Looking for Alaska (68 page)

I love this poem of Leslie's about my girlfriend Naphtali, their daughter:

BEFORE LEARNING TO COUNT

(For Naphtali, Age 3)

You were out till midnight last week

fishing with your father and me.

It is the herring you remember most—

tiny thing, caught among the salmon,

dead, but in your small hands

as you held them to the sun

shining back his emerald and opal prisms

to the sun,

he was almost

swimming again.

When you were done,

you set him down among the salmon

in the bin, petted him good sleep.

Later, at the tender, you did not see us sort

and toss the worthless over.

Soon you will have a job—

bailing and cleaning kelp from the boat.

After that, you will get the white cotton gloves,

children's small, to hold and hook the net

while others pick fish and count. Then you

will pick and count fish and

count 6 days till closure,

7 nets left to mend,

823 pinks from net #5

60 seconds before noon on opening day

3 hours of sleep lost last night

4 nets still to pick in the dark.…

Ten years from now, if I hand you a herring,

you will instantly know its weight,

what the canneries are paying per ton

that year, and you will remember, as you toss it over—

this one doesn't count.

This place, all of it, with its indifference and perfect photography light, shall be good for me, the timid loner in me. I plan to write for two hours a day. Not so much to ask from a girl like me, who fears the sitting, the silence, and what writing brings. But I will play that deep hide-and-seek game of the mind to come up with the words that I need to help me detail and describe what I see.

*   *   *

July 25: I've been on Harvester a week, or has it been a year? A lot of jumping on the trampoline today. The kids and I made up Olympic routines. I think we're making up for the fact that we can't actually watch the Olympics, since there is no TV on the island. We went on a picnic for lunch. Leslie and I talked about the things women talk about in the kitchen while we prepared dinner. We had a family prayer. The sun shone, the wind blew. I talked too much. I washed dishes; I gathered rainwater from the trash cans that are set out to collect it down on the porch, then put it on the gas stove to heat it. I go through that whole process every day just to wash the dishes. I listened to Andrea Bocelli. I took a picture of the sun as it faded away around 10:45
P.M
. I thought about the GQ boys and my new friend Tammy, Leslie's niece, who are all on Bear Island, and what they might be doing. And now I'm back in my blue and yellow Kelty tent that I put up on the third day I was here. I decided that I didn't like the dock house. Too creepy. I'd rather be in a tent anyway.

It's late now, around midnight, and Naphtali is here in the tent with me devouring one of her books by flashlight. She reads a book a day. I have never met anyone like her. I remember the first full day I spent around her and I was stunned at her vocabulary. She was using words that even people my age don't use. She is twelve but sometimes I swear she is much older than I am.

Across the bay I can hear the crew's voices, their laughter. They're having a cookout at Uncle Wallace's, Duncan's brother. Wallace has a shower, a real toilet, and a washer and dryer, the only washer and dryer working around here because of a drought. The crew is there doing laundry. I don't feel that I am missing out. I am just enjoying living this island life and acting like a kid again. There is so much kid in me. I am enjoying chasing the kids and not having to pretend that I am something I am not. Naphtali and I did take a banya last night. A banya is a sauna fired by wood. Ooh, was it ever wonderful. There has been a water shortage so bathing has been very limited. We're taking a banya only once every seven days. I got to wash my hair and pour hot water all over my body. I didn't even care that the water was bug-infested. I was only interested in being any kind of cleaner than what I was when I first went into the banya. I enjoyed every second.

I am tired from the day and tired from rehashing it and want to dream. All this dishwashing and landscape and energy overwhelm me at the end of the day. One more note: the kids don't call me Rebekah. They've decided to call me Leaf. I have always wanted another name. I like Leaf. I think I'll keep it when I fly back down south.

*   *   *

July 30: Dad's coming in two days for a weeklong visit. Duncan took all the children down to Bear Island today for the afternoon because fishing is closed. So Leslie and I were left to our tiredness and sisterhood. We talked and talked of many plunging things; of dependence and why women bond and how dangerous friendship can be between women because a woman can stop relying on her spouse to meet her emotional needs and come to depend solely on her female friend. I've seen this in my relationship with my mother. We fight the same wars, we women, and I think as time moves on the island, Leslie and I will armor up together as well and become sisters too. It is nice to be with Leslie, for she knows me even when I do not have the words to show who I am or what I mean. We are a lot alike. We both write poetry. We both are sensitive, even to the smallest of life's things. And we both are warriors.

*   *   *

I will never forget it. Duncan and I were almost to Harvester Island, and there was my daughter, standing there with everyone else, waving hello. I felt like crying but I didn't. I was coming to her world. The moment I got off the boat, Rebekah and all the kids came down wanting to show me everything on the island that they loved: the eagle's nest in a tiny, wind-smashed tree; their two horses; the place where her tent was—one horse had apparently knocked it down, thinking the tent was in its territory. I saw the dock house where Duncan and Leslie had lived before they built a house themselves. Their house reminded me of that house in the Andrew Wyeth painting
Christina's World,
with the young woman sitting in the field looking up at it. I saw the area out in the bay where they'd been seeing all the fin whales spouting, and I noticed the clarity of the ocean. I was shown the banya, the house, the kitchen where Rebekah did the dishes, the trampoline, and the books the kids were reading. I could easily see that Rebekah had become part of this family; what a beautiful thing to watch her as she so elegantly moved in this universe. I felt thankful that she was allowing me to see a bit of it.

