If You Lived Here, I'd Know Your Name

by Heather Lende

  At the bookstore Monday morning Tom greets well-wishers, who all want to hear his story. We think it’s a miracle he got out alive, especially with none of us there to help him. Tom says that isn’t necessarily so. “I know people say you shouldn’t go out alone,” he tells us, “but I’m really glad no one else was there. If Liz was with me, we both would have fallen through, and I can’t even imagine what would have happened if I had the kids.” Then he says, quietly, “I’m certain that somebody else would have gone in, so if it had to happen, I’m glad it was me.” I ask him if he’d skate again. “When I know it’s totally safe,” he says. “And I’ll be real cautious if there’s any kind of snow.”

  WHICH IS ALL there was for the next two weeks. As the third line of “In the Bleak Midwinter” goes, “Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow.” It could have been making me temporarily insane. Although I don’t think that excuses me from thinking vengeful thoughts or almost committing a crime. Maybe I was just so cold I wanted to heat things up. I had been having trouble coping after close friends of mine split. He’d left her for a woman twenty years younger. I’ll tell you the story, but I won’t use names; this is too small a town for that. The whole episode had left me feeling as if my heart was under a glacier. It was just enough pressure to cause permanent damage, but not enough for people to notice unless they looked closely.

  When my friend who was left home alone asked me and another friend to help her switch around the bedrooms in her house, of course we said yes. We would do anything for her. How we got from simply moving her old bed to almost cutting it up with a chain saw, tossing it out the window, and burning the mattress in the new girlfriend’s driveway at midnight, I’m still not sure. The three of us were playing a card game in my kitchen on a Saturday night when the question of what to do with the old bed made a spark that caught fire. Before we knew it, we were all excited and talking at once.

  Chip has a dump truck. We could put the mattress in it, tip it off the back under cover of darkness, and light it before speeding away. We’d never have to get out of the cab. No one would know who did it, unless we passed Fireman Al on the way home. When Al was in college he burned his folk’s cabin near Chilkoot Lake down to the foundation. It was an accident, and no one was hurt, but he decided to become a fireman instead of a biologist after that, so he could help prevent such a catastrophe from happening to anyone else. We agreed that Al would recognize us for sure.

  “Then we’ll wear ski masks,” one of us said. “And dress in black,” another said. “And light it with a Molotov cocktail,” added the third, a librarian, who also mentioned that “you can learn how to make them on the Internet.” I thought we were doing some heavy housecleaning, not starting a riot. Luckily, our friend with the bed said that we couldn’t toss a bottle with fuel in it. The leftover shards of glass might cut a dog’s paw.

  As I served up warm apple pie and ice cream, I recalled the song “Alice’s Restaurant” and all those eight-by-ten glossy photos at the trial, and I knew that while burning your own property in someone else’s yard might not be arson, it would, at the very least, be littering. We could all end up in jail, as Arlo Guthrie had. When I said so, one of my friends reminded me that Guthrie’s story did have a silver lining: “I mean, he didn’t have to go to Vietnam, right?”

  But she knew what I meant. It wasn’t the law or government we were worried about, it was a higher authority. “If we burn your mattress this way now,” she said to our friend, “the smoke will only soil your soul—and ours.” We all agreed to a private bonfire on the beach, with just the three of us, the next day.

  Still, I worried that the black smoke from all that foam rubber would attract Fireman Al and the volunteers. Chip came into the kitchen and put his pie plate in the sink with the others. “When they see who it is and what you’re burning,” he said, “they’ll run.”

  Before we went to sleep, I asked Chip if he thought I was crazy. “Yes,” he said, “but you were when I married you.” I thought about our wedding, how happy we were, and then my friend’s wedding, which had been such a fun day, too. I was suddenly dizzy with a grief that was worse in some way than the dying kind. I was so afraid it might happen to us, too, that I turned out the light and kissed Chip hard.

  In the morning my friend canceled the burn. She’d heard that the wind had blown most of the snow off Chilkoot Lake and said she’d rather go skating. So instead of standing by a bonfire watching her old life go up in smoke, we started her new one gliding over thick ice.

