If You Lived Here, I'd Know Your Name

by Heather Lende

  My grandfather, my mother’s father, had an Alaskan connection. When he was born, his mother died in childbirth. Family lore goes that his father, Charlie Smith, was so upset that he left the baby on his sister’s doorstep. But I wonder if that is really true. He must have at least knocked on the door and handed the baby over. Then again, maybe not. That would explain what happened later. Charlie Smith, my great-grandfather, headed west for the Klondike Gold Rush. He was in Alaska from 1898 or ’99 until 1952, when he came home sick and old. He lived in my grandfather’s house for about a year, until he died in the very same old iron bed that I am cleaning up and painting for Eliza to use.

  My mother, who was a teenager then, says she knew him only as “Uncle Charlie” and thought he was a distant relative. She knew he’d been in Alaska because he talked about it. She remembers that he took a lot of photographs, and shared them with her. Now she wishes she’d kept a few. When Charlie died, my grandfather took his father’s belongings and burned them in the backyard. His trunk, clothes, and any record of his Alaskan life went up in smoke. I have tried to find where Charlie may have lived, but it’s difficult. First, there’s the name. A lot of gold seekers changed theirs to the name he already had—Smith. Charlie was just about as popular, so finding my Charles Smith was not easy. He did have a middle name, Lawrence, which is why I think he was in Skagway—records there show a receipt for taxes made out to a Charles Lawrence Smith. He may have been in Nome, too, because a Charles L. Smith was fined for something there. Other than those two iffy connections, I have found nothing in all the Klondike and Alaska archives. Nothing. A whole lifetime, most of it in twentieth-century Alaska, just plain gone. That’s not as unusual as you may think. In a place always looking toward the future, the past often gets lost.

  THERE ARE PEOPLE who come to Alaska to be alone. People who don’t make relatives of their friends and who don’t stay connected to their past—either immediate or distant. My great grandfather didn’t die alone in Alaska; he made it home, and he had a home to make it to. Some people aren’t so lucky.

  A while back, I wrote an obituary for a man who had been a familiar enough sight in Haines, yet he befriended so few people that he had been dead about four days, in an apartment near the post office, before a neighbor called and asked the police chief to check on him. Everyone in town saw him often because he walked miles most days, in all kinds of weather. He had a formal nod and was well dressed. A man in pressed slacks and clean walking shoes attracts a certain amount of attention in a place where most men, except schoolteachers, wear jeans or brown canvas workpants. A neighbor told me he was what she thought southern gentlemen must be like. My dog, Carl, and I greeted him on our morning beach walks. But we didn’t really know him.

  One couple did know him well enough to have him over on occasion for supper, but they couldn’t shed any light on his past. “We knew him,” said the wife, “but we didn’t, you know?” She said that he sent them postcards when he left town, which he did often, in the dozen or so years he was in and out of Haines. Someone else said he was “a mystery.” The last person we think he spoke with called him “a traveling man.” It was impossible for me to find anyone who knew him well.

  At the lumberyard, a handful of guys discussed the unnoticed passing. They tried to match the unfamiliar name with a face. After I described him—“You know, he’s the guy who walks all the time; he had that van with the top sawed off”—a carpenter nodded his head, remembering. “He’s the fella,” he said, “who made the popemobile.” Then they all knew who he was. About ten years ago, before the tour-ship dock was built and bus tours became the norm, he had cut the top off his van and fitted it with a homemade Plexiglas box so tourists could see the mountains and eagles without getting out or craning their necks. But the van was old, and the top leaked. He couldn’t make a go of his tour business and left town.

  One woman thought he might have gone to Texas, where she’d heard he had family. Someone else said Fairbanks. About a year later, he returned with a new idea. He hoped to manufacture small custom RVs here. All he needed was financing. “You could be talking about the space shuttle going to Mars,” said one of the coffee drinkers, who the man had joined occasionally at the Bamboo Room for breakfast, “and he’d bring it around to his RV project.”

