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

  So there I was, defeated, perhaps knocked down a rung or two on the Haines social and political ladder, but back in the school library for the monthly meeting of the Parent Advisory Team. A different parent group. I was not saving the world this time, just going over the student handbook with other parents, page by page. I was asked to report on the thoroughly uncontroversial section devoted to school buses. There are two.

  At the end of the meeting one of the parents said she really thought we should weigh in on the current controversy surrounding the homophobia workshop. Everyone either looked at me or pretended not to. “You all know how I feel,” I said, and they laughed, a little. Then Kathy said, “Homosexuality is a sin. Some studies say it is biological, but just as many say it’s a choice.” She’s the same Kathy whose son is the captain of the gillnetter on which my daughters crewed. The Kathy who called me in the middle of the night when the Becca Dawn was sinking. I know her. I like her. We have a lot in common.

  I took a deep breath and decided to observe everyone as an anthropologist would, from a scientific distance. I didn’t get mad. I explained that for me the workshop wasn’t about the origins of homosexuality. “It’s not about why,” I said. “It’s about being nice to people, about loving your neighbor as yourself.” Kathy agreed that this was important. The school counselor, who is part of the Parents Advisory Team, told us she had been at an emotional faculty meeting earlier that had showed the school staff as divided as the community. Several teachers had threatened to quit if the workshop was reinstated. Others had threatened to quit if it wasn’t. Nobody can afford to lose one of the best jobs in Haines, so I doubted any teachers would really walk out, one way or the other. But I didn’t say so. The counselor observed that any room in town with ten people in it would not be able to come to a consensus on how and when to talk about homosexual issues in school. Echoing the sentiment at an earlier meeting, she said, “Haines isn’t a very tolerant place.”

  When the meeting was over, I gave Kathy a ride home and asked her what she would do if one of her children turned out to be gay. “I’d be sick,” she said. “I’d love ’em, I’m their mother, but I tell you, I’d be sick about it.” After I dropped her off, I couldn’t stop the tears rolling down my face.

  To shake off things like this I need to move—outside. I used to exercise for my body, but these days it’s more for my soul. I strap on my snowshoes and go for my daily outing. I rarely see anyone, and I look forward to the hour or two alone in the woods and ridges above town. I stomp up the trail, thinking, talking to myself, even rewriting the workshop saga. In my head the Boessers come and talk with everyone. They get a standing ovation. Half a dozen students come out of the closet and form a gay student union. Flash forward to years later: one becomes the United States representative from Alaska after the notoriously conservative Don Young retires. I’m feeling much better when I break out into a clearing and look down over the water, mountains, and this tiny place barely hanging on to a cold country.

  I’ll never be a nature writer, because my favorite part of any hike is looking down on homes and boats. From two miles up the trail, Haines seems like a toy town. I try to find my house. I can’t quite see it, but think I spot smoke from the chimney. I can see Chip’s truck parked at the red lumberyard on the waterfront, and the school, the boat harbor, Main Street, and Fort Seward. I think of all those people in all those little buildings, spending their days and thus their lives at work, school, or home, trying to do the best they can to take care of themselves and the people they love. I look right and left and see snowy mountains repeating all the way into the haze over Glacier Bay, whitecaps on Lynn Canal, and the braided channels of the Chilkat River weaving into the sea. I say thank you to whoever is listening and head back down the trail with a much lighter load.

  HERE’S SOMETHING THAT happened a few years after the ugly incident at school. It happened in the windowless basement kitchen of the American Legion, Lynn Canal Post No. 12. It confirmed what I had suspected for a while—that I was no longer an outsider looking in but an insider looking out. For all the flaws, Haines is my hometown now. I was one of the cooks for a fund-raising dinner for my daughter’s friend Haley and her family. Haley was in seventh grade, and had been in Children’s Hospital in Seattle for five weeks with a ruptured appendix. Her dad is a musician and carpenter. Last winter he built a sailboat, a wooden cutter. It’s in the harbor now. He has a rock band with his other daughter, Lesley. They’re called the Truffles. They play at the bars and have made two CDs. Lesley went to Los Angeles instead of college, but she’s home now, making sandwiches and lattes at Mountain Market. Haley’s mom grew up here and works at the post office, so they have insurance. But the emergency Learjet flight from Juneau to Seattle cost over $20,000, and they just don’t have that kind of money. Few people here do.

