The Genesis Story of The Doers Of Things Part 1
The beginning of The Doers Of Things podcast started summer of 2022 (despite the podcast itself not being released until Spring 2024), but to tell this story right, I have to start months before it happened. I could possibly pull the thread back years to 2019 with the start of the bad relationship I was partly escaping, but I’ll spare you and just start in March 2022.
At that time I found myself at an air-crete building workshop in Terlingua, Texas (which I was able to attend by bartering with the teacher a custom song for his business in exchange for my spot in the class). At this very informative workshop, I met two (well really 3) vital characters to this story. One was the lady who offered me a job at her “boutique” (her word) salmon smokehouse in Kodiak, Alaska that her daughter ran, we will call her The Fish Lady; two, a sister stranger who turned out to quit drinking the exact same day I did (November 1, 2020) who paid for my plane ticket to the Emerald Isle, my Fairy God Sis we will call her; and three, The Russian who would join me at the salmon smokehouse (however, that part wasn’t known until I arrived on the island and he was already there, as there was no talks of him working for The Fish Lady when we were all at the workshop in Terlingua).
We will fast forward past my return to Huntsville in east Texas from the west Texas desert and the drama that ensued at the plant medicine church where I was staying with Yonderlust (my 1993 Ford e350 shuttle bus I call home) and maybe tell that story another day. We will also slide by the drama that surrounded the aforementioned relationship and cut right to me arriving at the parking lot of the salmon smokehouse in Alaska and finding The Russian painting outside benches. It was nice to see a familiar face I liked (because I never really clicked with The Fish Lady but I didn’t listen to that intuition when I decided to fly to an island 4,000 miles away), however, I didn’t know then how important it would be to have a friendly face come a couple of weeks.
As I was getting my bearings in my new home (a small apartment that had been used for storage prior to my arrival) and my new job (which was in my wheelhouse having been in the service industry for nearly 2 decades) that I thought would be for the whole summer, I was talking myself up to enjoying the opportunity, despite not having a regular jobby jobby for a few years and despite the fact it was only $12.50 an hour, plus I had to pay $600 for the apartment. I looked passed all that and was sinking into the work and the routine. It was nice to get away from the drama in Texas and I had wanted to get back to Alaska since my summer of 2016 spent on the mainland (working at a Boy Scout camp then hitchhiking around for a few weeks). So I just sucked up any thoughts that the summer was going to suck and chalked it up to another adventure with something to gain and learn.
I made my first mistake by helping in areas I was not hired for; fixing their defunct website, agreeing to be the face of the company making social calls around town, and beginning to organize an event I would run for the local business association. The second mistake was made when I asked if we could renegotiate the terms of our agreement, now that I had proven to be more useful than just the front counter girl and was taking on more roles than what I was hired for. Despite offering up several options (more hourly pay, less or no rent, pay me my overtime, which I wasn’t getting as it was meant to supplement the other $600 portion of rent on a place they weren’t even previously renting but wanted to say the rent was actually $1,200) I was shot down to anything different than the agreement I was offered down in Texas. I sucked it up, said that’s ok, I’ll still be a good worker, but I might not stay for the winter Game season (something she was already asking me to consider).
I feel like right here it is important to let you know that I asked to renegotiate AFTER The Fish Lady had just told me, the day before, to let her know if I had any issues and that I couldn’t just get fired for a mistake, that we would handle it as a team, as adults. I prefaced my request to renegotiate by saying how hard it was for me to speak up on what I was worth and thought I deserved (this links to the relationship I was running from as well) and then I launched into all the options I had ran all the numbers on knowing that any option would be beneficial to both parties. We left the conversation with nothing changing, and I prepared to sink into the next 2 and a half months weighing out freshly caught salmon and sorting through freezers for orders.
The next day, as I was bending down to get my boots, there was a knock on the door. It was The Fish Lady, envelope in hand with my last paycheck, a glowing letter of recommendation, and word that I had 2 weeks to find someplace else to live. She explained I was overqualified for the job and that it was a job for high school students (her only other employees despite me, The Russian, her daughter, and her daughter’s mother-in-law). It is a high schooler’s job to her, because she wants to pay high school wages. Let me tell you $12.50 an hour does not go far in Alaska, especially on the island. But it does when you still live at home with your folks. Anyway, there were tears (mine not hers), I refused to let her hug me goodbye (I didn’t want her to touch me at all but she gave me a pat on the back), and I immediately went to figuring out a Plan B, which I had not previously planned for.
Enter the next pivotal character in this tale, Kodiak Paul. Within a couple of hours of posting something to a Kodiak community Facebook page about needing a job and place to stay paired with some of my work experience, I heard from Kodiak Paul who had a condo with all its utilities on, but nobody staying there and needing some basic remodeling repairs. Thanks to being a Doer Of Things, what he needed to be done was within my abilities (what wasn’t was completed with the help of The Russian). After collecting myself emotionally, The Russian used the company truck to take me to the condo to check it out and make sure this internet stranger was a safe one.
