by Laura Newman
Such animals she had never seen. A tiger. Monarch, one of the last wild grizzly bears on the California coast and poster boy for the state flag. Monkeys always ready for a game of Monkey See Monkey Do. Cormorants. A conservatory of butterflies in silk-sari colors. Three pink flamingos from Florida, a mother and two babies brought in just this summer, high-stepping a cattail pond.
One day in October, Grace garnered her courage and showed Mr. Woodward her anthropomorphics. Three mice made up as forty-niners, little picks and pans, sourdough box. “You made these, girl?” the great man asked; she nodded, her face a full blush. “Hum hum hum, let me think on this,” he said, nodding his head, and walked away. Three days later he set her up a taxidermy shop and fur did fly.
There came a December night when the wind blew in from the east with a story to tell of the Great Plains. Those who listened, all the birds and the little beasts, headed into the trees and under the doorsteps. There was a general burrowing. But people only heard the piano and the beautiful sound of Champagne. They never heard the hoot owls’ warning.
In the morning when Grace woke up there was an unprecedented six inches of snow on the streets of San Francisco. And the flamingos were dead. Grace stuffed them.
Come spring, Grace packed the pink flamingos in a special trunk and took them with her when she and Dougal headed to Valdez. If Mr. Woodward had foreknowledge of the flamingos’ northern migration, it is lost to history.
When Dougal and Grace stepped off the steamer and into Valdez, Dougal realized he had made a grave mistake. He should have left Grace in Scotland or at least in San Francisco. Valdez was a made-up city, made up by the penny-flyer men; there was no city. It was a hubbub of tents with a few raw buildings. It smelled of pinesap and shit. Everybody was scratching something. Dougal and Grace walked bewildered between the rows of canvas. It was quite clear to Grace that she would not be able to make a living selling anthropomorphics in Valdez, but her eviscerating skills might come in handy.
Eighty-Seven Years Forward
Valdez, Alaska 1985—Evan
Evan Sterling-Gutierrez rented a bungalow on Klutina Street in Valdez and took a job at the Eskimo Pie shop, which didn’t sell ice cream but actual pies. Salmonberry and blueberry with a Sitka spruce kicker in the crust. No vanilla here. Uki Begay owned the bakery and she hired Evan because she felt sorry for him. He looked like he would freeze to death come winter. Uki was always one to tend a broken wing. Evan knew he had that effect on people; he knew it was because he was too thin and because his pupils were just a bit larger than normal. But Evan wasn’t weak. Within a month he had introduced quiche to the menu with an imported Isle of Mull cheddar baked right into the crust. Next up: frittata.
Three days a week Evan left Eskimo Pie at the afternoon closing and rode his used scooter to Dr. Eloise Holden’s house, violin case bandoliered to his back. He arrived smelling of fresh air and flour with an eggy back. To Dr. Holden, Evan began to look like Lolita.
Evan was born on November 12, 1966, on the Sunset Strip, Los Angeles. His mother, Evangeline Sterling, had come to L.A. on the hippie caravan—that great western migration of Volkswagen buses converging on the California coast. She didn’t want to be a Baptist anymore. Evangeline joined a commune on Mulholland Drive, which was just the house of some Richie Rich kid whose parents were spending the season in Europe. By fall they would all have to clear out. Maria the Mexican maid kept them in line with her feather duster and black eyes that easily conveyed the message to not even think about sitting on the Elvis-blue-suede couch. She kept a silver ice pick in her apron pocket and wasn’t afraid to use it. Maria had a habit, almost a tic, of making the sign of the cross while she vacuumed around the stinky sleeping bodies at two in the afternoon. Evangeline would wake to this sight, and although she would not admit it to herself, it gave her comfort to see that benevolent gesture, a reminder of home. Sometimes Evangeline would get up and help Maria clean, and Maria would make her green banana–mango smoothies.
Evangeline spent her days trying to get signed at modeling agencies. God knows the longer she spent in L.A., the more she looked like Twiggy. She spent her nights on the Sunset Strip at the Whiskey a Go Go or the purple and gold Pandora’s Box built on a traffic island. Meeting the dawn walking down the avenue of tall, narrow palms on her dance-weary legs, the high-up pom-pom fronds waved to her. Hello, goodbye, she never could tell which.