  At the post office, the staff felt bad when they heard the news. They thought they should have noticed sooner that he hadn’t come in. When I told them he had been dead for about four days, one clerk did the math and tears welled up in her eyes. She said he had come in what must have been the day before he died, murmured something about seeing the light, and said good-bye. She said he had started crying, right at the counter, but she couldn’t talk to him because there was a line out the door.

  But maybe the people he knew in Alaska gave him what he wanted. Maybe he just wanted to be alone. Researching the man’s life was a little like looking for clues about my great-grandfather. And if we can know so little about our contemporaries, it’s no wonder I have had trouble tracking down stories from a hundred years ago.

  My job was to write about a man’s life, not investigate his death. Still, I couldn’t help wondering how this current mystery would unfold, so I went to see the police chief. In the chief’s office there’s a photo of him as a young man, squinting into the sun with dog tags hanging on his bare chest. His hair was blond then, and he looked more like James Dean than Andy of Mayberry, as he does now. There is a beautiful woman on each arm. I had to ask. He told me it was taken in Vietnam during the war. He fought with the 173rd Airborne Brigade there. Right in the middle of that terrible time, a helicopter showed up and landed in their camp. Two Playboy bunnies, some publicity people, and a congressman boosting troop morale hopped out and quickly grabbed a few soldiers, took their pictures, and flew away as suddenly as they’d appeared. “It was surreal,” the chief said now. I think he keeps the picture just to prove it happened. Had there been a photograph of Charlie Smith with Klondike Kate and one of her “girls” somewhere in that burn pile in my mother’s childhood backyard—next to the cherry tree, the gladiolus, and my grandmother’s clothesline?

  I told the chief about what I had learned at the post office and asked if the dead man had been unhappy. The police chief, who’d spoken with him enough to know that “September eleventh was hard on him,” said he had been “a little down lately” and that he’d had heart trouble. “He was sixty-one and died of a heart attack or maybe a stroke,” the chief said. But no one knew for sure. He gave me the phone number of his family, which did, in fact, live in Texas. I spoke to a polite southern lady. She told me that her brother had loved Alaska so much that he’d walked from Fort Worth all the way to Haines. That is a really long walk. He’d taken a dog, named Brown, but had apparently left him with a family in Utah because traveling with the animal was hard. She also told me that a neighbor from Haines had called her after her brother died and wanted her to know that in the last conversation he’d had with him, her brother had said he was going to a place even prettier than Alaska. She said he must have had a premonition that his end was near. She felt better knowing that he had found God first.

  I went back to the police chief and told him everything I had discovered. I asked if there was going to be an autopsy. That’s when the chief sighed, took off his glasses, and leaned back in his chair. “What difference would it make?” he said. “He’s dead, and that’s enough for his family to bear. Why waste the state’s money investigating something that isn’t a crime and that we don’t need to know?” It was not exactly a To Kill a Mockingbird moment; however, the chief had a point. My thoughts turned again to my great grandfather. Maybe even if I had his papers, I wouldn’t really know him. It could be that he’d left so few clues because he didn’t want anyone to know. Maybe like this man, my great-grandfather just wanted to be left alone. There is also the possibility that he didn’t do much that needed to be Duly Noted. What if he’d spent fifty years in some cabin by himself until he’d decided
to head back home? The subject of this obituary may not be much different. My imagination had me dreaming up drama where perhaps none existed. I asked the chief if the paper should print that the cause of death was a heart attack. He thought a minute about the wanderer with big ideas, and said “unknown” was more accurate. “Just say unknown.”

  I wrote that he died of an apparent heart attack, which is what it says on the death certificate. But that was just the first line of the obituary. The last word went to a snowplow driver who sometimes had an early morning cup of coffee with him at Mountain Market. He didn’t know anything about him at all, except what mattered: “I know he was a nice guy and I enjoyed his company.”

  MY MOTHER SAID from what she knew of him, my great-grandfather was a nice man, too. The iron bed that Charles Lawrence Smith slept in (and, I think, died in) at my grandparents’ house is now tucked under the eaves in Eliza’s room, looking out over the tidal flats and mountains of southeast Alaska, about as far from the oiled roads of western Pennsylvania as you can get and still be in this country.

