If You Lived Here, I'd Know Your Name Part 18

As I served up warm apple pie and ice cream, I recalled the song "Alice's Restaurant" and all those eight-by-ten glossy photos at the trial, and I knew that while burning your own property in someone else's yard might not be arson, it would, at the very least, be littering. We could all end up in jail, as Arlo Guthrie had. When I said so, one of my friends reminded me that Guthrie's story did have a silver lining: "I mean, he didn't have to go to Vietnam, right?"

But she knew what I meant. It wasn't the law or government we were worried about, it was a higher authority. "If we burn your mattress this way now," she said to our friend, "the smoke will only soil your soul-and ours." We all agreed to a private bonfire on the beach, with just the three of us, the next day.

Still, I worried that the black smoke from all that foam rubber would attract Fireman Al and the volunteers. Chip came into the kitchen and put his pie plate in the sink with the others. "When they see who it is and what you're burning," he said, "they'll run."

Before we went to sleep, I asked Chip if he thought I was crazy. "Yes," he said, "but you were when I married you." I thought about our wedding, how happy we were, and then my friend's wedding, which had been such a fun day, too. I was suddenly dizzy with a grief that was worse in some way than the dying kind. I was so afraid it might happen to us, too, that I turned out the light and kissed Chip hard.

In the morning my friend canceled the burn. She'd heard that the wind had blown most of the snow off Chilkoot Lake and said she'd rather go skating. So instead of standing by a bonfire watching her old life go up in smoke, we started her new one gliding over thick ice.

A few weeks later, I went to see Father Jim. I was writing a story for the paper on his Catholic mission boat, the Mater Dei. We met over coffee in the rectory. When the interview was done, I told him I'd been having some trouble lately with forgiveness. I didn't tell him how we'd almost burned a man's marriage bed in his new girlfriend's driveway, but I did ask if you could still be a good Christian if you were thinking really bad thoughts. "Heather," Father Jim said loudly in his South Boston accent. (I think he used to work in big cathedrals.) "Heather," he said, warming up for the punch line the way he does. "Heather, when G.o.d taps you on the shoulder and says it's time to go, he'll ask you one question: Have you been good to my people? If you can answer yes, then you've got it made."

On the way home, I ran into Christy Tengs Fowler, a close friend of the Stuart family's, at the library. She asked me if I'd be writing Gene Stuart's obituary. I told her I would be, as soon as I finished Father Jim's story... and I needed to record an essay for the radio... and I had to write my column, too. I didn't have time to visit with anyone about anything right now, especially that obituary. It was terrible and sad and could wait-the weekly paper wouldn't be printed for six more days. But Christy needed to talk and I'm her friend, so I slowed down and we moved out of the doorway to a quiet corner. Gene had died that morning in Seattle from the burns he'd suffered in a fire at his remote cabin the afternoon before. He had been lighting a woodstove with diesel fuel and the fumes had built up and it had exploded. He was on fire when the friends who were out there with him pulled him through the window and then "dropped and rolled" with him on the ground to put the flames out, the way Fireman Al has instructed us all to do. A helicopter that usually transports extreme s...o...b..arders and skiers saw the cabin in flames and radioed town. They flew Fireman Al and an emergency medical technician in to help Gene just as it was getting dark. Then a Coast Guard chopper flew him out of town from the airport. Doctors at the Juneau hospital decided to send him on to a burn center in Seattle, but there was not much that could be done. If that wasn't bad enough, Gene's dog, Willow, died in the fire, too.

Gene was a sawyer in the old mills; he ran the huge blades that cut logs into boards. When the mills were shut down, he became a fisherman out of necessity, naming his boat Reluctant. Mostly, Geno, as his friends called him, was a practical joker. He came up with electrician Erwin Hertz's slogan: "Hertz Electric-We'll Fix Your Shorts." Gene was a good man, and he was good to G.o.d's people. I told Christy what the priest had said about that, and I decided to take his words to heart. I promised Christy I'd start Gene's obituary whenever the family was ready, and asked her to let me know when they wanted to talk with me. My other projects would have to wait. Christy told me she felt awful for Gene's widow, all alone in her house. "She doesn't even have her dog," Christy said. She also couldn't help thinking about how quickly life can change.

