If You Lived Here, I'd Know Your Name Part 12

He was trying hard to act as though all of this was no big deal.

DULY NOTED

Haines tours were among those most highly recommended by pa.s.sengers aboard Princess and Norwegian cruise lines in recent surveys. The Chilkat Guides, Chilkoot Charters, and Alaska Ice Field expeditions were commended by Princess for their excellent customer service. Norwegian Cruise Line listed twenty-five Southeast tours on their most recommended list. Seven were from Haines: Sockeye Cycle, Chilkat Guides, Haines-Skagway Water Taxi, Alaska Nature Tours, and Alaska Icefield Adventures. Lenise Henderson of Chilkat Cla.s.sic Cars said her company has made the grade with Alaska Airlines customers as well. She's been so full lately she's had to hire extra drivers for her fleet of old cars. "In one day," Lenise said, "I had a group who said they couldn't live in Haines for forty-eight minutes or they'd go nuts and another car where everyone wanted to know how to buy land here. Go figure."

Before he was an artist and shopkeeper, before he served as Haines borough mayor, Fred Shields was an afternoon radio host on KHNS. Last week Fred met one of his hero's wives, Mrs. Carl Perkins, wife of the late rockabilly star. Valda Perkins and Carl's cousin visited Fred and Madeleine Shield's Fort Seward art shop. Fred played some of the country legend's music on the stereo, and Valda autographed the shop wall. Madeleine said the Perkinses "were really fun."

Kathy Franks was the top winner in the Chilkat Valley Preschool's getaway raffle. Kathy won her choice of $1,000 cash or a travel package including two round-trip tickets to Seattle plus three nights of hotel accommodations, car rental, and $200. Nelle Greene won airfare for two to Juneau, and Jill Closter took third prize, two tickets on the water taxi to Skagway and back.

Just Say "Unknown"

WE SPENT THE better part of a year building our house. Like most homes here, it has a colored steel roof (green) to shed the snow and rain. The weathered shingles help make it look like an East Coast house. Since we're from there, it makes us feel good. In fact, the house looks a lot like the house I grew up in, with porches and gables and even blue walls in the living room, but light blue, not navy.

There's a chimney for the woodstove and window boxes on the south side full of nasturtiums and geraniums. We built it with three carpenters from the Covenant Life Center, a Christian community twenty-six miles out the Haines Highway. The 150 or so members took over an old homestead, so they, and we, usually just refer to their place as "the Farm." The ladies all wear skirts, sensible shoes, and makeup. The Farm men are all clean-shaven; they're not allowed to grow beards. They are nice people who work hard and, besides being builders, own the bakery. When the Farm carpenters drop a hammer, they say, "Shoot" or "Gosh darn."

I worked with the carpenters on our house every day, hauling material, staining exterior trim, and sanding and finishing all the interior woodwork. Chip bought whole units of one-by-four-inch Douglas fir that I belt-sanded and coated with a water-based polyurethane. I used red paint on the front door. After I'd done the last cleaning up in my dirty coveralls and the table saw was carried off the porch and packed in the carpenters' truck, it was time to say goodbye. I teased the Farm men that I would have to hire a Farm woman to answer the door wearing a dress, the house looked so good.

The house I spent most of my childhood in had an acre of manicured lawn and garden surrounded by high, trimmed hedges and big old rhododendrons and azaleas. My yard now is mostly a tangle of long beach gra.s.s, fireweed, wild roses, spruce trees, and gravel paths. There's a fenced garden with three big strawberry beds, peas, lettuce, onions, carrots, zucchini, and some sorry-looking beets. There's a smokehouse for smoking fish that looks like an outhouse and smells like alder wood and salmon, and in the greenhouse behind it there are tomatoes, cuc.u.mbers, herbs, and hot peppers. In the chicken coop are seven laying hens and a rooster.

Living in this house has made me think hard about the bonds we have with our first homes, and what I want my children to remember from theirs. When Eliza and Sarah were babies, I didn't really think about what it meant to raise them far from their grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. It hit me about five years later, when my sister Kathleen was visiting from New York with my nephews. All six of our kids (Stoli wasn't here yet) were running up the Rutzebeck road in front of us, and Kathleen looked at them, all tumbling together, so much alike, and said she was sorry we didn't live closer. I was, too. We had come to Alaska on our honeymoon-and ended up staying. We hadn't planned it, but that's what had happened. Chip and I make sure our children stay close to their East Coast relatives with regular visits. Their grandparents all come every summer, and they take turns visiting with aunts and uncles on their own or with us. Often, one or two head back with one set of grandparents and return with another. It's not perfect, but there is a family chemistry that gels whenever we're together.

