It Begins

I am a card-carrying adventurer. In a moment of characteristic "why the hell not?", I had 500 calling cards printed up, hunter green on ivory stock, proclaiming, "Ajax Hagood Carpenter, ADVENTURER." Let it not be said that I suffer from lack of brio. Let it also not be said that I suffer from abulia, a condition which seemingly affects more and more each year, whereby they cannot decide or act.

At times I can appear wild and reckless; my decision to come to Alaska is one of those times. At first glance, it seemed a whim. Having just completed my second year of law school, I was having a bit of trouble finding a summer law job. I'd had one firm nibbling and I'd done an interview a few weeks earlier, but within fifteen minutes of receiving the customary rejection phone call ("We had a number of highly qualified applicants but unfortunately we only have two positions to offer..."), I had made up my mind, logged on to the internet and purchased a round trip ticket to Anchorage for May 19th to August 14th.

Dwight D. Eisenhower once said, "Plans are worthless, but planning is invaluable." As a former Army Artillery captain, I whole-heartedly agree and live by that maxim. Also I am a believer in the idea behind Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink", that what appear to be instantaneous reactions are actually the byproduct of a lifetime's worth of cogitating.

In any case, I am an adventurer. I've (accidentally) swum with sharks in the Galapagos; I hiked the Inka Trail to Macchu Picchu; I scaled the walls of Carcassonne; I broke into a British Naval Radar Installation atop the Rock of Gibraltar and watched the sun set and then rise; I served a tour in Iraq; I canoed 2,180 miles of the Mississippi river, from the headwaters in northern Minnesota down to New Orleans (the likelihood of heat stroke keeping me from making the Gulf of Mexico).

Not having a job lined up in Columbia, SC, and having a trenchant desire to get moving; to get adventuring; to do something somewhere else had all been playing in my mind. Also, and not insignificantly, I'd had a rather unpleasant and painful "setback" with a gorgeous young lady. When I'd told my father of the possibility of going to Alaska for the summer, he'd thought it humorous to tell his friends I was running away from a girl. I rolled with it.

"Goddam, Ajax! I've heard of needing to get space, but Alaska?!!" one of his buddies chortled between puffs of his fine cigar and quaffs of his scotch.

"Well, the better looking the girl, the farther you need to go. I'm going to Alaska; that should tell you something," I said as I smiled and winked.

"Woohoo! Hahaha! Hot Damn! Go get 'em, boy!"

As it stood, getting some space to clear my head was certainly appealing, but I'd considered going to Alaska the previous summer before a family situation required that I remain in South Carolina. I'd done the research necessary. The best case scenario was I'd find a deckhand job on a fishing boat which ended up with a good haul and paid me a passel of money. The worst case scenario was that I not get a good job and ended up with a minimum wage job and had to pay rent in not only Columbia, but Alaska too. I wouldn't make any money in the worst case scenario, but at least I'd be in Alaska, where I've never been, and not sweltering in the 105 degree heat of Columbia. And I wouldn't be wallowing in the remnants of rejection. The decision seemed fairly straightforward and obvious.

May 19th

Alaska is a damn long way away from South Carolina. I needed to get to Charlotte, NC, for my flight in order to cut the price of my ticket nearly in half. My mother drove me to the airport. Most would assume that she would be against her baby jaunting off to the frontier at the drop of a hat, but she just said, "This is what you do. Sounds like fun."

My father, himself a self-styled adventurer, rained fire and brimstone upon me, on how I was making a disastrous mistake and how it was sure to end up in me coming back with tail between my legs having failed, before he sensed my definitiveness and gave his blessing.

My travels took me thirteen hours, including the two hour layover in Cincinnatti. On the final, 8.5 hour leg to Alaska, I ended up sitting next to a young army wife whose husband was stationed outside of Anchorage. I learned two important things from her. The first being that there are two seasons in Anchorage: winter and construction; the second being that there was no permit necessary in Alaska to carry a concealed weapon. I was thrilled beyond belief to hear this last morsel as I'd brought my .50 caliber Desert Eagle pistol with me on the trip. I certainly never planned on ever shooting a living thing, but if I were giong to the land of the Grizzly, I wanted somthing that might make any bear that mauled me remember the punch the tasty, pink, screaming thing packed. Even beyond that, the idea of walking around with my "monument to phallic inadequacy" seemed like one hell of a macho, good time.

We landed in Anchorage at nearly 9pm local time. The sun was still well above the horizon when I stepped out of the airport. After verifying with the local police that it was indeed permissable to to carry concealed without a permit ("if you get stopped; just let the officer know you have it..."), I caught a taxi into town to a cheap hostel. A fifty year old Jamaican (!) who'd lived there for twelve years drove me in town as I stared at the tall, snow-covered peaks which surrounded the city, as well as the continent's tallest peak, Mt. McKinley, off in the distance across the inlet.

He dropped me off at the Anchorage International Hostel, where I paid $20 for a bed in a bunk surrounded by what would turn out to be obnoxiously loud, obnoxiously stinky, and obnoxiously tight-pantsed Moldovans. I needed a drink.

I asked the corpulent young man at the front desk where the closest bar was. Before he told me where it was he reminded me that alcohol was prohibited in the hostel and that the hostel had a curfew. I condescendingly informed him that I was nearly twenty nine years old and merely wanted a drink after travelling for over 14 hours. He pointed me to a nearby bar and I stowed my pack in a storage room. Before I headed out, I put on my holster and the pistol. What the hell? Why not? I wasn't going to leave a $1300 pistol in an unsecured room. I had no ammo, but I stepped outside, wearing my sunglasses at 9:30pm, with cause mind you, and carrying a hand-cannon. I felt like "Dirty Harry." I felt like I belonged here.

I came back to the hostel after my drink, grabbed my gear, and headed down to my bunk. The Moldovans were incessantly chatty and pungent, but cleared out relatively quickly. There was another American in the bunkroom as I disrobed and locked the pistol and my wallet into a locker in the room. He was looking for work as a lumberjack for the summer.

I crawled into bed and read. The Moldovans wanted me to go drinking with them but I demurred, claiming I was too old for such hijinks. Just as I was preparing to go to sleep, at 10:30pm, with a hint of sunlight still rimming the curtains, the fat man from the front counter waddled in.

"You the fella from South Carolina?"

"Yup."

"Heard a rumor you got a firearm."

Apparently the lumberjack was a bit less manly than I'd thought.

"I do. Is that a problem?"

"No, I'm just gonna ask you to lock it in our safe for the night. Don't want it gettin' stolen."

"Well, I only just got off the plane so I don't have ammo for it, and, as you can see," I said as I pointed to the locker from my bed, "I have it locked up already."

"Oh....um....okay," the fat man said timidly as he began to shuffle out, "just promise not to use it in here."

"Sure thing."

I was asleep in less than ten minutes.