Chelsea dropped me at the library in Glennallen on her way back to work. I spent a couple of hours updating my blog then went off in search of denatured alcohol for my stove. I tried the pharmacy, who were sold out, then walked a mile or so to a truck stop and tried there. They didn’t have any but directed me to a store about 5 miles to the south which might do.
“Are you on foot?” the lady in the truck stop asked me as I turned to leave. I nodded. “How are you going to get there?”
“I’ll hitchhike,” I said. She looked profoundly sceptical. “It’s no problem,” I assured her, then walked outside, stuck out my thumb and got picked up within thirty seconds by a guy in a large pick-up truck.
“Where are you headed?” he asked as I jumped inside.
“Nowhere in particular,” I said. “But the lady in there told me I might be able to get alcohol for my camping stove from the store in Tazlina.”
“I know the place,” he said. “I’ll take you there.”
He introduced himself as Gene, a retired welder originally from North Dakota. It was a funny coincidence picking me up, he said, because he’d met a British couple only a week before, at a restaurant in town. They’d got talking and the couple were waxing lyrical about the salmon salad they had ordered. “You call that salmon?” Gene had told them, looking at the puny portion of fish in their salad. “I could eat that four times over.” He had invited them back to his house to eat some proper salmon and apparently they couldn’t believe how good the fish was.
“I live down by the Copper River,” Gene said to me as he pulled into the store at Tazlina. “I’ve got space on my land for you to camp and I’ve got a fishwheel. Fancy coming and staying at my place for a couple of nights?”
“Sure,” I said. “That would be great.” (If you read my previous post ‘Out of Valdez’, you’ll recall that I wrote “We drove towards Chitina alongside the Copper River, which contains probably the best salmon on the planet.” And here I was being offered some of that salmon. You’d have said yes, too!)
Once again, I couldn’t find any denatured alcohol at the store. We drove another ten miles to get to Gene’s house. “This is a big truck you’ve got, Gene,” I said as we drove.
He laughed. “Yeah, but I’ve got a bigger one,” he said, and he wasn’t kidding. There were all sorts of vehicles on his property: pick-up trucks of various vintages, RVs, four-wheelers, a little bobcat digger and even a hovercraft he’d picked up a few months before.
Everyone should have a hovercraft, clearly.
He invited me into his kitchen and we sat there for the rest of the evening, chatting away about all sorts of things. He was a keen hunter and fisherman, had the head of a caribou he’d shot hanging on his wall, owned “at least thirty” guns and fed me that evening on a burger made from the meat of a moose he’d killed a few months before. It tasted great, but the real food experience was to come the next day.
Stuffed caribou.
In the morning, he went out to check his fishwheel, which had a couple of red salmon in it. If you’ve never seen a fishwheel, I took a video of it going round a few times. It’s quite hypnotic and you can watch it for hours. The mechanism is simple but effective. As the salmon swim upstream, they get scooped up by the fishwheel and slide off into the basket. Then all you have to do is pick them up and eat them.
To avoid overfishing, each named person on the wheel is limited to 200 red salmon per year, which is still a lot of fish. Gene’s wheel had his own name and a friend of his as well, so after they had caught 400, they’d have to take the wheel out of the water. Several times while I was there, a woman from the Alaska Fish and Game department came round to check the wheel. They’re very strict about this kind of thing.
Gene on his fishwheel with a red salmon.
Gutting the fish on the banks of the river. It doesn’t come any fresher than this!
Removing the head.
This is the colour a salmon should be, not the crappy pink stuff we get at home. (Incidentally, I’ve heard it from several authorities out here that the flesh of the farmed Atlantic salmon we get back home is actually colourless and they have to dye it pink. Needless to say, Gene’s red salmon did not need to be dyed.)
During the day, I helped Gene out a very modest amount by holding a few things while he screwed together the trailer he was making for his new hovercraft. It was a nice day out in the sunshine. Later on, he had a few friends over and we had a barbeque by the river.
No need for seasoning with fish this fresh. Just straight on the barbeque. Beans are always great, though.
That’s a big ol’ pile of fish. I went back for seconds, and thirds, and maybe fourths as well.
Mmmmm.
Food just doesn’t come better than that fish. Really as good as it gets. After a very pleasant two night stay, and after some moose sausage for breakfast, Gene dropped me at the nearby national park visitor centre and I continued on my journey, feeling justified in telling the lady at the truck stop that hitchhiking would be no problem.
Total distance hitchhiked: 1,067 km.
Total number of rides: 10.