With what seems like a premature, overreaction, I find myself forsaking t-shirts and short pants in favor of sweat shirts and winter weight trousers. I know what month it is and where I am but I’m like the batter who steps out of the box, making the pitcher wait. The high, tight fastball (cold weather) is more than I want to deal with right now. We have an overcast sky with a sharp edge on the 40 degree breeze. This must be one of those unanticipated modulations that accompany old age. I don’t handle cold weather like I used to. I still like the message it sends and I would reset my thermostat but the damn thing is on autopilot. Sneeze, shiver, runny nose; I never had that reaction when I was just 70.
What I would really like is to revisit a story that is nothing but good. In 2009 I volunteered the whole summer season at Kenai Fjords National Park, Seward, Alaska. Assigned to the Interpretation Division, my job was to work at Exit Glacier’s Visitors Center and to lead guided hikes on its associated trails, telling the Park’s story.
Late in the season, with schools open, we still had visitors but the numbers had dropped off. On a day off, I was invited to lunch with Jeff Mow, the Park Superintendent. We went to Chinook’s, a great restaurant on the harbor. Our table was at the window, looking out over all the boats in their slips. It was ‘His’ table. The Kenai Fjords family was relatively small and he knew everybody by name, even the volunteers. When the circumstance called for formality, everyone got proper but day to day, we were all on a first name basis. More than anything else, he wanted me to know how much he personally appreciated volunteers in general and me in the moment. He had done graduate study at the University of Michigan and we swapped stories of Ann Arbor. Then he told me the following story.
Two years earlier during the filming of a Ken Burns documentary, ‘The National Parks’ he had brought the then Senators, John McCain and Hillary Clinton to Chinook’s for lunch. They sat where we were, at ‘His’ table: I sat where John McCain had been seated. It seems the angst and rivalry between competing politicians ended when the cameras turned away and they were great friends, comfortable in close company and equally prone to teasing and spontaneous laughter. Jeff shared with them the Park’s story, the same story I shared every day.
As the story telling went around the table, Senator Clinton first prompted, then challenged her cohort to recite Robert Service’s, ‘The Cremation of Sam McGee.’ After some coaxing, John McCain, sitting in the same spot I then occupied, he began: “There are strange things done in the midnight sun, by the men who moil for gold: The Arctic trails have their secret tales that would make your blood run cold . . .” The work is an epic poem. It goes on and on, verse after verse to a distant conclusion: “. . . The Northern Lights have seen queer sights, but the queerest they ever did see, was the night on the marge of Lake LeBarge, I cremated Sam McGee.”
That was just the beginning, the backstory followed. As most people know, McCain spent five years as a POW in Hanoi, North Viet Nam. He was the son of an American Admiral and had refused to accept special treatment which drew reprisals including long periods of solitary confinement. His only means of contact with anybody was secretly tapping on a radiator pipe. The subtle metallic ping traveled through walls to other radiators in other cells. Another prisoner heard his pinging and responded in Morse Code. Over several years they communicated in secret. The other prisoner taught the maverick McCain the poem, in Morse Code. It took years. Whenever one of them wanted to study, they studied. It was one of several strategies that helped McCain prevail over his captor’s ruthless torture. Thirty five years later, with no preparation, he would recite the poem flawlessly for Jeff Mow and Hillary Clinton at Chinook’s, on the harbor in Seward, Alaska.
At the end of each season, Jeff Mow took each volunteer who had spent the whole summer, to lunch. I wasn’t any more special than other volunteers but he made you feel as if you were. The next year he took the job as Park Superintendent at Glacier National Park in Montana where he still serves in that capacity. On paper, this is a good story but good stories are a dime a dozen. This one is remarkable, the way it came together and then unfolded across thousands of miles, it was profound. Unless you were there, you lose decades of oral tradition and shared experiences, you miss the route it took to find me. If you weren’t there you lose the linkage from person to person, from the right table and the right chair, with the only source that could bring you into that loop, that day at Chinook’s, on the harbor in Seward, Alaska.
What I would really like is to revisit a story that is nothing but good. In 2009 I volunteered the whole summer season at Kenai Fjords National Park, Seward, Alaska. Assigned to the Interpretation Division, my job was to work at Exit Glacier’s Visitors Center and to lead guided hikes on its associated trails, telling the Park’s story.
Late in the season, with schools open, we still had visitors but the numbers had dropped off. On a day off, I was invited to lunch with Jeff Mow, the Park Superintendent. We went to Chinook’s, a great restaurant on the harbor. Our table was at the window, looking out over all the boats in their slips. It was ‘His’ table. The Kenai Fjords family was relatively small and he knew everybody by name, even the volunteers. When the circumstance called for formality, everyone got proper but day to day, we were all on a first name basis. More than anything else, he wanted me to know how much he personally appreciated volunteers in general and me in the moment. He had done graduate study at the University of Michigan and we swapped stories of Ann Arbor. Then he told me the following story.
Two years earlier during the filming of a Ken Burns documentary, ‘The National Parks’ he had brought the then Senators, John McCain and Hillary Clinton to Chinook’s for lunch. They sat where we were, at ‘His’ table: I sat where John McCain had been seated. It seems the angst and rivalry between competing politicians ended when the cameras turned away and they were great friends, comfortable in close company and equally prone to teasing and spontaneous laughter. Jeff shared with them the Park’s story, the same story I shared every day.
As the story telling went around the table, Senator Clinton first prompted, then challenged her cohort to recite Robert Service’s, ‘The Cremation of Sam McGee.’ After some coaxing, John McCain, sitting in the same spot I then occupied, he began: “There are strange things done in the midnight sun, by the men who moil for gold: The Arctic trails have their secret tales that would make your blood run cold . . .” The work is an epic poem. It goes on and on, verse after verse to a distant conclusion: “. . . The Northern Lights have seen queer sights, but the queerest they ever did see, was the night on the marge of Lake LeBarge, I cremated Sam McGee.”
That was just the beginning, the backstory followed. As most people know, McCain spent five years as a POW in Hanoi, North Viet Nam. He was the son of an American Admiral and had refused to accept special treatment which drew reprisals including long periods of solitary confinement. His only means of contact with anybody was secretly tapping on a radiator pipe. The subtle metallic ping traveled through walls to other radiators in other cells. Another prisoner heard his pinging and responded in Morse Code. Over several years they communicated in secret. The other prisoner taught the maverick McCain the poem, in Morse Code. It took years. Whenever one of them wanted to study, they studied. It was one of several strategies that helped McCain prevail over his captor’s ruthless torture. Thirty five years later, with no preparation, he would recite the poem flawlessly for Jeff Mow and Hillary Clinton at Chinook’s, on the harbor in Seward, Alaska.
At the end of each season, Jeff Mow took each volunteer who had spent the whole summer, to lunch. I wasn’t any more special than other volunteers but he made you feel as if you were. The next year he took the job as Park Superintendent at Glacier National Park in Montana where he still serves in that capacity. On paper, this is a good story but good stories are a dime a dozen. This one is remarkable, the way it came together and then unfolded across thousands of miles, it was profound. Unless you were there, you lose decades of oral tradition and shared experiences, you miss the route it took to find me. If you weren’t there you lose the linkage from person to person, from the right table and the right chair, with the only source that could bring you into that loop, that day at Chinook’s, on the harbor in Seward, Alaska.
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