I woke to a different alarm this morning: a piss and flush with the bathroom door wide open. When he wanted me to get up, Dad usually pushed out a drawn out series of bodily sound effects until I squirmed around in my covers. Unfortunately, the early alarm was indicative of the rest of the day; I was tired in two ways.
I was tired in the usual, sleepy sense since we had been operating mostly on Dad’s sleep schedule and not on mine. He slept fewer hours than me, plus on top of that I wrote for a long time after he went to sleep. The early-to-rise approach jarred with my circadian rhythms and showed its ugly side this day. It made me drowsy and somewhat apathetic.
My other tired: I was tired of so many miles. Obviously, reality and time constraints made that imperative; I fully realized that. But I constantly wanted to hike and take meditative time at each spot… spots that we sometimes had to just roll through. If anything, though, I had a great list of places to explore in the future at a more relaxed pace. The magnitude and length of our trip became very apparent, only to be aggravated by sleepiness.
Dad and I went further into the overcast-gray Kenai Peninsula. The weather was constant drizzle, which intensified to hard rain on the entire length of our turnaround trip back out towards Anchorage. We, for some unfathomable reason, kept our rain suits dry and warm inside our bags.
The poopysuits served as our weather armor, and the “armor” became soaked completely through. My gloves were squishy and I had to click my faceshield partially open to air out the condensing fog of breath. My face was splattered with rain and the whirling misty turbulence left in the wake of cars ahead.
The waterways and mountains of Kenai seemed to have their own weather, as it stopped raining as soon as we were away from them. We kept our wet clothes on to air them dry, making for a cool evaporative ride. One thing I did remove at a wet rest stop: my rubber booties. They had been on the outside of my pant legs, so the rain and road grunge ran down into them and filled with brown water. I took one off – tipped it over and splash on the ground. Same for the other. They had done more collecting than protecting.
Shore of the Kenai Peninsula
We followed the road to its terminus at the ocean in Seward. A recreational site attracted Dad’s interest, so we slowly slid along a potholed, wet-slick dirt road. Nothing much there though, except for a fish hatchery and another nice view, so we headed back to town and ate ice cream cones under a storefront’s overhanging protection. Sitting on the sill below the store’s display windows, passers-by must have thought we were construction workers on break with our rain suit-looking non-rain suits and our fluorescent orange safety vests.
Heading back out, we took an offshoot onto Exit Glacier Road. The road was a similar concept to the one going to the recreational site, just a few sharp turns added here and there for slick-braking fun. Exit Glacier was very interesting, as it was more visibly a river of ice than the slushy snow leading edge of the Athabasca Glacier had been. The huge, melting convoluted pillars and boulders of ice flowed down a valley between two mountains, ending in a milky, green-white stream filled with rocks and fine glacial flour. The glacier in all its forms. The ice, because of its hard-packed crystal structure, looked as though it had been air-sprayed with the brilliant blue food coloring of a snowcone.
The large number of people who walked up to us just to talk or ask questions continued to amaze us, and it was an ongoing treat of the trip. The combination of dirty motorcycles, laden-down packs, Maryland license plates, funny looking safety suits, and clean-cut father-son appearance must have all been particularly inviting. Dad theorized that many people were inwardly yearning for a similar trip on our form of locomotion; this was probably a large part of the truth. The unusualness of our situation added flavor also. I felt it was too bad that the good looking group of college women did not share that draw. There was a “scoping for chicks” scarcity in Canada, though it only proved distracting in the US.
It was rain from there on out to Anchorage, pouring out of clouds that passed through mountains and barely clipped the peaks. The bushy vegetation covering the mountains looked like moss on a rock, at least until it all came up to the road’s near edge and showed its actual large size. The mud ripples and eaten-away streambeds in the receded bays’ bottoms kept holding my eye. And everything was wet.
Our mini caravan passed through Anchorage again and we had a meal at Godfather’s Pizza, which was really just an excuse to change our wet socks. The day was topped off with a mad rush to a Texaco station for the worst case of diarrhea in my life. My left eyelid even puffed up and oozed for some unknown reason, perhaps because I was so full of shit. I told Dad that I would rather travel more miles tonight than get up early the next morning, so we took that approach.
We found the Glenn Highway, which I had read good things about. It did not disappoint that night or the next day. An eerie half-light showed us the way through wet shiny-slick twists in the lush mountains. Thin layers of clouds obscured strips of mountain, moving around and through, with others covering down from the top.
Palmer presented us with the King Mountain Lodge. For twenty dollars we got a doghouse stuffed with a musty sofa and a bed which was labeled as a double only because it had two pillows. We walked outside to the community bathroom located in a separate building, away from the outhouse. I slept on the floor in a sleeping bag, and the floor felt lumpy. So I lifted up a corner of the carpet to investigate; the carpet was laid directly on top of the earth with no floor in between.
Nighty night, sleep tight, don’t let the bed bugs bite…