“Then, one year, I don’t know how old I was—late teens, early twenties—it was wintertime, and I wasn’t doing much for working then or anything. Conrad Gunderman had been chopping wood and cut his foot open with an ax, and he still wanted to go trapping. He couldn’t go trapping, and he heard I wasn’t doing anything, so he called me up and asked if I would go trapping with him and be his legs. I said sure, so I went down there and talked to him. He made out a grocery list. I got groceries. It was the month of December.
“We took off and went trapping for a whole month. His trapline was down at Anan—down on the mainland shore south and then on the Wrangell shore from Hamm Island down to Fools Inlet. My uncle Frank Edwin, he had his trapline in Fools Inlet. Anyway, I went out with Conrad, and jeez we got along good. He’d run the skiff, and I’d run up and get the furs and rebait the traps and set the traps. And in the evening time, we’d skin out and stretch out everything—all the mink and otter. We got along good. We had a great time.
“One night, in the middle of the night, a storm come up and ripped the skiff loose from the boat. We had the big boat, the Lorelei Sea, Conrad’s big trolling boat. The storm ripped the skiff loose and put it up on the beach. The breakers came in and filled it full of sand. The next morning the tide was out. Conrad eased the big boat over to the beach, and I jumped off with a bucket and a shovel and got to the skiff. It was full of beach sand from the storm. I shoveled all the sand out of the skiff again before the tide came in. The motor was still good—still worked. I got all the sand out of the skiff, and we got it back to the big boat and we didn’t lose it. It was a nice, flat sandy beach there. It was pretty spooky for a while.
“We didn’t know what was happening. We wondered about it. Who did that? What did that? I decided I didn’t want to trap with Conrad anymore. On account of his luck. I didn’t want to drown. I’m done. I don’t want to tell any more stories. I’m sorry. This is enough. Thank you.”
Date: 1980s
Recorded by Tooch Waterson
Salmon Woman
Aino sits weeping on a rock of many colors. The rock sinks under the weight of her lamenting. In her grief, she cannot move. The water engulfs her. She slips into the sea, shapeshifting into a salmon.
From her float-house above the tideline, sixteen-year-old Mina walks through a thimbleberry patch to the beach. The bushes scratch her arms as she holds her two-month-old baby daughter closer. On the beach, she sits on a log. No one hears Mina’s lament. The baby looks into her mother-child’s eyes and fusses. From beneath the blanket, a pink bottle tumbles onto the sand. Mina picks it up and wipes the nipple off on her jeans and then puts the bottle in her baby’s mouth.
The breeze pitches the waves to whitecaps. Mina imagines her mother-in-law in the house on the hill above her, at the window, conjuring yet another storm. Behind, her young husband yells her name from the open windows of their float-house.
She rises with a familiar ache in her arms and walks to the water’s edge. She pauses, sensing her baby’s breath ebbing with hers. She looks out to Zimovia Strait: a troller chugs toward the fishing grounds. She turns, hearing her husband cursing again. He searches the bushes beside the house, his anger crashing closer. Water soaks into Mina’s shoes, swirling cold tongues at her ankles. The circling gulls join her whimper as she walks farther out until the water is at her knees. Her thoughts stir the sea, and time cools the air, allowing a moment of reflection—Ahtolaiset, her people-of-the-seas, live in the ocean, rivers, and lakes. She thinks about her oral tradition, of Aino fleeing from her husband. She tells herself she’ll migrate to Ahtola and swim around the salmon rocks, live with the Host-of-Waves.
It is then she recalls her own life cycle is like the ocean—she’s not only herself, she’s her baby too. She whispers her ancestors’ incantation: Woman-Beneath-the-Billows, rise on the foam. Gather the foam together; direct the current and the whitecaps. But this change of tide is unable to drown out her husband’s threatening voice—he yells for Mina and their daughter. Mina opens her mouth, but says nothing. Her baby fusses again and Mina looks down. The baby sees her shift from scaled creature to human face.
Mina slogs back through the water, her feet cramping against the cold. She returns to sit on the log. If she remains here, perhaps Raven will hop by and command, “I turn you to stone.” She will become a rock formation, appearing to cradle her babe in arms. Then, hundreds of years from now, someone will tell a story about her, the Salmon Woman.
