Skagway: Summer Solstice

"How do you spell ‘solstice’?”
 

Joe

I’d never before had the occasion to spell it, even talk about it, but living for the summer the Land of the Midnight Sun was going to change all this.

“S – O – L – S – T – I – C – E,” said someone.

The thing is, when you live where the sun circles the sky in ever decreasing circles, not the normal Ferris Wheel action of up and down, but more like a lopsided lasso spinning high above you, circling ever higher and ever tighter as June unfolds, Solstice is something to celebrate. It’s not just the longest day of the year but one that, up here, seamlessly blends the 20th to the 21st with nary a pause for daytime to blink and wake up to a new dawn. The sun is too busy chasing its tail. To celebrate?

Skagway has several parties that take up two weeks of fun and good times, but the actual night of? About thirty of us guides from just about as many companies decided to celebrate by hauling our bikes up to the White Pass summit and then, at midnight, riding down the 6% grade, dropping from an elevation of 3,000 feet to sea level in just eighteen miles.

The Summit

At around ten, those of us from Jewell Gardens loaded up Joe’s truck behind the Beek House with maybe half a dozen bikes, maybe more.

Isreal and Joe and Joe's truck

We drove over to the school where the guides from other tourist industries piled a couple more on. Several other vehicles were loaded. I’m not at all sure how we got everyone and everything up to the top—though it did take a good hour or more to organize ourselves.

Getting Organized

Earlier I’d asked Casg, leader of the pack, “Any advice?”

“Yeah, dress warmly.”

Getting Ready to Head Down
Skagway River Below

And so at midnight in the Land of the Midnight Sun, straddling the U.S./Canadian border at the summit of the tightly knit mountains that define Alaska and the Yukon, and despite my hat and mittens, I shivered. But then like a swarm of mosquitoes, everyone hopped onto their bikes and circled the highway a few times—whir, whir, whir—and then we all broke rank and headed like flies down the Pass.

I have to say, I’m the oldest. “See you at the bottom, Mama!” the young studs tossed off their shoulders as they hurtled out of sight.

All wobbly on my borrowed bike, with my friend Eric’s instruction on how to change gears fresh in my mind, I was nonetheless wondering if riding a bike again was as easy as “learning to ride a bike again.”

Amanda, Amanda, Moi

“You okay?” one of the two Amandas hollered over. The two girls had taken it upon themselves to ride tail with me. None of us had the testosterone levels the rest of the pack clearly possessed. Besides, we intended to enjoy the experience.

“I’m good!”

What can I say? It was a rush of adrenalin, riding down through a fairyland of cutting wind and cold on the face. Of skirling down through mountains that have stood their ground for thousands of years, one rising out of another, the lonely cut of a road wending through their ankles of rock and stone and plunging waterfalls.

Amanda, Amanda, and I quickly fell behind the others. It was just us, a trio in the austerity, the quiet so deep the world fell away, leaving only these mountains, this pass, and us.

There is a no man’s land that surrounds the summit. Because of weather conditions during the winter, both the American and Canadian governments have elected to build their customs and immigration offices away from the summit, a few miles into their own turf. Thus is was, about twelve miles south of the summit, Amanda, Amanda, and I rolled up to the U.S. Customs House (which for some bizarre reason was designed to look like an IHOP)  to the cheering of the others who had, for whatever reason, decided to wait on official American soil

I had my passport in my pocket, I slowed down.

“You the last of the group?” not Officer B asked. (Officer B is a guard around one particularly loves. A rather officious sort.)

“Yeah. We’re it,” I said.

“See you around."

I hit the brakes. “You don’t want our passports?”

“Nope.”

So not Officer B.

“Thanks!” I bellowed back, wobbling on my bike but picking up speed.

This was just enough interlude to give the others another head start and, with them this time, Amanda and Amanda. I was truly on my own. Just me in this icy, shadowy world, and another six miles to enjoy. I was thrilled.

Four miles later I spotted Eric walking his bike. “Hey, what up?” I slowed down.

"I have a flat tire."

I stopped. “What should we do?”

“I don’t know. It’s another two miles into town.”

We had some discussion. Do I walk in with him? Keep him company. Or do I leave him behind and go for help?

“I would feel more useful if I went for help,” I finally said.

“Okay.”

A mile later I remembered the bears and Eric's lonely walk, would he be okay? but a car was approaching, slowing. Kyle, a bus driver, stuck out his head. “You see the guy with a flat tire?”

“Yeah! A mile behind me!”

“Okee dokee!”

