The Scarf

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My buddy goes on a run and when hes done there is a bar near a creek. So he wades into the creek because the day is hot and the water is cold.

Tourists ask what hes up to, with his running stuff he didn't want wet piled on the shore and him very obviously cooling off in the water. He says he's fishing.

But now here is why I am telling you this story. The universe occasionally aligns in such a way that we get to really really fuck with people and their perception of said universe. The opportunities do not come often and when they come you must seize the day. This is what my buddy did.

So this Creek runs through town and as a result of the highway and neighborhoods and culverts and roads it does not have a great salmon run. It's a short Creek the headwaters are only a few miles from the ocean it never had a great salmon run to begin with. But there are salmon.

One such fish brushes past my buddy's leg. Immediately he knees the fish like he is juggling a soccer ball and pops it out of the water, then slaps it out of the air on to the shore.

This is dumb luck. He could not do this again if he spent years training. Noodling (catching fish with your hands) is a thing that is legal to do with salmon but it is so much harder than literally every other way to catch salmon, including grabbing them with a garbage can. What he just managed is the kind of thing that should make you want to grab the fish and swing it around your head like a stripper with her panties off.

But,

He has an audience.

This is the opportunity offered by the universe.

He plays it cool.

Remember the Spider-Man thing? great audacity, great fuckups whatever?

A friend of friend has to do an airport pick up. He's making conversation with a quartet of dudes who have just showed up from somewhere out of state. They're so excited to be in Alaska and they want to know what kind of adventures the locals will recommend.

So this is the time when you don't bullshit tourists. They are they are already here and you might as well share the enchanting wonder and majesty of the last frontier. There is some insane shit that you can see here that will not occur to people who are not from here.

So our dude says, go check out the fijords, go see the glaciers. You can rent a boat and get a guide and paddle out and see them for yourself up close.

And of course the tourists think this is awesome because who wouldn't want to go see a landscape carving 10000 year old behemoth? I think its awesome, and I live here.

A couple weeks later, our local is back at the airport, picking up or dropping off, and he just happens to see a couple of the dudes again. Small airports, small town, coincidences happen alot.

So he asks, Hey guys, did you go see the glacier? did you have a good time?

And the tourist looks him in the face and says yeah our buddy died.

So this story has been living in the back of my head, basically since I heard it. Because I heard the news that another tourist had died but it's the recommendation from the local part that keeps repeating on me.

What happened was they had done as he said and rented some kayaks and found somebody to take them out and they had paddled up to the glacier, and one of them had decided to go touch an iceberg. But icebergs are a dynamic system that are constantly melting from the underside until they flip when the top side gets too heavy. And the Berg just happened to flip, when the guy was next to it and it took him down.

There have been 2 tourist deaths this season so far, a guy from Colorado who squished himself with an atv and an man from Iowa who drowned on the mudflats. Now, heavy machinery and gravity exist everywhere, but that particular spot was 4 hours from the nearest hospital.

There is a world of difference between harmless joshing of people on their vacation and shit like giving the wrong directions on purpose. Tourists can't just casually pick up a fishing license here, it's a planned excursion. The three day non-resident sport fish license is 45, partly to stop people from trying to do something dumb like mimic a snarky local on a whim. Idk how it is elsewhere but the Alaska department of fish and game will come down on you with the wrath of a slighted God for even mild offenses and we still tell each other horror stories of the poor bastard who shot an antlered cow.

Fuck da Police embrace dirty unwashed spiders