Stories 1: Alaskan Salmon

This blog came about because people kept telling me that I should write a book about parenting and adventures in general. Apparently they enjoy my story telling. The problem is that my brain is very non-linear. I start thinking about one thing and then something distracts me and I'm off in another direction. I'm not ADD, but my story telling is. In a group this works out great because new subjects constantly come up and people seem to enjoy that. If I wander too far then I get an uncomfortable silence and reign in my weirdness. There's nobody to reign me in when I write, which makes writing on specific subjects very difficult. I've decided to let a few of these stories out into the wild so I can let my brain really run. I'm hoping it will be good for me as a writer and will maybe let me focus when it's necessary.  This first story started for the usual reason, because I'm an idiot.

Three of my four kids are in fall soccer. The kids all have fun and are presumably learning something positive. Part of participating in soccer is bringing a drink and a snack for after the game. Everyone on the team takes a turn and usually there are enough extras so that my little one can mooch from at least one of the teams. We play games on Saturday and the day can start as early as 9:00 and end as late as 2:00. We're often there for the whole five hours. Last weekend was a particularly sticky treat weekend. Gatorade and fruit rollups and all sorts of Halloween candy was given out. By the time I was loading everyone up, my youngest was a sticky mess and I really wanted to wipe him down before he got the truck too sticky. I set the cooler in back of the truck and walked him around to his seat and wiped him down with baby wipes. By then the three other kids were fighting about something so I had to restore order and get in the truck and head home to get them lunch. Three stoplights and a few corners later I noticed that the little light for my backup sensors is on indicating that the parking assist is off. This leads me to the conclusion that I'm an idiot and didn't close the tailgate. I stop and confirm that I'm an idiot and the cooler has been jettisoned somewhere between there and the soccer fields. Not a huge issue, I'll just to back and pick it up as long as I didn't cause and accident with it. I spin around and head back and it's gone. Somebody snagged it in the 3 minutes between when it fell out and when I got back. I don't blame them, it's not like you can look at a cooler and get a good feel for how long its' been on the side of the road, you just see one and think FREE COOLER! and pick it up. Now, losing the cooler is a bummer, but it's not a tragedy. The tragedy is that I left my coffee cup in the cooler and lost that too. It was a stainless steel travel coffee cup that Ford sent me after I bought a brand new Focus in 2001. It said FOCUS on the side. I loved that coffee cup. Losing it made me sad. Now I need a new coffee cup.
I have a few other travel cups around, though I don't like any of them. I use them in the truck, but they suck around the house. Around the house I use a Ball jar that came filled with canned salmon from a trip to Alaska. It was sent back to Texas with me by a guy named Scott. Scott was part of the famous duo of Scott and Danny who showed us around Alaska for a week. They helped us find places to moose hunt, they helped find us a place to fish for salmon, and they let us on an epic four day journey into the Alaska bush. That journey started with a 2 hour boat ride in a very solid boat with a very questionable motor. It then had a two day uphill hike into the mountains including a river crossing that was accomplished by sliding across a wire suspended over a 30 foot deep gorge. You sat on a piece of pine branch attached to the wire with an ancient looking steel carabiner and an old what looked like an old piece of water ski rope. Living through that wasn't a guarantee. Then we hunted for two days and Scott shot a smallish bear that we then ate for two meals a day so we wouldn't have to carry as much out. I declined to shoot a HUGE black bear sow because she had two cubs. I felt very good about not shooting her, but man was she a beautiful bear. I knew immediately that it's unlikely that I'll ever get a chance to shoot a black bear that big again. During this whole ordeal Scott and Danny smoked pot like they were semi-pro pot smokers intent on moving up to the big leagues. It never seemed to affect their friendly and social personalities, probably because they were stoned for every second that I spent around them. Scott was a seasonal commercial fisherman who worked maybe 6 weeks a year. This gave him enough money to afford his lavish lifestyle of living in an old 5th wheel trailer in the woods. I really do mean in the woods. I think he had to cut down a total of three trees to be able to cram his trailer back off of a two track road. Scott didn't do any yard work. Amazingly, Scott had a girlfriend who lived with him in his trailer in the woods. Danny was a sometimes bass player in local bands. Oh, and he was hispanic and talked exactly like Cheech, which was sort of surreal when he was skinning a bear on top of a mountain in Alaska. Danny lived in a single wide trailer with some very creative, though structurally questionable, additions on it. He kept a loaded pellet gun next to his couch to shoot mice in the winter. The mice had developed a sort of super intelligence and were very difficult to trap by conventional means so he had to resort to shooting them while watching TV. Danny had a wife, which is maybe slightly less amazing than Scott's girlfriend, but amazing none the less. Scott and Danny were great guys and insisted that I take home a couple of jars of their home canned salmon. I'd love to tell you how it tasted but I was never sure about the quality of the canning job. Eventually my wife and I agreed to pitch the fish and keep the jars to use as glasses. I hope that somehow through the wonders of the internet Scott or Danny end up reading this post and sending me a message. I do hope they're doing well.

And that, my friends, is how I start a story about forgetting to close the tailgate on my truck and end up talking about bear hunting stoners in Alaska. Feel free to point out in the comments whether this story made your more or less likely to ever check my blog again.