Vroom and Eric’s help was on the way. I was almost disappointed. I’d wanted to be a part of his rescue, but then I realized help always abounds in Skagway. It’s the personality of people who depend on each other all winter long and whose generous spirit filters down to all of us who come up only for the summer. Kindness is infectious. I was surrounded by it. I think this is, perhaps, how life should be lived. Perhaps the way it once was lived. Back before we all got so busy with life that, somewhere along the line, we lost it.

Another mile later and coming onto the bridge that runs over the Skagway River into town, I noticed a knot of people. Wait, here was Sarah, coming back. “Hey, Brenda!” she hollered. “I was just coming to find you!” She rode up, circled, came alongside me. “Yeah, it’s her!” she hollered up to the others. They waved, they dispersed.

I have to ask. Is it easy to feel part of something bigger than yourself when people linger and then go in search of you, a missing piece of the whole?

I wearily but happily rode my borrowed bike over to my boss’s apartment and tried to lock it up outside her bedroom window. For some reason, she and her husband had the window open. I could hear Sevren coughing. My frozen fingers could not get the lock into place. More coughing. Give it up already, I thought, and jumped into my car.

Eric and Joe

It had been agreed earlier that I would drive Eric and Joe back up to the summit to get their vehicles. By the time I reached the school five blocks away Eric was back, Joe too, and half an hour later we spotted their two lonely cars perched on the side of the road in the faltering light.

Joe headed down first. Then Eric. Now me. I followed their blinking brake lights as I again descended the pass, this time a little warmer, this time the light casting different shadows, this time the mountains even quieter, as if they too had fallen at last into slumber with the rest of the world. Was I the only one up? Eric and Joe had disappeared. Just me again on the road.

“You the last one in?” not Officer B asked when I again reached the customs office.

“I am.”

“I understand you drove the other two back up to get their cars.”

“I did.”

“Was the bike trip fun?”

“Fun?” I laughed. “Next year I’m inviting you!”

His turn to laugh.

I was so tired when I finally stumbled into my cabin and set the cardboard in the window to block the sunlight. Shivering, I slid into my sleeping bag without bothering to brush my teeth. The last thing I saw before plunging into sleep was the knot of friends on the other end of the bridge, Sarah back peddling toward me.

It’s rare that one experiences bliss. A oneness with the world, a peace, a harmony, a sense of well being so profound the reality of a physical self actually disappears. I slid into sleep hearing Sarah’s call, “It’s her! We’re all in!”

Summer’s solstice. A moment, a time, a rush of cold in the face, a knot of friends, a bath of kindness, a connection to the divine. Midnight’s sun shines down on us all.

Sometimes you simply can’t help but love life.

The Summit at Midnight, June 20th, 2010

It's A Bit Like Polishing a Turd

Skagway AK 2009 
by Christopher Prentiss Michel
used by permission but not necessarily as an endorsement this blog.

Skagway has a housing issue, there just isn't room for everyone. This town of 900 year-round residents live in a paradise hamlet just a few blocks wide and one mile long. Snowy mountains rise straight up to the east and west. This narrow valley almost immediately begins to pinch down from four blocks wide to three to one to a tight squeeze that zig-zags up the Klondike Highway to the summit of White Pass and into the Canadian Yukon beyond. A town conceived, birthed, and sustained by the Gold Rush of 1897/98, it’s a tourist Mecca. Almost a million people will pass through here before the summer’s end and it takes an influx of 1,500 summer staffers to man the plethora of jewelry stores and adventure getaways, everything from necklaces carved from woolly mammoth tusks to helicopter rides out to the glacier fields. Where do all us “summer staffers” reside for the five months of the season?

Employers often purchase or build housing or in some other way create places to live--from rustic to  historical landmark hotels. I was, however, hired late in the season and all these opportunities were long before filled. My son, a seasoned summer worker, arranged for me to stay the month of May with the Presbyterian preacher; after that, I'd be on my own. So I've spent five weeks trying to find a place to lay my head. At fifty-eight years old, I find the challenge a, well...a challenge. Even with my son assuring me “Something will work out."

Charlotte Jewell

Something was not working out and D-Day was imminent. Then one day my boss Charlotte, owner of Jewell Gardens where I'm working, slipped her arm through mine. "My brother tells me you're looking for a place to live. This true?"

"It is."

"He says you're looking for a five-star hotel."

I laughed. "And I want a chocolate mint on my pillow every night!"

"I have a cabin. In the back of my house. It's a half-star hotel."

