My First Year in Alaska - Meeting Wes Warner

Wes Warner at home on 26th Avenue, Anchorage

Wes Warner, having flown in from Idaho in July, was like the rest of us, a new arrival to Alaska. He was working the sales counter at the auto parts store with Bill Smith, and had rented a room, of which he found wanting.

We decided he should move in with us, but the only room available was one jammed full of junk. Our entrance, at the back of the building, passed through a small vestibule that doubled as a tool room and catchall area. From there we entered the kitchen to the right. The small room at the back of the vestibule had been filled and forgotten for years. The landlady was not opposed to our suggestion that we help clean and furnish the room. Wes moved in mid September.

Wes Warner, Christmas 1967

Wes Warner was not an imposing figure. The first time we met I perceived a short fellow with a slightly rotund body. His hair, kept short in a brush style cut, rose above bespectacled owl-eyes that stared out of a round face. Wes’s visage was remarkable in its plainness. He was, at thirty-seven, ten years my senior. We possessed very different backgrounds, but circumstance had introduced us, and over that winter we found common ground for a lasting friendship.

Wes Warner & landlady Louise Machevski

Two things helped to bring us closer: we were single men arriving in a new world; and we had arrived alone. Wes was starting a new life; I had yet to decide what I was going to do with mine. Neither of us considered ourselves to be a vanguard for those who might follow. Bill Smith and Bill Peasal had wives back home; Smith expected his wife and family to join him, which they eventually did; Peasal planned on returning to South Dakota and eventually did.

So Wes and I, unencumbered by domestic responsibilities, began to frequent nearby establishments on Friday and Saturday nights. There were many in the neighborhood, but our favorite haunts were the Chef’s Inn, a mere two block walk to Northernlights blvd, and the Pink Poddle, located in a strip mall off Spenard Road, only a block from home. Both had live music on weekends and offered diversion and entertainment within safe walking distances.

We often drove to the Office Lounge because we liked its uniqueness. The establishment lay a mile east on Northernlights. It had a circular bar on the second floor of a hex shaped building with windows on most sides. The view of the mountains and surrounding city was spectacular, but the unique aspect of the place was that the bar rotated. We would sit there as giant gears revolved unseen somewhere below, slowly spinning us as we sat at the bar - a merry-go-round of a different breed. Its movement was imperceptibly sluggish, making one revolution per hour. Many new visitors, ignorant of its capacity, sat on bar stools as it made one complete rotation after another. They watched the ever shifting scenery, mountains then city, mountains then city, without ever perceiving the ambiguity.

That winter we got to know each other while bar hopping. Many a night we would walk toward home after midnight, tramping through crisp snow that squealed ever louder underfoot as the temperature grew colder. Some nights we would rock back and forth listening to the crunch, trying to gauge the air temperature from the pitch of the noisy squeak.

On more than one night Wes broke out in slightly tipsy rapture, reciting a poem he learned in school. He never got beyond the first stanza - couldn’t remember the next line or the rest of the poem - didn’t recall the author - but he really loved it, and recited it on many a cold evening walk home.

I eventually found the poem, by Alfred Lord Tennyson, copied, memorized it, and waited patiently for Wes’s next attempt at recital. Eventually it came:

           “Sunset and evening star        

        And one clear call for me!
        And may there be no moaning of the bar,

       When I put out to sea,"
                          
 He faltered at that point and I took over:
   
       But such a tide as moving seems asleep, 

       Too full for sound and foam,
      When that which drew from out
        the boundless deep
      Turns again home.

      
       Twilight and evening bell,
       After that the dark!
       And may there be no sadness of farewell,
       When I embark,

       For though from out our bourn of
      Time and Place
      The flood may bare be far,
      I hope to see my Pilot face to face
     When I have crossed the bar.” 

I gave him the copy, and we joined in late evening recitals thereafter.
GO TO: My First Year in ALaska, Wes Warner - Part 3