by Laura Newman
Henry Wilson of Old Lyme, Connecticut, came back from the Klondike with pockets full of nuggets. He had stayed gone a long time; had moved from stake to stake on a whim or a whisper of a strike. He never struck a vein, but he struck it rich enough. Not for Nob Hill in San Francisco or even to buy a tin-can goat farm back in Connecticut. But it occurred to Henry Wilson that it wouldn’t take much to live well in Valdez. If he could find something worth staying for.
Henry was twenty years old, and what better sight than a red-headed gal with a plaid accent. Prospector pants, don’t-mess-with-me knife strapped to her thigh. Henry bought a potpie from her and along with payment put an empty perfume bottle in the palm of her upturned hand. And shortly after asked for that very hand in marriage.
They were never officially married. Grace lost faith in the power of her invisible friend when she saw the Klondike-riddled bodies come back from the interior, when her father failed to come home. It wasn’t a conscious decision. It just seemed that Nature was enough of a mystery; she sought no additional obscura. They went into a grove of aspen, song sparrows for witness and a white-tailed bunny that Grace momentarily thought of catching for supper.
“Grace Budge,” said Henry, taking her hand, his atremble, “I take you for my wife and I promise to never leave you unless you want me gone. I promise to be kind and to give you everything you ever ask for.”
“Henry Wilson,” said Grace, “I take you for my husband and I promise to be kind and to give you everything you ever ask for. And I will never ask you to leave.” A small wind trembled the aspen leaves in a kind of applause when Henry leaned in for his wife’s kiss. He was tentative; Grace was not. She had lost her mother, Scotland, her father, and Mary Kate. For once she wasn’t going to lose.
The rest of the season was spent building a sung up on Salmonberry Hill. The small cabin had a wraparound deck in a wraparound forest. On the second floor they positioned a telescope ordered from Seattle, pointed over the horizon to the tidal flats and the long fjord. They bought Pendleton blankets. At night they drank tea, or whiskey with tea, or whiskey, and played the game What Shall We Do with Our Lives? Henry had enough gold set aside that this was not a faerie-lark. Alaska was their oyster.
Grace went back to making her anthropomorphics. She pored over her Audubon Birds of America book gifted to her by Professor Wolcott in long-ago Scotland. She lingered on the drawing of the Eskimo curlew with its cinnamon wing lining, this tundra shorebird. One night, when the sun refused to set, it occurred to Grace that while she could never be an artist like Audubon, she could do a photographic book on the birds of Alaska. She ordered a Kodak Brownie from the Sears catalogue and set off to the rest of her life.
Oh, that the world had all the film of Grace Budge! There’s that photo of Henry, about forty, out on the ice fields by the Beaufort Sea with the sled and Husky dogs, all eyes hand-colorized, barely blue. Just blue enough to convey the cold. The tufted puffin with his orange nose insisting he wasn’t a laughing matter. The good posture of the bald eagles who seemed to know they were a symbol. Sometimes it was what she left out. The Eskimo curlew flying out of the frame, on her way to extinction.
Grace also had those infamous pink flamingo shots, five or six different locales, the last surviving photo hanging in the Valdez Museum and Curiosities. A mother and two babies on a tabletop iceberg, floating away on the Arctic sea like it was a party on Miami Beach.
Sixty-Six Years Forward
Good Friday, Valdez 1964—Grace
On Good Friday, March 27, 1964, Grace was eighty years old and Henry eighty-four. Yes, they were old, but rustically elegant like antler chandeliers, or reindeer. Grace delivered a set of new prints to The Cannery Gallery and the couple walked down to the dock to watch the supply ship S.S. Chena unload. It was always a bit of an event, and a few of the sailors were tossing oranges to the kids. There was a certain pure light on the sea from the late afternoon sun that drew Grace and Henry into its halo. Grace’s long gray braid sparked silver in the kind light; Henry took her hand. He never let it go.