The waves quiet down, but she still feels the lure of the sea. She wants to run toward it, to embrace its depths. Instead, with her baby held close, she turns toward the brush, toward the sound of her husband’s voice. She turns away from the ocean. She turns away from her ancestors. She turns away from her own shapeshifting.
Date: 1980s
Recorded by John Swanton
The Man Who Saves the Dead
Karl sat soaking in the hot tubs in Shakes Slough. His legs lifted up from the cedar bench, and he swirled the water with his feet. He took a sip of beer and leaned his head back. The water pressed against his chest, making it hard to breathe. Maybe this is what it feels like to drown. He shuddered. When he was a kid, his father had tossed him off the dock. He wasn’t really scared, at least he didn’t think so. Now, he lifted himself out of the water and sat on the tub’s circular rim. Shit, he couldn’t drown. He saved the drowned. At least that’s what people called him behind his back, anyway: The man who saves the dead.
Karl didn’t want to be known for saving the dead. It just happened that way. Sometimes, in fact most times, that’s the way things were in Wrangell. They just happened. How can you save the dead? Weren’t the dead unsavable by their deadness? But, then again, being rescued and saved, or taken, are divided by a narrow crack between the human world and the animal world, a line he couldn’t quite see. There were stories about those creatures, the ones he couldn’t mention. The creatures “saved” people from drowning, but they took the drowned to live with them. That’s how the old-timers told the stories. They said the landotters “saved” people who drowned. But what did that make him? Part of a weird myth? Maybe he was saving folks, like they said. If he found their drowned body, they wouldn’t be living in that world they couldn’t see, the invisible place. He knew that world existed. It was there all right, and it was gray as gray can be—like alder bark in winter, like his dad’s old wool halibut jacket. Life was a gray cloud, sucking the life from gray water surrounded by gray islands, gray trees, and gray moss.
The first time he saved a dead man he didn’t intend it to happen. It was one of those gray days when he was eighteen years old and working down on his dad’s boat, the Sea Wolf. The VHF radio blared out a call that One-Eyed Tom, an old-timer, had fallen in the water. Karl got in his skiff, which was tied next to his dad’s boat, and sped across the harbor. He asked the bystanders what had happened, but no one knew. The body, they pointed, might be stuck under the dock somewhere. They’d heard the old guy yell for help.
Karl made note of the tideline, nearly all the way up onto the grid, and noted a seagull floating by, heading toward the harbor entrance. The leaves on the big old cottonwood standing near the tribal house on Shakes Island fluttered in the breeze.
Karl took off running down the dock in the opposite direction. “Over here!” he yelled back. Fifty yards down the dock he stopped and knelt down, searching on his hands and knees, looking through the planks into the water. Sure enough, a blue sweatshirt bulged with air beneath the slats. He yelled for a crowbar. “Shit!” Time slipped away like the ripples from the dock. He yanked down the top of his rubber boots. They made a sucking sound when they came off. He discarded his jacket beside his boots and jumped in. Once he was in the water, he tucked his head and shoulders down and fought to get under the dock. Having previously been more of a sinker than a swimmer, he was surprised to discover he could sink if he let the air out of his lungs. He went down, then back up again. He took a breath and squinched himself unde
r the dock. He grabbed at the only thing he saw, a dark shape, and jerked on it, and the body floated out from under the dock with him.
Karl popped his head up. His friend Cooper, an EMT, and several other guys and their rescue equipment stood on the dock. He heaved the old man upward, and Cooper and another guy reached out and rolled the old man over the rail and onto the dock. It was like working with a huge halibut on the back deck of his father’s boat, and for a second the image stayed with him: the slicing and hacking and gutting. He turned away.
The EMTs worked on the man, but Karl had already sensed his deadness. The gray day had gotten him. “His name’s One-Eyed Tom,” said another fisherman, who stood smoking a pipe nearby, watching the attempted rescue. “One-Eyed, on account of him having one eye. He had the Lady Jaye down on the third finger, tied next to the Minnie Sue.” The man took one long suck from his pipe and turned to walk away.
Karl didn’t want to watch them load the man up on the stretcher. He didn’t want a pat on the back or a stupid sad look making him sick to his stomach. He walked back to his skiff and motored across the harbor back to the Sea Wolf.
