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  Praise for If You Lived Here, I’d Know Your Name

  “Delightful.... The writing is simple yet graceful.... A pleasure to read.”

  —USA Today

  “Lende offers touching stories about neighbors with whom she shares wedding celebrations, potluck dinners, tears for missing fishermen—all the joys and sorrows of family life in a remote town.”

  —People magazine

  “[A] beautiful, funny, compassionate story.... When, now and again, your reading is interrupted by tears, they will be the sweet sort.”

  —Michael Perry, author of Population: 485

  “Part Annie Dillard, part Anne Lamott, essayist and NPR commentator Heather Lende introduces readers to life in the town of Haines, Alaska... subtly reminding readers to embrace each day, each opportunity, each life that touches our own and to note the beauty of it all.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Dense and powerful.... Tiny jewels that, gathered together, create a stunning effect of pure, dazzling light.”

  —The Grand Rapids Press

  “This is something tender and brave—using death as an introduction to lives and loves and fabric of community in a northern town. Heather Lende provides powerful witness.”

  —Seth Kantner, author of Ordinary Wolves

  “Heartfelt, homespun essays about life.”

  —Seattle Post-Intelligencer

  “Lende’s quiet voice resonates long after the book is finished.”

  —Booklist

  “A true tale of ordinary people who do extraordinary things with (and to) one another in one of the most beautiful backwaters on Earth.”

  —Tom Bodett

  “Full of joy and insight, humor and sobering truth.”

  —Salem (OR) Statesman Journal

  “Written with ease and empathy, this is both about maintaining a household in Alaska and about being at home in the world.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Absorbing and reflective.”

  —Library Journal

  “Lende presents a remarkable sense of place.”

  —The Oklahoma City Oklahoman

  “Heather Lende is the perfect frontier guide—clear-eyed and big-hearted, tackling family and community and life and death with humor and hope.”

  —Stewart O’Nan, author of Wish You Were Here

  If You Lived Here, I’d Know Your Name

  News from Small-Town Alaska

  HEATHER LENDE

  Published by

  ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL

  Post Office Box 2225

  Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

  a division of

  Workman Publishing

  225 Varick St.

  New York, New York 10014

  © 2005 by Heather Lende. All rights reserved.

  First paperback edition, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, June 2006. Originally published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill in 2005.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  Published simultaneously in Canada by Thomas Allen & Son Limited.

  Design by Anne Winslow.

  “Alaska’s Flag” by Marie Drake, copyright © 1985, reprinted by permission of the University of Alaska Foundation. All rights reserved.

  Lines from poem 1741, “That it will never come again,” reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Ralph W. Franklin, ed., Cambridge, Mass.; The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1998 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

  Lines from Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1986, reprinted by permission.

  Material in some of these chapters was published in different form in the Anchorage Daily News, the Christian Science Monitor, and Alaska Magazine and broadcast on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, Monitor Radio, and the Alaska Public Radio Network.

  Most of the “Duly Noted” entries were written by Heather Lende; however, some may have been written by past and present newspaper staff. Printed by permission of the Chilkat Valley News.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Lende, Heather, 1959–

  If you lived here, I’d know your name: news from small-town Alaska/

  Heather Lende.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-56512-316-8 (HC)

  1. Haines (Alaska)—Social life and customs. 2. City and town life—Alaska—Haines. 3. Outdoor life—Alaska—Haines. 4. Frontier and pioneer life—Alaska—Haines. 5. Lende, Heather, 1959– 6. Lende, Heather, 1959–—Family. 7. Lende, Heather, 1959–—Friends and associates. 8. Haines (Alaska)—Biography. I. Title.

  F914.H34L46 2005

  979.8’2—dc22 2004066036

  ISBN-13: 978-1-56512-524-7 (PB)

  10 9 8 7

  For Chip

  We bring our years to an end, as it were a tale that is told.

  —from Psalm 90

  CONTENTS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INTRODUCTION: We Are What We Want to Be, Mostly

  If Things Hadn’t Gone Right

  Nedra’s Casket

  Everyone Knew Her as Susie

  The Sinking of the Becca Dawn

  Domestic Goddesses

  Who You Callin’ Crazy?

