Date: 2010s
Recorded by John Swanton
Assisted by Tooch Waterson
House Falling into the Sea
Charlie Edwin knew it was going to be a strange year when he found a three-headed dandelion blooming in mid-October. Charlie sat drinking his coffee in front of the picture window at his home on Petroglyph Beach. His dog, Ossa, an old Australian shepherd, sat beside him. Charlie was Wooshkeetaan, Eagle, from the Shark House. He is called Aan gux—the keeper or backbone of the land. His mother was from Hoonah, but he’d lived in Wrangell all his life. His father was Kaawdliyaayí Hit: House Lowered from the Sky. Here, Charlie lived among people from the Sun House, and the Dogfish Intestine House, and the Norwegians, the Finns, the Sámi, the Filipinos, and even the Chinese and Japanese. There were Vikings, wizards, bears, siyokoy, dragons, and Susanoo.
The best thing, though, about living in Wrangell was living among stories. He practically lived at the coffee shop. Their stories lived there, and at the gas pump, and the work float, and at Shakes Island, and among the petroglyphs beside his house. Since Jesse, his wife of many years, had died, he began to spend his time among rocks, wandering with his thermos of coffee along the beach. He knew exactly where the Raven stealing the sun story was carved as well as the spiral and the killer whale. But he worried lately about the beach and the erosion happening all along Alaska’s coastline.
The previous winter, an ice floe broke loose from the Stikine in March. Early breakup, they called it. He didn’t believe it. But, the large sheet of ice came round the corner, then along the shoreline, and smashed into his beach. The tides were higher these past few years and the storms stronger. In fact, the sea had eroded the shore so many times he had to move his house back two times in the last twenty years. It wasn’t just Wrangell, though. It was Shishmaref, Sitka, Tenakee, Newtok, villages on the Ninglick River, and more.
Charlie sat down in the wet sand, tucking his raincoat under his butt. He held his thermos in his gloved hands and took a big sip of coffee. The gulls circled overhead, which made him feel comforted, since Jesse had been a seagull. She was T’akdeintaan. Some people called her a kittiwake, but she was old school and claimed she was a seagull. He looked up and screeched back at them.
Every morning since Jesse’s death, he’d made a point to check up on the rocks.
Someone had to. Someone had to take care of them. Jesse used to clean up the beach. She’d pick up Pepsi cans and white plastic grocery bags. Now it was his turn, he supposed, a sad turn. But he’d take it. He’d take anything that would still connect him to Jesse. He’d started by trying to sit among the rocks, but he couldn’t ignore the garbage. Once he’d found remnants of a small fire and a pile of beer bottles. Another time, a roll of butcher paper that people use to make rubbings of the petroglyphs lay wet and soggy on the beach. He even found orange letters sprayed across a petroglyph and it wasn’t even something profound: the numbers 1995. That really pissed him off.
These were his people’s petroglyphs. At least that’s how he thought of them. He often had words with the tour guides and the town fathers when they’d claim they didn’t know who carved the petroglyphs. They were his ancestors. He knew this. It was as if the white folks were saying the land around here really isn’t Tlingit territory because they weren’t here first. You migrated here and so did we.
Sometimes he had to stop the tourists from defacing the petroglyphs. At first, he simply stood on the porch with his rifle in his hand. That’s when the cops got involved and told him not to scare the visitors—they don’t call them tourists anymore. The government had made the beach a state historic site and all that did was bring more people there. Some protection.
One day the government sent his nephew Johan to talk to him. “You’re in trouble, Uncle, for telling folks there’s a limit per day and they can’t go down there.”
Sure, he’d done that. It was clever. He was the first one there in the morning, standing on their newfangled platform and boardwalk telling the tourists the place was closed for renovations, or they had reached their visitor limit already, or that they had to go to the imaginary ticket booth in town and get a ticket. They always believed him. Who’d think an old man like him would be a liar.
“You are sooo lying, Uncle Charlie,” his nephew Johan had chuckled.
