If You Lived Here, I'd Know Your Name Part 1

If You Lived Here, I'd Know Your Name.

by HEATHER LENDE.

Acknowledgments

My heartfelt thanks to the people of Haines for giving me so many stories to tell, especially Doris Ward, who began the "Duly Noted" column I inherited, and to these friends, neighbors, and editors both near and far: Bonnie Hedrick, Tom Morphet, and Steve Williams at the Chilkat Valley News; Lee Heinmiller at Alaska Indian Arts; Liz Heywood from the Babbling Book store; James Alborough and Sarah Posey of Bear Star Communications; George Bryson, Kathleen McCoy, and Mark Dent at the Anchorage Daily News; Audrey Wynn and Greg Allen at National Public Radio; Tom Reagan, Sara Terry, and Duncan Moon from the Christian Science Monitor and the former Monitor Radio; and everyone at Algonquin, especially Amy Gash. Amy heard me on the radio, called to ask if I thought I could write a book, and then helped me do it with wit, wisdom, and grace. Thanks also to my family for giving me the confidence and time to write-from my in-laws, Joanne and Phil Lende, and my parents, Bob and Sally Vuillet, to my children, Eliza, Sarah, Christian, Joanna Jeanne, and Stojanka, and a friend who is like family, Linnus Danner. Above all, thanks to my husband, Chip.

Over the past four years, five people in Haines have asked when this book would be done every time they've seen me-which was almost daily: postmaster Wayne Selmer, artist Jenny Lyn Smith, librarian Ellen Borders, and my neighbors Don and Betty Holgate. Here it is. I sure hope it's worth your wait.

INTRODUCTION

We Are What We Want to Be, Mostly

I HAVE LIVED in Haines, Alaska, all of my adult life but there are still times, especially winter evenings when the setting sun washes over the white mountaintops, the sky turns a deep blue, and the water is whipped into whitecaps by the north wind, that I can't believe my good fortune. It's so wild and beautiful that all I can do is walk outside my house and stare. Looking south, I can see the red cannery at Letnikof Cove on one side of the inlet and Davidson Glacier on the other. Out front, Pyramid Island breaks the surface where the Chilkat River meets the sea. Behind it, steep mountains rise right up from the beach. On this fading winter evening, standing in the snow in my yard, I think I hear a wolf howl up the Chilkat River Valley and hold my breath, hoping to hear it again. But I don't. Maybe it was just the wind. I turn around and look back at my house-our youngest children moving in front of lighted windows, the teenagers doing homework at the table, my husband, Chip, reading by the woodstove-and my heart swells in my chest like a balloon.

It took us a year to build our shingled home on the beach down Mud Bay Road, a mile and a half from Main Street. From my bedroom window, I've watched bears wading in the channels along the sh.o.r.e in the summer. When I walk the dogs to the cove in the fall, the icy tidal flats are covered with bald eagles. The oily, smeltlike fish called eulachon return to the river in the spring, and the sea lions chasing them are so loud that they wake me up from a sound sleep. I see the light on across the road and, even though it's two in the morning, call my neighbor Linnus. The sea lions woke her up, too. She and her husband, Steve, walked to the beach in their pajamas. The sea lions were having a wild party down there, Linnus says.

JOHN MUIR CAME to Haines in 1879 with a friend, who established a Presbyterian mission where the city of Haines now sits. Muir, one of the first non-Natives to explore this region, afterward advised young people not to come to our part of Alaska. He warned that they'd have to either stay or know that every other place they'd see for the rest of their lives would be a disappointment.

But just because it's beautiful doesn't make Haines an easy place to live. It is isolated, cloudy, and cold. Everything from land to groceries is expensive, and there's little work to help with the high cost of living. There are twenty-four hundred residents in the Chilkat Valley, although I don't think they've ever all been home at once, and probably a third leave in the winter. There's no hospital and the high school has just ninety-three students. There is no shopping mall, no McDonald's, no movie theater-heck, we don't even have a stoplight. Tony Tengs, a friend of mine who grew up here, says there's nothing wrong with Haines "a couple thousand people couldn't cure." Still, half of the residents don't want any changes at all. We have terrible community fights every time there's a local election or public hearing. We usually split the vote on everything, fifty-fifty. I won't sign any more pet.i.tions, no matter what they're for.