WHEN I GOT HOME, Chip's big old boat with the blue tarp flapping on the deck looked as pretty as a white-sailed sloop in the harbor. The skates and boots all over the floor in the mud-room, the dishes in the sink, and my good old dog sleeping on the couch all seemed to shout, A family lives here; they are busy and happy and a little messy but someday that won't be so and you'll be sorry. A little joy has come from all this winter's sadness. After Tom fell into the lake and lived to tell about it, his wife, Liz, said she didn't care anymore what he bought her for her upcoming birthday; he'd already given her the best present ever-himself. My friend's divorce has given me a new appreciation for my own marriage. That doesn't mean I would want the bad in order to have the good, but I know that love and life are all mixed up with loss and death, just like beautiful bubbles frozen in the lake.

Robert Frost wrote that the world may end in fire or ice. Well, from what I've seen, heard, and imagined of both this winter, all I can conclude is that the world could end in any number of ways, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. The only choice any of us has is what to do if we're still here after it happens. Do we die a little death every day ourselves or do we reach for someone's hand and dance again?

DULY NOTED

The Lynn Ca.n.a.l Community Players "King of Fools" float took first prize in Sat.u.r.day's first ever "Mardi Gras in July" Parade. The Harbor Bar's "Pirate Ship" float took second. Having a parade on the Fort Seward Parade Grounds may seem obvious, but according to Officers' Row resident Annette Smith, it took two seasonal workers from the Hotel Halsingland to suggest it. "They were sitting up on the hotel porch roof one night having a few beers and looking out over the parade grounds and they said, 'Gee, someone really ought to have a parade here.' At least that's how it was told to me," Annette said.

The Sheldon Museum held its annual volunteer luncheon last Tuesday. For this year's tropical theme, volunteer Jane Bell said, "Most everybody wore flowered shirts." Milestones for the museum this year included Joan Snyder receiving the First Lady's Volunteer Award from Susan Knowles and the museum's first all-male, all-ex-marine volunteer staff day with Alan Traut, Roy Lawrence, and Frank Draeger. Another gender barrier fell when the Doll's Fair was organized by a mostly male crew, which included George Mark, Mark Klevons, Paul Morgan, Matt Turner, and Alan Traut.

Byrne Power, the KHNS program director, has opened Imago Video in his Quonset hut in Fort Seward. Hours are Thursday, Friday, and Sat.u.r.day from six to nine P.M., or by appointment. Byrne specializes in foreign, independent, old Hollywood, and art films the other video stores don't have.

Tim June spent the summer solstice sailing his wooden ketch Keku in the Juneau Yacht Club's annual Around Admiralty Island race. Tim said he and two crew members planned on taking turns at the helm, but they all ended up staying awake most of the time. "It was still light enough at midnight to not need a headlamp to read the chart," he said, "and by two-thirty or so the sun was shining."

Curtain Call

I WAS TWENTY-FOUR years old with a husband steering, a baby in the car seat, and two huskies in the back of the truck when, in the spring of 1984, I arrived in Haines from Anchorage, where we had been living for about a year. Driving down from Alaska's frozen, flat interior into the Chilkat Valley in April was a lot like going from black-and-white Kansas to the colorful Land of Oz. The mountains were huge and jagged. Everything else was wet and green or blue and bright. I called my mother in New York, from a phone booth on Main Street. I could see down over the Harbor Bar to the bay and mountains beyond. It was hot and sunny. I was wearing shorts. I told her that Haines looked like Switzerland, only on the ocean. Chip was already fishing. This was spring-king salmon, daffodils, and green gra.s.s. Chip had been here earlier and had found us an apartment in one of the big houses on Officers' Row, in old Fort Seward.

Ted and Mimi Gregg, who lived in their own home next door, owned it. During World War II, Fort Seward was the U.S. Army base in Haines. After World War II, when the army left, it sold the fort as surplus; the Greggs and four other families bought the decomissioned turn-of-the-century army base, sight unseen, with the hopes of turning it into an artists' colony, and moved to Haines from the East Coast. They've lived here ever since. Today, the most popular postcards of Haines are the ones of the cla.s.sic white buildings surrounding the parade grounds at Fort Seward. The best pictures are taken from across the cove, with the dramatic backdrop of five-thousand-foot snowcapped mountains.

There was (and still is) a bar in the Greggs' front hall. Ted painted the portrait of a naked lady that hangs in a gilt frame over it. There's also a baby grand piano in the living room. It belonged to Mimi's mother, an opera singer.

