No good deed goes unpunished OR Anchorage’s Seedy Underbelly OR A Crash Course in Money Management by Shana Tinkle, for street-urchins near you

First, one of the clearest pictures of Mt. Denali/McKinley I've ever seen. Credit goes to my friend Briana the bartender. Taken July 5th.
Many people in Anchorage are less fortunate than I. All of the passengers on the train have more money than I do, except for a few of the children.

I am, as I may have mentioned, making a bit less money than I originally thought or hoped I would. This is because of a variety of factors. Bartenders make less than almost anyone on the train. I guess we make more than dishwashers and cooks. But food servers and rail guides definitely get tipped more, as a general rule. This is due to several factors. Most people eat, since they’re on the train for 4 or 8 or 10 hours, and the food costs a fair bit of money. It’s basically a guarantee that if they eat, they will tip at least 15% of the meal cost. Most people understand that to be proper tipping etiquette. And thanks to the bartender’s speech encouraging them to do so, most everyone tips the rail guide for their tour. Not everyone wants to drink on the train. Many of the people who want beverages order water or free coffee or hot tea or $2 hot chocolate or refillable sodas for $3.25. Many of those people don’t tip at all, even if I end up spending more time waiting on them than anyone else. Even with those who do drink alcohol, it takes quite a few drinks to add up to the price of a meal downstairs. So tipping is intermittent and sometimes disappointing.

I am still making an hourly wage, $8 an hour, and $12 for every over time hour. But I am also usually only working about 4 out of 7 days. Usually, those days are 15 hours each, so I guess that makes sense. But sometimes we lose out on hours because instead of doing the whole 30 hour trip, Anchorage-Fairbanks and Fairbanks back to Anchorage, we get dropped off in Denali (the 2/3 mark going North), and then either bussed back the next day, and thus paid for 5 hours of “work” instead of 15, or we work a “ship day” in which we get about 12 hours. Either way, less over time.

And then of course there are taxes. And rent. And utility bills. And groceries (sometimes) and expenses.

I am attempting, this month, to pay for all of those things out of pocket, with whatever I’ve made in tips (except, of course, for the taxes. Which, ultimately, I hope to get back.)
It’s not easy, especially because some people tip with credit cards. Basically, my system is that when I get back from a run, I put all the cash I have into a “save for rent” envelope except for about $10, which is my spending money until I refill my wallet with new bills.

I’ve been trying to limit myself to one meal out per pay period (2 weeks). Recently, I’ve started being a bit more social, which means the added expense of going out and drinking at bars, or buying beer or other stuff to consume at the BVI, and it turns out one of the bars in Healy (49th State) has amazing food, so I usually end up spending some extra money when I’m there, particularly for the sake of sweet potato tots, one of the most delicious and decadent things I’ve ever tasted.

Generally, I’ve found the best way to avoid spending money is to work as much as possible. You have less time to wander around frittering, several meals and snacks are provided, and you’re adding bills to your pocket. Good thing I worked the last 6 days in a row. :) Yesterday, on my first day off, I indulged in a wonderful California roll at a Japanese place in downtown Anchorage (surprise, surprise, the seafood is good here.) $12. Then I ran into a super silly street performer at the weekend market and chucked him a buck. He suggested a donation of $5, but I decided I needed the money more, and worked harder for it. I was hoping to buy a new gallon of milk and some fruit.

Later in the day, I went out on a long solo walk, mostly using the Chester Creek trail. I took some lovely pictures, and then I ran into a group of neighborhood kids on my way home. Long story short, I decided to spend 6 of the last 7 dollars left in my wallet, my allowance for aforementioned groceries and necessities, because I had already put the rest of my tip money from the week into my rent envelope. They wanted snacks, and only had a dollar between the four of them. I knew that wasn’t enough for too many snacks. I tried to explain to them that they needed to share, and just choose a couple snacks, and that they needed to negotiate and compromise in order to snack within their means. But they had a hard time not all getting exactly what they wanted.

Eventually, after about 45 minutes of interacting with these kids, making friends with them, striving to teach them some valuable life lessons, buying them snacks, and attempting to get the second youngest (K.P.) to stop her incessant and noisy habit of crying, I finally reached the end of my very long rope of patience, nudged the 6 and 4 year old out of the gas station where they were now also driving the clerks crazy with all their noise, and told them that if they didn’t stop crying, I would leave them there and go home. They kept crying, so that’s what I did. I needed to pee, after all. And I figured, they got themselves there, and we were just a few blocks from where they lived, and the older two (who had, by this time, run off with their swag) at least knew where they had left them, and could come back and find them if it came to that.

I’m not sure what the take-home lesson from all this is. I knew after 2 minutes of talking to these kids that they were going to take me for a ride if I wasn’t careful. Their fourth question (out of about 75) was “Do you have any money?” followed directly by “Can we have it?” Still, I felt it was the right thing to do to help them out. I figured they probably needed the snacks more than I needed to spend that particular $6 on milk and apples. So I guess the moral is that small kindnesses have their own internal rewards, and it’s better to rely on them than to expect gratitude or acknowledgement from others. And at the end of the day, the thing that it’s most important for me to use my resources on, after looking out for my basic necessities, is helping other people.

I’ve been keeping very busy with work and socializing and writing, reading, biking, and occasionally watching movies or relaxing. But when I do have time to myself, it occurs to me that I don’t want to stagnate or regress in any way. I want to maintain a sense of forward momentum. I want always to be learning, and growing, and improving myself. I am trying to continue past trends of staying in touch with people that are far away, and refusing to lose friendships that are important to me simply because of distance. It’s not an easy task, but it is, I think, the greatest struggle I have and will continue to face in my life, the separate pulls of constant adventure and seeking the horizon, motion and new locations, versus the desire to have continuity in friendships and relationships over time.