Karl's friend Cooper sat across from him on the edge of the wood hot tub. Steam rose up from their skin. “You look like you’re gonna have a heart attack,” Cooper said, slurring his words.
Karl put his hand to his face. It burned with heat. He inhaled the cool May air and flicked off a mosquito. He was tired, that’s all. It had been a hell of a halibut opening, a seventy-two-hour grab from the seafloor. He and Cooper had been up the whole time, and, after they’d unloaded their fish, Cooper suggested they head upriver to soak in the tubs. Sounded good to him. The fishing had been good and it was time for a reward.
Karl came from a family of fisherman. He was part Tlingit and part Norwegian on both his parents’ sides. His mother, Berta, had told him the Norwegians and the Tlingits had always gotten along because they all liked to tell stories and eat fish. In Wrangell, his great-grandfather met and married a Tlingit girl because when he told her stories, she didn’t laugh about dark elves living underground or about the Nidhogg, a dragon that eats the roots of the world tree. She had said she believed in those things too.
Those were the kinds of stories Karl secretly liked, the ones that told of dragons and elves and spiny, slimy, yellow-eyed creatures. Growing up, he and Cooper had that in common. They traded adventure comic books. Cooper used to tell him dragon stories. Cooper was part Chinese, his family history going back to Wrangell’s salmon cannery days. They still shared stories. They had skiff adventures, hot tub adventures, trolling adventures, salmon and killer whale adventures. And, of course, women adventures, family stories, work stories, and beer stories. Lots of beer stories. Heck, he was a story. His life made a good story. Especially all the people he saved or, rather, dragged up from the sea.
The second time he saved a body was a bit disturbing. Even he had to admit that. Someone had seen a guy inside the boat, a young deckhand. But after the fire died out, the deckhand’s body wasn’t there. He’d found him thirty feet beneath the boat, almost sitting up on a rock staring ahead, like he’d done when he was a kid, waiting to be rescued. But the deckhand was dead. He hadn’t known until he reached out toward him. It was the way the guy swayed, the way his mouth opened slightly.
He shook his head then sipped his beer. He shouldn’t think about that; time to celebrate their catch. After they sold their fish, Karl and Cooper had grabbed a couple cases of Rainier and headed off in his river scow. Several of their friends were supposed to meet them at the tubs, but the high tide that carried them upriver was already going out. If their friends weren’t here already, they probably weren’t coming up until the next tide.
Karl tipped his beer back and guzzled what remained. He tossed the beer can down into the soggy beer container sitting next to the tub and reached for another. The beer slipped from his hand and bobbed in the tub. He grabbed it. He held it up to his face, cooling his skin. He hadn’t even said good-bye to Mina. Sure, she knew he was unloading fish, and that they’d done well, but he’d forgotten to check in. Shit, how could he have forgotten to tell her he was going upriver? By now she already knew. She’d be off work from the deli and she’d see his rifle wasn’t propped up next to the bed and that his XtraTuf boots and coat were gone, as well as the checkbook.
Karl slunk back down, until only his eyes and the top of his head were above water. Cooper remained sitting on the edge of the hot tub, sipping his beer. “Did you feel that 300-pounder tug the line when we pulled it in?” He laughed. “Shit, I thought it was a skate, and then I thought, fuck, it must be 400 pounds the way it came up and fought.”
“Sometimes the smaller ones fight more,” Karl said.
“Yeah, but that one, it’s gonna pay the fuel bill.”
Yeah, he hated that the most: paying the fuel bill, the grocery bill, the stall rent, the boat repair bills, the new gloves and raingear bill, the bait bill. He finished off another beer and tossed it out of the tub. It rolled onto a small patch of grass.
If they’d only pay him for hauling up the dead people, he might be able to pay off a few things. He should charge them. A lot. Just because finding them seemed to come easy didn’t mean it was easy.
The third time he saved the dead, it was a white guy, an out-of-towner, who went canoeing between a small island and the shore outside of Pat’s Crick. Considering the current there, the man was an idiot. Karl figured with the incoming tide, the body would be pushed up the shoreline. For hours, the search-and-rescue and EMTs looked in the wrong area. Eventually, Cooper came and got Karl. “We need you for retrieval,” Cooper said. Retrieval was Cooper's new lingo after all his training. God, that sounded like he was going out in his skiff to pull a log off the beach for firewood or turning his skiff around to grab a crab pot buoy. But that’s what they called it now.