  When we first moved into our house, I wanted everything to be clean and new. I wanted it to look like the magazine clippings I’d saved. I had an old wingchair reupholstered and almost bought matching chairs for the dining room table, but decided that the funky assortment from our families’ houses looked right at home around the table made by a Haines cabinetmaker. Underneath it is a worn Oriental rug from my mother-in-law’s house.

  My grandfather’s old rolltop desk is in the kitchen, quickly filling with school papers, ferry schedules, and the manuals to new appliances. He’d climb out of his grave and organize the pigeonholes if only he knew what a mess it is. My other grandfather’s cane leans against the wall in the hall by the piano. Across the room, a crystal pitcher with a heart etched in it catches sunlight on the windowsill. It came from Norway to North Dakota with the first Lendes to arrive in America. Chip’s parents gave it to us as a wedding present. I imagine a farmer’s wife arranging prairie flowers in it, and setting it on a handmade table in a sod hut. I can even see her stepping back to take in the room and smiling. Her new house, in a faraway place, is now a home. That’s just what all these old things have done for mine.

  DULY NOTED

  A Japanese legend says that if you fold a thousand paper cranes, a wish will be granted. Well, we are all wishing high school freshman Rigel Falvey so much wellness as she battles Hodgkin’s disease that our fingers hurt from folding cranes. Little children are learning how to make paper cranes in classrooms. High schoolers create hip cranes from teen magazines during lunchtime. Tanned summer guides fashion cranes from pretty patterned paper over espresso at Mountain Market. Friends gather at Friday night potlucks to make cranes. Library patrons fold them while they check their e-mail. If you still haven’t made any cranes yet and would like to learn how, see Jeanne Kitayama for instructions. The cranes will be sent to Rigel in Children’s Hospital in Seattle next week.

  _____________

  Paul Wheeler’s Haines Brewing Company is celebrating five years in business and thirty thousand gallons of finely crafted brews. Paul has plenty of the two favorite seasonal beers on tap for summer solstice parties. Birch Boy Summer Ale is made with the birch syrup from the Humphreys’ trees at 18 Mile. The Spruce Tip Ale is brewed using buds of local spruce trees. “Captain Cook came up with that idea,” Paul said. “The spruce tips helped prevent his sailors from getting scurvy.”

  _____________

  Colleen Harrier and Zach Taylor returned last week from an aborted ski tour to Mount Fairweather. They were forced to turn around near the halfway point after encountering difficulties with harsh weather and shuttling gear. A three-day storm had dumped four feet of snow. “Nothing went according to plan,” Zach said. Although sunburned and rebuffed, the pair isn’t discouraged. They intend to try again next year.

  _____________

  A Whole Lot of Love

  MARY AND WARREN PRICE had eight children together, and Warren came to their marriage with three small children of his own. Father Jim, Sister Jill, and even some of the parishioners of the Sacred Heart Catholic Church call Mary Price “Mother Superior.” Warren was more like the biblical Joseph—patient, hardworking, and always in the background. That was even more true lately. Since he’d come home from the hospital in Juneau, Warren hadn’t been able to leave the house. I wasn’t too surprised to learn, while I was taking the ferry home from a wedding in Juneau with my daughters J.J. and Stoli, that he had died.

  The ferry schedule this winter and early spring has been difficult. Sometimes we don’t have one for three or four days, and when they do come and go it is likely to be at three in the morning. The Sunday morning ferry up to Haines from Juneau was perfect; it left at ten and arrived at two-thirty. Getting down there had been another story. The last ferry of the week was Tuesday, and the wedding wasn’t until Saturday, so we took our chances on the weather and flew—barely.

