If You Lived Here, I'd Know Your Name Page 2
John Schnabel, an old-timer who owns the Big Nugget Gold Mine in the historic Porcupine mining district, is the reason we were able to stay in Haines when the sawmill Chip worked at closed. John offered to sell us a building supply business he also happened to own. Twenty years and five children later, Chip still runs the same lumberyard and hardware store at the bottom of the hill, just across the road from the new cruise-ship dock. There are a lot more tourists than loggers in Haines now.
We have a weekend cabin off an old logging road eight miles south of town. You can get to it in a four-wheel-drive truck that you don’t mind scratching with tree branches, or you can walk. That’s in the summer. In the winter you have to snowshoe, ski, or snowmobile in. Our cabin is built on the former homestead of a writer and Danish seaman, Hjalmar Rutzebeck. The pond it sits on is called, optimistically, Rutzebeck Lake. It’s mostly muskeg and about eight feet deep in the deep end. If you’re brave, you can wade in the muck all the way across it. The shallow water gets warm enough on sunny days for skinny-dipping. Rutzebeck, who came to Haines in the 1920s after jumping ship somewhere on the West Coast, wrote two fat novels about his life here. He shot ducks on the pond and didn’t have a dog, so he dove in and picked them up in his own mouth. He killed a man and was sent to jail in Juneau, but he escaped and walked the hundred-plus miles home over the ice fields, around Skagway, and back down the peninsula. He hadn’t shot the fellow in cold blood. He’d been hired as a watchman for a cannery because people were stealing supplies from the warehouse. Before he went to sleep one night, he rigged a string to the trigger of a loaded shotgun behind a door with a sign that said IF YOU OPEN THIS YOU WILL BE KILLED. A would-be thief ignored the warning and was shot dead.
When asked to sum up his philosophy of life, Rutzebeck wrote something that holds true for most people in Haines today: “We are what we want to be, mostly.”
Most folks in Haines know I write obituaries, so while I’ve spent a lot of time sitting at kitchen tables thumbing through old photo albums, I’ve also had people stop me on the road while I’m out running to tell me something about their friend who recently died. They talk with me about dead people over coffee at Mountain Market, at the back booth in the Bamboo Room Restaurant, in the aisle at the grocery store, and when they are looking for garden tools at the lumberyard. I’ve stood on the sidewalk in front of the bank while a father told me he felt the presence of his dead son, and I quietly left the Pioneer Bar during a wake when two grown sons fought about cremating their father’s remains. One Tlingit elder helped me write her obituary after she’d been buried—I learned everything I needed to know about her, and much more about the first people to live in the Chilkat Valley, from watching a series of interviews Anne Keener had given on videotape at the museum a few years before she passed away. When an older man was dying at home, his neighbors let me know they didn’t expect him to last through the weekend. Just so I’d be ready. Recently, one new widow even called the newspaper office and asked when I was coming over. I didn’t mind at all.
Because I love what I do. Being an obituary writer means I think a lot about loss, but more about love. Writing the obituaries of so many people I’ve known makes me acutely aware of death, but in a good way, the way Emily Dickinson meant when she wrote, “That it will never come again / Is what makes life so sweet.” My job helps me appreciate cookouts on clear summer evenings down on the beach, where friends lounge on driftwood seats and we eat salmon and salads by the fire while our children play a game of baseball that lasts until the sun finally sets behind the mountains, close to eleven o’clock. And it helps me savor the quieter view from the top of Mount Ripinsky on New Year’s morning when Chip and I and our neighbor Steve snowshoe up at sunrise.
Most of all, though, writing about the dead helps me celebrate the living—my neighbors, friends, husband, and five children—and this place, which some would say is on the edge of nowhere, but for me is the center of everywhere.
DULY NOTED
An article in the New York Times travel section recently called Haines “the real Northern Exposure.” Tourism director Michelle Glass said that while the television show may not be how we see ourselves, the comparison can’t hurt. “We couldn’t buy this kind of publicity,” she said. The article also mentioned that women in Haines have a fashion sense twenty years behind the rest of the country. When asked what she thought about that, Michelle pondered for a minute, then said, “No comment.”
