This is a fitting title as we watch and read the news of the Gulf oil disaster. The toxic effects on such a large area of ocean and coast, and on the people living there is fairly paralyzing. Like the Gulf residents are deer in the headlights. It affects us far removed folk the same way. BP injured everyone on this rock by virtue of our commonality.
We constantly hear that BP is covering up the damage, with the Coast Guard's help. Sounds like Coast Guard ops in Alaska. They'll cite a boat owner for not having a survival suit for a tot, but won't cite trawlers destroying the ecosystem and livelihoods of thousands of Alaskans. And they call picking on small boats for minor infractions "Sustainable Fisheries Patrol?"
We wonder more all the time what kind of a future are we facing. I missed the big multi-year class reunion in Petersburg this Fourth of July, but saw some reports on the goings-on. Sounds like a good time was had by all, in spite of the rain. A poem by one of the attendees was distributed. Good work, Mike. It reflects how ill prepared we are to deal with these disasters, and maybe especially we who grew up so sheltered on a small island in Alaska.
Sure, we roll with the punches. What else can you do? War has had a profound effect on the ones who served in the military, especially in-theater. But it affects all of the rest of us as well, ie., family members, news viewers. My son, Jesse, served in Iraq for two tours of duty and is now out and trying to make plans. He and I went to Alaska last winter to prepare the old State ferry 'Chilkat' for sea last.
Low level bureaucrats can and do scuttle anything new, unless there is enough perceived power on your side to make them think twice about their own job security. Well, that brings up the subject to those new to my blogs, that the PSPA (The shore-based processors, when I was there.) used to go around the agencies in Juneau and threaten jobs right and left.
It's not by the rule-book anymore. Hasn't been for a long time. Education? I remember the Whitney-Fidalgo Seafoods VP for Southeast Alaska telling me that he didn't think the President of the company even knew he had a college degree. Would your college tell you that you should expect to change your entire career five times in your life? And that secure pensions in industry are a thing of the past?
Resource extraction industries are just that. They extract all the resources, whether fish or oil or minerals, then lay everyone off and everybody goes home. Leaving the world a poorer place, of course. So, should we plan for a barren planet?
I think there might be a future in underground construction. They say the water is so toxic in the Gulf of Mexico that it is eating up boats. There might be trading to be accomplished with alternative energy powered vessels, if they stay afloat. And the technology is there. Rest assured the oil producers won't have any qualms about charging ten dollars a gallon for gasoline if they thought they could get away with it.
Where this is going is, looks like planning for change is the way to go. Like they are saying, "Change is occurring at a faster and faster rate all the time." Be resilient. Be adaptable. Be mobile. Funny I should say that, because there is an old saying that in the last days people will be moving around alot. Well, it might be necessary, so get a good fuel efficient way to travel around.
The sage advice of our grade school principal, and you know who I mean, is even more valid; "You need a good woman and fourty acres." Jesse and I climbed to the very rocky pinnacle of Mt. Ashland the other day, and what strikes you is that there is a lot of good quality vacant land out there. Of course anyone who has flown across Alaska is struck by this fact as well. Not that a lot of it is very high quality land though.
Well, don't take any wooden nickels, but certainly don't be the proverbial frog in the slowly warming pot of water. It will boil eventually. I would say any bank money you take is a wooden nickel. The games are much more subtle than the difference between wood and metal. Any more it's like a loan is a pipeline to suck the life out of you.
And speaking of pipelines, I wouldn't vote for someone promising anything regarding a pipeline. I've been working for reason in the fishing industry for decades and it just gets more crooked all the time.
The physical Pastime Cafe was located about across the street from the old Mitkof Hotel. It was the third seat in from the door that my father jumped off and ran to enlist in the Navy when the news of Pearl Harbor came. Seems like he sat in the same seat when I ate breakfast with him before going deer hunting as a kid.
