I owe a young man a post here.

I was talking to your parents about some of the things I used to do years ago when I was sailing. I mentioned that when I was looking for work I would wander up to the bar in a new town and listen and ask around about the price of various illegal activities.

If the price of vice was high, I stayed there as there was likely honest money to be made. Busy people are often too busy to do some of their own work so they hire people.

All in all it was a pretty good way to judge the economic situation of a town from a grass-roots level.

Most of these places were small boom or bust towns along the Inside Passage between Alaska and Washington. They were logging or fishing towns.

I'll admit that I did spend a lot of time in bars. This sounds a lot worse than it is until you learn about Alaskan bars.

When sommeone thinks of a bar they think of a place where people sit on stools and drink. Stateside that's pretty much it. In Alaska in the 70s and 80s they did that...and a lot more than that.

They were meeting houses and a lot of networking took place there. People looked for people to hire and people looked for people to work for there. Seeing someone sitting at a table doing paperwork of one sort or another was common place. I remember sitting next to Captain Frank while he was filling out his Social Security application. He said he wanted to fill it out in a place where he could think.

Seeing someone Sunday morning at a table reading the Sunday paper was common, too.

They also served as short term banks. I once borrowed money to finish a job I was working on and it was repaid in jig time. The guy I was working for was out of town and a week later was pleased to see I had finished his porch and when he paid me, I paid off the loan. The bar owner that handed me the money knew my customer and knew I he was good for it.

Another time some clown paid me on a Friday evening in cash for a job I did. It was a wad big enough to choke a horse and I didn't want to pack that much cash around all weekend.

I approached the owner of the bar and told her that I needed a safe place to stash my wad until Monday. She put it in an envelope and put it in her safe for the weekend. Monday I picked it up and put it in the bank.

As I have said, much of my earlier life was spent in small little places in Alaska. It drew a lot of interesting and varied people. Some were saints, some were out and out devils but the most of them were somewhat in between.

I suppose I could say I was a saint because I am writing this little essay but I won't. I won't lie to you. I was like most everyone else, I was in between. 

I made a part of my living commercial fishing and it was an interesting thing to do because so many people in it came from so many interesting backgrounds.

One interesting pair out there to watch was a West Texas grammar school dropout and an East Coast Annapolis graduate with a master's in some kind of higher mathematics. It would surprise you to find out that the mechanical genius of the pair was the Texan. He had little formal education but was a wonderful baling wire and junk pile artist that could keep anything mechanical running.

The Annapolis grad ran the books and had a knack for making money grow. It was a good team.

Knowing those two added to my value system. I learned that education is a nice tool to have, but there are a lot of people out there that have a lot to offer the world that don't have much of a formal education.

I learned to judge a man by his abilities and talents and not necessarily by his formal education. Ask your dad about this. I'll bet he met a few pretty damned good NCOs that didn't have much in the way of formal schooling. His NCOs were the hands-on guys that got things done.

I also met a Harvard grad that chose the rugged, dangerous life of a fisherman  instead of working ashore in an office. There was also a Rutgers grad that I knew that was a trapper. In town this guy was a total klutz and a drunk. In the bush he was astonishing. He fit right in like one of the animals. He was some kind of a math major but chose to take a different path.

The common interest of making money from the sea brought a lot of very different people together. I fished on one crew where one of the guys was deeply religious and another was a heroin addict. The skipper shoreside was an out and out drunk but didn't touch a drop underway. Then there was a guy that was a shoreside occasional pot smoker that would occasionally dabble in cocaine.

And me. I would occasionally drink a little too much beer and raise a little cain ashore. On rare occasions it got out of hand and four of the five of us would put to sea on the verge of having poisoned ourselves with too much liquor.

After pulling a pimplebrained stunt like that a couple of times I smartened up. I didn't stop drinking beer, I simply learned when to quit.

The truth is that a small Alaskan town has all kinds in it and at the time was pretty much like a frontier town in the movies. There were all kinds in Kodiak and most llikely there still are now.

The difference between our neighborhood and Kodiak is that we all had to share the same stores, the same restaurants, and the same facilities. We were pretty much all stuck in the same boat.

At Joe's (yes, it really was Joe's) Diner one day I sat an a table with a friend of mine and noticed the other diners sitting around me. The Burough Mayor was sitting with the City mayor, at the next table was a pair of prostitutes. The next table held three fishermen, one was slightly drunk. The owner of a local business and a customer of his sat at another. The fifth table was occupied by a couple of housewives.

You never knew who you'd meet at Joe's in the morning.