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Tammy Hotch took matters into her own hands Friday in Ketchikan where she assisted in the birth of her son Casey Logan. “She reached down and pulled him out herself,” said Tammy’s mother, Linda Terracciano, who watched Casey’s birth at Ketchikan General Hospital’s new birthing facility. Casey joins brothers Steve and Alex and dad Stan Hotch.
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Tlingit Barbie is here. The iconic female doll now comes in a Northwest Native American version, complete with a Chilkat blanket, headdress, and other regalia. The Mattel Corporation sent a shipment of dolls to the Chilkat Valley Historical Society last week. Joan Snyder said the group asked for three but were given eight, so the extras will be raffled off.
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The bad news was that Judy Clark was stuck in Haines three days longer than she’d planned following the eightieth-birthday celebration for her mother, Betty Heinmiller. Planes were grounded because of snow and rain, and there were no ferries scheduled until later in the week. The good news is that she was able to stay and celebrate brother Lee’s birthday as well. “We half-expected it,” Lee said. “It is winter, after all.”
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Brian and Laura Johnson are trying a unique approach to selling the Bear Creek Camp youth hostel in Haines. They are sponsoring a nationwide essay contest, offering the 2.5-acre Small Tracts Road facility to the winner. Entrants must submit a four-hundred-word essay describing how owning the rural Alaskan camp would change their life.
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If Things Hadn’t Gone Right
IT WAS JUST us and the small Haines clinic staff eighteen years ago when I had our second daughter, Sarah. Dr. Jones had the day off, so Dr. Feldman was in charge. Some people called him the “hippie doctor.” He lived on his boat and had a beard. He’d also graduated from Johns Hopkins Medical School. I liked him. The worst blizzard in a decade raged outside. Inside, I was pushing. I had started at one in the afternoon. Two hours later, I was still at it. I pushed and breathed and pushed and breathed and pushed some more. Then I gave up. “I can’t do this,” I said. Chip got pale. Mary, the nurse, who had been a friend just moments earlier, snapped, “Of course you can.” Dr. Feldman was even firmer. He said that the only way this baby was coming out today or, for that matter, any day, was if I made it happen. He was deadly serious.
It was snowing so hard that looking out the window I could barely see beyond the curtains to the log visitor center across the alley. There were no regular planes flying and no ferry. A Coast Guard helicopter flight to the nearest hospital, in Juneau, would risk the lives of the crew. And there might not be time anyway. There was no operating room in the clinic. Dr. Feldman said all these things to me as I tried not to cry. Dr. Jones, who owned the clinic, was coming in the door to help when Mary leaned over and whispered, “Come on, Heather, you can do this.” On the next contraction, I pushed as hard as I could, and out she came with a shout—a healthy baby girl with a head as round as a baseball.
The mood instantly changed. There were smiles all around. We took turns holding the baby and taking pictures. When they heard the news across the street at the Fogcutter Bar, they brought us all sandwiches and cold drinks. Cranberry juice with ice cubes never tasted so good. By six o’clock, we were back home with Sarah’s older sister and my mother. Mom had arrived from New York a few days earlier on a ferry coated with ice. The usual four-and-a-half-hour trip had taken nearly eight as northern gales kept the boat from moving at full speed. Mom was one of the few passengers w
ho didn’t get sick. She also didn’t know it was dangerous at all. She’d never been on the ferry before and assumed it was always like that. She was much more concerned about me having a baby with no hospital nearby.
When we walked in with Sarah, Mom thought I should go right to bed. She was even less happy when I got to the kitchen before she did the next morning. Our friends Steve and Joanne were co-hosting a radio show on KHNS, and they talked on air about the new Lende baby, telling listeners that her name was Sarah (after my mother) and her weight was eight pounds, two ounces. As for the state of the mother’s health: “I saw Heather shoveling the driveway today on my way to work,” Steve said.
