Correcting the Landscape

by Marjorie Kowalski Cole

  Well, I didn’t think I’d ever read it again, and a couple of the frames were certainly unexpected, but that story was simple and kind of sweet, even. It was of no concern to me that the Mercury had been scooped by the daily. Our role, most of the time, was rather to provide a little depth and reflection. We had the luxury of a few extra days, or I could stick a short piece in the issue that was going to press tonight. Why not? I interviewed the director briefly on the facts, looked at the letters of complaint, including one from the Catholic bishop, which I personally would have balled and flung across the room if it came to me. I guess this guy wasn’t raised Catholic, though; he took everything in stride.

  At the office on College Road I smelled the hot wax machine warming up as Noreen trimmed and adjusted a little copy, made last-minute repairs. This week’s columnist was at a computer deleting bits and pieces, trimming down his essay to meet our word count. “You can do it yourself, or I’ll do it for you,” Noreen would tell them; that forestalled any argument.

  “Did you sleep here, Gus?” Noreen called to me. “A lot’s done. We’re in good shape.”

  “Not this time,” I said. “I went home last night.”

  I keep a sleeping bag and mat handy in my office, and I have been known to crash here after a long night, on the day before we go to press. There’s no one waiting for me out on Bad Molly Road, not even the neighbor’s dog, who used to greet me hoping for biscuits until that day in her fourteenth year when she didn’t wake up from her afternoon nap. We named the road after her. In the mideighties, when the borough decided to name all the side roads, Molly the sled dog, always hungry, always raiding the compost piles and other dogs’ dishes, had just died. She had been yelled at so often by everyone, the name stuck. We had all grown fond of her. “Bad Molly,” you’d say affectionately, scrubbing her head with your fingers, “still hungry?”

  We put the paper to bed at five on Thursdays. I wrote up the book controversy, set it in place, wondering how Gayle was doing.

  She didn’t stop in until three. From the office I heard her talking with No, who seemed to be making reassuring responses.

  “How are things going?” I called out, coming to my door.

  “Well I don’t have a story yet,” Gayle said. “I called the previous owner, who had nothing to do with cutting the trees but thought he’d heard of plans to build a motel. I can’t get hold of the current owner. The land was just put up for sale again, and the agent told me they already have an offer.” She looked down at a few pages of notes. “I don’t know how to put this together. I still don’t know who did what.”

  I walked across the room as she continued looking at her pages. The way she hung back, almost as if uninterested in being here, got my attention. What’s the word, diffidence—that kind of shyness when a person retreats—is that what I was looking at? I thought it would be best to act the same way, easy, not pouncing on her first-ever story for us. She was wearing black jeans and a dark blouse, and there was something crisp and appealing in her clothes. The way the hem of the blouse sat on her hips. I like new black jeans on a woman, I realized all of a sudden.

  “This is not a deadline story,” I said. “We’re looking to see if something’s there that we ought to pursue.” As I stood next to her and reached for the pages, I felt myself slowing down, felt the pace at which I lived my life and grabbed for things start to relax in an odd, surprising way. New to me.

  “We could look for building plans,” I went on. “A zoning change, a building permit on file.”

  Noreen had already looked at these notes, so when I read the name of the current owner, Tad Suliman, and looked up at her, her stare was riveted on me.

  “So yes,” I said. “Well, no.”

  Noreen raised one eyebrow at me, a look I detest above all others. Gayle waited at my elbow, as if for suggestions. What’s the next step? Her expectancy was so pleasant; it made a stillness between us. If only I could leave it undisturbed, but I had to say something, ruin the still surface.

  “I know Tad Suliman,” I said at last. “Maybe I better give him a call. What’s he up to? I wonder. Nice work, Gayle, thank you.”

  “Planning and zoning is going to call me back,” Gayle said. “They’re looking up stuff now.”

  “Excellent,” I said. I studied her photographs, as though I might actually go ahead and use one, but I already knew. Bulk up the library piece, stick it in. Call Tad from my office.