I think Dad was pretty traditional. Same as the rest of us I suppose. He fought for profitability in the fishing industry and so did I. He fought for the same fishing business models, and I for the family fisherman. But, unknown forces change everything for us whether we like it or not. Some say it's just the times, some say it's a money cartel based in London, the old home of the most successful Rothschild sibling. Some say it's a backlash against a greater joy and awareness going around.
Whatever is going around, visualize the future you want for yourself and plan accordingly with good intel. And plan to be in good health. Just don't get your intel here. You get what you pay for. And don't hit the 'snooze' button, no matter how tempting. We really are all connected, so don't let me down.
Monday, July 12, 2010
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Focus on the future
"Vision for your future is the road map of what God wants to accomplish in and through you." --Jim Williams. It's just that I got the idea to title my posts with Stan Toler's Minute Motivators. They aren't earth shattering, and some people, like my daughter, might think them hoakey. After all, Alicia said the slow 'movement' of the moon "reminds me of God's great patience," at barely five years old.
Genetics got to have a lot to do with it. Like the researcher who figured that six percent of the population is psycho and 12 percent willingly go along with them. On both ends of the spectrum, the individuals know they are different, even as children, and group with others accordingly. And for better or worse, I got the genes to not do nothing when injustice rears it's head. I was the one that beat up the kindergarden bully when I was in first grade. That may explain a lot to readers of my other blogs.
There are cultural norms, like not beating up on other people, for no good reason. If you don't get the term 'helping your fellow man' at least don't beat up on him. I think a lot of folks need to go back to basics and we'd all be better off. And maybe my kids will have a few fish to catch. Just had to get fish in there somewhere. But why not? After all this is Petersburg, Alaska.
The plot about who started the Pastime Cafe gets thicker. I've found so far that Swede and Evelyn Wasvick got the Pastime Cafe well before WWII, and that Ernie Haugen bought it after the war, in 1946. Swede and Evelyn could't have bought much, because they did most of the cooking at home and Swede would drive it down to the Cafe in his panel truck. Everyone liked this couple and I know very fondly by my parents, John and Carol Enge.
Berries, before I forget. My sweetie, Terry, found lingonberry jam and cloudberry jam at IKEA in Portland. (There's an old story that right before the world self-destructs, everyone will be running to and fro. We must be getting close, because Terry is going off on scrap-booking trips all the time and I'm starting to do projects in Alaska.)
Back to berrys: she bought some lingonberry concentrate too, which dilutes the jam in a double boiler nicely. Great on Swedish pancakes. And if you make 'em on Saturday mornings on a regular basis you'll get all the neighbor kids coming over all the time like my mother did. From the Sandvik's house on one side to the Strands house out the other way.
But looking around in the book 'Petersburg Profiles' on the pioneers of Petersburg, I found a different context to a picture of a seine crew in a rowing seine skiff from the thirties. The picture was labled, in my dad's handwriting, "Vernon," "John," "Arnold," "Dad." I don't know who the Vernon is, but Arnold was my dad's brother who died in a war-plane accident in Juneau during WWII. And Dad is Martin Enge, my grandfather. And my first skipper. Grandad Enge started to teach me to row in a gillnet skiff up the North Arm of the Stikine River.
Interestingly, I found the same picture in 'Petersburg Profiles' on the page on Bob and Pam Thorstensen. Bob, of course, was hired well after WWII by my father as a deckhand on one of the Kayler-Dahl tenders and didn't personally fish in Alaska. I guess I'm like the guy who would always disappear from some setting or other to correct an error on the Internet.
Genetics got to have a lot to do with it. Like the researcher who figured that six percent of the population is psycho and 12 percent willingly go along with them. On both ends of the spectrum, the individuals know they are different, even as children, and group with others accordingly. And for better or worse, I got the genes to not do nothing when injustice rears it's head. I was the one that beat up the kindergarden bully when I was in first grade. That may explain a lot to readers of my other blogs.
There are cultural norms, like not beating up on other people, for no good reason. If you don't get the term 'helping your fellow man' at least don't beat up on him. I think a lot of folks need to go back to basics and we'd all be better off. And maybe my kids will have a few fish to catch. Just had to get fish in there somewhere. But why not? After all this is Petersburg, Alaska.
