Looking through my journal from the second summer of guiding, for information to back up a paper I’m writing, I ran across this particularly anecdotal day.

14 July, 2005

No guests at all today, after breakfast. Cleaned the stove and scrubbed and waxed the kitchen floor. A man and his two sons came to buy fishing licenses from Nelda. She introduced me as a local girl who just finished college back east.

“I went to the East Coast once,” the man said. “I got arrested.”

He told the story:

“I was just a kid and I drove across the country with an older man, our neighbor in California. He was a trucker. We got there and he was beat, so he was sleeping, and I went to go do our laundry; we’d been on the road for a while.

“This little black kid come in, and asked me to buy him a beer. I said, ‘I can’t buy beer, I’m sixteen.’ The kid said, ‘yeah, but you look eighteen.’ So I went over and I bought him a beer and one for me.’

“We’re doing our laundry and drinking our beer. I never drank before, I thought, ‘this is pretty good.’ I went back and I bought some whiskey, and I woke up in jail.”

He shook his head. “I wouldn’t go east of the Continental Divide now, that’s where people change.”

One his sons asked “What state was that in?”

“Buffalo, New York.”

I caught another fish and watched an ugly brown cloud of smoke roll across from Homer. The sun turned orange.

This time I brought home most the whole fish, less the tail intestines and the bloodline. Froze the fillets and boiled the backbone and head, picked the meat off, and threw the bones out, added onions and rice for soup.

Looking in the Cooking Alaskan cookbook, it said the Aleuts would mix salmon liver with berries and seal oil. I tried it with blueberries [without seal oil], but I don’t think I will again. The liver tasted okay (boiled intil white and mashed) and the blueberries tasted fine, but they weren’t a great mix. But you never know unless you try!