It was an interesting way to live and I got to meet all kinds face to face.

A big part of what made me what I am today is that I made halfway decent choices based on what I saw. For example, I saw what happened to drug users. I mentioned the heroin addict I fished with. He's long dead. He died of an overdose which seems to be the way junkies go. They keep chasing the rush like moths around a candle. Eventually they get burned and pay with their lives.

I avoided the drug scene not because I was afraid of the drugs but because I saw that almost all heavy drug users seemed to always have the kind of problems I didn't want to have. They were always being ripped off or beaten up. The never had anything worth having because everything they made went straight into their arms or up their noses. Getting arrested periodically was a given.

Seeing a huge fishing settlement check for thousands of dollars disappear into the thin air of drugs was something I saw happen quite a bit. It was sad to see.

A man would bust his ass and risk his life only to come ashore and put his entire earnings up his nose in the form of cocaine.

There was a lot of underground gambling going on and I steered clear of that. I saw early on that the only people making any money (they made a LOT) were the keepers of the game.

It didn't take a lot to see that the players led a pretty much sad life of debt and unhappiness. Back in the 80s I saw a guy lose well over $10,000 in a couple of hours at a poker game.

What is interesting to note is that I knew a guy that played for love of the game. He entered the game with a set amount of money he could afford to lose gracefully and when he went bust his game was over. No borrowing, he simply went home.

Oddly enough he seemed to win a lot but never kidded himself. One day after I had heard he had won pretty big I asked him how he had made out over time playing poker.

He laughed and admitted that he had probably lost a lot of money over time. He played strictly for recreation and never with 'scared money'. Scared money is money you can't afford to lose.

My gambling (if you can call it that) was limited to shooting an occasional  game of pool or playing cribbage for beers. It was mostly a way to pass time waiting for someone.

It was their choice and I made mine not to get involved. As an old man now I am glad I made that choice.

Another choice I made after a couple of close calls was to give up winter fishing because it was just plain too dangerous. It proved to be a good choice because the last boat I fished crab on went down with all hands. Five good men died when the boat rolled up during a storm.

I spent about a decade in Kodiak and during that time I would up attending about 50 funerals or memorial services. I also went to only three or four weddings. For a man in his late 20s and early 30s that was just plain wrong. It should have been the other way around.

Life is all about choices. You can make bad ones or good ones. The good choice you make today can effect you for your entire life and make life pretty easy. It can even save your life.

My choice to stop commercial fishing in winter time saved my life as I would have been aboard my last boat when she went down with all hands. I doubt I would have been a 'lone survivor' and if I had been it's likely I would have been crippled for life. The sea can be quite cruel.

A bad choice can stick with you for life and plague you forever. A real bad choice can end your life early or even instantly.  

I have an old friend that is busted up and living pretty much hand to mouth in a cabin in Washington State. He could have been comfortably retired but he chose to squander his money. He did quite well during the Bering Sea boom in the late 70s and early 80s. Shorting the IRS and having to repay with  penalties and interest didn't help any, either.

He chose poorly.

I took a different path than a lot of people and have no regrets. I got an informal education a lot of people don't have and have been to places and done things most people only get to see on the Discovery Channel.

Your dad took a pretty interesting path, too. He got to see a lot of things and do stuff most people never will. He's a good man. His experiences in Bosnia helped shape him and so did the time he spent in Germany with your mother. I'll bet your mother learned a lot in Germany.

Because I took the road less traveled in life I was exposed to a lot more than most people on a daily basis. Life in Alaska was pretty good to me yet it brought on a certain air that is sometimes hard for people to take.

One ot the things I liked the most were the people. Most of them were pretty independent hardy souls that believed in taking charge of their own lives. Many were pretty big risk takers. There was a lot more liberty there than there was in the States at the time.

It was fun being around loggers, fishermen and other outdoorsmen.

I suppose it comes from having been exposed to a lot while I was in my 20s and 30s. 

The next time you look across the street take a look at the old guy that lives there. He spent a lot of time around a lot of temptation and didn't succumb to it. It takes a lot to be surrounded by things like that constantly and not fall into the traps all around you.

He didn't fall for the 'everybody's doing it' line. He plotted his own course and steered his own ship.

I suppose I haven't done as well as I could have, but I haven't done all that badly, either.


To find out why the blog is pink just cut and paste this: http://piccoloshash.blogspot.com/2009/12/my-feminine-side-blog-stays-pink.html NO ANIMALS WERE HARMED IN THE WRITING OF TODAY'S ESSAY