The Perry/Gumbleton Line

In John’s voice

The Juneau Summer — 1988 or 1989

My brothers Perry and Patrick, my mother Carol, and I flew into Seattle and drove to Bellingham, Washington to catch the Alaska Marine Highway ferry up the Inside Passage. My uncle Robert worked as a purser on the ferry line, and through him we got a discount rate — we set up a tent on the back deck, where the ship had installed fake-turf grass for exactly that purpose. We saw whales. We watched bears fishing along the shore at the small-town ferry stops — Sitka was one of them, out in the middle of nowhere.

I remember Uncle Robert as someone who made things fun. He’d put on Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back” — it was the song that summer — and the whole house would shift. He had a gift for stories. One he told me was from when he’d lived in Southern California: he and his friends would take bottle rockets — the kind you can buy around the 4th of July with a fuse — and balance them on the metal side-mirror brackets of their VW van, light them, and shoot them off into the street from the side of the van. He had that kind of humor. He’s still around. He’s the reason the trip felt the way it did.

We landed in Juneau and stayed with my aunt Sandy, my uncle Robert, and my cousins Robbie and Katie in Douglas, across the channel. We hiked the Mendenhall Glacier. Perry and I brought mountain bikes and rode them in the towns we could reach by ferry — Skagway was the one with wooden sidewalks, the Klondike gold-rush feel still preserved. My brother bought a belt buckle there.

The summer daylight never fully left. Around ten at night one evening, kids from the neighborhood showed up at the house. My aunt had told them about me and asked them to come get me. I was stunned — ten o’clock, still full daylight. We went into Juneau and just hung out.

After a few weeks, Perry and I flew home. Patrick stayed on. My mother Carol had just been formally divorced from our father, and she decided to travel through the Yukon Territory with her sister Sandy, her brother-in-law Robert, Robbie, Katie, and Patrick — about a month together on the road. Perry and I had the option to stay longer too, but we wanted to get home — back to our friends, back to summers on the Westport River.

Somewhere on that trip, my mother and Patrick each bungee-jumped off a bridge in the Yukon — separate jumps, not together. There’s a video. What I remember about the video is my mother’s chant before she jumped: “You can do it, Carol. You can do it, Carol.” Over and over. Self-encouragement, post-divorce, stepping off into the air with her own name as a prayer. Patrick jumped too. He had a wrap around his middle on that trip — some injury he’d picked up along the way. The family joke, from me, was that he’d wrestled a bear. The truth is lost to me.

The video camera was relatively new technology then, and we’d play the footage back at my aunt’s house on later visits. It felt like watching something from the future, of two people I knew doing something the world was just learning was possible.

Juneau in those years was pre-cruise-ship-megaship era. The big cruise ships were just starting to come in. It still felt like a place where weird summer light and a quieter town could just exist, without being overrun.

In later years, Sandy would come east for summers. She’d stay with us in Westport, and my mother — who was deep into black-and-white photography then — took pictures of those visits. I still have them somewhere. When I find them, they’ll come here.

The Ritual

Sandy passed away some years later. When I think of her and that trip north, I think of Robert W. Service ↗’s “The Cremation of Sam McGee” ↗ — the Yukon narrative poem published in 1907 that captures the territory’s strange, hard beauty. It opens:

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…

And closes with a line I never get through without thinking of that summer:

Since I left Plumtree, down in Tennessee,
It’s the first time I’ve been warm.

At Christmas at our family’s Westport, Massachusetts house, we light a fire out back, and sometimes I recite Sam McGee around it. It’s become a tribute to Sandy — to the aunt who moved north, to the cousins we visited, and to the territory she and my family crossed together one summer.