The Ice Storm, Chicken-fried Turkey & the Man on the Moon Part One (or how to make a really bad impression on your future father-in-law)

I'm about to experiment in telling a story in installments. I think this story deserves a preface. I've never been one for prefaces as such, I tend to skip them and get straight to the meat of a book, but in this case, a certain amount of background information is required.

I'll start by introducing my father. Blog readers, meet Ricko, Dad meet the blog readers. My dad was a bit on the eccentric side - though I never really saw it that way while I was growing up, but in the telling of these stories now I realize how individual the man truly was.

We'll pick up his story after he and my Mom split up. He'd been living alone in their little A-frame love nest in the Eagle River Valley outside of Anchorage for a good 16 or 17 years by now. When I was 25, after finally graduating college (after 7 years!), I returned to Alaska to make a go of it. The first time I went round to my Dad's for dinner he offered me his famous Moose-meat Lasagne for dinner. It was gorgeous. The mushrooms he used literally melted in your mouth and were the most scrumptious thing I'd ever tasted.

I asked him "Dad, what did you do to these mushrooms? They're amazing." He paused, caressing his long ZZ Top beard as he did whenever he was about to make a point "Well, Brookie." That's what he called me, much to my horror and despite my fervent protests, "Carr's was offering a great deal on mushrooms and I bought the store out."

"I thought you might have picked them yourself, like they were shaggy manes or something?" I suggested.

"Nope, just good ole supermarket variety." He punctuated the comment with a curt nod of the head, his beard hovering dangerously close to his plate of lasagne. "I just fried them up in butter and garlic and froze the whole lot of 'em. Must have been 15 years ago now...." He looked up from his reverie at the sharp sound of my fork clanking off the plate as I dropped it. I quickly recovered it and spent the rest of the meal surreptiously avoiding the mushrooms. I didn't dare inquire about the age of the moose meat, though I'd known he hadn't been hunting in a couple of years....

He was always doing stuff like that, buying the store out of something. It wasn't that he lived so far out of town that it was worth stocking up in case of bad weather. There were plenty of other cabins that were further out and even more remote. He just knew a good deal when he spotted one. There was also the practicality of his driveway. His house was built on the side of mountain and his was a nearly vertical potholed, dirtroad deathtrap that was only passable about 4 months of the year.

There was the time a little later that autumn, the year I came back to Alaska, that he called me up to come over and help him unload the truck of this really good deal he got on canned tuna. "It was such a great deal, Brookie, I bought the whole fucking stock!" He explained, "I even sent the bag boy to out to see if there was any more in the back. Wooh! What a bargain!" He said, clearly pleased with his eye for pinching pennies.

When I arrived, I noticed the Whiskas label on the tin and asked when he got a cat. "Damn it to hell, Brookie. You always did have an eagle eye." He proclaimed, and we hopped back in the truck and took it all back to the store. Even though he threw his receipt out the window on the way back home, everyone at the market knew he'd just bought them out of cat food. The check out girl remarked that she just thought that he really loved his cat.

His infamy in town hadn't always worked out in his favor. The truck was a new edition to my old man, only a year or two old. Before that, and for as long as I could remember, he drove a 1968 VW bus otherwise known, to my sister and I, as Puff Puff Squeeze Cheese. It looked like a block of cheddar, (or maybe swiss cheese near the end with all the rusted out holes and you could totally see the road beneath your feet in places, Flintstones style) and backfired every few minutes, much to the hilarity of my sister and I when we were little. Though by the time we were 14 or 15, it wasn't nearly as amusing.

The Cheese slowly disintegrated over the years, but Dad never seemed to notice or mind very much that there was no heat (this was fucking Alaska for Christ's sake) I don't think it had a muffler for 15 years, and he didn't even blink an eye when the starter finally blew out. He just travelled with a couple of wooden wedges that he'd back up onto if he couldn't find a hill to park on.

Britt and I learned at a young age, how to pop the clutch to push start a car. We were still pretty little, so it was a team effort to get the van started; Britt worked the pedals while I steered and shifted into gear. Dad would push the Cheese down the slope and run along side us and shout "Let 'er rip, girls!" when we'd picked up enough speed. Britt would pop the clutch, while I struggled to push the gigantic gear stick into second. The Cheese would start with a pop (literally, she backfired on ignition) Britt would gently work the brake, I'd stick her in neutral and we'd slow down to halting, rattling speed so that Dad could catch up to us. He'd hop in, light a Lucky and say something like "How bout one for the road, girls?" And we'd find something suitably cold from the ice chest he carried around behind the front seat.

