These are the Chronicles of Famous Surf Writer Ben Marcus and his trip into the Wilds of the Alaskan Frontier.
Latest Update: September 21, 2000

18:19 PARKED IN A 20-MINUTE PARKING ZONE IN FRONT OF THE GOLDEN NORTH HOTEL, SKAGWAY, ALASKA

Today was a money day. A day to think about and worry about dough, dinero, lettuce, moolah. So now I'm going to bore you with the details.

I woke up cold with about $30 Canadian in my wallet, another $20 in Canadian change lying around and maybe $6 American. I didn't have any money stashed in my keytainers. I have two credit cards that are maxed out at $5,000 each, and both are a little over. I have a $600 Pac Bell Wireless bill that is due soon, most of those calls made while driving around in Sequim, trying to do bidness.

Yesterday my brother Dan made a $500 deposit into my Wells Fargo Account, because that is something that is hard to do from the road: Get the checks and deposit them. All of my checks are going to him, and Jane-his-wife is depositing them for me.

I thought that money would be available today, but when I went online at the Midnight Sun CafÈ in White Horse, I found that Branch Deposits like that take more than a day to clear. I thought, "Uh oh. Time to stress." And I was right.

I hadn't yet paid for spending the night at the Trail of '98 RV park. After going to Sears with my Sears credit card card and finding they had neither thick down comforters nor electric space heaters, I stopped at a Shell Station which had a sign saying you could buy gas using a Sears card.

I put in only $40, because that would be enough to get me back to Skagway, and it's a good thing I did, because the Sears card didn't work. Turns out I had just exactly $40 in Canadian coin, bills and American dollars, and even then I was scraping. They were nice about it, but I was a little embarrassed.

As I was scraping the money together I got into a conversation about moose with one of the gas stations guys. One of the guys at the station said that a record moose had been shot somewhere in northern Alaska this summer, and that it had an antler spread of 196 inches. Holy shit. Think about the moose that was carrying 15 feet of antlers around.

IN another e-mail I will digress about all the comedy that has been inspired by people and animals in the frozen north: Bullwinkle, Yogi Bear, Dudley Doright, Fargo, etc. etc. But this is a serious e-mail, and one that will probably get me in trouble.

I went back to the RV place and they were going to let me slide-they were going to do me a good deed-but I wrote them a California check for $10, and got out of there.

On the road between White Horse and Skagway I did my good deed when I picked up two backpacking hitch-hikers who were slogging along in the cold. They were a rosy-cheeked German gal and a rosy-cheeked Austrian guy, and didn't fit together in the passenger's seat very well. I was looking forward to having company because it would take my mind off the money stuff, but I let them out at the turn to Skagway, because they were headed for Watson's Lake.

Driving back to Skagway I was listening to Jimi Hendrix' BBC recordings and Best of Sting, enjoying the cold, clear scenery and stressing about money.

I had to pay for the $120 ferry ticket to Juneau, and I wasn't sure how I was going to do it. I was tapped, with only a few dollars in Canadian and American coin available to me, and also that small amount in checking, and it wasn't yet available.

Until the end of September I had been getting regular bi-weekly deposits from swell.com put directly into my checking account, but that ended when they changed the work agreement. Up until the second day of this trip I was a fully salaried employee of swell.com. In fact, I had been the first employee to sign on. The money they were paying me was a fortune to a cyber nomad, and I was happy with the deal, but then they yanked the carpet away on the second day of this trip.

My contract describes me and my duties as a "contributing editor/writer/visionary of the company. Subject to the direction and control of the Chief Executive Officer of the Company and the Chief Editor of the Company, once such position has been filled. Employee shall perform such journalistic services as the Company may require and as are normally associated with such a position."

Well, that's what I was doing. They asked me to write something and I wrote something. And if I came up with a good idea, like how to do the Exposurometer better, I gave that to them. The contract didn't say anything about coming into the office every day, and I argued from the beginning that I could do my job from anywhere. All I needed was a computer and a phone. Before leaving Tiburon I had done all my work from home, and only went into the office a couple of times. Those two or three times were enough. There was no way I was going to sit in some dopey office again, on Geary Street or anywhere and write about surfing. I could do it from anywhere and e-mail it in. That's what this 21st Century tech and communications revolution is all about. I was perfectly willing to help make swell.com a good website, but I wasn't going to waste any time doing it.

Hawk and I argued about that, but I made it clear from the start that I had no intention of ever going into the office. I felt I could earn my salary by writing a good 100,000 words a year for swell, which I was well on my way to doing when they pulled the plug. I did a surf map of the coast from San Francisco to Carmel which must have been at least 30,000 words, and I also did an article called A Farewell to Arms, which was probably 20,000 words. I had done a few other things: Reviews, and I was writing the San Francisco to Carmel column for Local Knowledge. And I was going to do a road trip to Kamchatka, with reporting along the way. So I was doing my job and halfway home, or so I thought.

The salary I was earning from swell.com was more than enough for a cyber nomad, but apparently they got so much heat from their investors, that they had to make cuts, and I got cut down to a monthly retainer, with more to be earned at a per-word rate. That word rate is not retro-active, unfortunately, or they'd be owing me some dough, I think.

So I got cut on the second day of this trip, and I of course was counting on that salary. The timing was either chickenshit and mean-spirited or just bad timing, but what could I do? The more I think about it, the more pissed I get. I think I held up my end of the contract, but they basically rat-fucked me. Any lawyers out there?

