Anchorage and the Chugach (Chew-gatch) Mountains
 
 

Alaska Journal
Part 10: Homer, Alaska
Date: September 28, 2000 (Saturday night)

I’m in Anchorage now. I’m having a drink at a bar around the corner from home base, on Spenard Avenue, called Chilkoot Charlies.

Half-Ass and Honeybucket don’t care much for Anchorage. He is not alone. Many Alaskans loathe Anchorage. It doesn’t really live up to the Alaska promise -- you know, the wilderness, the moose, the grizzly, the fireweed and cottonwood. To Alaskans, Anchorage is no different than New Jersey.

But I think Anchorage slugs it out with the Best of them:

Anchorage is a Great City For:

1) Great walks, wildlife in their backyards, Chugach mountains (so close, they are the easel on which Anchorage was painted).

Anchorage
 
 

2) A government that respects free will by not mugging its citizens with an intrusive morality code.

3) A view (Mt. McKinley can be seen on a clear day).

4) A large and serene disc golf course.

5) The Beautiful parks that run adjacent to small forests

6) The abundant Glaciers which are a hop, slip,and a slide away.

7) The Citizens, who respect the wildlife and indigenous peoples.

and

8) The bar scene. As in Chilkoot Charlie's.

Chilkoot Charlie's (Koots to the regulars) is one of the larger clubs in Anchorage. It has four or five rooms each with it's own identity. There is a karoake room, a game room, a live rock and roll room, a lounge and so on. The chamber I am currently in has wood shavings on the floor, a kitchen, and an oversized bar. There are pool tables, shuffle board, and fooseball games everywhere. Though it doesn’t look like it, many hard rock and punk bands perform here; Agent Orange, Dee Snider (Twisted Sister), DRI, and Quiet Riot, to name a few. But tonight a local, loud, 90’s alternative cover band that doesn’t suck too much, is playing under a frenetic light show.

There is sign on the door that says, "We cheat the other guy and pass the savings on to you." They sell bumper stickers that say the same thing. I want to buy one, but they are out. So I settle on the sticker that says,"My mom is on the 86’d list at Chilkoot Charlies."

I order another Labatts on tap and tell the bartender to put it on my tab.

While in Alaska, I consider Koots to be my home bar. This because it is mere steps away from my home base in Anchorage. But also for its outstanding beer selection, its house-band-that-doesn’t-suck-too-much, and this particular barmaid whom I have come to adore.

I can tell she has had many lovers. A woman doesn’t gather the kind of confidence in her stride without screwing her share of good and bad men.

Alas, We will never have sex. It would take weeks, maybe months, to trick her into it. And I don’t have that kind of time.Tomorrow I fly home.

That’s right -- tomorrow evening, Alaska and all her many treasures, will be little more than photos and words on memory's website. There is nothing left, but to scribble this -- the beginning of the final entry of the Alaska Journals. I open Blue Journal and begin by churning my writing juices with a poem about the lovely barmaid:
 
 

Poem About the Lovely Barmaid

She holds my credit card in her mouth
When she starts the tab.
She has a conditional smile,
Thanks to some past asshole,
Who must have swallowed her whole.

She has short, black, thick hair
Like a head full of charred candle wicks;
She has bladi bladi blah . . .
 
 

I taper off.

"God what lard," I think. That's the problem with not churning your writing juices enough.

I tried everything to make that poem worth reading. I gave it a sex scene (the bartender takes the protaganist in the cooler). I tried violence (a bar fight breaks out over the bartender). Nothing works. It’s just garbage. When your writing is in a slump, you could ink your pen with the blood of Ezra Pound, and still not make a poem worth a ptarmigan shit.

I finish -- or rather, abandon -- the poem and begin the Alaska Journal. . .
 
 

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FINAL ENTRY: The morning after we climbed Mt. Cecil Rhode, joints and muscles screaming, Half-Ass Honey Bucket and I packed our gear, loaded the Flying Tiger and headed down the Seward highway to Homer, Alaska; a small fishing village on the Kachemak Bay of the Kenai Peninsula.

