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We have a weekend cabin off an old logging road eight miles south of town. You can get to it in a four-wheel-drive truck that you don't mind scratching with tree branches, or you can walk. That's in the summer. In the winter you have to snowshoe, ski, or snowmobile in. Our cabin is built on the former homestead of a writer and Danish seaman, Hjalmar Rutzebeck. The pond it sits on is called, optimistically, Rutzebeck Lake. It's mostly muskeg and about eight feet deep in the deep end. If you're brave, you can wade in the muck all the way across it. The shallow water gets warm enough on sunny days for skinny-dipping. Rutzebeck, who came to Haines in the 1920s after jumping ship somewhere on the West Coast, wrote two fat novels about his life here. He shot ducks on the pond and didn't have a dog, so he dove in and picked them up in his own mouth. He killed a man and was sent to jail in Juneau, but he escaped and walked the hundred-plus miles home over the ice fields, around Skagway, and back down the peninsula. He hadn't shot the fellow in cold blood. He'd been hired as a watchman for a cannery because people were stealing supplies from the warehouse. Before he went to sleep one night, he rigged a string to the trigger of a loaded shotgun behind a door with a sign that said IF YOU OPEN THIS YOU WILL BE KILLED. A would-be thief ignored the warning and was shot dead.
When asked to sum up his philosophy of life, Rutzebeck wrote something that holds true for most people in Haines today: "We are what we want to be, mostly."
Most folks in Haines know I write obituaries, so while I've spent a lot of time sitting at kitchen tables thumbing through old photo albums, I've also had people stop me on the road while I'm out running to tell me something about their friend who recently died. They talk with me about dead people over coffee at Mountain Market, at the back booth in the Bamboo Room Restaurant, in the aisle at the grocery store, and when they are looking for garden tools at the lumberyard. I've stood on the sidewalk in front of the bank while a father told me he felt the presence of his dead son, and I quietly left the Pioneer Bar during a wake when two grown sons fought about cremating their father's remains. One Tlingit elder helped me write her obituary "after" she'd been buried–I learned everything I needed to know about her, and much more about the first people to live in the Chilkat Valley, from watching a series of interviews Anne Keener had given on videotape at the museum a few years before she passed away. When an older man was dying at home, his neighbors let me know they didn't expect him to last through the weekend. Just so I'd be ready. Recently, one new widow even called the newspaper office and asked when I was coming over. I didn't mind at all.
Because I love what I do. Being an obituary writer means I think a lot about loss, but more about love. Writing the obituaries of so many people I've known makes me acutely aware of death, but in a good way, the way Emily Dickinson meant when she wrote, "That it will never come again/Is what makes life so sweet." My job helps me appreciate cookouts on clear summer evenings down on the beach, where friends lounge on driftwood seats and we eat salmon and salads by the fire while our children play a game of baseball that lasts until the sun finally sets behind the mountains, close to eleven o'clock. And it helps me savor the quieter view from the top of Mount Ripinsky on New Year's morning when Chip and I and our neighbor Steve snowshoe up at sunrise.
Most of all, though, writing about the dead helps me celebrate the living–my neighbors, friends, husband, and five children–and this place, which some would say is on the edge of nowhere, but for me is the center of everywhere.
DULY NOTED
An article in the "New York Times" travel section recently called Haines "the real 'Northern Exposure.'" Tourism director Michelle Glass said that while the television show may not be how we see ourselves, the comparison can't hurt. "We couldn't buy this kind of publicity," she said. The article also mentioned that women in Haines have a fashion sense twenty years behind the rest of the country. When asked what she thought about that, Michelle pondered for a minute, then said, "No comment."
Tammy Hotch took matters into her own hands Friday in Ketchikan where she assisted in the birth of her son Casey Logan. "She reached down and pulled him out herself," said Tammy's mother, Linda Terracciano, who watched Casey's birth at Ketchikan General Hospital's new birthing facility. Casey joins brothers Steve and Alex and dad Stan Hotch.
Tlingit Barbie is here. The iconic female doll now comes in a Northwest Native American version, complete with a Chilkat blanket, headdress, and other regalia. The Mattel Corporation sent a shipment of dolls to the Chilkat Valley Historical Society last week. Joan Snyder said the group asked for three but were given eight, so the extras will be raffled off.
The bad news was that Judy Clark was stuck in Haines three days longer than she'd planned following the eightieth-birthday celebration for her mother, Betty Heinmiller. Planes were grounded because of snow and rain, and there were no ferries scheduled until later in the week. The good news is that she was able to stay and celebrate brother Lee's birthday as well. "We half-expected it," Lee said. "It is winter, after all."
Brian and Laura Johnson are trying a unique approach to selling the Bear Creek Camp youth hostel in Haines. They are sponsoring a nationwide essay contest, offering the 2.5-acre Small Tracts Road facility to the winner. Entrants must submit a four-hundred-word essay describing how owning the rural Alaskan camp would change their life.
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