If You Lived Here, I'd Know Your Name Part 2

I'm no slouch, but the going is hard, slow, and takes all of my strength. My muscles quiver. I'm sweating, breathing hard, and gripping my climbing poles tight. I hope the new ligament in my knee holds. While it works great on the flats, cycling or running, this is a big test. On the other hand, Annie had the same surgery, more recently-and just watch her go. After looking way down, over my shoulder, I resolve not to do it again. We're a thousand feet up. I jam my boot into the step made by Paul and packed down by Annie, and the snow gives way-not completely, but enough for me to hear the blood rushing through my veins.

It's Paul's regular day off, but Annie has taken a leave day from her job as high school secretary. It's been a long, dark winter. The last time we had sunny skies, warm temperatures, fresh white snow, and no wind was a year ago. There was a little debate at the trail-head if this route was too difficult for me, but I a.s.sured them I could do it.

Now I'm not so sure. I slip a little and my forehead touches the snowy wall. Maybe I should just crawl up it. Leaning into the hill makes me lose any purchase I have, and I slowly slip down.

"The runoff isn't too bad," notes Paul, the leader with eyes in the back of his head. "If you feel yourself going, dig the poles in or grab the snow with your hands." Annie tells me to go with the fall, maybe even roll a little if I can't stop.

"Stay loose," she calls down. "Just stay loose if you're going."

My body is tall and angular, more Tin Man than Kathy Rigby. I'm pretty sure I'll break before I bounce. I wonder, for just a moment, if I could get killed doing this and decide, just as fast, that yes, I could. I jam the poles hard into the bank to stop myself from sliding, but they don't catch. It feels like I'm falling forever. I don't see my life flash before my eyes; I don't see a bright light. I don't see anything at all. My eyes are shut. Finally I stop. Turns out I've only skidded about twenty feet.

My partners continue up, unconcerned. Maybe it's because Paul and Annie are the undertakers that they don't have my fear of falling. They know death is inevitable and would rather meet theirs on a mountain than at home in bed.

On a good day, a day like today, Haines is often compared to heaven. But on a bad day, these mountains and the water below them are deadly.

I know that, but I still want to be up here. I keep climbing, not only because I can't back down without falling but because I feel so good all of a sudden. I faced my fears and won. For now anyway. I want to sing-but I don't dare because it takes all my concentration just to hold on to the hill.

At last, we step up onto the ridge, and rest before heading up and over the gentler hiking trail for the trip back down. I try to drink from the water bottle on my f.a.n.n.y pack, but it's frozen. Paul offers me some from the flat old Listerine bottle he keeps tucked into an inside pocket. We break an energy bar and pa.s.s it around with some cold orange slices. The only other tracks in the snow belong to a wolverine. Below us, eagles glide over the treetops.

Paul shakes his head in awe of the view. He's seen it a thousand times and it still moves him. Annie sighs and then smiles a big, wide grin. It's a face she never wears down in town. Seeing them now so happy reminds me of a more somber afternoon, back when I didn't know them as well but was just as impressed by their bravery and teamwork.

ANNIE AND PAUL worked quickly. They bathed Nedra and shampooed and dried her wispy white hair before slipping her thin arms and legs into undergarments and sliding over all of it the royal blue dress that once showed off her eyes.

Nedra was my friend Joanne's mother. Joanne had helped Paul and Annie get her dad in his last suit, but she said that with "Mom" it was different. The long illness had reduced Nedra's already small frame to veins and skin, nothing really, and Joanne didn't want to remember her that way.

Taking care of Nedra, especially near the end, wore Joanne out. One afternoon I came home and found her asleep on my couch. Sometimes after Nedra went to sleep, Joanne would go for a drive with her dog and park someplace where he could run around, while she lay on the warm hood of her pickup, watching the northern lights.

