Post by M/V LeConte on Oct 30, 2008 12:54:12 GMT -8
Does any of the other systems do something like this?
An article from the October 2007 Alaska Magazine;
The Great Aleutian Pumpkin Run
Ferry workers deliver a dose of Halloween to isolated towns during the Tustumena’s final trip of the season.
__________________
As the M/V Tustumena docks at King Cove in the darkness of a damp October morning, deckhands begin the well-rehearsed routine of lowering gangways and off-loading passengers and vehicles from the ferry that serves as a lifeline to this remote community.
This is the Tustumena’s final Aleutian run of the year, and the last chance for residents of tiny port towns along the Alaska Peninsula and the eastern Aleutian Islands to bring home cars, pickups and four-wheelers before winter. As the last set of taillights disappears from the dock, dozens of waiting children eagerly step aboard the ship, splashing through the shallow puddles on a huge, steel elevator used to lift vehicles and cargo.
As the elevator descends into the fluorescent glow of the ship’s car deck, the sounds of squealing children mixes with peals of laughter and the shouts of ferry workers dressed as pirates, wenches and goblins. Below, in a colorful corner of what amounts to a cavernous garage, ferry workers wave plastic swords and witches’ brooms as they stand among inflatable ghosts and skulls, orange banners and pallets full of a rare commodity in this corner of Alaska: big, round, orange gourds.
Yeah, it’s breakfast time on a school day, but books can wait—it’s almost Halloween and the “Trusty Tusty” is making the Great Aleutian Pumpkin Run.
Ferry travel is usually relaxing, but in October, while making the long runs between communities strung along the route from Kodiak to Dutch Harbor, life aboard the Tustumena is even quieter than usual. On some legs of the trip, the crew outnumbers the passengers, and there’s plenty of time to study the countless miles of rugged, windswept and mostly unpopulated coastline.
There’s a last-day-of-school mood among the crew. They’re saying goodbye to regular passengers and dockworkers they won’t see again for months, and rules requiring uniforms can be bent in favor of Halloween costumes and face paint.
Don Darnell of Halibut Cove used to make this run regularly before retiring from the Alaska Marine Highway System, and now he comes back in the fall to help carry on the project he helped establish about eight years ago after a conversation with an Alaska Native crewmember from the Aleutians.
As beams from the rising sun brightened the ship’s dining room, Darnell sipped coffee and worked his way through a blueberry pancake and some sausage as he remembered how his coworker told him that children in her part of the state rarely carved jack o’ lanterns because by the time a pumpkin was shipped to a remote village, it had to be sold for about $35—far too expensive for most families.
As the ferry pulled out of Homer that year, Darnell put up a donation envelope in the crew’s mess in hopes of buying a few pumpkins to give to kids. When the ship reached Kodiak 10 hours later, the envelope contained $400, which Darnell hoped to leverage by asking for a discount when he got to the Safeway store in Kodiak, where pumpkins were selling for 50 cents per pound.
When Darnell and a co-worker told him about their half-baked plan, Lee Bondurant, the store manager, cut his price in half. The ferry workers found themselves with far more pumpkins than they could carry in the state-owned pickup they had driven to the store. But “right out of nowhere,” Darnell said, a guy walked by and asked what they were up to with all those pallets full of gourds—and offered his flatbed truck to move them. And that was that. A tradition was born.
“The first year was pretty haphazard,” Darnell said. Ferry workers radioed ahead to harbor masters and asked them to call schools and get children to the docks at each stop, then they invited them aboard and let each kid grab a free pumpkin. Once they saw all the smiles, doing it again the next year “was a no-brainer.”
The next year, the store manager threw in an extra crate of pumpkins for free. Then he decided to start donating all the pumpkins each year. Now the kids in Chignik Bay, Sand Point, King Cove, Cold Bay and False Pass have learned to count on the Tustumena to bring them a taste of Halloween. The effort has even grown to include nearby villages not served by the ferry— local air carriers pitch in to deliver pumpkins.
“This is a crew thing,” chief steward Mark Listberger said one day as he sat down with a cup of coffee at one of the tables just outside the ship’s dining room. The AMHS provides moral support but no funding, so ferry workers donate their time, effort and supplies, with help from groups like the American Legion chapters in Homer, Kodiak and Ninilchik.
