Your body isn't anymore, doesn't ask for much. A little music and a soft touch. Why don't you let it out to play?

Your heart isn't a birdcage, singing in your chest. You want to shut it up and give it a rest. You're gonna die one day.

That's right. You're gonna die one day and so am I. But first let me tell you the stories of when I was alive.

This is episode three of Talking Out My Ass. And I intend to talk out my ass until we get to Fairbanks.

Where I left off last time I believe was Ed and the fateful Sam and that he caught up there in Petersburg.

When I left Petersburg I had met these two guys at the campsite where the whole worms and the salmon thing happened.

And I'm gonna change their names because I'm not sure that they would want to be known and as you'll hear they're both unusual characters.

Let's call one guy Russ. Russ was these were both guys they were in college at a university in the mountains in the Rocky Mountains somewhere.

Probably shouldn't name that either. Anyway they were studying together in the university. They were buddies and they had decided to go up to Alaska together.

And I don't know how long they had known each other if they just met at school or what I don't remember that but they were obviously really good friends.

Russ was from a small ski town. He sort of looked like a ski bum you know long hair and they were both very very good looking guys very fit.

And his buddy who I'm gonna call Brad was very interesting guy because he was a black Mormon. I don't know how many black Mormons there are.

I know that until a couple of decades ago the Mormon church thought that black people were I don't know if they were evil or inferior.

I don't know the specifics of the disdain with which Mormonism held black people but I know that they were that there are no more than a handful of black Mormons in the world probably.

So I hope I'm not giving anything away here with Brad being a black Mormon but in any case neither of these guys did anything they should be ashamed of but I'm just trying to be protective of them.

Anyway so what happened was that I met them in Petersburg and they were going north and I was going north and we ended up on the same ferry and we got off in Skagway together.

I don't remember if we became friends on the boat or whether we just decided to you know hitch together on the way out of town.

I don't really remember how it all came together but the three of us got off the ferry and stuck our thumbs out and this is at the top of the ferry that runs up along the coast of Canada and we're in this little town called Skagway which if you ever saw the TV show Northern exposure it really sort of brings that to mind is like a frontier town you know warped wooden floorboards you know in front of the saloon.

That kind of thing. Ram shackle I think is the is the term that people would use.

So I don't remember if I spent a night in Skagway or we just headed straight out but we stuck our thumbs out on the main highway I think the only highway that leads out of that town that heads up north.

Now keep in mind from Skagway to where we were headed which is Fairbanks you're looking at well over a thousand kilometers.

I don't know exactly how many it is but it's it's far it's days away and it's days through tundra through forest through mountain ranges through you know crazy stuff and there's this there is a highway that leads up from Skagway.

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