Joanne did finally call the hospice people for help, but Nedra was already dead before they arranged for her care. She had bad lungs and died of emphysema. Seneca wrote that asthma is a rehearsal for death. If that's true, then Nedra had about ten dress rehearsals and time enough to prepare for the final curtain. Her last instructions requested an Emblem Club funeral, an Episcopal burial, and Joanne to make her casket.

The casket part came about because when Joanne's dad died, she and Nedra had tried to buy one at the True Value hardware store, the only place in town that sells caskets. The coffin that matched their budget was green fibergla.s.s. Joanne said it looked like a submarine, and she knew her dad wouldn't want to be buried in something with a snap-on lid, like a plastic garbage can. Since Joanne had just finished building her kitchen cabinets, she thought she could make a wooden casket. Nedra was so pleased with Joanne's first one that she ordered another, for herself.

Joanne's sisters, Kathy and Julie, live in California and Nevada now. Kathy flew up as soon as Joanne called to say Nedra was going fast, but she missed saying good-bye to her mother by one flight from Juneau. Julie and her husband were driving up the Alaska Highway in their motor home, and weren't expected to arrive until the day before the funeral. Julie's two daughters and their children drove down from Anchorage as soon as they got the word that Nedra had died.

On Tuesday morning, we sat at Nedra's kitchen table writing her obituary. It was my first one. I'd volunteered to do it because Nedra hadn't liked a new reporter at the paper. He was an investigative type from down south. I also wanted to do something for Joanne. She's the kind of friend who brings her mother and her dog to dinner. The last time we'd carried Nedra into our house in a lawn chair; it was Joanne's fortieth-birthday party.

I listened as the two sisters struggled with the Victorian language of death-"pa.s.sed away," "gone to her reward," "resting eternally," "met her maker," "entered into the kingdom of G.o.d." None of it fit Nedra. She was a direct woman and would have appreciated letting people know right up front how and when she died. We wrote, "After a long illness, Nedra Allen Waterman died from emphysema Sat.u.r.day evening at her Small Tracts Road home. Her daughter Joanne was by her side. She was seventy-eight years old."

The rest was easier, because Nedra had written most of it down herself. There was her ride on the first steamship into Seward after the j.a.panese bombed Pearl Harbor, how she met and married Wes Waterman, the years at the gold mine, the babies, leaving Alaska for California and coming back again, the hotel she ran in Anchorage, and the volunteer work she did in Haines for the Emblem Club. Nedra had even included the date and place of her high school graduation, and the middle names of her parents. All seventy-eight years in two letter-sized, handwritten pages.

When the obituary was finished, Kathy turned her attention to Joanne and the casket. "It's now ten A.M. on Tuesday and the funeral is six P.M. on Thursday," she announced, taking a long pull on her cigarette. She was still in her pink bathrobe. "Mom better be buried in something st.u.r.dier than an old bedspread." She didn't say it in a mean way, and succeeded in making Joanne laugh for the first time all morning. Joanne has a great laugh, a deep-throated belly chuckle that makes anyone who hears it smile.

The casket had to be finished in time to put Nedra into the dress she wanted to be buried in, the one she wore to her fiftieth high school reunion.

Karl Johnson walked over from next door to see if Joanne needed any help with the casket. He'd heard at the lumberyard that she'd bought the wood and planned to build it herself. Kathy, who can't tell a mitered joint from a dovetail, said yes, but Joanne, the carpenter, shook her head and answered, "No, thanks." She said there was plenty of time.

We all went into the shop and looked at the pine one-by-twelves, one-by-sixes, and two-by-twos that Joanne still needed to cut, screw, and glue into a casket. Kathy said that if Joanne didn't get to work soon she'd miss the family dinner planned for that evening. Which I think is exactly what Joanne had in mind. Building the casket gave her an excuse to leave the crowded kitchen, filled with women and babies-Nedra's grandchildren and great-grandchildren. The work helped Joanne sort it out, alone.

Joanne finished the casket about five hours before the funeral. She coated it in Danish oil instead of varnish, so it would dry on time. Julie and the motor home pulled into the driveway the night before, carrying a bolt of blue satin to line the coffin. Kathy tucked some quilt batting underneath it.

