An idiot in the land of the midnight sun

Can I make a confession? There are times, many times, when I suspect that I might actually be an idiot. I mean this in the old sense of the word, as in dim-witted, retarded, slow. When I have these suspicions, it occurs to me that maybe everyone around me is actually aware of my disability and they are really just humoring me. Oh sure, everyone’s so nice to me on the surface, because these days you can’t possibly tell a person that they aren’t normal. That’s just too mean. So society lets idiots like me grow up thinking we are like everyone else, just keeps on patting us on the head and telling us we’re special and deserve all the things that normal people get, a house, a wife, kids, etc.

My housemates probably think of themselves as very altruistic for living with and tolerating a mentally subnormal person. My company probably gets a tax break for keeping me employed. My former church no doubt thought of me as a perfect token example of their kindness and a welcome addition to the diverse congregation they are attempting to foster. I’m not so helpless that I can’t do simple tasks like bathe and dress myself, take the subway to work, push buttons on a computer all day, and thus pay my rent, and buy food and clothes. But more when it comes to more cognitively difficult challenges I’m stunted, and thus stuck in this particular existence. Still, all and all, I’m a relatively easy idiot to interact with, so people have been fairly successful at keeping the truth from me. I realize they’re just trying to be nice, but I still find it somewhat cruel that they won’t be honest. Fortunately, I’ve figured out my disability for myself and I no longer feel so bad that women don’t want to mate with me. I understand ladies. I wouldn’t want to mate with a retard either.

The fact that I have the mentality of a small boy was made doubly manifest to me last month when I took a trip to Alaska to visit my younger brother who lives his life as a full-grown man with normal, perhaps above average, cognitive abilities. It was a good trip. I had never been to Alaska, even though I’ve had family living there for over a decade. My reasons for not going were financial. I never had enough money to buy a plane ticket. This year my brother had accumulated a bunch of Sky Miles and got the ticket for me. Luckily I had enough vacation time stored up to actually take off of work and go on the trip.

My flight was booked with Delta, but when I got to the airport it was cancelled, and I was reassigned to a flight on Alaska Airlines. Everything was delayed and I missed my connecting flight. I wasn’t due to arrive in Anchorage until 2:30 am, I told my brother while laid over in Seattle, so he texted me his number and told me to cab it, which was a good thing because I discovered upon arriving that my Virgin Mobile phone could not get any service. I wouldn’t have had a way to contact him. I did not have access to phone service for the entire 11 days I spent there. Not that it mattered. Nobody called or texted me while I was away.

Although it was 3:00 in the morning when I left the airport, the sky was starting to look as if the sun would come up soon. I got in the first cab in the line. The driver was an old grisly white-haired bearded guy who had no idea how to use the GPS system installed in his car. He made several attempts to use it before deciding to rely on his vague sense of where he was going. After several wrong turns we found the street but couldn’t find the address. He allowed me to call my brother on his cell phone and he emerged from a house without numbers on it, apparently the exterior had been freshly painted. When we got inside my brother tried to make small talk, but to me it felt like 7:30 am, and I hadn’t gotten much sleep during the trip.

The next day was Saturday. We went to Talkeetna, a small town to the north where most people who climb Mount McKinley start from, a journey that usually takes 2-3 weeks. There were a lot of sunburned people walking around who had recently gotten back from their climb. We didn’t do any outdoors stuff while there, however. Instead we met up with my brother’s girlfriend, had lunch, and went to visit some of my brothers' friends. Since my brother is a pilot, he has a lot of friends who are pilots. One guy lives on a lake, where he keeps several planes, the kind with floats for taking off from and landing on water. We hung out there for a while, slapping mosquitoes and drinking beer, and talking about the oil industry, since most of the people there were mud engineers. One guy, visiting from Texas said he could probably get me a job as a mud engineer in Pennsylvania, on the fracking sites presumably. All these guys seemed to be pretty well-off so I fantasized about that for a while, even thought about giving him my resume, but in the end I don’t think I would be interested in it. Plus, as I’ve already disclosed, I’m an idiot. Can’t do math.

We went back into town with all the mud engineers and went to a bar where we ate chunks of deep fried Halibut and chicken quesadillas. The power went out in the bar. It was 10:00 pm, but no matter, light still streamed through the doors and windows, so we stayed there for a while before heading to another bar where a 90s cover band was playing. I danced a bit and everyone was so surprised. “Look at the retard dance!” People always say I’m a good dancer, but again, I know they’re just being nice because of my disability. Still, a lot of the girls wanted to dance with me. None of their boyfriends would dance with them, sitting on the side instead. Eventually my brother did go out and bob his head a bit at the insistence of his girfriend. One girl really danced with me, I mean, like, grinding up and down my leg. Then she walked away and started hitting on a German mountain climber. There were a lot of Europeans there.

