Out of range:
Get to know the travelling, punk-rock park ranger
If jumping aboard a commercial fishing vessel in freezing Alaskan waters, doing your business in a bucket and sleeping only an hour a day in the pursuit of salmon isn’t punk-rock – well, we don’t know what is. To Ayisha Jaffer, a radio host, seasonal park ranger and the driving force behind the band Skux, punk-rock is about “being loud about what you care about”.
Ayisha cares a lot about the natural environment and the human connection with it, which is why she recently wound up on a boat with a zany captain, fishing non-stop for days at a time. Admittedly, she lasted only a month on board, but the gruelling experience taught her a lot about the importance of salmon to the Alaskan economy, and how scientists work to sustain the fishy populations.
Before Ayisha was riding the high seas, the Milwaukee native was an artist manager for bands like Cut Copy and Architecture in Helsinki. In 2013, she headed to New Zealand on a working visa, eager to take a break from music and get back to nature. “I’m pretty obsessed with marine life,” she explains. “And as cheesy as it sounds, I watched the movie The Life Aquatic and was like, ‘This is my second calling.’” She attributes her sense of adventure to her dad, a Ugandan immigrant who told wild stories about running from crocodiles, jumping into the Nile and walking over quicksand. In New Zealand, Ayisha free-dived with sharks and worked as a hiking guide.
It was also there that she started her band Skux. (The name is a uniquely Kiwi slang word Ayisha heard crowds yelling out at music shows, which loosely means ‘fresh’ or ‘cool’.) “Growing up, the only time I ever got to join a band was when an all-male line-up wanted to try out a female voice to see what it sounded like,” Ayisha says. “I always wanted to go back to punk music and work on my own stuff.” She linked up with Aussie fellow Dan Walker from The Death Set, and together, they wrote the first Skux EP, Kudis (pronounced ‘cooties’) – a bunch of frenetic guitar-laden tracks about defending yourself from a) literal germs, and b) metaphorical cooties – the anxieties and obstacles that “stop anyone from being themselves”.
The latest batch of unreleased Skux songs is heavily influenced by conservation activities, climate change and animal-related topics – which is not entirely unexpected, considering Ayisha’s dedication to the great outdoors. “I still want my music to be fun and not take itself too seriously,” she says. “But I also want people to be aware of the environment in their daily life.”
Ayisha left New Zealand earlier this year to take up the aforementioned salmon-fishing gig, and to spend time as a park ranger out on Kodiak Island, Alaska – a place filled with “pristine mountains and beaches”. Kodiak Island also happens to be home to the largest bear in the world, the Kodiak brown bear. While there, Ayisha spent her days teaching locals about bear safety and helping to maintain nature trails. At one point, she came face-to-face with a furry giant at an observation deck. “A bear would normally charge in that situation,” she says, “but I basically pretended not to see it and calmly walked back. Thankfully, it was OK, but it could have ended pretty badly.”
Since the park-ranging season’s ended, Ayisha’s returned to Milwaukee to work at a radio station and make music in her downtime. “I bounce back and forth between music and nature,” she says. “It’s a sanity check.” With a master’s degree in wildlife biology in the works, we suspect it won’t be too much longer until she’s off-grid again.