A SUPPOSEDLY FUN PLACE I'LL NEVER GO AGAIN
ON FAMILYTIME! IN ALASKA
1. WIDE FROM THIS LEDGE
It was my mom’s birthday. Her dream, apparently, was to go to Alaska.
People raised in the Southern Hemisphere do tend to have these insane snow-capped, cold-weather fantasies.
I hadn’t been the most attentive of sons lately (if you hear her tell it), so despite being a weather-pussy & sun-hound, I woke up last Friday, hungoverly tossed all my jackets & layers into a haphazard suitcase and headed to the Newark airport.
A couple weeks ago the air-traffic control at Newark piffed out and there was about a 30 second danger of planes crashing into eachother in the sky.
But I think a much bigger threat is actually starving to death on the plane. It’s funny that airline food used to be a hack comedy topic. Now they give you one bag with a thimble-sized pretzel & your inch-ration of water.
The lead flight attendant was a portly, anxious fellow with a buried boiling tyranny that would occasionally burble up. His fly was down the whole flight.
He moved an old Chinese woman from the Exit Row because she didn’t speak any English, and sat her down across the aisle from me.
She didn’t understand what was happening (because she didn’t speak English), so she kept trying to stand up and go back to her original seat and they ended up screaming back & forth thru Google Translate until she finally gave up the ghost, protestwise.
The Tyrannical Attendant was pushing the 1st Class food cart up the pleb aisle, but in one of his jittery perambulations, he turned around & jetted back toward the cabin, leaving a beautiful basket of bread rolls, next to me, unattended.
I locked eyes with the anarchic Chinese woman and furted two rolls. I handed her one; my comrade!
I landed in Vancouver; a nice city with a labyrinthian airport slathered in gaudy carpet.
There I met up with my father, mother, and grandma.
2. THALATTA! THALATTA!
We were going on a 7-day cruise from Vancouver to Juneau.
Ever since my dad got his money back from the feds, he & my mother have been living large in an effort to deplete me of any possible inheritance: so it was a Bougie Cruise.
Therefore, it was Old City on the boat. White hair & walkers as far as the eye could see. Even the geezers’s age-gap hunnies were grizzled.
My mom was delighted to be the spryest, most vivacious of the Olds.
My dad fit right in, moaningoaning & occasionally YELPING! b/c his neck hurt.
A couple days before the trip, in a marijuana-induced moment of zen profundity, I thought I would suggest we all do a sober cruise; it might help us heal the wounds of the past. That lasted 15 minutes.
The alcohol was included with the ticket price.
We had one brief friction; my mom threatened to throw herself overboard before the boat even got going, but balked; and then we were off.
There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God.
3. DICE OF DROWNED MEN’S BONES
My parents were in a lavish suite on the 9th Deck; they were making my poor grandmother sleep in a sleeping bag out on their balcony.
I said, “what if she rolls off!?”
My callous father said, “she’ll be fine.”
They stuck me in a claustrophobic hovel down in the brig.
There was a lot of time to kill before our first stop, so I was not surprised to find my parents in the casino: the casino was a small room with about 12 machines on the wall and 3 tables: roulette, blackjack, 3 card poker.
3 people worked there. 2 grim-faced russkis & a South-African named Kyle with an odd accent & an inflection that made everything he said sound sarcastic.
My parents love casinos. They met in Las Vegas. My dad was a bookie & my mom was a cocktail waitress at Caesar’s Palace.
They were introduced by a shady mutual friend named Ron; who was also the only person we knew who had ever lived in Alaska: —he lived in Anchorage decades ago with his partner-in-crime Barry, to collect the Alaska-stipend and run a (lucrative) jerk-off massage parlor for the oil & gas guys up there.
My dad is a frightening person to gamble around. He is, especially, a Blackjack Fascist.
When I play blackjack next to him, I’m a little slug he’s pouring salt on; he ridicules my every move, laughs heartily, scornfully, when I make the wrong decision,
“YOU HIT! ON THAT?!! HAHAHA!”,
creating what amounts to an iron-curtain of terror that really riles my mom up. And she starts getting pissed at him, feeling like her freedom is being curtailed.
Creating an atmosphere of tension that was redirected when a random man on the other end of the table started muttering corrections on her decisions,
“Should’ve doubled there.”
My mom started saying loudly, in portuguese, “VELHO BABACA! VOU ENFIAR A PORRADA EM VOCÊ!”
I whispered, “mãe. . . chill.”