On a map of Alaska, Haines is up near Skagway, at the northern tip of the Inside Pa.s.sage, an archipelago that stretches five hundred miles from the southern end of Prince of Wales Island, near Ketchikan, to the head of Lynn Ca.n.a.l, the largest fjord in North America. We call this region Southeast, in the same way some eastern states are called New England. Most of it is very wet, and all of it is covered with big trees. To get anywhere from here you have to drive hundreds of wilderness miles. In the winter the Chilkat Pa.s.s into Canada is often closed because of heavy snow. Anchorage is eight hundred miles away. Whitehorse, the capital of the Yukon Territory, is about two hundred and sixty miles. It's possible to keep going past Whitehorse and drive all the way to Seattle, but few of us do. Instead, we take the ferry or fly ninety miles to Juneau, the state capital-a small town by most standards, with thirty thousand people-and catch a plane south. Every time I get on a jet to or from Juneau, I know people. The planes are different from the ones that cross the Lower Forty-eight. They're noisier, because everyone is talking to everyone else.

My sister-in-law came to Haines for Christmas, some years ago, from her home in Virginia. She took a plane from Dulles to Seattle, and then had to wait in Seattle two days for snow to clear in Juneau so the Alaska Airlines jet could land. On the way up it stopped in Ketchikan and Sitka. Each time they screeched to a halt on those short island runways, she braced herself against the seat in front of her. Local pa.s.sengers cheered when the plane stopped. In Juneau she learned she couldn't fly up to Haines because of snow and fog, and was advised to take the ferry instead. After four hours of cruising by waterfalls, glaciers, and forested coastline she docked in Haines just as the day's six hours of light were being replaced by inky darkness. The first thing she said after walking up the boat ramp to greet us was "People have a lot of nerve living here. Maybe you shouldn't."

Well, it's too late for that. John Muir was right. Chip and I both grew up on the East Coast, met in college, and drove to Alaska when we graduated. This is our home now, and I have a feeling it always will be. In many ways Haines is a place out of time. Chip and I don't lock our doors, or even take the keys out the car. Ever. We don't expect to read the daily papers from Juneau and Anchorage on the day they are printed; they rarely get here on time. In the winter, when snow or rain or lack of daylight limits flights to and from Juneau, they sometimes don't arrive at all. We haven't had TV at our house for months because a new water tower blocked the transmitter for the one free channel we could get from Anchorage. I have never seen Survivor.

I get my wider world news from the public radio station, which plays NPR early in the morning and country music and rock and roll all afternoon. I have the radio on all the time. The eclectic mix is the soundtrack to my life. Everyone reads the Chilkat Valley News, our weekly paper, all eight or twelve or sixteen pages of it (depending on the season, the ads, and the letters to the editor), from headlines to the uncla.s.sifieds. When someone is selling a house or boat and only the phone number is listed, we find out who it is by running a finger down the few pages that the Haines listings take up in the southeast Alaska phone book. The two reporters joke that most readers are checking for mistakes, since they already know the news. I took over the paper's "Duly Noted" social column from its creator, Doris Ward. When her husband died, Doris needed a break from recording who went on vacation or who bid on what at the fund-raising auction for the Alaska Bald Eagle Festival. It wasn't much of a leap to go from reporting on the living to chronicling the dead, so I began writing the obituaries, too.

Death is a big part of life in Haines. As they do everywhere, people get cancer and have heart attacks. Teens die in car wrecks on the Haines Highway. One middle-aged man even succ.u.mbed to a weird flesh-eating bacterium. But there are many accidental deaths, too. This is a dangerous place. One man died falling off a cliff while goat hunting. Another was lost diving for sea cuc.u.mbers. Skiffs capsize in icy water, planes disappear in the mountains. Sometimes people vanish without a trace.