I thought my mother would kill me. “He’s kidding, Mom,” I told her. “It’s a joke.” She was not amused. She decided to go out for her morning walk but found she couldn’t get out the door. The snow had drifted up to the second-floor windows. The dog had to burrow down to scratch the top of the door. It would take Chip most of the morning to dig us out. Dr. Jones snowshoed down the hill from his house to make sure we were well. By then, I felt great—like Wonder Woman, like a pioneer. This was better than Little House on the Prairie.
The high cost of malpractice insurance was one of the reasons the clinic quit deliveries in Haines in 1987. Dr. Jones retired shortly afterward. With 620 births in twenty-five years, he’d never lost a mother but hadn’t been able to save a “few” infants, he recollects now. Even so, he says, his clinic had “a very, very good record. I’d put it up against anyone’s in any place.” They did it all without an operating room, fetal monitors, or anesthesia. Dr. Jones had a gift for anticipating who would need help. If he thought there was any reason you might not be able to have a baby in Haines, he made sure you went to Juneau, Whitehorse, or even home to Mother. He informed you of the risks of not being able to fly or drive out in bad weather and of being in labor on a plane or a slow ferry to Juneau. He had great confidence in the Coast Guard helicopter pilots but little cause to call them, even when things didn’t go exactly as planned.
Once, a young woman was in labor—a girl, really; she was still in her teens—when Dr. Jones discovered that something was not right. The baby was coming out feetfirst instead of headfirst. When children are delivered this way, their lungs inflate as soon as they are out of the womb. But with the head still inside, they can’t breathe. If they aren’t pushed out right away, if there is any delay, they suffocate. The only way to make sure that a baby in this position survives is to perform a cesarean section. Dr. Jones had to get his patient to the hospital in Juneau, quickly. Luckily, it was clear and cold, a good day to fly. Dr. Jones called a flying service and chartered a plane.
Pilot, doctor, and laboring mother-to-be flew as far as the Eldred Rock lighthouse—it’s on an island in Lynn Canal about thirty miles south of Haines—before the baby started to come. Somehow, in the back of a rattling, drafty plane as big as a taxicab and half as comfortable, Dr. Jones pulled that baby out in time. Then he tucked it safely inside his coat to keep it warm, double-checked to make sure both mother and child were well, and told the pilot to turn around and head back home to Haines.
Outside actuaries didn’t see childbirth in Haines the same way Dr. Jones did. They saw the potential for disaster and advised insurance companies to make sure that they asked Dr. Jones to pay for it. Alaska Native insurers concluded that it would be best not to take the risk, and all their clients were advised to give birth in the Native hospital in Sitka. Other Haines families couldn’t afford what Dr. Jones would have had to charge to break even. That was the end of that.
THESE DAYS, WHILE Dr. Jones no longer practices, the once young Dr. Feldman is my neighbor. He has two children of his own now and a private office in his house. On Sarah’s eighteenth birthday, I stopped to talk with him on the way back from my morning run. The weather was better than it had been when she was born, but we’d gotten a few inches of snow overnight. Dr. Feldman was out shoveling his front steps. I reminded him that it had been eighteen years to the day since he’d delivered Sarah. “Remember the blizzard?” I asked.
He said he’d never forget it. Then I asked him, a little wistfully, if he thought babies would ever be born in Haines again. His answer startled me. Sarah’s birth, he said, was “the perfect example” of why he’d quit obstetrics. “If things hadn’t gone right...” he began. Then, seeing the look on my face, he changed his tack. “Healthy women who are well prepared can and do have catastrophes. It really isn’t safe,” he said. “I loved delivering babies. Those were wonderful, almost home births, but I hated being so apprehensive, doing acrobatics without a net.”
This week safety was very much on my mind. I had four obituaries to write: An old man had died of cancer at home and three people closer to my age had been killed when their skiff had capsized in rough water between Haines and Skagway. Gathering information for the obituaries of the drowning victims was painful and sad. At the Pioneer Bar, where the woman who died had worked, I learned she had been afraid of the sea. “I just can’t imagine how terrified she was when the skiff turned over in that cold, cold water,” Christy Fowler, the bar owner, said.
