HIDDEN ALASKA: Poetry & Prose
Editor’s Note
Two cents an acre is what it cost to buy Alaska from Russia in 1867. It was a hard sell for those 365,000,000 acres. The purchase was ridiculed, as was Secretary of State William Seward who negotiated the deal. History is unequivocal, however. Seward got a bargain, and today Alaska honors Seward with a town, a highway, and a paid holiday named after him. But that doesn’t tell you much about the 49th State and its human dimensions.
In our pages year after year one finds a national and international literary focus, and yet Alaska is an important part of that perspective. Indeed, Alaska Quarterly Review is a product of our unique state and the rich diversity of Alaska’s people, some of whom trace roots back generations before the concept of “purchasing” or “owning” land.
Now on the cusp of Alaska Quarterly Review’s 25th anniversary, contributing editor Peggy Shumaker and I thought we’d invite you into our home to give you a glimpse of Alaska as we know it: a vista beyond the vast, wild, spectacularly beautiful place of brochures, beyond the images of cold natural scenes, or oil reserves, to the hidden Alaska of history, of the heart and imagination.
We cast our net among writers who know Alaska because they have lived and breathed it. We asked for their two cents worth. The result is a collection of poetry and prose we call Hidden Alaska.
Welcome to our home.
Ronald Spatz
Editor
REPATRIATION by Nora Marks Dauenhauer
– for John Feller
A Killer Whale, you bend,
entering the Chilkat robe.
The hands of holders tremble.
The robe ripples
with its multiplying pods
of killer whales.
You dance
to an ancestor’s song.
The sea of killer whales
splashes on your back.
We can smell the sea
laced with iodine on beaches
at low tide.
Nora Marks Dauenhauer is the author of a book of poetry, The Droning Shaman (The Black Current Press) and Life Woven with Song: Poetry, Prose, and Plays (University of Arizona Press). Her poetry and prose have appeared in more than twenty anthologies. She co-edited with Richard Dauenhauer eleven books about Tlingit language and literature.
GRAVEYARD AND BUBBLES by Susie Silook
Jimmy and I bought bubbles
and blew them at the old warriors
watching the big screen t.v. in
rehab. We laughed as men of Vietnam
and Desert Storm popped the bubbles
floating about their heads. Incoming
we yelled, incoming.
He wouldn’t put his middle aged frame
with the pot belly and the salt and pepper
beard on a bicycle and so he walked
and I rode circles around him as the bike
trail meandered past the trailer park and
model airplane field.
The sun shone yellow and the birds
chirped at us as we laughed and made
our way to the old graveyard
and I joked that I, a fierce Native American,
had no business being rehabilitated at an
old cavalry post.
Here lies Colonel so and so
killed by hostile savages and
here lie those hostile savages
four to a grave and
here lie children and women
and more brave soldiers killed
by hostile natives.
Jimmy laughed at my internal conflict,
my musing over what our headstones should read;
a hostile savage who’d served her country,
and a ’Nam vet who blew a mean bubble.
Susie Silook’s work has appeared in From Totems to Hip-Hop: A Multicultural Anthology of Poetry Across the Americas, Nimrod, Spreading the Word: Editors on Poetry, and Alaska Native Writers, Storytellers and Orators: The Expanded Edition published by Alaska Quarterly Review.
IT BEGINS IN ICE by Eva Saulitis
I don’t know what we expect to find: something blue
and pretty. Not how the world begins in ice, not how it’s still
being created. Here past and future exactly the same.
How we float in between slickensides, our fingers
poking out of fingerless gloves. We belong to the older world,
clad and lush. This creation of our country, chaotic, wild,
Doesn’t recognize us. We weren’t born yet. The ice pulls back
unlike the tide, exposing nothing alive, just natal parts:
Rock flour, newborn scree, a template for the first lichen.
The glacier’s intelligence is unfathomable to us.
Who, hiking up the moraine to where the ground
is barren could feel at home pitching a tent?
Even the alder thickets don’t invite us to build a fire,
squat with a mug of smoky tea, listening to the one
sparrow claim his undisputed terrain over and over.
In the morning, when we pack to go, we’re relieved.
Hearing the sudden cracks as the faces give way, unloading
a wall of Jesus ice into innocent milk of the fjord.
There are places on earth that aren’t our home. Scenery
about which, cameras cocked, we can’t say, “When you look
at this, you can see forever,” and not be afraid.
Here past and future always backing away, leave us
marooned. If we put our ear to the ground,
we won’t be reassured. We don’t belong here. We never did.
Eva Saulitis is the author of Leaving Resurrection, a collection of essays (Red Hen Press, 2007). Her poetry and essays have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Northwest Review, Quarterly West, Connotations, Seattle Review, and in several anthologies.
REFUGE ROCK: EGG ISLAND, 1764 by Jerah Chadwick
What I remember: bitter
mouthfuls of sarana rice
dug too early, fireweed
stalks taken too late.
A rancid taste of waiting.
From the Kazakax ships that sound,
great waves breaking
rock around us, sharp
crack and whistle then
sickening shatter, cries of people
schooled like salmon
in our village weir. Even now
it seems it couldn’t be.
So many, so much blood.
What could warriors do
but shake bow and spear
and die at such a distance?
We hurled rocks when Kazakan
climbed from their small boats. Some
clutching children hurled themselves.
To the beach below
men who could
rushed firing muskets.
An Aayagii^gu^x, man-woman, forbidden
to touch a weapon, afraid to die
and to live, I held my sister’s son,
crouched beside her body.
Tanam inaa^guliisangin chida^ga akiitali^x –
At the edge of the land
to the end of the world –
Like someone hauled
from freezing water,
I was herded off with the rest.
Note: In 1763, after years of exploitation, the Qawalangin people of Unalaska and Umnak, in alliance with other Eastern Aleut tribes, rose to drive the Russians from their lands. This coordinated effort to retain sovereignty occurred on the same day well over a 400 mile area, much like the Pueblo Revolt against the Spanish 83 years earlier.In 1764, Russian retaliation was brutal. Villages were bombarded and many people killed or driven into the mountains to face starvation. On Unalaska, some survivors fled to Egg Island, which had been for centuries a place of refuge from attack by traditional enemies.Jerah Chadwick is the author of three chapbooks, including The Dream Horse (Seal Press, Seattle) and From the Cradle of Storms (State Street, New York). His first full-length collection, Story Hunger, was released by Salmon Publishing Ltd., Ireland, which issued a second edition in 2005.
A MAN WITHOUT LEGS by John Morgan
Foxes are common this year, kingfishers
perch by the river,
but today on the bikepath alone
a man without legs
hands briskly circling to power
his chair up the hill toward town
and I slow my car as I pass
his firm native face etched with wrinkles,
brown like the color of spruce bark,
his wide brimmed floppy hat
and ranger’s camouflage
worn with a fluid grace
as the mine he must have triggered
a couple of decades ago
goes off again in my face.
John Morgan is the author of three collections of poems and four chapbooks. His poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, APR, Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, and more than a dozen anthologies.
THE OTTER HUNTERS by Tom Sexton
Moving east from island to island
they forced the Aleuts to hunt
for them by holding their women
and children hostage until the hunters’
quota of otter pelts was met. An infant
covered with seal oil would be left out
for Arctic foxes to devour. A stomach
cut open and filled with burning coals;
if their lust was stronger than their greed,
they killed the men and seized the women.
They had learned that this was what
the strong did to the weak when
they were children in Siberia
where the czar and God were far away.
Tom Sexton is the author of four chapbooks, including A Blossom of Snow (Mad River), Leaving for a Year (Adastra Press), World Brimming Over (Brooding Heron), and The Lowell Poems (Adastra Press). His third collection, Autumn in the Alaska Range, was published in 2000 by Salmon Publishing Ltd., Ireland.
ABLUTION by Rachel Rose
In the beginning was darkness –
Puffins sun themselves on outcrops of rock
snug seniors in beach chairs. Aleutian Babylon of the cliffs,
they fight with cormorants for the best spot, chat
around the two or three flat silver fish
garnishing their bright beaks, each tipped
with orange arrowheads that dip
toward the place where the moon slipped
beneath the ocean some months before. In sorrow
the sun palls its light in mist, wet shawl cast over a lamp.
We are too far gone for trees. We are three and ten,
my little brother and me, the only children in this camp
on Unga Island: my stepmother and the cook the only women.
After long darkness upon the face of the deep,
let there be light. Let there be multitudes of birds
in the firmament above.
Two dozen men have been shipped in to reopen the gold pits.
There are two trucks and one dirt road. I mind
my brother, help the cook mop grit
from the floor three times a day, drown
my grey mop-head in greasy water, erase
the tracks of miners’ boots, their jokes, their hunger.
Ablution. At night we sleep with our faces
to the sun, the thin curtain half unstrung, saturated with light.
We drink when we thirst, we lie down
when we are tired and sleep in full sun.
We stick our arms in among the salmon
pirouetting upriver to spawn. We grow numb,
but we catch them, thick-lipped Kings
longer than my brother. Neat as bears
we throw them to shore, flipping tail over head,
drag them back in buckets for the cook to prepare.
In the firmament below,
let there be salmon! When ye eat thereof
let the flesh fall apart as the petals of a rose.
A miner developed a taste for me,
and I did not know why. His hands are now
inseparable from that landscape, though I ran with my brother
through bogs of white orchids I couldn’t trust,
our tracks revealed in the stinking plants
that bruised and bled black under our boots.
