The Delta flight out of Salt Lake City had a two-hour layover in Seattle so they didn’t get up to Juneau until late in the afternoon. Coming into the terminal from the bag retrieval, Gannon saw that it looked a lot like the airports in the lower forty-eight except it wasn’t that crowded and the gift shop had a giant stuffed moose in its plate glass window.
When they were halfway down the concourse to the exit, the rumbling luggage cart suddenly got much heavier as Gannon’s son, Declan, stopped pushing it. He stood pointing at the green glow of a Starbucks sign.
“What do you think, Dad? Coffee time?” he said.
“Again?” Gannon said skeptically as he slipped out his phone to check the itinerary. “How much coffee can a person possibly drink?”
The super-extra-deluxe spring brown bear Alaskan hunting trip they were about to embark upon had originally been booked for Gannon’s friend, John Barber. But when John couldn’t go at the last minute, in order to avoid the huge hit on the cancelation fee, Gannon had decided to step in and scoop it up for his son’s birthday instead.
Gannon read off the screen. They were to head to a seaport on the other side of Juneau, where a little Piper Cherokee would take them on the final hop to a base camp in the interior of Glacier Bay National Park.
But that was at three, he read. They still had about an hour.
“Yes, okay,” Gannon said. “I will allow it. If you hurry. Get me a small one. Black.”
“Cookie, too, Daddy? Please?” his six-three, two-hundred-twenty-pound son said, maneuvering around a sandwich board sign that said Alaska: North To The Future.
“Split one?” Gannon said.
“Split one? Come on, Dad. We’re headed straight into Call of the Wild country. We need to carbo-load.”
“Speak for yourself,” he called out at his son’s wide departing back.
To the left of where Gannon was standing was a huge window, and he squealed the luggage cart over and stood looking out. Beyond the airport tarmac, a bright silver curtain of mist was billowing gently along hills filled with huge pine trees. As he watched, an open airport vehicle went by along the shoulder of the landing strip, its driver wearing a snow hat that said, Yeah, But It’s A Dry Cold.
Gannon smiled out at the landscape. Even though he’d been born and raised in New York City, he actually possessed a special affinity for Alaska ever since he was a child. In his fourth-grade class at St. Margaret’s, each kid had to do a special project on one of the fifty states and when he reached in and drew out Alaska from the Yankee hat Sister Ann was holding, he had a special feeling about it being his state.
Silly as it sounded, throughout the entirety of his life, his sense of fateful connection to its Big Dipper star state flag, (which he had to draw), its state flower, (the forget-me-not), and its main exports, (zinc and oil and fish), had never left him.
“And now I’m finally here,” he said out loud to it.
Gannon smiled even wider as the mist parted and a muscular mountain range suddenly became visible in the distance, majestic fissured peaks still thick with snow.
“So far so good,” he said as he placed a palm to the cool glass.
The weather was holding up, thirty degrees going up to near forty tomorrow. In the travel guide it said that March was the best time for Alaskan hunting because it was no longer freezing, and it was before what they called breakup when all the snow melted and everything became a muddy mess.
Gannon turned and sat in one of the lounge chairs behind him with his hiking boots up on their bags and hard-pack rifle cases.
“Guess we’re about to find out,” he whispered excitedly as he scratched at his fledgling beard.
His son had insisted that they both work on their facial hair for the last two weeks. Like pretanning before heading on a beach vacation, he had explained, they should already have a semi-lumberjack-mountain-man look to blend in, to really hit the ground running up here in the wild blue yonder.
Declan was jazzed all right. They’d tagged along on a hunt to Arizona with John Barber for bighorn sheep two months before, and it seemed like he had really caught the bug.
Gannon was more of a fisherman than a hunter by far. But moving forward, maybe hunting would be something he and Declan could share together from time to time.
Especially now that his son was leaving him, Gannon thought with a frown.