by Bob Smith
I didn’t realize until recently how Rorie’s being a dad influenced my choosing to become a father. Rorie plays hockey and runs races, but he’s most competitive at being a good dad. I had visited for a weekend earlier in the year and the four of us played a game of kickball in Juneau’s historic Evergreen Cemetery. It’s just down the block from Rorie’s house. Joe Juneau is buried there. Tombstones became our first, second, and third bases and Andrew Connelly RIP was our home plate: our own “Fuck You!” to the Angel of Death.
Rorie and I and his sons also took a hike in a park on Douglas Island, which is across from downtown Juneau. The park is heavily forested and on the ocean. It also has a big patch of skunk cabbages. The western species has beautiful yellow flowers that stink like corpses. Unfortunately we visited after the flowers had stopped blooming and we missed their stench. For a Nature Boy, it is disappointing to not experience flowers that would be perfect for a zombie funeral.
We had a chance to visit Jasper’s school. As the head of the chess club at the elementary school, Rorie had to see if the school had enough chess sets. It was a rainy day, but the kids were still playing in the playground. The children were all dressed with rain jackets and jumping rope, swinging and leapfrogging. Alaska kids are tough. This playground outing wouldn’t happen in the Lower 48. “Playing in the rain? Amelia might get wet!” some parent would say. Blond-haired Jasper saw us and ran over to say hello.
We took a ferry to Skagway, leaving at 7 a.m. and arriving at 2 p.m. We grabbed deck chairs and saw why it would cost five hundred million to build a road to Juneau. North of the city is blocked by cliffs. Beautiful to look at but impossible to asphalt. I started a conversation with Rorie as the ferry left the dock. “How did you meet Mk and Susan?”
“I met Mk my first day in Juneau,” said Rorie. “She was photographing a pregnant friend of ours. I was sad that as a gay man I probably wouldn’t have kids. And I wasn’t shy about saying that.”
Rorie looked at the cliffs for a minute.
“A woman told me Mk and Susan wanted to start a family. I got a phone call from Mk. She said, ‘Hi. This is a hard conversation to start . . .’ I said, ‘I know.’ Then told her that a friend of hers had explained what she was phoning about. We decided to meet for dinner and I made a pie from sour cherries picked in my yard. It was a beautiful pie. When I brought it over, they oohed and aahed over the pie and I said, ‘That’s genetic.’”
I almost spit out my coffee laughing.
“I had a lot of questions,” said Rorie. “We started meeting weekly and discussed every child-related issue we could think of: custody arrangements, toy guns, nudity in the house, spanking, sugar intake. In hindsight, we led ourselves through a great process; everyone should do this before they have kids together! We discovered we were all compatible.”
“Nudity in the house?” I asked. “So you Scottish guys don’t wear anything under your kilts?”
“We’ve been going commando for thousands of years,” said Rorie, sipping his coffee as if he were describing something as mundane as the weather.
“I lived a mile away from Mk and Susan,” said Rorie. “After Jasper was born, I used to fall asleep on their couch, so we decided to start looking for a place to buy together. We also decided to apply for a three-parent adoption, giving all three of us parental rights and responsibilities. We succeeded in establishing that all three of us are willing, equal parents. It’s been hard to fit on forms ever since . . . but a problem I’m happy to grapple with. We searched for a house for almost two years and couldn’t find anything that was affordable without being a ‘daddy in the dungeon’ kind of setup. And then their landlord announced they were selling the house and we could have first dibs on buying.”
“The house you have?”
“Yes.”
“I love your house,” I said. “On a corner lot. High on a hill. An easy walk to downtown. Large windows that let in the light. A big yard. If I lived in Juneau, I’d want that house.”
“It is a great house.”
The ferry arrived at Skagway on time. This was my first visit. The town is an architectural marvel: an intact western town that is vibrant and alive.
“It looks like a set for a John Wayne movie,” I said.
“The pavement was done so it looks like an unpaved gravel road,” said Rorie. “There are no curbs and they used a coarse gray crushed rock to give it that look.”
“Only an engineer would notice that,” I said.
“An engineer organized this trip.”
“I’m grateful for that,” I said. “If an artist organized it, we’d be back in Juneau trying to hitch a ride on a fishing boat.”
