North of Hope (10 page)

A week later, an emailed acceptance appeared in my in-box. Relief and exhilaration rushed into my muddled brain, cooling water over coals of grief. I would be able to sing Mozart’s Requiem. I had something I could do for Dad and Kathy. This was my Kaddish; this was the structure for my grief.

Deb is the first person to whom I confess the events of the summer and the reason for my joining the chorale. I am surprised at her lack of surprise. We are a month into rehearsals, and as the director
works with the men on a section, I whisper to her, a flood of information draining from me in desperation.

“This bottle is from their trip.” She nods at me. “And this sand? It’s still here from the river, from the beach where they died. I haven’t washed it off. Think that makes me crazy?” I laugh nervously, appalled that I have admitted my neurosis, exposed weakness and oddity and an indication that I am seriously screwed.

She shrugs. “Not really,” she says.

I take a drink. The fine sand crunches lightly between my teeth.

The conductor looks back in our direction. “Okay, altos, sopranos—join us, top of forty, measure three.”

I flee my anxiety, diving deeper into the black notes on the white page, the sounds of sorrow and hope and pleading, submersing myself in the music, feeling it close over me like water.

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.

—C. S. Lewis,
A Grief Observed

[Man] can do nothing by natural instinct except weep! … To man alone in the animal kingdom is granted the capacity for sorrow … to no animal is assigned a more precarious life.

—Pliny,
Natural History

A
picture shows my father in front of a U.S. Forest Service log cabin in the woods of Alaska, tall, lean, handsome, with thick black hair and an optimistic grin untainted by tragedy or other devastation, the stance of a young and virile man who has stepped firmly into his place in the world of accomplishment and adventure well beyond his origins. He holds me, an infant just five months old. The photo is dated August 1972. It is thirteen years after Alaska became the forty-ninth state, a year before the oil crisis of 1973 prompted construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. I am the first child and daughter of an army JAG captain and his wife sent at the last minute to Alaska instead of Vietnam. We were just one family among many compelled to move to Alaska because of oil industry employ or military service, and one of the many who, once acquainted with Alaska’s remote beauty, decided to stay.

I was actually the second child; an older brother was stillborn
at seven months and buried in the Fort Richardson cemetery. Perhaps that is why I was baptized within a week of birth in the post chapel, wearing a gown, booties, and cap my mother crocheted of fine ivory yarn and run through with pink ribbon. I was not a docile child; one story goes that I screamed so loudly in the hospital nursery that I was always fed first. My baby book notes that I logged more than one hundred miles of backpacking around Alaska in my first year, including a crossing of the Resurrection Trail. When I was nine months old, my parents and close friends bundled me up and strapped me to their backs and cross-country skied among the deep tracks of moose and the marks of scurrying porcupine into another Forest Service cabin for my first Christmas. The story goes that I woke up screaming in the subzero temperatures in the dark of night because I was too hot, and my father bumped his head on the upper bunk jumping up to tend to me.

I was born on the Ring of Fire. Anchorage, Alaska, sits in the middle of the long, horseshoe-shaped series of oceanic trenches, volcanic arcs, volcanic belts, and plate movements circling the Pacific. There were nights I woke to the lurching and shuddering of the earth, the sudden subterranean slide of the coastline away from the steadily moving Pacific Plate. Dad would round us up to stand beneath the downstairs doorways until the quake passed. Eight years before I was born, the Good Friday earthquake of 1964 crippled the state. The Pacific Plate shifted suddenly under the Northwest Plate, the earth buckled and cracked, and houses and buildings were ripped in two, some falling into the sea. Buildings shook as far away as Seattle, and the earth in Houston temporarily surged four inches. Geologists say that for weeks, long period-waves traveled the earth, with seiches—sloshing water as in a bathtub, but on an oceanic scale—reported as far away as South Africa, and that aftershocks from this quake continued for a year. After I was born, other than the odd object falling off a shelf, earthquakes never caused harm.

But perhaps I should have seen the signs. I was born on the Ring of Fire. I had always thought of myself as born in Alaska. This distinction makes a difference.

