If You Lived Here, I'd Know Your Name Read online

  Della was quiet. It was okay, she said. For me, okay was perfect. Then she said there was one thing she’d like me to take out. She asked that I not quote the nice old lady from her mother’s church. “She doesn’t like Indians,” Della said. I mumbled something about not knowing that, which I hadn’t, and scratched the words out dramatically.

  Then Della asked that I use both photographs; the younger one was her favorite. I said I was sorry, but my editor (and good friend, Tom Morphet) would never print it. “No forty-year-old wedding portraits,” Tom had told me the first time I’d brought one like that back. “No one will know who the hell it is.”

  I explained it differently to Della. “We can only use one picture,” I said, “and since your mother was so well liked and respected by so many people who may not recognize her name but will know her face, it is important to show what she looked like, you know, now.” But since she was dead, I added, “Sorry, I mean, then.” Della had me flustered, and I suspect she knew it. My ancestors had never met hers, but that didn’t absolve me of guilt about what my race had done and in many ways is still doing to Native Alaskans and Native Americans. I wanted Della to know I was respectful as well as trustworthy. It might not be much, but writing a good obituary for her mother was the best I could do. Printing an out-of-date picture, though, was impossible. She said she was disappointed but she understood. She shut the door without saying good-bye. I tucked her mother’s photograph safely inside my coat and stepped off the porch.

  Last time it had been Paul Wilson’s heart that was showing; this time it was mine. I wanted to raise my hands and testify—thanking God for all these good people who forgive the past without forgetting it. I almost shouted Thank you right out loud. Thank you for Della’s face, the Wilsons’ kindness, eulachon, and for strong hearts beating in rhythm with ancestors. Thank you for Ravens and Eagles and halves made whole.

  But I didn’t. I never do anything like that. I am, as my mother likes to say, a “stiff-upper-lip” white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. That is my culture. So instead, I stood in the mud next to my car and realized that the only thing that keeps us going is love. I knew it then like I knew it was raining. I got a little off balance, the way you do when you’re on a boat. I thought, It’s as if we are all moving through this world on a big old ship, holding on to one another as we cruise up the generous river of life. The water that floats us is always new, yet it flows in the same direction, over the same old sand.

  DULY NOTED

  About seventy local fishermen, their wives, and guests celebrated the season at the Fishermen’s Ball. The annual event was held at the Harbor Bar, with a big buffet spread on the pool table and live music from Skagway’s Reverend Neil Down. The party lasted until the band quit at two A.M.

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  Kristin Bigsby and Frank White planned to spend the time between last week’s gill-net opening and this one planning their August wedding. Instead they were mending Frank’s net after a humpback whale swam right through it. “It was brand-new,” Kristin said, “which made it even more of a bummer.”

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  Gillnetter Norm Hughes is back from a Hawaiian vacation. He spent some time with other Haines vacationers, the Jacobson family, before visiting his mom, Colleen Hughes, at her home in Maui. Norm says he couldn’t sit still on the beach so he took a diving class and is now a certified rescue diver.

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  Gold Medal Tournament basketball games were broadcast for the first time to Haines on Juneau’s KINY radio station. The champion Haines Merchants team includes the Fannon brothers, Jesse McGraw, Danny Pardee, Stuart Dewitt, Chris Dixon, Andrew Friske, Daniel Martin, and David Buss, who all played for the Haines Glacier Bears in the high school state championship game not so long ago. Steve Williams called the games, which were broadcast to Angoon, Kake, and Yakutat as well.

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  The Sinking of the Becca Dawn

  MY OLDER DAUGHTERS, Eliza and Sarah, are working as deckhands on a gillnetter, fishing mainly for chum salmon eggs, or roe, which will be sold to a caviar company. The captain is a boy about their age who just graduated from Haines High School. They’re learning a lot about fishing, and about life and death.

  Gill-net boats, or gillnetters, are usually between thirty and forty feet long and catch salmon in nets two hundred fathoms long and thirty feet deep. A line at the top is threaded with oval corks to keep the net floating. A heavier lead line on the bottom keeps it straight, like an underwater fence. One end is attached to a drifting buoy, the other to a hydraulic reel. Some gill-net fishermen call themselves “fish chokers” because that’s how the salmon die. The nets catch them by the gills and they suffocate.

