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

  The rest of us were so suddenly happy—from all the berries, our friend’s unexpected boldness, and her generosity in sharing it with us—that everyone smiled big, goofy grins. The Andrew Lloyd Webber tape ended. The photographer, a Brownie troop leader acting just like Annie Leibovitz on a shoot for Vanity Fair, shouted, “Music, music, my model needs music!” Someone flipped the cassette. Our friend asked if she looked okay. “Am I too fat?” she said. We assured her that she looked better than okay. She was beautiful.

  And then it was time to go home. None of us wanted to be late to pick up our kids on the first day of school. On the way down the hill we talked about what we had written on the school registration forms in the space labeled “mother’s occupation.” A couple of us had left it blank, one had put “homemaker,” and another had written “housewife.”

  “I didn’t like those options,” the Brownie leader–turned–fashion photographer declared. “I wrote ‘domestic goddess.’ “

  I still can’t sew, and my girls bake better cookies than I do, but if I look back over my life since I left my parents’ house all those years ago, it would not be incorrect to say that my primary job has been homemaker. It would also not be incorrect to say that I have taught myself, with the help of friends, to be a pretty good one. In a few months, on a dark Sunday afternoon, I’ll open a jar of salmon, get out the cream cheese, jam, and bread, and bring everything into the living room for the family to share by the fire. It might look like an ordinary snack, but I know that the salmon and jam are preserved with more than smoke and boiling water. They are products of the love and skill of generations of women. As my thickest dictionary, the unabridged edition of The Random House Dictionary of the English Language, makes clear, subsistence, “the source from which food and other items necessary to exist are obtained,” is also “the quality of having timeless or abstract existence.” My friend was right. There is more than just a bit of the divine in food gathering and preparation. We are all domestic goddesses.

  DULY NOTED

  Joe Parnell is inviting friends to his college graduation party. Joe, who is graduating with a degree in general studies from the University of Alaska Southeast next month, said the May 5 bash will feature music by his rock band, Animal Rights; a performance of an original play, Don’t Bite the Man Who Feeds You, by Joe’s theatrical group, Querulous Theater; and a French-kissing booth. “I’m going to read some of my senior papers too,” Joe said.

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  Presbyterian Pastor Pat Jeffrey had some explaining to do on Sunday morning when he stood in the pulpit with a black eye. The pastor, who plays for the Alaska Native Brotherhood team, said tournament play is intense. “It got a little rough under the basket Saturday night.”

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  Ed Hays said the small house he built at Paradise Cove twenty years ago just isn’t big enough anymore. So the former teacher is expanding to accommodate his wife, Yuko, and sons, Kai, four, and Mori, three. Ed, who taught woodshop at Haines High for many years, is back here after teaching English for ten years in Japan.

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  John Schnabel said he’ll make it to his eightieth-birthday bash, scheduled for Friday at the Haines Elks Lodge, even if he has to go in a wheelchair. John is recovering from bumps, bruises, and broken bones suffered in a thirteen-foot fall off the roof of his Porcupine lodge Tuesday afternoon. John, who still actively mines his Porcupine gold claims, was shoveling snow off the roof of the log building when he slipped over the peak. He hooked his heels over the ridge cap and hung there for a while before letting go and sliding off the eave. “It’s a long way down,” John said. “You’ve got time to think about a lot of things.”

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  Who You Callin’ Crazy?

  TOM EDITED MY first obituary for the Chilkat Valley News, and ever since then he’s been the little voice on my shoulder saying, “Wait a minute, is that the whole story?” He also still poses the question in person, too, sometimes so loudly that we argue. Tom believes what they told him in journalism school—that all good reporters comfort the afflicted and afflict the comforted. I’m not sure this is the best approach when it comes to obituaries. And I tell him so. Often. We’re still great friends. For my fortieth birthday, the newspaper staff gave me a T-shirt with TO HELL WITH YOU, TOM printed on it.