The plot about who started the Pastime Cafe gets thicker. I've found so far that Swede and Evelyn Wasvick got the Pastime Cafe well before WWII, and that Ernie Haugen bought it after the war, in 1946. Swede and Evelyn could't have bought much, because they did most of the cooking at home and Swede would drive it down to the Cafe in his panel truck. Everyone liked this couple and I know very fondly by my parents, John and Carol Enge.
Berries, before I forget. My sweetie, Terry, found lingonberry jam and cloudberry jam at IKEA in Portland. (There's an old story that right before the world self-destructs, everyone will be running to and fro. We must be getting close, because Terry is going off on scrap-booking trips all the time and I'm starting to do projects in Alaska.)
Back to berrys: she bought some lingonberry concentrate too, which dilutes the jam in a double boiler nicely. Great on Swedish pancakes. And if you make 'em on Saturday mornings on a regular basis you'll get all the neighbor kids coming over all the time like my mother did. From the Sandvik's house on one side to the Strands house out the other way.
But looking around in the book 'Petersburg Profiles' on the pioneers of Petersburg, I found a different context to a picture of a seine crew in a rowing seine skiff from the thirties. The picture was labled, in my dad's handwriting, "Vernon," "John," "Arnold," "Dad." I don't know who the Vernon is, but Arnold was my dad's brother who died in a war-plane accident in Juneau during WWII. And Dad is Martin Enge, my grandfather. And my first skipper. Grandad Enge started to teach me to row in a gillnet skiff up the North Arm of the Stikine River.
Interestingly, I found the same picture in 'Petersburg Profiles' on the page on Bob and Pam Thorstensen. Bob, of course, was hired well after WWII by my father as a deckhand on one of the Kayler-Dahl tenders and didn't personally fish in Alaska. I guess I'm like the guy who would always disappear from some setting or other to correct an error on the Internet.
Monday, June 14, 2010
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.
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.
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
The New Old Pastime Cafe
There was a cafe in Petersburg, Alaska for decades called the Pastime Cafe. It is remembered fondly by folk who waited out snow storms and fishing closures and pouring rain in there drinking coffee with the 'coffee crowd,' as the waitresses dubbed them. The coffee crowd changed over the years as new-comers tried to horn in and old-timers pretended to ignore them.
I was in Petersburg a few weeks ago to attend my father's memorial services and was told a story of one such new-comer's experience with the 'coffee crowd.' As he told it, he showed up in Petersburg with long hair and proceeded to attend the early morning 'mug up' at the coffee shop to try to get to know the locals. It was two months before someone finally gave him the heads up that the 'coffee crowd' probably wouldn't talk to him unless he cut his hair. This he promptly did and the next day when he graced those hallowed stools he recieved a hearty "Hi, K....."
There was decorum, there was education, there was sustenance, there was camaraderie, there was encouragement, there was intelligence gathering for business purposes, there were business meetings, there was politicing, there were romantic rendezvous, and the list goes on.
The original Pastime Cafe in Petersburg moved locations on main street, and later it's name changed to the Homestead Cafe. But there was always a state of mind of the Pastime Cafe. A place of getting your bearings for a new adventure, of fitting into society, and sharing griefs and joys. Petersburg's Pastime Cafe was on a roll all through the years when the town chalked up it's impressive percapita income statistics: second highest income per capita in the U.S. in the 1960 census, and the second highest number of millionaires per capita in the 1970 census.
There is no cafe in Petersburg now that carries the torch. The building that housed the last 'Pastime Cafe' was sold to a fish processing company who turned it into a mess hall for it's workers. I think that was particularly disappointing for my dad who used to be one of the 'regulars.' He was a fish processing plant superintendent and lived near enough the water that he could hear the fishing boats come by headed for town.