Now Charlie looked up at the typical clouds shrouding the mountains. No, he didn’t mind local folks coming down to the beach making petroglyph rubbings. He loved to see little kids tracing the spiral petroglyph with their fingers. He’d tell them about the cycle of salmon. He used to help the kids find the petroglyphs they wanted. Then he’d supervise them. That was before it became illegal to make rubbings. Now, they have fake ones on the platform tourists can make rubbings from. I suppose it might be for the best. But, this past summer, someone had spray painted a genuine petroglyph with blue paint. It had been there nine thousand years, maybe ten thousand. Probably wasn't kids because all the kids he’d met on the beach really liked the glyphs.
Charlie took another sip of his hot coffee and then remembered he’d stuffed a breakfast roll in his raincoat pocket. He took it out, ate some, and shared a piece with Ossa and a brave gull hopping on a rock nearby.
The clouds darkened, moving a sheet of rain toward the shore. He supposed he’d better head back inside. Besides, the beach was clean today and the man in the green state uniform would be showing up soon. After the blue paint incident, Charlie was pretty mad, but he’d always been told to think about his words first before saying anything. He didn’t know what he was going to say yet, but something had to be done. He just didn’t know what.
Plus, he didn’t think the local government or the State of Alaska was used to Natives speaking up about things, especially in Wrangell. Recently, his niece, Sarah, got the city to say the Tlingits were here first. She had to keep writing letters to them, put stuff in the paper, and finally, she called the governor. The city used to say Wrangell was the first settlement in Alaska, established when the white people built a fort. They forgot all about the Tlingits who’d inhabited the island for thousands of years.
Then, in the 1970s, the lawyers left Wrangell Tlingits out of the land claims. He and his friends went to all the meetings, went to DC, and still they forgot. Said oops and went on giving out their land to other tribes. They now called Wrangell Natives “the landless.” Without the land we are nothing. Without the rocks we are nothing.
He stood and walked among the rocks as he headed back home. Ossa followed him, sniffing seaweed along the way. He shook his head. He wasn’t landless; a strange concept for sure. He could have claimed this beach instead of the state owning it. Maybe, claimed Farm Island at the mouth of the Stikine River instead of the white farmhand and his relatives who now own it. His dad had hunted and fished there. That river was in his blood. Stikine meant “Bitter” or “Silty Water,” not Great River like the touristy types called it. Hell, it was silty and could be very bitter. The river had even taken a few of his friends’ lives. One fell off a riverboat, the Madeline Rose. And, one winter, another friend went trapping and was found dead stuck to an ice floe.
Charlie nodded to the river water, mixing with the green ocean in front of his house. Respect that river. Respect the rocks. He was nearly to his house when he turned back toward the beach. A small man walked among the petroglyphs. He thought he recognized him and yelled, “Morning, Mr. Lee.” But the man didn’t look up. That’s when Charlie remembered old Mr. Lee had been dead a few years. He and Mr. Lee used to have coffee at the gas station and bullshit about old times. A long time ago, Mr. Lee had said the townsfolk didn’t want the Chinese buried in the white cemetery. They used to cut them up and shove them into barrels and salt them. Then someone was supposed to let the Chinese government know so they could come get their countrymen. Mr. Lee said he didn’t know if anyone ever did, but he was never going to set foot on Deadmans Island, that’s for sure.
The man bent down and rubbed sand off a rock
, the spiral petroglyph—Charlie’s favorite one. The man crouched there staring at the rock. Finally, Charlie turned back and headed up the beach to his house. The tide flowed inward, already lifting a log from the beach. Soon it would be pitching waves onto his front porch.
Last week, Johan had come to visit. He asked Charlie about moving the house back again. Charlie had said, “I’m not moving back. I’m old. I won’t be able to see the petroglyphs if I move to where you want me to, anyway. And, I’ll be too close to that damned road.”
Charlie and his friend Nillan Hetta sipped their coffee and looked out the window.
“The big tides are coming. Lots of bad weather,” Nillan said. “You ready?”
“I’m ready.”
“I like your plan, but you’re a crazy son-of-a-bitch, you know that?”