Kachemak Bay and the Grewingk Glacier of Homer, Alaska
(Photo Chris Arnold)

It’s fairly well known for being a quaint, rustic stop for backpackers. It has just enough bars to keep a traveler medicated, and few enough to keep the masses away. Homer does attract some tourist business, but it is late September now -- the tourists have scrammed -- the icestorm cometh...

We pulled into town, erected the tent, and headed directly to the Homer Spit and the Salty Dawg saloon.

I have been hearing about the Salty Dawg ever since I arrived in Alaska. It’s a famous tavern. Half-Ass wildly raves about it as if it were an endangered species requiring his protection, Honeybucket wears a Salty Dawg sweatshirt, and anybody I meet, who drinks and has been to Homer, tells me I must go there.

The Salty Dawg Saloon is located on the Homer Spit. The spit is a narrow finger of land that juts from the Homer land-mass, into the Kachemak Bay. This is fisherman turf. The water on either side of the spit serves as a port for the boats, and small, few-seater, sea planes. The spit itself is wide enough for a single two-way road and a small stretch of dingy beachline on either side. The buildings on the Homer Spit are mostly marine gear and supply posts, a few canneries, and one lone bar -- The Salty fucking Dawg.

The Homer Spit juts into the Kachemak Bay
 
 

The Salty Dawg is a fisherman’s hole. But not just any old fisherman. CRAB FISHERMAN. This will become relevant shortly.

Half-Ass, Honeybucket and I went inside. They only had a couple of drinks before they decided to return to the tent for some alone time; leaving me to a favorite pastime -- hanging out in an unknown bar, with a group of people, whose lifestyles or culture are completely unknown to me.

I love to win over a bar.

It is both a challenge (Will I fit in? Will they accept me and tell stories of the wild sea?) And a source of pride. It’s one of those things I was just born to do. Oh sure, I would have liked to have been born to be a sculptor, or film director, or a novelist, or a surgeon -- but I wasn’t. I was born to win over bars. And one should not complain about one’s God given gifts -- he should just exploit them.

And this room was the challenge of a lifetime. The Holy Grail of rooms-to-be-won-over. These were King Crab Fisherman of the Bering Strait.

The Bartender and unimpressed crabbers of the Salty Dog.
(The Fosters oil can in the foreground belongs to the author)
 
 

The king crab season is seven weeks long. A crabber can easily make 60,000 dollars in that time. However, it’s seven weeks of hell. They work 20-hour shifts, retrieving 450-pound crab cages, in up-to 90 MPH arctic winds and 25-foot swells. They are in constant danger of capsizings, men being washed overboard by mongrel waves, collisions with icebergs, and -- my particular favorite horror story -- getting their feet lashed in the rope coil as the 450 pound crab cage plummets to the bottom of the ocean dragging the poor bastard with it.

"Each winter a crabber faces about a 1% chance of not coming home.
That’s 75 times the fatality rate for firemen and worse odds than a prisoner
on death row. . ." Americancynic.com
 
 

So the fisherman work seven weeks out of the year and have over nine months to do whatever they want -- like, like, well like hanging out at the Salty Dawg, drinking to oblivion, and fucking with tourists.

If ever there were a "won-over room" to put on your "room-winning-over" resume, it was this one.

I took a place at the end of the bar and summoned the bartender. She was about forty-five years old, with a short, box-shaped figure, strawberry blond hair, and a shimmering, stunning, pale complexion. I ordered a Fosters Oil Can.

The bar was shaped like an "L." I took a seat on the short side, near the corner. All the crabbers sat along the longer side and I was facing them. There were about eight men, between forty and sixty years old. They had beards as long as the Corona bottles they were drinking, and were hunched over the bar talking in low voices. Every now and then one of them would burst a toothless guffaw.

There was no music coming out of the jukebox so I perused the titles: What band would impress, or at least not annoy, an ornery old bunch of alcoholic crab fisherman of the Bering Strait?

This was an important decision. A deal breaker actually. This was the first impression. And you know they’re paying attention. (Think of it the other way around: You’re in your small local bar with all your small local alcoholic friends and one stranger. Suddenly, the stranger goes up to the jukebox, which is currently silent, and selects some songs. When, say, Mariah Carey, comes screeching out of the speakers, are you not going to loathe him for ever and ever after? Of course you are.)