The house next door to ours is empty now. The neighbors crashed their plane on Douglas Island last summer. They died instantly, along with two pa.s.sengers: their best friend's newly wed son and daughter-in-law. They were the second owners of the house. The couple who built it came here from New Zealand after buying a local air taxi service. The wife flew me back and forth to Juneau for my prenatal appointments. She had gray hair and five children. She died when her plane hit a mountain on a flight over the ice field between Glacier Bay and Haines. No wonder I'm afraid to fly.

In Haines, funerals are community affairs. I've been to memorial services in churches, gardens, the Elks Club, the Alaska Native Brotherhood Hall, and the American Legion. At Paul Potter's funeral, held in the high school gym, the pastor invited everyone to come up in front of the coffin and sink a basket for Jesus. Paul was a popular youth basketball coach who had recently joined the Haines Cornerstone Foursquare Gospel Church. Even people who don't normally attend church turn to G.o.d for comfort when someone dies. Being with men, women, and children who have lost the person they loved most in all the world only days before yet still open the door and invite me in, ask if I want honey in my tea, and then thank me for helping them when I leave is all the proof I need that G.o.d is good.

In most places, families write their own obituaries for local papers-or they send in an even shorter death announcement to larger newspapers. They pretty much say what they want. When my grandmother died back East, my parents gave the New York Times her incorrect age, by mistake, but the Times printed it just as they wrote it. Only celebrities or prominent citizens get the kind of treatment I give everyone who dies in Haines.

I spend as much time as I can researching a life but, with a weekly deadline, invariably I'm talking with friends and family heartbreakingly close to the death. Often within a day or two. Mostly I just listen. The details I need for the obituary are usually given right away, but the visit lasts much longer. By the time I'm ready to write, I know a lot about the person, and their friends and family. Much more than we'll ever print in the paper.

HAINES IS THE kind of town where if you live here long enough you recognize everybody and everybody recognizes you. High school basketball games are the biggest thing happening on most winter weekends, and on Sunday morning the church parking lots are full. So is the driveway at the Buddhist-style meditation hut. Picking up the mail at the post office (we all do; there is no home delivery) is a chance to socialize. If I arrive at the post office in a bad mood, I usually leave in a good one after chatting with everyone in line. Haines is so full of local color that if they ever made a movie about us, no one would believe it. There's an artist who lives with his wife, a weaver, in a fanciful cabin overlooking Rainbow Glacier. He keeps a dead temple pit viper in a big jar filled with vodka and takes sips of the "snake juice" every now and then to ward off illness. He'll offer you some if you stop by. The controversial new Presbyterian pastor's arms are covered with tattoos. The sewer plant manager rides a Harley-Davidson and has a ZZ Top beard. Recent mayors have included an artist, a heavy equipment operator, a Tlingit Indian woman, a Scotsman with a burr in his voice, and a white-haired former Vermonter. One school princ.i.p.al was a Roy Orbison impersonator; he dressed all in black and sang "Pretty Woman" at fund-raisers. Dave Pahl has collected so many hammers the Smithsonian sent him their old life-sized manikins to help him display them in action-right in his house, which doubles as the Haines Hammer Museum. I haven't even mentioned the Mormon spelunkers, the one-legged lady gold miner, or my friend Tim, a salmon fisherman and carpenter who spent eleven years building a cla.s.sic thirty-six-foot reproduction Herreshoff ketch, doing all the work himself, from sewing the sails to melting lead from old car batteries for the keel. When it was done, he asked me to teach him how to sail.

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 alb.u.ms, 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 pa.s.sed 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 d.i.c.kinson 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 Mich.e.l.le Gla.s.s 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, Mich.e.l.le pondered for a minute, then said, "No comment."

Tammy Hotch took matters into her own hands Friday in Ketchikan where she a.s.sisted 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.

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.

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."

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.

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 pa.s.sengers who didn't get sick. She also didn't know it was dangerous at all. She'd never been on the ferry before and a.s.sumed 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 antic.i.p.ating 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 Ca.n.a.l 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.