Halfway between Valdez and Anchorage, fifteen miles deep into the Prince William Sound, great slabs of the earth got up and moved around. A 9.2 magnitude earthquake, the second most powerful ever recorded, struck at 5:36 p.m. The Seattle Space Needle, 1,200 miles away, wobbled. There was a great heaving of underwater landslides that muscled the ocean into tsunamis. Valdez was always a temporary town built on sediment and dream. It took only seconds for the unstable ground upon which the dock was built to cruelly plunge into the sea. The Chena rose on a wave some thirty outrageous feet into the sky and landed where the dock had been. Everyone on the pier was lost as well as three of the poor sailors who had been tossing oranges.
Of Henry and Grace: the ocean ground and polished their bones to sea glass and their hearts to aquamarine. That’s all we know of them.
Twenty-One Years Forward
Valdez 1985—Evan
Over the long summer days Evan continued to work at Eskimo Pie, study the ten top violin pieces in the world, and work on his original violin piece. When his eyes were closed and music was rippling off his fingers, color soaked his mind. When he opened his eyes the world was chalk and ink. He still had the admittedly childish hope that if he played the perfect piece, his interior color memory would finally leak into his open eyes.
Through the summer evenings and into the fall, Uki taught Evan to fly fish on the Copper River. They packed a blanket, a cold-chicken-and-beer dinner. For dessert, she tried to get him to eat akutaq, made the traditional way—moose fat swirled with cloudberries. “Come on, try it,” Uki said holding out a spoon like Evan was a baby. “It’s the real stuff, not the knock-off crap made with Crisco.” How could he say no?
Uki taught him to cast the line rather than the lure, the transfer of influence, the beautiful waves that travel through the line as it unfurls. Dry-fishing in the heavy reeds to keep the lure on top, wet in the open stream. The funny little lures with bits of feathers. It rather fascinated Evan—kids from East L.A. don’t fish. Uki gave him several back issues of her American Fisherman magazine. It was in the classified ads of these magazines that Evan found his personal bonanza.
Dr. Holden, “Please, call me Eloise,” was depleting his funds. She obviously had no sense of money or she thought she was Harvard.
Evan went back to the Grace Budge and Henry Wilson Room. Even with a cruise ship docked, the museum didn’t get a great deal of traffic. Most tourists wanted to see Old Valdez, the city before the Good Friday earthquake, before the entire municipality was rebuilt on higher ground. They wanted to see buildings sliced open like dollhouses, the splintered twistiness of everything. Rotting wallpaper lifting on the wind like prayer flags. Everybody loves to rubberneck a disaster. Thus the museum at best only had a few tourists at any time. Evan had the Grace Room to himself. He looked at the flamingo photo. He could tell by the shading that Grace had colorized just the tips of birds’ feathers, a whisper of pink. Evan went to the huge wood cabinets and opened up the display drawers that held hundreds of her specimens. The drawers glided. Lying on parchment paper were disembodied wings. Feathers and feathers. Snow goose, blue-winged teal, ruddy duck. Five single (assumedly pink) flamingo plumes set in a specialty box.
Evan made his heist.
Come to find out there is a spectrum of fly-fishing angler who longs for the 1800s. Horsehair lines and Nottingham reels. Fly-tyers who insist on authentic plumes and will pay outrageously, even though the trout don’t know the difference. For Evan, it was a mail-order feather Klondike. His customers found him through a small ad he placed in the classified section of the American Fisherman.
Christmas Day. Evan was sleeping in when the yapping of his neighbor’s stupid Yorkie, Archie, woke him. The sun was barely up at 10 a.m., the sky a golden bunting. The dog was going insane. God, he hated that mutt. It’s embarrassing to own a small dog in Alaska; Huskies don’
t bark. Evan opened his front door to yell at Archie just in time to see a massive gray coyote trot by with the poor creature in its jaws. Archie was wearing his Christmas sweater. Jesus Christ, Evan thought. Someone should loose a coyote on the purse-dogs of Rodeo Drive.
