While most of the time in Alaska I kept fairly busy doing things the truth is I really didn't have to do a whole lot if I didn't want to. 

There were a lot of ways to get by without having to bust my ass.

When it came timer to eat, one ate food, of course. However sometimes it came down to whether one wanted to purchase store-bought grub or live off the land. 

One could work for money and buy food or, for example, simply wander down to the fuel dock and pull up the crab ring and eat king crab. Personally I liked a combination of the two as I prefer beer with my king crab. Unfortunately beer is not found running free out in the wild so occasionally work of some sort proved necessary.

If I was up early enough I could run down to the Anchor Bar before it opened and the owner would gladly pay me a quick $20 to swamp the place out. A half hour and I was set for a day or two. 

Hell, sometimes I could last an entire week on $20 if I wanted to hunt of fish.

I could easily walk just about anywhere I had to go and if I decided to fire up the pickup I could often get gas for free by going through the Avgas drums that piled up on the point near the floatplane pier. 

The bottom couple of inches were unpumpable using barrel pumps so the pilots just left it.

I would dump it into a plastic 5 gallon bucket and skim the gas off the top any of of the accumulated water. My '62 Dodge ran fine off of Avgas. A Slant Six engine could run off of almost anything.

Unless one had a specific goal and was saving for something there really was little incentive to work. After a while one got pretty good at getting by on little or nothing. It was easy to live off the land and the leftovers of an affluent society. Sometimes I think my biggest expense in Kodiak was beer. Maybe it was.

Sometimes it would irk people that life could be that easy. Sometimes a fisherman coming in broke off of a bad fishing trip would be pretty frustrated that I could get by as well or even better than he did without risking my ass at sea.

I had spent a month or so working at a bush construction job and had been able to buy a small trailer to live in. There were all sorts of free places to park it. I suppose right now one of the places is a Safeway parking lot or some damned thing.

Actually what I did was pick and choose my jobs with little regard for how much money the job paid, but by how interesting the job was. More than once I would refuse a $22/hour union scale job to work for $12/hour doing something nastier and harder because it was more interesting or worthwhile.

It was always satisfying, for example, to help a guy build a house for his family then haul stuff around on a government project.

While I would not do anything too dangerous simply to accrue cash, I was of the ilk that would do something pretty damned risky for the adventure of it.

For example later on after I got a taste of sailing  while on a trip to the Caribbean I decided to get myself a 25 foot sailboat. I busted my ass and saved. Then I bought it in Washington and learned to sail by simply sailing it to Kodiak. The last part the of the trip entailed a 600+ mile open ocean crossing across the Gulf of Alaska.

Over the next couple of years I managed to have a number of adventures in her and other sailboats.

Still, all in all I consider myself damned lucky to have wound up there for a decade of my formative years.

As I write this I have a craving for pickled octopus and smoked salmon.


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