If You Lived Here, I'd Know Your Name Part 3

Another grouping-are you still with me?-determines lineage. Houses are named for the place where the family initially lived, and link blood relatives. What makes it confusing is that, traditionally, newlyweds moved to the bride's mother's village and often lived in an uncle's house there. (The mother determines the children's moiety affiliation.) And sons were raised by their mother's brothers, not their fathers. Much of this has never been written down, and over time some of the finer points have been lost or changed. Often, so-called experts disagree.

Still more factors that make Tlingit families hard to track are adoption and the way names are used. Tlingits are generous with their culture and have adopted many non-Natives, giving them equal footing with birth relatives. They don't usually adopt them as babies and raise them as their own; instead, they adopt adults they like and who agree to honor Tlingit customs. Also, when an elder dies, his or her name is given to another relative (adopted or blood). This ensures that the family will have everyone they have loved with them throughout all time.

So you see, deciphering a Tlingit family tree, filled with the same names for many generations, gets confusing, even if you are Tlingit. I use the Tlingit names in obituaries because they tell who the person was and where they came from. But in the "survived by" category I stick with blood family lines. There isn't enough s.p.a.ce in our little newspaper to write more.

Now Marilyn says that her friend Susie was a Raven. She thinks she was also in the sockeye, or Lukaax Adi, clan. "But don't put that in the paper," she tells me. "I'm just not sure." She does know that Susie was from Taac Dein Caan, or the Snail House, and that her name was Naa Goolth Claa. Marilyn watches me carefully spelling everything correctly. I repeat the way the words sound until she nods her approval. She suspects the truth-that I am trying to make up for past wrongs by people who look like me, who are part of my broad Christian-European-American heritage, by honoring her culture and her wisdom and her husband's open-heart poetry. After I get it all right, she smiles and says, "Everyone knew her as Susie."

All I can think of is the Beatles' song "Rocky Racc.o.o.n," where Magil was called Lil, "but everyone knew her as Nancy." I have a feeling Marilyn may have shared that thought.

Besides all the Tlingit stuff, I learn from Marilyn that Susie raised five children and two stepchildren. Her husband, a fisherman, was killed loading a log ship in 1965. Their youngest daughter drowned. One of Susie's friends from the Catholic church where she worshipped had already told me that, despite personal tragedy, "Susie had a gift for making whoever she was with feel special."

Before I leave the Wilsons', Duane hands me a pint jar of smoked eulachon. His father likes his dried, but Duane prefers to can them after smoking because the moisture comes back in the pressure cooker, plumping them up. They look like sardines. These first spring fish arrive sometime between March and May. The rendered oil is especially valued by Natives for both taste and health benefits.

This year the eulachon run has been strong. Beaches are noisy with hungry sh.o.r.ebirds. Sea lions cruise the sh.o.r.eline with their mouths wide open. In the first few hours of the run, before the birds arrive to eat them, sp.a.w.ned-out dead eulachon litter the tide lines. As soon as word gets out that the eulachon are here, families such as the Wilsons reopen their fish camps along the Chilkat River. There are blue tarps strung between cottonwood trees for shelter and a shack or trailer to sleep in. Often there's an old couch or the bench seat from a pickup on the bank for elders to sit on. Some fresh eulachon are roasted over open fires, some are smoked, but most are buried in lined pits and left to rot for about three weeks. They smell so strong that when I'm riding my bike nearby I have to hold my breath. After the fish decompose, they are boiled outside in big pots until the oil can be skimmed off the top. When it cools, it's solid and white, like bacon grease.

Paul is eating some now, licking it off the spoon. He keeps it in a jar in the freezer and has it once or twice a day. "It's good for the heart," he says, offering me a spoonful. I try not to make a face. Paul laughs. He knows that eulachon, and especially the fat, is an acquired taste. I have a Native friend who won't touch the slimy little fish-not "boiled, roasted, or smoked," he says. He does help harvest them, though, because for him it's an annual reminder of the past, and an affirmation of the Tlingit culture's future.

The perfectly sealed jar of fish Duane gave me took the better part of a week to make-from netting on incoming tides to smoking for three days, and finally to sterilizing jars, checking lids, cutting and packing the fish, and staying close to the stove and watching the pressure cookers seal them for one hundred minutes at ten pounds of pressure. It is a generous and unexpected gift.

