What Color is the Grass in Alaska?
Talking with my friend Clay Duda about trading in journalism, driving 4,500 miles to the end of America, and becoming a charter boat fisherman in his thirties.
Aware that there is little remaining on social media beyond clickbait and distraction, I’ve done my best this past year to scroll Facebook or Instagram sparingly. But I haven’t abandoned the platforms altogether, in part because I have friends like Clay Duda out there doing very cool things I’d have no idea about if it weren’t for the casual decision we’d made years ago to link our digital lives.
Clay is a writer and photographer. We met in 2015 when he came to Knoxville to write for the local alt-weekly. During his two-year stint at The Knoxville Mercury, he told stories journalists love to read to be reminded that the craft isn’t dead. His features included a 24-hour diary of living homeless, an adventure in a shanty boat down the Tennessee River, and spending the day at a clinic in Pigeon Forge for how to survive a mass shooting. He also took the photos for my 2016 cover story on fraternity boxing weekend.
After the paper shut down, Clay left town. I knew of his life exclusively through Facebook. One day, he uploaded a video of a 70-pound halibut being shot in the head with a pistol, and I learned he was in Alaska, not writing but working as a charter fisherman. In the intervening years, some of the few times I’ve been happy while scrolling were when updates from his life showed up in my feed. This past March, when he posted a story about buying picture slides at a thrift store that wound up belonging to the Kilcher family of Alaska: The Last Frontier fame1, I decided to reach out.
It’s not easy for me to come up with subjects to write about twice a week. So, I figured: what if I played the journalist again, mining my social network for stories? If the stories sucked, at least I’d gotten to spend time with the circus performers, doomsday preppers, rocket scientists (that one in two weeks), and other weirdos I’d befriended over the years.
Clay has never performed in the circus and, despite being able to see Russia from his back porch, does not have a bomb shelter. But he is living a life many non-conformists imagine when daydreaming about what future exists beyond laptop screens and jobs with 401k plans. So, I wanted to find out: is the fantasy real life? Did he spurn a career he’d invested years into and a steady paycheck to pursue a dream?
The answer, like many things in life, is complicated.
“I had no idea what I was getting into when I came up here,” Clay said over the phone last Tuesday. “I had turned in my notice at the Mercury, and then my wife and I flew down to South America for six months.”
They landed in Colombia and backpacked down the coast to Ushuaia, the southernmost city in the world. A family emergency in Georgia brought them back stateside. While back home, Clay was offered a job with a legal publication in New York. He, his wife, and their dog were set to move to uptown Manhattan when Clay spoke with an old friend, a ski bum who’d gone out to Alaska after high school. He was working as a fisherman in the summertime and told Clay that he’d make a million dollars2 if he scrapped the journalism gig and joined him on the docks.
“It was March or April, just before fishing season started,” Clay said. His wife was up for another adventure. “We packed up the car and drove 4,500 miles from Atlanta to Homer.”
It was easy to know where to stop. Spread over 15 miles, the city of 5,500 people is at the terminus of the U.S. highway system; Alaska Route 1 drops straight into Kachemak Bay, home of the world’s best halibut fishing. Clay pulled up on a Friday. By Monday, his wife, a hairdresser in Knoxville, found work for a charter company, and they had locked down an apartment.
Clay grew up drowning worms in creeks and lakes in the American South. He didn’t have a clue what a halibut was when he walked the local docks in search of a captain who’d hire an amateur for the summer. Fortunately, he learned there are only two requirements for cutting it as a fisherman in Alaska: working hands and the willingness to wake up before 5:30 a.m. every day of the week.
My only knowledge of Alaskan fishing before Clay was gleaned from watching the show Deadliest Catch in college. Back then, like so many dissatisfied young men who’d read Into the Wild and were set to graduate in the midst of the Great Recession, moving to Alaska to become a crab fisherman was one of about a hundred ideas I’d had to avoid working a crummy desk job like the one I eventually landed as a bill collector for Jim Clayton.
Boats like the show’s most famous, the F/V Time Bandit, which ships out of the same harbor in Homer, are commercial. The guys who fish in them head out in wintertime—generally, the off-season—and catch as much as they can. When they return to shore, deckhands earn a percentage (between 6% and 13%) of the overall catch. Clay’s done that kind of work twice, once on a crab boat and another time on a Pacific cod boat, where he earned $5,500 for three-and-a-half months of work.
“The five-year outlook for commercial fishing in Alaska is bleak,” Clay says.