I dreamed I would sneak away, alone
after the light had gone, when all the mines were blocked
and the men had flown home. I wanted to watch the ermine
lose their summer brown. I wanted to watch them
white against the snow, their endless game
of freeze-tag past midnight. I wanted to be here by myself
tagged and already frozen, unobserved,
breathing with the volcanoes, white mist
into moist light, cloud torn to an illusion of moon.
I’d walk into the miners’ cabins, built a century ago,
slowly settling back into the landscape, and be home.
Doors without locks, windows holding glass
that had thickened as a woman’s ankles
thicken with age. Detritus
of wasps and flies, blue
milk of magnesia bottles cracked on the floor,
a perfect wooden rocker that rocked on its own
when the wind knocked.
I hid with my brother, breathing in the hot dust of the cabins
until my father called us home. On the shore
an ancient forest had turned to stone.
Petrified. I cared and I didn’t care.
I washed and washed myself, rebraided my hair.
I said nothing to anyone about his hands,
or my body, the landscape drenched in light,
summer-brown ermine who shape-shifted
through deserted mine shafts, stalactite,
water becoming dripstone, me becoming, he said,
a woman, geodes cracked in the back of the truck, my body,
his hands, the unanswered prayers, the light.
Rachel Rose is the author of two books, Giving My Body to Science (McGill/Queen’s University Press) and Notes on Arrival and Departure (McClelland & Stewart). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Malahat Review, and The Best American Poetry and other anthologies.
FROM THE GROUND by Marybeth Holleman
From the air, Nunivak Island looks as lovely as I’d imagined – curves and swirls of varying shades of green, the tan arc of a shoreline, and steel-blue water, swirling in shades of itself.
Mekoryuk, the only village on this island in the Bering Sea, tilts into view as the plane bends toward it: a small boat harbor and a compact oval of buildings clustered along the coast beside a river’s mouth. Closer, I see what must be the school, biggest building in town, and a thin straight line of road emanating from the village and out across treeless tundra to the gravel airstrip, where we land.
We walk the narrow dirt road. A wooden skiff sits on blocks, listing toward sunlight. Upon one roof, a walrus skin is stretched to dry, and next door, the fuzzled head of a musk ox sits in a weathered wooden skiff. Spaces between houses blossom with useful objects – fishing floats, four-wheeler engines, blue tarps, piles of salvaged lumber. In the fields behind the houses, five pale yellow umiaks sit upside down on blocks, like a pod of beluga whales surfacing in a green sea.
A woman walking by on the other side of the road crosses over to say hello, reminding me that in this village of 215 Cup’ig Eskimos, 30 miles offshore Alaska’s Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, three visitors – especially three tall, blond, Caucasian visitors – do not go unnoticed.
“Are you,” she says, slowly, “are you here on – vacation?” It’s said kindly, but incredulously. No one comes here for vacation; there are no hotels, no tours, no facilities for visitors. My husband, I tell her, is here for work, and my son and I just came along.
“Oh, why?” she asks. I forget that this island – the high volcanic plateaus across which herds of musk ox and reindeer roam like a northern Serengeti, the wide sandy beaches and 200-foot-high cliffs where thousands of seabirds nest – is just, to her, home.
I answer briefly, saying something about wanting to get away for awhile, or I tell her the truth: I’ve wanted to come to Nunivak Island since I first read about it twenty years ago, and I want to show my ten-year-old son, who has lived his entire life in the city of Anchorage, how some other Alaska kids live.
I’ve come seeking a better comprehension of the urban-rural divide, the apparent rift between the 60% of Alaskans who live in cities and the 40% who live in the Bush – mostly in Alaska Native villages much like this one.
The term “urban-rural divide” was first used in the late 1990’s, and now it’s everywhere, in speeches, reports, newspaper stories. A Commonwealth North report describes it as a “cultural fissure” caused by “conflicts over education funding, access to health care, tribal governance and land use.”
Adult concerns, adult words; I’ve lived and worked in Alaska long enough to know these inequities are real. Interviewing the Tlingit residents of Kake about their subsistence use, I saw them clam up and slam their doors in my face, out of fear and anger that I might be there to restrict their hunting and fishing. Reviewing the juvenile detention records of Village Public Safety Officers in the Cup’ig villages of St. Michael and Stebbins, and the Aleut village of St. Paul, I recognized the absurdity of applying federal laws created in Washington, D.C. to these small, intimate villages. I’m no stranger to the myriad ways in which Native village life clashes with city life, but my experiences all preceded the waves of debate and discourse about the urban-rural divide.
I wonder how it is now, decades later. How prevalent is this cultural and racial schism, on the ground, face to face? How much is imagined, or created, or magnified, in the too-busy minds of adults? Knowing that ignorance of each other’s lives feeds this fissure, I want my city boy to have at least some unmediated groundtruth of life in a village.
It’s just a glimpse he’ll get, only in town a few days in June. My husband, Rick, is helping fishermen with their longline fishery, a relatively new foray into a cash economy for this mostly-subsistence community, a commercial enterprise that doesn’t easily weave into the weight and heft of their daily life, the rhythms of fish camp in late summer, reindeer roundup in fall, seal hunting in winter.
James loves everything about this place, immediately. He loves the one-room house we get to stay in, sleeping on cots on a linoleum floor, the tiny space heater, the raised compost toilet. He loves the dirt roads with 10-mph speed limits and only two trucks, no cars, where kids can drive four-wheelers all over town. “They don’t need a license?” he asks, more than once. He loves the dogs that roam throughout town, especially the little red short-legged one that looks like it’s part red fox. What he loves, I think, is a kind of simplicity and freedom that city life often lacks.
We stop by Oscar’s Originals, an art studio, and the only shop in town besides the grocery store and fuel station. Inside we meet Oscar and his son Aaron. Aaron, who is the same age as James is playing a computer game. Good, I think, they have something in common, maybe they’ll play together. But Aaron is quiet, and barely looks at James.
Less than an hour later, Rick, James, and I are walking across the tundra toward Mekoryuk River, and Aaron runs up behind us, falls in step with James. “Let me show you something,” he says, to all of us or just James, I’m not sure. Aaron runs ahead, so easily across the hummocky land, and we follow clumsily, down to the bouldered shoreline where the river rushes by, dark and deep. Aaron and James throw stones, skipping them over the water’s ridges. Then Aaron says, this time most certainly to James, “Let me show you something,” and they scramble down the shoreline. As we head back toward the village, Aaron whispers to James, “C’mon, let’s ditch ‘em.”
At the village offices, they spread before us a hand-drawn map of their island, showing the river’s curve out to sea, the bird cliffs, the volcanic peaks, their fish camp. They urge us to come back and take a boat to the northwest cliffs to see auklets, or east where the musk ox spend summer. I imagine kayaking those shores, encouraged by their eagerness to show us their island’s charms. I love especially the lilt in their voices when they talk about fish camp. I’d already noticed it in Aaron’s voice, as he told James, “Oh, you have to come back for fish camp!”
Night, it’s late, we’re all settled onto cots, inside sleeping bags. The door flies open and three boys burst in – Aaron and two others. “Where’s James? Can he come out?” Tomorrow, I say, tomorrow he can play with you. I’d forgotten that, in these villages in summer, people follow the light and not the clock. It’s still light outside at midnight, so it’s not yet bedtime. Some nights they may not sleep at all.
In front of me, as I walk across the fields just beyond town are six children: James, Aaron, and Aaron’s brother and sisters. They are taking us to the beach. “We want to show you something,” they say. The two oldest girls, Kayleen and Caroline, run ahead, they run back and give me two bouquets, one from each – wild geraniums, lupines, asters. They run ahead again, this time to pick wild celery. “We eat this,” they tell me, their eyes wide and bright. Up ahead, Aaron and his brother Jeremy have taken off their coats and are crouching and walking forward slowly, coats over their heads like sails. They are stalking a pair of wild ducks walking in front of them.
Look at this, I say to Rick, these children playing at what the adults do – hunting and gathering. Subsistence training.
We all climb up the dunes that tower between the fields and the beach. The boys run, jump, slide down, clamber back up quickly, on sand that is soft and warmed by midday sun. We walk across dune tops, sea breeze whipping the long dark hair of the girls’ ponytails. Holding my hand, they bring us to one hilltop and show us the gravesite of their mother.
They talk about her easily, but I don’t ask the question I think of first. She was young; what did she die of? Village life contains such different dangers: alcohol taking so many Native lives, boating accidents in Arctic seas, snowmachine strandings in winter storms. Perhaps it wasn’t the dangers, though; perhaps it was the difference in health care between village and city.
The children would tell me, if they knew, or wanted me to know. I don’t ask; I just hold the girls’ hands, and listen.
We slide down the dunes to the beach. It’s wide and flat, hard-packed golden sand backed by the dunes that, like a small mountain range, hide us from the village. Here and there, rock juts through sand, flanked by swirls of tidepools. The older kids organize a game. Rick is the referee while I hold Emily; she’s only three, and her legs have tired out. Or maybe she just likes being held. Or maybe she knows I like holding her.
The race begins at one rock outcrop; they run barefoot to the row of their rubber boots, pull on their boots, and run back to the start line. Aaron wins several times. The third time he stops to help James get his boots on, so James is a close second. Fourth time, one of Aaron’s boots falls off and Caroline wins. Then the game deteriorates, or transforms, into tidepool splashing.