It was easy to eliminate the obvious. Michael Bolton? Cher, Wynton Marsalis, Of course not.

But then it got a little harder.

Elvis? No. Too cute in the beginning of his career, a pill popper in the end. No way are crabbers impressed by pill poppers. Boozing is a man’s why to medicate.

Zeppelin? No. Too hip.

Credence? Gimme a break.

Stones? Hmm, possible. . . Nah -- they’re Brits -- crab fisherman buy American.

Deep Purple? Ahhh. Deep Purple. That just might do the trick. Yeah, it's a classic too. Machine Head. Ahh yes. Ok, what songs? Well clearly "Smoke on the Water" is out. If ya can’t find a better song than "Smoke on the Water" off Machine Head, then you shouldn't be putting money in a jukebox in the first place.

I selected "Space Truckin’" and "Highway Star." A no-brainer.

Actually, I almost blew the whole deal. When that first "Space Truckin’" power chord kicked in, I nearly burst into an impulsive, reckless air guitar solo. But a voice inside -- I guess it was my special, God-given, "winning-the-room", inner voice -- told me that crab fisherman don’t air guitar.

So I sat and sipped and inconspicuously; watched, as the line of fisherman hunched over the bar, sat completely unaffected by the music. Not one of them lifted an ear, or tapped a finger. Not a damn single one of them took an extra breath, or were aroused in any way.

But then I noticed something. Could that be. . . ? Why yes. . . . The bartender was rocking out!

She was dancing behind the bar and making her drinks with zip and, uh-oh. . . Oh yes, yes, I saw it! That was most definitely a triple-bob-head-bang.

Of course, now the pressure was on. Any idiot knows you can't play more than two songs from one band in a jukebox; if you don’t want to be run out that is.

My target audience had changed though, as I had given up trying to impress the crab stabbers. I was now after a fish that was already on the hook -- The bartender. There are few creatures I understand better than the red-striped North American bartender. And she was already nibbling on the bait.

After Deep Purple, I set the hook with "Problem Child" (AC/DC) then reeled her in with Fairies Wear Boots (Sabbath).

Now, in most bars across America, if you win over the bartender, the remainder is frosting. But this was no ordinary bar. This is the Salty Dawg on the Homer Spit.

So I sat silently and watched and listened -- waiting patiently for a conversation that I could slowly ease in on….

3 PARTIAL CONVERSATIONS OVERHEARD AT THE SALTY DAWG

1) "They found him in a beaver pond looking up."

2) Crabber 1: "Where you been? Haven’t seen you in months so I know you were either dead or in jail."
Crabber 2: "I was in jail."

3) "Don’t take that idiot out with us on the next run -- I almost lost my hand because of him."
 
 

I finally eased into a conversation that was happening on the other side of the only corner of the bar. They were talking about W. Bush -- who was, at the time, in a real scrapper with Gore for the White House -- and how they hated him or something. I added something agreeable to their point of view and they nodded in acknowledgement.

Now, they didn't necessarily welcome my input, but they hadn't shut me out either. They regarded me exactly as I regard any stranger who inserts themselves into my bar conversations: with great suspicion.

I knew all I had to do was bide me time, listen much, speak seldom, and for God sakes don't say anything stupid!

I don’t really understand how it all went wrong.

Just as the room was warming up to me, thanks in no small part to the bartender, I asked if I could look at her schwag which was on the other side of the bar.

She said, surely. So I went all the way to the other side of the bar and peered the glass door of the merchandise cabinet, and scrutinized the hats, sweatshirts, t-shirts, and bumperstickers.

I chose the Bumper Sticker that said, "Homer: a quaint drinking village with a fishing problem," and was trying on a baseball cap when I heard a sort of grumbling behind me.

I turned around and saw that all the crab rakers were pointing and frowning and saying things that were difficult to understand because they were angry and also missing teeth.

The bartender translated.

"We have certain rules here -- If you break them you have to buy the house a round. One of those rules is, you can't wear a hat inside the bar."

With that, one of the crabbers reached up to an enormous brass bell that was hanging over the bar, grabbed the clapper, and slammed it. The clang filled the room.