(The next day she said, “I’m pretty easy going right?” and did not like when I used her casino-fury as contrapunct.)
But all of us got distracted by a dude who’d been vehemently playing the machines and started punching them, screaming, threw down a chair and stormed out of the room.
It was the first day of the cruise.
I don’t wanna toot my own horn, but I ended the trip up $127. DM me if you want my roulette strategy.
4. KETCH-ME-IF-YOU-KEN
Alaska is like completely empty. Gun to my head I’d say, Yes, there’re literally more souvenir shops than people.
Ketchikan is the first city in Alaska. I thought it looked not dissimilar to West Virginia. Except with pine trees instead of deciduous ones.
That was not a popular opinion in my group.
We scheduled a van tour of the city.
Our tour guide was a member of the Tlingit tribe named Ken; he was wearing a crisp suit (we’d come to find out that he has 41 suits & 300 ties) and a gold watch that every half hour he’d lift up and shake and say, “I bought this gold watch.”
He did not take a breath for 4 hours. Of course, he & his ancestors have been in Ketchikan for a very long time so it made sense that a tour of the city would be, essentially, a tour of his mind & past.
A not-exhaustive list of all of Ken’s jobs:
he was a commercial fisherman; an insurance salesman; a logger; he did every job in the mill; he was a missionary (and his missionary ~company(?)~ was “the fastest ever to go international”), he was a Tribe liaison to the US government; he currently runs a lodge; he’s driven literally every vehicle known to man; he was a paramedic (for which job he “passed the fastest background check in history”); he delivered 1 baby (who, grown now, he just had coffee with last week) & was in the room for 20 deliveries; he’s an accidental prophet, and he did (not HIM!, God working thru him!) cure a woman’s cancer when he drove her to the airport; he has 16 children (15 girls, 9 of which “showed up on his doorstep”, and 1 Nigerian son), certainly a full time job; he was a gunsmith, he’s made 38 guns, kept 27, gave away 11. . . —rest assured that if any aspect of human life came up, Ken was once a professional in that domain.
You’d think that he was 200 years old, and thanks to Alaska’s no income tax, the hoarder of hundreds of millions of dollars.
He had 2 separate origin stories about how he left his house; in one, his mom sent him away when he was 12 for his uncle to teach him how to fish and be a man; in the other, his mom & dad had a suitcase packed for him when he came home from his high-school graduation.
His wife Gloria is 10 years older than him, and she either has dementia or restless leg syndrome; either way, marijuana was helping.
Let me tell you right now: I fucking loved Ken.
The first stop on the tour was a reconstruction of a Tlingit village by the water.
Ken’s grandmother was a big-time Tlingit matriarch; when she died, there was an eagle in every tree and a bunch of Tlingits & Haidas from faraway villages canoed 60 miles to come to her funeral; they had a competition to see who could tell the most convincing bullshit,
—I wondered if Ken descended from the winner of that competition.
I thought the village was awesome, full of beautiful totem poles. My dad did not seem interested in anything Ken was saying; he was more or less fleeing.
I said, “dad, this shit don’t interest you?”
He said, “it’s amazing they climbed up them totem poles, carving them.”
I said, “I think they carved them on the ground.”
(The only matter that did interest my dad was whether or not we would have to go thru customs when we got off in Juneau because we started in Canada.
He asked Every. Single. Person. we encountered that very question, to frequent blank stares. He was giddy like a schoolgirl when there was a customs officer waiting for us in Juneau.)
Ken’s sense of identity was fascinating to me. It was obvious he was a fervent American & Christian.
(He was wearing a pin with the U.S.A & Israeli flags intertwined.
I quickly learned why: he has a theory that the Tlingits are actually the first people in the Biblical sense; that they might have a claim to that land. . .
Good luck cracking in to that fight. . .)
But tinging everything he said was this sense of him as an Alaskan & Native that was often even antagonistic to the idea of the United States; also, the architecture of his spiritual thinking never went back to Jesus Christ: it seemed like he was much more invested in his grandmother’s god.
I tried to ask him straight up about this but his answers were diffuse & elusive.
I asked him, “what is your relationship to the idea of America?”
He said, “that’s a great question! I am PROUD TO BE AN AMERICAN. But let me ask you something, how much do you think it costs to ship a car up here from Seattle?”
I said, “I don’t have the slightest fucking clue.”
He goes, “take a guess!”
I said, “uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh—”
“—2200,” my dad said.
“. . .that’s exactly right. . .,” Ken said, putting a bullet in that thread.
Our second & last stop was a beautiful lake.