At summer’s end it was obvious to Maria that Evangeline was pregnant. Evangeline knew who the father was, but he had left for Mendocino to grow marijuana and whale-watch and there was no forwarding address. Neither of them had known she was pregnant when he left. Maria took Evangeline to live with her in the barrio on the Eastside. On November 12, 1966, Evangeline was seven months along but she wanted to go to the rally at Pandora’s Box—it was all over the radio—to protest the new curfew and loitering laws aimed at getting teenagers off the streets. A thousand people showed up.
That night Sunset Strip smelled of patchouli and pot, pre emission control exhaust, and teen spirt. Music pulsed. Kids in tie-dye and fringe—Isn’t that Peter Fonda? It was beautiful. But the police showed up with their bullhorns spouting the blue-hair bully-pulpit line. With their bully sticks. Pandora’s Box turned the music up louder, outside speakers vibrating. The kids moved in a psychedelic wave. No one would think that L.A.’s Finest would hit a pregnant girl, not that girl with long black hair and the little bangs, the one with too-big pupils, right in the stomach with his pig-stick. But he did.
No one could hear Evangeline’s scream, or they did hear it, but everyone was screaming. Her water broke. Her baby began to follow the exit signs. It’s hard to go upstream in a riot. She made her way to the back of Pandora’s Box and gave birth to Evan behind the trash bins. The first song Evan ever heard was “19th Nervous Breakdown.” He would have had one himself if he wasn’t so busy learning to breathe. Evan’s birth certificate lists his birthplace as the Corner of Sunset Boulevard and Crescent Heights.
By the time Evan got out of the hospital, all five pounds two ounces of him, Evangeline was gone and Maria was his mother. Dios mio. It wasn’t easy growing up white in the barrio but Maria was a saint. Evangeline was nothing but a single black-and-white photo of a young girl in a peasant dress with sunglasses so dark Evan couldn’t even make out her eyes. Evangeline became a piñata for all his angst.
While the neighborhood chicos learned to play with switchblades, Evan learned to play scales on his garage-sale violin. He was first chair by his freshman year. When he played, eyes closed, he saw wavery colors. An aurora borealis of music. Perhaps this was not such an amazing thing except for the fact that Evan was completely color-blind when his eyes were open. The ophthalmologist conjectured Evan probably had color sight at birth but had lost it, a not unknown medical event. Thus he was conjuring, with the aid of music, his color-memory. Synesthesia.
When Evan was around ten years old he made a little boy pinky-swear promise to himself that he would go to Alaska and see the northern lights. Would they be nothing but stingy shades of gray? Or if he played the perfect violin piece, eyes closed, and then opened his eyes, would the sky show its true colors?
At age ten, regaining his color sight through an act of the heart had seemed possible; at nineteen, improbable. Likely impossible. But he had graduated from high school and college was financially beyond him. He had the small proceeds of the savings bond Maria had bought him when he was an infant. Call it a gap year, an adventure. Plus, in Theories and Oddities, a magazine that appealed to him, he had read about the extremely rare sightings of the Alaskan pink flamingo last seen in the vicinity of Valdez, Alaska. Where Dr. Eloise Holden, renowned retired violinist, lived. A trifecta.
Valdez may be the perfect place for a color-blind person. The Prince William Sound flows through the Valdez Narrows into a glacier-fed alluvial bay. Come winter the surrounding Chugach mountains shoulder more snowfall than any other sin
gle place on earth. An obliteration of color. Orcas and eagles, Eskimos and black bears. A landscape of darkening shades quite simply too beautiful to be in full color—the human mind would explode. It’s a very Buddhist place: The sky is the color of sky, water the color of water, the pines and mountains dare no other tones. Here live the elemental colors of the earth—the rest is frivolous. The whole landscape could be reduced to black ink on rice paper in seven serious strokes.
Until the northern lights show up and the polar sky turns Berserker. Who cares why? Whatever scientists say, they’re wrong. Everyone knows true art needs no explanation.
Uki Begay was built like a totem pole. She could tell a story without opening her mouth. A mix of Copper River Delta Eyak and Tlingit, she carried her stout body with the dignity of the disenfranchised. She wasn’t interested in living in an igloo or whale fat. She just wanted her slice of the American pie and to that end she sold it, a piece at a time. Uki was twenty-five when Evan came to town. She really wasn’t intending to stay in Alaska. She was toying with college admission and student loan forms. Perhaps vet school; all those broken wings.