I had written a couple of other freelance articles for Surfer's Journal and another non-surfing website, when the contract said I was barred from working for "any business or commercial enterprise which operates a web site primarily consisting of content related to surfing or which acts as a portal to other web sites primarily consisting of content related to surfing." I was supposed to devote 100 per cent of my time to swell. But all of the work I did for swell took about a week, and I figured I'd really get busy if and when the thing ever went online. What was I supposed to do the rest of the time, twiddle my thumbs?

Anyway, I got this e-mail from Hawk on August 14, jsut after fishing with Greg Noll:

Ben,

Call me from your cell when you get a chance. We gotta talk.

Steve

I called and was told I'd been demoted from a full employee to a consultant on a monthly retainer. No medical benefits or anything like that.

I made one phone call in protest to Jeff Berg, but I didn't fight it very hard.

I went from Easy Street to Skid Row, and now I'm starting to feel the pinch. I feel a little shafted. I mean, we did have a contract, and the work I did was as good or better than anyone else on the staff.

I've been continuing to do good work from the road. I write a weekly Local Knowledge column for the Surfline, which is funny and good. And I'm willing to do anything else they ask. I managed to snag an interview with Ross Clarke-Jones from my mom's house in Washington. Tracked him down in the Australian snowfields and got the scoop on an upcoming big-wave contest in Tasmania. That proved that I could do anything from the road that I could from an office. But they don't see it that way.

This would all bug me if I thought swell.com was going to work and those guys were going to get rich. But the truth is, I'm pretty sure it's going to turn out to be a colossal waste of time and an even bigger waste of money.

HardCloud and BlueTorch are already down the tubes, but they belong down the tubes because their content was lame. Swell.com has already put up some good content and there is going to be an awful lot more. But the truth is, the surfing world is a very small world, and I just don't think there are many people out there that care about online information, outside of what the surf is doing. And I'm pretty sure surfers aren't going to be spending millions of dollars online. I could be wrong, but most of the surfers I know are too dumb or poor to own or operate computers.

I mean, go surfing and look at everyone around you. You think you're going to make millions from those chumps? No way.

I could be wrong, but I never wanted to get rich from surfing. I just like to write.

So now I'm on a montly retainer from swell, but it still should be enough to get along. I also make $300 a month from a Japanese magazine, and there is the occasional freelance assignment, which I now have to try harder to get.

So, now I'm scratching in Skagway, and regretting all the money I've wasted in phone calls and Internet services and Indian Casino gambling in the last month. I've been gone a month and a week, and I've shot most of my grubstake. I'm like the guy heading for the Yukon gold-fields who blows all his money in Skagway, because this trip has just begun.

Oh well. It's only money.

To finish my money details from today. I got to Skagway around noon and went to the Internet place and was able to transfer $60 from Joanne's account to mine, which I will pay back. Honest, Joanne.

Then I called brother Dan to see if he could pay for my ferry ticket with his credit card. I called collect, which pissed Jane-his-wife off, but right after that I went to a local power company here and bought a $10 phone card. Those phone cards are a good deal. If I had known about them in Washington, I would have saved hundreds of dollars.

Dan was able to pay for the ferry with his credit card, and God Bless Him. Maybe I'll do something nice for him one of these days.

I hung around at the ferry building for a few hours this afternoon and had some good conversations. Met a crusty oldtimer named John Dobson who knew Michael Graber and Yvon Chouinard from back in the day. This guy had a Ford Courier with California plates and a green canoe on the roof. I asked him about this and that and asked if anyone had ever taken the Yukon from go to woe. He stuck out his hand and I shook it and he told me he had paddled his Penobscot canoe all the way down the Yukon to the ocean back in the 70s. Took him three months. Only three major rapids along the way.

In line at the ferry building, I met a guy who had just been moose hunting somewhere along the Yukon, and had two of them festering in his truck.

There were two girls from Australia waiting to get a stand-by pass, an older man who had been on subs during World War II, and a bunch of other people. It felt a little Canterbury Tales-ish.

So now I'm typing this as the sun goes down, in the driver's seat of the van parked in the main street of Skagway, with tourists looking at me funny.

Sorry to dump all my money worries on you, but I thought I'd give you the downsides of being a cyber nomad, as well as the upside.

I'm gonna go spend some of my last $12 in the cyber cafÈ at the Golden North Hotel. Maybe there will be a good e-mail there. Maybe I won the Big Australian Screenplay Competition. Maybe Chronicle Books has bit on my Cinema San Francisco proposal. Maybe that English magazine wants me to write my Adventures of a Cyber Nomad Piece. Maybe boats.com wants to run my Fishing With Greg Noll story. Maybe swell.com is feeling guilty and want to give me back my salary. Maybe Jeff Berg of ICM liked Water on the Brain and wants to option it.

There are a few irons hanging over the fire, and maybe one of them will sizzle. I feel kind of like the Jack Dawson character in Titanic, who didn't really know where his next meal was coming from, but liked it that way. I'm getting a little old for that, I know, but I still enjoy the hand to mouth thing.

My mom says I'm always shooting myself in the foot, but maybe I do it on purpose. I kind of like playing it fast and loose like this. To paraphrase a famous quote: "I've been rich and I've been poor, and let me tell you baby, sometimes poor is a lot more dramatic."