his persistent snarl. “Nice of you to drop by. Have you eaten yet? I’m just starting breakfast for George, how do you like your eggs?” Not waiting for the answer I already knew, I began pulling out the fixings -eggs, bacon, plates, and pan. George plugged in the toaster, popped in two slices of bread, and put the butter on the table. Apparently preferring food rather than sympathy, Jerry gave up the pained look and replaced it with a pleasant grin.
“Yeh, yeh, I guess I could go for something to eat. Make mine over-easy with just barely runny yolks and I could go for some of that strawberry jam with my toast. Yeh, that sounds good. Maybe I’m a little hungry after all.”
It was that way with Jerry. One minute he was as mean and grouchy as a territorial bear, the next he was just as pleasant as pie. The problem was one never knew which side of him would show up at any given moment. George saw the intelligence and energy behind the gruff, prickly exterior; I saw a challenge to smooth Jerry out occasionally, disconcerting him with kindness.
5 WAITING
In Kodiak there seemed to be a lot of waiting. Not like the waiting in other places, not like waiting for a bus or waiting in traffic or waiting in line at a retail store.
Everyone waited for the tide to come in or the tide to go out; waited for the first salmon to arrive in May; waited for the frigid, dark winters to melt into cool, daylight springs and even longer daylight summers. We waited several days for dense fog to lift off the trees and hillsides and ocean waters; we waited weeks for the rain to stop (an unofficial record one year of 41 days); we waited three hours in a tree one time for a bear to finish his long lunch of fresh salmon at the river just below us; waited months for the winter accumulation of snow to melt down to the ground again in April. We waited hours and sometimes days for the winds to die down and waves to smooth out enough to launch boats on to the ocean or the fog to lift to the required 500 feet visibility so airplanes could land and take off again. We waited months for catalog orders to arrive by barge from the “lower 48,” delivering much needed parts and supplies to repair machines, vehicles, boat engines and generators (the wait could be cut to just weeks if one was desperate enough to pay the exorbitant cost of air freight). Sometimes we waited days for a technician to fly over from the mainland to repair a complex piece of equipment, usually having to do with electronics. For this reason, Kodiak people tended to stick with basic equipment, stuff that could be taken apart and put back together by a handyman (which most everyone became, sooner or later). The saying “you own it, you fix it” was born in Kodiak; it couldn’t be more applicable. We waited for the inevitable disasters. The community practiced diligently each year on how to survive earthquakes, tsunamis and oil spills, fine-tuning the lessons learned from past incidents. One could set a watch by the test-warning siren that blared every Wednesday at two o’clock.
George and I waited for the fish to hit the net on an overcast day. The sky of pearl gray blended seamlessly with the gray water, almost obscuring the horizon. I had no idea what waited ahead.
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