We both laughed.

"It's not much to look at right now," she said. "We've been using it for storage and there's been a bad leak in the roof. A lot of water damage. I think there might even be mold in there. But if you'll give my husband some time to do some new dry walling--"

"I can paint!" I eagerly interrupted. "And I don't mind helping with the clean up." Little did I know.

Jim Jewell duly did the dry walling and I was told to go over and take a look--fully warned there would be no place to poop, cook, or keep clean. But she would get me a wee frig, a microwave, and a membership to the Recreation Center so I could shower.

I first saw the place five days ago. Here is what I saw:

What the pictures don't show is the smell of mold--or the detail of "clean up." I backed out and headed down to see my new friend Jess, manager of the gift shop at Jewell Gardens where we both work. We sat in her mezzanine office. “I don't think I can live there. My health,” I stammered, ever mindful of the precariousness of a faulty immune system and the fact that there is no doctor in this town, not even a pharmacy.

A few minutes later I again stood in the little cabin, this time with Jess, watching her pretty face. She looked around and finally said: “We can make this cute. I promise. It has potential. We can do this.”

I put my trust in her. And such is life here in Skagway. On her day off, she and Natalie, a server at the Gardens, plus my son Blake and his friend Ethan (my friend, too, another bus driver up here and a total cutie pie I’ve gotten quite attached to) all showed up and we went at the place—hauling out the stuff, bleaching down every square inch, painting the entire thing a pale buttercup yellow.

Blake pried off a window of plexiglass up by the bed, which had been stuck on tight with some kind of goo, then headed to the hardware store. He brought back hinges and weather stripping and made me a window that actually opens and closes, enabling much needed cross ventilation. The open/close window is critical. I need fresh air if I am to mitigate the mold, and now the bleach and paint fumes. He also brought back some screen mesh and nailed it up so the mosquitoes don’t come in—important here in Alaska and probably more critical than the fresh air!

White House B and B

It’s taking some work. The carpet, which I asked to have ripped out, and which won’t be ripped out, had to be cleaned—somehow. Miracle enough, after a day of cleaning and painting, Blake, Natalie, Jess, and I went down for a “pint of ale” at Skagway’s Brew Co, and one of the women from the preacher’s church overheard us talking about the place. She owns the White House, a lovely Gold Rush B and B just around the corner from my new digs. She offered to let me use her carpet cleaner.

Perfect strangers overhearing a conversation in the pub. Only in Skagway. But there’s more to the story. The next morning Jess and Natalie met Jim, Charlotte's husband, at the coffee shop.

"Hey, how's it going with the cabin?" he asked. "Getting the place cleaned up okay?"

They duly reported.

Jim laughed and said, "Still, it is a bit like polishing a turd, isn't it?"

Ha, ha.

I still can't tell the story without cracking up. And so despite my scattered existence in this faraway place called Skagway, Alaska, I find myself at last beginning to feel at home in this narrow valley of river and rock, squeezed in between high mountains. Housing can be a bit like polishing a turd at times, yes, but there's no shortage of humor and  friendship. If Skagway struggles with its housing, it doesn't suffer from lack of generous and warmhearted people--permanent and seasonal and all ready to step in--"something working  out"--planting me firmly in the warm and nurturing soil of humanity at its best.

What Brings You To Skagway?

Charlotte Jewell's Tea Room

I'm talking to Bonnie from Boston. She's seated in the conservatory at Jewell Gardens, Skagway, Alaska, with other tourists. I am pouring her English Rose tea while she waits for her treat of a lunch: smoked salmon quiche, salad, Nolan Jahn's soup of the day, and rhubarb-begonia bar. Always rhubarb at Jewell Gardens.

"What brings you to Jewell Gardens of Alaska?" she asks.

"I was replaced at work two years ago by a twenty-year-old," I tell her, "and it's been hard to find work. Yes, it's still sticking in my craw, and, yes, I know I should get over it." But I have to say I don't really see age discrimination as anything to get over. It's an injustice someone needs to object to. Even if it is only me. Anyway, I tell Bonnie that my youngest son had come up to Skagway the summer before to drive tour buses, had taken one look at Jewell Gardens and e-mailed me, an avid gardener, to say: "If you still haven't found work by next year, Mum, apply to Jewell Gardens."

"I couldn't, I did, and here I am," I tell Bonnie.

