Hilo! I'm writing mostly just to reassure everyone that I am indeed still alive, and yes, I have an excuse for not having been online or anything at all.
A few weeks ago, I arrived in Fairbanks to visit a friend. Once I got the internet thing working for my laptop, I basked in the glory of fiber optic backbone routed through the third fastest supercomputer in the world for a few days (some of you may have seen me...I didn't get much chance at it--busy week), after which I boarded a train headed south to join up with the Princess gang (Princess Cruises, my current employer). It's was beautifully sunny all week in Fairbanks, and even warm, which is unusual this early in the year, and I didn't even see snow and icebergs until I was onboard the train about 50 miles south. But Talkeetna, my disembarkation point, was wreathed in thunderheads, and I should have recognized the literary cliché as soon as I saw it. So I step off the train (which is an hour late) into a part of Talkeetna I'd never seen before (and that's saying something since the whole town is exactly one block in size), and there is no one there. Or rather, there are lots of people there, but they are all there for the weekly mail, and they all leave with their various packages and letters, leaving me all alone with my luggage and distinctly lacking in the person-who-is-supposed-to-meet-me-and-drive-me-the-next-60-miles-on-the-last-leg-of-my-journey department. So after waiting for about 20 minutes in the rain, just to be sure, I decide to trudge down to the Princess office on the other side of town (one block) dragging 60 pounds of suitcase with a bright red "overweight" sticker on it. It only occurs to me after I try the locked door that it IS pre-season still, there's no reason for anyone to be there. However, there is someone standing in the parking lot who asks me what I'm doing, and she brightens when I mention I'm from Princess. She informs me she works at the office whose door I am rattling, she isn't aware there anyone is supposed to be coming in by train tonight, but they wouldn't tell her if there were because, well, it's still pre-season, but not to worry, she's dealt with more difficult situations in the past. So we go into her office and are reminded by the absence of dial-tone that it is indeed pre-season, in case we were still wondering, and that means her phones aren't hooked up yet. Again, I should have caught the blatant foreshadowing, but I'd been on the train for the last 9 hours; I was a bit dull(er than usual, even!).
So we hop in her car and drive down to the OTHER (summer) train depot (the one I'm familiar with) outside of Talkeetna (two blocks) in the vain hope that the person I was to meet had gone to this depot instead of the one I got off at, she and I trading off the phone and the steering wheel, dialing like crazy with her cell phone in vain attempt to raise someone at the Princess lodge (my intended destination). But it's pre-season. No one has their phones with them. Lana, my manager, says that when people go on vacation for the summer, they leave their brains at home. I'd say it's the other way around for tourism employees--they only have their brains during tourism season, not the rest of the year. Apparently the same is true of their phones. She tries the person who was supposed to be coordinating my pickup in Talkeetna. I try the person in charge of hiring. She tries the general manager. I try the employee services manager. She tries HR, I try the maintenance staff. She tries a friend who lives nearby, I try the public phone in the lunch room. Eventually she managed to get a hold of someone, and after a few phone-shuffles we get the person who was supposed to be coordinating the whole business, who informs us that yes, indeed, there is someone in Talkeetna waiting for me at this very moment...or at least he should be, they can't be sure because he left his cell phone at the Lodge, and no one knows exactly when he left.
