A guy had offered me a job refurbishing his boat in the Honolulu dry dock. He was sailing it over from Maui which would give me a work opportunity and a chance to check on tuna fishing jobs. I made the mistake of leaving my truck and the keys with the Filipino man at the hostile. He was staying at the hostile and also running it so I thought that it would be safe enough with him. The man had insisted that I leave the keys with him in case he had to move it. My instincts told me not to leave him the keys but I did it anyway. This was one of the few times that I did not trust my instincts and I paid the price for it. We sailed to Honolulu the next day and the boat was lifted out of the water into the dry dock. There were four of us working on the boat including one Australian guy. Him and I dared each other to swim across Honolulu harbour at night. We drew straws for the one set of diving gear and I drew the short straw so I had a snorkel, mask and fins. I swam across while dodging boats on the way and arrived on the other side. A Polynesian man was fishing there and I got out of the water next to him. The guy just came over and punched me square in the face. I began to go after him and he ran down the docks and got his friends. They all began running towards me so I figured that I would take my chances with the sharks. I quickly put my fins back on and began swimming back across the the harbour. They did not follow me. I had a flashlight with me but it began to fail before I got to the other side. The hairs on the back of my neck began to stand up as if something was watching me. I knew that the harbour was very deep and that there were a lot of sharks in there. I began to kick my feet rhythmically like a boat propeller thinking that it might throw and sharks off. I was glad to finally climb out of the water on the other side. I was back on the boat in dry dock for about thirty minutes before the Australian guy came back. He said that he could see me swimming above him and that there was about a fourteen foot tiger shark swimming in circles around me. He said that he had been looking in some lava tunnels below when he spotted me with my flashlight above him. The rest of the job was pretty dull in comparison and I was not able to land any work on a fishing boat. I did meet some very interesting people though including a man and his wife who were sailing around the world and finding work where they could along the way. We were back in Maui the next day and I arrived back at the hostel. The filipino man told me that my truck had been stolen. He said that him and his son had taken the truck fishing and left the keys in it. I wanted to rip the guys head off because I knew that he was lying. A few more days passed and I began to think that I was really screwed. I had no money, no job and now I had no truck. The finance company was also trying to repossess the truck because I had stopped paying them. I was also wondering what would happen when the shipping company eventually found out what happened. I got a plane ticket back to California and gave the police another call from the Maui airport to see if they had any news about my truck yet. They said that they did not but that they had some information about the Filipino guy at the hostel. The police told me that he was a professional car thief so I knew for sure what had happened at that point. My first thought was to go back to the hostel and beat the hell out of the guy. I then thought that it would be better to make my way back up to Alaska. I could tough out the rest of the winter and maybe pickup some work there. The oil spill cleanup was going to be starting up again the following spring and I had planned to get on it. I could no longer get into Canada legally so I got a cheap flight from California to Alaska. I was really concerned about freezing or starving to death or both. I made my way from where the plane landed in Anchorage to Valdez, Alaska. It was not as bad as I thought because there were plenty of hotels available and work shovelling snow which paid well. It was a little bit weird only having three hours of daylight. I would make my way down the roads and through the snow tunnels and then up to the rooftops over the frozen mounds of snow. I was shovelling snow off of peoples roofs for them. Most of the rooftops were two stories and the snow was so high that I had to throw the snow up off the side of the roofs. Some people had portable lights on their rooftops or I would just use the street lights to work by. The snow began to melt when spring began and I was getting less work so I went to Fairbanks, Alaska and found work peeling the bark off of logs for log cabins. This was done with a draw knife which is kind of like a thick, curved machete with a handle on both ends. It was very hard work and I was getting a dollar a foot. I met another guy on the job and we both rented a trailer. We both got pretty good at peeling the logs and we were getting around six hundred dollars a day before long. We would usually go out on a Friday night to the Red Dog saloon. It was the first bar on the road from North Slope Alaska where the oil rigs are. The guys would come off of the rigs for their home rotation and stop there with a pocket full of money. The place was always booming and they could afford to get top bands in. We finished peeling all of the logs and then I found another job peeling logs on my own. They had a log cabin for me to stay in while I was doing it and their was a cafe across the street. The yard was on the road to the Princess cruise camping resort where people would go with their motorhomes. I would take my cuttings from the logs and bind them up. I would then put the bundles on the side of the road with a sign for three dollars. They were perfect for camp fires and sold like hotcakes. I finished up with the logs and headed back to Valdez to get on the oil spill cleanup again. I got back on the spill again from the start and it was not long before I was earning big money. I would go into the Valdez post office and look in the little window of my post box before opening it. I could pretty much tell how much money was in there by the height of the pay checks. They had made Marijuana possession against the law that winter so there were no more people smoking it in front of the post office. Exxon was experimenting with two different types of bioremediation. One type was a natural method which used a substance to accelerate the dispersal of oil. The other type was like a rocket fuel dispersant which we called agent orange. It was very nasty stuff. They would spray it from a