After the Tustumena pulled out of Kodiak one afternoon last fall, Listberger walked through the ship letting the handful of passengers know they were welcome to join crewmembers on the car deck after dinner to decorate a small area around several crates of pumpkins. A few took him up on the offer. It was just one of dozens of tasks Listberger juggled while preparing to distribute more than 400 pumpkins, which are used for more than just jack o’ lanterns.
On a crisp, beautiful day last fall, a mix of children and adults patiently waited in the sun on the wooden dock at Chignik Bay as vehicles rolled off the ferry. Chief purser Christy Taylor and second mate John Mayer chatted with the crowd and reassured the restless that they’d soon be able to board. When the signal finally came, excited kids charged up the steel ramp, followed by the adults, some carrying infants or shepherding toddlers in winter coats.
As the elevator slowly dropped toward the car deck and the Halloween display came into view, smiles and anticipation grew exponentially until the big, steel platform settled onto a turntable and rotated to deposit the crowd in front of the Tusty’s costumed crew. At that point, loosely organized chaos broke out. It was the same in every town: Adolescents in jeans and hooded sweatshirts tried to maintain an appearance of coolness while scoping out the best pumpkins; their younger siblings and neighbors held tightly to big hands and tried to cope with information overload amid the bright decorations, noise and oddly dressed strangers offering them treats and pumpkins.
The Halloween display occupied only a few square yards of the car deck, but within that small area was a maelstrom. Knowing they had only a few minutes aboard the ship, children buzzed about in a small but tightly packed crowd.
A fair number parents and grandparents joined the fray to take pictures or to lift multiple pumpkins and display them to discriminating kids, many of whom would thoughtfully reject four or five before deeming one acceptable. Other adults smiled as they watched from the relative calm of the nearby elevator. Led by parents or the experience of past years, a number of children soon walked back up the ramp, claimed their spaces and then patiently waited for the stragglers to join them on the elevator as it filled with what appeared to be a significant portion of the town’s residents—and even more pumpkins
“It’s really important to the kids,” teacher Linda Jennings said of the Pumpkin Run as the elevator lifted everyone back up to the dock and school custodian Dave Hill backed his Chevy Suburban into position to load the extra pumpkins that would be sent to nearby villages. Jennings explained that her school in Chignik Bay makes sure the pumpkins are fun and educational at the same time—teachers use them in math lessons involving weights and measurements, as well as for cooking classes.
Hill’s Suburban was quickly loaded and pulled away from the ship. Only a few children and their parents lingered nearby as the Tustumena prepared to depart. The whole affair had taken a matter of minutes, and was over for the year.
Ferry visits are brief but notable in these small towns. The blue ships of the Alaska Marine Highway System are more than just a means of transport for passengers and cargo; they’re a tangible connection to the rest of the state. If nothing else, a ferry visit provides a change of routine, something to watch for a few minutes if only for the excuse to wave at someone with an unfamiliar face.
At Cold Bay a one-lane, wooden causeway leads several hundred yards from the shore to a damp dock raked by wind. As the Tusty pulled up one afternoon, the local children hadn’t yet arrived. A lone, dark figure stood in the rain wearing a skull mask and black cloak, watching the ferry. It was a woman who lives here at the far end of the Alaska Peninsula on a narrow piece of land between the Pacific Ocean and the Bering Sea. She comes out to meet the Pumpkin Run ferry every year, Listberger said, and always wears a costume.
Like her, a tiny handful of people are hooked on being part of the Pumpkin Run. Most—but not all—work on the ferry. Another woman, Barbara Abbott, started traveling to Alaska from her home in New Mexico nearly a decade ago when she took a cruise. “I didn’t like it,” she said. “It was just so fake.” When she heard about the ferry system and its Aleutian route, she quickly booked a trip. Now the Pumpkin Run is her annual vacation. Instead of taking a cruise with flip-flops and sunglasses, she packs a witch costume and her sweatshirt from the Salty Dawg Saloon in Homer, and travels to Dutch Harbor while helping the Tusty’s crew distribute pumpkins and treats.
“I brought some Mardi Gras beads,” she announced. “They were good ‘n’ cheap.”
And that’s the beauty of this annual Halloween celebration. It’s not about how much a pumpkin or a handful of candy is worth. It’s the gesture. It’s about a big blue boat that comes out of the mist and darkness, stops at isolated little towns on the edge of Alaska, and fills them with color.
