If You Lived Here, I'd Know Your Name Part 17

Tom Ward would have told her, This is a real American town. Right out of Haines High School, Tom was sent to the jungles of Asia to defend America. He spent the Second World War building the famed Burma Road. Back home, he put his wartime skills to use maintaining dirt roads for the territorial government. Alaska didn't become a state until 1959, when he was thirty-four. After Tom retired from the Alaska Department of Transportation, he kept busy plowing driveways; cutting, splitting, and selling firewood; running a small sawmill; and gardening. He fished commercially for salmon, and at one time owned a gillnetter. Like most people here, even now, Tom didn't have a "career." He had jobs. For a while he skippered the mail boat. Today the mail flies in on small commercial planes or is hauled on the ferry. And the big sawmills of Tom's younger days have closed. Haines has evolved into a seasonal tourist and fishing town. We still don't have a traffic light, not even a yellow flasher, but the streets are almost all paved now.

I learned a lot about Haines from Tom's friends. But by the way his family spoke of him and the way they treated one another, I also learned a lot about Tom's character. The feeling around the table that afternoon when they helped me write his obituary was more like a family reunion than a wake. With old family and new family, the room was full of noisy love. In many ways, Haines itself is like the Wards. There have been bitter splits, but we still live together in relative harmony. There are times when we are angry with each other for years, but we nod h.e.l.lo, time young runners at school track meets, and sit near each other in the bleachers at basketball games. Tom's son-in-law the conservative school board member and I have ongoing battles about school prayer, teaching tolerance, and what is patriotism-he's a Republican "America right or wrong" Vietnam vet; I'm a liberal Democrat. But we still work together. He has read eulogies I've written at veterans' funerals. I've often quoted him in an old soldier's obituary.

Our former city mayor made a big mistake when he told a reporter down at the Juneau Empire that Haines was a "gripey community" full of whiners. He lost his seat on the council in an election a week later. By a lot. Then he moved away. As my farm-bred Pennsylvania grandmother would say, he shouldn't have "aired our dirty linen." What the mayor should have said was that Haines was p.r.o.ne to disagreement. We don't whine; we argue. Haines is the easiest town in Alaska to represent in the legislature: No matter how our delegation votes, they'll please half of us. What the mayor didn't say was why we fight so much. It's because we care about this place and what happens to it. We care about mines, roads, and land-use issues of all shapes and sizes. Not to mention the school, health clinic, helicopters, tourists, high school basketball, and salmon.

When my sister first visited Haines from Brooklyn, she couldn't believe how worked up we got over zoning and the decline of the public radio station. Back home she has to park her car on alternate sides of the street Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and doesn't know why. She thinks it has something to do with snow removal. I asked why she still did it in June, and she shrugged; she's a big-city gal with better things to worry about. In Haines, such regulation would cause public outcry, and if that didn't fix it, we'd start another pet.i.tion to recall the city council. The latest census figures put our population at just over twenty-four hundred. That means we're big enough to avoid people we don't like, but small enough to have to be careful about what we say in public. The longer I live here, the more I understand how important it is to choose my words-and battles-cautiously.

Twelve of us had dinner together the other night at Debra's house. We argued loudly about a close borough a.s.sembly race between an old sage and the new millionaire. The old-timers among us (several were born and raised in Haines or Juneau) confirmed that the issue wasn't a vote for the new money but, rather, a vote against the other candidate. It was pointed out that money didn't get votes; if anything, it lost them. The old sage was challenged because of his history here: The better you're known, the less chance you have at holding public office. Tom announced that he wouldn't speak to anyone who voted for the millionaire. We knew he'd never be able to keep his word, because it was clear that our dinner party was as divided as the rest of Haines. Absentee ballots would decide the winner.

With that, the debate switched from local politics to music. This is one area where we have a broader view, especially when Mick Jagger is as close as Seattle. The new question was, Should we cash in our latest Alaska Permanent Fund dividend checks to fly down and see the Rolling Stones in concert? If you had taken a poll right then our party would have been evenly divided. Steve and Linnus were going, but Joanne thought it was crazy. That former mayor would take it as proof that we just can't get no satisfaction.

