Hard to Break by Michael Ledwidge EPUB & PDF – eBook Details
- Author: Michael Ledwidge
- Language: English
- Genre:
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 1 MB
- Price: Free
The Delta flight out of Salt Lake City had a two-hour layover in Seattle so
they didn’t get up to Juneau until late in the afternoon. Coming into the
terminal from the bag retrieval, Gannon saw that it looked a lot like the
airports in the lower forty-eight except it wasn’t that crowded and the gift
shop had a giant stuffed moose in its plate glass window.
When they were halfway down the concourse to the exit, the rumbling
luggage cart suddenly got much heavier as Gannon’s son, Declan, stopped
pushing it. He stood pointing at the green glow of a Starbucks sign.
“What do you think, Dad? Coffee time?” he said.
“Again?” Gannon said skeptically as he slipped out his phone to check
the itinerary. “How much coffee can a person possibly drink?”
The super-extra-deluxe spring brown bear Alaskan hunting trip they were
about to embark upon had originally been booked for Gannon’s friend, John
Barber. But when John couldn’t go at the last minute, in order to avoid the
huge hit on the cancelation fee, Gannon had decided to step in and scoop it
up for his son’s birthday instead.
Gannon read off the screen. They were to head to a seaport on the other
side of Juneau, where a little Piper Cherokee would take them on the final
hop to a base camp in the interior of Glacier Bay National Park.
But that was at three, he read. They still had about an hour.
“Yes, okay,” Gannon said. “I will allow it. If you hurry. Get me a small
one. Black.”
“Cookie, too, Daddy? Please?” his six-three, two-hundred-twenty-pound
son said, maneuvering around a sandwich board sign that said Alaska:
North To The Future.
“Split one?” Gannon said.
“Split one? Come on, Dad. We’re headed straight into Call of the Wild
country. We need to carbo-load.”
“Speak for yourself,” he called out at his son’s wide departing back.
To the left of where Gannon was standing was a huge window, and he
squealed the luggage cart over and stood looking out. Beyond the airport
tarmac, a bright silver curtain of mist was billowing gently along hills filled
with huge pine trees. As he watched, an open airport vehicle went by along
the shoulder of the landing strip, its driver wearing a snow hat that said,
Yeah, But It’s A Dry Cold.
Gannon smiled out at the landscape. Even though he’d been born and
raised in New York City, he actually possessed a special affinity for Alaska
ever since he was a child. In his fourth-grade class at St. Margaret’s, each
kid had to do a special project on one of the fifty states and when he
reached in and drew out Alaska from the Yankee hat Sister Ann was
holding, he had a special feeling about it being his state.
Silly as it sounded, throughout the entirety of his life, his sense of fateful
connection to its Big Dipper star state flag, (which he had to draw), its state
flower, (the forget-me-not), and its main exports, (zinc and oil and fish),
had never left him.
“And now I’m finally here,” he said out loud to it.
Gannon smiled even wider as the mist parted and a muscular mountain
range suddenly became visible in the distance, majestic fissured peaks still
thick with snow.
For More Read Download This Book
EPUB