Doug Fine: Author, Journalist, Adventurer, Goat-Herder

 

The owls were still hunting, the moon still smiling, when the goats hit the milk stand yesterday. In such circumstances, I’d be hard pressed to make it anything but a solid day.

For one thing, it’s an ethical matter: it the universe is going to make life easy, if the very set dressing is going to cause endorphins to flow, I feel an obligation to go along for the ride. In yesterday’s case, literally: I was about to embark on a road trip.

For another thing, I’ve learned that a fine day is likely to flow from such a beginning, according to probably the most important lesson I learned from my fairly rigorous six week training as an Alaskan river guide. The lesson is this: set yourself up for success. Look not only at the 34 degree glacial river directly under your boat, filled with 1,200 pounds of cruise ship buffet graduates, bur rather three turns ahead.

Even outside of early morning atmospheric gymnastics, I’ve been in River Mind lately, not least because of the amazingly snowy winter we’re having here in my canyons, which bodes well for spring runoff. Finally! Dang Climate Change. Though when the atmosphere does decide to precipitate, it sure does swing to the other extreme. Not that I’m complaining. I’m already buffing my boat and trying to leave space between speaking events.

Point is, every Alaskan river guide trainee knew, by two weeks in the pre-season, that if you wanted a smooth, safe run, the long term “read” mattered as much as the immediate situation. For whatever reason, this pre-dawn memory yesterday in turn reminded me about a rule of thumb for the trainee “check-off run.” This was the final exam during training that allowed you, if successful, to graduate to guide status. To earn your hipster life jacket, complete with sheathed knife.

The rule of thumb was this: you must “stick” your Swift Water Stop. This was the maneuver whereby, laden with that half-ton of passenger weight (in the case of your check-off run, this was friends and fellow putative river guides), you leaped out of the 16-foot inflatable raft at the command of your trainer, wrapped the bowline around your waist, planted your rubber-booted feet, and allowed all your guests to disembark safely (to snap that moose or empty that bladder). You can see why this was an important part of the check-off run: in the case of an emergency in your boat (post-buffet passenger heart attack) or another boat (post-buffet passenger overboard in fast-moving glacial runoff), you needed to be able to stop at any time, in any part of the river.

Safe to say, if you didn’t stick your Swift Water Stop, you might as well let go of the bowline and allow your trainer to grab the “sticks” (oars) to bring the boat under control 100 feet downstream. In a contest between your biceps and untold millions of pounds of God, in the form of glacial melt in a wilderness salmon stream, you will not win, not even if you summon your best-ever day at the gym. To get a sense of what you’re up against should you conduct this maneuver anything less than perfectly, you might want to conjure the famous image of Saturday Night Live’s Kevin Nealon losing his arms to an excessive weight lift attempt in the “Steroid Olympics” sketch.

But, being one of the final trainees to earn his check-off run, I’d noticed that in the case of a botched Swift Water Stop (a fairly common occurrence), no one ever let go. All pre-season in 2004, I watched doomed, brave, soaked attempts to conquer the elements, in what was a manifestation of a human trait that surfaces rarely, but in everyone. Namely, “I am the one who will succeed in this circumstance when all others have failed.”

Another way of stating this is that guide training at the Chilkat Guides outfit out of Haines was fairly competitive. Which is good thing, if you’re a customer. When I finally, second to last in my class, was told by my trainer that I was ready for a check-off run in May of that year, as the first king salmon returned to the streams and the first buffet Sternos were lit on the cruise ships, I was fairly confident about my Swift Water Stop. All pre-season long, in fact, I considered myself to be one of the best of my dozen-strong trainee class at the maneuver. I feel safe saying that since I wasn’t the best at many of the skills needed to check-off and become a full-time guide in time for the start of cruise ship season and associated tips. I was bad at small talk while rowing, for instance. While on the sticks, my priority was survival. For my passengers and for myself. Especially when weather was iffy, which in Southeast Alaska is like saying “when Jerry Jones is a bad owner.” Always.

In fact, by the time of my own first check-off run, I hadn’t yet missed a Swift Water Stop. Draw parallel to the bank, grab the bow line, hop out, wrap bow line around back of waist, plant feet. Not so hard. I won’t say why I believe I missed my crucial one that day; why my feet slid off the mushy glacial silt that comprised the bank where I landed. I generally believe it’s unseemly to blame conditions, equipment, or other people (even rude other check-off trainees) for one’s own mistakes. One has to factor in the above realities, and succeed anyway. All I can tell you is that I’m grateful for my friend Anthony, who came to photograph what we thought might be my triumphant graduation ceremony, and instead captured me at my peak Agony of Defeat moment.

The reason I keep the photo that begins this Dispatch on my desktop photo rotation is much more than to provide a hardly needed lesson in man versus elements humility, which is basically the story of my adult life. The reason is this: even though I knew I’d never reel in the boat and in fact at the moment Anthony’s shutter released the boat was already reeling me in — to (trust me) freezing water of the “you’re done in 60 seconds” variety — I wasn’t about to let go. Just like the two dozen other people I’d seen in this situation over the previous month and a half hadn’t been.

I love this photo. I love that I am witness to my face saying, “I’m going to be the first fellow since Jacob to at least earn a draw in a wrestling match with God.” Or maybe I was just trying to fool the check-off guide, Jessica, into thinking that I had the situation under control. Don’t dismiss the importance of such a bluff. We’d In fact been trained that if we believed we had the situation under control, we had the situation under control. The reason this is no off-handed lesson: to keep a paying passenger calm in an emergency is often the difference between recovery and true carnage. And if you miss a Swift Water Stop on an actual tour, you can in most situations hop back into the boat and try it again.

The image tells a volumes-long story. For me, it’s like a memory index for events getting on a decade ago. With regard to the check-off run at hand, my expression hysterically (and to me, somewhat impressively) insists success is just moments away. Fellow trainee Jonathan (in the stern, gaping in horror at the reality of my once-looking-good, now-irremediably-botched check-off run), as you can see, knows better. Perfect photo, Anthony, Thank you. It was an important moment for me.

I wound up checking-off on my third try, by the way, in what was arguably my worst run of the season. The trainers discussed it for a long time, and awarded me a sort of pre-season-long achievement award. I wound up having an unforgettable summer of ’04, just before Not Really An Alaskan Mountain Man was published, I was on my way to finding other ways to pay for food, and river trips returned to their current status as my second favorite hobby.

Every river trip is a microcosm of life’s journey. A never-to-be-repeated phase. A snapshot like Anthony’s. I thought of this again yesterday once the sun had risen and I was en route to the airport for a speaking event. What I realized was that in my prayer book back at home on the Funky Butte Ranch, there’s a Prayer Upon Moving Into a New House, a Prayer Upon the Arrival of a New Family Member, even a Prayer Upon Beginning a New Work Project.

But there is no Prayer At a Time of Departure. No shout out to our nomadic human nature. And a river trip is both a departure and an arrival. What if we were still wandering? So in my ridiculously oversized, vegetable oil-powered truck, I recited one spontaneously just before the dirt road ended and I hit pavement, and with a deer and several ravens in active presence.

To the Divine, I said, “Thank you for my so sweet time in this place. Please bless everyone and everything that is of here. Please allow me to learn from my lessons to this point so as to make the next place and phase even better and to allow me to live closer to you. To allow every Now to be training for Next.” And I add now, “Thank you, owls and moon, for starting this morning off right.”

 

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