This country (Alaskan don't see themselves as part of the USA) is divided.
There are real redneck people out here. I speak with people who have voted for Sarah, who stock up on bullets, while Obama might raise the tax on it, who drive ATVs the whole Memorial weekend on the beach. It might be clear already, but these people are not my kind of people.
And then there are the outdoor people, the real Alaskan men, my kind of men. Every spare minute they spend in the outdoors, rock climbing, hiking, skiing, fishing, kayaking, ice climbing, pack rafting and boating. V, his brother A and their friend H belong to this group and they take me out for Memorial day weekend.
We are meeting up at Anchor Point for the yearly clamming "family" tradition. With no fishing license, I am only shown how to dig for razor clams. With low tide you have to look for little dips in the sand, and then the technique is to dig as fast as possible between the dip and the ocean. The clam will run for the ocean at 0.5 cm/s and it needs speed and skills to find the clam in the muddy hole. "My men" possess these skills and we end up with a bucket full of clams.
We all help cleaning the clams, but the woman prepare the food in the end and the real Alaskan men show their muscles by splitting the wood. Its a pity I am no match for these men. I might be able to clean a clam now, I have never in my life cleaned a salmon, a crab, a shrimp, let alone a sheep, a goat, a deer, an elk, a moose, a caribou or a bison. Animals, if getting a permit, they will go out for hunting later in the season to stock up their fridge (one animal is enough to feed a family for the whole winter). So many skills yet to be learned before I can become a real Alaskan woman.
But the good thing is that even real man likes to dance and that is a skill I posses too. And so we end Memorial day weekend at the Trapper Creek Bluegrass festival, where we dance the whole night. Its hard not to fall in love with these real Alaskan men.
Dag,
Iris (Anchor Point, 6696 miles)