  “We can take more time with this,” I said. “I’ll get back to Dr. Leasure, just to answer a few of her questions if we can. Okay. We’ve got a paper to get out. No, who’s covering the Working Mothers fund-raiser? Is there a chance we could send you, Gayle?” The Working Mothers for a State Income Tax was a group dear to my heart. In fact, I was a founding member three years ago, before my own funds had become so short. I was handing Gayle something I considered important. “Keep working on the riverbank, but take your time; maybe this one is not time-sensitive. Nordstrom—we could also use a story next week on Nordstrom leaving town.”

  Did No raise her other eyebrow?

  In 1985 the oil boom crested. People were shocked, as though they’d thought it was going to last forever. The income tax had been repealed years before, and “decision makers,” as we called ourselves in Juneau, from both parties backed away from tax increases as if from political suicide. Royalties were going to pay for everything, into the future. Those of us who labeled this foolishness for what it was found ourselves in a dwindling minority. Suddenly, in ’86, oil prices began to slide, and then to plummet. The bottom dropped out of the market on which Alaska depended. State revenue started to dry up. Funding for social services and the university—the town’s major employer, on which we all depended for so much, for talent, expertise, and culture as well as paychecks—started to shrivel. People began to emigrate.

  This isn’t good at all, this riverbank slashing, all this new land development, but it does mean the economy is on the move again after a few years of scary retrenchment. It occurred to me that Gayle and I should try to see the cutting of the trees in an economic context.

  “Maybe we won’t find this kind of thing to be an isolated event,” I said, stepping back toward my office.

  I was retreating now. Yes, that’s it, we need to see this in context, I thought, at the same time coming back at myself: Context! Christ, what a cheap refuge for an irritated conscience. Tad Suliman was out of line again, and I didn’t want to be the ref who called him on it, nor let Gayle blunder into him, either one. And I sure as hell wasn’t likely to turn this over to Noreen.

  “No, can you give her the Working Mothers file?” I called out, and pulled my office door half to.

  All this brisk walking back and forth and the abrupt exchanges were typical of press day. The only lie this morning was a private one, this sudden fascination with context—normally, I suggested to my reporters that they separate the facts, isolate the facts, corroborate the facts. Get a good look at the facts. None of this context shit. A little panicky, aren’t you, Gus? It’s not bad, it’s not illegal, it’s just so damn messy when a good friend and major patron takes a liberty like this. And I have to look the other way. What choice do I have?

  When I finally got him on the phone it got worse. It seemed that Tad was in the middle of a divorce. Shelley was due to get half of everything. The sooner he could dump that land, the easier it would be for him to pay a lawyer and the less she’d get. Cutting the trees would promote the sale. “Yeah, it’s going to be great,” he said. “They’re putting in a tourist camp. Besides,” he added, “I like to get out with a Cat when I’m upset. Shove some dirt around. Shelley’s had me plenty upset lately.”

  “Yeah, but Tad, look, I’m sorry about the divorce, but you took fifty thousand dollars off the value of the lady’s house across the river, did you know that?”

  “Excuse me? Man, I’m sorry to have done that, Gus, but I only did what North Spur Construction was going to do anyway, they showed me the
fucking architects’ drawings. This was happening, Gus. Christ, too bad for people up and down the river, but a landowner doesn’t own both sides.”

  “You had a permit to start development?”

  A silence, then he said, “Well now, did I? Gosh, I’ll have to double-check, Gus. I had ten acres that needed clearing and a tractor to clear them with. My first plan was to put up a restaurant, myself. Shortage of restaurants around here. But I couldn’t do it, turns out, financially. What with Shelley and me splitting up.”

  “Just asking, Tad. I’m sorry about Shelley and everything.” I should be sorry, that is; I knew there was pain in there, somewhere, but Shelley was an impressive, energetic realtor, and Tad close to being a millionaire or beyond, for all I knew. They weren’t soft, delicate people.