In the meantime, practically everyone I talk to has a new idea for something I can do with my life, or something I can try in the next few years. I had a lot of ideas and options when I got here, and now I have even more. I am struggling to choose between:

1. Going off to someplace exotic, perhaps New Zealand, to get work on a sailboat
(I’m assuming the appeal is obvious.)
2. Returning to Alaska in November to spend 5 months bartending in Dutch Harbor, Unalaska, Alaska (yes, it’s really called that). A train friend said she could get me a job there where I would make $500/day, serving workers in the fishing industry. It’s the busiest fishing port in the US, by volume caught (according to Wikipedia.) It’s also an island, where I would be surrounded by water and boats. And the temperature is supposed to be much milder than most other parts of Alaska in the winter, and it’s in the south, so it doesn’t get as dark as others, and it has ocean and mountains, so it will snow a lot (which I like.) I sort of like this idea, both because it’s crazy, and I would make a ton of money, but also because it somehow appeals to me to finish off my Alaska Experience this year. I’ll have spent a summer here, then I can spend a winter, then I’ll know what that’s like, and say I’ve done it, and then I can go off to someplace warm and tropical and call it a day. I would also probably get to see amazingly beautiful scenery, skies, light playing in the snow, Northern Lights and whales.
3. Moving to New York and starting an acting career, with probable bartending on the side.
4. Getting a teaching job in Asia
5. Getting some kind of job in Australia. Perhaps taking that opportunity to get super Scuba certified, so I could later/soon become a divemaster on a boat somewhere
6. I’ve also reopened the idea of applying to the Peace Corps, and/or a Fulbright (though I have no idea how I would narrow down the what and where for that app.)
7. I am still planning to sooner or later apply for the Foreign Service or some other government or non-profit track job in which I can help people and foster peace and be diplomatic and make the world better. But I think this is still a few years off.
8. Whoops, this is usually option #1. I might also move to Bolivia for the year and live cheaply and write and learn Spanish and do theater with street kids
9. I got a suggestion from a friend to work for another theatre company that tours around all over the place and does something. I forgot to look closely at the details, but it also sounded sweet.
10. My dad also forwarded me an email about an opportunity to teach or work at the Island School in the Bahamas (where my younger brother spent a semester in high school.)

So, options are not my problem. The problem is picking something. I might need to make a web and put it on my wall and throw a dart at it and resolve myself that way, leaving it to chance. With this number of ideas, it would just take too damn long to evaluate the pros and cons of everything. How much money I have at the end of this season will have some impact on my decision, but basically everything else is up to chance and up in the air.

Damn. It’s fun to be almost 23. (Of course, I long ago decided to calculate my age by adding the digits together, so I never get to be too old, so I’m actually about to turn the wonderful and worldly, very zen age of 5. Just like Rucha, my new Indian San Franciscan friend from the train, who is also an aspiring writer, precocious and curious about the world around her. We hit it off right away. Actually, I made friends with her whole family, parents and grandparents and all.)

I ought to be writing more often, I am stock-piling stories at a rate I can scarcely contend with. My parents loved the one about the town of Ferry (population ~25) who have an annual tradition of collectively mooning the passenger train as it passes on the 4th of July. The railroad pissed them off in the 1920’s, by telling them they couldn’t drive to the other side of town on the railroad bridge (because it was incredibly dangerous), so they’ve been mooning us ever since. Don’t believe me? Here’s a picture.



I’ve faced plenty of unexpected challenges each run. I am literally surprised by nothing now, anything is possible on that train. One great tragedy this past week—a full bottle of Bacardi slid off my liquor counter (where generally the booze sits snugly and securely on a mat, despite the constant rocking of the train) and crashed to the floor, spreading glass shards for me and soaking the back of my black pants in rum for the rest of the day. As a pirate, there are many worse things I can imagine smelling like, but I haven’t felt like my uniform was quite up to snuff ever since.

Alaska is a supremely weird and quirky place, mostly thanks to its populace. I’ve learned to pay close attention when I roam around. You never know what you’re going to come across.

Yup, that's a pet reindeer he's got there.

And, of course, my neighbor's roof is covered in antlers and skulls.


I know I am gaining a lot from this summer and this experience in terms of learning some new practical skills (something I felt I lacked in my time at Brown), and meeting dozens of new people from all kinds of backgrounds, with approaches to life both similar to mine and in some ways very different. Many of the people I work with have made or intend to make a lifetime career out of seasonal and/or customer/food service work. This is not my intention. This is something I want to try, to dabble in for a little while, so I can see what it’s like, and live somewhere different and exotic for a temporary period of time. But ultimately, I am too ambitious to do this forever, and I wouldn’t want my scholastic or creative education or inclinations to go to waste. Thus, I came to the library today to get myself some books I missed as an undergrad—some Proust, Joyce, Freud, David Foster Wallace and Frankenstein.

It’s not easy to find time for everything I want to do, but I have found that this is very valuable and grounding solo time for me. There is little separating me from a homeless person. I have a house, but I sleep on a double-folded (and therefore very skinny) flimsy futon mattress on the floor, surrounded by little stacks of my belongings. I pack and unpack my backpack every single day. I have responsibilities that are entirely new to me. It’s hard to balance all this with also making sure I’m eating all the right things and getting enough exercise, but I am in a brand new world where I have plenty of food for thought and I am making progress in deciding what matters to me, what I want to do and where I want to be. (Essentially, everything/everyone, everything and everywhere.)