  A few weeks later, I went to see Father Jim. I was writing a story for the paper on his Catholic mission boat, the Mater Dei. We met over coffee in the rectory. When the interview was done, I told him I’d been having some trouble lately with forgiveness. I didn’t tell him how we’d almost burned a man’s marriage bed in his new girlfriend’s driveway, but I did ask if you could still be a good Christian if you were thinking really bad thoughts. “Heather,” Father Jim said loudly in his South Boston accent. (I think he used to work in big cathedrals.) “Heather,” he said, warming up for the punch line the way he does. “Heather, when God taps you on the shoulder and says it’s time to go, he’ll ask you one question: Have you been good to my people? If you can answer yes, then you’ve got it made.”

  On the way home, I ran into Christy Tengs Fowler, a close friend of the Stuart family’s, at the library. She asked me if I’d be writing Gene Stuart’s obituary. I told her I would be, as soon as I finished Father Jim’s story... and I needed to record an essay for the radio... and I had to write my column, too. I didn’t have time to visit with anyone about anything right now, especially that obituary. It was terrible and sad and could wait—the weekly paper wouldn’t be printed for six more days. But Christy needed to talk and I’m her friend, so I slowed down and we moved out of the doorway to a quiet corner. Gene had died that morning in Seattle from the burns he’d suffered in a fire at his remote cabin the afternoon before. He had been lighting a woodstove with diesel fuel and the fumes had built up and it had exploded. He was on fire when the friends who were out there with him pulled him through the window and then “dropped and rolled” with him on the ground to put the flames out, the way Fireman Al has instructed us all to do. A helicopter that usually transports extreme snowboarders and skiers saw the cabin in flames and radioed town. They flew Fireman Al and an emergency medical technician in to help Gene just as it was getting dark. Then a Coast Guard chopper flew him out of town from the airport. Doctors at the Juneau hospital decided to send him on to a burn center in Seattle, but there was not much that could be done. If that wasn’t bad enough, Gene’s dog, Willow, died in the fire, too.

  Gene was a sawyer in the old mills; he ran the huge blades that cut logs into boards. When the mills were shut down, he became a fisherman out of necessity, naming his boat Reluctant. Mostly, Geno, as his friends called him, was a practical joker. He came up with electrician Erwin Hertz’s slogan: “Hertz Electric—We’ll Fix Your Shorts.” Gene was a good man, and he was good to God’s people. I told Christy what the priest had said about that, and I decided to take his words to heart. I promised Christy I’d start Gene’s obituary whenever the family was ready, and asked her to let me know when they wanted to talk with me. My other projects would have to wait. Christy told me she felt awful for Gene’s widow, all alone in her house. “She doesn’t even have her dog,” Christy said. She also couldn’t help thinking about how quickly life can change.

  WHEN I GOT HOME, Chip’s big old boat with the blue tarp flapping on the deck looked as pretty as a white-sailed sloop in the harbor. The skates and boots all over the floor in the mud-room, the dishes in the sink, and my good old dog sleeping on the couch all seemed to shout, A family lives here; they are busy and happy and a little messy but someday that won’t be so and you’ll be sorry. A little joy has come from all this winter’s sadness. After Tom fell into the lake and lived to tell about it, his wife, Liz, said she didn’t care anymore what he bought her for her upcoming
birthday; he’d already given her the best present ever—himself. My friend’s divorce has given me a new appreciation for my own marriage. That doesn’t mean I would want the bad in order to have the good, but I know that love and life are all mixed up with loss and death, just like beautiful bubbles frozen in the lake.

  Robert Frost wrote that the world may end in fire or ice. Well, from what I’ve seen, heard, and imagined of both this winter, all I can conclude is that the world could end in any number of ways, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. The only choice any of us has is what to do if we’re still here after it happens. Do we die a little death every day ourselves or do we reach for someone’s hand and dance again?