  “Shelley was Realtor of the Year last year, did you know that? What do you think she would have done if she’d got her hands on that land? Look, it abuts the highway. It was bound to go commercial one way or the other. Your friend the old lady, she took her chances, like the rest of us, buying a house. What’s a river but a highway itself, it’s public property, isn’t it?”

  “How was it, cutting the trees?”

  “Ah, fuck you, you looking for something to write about? Is that the best you can do, the way things are going around here? Seems to me there’s plenty other things to be writing about, Gus. Come on, take a look around.”

  I’d struck a nerve. I bet it was an impulse, him cutting those trees. He didn’t have to do it, any more than he had to drive his airboat up Airport Way.

  “Yeah, well,” I said, drawing stars on my notepad. Realtor of the Year and Tad Suliman. It was too bad for Dr. Leasure that her peace and quiet, and her privacy, got sandwiched between those two.

  Tad, on the other hand, was also a founding member of Working Mothers for a State Income Tax, whereas Shelley, as I knew well, was a Reaganite and a believer in the trickle-down theory. One of those odd couples who cancel each other’s vote every election year. Sometimes these marriages last and sometimes they don’t. I always thought Tad was a smart and sympathetic man, but maybe I was giving him too much. Maybe he was just smart, that’s all. I wanted to get off the phone.

  “Not to worry,” I said. “Not that you would. Just collecting a little information. ‘The shock of my life,’ that’s what she said, those were her exact words to me.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’ll have to do something about that, someday.”

  I’d have to do something, too, I admonished myself. But if you wade in there now, Gus, you could make things worse. Why, Dr. Leasure herself, a woman of her experience, she’s seen worse. She’s probably moved beyond this by now. She knows the trees aren’t coming back.

  That’s what I told myself, putting down the phone. You need to live with this discomfort, it’ll go away like it has before.

  A bunch of women were organizing a protest march around the Nordstrom store downtown, or you could call it a pleading march, urging the store not to leave us. On the surface it sounded silly, but I knew there was more to it. Maybe Gayle could add that to the story. Maybe she could write a changes-on-our-riverbank feature.

  If Tad Suliman wasn’t such an opportunist, just like one of those big old ravens outside my window, I wouldn’t be sitting at the helm of the Mercury. There’d be no Mercury without the money he’d made from development schemes and lucky investments—and then given away, to good causes, with the same indifference he showed mowing down those trees.

  I wanted to slide the story under my desk blotter and give it a few weeks, a few months. See if it didn’t resolve itself, somehow.

  THREE

  WITHIN A FEW DAYS I DIDN’T MISS DR. Leasure’s trees anymore—unless you’re hunting for shade you don’t tend to seek out trees, any more than you seek the opinions of those who prefer to speak softly or in complete sentences. So when Gayle delivered her story about efforts to preserve the riverbank, it was a bit of a jolt for me. The trees were still there, living in her prose. Or should I say, still freshly mowed down.

  Just as I had suggested, she did find an angle, a certain shape, and she painted on the facts. Perhaps a few too many facts. I thought that if I trimmed away most of the tree slashing it would work well, what with Nordstrom leaving and everything, all the excitement that caused in town. We went over her pages together, and I realized that I stood poised with my pen like a guy spearfishing. It couldn’t be comfortable for her, though it was second nature to me by now, as editor and writer both.

  So I put the pen down and looked around for a pencil. It wouldn’t be so harsh.

  “Look here,” I said, and drew a curving line through the story from one good sentence to another. “Here’s your story. Let’s link up these ideas. Then we’ll have a—a unified narrative, a punch.” I traced the curving line. “A shape. It helps the reader if you organize the facts around a shape, build a way in.”

  “What about this part?” She touched the sentences underneath the pencil lines, sentences I was not including in what I now called a unified narrative. Her brown eyes held a warm light inside.