I met Ted while he was mowing the lawn. Chip had started his new job and was out at the sawmill. Baby Eliza was in the backpack. Ted wore faded pink canvas pants, a white b.u.t.ton-down shirt, and a tall straw hat that looked like a potato ricer with a beak. He stopped mowing. "Just like Madeira!" he said, in a slightly patrician accent. We silently admired the view. Then Ted said it again, wagging his hand at me to make the point. "Just like Madeira, Haines is just like Madeira." I have never been to Madeira, but I believed him, because he told me that's where he'd bought his hat. The whole scene was like something from a movie or a play.

The next morning I woke up to the sound of a chain saw and looked out the window to see Ted, in safety goggles, carving a woman's torso from a stump. Wood chips flew everywhere. When a small cruise ship docked at the old army pier at the bottom of the hill, the Greggs invited us to a party for the captain and crew. Ted grilled salmon, and his daughter-in-law Gail wore a cancan outfit and baked two cheesecakes for dessert. The sun slanted across the parade grounds and, across the inlet, mountains reflected the evening colors. Ted handed me a gla.s.s of wine. "Just like Madeira," he said.

Almost twenty years later, when I was writing Ted's obituary, a friend of the Greggs' recalled, "Ted was the ultimate host. You walked through the door and he had your coat on his arm and a drink in your hand." By then, I knew Ted well. So did everyone else in town. Writing his life story for the Chilkat Valley News would be a challenge. Not so much to get the details-he led a well-doc.u.mented life-but to capture his character. I took a break from my drafting to get the mail. The post office was crowded. One of the clerks had had to leave town suddenly with a sick child, another was out with an injury, and the postmaster was away on his winter vacation, so there were just two guys left to handle all the packages and letters for the whole town. I ended up in the long line between Helen and Joan, two of Ted's contemporaries. We talked about him.

"Ted always had a good time," Helen said. Then she thought a minute and added, "All the men had a good time, didn't they?"

Joan, who, like Helen, is a widow, said, "Yes, but we're still here, aren't we?"

When old people die, friends and family are, for the most part, prepared. As Mimi said, "Ted lived a wonderful life, but he wasn't having much fun lately." He'd had several strokes and had spent the last few months in a nursing home in Ketchikan, where a daughter of his lives. Mimi had decided not to have a funeral. At least not right away. She had Ted cremated and was planning a concert and picnic on the parade grounds in the spring. Ted had never liked funerals anyway. He'd liked parades, parties, and plays.

The Greggs had founded the Lynn Ca.n.a.l Community Players, and for fifty years Mimi and Ted had tried to make the motto of Haines "Alaska's Theater Town." The t.i.tle shows up in the brochures for the Chilkat Center for the Arts and on and off in various tourist publications. The truth is that no motto has ever really stuck to Haines. We also have tried calling ourselves "The Valley of the Eagles," "The Alaska of Your Dreams," and "Alaska's Best-Kept Secret." At Ted's memorial service, his son Tresham talked about Ted's weekly trips to the town dump. His father, he said, would always come back with more than he'd dropped off. He'd made sets, parade floats, and decorative objects for his home and yard from found objects-treasures, Ted had called them.

The attic of the Greggs' home is filled with costumes, props, and bags and boxes of stuff Ted hauled up over the years just in case he ever needed it. Ted was the one who had authentic, old-fashioned milk bottles for Our Town. He played the milkman. Ted also had the cart wheels for Tevye's wagon in Fiddler on the Roof. He built the fireplace for a.r.s.enic and Old Lace with antique mantel and trim pieces he had salvaged from buildings in Fort Seward. He also built the bar in the saloon for the historical melodrama l.u.s.t for Dust, about Haines during the Gold Rush. The play, created for tourists, was full of chorus girls and slapstick humor, and much of it rhymed. Jack Dalton was the Bad Guy. In real life Dalton had driven beef on the hoof from Pyramid Harbor to hungry miners up north, charging them a fortune. In the play Dalton said things like "It's time to steer the steer and herd the herd" to his trusty sidekick, Dusty Trails. You get the idea.