We walked up to the pier. There was a canoe in the distance filled with people. They spotted us and turned around, paddling intensely back toward us. The captain of the canoe hopped off, huffing, completely out of breath; goes,
“DID WE FORGET YOU GUYS?!”
Admiring the gorgeous landscape that his ancestors have settled in for centuries, Ken pulled out a Marlboro 100 and smoked it languidly; when he was done, he flicked it right into the pristine blue water.
He dropped us off at Ketchikan’s Times Square, —crying, for the second time on the tour, (I almost shed a tear myself, leaving him), —and we ate outrageously priced fish & chips (Alaska is more expensive than Manhattan) at their equivalent of Bubba Gump Shrimp Co.
5. WRECKS PASSED WITHOUT THE SOUND OF BELLS
Boatlife can be boring between ports. What do you do all day?
It’s almost always daylight on the sea, in Alaska, in June. So you feel vigorous, always awake.
I’d get up around 5:55AM, shake off the hangover; go upstairs to the 7th Deck where they had the coffee bar. I thought I would see the ship in its solitudinous peace this early in the morning, but I forget: the ship is full of Olds!
Everybody’s out worm-hunting at crack of dawn.
The dude working the coffee was Adolf. (Yes, people are still named that and you’re not supposed to mention it!) He was surly & didn’t like me.
I’d get a silver hotel-pot of coffee and head back downstairs where I’d toil over my revision of Humpty Dumpty for a few brutal toilsome onerous arduous strenuous hours in the extreme dereliction of this thing we call writing.
I’d edit 1 or 2 words, wipe the sweat off my brow, and call it a day.
After I was done with work, it was my job to make sure my beloved grandma didn’t fall overboard.
She loves nature & she loves taking pictures.
So she’d often fly off toward the outer deck, dodderingly, tumblingly, regardless of the ship literally bouncing up & down, “VÓ!”, and stick her phone out 2 feet over the edge with an unstable grip to get her 100th picture of a floating log she thinks is a whale.
Then I’d go back to my room and call Gaby.
We didn’t facetime because the brig’s wifi couldn’t handle video. And, like Énard writes in The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild:
“webcams are intensely unsatisfying, in spite (or maybe because) of the powerful erotic tension.”
I was trying to be like Darwin on the H.M.S Beagle, devote sealife to scholarship & world-contemplation; remove all eroticism from the equation.
After that I’d go back on deck to meet my family for hot dogs & beer.
What ship was Darwin on? came up in trivia.
I thought I was the only one who was gonna get it, but I forgot that most of the people in the room knew Charles personally.
Our team name was “the Brasilians”, which ended up giving everybody on the ship an easy synecdoche to refer to us being vulgar, or boisterous, or obnoxious, or obtrusive, (or. . . I could go on and on), which they had frequent reason to do:
“Jesus, those brasilians are annoying.”
Trivia was a bloodbath.
They didn’t ask any questions about sports betting; James Joyce; which actresses born around 1968 have had extensive plastic surgery; or my late grandpa Hugo; so all of our areas of expertise were null.
Miserably, sore-loserly, we got last place.
6. SHOWTIME!
They did have ship entertainment.
There was the much vaunted Bougie Cruise Crew. A group of 6 glue-colored smile-plastered musical theater performers.
We watched 2 of their shows.
One was a medley of songs about cities in which they did brasilian classic “Mas que nada” but replaced the portuguese with a Hamilton-style rap; no worries, my grandma loudly, distractingly sang the entire original, even after they’d moved on.
The other one was a medley of big songs that people used to embarrass themselves on American Idol, like “Bohemian Rhapsody” & “I Dreamed a Dream”.
Despite the standing ovation from the Olds (who ate it up like Werther’s Candy), I was skeptical of the execution.
Later on, when I was lurking at the late-night bar, the 2 lead members of the Bougie Cruise Crew came up to me.
They had on nametags and their smiles were so extreme I felt bad for their cheeks. I said, “are you guys contractually obligated to talk to people?”
“Yes!”
I grilled them about shiplife.
Turns out the Bougie Cruise Crew is rife with internecine squabblement, —the onstage smiles are fake!?!; —they also know the show sucks, but they’re chained to the proverbial radiator, forced to rehearse under Jackson 5 type conditions, churning out digestible pablum for the Olds.
But they make $6500 a month for a 4 month contract not having to pay for food, rent, etc. . .
but sealife is hard; the hands of the male Olds drift; the dating options are scant: there was a nicely-uniformed crew member staring buzzardly at one of the girls.