NEDRA WAS LYING comfortably inside the casket in plenty of time for the move in the old ambulance, which doubles as a hea.r.s.e, to the Elks Lodge for the funeral. Even Kathy said that once the casket was done, time seemed to slow way down. The final hours before the funeral were empty. Getting everyone showered and dressed took less time than antic.i.p.ated, especially with the motor home's extra bathroom. It was a warm, sunny April day. The very best kind of day. We sat outside in Nedra's garden, trying to keep the children clean and Joanne's energetic spaniel away from our good clothes.

Nedra's favorite hymn was the one about walking in the garden with Jesus. "And he walks with me and he talks with me and he tells me I am his own." At the funeral, Debra played it on the piano while everyone sang. I pictured a healthy Nedra alone with Jesus. What would Nedra say to him? My guess is she'd suggest a shave and a haircut, and then she'd question him about why he hadn't intervened in the more difficult days of her life. "Where were you," she might ask, "when all I had to feed the girls was mustard sandwiches?"

The ladies of the Emblem Club, dressed in black from gloves to stockings, conducted the service, taking turns at the wobbly podium overlooking the closed casket. Each woman carried a dark purple silk rose.

At the graveside, Reverend Jan Hotze said the final blessing, and the Emblem Club ladies each dropped a handful of dirt and a flower onto the coffin. Maisie Jones, who has buried a husband and several close friends, says it's good for the living: "When you throw flowers on the grave and say the Twenty-third Psalm, it does help. It helps us come to terms with the absence. Everybody feels serene about it afterward."

The Episcopal burial service includes a verse from John's gospel: "in my house are many mansions." In the obituary letter Nedra left for her daughters, she wrote proudly that her first home in Alaska was a fourteen-by-fourteen-foot shack on a mining claim in Talkeetna.

Nedra spent most of her life in the biggest state in the union in small, handmade houses. She wouldn't be comfortable for eternity in a mansion. Which is why her simple cabin of a casket, built with love and skill by her youngest daughter, ought to make her feel right at home in her new neighborhood.

DULY NOTED

On Monday about thirty Klukwan residents turned out at the Alaska Native Sisterhood Hall for an Elizabeth Peratrovich Day luncheon program honoring the legendary Alaska civil rights leader. A video of Elizabeth Peratrovich, a play performed at Hoonah High School a few years ago, was shown. The Klukwan School children read essays they'd written about Mrs. Peratrovich. Elsie Spud said, "It was hard for us to hold back tears because of the good job the kids did, both in the writing and the reading." She added, "We all left with important knowledge about why we celebrate the holiday." Elizabeth Peratrovich is credited with convincing the territorial legislature to change laws that once banned Native people from many public places, including movie theaters, restaurants, and stores.

The last weeks of the school year mean trips and special events for elementary school cla.s.ses. Kelly Pape's third graders went to Whitehorse on a two-day camping trip at the hot springs. Jansy Hansen's fourth graders took the water taxi to Skagway for a ride on the White Pa.s.s and Yukon Route Railroad and visited the Klondike Gold Dredge. Tim McDonough's fifth graders loaded up a school van with gear and left for two nights at Rainbow Glacier Camp.

Local carvers John Hagen, Clifford Thomas, and Greg Horner have started work on a new totem pole commissioned for actor James Earl Jones. Alaska Indian Arts president Lee Heinmiller said the twenty-two-foot pole will take about a year to complete. "It's basically still just a log right now."

A s...o...b..ard signed by members of the Teton Gravity Research pro ski team was Lucas Dawson's big present at his eleventh birthday party Sat.u.r.day. The team of elite skiers and s...o...b..arders from around the world stayed at the Dawson family lodge while they filmed extreme spring skiing adventures. "Lucas got to know the guys while they were here-and they got together and gave him the board," Lucas's dad, Jon Dawson, said.