Karl found the dead man face down pressed under a submerged tree near the north end of the small island. Took him about ten minutes, searching the area where he’d guessed the body might have been, and, sure enough, it was. After that, the rescue squad was impressed, so much so, they decided he should have his own dive suit, which was really a wet suit, a scuba tank, and a mask and regulator. But he’d always jumped in with his jeans and T-shirt on. He didn’t know the first thing about scuba diving. He’d spent most of his life on the water, avoiding going down into the water. Besides, his mother would freak out. She warned him about the water and drowning. It was her worst fear—to have a relative disappear and never find the body. She’d seen it happen to other people: fathers, mothers, uncles, aunts, brothers, sisters, cousins, cousins-twice-removed, friends, strangers.
The sun finally peeked through the clouds. Daylight lasted longer these days, nearing 10:00 p.m. The sun felt warm and had already reddened his skin. Whenever he tanned, his skin shaded like the inside bark of an alder tree. Sometimes his wife, Mina, called him beautiful. She was New Agey. She embarrassed him. She said it wasn’t New Age, that she was Sámi. That it was how she saw the world, like a circle. Mina said he blended in with the island—green eyes and brown skin. Every generation, a child or two was born into the Agard family with sea-green eyes. Great-grandfather had had them, a great-aunt, and then his own father. He had them. Green-eyed Indian. Kids used to tease him. His five-year-old daughter, Tova, had those same eyes. He called her his green-eyed Indian. But no one was going to tease her about it. He’d make sure of that. He’d always figured his kids would look like Mina: light skin with blue eyes. When they were first married someone pointed out that his wife was a white Indian, and he thought they were cutting her down. He didn’t know she was a Lapp. He had been ready to fight. He’d been fighting his whole young life. He would probably die for Mina, his kids too. He put his hand to his chest. Maybe he was already doing that.
In the grand scheme of things, he couldn’t die. Who would replace him? He was the only one who could read the water. He was the only one who cared about remembering where people d
ied, how they died. At first he kept a notebook, writing down the people he saved. Their names, where he found them, what the weather was like. The fourth time he saved a body, he saved it from beneath a giant tour ship tied up at the cement dock downtown. A woman had jumped in to kill herself and she did. He found her still clutching her expensive purse, her hand outstretched, reaching for him.
He was destined to fetch bodies with nearby life jackets floating just out of reach, bodies with hooks and lines wrapped around their ankles, bodies with bulging eyes or no eyes. No one in town wanted anything to do with drowning. In a community of mixed Scandinavian and Tlingit heritages, himself included, he knew why: the landotter people. He couldn’t or wouldn’t say the name in the Tlingit language out loud. He’d been taught it was taboo. Saying it in English was a different matter, though he didn’t do that either. As a kid, he used to laugh about the taboo, but not now. Better safe than sorry. He’d grown up with the stories, knew the taboos, but it was never talked about directly. In the stories, it was sort of mentioned, skirted. Once he’d heard his grandfather mention the old-timers used to check their babies for tails. He’d checked his babies for skin and eye color.
Karl clanked another beer in the box. “Let’s head back.”
Cooper swigged the last of his beer down and threw it across the tub, hitting the side. The can plopped into the water. “Twin Lakes. Let’s go there. We can crash in the cabin.”
Karl left his wet T-shirt hanging over the side of the hot tub. He and Cooper dressed and headed back down the trail to the scow, leaving their empties scattered and the cardboard beer container soggy with rain and steam.
The Twin Lakes cabin was a half-hour trip back down the river. They would stay the night there rather than try and make a run through the flats on an outgoing tide. If they went now they’d be stuck for sure. The snowmelt had left Shakes Slough deep and muddy, their wake washing small trees behind them. Cooper drove the scow, getting the boat up on step in order to make it over some of the more treacherous spots in the slough: the sandbars and fallen trees blocking the river were invisible due to the high water. The scow skipped over the submerged logs, occasionally scraping the bottom of the boat. Cooper steered the scow, twisting his body with the sideways maneuvering. Karl sat in the bow, sideways, one leg out over the flat surface of the bow, the other leg down in the scow, braced against a heavy plastic tote of gear.
The Dead Go to Seattle Page 9
