Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
the phone on the dock at Akutan, a pair of uptown jeans for the Elbow Room in Dutch
Harbor, Extra strength Tylenol, and a plane ticket home. “If it looks like something you'd
wear on a sailboat, forget it.” It is the most evocative description, in verse or in prose, that
I have ever heard on the subject of the commercial fishing life, and it's good poetry, too.
Most of the poems that follow are also concerned with the art of commercial fishing, and
with the fishermen who are lost and almost lost practicing it, and they are read to a know-
ing and very appreciative audience.
Bar owner Andy Lundquist isn't stopping with poetry, either. On Saturday there will be
arm-wrestling (with a professional arm-wrestling table) and on Sunday there will be a
frog-jumping contest. “Yeah,” says Andy, “I've got a hundred of them in the back room.
I've even got a permit from the Fish and Game. These are legal frogs.”
Next day we drive up to Fort Ambercrombie State Historical Park, where, if you can
tear yourself away from the view of Monashka Bay and Narrow Strait and Spruce Cape
and whale spume, you can take the walking tour. Fort Abercrombie was constructed in the
early '30s in response to American concern over Japanese and Russian incursions into the
Far East. The surviving bunker houses the Kodiak Military History Museum, where you
can tap out Morse code on real telegraph keys, try on Navy pea jackets and Army Air
Corps bomber jackets, and read eyewitness accounts by they-were-there soldiers. I espe-
cially liked the GI sewing kit with thread in three different shades of khaki.
Lunch, king crab at Dick and Kandi's, of course, and then we drive south. The road is
one, long heart-stopping view of islands and inlets and beaches and creeks and meadows
and snow-capped mountains around every hairpin turn, ending in Chiniak, a tiny bedroom
community with a miniature elementary school, a minuscule post office, and Road's End,
a full-service roadhouse where we sit down to Pat McCloskey's homemade strawberry
rhubarb pie.
Saturday dawns windy and rainy but “This is what we live with,” a cheerful bystander
tells us, and the Shrimp Parade begins exactly on time. Sharyn and I station ourselves at
the corner of Shelikof Street and Marine Way, next to a little kid in yellow oilskins and a
green sou'wester. The United States Coast Guard color guard marches by in dress
raingear. The junior high marching band is coaxed into a very damp “Louie, Louie” by a
determined drum majorette. A huge dory powered by a Viking sail is manned by the Sons