  It’s seven A.M. on the first day my teenage girls have been home in four days. They arrived unexpectedly in the middle of the night. Their boat’s net got tangled in the prop and torn and now needs to be repaired. While the captain and his parents were working on the boat the girls showered, slept a few hours in their own beds, and now have clean laundry tumbling in the dryer. At breakfast, they tell us all about their latest adventure. “It’s like everyone is surprised that these blondes can be up to their butts in dead fish, working,” Sarah says between bites of toast.

  “Don’t make eye contact, don’t make eye contact,” Eliza laughs, demonstrating how they quickly hand over the roe to the buyer’s tender, without looking at the flirting crewmen. The girls pitch the salmon carcasses onto a barge that will haul them to a fertilizer plant in Washington.

  When our friends asked if Eliza and Sarah could deckhand with their son, I said yes right away. We are Alaskans and live in a fishing town. They should know firsthand what that means. While I won’t let the girls stay out all night with boys, when a young man is captain of a fishing boat it’s different. He’s in charge of $100,000 worth of vessel and permit. He has to make boat payments, buy insurance, and pay license fees—and maybe hopes to earn enough money to pay for college. He can’t afford to mess up.

  Eliza and Sarah have been to a fisherman’s funeral. They understand that working on small boats in the cold ocean is serious stuff. The bloody business of killing fish is hard and dirty work, and there’s not much room on the thirty-six-foot boat for privacy. Fishing around the clock leaves little time for sleeping or eating, and there’s no shower. But, incredibly, they like it. Eliza pours tea and steadies herself against the stove. “Is it just me, or is the kitchen rocking?” Sarah reaches for the jam and shows us the new gash on her chin. It’s from the gut-scooping spoon at the other end of her fillet knife.

  Fishing is mostly about work, but there is some time to play. One evening, Sarah says, their boat tied up with some friends from town. They cooked spaghetti, walked on the beach, and played games that included hanging from the bow and seeing who could do the most one-armed pull-ups before falling in the freezing water. “But the most fun,” she adds, “was firing the AK-47.”

  What was I thinking when I said they could fish? How much do I really want them to know about life and death? “Relax, Mom,” Sarah says, “we were just shooting a rubber glove, not at anyone.”

  I wish I knew the fisherman’s prayer. All I can think of is part of the line on the memorial I’ve seen at the boat harbor: “They that go down to the sea in ships...” I have a feeling the rest of the verse is not very positive. Instead, I silently ask God to watch over my girls, if he gets a break from world peace and AIDS in Africa. It’s a sparkling summer morning, which may be why the memory of a much more urgent prayer hits me like a bad wave and I have to leave the kitchen.

  When the telephone rang at four on that November morning, I ran downstairs to get it, but the answering machine had already begun. I heard my friend Kathy say, “Heather, if you can hear me, pray.” She said that the Becca Dawn, the Nash family fishing boat, was sinking—with three brothers and a friend on board. I didn’t pick up the phone. I sat down on the bottom step and prayed that this was a false alarm. Then, just in case, I asked
God to drop everything else and hold those boys in the palm of his hands. It was an outside shot, but I had seen enough three-pointers made by the crew of the Becca Dawn at the buzzer in high school and city-league basketball games to know that their odds of making it were better than you’d think.

  Their parents, Becky and Don, are our son’s godparents. Don is a fisherman and a carpenter. Becky is a quilter and teaches Sunday school at the Presbyterian church. There are six Nash children all together—Lee, Aaron, and Olen are biological and Yongee, Song, and Corrie were adopted from Korea. Becky refers to them as a six-pack of “half domestics and half imports.” The Nash kids were raised on boats. Just out of high school, Lee and Olen both skippered their own trollers, which are bigger boats than gillnetters and use tall poles that drop out over the water trailing lines of hooks, with their brothers Song and Aaron as regular crew.

  I woke up Chip, who headed straight for the Nashes’ house with our neighbor Steve. Then I called Kathy back to learn what had happened.