It turned out to be the Chief Engineer, Mircea.
I ended up outside with him; he offered me a few unobligated-contractually Marlboro Lights (the only cigs on board).
He was from Bucharest where he had a maybe-girlfriend.
But his real interest were prostitutes all over the world. He’s been doing this for 16 years, 3 months on, 3 months off. He knows “the best spots” in every city. Hong Kong is his favorite city.
“Why?” I asked. He smiled, “why do you think?”
He said it was a shame I wasn’t coming back to Vancouver with the ship; he could really show me a good time there.
I asked him what he was going to do for the rest of the night.
He said, “the girl in the white dress,” (the Bougie Crew member), “she is ready for me.”
7. THERE SHE BLOWS!
The farther north we got in Alaska, the less it started to look like West Virginia.
It looked more like a bizarro Rio; outrageously lush green hills, glacially azure water, undulating snowcapped mountains, eagles at the top of every pine tree in the dense forest protruding nobly like pineapples.
I saw an eagle nest: it looked like a hairball that a giant’s girlfriend would’ve left in their gargantuan shower; they pile on the nest until it falls out of the tree: it becomes huge & portentous.
I saw a teenage eagle fly up to the nest; they’re undignifiedly unbald.
We were in the vicinity of the Hubbard Glacier.
The ship’s captain said we had to sacrifice our weakest Old to the Eagle God to ensure safe passage; I thought that was a bit extreme, but after a protracted & tense struggle, me and Mircea threw a phlegmy 93 year old wheelchair fellow from Saskatchewan to his icy doom.
His wife yelled, “VINCENT!!!!” while the waitstaff restrained her.
Rest in Peace, Vincent.
Not to get too poetic & lyrical about it,
but the glacier was cool, really like ginormous, like totally as blue as the gatorade color would suggest, then like a huge chunk of ice would fall off, a thingy they called “calving” and it would totally make like a noise like thunder and splash into the water like it was doing a cannonball,
I was like woooooooooow.
We got on a smaller ship to go see if we could find any sea otters.
Sea otters are the largest member of the weasel family, so they’re especially untrustworthy. They’re like 6 feet long.
From afar we saw what is called a raft of sea otters. Because they hold hands so as to not drift off.
They also have the softest, densest fur of any animal, they easily float on their back; from which position they eat, putting a bunch of oysters on their stomach, pulling out their favorite rock they keep concealed in their fur, smashing open the oyster, slurping it up.
All that info was making me hungry; I had my harpoon in hand, but the eco-freak captain refused to get closer.
We also seen 3 whales.
I wanted us to chase the whale because only in the heart of quickest perils; only when within the eddyings of his angry flukes; only on the profound unbounded sea, can the fully invested whale be truly and livingly found out.
But due to the famous cockblock called “the law” we had to stay far away.
We seen them blow the air & snot that looks like water out their blowholes and heard their remarkable noise. To be fair to my grandma, the whales did look exactly like logs or rocks out there.
Every numbnuts Old had a gigantic camera; taking a million pictures. I was annoyed, getting my head bonked out of the way by tunnel-length lenses.
I really, really think there should be a limit on pictures.
It’s not ontologically sound, but how doesn’t taking a billion pictures of an animal or a swath of land dilute its essence?
I just think the world would be much better if we had less pictures of it. You get 25 pictures a month, use it wisely!
My favorite animal in Alaska is the raven.
They are plump like black watermelons. They don’t walk but hop around like they’re in a 3-legged sack-race.
And they make so many different noises; when we first walked into Sitka, they were perched, haunting building-tops ominously, screaming like stab victims; sometimes they would chortle like hanged men.
I have to say this ebony bird beguiled my sad fancy into smiling, by the grave & stern countenance it wore.
Back on the boat, we seen sea lions, and the captain of the ship was like,
“does anyone know what kinda noises sea lions make?”
And my dad goes, “OR! OR! OR!”
The captain says, “those are California sea lions, the ones out here make this noise, RAWR,” and he made a dainty roar.
Then he goes, “let’s all be very quiet and see if we can hear them.”
Everyone on the ship got dead silent.
My mother goes, “RAAAAAAAWWWWWWRRRRAHAHOWWW,” making a loud & horrible noise.
Everyone looked at her; I was like, “mãe. . .” and she goes,
“IT’S MY BIRTHDAY! I CAN MAKE WHATEVER NOISE I WANT.”
(This was June 5th, for the record, her birthday is May 27th.)