Rorie led me down the Main Street of Skagway then turned left down a side street. There was a cool coffee joint that served lunch. After downing roast beef sandwiches and lattes—I’m a metropolitan outdoors-man since I like a latte before a hike—we explored the town and then took a hike around a small pond. Skagway’s population is 920, but once a town ends in Alaska, wilderness begins. Our hike around a pond might not sound adventurous, but we could have run into bears or been trampled by a moose.
I love places where the border between wildlife and civilization seems porous. I remember when I lived in Santa Fe how thrilled I was to see a coyote in my yard. In Provincetown, I was scared when two coywolves—much bigger than coyotes—crossed the road near our condo. I was frightened because Michael and I had a beagle, Toby, who we walked around town, and I didn’t want him to be coywolf supper.
After our hike around the pond, we met up with the other members of Rorie’s relay team who wore T-shirts embossed with the name “Dumpster Juice.” The name of Rorie’s team made me laugh. Taking something disgusting and glorifying it is sensible. I crack jokes about my ALS all the time.
There was a field nearby where the team set up tents to take naps before the all-night race. A campfire was burning. Rorie had a friend drive his car to Whitehorse. We were offered the use of a tent and two sleeping bags.
Rorie needed a nap before his run. So we got into the tent. We kissed each other, something always made sexier while surrounded by straight guys. We napped and got up when it was dark. The two of us ate beef stew a team member made and then watched the start of the race.
Rorie wasn’t running until two in the morning. We rode in the backseat of a car until Rorie’s leg of the race. Riding in a car while men were running beside me made me feel lazier than a pre–Civil War slave owner, the all-time laziest fuckers: making African Americans pick cotton so they could sit on their ass and sip bourbon.
I felt more indolent when Rorie started his segment—the hardest of the race—running up a mountain for an hour and a half. I was still in the backseat of the car. We drove up the mountain in segments and waited for him. Then he’d come running up to the car and we’d give him water. I thought we had sold our souls at a garage sale as we sat in a car while an athlete ran up a mountain.
After Rorie was finished with his part of the race, we crashed at 3:30 a.m. in the back of a truck that was part of Dumpster Juice’s team effort. Unfortunately, the transmission was fried and it needed a tow. Thank God the back of the truck had a roof. I didn’t need to meet some Yukon mosquitoes whose call of the wild was slurping my blood. Rorie was exhausted and fell asleep immediately. I fell asleep soon after.
Waking up in the back of a truck might not sound beautiful, but it was. Looking out the tiny windows I saw autumn in the Yukon—Labor Day weekend! The aspens were golden. It was a sunny day and we both got up and sat on the hatchback of the truck.
“I can’t believe I’m in the Yukon,” I said.
“People in Juneau come up here for long weekends,” Rorie said. “It’s the Call of Good Restaurants.”
“It’s dazzling up here,” I said. We were in a valley where a two-lane road had been built. The mountainsides were a mix of yellow aspens and green lodgepole pines.
“Would you say it was dazzling in January?” Rorie asked.
“No fucking way,” I replied.
Just then Rorie’s straight friend Mark pulled up in Susan’s maroon Toyota Tercel.
“How’d you get my car?” Rorie asked.
“I hitchhiked into Whitehorse,” Mark said. He looked like he was in his twenties, handsome, blond-haired, and wearing wire-rimmed glasses. “I thought you guys would need a ride.”
I sat in the backseat of the car, and Rory drove into Whitehorse, where Dumpster Juice had rented a few hotel rooms where we could shower. Runners for the relay race ran past us all the way into the Yukon’s capital city, making me feel lazier.
Whitehorse had roughly the same population as Juneau. It had a few blocks of frontier buildings that looked like Skagway. But it also had modern buildings built by the Canadian government: a huge ice arena, an arts center, and government offices.
For the rest of the trip, Rorie and I separated from the relay team. We stopped at one of Rorie’s favorite places in Whitehorse: the Alpine Bakery. They’re organic, holistic, and environmentally active and aware. You’d expect a bakery like this in San Francisco, but not the Yukon. The staff were all hipsters and one guy offered us a hit off the joint that he was smoking in the parking lot. Rorie and I accepted his hospitality. Breakfast weed and we got sandwiches, great coffee, plus a cookie for dessert.