Friends also become like relatives, and on holidays, our house is as full or fuller than mine was growing up. Chip and I both make the connection with objects from our past, too, and like to live surrounded by old things that wouldn't pa.s.s as antiques and aren't valuable to anyone except us. Recently, both my family and Chip's sold the homes in New York and Ma.s.sachusetts that we grew up in. Last summer a huge container arrived here full of everything no one wanted back East. Aside from a few broken lamps, all of it is now in our new home.

I scrubbed the iron bed that came from my grandmother's house with a wire brush and gave it three coats of creamy oil paint. I'd slept in this bed the night my grandfather died, back when I was a teenager. We had arrived at my grandparents' home in Pennsylvania a few days earlier, when my grandfather was put in the hospital. He fell into a coma, and we waited. The phone rang in the middle of the night, during the kind of thunderstorm they only have in the Allegheny Mountains. My aunt ran to my grandmother and led her in the Lord's Prayer. They shouted the words above the rain and thunder. It's funny, but I have no recollection of the funeral. None. I do know that my grandfather was prepared for death. Before he got sick, he cleaned the garage, attic, and bas.e.m.e.nt. He gave away or sold his hunting and fishing gear. By the time he was in the hospital, only one suit hung in his closet, along with a clean shirt, underwear, and the socks and shoes he wanted to be buried in. His household records were all in order, his bills all paid.

My grandfather, my mother's father, had an Alaskan connection. When he was born, his mother died in childbirth. Family lore goes that his father, Charlie Smith, was so upset that he left the baby on his sister's doorstep. But I wonder if that is really true. He must have at least knocked on the door and handed the baby over. Then again, maybe not. That would explain what happened later. Charlie Smith, my great-grandfather, headed west for the Klondike Gold Rush. He was in Alaska from 1898 or '99 until 1952, when he came home sick and old. He lived in my grandfather's house for about a year, until he died in the very same old iron bed that I am cleaning up and painting for Eliza to use.

My mother, who was a teenager then, says she knew him only as "Uncle Charlie" and thought he was a distant relative. She knew he'd been in Alaska because he talked about it. She remembers that he took a lot of photographs, and shared them with her. Now she wishes she'd kept a few. When Charlie died, my grandfather took his father's belongings and burned them in the backyard. His trunk, clothes, and any record of his Alaskan life went up in smoke. I have tried to find where Charlie may have lived, but it's difficult. First, there's the name. A lot of gold seekers changed theirs to the name he already had-Smith. Charlie was just about as popular, so finding my Charles Smith was not easy. He did have a middle name, Lawrence, which is why I think he was in Skagway-records there show a receipt for taxes made out to a Charles Lawrence Smith. He may have been in Nome, too, because a Charles L. Smith was fined for something there. Other than those two iffy connections, I have found nothing in all the Klondike and Alaska archives. Nothing. A whole lifetime, most of it in twentieth-century Alaska, just plain gone. That's not as unusual as you may think. In a place always looking toward the future, the past often gets lost.

THERE ARE PEOPLE who come to Alaska to be alone. People who don't make relatives of their friends and who don't stay connected to their past-either immediate or distant. My great grandfather didn't die alone in Alaska; he made it home, and he had a home to make it to. Some people aren't so lucky.

A while back, I wrote an obituary for a man who had been a familiar enough sight in Haines, yet he befriended so few people that he had been dead about four days, in an apartment near the post office, before a neighbor called and asked the police chief to check on him. Everyone in town saw him often because he walked miles most days, in all kinds of weather. He had a formal nod and was well dressed. A man in pressed slacks and clean walking shoes attracts a certain amount of attention in a place where most men, except schoolteachers, wear jeans or brown canvas workpants. A neighbor told me he was what she thought southern gentlemen must be like. My dog, Carl, and I greeted him on our morning beach walks. But we didn't really know him.

One couple did know him well enough to have him over on occasion for supper, but they couldn't shed any light on his past. "We knew him," said the wife, "but we didn't, you know?" She said that he sent them postcards when he left town, which he did often, in the dozen or so years he was in and out of Haines. Someone else said he was "a mystery." The last person we think he spoke with called him "a traveling man." It was impossible for me to find anyone who knew him well.