Tim Woody is managing editor of Alaska magazine.
An article from the October 2007 Alaska Magazine;
The Great Aleutian Pumpkin Run
Ferry workers deliver a dose of Halloween to isolated towns during the Tustumena’s final trip of the season.
__________________
As the M/V Tustumena docks at King Cove in the darkness of a damp October morning, deckhands begin the well-rehearsed routine of lowering gangways and off-loading passengers and vehicles from the ferry that serves as a lifeline to this remote community.
This is the Tustumena’s final Aleutian run of the year, and the last chance for residents of tiny port towns along the Alaska Peninsula and the eastern Aleutian Islands to bring home cars, pickups and four-wheelers before winter. As the last set of taillights disappears from the dock, dozens of waiting children eagerly step aboard the ship, splashing through the shallow puddles on a huge, steel elevator used to lift vehicles and cargo.
As the elevator descends into the fluorescent glow of the ship’s car deck, the sounds of squealing children mixes with peals of laughter and the shouts of ferry workers dressed as pirates, wenches and goblins. Below, in a colorful corner of what amounts to a cavernous garage, ferry workers wave plastic swords and witches’ brooms as they stand among inflatable ghosts and skulls, orange banners and pallets full of a rare commodity in this corner of Alaska: big, round, orange gourds.
Yeah, it’s breakfast time on a school day, but books can wait—it’s almost Halloween and the “Trusty Tusty” is making the Great Aleutian Pumpkin Run.
Ferry travel is usually relaxing, but in October, while making the long runs between communities strung along the route from Kodiak to Dutch Harbor, life aboard the Tustumena is even quieter than usual. On some legs of the trip, the crew outnumbers the passengers, and there’s plenty of time to study the countless miles of rugged, windswept and mostly unpopulated coastline.
There’s a last-day-of-school mood among the crew. They’re saying goodbye to regular passengers and dockworkers they won’t see again for months, and rules requiring uniforms can be bent in favor of Halloween costumes and face paint.
Don Darnell of Halibut Cove used to make this run regularly before retiring from the Alaska Marine Highway System, and now he comes back in the fall to help carry on the project he helped establish about eight years ago after a conversation with an Alaska Native crewmember from the Aleutians.
As beams from the rising sun brightened the ship’s dining room, Darnell sipped coffee and worked his way through a blueberry pancake and some sausage as he remembered how his coworker told him that children in her part of the state rarely carved jack o’ lanterns because by the time a pumpkin was shipped to a remote village, it had to be sold for about $35—far too expensive for most families.
As the ferry pulled out of Homer that year, Darnell put up a donation envelope in the crew’s mess in hopes of buying a few pumpkins to give to kids. When the ship reached Kodiak 10 hours later, the envelope contained $400, which Darnell hoped to leverage by asking for a discount when he got to the Safeway store in Kodiak, where pumpkins were selling for 50 cents per pound.
When Darnell and a co-worker told him about their half-baked plan, Lee Bondurant, the store manager, cut his price in half. The ferry workers found themselves with far more pumpkins than they could carry in the state-owned pickup they had driven to the store. But “right out of nowhere,” Darnell said, a guy walked by and asked what they were up to with all those pallets full of gourds—and offered his flatbed truck to move them. And that was that. A tradition was born.
“The first year was pretty haphazard,” Darnell said. Ferry workers radioed ahead to harbor masters and asked them to call schools and get children to the docks at each stop, then they invited them aboard and let each kid grab a free pumpkin. Once they saw all the smiles, doing it again the next year “was a no-brainer.”
The next year, the store manager threw in an extra crate of pumpkins for free. Then he decided to start donating all the pumpkins each year. Now the kids in Chignik Bay, Sand Point, King Cove, Cold Bay and False Pass have learned to count on the Tustumena to bring them a taste of Halloween. The effort has even grown to include nearby villages not served by the ferry— local air carriers pitch in to deliver pumpkins.
“This is a crew thing,” chief steward Mark Listberger said one day as he sat down with a cup of coffee at one of the tables just outside the ship’s dining room. The AMHS provides moral support but no funding, so ferry workers donate their time, effort and supplies, with help from groups like the American Legion chapters in Homer, Kodiak and Ninilchik.
