The view from the booth

Most of the time I sat at a table, when it was the Homestead Cafe. And at the cafe that the Ericksons had on the other end of main street too. That one was closer to where we were living at the time; the old Enge building on Sing Lee Alley. Wow, those were the real boom years; when Petersburg had TWO bona-fide coffee shops.

When you said you were going to the coffee shop, people knew which one you meant. They could walk in blind-folded and sit right down next to you for the most part. Most of the coffee crowd had their favorite seat. Like my dad remembers jumping up from the third stool from the end to go enlist in the Navy when the report of Pearl Harbor got to the Pastime Cafe. In later years he sat in about the same place at the Homestead Cafe. That seemed to be the 'elder corner.'

The other two who usually sat near there were 'the Old Doc' and the druggist. One time I had arranged to meet the Lt. Governor for coffee and dad popped out of that corner to land an introduction on our way out. We had been sitting down the row of stools at the counter. I figured the Lite Guv would want to feel like one of the real coffee crowd for a moment in time, before going back to Juneau and ignoring us again.

It was easier for a politician to walk in and talk to a group at a table though. The real business of life was conducted with a mug of coffee near at hand and politicians were only given slight consideration. It was just too hard to figure how a novice to the conversation could contribute. Which is why it took years for a greenhorn to be accepted into weightier conversations.

A memorable period of about a month straight, drinking NUMEROUS cups of joe before daylight, was during the time K... and I were putting the new roof on my folk's place. As I recall, it was raining and blowing all that October. Nobody else in town wanted the project, and I went through ten people before K... stepped up the help. I'd found him a place to live in town when his little family first came to town. They were living on their boat and it was starting to freeze. No place for a baby. Now he has one of the biggest boats in town and was a mover and shaker to get the community cold storage built.

We sat at a booth all that month. Later when I was working for the Alaska Commercial Fishing and Agriculture Bank I'd sit at a booth to talk up our program to several fishermen at once. Once, one of the highliners, and a former skipper of mine, came down off the high ground of a counter stool and sat at a table next to ours to line up for a chat.

I didn't get a chance to accommodate him, and I felt later like I had stood up a date. But our bank wasn't very accommodating to the highliners, even if we could match the other banks' interest rates. Just the words 'cooperative bank' may mean something to a lot of folks, but it doesn't pack much water with hard-nosed fishermen. He was an old coffee drinking buddy of my dad's, which made it worse. He probably doesn't even remember the occasion.

The Pastime Cafe is a good place to admit one's faults, because it's taken in the context of fixing lives. The coffee shop was church for a lot of people. Some very spiritual people too, in their own way. But there was an unwritten rule that you didn't talk religion there. Which is why my old Sunday School teacher, the oil dock guy, never came in for coffee. Of course he worked too far from downtown to duck in for a quick coffee, even if he could take the swearing and loud verbal jousting.

When he would come in it was to find a certain fisherman for some purpose or other. He was the most steady person I knew in Petersburg. He had that job of fueling up boats at the Union Oil dock from when I started buying gas for our three horse, to when I was visiting on business from the bank or state government. Everybody got fuel there.

When I first started getting gas at the oil dock float, they had blue-stone tanks for the net fishermen. Off and on you'd run your seine or gillnet through the tank of copper sulfate to preserve it. When nylon nets came along the practice became unecessary. I won't hurt anyone's feelings now, because they are all gone, but some fishermen used to dump blue-stone in creeks to flush out the salmon so they could catch them at the mouth of the creek.

Blue-stone is sold around here in Southern Oregon to put down your drain pipes to keep out tree roots. Seems counter-productive to all the efforts to bring back the salmon to this area. Although in cattle country, those efforts are pretty weak.

At the coffee shop, conversation always gets back to fish. Why is it that a disproportionate amount of effort is expended divvying up the existing fish between user groups, and going out and catching them, compared to bringing back the fish runs so there is plenty for everyone? That's the kind of question you throw out on a slow morning before daylight and everyone at the coffee shop is still half asleep.

You won't get a paradigm shift before daylight, that's for sure. And probably won't at this forum ever. It's accepted to throw out rhetorical questions, just don't expect an answer that you would be remotely satisfied with. That's the nature of the Pastime Cafe, where the men wear 'skipper slippers' and the women wear Xtra-Tuffs. And it being only a state of mind, but in no way a prison of the mind.