I COULDN'T CALL Susie Brouillette's daughter Della and tell her I was coming over because she didn't have a telephone. I'd seen the red Trans Am she drives, but I hadn't been successful in flagging her down; she didn't pay any attention to my frantic waving. I had thought I was finished with Susie Brouillette's obituary when Marilyn gently insisted that I couldn't put anything in the paper without the immediate family's blessing. That would be Della. When I couldn't make contact with Della, I asked Marilyn where she lived. She told me, and said I could tell Della she had sent me. Marilyn also mentioned that Della was a private person and might not take kindly to a stranger. Then she added, "You'll do fine."

Cold rain blew as I knocked at the trailer door. When Della appeared, she was in her pajamas. It was almost noon. Marilyn had told me she was between jobs. Even surprised and rumpled, she was extraordinarily beautiful. I tried not to stare. I said Marilyn Wilson had sent me. She looked at me sternly and shut the door before I could tell her who I was or why I was there.

A long minute later, she reopened the door enough for me to finish my introduction and explain that the paper wanted to borrow a recent photograph for her mother's obituary. I also asked, quickly, if I could run the content by her, to be sure it was all correct. Silently, she took in my eager fair face, Patagonia jacket, and pressed khakis. For a second I thought she might throw me off the porch. Instead, she shut the door again and left me standing in the rain with a wet cat rubbing my ankles. I knew that her mother had been gracious, and that she was her mother's dutiful daughter, and that Marilyn had said I had to do this, so I waited, hopeful, under the wide eave of the firewood shed attached to the trailer.

When she reemerged it was to show me a photograph. I leaned inside the doorway to look. Actually, there were two: one was recent, her mother's long white hair instantly recognizable; the other showed a young black-haired Tlingit beauty, much like herself. She wouldn't give the pictures to me until she heard what I'd written. She was prepared to dislike it. Sometimes you just have to do things, like eat a eulachon, that you think you can't do. I read carefully.

Della was quiet. It was okay, she said. For me, okay was perfect. Then she said there was one thing she'd like me to take out. She asked that I not quote the nice old lady from her mother's church. "She doesn't like Indians," Della said. I mumbled something about not knowing that, which I hadn't, and scratched the words out dramatically.

Then Della asked that I use both photographs; the younger one was her favorite. I said I was sorry, but my editor (and good friend, Tom Morphet) would never print it. "No forty-year-old wedding portraits," Tom had told me the first time I'd brought one like that back. "No one will know who the h.e.l.l it is."

I explained it differently to Della. "We can only use one picture," I said, "and since your mother was so well liked and respected by so many people who may not recognize her name but will know her face, it is important to show what she looked like, you know, now." But since she was dead, I added, "Sorry, I mean, then." Della had me fl.u.s.tered, and I suspect she knew it. My ancestors had never met hers, but that didn't absolve me of guilt about what my race had done and in many ways is still doing to Native Alaskans and Native Americans. I wanted Della to know I was respectful as well as trustworthy. It might not be much, but writing a good obituary for her mother was the best I could do. Printing an out-of-date picture, though, was impossible. She said she was disappointed but she understood. She shut the door without saying good-bye. I tucked her mother's photograph safely inside my coat and stepped off the porch.

Last time it had been Paul Wilson's heart that was showing; this time it was mine. I wanted to raise my hands and testify-thanking G.o.d for all these good people who forgive the past without forgetting it. I almost shouted Thank you right out loud. Thank you for Della's face, the Wilsons' kindness, eulachon, and for strong hearts beating in rhythm with ancestors. Thank you for Ravens and Eagles and halves made whole.

But I didn't. I never do anything like that. I am, as my mother likes to say, a "stiff-upper-lip" white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. That is my culture. So instead, I stood in the mud next to my car and realized that the only thing that keeps us going is love. I knew it then like I knew it was raining. I got a little off balance, the way you do when you're on a boat. I thought, It's as if we are all moving through this world on a big old ship, holding on to one another as we cruise up the generous river of life. The water that floats us is always new, yet it flows in the same direction, over the same old sand.

DULY NOTED

About seventy local fishermen, their wives, and guests celebrated the season at the Fishermen's Ball. The annual event was held at the Harbor Bar, with a big buffet spread on the pool table and live music from Skagway's Reverend Neil Down. The party lasted until the band quit at two A.M.

Kristin Bigsby and Frank White planned to spend the time between last week's gill-net opening and this one planning their August wedding. Instead they were mending Frank's net after a humpback whale swam right through it. "It was brand-new," Kristin said, "which made it even more of a b.u.mmer."