Our next stop was Miles Canyon on the Yukon River. It’s a narrow canyon and the current is racing. If you fell in the river there, you’d drown three miles downstream. The water is a bright green that looks tropical. The pine forest along the river is a memo that you are in the Yukon. We hiked along the canyon on well-used trails and picked a boulder to eat our sandwiches.
“I did some research,” Rorie said. “Salmon swim up here.”
“Imagine swimming almost two thousand miles to get laid.”
“Well, salmon get laid once in their lives.”
“They must be the horniest fishes on earth.”
“The horniest animals on earth.”
“They orgasm, then die,” I said.
“There are worse ways to go.”
“Salmon have tough sex lives; it’s the worst one-night stand.”
“They can’t even brag to their friends about the great fins on last night’s lay.”
Our next stop was Takhini Hot Springs. We would camp there for the night. The springs had been used by Native Americans (Native Canadians?) for hundreds of years. We set our tent up in a grove of aspens. I’ve slept in tents in many places but having all the trees wearing gold crowns was so lovely. We changed into our bathing suits and headed for the hot springs.
Most hot springs are in cement swimming pools but Tahkini made their pools surrounded by a small wooden boardwalk bordered by rocks. It reminded you the springs are natural. One pool was a half circle connected to a rectangular pool. It was crowded at the end of summer. Although in the Yukon there should be a new word for Labor Day weekend: Autummer. Rorie got in the springs first. I wasn’t afraid of trying it and got in after him. The water was hot and relaxing. Rorie needed it after running up a mountain. I needed it from sitting on my ass.
“People are like lobsters in hot tubs; the hot water makes them give up and turn red.”
“I’m Scottish, so I’m a teakettle,” said Rorie. “When I whistle, take me from the pool.”
After two hours of soaking, Rorie whistled, and we got out of the water. Resting in a hot tub is exhausting so we took a nap in our tent. We had dinner at the Takhini restaurant—burgers and homemade blueberry pie.
Sitting around a campfire in the Yukon made me feel adventurous— for a guy who loves wilderness but couldn’t start a campfire without matches. Sitting under the royal aspens with their golden crowns, we felt like the kings of the forest.
“Why is it fun watching logs and branches become ashes?” I asked.
“It’s a metaphor for life. We all have to entertain and comfort people before we become a pile of dust.”
We properly extinguished our fire, then entered our tent. We kissed but it was too cold to have sex. Our balls were sleeping bags.
The next morning after breakfast and coffee at the Takhini Hot Springs restaurant, we packed up. Rorie drove us to the Takhini River. It was the size of a creek, curving and winding through the land. But we had the river to ourselves. It was warm and sunny. We put a blanket on the side of a hill that sloped down to the river,
We cuddled then were poked with the urge to have sex. Rorie and I were ready for it when a truck pulled up right behind our blanket. We were out of sight, but it was disappointing. It was like being a teenager and your mother knocking on your bedroom door when you want to beat off.
So we got in our car and onto the Alaska Highway heading toward Haines Junction. Once we left Whitehorse, it was wilderness. The green pines and yellow aspens gave me the fake thrill that we were pioneers. But I thought about Rorie in the Peace Corps.
“I know you taught math in a secondary school in the Peace Corps,” I said. “What were your feelings when you left?”
“It was the summer of 1988, and I was twenty-four and had been in Sierra Leone for about a year,” Rorie said. “I had recently had worms, giardia, amoebic dysentery, and malaria.”
“No syphilis or gonorrhea?”
“Nah,” Rorie said. “I’d just had a tumbu fly removed from my leg. Envision, if you will, a big pimple on your thigh, except it wasn’t a zit. The nurse worked and squeezed my leg. Out popped a maggot.”
“Oh, that’s disgusting,” I said.
“But none of those things came close to killing me—or at least I don’t think they did—but my six-week run of bad luck of all kinds was about to start. I lived in a small rural village with about three thousand people. There was no plumbing, electricity, phone, pavement, or many hints of modern life. A dusty road ran through town, a couple of cars and trucks every hour. I was the only foreigner, the only white person. My house had mud block walls, covered with a smear of cement, faded whitewash. I had a covered veranda, wooden shutters covered window openings, and I had a metal roof. The windows had strips of wood across them. They were called teefs bars, for keeping the teefs, or thieves, out. Isatu, my neighbor, would say ‘Mr. Rorie, never leave your door open; snakes will come into your house.’”
