Looking for Alaska

by Peter Jenkins

  “My grandma Violet, I remember so well the smells of her perfume and smoked salmon. Sometimes one was stronger than the other. I never knew which one would win out when I opened her door. She was the one who lived to fish, catch, and put up the Native foods. I remember, she had her own skiff; one of my favorite things was to go out with her and gather driftwood. We could get almost everything we needed from the ocean. It even brought us our wood. In summertime, we’d get the best blueberries and thimbleberries, and then us kids, we’d go swimming. During the summer we ate lots of crab, salmon, all kinds of shellfish.”

  Across from Hydaburg are several large islands—Dall Island, Goat Island, Sukkwan Island, and Suemez Island—and hundreds of tiny islands: Lone Tree Island, McFarland Island, and on and on. The summer has the most sun, and though there are sometimes large snowfalls in the winter, the dominant weather is rain. Haidas always built their villages to face the southwest to take as much advantage as possible of the sun’s drying power.

  “In the winter, snow could be deep sometimes, the creek would freeze up. We would get Nana’s high-heel shoes and put ’em on. I’d zoom on top of the frozen creek. We would get in lots of trouble; they were her favorite shoes and she could not afford to get more. I think back now and I wonder where she wore those high heels around here.”

  The Haidas that live here order almost everything from catalogs. The world comes to them in catalogs on the mail plane. They get tired of explaining to the order-center people in Arizona or Nebraska that they don’t live in igloos, that they aren’t Eskimos, that there are no polar bears, and that they only get mail three times a week. The mail comes in on a floatplane, and it is not unusual for mail to be delayed by weather; sometimes they go four days without it. Always the people have to explain that everyone has a P.O. box in Hydaburg. When asked for a street address for something to be delivered, they just make up a street and number. Everyone knows where everyone lives. Tina and Jody are related to about a fourth of the town, and they are not one of the larger families. (The Edinshaws are.)

  Most of the houses have been built a few at a time by some government agency. Few people plant gardens or flowers or have fences. Every few years there get to be so many free-ranging dogs that they have to hire someone special to come in and get rid of the ones that aren’t registered. Black bears raid just about everybody’s garbage, that’s just part of it. Few people have decks; there are far more smokehouses in backyards to smoke the salmon. There is one store, the Haida Market, now owned by Jerry’s mother, and two gas pumps, one for regular gas and one for diesel, run by the village Native corporation. There are two churches, one Presbyterian—which has a red neon cross and is next to a totem park, in front of the school—and an Assembly of God. The Presbyterians have more people as they were the first missionaries here. There are no places for the public to drink alcohol, but when you think of it, there is no “public” here at all—it is all personal.

  The Haidas of Hydaburg let it be known that if you’re not Haida, then don’t think about moving here. You probably don’t even want to come visit, unless you are related to someone. At least one Native village in Alaska does not allow whites to spend the night, though it is not Hydaburg. The Haidas have always been considered the fiercest of all coastal Natives. Now, they just want their own community, they want no one else coming here telling them how to live or what to believe. Some people are afraid of the place. When the village did not have a village public safety officer, a VPSO, and there was no one to keep the law, basketball teams, their fans, and the refs had state trooper escorts to get in and out of the village. Now since they have a VPSO, a white woman who worked in some prisons upstate, they only have to call the state troopers for serious crime.

  On the way into town I had noticed a large sickle-shaped skid mark that began on the left side of the road and went across the centerline and then off the road. I could see where something had skidded through the dirt shoulder. Tina was in a trancelike flashback then; I’d hoped no deer or bear ran out in front of us. I thought about asking to drive a few times to free her up to concentrate on her stories.

  We were headed for Jody’s, Tina’s younger sister’s house. Both have black hair, but they look nothing alike. They’re close, though, clearly—Jody had four or five of Tina’s paintings hanging on her walls.

  When we arrived, there was almost no time for any greeting or introductions.