  The post commander ended up doing much of the cooking. After the other volunteers and I took one look at the ancient black commercial stove and feared it would either catch on fire or blow up if we turned the wrong knob, we called him for help. He arrived a few minutes later and showed us how to work the stove. Then he decided to stay and put on an apron, and began sautéing onions and peppers on the griddle.

  The commander had lots of opinions about what to put in the spaghetti sauce. He’d never used a recipe, he said, and wasn’t going to begin now. I never do either, but dinner for two hundred was so daunting we had figured that the best approach would be to multiply out a Moosewood Cookbook recipe. “Moosewood?” said the commander. “Never heard of it.” Then he dropped a handful of chili powder and handful of salt into each of the five bubbling pots.

  The butcher, Clint, came in to inspect the cooking. He had on a cowboy hat. He tasted the sauce and in his Texas twang said it needed wine. “Should we have wine at a fund-raising dinner?” someone asked.

  “Not to drink,” he said. “To put it in the sauce. Go out and get a nice big bottle of burgundy—that’ll do the trick.”

  The commander said he didn’t know why guys don’t join the Legion anymore. He’s the youngest member, he told us, and he’s fifty-three. One of my friends chopping peppers next to the commander is married to a Vietnam vet, but her husband never says anything about the war and doesn’t have a flag decal on his pickup. He definitely wouldn’t want to share war stories down at the Legion. She didn’t say anything, just finished her task and left quietly. The other volunteers wiped the dishes, hung up their aprons, and went upstairs to set the tables and organize the auction. That left just me and the commander, stirring sauce and boiling noodles for the next two hours.

  I learned that he was in the navy in Vietnam. He said he got in trouble for not making regulation spaghetti sauce. “The navy sauce had no spices, just paste, tomatoes, meat, and one bay leaf for, like, twenty gallons. It was bad.” So he added all kinds of things—onions, garlic, oregano, basil, and lots of salt and pepper. “Guys came back for seconds—that’s when the cook knew I’d done something. He was not happy. I got in trouble for that one.”

  The commander showed me his discharge papers; he keeps them folded in his wallet. He earned three awards—I don’t remember which ones—and told me about his broken back. I said he must have gotten a Purple Heart for that. “Nope,” he said. “Gotta bleed. No blood, no Purple Heart.” I joked that if he cut his thumb slicing mushrooms I’d give him a cook’s Purple Heart. Then he felt the edge of my knife, which I’d brought from home, and said that it was too dull to cut much of anything and started sharpening it. He told me about his heart attacks (two) and his wife (“If she even has a sip of a margarita she gets tipsy”). And how proud he is of the Legion Hall’s new paint and flooring, real improvements done on his watch. We talked about movies, too. We both liked Nobody’s Fool, with Paul Newman and Jessica Tandy, about a good guy in a small town who doesn’t seem to do much of anything but who really takes care of his friends and neighbors.

  It was close to five, and the Legion’s bar was filling up. A woman with a r
aspy voice was bartending, and a handful of regulars sat on their stools. Country music played on the jukebox, and whenever anyone opened the door, warm smoky air went out and cold damp air came in. The flags above the porch were in a wet tangle around the pole. The snow had changed to rain.

  The sauce was finished and we had noodles waiting in warming pans and garlic bread wrapped in foil in the oven. The Bamboo Room Restaurant, across the street, sent over donated salad and dressings. Upstairs, the long folding tables were covered in white paper, and Haley’s friends and their parents were gathering to help serve and clear. Chip was there, too, with the kids. They had already poked their heads into the kitchen to say hello.

  Debbie, who was the main organizer along with the post office crew, came into the kitchen. “I haven’t slept in a week, I’m so worried,” she said. “Do we have enough food?”

