Starting Out In the Afternoon by Jill Frayne

Author:Jill Frayne
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 2010-07-07T00:00:00+00:00

JULY 28

More rain. I dash into town and eat breakfast in a homesick coffee shop that reminds me of Queen Street in Toronto, the waitress presiding in shorts and T-shirt. She fries up blueberry pecan pancakes on the grill and entertains her customers with local baseball news. Baseball teams in the panhandle use the ferry to get to their games.

The Harbor Washboard, next on the chore list, is the best laundromat I’ve ever seen. Twenty-foot ceilings keep the air airlike, a shower token buys an unlimited burst of strong, hot spray, and a two-dollar deposit gets you a fragrant, worn towel and a washcloth. By the dryers an Asian grandmother tries to keep a rein on two toddlers, but gives up and lets them run around, slamming themselves against the warm machines.

No rules are posted in the laundromat, just the hours they’re open and an apology for no change. Aerial photographs of Juneau curl on the walls. Two rows of plastic chairs, smoking and nonsmoking, are set congenially side by side.

All my clothes are in the wash and I sit naked in my rain gear, reading an old New Yorker. This is truly time out. For the time being I do not live in a tent on a freezing riverbank.

When the rain stops, the weather promptly turns muggy and buggy. I re-attire myself, take my bicycle downtown, park it outside a bookstore and start toiling up the hill, bent double, to take a walk in the mountains.

On the trail it takes a long time to get used to the sticky air and the coating of flies clinging to my arms and hair, and to surmount the ambivalence I have about hiking alone. But I’ve noticed this about leaving town: there comes a point when whatever zone of habitation you came from fades out and the venture opens up. The land spreads out, sparkling, and the sensation is mostly sound, a slight electric hum that you feel in your solar plexus, thrilling and quieting both.

The hills are steep, stroked in alder and spruce, which means the vegetation’s not very advanced. The land here must slide so often that the trees have to keep starting over. There are pale green bands running down the slopes, slowly filling the slide paths. The watery air makes the view glimmer. The mountainsides are tickled by thin, fast-falling rivers spreading like veins in an old hand from small, clean-cut dabs of snow in the hollows of the peaks.

A FUNNY THING happens in the bookstore later. When I’m ready to leave, a title catches my eye: Paddling My Own Canoe by a Hawaiian paddler, writing up her kayaking adventures. I recognize the name of the author from the defunct napkin. Audrey Sutherland, lost and found.

I GET INTO A CONVERSATION with a man and woman in a gold rush bar. He is a voluble, commanding person with a wide, rippling white beard; she, years younger and rather quiet. Perhaps she’s heard his stories too many times, but she’s diplomatic and relaxed and we pass a pleasant time.

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