.....Corona sits nestled like a dusty jewel at the foot of a crown of shimmering mountain ranges. Their towering, jagged peaks remain frozen, brilliantly white, far into July.

These rugged Alaskan peaks also overlook the sparkling blue-green waters of Orca inlet, which are liberally dotted with emerald, rain-forested isles in a myriad of shapes and sizes. Otters and seals by the hundreds frolic and feed, while mighty bald eagles patrol overhead, instantly ready to claim their portion of nature's rich bounty.       

The call of a thousand gulls and seabirds mingles with the babble of icy mountain streams and the gentle lapping of the wind and the waves on the rocky shorelines. Sitka black-tail deer and huge brown bears roam unfettered through the verdant forests, the trees richly festooned with chameleon-hued lichens and furry, dripping mosses. Great majestic mountain goats and their ewes maintain a lofty vigil far above on the precipitous mountainsides.     

  In the vibrant summer season, even the sun hangs glowing in the sky––day and night.

...So was this wonderland––this piece of heavenly paradise––when I first beheld it in the summer of 1980. Tucked away unheralded in the south-east corner of Alaska's magnificent Prince William Sound, it was as though some giant hand had taken a knife and sliced off a vast chunk of the Austrian Alps, spread it all around the crystaline waters of Greece, and generously dabbed it with the most magnificent and rocky fir-clad islands of New England.     

  The awesome and splendorous vistas of this region are not readily described in mere words, and even an admirable attempt to do so cannot convey the power and beauty of the area as it is seen in person. Someone actually has to see these sights before he can appreciate just how far short verbal descriptions fall. Yeah, ....THIS you gotta see to believe.  

...And so, borne on the wings of a giant metal bird, this not-so-fresh-faced kid of 23 years came jetting to the great big splendorous wonderland of Alaska, a runaway fugitive from a second stint at college. I escaped to this far-flung sanctuary some 5000 miles away from my vicariously driven father, whose perpetual and obsessive efforts to exert his control over me had become unbearably tiresome.  

I simply could no longer justify the expenditure of large sums of money,–––his and mine–––in the pursuit of such an anachronistic and abstract goal as a college degree. Judging from the quality and content of the lackluster instruction I occasionally deigned to endure, my gut instinct to flee was indirectly proportional to the intrinsic and economic value of the political science curriculum which I had elected to undertake.

Sheepskin, shmeepskin! Hell, they only printed diplomas on cheap paper any more, anyway! Shit, ...I could get a better education partying and whoring my way around Alaska–––or my home town, for that matter–––and at a fraction of the cost. No more would I heed that deep-down sense of duty and responsibility, ....that innate sense so laboriously ingrained in me by my dear mother, telling me to honor my pappy's every whim and whimsy. I (he) would just have to deal with the fact that I wasn't going to graduate summa cum laude Harvard and chase mega-bucks somewhere grinding out 80 hours a week in some glitzy multi-national corporation.

Thus did I go from potential corporate mogul to fish-cannery laborer in one easy lesson. Ahh, ...the freedom!

So I made the transition from the languid and beery, semi-subsidized lifestyle of a college playboy, to the hard-bitten and often slimy grind of laboring in an Alaskan fish cannery. Let's see now...quick math...7 days x 18 hours a day...hmmmm...126 hours a week! (Read here: mild irony)...       

Hey! This was my choice, damn it! Besides, ...I was young and tough. We had drugs, too. Lots of drugs. The cannery generously allocated us a ten minute coffee break every two hours, every precious second of which was spent administering the appropriate substances, in egregiously excessive amounts, all washed down with ....well, ....coffee!

There was stuff to make us happy. There was stuff to make us numb. We had white stuff to keep us awake, and we had other white stuff that made us feel like God. When the whistle blew at midnight, there were always rivers of beer and whiskey to slake the heartiest, ....and the foolhardiest, of thirsts.       

By that time at night, bereft of much sound judgement after a long day's toil, the administration of the various in vogue herbs and powders routinely continued unabated, into the wee, wee hours. Hell, it was daylight out! A popular song at the time was aptly entitled, "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead."

Long weeks during the summer busy season passed with but a paltry nap stolen here and there. A half hour lunch was the cannery standard during the season, and many eschewed the noontime break in favor of a desperate midday snooze....and some others really did die, ....but they slept!       

The cannery issued paychecks every week, but there wasn't much time to spend them. This was a good thing. Stuff costs a lot in Corona. I will never forget the time I went to the grocery store to buy some celery for a spaghetti sauce I was making. ...seven bucks for a freaking little bunch of celery! Well, I needn't tell you, I never bought celery in Corona again.  

That first summer in '80, my weekly paychecks were almost a $1000, and I was absolutely flabbergasted. Compared to the buck-fifty a week I had made the previous summer at home, this was the "big-time." If one didn't blow too much on booze and dope, he could roll up a nice hefty wad over a season and go back home to spend it. "The World," we called it, which was anywhere in the Lower 48, was the place to have a real blow-out, where money had some purchasing power.

Like the man said, "I spent most of my money on women and booze....the rest, I just wasted!"

Pissing away the big-bucks is an interesting tale in and of itself, and will be fondly and wistfully recounted in a subsequent chapter.