He prefers working on a charter boat from May to about the middle of September that takes tourists out to catch sport fish like halibut. Income is supplemented by fish, which the deckhands and captain take home and put in their freezers if the customers aren’t interested.
Two years into fishing commercial boats in winter and charter boats in summer, Clay had spent enough time at sea to qualify for a captain’s license. He got a job as a captain-for-hire for a large charter company and now spends as many as 60 days straight on the water.
“I take six passengers on my boat every day,” he said. “That’s six new people I get to meet and teach how to fish. I wind up getting to know a lot of the same things I would if I were still in journalism.”
The work is brutal on his hands, which are callused over like the hardened faces of old frontiersmen in black-and-white photos. And even though he rarely has the capacity for anything else during summer tourist season, he has the winters off to spend with his family and travel, as long as he’s not picking up side work as a carpenter3.
“There is a level of escapism to it,” Clay said about his decision to go to Alaska. He’d also read Into the Wild and had a streak for risk-taking and adventure. “Homer is quite literally at the end of the road. Many of the people here came from somewhere else, saw nowhere left to go, and stayed. My story isn’t very unique in that way.”
The city is a quiet place of kind-hearted folks who live day-to-day and know how to appreciate the wonder of a sunny day because they’ve lived through long winters of deep gray haze. But it’s also got a Safeway with a Starbucks inside, a McDonald’s, and a Subway. There are modern trappings no one can escape.
“Everything comes with a tradeoff,” Clay said. “On the one hand, I don’t miss sitting in front of a computer 8 hours a day. But what you see is also fantasy.”
“I work incredibly hard to make a life up here. My hands hurt. I’m gone before my son is up, then I see him for an hour before bed. When the season starts, those are five months I don’t get to be a part of his life.”
All that glitters isn’t gold. Clay’s family still live in Georgia. In Homer, they have no support system beyond friends. Some papers have tried to pull him back into journalism. Right now, he feels at the crux of deciding whether to stick it out or do something else. In the meantime, he’s built a dark room for $37 and populated his Facebook and blog with beautiful photos of the Alaskan wilderness and local Homer community. Next month, he has his first solo gallery exhibit at the Homer Council on the Arts.
“Being a dad is the next adventure for me,” he said. I’m thinking about my future and what we want to do as a family. As long as the positives outweigh the negatives, we’ll probably stick around. But life here is seasonal. There’s no long-term planning. We don’t know what we’re going to do next winter.”
Eventually, Clay had to get off the phone. He’d given me nearly an hour during one of his final Tuesdays at home. His son seemed to have run out the front door while we were talking. My three were asleep upstairs. I was outside, listening to the birds chirp and the wind wrestling the trees. Part of me wanted Clay to say, “Man, you should do this, too. Chuck it all. The healthcare is cheap, the pay is good, and the memories are well worth the risk. This is your book right here!” Instead, what he said that has stuck with me is this: “We’re all playing in our own movie.”
Not every film is the adaptation of some great adventure novel like Into the Wild or The Motorcycle Diaries, two of my favorites. Sometimes, the story of your life mirrors The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. Other times, it’s more like Paterson, a film about a bus-driver poet in New Jersey (played by Adam Driver) that I saw at Regal Downtown West on its opening night in 2016 and, when I went back a week later, was told it was no longer showing because only three people had bought tickets to see it all week.
My therapist asked me recently if I feel grateful for having the self-control not to quit my job and head out on an odyseey that would tank my family’s savings for the sake of experiencing something out of the ordinary. He wants me to not be so hard on myself. But while I agree, there is virtue in everyday life, I’d still like to get out of here some days. Sell the house, buy an RV, and hit the open road, schooling the kids on the go, driving from one National Park to another, and scribbling under the moonlight.
Maybe my movie won’t be the kind a person escapes into, but about someone who tries and eventually finds contentment in the ordinary. Only time will tell.
Read previous The Weekly Big Head columns:
April 15 – Restlessness on Weekends
April 8 – Adventures with the Apocalyptic Cowboy
April 1 – Free Barabbas
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Clay returned these pictures. The blog I link to is well worth the read, at the very least for the pictures and what it meant for them to get back in the Kilcher family photo album years after they thought they’d been lost for good.
That first summer, he earned $20,000, a far cry from a million but not so bad for a newbie.
Just like three major industries employ Alaskans—fishing, tourism, and oil—Clay’s life has been made up of three vocations: journalist, carpenter, and fisherman.