Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
— 52 —
Goodbye, So Long and Thanks for All the King Crab
IN OCTOBER 2003 I
took
Alaska Magazine
editor Andy Hall to lunch and gave him a year's
notice.
He took it well. He made me pay for lunch.
So this is my last column.
Five years ago I got a call from senior editor Jill Shepherd, asking me if I wanted to
travel around Alaska and write about it. A long time later Andy told me that no one thought
I would say yes.
Little did they know. I would have done it for free.
“We want a lot of Dana in it,” I was told, so I wrote in the first person and never missed
an opportunity for the reader to have fun at my expense. I have extraordinary memories.
The hike over the Chilkoot Trail was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and it's going to stay
that way. I'm still wondering what happened to Madison, the very pregnant frog I met on
the Hurricane Turn flagstop train. I can still sing all the lyrics to Belly Meat's signature
song, heard during the Boardwalk Boogie in Pelican. I never again need to see grizzly
bears as up close and personal as I did with Gary Porter and Bald Mountain Air. My nos-
trils are still thawing out from riding snow machines with Carl Dixon at Winterlake Lodge.
The column I'm most proud of is “Let Freedom Ring,” about a family reunion in Sel-
dovia, published one year after 9/11. Freedom truly is found in the little things, like being
volunteered to make Auntie Dana's famous spaghetti for thirty-six people.
The column I'm most grateful to have been allowed to write was the column about my
time on board the Alex Haley. I don't think just anybody gets to waltz on board a United
States Coast Guard cutter for a two-week stay, and I was supposed to be writing about stuff
you could do, too. I owe Andy for that one.
