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The One-Man Iris Davis Fan Club continues the adventures and challenges of Sam Barger, son of Alaska homesteader fishers and a serious headache to his now urban widowed mother. This time Sam is out of high school but not out of trouble because his girlfriend is pregnant and he's trying to figure out what's next. Here's an excerpt from when Sam finally gets to pursue his dream of becoming a setnet fisherman.
Peterson’s beach cabin was built of rough lumber with a door and three windows, one each north and south, and one that looked out at the water. The outside was battered and gray, but the inside was worse. In the back were two bunks heaped with dirty sleeping bags and old pillows. Raingear, rank with mildew and year-old fish slime, hung on nails by the door, and a dirty table with two folding chairs and a bench nailed to the wall sat under the front window with a view of the beach and the inlet. A bucket parked on the end of the bench, apparently to catch drips from the leaky roof, had caught four shrews, their bodies floating in the gray water. A woodstove made of half of a fifty-five-gal- lon drum stood rusting across from the door, and a shallow counter held a two-burner camp stove and a clutter of dishes crusted with eggs, beans, and dead flies from last fishing season. The cabin was so dirty that I left the groceries on the steps and started to clean the place instead.
I found a big pot and shook out the dead flies, then filled it with water from a five-gallon jug under the counter and started heating it on the camp stove. While the water heated, I found a broom and swept a mixture of sand, dirt, and dead flies off the warped and stained plywood floor and collected food wrappers and cans into a bucket, then hauled them to the burn barrel nearly hidden in a tangle of pushki and fireweed by the outhouse. When all the dishes, the countertop, and the table were
scrubbed and drying, I brought in the groceries and stocked the shelves above the counter. Finally, I mixed a glass of Tang and built a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I lunched on the cabin steps watching the falling tide.
The waters had retreated down the beach nearly a hundred yards since we had landed, so the clam beds and sandbars were lying gray in the sun. I was reminded of a morning with Dad, watching him bring the skiff to the beach for the last time with the boat on the swell, and him all man and muscle and pride. Less than an hour later he was lying in the back seat of the station wagon on the way to a doctor who couldn’t heal his failing heart. I was back now to take his place on the beach and on the water. If it meant scrubbing a nasty old beach cabin or anything else Peterson wanted me to do, so be it.
Peterson didn’t show himself at the beach site until the next morning, and by then, I was restless and at a loss for anything to do other than clean, eat, and read from the stash of paperback Westerns I found in a box under one of the bunks. When Peterson climbed out of his 4x4 and stretched his back, my restlessness came to an end. “All right, Barger, I brought you a present there in the back of the truck.” He gestured with his thumb and walked off to the outhouse like last time.
The present was four sections of stovepipe and two rolls of tar paper roofing, a bag of one-inch roofing nails, and two cans of black tar-like roof cement. I looked from the gift to the roof of the cabin and put the roll of roofing on my shoulder. I had never put down roofing before, but I had seen it done when I was too little to help. I figured it was just a matter of keeping it straight, spreading tar on the seams, and using lots of nails.
By the time he came out of the outhouse and lit a cigarette, I had the tar paper unloaded and the ladder I found behind the cabin leaning against the north wall. “That’s a good start,” he said. “There’s a half-assed toolkit with a hammer and such under the cabin in a wooden box. You need to strip off the old paper first. Pull any nails you can and drive the others flush. Then roll this new shit out and nail it.”
I looked at Peterson with his meaty hands and his big belly, and I knew there was no way he was going to get that round body of his up a rickety wooden ladder. He must have weighed twice what I did. “Yup, Sam, I think you’re on your own,” I muttered. Peterson quickly confirmed my inference.
“I’ll be down here if you need anything, and don’t fall off. I don’t need that on my day.”
I laughed even though it wasn’t funny. “I’ll try,” I said. “I don’t mind falling. It’s the landing I hate.”
Peterson gave me a dirty look and shook his head. “I got nets to mend. You best get to it.” Obviously, humor wasn’t on the menu.
I put my head down and headed for the cabin and that half-assed toolkit. I found it where he said it would be, but it was covered in dirt and the mummified remains of a dead gull. Armed with a hammer and a pry bar, I scrambled up the ladder and attacked what was left of the shredded tar paper just as clouds passed across the sun, and the warmth of the day blew away on a southwest wind.
I had the old paper off when dribbles of rain began to dot the roof, and I rolled out the new roofing with rain running down my back. By then I was hungry enough to eat about anything and too tired to care what it was. Peterson had spent the afternoon stretching and mending nets, then stomped into the cabin. I hoped he was making something for us to eat, but when I climbed down the ladder for the last time and stepped back to admire the new roof, I could hear him snoring.
That’s how the first week of fishing with Peterson went. I worked on the cabin, dug a new outhouse hole, and scraped and painted the twenty-foot wooden skiff that I had ridden in on that first day. Peterson drove the 4x4 when we used it to flip the skiff over. Other than that, he came and went, seldom talked, and offered no pats on the back, small talk, or hints about what was to come the next hour or the next day.
I was getting a lot of reading done, and I had groceries and a roof over my head, but I wasn’t making any money, and I wouldn’t until the fishing started, and this setup wasn’t the way I imagined it. Every time I tried to talk fishing, Peterson just waved me off and mumbled, “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to. If the bastards let us fish at all.”
Anchorage Daily News published a review this week by David James. Here's a quote:
"The political themes that were prevalent in the previous two novels are found here as well, although they’re more subdued than in “Coming Home.” This book is set in 1969. Vietnam is still raging and Sam faces the possibility of being drafted. But for an 18-year-old with a pregnant girlfriend, those have become secondary issues. Walker does a good job of showing how the world can intrude on people’s lives, and also how people’s immediate needs can push broader realities aside. Sam periodically stresses over his near-term future and what it will take to avoid being caught up in the war, but mostly he is thinking about reclaiming Iris and preparing for fatherhood." Book review: In series’ final installment, author Dan Walker’s story accents the personal over the political
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