This is Tongass Voices, a series from KTOO sharing weekly perspectives from the homelands of the Áak’w Kwáan and beyond.
James Houck has shuttled tourists around town on his bike for seven years as the owner of Juneau Pedicab. It’s his retirement job, he says, and he loves running a tourism company that doesn’t emit carbon or use fossil fuels.
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This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
James Houck: My name’s James P. Houck. I’m a retired Coast Guardsman who lives in his favorite place on Earth. I run a human-powered tourism business. We call them pedicabs, and we take passengers from the docks and the hotels around town, and we bring them into Juneau and show them the best of the best. That’s pretty easy to do in such a wonderful place.
The great thing about being retired and having a pension is, while you’re busier than you’ve ever been in your life, you get to choose how you spend all those hours.
I think it’s important for them to know that we are doing our level best to accommodate the number of people who want to come and visit, and that if we are saying that we’re at capacity, we are at capacity. This is a town that does not boast. It’s a town that does not hyperbolize. And we can feel it.
And I don’t really think people have a feel for what their impact is when they pull in here, and I think the city of Juneau is doing a good job of trying to mitigate some of that. You know, we’re looking at electrifying these two docks so that the ships don’t run their generators all day long while they’re sitting here.
Well, it’s a giant game of dodgem, and we smile and we laugh and we sing and we never raise our voices at people. And so far, knock on wood, we have not impacted anyone. We haven’t run over anyone’s toes. We haven’t run into anything. And in eight years, that’s a phenomenal record.
But in large crowds, how we get through is we ring our little bell and we sing songs like “Joy to the world, all the boys and girls.” When the people hear that kind of discord, they’re like, ‘What the heck? How could a person sing that badly and be so loud?’ And they get out of the way in a hurry.
And then when I find a spot in the crowd where it looks like I can get away with it, I pull over and I show off our rain chimes. So the rain is captured in the bowl and funneled into the tube, and about every quarter inch of real rain fills the tube all the way to the top. It gets top heavy, leans down to dump its water and then rings a gong on the rebound. This one is C sharp, the longest ones are F sharp, and the shortest ones are A sharp, forming the chord F sharp major.
Now back in 2017, the first day I operated, it probably rained an inch and a half, and I was cruising down this dock, and one of them went off. And I’d never seen them before. No one had told me about them. I nearly jumped off my pedicab into the weeds.
I looked in the mirror and said, ‘James, you worked from the time you were 12 until you were 18, roofing houses, and then you never worked again until you were 44, because the Coast Guard treated you so well. Why would you pick a job where you had to work?’ And the next day, I put in an application with Kris McClure to run one of his pedicabs, and he called me up and he said, ‘Is this a joke?’ I said, ‘What’s funny about it?’ He says, ‘I have never heard of anyone with a master’s degree from Princeton wanting to run a pedicab.’ I said, ‘Well, I want to run a pedicab, and I will be out there every day if you give me a job.’ That’s when he told me he married a woman that didn’t like Juneau and he needed to get out. Three weeks later, I wrote him a check, and I had to figure it out from there.
I thought that I was going to be running short run taxi services, and my customers would say, ‘Hey, what’s this?’ I’d say, ‘Well, I can tell you about that, but I’d have to charge you for the time.’ They’d say, ‘Okay, do it. Tell me about it.’ So that’s how I got in the business of turning this into a tour company.
So now, instead of running from the Franklin dock as fast as I can to get to the Red Dog Saloon, I ride two or 300 feet and I stop and I tell a story. I ride another two or 300 feet and I stop and I tell a story. I still burn over 4000 calories a day, and can eat whatever the heck I want, but I figured out a way to do it without a battery, without a motor, and be able to do it — I hope — until I’m in my 60s and 70s. So we’ll see.