  Tom grew up in Philadelphia, was educated in Catholic schools, and still wears his old Marquette sweatshirt. He worked in Anchorage at a big paper before coming to Haines and has edited the Chilkat Valley News on and off for fifteen years. Every few years he quits, determined to get either more of a real job or less of a real job. Lately Tom has been working for the United Fisherman of Alaska in Juneau as an information specialist. He researches fisheries issues and writes reports. (My neighbor Steve, the paper’s other reporter, is serving as editor these days.) For now, Tom and his wife, Jane, live in Juneau, although they haven’t fully moved there. Tom sees the out-of-town job as a way to pay for the improvements on his true home, the place at Rutzebeck Lake here in Haines that he calls Camp Weasel.

  Tom built the cabin himself, more or less. He’s not very handy. We learned that he couldn’t run an outboard motor when we were fishing and asked him to drive while we fed the net into the water. How, we all asked, can you live here and not know how to drive a skiff? It seemed impossible. Tom has been building his dream home for a long time. Last year’s Christmas-card photograph was pretty much the same as this year’s: About half the siding is on. It’s a ten-by-twelve-foot shed-roofed cabin with a loft and big windows in the woods off the same old logging road as our own weekend cabin. The last e-mail Tom sent from Juneau ended with “By the way, how’s the Rutzebeck road?” What he wanted to know was whether he and Jane would need mud boots or snowshoes to get home next time they’re here.

  Tom’s cabin is not a miniature log showplace. It’s your basic plywood, shingle, and blue-tarp shack. I mean that in the best sense of the word. Like our cabin, there’s no phone, water, or electricity. Tom doesn’t have an outhouse, but there is a woodland privy area that’s clean and secluded, and he has plans for a Japanese-style waste-composting system. Tom also built a substantial picnic table for guests.

  He’s no Henry David Thoreau, but sometimes I think the life Tom imagines at Camp Weasel is pretty close to the philosophy of living deliberately espoused by the reclusive New Englander. Thoreau’s book about his own simple shack, Walden, or Life in the Woods, has never been out of print since it was first published in 1854. Tom isn’t the only one, it seems, who likes the idea of a cabin in the woods.

  Remember the Unabomber? Tom’s cabin was winterized about the same time Theodore Kaczynski’s attorney put the Montana cabin on a flatbed and drove it to California in an attempt to get Kaczynski declared legally insane. They argued that anyone who lived in a place like that for twenty-five years must be nuts. The cabin looked all right to me. Moreover, as Tom pointed out with genuine admiration, it didn’t fall apart when they picked it up and put it on the truck.

  We moved Tom’s cabin, too. Because he started it in the winter, when there’s no direct sun on the hillside, he faced his window in the wrong direction. When summer came, he realized that he was still looking out into the shade. One morning a bunch of us jacked it up off its pilings and spun it around to catch the light.

  Alaska probably has more cabin dwellers per capita than any other state. So when I read about Kaczynski’s neighbor telling a Washington Post reporter that “he let things go” in the yard, it was easy to imagine the general disarray—the unstacked firewood ready for splitting, the crates of cans and bottles intended for recycling, the empty fuel drums, the old truck, the spare for parts. It’s not Currier and Ives, but it is a familiar sight in rural Alaska. A cabin is also the first home for many of us, and for some the last. Now people Outside were suggesting that anyone who lives like that must be crazy.

  Well, some of the craziest people I ever met weren’t cabin dwellers at all, but lived in Alask
a’s biggest city. When Chip and I first came to Alaska we drove to Anchorage and, mainly because of a sled dog puppy acquired on the way, we couldn’t find a place to live. We ended up sharing a split-level tract house in Anchorage with about eight other people.

  Patty and Mark had left jobs in Florida for Alaska when they’d heard you could get $1,000 just for living here. Money from the state’s oil revenues goes into a permanent fund that pays shareholders—every Alaskan man, woman, and child—an annual dividend. That first year the checks were worth $1,000. They have been as high as $1,700.