After the Tustumena pulled out of Kodiak one afternoon last fall, Listberger walked through the ship letting the handful of passengers know they were welcome to join crewmembers on the car deck after dinner to decorate a small area around several crates of pumpkins. A few took him up on the offer. It was just one of dozens of tasks Listberger juggled while preparing to distribute more than 400 pumpkins, which are used for more than just jack o’ lanterns.
On a crisp, beautiful day last fall, a mix of children and adults patiently waited in the sun on the wooden dock at Chignik Bay as vehicles rolled off the ferry. Chief purser Christy Taylor and second mate John Mayer chatted with the crowd and reassured the restless that they’d soon be able to board. When the signal finally came, excited kids charged up the steel ramp, followed by the adults, some carrying infants or shepherding toddlers in winter coats.
As the elevator slowly dropped toward the car deck and the Halloween display came into view, smiles and anticipation grew exponentially until the big, steel platform settled onto a turntable and rotated to deposit the crowd in front of the Tusty’s costumed crew. At that point, loosely organized chaos broke out. It was the same in every town: Adolescents in jeans and hooded sweatshirts tried to maintain an appearance of coolness while scoping out the best pumpkins; their younger siblings and neighbors held tightly to big hands and tried to cope with information overload amid the bright decorations, noise and oddly dressed strangers offering them treats and pumpkins.
The Halloween display occupied only a few square yards of the car deck, but within that small area was a maelstrom. Knowing they had only a few minutes aboard the ship, children buzzed about in a small but tightly packed crowd.
A fair number parents and grandparents joined the fray to take pictures or to lift multiple pumpkins and display them to discriminating kids, many of whom would thoughtfully reject four or five before deeming one acceptable. Other adults smiled as they watched from the relative calm of the nearby elevator. Led by parents or the experience of past years, a number of children soon walked back up the ramp, claimed their spaces and then patiently waited for the stragglers to join them on the elevator as it filled with what appeared to be a significant portion of the town’s residents—and even more pumpkins
“It’s really important to the kids,” teacher Linda Jennings said of the Pumpkin Run as the elevator lifted everyone back up to the dock and school custodian Dave Hill backed his Chevy Suburban into position to load the extra pumpkins that would be sent to nearby villages. Jennings explained that her school in Chignik Bay makes sure the pumpkins are fun and educational at the same time—teachers use them in math lessons involving weights and measurements, as well as for cooking classes.
Hill’s Suburban was quickly loaded and pulled away from the ship. Only a few children and their parents lingered nearby as the Tustumena prepared to depart. The whole affair had taken a matter of minutes, and was over for the year.
Ferry visits are brief but notable in these small towns. The blue ships of the Alaska Marine Highway System are more than just a means of transport for passengers and cargo; they’re a tangible connection to the rest of the state. If nothing else, a ferry visit provides a change of routine, something to watch for a few minutes if only for the excuse to wave at someone with an unfamiliar face.
At Cold Bay a one-lane, wooden causeway leads several hundred yards from the shore to a damp dock raked by wind. As the Tusty pulled up one afternoon, the local children hadn’t yet arrived. A lone, dark figure stood in the rain wearing a skull mask and black cloak, watching the ferry. It was a woman who lives here at the far end of the Alaska Peninsula on a narrow piece of land between the Pacific Ocean and the Bering Sea. She comes out to meet the Pumpkin Run ferry every year, Listberger said, and always wears a costume.
Like her, a tiny handful of people are hooked on being part of the Pumpkin Run. Most—but not all—work on the ferry. Another woman, Barbara Abbott, started traveling to Alaska from her home in New Mexico nearly a decade ago when she took a cruise. “I didn’t like it,” she said. “It was just so fake.” When she heard about the ferry system and its Aleutian route, she quickly booked a trip. Now the Pumpkin Run is her annual vacation. Instead of taking a cruise with flip-flops and sunglasses, she packs a witch costume and her sweatshirt from the Salty Dawg Saloon in Homer, and travels to Dutch Harbor while helping the Tusty’s crew distribute pumpkins and treats.
“I brought some Mardi Gras beads,” she announced. “They were good ‘n’ cheap.”
And that’s the beauty of this annual Halloween celebration. It’s not about how much a pumpkin or a handful of candy is worth. It’s the gesture. It’s about a big blue boat that comes out of the mist and darkness, stops at isolated little towns on the edge of Alaska, and fills them with color.
Tim Woody is managing editor of Alaska magazine.