Gillnetter Norm Hughes is back from a Hawaiian vacation. He spent some time with other Haines vacationers, the Jacobson family, before visiting his mom, Colleen Hughes, at her home in Maui. Norm says he couldn't sit still on the beach so he took a diving cla.s.s and is now a certified rescue diver.

Gold Medal Tournament basketball games were broadcast for the first time to Haines on Juneau's KINY radio station. The champion Haines Merchants team includes the Fannon brothers, Jesse McGraw, Danny Pardee, Stuart Dewitt, Chris Dixon, Andrew Friske, Daniel Martin, and David Buss, who all played for the Haines Glacier Bears in the high school state championship game not so long ago. Steve Williams called the games, which were broadcast to Angoon, Kake, and Yakutat as well.

The Sinking of the Becca Dawn

MY OLDER DAUGHTERS, Eliza and Sarah, are working as deckhands on a gillnetter, fishing mainly for chum salmon eggs, or roe, which will be sold to a caviar company. The captain is a boy about their age who just graduated from Haines High School. They're learning a lot about fishing, and about life and death.

Gill-net boats, or gillnetters, are usually between thirty and forty feet long and catch salmon in nets two hundred fathoms long and thirty feet deep. A line at the top is threaded with oval corks to keep the net floating. A heavier lead line on the bottom keeps it straight, like an underwater fence. One end is attached to a drifting buoy, the other to a hydraulic reel. Some gill-net fishermen call themselves "fish chokers" because that's how the salmon die. The nets catch them by the gills and they suffocate.

It's seven A.M. on the first day my teenage girls have been home in four days. They arrived unexpectedly in the middle of the night. Their boat's net got tangled in the prop and torn and now needs to be repaired. While the captain and his parents were working on the boat the girls showered, slept a few hours in their own beds, and now have clean laundry tumbling in the dryer. At breakfast, they tell us all about their latest adventure. "It's like everyone is surprised that these blondes can be up to their b.u.t.ts in dead fish, working," Sarah says between bites of toast.

"Don't make eye contact, don't make eye contact," Eliza laughs, demonstrating how they quickly hand over the roe to the buyer's tender, without looking at the flirting crewmen. The girls pitch the salmon carca.s.ses onto a barge that will haul them to a fertilizer plant in Washington.

When our friends asked if Eliza and Sarah could deckhand with their son, I said yes right away. We are Alaskans and live in a fishing town. They should know firsthand what that means. While I won't let the girls stay out all night with boys, when a young man is captain of a fishing boat it's different. He's in charge of $100,000 worth of vessel and permit. He has to make boat payments, buy insurance, and pay license fees-and maybe hopes to earn enough money to pay for college. He can't afford to mess up.

Eliza and Sarah have been to a fisherman's funeral. They understand that working on small boats in the cold ocean is serious stuff. The b.l.o.o.d.y business of killing fish is hard and dirty work, and there's not much room on the thirty-six-foot boat for privacy. Fishing around the clock leaves little time for sleeping or eating, and there's no shower. But, incredibly, they like it. Eliza pours tea and steadies herself against the stove. "Is it just me, or is the kitchen rocking?" Sarah reaches for the jam and shows us the new gash on her chin. It's from the gut-scooping spoon at the other end of her fillet knife.

Fishing is mostly about work, but there is some time to play. One evening, Sarah says, their boat tied up with some friends from town. They cooked spaghetti, walked on the beach, and played games that included hanging from the bow and seeing who could do the most one-armed pull-ups before falling in the freezing water. "But the most fun," she adds, "was firing the AK-47."

What was I thinking when I said they could fish? How much do I really want them to know about life and death? "Relax, Mom," Sarah says, "we were just shooting a rubber glove, not at anyone."

I wish I knew the fisherman's prayer. All I can think of is part of the line on the memorial I've seen at the boat harbor: "They that go down to the sea in ships..." I have a feeling the rest of the verse is not very positive. Instead, I silently ask G.o.d to watch over my girls, if he gets a break from world peace and AIDS in Africa. It's a sparkling summer morning, which may be why the memory of a much more urgent prayer hits me like a bad wave and I have to leave the kitchen.

When the telephone rang at four on that November morning, I ran downstairs to get it, but the answering machine had already begun. I heard my friend Kathy say, "Heather, if you can hear me, pray." She said that the Becca Dawn, the Nash family fishing boat, was sinking-with three brothers and a friend on board. I didn't pick up the phone. I sat down on the bottom step and prayed that this was a false alarm. Then, just in case, I asked G.o.d to drop everything else and hold those boys in the palm of his hands. It was an outside shot, but I had seen enough three-pointers made by the crew of the Becca Dawn at the buzzer in high school and city-league basketball games to know that their odds of making it were better than you'd think.

