If You Lived Here, I'd Know Your Name Page 13
The residents of the nearest town, Yakutat, are worried that the backed-up fjord will overflow into Situk Lake and Situk River, wrecking sport, commercial, and subsistence fishing and flooding the airport. But they can’t do anything about it. Trying to stop a glacier is, well, like trying to stop a glacier. In the not too distant past, a hundred years ago, a nearby Tlingit village was destroyed by another advancing glacier.
On the way home, we take a friendlier route along the coast. There are set-net camps dotting a long, sandy beach. Instead of using big boats, Yakutat fishermen anchor gill nets on the shore and float them out into the bay, tending them from the beach with small skiffs. A group of rafters, at the end of an eleven-day Alsek or Tatshenshini River trip, wait on the shore of Dry Bay for their flight back to civilization. Just beyond their camp three bears play in the waving green grass. We head up into Lituya Bay, to see the new trees marking the line from a giant wave that filled the bay after an earthquake nearly forty-five years ago. It was the largest tsunami recorded in modern times. Then we fly up over the Johns Hopkins Glacier and down the other side into Glacier Bay. Two cruise ships look like bathtub toys. From here, it’s a short hop over the Davidson Glacier to the familiar landmarks of home: the red cannery, muddy Chilkat Inlet, our house, and the Haines airport.
When Chip asks about the trip that evening, I tell him the glacier was magnificent, too grand for words, really. Everything was so rough, new, and foamy white; it looked as though God had just shaped piles of rocks into mountains and valleys with a bulldozer and a backhoe and filled the gaps in with shaving cream. Chip would love the beaches of Yakutat. I also realize that I wasn’t afraid at all, and didn’t feel sick except way up high above Lituya Bay when we were climbing over into Glacier Bay between the pointy peaks above the ice fields. When we hovered up there the only thing I could think of was that Patsy Cline song “I Fall to Pieces,” which is what happened to her when the plane she was in crashed. I have got to quit listening to so much country music. What I should do is ask Ken to show me how to steer the thing next time we go up, so that “in the unlikely event of an emergency” I’ll be able to soar east with the dawn and west with the night, or at least get us back to Haines.
DULY NOTED
Maisie Jones, Nowyta Badgley, and Joan Snyder are back from a trip to Greece and Turkey. Everyone’s favorite place was the Greek island of Thíra. Maisie hiked to the top of the Acropolis on her birthday. (She’d rather not say which one.) She did say the trip was “wonderful,” though the ladies are all “extremely glad” to be home.
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Klukwan residents Lani Hotch, Marsha Hotch, Ruth Kasko, and Denise Kahklen recently completed training at the Sealaska Heritage Foundation’s Kusteeyi Institute. Lani and Marsha learned methods for teaching Tlingit language lessons to adults and children. Denise and Ruth took part in Chilkat-blanket-weaving and spruce-root-basketry classes.
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Mimi Gregg, director emeritus of the Alaska Community Theater Festival, and her daughter K. A. Swiger of Ketchikan attended the International Community Theater Festival at the Mendel Center of Lake Michigan University. The festival featured fifteen plays, including a Russian Romeo and Juliet and a French version of Chekhov’s The Marriage Proposal. Mimi says not knowing what the actors were saying wasn’t a problem. “The plays were so well done you got the gist of it.” Mimi is busy reading scripts and scores for the Lynn Canal Community Players, who are hoping to stage another musical this fall.
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The next time you fire up the hot tub, give Elsie Mellot a call. The octogenarian was honored with a gift of a bathing suit at last week’s Chilkat Valley Historical Society meeting. Members gave Elsie the aquamarine one-piece suit after she used the old “no bathing suit” excuse when begging off a soak at a previous historical society meeting.
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Grand Old Dames
ABOUT TEN YEARS ago I traveled to the Kenai Peninsula with Mimi Gregg for a state community-theater festival board meeting. We flew to Anchorage and rented a car for the two-hour trip south to Soldotna. On the trip, we talked about marriage and family, and Mimi told me that her long marriage to Ted was not an accident. He always let her try new things, and whenever they had a big fight her rule was, Will this matter in ten years? Usually it wouldn’t. “Take the long view,” Mimi said. “It works.” Mimi drove that wet, winding road through Turnagain Pass like Mario Andretti, chatting as if we were at her kitchen table. I thought I was going to die. I begged to take my turn at the wheel, pleading the case that my young children needed a mother. Mimi called me an “old fuddy-dud.” She was seventy-four.