As I’ve said before, the bars in Alaska almost always have a bell hanging over the bar. When a customer rings it, it usually means he is buying the house a round.

But this time it meant something different. This time it meant, "Hey gang, this idiot here from the lower 48 -- who thinks he can hang with the Homer locals -- wants to buy a round."

I could see in their eyes that this was serious business. I quickly did the math. Five dollars a beer (eating and drinking in Alaska is very expensive) times fifteen crab killing bastards equals 85 dollars. Fuck that! This was a low budget trip. Why would I want to spend the rest of my booze money on a bunch of ornery old pricks who think they're bad asses because they have a so-called dangerous job.

"Oooh, oooh, I'm a crab fisherman -- oooh, I might fall in the cold water, ooooh, I'm sooo badass!"

I'm not buying nobody nuthin'.

I walked around the corner of the bar and headed toward my stool. I pretended that I would oblige them. They followed me with their eyes and snarled. When I got back to the stool I told the bartender, who clearly didn't love me anymore, that I had to go to the car and get more money. But when I gathered my coat the crabbers became angry.

"You better come back" they shouted.

"Sure" I said as I rushed toward the door. Once there, I turned and hoisted my finger. "Fuck you all!" I shouted, hoping  that they were too drunk and lethargic to follow.

They turned around in their stools (the most exercise they’ve probably had since the last crab run) and rose as I quickly strode outside.

It was still daylight when I dashed up the spit back, and back to the mainland.

Dissapointed, shaken, and disgusted with my failure, I wandered around the towship of Homer like a hunchback trying not to look suspicous. I found a spot on the beach that overlooked the Kachemak bay, rolled up a joint, smoked it 3/4 down, and watched the psychedelic sunset paint the sky over the St. Augustine volcano.

Photo by Chris Arnold

When the sun went, I roamed the township in search of another Homer bar to win over. I was not leaving this town until I had.

I discovered a small, darkish tavern called Kharacters and stepped inside. It was largely filled with bartenders and other service-folk gearing up for the long, slow winter ahead. Kharacters was not necessarily as hard-core as a crabber bar, but the room was filled with veterans and bartenders and waitresses -- they were no slouches either.

I went to the jukebox again, which was already playing, and strummed through the CD flipper.  That's when I came across. . . Her.

That crooning, cardialgia-causing, coxcomb -- Jewel

And it all hit me at once. I remembered that Homer is known for something other than crabbers, glaciers, volcanoes and eagles. It is the childhood home of Jewel Kilcher -- my arch nemesis. It was here in Homer that she and her father first began playing gigs in the local bars. And now she's in jukeboxes all across America, smiling her beautiful smile, begging me to choose her over Johnny Cash and Patti Smith. I selected "Hands," found a stool at the square shaped bar, and slowly, but steadily, drank pints of Mooshead.

The room was really warming up to me. I was polite, tipped well, and had not yet said or done anything stupid.

Suddenly, the sharp clang of a bell rang out. The bartender set up fifteen tequilas around the square of the bar and called out, ‘Wit shots!"

I had never encountered a wit shot before: It all begins at one end of the bar and moves clockwise. The first person shares a wit (it could be a joke, an observation, or a limerick), downs the shot, and slams the jigger on the bar -- which signals the next person in line to do the same. It's like falling dominoes

Of course, winning the room depended on my wit shot.

When the girl sitting next to me slammed her glass down I shouted, "What is the definition of endless love?"

"What is the definition of endless love?" they responded.

"Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles playing tennis," I answered and drained the glass. . .

I sweated it out during that frozen moment, while everyone scrunched their brows and considered the joke's slightly obscure punchline. Seconds seemed like minutes, as nobody laughed or even smiled

But then came a chuckle,  then a hearty laugh, and bellows, followed then by the pats on the back and the roomshine of full acceptance.

"Take me to your wimmen!" I almost blurted.

It was then that "Hands" leaped through the speakers.

The room went quiet. As if, either, they wanted desperately to hear the song, or that they couldn't believe somebody had the gall to play that record -- Again.

Then somebody shouted, accenting each word like a drill sergeant,

"Respect.

