One mistake in life I’m fairly convinced I will never learn from is getting sunburnt. It just makes me too happy. I take it as a sign that I’m doing something correctly in my life. Especially get sunburned in Alaska in August; this is no small feat, and I achieved it with pride and glee.
I haven’t updated this in a while, but the general trend of this past few weeks has been working quite a lot. I have been more or less on the same schedule as my friends Hope, Nicole and Caitlin, particularly when it comes to North-Bound Ship Days, the bane of my existence and that of most people who work on the train. The double brutality of getting to work at 4:45 in the morning and then spending 10 whole hours with tired cranky people who just got off their luxury cruise and expect a similar level of service and/or have lost all interest in spending more money on food and drink is a lot to face. And I’ve gotten to work nearly every one for the last few weeks. We also had a scheduled 6 day run, with two such ship days included, a week or so back, and it’s taking a little while to fully recover from the fatigue of that. Also, as the season is starting to wind down, some people are leaving, going back to school and doing other such silly things, so more shifts are opening up. Meanwhile, we’ll start seeing a drop-off in passenger counts before long as well. So it’ll be interesting to see how all that plays out.
In any case, we have just about a month to go before the end of the season now. The Termination Dust (first sprinklings of snow, indicating the tourist season is about to end, and winter is about to strike) is out on the mountains. Of course, since that happened a week or two ago, we’ve had a couple surges of beautiful sunny weather. But it’s far from consistent, and we’re also getting quite a lot of rain, depending on where we are. The weather changes many times a day, most days, especially as we travel along. The sky was lit up in a beautiful sunrise display this morning, and it was clear and blue and radiant all day yesterday, but now it’s raining again in the Anchorage railyard.
The time pressure started to get to me last week, when I realized I had less than 6 weeks left in my summer in Alaska, and it’s just going to get colder and nastier, most likely faster than I expect, and I better get in some more quests and trips before it’s too late and I run out of time, energy and motivation.
Thus, I organized myself a trip to Seward last Friday. I had Thursday and Friday off, and I was invited to go ice-climbing Thursday, which was extremely tempting, but I also had a lot of errands to run and stuff I needed to take care of, and sleep to catch up on, at least a bit, so I ended up missing out on that, but making it even more of a priority to make plans that day for Friday. I tried to find a buddy or two to go with me, but also because of the craziness of the schedule, most people that could have gone were out on the train Thursday and couldn’t give me a conclusive answer until after it was already too late to make advance reservations. So in the end I decided to be independent and just go have a Seward boat glacier and whale-watching adventure on my own.
For the most, it worked out pretty perfectly. I enjoy my own company, and I had to get up at 6 in order to take a bus ride down there ($40 round-trip with industry benefits, quite a deal for 6 hours of travel), so I was happy to sleep for most of the southward journey. I had my ipod and journal and book (then A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, though I am shifting gears to Frankenstein for the next two days).
I went out on a 6 hour National Park cruise tour. I had a perfect day for it in most ways—the sky was clear, blue, bright, sunny and stunning, the water was perfectly still and calm, like a really really big lake with glaciers and sea mammals in it. The downside was that it was not the best day for seeing whales. I saw only one, some saw a second as well, and we saw its tail a couple times but no breaches or any crazy maneuvers. Whales were a pretty high priority for me out here, so this was something of a disappointment, but I really can’t complain at all about the experience. It was a gorgeous day, so beautiful I even managed to get sunburned from being out on the water exposed to the elements and reflections for 6 hours straight, and I saw 9 glaciers, one of which was “calving,” cascading chunks of ice into the water with great rolling noises of thunder, plus harbor seals lying on floating icebergs, sea otters floating and fooling about, porpoises feeding and playing with us a bit, a whole great pack of sea lions up close, resting on a rock, some puffins and “meres”, a cousin of penguins that actually can fly, but aren’t very good or graceful at it, a hunting bald eagle, and some jellyfish and salmon and other cool birds. So all in all it was a pretty sweet day for wildlife, weather and life in general.
I actually liked the boat ride so much I am considering going back to Seward and doing it again, or doing a different version of the tour. There’s a four and a half hour trip where you take a catamaran out instead of the big tour boat, and I think I would get a big kick out of that. I am also strongly thinking about coming back to Alaska 2 or 3 summers from now and trying to score a job as a deckhand on one of those boats, so I could go out and look at amazingly beautiful things every single day. It seems like a pretty sweet deal to me.
I made a couple friends on the boat as well. One of them was one of the current deckhands, an Alaskan guy around my age by the name of Jacob. He was very silly and fun and entertaining, great at goofing around with the kids on board. He said he’d be relocating to Anchorage in a couple weeks, I think to teach, so we swapped numbers and are planning to meet up. If nothing else, I think it’d be fun to pick his brain about his awesome job. There was another, much older fellow on the boat upon whom I think I made quite a favorable impression, and we had a couple good chats, but I decided not to give him my number, even though I could sense he was looking for an opening to ask towards the end, just because it seemed like it was more likely to end in trouble than in a harmless beer or cup of coffee and friendly conversation. It’s often hard to tell, and I certainly wasn’t getting any major sketch vibes from him, but experience has taught me that it’s usually better to err on the side of caution with random older men one encounters while traveling. I guess that makes me slightly sexist, or ageist, but there it is.