  The rain was blowing sideways across the runway. The girls and I were in the biggest small plane in Haines. There were six of us, plus the pilot. He tried to take off and couldn’t; the wind was too strong. As he motored back toward the terminal, I felt relieved. But then he decided to try it one more time. We raced down the tarmac, and instead of flying above the end of the runway, we were yanked off the side, jerking like a kite catching a lift. I swore. I thought we would die. I didn’t reassure my frightened children. I cried. I was a really bad mother, and I knew it.

  Luckily, the pilot was a really good pilot and he knew it. He got us level and moving forward (and up and down and a little sideways) all the way to Juneau. Thank God I had my rosary. I pulled it out of my coat pocket and held on tight. I shut my eyes and breathed deep, saying the prayers over and over as we bobbed through the waves of wind. Then I felt a kind of calm. I attributed it to prayer. Later, the bride’s sister, Robyn, who is now in medical school, told me I was probably so scared I was in shock. That’s why my hands were numb and I was tingly up to my elbows.

  The first time I heard anyone say parts of the rosary was when my childhood friend Meg Dougherty, all red hair and freckles, shrieked, “Holy Mary, mother of God” as the small sailboat we were in capsized in Long Island Sound. It was more swear than prayer, but I liked the music in it. I’d repeated it myself many times since then without knowing it came from a longer rosary prayer, the Hail Mary: “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you. Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen.”

  Then, a few years ago, I saw a Native woman take rosary beads out of her purse on a bumpy jet ride to Anchorage. As her fingers rolled the beads and her lips moved in silent Hail Marys—you say ten in a row five times as you make your way around the chain—her whole body changed from tight to loose. She was still jostled with every gust, but she looked comfortable, like the Queen of Sheba riding an elephant.

  I have been wondering about the power and effectiveness of prayer for years. I pray often but in a random kind of way, and usually a little apologetically, as in “Dear God, I’m sorry to bother you, what with war, famine, and disease and all, but I’m worried about Sarah’s math grades.” Her grades did improve, but I wasn’t sure why. I think it had more to do with extra help from the teacher than God. If you pray and then get help, does that mean God heard you? I wish I knew.

  I was in the Presbyterian church once when a woman stood up and said she’d prayed for a bathtub and God had had Sears send one. She knew because it was yellow and extra long. Her husband was six foot two, and, she said, no one but God could have known this. Or that yellow was her favorite color. She said the original order had been for a standard-sized white one; they couldn’t afford the custom length. She had prayed and prayed for a different tub, and then this one arrived. I had a lot of questions I never got to ask. Did God pay for it? Or even sign the purchase order? Did her mother send it but she credited God because
her mother isn’t usually that generous?

  The one time I prayed harder than I ever had about anything—the time Becky and Don’s son Olen was missing after his fishing boat sank—it didn’t work. They never even found his body or the boat. After the funeral, when I talked about this with Jan, she said God was doing better things for people we love than we could ever know. She quoted the Second Song of Isaiah: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor your ways my ways, says the Lord.” She said I had to trust that God is good and great.

  I understand that.

  I just thought that this time God must have made a mistake; he must not have heard how much we loved that boy or realized how unfair it was for him to die at twenty when there were lots of really bad old people lurking around who no one would miss at all. And there must have been at least one nice old man who would rather be in heaven than a nursing home. If Warren Price had been sick back then, a good God could have switched him with Olen. It would have been a win-win situation.

  Warren had “been ready to go,” Father Jim told all of us sitting around Mary Price’s kitchen table a day after my return from Juneau. I was there collecting the information I needed to write Warren’s obituary. We all knew that Father Jim was right. Warren had been housebound too long; he’d had a couple of strokes and had lost a leg to diabetes. Mary had been nursing him for years. This winter, just after Warren came home from the hospital in a wheelchair, Mary fell on the ice and broke her wrist and had to get it set in Juneau and arrange for one of her children to come and stay with Warren. But Mary rarely complained. Instead, she prayed. Mary goes to Mass almost every morning. Often Father Jim puts on all his vestments and says the service just for her. Hearing Father Jim and Mary talk made me want to have that kind of easy faith, the kind that is like breathing. Faith so clear you don’t even think about it, you just feel it.