  Learning Moments

  Angels All

  Mother Bears

  Peculiar Awe

  Grand Old Dames

  Black Mariah’s Lunch Date

  Leaning into the Light

  Just Say “Unknown”

  A Whole Lot of Love

  Mating for Life

  If I Saw You in Heaven

  When Death Didn’t Stop for Angie

  Alaskans Dear

  Fire and Ice

  Curtain Call

  I Am Not Resigned

  Acknowledgments

  My heartfelt thanks to the people of Haines for giving me so many stories to tell, especially Doris Ward, who began the “Duly Noted” column I inherited, and to these friends, neighbors, and editors both near and far: Bonnie Hedrick, Tom Morphet, and Steve Williams at the Chilkat Valley News; Lee Heinmiller at Alaska Indian Arts; Liz Heywood from the Babbling Book store; James Alborough and Sarah Posey of Bear Star Communications; George Bryson, Kathleen McCoy, and Mark Dent at the Anchorage Daily News; Audrey Wynn and Greg Allen at National Public Radio; Tom Reagan, Sara Terry, and Duncan Moon from the Christian Science Monitor and the former Monitor Radio; and everyone at Algonquin, especially Amy Gash. Amy heard me on the radio, called to ask if I thought I could write a book, and then helped me do it with wit, wisdom, and grace. Thanks also to my family for giving me the confidence and time to write—from my in-laws, Joanne and Phil Lende, and my parents, Bob and Sally Vuillet, to my children, Eliza, Sarah, Christian, Joanna Jeanne, and Stojanka, and a friend who is like family, Linnus Danner. Above all, thanks to my husband, Chip.

  Over the past four years, five people in Haines have asked when this book would be done every time they’ve seen me—which was almost daily: postmaster Wayne Selmer, artist Jenny Lyn Smith, librarian Ellen Borders, and my neighbors Don and Betty Holgate. Here it is. I sure hope it’s worth your wait.

  INTRODUCTION

  We Are What We Want to Be, Mostly

  I HAVE LIVED in Haines, Alaska, all of my adult life but there are still times, especially winter evenings when the setting sun washes over the white mountaintops, the sky turns a deep blue, and the water is whipped into whitecaps by the north wind, that I can’t believe my good fo
rtune. It’s so wild and beautiful that all I can do is walk outside my house and stare. Looking south, I can see the red cannery at Letnikof Cove on one side of the inlet and Davidson Glacier on the other. Out front, Pyramid Island breaks the surface where the Chilkat River meets the sea. Behind it, steep mountains rise right up from the beach. On this fading winter evening, standing in the snow in my yard, I think I hear a wolf howl up the Chilkat River Valley and hold my breath, hoping to hear it again. But I don’t. Maybe it was just the wind. I turn around and look back at my house—our youngest children moving in front of lighted windows, the teenagers doing homework at the table, my husband, Chip, reading by the woodstove—and my heart swells in my chest like a balloon.

  It took us a year to build our shingled home on the beach down Mud Bay Road, a mile and a half from Main Street. From my bedroom window, I’ve watched bears wading in the channels along the shore in the summer. When I walk the dogs to the cove in the fall, the icy tidal flats are covered with bald eagles. The oily, smeltlike fish called eulachon return to the river in the spring, and the sea lions chasing them are so loud that they wake me up from a sound sleep. I see the light on across the road and, even though it’s two in the morning, call my neighbor Linnus. The sea lions woke her up, too. She and her husband, Steve, walked to the beach in their pajamas. The sea lions were having a wild party down there, Linnus says.

  JOHN MUIR CAME to Haines in 1879 with a friend, who established a Presbyterian mission where the city of Haines now sits. Muir, one of the first non-Natives to explore this region, afterward advised young people not to come to our part of Alaska. He warned that they’d have to either stay or know that every other place they’d see for the rest of their lives would be a disappointment.

