Category: Life in Alaska

I was a curmudgeonly elf in training. Santa came to the gift shop today.
Here are my boss and I.

Here are the store’s owner and Santa.

Many children came in the store to see Santa. There are many false Santas on this island, but I guess this was the true one – he had the uniform, anyway. We all had a discussion as to whether groups of children should be quantified as “barrages of children” or as “herds of children.” We decided it was a matter of experience. Having worked as a teacher, I felt children mostly needed to be considered as herds. But working in retail, my coworker felt strongly that children should be considered as barrages.

This morning, we took Alan to the airport in Klawock and he headed back home. These are two masked bank-robber brothers at the tiny Klawock airport terminal at 6:15 AM.

Yesterday, we were very lucky. We’d gone in, in the morning, to fetch the boat from the boat service shop. Everything in town went very smoothly. We launched the boat without problem at the public launch, and I drove the Blueberry with boat trailer back home while Alan and Arthur navigated the boat back home. It wasn’t too windy, though it was sporadically rainy.
I got home before they arrived at the dock. I paused my efforts to park the boat trailer – a pretty complicated set of maneuvers involving backing the trailer into position – and ran down to meet them at the dock. I helped get the boat temporarily docked, and then went up to operate the trolley to lower it into the water to get the boat out of the water. We’d timed our trip to town to correspond with the high tide, with this transition in mind.
As the boat trolley was lowering, the pulley at the bottom of the rail snapped off. This was alarming. But it was very, very lucky – because my first thought was: what if the pulley had snapped off after we’d put the boat on the trolley and were raising it out of the water? The cable could have flown around with much more force, for one thing – possibly injuring someone standing nearby. For another thing, the boat and trolley would have been liberated from their cable, and would have rolled without brake or restraint back into the sea. Would we have been able to stop it? No.
That was the first element of luck.
So we paused in our efforts to fetch the boat out of the water. We’ll have to wait for: a) a low tide so we can inspect and work on the lower end of the rail, where the pulley attaches, and b) a chance to go into town to buy a new pulley and whatever other hardware is needed to repair the cable attachment.
Later I went up to finish parking the trailer, I was on the final leg: back the trailer into its slot near the water cistern. And… the left rear wheel came off the trailer. Literally, it just fell off onto the ground.

This was, needless to say, alarming. I stopped my efforts to maneuver the trailer, and Alan and I parked it off to the side of the parking pad by pushing it manually. It’s heavy – but not impossible to shove around with two people.
I was immediately struck by the sheer luck of this event: specifically, the wheel had not come off when the boat was on the trailer, in town. That would have been substantially more disastrous.
So twice, yesterday, Arthur was lucky. Alan pointed out that both failures were instances of a lack of ongoing maintenance. And for that, I feel I bear some blame – but it’s very hard to take on the tasks of ongoing maintenance within Arthur’s domain when: a) he never communicates what those maintenance tasks might be (he’s either forgotten them or he thinks of them but fails to share with me), and b) when he does decide to engage in maintenance, he gets highly annoyed and irritated with me, due to the fact that I don’t already know the procedures and so he insists that he will do it himself because I’m not doing it right. He doesn’t seem to have ever internalized the fact that I don’t actually know all his rules and procedures. Well anyway, that’s neither here nor there… ultimately, collectively, Arthur and I need to be doing more preventative maintenance, and we’ll have to work out how that might happen. This kind of luck can’t go on forever, right?
Today, I began the effort to repair the boat trailer. I removed the other rear wheel and then removed the “axle” – not really an axle, just a beam on which the two wheels are mounted. This will permit us to take the whole assembly into a mechanic in town and try to get the broken wheel repaired. That will have to happen on Monday at the soonest, however.




And we have to wait for a negative tide (not super common) to do the repair work on the boat rail. Meanwhile, the boat is going to have to wait things out, tied up at the dock, cultivating barnacles.

Arthur finally got around to wanting to host one of his patented Rockpit “Mexican Feeds”. He made his signature dishes: chiles rellenos, chicken verde, and refried beans. Jeff and Pam and Jan and Richard came over and we ate and Richard told stories, as he does.

In the picture, from left to right, you see Arthur, Pam, Jeff, Jan and Richard. I’m behind the camera.