  “Tina,” Jody said, “did you hear?”

  “What?” Tina’s voice could change whole octaves and get low.

  “The other night when we were all at the Hill Bar, Lori, from here—you know, the one you always see in town taking her little kids for a walk—well, she died in a car crash.”

  “What?” Tina seemed spooked.

  “She was rushing to catch the ferry, had her three kids in the car, they were going to Ketchikan to buy school clothes. One of the kids may have been squirming around, no one knows—she lost control of the car, anyway, and rolled it. She was the only one without a seat belt on, and she died.”

  “Oh, God, maybe this is why I was thinking of death on the way here. Is that why there are all the cars across the street?”

  “Yeah, the body is over in the house.”

  Tina got up, walked across the dirt road, said she needed to go pay her respects.

  Jody’s boyfriend, Tony, came out from a back room. He is a massive young man, seven years younger than Jody. Tony was an Alaska state heavyweight wrestling champion; he has hands twice my size. He seemed like a gentle giant or just a man who knew he had nothing to fear and could always be relaxed. He is a gifted carver, Native-designs painter, drum-maker, hunter, fisherman. Tony can be standing in a river on the island and catch ten cohos while three tourists catch one between them. He can see the fish, while they see only rushing water. He can call deer to within fifteen feet of him using a piece of grass.

  Tony explained that the Alaska State Troopers had already done their investigation and there was no foul play. Lori never hurt anyone, he said; she didn’t drink or smoke dope. When you saw her, her kids were always with her. She took care of an elder, bathed her and cooked her meals. She was one of those uptight lady drivers, Tony said, always drove with both hands on the wheel. Her body would never leave the Hydaburg area. She would be laid out and never left alone in the house across the street.

  According to Tony, village men, about ten to twelve guys, would go over in a boat to a small island across the bay and dig her grave by hand. Then after the church service, someone with a seine boat would put the casket and the family on the big boat and the rest of the town would go over for the service in their own skiffs. Sadness often visits Hydaburg, as it does every place; it’s just that here everyone feels it.

  Tina stayed visiting for a long time. When she returned, we went to her auntie Martha’s. She sat at her kitchen table in her small wood home, with a cigarette in one hand and a beer in the other. She had a smoker’s voice and a skinny, skinny body. She was taking care of one of her grandsons, who had just taken a bath. He had splashed around so much the water had run under the bathroom door. Auntie Martha was confrontational, the life of her own party that never seemed to end, and knew everything that was going on in Hydaburg. She and Tina spent some time catching up with each other while I sat quietly and listened.

  Tina said it was time to drive the forty-six miles back to Craig. For the different world it was, it might as well be forty-six hundred miles. I don’t know what I was expecting out of Hydaburg after all Tina had said coming over here, but as is often the case, that’s not what I experienced. But then Hydaburg holds no part of my history, my heart; it’s not the scene for any of my memories or nightmares. No one in Tina’s family wanted her to leave. Her baby-sitter had been taking care of her girls all day and it was getting dark, she said. Time does not tick off at the same speed in Craig as in Hydaburg. Sometimes it seems that time does not pass at all in Hydaburg. It gets light and it gets dark, but the moment stays the sam
e.

  Tina was ready to leave, but first we stopped by Jody’s house again to call the baby-sitter to let her know when we’d be there. Louise, sixteen, one of Jody’s neighbors, was on the phone ordering school clothes from J. Crew. Finally, Tina got to use the phone. Someone she called before the baby-sitter mentioned that there was a house party tonight, at Laverne’s mother and stepfather’s house. Laverne’s father had died years ago in one of Hydaburg’s worst tragedies. It has cast an awful dark shadow over the people here for over fifteen years. There was no road then and five of Hydaburg’s most handsome, athletic, and popular guys were partying. They decided they would get in one of their skiffs and run to Craig, forty dangerous miles in a large boat, much less a little skiff. No one knows what happened, but they all perished. This dark, cold death lay down a cloud of depression that will never completely leave. I could almost feel the wailing of the mothers and brothers and sisters and fathers and grandparents still.