A few years ago Tom Morphet took his visiting parents and brother to meet Ted and Mimi. Ted invited them all inside for a family brunch, cooked Swedish pancakes, and afterward got out his tandem bicycle for Tom and his brother to ride. The seats are side by side, and there are double sets of pedals. Ted and Mimi used to ride it in the summer parades, dressed in Gay Nineties costumes. After Tom got the hang of it, Ted went inside and came back with a full-sized bear costume, urging Tom's brother to put it on. He did, and they rode around the parade grounds, with their delighted parents taking pictures. "Who but Ted," Tom said, "would have a bicycle built for two and a bear costume?"

Ted decorated pickups, cars, and trailers for every parade in Haines. The floats and costumes he and his family designed and built are still the highlights of our three big annual parades-on the Fourth of July, at the Southeast Alaska State Fair, and, my favorite, at Christmas.

When I was small, Christmas entertainment meant the Messiah, The Nutcracker, and Amahl and the Night Visitors. Our household included my parents, two sisters, and, for a few years when I was in high school, three grandparents. My grandfather was French, but he and my grandmother had spent much of their lives in England. My father was born in London. So Christmas dinner always ended with a flaming plum pudding and hard sauce. No one under seventy actually ate it, but that's not the point. It was a tradition. My Pennsylvania grandmother, who also lived with us, was a soprano and a pianist. She and my mother, an alto, sang in church choirs.

Our first few Christmases in Haines I was homesick. I missed the eastern holidays, with candles in colonial windows and tiny, delicate white lights. Here, December is dark; the sun rises at about nine-thirty and sets before three, but it hangs so low in the sky that it feels like dusk all day. Often snow and rain obscure the sun completely. That's why everyone uses lots and lots of little and big colored lights. More of them are inside than out, because windy, wet snowstorms rip them off the eaves and short them out. We leave them on all day. The Friday after Thanksgiving may be the biggest national shopping day of the year, but just about every store in Haines is closed. Main Street is quiet. Shops have shorter winter hours, and many are closed until the summer tourist season. The holidays are more about having fun than buying things. And it simply wouldn't be Christmas without the parade, and we couldn't call it a parade without the Snow Dragon. I have never actually seen the dragon, because I'm in it, along with seven other members of the Lynn Ca.n.a.l Community Players. When I met the Greggs, they recruited me for various bit parts in l.u.s.t for Dust. I've also acted in other shows, have served on the club's board of trustees, and directed Carousel when I was pregnant with my fourth child, Joanna Jeanne, or J.J. I got the idea for her nickname from the Greggs; their youngest daughter, Kathy Ann, is known as K.A.

This year, as usual, I'm right behind the dragon's head with a fifty-pound fire extinguisher that Fireman Al has filled with flour and strapped to my chest. Every time I squeeze the handle, the dragon spews a floury cloud of "smoke." The twenty-three-foot-long dragon is made of heavy plastic oil drums, cleaned and cut in half, with holes for our necks, all tied together and draped with yards of white and green cloth finished with a foot of tinsel fringe all the way to the ground. Foam fins cover our heads, completing the serpentine effect but making us legally blind. Tom is behind me, cracking jokes and holding the car battery that powers the dragon's red eyes and flashing lights.

A long time ago Ted's son Tresham helped build the Snow Dragon for one of the Lynn Ca.n.a.l Community Players shows, The Twelve Dancing Princesses. Ted made a swan-shaped sleigh for the Snow Queen that year too. But while he was towing it back home behind his pickup from that very snowy parade, it skidded into a ditch and was totaled. Today Ted's oldest daughter, Annette Smith, acts as our guide and handler. She looks great in her Sergeant Pepper costume. The parade begins as soon as it's dark, about three. Annette leads us out of the Elks Lodge onto snow-packed Main Street. Santa and his fire truck get their lights and sirens going; the s...o...b..rners snowmobile club starts their engines. A pickup truck of Christians with JESUS SAVES spelled out in lights above them sings carols, and in the dragon's tail the last person turns on the boom box with the traditional parade soundtrack: Alvin and the Chipmunks' Christmas alb.u.m edited with roars every few tunes.

The dragon bobs and weaves, with all of us pa.s.sing instructions down the line: "Watch the ice," "Slowly left," "Swing right," "Hop a little." Remember, we can barely see anything. Someone-it must be Tom-suggests that we go into the Fogcutter, so we part the crowd on the sidewalk, take a spin around the bar, and head back out the door. The dragon belches smoke and roars while my children, dressed as Robin Hood's merry band, run alongside tossing lit firecrackers, waving sparklers, and pausing occasionally to launch a bottle rocket. When my mother saw a video of the parade she said the whole thing was vaguely reminiscent of the Tet Offensive.