He was, however, a stickler for safety and there was only one working seat belt in the old Cheese on the bench at the back, and he strapped my sister and I into it until we were 12 or 13 years old. Can you picture this? Is there anything more embarrassing than your father when your 12? Is there anything worse than a little sister at that age either? When he'd fill up the tank, he leave us in the van, and wouldn't (couldn't) turn the Cheese off, he'd stand at the pump with the Lucky Strike that never left his mouth alight, the lack of muffler doing nothing to camouflage his bold disregard for gas station rules. He also had a penchant for snacking on raw meat. He'd pick up a package of ground beef from the little store inside station and munch on it while pumping the gas, blood dripping off the end of his beard and running off his fingers in rivulets. As a 12 year old, this nearly topped the list of mortifying behavior, but there was one thing that was even more embarrassing.

He really enjoyed lecturing to tourists. In the summer months, we'd head down to the Kenai peninsula every weekend to go fishing and along the way we'd no doubt cross the paths of the 'Winnebago Brigade', as he referred to them, blocking the road because there was a moose or mountain goat alongside the road. He would take great pleasure in pulling up to the middle of the crowd, the Cheese chugging over so loudly he'd have to shout his well-rehearsed facts about moose biology out the window, all of which culminated in a crescendo of hunting calls for which he dramatically opened the door and stepped out.

He'd cup one hand over his mouth and huff "Mmmwah, mmmwah. That's the sound of a male in rut," he'd explain to the masses, with a curt nod of his head. He'd light another Lucky and hop back in the van and roll out of there leaving the tourists murmuring amongst themselves and with something of a story to take home about their run in with a 'real Alaskan.' Inevitably, there was always a cute boy among the herd of tourists and my sister and I would contemplate the probability of spontaneous combustion from blushing so hard while strapped into one seatbelt at the back of the van.

When the Cheese finally died, sometime in the late 90's, he tried to sell it for parts. When that didn't work, he tried giving it to the scrapyard, but they told him he'd have to pay them to take it off his hands. He finally devised a plan that he thought would outsmart them all. He would remove the license plates, scratch out the VIN and leave it illegally parked in town. The authorities would tow it away, not know whose vehicle it was and be stuck shouldering the disposal costs. It didn't really work out like that, considering it wasn't really that big a town and everybody knew his van.... how could you not have noticed that backfiring, mufflerless, atrocity parked up on blocks at the supermarket?

One more bit of back-story you need to know is that for the last 10 years of his life, he didn't have a toilet. Or an outhouse for that matter. In the 70's, he'd come across this invention called the Destroylet - a propane powered toilet that burned up all your waste. Imagine toilet training on that bad boy! For the most part it worked out well for us, the permafrost made it pretty difficult to dig a septic tank, and no one really wanted to have to trek out to an outhouse when it was 30 below zero in the middle of winter. It didn't really smell that bad and we learned pretty quickly to let it cool off first thing in the mornings before sitting down to take of business.

They stopped making the Destroylet some time in the late 80's, I can't imagine why. That did make it pretty difficult to find parts when things went wrong though, or to get hold of a mechanic willing to work with it for that matter. So when the Destroylet finally took it's final crap, my Dad just lived without. He was on his own, it didn't bother him to go outside - he was Alaskan afterall - though most Alaskans would argue that an outhouse is a minimum requirement.

Dad never did build one. The magpies were pretty pleased with the free style situation as it were. So my dad just took an old lawn chair, ripped the seat out of it and replaced it with a spring loaded toilet seat and he just moved it around the yard, so that things didn't pile up so much that the magpies couldn't handle it. "It's the beauty of nature, girls." Dad announced, "Nothing gets wasted." Whenever we visited, Britt and I had to make the 20 minute journey into Wal-Mart to use the shitter when the need arose.

In a morbid twist of irony, my father died of colon cancer and I try not to think about those last couple of weeks on the lawn chair out in the cold before he finally left this world.

In part 2, I'll introduce you to my sister, her babydaddy and set the scene for the infamous $10,000 Bet that ruined Christmas as this story continues in the next installment.