When Larry and I arrived in Anchorage, we immediately began looking for fishing boats. He had been talking about it for three weeks. Something like, "Just think, in a few thousand miles, we'll be sitting by the water painting those old wooden boats for days." I was excited that he was excited. So much so, in fact, when we arrived in Anchorage at 10pm with the sun still high in the sky, we started our search for a painting before finding a place to sleep. You've probably already figured it out, but we soon discovered there are no wooden boats to be found in Anchorage. Evidently, Larry's major motivation for driving all the way to Alaska was based on an honest assumption...we didn't do our homework.
The next day, after painting at a fly fishing tournament, we headed south to Homer. We had been assured we'd find our old boats there. It was just a five hour drive...a drop in the bucket at this point. We arrived at about 7pm, got a camping spot on the spit, and found the mother lode. Considered to be the halibut fishing capital of the world, there were enough boats on the spit to hold us over for a month. Big boats, bigger boats, boats for hauling other boats, a bunch of those "Deadliest Catch" boats, and so on. We painted the harbor while the sun crept closer to the horizon. We called it quits after we lost the best light, loaded up in the van and started looking for dinner. Of course, we'd forgotten the Alaskan sun sets around midnight in late June. We had a drink at the Salty Dawg, ate chicken wings at some dive that never closed while the sun was up, and called it a night around 2am with plenty of light still in the sky. I couldn't sleep and wandered down to the beach to discover at least twenty bald eagles fighting over fish at the water's edge...it was one of the most surreal moments of the trip.
We were closer to Tokyo than we were home, so we expected to have some interesting interactions with the locals. While painting some grounded boats the next morning, we ran into some real characters. A skinny man named Jim greeted us pretty early on and gave us a thorough history of each wooden vessel. Some were being used as homes now...not houses so much as lean-to fort-type structures held together with buoys and crab traps. Several other squatters appeared randomly from the mess of tangled wood and nets...some were friendly, but most kept to themselves. And then, about five paintings into the day, he appeared...Yak.
I didn't learn his name right off the bat. He greeted us at a distance from his bike. He said something like, "Hey! Wow! Woah, you guys are still here. I can't believe it." Passersby often say things to us, but rarely with such flare and enthusiasm. I turned to watch him roll up on Larry and I. Larry was within earshot, but not close enough to participate in the interaction that followed. "You want some salmon?" he screamed at me. "Salmon?" I said. "Yeah! I got all kinds of salmon here." I studied him and the bike. I was curious. I turned him down as kindly as I could, but he insisted. Before I could change his mind, he had a bungee-corded bag off of his bike and open in front of me. He reached in and pulled out a large salmon fillet, frozen in plastic. "I come down here everyday to get my salmon for the month," he said. I was very curious now. "For the month?" I asked. "Yep. I ride down here everyday on yellow thunder and get six salmon fillets." Yellow Thunder was the name he'd given to his bicycle. It was a blue bicycle. "I'm Yak," he said with his shirt pulled up over his head, revealing a ten inch belt buckle with "Yak" inscribed on it. I shook his hand, thanked him for the salmon, and learned about his daily routine through way too much casual conversation...then it got weird. "You want to go smoke this over there in that boat?" he asked while holding what I assumed was a marijuana cigarette. I turned him down, again, as gracefully as possible. I then asked him if he was referring to Jim's boat, what I assumed was the home of the "historian" we'd talked to earlier. Yak perked up straight in a violent jerk and changed his demeanor from carefree to careful. "We don't use real names here," he said like a ghost. There was an awkward silence. Then he screamed with a smile, "I call him Slim!" I was relieved for a moment. "We don't use real names," he said again while hopping aboard his trusty Yellow Thunder. He looked off into the distance like a stoic statue, then back to me to bid farewell. "I love it here," he said. "Everyday I come and get my salmon for the month. I just ride Yellow Thunder and breathe the fresh air and talk to people like you. I used to live in the desert. I lived in Arizona. I used to kill people. But I don't talk about that anymore."
Yak pedaled off, silhouetted by snow covered peaks. Larry and I left the frozen salmon to thaw in the boat graveyard. The end of the road is a strange place. But like Jim said, "People are strange when you're a stranger."