Evan was changing Eskimo Pie. Next he added green chilaquiles. He taught Uki to make homemade tortillas. Pretty soon people were showing up for breakfast and Uki had to buy some tables and chairs and put in an espresso machine that made a sound like a whale’s blow. Tablecloths. It was nice. The days lasted all night.
On one such day Evan and Uki were sharing a piece of chokeberry pie after closing and he asked if she had ever heard of the Alaskan pink flamingo. “Sure, everybody has,” was her casual response. Evan’s heart felt anything but casual.
“What do you know about them?” He pushed his fork into the lemon-zest crust. He acted like it meant nothing to him.
“Well, it was that self-made naturalist Grace Budge who first took photos of them. Out on the ice floes on the Beaufort Sea. She and her husband photographed and collected Alaskan birds. She kept eggs and wings and, I don’t know, all sorts of body parts. I think she stuffed them. They still have a lot of her collection over at the museum.” Uki paused. “Nobody really goes there.”
Evan did. All those pretty little feathers.
Dr. Eloise Holden was surprised at herself. She was a renowned violinist who had played the Vienna Opera House and the Scala in Milan. The Roxy when she felt like wearing fishnets. She’d slept with Warren Beatty. Taught a child prodigy from North Korea. At fifty-nine, what was left to do? She had come to a point in her life where all her passions had passed out. Time to Garbo. Valdez would do. She bought an acre of land up on Blueberry Hill and built a Craftsman in the Sitka spruce that looked like it was a hundred years old. Slate roof with moss. Stone fireplaces, a (faux but quite well-done) polar bear rug. When she received the first letter from an Evan Sterling-Gutierrez asking for violin instruction she tossed it in the fire, where it burned in green and blue. By the fifth letter she felt forced to respond. She named an impossible price for anyone named Gutierrez. The boy agreed! Well, why not take him on then? She was bored.
Eloise thought not much of Evan when he arrived. Skinny, surprisingly white, effusive but not nervous. He held his violin with excellent posture, his gut strings of high quality although the violin was not. There were teeth marks in the wood of the bow; well, she could understand that, who didn’t want to destroy the exquisite?
Eloise decided to take Evan through the ten best violin pieces known to man. Saint-Saens’s Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso with its stormy arpeggios. Bach’s Partita No. 2, Chaconne, with the serrated chords and agitation. No matter if he had played some of them before. He must play them her way to her. It was rather exhilarating to watch the pressure of this young man’s style. He was good. She would not tell him so, only yell, Again!
Eloise began to dress for Evan’s lessons. Oh, still the black stretch pencil pants and flats, but perhaps a falling-down up-do? She wondered if there was a decent colorist in Valdez or if she would have to drive to Anchorage.
Evan loved his lessons with Dr. Holden—now “Call me Eloise.” The woman was intense. Later in the long artic twilight he would work on his own original piece, Score for the Northern Lights.
Evan made his way to the Valdez Museum and Curiosities, which was only open when a cruise ship was in port. Mrs. Shelton was the curator and owner. She had everything from Eskimo baby moccasins with seed beads to nineteenth-century flocked wallpaper from the Valdez Hotel. She had purchased for $10,000 a totem by the great carver Frank Steward. In the dusty back was the Grace Budge and Henry Wilson Room.
It was quiet as a nesting bird in the Grace-room.
One Hundred and Three Years Previous
Valdez 1898—Grace
Timing is everything.
The truth of the matter was that there was no “All American Route,” no easy passage linking Prince William Sound with the interior. It was a hoax promoted by the steamship companies based on inaccurate descriptions by U.S. Army Lieutenant William Abercrombie. The stampeders who reached Valdez in 1898–99 were faced with the options of going back, staying in Valdez, or heading out to the Klondike over the Valdez and Klutina glaciers, twice as long and steep as the Canadian route. A year later the Army would cut a trail through Keystone Canyon and over Thompson Pass. But Dougal was a year early.
“Puss-in-boots, I want you to go back to San Francisco,” said Dougal over their campfire.
“Dad, don’t call me that. I’m fifteen. I’m not going back,” said Grace, stirring the beans. “We can stay here and try prospecting in Copper Canyon.”
The fire did all the talking. “I came for the Klondike,” Dougal whispered at last.
“No you didn’t! You came for gold. Who cares where?”
