“We might not be back to town for a couple weeks,” Mikey warned before I bought groceries, thrilling me with the chance to prove myself a real fisherman. Other summers, multiple friends had been serious enough about fishing to miss the first week of school, along with most of the preseason cross-country running practices. I’d been disheartened being one of the few who made it to all the summer practices, implying I didn’t have anything better to do. Then I got dejected when the fishermen showed up just in time for our first race and I still ran slower than them. More than that though, I wanted to get away from my parents and go on an adventure of my own, and hopefully make more money than I had on the past few trips to Point Baker.
On trips for school and Boy Scouts, I’d had certified chaperones. My parents signed waivers weeks or months in advance and wrote checks for travel fees. In exchange, they received a printed itinerary and the knowledge that I would be supervised by someone with official training and a title.
In the morning I would leave with a guy they knew of sort of, headed to “Somewhere around Juneau, maybe Sitka.”
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