In my early days of discovering Alaska, I used to ride the pipeline stretching those odd-800 miles from Prudhoe Bay to the ice-free Port of Valdez with nothing less than the thumb of my left foot to take me to places and faces unknown. I met a girl on one of those trips with hair that smelled of Light Crude Oil and rosy cheeks that glowed like the Steam towers of the Amine Gas Theater at the Oil Refinery at Kenai on the Kenai Peninsula.
My left foot had always been my lucky charm, and the thumb of that foot was the one that led me to the fame of the Amine Gas Theater, with a ticket to Glory in my right hand, while my left resided in that box of popcorn affectionately known as “Lola”. She was-
-“Just what was that hand “doing” in my box of popcorn, and are you really sure it “was” me on stage of the Amine Gas Treater, or have you just misspelled things to tell your tale of woe and passion in the fading moments of the Alaskan Winter?”
She tended to “doubt” our love, knowing that men like me, who knew women like her, would say just about anything at all to gain her favors and the chance to lick her candy corn, while lying in her bed in that little apartment next to the Refinery, that always smelled of Light Crude Oil with just a trace of Naphthalene!
“Was it my hair, my apartment or the Candy Corn that smelled of Naphthalene?” was one of the things, she used to ask me, while our passions were ignited to ……looking up some facts and figures in Wikipedia.…a temperature just under the boiling point of water which would-
“If you hadn’t gotten side-tracked somewhere on the Dalton Highway, this story “could have” covered the Hot Passion of an Alaskan Afternoon turned Night instead of wondering about how many different “Hydrocarbon Products” can be had from one barrel of oil!”
“Now get that thumb from your left foot out again, and get this story “back on track”!
I had paused in my trek, somewhere along the Dalton Highway, when I saw a young woman walking slowly through the multi-colored Lupines on the meadowed-floor of my memory. Her words were as sweet as the honey nectar that the Alaskan Bees had gathered, but I had been stung by those Devils more than once, let me tell you! She said, “I…
“You’ve gotten off track again, haven’t you? It was just beginning to sound like the first time that our paths might have “crossed”, but then you had to go and ruin it with that, that….
Her words flowed into my mind, not unlike the round about 500,000 barrels that flowed along the Alaskan Pipeline on a daily basis. “I’ve known Crude Men like you before, but none so well versed in the Art of thumbing with their left foot!”
“Have you ever really “thumbed it” with your left foot, or did you really use your upper body hands instead?” she asked me as if I didn’t know up from down, but then what is an appendage anyway?
Perhaps, she had been riding Steer when she came upon that Great Beast named The Trans-Alaskan Pipeline System? She ran her hands along its 48 inch diameter and could almost feel the surge of the ghost of those 16 billion barrels of raw crude that have passed by her, as she waited for a man such as myself to lasso her heart and her…….but I digress, don’t I? This was a tale of one woman’s plight, and one man’s duty to maintain the bolts on that surging pipe while she used to…
“Blah-blah-blah!” repeated Lola having just shoveled out the blog after the last paragraph of Penguin Poop! “The problem here is attributed to a delay in finishing this “work of artistic excellence” and trying to pick up the pieces over 12-hours later, when inspiration consisted of a cheese sandwich and a cold compress, in order to sort out the muddled mess that started when Wikipedia purported to know more about Alaska, than you did yourself!”
He was temporary distracted with adding up how many times Alaska had been mentioned until this point in the blog, but suddenly had to answer the Love of his Life, with something less than an inspired answer, which he turned around into a compliment, hoping against hope to stem the tide of her frothing anger?
“Gosh Lola. I’ve learned more about our Home State with this blog than the ones with the Conoco-Phillips Building in beautiful downtown Anchorage, and that is with one thumb tied behind my back!”
Lola just looked at him hoping that the next blog would be more inspired than this one, but not everything is possible in this really real life, now is it?
“Well, it’s been a real struggle, but we’ve crossed over the 800-word mark without our Tennis Shoes steaming like Mt Redoubt Stratovolcano, or what say you, My Dear?”
“I” managed Lola to utter, before the 800-word committee began rolling up the edges of this blog, readying it for publication sometime in the future!
“At least you got the last word in edgewise” he said, as his face rolled under the next curve, as the blog was put in the Drafts File until later use……
Lola's Travels in Alaska 