The skippers would steam in the 'Narrows' and past his house and he could tell the boats apart by the sound of their engines. The skippers would come in early in the morning a lot of the time to line up to unload. But the first order of business was to head up to the Pastime to brag about the trip, relate any comedic occasions, or commiserate over any unfortunate events during the voyage. My father would know he needed to be there if he wanted to bid on a load of halibut, especially if a highliner has just steamed by at 7 am.
I think maybe some newer folk to town thought his appearance whenever a boat with a load came back was somehow prescient, from comments my dad made. He was one to let a mystery ride, whether it was made up or had a simple explanation. Like the time he told us kids that a cannery worker that was working to push gondolas of canned salmon into the retorts went missing one day. We were told they found nothing but his watch after opening up the retort after cooking a load. He never did retract that story. That's the kind of thing that made the Pastime Cafe so full of life and energy for the rigors of life in Alaska.
That zest for living was common and was probably born of a need to stay sane on long voyages that the ancestors of the town's Norwegian founders fine tuned. Like sailing over to Iceland, or Greenland, or Newfoundland and not knowing if you'd make it back. Now, that right there is Pastime talk. Some people fall into that mode of josh and jive and like the water and never come out. It makes it interesting, but at least folks don't fall into debilitating depression. It's OK.
So, there is no physical location of the Pastime Cafe as I knew it anymore. Maybe in some town in Alaska, or even near where I live in Central Point, Oregon. Starbucks just doesn't fill the bill. The closest I've seen recently is the 'Linnwood' in Seldovia, Alaska. Now there is a thriving 'Pastime Cafe.' It's a bar and grill, heavy on the bar part. But much is done to conduct city business from the comfort of bar stools and a hot cup of coffee. We would stage our forays into town for supplies and showers there this winter. Everybody met there. There were even town potlucks there. When the cafe on mainstreet Petersburg closed, my father took to visiting the coffee pot at the Harbor Master's shack and listening to the harbor chatter there. A poor substitute.
I don't intend to start something with this blog, just to have a fun forum in the vein of the Pastime Cafe as I knew it. (I think I even remember my older cousin Bobbie waitressing at the old Pastime Cafe location across from the Mitkof Hotel one Saturday morning before light. I was going deer hunting with my dad in the fall, and we deemed the day daunting enough to warrant a good breakfast and coffee at the Pastime.)
Now that age is showing my vulnerabilities more, I'll have to stick to herbal teas such as South American yerba mate, with a sprinkle of stevia powder. I found out recently I'm allergic to wheat and caffeine. Another reason to focus on a virtual Pastime Cafe. I think Facebook is a better 'virtual gathering place,' but I can elaborate more on a blog. And I started blogging to set down a record, to tell the story. And definitely a place to stay away from politics and keep it light.
My Great grandfather, Rasmus, who was the patriarch of the first white family to settle in Petersburg, built a cafe in the bottom floor of the Enge Building to help preserve the town. The Moose Club cafe had just burned down and he figured the town needed a cafe if it was to survive. With the moving of the big grocery store and the Post Office out of downtown, and the closing of the last cafe on main street, I wonder about the new model's ability to serve the social needs of a community. These kinds of things are what I think about and may talk about here. Besides rowing, hunting, fishing, ice skating on the beaver ponds, climbing Petersburg Mtn and Horn Cliffs, etc.
I was in Petersburg a few weeks ago to attend my father's memorial services and was told a story of one such new-comer's experience with the 'coffee crowd.' As he told it, he showed up in Petersburg with long hair and proceeded to attend the early morning 'mug up' at the coffee shop to try to get to know the locals. It was two months before someone finally gave him the heads up that the 'coffee crowd' probably wouldn't talk to him unless he cut his hair. This he promptly did and the next day when he graced those hallowed stools he recieved a hearty "Hi, K....."
There was decorum, there was education, there was sustenance, there was camaraderie, there was encouragement, there was intelligence gathering for business purposes, there were business meetings, there was politicing, there were romantic rendezvous, and the list goes on.