  “We want to deliver one story, not bits of several.” She took this in without comment. I touched my pencil to her draft again. “Here, where these people think the riverbank can be part of the local economy—that’s the story. And the tourist cabins that are going to be built, let’s link that up with the quote from the C of C—‘things are looking a bit rough and raw, but we’re going to provide world-class facilities to visitors, down the road’—and it’ll flow together. It is a nice piece, Gayle.” I circled a paragraph, wrote “stet” in the margin—leave as is. “This paragraph, this historical color about Nordstrom—well, that’s first-rate. ‘Fairbanks is a place constantly transforming itself…’ We can use that. And one photo, which one, let’s see.”

  In Gayle’s photos the picketing women in front of Nordstrom were dressed for success. One linen-suited marcher rested her sign on shoulder pads big as a football player’s. She wore bangles on a long, elegant wrist. Noreen looked over Gayle’s shoulder. “Not like protest marches used to be,” she said.

  “But these are the same people, I’ll bet,” I said, “and they’ll like this story, it’s a freeze-frame on big changes, Gayle captured something in motion.”

  As I was packing up to head down to the press—the Mercury was actually published on the same press as the big daily—No paused at my side.

  “Yeah?” I said finally, feeling touchy.

  “Careful you don’t put some people in a special category, Gus,” she said.

  “Like who?” I said, knowing perfectly well.

  “Your pal Tad Suliman.”

  “It’s a judgment call. There’s news and there’s news,” I said, trying to dismiss her with soapsuds. Lathering. She wouldn’t be silenced.

  “But it would be better to hash it out openly, Gus, before you start censoring your own self.”

  “That bad?”

  “What do I know?”

  “I did talk to him.”

  “And you’re the editor,” she said. “But it bothers you some, doesn’t it?” She didn’t expect an answer. She twisted her mouth and shot her eyebrow up at me, as she claimed the last word. Noreen has a small mouth, overfull of white teeth. All of her features are narrow, as if pushed too close to the center line. She can be a very pretty woman when she’s relaxed and animated, but when she focuses hard she has a face like a weapon. Maybe a power drill.

  Yes, it bothers me some, I thought.

  I did keep a copy of Gayle’s first draft for myself. Usually I sailed this stuff right into the recycle box. But not this time. She wrote a little about what pedestrians, boaters, and canoeists see, how most of those folks are locals, or hardy tourists traveling light, not tourists in the industrial sense.

  Tourists on the industrial scale, the scale that is going to alter our local landscape, ride the big sternwheeler, which starts in deep water even farther down the Chena River close to the s
pot where it joins the Tanana. They cruise past unbroken forest, stop at a fish camp and a musher’s dog yard. The idea is to give them a sense of how Alaska used to be, not to insult their eyeballs with how Alaska looks today. Who needs that—you get that back home.

  That’s me talking, not Gayle. She had a quieter style. Just feeling her way, like someone out walking.

  I wondered if Gayle might remain a little distressed at the cuts in her story. Over the next week she was a little quieter than usual, if that’s possible. “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant,” Emily Dickenson wrote. I keep that poem handy in my desk, I like it. But sometimes I know that’s not what we’re doing: we’re also creating some untruths. If you pick one angle, you’re telling people what to look at. You’re saying, out of everything here, focus on this. I’ve seen other newspapers do that and I’d be a fool not to see it happening at my own.

  But what the hell could I do?

  I thought, well someday we can hash it out, Gayle and I, but she’s in the middle of trying to finish a degree. Is this the right time for her to question the basis of the whole discipline? The instant I asked myself that question, the answer arrived: yes, it could well be the exact right time. Didn’t someone say that an issue should get more complicated, not less, the more you study it? Who said that? But some of these complications are kind of…personal. There are some private decisions involved. That’s what I told myself, and fortunately, in this business, you have to move along at a good clip, on to other stories. Keeps you from dwelling on things.

  Nordstrom was unmoved by the protest march and vacated its building on schedule. A committee sprang up to try to save the historic old structure. A letter to the editor in the big daily mentioned Gayle’s story. I announced this as a coup, of sorts, and posted the letter on our bulletin board. Gayle suggested that she interview members of the Save Our Historic Buildings committee and the Riverfront Commission. Bless your heart, I thought.

  By trimming my own pay, I managed to cut her a small check for the first story.