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August 07, 2002
been back 2 days now,
been back 2 days now, yesterday aaron get into town at 9 am and we went to see modest mouse in chico california at 2 pm, so i haven't seen many folks yet.
modest mouse was really good, they played the song we were hoping to hear, talking shit about a pretty sunset, so i was very happy. the drive back, however, is damn long, and it made me not want to go back there. the drive up was beautiful, but on the return we got kinda turned around changing from the 70 to the 20. it was ok, but we got in early this morning to the sight of the sun coming back up.
on being back in the lower 48: it's damn nice, that it's warm and i can wear shorts and not have to drag rain gear everywhere. i'm excited to listen to records i haven't heard in 2 months, and to eat mexican food that's actually good and to stay at the old katherine house, which is dirty a little and i'm cleaning it in between writing this. it's getting to be a normal feeling for me to come back and drop into annoying travelling storytelling mode, but some of the stuff that went down in alaska was pretty amusing. it feels like a good time to introduce ozzie, a guy we met in the last week.
ozzie
we got dropped off in wasilla on the 1st by this nice guy who really liked arm bands, he'd hurt his back backpacking and was gonna get back surgery in a month. wasilla is about 40 miles north of anchorage, and it seemed like a hillbilly paradise. imagine people pulled up at intersections on 4 wheelers and on 3 wheelers, which i had thought were illegal since they're so dangerous, but no, in alaska i guess you can't sell them but if you have one it's still ok to drive around and try and crush yourself with. it sorta reminded me of horses, cause they'd get the green light and zoom on into the gas station with their kids on the back of their motorized vehicle and the kid would wait outside while the adult rambled into the store to buy some more keystone ice 12 packs. anyways, we were walking through this town when this guy in a little truck with a campershell shouted at us. i walked over to his car cause we needed a ride, and he asked me, "wanna drive my car?" "why?" i asked him back, and he said "i'm too drunk to be driving right now." well, aaron and meredith loaded into the back of the campershell, and the guy, a native athabaskan indian named ozzie, stumbled out from behind the steering wheel and got into the passenger seat. he was fat and had a greasy mustache, and what i've come to call "alaskan teeth." i hopped in, and we shook hands. then he downed what was left of his beer, cracked open another one (miller high life was his brand), and offered me a cold one. i declined, and started to put the car into first, when he shouted, "wait, got some puppies in here, gonna throw them in the back, give your friends something to do." he started rooting around behind the driver's seat, and i saw at least 100 crushed beer cans hanging out back there. he found a tiny rotweiler/pitbull mix, and moved around to behind the truck, handing it to aaron and asking if any of them wanted a beer. they declined as well.
we took off, and ozzie started telling me about himself and his week. apparently his girlfriend had been thrown back into jail that very morning, after she failed a urinanalysis test that was part of her recent paroll agreement. they'd been drinking all of the prior evening, and she hadn't been expecting the test. sufficed to say, he was a bit angry, cause she'd only been out 4 days after being in for 4 months, and was looking at another 6 months. he had 2 teenage daughters with her, and he said he'd rather be in jail doing his girlfriend's time then have to deal with the daughters. he confided in me that he had a few other girlfriends around alaska though, but that his relationship with the jailbird was the most important because of their mutual offspring. i looked over at this drunken native and he smiled and said, "i don't know why the women love me but they do." i didn't know what to say.
we came to some road work, and ozzie continued with the stories, in between cursing the construction. he told me about how when he was young, he'd carry marijuana between tijuana and mexico, till he got arrested and fined 10,000 dollars. he was mad that he couldn't go back into mexico. when he asked where we were all from, and i told him that meredith was from canada, his first response was "i hate canada." i laughed, and he told me about how they wouldn't let him into that country either, because of a dui. he has booked hotel rooms in the yukon territory and everything, and they let his wife and daughters drive in, but they turned him around. this failed to deter him though, first he tried taking a boat into canada, but was stopped and sent back again, then he got a flight into canada, but they still wouldn't let him in, and threw him in jail cause there weren't any returning flights that night. he finished that story by telling me, "fuck canada. i hate that fucking place anyways."
during the drive to sheep creek, which was all the farther he could take us (all the farther is a neat thing the idahoans said, it sounds cool i think), ozzie probably downed about 5 beers. this was in the course of an hour, and it seemed to be his regular pace. he made me stop at some gas station so he could go buy a few more 12 packs. when we stopped he fished two more puppies out from behind the seat. they were cute and smelled like stale beer.
the natives have a corporation called CIRI in alaska that owns tons of tourist businesses and restaurants and things of that sort, and he gets checks from them every few months. he also builds houses, and showed me where he'd smashed his thumb with a hammer countless times, leaving it damned mangled.
like other folks who have picked me up hitchhiking, ozzie was a little lonely. he tried to convince us to come camp in his yard, and he's drive us farther north to talkeetna the next morning. we declined, so he decided to show us a camping spot on the banks of sheep creek. we all hopped out of the car and aaron asked for a beer. ozzie of course was all for this, and when aaron asked for my knife, ozzie instantly knew. "shotgun, eh?" he chuckled, then crushed a beercan and threw it in a firepit. he started telling us about fishing. one time him and some buddied were doing some illegal midnight net fishing, in which his buddy swam across a river and tied the net up. they waited till about 30 salmon were in the net, then dragged it in. he said that shortly after that they all pretty much passed out drunk, which was how they rangers found them, a bunch of drunken indians with 30 dead fishing and empty beer cans scattered all around. they got lucky and got a fine instead of jail time, since the rangers didn't want to deal with hauling them off to jail at 3 am. i think the rangers took some of the fish as well.
the other fishing story sounded unbelievable, but it probably wasn't. one time they had left lines in at the mouth where a river met a bay, or maybe it was another net, but they managed to hook a beluga whale. "what did you do?" i asked him. "we got the fuck out of there!" he replied. i just pictured a bunch of drunken indians running away from a beached whale, goddamn imagine that.
ozzie was good at pool, but too drunk to play, and although he boasted that he'd "beat my ass" i managed show him up. we sat around the creepy sheep creek lodge for a while, drinking beer and playing pool, till ozzie decided he was too drunk and had to get home to feed his puppies, which were still in the truck. he bid us about 5 farewells, then careened off in his automobile. we ended up getting invited back into the lodge by 2 brothers from chicago who were up for a week and were terrified of mosquitos and bears, but that's another story. maybe it's not good to say but i had a good time and was pleased to drink with a drunken indian.
Posted by bendan at August 7, 2002 12:02 PM
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