  “Yes,” the commander said, in an of-course-we-do-dear-take-it-from-me-I-know-these-things voice.

  “Will people come?” she asked.

  “Yes,” the commander said again.

  “But I want it to be really big, a real success. I want it to mean something.”

  “It will,” the commander said, taking off his apron and heading toward the bar.

  Two hundred and forty people paid ten dollars a plate for spaghetti, garlic bread, and salad. Some, seeing the line out the door, wrote checks and went home without food. Some came during the intermission of the arts council’s annual film festival, the Panhandle Picture Show, featuring local videos. They were laughing over one video made by Doug Fine, a KHNS radio station reporter who hosts a popular call-in show called Talk Around Town. Doug’s video, which he dubbed Talk Around the Cave, poked fun at his own show and our predictably polarized politics. In it, early Haines cavemen fight about everything and there are always two distinct camps—exactly the same way we fight today. You can see it in arguments over bear hunting or the benefits of tourism—and in the uproar over a homophobia workshop—and our opinions are always reflected in the letters to the editor in the Chilkat Valley News and the Eagle Eye. Apparently, one grunting guy in the video does suggest that they all take a break from arguing and share some mastodon meat, but the others caution that while that may sound like a good idea, “it’s not so simple.”

  By eight-thirty the commander, who had been in and out throughout the evening, had given his last order in the kitchen and was smoking in the doorway, inspecting the cleanup from the fund-raising dinner. The stove had been wiped to a shine, the floor mopped, and the pots washed, dried, and put away. I’d worked extra hard on the stove. I wanted it to be cleaner than I’d found it, and I also wanted to prove that I’m not all bad, and that just because I may disagree with the folks at the Legion on some issues, I am still respectful.

  You see, I am someone who some folks at the bar at the Legion don’t think they like. I may even be someone the commander himself doesn’t think he likes. A while before the fund-raiser, I had run for the school board and lost the election to the former Legion commander by fifty votes. He said I was antitourism because I wanted helicopter tours regulated, some wilderness areas set aside as noncommercial, and I don’t think riverboat guides should feed eagles herring so tourists can get better pictures of them. My opponent also brought up the homophobia workshop debacle. He warned of what he called “the new tolerance.” He told the Eagle Eye I had both gay and environmentalist friends. It wasn’t a compliment. When one of my friends told me I had to contest that, I said, “Why? I even have gay environmentalist friends.” He laughed, but we both knew it wasn’t that funny.

  The Eagle Eye supported my opponent. The new editor from down south, a man I had never met, called me—and Chip, which really hurt—slackers and hypocrites in several editorials. The Chilkat Valley News didn’t come to my defense, because they’ve been in business long enough to know better than to ever endorse candidates.

  Until Haley’s fund-raiser, I had never met the new commander, but I saw the recognition of my name move across his face when we were introduced. He didn’t say, “So you’re Heather Lende.” To his credit, he never mentioned that he knew exactly who I was as he told me all about his wife, his navy life, and his cooking philosophy. He never mentioned it as we laughed about the scene we both liked in Nobody’s Fool when Paul Newman drives his pickup down the sidewalk and the overzealous small-town cop shoots at him. I also kept my feelings about more controversial subjects to myself and genuinely enjoyed my day with the commander.

  Every now and then a curious legionnaire poked his head into the kitchen to see who the commander was talking with, only to twitch at the sight of me. Or maybe that was just my imagination. At the end of the evening, everyone complimented all of the cooks.

  Annie Dillard is right about days adding up to make a life. My afternoon and evening with the commander was a good one. A life spent working and living in a small town with people I may disagree with has taught me a lot about humility and forgiveness. And when to keep my mouth shut. Some lessons have been more painful than others, but my days and my life are richer because of them.

  DULY NOTED

  Don “Bosh” Hotch said that memories of his Vietnam service are clearer after a recent visit with a former platoon mate. Bosh, who served as an infantryman for about six months in 1968–69 before being injured jumping out of a crashing helicopter, just returned from a North Carolina reunion with fellow Vietnam veteran James Featherstone. Bosh said Featherstone’s was the only name he could recall from his days in Vietnam, since most of the soldiers went by nicknames. “They called me Cold State because I was from Alaska,” he said. It had been thirty-one years since he’d last talked with a buddy from his war days. “It felt good to know I could talk with somebody from my company. We went through a lot of the same things,” Bosh said.