Rick and I walk back to town, leaving the kids playing on a huge sand mound, one they’ve built up into a kind of fort, playing king of the hill. When I last looked, Aaron was on top, Kayleen was climbing one side and James was scrambling up another, laughing.
Late at night, there’s a party at our little house: eight kids sitting on the floor in a circle, a pile of comic books and some snacks in the middle. Two of Aaron’s friends have joined in. I stand in the doorway, watching all of these children leaning over the pages, reading to each other, laughing. The next day, James leaves some books with them. “They don’t have a bookstore,” he tells me.
From the plane, I see children, the ones who showed us their island, playing on the mountain of sand. I’m glad they were so friendly, and say so to James. Then he tells me something that Aaron told him on the second morning. One of Aaron’s friends had asked him, “Why are you playing with that fucking whitie?” Aaron told James he’d answered, “I just want to.”
My smile freezes as I tumble through anger at Aaron’s friend, sadness that a child could feel that way, gratitude to Aaron for not being swayed by his friend, worry over how this might affect my son. I churn through what I might say to soften the harsh words, to keep my son from feeling the sting of racism and from harboring any seedling of racism himself. Should I tell him about the urban-rural divide, about the social and economic differences between Native village life and his city life? Should I tell him the history of Europeans and Native Americans? Should I have waited until he was older, or knew more, before bringing him here? Should I try to explain the friend’s hatred, or protect James from it?
All I say is, I’m glad Aaron did what he wanted to do. For, after whirling through my own fears and hesitations, I notice the way James told me about it: in a light, matter-of-fact tone, as if he was relating the color of Aaron’s four-wheeler, or the size of the sand mountain. No need to add weight to the words.
Home, I get pictures developed, and sift through them looking for one of James and all the kids on their front porch, one I’ve been looking forward to seeing, to sending to Aaron’s family, sharing with them, they were all so sweet. There’s a lovely close-up of little Emily in her pink coat, sitting on a sand dune; another of Aaron and Jeremy climbing up the sand, barefoot; and another of all the kids running on the beach, a jumble of boots at one end. But when I reach the porch photo, what strikes me, first and foremost, is how, standing among those lovely Mekoryuk children, my own son looks so startlingly white. And what most astonishes is not his pale skin, but how all I saw when I was there, on the ground, taking the picture, was a group of joyful children gathered together.
Marybeth Holleman’s most recent book is The Heart of the Sound: An Alaskan Paradise Found and Nearly Lost. Her work has appeared in the North American Review, Orion, The Christian Science Monitor, Sierra, and The Seacoast Reader.
AVALANCHE by Ann Fox Chandonnet
“The force that through the green fuse”
is no match for avalanche.
On the trail to Happy Camp,
a sort of clearing opens its arms,
a leafless clearing between a distant cliff and a chute,
an eerie grove of eight-foot trunks – stumps snapped off at snow depth,
preserving the winter just past, freezing the power.
Clean fractures through foot-thick live spruce,
as if Ruben’s Chilkoot Charlie had passed here
in seven-league boots,
idly swinging his axe at knee level,
just idly swinging.
Like a glacier, the site radiates chill –
That incalculable blast, that utter nonchalance.
Ann Fox Chandonnet is the author of the poetry collections Ptarmigan Valley, Canoeing in the Rain and Auras, and Tendril. Her food history, Gold Rush Grub, was published in 2005 by the University of Alaska Press.
DISCOVERING AN APPRECIATION FOR GOLF IN CIRCLE, ALASKA by Frank Soos
I have always been suspicious of golf. Just taking hold of a golf club, I am certain, would cause me to turn into a Republican. Golf on TV, then, is worse, a kind of torture akin to being dragged to a church service at night after my high school basketball practice. Golf was what my brother and I watched when it was raining and cold and nothing else was on, not even wrestling. Just like church: the whispered voices of the commentators, the reverential admiration of the gallery, and all those shots of high sky – gray sky on our black and white TV where a ball invisible to us on the grainy picture tube soared off to heaven.
So it happened that the first winter I lived in Alaska, I drove with my then-wife up to Circle Hot Springs. It was cold in Fairbanks, and cold beyond cold on the north side of the White Mountains. The hot water felt pretty good, but how long can a person spend turning himself to broth? We got in the car and set out for Circle City. Out on the road, not a living thing stirred, no moose in the willow, not a bird crossed the sky. As I said, it was cold and way down in the dark bottom of winter, and nobody with any sense would be driving around out there, just us Cheechakos.
In winter, the Steese Highway can take on an extraterrestrial aspect. The tundra on the summits has been covered by snow, and that snow has been scoured and shaped by the wind. The few trees suggest antennae hoping to receive frequencies from a mother ship coming to the rescue. The tiny walk-in cooler that serves as a shelter at Milepost 107 advertises the potential cost of a person’s foolishness. In low light, the road seems to dissolve into all that emptiness. It might cause a person to have Jack London thoughts of coming unraveled in unforgiving blankness. It might cause a person to feel hollowed out all the way down to his soul.
And so it was that the road brought us to Circle. “Stop,” the sign at the far edge of town commanded us, “you have reached the end of the road.” A little photo op for the tourists. We were those very tourists come the wrong time of day, the wrong time of year. And there beyond was the Yukon itself, a jumble of ice, chunks as big as refrigerators, as big as Volkswagens, as big as the cabins some folks I knew lived in. Another alien landscape.
The few houses were dark and gray and turned away from us. One business was open in Circle, a kind of gas station, grocery and sundries store, cafe and bar. Dirty yellow light spilled out the windows onto the cluster of snow machines nosing up toward the door. I filled up the gas tank (I’m not sure we needed gas, but I am sure we did not want to run out) and went inside to pay.
There, around the bar, sat the men of Circle watching golf on TV. The green sward of the golf course seemed to unspool across the screen like a bolt of silk cloth, rich, green, the color of spring, the color of life, endless. I stood there transfixed as any of the barflies by the color running off the TV screen right at us, soaking up all that chlorophyll until the storekeeper took my credit card and we finished a wordless transaction.
Outside, it was still as cold and gray as a stone. But spring did come that first year in Alaska. It always comes in jerks and false starts and broken promises, but when it does come, it is rich and wondrous. And it is green.
Frank Soos’ books include Early Yet and Bamboo Fly Rod Suite. His short story collection, Unified Field Theory, won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction.
LITANY FOR THE DECEASED by Ernestine Hayes
The service is to be held at the Russian Orthodox church across the street from the assisted living residence where Lorraine spent much of her life. Lorraine’s grandfather was brother to my own great-grandmother Anna Willard. Although Lorraine and I were about the same age, because of my great-grandmother’s relation to Lorraine’s grandfather she was my ceremonial grandchild. She must have been there during the last few weeks of my mother’s life as she, too, was coaxed and cuddled through her last days by a caring staff. Or at least I can hope that’s how it was.
I arrive to find the door locked, the paths to the wooden octagonal church empty, a sign on the gift shop door saying “Sorry We’re Closed.” The only other people near the place are a little family of tourists snapping pictures.
A number of old Russian Orthodox churches around Southeast Alaska are historical buildings over a hundred years old that contain priceless artifacts presumably rivaled in splendor only by those found in the Catholic church across the street. I don’t really know. I’m not religious. I don’t consider myself a Christian. When my sons were very young, I attended a Pentecostal church in the belief that the strict and simple upbringing would be good for them. That lasted some five years. When I was a girl, my grandmother sent me to the Salvation Army church for Christmas services so that I could receive a present. When my mother came back from the TB hospital where she’d had half a lung removed, we attended the local Presbyterian church every Easter. None of those denominations featured much pomp. Gold and glitter and gowns and chanting are not part of my churchly experience.
After a few minutes outside the onion-shaped church, I walk three blocks over to the Legislative Building, at one time the school where Lorraine and I attended our early grades. I remember her spinning in the school basement on a day too blustery for outside play. I remember her having even fewer friends than I did. I remember her as the other little girl from the village.
A hearse is making its somber way down the street. By the time I walk back to the church, the hearse has been parked a block beyond. They haven’t managed to find a parking space in front of the church, which is surrounded by a little white fence and features a narrow meandering path up a slight grade and around to the entrance at its back. Two suited men, clearly mortuary representatives, posture on the sidewalk gauging the distance to the path, and up the path around the corner to the door.
A rusted clunker is parked in the way. A For Sale sign skews itself to the back window. One of the mortuary men pulls a cell phone out of his grey flannel pocket and dials the advertised number. I stand across the street watching the action. A few of the family stand in clumps here and there. A passing woman calls out that the man who owns the car lives in the building I’m leaning on. The suited mortuary man pays no attention.
Two women approach, walking maps and umbrellas in hand, cameras hanging from their grip. “Are they opening the church?” one asks.
“Yes, for a funeral,” I say.
“But are they going to open it?”
The tailored funeral man talks into the phone, gesturing at the clunker in his way. Down the street, the hearse sits comfortably in its space. The family glances my way and pretends not to see me.
“Yes, but it’s for a funeral,” I tell her more plainly.
“Will there be time to look around? Can we go in?”
I take a good look at her. “That doesn’t sound like it would be a good thing.”
“Oh, well, what about that church?” She points to the Catholic church across the street. “Is that a good one?”
“That’s the Catholic church,” I say. “It’s a historical building, too.” She gestures to her friend and with a brief glance – is that regret? – they walk off toward the other church.