At 3:00 a.m., four days later, on a November night, the black dark folded over the island and the wind howled. No one could hear Nillan rolling the bobcat off the back of his lowboy trailer and driving it down the beach. The bobcat heaved the rocks into Charlie’s house. Charlie had torn out the two by fours on his front door to make it bigger, and then eventually the wall, and most of the walls inside his house. Nillan drove up a makeshift ramp and set the rocks down in Charlie’s living room and in what was once his bedroom and kitchen.
The previous week, Johan and two of his buddies had come over and put in Styrofoam floats beneath the house. They didn’t think it would hold forty petroglyphs, but some of them wouldn’t be able to move, anyway. They’d pile in what they could. Now, the house sunk down a bit, but the large logs beneath it held. After all the rocks were loaded, Nillan put the bobcat away and drove home in the dark.
Waves thrashed the front of the house, like a truck in a carwash, smashing into the large window. The tide stuck its tongue under the logs and lifted Charlie’s house as if it were a piece of candy to be eaten. The house rocked, and then lifted, bobbing on the sea. Charlie sat inside on his recliner, the only piece of furniture he saved, holding on to a two-by-four post. Ossa, big as he was, jumped in his lap. Ossa whined. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.
The current shoved the house out hard and it thumped. What was that sound? Charlie cringed as he felt the rock scraping the floats beneath him, but it didn’t stop the little house from floating. The storm surged and the wind blew. Out his front windows, the night was so dark he couldn’t see anything. Hanging onto the skeleton frame of his house, he went to the living room and then the bedroom looking out the windows. Through his bedroom window, the faint outline of the shore swept by. He was moving fast. Real fast.
Charlie sat back down in his chair, trying his best to take sips of coffee from his thermos. That’s when he heard it. He’d heard that sound before, a howl spiraling by. Nillan, who worked for the Forest Service, had once taken him to Garnet Ledge to show him the destruction left by one of those winds. No one believed Nillan when he’d reported something like a tornado had torn through the trail, making a swath through the trees, so he’d shown Charlie. Charlie remembered the giant spruce and hemlock toppled as if they were sticks.
Now, the house spun around. The wind knocked the kitchen window in. Glass crashed onto the petroglyphs. The house moaned and creaked with each wave that hit it, slopping over the logs. Beneath him, the floorboards wobbled and a large piece of the float gave way and popped up from beneath the house. One corner of the house sunk down. A piece of float whipped up and hit the roof hard. The house shook.
“Shit,” Charlie said to Ossa, who now quivered at his feet. The house rocked and rolled on the waves as he hobbled over the rocks, clamoring on his hands and knees to the corner of the living room where water seeped in fast. The wind howled and the house twisted again. Finally, the house stopped twisting and then went up and down as if riding huge waves.
Charlie looked out the living room windows and, this time, he was face to face with the white froth of a wave ten or more feet high. “Christ, the size of the waves,” he said out loud.
He kneeled among the petroglyphs, his hand clutching a two-by-four post, and hung on for what seemed like hours. Waves and wind bellowed through the house. The house tilted and cracked with a splitting sound. Charlie fell sideways, hitting his head on a rock.
Water, waves, and wind roared through his ears as if he had an inner ear infection. He woke to Ossa licking his face. He blinked, trying to adjust his eyes to the darkness, and then reached out and felt around. Beneath him, it felt solid. Should he move? His back hurt. His arm was on fire. He reached to touch his arm, feeling a big gash, sticky with blood. It was then he realized the ground wasn’t bending like the floorboards in his house. He was lying on a beach on a small piece of his living room floor. He sat up. He could see the airport lights. He was on Deadmans Island.
Crap. He hadn’t made it far. The wind had picked him up and slid his house on the waves to the small island. He could make out sand around him and a rocky beach. He stood and patted his dog. Ossa dripped water. The old dog stank, plus he limped, but his tail still wagged.
Charlie pulled his Bic lighter from his pants pocket. He walked along the shoreline, clicking his lighter to find his way, discovering pieces of his house: a wall with sunflower wallpaper, a log from the float beneath the house. There, a piece of his roof. Over there, a small refrigerator banged against a rock. He stepped over a rock. Parts of his house scattered to the treeline, where he found his recliner upright as if waiting for him to sit in it and flip the television channels. Maybe he could change this channel.