The.

Jewel!"
 

Everybody laughed.

Then, in a mock show of "Respecting. . . the. . . Jewel," they joined hands and swayed as though the melody were coursing through them like a Merlot-and-Quaalude cocktail.

(A guy named Andy told me about The Anchorage Incident. After ignoring her Alaskan roots for years, he said, Jewel finally booked a concert in Anchorage. But ticket sales flopped and Jewel -- in a move that would make Elton John proud -- canceled the show.)

As it goes with bar stories, this is where it gets fuzzy. By midnight my brain was floating in a rickety barrel down the Tequila River toward raging Blackout Falls.

We started singing show tunes -- Oklahoma, Grease, Jesus Christ Superstar, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang -- and then all the guys in the bar stripped down to their underwear and danced a chorus line.

I sang "Maria" from West Side Story, but changed the words to "Tequila: I just met a girl named Tequila. And suddenly I heard, how beautiful a word can beeeee. Te-keel-ahhhh!!!"

They looked at me as though I were an alien.

In an act of desperation, I sang "Gee, Officer Krupke," and the room went wild again.

Somebody clanged the bell again and my barrel went over the falls.

the non-homo men of Kharacters perform a naked chorus line
 
 

The next day, hung over and stinking, we packed our gear and headed out of Homer. We had one stop to make before leaving. Honeybucket said that Jewel’s Aunt, Mossy Kilcher, still lived in Homer and she ran a co-op ranch where travelers can work for board or campsites. It was her father’s property and her father -- Jewel's grandfather (Yule Kilcher -- after whom Jewel was named) -- is something of a badass -- a real Muir/Krakauer/McCandless type..

In the early 40s, when things were getting ugly in Europe, he migrated to Alaska to find a place for his family to live. In the 40s Alaska was nearly uninhabited. He crossed seas and mountains and glaciers and arrived here, in Homer.

So I wanted to find Mossy and interview her for a story about her badass father, and her pussy-ass niece. The ranch is called Seaside Farms and we found it on the way out of Homer, and as luck would have it, Mossy Kilcher was home -- and though a little suspicious of my intentions (all the world distrusts the media -- especially Alaskans) I finally sweet-talked her into giving an interview.

Mossy Kilcher at Seaside Farms. (click on photo to read interview)

After the interview, H.A. and Honey Bucket picked some berries for jam (sometimes they are so disgustingly -- Alaskan) and we headed out of Homer, and back to Anchorage.

It was all over now, except the return.
 
 

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The bartender calls last call. I close my tab, and step outside. It is 2:15 a.m. There are two cabs waiting for the closing time rush. "Well," I think, "It’s now or never. I leave for San Diego in the morning. I have a good buzz on. I have over fifty dollars in my pocket and enough courage to do this."

Time to return to the Gentleman’s Club and resolve some unfinished business.

I approach the cabby -- how much do you charge to get to The Gentleman’s Club?" I ask.

"Five dollars," he says.

I climb into the back seat.

"The problem is," he adds, "They are closed now."

"Closed?? That makes no sense -- isn’t bar-closing-time busiest for brothels?"

"Probably," he answers, "but they hate drunks. Especially a rush of them. They run a clean operation over there."

The cabbie takes his hands off the steering wheel and turns his upper body toward me.
I’ll tell you something," he adds, "and I know from experience. The idea of a brothel is better than the actuality."

"Well thanks man," I respond. "A lot of cabbies would have just taken me down for a quick fare anyway."

"No problem," he says. "Take care."

"You too," I answer as I shut the door behind me. I tap the roof lightly with an open hand as a final thanks and wade slowy, dreamlike, toward the home-base house. I arrive, like a ghost, fumble the key at the front door for a moment, step quietly into the dark and silent house, step downstairs to my room in the basement, set my travel alarm clock for 6 a.m., and climb into bed.
 
 

"I'll take the dream I had last night
And put it in the freezer,
So someday long and far away
When I'm an old grey geezer,
I'll take it out and thaw it out,
This lovely dream I've frozen,
And boil it up and sit me down
And dip my old cold toes in."

"Frozen Dream" By Shel Silverstein
 
 
 
 

THE END