So off we drive all the way back to Talkeetna (2 blocks) and I walk back to the winter train depot looking for any sort of Princess-flavored white vehicle with or without the Princess logo, and she searches the entire town of Talkeetna (all block of it) for this person, whom she apparently knows and describes as "male, with a sort of half-moustache-beard thingy that he may or may not still have". Which is why I'm looking for vehicles, not people. I find lots of them, mostly filled with half-drunk, all-stoned typical Talkeetna winter population, but none are white or Princessey. We meet up again half an hour later and she calls the Lodge, which still hasn't heard from him, and learns that he is driving a blue firebird, which she passes on to me in the hopes that maybe I'd know what one looks like; I don't either. Now it's 60 miles between Talkeetna and the Mount McKinley Princess Wilderness Lodge, and in Alaska, when someone leaves point A and doesn't show up at point B on down the straight, wide, well-paved highway (well, "straight" in the loosest sense of the word--if it really was a straight, it'd only be a 20 mile drive between Talkeetna and the Lodge), it means that either moose or bear got them, either of which are liable to gut cars they don't like and trample/maul the drivers, especially during meltdown (Alaskan for spring, when the snow is melting and the rivers are thawing). And honestly, NOBODY likes that shade of blue. So I wait at the train depot for the rest of the hour it takes to drive between the Lodge and Talkeetna (in case he left the Lodge or Talkeetna at the exact moment we called), she goes back to scouring Talkeetna, and the Lodge sends out a search party to check the road in between. Hour up, the nice Princess lady, who happens to be from Talkeetna and lives right next door to my assistant manager, moves me and my 60 pounds of luggage out of the rain to "a spot EVERYBODY in Talkeetna knows", the bar/cafe. More precisely, the bar/cafe/grocery store/general store, because they're all one building. She's right, though; I'm not even from Talkeetna and I know the place--it's the one spot in town you can get wireless internet, and it's free. Nice Princess Lady calls the lodge, tells them where I am and that she's going home, and vanishes out the door saying that she'll come check on me in the morning.
So an hour and a half later, I'm sitting in the corner of the bar/restaurant, trying to look like a local despite the fact that I'm chatting with half a dozen people on my laptop, periodically checking with the waitress/bartender/grocery store clerk to see if anyone has come in looking for "Jari", "Jerry", or anything roughly approximate, or anyone saying they were from or looking for Princess. Aside from a couple knights who looked disappointed to find neither dragon nor damsel, and an annoying Arab-looking boy who choked on "A Whole New World" when he saw me, she hadn't seen anyone. I thought maybe I really would be seeing Nice Princess Lady in the morning when two girls walked through the door followed by a male with a sort of half-moustache-beard thingy that looked entirely unlike any of the fifteen other people in the room that matched that description. They swept over asked if I was J-Jai-Jeeerr-umm-ey?, and then swept off again with my stuff in hand almost before I could answer (apparently the aforementioned male is bellstaff--making him a bellhop, though the term is politically incorrect for some reason, and his actions at that point completely automatic). So if you were chatting with me that night and I just sort of vanished abruptly, that was the reason. Apparently aforementioned male had been waiting for me at the wrong depot (no one at the Lodge was aware there WAS a winter depot...I sure wasn't before I landed in it), but had left to get gas at about the time Nice Princess Lady and myself were nosing around it to see if he was there, after returning from getting gas and waiting around for about an hour, he gave up and went back to the lodge, whereupon the search party (the two females) intercepted him and they all piled into a little icky-blue firebird equipped with exactly enough trunk space to store a backpack, a laptop, and a 60-pound suitcase. Thus began my decent into the depths from which I now write.
But I get ahead of myself.... When I arrive on the property of the Mount McKinley Princess Wilderness Lodge, I'm dropped off at the Employee Bench, as it's known (it's home to half the on-campus employees; the other half live in a different area called the Employee Park) at the point where management is greeting the freshly arrived bus full of employees that flew into Anchorage and handing out room keys. But it seems that my key isn't with everyone else's; it was left on the front desk for me to pick up when I arrived from Talkeetna. So poor aforementioned male has to go down to the lodge and grab it, then give me a ride up to the Park to show me where my room is.
Perhaps the first thing I note as I'm pulling in to my new home is the distinct lack of the pavement Princess had promised us last year. Instead the not-taken-up-by-employee-housing area is covered with all the construction vehicles Princess had promised they were finished with last year. Worse, they all seemed to be actively driving around (in reverse--all construction equipment in the world is permanently stuck in reverse) very busily accomplishing precisely nothing (except *beep* *beep* *beep*) except keeping the vast flat mass of dirt outside more door simultaneously vast and flat, and allowing nature to turn the whole thing into one of those hardships that unifies the hapless residents of Alaskan spring: mud. Lots and lots of it. It's the wonderful time of year Alaska calls "meltdown", when all the pretty white snow turns into not-so-pretty brown slush that acquires its own gelatinous qualities as it flows about in varying stages of viscosity, assimilating or destroying everything it touches. Like construction vehicles. Or 5-star hotel/lodge employee's uniforms.