A man skips out of the building behind me, dressed in khaki shorts and a dingy t-shirt, glasses taped together at the bridge, glad to help. He unlocks the car door and warms up the engine.
Inside the church’s ornately decorated room, I find a seat on the shiny smooth bench that lines the wall. I watch the family wheel Lorraine’s old mother to a space across the doorway. After she is settled, I walk over to take her hand and introduce myself. She gestures to her son to turn up the hearing device resting in her lap. He winds the small knob. I introduce myself again. “Ernestine Hayes. Saan ka lax’t!” I holler into her ear.
She recognizes my name. “Yes. Yes. Yan waa shaa!” she murmurs. I tuck a twenty-dollar bill into her hand and retake my seat.
A young man in a black robe walks around the room offering and lighting tapered candles. We all hold our candles and watch as the coffin is rolled out.
The gilded casket fills the room. Behind it, a brocaded door on the other side of a little fence features colorful scenes of white men conscientiously going about their holy business, clearly aware of the halos that hover above their pious heads. Gilt and gold and velvet and long silky tassels deck all the walls. Smokeless, dripless candles with devout flames burn virtuously in our laps. A choir takes its place on the other side of the coffin.
The jammed room grows silent. Lorraine’s mother, trapped in an unyielding wheelchair and in her rigid years, begins quietly to moan from deep inside her ninety-year gut. A Raven growl of long years filled with riches and sorrow rises from the walls and becomes a loud, wide groan of bottomless grief. An old woman has outlived her child.
The priest appears from behind the center-stage brocaded door, leaving it open to expose even more treasure. Sparkling portraits of pale-faced men I don’t recognize adorn every inch of wall. The priest begins to chant.
Blessed is the kingdom of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, now and forever and to the ages of ages. And the choir answers, Amen. The priest chants, In peace let us pray to the Lord. The choir answers, Lord have mercy.
The priest chants, For the peace of God and the salvation of our souls, let us pray to the Lord. The choir answers, Lord have mercy.
For peace of the whole world, for the stability of the holy churches of God, and for the unity of all, let us pray to the Lord.
Lord have mercy.
For this holy house and for those who enter it with faith, reverence, and the fear of God, let us pray to the Lord.
Lord have mercy.
As the priest chants he spreads smoke from a gold decanter, stopping every few minutes to allow his helper to relight the incense. The priest circles the coffin swinging the incense burner on delicate chains that threaten to tangle themselves in the folds of his long black skirts.
Lorraine’s mother quiets. The priest gives glory. The choir responds.
Lord have mercy.
Ernestine Hayes is the author of Blonde Indian: An Alaska Native Memoir (University of Arizona Press, 2006).
HIDDEN by Holly Hughes
A seal that tilts back its head and slips beneath the surface, a fox that vanishes in an alder thicket. Gone. Only waves circling, a few alders shivering in the wind. For a moment, the curtain parted, a dream-glint of recognition. Did I see it? Or imagine it?
The Alaska I love dwells where it eludes me, where words fail, shutters freeze. Not the white mountains, distant and austere, not the calving ice dropping theatrically into the sea. Instead, the interstices where impossibly blue ice begins to melt. Quieter. Slower. The shush and burble of the tide inching back into the estuary across long mudflats. Starfish the color of eggplant, of pumpkins. Slick drifts of bladder wrack, undulent snakes of bull kelp. A bear loping alone up the beach, tracks erased by the next tide. Raven’s hollow water drop call. White femur of a deer lying still in waving green grasses, bear scat shot through with huckleberries. Scrim of frost on aspen leaves.
The Alaska landscape is so dramatic, it’s taken many seasons to see what’s hidden, to be grateful for what I don’t see as well as what I do. Last summer, I spent almost an hour watching a slug tilt its strange head down to drink from a still pool. The intimacy of this simple act stunned me. How is it that I’d never paused long enough to notice the erotic unfurling of its antennae, its small mouth slit open and beginning to sip?
A few summers ago, I spent a week exploring the west coast of Chichagof Island. I’d always fished inside waters, never traveled the outer coast. When we arrived at our first night’s anchorage inside Piehle Passage, the steep, rocky coast was shrouded in fog. In the morning, the fog lifted like a woman raising her skirt, sun shimmering on glacier-scarred flanks. Even the granite cliffs seemed to tremble. What was revealed seemed sacred. No boats were visible, no floatplanes, no sight or sound of human life. We kayaked in silence, walked the beach in silence, letting the land reveal only what she chose.
In our culture, hiddenness is undervalued: we seem to need to get everything out on the table. But spirit is shy and if we’re to honor that shy creature, we must be willing to let some parts remain hidden, even to ourselves. Or we must be willing to provide quiet clearings where she might be coaxed into the sun. As Thomas Merton wrote in the latter part of his life, we must “not neglect the silence imprinted at the core of our being.”
Here, where there’s still room for silence, I remember that what remains hidden is as sacred as what’s revealed. Here, where wildness still roams, I am grateful for all that eludes me, for all the seals I don’t see, each seal I do.
Holly Hughes’ essays and poems have appeared in Crosscurrents, The Midwest Quarterly, Kalliope, and three anthologies, American Zen: A Gathering of Poets, Family Matters: Poems of Our Families, and Steady As She Goes: Women’s Adventures at Sea.
ROT by Erin Coughlin Hollowell
The smell slips in through the place
where the wood pulls away from glass,
where the wind has peeled the paint
and left a gap under clapboards.
Rotting carcasses blanch at the edge
of the stream that runs under brambles;
even the bears aren’t interested, not like
those dogs that roll in any unhappy surprise.
In the white cupboard, behind the kitchen
where rubber boots used to pile up,
there is a river of jars, gleam of fish scales.
She doesn’t eat so much anymore,
just saltines and maybe some salmon,
and tea, weak with no sugar or milk.
Her arms are scratched, picking salmonberries
along the side of the house where the garden
once grew rhubarb and maybe radishes.
Those berries, they don’t taste like much,
but it hurts her to let them go to waste.
Erin Coughlin Hollowell’s poems have been published in Rainy Day Magazine, Epoch, Cairn, and Inside Passages.
BELUGA SONG by Mary L. Tony
When they came and told me
The midnight sun was gold
On their words piercing my heart
Unwelcome words of death
He was found dead, baby beluga
On a silty riverbar, alone and frozen
Thirty miles south on the river
A thousand miles from the sea
He had come in the fall, they insisted
Caught in the ice and washed ashore
While chasing salmon up the river
I knew better, but kept silent
I went to the bluff and sat
Watching the river and listening
Weeping and waiting, wondering
What song did you sing for me, baby beluga?
Silent currents swirling ceaselessly
Keeping secrets of love come up from the sea
Washing down the river and gone forever
Memories of beluga songs settle silent in the sand
Note: A carcass of a baby beluga was found in June, 2006 several miles upriver from Nenana on the Tanana River.
Mary L. Tony’s poems have been published in the Tundra Times and were selected for anthologies published by Poetry.com. Six of her poems were translated into Yup’ik in “Through Yup’ik Eyes.” She has published two books under the pen name Aurora Hardy: Terror at Black Rapids and Ramona’s Gift, which was awarded the 2004 Mary TallMountain Award.
DRINK by Molly Lou Freeman
Hard up (on a reef) the skipper wept (in-
to his bunk and his bottle)
while she – craftily – banged (sat tight)(shook)
a little – someone radioed in
looks like we’re screwed
to a rock.
In the prelude, the iodized air smelt frond-
like, like iron
cold suckle and gut
fresh – when she was yet an April still thing –
– laid so deep in the nightfall.
When despair was distant –
that was before anything, anything bad had
happened – some boats with booms came.
Someone rode a bicycle down the deck and sniffed out
the Sound
smelt then
the hull hole,
perfume of earth’s ass, earth’s anus
which lubed, spewed-slow-ribboned the sea’s self.
Contagion at day break,
not blue – shone – she
looked silked, looked sauced.
Who would wash the tarry feathers –
& how would they
die there, these beasts? –
So fully licked.
You wouldn’t want to put into that
our sweet bottle of Joy.
What a sad catch
water haul and tar-
strewn passage.
A chopper
hugging the shore,
groped. She
in her dress,
she rode coastwise and in
to Afognak and Dutch
went leagues beyond the mind’s
measure – the sad fisherman
on his boat he too weeps – my skipper.
The long lines, the net not
unwound, worked – she went crudely on and in,
I said she wore black
which sunk and stank beyond law
my dark girl, my dark gulf well-strapped
& stacks barren
of birds.
Hello
All
Vessels.
The mind is wider than –
the Sky.
The mind is deeper than –
the Sea
says my log.
A malady – we await money.
Ask which beasts are
all gone and for how long
– if 1 oyster-
catcher garnet trills.
Still we highline, run her on the high
tide,
her beauty misleading –
The Sea, Love, the Deep
Drink
the Mind and its Capacity
& God & We
[buy rounds]
[sing a cheap song]
[We don’t go down with this ship.]
Molly Lou Freeman’s poems have appeared in Bellingham Review, Colorado Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Seattle Review.
AT FISHCAMP by Renee Singh
smoke rises, twisting
against kings sliced
dripping slow deliberate
delicious clear oils
that run then drop
down gently into ashes
below
Renee Singh’s work has appeared in SAIL: Studies in American Indian Literatures, RED INK, and Raven Tell Stories: An Anthology of Alaskan Native Writers.