“Grace, don’t cry.” Dougal could see that his daughter was breaking down.
“I’m not crying,” Grace said, standing up. “I’m deciding. I’m deciding for you. I know you think it’s too dangerous to take me but you’re afraid to leave me here. I’m afraid too! That you’re going to get scurvy or fall in an ice crevasse.” He couldn’t deny it. “But, Dad, just go. I’ll wait for you.”
“How can I leave you?” asked the father.
“How can you not?” asked the daughter.
Dougal dished out the beans and a braised, white-tipped rabbit Grace had trapped. She was good at that. “What will you do?” Dougal had accepted her proposition.
“I’ve been talking to Mary Kate,” said Grace. Dougal pictured the young woman and her husband from Texas. “Jared’s going too. So we decided. There’s a lot of mountain berries just about ripe. We’re pickin’ ‘em before the bears do and making preserves. Every stupid miner in this place is going to the Klondike with Mary Kate & Grace Scurvy-Cure.”
So Dougal went. He never did come back.
Day by day Grace watched the slow stampede climb over the first ridge. Many would die. A paltry few would become gold-pan-and-pickax rich. Some, pickax murderers who got away with it. The majority would come home with nothing but a Great American Story for their grandchildren. When Dougal joined the exodus he so quickly blurred into the single-file line Grace had no choice but to wave goodbye to all of them. Godspeed, late snow! Then she and Mary Kate set to the bushes like furious squirrels. They put preserves in every available canister. In a sad act of release and acceptance, Grace filled a long-empty perfume bottle of her mother’s she had carried from Elishader with pure juice and a single seed. She called it Heart’s Balm and sold it to a young prospector for a good price. She was never going home. To the most pathetic, the girls gave their preserves for free.
That first winter was harsh. Six hundred inches of snow and nights that lasted all day. By now Grace and Mary Kate had managed squatters’ rights on a one-room cabin with a potbelly stove that a prospector had quit. There came a night when Grace awoke to a commotion; most probably a bear in town, poor thing, it would go from shot to pot
by dawn. She looked outside. The northern lights had come! Grace and Mary Kate put on their boots, blankets over their heads and shoulders, and went out. To Grace it seemed a thing almost worth losing Scotland for, maybe worth the beating of all the faeries’ wings on the Isle of Skye …
Come spring the prospectors started coming back with horrible stories of deprivation. Prospectors began to move sick people out of the interior and back to relief cabins in Valdez. Mary Kate’s husband came back on his own two legs with just enough gold to cover their expenses home to Texas. He wasn’t broken, but he was done. “We got separated at Hell’s Gate,” said Jared to Grace, soon as he could bring himself to break embrace from Mary Kate. Grace knew he was referring to the Klutina River rapids. “It was like we were salmon being grizzly-slapped …” Jared stopped. There was no kindness in going on. “I just don’t know what happened to him, Grace. I just don’t know.” Jared and Mary Kate left on the next steamer to Vancouver. They wanted Grace to go with them but she could not bring herself to give up on Dougal. As the steamer pulled away she had a terrible feeling that the foghorn emptiness would never leave her.
Grace spent her summer making edibles out of anything she could forage or trap. Rabbit with sorrel, salt-and-sage flatbread cooked in her potbelly stove. And she found little pieces of gold herself, one pea-sized nugget in a cold stream. Every day she watched the black line of prospectors coming home while others headed out on the new route being cut through Copper Canyon. No matter how many times she thought she saw Dougal, it was never so.
Two years went by and Grace began to wonder if she should leave. But she had come to love the rough place. It wasn’t the boomtown that interested her. It was the clarity of light, in the sea and of the sky, the reaction of the forest when the bear padded through, and all the birds in their cacophony. It was the northern lights and their wavery message she was still trying to interpret. Every culture has a mythology for the aurora—slain enemies rising in revenge, spirits of the harpooned beluga sounding the night sky, or even the Scottish version of Merry Dancers engaged in deadly battle. But through the long nights that Grace watched the bolts of color she found herself drawn more to the Norse legend of the Valkyries, the warrior women on horseback leading fallen soldiers to rest at Valhalla. She came to think of the lights as comfort for the lost miners, to catch her father’s wink in the deepest of the greens. She knew Dougal was gone. Who was left for her? How could she leave the place closest to his lost bones? She sat a quandary through another season, another six hundred inches of snow.