We stayed in the smallest hotel room I’d ever seen. On Sunday, after looking at a piece of land my brother is considering purchasing, we headed back to Anchorage and in the evening had dinner with our Aunt and Uncle. Basically, I sat and listened while everybody talked. Our cousin had gone off to the Air Force Academy on Colorado for the week, for some kind of prospective cadet experience. His sister was at home, but she was going to volley ball camp this week at one of the local universities. I got to tour their giant house and gym they built for practicing basketball and volleyball. Pretty impressive. That night we rented and watched the movie Captain Phillips, recommended by our uncle since my brother is going to be deployed to Djibouti next year, pretty much to deal with Somali pirates I suppose. 

On Monday, we drove south to Girdwood, where my brother’s girlfriend needed to clean up her apartment as she was moving to a less expensive place in Anchorage. While she cleaned the place, we went and hiked part way up the north face of Alyeska mountain. I had been warned by one of the mud engineers that it was no fun hiking with my brother. “He’s a phenom. You’ll be huffing and puffing.” This actually made me feel a little bit better when I did start huffing and puffing to an embarrassing extent. Meanwhile my brother patiently waited a few yards up the trail. It was pouring rain the entire hike. As we got higher there was snow on the trail. We caught up to a Scandinavian family who marveled at my brother hiking in sandals. The trail ended at a ski resort restaurant with a tram that we could ride back down the moutnain for free. The hike took a little more than an hour, but my brother told me that he usually sprints up it in about 30 minutes. The phenom.

We all had lunch at a burger place in Girdwood and watched the U.S. defeat Nigeria in the World Cup. Then we headed back to Anchorage to pick up supplies for our rafting trip, which was to last from Tuesday to Friday. I needed wader boots, since my feet are so dang big we couldn’t borrow any from my brother’s friends. I also needed a fishing license. My older brother paid for all of this since he’s the grown-up and I’m the older sibling with a child’s mind. While he went to REI to get a dry bag, I checked out a used bookstore our aunt had recommended to me. She said I should get a job there and move to Alaska. Sure enough, they were hiring “long-term employees,” but I didn’t want the complications of moving to Alaska so I didn’t inquire about the position. My aunt promised I would like the store, and I must admit, it was an impressive operation, exactly like a Barnes and Noble, but all used books. Personally, I prefer small specialized bookstores with unique personalities. I didn’t buy any books. My brother came a got me. He has no use for books himself. The week before the trip I had asked if he wanted me to give him Jack Donovan’s The Way of Men, since I thought he might like it. “Send it to me when I’m deployed,” he said, “I won’t have anything else to do. Maybe I’ll read it.”

On Tuesday, we had breakfast and waited for the arrival of Wayne, my brother’s hunting companion who would be going on the trip with us. I had heard a lot about him, mainly that hunting and fishing was all he cared about. We were all packed up to go. We had two duffel-sized dry bags, one filled with camping gear, the other with clothes, four cases of light beer (Coors Light is my brother’s favorite for some reason), and a rifle. Wayne was going to bring the food, the tent, and the raft, as well as his own gear and clothes. He showed up around nine, but we weren’t supposed to meet the pilot at the airport until eleven, so we sat around for a while and they talked about hunting and fishing, which were to be the primary topics of conversation for the next four days.

Finally we drove out to the airport and eventually the pilot arrived, a friend of my brother’s who had agreed to fly us up to this lake somewhere southwest of the base of McKinley. When he opened the hardtop of the pick-up to see how much stuff we had the first thing he said was, “Only four cases. You need more beer.” The pilot and my brother went off to pick up the plane which was parked at somebody’s house (on a lake). My brother drove the pilot’s truck back to the airport with two more cases of beer. In a little while the plane showed up, we loaded all the stuff in and took off. At first I was having a swell time looking down on the wilderness landscape, but soon started feeling incredibly motion sick. The flight took about an hour, and by the end I was sure I would vomit, almost did as we circled the lake before landing, but managed to keep it together. 

We dumped all the gear on the shore of the lake, the pilot took off and we started blowing up the raft with a large handpump. Immediately we were swarmed by mosquitos. We busted out the bug spray and covered ourselves in it, and suited up in our waders, which was basically what we wore for the next four days, except when we went to bed. The raft didn’t take long to inflate. It was 14 feet in length. In the middle there was a chair where the person who handled the oars sat. The back third of the raft was filled with our gear, and front third was where whoever wasn’t rowing sat. We pushed off into the lake and my brother rowed us toward the southern end where it let out into the lake stream. The plan was to float down the lake stream for 54 miles until it let out at the much larger Yentna River where the pilot would pick us up on Friday. My brother had brought a GPS device with various coordinates programmed in for good fishing spots. 

