Neighbors of Skagway

Sarah’s Panda Blog was intended to document my travels to Bolivia, where I am headed less than 48 hours. Supposedly it is in the interest of my friends and family that I share my stories regularly and in type.

I started this Panda Blog too late. I was a fresh college graduate, heading out to pursue adventure and days of never-ending sunlight, but I recorded none of my adventures for eight months. I started this post trying to give a summary of my adventures, but I didn’t get past my first two months in Alaska, and my crazy neighbors of my place of residence during this time: the Skagway shanty town, Mountain View RV Park and Campground.

On June 4th I travelled through 7 airports to get to Skagway, AK; a town of 800 year round residents nestled in a valley at the end of North America’s longest and deepest fjord. The National Park Service bought and restored many of the buildings in the town in the 1970s, so that Broadway Avenue has the Disneyland-feel of a recreated Old West town. This street is the hangout of the 900,000 or so tourists that flood this port from May through September.

Without the Park Service’s restoration, this town would have very little going for it besides physical beauty and extreme isolation. The town is fed by a barge that arrives once a week with wilted vegetables, precarious meats, and the most expensive bags of potato chips I have ever seen, anywhere. All trash is burned in an incinerator located 5 miles down the only road out of town. Skagway is essentially a snake that doesn’t move. Once a week the snake opens its jaws, and half digested food is divided between the desperate denizens of the intestines (who will secure the only unrotten onion!!!). Waste from each individual funnels back to one uniform solid and is deposited, a snake-length away. Where it is burned.

The cruise ships, though they swell the population of the town by two orders of magnitude, daily, are not a part of the snake. They supply their own (delicious) food, and then dump their waste any which place.

Steep mountain walls keep the town long and narrow, and because of the waste-disposal problem, yards are filled with the artifacts of a town a century old. Old abandoned train cars reside in the woods, cars with bulletholes in the windshield adorn backyards, and, my personal favorite, abandoned school buses and campers that—no longer able to roll anywhere—are inhabited by my fellow residents of Mountain View. My sister drove her tours past the campground daily: “…and this is the shanty town of Skagway. My sister lives here.” And then she would giggle.

My campsite was bordered by a train tracks, one perfectly normal couple, and a pirate. To be fair, the pirate was only a pirate when he was drunk, which was fairly often. About 35 years old, Terry the pirate inhabited a setup so well-constructed that it looked bomb-proof. Or at least saber-proof. Terry had an old immobile camper with tarps strung from clotheslines spiraling outward from the entrance. I never did see the center of his compound, but I could only guess it held an altar devoted to beer cozies.

Occasionally we gathered at my other neighbor’s site: Dylan and Amity had a large-ish site with a nicely arranged fire pit. Terry would wander over and recite poetry, and inquire things like, “how many moons have ye been here lassie arhhh?” He punctuated every sentence with “arghh” without hesitation. When asked how he became a pirate, he responded, “Well! Me mam was a pirate… and me dad was a pirate... so guess what I became, lassie?”

My favorite member of these fireside gatherings was Benny, or as I called him, the African Storyteller. Benny had graying dreadlocks and walked with a limp. He scared me the first week I was there, because without a job I was often hanging around the campground during the day. Every time I went to the bathroom, and came back from the bathroom, I passed Benny’s site, and he would make sure to catch my eye. “Hi How are you?” he would say. My “hi, how’s it going?” invariably ellicited “Oh, fine, fine.” Repeating this twice for every trip to the bathroom, and say five trips a day, was quite exhausting. But I couldn't very well not go to the bathroom, so I got used to Benny pretty quickly.

Benny had one story he liked to tell best of all—the story of the Lion’s Den. The way he tells it, Benny was sent off one day to deliver something for his father. Instead of taking the long way around, Benny takes a shortcut through elephant grass. Here he makes swimming motions with his arms, and suggests struggling steps with his legs.

“…And I was walking through...the elephant…grass, and what did I stumble upon, eh? I step out of the elephant grass, and what do I step into but a Lion’s Den. Right in the middle of a lion’s den!!”

At this he throws his head back and laughs, big deep barks that shake the treetops. Seriously I saw them shake.

Later Benny told me he had been working on a DVD with Paul, a white-bearded man that seemed to be in the same shape as Benny—an underemployed older man who somehow ended up in Alaska and never made it out again. I want to say both were homeless bums, but at that point, so was I—so I don’t want to name names. Later Paul moved into Benny’s campsite, and two one-person tents and associated repetitive conversations blocked my way to the bathroom. But I’m getting ahead of my story.

One day I was walking back from the bathroom and I hear, “HEY!” and saw the treetops shake. Seriously that voice came straight from the diaphragm. How did Benny end up here in Skagway, AK, when he was meant to be a professional tree-shaker and getter-of-attention? Benny handed me his DVD.

Paul’s videography did not do Benny justice. The camera rotates madly around Benny as he stands, singing, on the pedestrian bridge over the Skagway River. On top of that, bubbles. You know, at one point I thought bubbles were a fail-proof ingredient: anything, combined with bubbles, would be better than it was before. In this case, circular bubbles in solid colors bounced around the screen, both obscuring the scene and not quite concealing the wild careening of the camera and Benny’s stooped posture. Something that had potential got roasted in the oven with onions and then covered in strawberry frosting. Carbonated strawberry frosting.

Later Paul and Benny called me their biggest fan, for returning the DVD with a smile.

I lived in the campground for two months—June and July—before vacating my site. It was the rainiest June and July I have every experienced, but I made a home for myself, and made it nice. I lived in a three person tent. I had a cooking table and a picnic table, and a tarp over most of that. I had a two-burner stove, a pot, a pan, and all the mugs I would ever need. I built myself a firepit. By far my most bothersome neighbor was the train—trains really—that migrated from their hangars to the docks between 5am and 8am every morning. Between that and the 20 hours of daylight, I learned to be a sound sleeper. I might have been sad when I moved to a real house on August 8th –-if it was a shanty town, it was my shanty town—but the rotting mushrooms underneath my tent sealed the deal, and I was out of there.