ELUSIVE LYNX by Carol Kaynor
A few years ago, as the hare cycle was just on the far side of peaking in Interior Alaska, I saw an unfamiliar animal running across the end of our road. At first I had no idea what it was. It was as big as a dog but ran like a cat, and I puzzled over it for a moment until I realized, with a sense of awe, that I’d seen my first lynx.
Some days later, as my husband, my neighbor Bonnie, and I were driving home, our headlights illuminated the tail end of the lynx just ahead of us. It bounded down our road for a little while in a funny, up-and-down gait before bolting off into the bushes. The rest of the way home, we talked excitedly about the encounter. We live in Goldstream Valley, a bit out of Fairbanks but certainly not far enough out to be considered real wilderness. To see a lynx in our little mushers’ subdivision was something quite out of the ordinary. It became the main topic of the neighborhood.
Bonnie and I run sled dogs together, and the next time I was at her house to take out a team, she spoke enthusiastically about setting out a snare for the lynx. I asked her if she wanted it for the pelt, and she said yes, but also, she’d eat it. I was surprised. In my ignorance, I thought all carnivores were not good eating. No, she said; she’d had lynx before. “It’s delicious.”
Bonnie was born and raised in Alaska, and brought up to hunt, fish, and trap. Her father expected her to be just as tough and capable as her two brothers. Bonnie’s parents are taxidermists, and she has handled dead animals all her life. She has studied the tracks and habits of live ones, as I think all good hunters must do. Many times she and I have come back from running teams and she’s asked me if I saw the tracks on the trail that day. They might be moose, maybe fox or dog, or marten or lynx, and she would have identified what kind of animal made them as she went by at 18 miles an hour. I’d have been lucky to notice there were tracks.
I love woods and water, and wild animals of all sorts, but I’m a pesco-vegetarian. I don’t trap, I don’t hunt, and I only kill fish. I look with fascination and appreciation at the variety of stuffed and mounted animals scattered throughout Bonnie’s house – sheep and buffalo heads, a raccoon, a gray fox, a ferret. I don’t spend too much time thinking about how they got there. Most of the time, our two disparate philosophies run quietly and peacefully counter to each other, without any need to find common ground. We have enough common ground in the dogs, and in loving the woods. We work for hours together on the dog trails – grooming, brushing, clearing. I pull on leaning spruces as Bonnie fells them with her brush ax. Bonnie cleans up behind me as I mow down encroaching willows. We dig obsessively around the roots of a big stump that has snagged our trail-grooming drag one too many times. With Bonnie’s ax and my mattock and chainsaw, we say we are the deadliest stump-murderers in the valley.
The lynx was a challenge. Bonnie had been just as enchanted as I to see it in our neighborhood. We were in accord on that. Our accord parted ways when she began to talk of trapping it. I didn’t know how to reconcile my respect for her lifestyle, even if I didn’t like the idea of killing, with my desire to keep this particular lynx alive. I wanted to say to her, simply, “If you trap it, none of the rest of us will ever be able to see that lynx again.” I wanted our little neighborhood to be sacrosanct, so that animals would be safe and therefore more visible. I wanted the lynx to find haven here.
I said nothing, and hoped the lynx would stay out of her snare. I believe Bonnie may have known how I felt without my having to put it into words. I don’t know if it would have stopped her. We negotiate many of our differences in silence. She didn’t catch the lynx, I do know that. She would not have hidden it from me. But it disappeared. It may have starved in the waning hare cycle, or perhaps it went somewhere else seeking a way to survive. Maybe someone else trapped it. It is easier not to know what happened to the lynx than to think of seeing it stuffed and mounted in Bonnie’s living room.
In my yard is a dog Bonnie bred but would not have kept. To Bonnie, this dog is useless, a waste of time and dog food. I saw something else and brought her home. Now, Kluane comes with me back to Bonnie’s house and we run her with our other dogs. Bonnie wishes I had not taken Kluane, and sometimes complains, but she deals with it. In Bonnie’s house are the bodies of animals I would not have trapped, and food in her freezer that I will not eat. She shoots squirrels, and I teach gray jays to eat from my hand. It is an uneven partnership, and sometimes the ground we walk together is a little bit unstable. We both love the land and we are loyal friends to each other, so we’ve found a way to manage. I feed my dogs the moose bones she gives me, and she doesn’t try to talk me into eating moose myself.
A long time ago I was given a beautiful white-and-silver fur hat. Though I rarely wear it nowadays, preferring my musher’s hat with its synthetic fleece and nylon, I sometimes dig out the fur hat when it’s really cold. It is probably arctic fox, but for all I know about furs, it could as well be lynx.
Carol Kaynor has published a book titled Skijor with Your Dog, and articles in Alaska Business Monthly, Alaskafest, Mushing Magazine, and Team & Trail. This is her first essay to be published in a national literary journal.
ERMINE IN THE WOODPILE by Jo Going
Minus 60,
and in the morning snow,
a tracery of delicate tracks
circling the cabin.
That slip of white,
here,
there,
then gone,
in
and out
of winter
and the woodpile.
On my birthday
I nailed meat, frozen,
to the window ledge,
and she came,
and gnawed,
and watched me inside
by the wood stove
watching her.
My candle wish,
for us,
so small
in this
unforgiving arctic,
changing
black to light,
night to white,
slipping
in and out
of winter and the woodpile,
here,
there,
then gone.
Jo Going is the author of a collection of paintings and poems, Wild Cranes, published by the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Her poetry and essays have appeared in Bloomsbury Review, New Art Criterion, SECAC Review, Driftwood, and Nimrod.
HARVESTING POTATOES by Richard Dauenhauer
Nondescript: the autumn
of our lives. A kinglet?
Basking in the spruce top
in fading sun? Juncos
flashier, more ener-
getic. In my rusty
garden chair I rest from
harvesting potatoes
this crisp September day,
savoring the sunlight
after weeks of steady,
unrelenting rain – com-
munion of sorts, in turned
potato beds, all those
upright stems of summer
fallen of their age
and weight. Our faith is gold,
of bounty more obscure
beneath the waiting earth.
Richard Dauenhauer is the author of five collections of poetry. He co-edited with Nora Dauenhauer eleven books about Tlingit language and literature including Haa Tuwunáagu Yís, for Healing our Spirit: Tlingit Oratory, the winner of the 1991 American Book Award; Haa Kusteeyí, Our Culture: Tlingit Life Stories; Haa Shuká, Our Ancestors: Tlingit Oral Narratives; and Anóoshi Lingít Aaní Ká, Russians in Tlingit America: The Battles of Sitka, 1802 and 1804, all published by the University of Washington Press.
IDENTIFICATION by Susan Alexander Derrera
You are trying to learn
the names of flowers
because, finally, you remember
that the world
has been given to you
like the children
in your classroom
to whom you are
responsible,
and from whom
you will first learn
their potent names,
and so in summer,
you have taken up
the field guide and left it open
as you barrel down
the narrow, frost-heaved Glenn,
calling out to the wild ones
in ditches – Locoweed! Alpine milk
Vetch! – by the banks of ancient
glacial rivers – Fleabane! Decumbent
goldenrod! – and near trampled
campsites where they are beginning
to look quite familiar:
the bright flag of your child’s
hand waving in the five-petalled
shrubby cinquefoil;
and the pale pink
Eskimo potato blooming
on tall stalks
like the long-boned body
of your brother
from who you are
estranged and of whom
you suddenly think of
with something other than
bitterness and for this
moment caught open-
hearted you are so grateful
as if a prayer you hadn’t thought
had been answered;
and hanging below
the beautiful blooms, the pods
wrinkled and leathery,
plump to bursting
like your husband’s own
purples – so many seeds –
a meadowful of
bright
heads
dancing.
Susan Alexander Derrera has published poems and essays in Our Alaska: Personal Stories about Living in the North (Epicenter), We Alaskans, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Ice Floe, and the Anchorage Daily News.
HOW IT GOES by Anne Caston
Each morning now, the Queen of the Damned goes off to work
at the local mortuary where she minds the phones
and, on slow afternoons, plays cards. It’s a job
she likes. It pays the bills. Good
benefits. And because she doesn’t have to go
below, she doesn’t mind the great furnace there
and its irrefutable alchemy: ashes
to ashes, dust to dust. Her work
is accounts – receivable, payable – the lists
of names, the next of kin. It’s not her
job to deal with the dead on the stainless
tables – the faces, unmade, remade – the bodies propped
properly into place again before the grief-
stung families arrive.
* * *
Across town, a man
is dying. In a few days, or weeks,
he will have ceased to be. He will have left
behind, for good, the rented two-railed bed,
its bright blue bottom sheet, the catheter, diapers
and pills, the hinged tin of medicinal pot. Grown
children. A wife. All those who’ve come. Who
are trying to hold him here one day more.
And all their reasons for doing so.
* * *
Upriver, the weary sockeye and king
have almost reached the spawning grounds,
returned – undone – to the waters of their making.
* * *
He wrote to her once about those
who went into war like pennies into wells
carrying on their backs the burden,
the unasked-for weight of someone else’s dreams.
News of their dying reached her
from a long way off and sometimes
she thought she could see them moving still
from a valley of shadow to mountains brilliant with sun.
But the dead are always
the dead, no matter how much
light we throw over them.
