Watson's Lake

Watson’s Lake





“What’s this place, Daddy?”

I looked at the sun-burned, peeling face of my six year old son, chocolate smeared at the corners of his mouth.

“They call this The Sign Forest..... see, it looks like trees in a forest? People driving up the Alaskan Highway like we are doing stop here at Watson’s Lake and hang up a sign with the name of their hometown on it.... pretty cool, huh?”

He looked around, openly unimpressed.

“Why, Daddy?”

“Well, some soldiers built this road a long, long time ago. It was lonely out here in the winter and cold, and one soldier got homesick and put up a sign about his hometown, and then everybody started doing it..... and it just became a tradition, I guess.”

“What’s a tra-dish-un,” he asked, hacking at the base of a sign with a stick.

“A tradition is when a whole lot of people do something, the same thing, and then pretty soon everybody does it. Then it’s a tradition.”

He looked around again, thoughtful.... biting at his lip.

“We don’t have a sign to hang, do we Dad.......?.”

“No, no we don’t.... we didn’t have room in your sidecar for a sign.”

“I wish we did, though,” he said. And then he grinned up at me.

I looked at him for a moment.... “Tell you, what..... will you give me that stick? If you do, I think we can make up a sign.”

He looked at the flat stick in his hand. “It’s my sword......”

“Pretty good sign stuff, that sword, but.... it’s your decision, son.”

He handed it over.... slowly.

I looked at Red, his smiling stepmother, who leaned against the bike watching us..

“See if you can find a spike, or a nail, thick wire, or something.....something I can heat on the campstove.”

After we all looked around for a few minutes in the gravel, Red called out, “how about this?” I walked over as she scuffed a long object up out of the gravel with her boot. It was an old bastard file, red with rust.

“Perfect!”

I got our campstove out of the sidecar, fired it up, and wrapped the body of the file in my glove for a handle. I then put the tine of the file into the blue flame.

“Whatta we doing now, Dad?” He leaned forward against my arm, staring at the file in the flame.

“Just watch,” I said. “Be careful of the stove... it’ll burn ya.”

After a while, I took the file and laid the heated end against the wood. A curl of blue smoke rose as I burned in the first letters.

“Oh! Cool, Dad, cool! Cool Beans!” He rose and danced in place. “Look, Sandy, look.....Dad ‘n me are makin’ a sign!”

A few minutes later, last letters still smoking, the sign was finished and read:

The Goudges
Ellensburg, Wa
By MC, 1992

We drilled some holes in the top of the board with a Swiss Army Knife and hung it on a pole with some scrap wire we’d also found in the parking lot.

“What do you think, son?”

He squinted at our sign dubiously. “Kinda small..... real little sign..........”

I squatted down and looked into his face. “These other signs, these big fancy ones? The people who hung those here didn’t make them themselves.... they bought them ..... maybe paid someone else to make them. It is much, much better if you do something like this yourself, huh?”

He thought for a minute, and then, that quick, mercurial grin flashed like fire......

“Yeah! We made it ourself, huh, Dad?”

We ate some sandwiches Red made, she took a picture of us with our sign, and then we loaded up and turned back out onto the Alaska Highway, heading north.

My son hung out of the sidecar, waving..... “Goodbye Sign Forest! Goodbye our sign, our sign we made ourselfs! Goodbye!”



(Thirteen Years Later)


He swung into the parking lot at Watson’s Lake on a smooth running old 1100 Wing, it’s original maroon paint faded to a light tan on top of the tank and fenders. He wheeled it expertly it to a stop alongside our much newer bike. He switched off the old machine and raised a muddy visor. He was seventy if he was a day.

“How do,” he sang out.

“How’ya doin,” I replied, “North or South?”

“South,” he grinned. “Been North!”

“What’s the road like above Whitehorse,” I asked.

“Well.....,” He took out some beef jerky, put some in his mouth, began chewing and talking at the same time. “You’re kinda late.... the road is really potholed almost all the way to Tok, but.... go slow, go easy on the throttle, you’ll be okay.” He drank some water from a bottle he pulled from a pocket. “What are ya doin’, puttin’ up a sign?”

“Naw,” I said looking back at the poles and signs. “Looking for one, a little one, made it way back in ‘92 when I brought my kid up here in a sidecar..... can’t find the damn thing! He’s at school now, Washington State University..... wanted me to find the sign and take a picture of it for him.”

He bit off more jerky. “Maybe it fell down... maybe they threw it away.”

“They’re not supposed to... and they keep up the signs pretty good for us tourists.” He grinned at me and I grinned back. “But they changed all the posts, moved everything around.... thousands of people been up the road since then...been looking for an hour.”

He nodded sympathetically. Red came up from the other side of the Forest, and smiled at him.

“No luck,” I asked her. She shook her head. “Damn, I wish we could find it,” I said. “Only thing he asked for.......”

The man put the package of jerky in a pocket of his weathered jacket and took another swig of water.

“Well,” he said as he tossed the empty bottle into a waste container on the sidewalk. “Guess I better mosey.....”

“Where ya goin’ now,” I asked.

He grinned and started the smooth old bike. “Where ever the spirit takes me, partner, where ever the spirit takes me!” He put his visor down and began backpedaling his bike, and then, he stopped and raised his visor again.

“Hey, Son, “ he yelled.

“Yeah,” I replied.

“The important thing is not that you can’t find the sign now..... the important thing is that you and her once put it up for him. He’s got the memory....and ya know, in the end, that’s all we ever get, anyway.....”

He put his visor down, put the bike in gear, waved, spun in a tight, smooth turn, and was gone.