The chamber of commerce would like something more traditional than the dragon, and last year tried to add an old-fashioned sleigh full of carolers. It seemed like a fine idea. There are summer horse-and-buggy tours now, and a few draft horses winter over. But the fireworks spooked them, and the snowmobiles drowned out the singing.

EACH YEAR DURING the holidays my parents would take us kids into New York to see a Broadway play. When we travel back to see my family now, I always try to include a visit to the theater. Years ago, Chip and I took the children to see Cats. It was good, but not nearly as memorable as the musicals they'd seen, and been in, in Haines. It was nowhere near as much fun as the show we saw in Haines a few months later. For The Sound of Music there were fifty people in the cast, crew, and orchestra, although that's stretching the last term: Five instrumentalists held together by a strong piano player provided the music. Everyone else had built the set, gathered props, or sewed costumes. Outfitting an Austrian villa with furniture from Haines homes is not easy. First, you have to find someone who actually has a nice Louis Quatorze love seat (or anything close), then convince him to part with it for a few weeks. Ted also used a lot of gold spray paint to dress old set pieces up.

Just before opening night Maria, the leading lady, got laryngitis. Over coffee at Mountain Market, everyone talked about what would happen if she couldn't go on. No one else in town could possibly sing the part. Since she's the Presbyterian minister's wife, we hoped she had an in with G.o.d, but we knew she'd been to the clinic. And someone said they'd even seen her going into the new Chilkat Valley Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine office, above the Alaskan Liquor Store on Main Street.

Did it work? Of course it did. As the curtain parted, we heard Maria loud and clear. The hills are alive...

The stage was full of our friends and neighbors wearing nun costumes. There was Mrs. Maple, my son's teacher; Annie, the volunteer undertaker; Marie, who has a whole yard full of giant malamutes she sells to j.a.panese people for a lot of money; and Sylvia and Teresa, who teach out at the Klukwan School. Father Jim got a round of applause when he appeared in his own red vestments during the wedding scene. Having real people play themselves is an old Haines tradition. In Our Town, the police chief played the police chief. That play also gave me my own opportunity to play a role awfully close to myself: the Stage Manager. Instead of a suit, I wore a long skirt to tell the story of life and death in Grover's Corners. My family also played a family in The Best Christmas Pageant Ever. In that show the real fire department put out the pretend fire.

After helping with sets, props, and programs, I watched The Sound of Music knowing all the cast members and rooting for them as you would for a home team. Everyone in the audience did the same thing. We put up with an off-key French horn player, because he's old and we all knew he was doing the best he could. We smiled at the youngest children, who looked like little angels and delivered their lines so you could hear them in the back row. The ballroom scene got the biggest applause because everyone was wearing evening gowns and rented tuxedos from Juneau. They were so finely dressed up we hardly recognized them. When it was over, we presented flowers and locally made jewelry to the guest director, an aging grand dame from South Africa who was a friend of the Greggs'. She told us that Haines was "weird and wonderful, a place out of time." Which we took as a compliment.

I'm still humming "My Favorite Things," and so are my children. Chip's been playing the John Coltrane version on the stereo. No one remembers any of the music from Cats. This summer when we hike up Mount Riley, I'm sure at least one of us will break into "the hills are alive with the sound of music." It's our song now; everyone knows all the words. That's why local shows mean more than big Broadway productions, and local customs, shared with friends and family, take the place of other ones from other places. Happiness can be as simple as a familiar tune and someone to sing it with.

AT TED'S MEMORIAL service in the theater the singing kindergarten teacher belted out "Danny Boy" and "Unforgettable." Debra Schnabel played the piano. At the reception afterward on the parade grounds, the sun shone as warm and brightly as it had that first spring day when I'd met Ted. The wind blew paper plates and napkins off the tables. We ate salmon, salads, and cake that the Gregg family had prepared-a meal for a hundred or so. Two of Ted and Mimi's grandsons toasted Ted, and Mimi, too, who smiled and took a theatrical bow. Then we raised our gla.s.ses, drank to Ted's spirit, and sang "Auld Lang Syne" together. Mimi had made sure we all had a copy of the words.