Rain pelted his face. He rubbed his hand across his partly bald head. He’d always dressed in layers, so he took off his flannel shirt and tied it up like a hood. He walked a few steps farther and his foot clunked against a rock. He bent down close to the rock touching it. “What the hell,” he said, feeling the spiral in the rock at his feet. The spiral, he knew, was the symbol for new beginnings in many cultures: Maori, Hawaiian, Tlingit, and Finnish.
He tried to adjust his eyesight, but it seemed the darkness had swallowed up the beach. Maybe he had a head injury. He couldn’t tell if a rock was a petroglyph until he touched it. He clicked the lighter on again to be sure. Floorboards from his house surrounded them. “Well, Jesse, I’ve done it now.” He didn’t know, really, what he did. Or at least the consequences. But it would make a good story, anyway. He stepped around the petroglyphs sunk into the sand. They were stuck, too, like he was.
Charlie sat down and rested for a minute next to a glyph. He flicked his lighter again and traced the Raven steealing the sun glyph with his finger. “Well, Raven,” he said out loud, “I guess we’d better build a fire.”
Up near the treeline, Charlie fumbled with his lighter. His hands were becoming numb. His thumb barely worked, but eventually he lit it again. He fashioned a small torch from a stick and moss and lit it. Moss covered stumps, stones, and roots, so he couldn’t see where the graves or the ghosts were. Were the barrels still here? Were there graves? Markers? He’d never been here. Never wanted to go here, really. With the torch held out to the woods, he said Chaa addei yei xat naay oo. Please forgive me. It was one of the few Tlingit phrases he knew. In English, he asked the island’s dead to forgive him for trudging around.
Charlie gathered wood from the small stand of trees and found a dry spot under a tree and built a fire. The rain softened to a light mist. The fire lit up the beach and Charlie sat by the fire rubbing his hands over Ossa’s hair. He stopped in mid-pet, seeing a shadow walking along the beach. It looked like a small man or a child. Mr. Lee?
The person stopped near the spiral rock and bent over. The person never looked in Charlie’s direction, in the direction of the fire, but instead kept tracing the spiral pattern over and over. Charlie knew what he was doing, as he’d done the same thing many times, pressing his finger into backbone of the spiral, letting his mind wander to a centered place in a spiral galaxy, our Milky Way. The man faded away in the early morning light and the fire died down to white ash.
&n
bsp; Date: Any day now
Recorded by John Swanton
Assisted by Tooch Waterson
The Dead Man Who Swam Away
He awoke from the dead at around 5:00 p.m. It wasn’t an extraordinary time to come alive. He smelled mashed potatoes and baked halibut. His mouth was raw and he coughed. That was the first thing he did.
Evert Planz looked around his long-term care room, at the mauve drapes and the hard chair in the corner. He raised his hand only to find a contorted tree branch, but it was indeed his hand. He felt a pillow between his knees and he tried to turn but his back seemed fused in place. What the hell. Had he been dreaming for a long time, maybe days? Shit. How long he had been lying there?
He wiggled his toes and moved his leg slightly, and the thing that was once his foot, the small, thin childlike wedge, moved out from beneath the orange bedspread. His yellow toenails had been clipped, but they were still too long. His toes pressed tightly together like one giant toe. He lifted his head up. After all this, he was exhausted and fell asleep.
Evert awoke again as he was lifted and moved to the side. A warm washrag wiped his bottom and then someone flipped him like a fish onto his other side. He groaned. No one responded. He groaned again. No one responded. He raised his head. Two nurse aides—one at the sink rinsed something, and another shoved a chair around. They didn’t look at him. And he couldn’t cough again. He tried but his chest heaved and a jagged pain tightened his torso.
Fuck. They think I’m still sleeping. He rolled his eyes back and laid his head back down as they walked out of the room and shut the door. It was dark outside. The aides had forgotten to shut the drapes. A small light shone on his headboard and an FM radio played on the nightstand beside him. The lyrics chimed in his head: “Wake me up before you go-go. ’Cause I’m not plannin’ on going solo.” He tried to sing with them, but only made strange burbling sounds.
The Dead Go to Seattle Page 22