PERHAPS SATISFACTION COMES in other ways. I'm thinking of a fund-raiser a few years ago when Chip paid five hundred dollars for a dozen cream puffs. I had spent the night in Juneau. I barely was off the ferry when a friend out in the parking lot asked, "How 'bout those cream puffs?" At the post office, I got knowing glances. Everyone I saw smiled broadly and noted that Chip must have some sweet tooth.

The whole story is more complicated. Chip bought the cream puffs at an auction at the American Legion. The proceeds went to help the parents of a child with cancer of the optical nerve. They needed help paying for treatments and the a.s.sociated expenses of staying in California, where their daughter must go to get them. Nikki is blind, a result of the tumor she's had since she was a baby. She is the only child of a couple who adopted her after being childless for years; a few months later she was struck with this debilitating illness. Since we've known her, Nikki has been fighting cancer. She lost her eyesight early on but she's cheerful, funny, and as my mom, who when visiting us has spent time with Nikki, says, "She's sharp as a tack."

My daughter J.J. and Nikki are playmates. J.J. talks all the time. Nikki enjoys a good conversation. Together they never run out of things to say. Nikki's dad is Haines's emergency coordinator-the man in charge of preparing for an earthquake, oil spill, or enemy attack. He works most days on Haines's emergency response plan. He also sells houses to supplement his income. Once, when we were all having coffee and cocoa at Mountain Market, Nikki felt her way over to our table. She has a stick she waves back and forth, tapping the ground and obstacles. She sat down and asked what we wanted to talk about. No one answered right away, so she said, "How about real estate?" Everybody laughed at the little redhead talking just like her dad.

Her dad is why Chip bought the cream puffs for five hundred dollars. Jim is not the kind of guy to ask for help. His picture is under the gla.s.s counter at the Alaska Sports Shop, with all the other pictures of local hunters and their dead animals. He's holding up the head of a trophy bison he and Dr. Jones shot near Delta Junction. He's a volunteer fireman and a good Catholic. He takes care of his family. They have insurance, but it's not enough. Nikki's cancer came out of left field. Chip said, "I don't know what I'd do if it was one of our kids."

When close friends reported that the cost of Nikki's treatment was off the map, it was time to help. Friends, neighbors, churches, Elks, and Nikki's teachers got busy. With barely a week's notice they gathered donations and arranged for a fund-raising dinner and auction. An award-winning chef donated her salmon-in-phyllo-dough dish that was a semifinalist in Sunset magazine's annual cooking contest. A commercial fisherman made a small salmon net for family use. Businesses donated practical and pretty things, from metal roofing and a side of beef to handmade jewelry and original paintings. The new millionaire, the same one running for office, offered a ride in his helicopter. Dr. Feldman donated a vasectomy. My friend Leigh wanted to do something special. She's the one who baked the cream puffs. Everyone loves Leigh's cream puffs.

Chip is not a big spender. He enjoys simple things, like family dinners at the end of the day. We have them nearly every night. His favorite holiday is Thanksgiving because, he says, it's just like Christmas but without the presents. New shirts stay in the wrappers in his closet until his old ones wear out. He has four pairs of pants and a Timex watch. His favorite jacket is a black-and-white wool one he's had since college. He owns a building supply store and doesn't have any expensive tools. An avid reader, he rarely buys books; he uses the library. And his trucks have to break down completely before he'll buy a new one.

Yet after he splurged on the cream puffs, he was happy for a week. He said that he'd planned on spending five hundred dollars at the fund-raiser. It was a lot more fun to bid on cream puffs than the higher-end items I was hoping for-the load of gravel for the driveway or some round-trip plane tickets to Juneau. We were talking about it over a beer before dinner, while watching the kids play on the beach. They are all healthy and happy. "We don't really need anything, anyway," he said.

Everyone had a great time at the fund-raiser. People who hadn't been together at a social event in years cheerfully bid against each other, paying too much for things they didn't need. There were environmentalists and developers, Catholics and hippies, newcomers and old-timers, Natives and whites. Everyone spent more than they had, and loved every minute of it. A carpenter paid over three hundred dollars for a drill Chip donated. He could have bought it for half the price in our store.

