by Bob Smith
When Mary Leakey entered the president’s house, I recognized her immediately. She had the dowdy, I-can’t-be-bothered-about-my-appearance look of a distracted intellectual who’s smart enough to know the speed of light but too dumb to use sunblock. After sixty years of working outdoors, Mary Leakey’s face had developed several prominent moles that were arranged in a kind of disorganized Stonehenge.
Mrs. Leakey was one of the guests of honor, but I noticed during the dinner there were long periods where she was ignored even by the people seated next to her. At first this shocked—and then infuriated—me. She was seventy-eight, and I couldn’t believe that people weren’t curious about her life and work. She wasn’t a second-rate celebrity. Mary Leakey had made discoveries that were scientifically important and also poetically evocative of what it means to be human. I was thrilled to be in the same room with her and decided all the other guests were idiots. When Mary looked bored, I hated them. I went over to Tom, my boyfriend at the time, to point her out and let off steam about the academic drudges who weren’t showing any interest in her. My conversation with him was dissatisfying because he sympathized with the drudges since he wasn’t interested in her either. He gave me his polite attention before mocking me with “Bob, it’s not like she’s Barbra Streisand.”
During the dinner, Victor asked me with his usual deference if I would later serve after-dinner drinks in the library. (“Bob, would you mind, but only if you don’t mind, if you do, let me know, I’ll try to find someone else, could you . . . maybe, um . . . would you set up the bar in the library for the after-dinner drinks? If that’s okay?”) I agreed and went into the library after coffee was served. As soon as the dinner ended, most of the guests began to leave. I was glad of this and assumed I wasn’t going to be too busy.
To my surprise, Mary Leakey wandered in by herself. I couldn’t believe it. Like any devoted fan, I had read her autobiography, Disclosing the Past, and knew that she was fond of a glass of single malt and even a good cigar at the end of the day. So I immediately asked her, “Mrs. Leakey, can I get you something to drink?”
She smiled when I recognized her. “I’d love a Jack Daniels on the rocks.”
Cater waiters are not supposed to converse with the guests, but I understood this would be my only opportunity to talk to her. I easily stepped over the velvet rope that separates the public from a star. As I poured her drink, I said, “Mrs. Leakey, I’m a big fan of yours.” When the words came out of my mouth, I realized how absurd I sounded, but real fans are unstoppable. I pushed on with “When I was a boy, I saw the National Geographic Special about your work, and I’ve always wondered what it was like to discover the footprints at Lee . . .”
I was so excited that the name of the footprint site slipped my mind. She’ll think I’m an idiot, I thought. But she smiled and helped me out, “Laetoli.”
When I handed her her drink, she added, “That was possibly the most significant discovery that I played a part in. The excitement was quite intense when we realized what we had found.”
Under my incessant questioning, she talked briefly about some of her other experiences: tracing cave paintings in Tanzania, finding a huge deposit of Stone Age axes, the discovery of the Zinjanthropus skull. It was at this point that she looked directly at me and said, “I’ve always been curious. That’s what kept me searching.” She then took a sip of her drink and asked me about myself.
“I’m a stand-up comic,” I said.
She stared at me at me as if a tibia was sticking out of my head.
“You’re funny?”
Her skeptical tone seemed to say I’d need hard evidence to prove my theory.
“Yes,” I answered, thinking I’m not about to tell Mary Leakey a joke and risk bombing. I mentioned I was nervous about quitting my day job to go away to perform for three months.
“Oh, you can’t let that be an obstacle,” she said. “I’ve always done exactly what I wanted and I’ve had a wonderful life.”
Mary spoke with a sense of pride and a trace of maternal asperity. It was startling, as I’d never heard anyone claim to have lived a wonderful life before. At that moment it became absolutely clear to me that leading a curious life is the most practical thing a person can do. Suddenly I understood that I had made Mary’s evening—and she had made mine. It’s a rare event when a conversation turns into an epiphany, almost as infrequent as finding an Australopithecus skull while out walking your dogs. At that moment it became absolutely clear that I would be happy spending my life searching for farcical, hysterical, and witty.