* * *
Maybe death is, in the end, a mercy:
like arriving at the shore of a strange wide sea,
a moored boat waiting, and you stepping lightly
into it, the white sails unfurling, the setting-off, a faint
sound like wind or warm surf breaking
over the shimmering hull
and everything, everything, difficult
behind you in the wake.
Anne Caston is the author of the poetry collection Flying Out with the Wounded (New York University Press). Her poems have appeared in Annals of Internal Medicine, The George Washington Review, Prairie Schooner, River Styx, The Southern Poetry Review, and in the anthologies The Long Journey: Poets of the Northwest, New American Poets: A Breadloaf Anthology, and Sustenance & Desire.
ARCHITECTS OF AIR by Anne Coray
Here is the pitch and swirl of winter:
the raw north wind, the bloodless thorn.
Water in its wake churns to jagged slate,
snow keels upward from the mountains.
I’m staying in. No sense shouldering out
against this weather, when my cabin,
my quiet ship – built of two-by-sixes
and twelve-inch siding – grants me cover.
Best time to take custody of love,
having all I need, though never all
I want. Husband, give me your hand.
What we have left to build with
isn’t wood, but air –
this space resting between our fingers
like absent stone
of the ancient temples;
our fingers in column and frieze
as if holding the morning’s fervent storm
in pale illumination; half-gift,
this portico, this life
more beautiful for the surrounding ruin.
Anne Coray is the author of two poetry collections, Bone Strings (Scarlet Tanager Books) and Soon the Wind (Finishing Line Press), and the chapbook Ivory (Anabiosis). Her poems have appeared in several anthologies and The Southern Review, Poetry, Commonweal, Northwest Review, North American Review and The Women’s Review of Books.
LIST by Michele Harmeling
Dress warmly.
Find the village
of Ahtna,
find the very spot.
Bring flowers.
Ask a villager
to nail together a cross.
Perhaps scrape
some of the ashy soil,
from right where
the fire started,
to put in a jar
and take home.
Be polite, because
the locals have no idea
that his body is kept
just under the surface,
not quite like a drowned
thing, but more
like the scar tissue
left through a beaten
back, a tough stripe.
More like a sticky
bit of cut skin
hiding on the underside
of the tongue.
More like a shy
blue vein, the kind
that can only be seen
if the hand is opened
and closed and opened
and closed and finally
tightened for a minute.
The kind of vessel
that only rises
to the surface if the hand
is fisted. Do not reveal
to the rest of the family
that the obituary is printed out,
taped to your wall.
Go to Ahtna.
Go alone.
This is Michele Harmeling’s first publication in a national literary magazine.
ICE CLIMBING by Eric Heyne
Suiting up to hang over nothing,
wielding a steel pick, icechips
slivered like glass from an accident
or the scales of fish frozen silently
into the slick, mutated waterfall;
taking the hard way on purpose,
straight up, gloved, helmeted
and spike-booted, blinded by sun
off the mirror face, cold as the moon
on one side and melting like Venus
on the other – oh, no thanks,
I’ll pass, you go on and dangle
at the edge of your pretty abyss.
Eric Heyne is the author of essays on Alaskan literature and critical theory in Narrative, River Teeth, Modern Fiction Studies, The Northern Review, Updating the Literary West, and Encyclopedia of the Arctic.
FREEWRITING WITH MY ALDO LEOPOLD CLASS AT THE UNIVERSITY by Carolyn Kremers
(in January, in America, where 1% of households have no
running water, says the newspaper)
The outhouse. Oddly, that’s the first thing that comes to mind, when I think of a place special to me.
Driving into town this afternoon, I felt that arctic winter light, all pink and blue and yellow, like a watercolor wash. Peaks and lumps of the Alaska Range, sticking up like paper-dolls. My faith that a moon would be rising as the sun sank (3:45, it must have been). And the memory of a sanctitude, the promise of the day: sitting in the doorless, tilted outhouse when the moon dips down, exactly opposite, a peaceful, quartz-like globe with a face in it, about to disappear into the chilly morning behind Ester Dome.
Nightly, too, she glides – over Chena Ridge – a sliver or a half-circle or, just once each month, full: soundlessly spilling her liquid light (if not too many clouds) upon the birch trees and the willow branches, the hillside and the sauna cabin, the driveway and the Subaru, the woodshed and the sawhorse, the moose tracks and the dog tracks, the squirrel’s and the vole’s . . . shepherding my footsteps, up the snowy wooden stairs, from the cabin to the outhouse and back.
Carolyn Kremers is the author of Place of the Pretend People: Gifts from a Yup’ik Eskimo Village, and co-editor (with Anne Hanley) of The Alaska Reader: Voices from the North.
NANSEN IN NOME by Elizabeth Bradfield
His head is huge, bronze, snow
drift in the eye sockets, which
I think he’d approved of, and placed
near the spruce-burled arch
that marks the end of the Iditarod which
I think he’d by now be tired of,
the cameras and bright fabric, the same
route run year after year, politicians
sitting on the sled as mushers
stand above at the finish line into
the next day’s news.
Silver
abdomen of hydrogen above him, props
spinning the great airship over tundra – yes,
headwinds, ice fog, and glare. Caribou
strung out miles along the Porcupine, the Yukon.
Another first. And did he like the comforts
he never had to stow, the books
always with their spines exposed?
Ski to ship
to Zeppelin – look at how we step away from slog.
Of course he liked the ease. Of course he knew
a new danger could always present itself
perhaps more terrible, perhaps more strange,
and that was what he was exploring
as much as the Beaufort’s pack ice, the many uses
of seal. As much how as whether, as much new
as done. Another shove against the impossible,
shoulder to it, gut straining, unsure if it would move.
Elizabeth Bradfield’s poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, Field, and Prairie Schooner.
THE FARTHEST ISLAND by Nancy Lord
I.
The island emerges, finally, from fog. I’m thinking of the old days, when ship captains plunging through fog could only locate land from the sounds of waves breaking on shore and seabirds crying from their rookeries. As our anchor chain rumbles out, I stand at the rail with passengers, watching the darkness that is the island rise into low and wooly clouds.
A passenger says to me, “You must get to visit these amazing places all the time.” He says this because he knows I live in Alaska, and because he does not really understand where we are.
I say, “Well, actually, I’ve been to the Bering Sea a few times now, but this is only the second time I’ve been lucky enough to come here. This place is as far from anywhere that you’ll ever be.”
I’m the historian on the cruise staff, but St. Matthew Island is thin on human history. I’m fond of imagining the members of the Harriman Expedition landing here in 1899 to collect newly discovered buntings they called “hyperborean snowflakes.” I know little more of their visit than that they explored the remains of a driftwood shelter while William Dall told them the story of three Russian fur hunters who shipwrecked on the island many years before.
I share this story with those on deck. A rescue ship that came looking for the hunters the summer after their disappearance found just one survivor on the island. That man told his rescuers that the other two had floated off on ice floes. “Unlikely,” I say to those around me. “Everyone assumed he’d eaten them.”
The passengers step away from me, horrified.
II.
Ashore, I lead a group over the tundra, where we exclaim about the extravagance of wildflowers: monkshood most purple, roseroot crowning red, yellow saxifrage. I point out mosses and the gray, prickly lichens – how few they are, still, among the grasses and flowering plants.
Earlier, I’d briefed them all about the reindeer. During World War II, when a Coast Guard station was established on the island, twenty-nine reindeer were brought over from the mainland. The station was abandoned after a year or two, but the reindeer reproduced in Malthusian fashion and by 1963 numbered some six thousand. They ate everything in sight and then, that brutal winter, all but forty-two starved to death. The sole surviving male was shot by a biologist committed to returning the island to its former ecology, and the final females gradually died out.
As we climb higher, the vegetation tightens toward the ground, more wind-whipped and farther from summer. Here among the berry leaves I find what I’m looking for. It’s just a pale point poking free, but when I take hold of it and tug, it rips loose from the mosses. I have in hand a reindeer antler, two single prongs attached at their bases to a small white skull.
“Look at this!” I call out to my group, now spread over the hillside, on their knees with macro lenses or posing for one another against a background of anchored ship and sea. “Look at this! One of those six thousand reindeer that starved in the big die-off, forty years ago!”
Two of our group wander over to where I’m holding my find as the lovely natural object it is: elegant curves and porcelain bone, draped in moss, nibbled by voles. I am still holding it when they march on without venturing a touch, without raising their cameras. They are unimpressed with the dead thing, some poor dead animal that would only make them sad.
III.
Back on our ship, we round Glory of Russia Cape. The island on this north end rises vertically to a long, gorgeously castellated, fairytale ridge. In the foreground, right up against the cliffs, rests the wreck of an old freighter, broken in two and reduced to rust. The freighter was Greek, I know, the wreck only a decade ago. Imagine losing power in these far-away waters. Imagine drifting through a storm, tossed like a tin cup by enormous waves. Imagine smashing up against this rugged shore. The wreck is a monument to the indifferent ferocity of this place and to the frailty of humans and their machines.
I don’t say any of this. Instead, I listen to passengers tsk at the rotting steel as though it’s unsightly litter, a ruinous spoiling of their picture-perfect view.
Nancy Lord is the author of Green Alaska: Dreams from the Far Coast; Beluga Days: Tracking a White Whale’s Truths; and several short fiction collections.
NEW HOUSE ON NARROWVIEW LANE by Derick Burleson
Turn right off Breeze and you’re practically here.
