Huge cruise ships with thousands of passengers stop at Southeast
Alaska ports every summer, most of them stopping in Ketchikan, Juneau, Sitka
and Skagway. Haines, being only fourteen miles south of Skagway but of less
historical (gold rush) importance, docks far fewer, perhaps one tenth of the
number in Skagway. Haines folks like the tourist trade well enough, but do not
like to think of themselves as nothing but a tourist trap town. So there are
fewer T-shirt shops, junk jewelry stores, and "art" objects made in
Taiwan here. We do have, however, the most spectacular scenery in Southeast
Alaska. Tours of various kinds are arranged to show off the truly great views
to the visitors. I became one of the tour guides.
Bart Henderson's Chilkat Guides had a number of great river and
mountain tours; Lenice Henderson had collected four classic six or
seven-passenger cars/limos which were to be used in the scenery tours. They
were to be driven by the young women friends of Lenice. They were all pretty
and charming as tour guides but many of the eight or ten members of the driving
pool were not at all happy with the cars, a 1946 DeSoto, a 1947 DeSoto, and
1946 Packard and the car that eventually became "my" car, a 1939
Packard limousine. The difficulties were that these younger ladies had a hard
time coping with the DeSoto Fluid Drive transmissions, and the Packards which
had hand-shifting mounted on the steering column. Not the "four on the
floor" they had at least heard about. Since I became the only driver older
than the oldest car, these gear-shifting procedures were easy for me. So,
almost always I got the job of driving and touring with the 1939 Packard.
This Packard is a great car, a reasonably wide car, capable of
seating three on the front bench seat, two in the grand rear bench seat, and
one each on the two jump seats. Much depended, of course, on the size and
weight of the passengers. This car has a very long straight eight engine with a
lot of torque, but only a six-volt ignition system so it is tricky to start it
on a cool morning. It has no fuel injection, no seat belts, no turn signals, no
power steering and no power brakes.
The appearance of this vehicle is impressive to say the least. Very
long wheelbase, long hood to accommodate the straight-eight engine, very shiny
black paint, wide white side-wall tires, two spare wheels and tires mounted in
the front fenders, and of course the famous Packard hood ornament. This car is
what the Russians copied practically bolt for bolt for their top Communist
apparatchiks, called the ZIL.
The other cars are impressive too; the other 1946 Packard is
light blue, huge, bigger than the '39. The 1947 DeSoto is a "woodie"
station wagon made with genuine wood trim; the ‘46 is a Suburban and had that
name before the Chevrolet Suburban came out some years later. The Suburban is
exactly like a limousine, but the rear seats could be folded down to create a
very large storage space. A useful and elegant car during its limited
production. Bart also has a 1941 Chevy four-door used only when we had filled
the other cars. I had to drive it, as it has a vacuum-assisted shifter (!) and
a hand choke. The ladies had no experience with either.
The Classic Car tours were scheduled mostly for mornings and
lasted a bit more than one hour. The routes were all prescribed and included
views over the Upper Lynn Canal, down-town Haines (no McDonald's, no Dairy
Queen, no Starbucks, and certainly no high-end stores like Nordstrom or
Neiman-Marcus.), views over Chilkat Inlet, the old fish cannery at Letnikov
Cove and back again. There would be stops for picture-taking and one at a
constantly flowing spring where everyone could have drinks of truly delicious
hillside spring water. We drivers all rejoiced when we got sunny days and good
see-ing conditions.
One bad trip I took was on a dark, foggy, and rainy cool day. My
passengers happened to be two Chinese ladies and the maybe eight or nine year
old son of one of them. They spoke almost no English, and I don’t know how much
they understood. The boy had enough English to be able to talk to me, but
lacked the age and experience to be able to translate quickly and accurately.
So there I was, responsible for keeping everybody happy for more
than an hour—I couldn’t show them any of our magnificent scenery because of the
fog, and I couldn’t tell anything either. Possibly the most successful stop was
the one at the spring. They liked the cold water. I remember that the boy was
shocked when he found there was only one police and one fire station in town. The
ladies, I am sure, would have been happier if I had left them downtown to see
the tourist gift shops.
Then there were the unfortunate souls who had to have their wheelchairs
or their oxygen tanks with them at all times. Now and then there would be
frightfully obese people who could barely get into the car, big as it was. One
elderly woman from New York City complained about how uncomfortable the seats
in the Packard were. It always struck me that the worst of the Packard seats
were much more comfortable than the ones in my own almost new Subaru. But she
did make a fuss after the tour, wanting to give me a tip as did some of the
rest of the passengers. She told me she had no small bills and wanted me to
give her my name and address so she could send the money. I gave them to her,
but as I expected, the tip never arrived.
