PRESENT DAY
40°14'1.82" N -111°39'30.71" W
"It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end."
--Ernest Hemingway
A good story should have an ending. Shouldn’t it?
Perhaps not. This one might though.
Your skipper is sitting here in Utah, my heart and soul landlocked. I am in no danger of an anchor coming loose, springing a leak in the bilge or a whale breaching too close—more’s the pity. Much has happened since we last added to these annals. Another year of adventures in 2019, including Glacier Bay and scary-close bear encounters. There’s a new member to the crew, Kaleb, one too small to visit the Star.
And the Star is to be sold.
As I write, she's landlocked too, onshore in a Seattle dry dock getting repairs. Her railings are polished to a beautiful teak shine and she’s yare inside and out. She’s still ours. In my mind and heart she always will be ours because the places and the people and the perfection we witnessed with her are ours forever.
Let’s have a rousing good time friends. Lift the sails, trim the lines, push away from the dock and feel that breeze in your face again. At eight knots if we’re lucky. We said we’d see the world. We never said we’d see it fast.
When we’re finished looking back, I’ll admit that these exiles are already looking to our next adventure. Some of the crew has been years now trapped away from the sea, but we’re plotting an escape if we can. We want to go home to where the sunlight never ends and neither does the horizon, even if we’ll miss the Star when we go.
She’s not gone yet, but time is running out. So while the Star’s still ours let's add a few more adventures to the log. For her.
Skipper Krystal
WEDNESDAY,JULY 17, 2019
47.4502° N, 122.3088° W, 58.0989° N, 135.4134° W
It’s a little disturbing, riding shotgun to a float-plane pilot. There’s a control wheel, like a double joystick, sitting right between my knees, turning gently in tandem with the pilot’s wheel. Dozens of switches, buttons, dials, altimeters and big blinky lights are within easy arms reach. Knowing I can’t touch all of them makes me irrationally want to touch all of them right now. Especially the big red switch by the pilot’s torn-jean knee.
Since I’m not one to go co-pilot-postal, grab the controls and find out what Alaska looks like upside down, I look out the window.
The view outside is even more mesmerizing than the cockpit is. Bright clouds hug green mountains like fuzzy sweaters. God made a jigsaw out of the coast, lining the spiky islands prettily in brown beaches and white surf.
We approach Chicagof Island, soaring in from the northeast. The tiny runway of Hoonah Airport appears up ahead, cut fiercely out of the forest that never gives up its fight. Beyond it is a sliver of silver sea, and beyond that, mountains loom over Port Frederick, stray tufts of cloud hanging motionless around their faces. The plane dives so low, it feels as if the landing gear will clip a few of the pines on its way in but I know we won’t. We flit over a stream reflecting black trees and grey-blue sky before coasting over a green meadow dotted with scrub, the asphalt runway coming up from nowhere to slip under the seaplane’s wheels--a land landing this time.
I’m bear-tired but so happy. And feeling a little strange. I’ve never flown into Hoonah alone. I’m already missing Boatswain Jack and Crewmember Alyssa who will not be coming this year. Jack is sick, the kind of lasting sick that Alyssa can’t leave him.
In the distance, the tiny airport with its open, chain-link gates draws nearer. I can just make out our white, Jurassic-Park-esque jeep waiting in the parking lot, Captain Gary and First Mate Kris waiting in it.
As the plane taxis down the runway, passing a glassy pond along the way, no one in the plane said a word. For them, this is another day at their beautiful office or perhaps coming home from a routine trip to the dentist in Juneau.
Me? I’m smiling.
I’m home.
Skipper Krystal