Lib Hakkinen, our town historian, says that sometimes things have gotten so bad here that people have wondered if they would be able to make enough money to stay. Like Tom Ward, though, they figured out a way. With Nikki's health, I'm sure that her parents have thought about moving to a city with a hospital. But they haven't. Haines is their home.

TOM WARD'S FLAG-DRAPED coffin rests on a mat of wood chips at the cemetery. The pallbearers, all workingmen like Tom, look uncomfortable in their rarely used suits and ties. Some don't fit as well as they did the last time they were worn. It may have been years. The men don't have overcoats on. It is four below and feels even colder this close to the river. On the way out, straggling mourners stop briefly to brush snow off headstones. One cuts through the knee-high drifts to pray over his daughter's grave. She was killed in car wreck not too long after she graduated from high school. At the reception at the Elks Lodge, the bar is open and the tables loaded with potluck dishes. The party lasts late into the night.

When I turn in the two-page obituary, my editor, Tom, roars, "Jesus, Heather, the guy was a woodcutter, not the governor." Then he puts it on the front page.

DULY NOTED

The ice at Chilkoot Lake hardened up for skating this week, and with no snow on the ground you can drive to the landing. Sue Libenson and friends skated in the moonlight at her birthday party Sat.u.r.day night. Sunday afternoon the Port Chilkoot Bible Church held a skating party.

Candlelight, a warm fire, pasta, Caesar salad, garlic bread, and Leigh Horner's famous cream puffs contributed to a fun night out and a good cause Sat.u.r.day evening at the Senior Center as the Haines Hockey a.s.sociation hosted their first fund-raiser to pay for Mary Jean Sebens's dental work after injuries sustained in the Haines Olympiad Hockey Tournament. Funds will also be used to purchase mouth guards and helmets. Organizers and chefs Tom Morphet and Steve Williams are already planning the next dinner. "I feel real fortunate," Mary Jean said. "I just felt so much love from everyone." Her compet.i.tive spirit hasn't dulled. "If I had stayed in the game our team would have been in the championship," she said.

While most residents have been enjoying the ice on Chilkoot Lake, Teresa Hura says Chilkat Lake is also close to perfect. She says the ride in on the snow machine to get there was well worth it. Teresa spent an enjoyable day last weekend skating from her cabin to neighboring camps. Night skating has benefited from the impressive aurora borealis displays and the howls of wolves. Teresa says as many as fifteen wolves have been spotted on the lake ice.

Registration for the fourteenth Buckwheat Ski Cla.s.sic is now open. The annual cross-country ski race is set for Sat.u.r.day, March 25 in the White Pa.s.s above Skagway. Compet.i.tors will race in ten-kilometer, twenty-five-kilometer, and fifty-kilometer heats. Entry fees cover the cost of a prerace breakfast at the Presbyterian church, a postrace dance and banquet at the Eagles Hall, and, says organizer Buckwheat Donahue, "a really cool T-shirt." Entry forms are available at Lutak Lumber.

Fire and Ice

AFTER THE LAST fisherman's funeral, I decided water around here is best when it's frozen. As I help my youngest daughters into their ice skates, I hum the old carol "In the Bleak Midwinter": "Earth stood hard as iron, / Water like a stone." The afternoon is so perfect; it's like a big exhalation, throwing off all that crummy winter-weather tension. The bowl that Chilkoot Lake sits in is protected by a rim of high mountains and tucked back into a valley. Although a north wind blows forty knots across Lynn Ca.n.a.l, icing boats in the harbor at the foot of Main Street, here on the lake it's calm. Dark spruce trees and white mountains reflect on ice as hard and shiny as a marble floor. Chilkoot Lake is so big that, although I recognized the handful of Subarus and pickups parked on the road, their owners are out of sight. Looking across the ice, I can't see a soul.

I learned to skate on an artificial rink on Long Island, the kind filled with organ music and people in rented skates all circling around and around in one direction. I still can do crossover turns only to the left. Skating at Chilkoot is as different from skating at a rink as swimming laps in a pool is from snorkeling in the tropical ocean. Instead of weaving in and out of other skaters, the girls and I quietly glide about a mile out, to where the rest of the family is already playing hockey. Chip and the three older children are crazy about the game. It's only a matter of time before the two younger girls join them. The games are so fast and rough that it's no place for cruisers like me. Every time I think about playing hockey, too, I'm reminded of the mother in A Prayer for Owen Meany. Instead of being killed by a Little Leaguer's foul ball, I'm sure a stray hockey puck will catch me right in the temple.