  “Peter, you want to go by this house party? I grew up with both these people; you met them at the Hill Bar. People are afraid to come to Hydaburg, there are very few whites that would ever go to a house party.” Tina winked at Jody. I had been dared. Of course I wanted to go, I said.

  Jody had just gotten out one of Tina’s paintings, a woman growing out of a killer whale, and asked Tina how it should be framed. Jody also showed us a print she’d recently bought of some Haida men traveling several hundred years ago in the open ocean in one of their renowned cedar canoes. The canoe had magnificent carvings on the high bow and sides; it was a living, floating totem.

  “Jody, what do you think about taking him to a house party?” Tina wondered aloud, perhaps second-guessing her invitation.

  “I think he can handle it. They liked him the other night, but you know how things can get.” Jody lifted her dark eyebrows, showing off a childlike quality to her personality.

  The party was at the edge of town, where some of the newer houses are. They all looked to be about twelve hundred square feet, with three bedrooms, one bath, and no garage. Four or five young teenagers were standing outside; Tina said they were there to watch what went on; it was a local form of entertainment to see what adults did what, or to whom. Some early James Brown song was blasting out all the open windows and doors. Inside, the local people, about equally divided between men and women, sat and stood mainly in the kitchen. The host couple recognized me from the Hill Bar. After a half hour, six people were dancing in the living room, the rest were talking around the kitchen table or out on the steps. A half hour later I noticed I had to raise my voice to be heard. Outside, a woman about twenty was shouting to someone on the steps. She had gone home and changed clothes, changed into a dress. She said that her “boyfriend” was still talking to that other woman, he hadn’t noticed she had changed clothes. She seemed ready to cross over into totally out of control. The teenagers in the yard were all ears. They certainly knew something about this young woman’s past. She was yelling so loud at the person trying to calm her that she could be heard over the stereo playing “Lodi” by Creedence Clearwater Revival on about eight and everyone else talking as loud as they could.

  Tina walked over to me. I half smiled and lifted my eyebrows. She said she thought it would be a good time to leave.

  “There aren’t many white people, or for that matter, any outsiders that can say they were at a house party in Hydaburg,” Tina said to compliment me.

  “All that drama, that girl yelling, it brings back too much. It reminds me what a tiny little world it is over here in Hydaburg. I love it here and I hate it here. Why can’t I find the right place for me? It doesn’t seem to be in Craig, and it doesn’t seem to be in Hydaburg.”

  One of her cassettes was playing, but it was turned down so low I couldn’t make it out. She turned it up; it was Lionel Ritchie and Diana Ross singing “Endless Love.” The road and everything surrounding it was the blackest dark. Something ran across the road, far in front of us. Was it a black bear or a wolf or one of the many dogs running free?

  “When our mother got on the ferry and didn’t come back, I went to live with Jerry’s family. That’s how I met my present husband, Jimmy. I told you we’re separated, right?”

  “Yes,” I answered.

  “Well, my grandmother Helen, the teacher, who got me reading everything, she raised this man Foo, Alvin Young. He was orphaned. He married Jerry’s mother, Margie. I was a good student, I loved to learn. My grandmother asked Margie and Foo if I could live with them and go to high school in Craig. They had four sons, some of the best-looking guys on the island. Jimmy was four and a half years older than I was, and Jerry was four or five years younger. I was young and impressionable when I first went to live with them. Man, Jimmy was good-looking.