Mimi’s friend Mildred Meisch also used to drive fast. She would cruise around town in her vintage Mustang or, later, silver T-bird and invite tourists to come for a ride, promising to show them the sites for free. She may well have been Haines’s first tour guide, spiriting delighted and no doubt increasingly alarmed tourists to her friend Nowyta’s place ten miles from town. “She druugg more people into my cabin than I can count,” Nowyta declared in her Texan drawl. “She knew any friend of hers was a friend of ours, and everyone was Mildred’s friend.”
Mildred, whose own Texas accent, heavy silver jewelry, tight red leather pants, and cowboy boots made her hard not to notice, died of congestive heart failure. She was eighty-eight years old. “That little woman was all heart,” Clint, the butcher and Mildred’s fellow Texan, told me. He said he knew summer had arrived when Mildred came in and ordered her chili beef. Mildred first saw Haines when she was eighteen. She came from Texas with her cousin, a military doctor, to care for his children while he was assigned to Fort Seward. She fell in love with another army doctor, H. M. “Doc” Meisch. They were married four years later in Texas. The Meisches returned regularly on vacation. When Doc died in 1980, Mildred decided to spend more time in Haines. As her friend Lola says, “She was a guest who came for the summer and stayed twenty years.”
After visiting Haines with Mildred and Doc, Nowyta (pronounced No-wheat-ah) decided to make Haines a permanent part of her life, too. Nowyta and her husband, Abe, summered here until he retired from Exxon, and then they moved up for good. When Abe died suddenly, Nowyta was lost. He was the love of her life for fifty years. She had to learn how to make the bed, she told me, because she had never done it by herself before. She sold their cabin, called “Happy Ours,” and now spends part of the year in Texas with her daughter and the rest in a rented house on Officers’ Row, next to all the Greggs, with an entourage of southerners—friends and relatives from Texas and the Mississippi Delta.
Every July they host the Mississippi Blues Party. Which may explain how I ended up singing “The Beer Barrel Polka” with a retired public health nurse, the Episcopal priest, a tourist from Mississippi, and a friendly guy I’d never seen before who was wearing a T-shirt with a picture of an automatic rifle on the front commemorating some sort of militia warrior weekend. My guess was that one of these old gals around me picked him up hitchhiking to town from the ferry terminal and invited him for supper. We were the opening act. I was there without the rest of my family partly because they all went to a fund-raising spaghetti dinner at Mountain Market. Another reason was that my children are shy about attending a party where the youngest people were Nowyta’s nephew Fireman Al, his wife, and me. There was one teenager from next door, but she didn’t stay too long. Al is the son of Nowyta’s husband’s identical twin brother, Babe. Abe and Babe, and their families, lived in matching log cabins on the beach out at Lutak.
It rained all day and was still wet when Nowyta’s party began, so while some hardy souls had mint juleps, iced tea, and home-fried salty pecans on the front porch, most of us crowded into Nowyta’s living room, balancing paper plates of exotic southern food; no local moose, salmon, or halibut here. Instead, we ate black-eyed peas, sweet-potato salad, spicy okra with rice, jalapeño relish on corned beef, pecan tarts, pralines, and Ritz crackers with a sweet lemon spread
(it tastes better than it sounds). It wasn’t a potluck either; they made all this themselves.
People were dressed in whatever we Alaskans think Mississippians look like. One guy wore a wide straw hat and new denim overalls. Several women had big hairdos. Nowyta was in a long flowered skirt and matching shawl, a southern belle, her tanned face accented with bright lipstick and shiny earrings. Like her friend Mildred did, Nowyta has a double-take kind of style that the hokey costume couldn’t disguise.
