CARNIVAL TOWN
Ketchikan these days: the narrow winding streets, the hills and the hidden parks and the surrounding mountains views, all recall a time of joy and youthful pain and awe, a nearly devastating poignancy of when I first came to this southernmost city in Alaska. I remember waking early in the summer dawn drizzle when I was 18, hung-over and leaving the sleeping still boat to walk alone.
The night before I walked into the Polar Bar for the first time, thronged with familiar faces, bright and faded from drinking. I sat on laps, I had drinks bought for me, was surrounded, included, part of something old and sincere: the commercial fishing fleet in town for a closure, there to unwind and to drink. I was charmed by the attention. That night I was out until three a.m., walked back to my boat, thronged with friends and family and laughed and laughed and laughed. That first summer, fishing out of Ketchikan, is bathed forever in my memory in a sort of chiaroscuro of adolescent charmed novelty.
On that morning I ate blueberries and salmon berries and experienced a thrill and exhaustion and felt something I am well acquainted with now, but was largely a novelty them: a departure, a stripping away of the rational confines of daily living. Breathless with the joy of living I walked in the rain alone for a time, went back to the boat where we untied and ran out to the fishing grounds.
Now, at 25, I see tired urban expanses at the edge of town: run down, for sale, vacant, dirty. Regan Era apartment buildings tower like life sized monopoly hotels in how they seem to have been haphazardly placed. The scale is all-wrong, it seems. Their faded colors and ashen streaked exteriors recall slums of another country. Kids play and ride bikes in parking lots while 20 stories of identical windows look on.
Nearly every day of the week, mammoth vessels, cruise ships of titanic proportions dock and regurgitate their human cargo for hours of strolling, shopping, picture taking, touring in the cheery downtown. The city center of Ketchikan is carefully roped, partitioned to corral herds of cruise tourists. The tide of bodies turns after a time and they stream back to their white oblong births where they sail away to Northern destinations.
I jogged into town. The streets lined with fine jewelry and fur stores, a stones throw away from Chinese restaurants whose sun bleached window-side menus have gathered dust, dive bars, sleepy hotels. Conspicuous consumption neighboring weathered mediocrity. No middle ground.
Down town, normally thronged and bustling with tourists looks sad and remote with the ships gone and the streets deserted. Fishermen roam, gather, disperse in the 8 p.m. Alaska dusky summer gloom.
My feeling of homesickness and isolation furthers. This town is not as I remember.
I ran back to the boat, somewhat limpingly, the surrounding beauty of the mountains the only rebuke in my mind to the garish tired downtown scene.
Remember: the objective of fish camp is to catch fish.
