by Carl Conrad

Created on: February 26, 2009

I Ordered the Fish, But I Didn't Know I Had To Catch It, Too! ~

Dating can be such a shocking surprise. Sometimes you're expecting a moose and you get a reindeer; sometimes you're expecting an otter and you get a seal. But, in my case, I was expecting a woman who loved the outdoors and I got an Eskimo!

Juneau, Alaska, is only accessible by sea or air, but when I flew into this beautiful, rich, heavily forested area, the snow was deep and crusted, the air had a breathtaking frost, and night just never seemed to come. After our plane landed, I was driven to a lodge outside the city where I had rented a cabin for the week. The countryside was stunning, but the endless glare of snow was as persistent and irritating as the interrogation lamp of a police investigation.

I was attending a business conference for a computer company I represented, and there were more men in that conference room when I walked in than there are on a construction crew building a new highway. But, one of the men I was seated next to when lunch was served told me that he knew an escort service that would provide me with a local woman to show me some of the sights. He gave me the number on a business card that should have tipped me off to trouble, but I failed to notice it at the time. It said: "Bonnie's Tours; bait, buckshot, and whale blubber for that REAL Alaskan experience!"

I'm not sure if you could call this a "date", but I called the number later in the day and arranged for a woman to come to my cabin to pick me up early that evening. Of course, with daylight lasting nearly 24 hours, it was never officially "night"; the hands of the clock just kept circling the dial of my watch like a vulture circling a weakening prey.

When I heard the knock on the door of my cabin, I was hardly prepared for what I saw when I opened it. A woman with straight, jet-black hair hanging over her forehead, a furry Alaskan parka bundled up around her body, mukluks on her feet, and a weathered face that looked like she might have shaved earlier in the day smiled at me with a gap between her teeth that seemed to indicate that she had chewed plenty of animal hides to soften them in her day.

She said her name was Ula (pronounced Ooh-la), and she handed me a more conventional looking snowmobile suit that was bulky and red, all in one piece, with a zipper that pulled up in front after you stepped into the legs and put your arms in the sleeves. She helped me get it on, gave me some boots with furry tops that seemed a little

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