Zipper Blues
I have the Smashing Pumpkins, "1979" on repeat today. Some days, all you need is one song.
In 1979, I was living in Alaska. One day, with my friends Bill and Mike, we decided to take a skiff and head up Nakwasina River. Took about an hour or so to get there, and then Bill--who had lived in Alaska the longest, and so was the one we trusted to know what he was doing--ran the boat a mile or two up the river.
The salmon were spawning, and there was that scent everywhere of dead fish. I don't know why we didn't see any bears--probably three teenage boys make enough noise to scare off every bear for a hundred miles.
We tied the boat, got the rifle out, and started hiking up the river. It was a beautiful Alaska day, cloudy sky but no rain, exactly the right temperature to be outside.
Mike had never shot a rifle before, so we got a dead salmon out of the river, stuck it on a log fifty feet away, and handed him the .30-.06. "Hold tight," we said. "It's gonna kick."
Mike still has a scar from where the scope cut him above the eye. When somebody tells you to hold tight, you've got to hold tight.
I fell in the river while crossing it--feet just swept right out from under me--and yet somehow avoided hypothermia.
A great afternoon.
And when we got back to the boat, the tide had gone out, and we were a couple miles up a dry river.
These things aren't problems when you're young and stupid and male. Just like, that same winter, when we managed to get my Jeep pickup stuck in the snow three times in a single afternoon--even Jeeps can't take six-foot snow drifts--we had time and energy to spare. We went into the forest, got some saplings, put them under the boat, started pushing. Took a couple hours, which gave us plenty of time to hassle Bill, but our only real worry was that we'd get back to town too late for the showing of Saturday Night Fever, which had finally, finally come to our town.
At last, we hit deep water. Fell back exhausted.
And when the current took the boat away, because we had been too tired to tie it down, it was Bill's problem to swim after it.
1979.
There's no moral at all to this story, no real point. It's not even a story, really, more like an anecdote.
It was just a very happy day. And those deserve remembering.
In 1979, I was living in Alaska. One day, with my friends Bill and Mike, we decided to take a skiff and head up Nakwasina River. Took about an hour or so to get there, and then Bill--who had lived in Alaska the longest, and so was the one we trusted to know what he was doing--ran the boat a mile or two up the river.
The salmon were spawning, and there was that scent everywhere of dead fish. I don't know why we didn't see any bears--probably three teenage boys make enough noise to scare off every bear for a hundred miles.
We tied the boat, got the rifle out, and started hiking up the river. It was a beautiful Alaska day, cloudy sky but no rain, exactly the right temperature to be outside.
Mike had never shot a rifle before, so we got a dead salmon out of the river, stuck it on a log fifty feet away, and handed him the .30-.06. "Hold tight," we said. "It's gonna kick."
Mike still has a scar from where the scope cut him above the eye. When somebody tells you to hold tight, you've got to hold tight.
I fell in the river while crossing it--feet just swept right out from under me--and yet somehow avoided hypothermia.
A great afternoon.
And when we got back to the boat, the tide had gone out, and we were a couple miles up a dry river.
These things aren't problems when you're young and stupid and male. Just like, that same winter, when we managed to get my Jeep pickup stuck in the snow three times in a single afternoon--even Jeeps can't take six-foot snow drifts--we had time and energy to spare. We went into the forest, got some saplings, put them under the boat, started pushing. Took a couple hours, which gave us plenty of time to hassle Bill, but our only real worry was that we'd get back to town too late for the showing of Saturday Night Fever, which had finally, finally come to our town.
At last, we hit deep water. Fell back exhausted.
And when the current took the boat away, because we had been too tired to tie it down, it was Bill's problem to swim after it.
1979.
There's no moral at all to this story, no real point. It's not even a story, really, more like an anecdote.
It was just a very happy day. And those deserve remembering.
posted by e. Readicker-Henderson at 11:42 AM
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