|
|
(back to page 1)
I get my wider world news from the public radio station, which plays NPR early in the morning and country music and rock and roll all afternoon. I have the radio on all the time. The eclectic mix is the soundtrack to my life. Everyone reads the "Chilkat Valley News," our weekly paper, all eight or twelve or sixteen pages of it (depending on the season, the ads, and the letters to the editor), from headlines to the unclassifieds. When someone is selling a house or boat and only the phone number is listed, we find out who it is by running a finger down the few pages that the Haines listings take up in the southeast Alaska phone book. The two reporters joke that most readers are checking for mistakes, since they already know the news. I took over the paper's "Duly Noted" social column from its creator, Doris Ward. When her husband died, Doris needed a break from recording who went on vacation or who bid on what at the fund-raising auction for the Alaska Bald Eagle Festival. It wasn't much of a leap to go from reporting on the living to chronicling the dead, so I began writing the obituaries, too.
Death is a big part of life in Haines. As they do everywhere, people get cancer and have heart attacks. Teens die in car wrecks on the Haines Highway. One middle-aged man even succumbed to a weird flesh-eating bacterium. But there are many accidental deaths, too. This is a dangerous place. One man died falling off a cliff while goat hunting. Another was lost diving for sea cucumbers. Skiffs capsize in icy water, planes disappear in the mountains. Sometimes people vanish without a trace.
The house next door to ours is empty now. The neighbors crashed their plane on Douglas Island last summer. They died instantly, along with two passengers: their best friend's newly wed son and daughter-in-law. They were the second owners of the house. The couple who built it came here from New Zealand after buying a local air taxi service. The wife flew me back and forth to Juneau for my prenatal appointments. She had gray hair and five children. She died when her plane hit a mountain on a flight over the ice field between Glacier Bay and Haines. No wonder I'm afraid to fly.
In Haines, funerals are community affairs. I've been to memorial services in churches, gardens, the Elks Club, the Alaska Native Brotherhood Hall, and the American Legion. At Paul Potter's funeral, held in the high school gym, the pastor invited everyone to come up in front of the coffin and sink a basket for Jesus. Paul was a popular youth basketball coach who had recently joined the Haines Cornerstone Foursquare Gospel Church. Even people who don't normally attend church turn to God for comfort when someone dies. Being with men, women, and children who have lost the person they loved most in all the world only days before yet still open the door and invite me in, ask if I want honey in my tea, and then thank me for helping them when I leave is all the proof I need that God is good.
In most places, families write their own obituaries for local papers–or they send in an even shorter death announcement to larger newspapers. They pretty much say what they want. When my grandmother died back East, my parents gave the "New York Times" her incorrect age, by mistake, but the "Times" printed it just as they wrote it. Only celebrities or prominent citizens get the kind of treatment I give everyone who dies in Haines.
I spend as much time as I can researching a life but, with a weekly deadline, invariably I'm talking with friends and family heartbreakingly close to the death. Often within a day or two. Mostly I just listen. The details I need for the obituary are usually given right away, but the visit lasts much longer. By the time I'm ready to write, I know a lot about the person, and their friends and family. Much more than we'll ever print in the paper.
Haines is the kind of town where if you live here long enough you recognize everybody and everybody recognizes you. High school basketball games are the biggest thing happening on most winter weekends, and on Sunday morning the church parking lots are full. So is the driveway at the Buddhist-style meditation hut. Picking up the mail at the post office (we all do; there is no home delivery) is a chance to socialize. If I arrive at the post office in a bad mood, I usually leave in a good one after chatting with everyone in line. Haines is so full of local color that if they ever made a movie about us, no one would believe it. There's an artist who lives with his wife, a weaver, in a fanciful cabin overlooking Rainbow Glacier. He keeps a dead temple pit viper in a big jar filled with vodka and takes sips of the "snake juice" every now and then to ward off illness. He'll offer you some if you stop by. The controversial new Presbyterian pastor's arms are covered with tattoos. The sewer plant manager rides a Harley-Davidson and has a ZZ Top beard. Recent mayors have included an artist, a heavy equipment operator, a Tlingit Indian woman, a Scotsman with a burr in his voice, and a white-haired former Vermonter. One school principal was a Roy Orbison impersonator; he dressed all in black and sang "Pretty Woman" at fund-raisers. Dave Pahl has collected so many hammers the Smithsonian sent him their old life-sized manikins to help him display them in action–right in his house, which doubles as the Haines Hammer Museum. I haven't even mentioned the Mormon spelunkers, the one-legged lady gold miner, or my friend Tim, a salmon fisherman and carpenter who spent eleven years building a classic thirty-six-foot reproduction Herreshoff ketch, doing all the work himself, from sewing the sails to melting lead from old car batteries for the keel. When it was done, he asked me to teach him how to sail.
John Schnabel, an old-timer who owns the Big Nugget Gold Mine in the historic Porcupine mining district, is the reason we were able to stay in Haines when the sawmill Chip worked at closed. John offered to sell us a building supply business he also happened to own. Twenty years and five children later, Chip still runs the same lumberyard and hardware store at the bottom of the hill, just across the road from the new cruise-ship dock. There are a lot more tourists than loggers in Haines now.
(continued on the next page)
If you’re enjoying this excerpt and you’d like to sample other books, join our Online Book Clubs.
|
|
WIN
a trip to Alaska.
To enter, go to:
www.algonquin.com/alaska/
|