The skiff captain, Dan Burnham, had regularly taken his little boat between Skagway and Haines—about fifteen miles—and had never had any trouble. Dan was a lifelong Skagway resident who had recently moved here. “I’m sure he thought it was perfectly safe or he wouldn’t have done it,” one of his friends told me. While I was at the house of the third victim, a retired logger, his grown sons got into a big fight about where their father wanted to be buried. When someone you love dies senselessly, the line between grief and anger gets really blurry.
As I was researching the obituaries for the drowned trio, Jim Hatch lay dying of cancer with a church choir at his bedside. “They sang him into heaven,” his widow told me when he finally passed away late that day. Even though his family assured him that it was all right if he said good-bye, that he was so sick they would understand, and that it was time for him to go—Jim stayed. He hung on so long that the choir started repeating songs. “He liked the music so much he didn’t want to leave,” said one of the singers. Which put me right up against the paper’s deadline.
After turning in Jim’s obituary late that night, I lay in bed, not sleeping. Three bad deaths and one good one, but the endings were all the same. “What’s the point?” I said loudly—twice—to wake up Chip. When he turned toward me, I told him that if the biblical “three score and ten” life span was correct, we were past the halfway mark. “Shouldn’t we stop for a minute and reevaluate here?” I asked. “I mean, why get up and go to work if we’re just dying anyway?”
Chip yawned. “Because that’s what people do,” he said. Then he put his arms around me and fell back asleep before I could argue. I listened to his heartbeat and thanked God I’d married such a steady, good man.
THE SOUTHEAST ALASKA Regional Health Consortium has transformed our former clinic into a million-dollar state-of-the-art rural health center, with three doctors, a dentist, nurses, counselors, and physician’s assistants. When my son, Christian, broke his hand a few months ago, we got to look around. The X-rays came up on a computer, instead of a plastic sheet developed in the closet, like in the old days. Now they are e-mailed to a bone doctor in Seattle for advice. The little brown paneled room where I was in labor with Sarah is long gone.
The new clinic is beautiful, but I miss the old one. Not the building, but what happened in it. I’m sad we can’t begin the circle of life in Haines anymore. My friend Nancy, who had all her four children in Haines, says that even with the new clinic, without a hospital nearby we still have to “accept medical risks just living here.”
It is precisely because Dr. Feldman understands those risks that I took Christian to his new office next door to our house when he complained of terrible stomach pains. I knew Dr. Feldman would know what to do. Dr. Jones had taught him well. My great-grandmother had died when her appendix ruptured. My grandmother lived with us when I
was growing up, so I heard the sad story every time anyone had a stomachache. The day we visited Dr. Feldman, the weather was bad: raining hard sideways on the shore and snowing on the mountains. No planes were flying to Juneau, and the ferry had left a couple of hours ago. The only way out was the road to Canada.
Dr. Feldman prodded, and Christian jumped in pain. An old dog pushed open the door between the living room and the office and walked in, but the good doctor didn’t notice. He scratched his beard and looked out the window. He thought for a long, silent minute and said, “I’m pretty sure it’s appendicitis. If he was my kid, I’d be on the way to Whitehorse.” He guessed we had twenty-four hours from those first bad pains—which meant we had about ten hours—until it might rupture. “And you don’t want that to happen in Haines,” he said. He called the Alaska-Canada border. The officer said it was snowing and the road was closing for the night. We had to leave right then or we wouldn’t get through.
In the summer, on a nice day, you can drive to Whitehorse in four hours, or so I’ve heard. It takes twice that long in a car full of children who never pee in the bushes at the same pit stop. Eliza and Sarah were old enough to be in charge while we were gone, so we didn’t have to take the whole gang. But we were in the middle of a winter storm, and our new snow tires hadn’t arrived. The old ones were fine for around town, but we couldn’t afford to skid off the road right now. We borrowed our neighbors Steve and Linnus’s sturdy truck and, in a flurry of purposefully calm activity, they helped us grab essentials before we kissed the girls good-bye. Following an old Haines rule, we dressed for the weather, not the vehicle. Just in case. It was snowing hard when the officer waved us through Canadian customs. From there, we headed over the Chilkat Pass through 120 uninhabited miles, to Haines Junction, Yukon Territory—population six hundred.