I Traded My Car for A Plane Ticket To Alaska

It was a great car, but sometimes you’ve just got to go.

I’ve known a lot of guys named Steve before. But only one of the Steves I’ve known had the right combination of je ne sais quoi and body odor to earn the name Steve-O. I don’t know what’s so powerful about that stupid uppercase O, but to say that a Steve is the same as a Steve-O is like saying there’s no difference between a thoroughbred racehorse and the metal pony you can pay a quarter to ride outside the grocery store.

We’ve all had a friend like Steve-O before. Steve-O is the guy who shows up late without any money but can still make everybody laugh. He’s the kind of friend who isn’t good looking or charming but lights up the room anyway. One night when a group of us went out for wings, we looked down to see Steve-O wearing two matching left flip-flops. It was unsettling and nobody knew how it happened, but that’s just how you roll when you are a Steve-O.

Steve-O and I spent most of 2005 working together on a boat in a yacht club in Connecticut. We were both college graduates without a plan, hiding from the real world in low-paying, fun jobs. While our friends were earning real money and renting apartments full of Urban Outfitters decor, we drank PBR and raced dock carts after dark in the boatyard.

I had a silver 1993 Toyota Camry that had carried me through my college years. It had the kind of sweet after-market stereo that you could pop the face off so it wouldn’t get stolen. Sometimes we’d sit in my car and listen to the song Wagon Wheel, convinced that it was our anthem and nobody else's.

I later learned that Wagon Wheel was the anthem of every group of outdoorsy friends who wore flannels and Birkenstocks and drank out of Mason jars unironically.

One night, I got in my car to drive to Philadelphia to visit a guy I’d met at a regatta the previous weekend. Before I drove away, Steve-O raced up the dock and pushed a bag of Cape Cod potato chips through my car window. Once I got on the road, I opened the bag to find a cream cheese and jelly sandwich and an EZ-Pass transponder nestled on a thin layer of crushed salt’n’vinegars.

I hit the road and cruised through the EZ-Pass lanes, glad to hang onto the stack of dollars I had budgeted for tolls.

Later, I paid over a hundred dollars in fines for using the transponder since it wasn’t registered to my car. Steve-O had a way of getting you into trouble without meaning to. Even so, he was hard to stay mad at.

In the fall, it was time for all of us to move on and find something else to do. I was 22 and I felt as rudderless as the abandoned boats at the back of the marina. When I stumbled on a job posting for a seasonal position monitoring crab fishing boats in Alaska, I submitted the application without a second thought.

The day before Christmas, I was back at my parents' house in upstate New York trying to put a positive spin on my lack of plans for the new year. In the midst of the festivities, Alaska called and asked if I had a few minutes for an interview.

I got hired and was given a start date of January 15. The only hitch was that I needed to show up at the office in downtown Anchorage at 9 am and I had no way to get there.

Fortunately, when you have a friend like Steve-O, obstacles like this are easy to overcome. I called him, and we made an agreement: he’d buy a plane ticket in my name using his credit card (which had a responsible $500 limit). In exchange, I’d give him my silver Camry, complete with the Wagon Wheel cd.

Two weeks later, Steve-O drove me to the airport and I signed the title of my car over to him.

Alaska is a cold, dark place to spend the winter. But I learned lessons there, in the biting, lonely, frigid air that were more valuable than any I learned in my college courses.

In the middle of the Bering Sea, thousands of miles from a friend or a familiar face, I learned how to be happy, even when I was truly alone. In the middle of the night, bracing my legs against the side of my bunk as 15-foot waves rocked the boat, I learned to transform panic and fear into a manufactured sense of calm. I learned how to measure and identify fifteen different species of crab and how to rubber band my pants around my boots so they didn’t flood with 40-degree seawater every time we hit a wave.

By late spring, I felt like a different person. I’d survived a season at sea with rough fishermen and coarse sea captains. I’d boarded countless small planes and boats as I skipped around the Aleutian Islands. I’d slept in bunks, crew houses, and on boats. I’d read dozens of cheap mystery novels and completed more than a thousand sudoku puzzles. I hadn’t fallen in love and I hadn’t fallen apart. I’d just lived.

When I left Alaska, I returned to New York to find that Steve-O hadn’t filled out any paperwork on my car and I was hit with a heavy fine and a six-month suspension of my drivers’ license.

A lot of people give advice like it’s a prescription. Do X so you can feel Y. The problem is that life is too full of variables to pretend there's one secret to success or happiness. So I’m not going to advise you to trade your car for a plane ticket — that would be crazy.

But what I will say, is this: If you meet a Steve-O, you may want to keep them around. You never know what the future holds.

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