Low and behold the condo turned out to be directly across the lake from where I had just gotten booted. When I say directly I mean that, it was not cattycorner or a block down, I was literally able to see the door to the apartment all my stuff would shortly be moved from. I think you’d like to know, and it turned out to be an omen to my eyes, that the lake was called Lily Lake filled with lily pads, and was the lake where float planes took off and landed. It didn’t take too long to become clear to me that whatever force wanted me to be in Kodiak wanted me to stay in Kodiak, as I was just a lily pad jump away from my first landing zone. I broke apart the cozy home I had already made for myself and moved my stuff the next day with the help of The Russian.
You might wonder why I was so sure the lake was a sign. You might wonder why I was so willing to stick around instead of just packing up and returning home. Well, aside from the fact I didn’t travel 4,000 miles to just turn around and go back to all the drama I had left behind, I had been given the book The Alchemist by my coworker, the mother-in-law, the day before my canning. This is a book people have been trying to get me to read for over a decade and I had just been waiting for it to physically cross my path. The timing was not lost on me. In my newly found free time, I started to read The Alchemist which made things even more clear that The Universe was talking to me and I needed to be patient and listen to the signs, symbols, and omens. So I hunkered down on my camping mat on the floor of the abandoned condo across from my old job waiting to see what the point of all of this was.
It didn’t take long for Kodiak Paul to prove to be a vital resource yet again. As the unofficial ambassador of Kodiak, the IT guy for the borough, as well as the public radio station, he reached out to 100.1fm KMXT to see if they had anything for me. To my luck or destiny, they had an opening on Wednesdays from 12:30-1 pm, right after the midday news and before NPR’s World Cafe. The old timer who was in charge of the time slot was retiring in less than a week. He walked me into the production booth, showed me some buttons and knobs, then left me to do my thing. I commenced to return every week recording my songs and a little description of what it was about. A couple of times it made sense to do an interview (the first with Black River Revue, buddies from Minnesota who were playing SalmonFest on the mainland, which I hitchhiked to in 2016 and again in 2022; one with Kevin Worrell of Super Saturated Sugar Strings, Alaska favorites also playing SalmonFest; and then a song swap with Ellamy Tiller and Matthew Brunoehler, Kodiak songwriters, recorded in the KMXT studio before a charity event we were supposed to play, but got rained out). By this point, it had become clear that I was onto something and that this opportunity to bide my time while on the Emerald Isle might be something I could take home with me and grow.
With this newfound vision of what my radio show could be and despite the last time I spoke up for myself in Kodiak not going so hot, I worked up the nerve to ask the station if I could keep the show when I returned home, as it was prerecorded after all and I had all the necessarily equipment. To my surprise and relief, they thought it was a great idea. After all, they didn’t pay me for the 30 minutes (technically 28) of content I provided them and they had lost not only the old timer who used to produce that segment block, but they had also lost funding post The Great Pause of 2020. A very valuable lesson was learned that day, that the more comfortable you get with the word “no,” the more “yes” you will get, as sometimes the question just needs to be asked in order for the cards to fall in your favor.
My summer in Kodiak was a wild adventure survived by radical faith and few good people. I was bolstered by a visit from my Fairy God Sis and her wife as well as a friendship forged with a fellow female traveler on the island trying to sort out her life, The Hypnotist (which I find interesting because The Fish Lady was also a hypnotist, but at least I listened to my intuition on that front by not letter her all up in my kitchen, so maybe there is hope for me yet to one day fully listen to that little voice that knows more than me). And I’d never have survived the summer without the friendships with The Russian and Kodiak Paul.
I eventually found a job prep cooking and waiting tables on the other side of the island. I’d get a ride on Wednesday night to drop me off at the staff cabin (a box with no windows in the bedroom and sort of warm water in the shower). I worked in the kitchen all day Thursday and half of the day Friday, then waited tables Friday and Saturday night then brunch on Sunday. I’d then snag another ride the 45 minutes back to town where I’d help Kodiak Paul and The Russian with remodeling the condo. On Tuesdays, I’d go to the KMXT HQ and record my show. I did this for about 6 weeks and in total I think I packed up and moved my stuff 18 times that summer. I ended up making in my time at the restaurant more than I would have made working 2 1/2 months of 40 hours for The Fish Lady. However, I quit the job with a few more weeks I could have worked with a Todd Snider line because they were super tough people to work for, a fact known all over the island, (despite one of the owners having a brother who works at my alma mater in the town I still called home, small world, and the other sharing the same first name with me). But I had made what I needed to not make the summer a bust and when given an ultimatum I walked out the door.
Despite starting a podcast, much less a radio show in Alaska of all places, not being on my list of things to do, I knew that a co-creation was taking place. I knew that walking away from it when I went home, just because it wasn’t something that was my idea, would be looking a gift horse in the mouth. I also knew that if I wanted to start a podcast I would have to lean into doing interviews, something I had no idea if I’d be good at it or not. However, my main doubts were if people would be willing to talk to me. I just knew I had to give it a go.
Stay tuned for Part 2 of “The Genesis Story of The Doers Of Things” to read about how the podcast idea progressed once I made it back to the lower 48.