I started life with two parts of me in conflict: the part that drew rainbows and unicorns, and the part that wanted the carpentry sets Max and Ned received when Sam was born instead of the tea set I was given. We moved from the military base to a midcentury split-level house in the foothills of the Chugach Mountains when I was only a year old. The walls were decorated with Alaskan art, and a large gold velvet sofa sat in the living room. Our meals were made of the more limited provisions available in Alaska: frozen vegetables and powdered milk and Tang and otherwise heavy but not epicurean Midwestern-inspired fare. I remember one egg casserole made with Spam. My mom decorated my room in orange and green. As a toddler and a young child, I could sit for hours drawing on paper without other entertainment, something that must have proved handy for my parents. I started music lessons when I was three and studied piano for a decade. My mom taught my brothers and me to read chapter books before we were five, and read us Greek myths and history for fun between hauling us to piano lessons and soccer games. We were allowed little TV, if any, as children, only occasionally watching
Mister Rogers
or
The Electric Company
on a tiny black-and-white television in the kitchen. Later we watched
Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom
as a family once a week. I remember an occasional episode of
Gilligan’s Island
well after it was syndicated, and sneaking out to watch over the balcony when my parents bought a small color TV to watch the miniseries
Shogun
and
The Winds of War
.

I started swimming at six, running at eight, and skiing as a teenager. The summer I was ten, my mom dropped off my brothers and me for lunchtime runs with Dad from his midtown office, and we ran 10k races on the weekends. At one point Sam had the third fastest time in the nation for a five-year-old running a 10K.
He may have been one of three five-year-olds who ever ran a 10K. I continued swimming competitively most of the way through high school. In many ways, our life in Anchorage was not unique from those who lived in any other American city of similar size, other than an appreciation for and acceptance of the wildness around us remembered by the regular visits of moose, the practice of earthquake drills in elementary school, and an awareness of Cold War fears that manifested in my drawing designs for houses with complex bomb shelters.

When I was ten, we moved to the house I remember as my home, farther up the hillside, surrounded by more than an acre of forest. It was modern for its time in the early 1980s. We moved at the height of the economic boom, which collapsed only a few years later, at the same time my parents’ marriage fell apart. I anchored myself in that home in the midst of our family’s disintegration. It sat in the foothills of the Chugach, which formed a fortress, a high protectorate. The mountains stood as sentinels, points of reference no matter where I might be. I had the smallest room, but one with windows on one side and a balcony with a sliding glass door on the other, looking out to the mountains behind, the city below and the sea beyond. Orion, the hunter, marched across the sky at night, club and shield in hand, belt glistening, from the shale arêtes of the Chugach, above the spruce and birch forests, and around our house to the rainbow strip of reflection that was Cook Inlet, across which Mount Susitna, the Sleeping Lady, reclined. Ursa Major and Ursa Minor traversed the sky too, Big Bear and Little Bear. I had read the myths: Zeus turning the beautiful goddess Callisto and her son into bears and flinging them into the sky to protect them from his jealous wife, Hera. Part of Ursa Major made up our Alaska state flag, the Big Dipper, “eight stars of gold on a field of blue,” as the state song goes. Polaris, the North Star, is one of those eight stars. This world around me, mountains, stars, and sea, told me I was safe. As did waking in that room to find
my door nudged-open in the night by my dad roaming the house to check on everyone while we slept.

Dad introduced us to the Chugach Mountains as we grew. One year we ascended Flattop as the weather came in; Dad carried Sam, still a small boy, on his shoulders on the way down as we tried to beat the storm, losing his hat to the wind. I cried unreasonably. I’d liked Dad’s hat, and it was gone, and we raced the rain to the car and I felt the urgency of danger. Another year we kids scrambled up the rocky O’Malley Peak with Dad, reaching the ridge and then false peak after false peak, finally signing our names on the ledger in the hard plastic tube at the top. I knew the contours of the mountains and valleys on each side of Flattop Mountain, and had camped in the mountains beyond what was visible from the city in each direction.