  “There wasn’t any TV on the island then at all,” Tina continued. “Margie’s house is right across the street from the Hill Bar. Jerry and I, we would open the second-floor window and just watch people come and go. We knew just about everyone, and they didn’t know us kids were watching them. It was better than any soap opera. Every weekend it was something different. And it got funny too. On real icy nights in the winter, people would come out, set foot on the street, and slip and slide, usually on their butts, all the way down the hill towards old town. We liked the fights the best. You could always tell when one was going to start. The people, guys and girls, would walk puffed up, usually around closing time. Some of the fights would be huge, twenty people. Some woman would say something to someone else’s old lady. There were the rowdy ones, one family we called the James Gang. If we saw them there, we were almost positive there would be a fight. It was better than watching WWF. Foo would go down the next morning, pour Pine-Sol all over, and the place would be ready for another night.”

  We passed the place where Lori had run off the road and died. Someone had placed some flowers there since we’d passed.

  “After Jimmy and I got married, I thought I was right where I wanted to be. Maybe my life would be happy, like I saw in California, just without the sun and the blondes. I became the Martha Stewart of Prince of Wales Island. All my Christmas ornaments matched. I changed my theme for Christmas every year.” Tina now spoke in a different cadence; her words were coming out faster.

  “I saw something in the Spiegel catalog, I ordered it. I had a J. Crew card, Nordstrom’s card, Alaska Airlines card, Visa. I wore Lancôme makeup. Last thing I wanted was the smell of the life that I grew up with. We used to say my grandmother’s perfume was the smell of salmon. I didn’t want to smell like the smoke from the smokehouse or, for that matter, even smell it at all. I didn’t want to smell stink eggs or kneel on the beach, gather driftwood and seaweed. I became a gourmet cook, cooking Martha Stewart recipes instead of my own people’s foods.”

  Tina put the bright lights on, finally, something I had wanted to do for miles. I couldn’t see the road because her low beams were incorrectly adjusted, and I’d wondered how she could.

  “I thought if I lived more the white man’s way with a man that wasn’t so Native, I would have a better life. I married into this island’s version of the Ewings, you know, from that TV show Dallas. I found that I could not only adapt but also excel doing their things. Jimmy’s part Native, but really the white side is much stronger in him. I had so much more than I did growing up. We certainly didn’t have to haul water like my father did. But, I lost myself with all those things. My heart almost died, like it was covered with a black blanket.”

  There was silence in the car for quite some time until we almost ran into a doe, blinded by the bright lights, frozen in the middle of the road.

  “You know, Peter, the Haidas believe our spirits are from people that were here before. I wish I knew who mine came from. I feel pulled in so many directions. My life has been like the experience of giving birth: there is this lust involved, then this pain, then joy comes, and it goes on and on like that.”

  We made it to the end of the Hydaburg road, took a left, and had a
nother twenty-something miles more of almost no streetlights. The headlights caught the glowing eyes of several deer feeding on the grass that grew on the side of the road. Driving down these roads on this part of the island, I felt as if Tina and I were the only ones in the world. When she spoke again, it startled me a little bit.

  “I don’t know what it is about you, but I feel like I could drive around this island for a week with you and never run out of things to talk about.” I have noticed during my decades of traveling that people from every walk of life seem to trust me with their stories. I told Tina I knew how difficult it is to speak about yourself, your pains and joys, when you’re in the midst of such change. I was honored she felt free to talk.

  She spoke the next few sentences in almost a chant. “Someday I will, someday I really will be strong enough, someday. I can’t believe I am already forty. I will … I will become an artist.… I will do what I need to do. I really will.”

  Then when it seemed that we would never see our surroundings again, we passed a couple of streetlights; it seemed bizarre to have light coming from something other than the car. We were back in Klawock. It was as if we had been flying around in outer space and were returning to the mother ship. Tina turned up a hill, and halfway up she slowed way down. On the right side of the road was a trailer with a light on the front porch and a small house next to it, with another light shining from the corner eave. The weak light couldn’t overpower the night, but it did shine into the field across the street. Dimly lit by the feeble light, there were maybe twenty totems rising up from the ground, their faces barely discernible, eerie. Tina didn’t say anything about why she had taken this detour but just drove on.