  But just because it’s beautiful doesn’t make Haines an easy place to live. It is isolated, cloudy, and cold. Everything from land to groceries is expensive, and there’s little work to help with the high cost of living. There are twenty-four hundred residents in the Chilkat Valley, although I don’t think they’ve ever all been home at once, and probably a third leave in the winter. There’s no hospital and the high school has just ninety-three students. There is no shopping mall, no McDonald’s, no movie theater—heck, we don’t even have a stoplight. Tony Tengs, a friend of mine who grew up here, says there’s nothing wrong with Haines “a couple thousand people couldn’t cure.” Still, half of the residents don’t want any changes at all. We have terrible community fights every time there’s a local election or public hearing. We usually split the vote on everything, fifty-fifty. I won’t sign any more petitions, no matter what they’re for.

  On a map of Alaska, Haines is up near Skagway, at the northern tip of the Inside Passage, an archipelago that stretches five hundred miles from the southern end of Prince of Wales Island, near Ketchikan, to the head of Lynn Canal, the largest fjord in North America. We call this region Southeast, in the same way some eastern states are called New England. Most of it is very wet, and all of it is covered with big trees. To get anywhere from here you have to drive hundreds of wilderness miles. In the winter the Chilkat Pass into Canada is often closed because of heavy snow. Anchorage is eight hundred miles away. Whitehorse, the capital of the Yukon Territory, is about two hundred and sixty miles. It’s possible to keep going past Whitehorse and drive all the way to Seattle, but few of us do. Instead, we take the ferry or fly ninety miles to Juneau, the state capital—a small town by most standards, with thirty thousand people—and catch a plane south. Every time I get on a jet to or from Juneau, I know people. The planes are different from the ones that cross the Lower Forty-eight. They’re noisier, because everyone is talking to everyone else.

  My sister-in-law came to Haines for Christmas, some years ago, from her home in Virginia. She took a plane from Dulles to Seattle, and then had to wait in Seattle two days for snow to clear in Juneau so the Alaska Airlines jet could land. On the way up it stopped in Ketchikan and Sitka. Each time they screeched to a halt on those short island runways, she braced herself against the seat in front of her. Local passengers cheered when the plane stopped. In Juneau she learned she couldn’t fly up to Haines because of snow and fog, and was advised to take the ferry instead. After four hours of cruising by waterfalls, glaciers, and forested coastline she docked in Haines just as the day’s six hours of light were being replaced by inky darkness. The first thing she said after walking up the boat ramp to greet us was “People have a lot of nerve living here. Maybe you shouldn’t.”

  Well, it’s too late for that. John Muir was right. Chip and I both grew up on the East Coast, met in college, and drove to Alaska when we graduated. This is our home now, and I have a feeling it always will be. In many ways Haines is a place out of time. Chip and I don’t lock our doors, or even take the keys out the car. Ever. We don’t expect to read the daily papers from Juneau and Anchorage on the day they are printed; they rarely get here on time. In the winter, when snow or rain or lack of daylight limits flights to and from Juneau, they sometimes don’t arrive at all. We haven’t had TV at our house for months because a new water tower blocked the transmitter for the one free channel we could get from Anchorage. I have never seen Survivor.

  I get my wider world news from the public radio station, which plays NPR early in the morning and country music and rock and roll all afternoon. I have the radio on all the time. The eclectic mix is the soundtrack to my life. Everyone reads the Chilkat Valley News, our weekly paper, all eight or twelve or sixteen pages of it (depending on the season, the ads, and the letters to the editor), from headlines to the unclassifieds. When someone is selling a house or boat and only the phone number is listed, we find out who it is by running a finger down the few pages that the Haines listings take up in the southeast Alaska phone book. The two reporters joke that most readers are checking for mistakes, since they already know the news. I took over the paper’s “Duly Noted” social column from its creator, Doris Ward. When her husband died, Doris needed a break from recording who went on vacation or who bid on what at the fund-raising auction for the Alaska Bald Eagle Festival. It wasn’t much of a leap to go from reporting on the living to chronicling the dead, so I began writing the obituaries, too.