So yeah, Seward was astronomically and catastrophically beautiful, and I would welcome any opportunity to go back there in a heartbeat. I was actually invited to head back down that way Sunday night because a couple train friends were about to do what I had just done, and I was tempted despite the extreme proximity of my last visit, but I ended up being asked to “jump at the meet” and tacked on an extra day (really more like a day and half or two days all told) to my work schedule this past run. I’d just had 2 days off, and I was supposed to have another two Monday and Tuesday, so I figured it was ok to work a bit more instead. But now I’m getting again to a point where I really wouldn’t mind a couple extra days off to get my head together, take care of some non-work stuff in my life, sleep and rest a bit more.
This past day off was also great. When I finally got home late Monday evening, the party was already well under way at my house. Zack and Blair and my train friend Matt were all in the kitchen, sucking down gigantic and tasty home-made bloody marys and cooking and eating pasta, and Blair and Matt were already happily on their way. I was supposed to go to another friend’s going away party, but I got cozy and comfortable and into pajamas after my shower, and it was too hard to pull myself away from roommate bonding time.
I ended up swinging by my friend Holly’s house the next morning to say goodbye and many of the remnants of her going away festivities were still present at her house. It was another fortunately wondrous summery day (they’re really pretty rare out here, and getting rarer as August clips along toward 2 week autumn and then winter), so I spent the majority of the day wandering around soaking in some more sunshine, writing, listening to music and loving life.
I got hungry around 5:30 or so and decided to take Zack out to dinner, because he feeds me at the house quite often, and does other handy stuff around there, and is just generally a really great guy, and I’ve been really disciplined and good about saving money for the most part this summer, so I figured why not, let’s have a good meal. Humpy’s, a favorite local spot in Anchorage where I had my first meal in Alaska on May 31, has outdoor patio seating and a long list of local beers on tap, as well as freaking phenomenal food, particularly of the seafood and burger variety. I had a local hard apple cider, which was quite delicious, we split some kalamari, which was magnificent, and then I went with a healthy and fortifying portabello burger, rather than really going all out and ordering the oysters or halibut fish and chips. I will go with one of those, and perhaps order a few more drinks, as an end of season reward a few weeks down the road.
There’s been another major development in my life recently, which I’ve held off on publicizing until now because I was still mulling it over and not officially committed until last Thursday. But here it is. My favorite teacher from UWC, the fellow I studied theatre with for two years, is now the principal at another international IB school outside of Victoria, British Columbia. He told me in mid-July that he had an internship opening out there. I was intrigued, and in the midst of exploring future employment options, so I asked for more info. We emailed back and forth for a couple of weeks, and eventually the opportunity that presented itself was working as an assistant/co-teacher of an interdisciplinary expeditionary learning multi-age middle school classroom for the year. He says the teacher I’d be working with is great and very creative, and I can take as much charge in the class as I want, and will definitely take the lead on whatever projects I feel most invested in and knowledgeable about. This is the kind of education I was raised with, and it’s a model I whole-heartedly believe in. It’s a bit of a bizarre twist of fate because I wasn’t really looking to get a teaching job right now, but I have been talking for years about trying to line up a job at an international high school, possibly including the new UWC they’re opening in New Zealand in 2012, and I think teaching would be a good vehicle for me to do some more traveling and living abroad, and it would also be a job I’ll find challenging and stimulating and interesting and rewarding and fun. I don’t think it’s a forever job or a career path for me, but it’s something I could see myself being happy doing in more of a short term kind of way. And here, presented to me practically on a golden platter, is an opportunity to get some real teaching experience, in a fairly ideal sort of teaching/school environment (except for the whole middle school thing), in a cool, brand-new living location. I’m not going to make any money, one of the more major downsides to the offer, but I will have lodging and apparently great prepared food provided to me, and they’re also covering my travel expenses out there, and there aren’t too many other things I need money for, and I’ll have all the money from this summer just sitting in the bank waiting for me to get to it. So I’m not super worried about it.
The only other real downside to this job that I can see is that my plan for going home and getting some downtime before launching into the next thing is rendered impossible. The school year starts, as these things often do, at the beginning of September. My contract ends here around Sept. 20th. Tim, my new employer, said they were willing to wait for me to finish up here and come late, but that doesn’t leave me time to fart around for an extra week here and then mosey home for a week or two, and then to go hang out around Brown and see my friends and then get going in early November. I need to get out there as quickly as I can and start playing catch up. This prospect is rather daunting to me, especially as I didn’t get any kind of break or trip home between finishing college and starting to work here. And it would be nice to figure out what stuff I need from there too, as I’ve been living out of the contents of a backpack and duffle bag for the summer.
However, I am coping with this by trying to arrange a preemptive trip home, before the end of the train season. I know it’s starting to wind down, and I know a few other people that have ventured out of Alaska recently, or have plans to in the next week or so, and there are a few things I’m homesick for, much as I generally love it out here. I miss fresh fruit and veggies, and inexpensive food in general. I don’t know if it’ll be possible, but I’d love to get a swim in if I get a nice day in Maine. And I’d like to see Tiger and my parents and friends if I can. So we’ll see if it works out. In the meantime, life is plenty full and busy and fun and tiring and exciting, and I expect the next few weeks will fly by pretty quick. I’m enjoying my dead breakfast leg, but I’ll have to deal with people and do real work for most of the rest of the day, so I’ll see if I can get a quick nap in first.
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