  Armed with a master’s degree in forestry from Yale, Chip found work cleaning movie theaters at night (he used a high-pressure hose to blast gunk off the floors) and splitting firewood by the cord during the day. I applied for a receptionist job at a downtown hotel, and after I’d presented my résumé—Quaker prep school and Middlebury College graduate, sailing instructor on Long Island Sound—the woman in charge snapped her gum and said, “But honey, what can you do?” I didn’t get the job. Instead, I worked as a waitress in the same place where our new housemate Mark was the bartender. That winter, Chip began working for a small rough-cut sawmill, then met a friend who got him high-paying manual labor in the North Slope oil fields. He helped lay out a ten-acre drilling pad at fifty below in total darkness. In between trips, Chip ran a loader and his friend drove a dump truck as they contracted to remove snow from shopping center parking lots.

  Mark and Patty rode their motorcycles from south Florida to Anchorage with a Saint Bernard in a sidecar. Dressed in a snowmobile suit, Mark used the motorcycle to get to work all winter. Our other housemates were just as colorful but not as much fun. Jed drove a Cadillac Eldorado with steer horns on the hood. He wore cowboy boots and slicked back his hair. He worked up on the North Slope, too, at Prudhoe Bay. Whenever he came home, he bought us all New York steaks for dinner. The aging stripper who stayed with Jed every now and then and sometimes lived in his room when he was working had a deaf son who supported them by stealing TVs and stereos. The other housemates, Karen and her two young children, spent a lot of time with her boyfriend, Mickey, at her (our) place, because he had a wife and kids of his own across town.

  As soon as we could, we got out of there.

  We found a cabin for rent south of the city, overlooking the water and mountains on the other side of Cook Inlet. It was so high on the mountainside that the only trees were scrub spruces that grew like a bonsai forest. The cabin had a woodstove and electricity, but no water. There was a propane toilet in the closet that actually burned human waste. Don’t ask. We took showers at a Laundromat in town and filled jugs of water for drinking and dishes at a fire hall on the way home.

  We could ski out the back door, and in the spring, we hiked up to Rabbit Lake. We liked that cabin enough that a decade later we built our own in Haines, up at Rutzebeck Lake, about a quarter mile from Tom’s place. It took two summers and a pair of hired carpenters plus me to finish off the twenty-four-by-twenty-eight-foot timber-framed cabin. The kids all have bunks in a loft and Chip and I have a small bedroom, and there’s another little one for company. Downstairs there’s a wood cookstove and a fireplace. We now have a little electricity. Chip attached a generator to an exercise bike that has a battery wired to it so that when you pedal you charge it enough to listen to a small CD player and radio. He also hooked one small reading light to it. Otherwise it’s kerosene lamps and propane wall lights. Chip also figured out a way to pump water from the lake to a holding tank in the eaves so that we have gravity-fed running water in the summer. In the winter, we haul it in buckets from the stream.

  We have seen bear cubs run down the trail past the woodshed, and moose climb out of the lake and walk by slowly in the woods, their great antlers somehow avoiding all the branches around them. We have whiled away hot summer afternoons drifting in the canoe and skated waving sparklers at midnight on New Year’s Eve. We don’t live there full-time, but we are crazy enough to want to.

  I GUESS THE truth is that there are crazy people in the woods and crazy people in the cities and crazy people in between. Recently I wrote an obituary for Speedy Joe, who did live out in the woods full-time. Joe, who was forty-eight, had apparently been dead for weeks when he was found frozen in his bed. Most likely he’d been on a drinking bender. He lived in a cabin at 38 Mile and worked odd jobs; he was a sometime mechanic and drove a truck. He wore a red union suit all the time, often with nothing else but boots and a wide-brimmed hat. He never took off the hat, not when he slept and not when he got his hair cut. “Uncle Joe was a very unconventional guy,” said Kristina, his niece from Anchorage, in what Tom and I agreed was the understatement of the week.

