Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
been in in my life that doesn't have an airstrip—if you fly in, you fly in on floats. Pretty
much everything in Pelican is on pilings, homes, school, library, two bars and one church,
held up just out of reach of the 13-foot tides, all of them connected by a boardwalk. You
can walk the length of the town in ten minutes, if Rosie doesn't drag you into her bar, talk
you into pinning a dollar bill to the ceiling and pants you.
Rosie is the proprietor of Rosie's, a local watering hole. The stories about her are le-
gion, including the one about a certain gubernatorial candidate, but, well, no, this is a fam-
ily magazine, and besides, “Nothing you do here follows you home,” says Curtis Ed-
wards, a guitar picker from Juneau. “That is the rule of Pelican,” his wife, Sheela
McLean, agrees. Sort of an Alaskan Bangkok, that's Pelican, I guess.
“Pelican,” Kathie says, “is one of the old rubber boot working class communities.”
Fishing is Pelican's major industry, salmon, halibut, and black cod. I'm here because John
and Jan Straley, who live 35 minutes south of Pelican by floatplane said incredulously last
spring, “What? You've never heard of the Boardwalk Boogie?” and made immediate
plans to correct this deficiency.
The Boardwalk Boogie “sort of started around this totem pole,” Kathie says, pointing to
the pole standing in front of Pelican's city hall. “Five years ago a carver from Klawock
came and with the kids in the school built a unity pole. We had some Native dancing
groups come in for the pole raising. By the time of the pole raising we had a couple of
bands, and by the second year it was the Boardwalk Boogie.”
A button that costs $35 gets you into all the events. The $35 provides transportation,
lodging and free beer for the musicians. “This boogie is so totally Pelican,” Kathie says.
“One big jam.”
The music starts Thursday night in the Brown Bar (the only bar other than Rosie's,
about fifty feet down the boardwalk) with Juneau band Dag Nabbit playing what Curtis
calls punk funk. Everybody who isn't playing is dancing, and everyone else who isn't
dancing is next door at Rosie's jamming in a pickup band, unless they're taking turns sit-
ting in with Dag Nabbit (banjo, mandolin, harmonica, hey, everybody's welcome). I
thought the pilings were going to melt out from beneath the Brown Bar, and it goes on un-
til 3:30am. “It started to get ugly, people started to fall down,” Jay Caputo, Dag Nabbit
lead guitar, says the next day, “so we packed it in.”
