Chinook
by George Hosier II  - September 24, 2007

Eccentrics

I’m not sure why, but Alaska seems to attract a lot of--to put it tactfully--“colorful” personalities. They especially seem to accumulate in the bush. Perhaps it’s a Last Frontier thing, what with the rugged individualism and all. I suppose it’s to be expected that anyone who would purposely make their abode in a place that can get colder than winter on the backside of Saturn has to be a few beans short of a burrito. Not that that’s a bad thing. I always thought burritos had too many beans in them anyway.

At any rate, I’ll never forget some of the Alaskans I’ve met and known. Their quaint personalities, their idiosyncrasies and their eccentric behavior add texture to my nostalgia. Many of them will be a part of me for as long as I wake up screaming in the middle of the night.

A case in point is Sally Blunt. When I first met her, I didn’t know she was a woman. I thought “Sally” was short for Salvatore or something. She shaved her head bald, wore a moustache, sang bass, chain-smoked cigars, drank Jack Daniels, spat, belched, rode a Harley, and could outshoot any man in Moose Hole. I had known her for months before I was introduced to the concept that she was of the female gender and that Sally was actually her birth name.

Sally fancied herself a musher. They say that before she succumbed to the call of the wild she had tried her hand as a dockworker, a professional bull rider, a bouncer, a diesel mechanic, a mason and an underwater welder on oil rigs. She lived in a spruce log cabin that she had built all by herself using nothing but an adze, a crosscut saw, a double-bitted axe, a chisel and a drawknife.

If you ever needed something mechanical fixed, Sally was the one to ask. She could listen to a car passing on the Alcan and tell you what was wrong with it. “They’re gonna need to replace their left CV joint in a hundred and fourteen miles and seventy-two feet, give or take six inches” she’d say. Or she would stop sucking her stogie for a minute, cock her head to listen, then offer in that raspy male voice, “I don’t know why they let that engine get two quarts low. I guess they think the synthetic oil they’re using means they don’t need to use the dipstick anymore.”

Although it seemed like Sally could do anything, It didn’t take long to discover two areas where Sally was woefully incompetent. The first was cooking. Sally couldn’t make ice cubes without burning them. Only once was I naive enough to sample something she had prepared. I had gone over to her cabin to see if she would let me borrow one of her reloading dies. In a paroxysm of hospitality, she offered me some peanut butter fudge. Unsuspecting, I managed to ingest one bite. I doubt I’ll ever look at another piece of peanut butter fudge again without requiring an Emergency Room visit! To look at it, the stuff appeared deceptively edible. In fact, it resembled spinach quiche. However, it tasted like licorice-mushroom ice cream served on a bed of kelp with guacamole and Purina Cat Chow topping. I guess it was an acquired taste.

The second talent with which Sally did not seem to be blessed, was the fine art of using soap and water. You could sense Sally’s presence a good half mile upwind. In fact, I recall meeting her on the way to Fairbanks once. We were each in our own vehicles, traveling in opposite directions on the highway at about 60 miles per hour, and although we both had our windows closed, my eyes still watered as she passed by.

Then there was Grover Schlenkenbogger. While Sally served her guests cigars and Jack Daniels and alleged peanut butter fudge, Grover served tofu and rice milk. While Sally lived in a log cabin, Grover lived in a straw bale yurt. While Sally had a Rottweiler, Grover had a tank of exotic tropical fish, complete with living coral and anemones. While Sally fixed things for a living, Grover’s income came from an investment portfolio that diversified into things like derivatives, hedge funds, Forex, and emu farms. While Sally mushed in her spare time, Grover tinkered with alternative energy, perpetual motion machines and quantum physics.

I tried to avoid a conversation with him whenever possible, because at the most banal of pleasantries Grover would leap enthusiastically onto one of his prolific esoteric soap boxes. I would wake up in shock several hours later, with a thick layer of glaze covering both corneas, and with my face experiencing a tic that any decent seismograph would have rated as at least a 7.8 on the Richter scale.

Predominant among his many obsessions, Grover was convinced that the universe was crawling with free energy just waiting to be plucked like a basket of raspberries from a thorny bush. The more I tried to downplay the idea, the more vehement he would get. I distinctly remember one such conversation:

“Do you realize there is enough zero point energy in this glass of rice milk to boil away the earth’s oceans?”

“Really? Boil the oceans, huh? Wouldn’t that kill all the fish?”

Grover didn’t think that was funny. He liked his fish.

“You think I’m crazy, don’t you? Everybody thinks I’m crazy, but I’m not. Not unless you think Einstein was crazy. Or Andre Sakharov. Or Nicola Tesla.”

“Sack of what? Nicole who?”

Grover wasn’t even listening. “What you’ve got to understand is that Zero Point Energy exists in a vacuum. It’s homogenous and isotropic as well as ubiquitous.”

“Did not!” I was outraged.

“Didn’t what?” For a moment he was off his beat, flustered, peering at me owl-like from behind his Harry Potter glasses.

“Didn’t peek at you. Furthermore, I’ll have you know I resent you calling me homogenous. I think you’re the one that’s homogenous. Yeah, that’s it. I don’t peek at you, but I bet you anything you peek at us.”
Grover blinked, and then failing to process my complaint, backed up and started over. “Uh...homogenous and isotropic and ubiquitous. I’m close to a breakthrough, I tell you! It’s simple, really. I just need to convert Zero Point Energy to light, then to microwave, and then to AC current.”

I could feel the glaze accumulating on my corneas.

“I’ve already re-created the Casimir Effect. Now all I need is a resonant chamber, a capacitance and an inductance. Hah! Six months from now, the electric company will be on their knees at my front door, begging me to accept a billion dollars to drop my free energy device in the lake and burn my research” He positively glowed with anticipation.

Poor Grover! I’m sure the man was a genius of sorts. It’s too bad he disappeared one day. He hadn’t collected his mail for a month or so, so somebody checked on him. He was nowhere to be found. His fish were all dried up and stuck to the pebbles in the bottom of his aquarium, and his yurt was deserted. Perhaps the electric company found a cheaper way to stop his research. It was the craziest thing, though--we never could figure out how to shut off his lights. Even after the moose had eaten all of the straw bales out of the walls of his yurt, the lights continued to blaze cheerily. For all I know they’re still on.

Yep, Alaska certainly is populated with some doozeys. I’ll let the anthropologists and statisticians figure out why. All I know for sure is that of all the people I have met in Alaska, this bastion of eccentricity, the only one whom I have found to be completely normal, sane, and unremarkable is me. Just ask my Oreo cookie-head doll collection. They’ll vouch for me.
 

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