Those boundless days under the liquid sun
Reminiscing about a co-worker who rescued me from living in a tent in Juneau, Alaska
This afternoon, the sky broke apart in a typical Colorado thunderstorm deluge just as I was settling down for my remote newspaper editing shift. As the rain pounded my dining room window, I opened an e-mail from a friend titled “Juneau Empire Changes.”
“Just in case you haven’t seen this,” he wrote with a link to an article. I groaned, only because I don’t need more bad newspaper news right now. I worked for the Juneau Empire from 2006 to 2010 — when it was still a bustling daily newspaper with dozens of employees in a large, aesthetically designed building on the shore of the Gastineau Channel. I left in the midst of massive layoffs — quit, actually, because I was one of those left behind to do the work of three former employees. Since then, my Juneau friend Brian has kept me updated on the latest developments (with just a hit of schadenfreude since he was let go after 25 years of faithful and award-winning photojournalism.)
Long story short: The Empire shifted from corporate ownership to an ongoing turnover of owners, a small fraction of the staff they employed even at the end of my tenure, and a tiny space in an older building downtown. Recently they dropped from a daily to a twice-weekly paper with “a focus on digital content.” I mourn for the slow, aching death of community journalism.
So I was braced for more sadness. But as I opened the link, I was surprised to see a familiar face under the headline, “Empire managing editor departs, familiar face takes over role.”
Wait, I thought … is that Mark? OMG, it is Mark!
Mark was an outgoing editor — as in he was leaving the job — when I started my gig as the weekend editor in July 2006. I may have been the one taking over his role, or at least part of his role, although I don’t recall exactly. I only worked with him for a couple of weeks, but I remember him well because he was kind to me at a time when I was uprooted, inexperienced, and desperately in need of a roof over my head.
I took the job at the Empire sight unseen because the managing editor offered me something that was considerably more lucrative than the $12 an hour without benefits that I was making at a small community weekly more than a thousand miles away in Homer, Alaska. At the time, neither my partner nor I had much in the way of disposable cash, so we agreed that he would stay behind in Homer while I searched for an apartment to rent in Juneau. In the meantime, I would live in my backpacking tent at the Mendenhall Lake Campground.
August is the beginning of the rainy season in Juneau. I knew this, but I thought, how bad could it be? I had lived out of my small tent for months on end while road-tripping and bike-touring. The tent was reasonably waterproof. The campground had showers. Luxury! Mark was aghast when he learned I was living out of a tent. He thought the Empire’s parent company should at the very least have paid a moving stipend.
“I’ll find a place,” I assured him. But when I mentioned my partner and I owned two cats, he shook his head sadly.
“No one in Juneau rents to people with pets,” he said. “You’ll see.”
“I love my cat, but she and I may just have to weatherproof a cardboard box for the quickly approaching winter,” I lamented on my blog several days later. “Yesterday, so many landlords and real estate agents shut me down on the phone that I finally stopped asking them about their pet policy up front, hoping that by meeting me first and seeing how nice and somewhat normal I was, they would overlook my little furball waiting for me in Homer.”
Meanwhile, the wetness that Juneau residents like to call “liquid sunshine” came down all day, every day. The rain soaked my tent, and then all of the things that touched the side of my tent — sleeping bag, Thermarest, socks, carefully folded khaki pants and sweaters that I needed to wear to work. My car wasn’t much better when it came to a dry space, as it hadn’t been watertight since a tree fell on it in New Jersey in 2001. Water would stream in through the top of closed windows as I drove the Egan Highway to my office.
“It's fun to wake up every morning to a view of large chunks of ice floating in the deep blue water, but living in Juneau in a tent during the rainy season is not as romantic as it sounds,” I wrote. “I have to take showers to dry out.”
One day, Mark walked into the break room to find me hanging wet bike shorts and jerseys on extra chairs near the wall.
“They’re clean, I washed them in the sink,” I assured him. “But they’re never going to dry in my car.”
He gently informed me about the location of a nearby laundromat. But the first time I used it, disaster struck when the washer didn’t spin my clothes. I stuck the dripping mess in a dryer for an hour, only to come back to clothing still soaked. So I stuck in more coins for another hour, only to come back to still-wet cotton sweaters and half-melted polyester jerseys.
“Those first 10 days in a tent were a baptism by immersion, quite literally, to life in southeast Alaska,” I wrote. “I lived out in the weather and learned to move with the rain. I learned how the drizzle stung my eyes but the downpour cleaned my skin. I learned the hard way how to construct a decent tarp shelter, how to dry clothing when there were no dry spaces, how to clean up for an office job using public facilities.”
As I neared 10 days in my tent — one of Mark’s final days at the office — I walked in one afternoon clutching my only pillow. “Even my pillow’s wet,” I lamented. I confessed to Mark that I had considered poaching the heated storage unit that I had rented for most of my belongings. “For $40 a month, my stuff has a better home than I do.”
Later that evening, Mark approached me. “Listen, I have this room at the Breakwater Inn. No one is using it. I rented it for the whole month for my mom, but she’s not coming to town until the end of the month. You can stay there for a couple of weeks until she gets here, or until you find a place.”
I was aghast. I had looked into hotel rooms and they were not affordable, more than $100 a night. I was nearly a stranger to Mark and we were never going to work together again. Was this story about his mom even true? Was I that pitiful? Still, I was so waterlogged that my skin seemed permanently wrinkled and the chill had seeped into my bones. There was no way I could refuse such a generous offer.
“A benevolent co-worker hooked me up with a long-term motel room today, where I can stay until his mother arrives at the end of August,” I wrote in my blog. “It's such an anomaly — Mini fridge! 30' television! Roof! I showed up at work today raving about it like I had just spent the night at the Four Seasons, and my co-worker cut me off to remind me that it's a budget motel. Doesn't matter. My rolled-up tent is still fermenting in rainwater in my trunk. It's all about context.”
I did find a small basement apartment for my partner and our two cats within that time period. Mark left and we didn’t stay in touch — he hadn’t expected anything in return from me. He was just a good person who took pity on a broke 26-year-old editor just getting her feet wet in Southeast Alaska.
I never heard what became of him until today, nearly 17 years later. Apparently, he just returned to Juneau last spring after spending 13 years as the editor and publisher of Icepeople, an English-language alternative weekly newspaper he founded in the world’s northernmost town of Longyearbyen, Norway. Now there is a career story I would love to hear!
I will have to reach out to Mark and congratulate him on the new position and thank him for that long-ago kindness. Through all of these gray days for journalism, it’s refreshing to see conscientious journalists hanging on. I can see clear skies ahead for the Juneau Empire.
I love this story and am excited for Mark. He sounds like a wonderful human being. I can't imagine - well because you write so well I get the idea - Let's just say I never want to have to camp in the rain like that and try to work each day all well. I'm thankful for Mark too!
That was a fun blog post! Didn’t realize my little email would be fodder, but I should have guessed it since I was sending it to a good storyteller.