Summer Bummer

Wednesday, August 31st

BUMMER…the end of summer has come! I know it happens every year but this year was different…is different. This end of summer brings with it the end of our job at the Haines Hitch Up RV Park which is what brought us to this part of Alaska and this beautiful little city.

We have loved every minute we have spent here – day and night, rain and sunshine, fishing and hiking, working and…ok, well work is work and can you really love it? We did enjoy the job and doing something so different - no worries, no responsibility, no liability – just mowing and cleaning.

As much as we have enjoyed all the wild beauty of nature this summer, we have enjoyed all the people we have met almost as much. People here seem to be so different from Vegas – they dress differently, they think differently, they do different things and they have such different lives.

Some of them have become our new good friends, like Patrick and Ivanca. Patrick was a state fish and game trooper until an on the job accident involving an ATV crushed his pelvis and forced him into an early retirement. Patrick is all Alaskan. He grew up in the Alaskan wilderness near Dawson City on the Yukon river. Their house had no electricity, running water or indoor plumbing. His father was a trapper and and his mother sewed the family parkas from the hides of bears, wolves and caribou. Patrick ran his own trap line by the time he was 9 years old along with his other daily chores such as hauling water from the creek to the house and taking care of the family’s dog sled team. His parents still live there and Patrick goes back every year at this time to hunt moose. He says you are welcome to fly into their cabin anytime using these coordinates in Google Earth:          64°55'22.03"N          141°17'55.75"W

Ivanca is his wife. She is a tiny ball of fire from Bulgaria. Her parents are long time  Haines residents (over 40 years) and her father was one of the towns first doctors. They adopted Ivanca from an orphanage in Bulgaria when she was 9 years old which started a trend that lead to 9 different orphans being adopted by others families in this tiny little town of 1,300 people. She has a dog grooming business and when she is not walking dogs for miles, she is running miles and miles all over town. She has also become quite a hunter and last year shot a grizzly that weighed 5 times what she weighs.

Marteen is another one of the orphans adopted from Bulgaria. His parents are very successful artist hippies that live in a home 8 miles from town with no indoor toilet, just an outhouse. His dad seems to be a true old school hippie from the 60’s. He studied physics at Berkley before he left for a voluntary apprenticeship crafting guitars by hand. He now makes a living painting and creating these beautiful custom guitars using no power tools. Please check out his work and read about these guitars at these links:

http://robgoldberghandmadeguitars.com/

http://www.artstudioalaska.com/

Some of them are just very unique characters we have gotten to know like Sally. We first saw Sally as we waited to catch the ferry in Skagway before we ever even got to Haines. We were waiting to board when this old 1970’s POS (piece of s#$t) Ford pick up parked next to us with this ancient looking, weathered old lady driving. We thought “now that is an Alaskan woman with some stories to tell”. Come to find out, she is the winter caretaker for the Hitch Up and…she does have some stories to tell. She must be about 80 years old and lives 26 miles out of town, alone, in a cabin that is half underground. She sells and hauls firewood by the cord in the bed of that old POS. She was married before although no one is sure what happened to her husband. She had a daughter and some grandchildren that met with tragedy some years back. Her daughter and grandchildren were with a friend out along the Chilkat River in winter when the ice gave way plunging her young grandson and friend into the swift, freezing cold river. Her daughter left her baby ashore and jumped in to save the others. She saved her friend and her baby but sadly, Sally’s daughter and young grandson drown.

If you really want to get a good glimpse into life in this small, remote little town there is an excellent book I can recommend. It was written by a long time resident and the book gained national fame. The title is “If you lived here, I’d know your name” (news from small town Alaska) by “Heather Lende” in 2005. Here is a link to check it out on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=If+you+lived+here%2C+I%92d+know+your+name&x=12&y=25

It’s really a bunch of short stories about life and death. It’s strange, this beautiful area seems to create lots of tragedies because it is a dangerous place to live. There are not many miles of highway for such a huge state so air travel by small planes in very unpredictable weather is common. It seems most everyone knows someone who has died in a plane crash. There is also lots of travel and fishing on the some of the most dangerous waters in the world that result in tragedy. Here, it seems like highway travel (even with a 5^th wheel) is the safest way to get around.

Speaking of safe, we seem to have downloaded a virus into Lori's laptop. It deleted all the pictures we have taken since we left, however, our son says he can retrieve them if we don't use it until we send him the laptop. Hers was the good computer that I did the blog on and mine is the old, slow POS and that explains why it has been a month since the last post...not cause we got eaten by a bear and made into a new book chapter. With his skill and the US postal service, we should have it and our photos back soon.

PS...We have also decided to stay the winter in Haines and we will tell you all about that in the next post.