The beginning of the trip was very exciting. We all had beers cracked open. The water was slow moving and there were mountains all around, but the tops were cut off by dark clouds and we could see lightning in the distance. Fish were jumping all over the place, so Wayne broke out his fly rod and started casting from off the raft. Every few minutes he’d catch one and release it. The speed of the water started picking up and we started seeing rocks jutting out of the water and some small rapids here and there. At the next relatively clear stretch I tried my hand at rowing but could not control the boat at all. I kept steering us into the side where we had to duck low-hanging trees. Apparently, rowing is one of those skills that requires high cognitive abilities. It occurred to us that I should have had a rowing lesson back when we were in the slow water, but unfortunately the river got more dangerous the further we went, so I never had a chance to row again on the trip. 

We floated about 10 miles down the stream on that first Tuesday afternoon. It rained about half the time, but when we found a nice gravel beach to camp on the sun came out and for the only time during my trip I could see Mount McKinley unobscured by clouds. It rose magnificently over the horizon with golden sunlight falling upon its snowy peaks. We had moose bratwursts for dinner and did a bit of fishing before settling down for the night. The next morning we fished some more and I finally caught my first fish of the trip, a medium sized rainbow trout.

On Wednesday,  we anticipated finding a good spot to stop and fish some more, but the rapids were rather tough to get through and we didn't really see any decent beaches along the shore. We saw several moose. Wayne wanted to see a bear and shoot it. Apparently it was open season on bear, but we saw none. Most of the day it rained and was rather miserable at times. We had several close calls going through rapids, smashing into large rocks that were unavoidable or getting stuck on rocks underneath the raft, particularly when going through a stretch called "the canyon" in which large towers of silt rose up on either side of the stream. My brother and Wayne alternated manning the oars throughout the day. By the end of the day it was getting late and we still had not found a suitable camp site. We were starting to fear that we would come to the end of the stream. We must have gone more than 30 miles before we finally found a sandy beach with enough space to pitch our tent. I was determined to make a fire, although the other two did not think it was feasible. I gathered as much driftwood as I could and started it myself and it was a truly comforting addition to our evening, having been cold and wet all day, to finally stand in front of a blazing hot fire and dry off. We ate moose burgers for dinner.

On Thursday we figured that we only had another 10 miles or so before we reached the end of the stream so we decided to fish nearby our campsite. A few hundred yards downriver the fishing got really good. Even me, a complete novice using a fly rod for the first time during this trip managed to catch ten fish that day, all rainbow trout. In the process, I discovered that when I waded into the water up to my thighs my waders started to leak. This was fairly disheartening to me, since I have this obsession about keeping my feet dry due to a tremendous battle against foot fungus a few years back. But I tried to grin and bear it and not complain. Sure enough, as soon as I said something, Wayne began to coo, "Aww, poor baby" in a mocking tone. This is how men interact, I told myself and sucked it up. 

The fishing at this stretch of river was exceptional. Wayne probably caught forty to fifty fish, and my brother did fairly well also. All of the fish were released. As evening began to approach we decided we should probably float down the river further and find a new campsite. We went a ways and we started to see signs of giant fish jumping out of the water, king salmon, who were just starting to make their ascent to breeding grounds upstream. Every time one jumped and slapped against the water, Wayne would mutter under his breath, "Fuckin' kings" with hunger in his voice. 

We came to a spot where a helicopter had landed and someone was fishing with an incredibly expensive fishing pole. We stopped on a gravel beach upriver and watched as he caught a few kings and threw them back. After the helicopter flew away we floated through the fishing hole they were using and Wayne dropped his lure into the water. It was immediately grabbed by a giant fish that almost pulled him from the raft. He handed the rod to me so that he could reposition himself, but as I was holding it and bracing myself the line broke and the damn fish jumped out of the water as if mocking us. We stopped for a few minutes and Wayne tried to cast into the hole again, but we soon moved on thinking that we needed to find a camp site. 

As we continued to float downriver we saw other signs of people. We assumed they had come up from the direction we were headed but as we passed one group a guy yelled out to us, "Hey, where are you guys going?" 

"To the mouth," my brother yelled back. 

"Have you been down there yet? Nobody's come up."