The Fields's children stage their own Olympics on Harvester Island.
P
HOTO BY
R
EBEKAH
J
ENKINS

Right before I left, Rebekah and I and the kids walked to the top of the island; it reminded me of a small green volcano in shape. It was a tough walk, but it seemed that from the top we could see the whole world, together and separately.

21

Unalakleet

You better have a fantastic sense of humor if you live
out
in Alaska. The farther
out
you are, the more laughter you need. That three-day storm just met the new three-day storm, your flight's canceled for a few days. The bears pulled your net out of the river and ate everything in it. You can't find your way back to the village from Bethel. The snowbank now covers your house. The king salmon barely showed up in the river. Smile, life is good. The farther out in Alaska I got, the more smiling, joking people I seemed to run into. This was especially true in Unalakleet, Alaska, on Norton Sound on Alaska's western coast.

Probably the whining, super-uptight types died off long ago, when life was so much tougher. Not long after Christ died, a Roman orator said, “Many who seem to be struggling with adversity are happy; many, amid great affluence, are utterly miserable.”

A friend of mine from Nome introduced me to Boyuk Ryan, who lives in Unalakleet and is mostly Eskimo,
¹³
⁄
₁₆
, to be exact. He has the dancing eyes of the Eskimo, and he is always ready to deliver a story. One morning he was sitting in the backseat of an eight-seater plane, the kind that takes people and freight from village to village all over Alaska. The plane was full; a few people were on their way back from Anchorage and were loaded down. There was a delay, could have been a hundred reasons. Most of the passengers were relaxed and waiting for the pilot in silence, but a few, well, maybe they'd had a bit too much fun in Anchorage, they began to complain. “Where is the pilot?” they said. Ten minutes later they regressed to “Where is the pilot, why are they always late?”

Then one said, “If I knew how to fly this stupid plane, I'd do it.” Boyuk, who is as relaxed as he is intensely energetic, got an idea. He got up from his seat in the rear, squeezed his way into the pilot's seat, and said, “I've flown on this plane enough times, I've watched these pilots—I think I can fly this thing.”

He reached above his head and flicked some switches. He turned on motor No. 1, then motor No. 2. He wore old jeans and jogging shoes. At this point, the complainers spoke up. “What are you doing, man?”

“I'm going to fly us to the village. I think I can do it,” Boyuk said, sure of himself.

“No, please, we'll wait, okay?” said a few of the now worried passengers.

“That's okay, I believe if I just push down one more switch and pull on something, we can go. We'll fix 'em!” Boyuk fumbled around on the panel.

At this point one woman and one man, not Native, got quite excited. They pleaded with him not to do it. Boyuk moved the plane forward just a bit, then informed them that he truly was their pilot and the freight they'd been waiting for was now ready to load. When I first began flying in Alaska, the experience that would become so casual was an adventure in itself, having to tell how much I weigh, flying through and over outrageous countryside. Now being in Unalakleet was nothing out of the ordinary, and Alaska itself was more like home to me.

During the Iditarod while I was following Jeff King, I'd stayed a few days in Unalakleet (pop. 798). It is close to Nome and the finish line, but still distant enough that the race is far from over. It is the first village the racers hit on the frozen Bering Sea, a place that can be brutalized by roaring storms coming from Russia or even farther west. Jeff said it was one of his favorite places in all of Alaska, that the people were open, friendly, caring. As usual Jeff was right.

When I first visited Unalakleet, it was March; normally I think of March as spring. In Tennessee the earth begins to seduce you again with its warmth. Little hints of green replace the brown and gold of the dead pasture. In Unalakleet, March is still raging winter. I recall sitting in a log cabin lodge at the edge of town drinking a coffee at Browns, the only place to get breakfast. I've never heard the winds howl and moan and whistle and roar as they did in this village. Man-made objects creak and shutter and rattle and flap. Across several snowbanks, I could see the top of a tiny wooden building, painted an odd green, that housed the post office. Walking by, you might not be able to see it because the wild winds filled with snow and ice crystals hid the building, but you'd know it was nearby because the American flag in front flapped so loudly. In front of the post office was a snowdrift so high it was almost up to the peak of the roof.

When you're in an Eskimo village like Unalakleet in the winter, you could curse the founding families for choosing this wind-whipped location. But now that Rebekah and I were here in the summer, we blessed their names, whoever they were, and understood how wise they were in settling Unalakleet, Deering, Kotzebue, Barrow, and Shishmaref, and hundreds of other villages. Just try leaving the strong breezes of the coastline in these communities in the summer, however short summers are, and you will know why even the caribou climb high into the mountains trying to stand on the remaining snowfields, why they go out on the remaining ocean ice, why they practically go insane.

I'd been warned about the mosquitoes around here. It's only the females that suck your blood, but there were so many inland around Unalakleet that I think I could go crazy staying too long with them in the bush with no way out. Several hard-core Alaskans, not Native, told me the mosquitoes were put here by God to keep people out of these parts of Alaska. The short summer season of the bloodsuckers and the flesh-biting gnats is another reason we were here now, in June. One of the two incredible women I'd met in Unalakleet this winter would be around the village now, both to avoid the bugs and because the king salmon were coming into the river soon and it would be time to make smoked salmon strips.