We’re the fifth driveway on the left, past
three dog yards, past the bus where we suspect
they’re cooking meth, past the collector of dead
cars and the big log cabin next to him.
You’ll know it’s the driveway when you see
the big No Trespassing sign we decided
to leave up. It’s an A-frame with a green
metal roof. They found the lady who lived
here before, huddled with her eleven dogs
in the middle of winter, out of wood,
out of water, out of her mind with the long
night, or sorrow for the man who’d up
and left her here like this. They hauled her off,
the people who sold it to us said. You wouldn’t
believe it’s the same place. First week here we had
wolves in the hills and an owl on the roof.
Now October’s coming on and all afternoon
chainsaws whine through birch. The leaves long
gone, and today the wind bends spruce double.
Geese and cranes long gone too, but the owl will
winter here, and today down by the river
we saw a falcon stoop and take a ruffed grouse.
About half the folks on our road have running
water. We do, but it’s been some years since
we did, and we all love the new big bathtub.
There’s a garden spot in front, forest in back,
high bush cranberries, raspberries, amanita
muscaria everywhere. What else? It’s moose
season and rifle shots mean somebody’s meat.
Plenty of bear sign not far from the house.
You’ll see when you get here. We’re close to
North Pole, closer to Two Rivers and mountains
hover above a sea of mist at the end of the road,
these crystalline fall mornings. The bears are fat
and sleepy this time of year, but they haven’t
denned up yet. We all have guns on Narrowview Lane,
and we keep them loaded. What else can I tell you?
Come on up for a visit as soon as you can.
Derick Burleson’s first book, Ejo: Poems, Rwanda 1991–1994 won the 2000 Felix Pollak Prize from the University of Wisconsin Press. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, and The Georgia Review.
NOATAK WOLVES by Susan Campbell
We hear them scuffle in the willow scrub,
watch them step one by one into the river,
swim across, single-file, to open ground.
They yip and bark, tumble for an hour,
collapse against each other.
We paddle on, think of them curled asleep
on the tundra, how lucky we were to see them,
when suddenly they appear again:
five wolves perched on a cutback above us,
shoulder to shoulder, heads cocked, staring.
Miles downstream, we walk up a low ridge:
they’re waiting. Closer.
Breeze off the river bells over us.
One breath follows another, and another.
They turn back to their invisible trail.
Time resumes its arc into the future where
a lifetime from now I will relinquish my
last breath, close my eyes, think of them,
their tracks winding up from the river,
my voice whispering, “Wait. Wait.”
Susan Campbell’s poems have appeared in PoetryAlaskaWomen, Top of the World, and Shaping the Landscape: A Journal of Writing by Alaskan Teachers.
HUNTING LESSON by Aleria Jensen
He says he leaves the head above the high tide line
facing the sea.
This way, his father told him,
the seal is always at home, and doesn’t know that
its body has been taken.
Last year, he got eighty for the village,
but usually, twenty.
He says the old women line up with plastic bags
to take the meat away, all wanting the best pieces.
His friends who went hunting last week
shot seven and lost four.
He says he can eat a side of blubber in one sitting,
a meal most white folks can’t stomach.
It would make them sick, he says.
He has a smokehouse too, for fish, big enough
to bring a couch and tv if he wanted.
He jokes that he could hide from his wife.
Last year when an elder died,
he gave away fifty cases of salmon.
The year before, the same.
This year – no one has died.
So, he asks, over a slice of pizza in the city,
how can the agencies try to tell us
how much we need from year to year,
how much we need for subsistence?
And then he is gone, flying into the snow and the night,
back to the shores where the seals
never leave home.
Aleria Jensen’s poetry has appeared previously in Potomac Review and Alaskan Southeaster.
A WINTER FAIRYTALE by Arlitia Jones
The moon is just
the moon and not a white doe
standing still in a forest of stars
and that is simply a dog
barking off in the night
and not the ancient wolf
baying, crouched, waiting to leap
and pull the moon down
and gore it on top of new snow
which is never a silvered robe
of silk draped over the earth.
The snow is simply snow.
Why insist on so much more?
It’s never enough
the moon is the moon,
full, celestial and distant.
Would no one believe me if I said
the dog is brown, mongrel and thirsty?
The man who owns him
did not feed him today,
why should he change his old habit?
The dog is scared, chained to a truck.
He makes a weird dance
lifting each paw in turn
because his smooth pads
sting when they touch the ice.
Ah, night, clear and arctic and long.
Is this not credible?
Forget the book of myths.
Look and see the light that comes on
in the window of the house
farther down the moonspit valley
where an angry wife
who is not a good witch,
hands a rifle to her husband
who is a huntsman
because she has to open up the shop
in the morning, because she’s desperate
for a few hours’ sleep, and she’s had it
with the damn dog, with the night’s injustice.
Write what she said.
Please, do this for me.
Arlitia Jones’ collection of poems, The Bandsaw Riots, won the 2001 Dorothy Brunsman Award from Bear Star Press. Her poems have appeared in Doubletake, Prairie Schooner, North American Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and in the anthology Long Journey: Contemporary Northwest Poets.
SUSAN’S CANDY STORE by Seth Kantner
Standing on the rocks in front of the MacManuses’ old sod igloo at Paungaqtaugruk Bluff, I watch the current twist by and somehow I get to remembering Susan’s candy store, of all things. The house is thirty-five years old, overgrown, leaning and lonely. Notched posts recline, sagging ridge beams ride them imperceptibly down. Young spruce and birch grow healthy on the moss roof. Porcupine, mice and marten have clawed out the homemade Visqueen windows and tunneled through the sod-block and sapling walls to marble the floorboards with turds. Bears have walked in, bitten empty Clorox and syrup jugs, walked back out.
I was a four-and-a-half-year-old kid living downriver when this place smelled fresh with the sap of split poles and peeled logs, overflowing with voices, the hiss of a Coleman lantern and the vigor of sweat and plans. Over the decades I’ve watched it coming down, molding and slumping back to the ground, and I suspect it will take more than the rest of my life to disappear.
Across the Kobuk River, an ancient stand of spruce darkly guards the tundra beyond. That timber will always remind me of black bear meat – from a fragmented memory of a bear my dad killed – and that damn candy store. Susan was five or six when they moved here and lived a couple seasons at this spot, thirty river-miles below the village of Ambler. My family had lived two miles down at the lower end of the bluff since before I was zero. We lived there because my dad respected – maybe more than all else – this land and the way the Eskimos used to live on it. I have no idea why the MacManuses came, but I believe their reasons were different.
Susan arrived with all sorts of worldly knowledge of real toothpaste powder, exotic realms such as Seattle, and stuff. We brushed our teeth with salt and soda. Our stuff was mostly dog harnesses and caribou skins and dark brown tools with lighter brown handles. Dad’s brass breadbox, Herter’s fox call and RCBS reloader were about our shiniest show-off items and my brother and I learned fairly abruptly that fall that they weren’t worth a penny. (This without mentioning that the fox call had never worked.)
The MacManuses had a three-foot-long oval galvanized washtub, with no leak! Two kids could take a bath at once. And they had a Washing Machine. The day I’m remembering, Susan’s older brother, Scott, had the first rabbit he’d ever snared down in that gasoline-powered Maytag – still alive and occasionally screaming. Susan, I think, was supposed to be doing her correspondence schoolwork, but somehow she ended up leading me out across the river ice toward those dark spruce. Looking for the candy store, obviously.
The thing I remember most painfully about the candy store was you had to give Susan candy for her to build up the generosity to lead you there. Then along the way, she’d stop, often, and you had no choice but to improve her memory of the trail with another butterscotch, or whatever you had. I rarely had anything in my pockets besides lint, string, and empty .22 shells. My mother was a health-food person and worried about our diet so we were seldom allowed candy, not much sugar and no pop.
I can’t imagine me having candy that day, and I don’t believe Susan operated on credit. But, those were long winters in our small sod houses, with mice rustling in the walls and under the tables and foxes tunneling down to steal dogfood, sled dogs being traded, paperbacks borrowed back and forth and read down to tatters – and we kids too with our own heavy bartering going. So actually Susan probably was willing to accept a promise.
Regardless, we ended up out on that river. My brother, Kole, wouldn’t come along. He was cynical about the whole subject. He’d been stung pretty bad once when we did have candy. That particular time Susan tried to convince him that the store had caught fire. This after she’d finished his Hershey Bar and he’d nearly froze his kneecaps off searching. “Where are the burned logs?” he asked. Even then he was pragmatic. We’d grown up out on tundra, hauling things home to eat. We asked simple questions and wanted useful answers, did something work, was it good to eat, did it hold a knot?
That day an east wind had the snow up and moving. The river was a quarter mile wide with deep drifts – miles across to a five- and six-year-old. We hunched close and protected our faces as best we could. Frostbite was a way of life back then. We called it “your face is white,” and helped each other thaw out with our palms. Then we slid our mittens back on and continued. Cold was, well . . . just cold. Nobody wore these Darth Vader snowgo masks people use today. Back then along the Kobuk River if you were sissy enough to wear a mask like that people would have talked about you all the way to Kotzebue, maybe even across in Russia. “What them white people always try to save their face for anyways?” is what folks would have said and thought.