The great majority of people who rode with me were fine folks
intent on enjoying themselves. Some wanted to see moose and bear, but even
though there are plenty of them in this area, a mere tour guide can’t produce
them on demand. Visitors were excited when a moose or two appeared, especially
if it happened inside the city limits.
The Packard had a few idiosyncrasies, one being that it would
stick in first or second gear and would not shift any further, up or down. I
had one fellow sitting in back who spoke up, “I know how to fix that!” So
I stopped, lifted the hood, he got out and using only his fingers got the gear
linkage to work properly. He showed me what to do. From then on I was able to
deal quickly with this problem.
Another fellow who rode with me was a collector and restorer of
classic cars, old Hudson autos only. He e-mails me now and then, and tells
me of the progress he is making on some restoration or other. The jokes he
forwards to me are outrageously funny, and once in a while he sends pictures of
amazing things.
Concurrently with the morning Classic Car tours, my afternoon
tours were a different kettle of fish. These were tours I guided for Jim Szymanski’s
fish cannery museum. Jim had called me one day and asked if I could guide tours
for him. I told him he was talking to the wrong guy. I didn’t know anything
about fish, catching them or canning them. But he said he had a booklet that
would cover everything I needed to know. Oddly enough, it did cover just about
any question that ever came up and I guess I became fairly convincing. It might
have been better, perhaps, if he had given me a spiel to memorize, but he did
not want any memorization. Neither did Lenice and the Classic Car Tour people
want any canned spiels.
The cannery in downtown Haines was supposed to duplicate the
canneries that proliferated in coastal Alaska around the turn of the 20th
century. Jim had gone to great trouble and expense locating and moving these
old cannery machines to a new building in Haines. The seven or eight machines
shaped the cans (they were shipped from Seattle flattened), cleaned the fish,
chopped them up into can-sized pieces, closed them and finally vacuum-sealed
them before putting them into a big retort and cooking them under pressure at a
high temperature. The machines were big and chunky, very heavy and designed to
work forever with hardly any maintenance. Jim was especially proud of his
vacuum-sealing machine, as he probably had the very last one to exist in
Alaska, maybe anyplace.
A bus-load of fifteen or twenty people would be picked up at the
cruise ship dock, the driver and I would give a tour that covered much of the
same ground as the Classic Car tours. We would stop at the cannery museum and
they would see the whole set of machines in actual operation. Actually, the
cans were empty because that kind of can is now illegal. Jim would usually ask as
we approached the vacuum sealer, “how much do you think this machine weighs?”
They would guess, usually much too light, and Jim would then tell them that it
weighed 3,500 pounds. So one day when I had a lively bunch of people on the
bus, I coached them, “When he asks you to guess the weight of the last big
machine, all of you jump up and yell “thirty five hundred pounds”. What
fun! They were all quiet as mice until the last machine. Jim asked for
the guess, and with no coaching on my part, or any indication that I knew
anything about it, they yelled in unison THIRTY FIVE HUNDRED POUNDS! The
look on Jim’s face was priceless.
And so passed a pleasant and profitable summer. Bad things
happened to me later. I was laid up with severe sciatic pains the following
summer and could not do the tours. The following year when I perhaps could have
resumed driving, neither the Hendersons nor Jim Szymanski called me again. I
was too proud, I guess, and too egotistical and conceited to ask for the jobs.
Now the Hendersons, Bart and Lenice, have broken up their marriage and the
classic cars get used only for special charters. Jim Szymanski has sold the
cannery machinery to a museum in Ketchikan.
Here are a few of the
questions that tourists sometimes ask.
Q. How far above sea
level are we? A. See the water over there?
That’s the sea; you can make your own estimate.
Q. Does it get terribly
cold here? A. It can get down to zero, but if
you want cold, try Minnesota.
Q. Do Indians live near
Haines? A. Yes. Q. Do they ever come into town? A. They
don’t have to, they live here in town.
Q. How do you tell a
small raven from a large crow? A. Easy, the raven speaks Tlingit.
Q. Do you live here all
winter? A. That’s when the scenery is at its very best, the
snow is the deepest and there is always a chance for a thrilling aurora
display.
Q. Do all Haines people
wear fishing boots all the time? A. Nearly all, but I’m sure they
take them off to go to bed.
Q. What brought you to
Haines to live? A. You can drive the 650 miles
from here to Fairbanks and see fewer cars than in any given half mile
of I-5 between Vancouver BC, and Los Angeles.
Illustration:
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