A safe distance from the game, a group of children my girls' age are learning to make figure eights. Leaving J.J. and Stoli there, I venture beyond the sounds of the game, beyond the voices and sc.r.a.ping of blades on ice. I am so far out I can't even hear a dog bark. The ice is absolutely smooth and clear and the air so cold that my breath makes frost on my eyelashes, scarf, and on the edges of my wool hat. I skate with my arms wide open, singing out loud: "I could have danced all night..."

Near the middle on the western side, I can see open water and an orange buoy ball floating way out in the distance, marking the danger. The best skaters, the oldest and wisest, have a.s.sured everyone that the rest of the ice is thick enough to hold a dump truck. Now I wish there were a dump truck here so I could see for myself. In places, the ice does look new, similar to the thin layer that appears overnight on puddles in September. The kind of ice that breaks like gla.s.s when children stomp on it. I slow down but keep moving across the stillness, hearing nothing but the scritch of my blades and the occasional m.u.f.fled thud of a pressure crack underfoot. That sound makes my heart beat faster. What if the ice won't hold? Can I make it to the shallow end in time? I am about to turn around and go back when I see the tracks of a lone skater. Two graceful curves of white on the dark green ice, repeating in a simple pattern over the lake.

I catch up with Linnus and feel much better skating with a friend. We push and glide fast for fifty minutes in one direction, then slowly circle back to check on the children, Chip, and Linnus's husband, Steve, who is also playing hockey. Everyone is happy, so we leave them again and zigzag silently along the sh.o.r.e, back to the landing, looking for wolves in the woods.

ON THE WAY HOME, Chip and I take the kids to the museum in town to look at a traveling exhibit of blown-gla.s.s bowls, vases, and b.a.l.l.s by world-renowned artist Dale Chihuly. They are beautiful, but they can't compete with the swirling patterns of frost and bubbles suspended in the clear green ice at Chilkoot Lake. I think I love those much more than the fancy gla.s.s because I know they won't last as long.

As if Mother Nature wants to prove the point, the day after our perfect skate we wake up to whirling snow. Across town Tom Heywood looks out the window, too, and knows he doesn't have much time to enjoy the lake. Soon snow will cover the ice. Tom hasn't been skating yet this season and is in a seize-the-day mood. But the rest of his family isn't. His wife, Liz, has a cold, and the kids don't want to go. When his ten-year-old says he prefers his computer game, Tom leaves, alone.

Steve and Linnus, who also decided to get in one more skate before the heavy weather, come ash.o.r.e as Tom starts out. They tell him the skating is great. Tom follows their tracks in the thin coat of dry snow out into the white winter wonderland. He is alone, so alone, in such a beautiful place that he thinks, This is unbelievable. He is happy; skating makes him feel light and carefree. The same way it does for me.

Tom is a mild-mannered former midwesterner. A pilot, he has his own small plane. At forty-six, after teaching first and second graders for twenty years, he's retired and with Liz owns the Haines bookstore. He had children relatively late in life-two adopted Korean sons and a biological daughter. When he taught my kids, their favorite time of the day was when he'd play the guitar and sing with them.

Since no one is watching and he's in such a good mood, he dances. A few fancy moves, some curlicues, a swirl, and a loop on the white surface. He's left behind the other tracks now and skates toward a buoy ball. He wonders what it's doing out on the ice. He decides to go beyond it all the way to the end of the lake, something he can't do with the kids. It's a long way down and back, nearly ten miles. He's thinking that there is no place he'd rather be when suddenly, completely without warning, the ice gives out. One second he's skating, the next he's in the water. This can't be happening. Tom is incredulous. I can't believe this.