The original Pastime Cafe in Petersburg moved locations on main street, and later it's name changed to the Homestead Cafe. But there was always a state of mind of the Pastime Cafe. A place of getting your bearings for a new adventure, of fitting into society, and sharing griefs and joys. Petersburg's Pastime Cafe was on a roll all through the years when the town chalked up it's impressive percapita income statistics: second highest income per capita in the U.S. in the 1960 census, and the second highest number of millionaires per capita in the 1970 census.
There is no cafe in Petersburg now that carries the torch. The building that housed the last 'Pastime Cafe' was sold to a fish processing company who turned it into a mess hall for it's workers. I think that was particularly disappointing for my dad who used to be one of the 'regulars.' He was a fish processing plant superintendent and lived near enough the water that he could hear the fishing boats come by headed for town.
The skippers would steam in the 'Narrows' and past his house and he could tell the boats apart by the sound of their engines. The skippers would come in early in the morning a lot of the time to line up to unload. But the first order of business was to head up to the Pastime to brag about the trip, relate any comedic occasions, or commiserate over any unfortunate events during the voyage. My father would know he needed to be there if he wanted to bid on a load of halibut, especially if a highliner has just steamed by at 7 am.
I think maybe some newer folk to town thought his appearance whenever a boat with a load came back was somehow prescient, from comments my dad made. He was one to let a mystery ride, whether it was made up or had a simple explanation. Like the time he told us kids that a cannery worker that was working to push gondolas of canned salmon into the retorts went missing one day. We were told they found nothing but his watch after opening up the retort after cooking a load. He never did retract that story. That's the kind of thing that made the Pastime Cafe so full of life and energy for the rigors of life in Alaska.
That zest for living was common and was probably born of a need to stay sane on long voyages that the ancestors of the town's Norwegian founders fine tuned. Like sailing over to Iceland, or Greenland, or Newfoundland and not knowing if you'd make it back. Now, that right there is Pastime talk. Some people fall into that mode of josh and jive and like the water and never come out. It makes it interesting, but at least folks don't fall into debilitating depression. It's OK.
So, there is no physical location of the Pastime Cafe as I knew it anymore. Maybe in some town in Alaska, or even near where I live in Central Point, Oregon. Starbucks just doesn't fill the bill. The closest I've seen recently is the 'Linnwood' in Seldovia, Alaska. Now there is a thriving 'Pastime Cafe.' It's a bar and grill, heavy on the bar part. But much is done to conduct city business from the comfort of bar stools and a hot cup of coffee. We would stage our forays into town for supplies and showers there this winter. Everybody met there. There were even town potlucks there. When the cafe on mainstreet Petersburg closed, my father took to visiting the coffee pot at the Harbor Master's shack and listening to the harbor chatter there. A poor substitute.
I don't intend to start something with this blog, just to have a fun forum in the vein of the Pastime Cafe as I knew it. (I think I even remember my older cousin Bobbie waitressing at the old Pastime Cafe location across from the Mitkof Hotel one Saturday morning before light. I was going deer hunting with my dad in the fall, and we deemed the day daunting enough to warrant a good breakfast and coffee at the Pastime.)
Now that age is showing my vulnerabilities more, I'll have to stick to herbal teas such as South American yerba mate, with a sprinkle of stevia powder. I found out recently I'm allergic to wheat and caffeine. Another reason to focus on a virtual Pastime Cafe. I think Facebook is a better 'virtual gathering place,' but I can elaborate more on a blog. And I started blogging to set down a record, to tell the story. And definitely a place to stay away from politics and keep it light.
My Great grandfather, Rasmus, who was the patriarch of the first white family to settle in Petersburg, built a cafe in the bottom floor of the Enge Building to help preserve the town. The Moose Club cafe had just burned down and he figured the town needed a cafe if it was to survive. With the moving of the big grocery store and the Post Office out of downtown, and the closing of the last cafe on main street, I wonder about the new model's ability to serve the social needs of a community. These kinds of things are what I think about and may talk about here. Besides rowing, hunting, fishing, ice skating on the beaver ponds, climbing Petersburg Mtn and Horn Cliffs, etc.
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