  Death is a big part of life in Haines. As they do everywhere, people get cancer and have heart attacks. Teens die in car wrecks on the Haines Highway. One middle-aged man even succumbed to a weird flesh-eating bacterium. But there are many accidental deaths, too. This is a dangerous place. One man died falling off a cliff while goat hunting. Another was lost diving for sea cucumbers. Skiffs capsize in icy water, planes disappear in the mountains. Sometimes people vanish without a trace.

  The house next door to ours is empty now. The neighbors crashed their plane on Douglas Island last summer. They died instantly, along with two passengers: their best friend’s newly wed son and daughter-in-law. They were the second owners of the house. The couple who built it came here from New Zealand after buying a local air taxi service. The wife flew me back and forth to Juneau for my prenatal appointments. She had gray hair and five children. She died when her plane hit a mountain on a flight over the ice field between Glacier Bay and Haines. No wonder I’m afraid to fly.

  In Haines, funerals are community affairs. I’ve been to memorial services in churches, gardens, the Elks Club, the Alaska Native Brotherhood Hall, and the American Legion. At Paul Potter’s funeral, held in the high school gym, the pastor invited everyone to come up in front of the coffin and sink a basket for Jesus. Paul was a popular youth basketball coach who had recently joined the Haines Cornerstone Foursquare Gospel Church. Even people who don’t normally attend church turn to God for comfort when someone dies. Being with men, women, and children who have lost the person they loved most in all the world only days before yet still open the door and invite me in, ask if I want honey in my tea, and then thank me for helping them when I leave is all the proof I need that God is good.

  In most places, families write their own obituaries for local papers—or they
send in an even shorter death announcement to larger newspapers. They pretty much say what they want. When my grandmother died back East, my parents gave the New York Times her incorrect age, by mistake, but the Times printed it just as they wrote it. Only celebrities or prominent citizens get the kind of treatment I give everyone who dies in Haines.

  I spend as much time as I can researching a life but, with a weekly deadline, invariably I’m talking with friends and family heartbreakingly close to the death. Often within a day or two. Mostly I just listen. The details I need for the obituary are usually given right away, but the visit lasts much longer. By the time I’m ready to write, I know a lot about the person, and their friends and family. Much more than we’ll ever print in the paper.

  HAINES IS THE kind of town where if you live here long enough you recognize everybody and everybody recognizes you. High school basketball games are the biggest thing happening on most winter weekends, and on Sunday morning the church parking lots are full. So is the driveway at the Buddhist-style meditation hut. Picking up the mail at the post office (we all do; there is no home delivery) is a chance to socialize. If I arrive at the post office in a bad mood, I usually leave in a good one after chatting with everyone in line. Haines is so full of local color that if they ever made a movie about us, no one would believe it. There’s an artist who lives with his wife, a weaver, in a fanciful cabin overlooking Rainbow Glacier. He keeps a dead temple pit viper in a big jar filled with vodka and takes sips of the “snake juice” every now and then to ward off illness. He’ll offer you some if you stop by. The controversial new Presbyterian pastor’s arms are covered with tattoos. The sewer plant manager rides a Harley-Davidson and has a ZZ Top beard. Recent mayors have included an artist, a heavy equipment operator, a Tlingit Indian woman, a Scotsman with a burr in his voice, and a white-haired former Vermonter. One school principal was a Roy Orbison impersonator; he dressed all in black and sang “Pretty Woman” at fund-raisers. Dave Pahl has collected so many hammers the Smithsonian sent him their old life-sized manikins to help him display them in action—right in his house, which doubles as the Haines Hammer Museum. I haven’t even mentioned the Mormon spelunkers, the one-legged lady gold miner, or my friend Tim, a salmon fisherman and carpenter who spent eleven years building a classic thirty-six-foot reproduction Herreshoff ketch, doing all the work himself, from sewing the sails to melting lead from old car batteries for the keel. When it was done, he asked me to teach him how to sail.