me when my meal arrived reminded me more of what my dog had thrown up than it did any culinary delight of southern travel. Reluctantly but bravely, I ate the biscuits and gravy and just like after your first-time having sex, when the meal was over I wondered what all the excitement was about. The meal stuck with me literally and figuratively and now 40 years later I can still taste it. 

My other southern culinary delight was grits (or “greeutz” in perfectly spoken Southernese) that crossed my palate in a restaurant at Oden’s Dock on the Outer Banks of North Carolina a year after my first and only bout of dog biscuits and gravy. At least with enough butter and pepper grits were bearable and they didn’t slide down like dog vomit.

The lunch buffet at Billy Bob’s contained no biscuits and gravy because, mercifully, we were there after breakfast time but there was a huge crock pot full of grits. Along with them was every southern food imaginable. One container held okra and another collard greens. Next to it was turnip greens and there was a huge vat of green beans complete with the little hunks of ham that make it southern. There was also cauliflower and mustard greens and poke (not polk!) salad. There was country ham (someday I want someone to explain the difference between country ham and city ham because it all looks the same) and hush puppies and succotash and boiled potatoes (“balled ‘taters” in perfect Southernese) and sweet taters and pimento cheese and a strange kind of bean with a black spot on it. Over on the meat table was more ham and more chicken and pulled pork and beef steak and shrimp and oysters and something that was passed off as jambalaya and almost everything was fried.  And it wasn’t simply fried it was southern fried.

Don returned to the table first with a plate filled with a sampling of almost everything that Billy Bob offered. His plate contained those curious beans with the black thing on them that I had never seen before so I asked Don what they were.

“What? These,” Don barked when I asked, “What are those funny looking beans you’re eating?”

“These,” Don began, “are black-eyed peas. Haven’t you ever eaten black-eyed peas before?”

When I admitted that I had never eaten let alone seen black-eyed peas Don motioned for the waitress to approach our table. When he did all of the eyes on the 100 other faces eating the buff-aaaay lunch at Billy Bob’s turned to listen. “Ma’am,” Don began in his finest Southernese, “This god-damned Yankee sitting here has never had black-eyed peas. Can you believe that ma’am?”

The waitress Bonnie, complete with a bouffant hair do, had a shocked look on her face as she turned to me and drawled “is that right?” (Only in Bonnie-speak it sounded like she said a long drawn-out “riot”). Admitting my transgression Bonnie looked at me with the same level of shock and disgust as the 100 other sets of eyes in the place each of which now knew that a black-eyed pea virgin Yankee was in their midst.

Don turned to the still-shocked Bonnie and drawled, “Ma’am would y’all fix him a mess of those mighty fine black-eyed peas, please?”

Bonnie turned to me and asked “Do y’all want corn bread with your black-eyed peas?”

Not knowing the proper etiquette of black-eyed pea consumption in Sumter County, Alabama, I replied, sheepishly, “Are you supposed to eat corn bread with black-eyed peas?”

Bonnie, now on the verge of cardiac arrest, bellowed out “of COURSE you eat corn bread with black-eyed peas!”  I could tell she wanted to add “you ignorant god-damned Yankee,” however her proper southern upbringing would not allow it.

I timidly dug into the black-eyed peas and washed them down with fresh corn bread as Bonnie stood over me, right hand on her right hip, with 100 nearby customers shaking their heads in disbelief that a Yankee among them never had black-eyed peas. The other patrons kept shoveling in fried everything as I found myself wanting nothing but black-eyed peas and corn bread. In fact, that meal was so good I had seconds and peas and corn bread was all I had for lunch. Black-eyed peas and corn bread are now my most favorite southern food.

My guess is that if I ever returned to Billy Bob’s Bar-b-Que and Bait shop at Exit 5 on Interstate 20 in Sumter County Alabama, the patrons there still tell the story of the day Bonnie had to teach a god-damned Yankee about proper southern food.