I start every morning by splashing cold water on my face. I’ll admit I’m too impatient to wait for hot water, but I would do it anyway. By this simple morning ablution, I’m swept back to kneel beside a snow melt stream high in the Canadian Rockies. Clear water gurgles over rounded granite. A raven rasps. A Canada Jay complains. Spruce resin and pungent moss tickle my nose. A feast for the senses.
It’s 1954, and my family has embarked on a journey up the Alcan Highway, a three-week odyssey from Louisiana to Valdez, Alaska. Though I couldn’t appreciate it then, this move would profoundly shape my life. My brother and I, aged five and four when the adventure begins, would reach adolescence before retracing our path back down the Alcan. Over those seven years, we would help our dad build a log church without power tools, pick berries for our larder, dipnet salmon and hooligan, and bottom fish for snapper. Between close encounters with bears and moose, we cured a bear-skin rug for our bedroom and learned to deal with forty-foot snowfalls, frigid dark winters, and the endless daylight of summer.
On my fifth birthday, I received (and lost) my first pocketknife and, by the following summer, was hunting snowshoe hare and ptarmigan with a .22 rifle. Dad left to begin proving up our Kenai Peninsula homestead while we stayed in Valdez, where Mom worked. Being boys, we took advantage of our relative freedom to join a gang over a wild summer of cuts, bruises, and even imprisonment. When I finally had to have my scalp sewn up, Mom caught on and shut down the street gangs of Valdez.
Our move to the Stariski Creek homestead the next spring was marked by long days of clearing land, hauling water, cutting and splitting wood, gardening, hunting spruce grouse, and catching trout and salmon from the nearby creek. We helped friends gillnet salmon from the beach at Ninilchik until Dad bought a 19-foot open dory, after which we boys regularly spent three days and two nights drift netting salmon with him on Cook Inlet. We fought mid-winter nighttime housefires and helped Dad cut lumber at our sawmill to expand the one-room cabin. Over seven years, we boys never attended the same school two years in a row. Though we only once ran out of money and food at the same time, that memory of going hungry was never far below the surface.
So, why do I still splash cold water on my face for the sake of rousing memories, which, in retrospect, sound painfully challenging? I suppose for the same reason that Mom, decades later, would call these The Wonder Years. Despite all the hard work, uncertainty, and deprivation, we did it together. Best friends and partners, we were family. And perhaps that’s the best gift any of us can give or receive.
Many of these stories are recounted in my memoir, scheduled for release in July 2024. If you would like to be notified of further blogs and of the book’s status, please sign up here.