  DULY NOTED

  The Lynn Canal Community Players “King of Fools” float took first prize in Saturday’s first ever “Mardi Gras in July” Parade. The Harbor Bar’s “Pirate Ship” float took second. Having a parade on the Fort Seward Parade Grounds may seem obvious, but according to Officers’ Row resident Annette Smith, it took two seasonal workers from the Hotel Halsingland to suggest it. “They were sitting up on the hotel porch roof one night having a few beers and looking out over the parade grounds and they said, ‘Gee, someone really ought to have a parade here.’ At least that’s how it was told to me,” Annette said.

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  The Sheldon Museum held its annual volunteer luncheon last Tuesday. For this year’s tropical theme, volunteer Jane Bell said, “Most everybody wore flowered shirts.” Milestones for the museum this year included Joan Snyder receiving the First Lady’s Volunteer Award from Susan Knowles and the museum’s first all-male, all-ex-marine volunteer staff day with Alan Traut, Roy Lawrence, and Frank Draeger. Another gender barrier fell when the Doll’s Fair was organized by a mostly male crew, which included George Mark, Mark Klevons, Paul Morgan, Matt Turner, and Alan Traut.

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  Byrne Power, the KHNS program director, has opened Imago Video in his Quonset hut in Fort Seward. Hours are Thursday, Friday, and Saturday from six to nine P.M., or by appointment. Byrne specializes in foreign, independent, old Hollywood, and art films the other video stores don’t have.

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  Tim June spent the summer solstice sailing his wooden ketch Keku in the Juneau Yacht Club’s annual Around Admiralty Island race. Tim said he and two crew members planned on taking turns at the helm, but they all ended up staying awake most of the time. “It was still light enough at midnight to not need a headlamp to read the chart,” he said, “and by two-thirty or so the sun was shining.”

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  Curtain Call

  I WAS TWENTY-FOUR years old with a husband steering, a baby in the car seat, and two huskies in the back of the truck when, in the spring of 1984, I arrived in Haines from Anchorage, where we had been living for about a year. Driving down from Alaska’s frozen, flat interior into the Chilkat Valley in April was a lot like going from black-and-white Kansas to the colorful Land of Oz. The mountains were huge and jagged. Everything else was wet and green or blue and bright. I called my mother in New York, from a phone booth on Main Street. I could see down over the Harbor Bar to the bay and mountains beyond. It was hot and sunny. I was wearing shorts. I told her that Haines looked like Switzerland, only on the ocean. Chip was already fishing. This was spring—king salmon, daffodils, and green grass. Chip had been here earlier and had found us an apartment in one of the big houses on Officers’ Row, in old Fort Seward.

  Ted and Mimi Gregg, who lived in their own home next door, owned it. During World War II, Fort Seward was the U.S. Army base in Haines. After World War II, when the army left, it sold the fort as surplus; the Greggs and four other families bought the decomissioned turn-of-the-century army base, sight unseen, with the hopes of turning it into an artists’ colony, and moved to Haines from the East Coast. They’ve lived here ever since. Today, the most popular postcards of Haines are the ones of the classic white buildings surrounding the parade grounds at Fort Seward. The best pictures are taken from across the cove, with the dramatic backdrop of five-thousand-foot snowcapped mountains.

  There was (and still is) a bar in the Greggs’ front hall. Ted painted the portrait of a naked lady that hangs in a gilt frame over it. There’s also a baby grand piano in the living room. It belonged to Mimi’s mother, an opera singer.

  I met Ted while he was mowing the lawn. Chip had started his new job and was out at the sawmill. Baby Eliza was in the backpack. Ted wore faded pink canvas pants, a white button-down shirt, and a tall straw hat that looked like a potato ricer with a beak. He stopped mowing. “Just like Madeira!” he said, in a slightly patrician accent. We silently admired the view. Then Ted said it again, wagging his hand at me to make the point. “Just like Madeira, Haines is just like Madeira.” I have never been to Madeira, but I believed him, because he told me that’s where he’d bought his hat. The whole scene was like something from a movie or a play.

