Other Lives

A dock walk, Xtratufs, and dreams of other lives

They are like dreams lined up bow-to-stern and cleated, just waiting for a person to step aboard. All it would take is one step, dock to gunnel, and life would change. You would slip your hands into rubber gloves, your feet into a pair of Xtratufs (Alaskan’s favorite rubber boots), and get to work, get to fishing. Life on the sea.

It is a rainy day in Juneau, Alaska. A day to slip into a raincoat, and pair of rubber boots and walk the docks where there is a dream in every slip. With nearly 400 slips, Statter Harbor in Auke Bay is the perfect place to dream the day away — a working dock with a vast array of boats. You can picture yourself stepping on to the deck of a purse seiner set for salmon like the 59-foot Rose Lee or a gillnetter like the Daybreak or the Annie V.

You might step aboard a crabber like the Worthy that sells its catch to the long line of bucket-carrying locals lined up on the dock for Dungenese crabs ($15 per crab or $13.50 each for six or more).

Or, it might be a vessel meant more for escaping everything than for catching anything - a sailboat rigged for Alaskan gales and provisioned for the long haul. Or, a working vessel like the tug Shannon weather-beaten and wave-pounded but still floating in defiance of time and the elements.

Of course there are the mega-yachts like the 164-foot Catching Daylight with its elevator, gym, and an expansive sundeck. Or the even larger Sea Owl famous for its distinct jade-mist-green hull and fairytale-inspired interior which comes in at 203-feet and $90 million complete with its own tender dubbed the Hatchling. But those are not the lives I dream of. My dreams are more down to earth, and come without their own tender or continuous four-deck, hand-carved mahogany central staircase shaped like a magical tree, stretching from the lower deck to the sun deck. In this harbor, there are, too, the husks of dreams gone awry.

That is a part of the beauty of a dock walk. You can step from slip to slip and try on different dreams as you might a collection of rubber boots — dreams of unimaginable wealth or the freedom inherent in having virtually no money at all but all the time in the world with a boat beneath you and the horizon ahead. It could be a dream of owning your own fishing charter, or a whale watching tour boat. Each with its own ebb and flow of hopes and despairs.

Then there are the names — Gypsy Spirit, Quicksilver, Strike Two, Yolo, and Sea Bird. Names that run the gamut of emotions — Total Chaos and Butt Ugly, Chatham Mist and Perseverance and Lucky Lady.

Beyond the dreams and the wanderlust inspired by the names, there is the sheer aesthetics of a marina with its sea smells, its reflections and colors and classic lines of boat hulls. There are gulls like white commas in the sky above, the black slash of ravens, seals slinking in the reflections of the rigging below, the abstract art of boats and water and life laid out before you in numbered rows.

And the art of the sea itself painted into the salt-encrusted sea walls by the brushes of countless incoming and outgoing tides.

I walk the docks up and down, trying on life after life. What is there about life aboard this boat or that one that appeals to the traveler in me? What would I miss of what is left behind on shore? Would I be happier, more lonely, fulfilled? Would I walk the docks at other ports of call only to dream of other lives aboard those boats too?

We all make our choices. We all step ashore in our lives here or there and cleat our hopes and dreams to the port of our choosing and our own making. But there is no harm in a day spent dreaming, only to finally step back to the familiar shores of our own life again, happy to have had some time away, happy to return to our home waters where we have known we belonged all along.

— Jeff Rennicke (all photography by the author unless otherwise noted).