My mom divorced my dad when I was twelve, explaining that she just didn’t love him anymore. This act shattered an idyllic childhood into shards that continued to slice our souls and each other decades later, and introduced doubts like many-headed monsters into my pubescent and faltering sense of self-worth. She reveled in her newfound freedom. Dad bent under the weight of betrayal and financial hardship.

The things I remember:

Eating out at Denny’s frequently, and Dad jumping up from his Asian stir-fry with the other men in the restaurant when a domestic dispute turned physical in the parking lot; unlike the other men, who clustered inside the door, Dad continued through and pulled the man away from the woman to allow her to escape.

Eating at a little Italian restaurant called One Guy from Italy in a strip mall off Northern Lights that looked just like every other strip mall sprouting across the oil-money-infused and minimally zoned city of Anchorage. Dad inevitably got tomato sauce on his tie.

Dad trying to make lasagna for us one night, and becoming irate when I told him he needed to boil the noodles first. That’s when I started to help cook.

Dad trying to do our laundry, and shrinking my favorite striped Esprit outfit, which wasn’t supposed to be put in the dryer. That’s when I started doing my own laundry.

Having to put Tampax on the shopping list for Dad in silent mortification, which became exponentially worse when he brought home the wrong kind.

I remember the insidious financial strain as Dad navigated a divorce and ran a small law practice that, like the rest of the Alaskan economy, was utterly dependent on oil revenues and staggered under the oil crash of 1986 and the crippling state recession that followed. I remember Dad showing up to our swim practices exhausted from work and sitting in the bleachers, his shoulders sagging with fatigue. I remember asking Dad why he was doing so much with the swim team board and at church when he was so tired and working so hard. “‘To whom much is given, much is expected,’” he quoted with a tiredness that ran deeper than I could comprehend. I always knew him, throughout his life, to volunteer in meaningful and behind-the-scenes ways, and he did so with joy, his manner and execution learned from his parents before him. I remember putting together a party for Dad, trying to imitate what we had seen grown-ups do in earlier years, wanting somehow to acknowledge his Herculean efforts. I hung a sign in the kitchen that said “We love you Dad!” and cut up carrots on a platter served next to a bowl of ranch dressing.

I learned quickly, as kids do, how to adapt, constructing a facade of success that I wielded like a shield. In high school I was president of the debate team, captain of the swim team, and editor of the literary magazine, which we laid out with paper and glue. I figured out what I needed to do to get mostly A’s in honors classes at my large public high school, and didn’t do more. I learned that if I kept busy by doing a lot of things and doing them well, I didn’t have to think about anything I wanted to avoid; I could get the attention a first child craves, and be excused from things I wanted
nothing to do with, like family counseling. If I performed, I was left alone. As soon as I had my driver’s license at sixteen, I moved my small stash of things from my mom’s house, where we spent every other week, back up to Dad’s house on a day when he was in Kodiak for business.

Five years after the divorce, Dad met and married Kathy, an elementary school teacher only a couple of years younger than he was with a quick smile and an easy laugh, light-blue eyes, and rosy cheeks. They married the summer I left for college. I regarded my new stepmom with considerable wariness. I went along when she scheduled a color assessment for me, coaxing me beyond my tomboyish ways. I wore the clothes she bought. She treated me as a daughter at times and a friend at others. I welcomed and resisted both. Though craving maternal affection, I didn’t want to recognize the shift in dynamics in our household. We weren’t any of us so different from the bull moose that wandered across our lawn. We sparred to establish dominance—my father as parent, me as teenager growing into an adult; my stepmother defining her new role, me resisting change to the precarious settlement of earlier family brokenness. We left a few antler prongs on the ground. Once focused exclusively on us kids, Dad found happiness with his new wife. I was too self-absorbed to worry about parental satisfaction. My one aim in life had been to please my father. I didn’t know what to do if he was no longer as interested. The dynamic of women in a household could chafe through civility at times to reveal a hardness as sharp as the shale on the Chugach behind our home.