Inside, my room is almost, but not quite, two-thirds the size of the room I'd had the previous year in the park, and I seem to be sharing my bathroom with the people on the opposite side of the building. The whole reason I elected to live in the Park with the smaller rooms and longer walk to work was because in the Park, the bathrooms are not shared with the person on the opposite side of the building. Apparently that's only true in the trailer houses in the park, which have rooms that are half the size of my current accommodations. So, utterly crestfallen that I hadn't been yet more specific and asked for the crummiest rooms in the Park instead of just a room in the Park, I unpack and plug in my phone, whereupon I discover the phones aren't working. Last year the phones went out in mid June when lightning destroyed the PBX server (the thing that makes all the phones work here at the lodge), which remained destroyed for nearly a month whilst Princess spent $87,000 to get a new one shipped up to them. It was actually kind of amusing at the time, because a couple days before, I'd commented to my Alaska friend that the giant array of antennas at the top of the hill above the Property looked like it was just asking for lightning to strike it, but I was assured that they don't get lightning in Alaska. And the night the freak lightning storm hit, all the phones started ringing simultaneously. Except mine. And it wasn't the normal sort of *riiiing riiiing*; it was one big long *riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing* that went on and on and then stopped abruptly. The reason my phone didn't ring, it turns out, was because it was plugged into my surge protector, which didn't survive the strike but still saved my phone.
But even thinking of all that doesn't make the fact that my phones are out any more pleasant. If anything, it makes it worse.
But when life gives you lemons, as the saying goes, make lemonade. So I try my best, even when I see later how impossible it's gonna be to check my email on the employee computers (they added an extra fifty employees this year, but no new computers), and I'm told phones won't be back up for a month or two, which means I'll remain with no way to contact anyone from the rest of the world. I mean, I'm used to being in my own little world, but this is a bit more literal than I'm comfortable with....
So I'm still thinking about all this when my Alaska friend (and family) stops by to visit en route to the far southern reaches (of Alaska, anyways). I met them as I was walking to my room, about the same time I note the massive pile of mud in front of me and the construction vehicles all over it frantically shoveling back and forth (they don't seem to accomplish anything even when they're rushed). One of the non-vehiclated construction workers flags me down and informs me there is no water in the Park. I begged to differ, noting the massive channels of said brown liquid flowing down the supposed-to-have-been-paved-last-year road. I learned subsequently that one of the purposeless construction vehicles ambling aimlessly about the Park in reverse accidentally accomplished something--it sliced through the potable water lines, adding a pretty new stream running right past my room, making the bottomless vat of mud outside my door deeper and more willing to leave its home in search of people downstream to consume, and making showers very difficult. I was impressed by how quickly they got the emergency water system up, and it worked very well if you don't mind your shower feeling vaguely like a sponge bath (apparently backup water systems don't come with water pressure). They only managed to shut off Princess Creek today, and I'd say that I'll miss it, but I don't expect to since it flowed right through the only access from the Park to the rest of the world, making the walk to work kind of difficult. Besides, it was more of a sustained mudflow than a creek anyways.
Needless to say, my summer adventure has been thrown into high gear, and I'm hoping to death all the bad stuff is happening now so that it'll be a good year. On the other hand, they're taking bets on which will be the next vital system the non-constructing construction crews will take out. Five dollars on electrical inside the week, except I'm starting to have a sinking feeling it'll be propane.
So in summary, basically I'm stuck in the middle of nowhere without phones or internet access. I'll try to nab a public phone long enough to check my email every few days/weeks, though...as often as I can manage. Sorry about all this; I'll let y'all know as soon as I get internet back!
UPDATE: They just got wireless internet up in the lodge! I'm proudly prolly responsible for it being a couple hours late...I got into a fun, involved chat with the lead technical specalist from Princess HQ (Seatle, Washington--Princess Tour's HQ...Princess Cruises, which owns Princess Tours, is headquartered in Santa Clarita, California).
PS. If anyone has an extra or retired satellite TV mini-dish they don't want, I'm working on building a super-antenna so I can get internet access in my room.