At the lumberyard, a handful of guys discussed the unnoticed pa.s.sing. They tried to match the unfamiliar name with a face. After I described him-"You know, he's the guy who walks all the time; he had that van with the top sawed off"-a carpenter nodded his head, remembering. "He's the fella," he said, "who made the popemobile." Then they all knew who he was. About ten years ago, before the tour-ship dock was built and bus tours became the norm, he had cut the top off his van and fitted it with a homemade Plexiglas box so tourists could see the mountains and eagles without getting out or craning their necks. But the van was old, and the top leaked. He couldn't make a go of his tour business and left town.

One woman thought he might have gone to Texas, where she'd heard he had family. Someone else said Fairbanks. About a year later, he returned with a new idea. He hoped to manufacture small custom RVs here. All he needed was financing. "You could be talking about the s.p.a.ce shuttle going to Mars," said one of the coffee drinkers, who the man had joined occasionally at the Bamboo Room for breakfast, "and he'd bring it around to his RV project."

At the post office, the staff felt bad when they heard the news. They thought they should have noticed sooner that he hadn't come in. When I told them he had been dead for about four days, one clerk did the math and tears welled up in her eyes. She said he had come in what must have been the day before he died, murmured something about seeing the light, and said good-bye. She said he had started crying, right at the counter, but she couldn't talk to him because there was a line out the door.

But maybe the people he knew in Alaska gave him what he wanted. Maybe he just wanted to be alone. Researching the man's life was a little like looking for clues about my great-grandfather. And if we can know so little about our contemporaries, it's no wonder I have had trouble tracking down stories from a hundred years ago.

My job was to write about a man's life, not investigate his death. Still, I couldn't help wondering how this current mystery would unfold, so I went to see the police chief. In the chief's office there's a photo of him as a young man, squinting into the sun with dog tags hanging on his bare chest. His hair was blond then, and he looked more like James Dean than Andy of Mayberry, as he does now. There is a beautiful woman on each arm. I had to ask. He told me it was taken in Vietnam during the war. He fought with the 173rd Airborne Brigade there. Right in the middle of that terrible time, a helicopter showed up and landed in their camp. Two Playboy bunnies, some publicity people, and a congressman boosting troop morale hopped out and quickly grabbed a few soldiers, took their pictures, and flew away as suddenly as they'd appeared. "It was surreal," the chief said now. I think he keeps the picture just to prove it happened. Had there been a photograph of Charlie Smith with Klondike Kate and one of her "girls" somewhere in that burn pile in my mother's childhood backyard-next to the cherry tree, the gladiolus, and my grandmother's clothesline?

I told the chief about what I had learned at the post office and asked if the dead man had been unhappy. The police chief, who'd spoken with him enough to know that "September eleventh was hard on him," said he had been "a little down lately" and that he'd had heart trouble. "He was sixty-one and died of a heart attack or maybe a stroke," the chief said. But no one knew for sure. He gave me the phone number of his family, which did, in fact, live in Texas. I spoke to a polite southern lady. She told me that her brother had loved Alaska so much that he'd walked from Fort Worth all the way to Haines. That is a really long walk. He'd taken a dog, named Brown, but had apparently left him with a family in Utah because traveling with the animal was hard. She also told me that a neighbor from Haines had called her after her brother died and wanted her to know that in the last conversation he'd had with him, her brother had said he was going to a place even prettier than Alaska. She said he must have had a premonition that his end was near. She felt better knowing that he had found G.o.d first.

I went back to the police chief and told him everything I had discovered. I asked if there was going to be an autopsy. That's when the chief sighed, took off his gla.s.ses, and leaned back in his chair. "What difference would it make?" he said. "He's dead, and that's enough for his family to bear. Why waste the state's money investigating something that isn't a crime and that we don't need to know?" It was not exactly a To Kill a Mockingbird moment; however, the chief had a point. My thoughts turned again to my great grandfather. Maybe even if I had his papers, I wouldn't really know him. It could be that he'd left so few clues because he didn't want anyone to know. Maybe like this man, my great-grandfather just wanted to be left alone. There is also the possibility that he didn't do much that needed to be Duly Noted. What if he'd spent fifty years in some cabin by himself until he'd decided to head back home? The subject of this obituary may not be much different. My imagination had me dreaming up drama where perhaps none existed. I asked the chief if the paper should print that the cause of death was a heart attack. He thought a minute about the wanderer with big ideas, and said "unknown" was more accurate. "Just say unknown."

I wrote that he died of an apparent heart attack, which is what it says on the death certificate. But that was just the first line of the obituary. The last word went to a snowplow driver who sometimes had an early morning cup of coffee with him at Mountain Market. He didn't know anything about him at all, except what mattered: "I know he was a nice guy and I enjoyed his company."