“Better snakes than roaches or centipedes,” I said. “One time I went to Costa Rica and my hotel room was infested with centipedes. Big ones.”
“That’s gross! One night I awoke with severe pain in my stomach. I knew the drill. I lit my kerosene hurricane and headed for the pit latrine, literally a hole in the ground. No bowel movement was forthcoming. I hobbled back to my house. On this night something was different. I pulled out my faithful self-help book, issued to all Peace Corps volunteers where there is no doctor, and went to the index to look up abdominal pain. The entry humorously said ‘see belly.’ Under the belly section I quickly found out how to diagnose the difference between ulcers, parasites, and the eventual winner appendicitis.”
“What was the title of your self-help book? ‘How to Die Quickly and Influence People’?”
“That’s close,” he said. “In the morning I took an hour-long bouncy truck ride down a severely potholed dirt road further into the jungle to a small town that had a rudimentary hospital. Appendicitis and bouncy rides do not go together. There were no doctors at the hospital. Janet Baxter was a nice English twenty-three-year-old studying to become a gynecologist. She had never done an appendectomy, but she had done a C-section. She was game and I had no choices. Everyone in the operating room was barefoot. Leave your shoes and therefore as much dirt and disease as possible at the door.”
“That sounds like if you drop a scalpel, you’ll lose a toe.”
“Exactly. They scrubbed up with homemade lye soap. It was called brookings soap because you use it to wash your clothes in the stream or brook. When she anesthetized me, I looked into her eyes and I could see that she was scared. The worst part were the hallucinations from whatever they drugge
d me up with. I felt and saw my body twisting and contorting, my head folding through my stomach and out the back and back on. They wheeled me in a gurney outside down some gravel paths. All the alien creatures I passed had big distended necks that came up with misshapen heads and they peered over and looked down at me.”
“At least you had an acid trip,” I said. “I’ve always wanted one.”
“A bad acid trip isn’t fun,” Rorie said. “After the surgery, since I was white, I was put in my own one-room building, away from the nursing staff who unfortunately couldn’t hear me hollering in pain all through the night. Out of fear of giving me too much, they had underdosed the painkillers. My first visitors came at dawn. Gotu came to eat the orange rinds on the veranda. One pushed the door open, stuck its head in the room, and stared at me for a bit. Later the doctor came. ‘You’d be amazed how hard we had to cut to get through your skin. Your appendix popped right out.’”
“It wanted to get away from you. Were you too mean to it?”
“We had a bad relationship. It was all about him.”
A red-tailed hawk flew ahead of us. We both followed his movements.
“Back at home three weeks later,” said Rorie, “I watched yet another spectacular tropical lightning show. As I was putting away my laundry I put a shirt on a metal hanger. I reached up to hang it on a pole that hung from the ceiling from the metal roof in the humid jungle. The room exploded. Everything was in black and white. My body—it was like I’d been hit by a truck. I knew I was being hit by lightning. I screamed as hard as I could. NOOOO! I didn’t want to die. I slammed to the ground, knocked unconscious. I jolted awake with my heart racing. I couldn’t move most of my body. My right arm and legs were paralyzed. With my left arm, I could push myself on my back, and I cried for help. My neighbor Cidu and his brother came to the window. They smashed through the teef bars, crawled over my bed, and dragged me across the floor. They looked down at my legs, no feeling or sensation at all. Cidu looked at me. The only thing left to do was to pray to God. And they jumped back out the window and left to get me help. I lay in bed, and with my left hand I kneaded my right hand, thinking please I want to have some feeling back, let me have some feeling back. After about a half an hour I could feel some tingling in my fingertips. Later Patrick, the dispenser, came. He ran a small business selling matches, cigarettes, aspirin, Band-Aids, and Valium out of a wooden box propped on a crate. Here, take these pills. These are for brain injuries. He cleaned the wound where my head had hit the ground. Through the night I slowly regained feeling in my body.”