fleet of crop dusting helicopters. The tides were some of the highest in the world. The entire underside of the little offshore islands would be exposed on low tide. They were shaped like giant mushrooms. We would push the barges with jet washing equipment onboard, up to the the little islands. The tide would go out and then the barges would be underneath the lip of the mushroom shaped islands. We had over twenty thousand people on the spill and hundreds of vessels and barges. The order was given to move the fleet and we were the only barge left still underneath the lip of the island. I was heading to the galley to get a coffee when I heard helicopters coming. They could not see us because of our location. I had one foot in the galley door when the bioremediation came down. It was the rocket fuel type. I was lucky that I only breathed through my nose a little before stepping in the galley and shutting the door. I was one of only two people left on deck. The other guy was out in the open, right in the middle of the deck. We had some large tents set up on deck as well for equipment storage. Some people were working, storing equipment in those as well. The smell from the bioremediation chemical was overwhelming. I heard a loud commotion outside and I waited a couple of minutes for the cloud to disperse before going out. The people who were working in the tents had taken the guy on deck to the medical tent. The guy convulsed for about thirty seconds and then he was dead. The bioremediation chemical had destroyed his lungs. I thought that I was fine but then my nose began to bleed and would not stop. They took me to the hospital in Anchorage by helicopter and cauterised some of the brood vessels in my nose. I was then taken back to the barge by crew boat. They switched me to another barge called the 312 after that. This was the barge with all of the Exxon top brass on it. They had every type of vessel out there, even a cruise ship for housing. The 312 barge that I was on was where boat owners would come to sign their boats up on the spill. A guy came flying towards the barge on his boat one day with Bob Marley’s red red wine blaring on his speakers. He asked me to throw him a line and then another and another. I had his boat tied up to the barge by six lines before long. He jumped off of his boat and it began to sink. It settled against the barge held on by the lines. He had set out across the sea with a big hole in his boat hoping to sign it up. Exxon told him that they would sign his boat up if he could make it sea worthy. He worked on his boat for a week of so and managed to get a patch on it. The boat turned out to be very useful and netted him a fortune. The spill cleanup ended for that year and I was back on shore again with a pocket full of money. I paid cash for a Jeep CJ7 with big tires and a lift kit and headed south. I managed to get into Canada and drove the length of the Alaskan highway to the state of Washington. Some guys were building log cabins so I asked them for a job. They hired me on the spot and I got a couple of weeks work out of it. I headed south to my friends house in Weed, California. This was the friend that I had made in town while going to the junior college previously. We started talking and he brought up the idea of my getting a mobile trailer to live in. He said that I could connect it to the water, sewage and electricity alongside his house if I wanted to. I found one that I liked but my little jeep could not pull it. A retired guy in town had a machine shop in his garage and had worked his entire life for General motors. He had a Jeep truck with a rebuilt motor and extra fuel tank. The guy had done all of the work himself and it was a great truck. He said that he had lined the inside of the cylinders with chrome and that you could put any type of fuel in it. The truck was easily capable of pulling this trailer that I had my eye on. The guys grandson really liked my Jeep CJ7 so I traded the CJ7 for his grandfathers truck. I took the truck and bought the trailer and connected it up next to my friends house. I spent the winter there but could not find any work except for a care taking job at a local teachers house in the mountains. The teacher was taking a vacation and wanted me to watch his house while he was gone. He said that I could park my trailer on his property in front of his house. I took the trailer up there loaded with enough food and water for two weeks. I had purchased a thirty eight special revolver from an advertisement in the newspaper just for security and had it in a drawer. I woke up one morning after I thought I heard something outside. There was some movement next to one of the trees so I rubbed my eyes to see if I was seeing straight. I looked again and did not see anything. I was just about to go back in the trailer and get my pistol when several FBI guys dressed in combat gear came running out from behind the trees and told me to hit the ground with my hands out in front of me. They all had machine guns aimed at me so I hit the ground and they put handcuffs on me. They went into my trailer and came out with my thirty eight special revolver. The guy asked me if I had a permit for it just as he got a call on his radio. They were raiding a marijuana plantation but it was the next property over that they wanted. I had told him that I did not have a permit but he said that he would not worry about it. They took the handcuffs off of me and left. I found out later that they had busted a couple of the guys but that the rest of them had gotten away with most of the marijuana. The guys who were growing the marijuana had it bailed up in trucks ready to go but a couple of them stayed behind. They had brought a hot tub up there along with girls and the two guys that got busted were still sitting in the hot tub with the girls when the FBI showed up. The teacher finally arrived back and I had to explain to him why he had some damage to his property. The FBI had been trying to kick his door in. I gave him a business card that the FBI had left and he phoned them. They explained to him what had happened. The teacher gave me most of what he owed me for care taking his property and I hitched up the trailer and went back to my friends house. The teacher had a right to be upset with the FBI but I could not understand why he was not happy with me. He refused to give me the rest of the money that he owed me and was insinuating that the FBI incident was somehow my fault. The FBI probably mentioned the unlicensed firearm that I had on his property to stop him from filing a complaint.

Next Chapter: Chapter nine