  AS THEIR BOAT foundered in fifty-foot seas, Lee, Song, and Olen Nash and their friend Jesse McGraw scrambled into neoprene survival suits, sent Maydays, and switched on the emergency locator beacon. They were thirty-five miles offshore with more than twenty thousand pounds of halibut on board. They were young, twenty to twenty-five, and, except for Jesse, experienced fisherman. They all knew enough about the sea to believe that without the life raft they’d never make it until daylight. It was unlikely anyone would be out looking for them in the storm. That’s when a wave hit the bait shed that carried the life-raft canister and it broke up, blowing the raft off the stern.

  Olen signaled over the din that he’d swim for the raft. He had been at the helm when the Becca Dawn had heaved over, and he may have felt responsible. He was the youngest, but the best swimmer. A lifeguard at the Haines pool, he liked to surf in the frigid waves on this same empty coast. He tied a line around his waist and secured the other end, so he wouldn’t be swept away.

  After Olen dove in everything went bad fast. The wheelhouse windows blew in, and the fifty-four-foot steel-hulled Becca Dawn, named for his mother and father (Becky and Don), sank bow first. Song yelled last Maydays into the radio. Lee couldn’t find Olen’s life rope, so he frantically cut every line in the tangle made by miles of halibut-fishing gear. About sixty coils one hundred fathoms long with big hooks every eighteen to twenty feet broke loose in the green water on the back deck. Lee had put his survival suit on over wet clothes, and the hooks punctured the foam rubber legs and feet. His numb fingers dropped the knife. Quickly, Jesse found another knife, and just as Lee thought they had Olen’s line and were ready to cut it, the blade dropped and the Becca Dawn went down underneath them, sinking in the darkness with a weird glow. The lights were still on.

  Olen was nowhere in sight.

  Jesse, maybe because he didn’t know better, was sure they’d be rescued. The big red-haired kid, who’d starred on Haines High regional championship teams and later on our town’s Gold Medal championship basketball team, held on to the remaining Nash brothers as huge waves slammed them together and pulled them apart. He found a piece of plywood from the wreck and pushed Lee on top of it. While it wasn’t enough to keep him completely out of the water, it did at least allow him to rest a little. Song, whose suit was too big, was puking seawater and struggling to keep his head above water.

  The Coast Guard did hear the emergency beacon, and called Don Nash at his home in Haines to make sure it wasn’t a false alarm. Don called Kathy’s husband, Dr. Stan Jones, and Kathy called everyone else she thought should know. Bad news travels fast.

  The Coast Guard sent a helicopter into the night, toward the emergency signal. Nearly three hours later, it found three of the boys tossing in the debris from the wreck. Jesse had managed to flip the switch of the strobe light on his survival suit with his teeth, never letting go of his friends. He had one in each arm. Lee was so tired and felt such relief he almost passed out. Jesse had to keep him from collapsing into the waves. Song saw the helicopter, but he had no idea how they would get into it. What they didn’t know then was that the seas were too high, the winds too strong, and the conditions too deadly to send a rescue swimmer in to help them.

  The Coast Guard practices these kinds of missions on calm days in tight-fitting wetsuits. The metal basket is lowered right to the role-playing “victims” who have tried this on land first. They climb easily into the metal basket bobbing on floats and sit with their knees against their chests for the quick ride up. In training, it takes minutes. In real life, it can take hours. In a recent rescue in the Gulf of Alaska, two helicopters ran out of fuel trying to pull up a boatload of drowning fishermen. A third helicopter finally saved what remained of the crew.

  Song, Lee, and Jesse were cold, exhausted, and numb with shock, and they’d never tried this before. The wind screamed, spray stung their eyes, and the waves were taller than their three-story house. The Coast Guard crew had taped some glow sticks to the supports and the cable holding the basket, so it would be visible in the darkness. Later, Song said they should have had one of those lighted signs, like in an airport or on a big scoreboard, telling them what to do.

  Song went first, diving for the basket, which was sliding sideways down a wave like a runaway toboggan on a snowy hill. He grabbed it but was flung back into the sea as it whipped up. It was lowered again, and this time Song held on tight and pulled himself in, because his life depended on it. After watching Song struggle, Jesse knew Lee didn’t have the strength left to make it to the helicopter on his own. So he swam to the basket with Lee, heaved him in and jumped on top, crossways, to keep him there. They spun up to safety together. The Coast Guard rescue team continued to look for Olen until their fuel ran low, then took the boys to the clinic in Yakutat.

