Alaska
I carried a Cajon to Alaska a few years ago. It was part of my carry-on baggage. If you don’t know, a Cajon is a rectangular box, with a hole on one side and a snare. It’s a percussion instrument that you can sit on and play with your hands. It made a handy chair, and conversation starter everywhere I went in the airports between Nashville and Juneau but was slightly cumbersome nonetheless. I arrived late on Wednesday. Jordan picked me up at the airport and we headed straight to a 4-hour gig so I could beat my hands into numbness and bruises. Jordan gave me beer and the crowd gave us whiskey so the next morning I had a headache and bruised hands.
Our first stop on the morning after was a gas station to get a frozen cappuccino, which magically cured the headache just as promised. We headed to some old boy scout trail through a forest that looked like something out of Lord Of The Rings. Mossy ground underneath towering trees that looked to be as old as Alaska itself. Everything slightly damp and cool. We walked through to one of the hundreds of beaches overlooking waterways that eventually become the Gulf of Alaska. Everywhere I looked was grey skies, white hills, green earth, and water a shade of blue so dark it’s almost black.
Few places I’ve been have left such a resounding mark on me. Langebaan Bay in South Africa is a place I remember as a dessert next to the ocean. Knysna on the east coast of South Africa is a crazy mix of craggy cliffs, pebble beaches, boulders, and giant trees. Idaho, sunny, cold, clear, and flat. My first morning in Alaska was like being planted on some other earth, untainted and glorious.
Our national bird poking around the garbage heaps with all the dignity of a drunken pigeon.
Right away I noticed the regal bald eagle, revered from my childhood, literally all over the place. Sure they were floating gracefully over the water. Sure they were propped like magnificent royalty in the branches of trees. They were also pecking at trash in the gas station parking lot, fighting off ravens for bits of chicken nuggets and barf. Our national bird poking around the garbage heaps with all the dignity of a drunken pigeon.
We drove over to a friend's house to drop off luggage and eat some lunch. The previous day’s travel and gigging catching up with me, I fell asleep on a couch amidst a party in full swing, with hot dogs, burgers, purple-drank, and cornhole. Even Alaskans play cornhole. That night we got down to the business of The Alaska Folk Fest, show hopping from venue to venue.
The main drag in Juneau is a small street with a couple of bars, hotels, and an assortment of shops selling touristy sundries, and other necessities. During folk-fest, it’s packed with festival folks dressed too warm for the weather, girls standing around in sundresses and tank tops next to guys wearing Carhartt and Patagonia jackets. The air, like any other festival, filled with a mix of body sweat, cigarette and weed smoke, and the smell of beer. Here and there, groups of musicians playing in spur-of-the-moment rounds, the obligatory drunk guys weaving their lonely way through the masses wishing they’d paced themselves a little better. In the mild mayhem of the folk-fest crowd, it’s easy to forget that two streets away is desolation, just another quiet, cold, dark Alaskan night.
We made our way through the crowds jacketed for warmth, at each new venue the heat of bodies made us shed the layers and order iced water. Some local guy we’d dubbed, “The Folk Lion” seemed to be everywhere at once, always shaggy, always dancing, difficult to get a good look at because he was always on the move. It got so I looked for him everywhere we went. “There he is! The Folk Lion!” The ladies danced with him, understanding that he was harmless. He only wanted to dance, and what a dance it was! Bobbing and juking, twisting and reeling, hair and garments outspread, like a ghost from some cheesy B-movie.
As 1 AM rolled in, we made our way to Pel’meni for perogies. Standing in line for about 20 minutes to order, I started to understand that Pel’meni perogies are an unspoken folk-fest tradition. Meat or potato, topped with butter, cilantro, and curry powder. These Russian dumplings cost $7.00 per serving and are worth the trip to Alaska. We returned on each of the following nights, 7 bucks outstretched, heads bowed, whispering, “Meat please, with all the toppings. Thank you, sir.”
Day two saw me back on the Cajon, shooting a video with Jordan. We rehearsed that morning, prepping for the video shoot and for Jordan’s performance later that night at the Centennial Hall. Our practice space was the friend’s house, with balcony doors overlooking a hillside, mountains, and water in the distance. We drank coffees and ran through songs, Jordan getting into the details of song structures and dynamics. We talked through the sets and ran them enough that we felt easy with them.