Coffee Point
Travel guides should advise their readers that the easiest way to fall in love with a place is to have hot sex there. I discovered this for myself since hooking up in Alaska just made me more smitten with our forty-ninth state. Until I visited Alaska, I had never thought of myself as adventurous—ignoring that I’d been performing stand-up comedy since I turned eighteen and several years later moved to New York City without a clear ambition other than to get out of Buffalo.
When Out magazine hired me to write an article, my editor asked me to suggest a subject. I immediately said that I wanted to write about gay people in Alaska. The previous year, I’d performed stand-up comedy in Anchorage at a benefit for Alaska’s gay rights organization, Identity, and met an extraordinary group of men and women.
A lesbian and her partner let me stay with them in their sprawling ranch house to conserve the group’s funds. (I’ve often done this to save money for LGBT groups, and my approval rating is 100 percent. The gays would never let your host or hosts be less than fabulous.) Marge was an expert musician in playing accordions, concertinas, and squeeze-boxes of all sorts. She had an all-women band called Marge and the Polka Chips that performed all over Alaska. Often, they were hired to celebrate the end of crabbing season and would be flown out to Dutch Harbor in the Aleutians.
At my performance in Anchorage at the Fourth Avenue Theater—a streamline moderne landmark movie palace built in the forties that survived Alaska’s catastrophic 1964 earthquake—I was seated at a table that changed my path for my life. I met two partnered doctors who were instrumental in setting up the Native Health Service, where community health practitioners were trained for eight weeks, then given a handbook detailing treatment for every sort of medical emergency plus a radio that could be used to call for help. Thus prepared, the health practitioners were sent to serve in remote Native villages. The two docs assured me that their system worked and later investigating their claims, I discovered that it did. Seated on my right was Vic Carlson, a retired judge who was a fierce advocate for LGBT rights, and to my left was Brad Williams, a handsome thirty-two-year-old, copper-haired, blue-eyed salmon fisherman.
After the benefit, Brad asked me if I wanted to go out for a drink at Mad Myrna’s, Anchorage’s principal gay bar. He had a new pickup truck, which was not the usual vehicle for gay guys in Los Angeles, where I lived at the time. This pleased me since it reminded me of my close friend Michael Hart, who lived in Santa Fe and also drove a pickup. It sounds as if I was impressed with the butchness of driving a truck. That was part of it, but to me it was a sign that I might have found another adventurous friend.
Brad met my requirements for being a close friend. He was a gay man who would rather go camping on a prairie than see a production of Oklahoma! (Admittedly, I do have plenty of friends who prefer listening to The Sound of Music’s “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” rather than hiking up any peak.)
On that first visit to Alaska, we made the drive from Anchorage down to Seward in two and a half hours. No tourist ever makes the trip in that amount of time since it’s one of the most scenic drives in the world and at some point a panorama will compel you to pull over. There’s a vitality to the landscape that makes everything seem fresh: clouds, sky, mountains, creeks, rivers, oceans—even trees. I’ve subsequently made the trip several times, and the comedian in me always insists on stopping at the Tesoro gas station and convenience store at the tur
n-off to Girdwood, Anchorage’s ski resort.
The convenience store faces Turnagain Arm, an inlet named by William Bligh—the Mutiny on the Bounty captain. He was then the sailing master on Captain Cook’s third and final voyage. Towering over the inlet are majestic snowcapped mountains. It’s the meeting point between America the beautiful and America the ugly and sarcastically emphasizes that every American is a citizen of both countries. If you’re going to litter the landscape with a jumbo Slurpee cup, you couldn’t pick a better spot.
It was the first week of October and the aspens and birches had turned, but their yellow leaves were shivering as if winter was an hour away. I’ve been to Alaska sixteen times, and it always evokes a complementary mix of exhilaration and pride. Part of me is always thinking, “Wow! I’m in Alaska!” while simultaneously congratulating myself, “Wow! I’m happy!”
