Driving along the Skeena River in British Columbia, my girlfriend Mariah and I started seeing gillnetters working the wide lower channel. That made us antsy for commercial fishing in Alaska. The next day, we would park my truck on the ferry for the last leg to Petersburg, the finish line of our road trip from Bozeman.
We’d graduated college, then loaded my truck with gear and hit the road, sleeping in the clammy camper shell on a piece of plywood perched on a pile of skis, climbing gear, and plastic coolers of booze.
My roommates moved out before me that spring, and I got stuck cleaning our rental house, piling our furniture on dumpsters around town and moving boxes and junk out of the garage. They’d left some partial bottles of booze as payment. Kraken rum, Beefeater gin, it wasn’t top shelf, but after four years of college my palate wasn’t distinguished so much as extinguished. It all went in the truck.
I’d imagined Mariah and I would do something rad almost every day in Canada, but we only skied one morning and rock climbed one afternoon. We didn’t miss a night of drinking, though.
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