On his 82nd birthday, Gene Cecil -- former Skwentna fur trapper, World War II coxswain, one-time motorcycle racer, lapsed pilot, retired fisherman and shrimper, former Dalton Highway trucker, Knik Arm boat captain, and the scrappiest entrepreneur on Anchorage's gritty waterfront -- sat under the leaky tarp outside his Busy Bee Bait Shack near the muddy tidal basin at the mouth of Ship Creek.
"(Expletive deleted) rain," he grumbled.
Even though fishing remained good, the silver salmon derby had ended a few days earlier. And now a dose of wet weather had cleared out most anglers who might buy bait, burgers and tackle.
"It's all over but the shouting" is how Cecil put it.
Only the serious ones remained, Bait Shack regulars, dedicated anglers who park cars and buy food and trade stories with Cecil, his daughter Linda Stowers and her boyfriend Rodney Weaver Sr. at the creek-side compound.
On a Wednesday afternoon, two of them sat next to Cecil and set up their fishing rods, while two other guys loaded six fish into the back of a pickup. Joiji Lino, who took third place in the derby, inspected the catch.
"Now that you know what they look like, go down and catch one," Cecil called to Lino in a voice as gravely as a diesel engine in one of his old work boats.
Lino handed out smoked salmon, made from fish he caught the day before. The men chewed in silence.
"It's all right," said Boyd Smallwood.
"Not too bad," Cecil concluded.
Talked turned to Cecil's sometimes rocky relationship with his landlord, the Alaska Railroad, and how nearby trucking operations and construction had been crowding him. Cecil is still irked by the loss of his boatyard across the street, now home to about 1,000 semitrailers and some kind of mining tanks.
"All those trailers have wheels. They could park them anywhere in town," he said.
And now the trucks are pushing Cecil again: He has to move the bait shack a few yards to the south to make room for more parking.
"They're squeezing him out," said Rick Helton, at the table with Cecil. "They're trying to get rid of him. ... But we won't let that happen."
"They told me one time that my problem was that I wasn't a millionaire," Cecil said. "Wish I'd had a witness."
Cecil's bait shack is the unofficial fishing headquarters for the lower reaches of Ship Creek, where Anchorage's industrial marine heart has not yet been prettified and beached steel hulls get washed by the highest tides.
With Stowers as the day-to-day boss, Cecil launched the shack about eight years ago, and kept it going as he gradually retired from his most recent career tendering the Knik Arm salmon catch from fishermen to buyers on shore. With his barrel chest, white hair and weathered face, Cecil is every inch the retired mariner, holding court outside the shack like a captain on a bridge, greeting fishermen and talking to his friends while Stowers and Weaver sell food and gear.
Most years, many of the top derby places get taken by what Stowers calls "the bait shack team," including this year's winner, Rodney Weaver, Jr., Weaver's grown son.
The scene is like no other in town: The thunk and clank of freight trains can drown the woosh of rushing water and the screeching of the gulls. But step a few yards into the sedges, and the ripe odor of rotting salmon dominates. Wading fishermen cast drifters and lures in the creek bottom. Eagles chitter from their perches on the power poles.
The site is also chocked with engines, boats, totes, vehicles, gear and equipment leftover from Cecil's long, extraordinary life, the last half century spent in Alaska. Inside one of his tents, he's got a chrome-fendered Honda three-wheeled motorcycle to replace the Harley-Davidson he can no longer drive. The flat-bottomed boats that he navigated around the upper Inlet over the past two decades -- the Top Cat, Tom Cat and Trader 1 -- rest on the mud near the pier he leases from the railroad.
Since he got work as a deckhand in his teens on California coastal tankers before World War II, Cecil did just about everything a man could -- U.S. Navy boat driver in the Philippines, trapper and guide in the Susitna Valley, commercial fisherman, trucker during the construction of the trans-Alaska pipeline. Along the way, there were four marriages, three daughters, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Lately, he's slowed down. Earlier this summer, dizzy spells led him to the doctor's office, and tests showed carotid arteries in his neck were almost completely blocked, he said. About two weeks ago, his daughters, including Stowers, took him to Alaska Regional Hospital for surgery.
Cecil said he wasn't worried about dying.
"I figured if anything went wrong, I'd be in a better place," he said.
Still, his thoughts were of his wife of 34 years, Irene, who died three years ago: "Irene's home on the shelf right now," he said. "We were approved to go in the military graveyard, but I didn't want to go in the ground -- I couldn't see nothing there. So I bought what I call a condo (in the Columbarium Wall of the Anchorage Memorial Park Cemetery) over on Ninth Avenue. I told them I wanted one that I could see out of."
He hasn't taken up residence just yet. Doctors were able to open one artery with a stent, and Cecil bounced back faster than expected. Meaning, in a few hours.
"The ... nurse came in, and they brought me some soup, and I mean broth. I said, ... if you don't get me something to eat, I'm going to call Wendy's or McDonald's and have them deliver."
That night, Cecil kicked out another nurse, who kept waking him to give shots and take vital signs.
"The next day, the doctor says, 'Are you ready to go?' and I says, 'Yeah,' and he says, 'Goodbye.'"
So the old mariner -- grounded from trucking, retired from fish buying, off his Harley probably for good -- isn't finished yet. He'd like to work out a better lease with the railroad. He's been thinking some about starting a water taxi to show off Anchorage's skyline to the tourists.
Next year, he also might cut the old wheelhouse off the Trader 1 and transform it into a Bait Shack with a nautical theme, equipped with marine radar and bridge instruments.
It's late August, and raining for the rest of us, but Cecil is already thinking spring: Next year, and for who knows how many more.
"I was going to go down and pay for the cremation in advance, you know, but I don't know if I'm going to do that now," he said. "It might be two or three years more. Who knows?"
Daily News reporter Doug O'Harra can be reached at do'harra@adn.com.