Their parents, Becky and Don, are our son's G.o.dparents. Don is a fisherman and a carpenter. Becky is a quilter and teaches Sunday school at the Presbyterian church. There are six Nash children all together-Lee, Aaron, and Olen are biological and Yongee, Song, and Corrie were adopted from Korea. Becky refers to them as a six-pack of "half domestics and half imports." The Nash kids were raised on boats. Just out of high school, Lee and Olen both skippered their own trollers, which are bigger boats than gillnetters and use tall poles that drop out over the water trailing lines of hooks, with their brothers Song and Aaron as regular crew.

I woke up Chip, who headed straight for the Nashes' house with our neighbor Steve. Then I called Kathy back to learn what had happened.

AS THEIR BOAT foundered in fifty-foot seas, Lee, Song, and Olen Nash and their friend Jesse McGraw scrambled into neoprene survival suits, sent Maydays, and switched on the emergency locator beacon. They were thirty-five miles offsh.o.r.e with more than twenty thousand pounds of halibut on board. They were young, twenty to twenty-five, and, except for Jesse, experienced fisherman. They all knew enough about the sea to believe that without the life raft they'd never make it until daylight. It was unlikely anyone would be out looking for them in the storm. That's when a wave hit the bait shed that carried the life-raft canister and it broke up, blowing the raft off the stern.

Olen signaled over the din that he'd swim for the raft. He had been at the helm when the Becca Dawn had heaved over, and he may have felt responsible. He was the youngest, but the best swimmer. A lifeguard at the Haines pool, he liked to surf in the frigid waves on this same empty coast. He tied a line around his waist and secured the other end, so he wouldn't be swept away.

After Olen dove in everything went bad fast. The wheelhouse windows blew in, and the fifty-four-foot steel-hulled Becca Dawn, named for his mother and father (Becky and Don), sank bow first. Song yelled last Maydays into the radio. Lee couldn't find Olen's life rope, so he frantically cut every line in the tangle made by miles of halibut-fishing gear. About sixty coils one hundred fathoms long with big hooks every eighteen to twenty feet broke loose in the green water on the back deck. Lee had put his survival suit on over wet clothes, and the hooks punctured the foam rubber legs and feet. His numb fingers dropped the knife. Quickly, Jesse found another knife, and just as Lee thought they had Olen's line and were ready to cut it, the blade dropped and the Becca Dawn went down underneath them, sinking in the darkness with a weird glow. The lights were still on.

Olen was nowhere in sight.

Jesse, maybe because he didn't know better, was sure they'd be rescued. The big red-haired kid, who'd starred on Haines High regional championship teams and later on our town's Gold Medal championship basketball team, held on to the remaining Nash brothers as huge waves slammed them together and pulled them apart. He found a piece of plywood from the wreck and pushed Lee on top of it. While it wasn't enough to keep him completely out of the water, it did at least allow him to rest a little. Song, whose suit was too big, was puking seawater and struggling to keep his head above water.

The Coast Guard did hear the emergency beacon, and called Don Nash at his home in Haines to make sure it wasn't a false alarm. Don called Kathy's husband, Dr. Stan Jones, and Kathy called everyone else she thought should know. Bad news travels fast.

The Coast Guard sent a helicopter into the night, toward the emergency signal. Nearly three hours later, it found three of the boys tossing in the debris from the wreck. Jesse had managed to flip the switch of the strobe light on his survival suit with his teeth, never letting go of his friends. He had one in each arm. Lee was so tired and felt such relief he almost pa.s.sed out. Jesse had to keep him from collapsing into the waves. Song saw the helicopter, but he had no idea how they would get into it. What they didn't know then was that the seas were too high, the winds too strong, and the conditions too deadly to send a rescue swimmer in to help them.

The Coast Guard practices these kinds of missions on calm days in tight-fitting wetsuits. The metal basket is lowered right to the role-playing "victims" who have tried this on land first. They climb easily into the metal basket bobbing on floats and sit with their knees against their chests for the quick ride up. In training, it takes minutes. In real life, it can take hours. In a recent rescue in the Gulf of Alaska, two helicopters ran out of fuel trying to pull up a boatload of drowning fishermen. A third helicopter finally saved what remained of the crew.