In Seward, we went on a cruise to see Kenai Fjords National Park and on our way ran into a super pod of killer whales. In the fall, orcas form large groups, and surrounding our ship were fifty whales. Standing on the deck of the boat, in the omnipresent Alaskan drizzle, I watched four dorsal fins rising like claws from the sea all around us while everywhere else I looked a whale was breaching. Another passenger on the ship exclaimed, “This is spectacular! And I’m from Montana.” His amusing endorsement reminded me that Alaska had always intrigued me.
Part of my love of Alaska will always be linked to my vitriolic disgust and hatred for antienvironmental fanatics. All through the seventies, I followed the Alaska Native Claims Settlement of 1971, the failed attempts to create new national parks in Alaska in 1974, and Jimmy Carter proclaiming all the designated Alaska parklands as national monuments in 1978 under the National Antiquities Act. When I was twenty-two in 1980, I was relieved and thrilled when President Carter signed the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, which doubled the size of our national park system, shortly before the antienvironmental Reagan took office.
People forget there was a time when protecting the environment was nonpartisan. Republican president Teddy Roosevelt created our national forests, Eisenhower created the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency and signed the Endangered Species Act. But Ronnie thought being green meant making money by sucking on the planet like a leech. He enjoyed the outdoors at his private ranch in California while he tried to trash our public lands with logging, mining, and oil and gas drilling. He was the first of the selfish right-wing fucks who have their ranches or oceanfront houses but don’t give a damn about our national parks, forests, and wildlife refuges. It’s as if these loathsome morons think sharing the planet with other life forms is communism.
Reagan’s appointment of James Watt, a fundamentalist Christian antienvironmentalist, as our secretary of the interior infuriated me. Watt seemed to want to cut down all our forests so there was no chance Jesus would be crucified after his second coming. In response, I joined the Nature Conservancy and the Wilderness Society and even donated extra money to both organizations when I was barely earning enough to pay my New York City rent.
When I contacted Brad about my article for Out magazine, he told me that I couldn’t just interview gay men and lesbians living in Anchorage. I needed to get out in the bush. Brad invited me to come salmon fishing with him at Coffee Point on Bristol Bay, out on the Alaska peninsula. I said, “Yes,” since my previous trip had convinced me that when an Alaskan invites you to do something outdoors the smart answer is always “Yes!”
On the summer solstice, I returned to Anchorage and stayed with Vic Carlson, the retired judge, and his partner, Jerry. Vic is a tall, handsome, elderly man with a neatly trimmed white beard, but his most distinguishing feature is his deep, authoritative voice. It’s the perfect voice for a judge since he sounds like Jehovah in a Cecil B. DeMille film. Vic and Jerry live in downtown Anchorage in a historic neighborhood near Delaney Park, where the architecture varies from log cabins to houses from the thirties that look like astronomical observatories to hideous suburban monstrosities built in the seventies during the pipeline boom.
I soon learned that Vic seemed to know every gay man and lesbian in Alaska. If I mentioned his name in Juneau or Fairbanks, there was always someone in the group who was a friend of Vic’s. He always threw dinner parties when I visited—serving excellent fresh salmon or halibut—and his guests ranged from Native Alaskan college students to lovely lesbians who worked at the art museum to the most rugged muscular interior decorator the world has ever known. One of Vic’s friends, a silver-daddy Paul Bunyan, told me, “I love opera and love my chain saw.” Through his friends, Vic was instrumental in making me see that gay people in Alaska should be celebrated.
Vic explained that he first visited Alaska when he was in the army and stationed in the Aleutians. In 1963, when he was in his late twenties, he moved to Fairbanks. It’s a story I’ve heard many times, and I’m convinced that if I had visited Alaska in my twenties, I too would have headed north.
I posted a notice about the purpose of my visit in a chat room for gay Alaskans and heard from dozens of LGBT Alaskans. One of the people who contacted me was Jim Wilkins, a handsome Inupiat Native Alaskan. We had dinner at a restaurant—in Alaska, always order salmon or halibut—and then he showed me the remarkable downtown fishing in Anchorage on Ship Creek where huge three-foot-long king salmon were caught by the locals. Then we went back to my room at Vic’s to make out.
The next day, I flew on a commercial jet to the airport at the village of King Salmon, the regional hub for the Alaska peninsula. At breakfast, Vic had grinned and told me, “You’re going to do something most Alaskans never experience.”
