Elbow Room: A Tale of Tenacity on Kodiak Island, Alaska. D. D. Fisher
“Oh, it’s right over there. Wanna cup?” Jerry spoke in calm, quiet tones, gesturing to the counter where his coffeemaker held our coffeepot.
“No. I want my coffeepot back!”
“Well, aren’t we cranky in the morning? And here I was being so quiet and not waking you two up,” Jerry reasoned.
He was a solid, chunky man, five feet eight inches with small brown eyes stuck in a round pudgy face with a permanent scowl on his broad forehead. He was mostly bald with peppered brown fringe running around the middle part of his head and a few strands combed desperately over the top. He lived alone except for a scraggly orange and white cat named Meathead (of all things). The cat was just as cantankerous as Jerry, and wore the same scowl on its rangy face—a real Garfield look-alike.
Jerry also had an annoying habit of “borrowing” stuff and not bringing it back. George knew right where the coffeepot had gone. Other times George had spotted a tool or rake or lawn chair around Jerry’s yard and had to carry it back to our place. But the coffeepot theft was the last straw.
George took a quick deep breath, preparing to let loose a fury. He grabbed the pot and turned to Jerry wielding it like a weapon. Jerry had pasted a small humble smile on his face that was so unusual George stopped in his tracks in stunned confusion.
“I slipped this morning when I was carrying my pot to the sink for water and it broke in a million pieces,” Jerry explained in a never-before-heard pitiful voice. It was then that George noticed the large white bandage wrapped clumsily around Jerry’s right hand. His eyes took in the broom in the corner with the dustpan filled with pieces of glass and a chunk of the black plastic handle. “And I was up at five a.m. this morning and I know how you two like to sleep in on Sundays and I was careful to be real quiet and you see I didn’t wake anyone up, although Blackie gave me one of his weird looks,” Jerry continued in this unusually quiet monologue.
George slowly let the air out of his mouth and happened to look down at the cat. It was sitting neatly next to Jerry, tail curled around its paws in a perfect pose wearing the same pitiful expression. The cat slowly lifted a front paw and delicately licked the pads and slicked down the orange fur over his toes, as if emphasizing this sorry state of affairs.
George blinked back the strange twilight thoughts, breathed out the last of his fury through his nose, and headed for the door.
“Come on over in a few minutes, Jerry. We’ll make a fresh pot,” said George. He brought the coffeepot back in the house, scooped in the fixings and turned the switch on. We looked at each other; George rolled his eyes and shook his head. Relieved my coffee cup would soon be filled, I headed for the shower.
Getting dressed in the bedroom, I heard the front door push open and the familiar obnoxious bellow.
“Hey, that coffee smells good. What’s for breakfast? Isn’t Mudiver up yet, it’s almost noon. She sleepin’ the day away again?” Jerry jerked a chair out from the kitchen table and plopped down, laying his injured hand in plain sight for anticipated sympathy.
“She’s been up already, Jerry, looking for the coffeepot,” answered George, his eyes locking on Jerry’s face in unspoken warning. Jerry looked down at his hand, gingerly fixing and tucking the bandage with his other hand, setting up a painful expression on his face as he heard me come into the kitchen.
“Good morning, Jerry,” I said in my cheeriest greeting. I was getting used to his ways and often used the ‘kill him with kindness’ tactic that seemed to tame down his persistent snarl. “Nice of you to drop by. Have you eaten yet? I’m just starting breakfast for George, how do you like your eggs?” Not waiting for the answer I already knew, I began pulling out the fixings -eggs, bacon, plates, and pan. George plugged in the toaster, popped in two slices of bread, and put the butter on the table. Apparently preferring food rather than sympathy, Jerry gave up the pained look and replaced it with a pleasant grin.
“Yeh, yeh, I guess I could go for something to eat. Make mine over-easy with just barely runny yolks and I could go for some of that strawberry jam with my toast. Yeh, that sounds good. Maybe I’m a little hungry after all.”
It was that way with Jerry. One minute he was as mean and grouchy as a territorial bear, the next he was just as pleasant as pie. The problem was one never knew which side of him would show up at any given moment. George saw the intelligence and energy behind the gruff, prickly exterior; I saw a challenge to smooth Jerry out occasionally, disconcerting him with kindness.
5 WAITING
In Kodiak there seemed to be a lot of waiting. Not like the waiting in other places, not like waiting for a bus or waiting in traffic or waiting in line at a retail store.
Everyone waited for the tide to come in or the tide to go out; waited for the first salmon to arrive in May; waited for the frigid, dark winters to melt into cool, daylight springs and even longer daylight summers. We waited several days for dense fog to lift off the trees and hillsides and ocean waters; we waited weeks for the rain to stop (an unofficial record one year of 41 days); we waited three hours in a tree one time for a bear to finish his long lunch of fresh salmon at the river just below us; waited months for the winter accumulation of snow to melt down to the ground again in April. We waited hours and sometimes days for the winds to die down and waves to smooth out enough to launch boats on to the ocean or the fog to lift to the required 500 feet visibility so airplanes could land and take off again. We waited months for catalog orders to arrive by barge from the “lower 48,” delivering much needed parts and supplies to repair machines, vehicles, boat engines and generators (the wait could be cut to just weeks if one was desperate enough to pay the exorbitant cost of air freight). Sometimes we waited days for a technician to fly over from the mainland to repair a complex piece of equipment, usually having to do with electronics. For this reason, Kodiak people tended to stick with basic equipment, stuff that could be taken apart and put back together by a handyman (which most everyone became, sooner or later). The saying “you own it, you fix it” was born in Kodiak; it couldn’t be more applicable. We waited for the inevitable disasters. The community practiced diligently each year on how to survive earthquakes, tsunamis and oil spills, fine-tuning the lessons learned from past incidents. One could set a watch by the test-warning siren that blared every Wednesday at two o’clock.
George and I waited for the fish to hit the net on an overcast day. The sky of pearl gray blended seamlessly with the gray water, almost obscuring the horizon. I had no idea what waited ahead.
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