MY MOTHER SAID from what she knew of him, my great-grandfather was a nice man, too. The iron bed that Charles Lawrence Smith slept in (and, I think, died in) at my grandparents' house is now tucked under the eaves in Eliza's room, looking out over the tidal flats and mountains of southeast Alaska, about as far from the oiled roads of western Pennsylvania as you can get and still be in this country.

When we first moved into our house, I wanted everything to be clean and new. I wanted it to look like the magazine clippings I'd saved. I had an old wingchair reupholstered and almost bought matching chairs for the dining room table, but decided that the funky a.s.sortment from our families' houses looked right at home around the table made by a Haines cabinetmaker. Underneath it is a worn Oriental rug from my mother-in-law's house.

My grandfather's old rolltop desk is in the kitchen, quickly filling with school papers, ferry schedules, and the manuals to new appliances. He'd climb out of his grave and organize the pigeonholes if only he knew what a mess it is. My other grandfather's cane leans against the wall in the hall by the piano. Across the room, a crystal pitcher with a heart etched in it catches sunlight on the windowsill. It came from Norway to North Dakota with the first Lendes to arrive in America. Chip's parents gave it to us as a wedding present. I imagine a farmer's wife arranging prairie flowers in it, and setting it on a handmade table in a sod hut. I can even see her stepping back to take in the room and smiling. Her new house, in a faraway place, is now a home. That's just what all these old things have done for mine.

DULY NOTED

A j.a.panese legend says that if you fold a thousand paper cranes, a wish will be granted. Well, we are all wishing high school freshman Rigel Falvey so much wellness as she battles Hodgkin's disease that our fingers hurt from folding cranes. Little children are learning how to make paper cranes in cla.s.srooms. High schoolers create hip cranes from teen magazines during lunchtime. Tanned summer guides fashion cranes from pretty patterned paper over espresso at Mountain Market. Friends gather at Friday night potlucks to make cranes. Library patrons fold them while they check their e-mail. If you still haven't made any cranes yet and would like to learn how, see Jeanne Kitayama for instructions. The cranes will be sent to Rigel in Children's Hospital in Seattle next week.

Paul Wheeler's Haines Brewing Company is celebrating five years in business and thirty thousand gallons of finely crafted brews. Paul has plenty of the two favorite seasonal beers on tap for summer solstice parties. Birch Boy Summer Ale is made with the birch syrup from the Humphreys' trees at 18 Mile. The Spruce Tip Ale is brewed using buds of local spruce trees. "Captain Cook came up with that idea," Paul said. "The spruce tips helped prevent his sailors from getting scurvy."

Colleen Harrier and Zach Taylor returned last week from an aborted ski tour to Mount Fairweather. They were forced to turn around near the halfway point after encountering difficulties with harsh weather and shuttling gear. A three-day storm had dumped four feet of snow. "Nothing went according to plan," Zach said. Although sunburned and rebuffed, the pair isn't discouraged. They intend to try again next year.

A Whole Lot of Love

MARY AND WARREN PRICE had eight children together, and Warren came to their marriage with three small children of his own. Father Jim, Sister Jill, and even some of the parishioners of the Sacred Heart Catholic Church call Mary Price "Mother Superior." Warren was more like the biblical Joseph-patient, hardworking, and always in the background. That was even more true lately. Since he'd come home from the hospital in Juneau, Warren hadn't been able to leave the house. I wasn't too surprised to learn, while I was taking the ferry home from a wedding in Juneau with my daughters J.J. and Stoli, that he had died.

The ferry schedule this winter and early spring has been difficult. Sometimes we don't have one for three or four days, and when they do come and go it is likely to be at three in the morning. The Sunday morning ferry up to Haines from Juneau was perfect; it left at ten and arrived at two-thirty. Getting down there had been another story. The last ferry of the week was Tuesday, and the wedding wasn't until Sat.u.r.day, so we took our chances on the weather and flew-barely.

The rain was blowing sideways across the runway. The girls and I were in the biggest small plane in Haines. There were six of us, plus the pilot. He tried to take off and couldn't; the wind was too strong. As he motored back toward the terminal, I felt relieved. But then he decided to try it one more time. We raced down the tarmac, and instead of flying above the end of the runway, we were yanked off the side, jerking like a kite catching a lift. I swore. I thought we would die. I didn't rea.s.sure my frightened children. I cried. I was a really bad mother, and I knew it.