The Mississippi Blues Party is participatory. You can’t just sit there and drink and eat. Guests provide the entertainment, though some are more prepared than others. Nowyta divided us into sections, counting off one to eight. There were four or five in each group. When none of us in Group 1 volunteered to go first with a song, joke, or story, we were assigned “The Beer Barrel Polka.” She handed us the music. Our hearty attempt loosened up the crowd, and the rest of the evening’s entertainment rolled forward.
Erma Schnabel and her friend Helen Tengs, representing the crew from the Schnabels’ Big Nugget Gold Mine, sang “You Are My Sunshine,” holding dancing battery-powered sunflowers that hummed the tune. Maybe it was all the food, or maybe I drank my julep too fast, but I started thinking about another remarkable old dame who really could have stolen this show.
Josephine “Porcupine Jo” Jurgeleit, a one-legged lady gold miner who died last year, was a great storyteller and especially loved to talk about her adventures. She and the Schnabels owned the only active placer mines in the historic mining district on Porcupine Creek, north of town. Jo threatened to settle most of her disputes with a rifle, and just about all of them were with John Schnabel over their mining claims. For years, Jo kept up a running feud with the Schnabels. The bullets she fired whizzed passed John’s head on many otherwise still woodland evenings. When she failed to kill him, she took John to court. John says he never had much chance against “a one-legged widow,” even if she was well known for her grit and independence.
Jo was profiled in numerous publications, including National Geographic. When she was seventy-three and still digging for gold, Jo told the Alaska Geographic Society Quarterly, “I love the mining game.... I feel sorry for people who live in the city and never go out in the woods.” During one illness, Jo even got a get-well card from tycoon J. Paul Getty. How he met her, I’ll never know.
Jo was almost killed six years ago when she backed her pickup truck off a cliff while moose hunting near her claim in Porcupine. She was eighty-five then. John rescued her. I would have loved to have seen the expression on his face as he stood over the ravine looking at her truck hanging on a tree and realized that her life was in his hands. John called his crew, and they got a winch and a loader and hauled her truck up and pulled her out of the crushed cab. John drove the twenty-five miles to town as fast as he could while Erma sat in the back of the pickup with the bleeding Jo on her lap wrapped in blankets. Jo might have died that day if the Schnabels hadn’t been there. Instead, she took her last breath a few years later in an uncharacteristically ordinary way, at a rest home near her daughter’s house in Soldotna.
Jo never had a prosthesis. Waiting to cross Main Street, she sometimes whacked the side of a truck with her crutch to get the driver to stop, while one empty pant leg flapped in the wind. I used to imagine the story she would tell about losing that leg. Maybe, I thought, it had something to do with a bear attack, or a rockslide, or even a shootout. The truth wasn’t nearly as interesting. Writing her obituary, I learned that a misdiagnosis had led to an infection and the leg had had to be amputated. It must have broken her rugged heart.
But it hadn’t slowed her down much. “Telling Jo she couldn’t do something,” her sister Hazel told me, “was like putting a red flag in front of a bull.” Jo came from a pioneering Haines family. She and her siblings were so similar that we just called them all by their maiden name: the Vermeire sisters. Besides Jo and Hazel there was Emma, Clara, and Mary. With Jo gone, Hazel is the only one left now. She still lives alone in a picture-perfect farmhouse with a steep gable and a front porch. Sitting in the spotless living room last year, Hazel told me all about her sister, peppering her speech with goddamns and sons of bitches, and lewder expressions that didn’t match her appearance. One unrepeatable story made me laugh, and she smiled, enjoying the “Did this nice little old lady really say that?” look on my face.
Like her sister, Jo had a quick wit and a sharp tongue. The most polite way to describe her was offered by her friend Jane, a retired shopkeeper who gets her white hair done at the beauty parlor and dresses up for lunch at the senior center. She and Jo used to go “four-wheeling” together in Jo’s truck on old mining roads in the Yukon. “Many of Josephine’s stories were risqué,” Jane said, “and her language was colorful.” That is how you put something that some people might consider a criticism into an obituary that you want the family to still be able to clip and save. You get someone who loved the deceased to say it. Then it becomes a compliment.