Eventually, Susan and I made it to the far bank and there the snow had drifted even deeper. At that age I didn’t wear extra stuff like socks, or underwear. My mukluks filled up. We stood uncertain as caribou, unwilling to start back. Our eyes crusted with ice. Susan explained patiently how the owners must have had to move the store because of the wind. It was plausible. By then the wind had increased and it was hard to make out the bluff on the north shore. And then, all Susan’s work pitching her vision of that candy store warm and heaped with sweets sort of blew away downstream. We headed back.
On the way we thought we heard a motor. We yanked off our scarves, pried open our hats and hoods, ignoring the gusting snow and cold, forgetting all about candy. There was almost nothing more important. A motor meant people; maybe Clarence Wood hunting, or Harry Ticket with the mail, maybe Tony Burnhardt in his Super Cub bounty-hunting wolves, bringing us ice cream bars and asking our parents when the wolf packs had last showed. When we heard a motor, at first who didn’t really matter. Anybody would at least be somebody. Maybe the person would spend the night. Probably they’d stop, say nothing to us kids, a little to the adults, have coffee and go on. And even that would be a big deal, for days.
But it was no motor – nor a traveler on his dog team like Don Williams who once a year might even play the guitar – only the wind which we had no scarcity of, and scarcity it seemed was how we kids measured value. We slogged back to the shore, up the drifts, past the dogs and the Washing Machine and inside the house. We stood red-faced thawing out by the barrel stove. Scott’s rabbit had met Scott’s hammer and that was over, and Scott and Susan showed Kole and I what super-duper was: hot Tang with Eagle Brand in it and that too was a novelty as our family didn’t have either.
The candy store was never found – at least not when I was present. Along the years electricity came to Ambler and other villages, flush toilets and the first community telephone, and then enough for everyone to have their own phone, their own color of phone. By then the MacManuses had long moved upriver to the village and got jobs as school teachers. Susan grew beautiful and she moved away where most stores are candy stores and she doesn’t have to fish anymore for her dogs and start a campfire every night to cook dogpot in a third of a drum.
And now on the shore in front of the old place, I hear a boat coming. I don’t feel any of that old excitement we once felt. It’s 2006. A lot of aluminum and fiberglass boats pass, looking for something to shoot. And though I’m not nearly an elder, sometimes it’s tough, watching all these young people and newcomers rush past with their fast and fancy equipment, with little room onboard for knowledge or respect for those by-hand times so recently passed.
Some of the old-timers are still alive, the ones like Nelson Griest, who walked from Point Barrow, and others who remember the taste of famine, dark, and eating sealskin to survive. Things that we kids at Paungaqtaugruk never experienced. But that past of treasuring the simplest possessions and meals leaves us all uprooted at times in the face of such heaped and flippant wealth. I’m thinking maybe we’ve found the candy store after all. I should call Susan. Talking about our old days along this river peels all that away. We laugh a lot. And I guess I better find out if she still has an I-owe-you of mine for half a stick of Spearmint or the last bite of my next store-bought cookie.
Seth Kantner’s debut novel, Ordinary Wolves, won the Milkweed National Fiction Prize and the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award, and Kantner subsequently received a Whiting Award. His prose has appeared in Outside, Prairie Schooner, Alaska, and Reader’s Digest.
IT WAS NOTHING by Carol Richards
Look at me. Turning white. An albino. A ghost. I’ll blend in with the snow. I’ll lie perfectly still on my white sheets. See me? See where the sheets end? And I begin?
* * *
I wasn’t always this way. It happened bit by bit. First I found one perfectly round circle. White. Dime-sized. On the inside of my left wrist. Hidden under the clasp of my metal watchband. I thought I was allergic to something. To time, maybe. To my watch, probably. So I cleaned my watchband with alcohol and swabbed my wrist and didn’t think of it again.
I didn’t think of it again until a boyfriend found the circle when he was stroking my bare wrists. What’s that? Nothing, I said. You should have it looked at. It’s nothing, I repeated.
* * *
I was right. It was nothing. The absence of something. The start of the absence. The beginning of nothing.
* * *
My knees. I skinned my knees. Late for a plane, I sprinted toward the shuttle bus and tripped over my own feet. Falling in slow motion, arms outstretched like I was flying, then landing hard on my knees, bouncing on my belly. People on the bus mouthed, Oh. Looking, pointing. Waiting for me to get up, to half-limp, half-run to the bus. I thanked the driver for waiting, thanked the passengers, too. Yes, I’m okay. My knees, bleeding through my torn jeans. I made the flight. The flight attendant examined me, pulled out her medical kit. I washed and patched up my wounds. When they healed there was no scar. Just one spot, on each knee: one the shape of England, the other, Australia. English-speaking spots.
* * *
Still I thought it was nothing.
* * *
My face. The corners of my mouth. That’s where I saw them next. Little white spots. One on each side. Symmetrical. Small. Friendly. They made me look like I was always smiling. Slightly. It was nothing. A highlight, sort of. I liked them, sort of.
* * *
When my skin first started losing color I was living in Portland. By the time I moved to Minneapolis, I knew the name for it. In New York I saw a dermatologist. Vitiligo. Loss of color to the skin. Loss of melanin. My immune system stuck in high gear. My immune cells attack the pigment-producing cells. My skin, a battlefield. Like the game of Risk, white overtaking the brown.
I’d lived Outside, far from Alaska for years. Back home, my Aunt Bea claimed my vitiligo was the Eskimo and the White Man fighting. White was winning. Bea says, they usually do. I always said I was half-Eskimo. Both my parents were half-Eskimo. Now, it seemed, bit-by-bit, White was claiming me.
* * *
The little circle on my wrist was soon besieged by dots on the back of my hand. First left, then right. On my knees England and Australia morphed to include Scotland and New Zealand, and other neighboring countries. My skin became a collection of reverse freckles, light spots instead of brown. A constellation. In the bath, or naked in bed when I couldn’t sleep, I’d study my changing skin. I could make out countries, or, more sleepily, shapes, like clouds of elephants and horses and dragons. One spot on my right forearm resembled a sperm, or a snail. I couldn’t decide which. My legs, nearly colorless. My nipples faded to pink.
* * *
The emergent white patches are especially susceptible to sunburns and to skin cancer. Sunscreens become vital. I never was much for sunbathing. Now I can’t tan, only burn. I started sporting wide-brimmed hats. Post-vitiligo, in Hawaii with friends, I slathered on 45-SPF sunscreen. When I took surf lessons I wore a long-sleeved, high-necked wetsuit top with built-in UV 50 sunscreen. Thick sunscreen, no makeup. At the beach I saw a boy, a good-looking surfer dude. In a wheelchair. We looked each other in the eye. With curiosity. What happened to you?
* * *
I used to be jealous of girls with perfect complexions, their lovely, smooth skin. Now I say to them, to me, enjoy it while you can.
* * *
When I was still more brown than white I didn’t wear much makeup. Post-vitiligo I splurged. I bought Chanel bronzer. I coughed up big dough at a day spa and got exfoliated and bronze-leafed, “to create the illusion of a sun-kissed body.” Now I shake my head. Silly me. It’s not like I was fooling anyone. Besides, who was seeing my “sun-kissed body”? Nobody. Nobody noticed. Not before, not after. I only tried it once. The exfoliation felt kind of good. But the results were short-lived. They washed off.
The dermatologist prescribed Tri-Luma, a bleaching agent that reduces dark circles. The idea is, if I can’t get back to brown, to even out the spots, to go lighter. The spot-reducing cream is smelly. It didn’t yield immediate results. I was impatient. Expecting instant transformation.
* * *
The vitiligo websites allude to the psychological consequences, the self-consciousness. Yet most everyone I know is self-conscious. The older I get, the more I realize this. I was probably always afraid to be intimate. I didn’t want to get naked. Before vitiligo I never was a nudist. Now that the disease has progressed further, I’ve somehow relaxed more. Maybe it’s just a matter of being older.
* * *
Vitiligo doesn’t hurt. Vitiligo is not a birthmark. Vitiligo is not a burn. Vitiligo is not contagious. It can be hereditary. It usually appears by the time you’re thirty. And only one percent of the population gets it. So I am different.
* * *
I’m not alone. My brother has vitiligo. He’s older. He had it first. Once my vitiligo showed up, my mother wondered if she was responsible. She worried, was it something she did? She was Catholic. She already had enough burdens.
* * *
Vitiligo. Michael Jackson claims to have it. His revelation on Oprah made him the poster child for vitiligo. He may well have it, but usually one does not lose pigment so evenly all over. So, maybe he has it, but he’s used makeup or bleaching agents to mask any remaining pigment. Or, he doesn’t have it, and he used chemical bleaching agents to lighten his skin color. One doctor says, “Patches on hands may explain his early use of the one glove.” I don’t care whether he has it or not. It just makes it easier to say, when people ask about my skin, “Oh, it’s what Michael Jackson says he has.” They nod, ah, like they know.
* * *
I catch my reflection in a window, in the mirror. I see someone with very white skin and very dark hair, dark brows, dark eyes. I look. It takes me a minute to recognize myself. Every day. Every night before I go to sleep. Every morning. In the mirror, that’s me brushing my teeth. I’m still there. It’s still me.
* * *
There’s this Eskimo legend, probably a true account, of a hunter who licked his finger after nicking it while butchering a polar bear. The bear’s liver was poisonous. He lost all skin color. Turned white. White as the bear.
© 2006 Barry McWayne Decadent Fireweed #3 Gordian Knot
This is Carol Richards’ first publication in a national literary magazine.