His comment excited me since I’ve always sought out the path less traveled. (Although getting a rare life-threatening disease versus coming down with a common cold makes me think I need to ease up on my predilection for idiosyncrasy.) Vic had advised me to bring fresh food as a thank you gift since at Coffee Point a trip to the nearest supermarket required an airplane. I bought some expensive frozen steaks, some fancy bakery bread, and salad fixings. On my flight to King Salmon, we flew over snow-covered mountains that looked close enough to crash into. After landing, I hired a bush pilot for two hundred dollars to fly me forty miles, to Egegik—pronounced Iggy-gick—the Native village across the river from where Brad fished. Egegik was 326 miles southwest of Anchorage, almost exactly the same distance between Portland, Maine, and New York City. Alaska is big.
We then took off from Egegik and looped over Coffee Point, giving me a clear view of all the fishing boats in the bay, the abandoned cannery along the Egegik River, and the collection of shacks and airplane hangars that comprised the summer fishing camp. The pilot left me standing on the gravel runway, carrying two heavy duffel bags.
The wind was snapping a signal flag on a pole, and I saw the top of a snow-streaked mountain to the southeast. Brad would later tell me it was Mount Peulik, an active volcano. A shack stood nearby, and behind me were miles of scrubby bushes, interspersed with tundra and ponds. It felt as if I had stepped through the looking glass of a frontier saloon. Moving toward the shack, my hiking boots puddled in the dry grass that camouflaged swampy mud. With every step, I teeter-tottered until I reached the shack. A middle-aged woman whose gray hair looked like an impenetrable old-growth forest—also the norm in Alaska—was fixing her four-wheel ATV. I was relieved that she knew Brad Williams and could direct me down toward the shore through a street of haphazardly placed shacks, which looked as if they’d been assembled from flotsam that had washed up on the beach. Every yard was littered with oil drums, fishing nets, an ATV, and a rusting, wind-battered pickup truck that mirrored Coffee Point’s architecture. The housing wasn’t pretty, but it got the job done during sockeye season in June and July.
I found Brad in his yard, dressed in waders, stacking plastic totes that were either labeled with Magic Marker “water” or “ice” or held fish. His welcoming smile had an element of astonishment. Later,
Brad admitted he’d had severe doubts that I would make the trip. I was the first friend of his to ever visit Coffee Point—and he had been a commercial fisherman since he was eight years old.
Brad’s house was on the bluff looking out on Bristol Bay, although the beach view was blocked by the sauna house, which had been built by Brad’s older brother, Dave. The sauna house had a picture window that allowed you to steam while giving you a spectacular view of the midnight sun setting over the ocean—horizoned with fishing boats. (“Spectacular” is the most overused adjective in Alaska, equivalent to the overused “fabulous” by the gays.)
We went inside the small house and entered the kitchen. There was an oak table with three mismatched chairs, a bathroom, and a tiny bedroom with a mattress on the floor. I especially liked the turquoise enamel gas stove that looked vintage 1960s. There were gray carpeted steps leading to the second floor. After removing our boots, we climbed the stairs and entered a spotless all-white room with three picture windows that offered a breathtaking panoramic view of Coffee Point. The fourth wall was a bed alcove with a handy thick blue curtain that blocked the sunrise at 3:00 a.m.
Looking out over the water, it struck me that this was better than tourist Alaska—and tourist Alaska is great; I was actually going to live like an Alaskan. Brad took me for a ride on his four-wheeler to show me around Coffee Point. Initially, I felt awkward about wrapping my arms around his waist but got over it quickly, as it was the only way I could hang on. We zoomed down to the Egegik River and saw a shack with a No Trespassing sign. Brad explained the owner was a kook who would pull a gun on you if you stepped on his property. We both mocked the idea of thinking anyone needed to fear strangers at Coffee Point.
We stopped at a pond where I looked down and saw three-inch-high irises and chocolate lilies at our feet. They had adapted to the ceaseless icy wind coming off the bay by hunkering down. When I pointed them out to Brad, he said, “I’ve never noticed them before.”