Jane was at the party, sipping a julep and talking with Mimi on the sofa. They both looked so small. All these great old dames make me want to be like them when I grow up. I want to spend my life in the same place with the same friends and, after all those years in the same community, still surprise people. This crowd at Nowyta’s bash had me looking forward to old age. I can’t wait to peer wisely over the top of my glasses, shake my gray head, and share contrary opinions punctuated with an occasional expletive. I’m going to bring down the house at parties like this when I’m eighty. I may even wear lipstick and get some red leather pants.
Laughter from Father Jim’s awful religious joke brought me back to attention. It was about a group of missionaries from several different denominations who were caught, cooked, and eaten by cannibals. “The next morning,” the Catholic priest said, “they had the first ecumenical movement.” Everyone groaned. A banker from Fort Worth made balloon animals and hats, and then a Haines elementary school teacher who is also an opera singer belted out “Summertime.”
Nowyta called the next day, to make sure the Chilkat Valley News would cover her party in “Duly Noted.” She told me they’d had a memorial service in San Antonio for Mildred. Her ashes will be mixed with Doc’s, and half will remain in Texas, but the rest will come back to Alaska and be scattered over Haines. No doubt Nowyta will host the party afterward.
“I love ya, darlin’,” she signed off in her singsong Texas lilt.
“I love you, too,” I said.
DULY NOTED
Martha Jones may need a vacation to recover from her summer visit with daughter C.J. Jones. Martha flew into Anchorage on June 10; then she and C.J. spent two days driving to Haines, where Martha volunteered at the museum and for the chamber of commerce. For Martha, the highlight of her trip was volunteering as the race marshal for the last checkpoint of the Kluane-to-Chilkat International Bike Relay. “Mom had a lot of fun being a marshal,” C.J. said. “She just enjoyed everything.”
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An unexpectedly quick onset of labor led to a relatively rare home birth in Haines last week. Emmanuel Raymond Hansen was born on Thursday to Valina and Scott Hansen at the family’s Cathedral Peaks home. “We had planned to have a home birth down in Washington, but when I went into labor we decided it was best not to go anywhere,” Valina said. After a doctor’s consultation, family members, including sisters Felicia and Victoria and brother Scotty, as well as two helpful friends, brought Emmanuel into the world. Everyone is doing well, Valina said. “You work when you can and nap when you can.”
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Scott and Mandy Ramsey welcomed about thirty-five family members and friends to their outdoor wedding ceremony at Moose Meadow on August 9. Neil Ramsey, the groom’s father, married the couple. The newlyweds don’t plan to honeymoon anytime soon. Scott is busy working as a mountain and rafting guide until September. The couple thank all the friends who provided skiff transportation to the meadow and erected the wedding tent.
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Black Mariah’s Lunch Date
IN THE OLD Joy of Cooking, the recipe for fish chowder began with fish stock. To make it, you take a fish head, bones, tail, skin, a cheesecloth bag of special herbs, a cup of good dry white wine, a twist of lemon zest, six white peppercorns, four cloves, a shallot, a celery stalk, and a carrot. You add two cups of water and simmer everything for fifteen minutes. Cool, strain, and then clarify it by adding a beaten egg white and the crumpled shell. Simmer it slowly until the whites and shell make a crust on top of the liquid. Don’t stir it. After an hour or so, let it cool and strain it again through a wet cloth into a clean pot. Now you are ready to start making the chowder.
Some people would say this is an awful lot of trouble for a bowl of soup. They might even say to themselves, “Oh, forget it, I’ll just make an egg salad sandwich.” Be warned: The perfect egg salad sandwich takes even longer to make than fancy fish broth. Especially if you are home alone on a cloudy late August day.
First, you need hens. You do not need a rooster to have eggs. Hens are like women; they ovulate with or without a mate. If you want to grow hens from baby chicks, you can keep them for a week or two in the cardboard box—the one in which they were mailed from a farm near Anchorage—safe in your daughters’ bedroom. Soon, you will smell them when you walk in the house. If you let them out of the box, they poop everywhere and are harder to catch than you’d think, especially if they get under the couch. If a curious dog picks one up, the chick dies instantly of fright.