  WE DIDN’T KNOW all that when Kathy urged me over the phone, “Pray hard.” I did, and then went in the kitchen to make cinnamon rolls to bring over to the Nashes. It was mostly men during the predawn hours because Becky was in Sweden, Olen’s older sister, Yongee, was in Anchorage, and his little sister, Corrie, was on an exchange program in Australia. A fourth brother, Aaron, had stayed behind at the last minute with Olen’s girlfriend, at the Nashes’ sportfishing lodge in Elfin Cove, where the Becca Dawn was based. It’s hard to imagine a man with a wife and six children facing this without any immediate family near, but that’s how it was. Women bearing casseroles and cookies would come later. Before Becky returned, they would clean the house and stock her cupboards.

  The Nash home is rarely empty, and this night was no exception. Don’s two hunting dogs slept on the couch, a cousin was staying in one of the upstairs bedrooms, and so was Jay, a guy who had hitched a ride with Don to the mainland from Elfin Cove. No one knew his last name or how long he planned to be there—but he was helpful, silently doing the dishes and taking out the trash as a steady stream of friends gathered around the woodstove in the kitchen.

  Dwight, a friend of Don’s who spends the better part of the year out on his own boat, the sister ship to the Becca Dawn, fishing with his wife and two young sons, pinned a map to the wall and traced the trail of the emergency position-indicating radio beacon (EPIRB). When activated, the floating emergency beacon sends a radio signal up to a satellite and relays its coordinates to the Coast Guard. This was how they knew the Becca Dawn was in trouble, how they found the crew, and how they hoped to find Olen. The Coast Guard figured the boat would drift in the same direction that a survivor or lifeboat would. Dwight didn’t say much. Like everyone in the room, he hoped for a miracle. The Coast Guard searched the fishing grounds for two days, covering a thousand square miles, before they declared Olen lost at sea.

  The next Sunday the bell in front of the Presbyterian church tolled twenty times, once for each year of Olen’s life. Inside, slides projected on the wall showed baby Olen in his father’s arms, Olen as a toddler on the boardwalk, and then all grown up—a handsome young man smiling in the rain, holding a tub of freshly fi
lleted halibut. We all saw Olen snowboarding in the mountains above town, and holding a wounded kestrel falcon he’d rescued and fed with ducks he shot down by the river. The last slide, of the Becca Dawn trolling poles out in front of the setting sun, broke any hearts that weren’t already cracked. Sure, everyone knows fishing is dangerous, and the perils of the Alaskan seas enormous, but a brave young fisherman is still a fine thing, a son any mother would be proud of.

  After the church service, we walked through fresh snow to the fishermen’s memorial, overlooking the boat harbor. Dr. Jones read a letter from the governor expressing his sympathy and praising Olen’s courage. As he spoke, a crabber pulled into the harbor, gulls calling and diving in its wake. One of the wilder Nash cousins from Juneau walked out on the rocks. He turned his back on us and faced the sea, hitting a skin drum with his hand, in the same rhythm as heartbeats. It was too windy to light the candles Becky wanted us to hold, but we sang the Navy Hymn, a little wobbly at first, but clear and strong by the final verse:

  Our brethen shield in danger’s hour;

  From rock and tempest, fire and foe,

  Protect them wheresoe’er they go;

  Thus evermore shall rise to Thee,

  Glad hymns of praise from land and sea.

  Afterward the Alaska Native Brotherhood Hall was packed for a community potluck. The food was like that at a wedding: the best fishermen could offer, crab and shrimp. Becky thanked everyone for coming and invited us up to the microphone to share memories of the youngest and quietest of her sons. As did many people, I looked away. It was just too hard.

  But Becky wouldn’t give up. She asked us to please celebrate Olen’s life, not mourn his death. “Olen died in a minute,” she said, “but he lived for twenty years.” Kathy made the first move. She marched up next to Becky and told us how Olen used to rearrange her Christmas decorations. It took her two tries to finish her story, to tell us how she has blocks that spell NOEL and Becky’s son always made them spell OLEN.