It was actually a hard land and I still wasn't on my feet. I'd been given ten days to report for duty--Washington to Alaska. Arrangements to be made for my house down in the Lower 48, goodbyes  said to my grandchildren, and packing up my Toyota Scion--Arizona Lunch Box--with five months' worth of basic food supplies. Blake warned that living  in a Gold Rush town isn't cheap. And housing is an issue--always an issue. Lucky for me, the Presbyterian minister has graciously agreed to temporarily take me in. But come the end of May, what then?

"God only knows," I tell Bonnie.

"How did you get here?" she asked.

"I drove."

My Four-Day Road Trip

It was a four-day trip. Exactly 1,649 miles from my front door to the front door of Skagway's Presbyterian manse.

Apprehension set in the morning of my third day on the road as I drove north out of Hudson's Hope, leaving behind my cousin Carolyn and civilization. A moose ambled across the highway ahead, a giant silhouette against dawn and as graceful as a giraffe. Two bear cubs frolicked in a ditch. Soon telephone poles disappeared, the radio shut off, and it was just me and the road, me and Arizona Lunchbox riding the left shoulder of the Rocky Mountains north for 600 miles. The farther I went, the deeper my apprehension, the higher my anxiety. By the time I reached Liard Hot Springs on the Yukon border I was nauseous from the distressing sensation I couldn't name.

Yukon/BC Border

I drove into the fourth day with a churning stomach and feeling adrift. Zigzagging west, back and forth across the Yukon/B.C. border, cutting across four entire mountain ranges and rarely seeing another car, here was land as God made it: never ending, eternal, unmarked by any sign of human the single exception of the road unzipping before me as I traveled into more of the same and struggling to contain the exhaustion that had set in and my mounting anxiety that was beginning to feel a little threatening.

At Whitehorse in the Yukon I turned south onto the Klondike Highway, the only road in and out of Skagway, and wound my way up the Gold Rush Trail in reverse through the White Pass.

White Pass

The snowy mountain peaks sprawling and stretching took me to the top of the world. I only had to get out of my car, snowshoe to the crest...I'd be able to see clear around the globe. I pulled to a stop at the summit and got out. Here was the international boundary line. Behind me the Yukon and Canada. Forward, southward, downhill, Skagway, Alaska, my destination. What am I doing here? I asked myself. What in the world am I doing?

It was while standing at the "Welcome to Alaska" sign, looking south into the seam of yet another tumble of mountains, that I recognized my agitation. I'd experienced it before. I was nine. My family had just immigrated from Canada to the States, to Meteor Ranch near Upper Lake, CA. As a child growing up under the filtered sunlight of cedar and hemlock and Douglas fir, I'd threatened by the endless land unfolding before me. I couldn't sleep, eat, think. One night I slipped out of the house and stood looking south over the sheep pasture to Clear Lake.

Sheep field, Meteor Ranch 1961

My father came out, stood quietly beside me. "What's happening to you?"

I struggled to find the words. What came out was this: "It feels like the land will go forever and we will all evaporate and die and be nothing." It was the best I could do, and I've spent a lifetime wondering what I'd been trying to define, to name, to understand. A kind of dark and lonely despair. Now here I was, nearly fifty years later, experiencing the same sort of thing and no closer to comprehension.

I got back into my car. Yes, land that spread forever, and it felt as though I might evaporate and die, disappear and be nothing. That night, settled in at the preacher's house where I was invited to live until the end of May and fighting for words, I wrote:

I am experiencing a kind of isolation that disconnects me even me from myself. I have yet to find a word that names this. A disconnect of some sort. A severing of normal thinking patterns. Who am I, sitting on the edge of eternity? Why does it feel so annihilating?

At both Meteor Ranch and now here in Skagway, the stretching land triggered and triggers something, broke and breaks something, internal, and left and leaves me adrift from myself. It takes me some time, but I'm beginning to think I am not teetering on the brink of losing myself but finding instead the insignificance of Self when compared to endless worlds that have no boundaries that ensnare and bind me to the person I've become.

My cousin asked when I stopped in on my way north, "If you could wish for one thing this summer, what would it be?"

I'd stared rather stupidly at her. Wish for something?

Carolyn, I now know. I wish to embrace this sense of separation, this lostness and disconnect from what I've understood myself to be me, to let go of everything that once told me who and what I was. An aging women? easily replaced by a twenty-year-old? and to instead embrace this expansion of possibility, unscripted and mine to explore.

Carolyn, I wish to live as someone I have not yet met.

"And this," I want to tell Bonnie from Boston, "is what brings me to Jewell Gardens of Skagway."

Jewell Gardens Kitchen and Tea Room