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  About eighty residents turned out for the Emblem Club’s annual community service auction on Saturday, contributing nearly $6,000 by bidding on donated goods, services, and unique crafts. The fund-raiser supports a wide range of local programs and activities, from youth softball to the food bank. Auctioneer Joanne Waterman kept the bidding lively. Items on the block included beadwork by Joyce Thomas, a night-light by Dave Black, and a birch jewelry stand with a mirror made by Don Braaten. A gold nugget from the Big Nugget Gold Mine was won by Diana Lapham in the raffle.

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  More than seventy snowmobilers participated in the annual Chilkat Lake Fun Day on Sunday. Drivers started at the steel bridge, then traveled up Clear Creek and around Chilkat Lake. The event, sponsored by the Gross and Hess family businesses, was a great day in the sun. Snowmobiling conditions on and around Chilkat Lake are ideal, said snowmobiler Diana Lapham.

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  Angels All

  NOT LONG AGO a friend asked if I would take her daughter to my church. She said her daughter was curious about it, and their family didn’t belong to any religious congregation. I agreed that our church was a good introduction to organized Christianity because it’s so traditional and historical. There’s the Book of Common Prayer, Holy Communion, and all the robes, crosses, and even incense on special occasions. She was shocked. “You’re kidding, right?” She’d thought Episcopalians were liberal.

  My mother says St. Michael and All Angels is very “western.” When I was young, she took my sisters and me to a formal old brick-and-oak-timbered church designed by Stanford White. Behind the altar was a Tiffany stained glass window depicting a bearded God in a flowing robe, light shooting out all around him. The caption, in gilt letters, read “God Said Let There Be Light.”

  St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal Mission meets Sunday morning at ten-thirty in the lobby of the Chilkat Center for the Arts. The altar spends the week in the theater’s ticket booth. Before church we roll it out and cover it with white linen. Behind the altar are floor-to-ceiling plate-glass windows. You can see the backyards of some Soap Suds Alley homes, the streets leading to the cruise ship dock,
and fishing boats in the harbor. But your eyes are drawn beyond the clotheslines and old trucks to the blue-green water of the Chilkoot Inlet and the mountains beyond. I’ve seen light stream down from clouds just as it did through the stained glass window in my old church many times, but every time it happens, I still think it might be God.

  We don’t have any churchy decorations or big stone sculptures, but we do have a small porcelain statue of the Virgin Mary. It doesn’t seem right to leave her in a box in the closet all week, so we take turns bringing her home. I have some friends who worry that I may become too religious on them someday. They were especially concerned the first time they saw Mary standing on the piano in my hall, but now they’re used to her.

  About twenty of us attend St. Michael’s regularly. We arrive early to set up chairs, get robes on young acolytes, and plug in the coffeepot for after church. We don’t have Sunday school, so the little children play with toys in the back during the service. Our senior member is Maisie Jones, a widow who has an English accent. She always dresses up and sometimes wears a hat to church. When I had knee surgery, Maisie took the opportunity to get me acquainted with opera. She lent me videos of Carmen and La Bohème and then came over and watched them with me, just to make sure I understood the story lines.

  Maisie brought an armload of red and yellow tulips from her garden for the most recent baptism: Shadow, a young woman from Klukwan, had just joined the Army National Guard and wanted some extra protection before heading out of town for basic training. Our priest, Jan Hotze, lives and works in Klukwan, where she runs the health clinic upstairs in the Alaska Native Sisterhood Hall. She’s also a volunteer firefighter. Growing up, we always called the priest Father, but my kids—and everyone else’s—just call ours Jan. She delivers short, informal homilies without notes that always seem to come around to the power of God’s love to change us, and the world. She has a rich alto voice and chants much of the service in plainsong.