Looking for Alaska (74 page)

Luke after a fantastic trip fishing for silver salmon.
P
HOTO BY
P
ETER
J
ENKINS

In those boxes there were pictures and video and voice interviews on minidisk about everything that had captured us in Alaska. Tina and the totems in Hydaburg; my first king salmon; Eric and Dean of Deering; Jeff King's retired lead dog Kitty; Cordovan's Per, Andy, and Neva; Harvester Island; Julianne and Rita standing beside the snow machines on the way into Eric Jayne's in the Brooks Range. There was Oliver Leavitt and crew on the edge of the land-fast ice, the blue-blooded woman from Unalakleet; Jerry and his moose; Luke holding up one of the huge silver salmon he'd caught; Jed sitting on top of Mount Marathan; and so much more. There were boxes of books, like
Our Boots: An Inuit Woman's Art, The Wolves of Mt. McKinley,
Bibles, and on and on, mostly bought at my favorite used-book store, Title Wave, in Anchorage. Once Aaron and I got everything crammed in, he put his collection of bald eagle posters on top of it all.

Rebekah and me.
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HOTO BY
E
LEANOR
S
ARREN

Rita and Julianne got out their charm bracelets to wear on the plane ride home. Added to them since we'd been here in the last year and a half was a bear with a salmon in its mouth, a sea otter, a puffin, a swimming salmon, and the supreme orca.

Down in the walk-in freezers at Captain Jack's, where Aaron and Luke had worked their first summer here, we had four huge boxes filled with vacuum-packed silver salmon, king salmon, red salmon, halibut, and lingcod. Everyone had caught some of it on our outrageously good family ocean-fishing trips on
The Servant
right outside of Seward. We would have to buy a new freezer when we got back to our farm, a place I loved and yet had not missed as much as I would have thought.

We were back in Tennessee in just a few hours, really. It was as if we'd only been gone the weekend. Or had we been gone a lifetime? It had seemed so difficult to leave, and yet it was so easy to come back home. Part of that was because when you've lived in Alaska, living in other places seems easier, less challenging, less threatening. The first thing I remember thinking was that I did not have to look up so often, at mountains and glaciers, or stare out at the endless ocean and tundra. Alaska had enlarged each of us. Whenever I get in long lines or jammed traffic, I think of Alaska. When I feel that I cannot overcome, I think of her people. No one is ever the same after coming back from Alaska.

Captain Tim Fleming, me, Rita, Julianne, Brooke, Jody, Trey, Cayla, Aaron, Rebekah, Luke and Trey's sister Dora and mother Janice on Fox Island on Brooke and Trey's wedding day.

Epilogue
Jump Out of That Plane

Milling around in the hallway of the Franklin Road Academy gymnasium were just over seventy high school students in caps and gowns. Some had been going to school together here since kindergarten. Soon, Jed and his classmates from the class of 2001 would march, one by one, through double metal doors to take their seats for graduation.

After their senior prom just a few weeks ago, about half of these humans had spent the night at our farm. Jed, Luke, and Jed's friends Kyle, who is going to NYU, and Rob, who is going to the University of Tennessee, had come out that morning and gathered enough dead trees, cut up with my chain saw, to make a pile of wood as big as an Alaskan single-room log cabin. When Jed, Kyle, and Rob lit the woodpile that night, the flames from the sun-dried trees seemed to reach the moon.

The mercury lights glared from above and reminded me of the brilliance of a glacier's reflected light. Alaska was never far away from me. Since I'd been back, I'd noticed that there was a calmer center in me; I could be in tight, milling crowds like this one or under intense pressure and not feel like I needed to escape.

Tiger Williams, head of the upper school, gave out several awards, the same kinds of prizes that were going to students in every high school in the country. Frankly, our family has not been known as award winners. Most of us are too ornery or dance to the beat of some drummer that others don't hear. But Jed was awarded Outstanding Senior Boy. At the beginning, Tiger had asked the audience not to scream and whistle for their family members, but several families totally disregarded her. One person even used a foghorn—a bit rowdy for so many well-behaved people.

Then Courtney Beavers, valedictorian, got up to make her speech. Her curly brown hair seemed more windblown and wild than usual. She and Jed were both going to the University of Southern California. I remember her, year after year, skinny and shy, winning all kinds of academic awards. She began quietly, talking about how being done with high school meant she and the class of 2001 could begin living
their
dreams in the daylight. She then informed her parents, that she, her older brother, and three classmates, including Jed, had jumped out of a plane yesterday at fourteen thousand feet. I couldn't see Courtney's parents' faces when she informed them of her leap into the clouds. Our family already knew about it—it was Jed's idea, his graduation present.

As far as Jed and our family are concerned, as I suppose it is obvious now, the adventures, no matter what they are and where they take us, will continue to be just one step, just one jump, just one encouraging word, just one heartbeat away.

ALSO BY PETER JENKINS

The Untamed Coast

Along the Edge of America

Close Friends

Across China

The Road Unseen

The Walk West

A Walk Across America

LOOKING FOR ALASKA
. Copyright © 2001 by Peter Jenkins. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.stmartins.com

Maps
by Paul M. Breeden

Grateful acknowledgment is given for permission granted to the author to quote from the works of Leslie Fields, Joe Runyan, and Jim Varsos.

eISBN 9781466866362

First eBook edition: February 2014