The shoot went without hitch. The video lives somewhere on the internet. Its primary function to remind me that I’m a lanky guy who looks a little silly playing a Cajon. We, songwriters, make videos because we think it’s something we are supposed to do. Sometimes we look at them later and wonder why we did them. In the grander scheme, it was an experience I shared with a friend and that’s about as good as it gets.
Jordan’s folk-fest set likewise went hitch-free at 9:45 PM. I met him backstage and snapped iPhone pics and slo-mo videos. I joined him for one song on stage as an official Cajonist. Later one of his friends would tell me my playing looked a lot more complex than she’d given it credit for on our first night in Alaska. We all walked over to an adjacent hall featuring punk bands and were happy to spot the Folk Lion again.
Saturday we hiked up to, onto, and underneath a glacier. I had imagined an easy trail and was poorly dressed for the occasion in skinny jeans. Instead of a neatly cut trail, we followed sparsely spaced markers, heading in the general direction of the glacier. I was struck again by the magnificence of the landscape. Everything you look at in Alaska seems bigger and more pristine than elsewhere. In every direction, there’s another mountain and another body of water. Weaving through scraggly, mountain brush growing directly out of rocks, the vastness of the place is inescapable.
Arriving at the glacier base, after an hour or so of walking, Jordan gave me a pep-talk before we entered a glacial cave. “Tim, you have to be ok with the fact that you could die in here. Things can happen. Everything will probably be fine but before you head in here you need to make peace with the idea that it could all be over in a second.”
The “cave” is a tunnel of ice on a bedrock of stone. Water from melting glacial ice is flowing all around you making a constant rushing sound in your ears. The ice itself looks blue from underneath and glaring deep into it you see millions of bubbles and specks of debris picked up on its journey down the mountain. The thought that the whole thing could indeed collapse with you underneath it is a million miles away. You simply stand there mesmerized, encased in an icy, blue envelope. Eventually climbing back out of the cave, we sat on a rock and ate lunch, before heading back down the mountain to the car.
I’ve told people about hiking the glacier. I’ve shown them pictures. I always feel a bit let down when I do because I can’t describe it adequately. It’s one of those things that you have to experience. There’s no way to capture the air and the views and the rocks and the ice in a way that people understand. They don’t have the reference points. There are no markers in their memories to get them there.
My performance at folk-fest was scheduled for the final day of the festival, Sunday at 12:15 PM. Last day. Second act on stage. Ok, I can admit it, I’m a nobody and I got a crappy spot in the lineup. Still… I played a festival…in Alaska. I played a festival in New York once which ended up bearing no resemblance to a festival whatsoever. That one was in a basement room of some bar and the act before me was using a boombox to play her backing tracks. The act who followed me was alright and I got them a gig in Nashville a few months later but the band had broken up in the interim and they never told me. The Alaska Folk Fest may not win me much acclaim but it was a real music festival at least.
Show done, we retired to Phil’s house for brunch. Phil’s a unique guy, who likes to build things, including guitars. He showed us one he was working on and then showed us a fishing rod he’d reconfigured the eyes on so that it worked better for trawling. He offered to take us out on his boat and we merrily tagged along. He told us about salmon fishing and Alaskan history. It was cold and foggy and he recounted a story about when he decided to test the waters by his dock to see how long he could last if he ever fell in. “Not long” is the short answer.
Alaska breeds Phils. You have to be a little bit handy and ingenious to live there. It’s beautiful, rugged, and mostly untamed. Like the festival streets, the Alaskan cities are alive with activity, and they represent only a tiny microcosm that is somewhat at odds with the wildness and desolation of the rest of it. There’s a reason Alaska seems so untouched. The harshness of the environment keeps the riff-raff at bay. Only the bold-hearted stick it out there. The beauty of it comes with a price. Besides, it’s cold. This southern boy was cold there, all the time, in the middle of April. I highly recommend that you visit the cool parts of Alaska. Take a coat. If you like bald eagles maybe you could live there and fight them for scraps of food in the parking lot of the gas station.
