By Lindsay Johnson
Andrew Cardella was working on an organic citrus farm in Sicily when he decided to come to Alaska. Cardella was spending the winter after college volunteering, learning Italian and making friends when he met another volunteer who guided hiking tours in Skagway.
Seasonal work surrounded by big mountains, rivers and ocean sounded like an ideal next adventure.
Cardella sent applications to every tour operator in Skagway, but none were hiring. Chilkat Guides, however, needed a river guide in Haines.
“I looked it up on the Internet and it looked perfect,” Cardella said in an interview this week. He came for the summer of 2010 and stayed longer each summer. Last winter, he worked as an aide at the Haines School and helped coach wrestling. In May, he bought a home on Piedad Road.
Besides co-coaching the wrestling team, Cardella now works as an aide for physical therapist Marnie Hartman, leads a circuit training class, and hosts and performs at the weekly open mic night at the Pioneer Bar.
Cardella, 28, was born and raised on Long Island, N.Y. to second-generation Italian and Irish immigrants.
His grandfather was a fiddler in Ireland who influenced Cardella’s decision to pick up the violin and play traditional tunes with his mom. After drum lessons, he moved to the school percussion section.
Cardella became increasingly involved with music in various forms: symphonic band, marching band, pit orchestra, jazz bands, choir and his own extracurricular music projects. “I just sucked up as much as I could,” he said.
Cardella taught himself piano to accompany the choir at school and dove into college-level music theory.
Though music had a place in his life, wrestling was Cardella’s primary focus during adolescence and young adulthood.
Soccer, lacrosse and other activities were cast aside once he started wrestling in eighth grade. “The other sports didn’t do anything for me after that,” Cardella said.
His passion earned him a place on a Division 1 team at Rutgers University. He practiced three times a day, competed and studied for a year and a half before a quarter-life crisis set in. “I realized that I didn’t want my life to be entirely about wrestling.”
He headed west to Colorado, drawn by memories of family road trips to the Catskills and Adirondacks and reports of bigger mountains within biking distance of the Boulder campus.
He took to hiking and trail running, joined a community service group, and made friends with other musicians. His keyboard skills took him on a wild ride at the end of his sophomore year, touring the mid-Atlantic states with an alternative metal band. Though they barely broke even, realizing his dream of going on tour tempted Cardella to pursue a traveling musician’s life.
“That was it for me. I came home and was like, ‘Dad, I don’t want to go back to college.’ I was having so much fun.”
He didn’t enjoy school but stuck it out, earning a degree in psychology with a certificate in elementary education. During one summer he also hiked the Appalachian Trail solo, an experience he called “a big part of my life.”
“It’s a good experience to be in your own head for four months, walking 20 miles a day and seeing the world at two miles an hour, meeting wacky people… and seeing different outlooks. People who are drawn to do that are those who are looking for something bigger,” he said.
In the last two years of college, Cardella found balance with wrestling as assistant then head coach of a club team.
“I was very much a student of wrestling. I thought a lot about it and I picked my coaches’ brains,” Cardella said. “I learned from a lot of different perspectives,” he said, which was helpful in developing his own coaching style.
Haines wrestling coach Dennis Durr said the local teams are fortunate to have Cardella’s technical skills and positive attitude.
“He’s like an encyclopedia for wrestling. You can ask him anything and he knows how to do it 10 different ways. He knows how to do it well and he knows how to teach it,” Durr said. “The kids respond to him well.”
Cardella’s enthusiasm for learning and enjoyment of people have taken him far.
In Italy he discovered the Sicilian dialect he learned from his grandparents was not the same as most Italian, but he sorted it out, then went to Argentina to learn Spanish. Words flow quickly there, he found, but he was able to learn the language through subsequent trips to Nicaragua, Spain, Mexico and Colombia. Friends came easily through volunteer work or walking around with a guitar.
Between travel seasons Cardella learned rafting from river guides at Chilkat Guides, leading to a Grand Canyon expedition last year. The trip included other musicians with lots of time for playing, inspiring him to make music a bigger part of his life.
He formed the local band The God Particle after returning to Haines last spring. “I knew who I wanted to be in the band and they all said yes. It was like a dream come true,” he said.
Cardella, Tully Devine, Tim Hockin and Eric Holle now regularly perform songs with sounds from Africa, Western and Eastern Europe, Central and South America and their own unique backgrounds.
When Cardella approached bassist Devine last year, he said they weren’t going to play the usual cover tunes. “He wanted to do a wide range of stuff. I dig it,” Devine said. That variety makes the music interesting for the band and the audience.
“He has good, creative ideas,” said banjo and fiddle player Holle. “I’ve been introduced to a lot of stuff I probably would never have heard otherwise.”
Cardella’s musical versatility helps in his role as host of the weekly open mic downtown, where he improvises with others to keep the show going.
That collaborative, energetic spirit recently resulted in a new cardio and strength training circuit class at Body IQ. Learning about the body in an EMT course last spring led to his job with Hartman, who supported the new class idea when it arose in mid-January.
Cardella said opportunities like that make Haines a place he wants to live. “Anything you want to do is very possible to do. It’s a good life here. It’s easy to grow (and) to find a spot in the community.”