My First Summer In Alaska (1998)

July 29, 2014 

We are spending our third summer of retirement at our cabin, which is located right across the inlet from Anchorage.  As I add to my stories I will also give you some tidbits about where I am and what is currently going on in my life.  I am going to look at this as if I were writing letters, but without getting the “writer’s cramp” I always used to get when I tried to write letters the old fashioned way.  If I can figure it out, I will also try to insert some photos.  Since I’m new at this, it may take me awhile to get the hang of all this.

One of my main complaints about this summer is that it has been more cloudy and wet than usual.  I like my warm sunshine, and have not had enough of it this year.  To add to my complaint, I have not yet seen any bears here at the cabin this year.  However, I have seen other wildlife that I’ve not seen here before.  We have a resident moose that likes to travel through our yard and across the airstrip, snacking on all the greenery along the way.  We’ve now seen her quite a few times, where we only saw evidence of moose here before. 

We’ve also had a couple of huge cranes out in our airstrip honking up a storm, apparently because their baby had wandered off too far.  It was so young it wasn’t even able to fly yet (also too small to show up in any pictures…), so they were trying to scare us away from the baby and herd the baby back to wherever they were nesting.  They were flying over us and flapping their wings and having a fit!  It was quite a site.  We finally left for fear they would actually attack us, even though we enjoyed watching them and the baby.  The parents were flapping around so much we couldn’t get both of them in the picture very well.  

We saw a baby coyote out on the airstrip a couple of days ago, but did not get a picture.  Later, I heard them all howling quite a bit though.  I don’t think it was a wolf because Jim said it was too small…  Although I do think I saw a wolf out here a long time ago.  Still, no bears yet this year.

Anyway, back to catching up on what I did, once I moved to Alaska.  My last blog explained what made me decide to move to Alaska, and described out trip.  I do have photos of the trip, but will have to eventually scan them into my blogs because that was before smart phones and digital cameras.  I only have actual photos.  I do have a hand held scanner and have had good intentions of scanning all my photos into my computer and organizing them…lol… That’s been on my To-Do list for years now…  I still have to figure out how to use the scanner…

Once we made it to Ninilchik, we took a quick look at our cash and realized that we were going to have to do some kind of work for the summer.  No one could believe we made it all the way in that motorhome, pulling that mile-high trailer behind us.  I gave Pam the disk that was left from that flat tire we had in the middle of Canada, and she was going to paint something on it for me, but we never got around to actually doing that.  Pam is really a good artist.  We spent a lot more money than we anticipated on the trip, and we still needed to buy cars (we sold our cars before we left California), and we still needed to have enough to get an apartment when we moved to Anchorage in the fall.  I planned on selling the motorhome, but that was not going to be enough.  We started looking for jobs and old cheap clunkers. 

For those of you that are not familiar with Alaska, Ninilchik is a tiny village down on the Kenai Peninsula, situated between Kenai and Homer.  It has a population of about 200 or 300 people that are permanent residents, and it increases tenfold over the summer due to tourism and fishing.  However, unless you work in the tourist or fishing business, there are no real jobs there….  They put fishing boats into the water with tractors, and you can catch some huge halibut or salmon down there.  It’s wonderful, but you may have a hard time finding a real job.  Gina got a job as a bartender at the Inlet View, and I got a job in an RV Park in Soldotna, and we were back in the business of trying to save our money again.  

Our friend, Pam, and her husband, Pete, had a boat and Pete was/is a fishing fanatic.  We got to go fishing a few times that summer.  My biggest fish was about a 70 lb. halibut.  Boy, was I proud!  Still am – because I haven’t caught one bigger than that yet.  But I caught the fishing fever myself after that!   

It was a great summer, but by that fall I was ready to head to town (Anchorage) and find a real job.

Gina managed to buy an old Saab, in which I managed to hit my first (and only, thank goodness) moose with!  I hadn’t even been in Alaska for a summer, and hit a moose!  I was actually driving to work from Ninilchik to Soldotna.  As I was driving down the road I saw a horse running down the road.  I was wondering what in the world a horse was doing running down the middle of the road.  I had just passed a place that actually did have a few horses that they rented out for rides, so I just naturally thought it was a horse that had gotten out of its pen.  I hit the brakes and swerved a little to try to miss it, but the tail end of my car fishtailed a little and knocked the hooves right out from under that poor horse!  I saw that it had fallen down on the road (from my rear view mirror), so I pulled over as quickly as I could and jumped out of the car – still thinking that I had hit a horse.  But by the time I got out of the car I saw that it got back up and was taking off running.  By then I wasn’t sure what it was!  It looked kind of like a horse, but it also looked a little weird.  I didn’t think it could be a moose because I didn’t think moose could run as fast as that thing was running.  All the moose I had ever seen were just standing by the side of the road or out in the field, and they certainly weren’t running!  When I got home from work that evening and told everyone what had happened they laughed at me and told me that it was surely a moose, and that moose could run really fast when they wanted to!  

I finally found an old Bronco 4-wheel drive that I thought would be a good vehicle for my first winter in Alaska, so I sold the motorhome and bought it right before we moved to Anchorage.  By then the Saab seemed to be blowing oil everywhere, and the Bronco had a real bad knock in the engine, so we were both a little worried about our transportation, but we figured that if we were lucky we would get through until we could get enough money together to get something better.  The main thing we were worried about at that time was just finding jobs and finding a place to live.  It took me 3 weeks to find a job, so I was really getting worried.  A “headhunter” told me that I shouldn’t have my age on my resume because that may be why I wasn’t getting hired.  That was the first time it ever occurred to me that my age might be considered a negative, just when I finally had lots of experience!  Lol…  

I did get a job with a small “boutique” law firm in Anchorage that specialized in estate planning for high dollar clients.  My boss’s client list looked like the “Who’s Who” of Alaska.  I thought it would be good to get into something other than litigation.  I had been feeling pretty burned out in California, and thought that estate planning would be a lot less stressful, even though I initially thought it would be boring.  In reality, I actually enjoyed it and did not find it to be boring at all.  I know – call me crazy…  The eyes of most people I know glaze over whenever I talk about it, but I thought it was great stuff!  

Anyway, jobs were procured, an apartment was found, and with just a few bumps along the way (including me rolling the Bronco and being without a car again), we were settling in to spend our first winter in Alaska.  Of course, it would be one of the coldest winters that Anchorage had seen for a decade… but that’s another story…