  Speedy Joe was born in Washington and came to Haines with his father. He attended grade school here for a few years before moving to Wrangell. Joe returned to Haines in his teens and after his father’s death made the upper valley his most permanent home. He was nicknamed Speedy Joe because he never did anything quickly. But his physical pace belied a mental quickness. “He was a good mechanic, and real sharp,” said his friend Henry. At the 33 Mile roadhouse, where Joe was an irregular customer, Kathy, the owner, felt bad when she heard the news. “Joe had his problems,” she said, “but I always enjoyed talking with him.” Speedy Joe came and went, sometimes for years at a time, sometimes visiting his nieces in Anchorage or friends in Juneau. Other times no one is sure where he went. Kristina and her sister, Shaunna, were Joe’s only family. Kristina said her uncle was a true hermit who would be out of touch for months at time. Now at least she knows where he is: in heaven, making St. Peter smile just to look at him in that hat and those long johns. “It’s like he was born in the wrong century. He just didn’t fit in this world, even as bright as he was. We loved him, but I don’t think anyone really understood him.”

  I ALWAYS GET a little kooky myself when the first snowflakes mix with rain in September. Winter is coming and suddenly this little town seems too small. I want to get out of here, but the firewood hasn’t been split or stacked, and the boat is still in the water; I haven’t gotten around to covering the garden with seaweed yet. I’m still in bed, stewing about all this, while Chip is singing in the shower across the hall. It’s a B. B. King tune. “I gave you seven children...” he wails “... and now you give them back.” Christian knocks on the door telling B. B. King to hurry up. I should have made my own bathroom when we built this house.

  Before everyone leaves for school, Eliza, who spent the summer kayaking around Kuiu Island and has just learned she’ll be traveling with the Haines High debate team to Hawaii this fall, stands on the porch holding a mug of herb tea with both hands and looking out across the water at the mountains asks, “Why would anyone want to be anywhere else?”

  I want to be somewhere else—for just a few days. In fact, if I don’t go somewhere else soon, for at least a little while, I’m going to lose what is left of my mind. Once I realized, months ago, that Eliza would be home through the first week in October, when the lumberyard slows down enough for Chip to leave, and that she could watch the other children, I dropped hints about just the two of us taking a trip. In twenty-one years of marriage, Chip and I have spent seven weekends away from the family. Six were to run marathons and one was for his laser eye surgery. When I first suggested that we could leave town without running twenty-six miles or having a medical emergency, Chip looked confused. This had never occurred to him. When I brought it up again, hoping he’d think of Seattle, Chip said we might as well head up to the cabin. Our cabin is eight miles from home. We can run there. But it was still better than nothing. On Tuesday, when I told him that spending the weekend at the cabin would be a fine vacation, he grinned and looked down. “We’re leaving town Friday morning and we won’t be back until Monday night and I’m not telling you where we’re going.”

  And he didn’t tell me we were going to Vancouver, British Columbia, until we were halfway to the airport in Whitehorse. Driving as fast as we wanted through one of the wild
est places on earth, where it wouldn’t be surprising to see a mastodon or even Mr. Big-foot himself walk out of one of the glacier valleys, I thought about how this 260-mile trip always makes me feel like Elizabeth Taylor in Giant. Especially when I have sunglasses on.

  In Vancouver, our room was on the eighteenth floor of a downtown hotel. It was an urban treehouse—two walls were glass, and we looked out on high-rises and rooftops. After the first day, I was convinced that when the kids grow up we should come here for the winter—or longer. In our children’s wedding announcements, we would be the “Lendes of Haines, Alaska, and Vancouver, British Columbia.” How hip would that be? A lot hipper than we are. The town has running trails, boat harbors, great ethnic food, stores, museums, music, brewpubs, fresh fruit, and a ski area. But the best part of Vancouver was that the streets were full of people we didn’t know. We did notice all the homeless people; they seemed more familiar than the well-dressed city folks and tourists. One gray-bearded raving man in a Greenpeace shirt looked just like a certain tireless Haines environmentalist. A saxophone player made us think of our friend Pizza Joe. If he’d been on that corner playing music and giving his passionate speeches about litter and manners, people who didn’t know him might have made the same wide arc that we gave the sax player.