8. THE BEST CITY IN ALASKA
Me and my dad went on shore in Haines, Alaska which is famous for its hammer museum.
We got drunk before noon at the Fogcutters Bar while the women shopped for souvenirs.
The bartender, Terry, was in his mid 20s; he was plucked right out of Steubenville; vibe-wise; he served us our Alaska Brews; my dad asked him, “you got a girlfriend?”
He said, “ain’t no girls around here cept my family. . . I gotta go to Washington.”
“How far’s that?”
“Like 300 miles.”
“You gotta go 300 miles to get pussy?”
To hold the locals over, they got a huge, lurid poster on the bathroom wall of the Hotties of The Week.
The Fogcutter was THE premier bar in town and it was for sale for $600,000. And we also found out that there was not a single bookie in town.
I said, “oh my God dad, you gotta buy this bar and move here.”
He asked Terry, “ain’t no golf course though?”
“There’s one a mile outside the city.”
My dad had a different-life glimmer in his eyes.
Catty-corner to us at bar was an octogenarian woman from the ship who was laughing at my dad’s stories.
I knew her because I had heard her robot voice around the ship; respectfully: she had an electrolarynx, a device you press up to your throat to help you talk after you’ve had your larynx removed.
My dad bought a drink for this woman, Z (“like easy”), she was a hoot & a half; her and her husband basically lived on cruises (they did a 52 day cruise to Antarctica!); she met him in a small-town in Canada, he was a very successful lawyer, —she needed a lawyer so she showed up cleavage-forward to get it pro-bon(er) and the rest was history.
“But when you marry for money,” she said, “you earn it.”
My dad said, “where’s your husband now?”
She said, “I left him on the ship, he’s too slow for me!”
I thought my dad was about to settle right in Haines with her, how charmed he was; but my mother walked in and he snapped out of it.
We went back to the ship.
9. THIS FABULOUS SHADOW ONLY THE SEA KEEPS
We only had one all-out brawl the whole trip; this was after my mother had like 3 drinks of all different alcohols: a portent as evil as a sudden solar eclipse.
I fell for a trap-line of questioning that led her to my dad’s big failure on Mother’s Day 1998 (a bugaboo for my mom if there ever was one), which, of course, led to chaos:
I’m sure most of the Olds were shaking their fists at the heavens, tranquility sundered, “THOSE BRASILIANS!!!”
But other than that, it was smooth sailing (HA!).
To prove how epically & transcendently our FamilyTime transformed us into a well-oiled machine: on the last day, we won trivia.
Oh, it was EPIC.
My dad knew how many great lakes bordered Ontario (what!?); my grandma knew how many black pentagons were on a classic soccer ball; we only cheated one time, when we changed our answer to,
“What 70s movie character had a dog named Butkus?”
because we should’ve known it was Rocky!
And I hit our game-winner: Who named the Pacific Ocean?
Ferdinand fucking Magellan.
On our triumphant march back to our cabin, we passed the Casino; the chair-tossing sick gambler from the first day was still in there, slot-shackled, fuckmuttering.
We got off the boat at Juneau where a mentally. . . bambulent. . . crossing-guard told my mom to “relax!” and she restrained herself beautifully.
We flew from Juneau to Seattle and then in Seattle we said goodbye.
FamilyTime was over.
Or so I thought.
As soon as my plane was completely boarded, the flight attendant made this totally untroubling announcement, “the pilot. . . um. . . he didn’t show up? So we have to get another pilot and it’s going to be another 2 hours.”
So I got 2 more hours of Fuh-fuh-fuh-family time. . .
When I got back on the plane after a solid 3 hours and we were reared up ready to go, the pilot got on and said, “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but there was a car accident behind us on the tarmac. It’s gonna be 30 more minutes.”
For my troubles, I got 2 cubic inches of diet coke, so I was pretty euphoric.
The pilot did something I’ve never seen before on a flight: he left the cockpit 3 whole times to flirt with the flight attendant!
I really thought we were going down; and in the middle seat surrounded by more flesh than the deep blue sea; medieval coughing fits that evinced escape from a tuberculosis sanatorium; no reachable form of entertainment. . . I was ready for fiery oblivion.
Thankfully, soon, I was back in the sweet arms of Lady Liberty.
The real America: New York City.
Why the fuck would anyone ever live in Alaska?
About to go on the same godforsaken cruise with my own family next month. This was helpful. Was also planning to take the same Enard as well as the cruise ship essay from DFW’s collection. Excited to hear more about this on the pod