Everyone Knew Her as Susie

DUANE WILSON SLIDES open the gla.s.s door to his parents' house, adjusts his eyes to the darker inside light, and takes a deep breath of the warm, smoky air, scented with fish and fresh cedar. "Smells like an Indian house," he says, and we all laugh. On the table, a foot-square pile of dried smoked eulachon (p.r.o.nounced "hooligan") rests on newspaper. Next to it is the remains of a sugary sheet cake. "Hmm. Cake and fish," Duane says, helping himself to both. The cake is left over from the potluck supper after the Alaska Native Sisterhood funeral of Susie Brouillette, a Tlingit elder who died earlier in the week.

I'm at the kitchen table, carefully chewing my own little dried fish and wondering if I should eat the fins and tail. It's actually better than it sounds. Much better than a similar dish my dad eats for breakfast-steamed kippered herring, or "kippers," which smells bad enough to drive a daughter to move to, say, Alaska when she grows up. Anyway, the reason I'm crunching the tougher parts of a eulachon and watching Duane snap off the shriveled eyeless heads into a neat pile is because I need Susie Brouillette's Tlingit name and the proper phrasing of her tribal lineage for the obituary.

This house is the home of the Alaska Native Sisterhood secretary, Marilyn Wilson, a happy woman with a round face and big gla.s.ses. She keeps good notes on her computer and has a fax machine in the back bedroom that she always offers to use when I call with a question. "What's your fax number?" she'll say, and I'll tell her I don't have one. I'd rather talk with Marilyn and her husband, Paul, in person. I like being in their house. There are usually puppies underfoot, grandchildren playing, and a nephew or cousin asleep on the couch. Marilyn and Paul's projects are everywhere. Today the television is on but no one is watching it.

While Marilyn and Duane, who is the president of the Alaska Native Brotherhood Haines Camp No. 5 and knows Tlingit better than his mother does, translate into English the Native words I've asked about, Paul carves a design on a yellow cedar canoe paddle and keeps me company. Paul doesn't greet me with any of the usual talk about when it will stop raining or if this summer will be warmer than last. Instead, the first thing he says is "I have missed many years of my culture."

Paul tells me he's learning the Tlingit language so he can believe the stories of his people, not just know the plots. When he was young, missionaries and the government prohibited Alaskan Natives from speaking their language and living traditionally. They often took Tlingit children from their homes and families, placing them in boarding schools as far away as Washington and Oregon. Now Paul is a grandfather and is committed to relearning a way of living that he says is not lost but rather hiding, just below the skin. He is proud of Duane and watches for a moment as his son helps his wife. "When I sing the old songs," Paul says, "it's like my chest is opened up and my heart is showing." Paul's words are poetry. I know because there is nothing I can say afterward. I just watch him resume his carving and try not to look too closely at the eye sockets of those dried fish. I recognize the movie on the television: On Golden Pond.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the table, Duane and Marilyn have quietly sounded out the deceased's name, but they're not completely satisfied with the result. "I'll write Taac, but it's really Taak'd," my hostess says softly, emphasizing the throat-clearing ending sound. Tlingit names are based on the moiety, or reciprocal group, to which they belong. The term moiety is taken from a Greek word meaning half, and there are two moieties: Ravens and Eagles. In the old days, Ravens could only marry Eagles. Now Tlingits don't always observe that rule, and in fact often marry non-Natives. However, Ravens and Eagles still take care of each other. When a Raven dies, it is the Eagles who plan the funeral. Eagles sing songs to Ravens at potlatches. When a raven and an eagle are depicted together on silver jewelry or wood, the design is called "love birds" and is often circular, like the Eastern yin and yang symbol. They are different, but always complementary. The two halves make a whole.

The denotations don't stop with Ravens and Eagles. There are also what we call clans, although there isn't a matching word in Tlingit. Clans are more political and specific to an area than the Raven and Eagle identifications, which cover all Tlingits everywhere. Clans are what determine design, story, song, and property ownership. Unlike moieties, clans do have designated leaders.