  The next morning I woke up to the sound of a chain saw and looked out the window to see Ted, in safety goggles, carving a woman’s torso from a stump. Wood chips flew everywhere. When a small cruise ship docked at the old army pier at the bottom of the hill, the Greggs invited us to a party for the captain and crew. Ted grilled salmon, and his daughter-in-law Gail wore a cancan outfit and baked two cheesecakes for dessert. The sun slanted across the parade grounds and, across the inlet, mountains reflected the evening colors. Ted handed me a glass of wine. “Just like Madeira,” he said.

  Almost twenty years later, when I was writing Ted’s obituary, a friend of the Greggs’ recalled, “Ted was the ultimate host. You walked through the door and he had your coat on his arm and a drink in your hand.” By then, I knew Ted well. So did everyone else in town. Writing his life story for the Chilkat Valley News would be a challenge. Not so much to get the details—he led a well-documented life—but to capture his character. I took a break from my drafting to get the mail. The post office was crowded. One of the clerks had had to leave town suddenly with a sick child, another was out with an injury, and the postmaster was away on his winter vacation, so there were just two guys left to handle all the packages and letters for the whole town. I ended up in the long line between Helen and Joan, two of Ted’s contemporaries. We talked about him.

  “Ted always had a good time,” Helen said. Then she thought a minute and added, “All the men had a good time, didn’t they?”

  Joan, who, like Helen, is a widow, said, “Yes, but we’re still here, aren’t we?”

  When old people die, friends and family are, for the most part, prepared. As Mimi said, “Ted lived a wonderful life, but he wasn’t having much fun lately.” He’d had several strokes and had spent the last few months in a nursing home in Ketchikan, where a daughter of his lives. Mimi had decided not to have a funeral. At least not right away. She had Ted cremated and was planning a concert and picnic on the parade grounds in the spring. Ted had never liked funerals anyway. He’d liked parades, parties, and plays.

  The Greggs had founded the Lynn Canal Community Players, and for fifty years Mimi and Ted had tried to make the motto of Haines “Alaska’s Theater Town.” The title shows up in the brochures for the Chilkat Center for the Arts and on and off in various tourist publications. The truth is that no motto has ever really stuck to Haines. We also have tried calling ourselves “The Valley of the Eagles,” “The Alaska of Your Dreams,” and “Alaska’s Best-Kept Secret.” At Ted’s memorial service, his son Tresham talked about Ted’s weekly trips to the town dump. His father, he said, would always come back with more than he’d dropped off. He’d made sets, parade floats, and decorative objects for his home and yard from found objects—treasures, Ted had called them.

  The attic of the Greggs’ home is filled with costumes, props, and bags and boxes of stuff Ted hauled up over the years just in case he ever needed it. Ted was the one who had authentic, old-fashioned milk bottles for Our Town. He played the milkman. Ted also had the cart wheels for Tevye’s wagon in Fiddler on
the Roof. He built the fireplace for Arsenic and Old Lace with antique mantel and trim pieces he had salvaged from buildings in Fort Seward. He also built the bar in the saloon for the historical melodrama Lust for Dust, about Haines during the Gold Rush. The play, created for tourists, was full of chorus girls and slapstick humor, and much of it rhymed. Jack Dalton was the Bad Guy. In real life Dalton had driven beef on the hoof from Pyramid Harbor to hungry miners up north, charging them a fortune. In the play Dalton said things like “It’s time to steer the steer and herd the herd” to his trusty sidekick, Dusty Trails. You get the idea.

  A few years ago Tom Morphet took his visiting parents and brother to meet Ted and Mimi. Ted invited them all inside for a family brunch, cooked Swedish pancakes, and afterward got out his tandem bicycle for Tom and his brother to ride. The seats are side by side, and there are double sets of pedals. Ted and Mimi used to ride it in the summer parades, dressed in Gay Nineties costumes. After Tom got the hang of it, Ted went inside and came back with a full-sized bear costume, urging Tom’s brother to put it on. He did, and they rode around the parade grounds, with their delighted parents taking pictures. “Who but Ted,” Tom said, “would have a bicycle built for two and a bear costume?”