Hanging on to the edge of the ice, up to his neck in frigid water, Tom Heywood doesn't watch his life move before his eyes like a movie. Instead, he sees one still image of his wife and three children. I am not ready to leave them, he thinks, kicking to keep his head above water and gripping the ice with his left hand. He knows he can climb out, and he says so, out loud, to the fish below and the mountains above. "I can do this," he repeats, echoing the Little Engine in the story he's read so many times to so many different children. "I can do this, I can do this." Like an icebreaker, he moves toward his tracks, hoping he'll find the solid section that held him just moments ago.

It's so clear what he has to do; the challenge is so immediate that he acts without hesitating-almost. This, Tom thinks for just a second, is how people disappear and are never found. The snow keeps his hands from slipping; he has a good grip, but the thin ice caves in with each attempt to climb out. His long johns, jeans, sweatshirt, and down coat are heavy. He's working so hard he doesn't feel the cold. He almost gets his right knee up but the ice breaks, again and again. He's not a churchgoer and knows he shouldn't expect a hand now, but he prays for help.

Finally, after almost getting up and crashing back in the water six or seven times, he pulls himself out and crab-scoots on all fours until he's sure he's on safe ice. With a shout he thanks the angels of Chilkoot Lake and skates back faster than he ever has. He sails by the patterns he made earlier and knows that that was a different life. He hears a cracking sound and his heart beats harder until he realizes it's the ice chipping off his coat, jeans, and ice-crusted skates. On the sh.o.r.e, arriving skaters help get him to his truck and take his skates off, but he waves them off and drives himself home. All he wants to do is get there. His family is at the kitchen table when he walks into the house. There's so much Tom wants to say, he is so grateful and loves them so very much, but all he can manage is "I had a bad experience." Later, he makes a sign warning of thin ice and drives back to the lake with it.

At the bookstore Monday morning Tom greets well-wishers, who all want to hear his story. We think it's a miracle he got out alive, especially with none of us there to help him. Tom says that isn't necessarily so. "I know people say you shouldn't go out alone," he tells us, "but I'm really glad no one else was there. If Liz was with me, we both would have fallen through, and I can't even imagine what would have happened if I had the kids." Then he says, quietly, "I'm certain that somebody else would have gone in, so if it had to happen, I'm glad it was me." I ask him if he'd skate again. "When I know it's totally safe," he says. "And I'll be real cautious if there's any kind of snow."

WHICH IS ALL there was for the next two weeks. As the third line of "In the Bleak Midwinter" goes, "Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow." It could have been making me temporarily insane. Although I don't think that excuses me from thinking vengeful thoughts or almost committing a crime. Maybe I was just so cold I wanted to heat things up. I had been having trouble coping after close friends of mine split. He'd left her for a woman twenty years younger. I'll tell you the story, but I won't use names; this is too small a town for that. The whole episode had left me feeling as if my heart was under a glacier. It was just enough pressure to cause permanent damage, but not enough for people to notice unless they looked closely.

When my friend who was left home alone asked me and another friend to help her switch around the bedrooms in her house, of course we said yes. We would do anything for her. How we got from simply moving her old bed to almost cutting it up with a chain saw, tossing it out the window, and burning the mattress in the new girlfriend's driveway at midnight, I'm still not sure. The three of us were playing a card game in my kitchen on a Sat.u.r.day night when the question of what to do with the old bed made a spark that caught fire. Before we knew it, we were all excited and talking at once.

Chip has a dump truck. We could put the mattress in it, tip it off the back under cover of darkness, and light it before speeding away. We'd never have to get out of the cab. No one would know who did it, unless we pa.s.sed Fireman Al on the way home. When Al was in college he burned his folk's cabin near Chilkoot Lake down to the foundation. It was an accident, and no one was hurt, but he decided to become a fireman instead of a biologist after that, so he could help prevent such a catastrophe from happening to anyone else. We agreed that Al would recognize us for sure.

"Then we'll wear ski masks," one of us said. "And dress in black," another said. "And light it with a Molotov c.o.c.ktail," added the third, a librarian, who also mentioned that "you can learn how to make them on the Internet." I thought we were doing some heavy housecleaning, not starting a riot. Luckily, our friend with the bed said that we couldn't toss a bottle with fuel in it. The leftover shards of gla.s.s might cut a dog's paw.