Heading North to Alaska
Wednesday, June 13, 2001
4:30AM, Alaska D. Time
Our flight left Honolulu on schedule, 10:55PM. I reset my watch to read 12:55AM.
At 4:20 my daughter woke from less than two hours’ sleep, woke me from less than two hours’ sleep, and, in irritable (& irritating) baby talk, declared that her collarbone was hurting. (She fractured it last Saturday while riding a horse named Romeo, who, in an instant, downshifted from cantering to grazing. Lizzie’s left arm is in a sling.) She asked for a codeine pill and fussed like a three-yr-old when I opened one of her three full bottles of water and poured half the bottle into my own jug of ice. My daughter is “young for her age,” but I snarled impatiently: “I don’t want to hear baby talk from a thirteen-year-old!”
About the same time, 4:20AM, I noticed out the window the faintest sign of a horizon, and a single bright dot of light about a thumb’s width above the horizon in what must be the east.
The sky rapidly lightened and the star or planet rapidly rose. Now, at 4:48 (I have not written continuously; I spent some time retrieving spilled compact discs from beneath my daughter’s seat), the sky ahead of us is blood red. “Look, Daddy! It’s like lava stuff!” is how Elizabeth described it.
“Is Uncle Bruce a doctor?”
“A nurse.”
“How could he be a nurse? I thought girls were nurses.”
I glared.
Eliz picked up on my impatience. “I guess there can be all kinds,” she said. “Does it matter if they are girls or boys?”
“Yeah. It matters. We’ll talk later.”
4:55. The star (Venus?) is a fist-&-a-half high now. The rich red and pink extend in a flat band as far as I can see (which is quite a ways—maybe 60°) (maybe 90°) (feels like 120°) (no, feels like 180° but it isn’t). In noticing today’s date on my watch, I realize my paternal grandfather, Earl Franklin Grossmann, was born in Wisconsin ninety-nine years ago today. As of tomorrow’s date, he’ll have been nine years and nine days gone from this earth. Oh, how I miss him!
5:00. “How many more hours?” asks Eliz, too loudly bec. she is listening to a CD through earphones. Her breath is Juicy Fruit & Night Mouth.
“One hour & forty minutes.”
“Who’s going to help me take my bath?”
“Annie.” That’s her cousin, age 11-going-on-twenty.
The sky is bright. The star is fading. Waves on the sea are now discernible. Not white caps, but ... Wait! Those are clouds! Elizabeth told me so, and I see now that she is right. They have plateaus and valleys and miles of wooly ripples.
5:07. The bright band widens, becomes more orange. My camera is ready, more or less. Doubt this is photographable. Esp. from my seat, 21H, the aisle.
5:10. Gold! The sun is rising! Hatching! Blazing! Gold-red-gold! Bright above & bright below a black band of cloud.
5:12. Sunrise! f2, 1/125; f5.6, 1/125 Eliz is my periscope operator.
5:17. Sun almost has sky beneath its disk of flame that blinds me in my quickest glimpse. I shake my head from the pain. Bright spots are dancing across this page.
5:20. Window frame is bright. Almost time for a portrait of my daughter, or time for a hike to the restroom.
5:21. White light.
12½ hrs later, 5:58PM, Wed. evening. Sun still high. We are camped beside a stream, somewhere on the Kenai Peninsula. At the Anchorage airport this morning, Bruce & Annalise picked me and Liz up in the Ford Midas motorhome that my parents purchased new in 1976. It’s a nice size, not a huge one. Bruce tells me he once drove it aboard a ferry boat and declared it to be nineteen feet, but a crewman measured it at nineteen-five. The extra inches resulted, Bruce says, in a thirty-seven-dollar increase in fare. Whether that was Canadian or U.S. money I didn’t think to ask.
The Midas is faded and frail, patched in places with duct tape and in-need-of-patching many places more. The refrigerator doesn’t work (nor the stove or furnace), but Bruce brought ice chests well-stocked with groceries and appropriate beverages. A few summers ago on a rough road, Bruce says, a rock cracked a pipe in the motorhome’s septic system. Since then, the bathroom has served as a closet for fishing gear. When the vehicle exceeds a certain speed, the plumbing’s lingering bad odor becomes almost imperceptible.
Delta Junction, three hundred sixty miles to the north, is where Bruce and his family reside. For these next four days my brother and I have no particular plans—we are not due in Delta until Sunday evening. Two dads, two daughters, no wives. This vacation is off to a glorious beginning! ♦
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Thanks! BUD GROSSMANN
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