Specifically, I had seen him during the third bite of my burger, which was about twenty minutes earlier and memorable. I had looked up and there he was at a deuce by the window, looking right at me. Eye contact. An athletic blond man in his late twenties with a trimmed beard. He was drinking from a mug with a string coming out of it. It took me a moment to realize it was a hot beverage called tea. By that point he had looked away. Besides the tea, the other thing was the beard.

In Port Morris, Alaska, beards are not memorable. They are commonplace, but a well-trimmed beard less so. Most beards I’d seen in the last four months working on a fishing boat had been either untrimmed or badly trimmed, but this guy’s beard was well-trimmed. Like he had access to a good mirror and good light. Maybe a mirror with lights on it, like in a hotel with a star rating. Good mirror and good light, two things definitely missing in the sleeping quarters of a fishing boat, which tend to be dimly lit mirrorless cavities behind the engine room.

I stopped and pretended to look at something in the window display. The guy swerved, slowed up, and started thumbing through a postcard rack outside of the tourist gift store. His left hand was bandaged, so he was thumbing through the cards with his right hand. I scanned in the reflection for other watchers. Another man was posted by the door to the diner. I hadn’t seen him before. He was leaning against the wall, below the stairs. Baseball hat and light blue button-down Oxford. I started walking again, nice and slow this time.

The next intersection was catty corner to a bank with an angled window. I glanced at the reflection before crossing the street. The guy with the well-trimmed beard was moving, now around forty feet behind me. I upped the pace from casual to brisk. Walked a couple of minutes without looking behind me. If there was a team tailing me, that might string them out and break their formation.

I cut left over a footbridge, crossing the creek to go up Lake Road. There was overflow from a bar. Fishermen taking a smoke break from drinking their salmon money. All beards were either badly trimmed, or untrimmed. I asked one for a cigarette, using the interaction to turn and glance down the road. The well-trimmed beard guy was on the bridge, both hands on the worn railing, looking down at the fish running up the creek from the Pacific toward the sweet water spawning grounds.