What did that mean? we wondered. In about a half-mile we knew. The river seemed to spread out and widen and was filled with logs that we had to maneuver around. The correct passage was unclear. And we came to a place that seemed very narrow with log jams on either side. We didn't know if we could make it through with the raft, and the river split off to one side in a direction that was clearly a dead end. We stopped on an island of gravel and weighed our options. When my brother got out the GPS device we found that we were no longer on the main stream but had somehow come to another side stream. Yet we had no idea how we could have made a wrong turn. The worst part was that our raft was parked in a place where the only option was to go downstream, but if we got caught in the log jam it could be fatal, and we didn't know whether the log jams continued like this further on or not. 

At this point it was about 9:00 at night, still light out, but we were all pretty tired. We were able to wade through the stream to other islands connected to logs but we could not reach the mainland, the river was just too wide and too deep. My brother was mainly concerned about why the GPS said we were on the wrong river. He got out the satellite phone he'd borrowed from the pilot and called a friend who knew the river. He was informed that a major flood had caused the river to shift and that the GPS map we were using was no longer accurate, but we were in fact in the correct place. We were also informed that we were probably the first people of the year to float down the lake stream which is why it was still so clogged up. 

Basically we had no choice but to go forward. But if the log jams continued we might find ourselves in a worse situation. Wayne began to argue that we should pack up all our gear and carry it to the mainland. But this proposal seemed absurd to me as there was no way of getting to the mainland by simply wading let along carrying hundreds of pounds of stuff on our backs. We also contemplated the possibility of calling the Air Guard to rescue us, but this would require leaving the gear behind, and considering that this didn't seem like a life or death situation it didn't seem appropriate. Things got a bit tense. Finally around 11:00 we heard a jet boat coming from down river. In a few minutes we could see a man and woman on the other side of the log jam we had been contemplating. 

We asked how clear it was beyond the log jam and they said that this was the worst of it. If we could get beyond this it wouldn't be too bad. We said that it was pretty clear on our end as well. The guy with the jet boat decided to go for it even though his female companion clearly thought it was a bad idea. But when he passed through the jam he made it look easy, so we decided we should try to go through with the raft. 

My brother rowed as hard as he could toward the narrow space we had to get though because when we finally got there he needed to pulled the oars into the boat, but if we didn't have enough momentum then we would be sucked down an alternate current toward the dead end that would have been a nightmare getting out of. As my brother pulled in the oars, Wayne stuck his legs out of the raft and started kicking against the logs to push us toward the narrow opening. We started crashing against the logs on my side of the raft and I thought to do the same thing as Wayne but when I began to stick my leg out of the raft Wayne grabbed me and pulled me back in. "Don't even try it. It's more dangerous than you realize." 

Needless to say, we made it through, and once we got to the other side of the log jam we pulled onto the first spot we could and made camp. The campsite was horrible. It was covered with tall weeds and infested with mosquitoes. We were all exhausted and in a bad mood. We had moose bratwursts and I burned the heck out of the top of my mouth on the first bite. I scarfed it down and immediately went to bed, sleeping badly because of the incline on which we'd pitched the tent. I was ready to go home, tired of being in the wilderness. Meanwhile, my brother and Wayne were talking about the next sheep hunt they planned to go on, deep into the mountains, with only enough gear they could carry on their backs.

The next day was beautiful. We spent almost the entire day fishing out of the hole near are camp site. At first it seemed promising because my brother caught a 30 pound king on one of his first casts. But as the day progressed we didn't catch nearly as many fish. Still it was interesting, because we were now in tourist territory. Fishing guides were taking clients from the lodges on the Yentna River up the lake stream and we were located at the point furthest accessible before the log jam. So we got to meet a lot of different people. One guy and his father spent most of the day fishing with us. We ended up giving him a case of our beer so we wouldn't have to take it back on the plane. Towards the end of the day we floated down to the Yentna, packed up our gear and the pilot came and picked us up. 

As soon as we were back in Anchorage I was thinking that this had been the greatest camping trip of my life. For all the hardships I had perceived, it was well worth it. My last two days in Alaska were very easy going. Saturday was the summer solstice, but it was gray and rainy so we didn't do too much. We had dinner at our aunt and uncle's again and then went to a friend of my brother's house and played cards. On Sunday we went and saw a glacier from a boat on a lake fed by the glacier that first began to form exactly 100 years ago in 1914 (the lake, not the glacier). It was an amazing site. That night my brother dropped me off at the airport and I flew home without any delay or flight changes. 

It was good to be back in Philadelphia, in the comfortable little room I rent were nothing is expected of me but the bare minimum. I can keep living my retarded life a bit longer. But for some time now, I've come to realize that I must stop being an idiot and grow up. For some time I've realized that I will soon be leaving this place and seeking a life of challenge and struggle instead. The time is coming. It's almost here. By November I'll be gone, moving to the country. It won't be as hard as a four-day rafting trip, but it will be hard enough for a boy like me. I'll keep you posted.