Working as a tour guide in summer, I’m occasionally asked what it’s like to live in Haines year-round.
“It’s hard and it’s sweet,” I tell them, “and the hardest parts of it make the sweet parts even sweeter.”
A couple minutes after getting out of bed Friday I was on all fours in a cold, windy rain, fishing around on the ground for nuts I’d dropped working on my 30-year-old pickup, which wasn’t running and needed towing to a mechanic.
It seems every November I’m either wrestling with a broken-down rig or walking. November is when marginal cars give up the ghost. The first freeze sucks the last life out of a battery or a starter or a distributor or a fuel pump, that die like leaves on our birch trees.
My wife and I eventually towed the truck across town to the mechanic, but I was chilled the rest of the day. Until about 6 p.m. when I grabbed a trumpet and jumped into the elevator in the Gateway Building for the “Elevator Music” event. There were six people inside and it was warm.
Because of federal disability laws, we have an elevator or two in our town of three-story buildings. The lift on Main Street is best-known, running between the state DMV office and the court office. It’s the favorite ride of young kids and a headache for the landlord, who must bring a mechanic 1,000 miles from Anchorage to fix it.
A friend dreamed up the “Elevator Music” gag for the First Friday arts event, putting musicians in the lift and giving riders a big-city experience. While I was doing my best on “The Girl from Ipanema,” between the third and second floors, the elevator door jammed.
Seven of us were stuck inside, living out the plot of an episode of every sitcom. As our little box got warmer, the air inside got thinner and we old people laughed uproariously but the younger passengers were alarmed. Seriously stuck, it might be a day before a mechanic could get us out.
No combination of button-pushing was opening the doors. When they finally parted, we charged out of our tiny cell, relieved. The musicians decided that playing beside the elevator shaft would work just fine.
My wife found me and got me to the opening ceremony of the 29th Bald Eagle Festival. A crowd was at the eagle foundation, noshing on nibbles spread out on a table in the lobby there. A biologist spoke about our mountain goats and how climate-change avalanches were claiming them in increasing numbers.
A second biologist addressed humpback whales, showing videos of giant, bright bubble rings these creatures can create by blowing air through a single nostril. The rings create a Spirograph effect when they explode on the surface. The purpose of the bubbles, the biologist said, might simply be to entertain folks watching from the surface.
We crawled into bed that night chuckling about the elevator episode and wondering about how one might blow air from a single nostril and what other tricks humpback whales might know.