The sun would be going down around 3:30 p.m. Eloise had invited him up to her house for a special surprise, which he hoped was going to be money, some kind of Christmas bonus, although he knew that made no real sense. Then he was having dinner with Uki. The northern lights were expected and they were going to watch together. His original score was complete. This was the night.
There were lit candles set out in the snow leading up the stone path to Eloise’s holly-wreathed front door. Evan let himself in, as had become their habit, and headed to the conservatory. The fire was crackling to itself about destruction in flames shot blue. Evan took in the room; he knew it well: ruby velvet curtains and a crystal decanter of claret. The (faux) polar-bear rug. But here was something unexpected: Eloise was lying on the pelt wearing a quite beautiful (not faux) full-length snow beaver coat. A naked thigh, a half breast, a patch of pelt exposed. Evan’s body admitted that Eloise was quite attractive for her age, in this light, in this near approximation to his northern fantasy. He felt fizzy. Eloise patted the rug. A rookie predator error. She should have stroked it. The pat-pat summoned a memory of Maria inviting him to sit by her on the couch and watch Happy Days. Evan’s body changed its mind and said, “Split, dude,” and he did.
“Shit!” said Eloise. She downed the rest of her claret as she rose from the rug, catching her foot in the faux polar teeth in her hurry to leave the scene. Even though it was Christmas Day Eloise, still naked under fur, called her agent. She didn’t say hello. “Fuck the Great White North, George. I’m coming home. Book me some gigs.”
George didn’t say hello either. “What took ya’ so long, beautiful?” was all he asked.
One month later she was booked for the Sydney Opera and the Alaska house was up for vacation rental: Pristine setting perfect for sport, solitude, or romance.
Evan escaped his boy-toy adventure and made his way to Uki’s house. Roast-goose-and-sweet-potato-pie later they drove about an hour north of Valdez to a little spit of beach poking out into the sound. They had been here before; it wasn’t a secret place. Some long-ago someone had constructed a heavy canvas tepee with strong poles and a potbellied stove venting out the top. While Evan tuned up his violin, Uki unloaded blankets for the floor of the tepee. It was packed dirt, pogonipped by the cold; her soft mukluks crunched on the filigreed ice. There was usually a small stack of logs inside the tepee and Uki brought more just in case, or to leave behind. She could hear Evan’s scales. She put on water for tea, English Earl Grey. “What, no birchbark?” Evan always teased her. But she knew birchbark was for achy joints and rashes. She also had a silver flask of golden whiskey.
Evan set the violin close (not too close) to the stove to let the wood soak up the heat, and he and Uki sat in fold-up beach chairs just outside the tepee, an old itchy Pendleton on their knees. They sipped their tea and watched the stars come out. “Archie was eaten by a coyote today,” Evan said.
Uki gasped. “That’s awful.”
“He had on his Christmas sweater, the one with Rudolph on it.”
Uki turned to Evan. She started laughing. “Oh, that’s awful,” she repeated but she kept on laughing. She was his kind of girl. She was wearing her anorak with the bone buttons and fur-lined hood. “Well, here’s to Archie,” she finally managed, breaking out the silver flask.
At last the northern lights. For Evan it was only grays and ghosts. He took up his violin and played a melancholy piece that made Uki feel falling stars and whale songs. Eagles with their terrible talons. Things that rushed, water and the Arctic hare. Things that waited for spring. The booming of blue-bottomed icebergs. It was a song of Alaska. Evan played with eyes closed, colors wavering through the notes of his internal aurora borealis.
His song gave Uki a great courage, a courage she had been waiting for. She quietly went to the truck, pulled a bundle out of the back, and went inside the tepee.
Toward the end of the score Evan prepared to open his eyes. He had done everything he could: He’d come to Alaska, studied with the master, practiced, stolen the wings of birds, composed his heart song and played it to the Wild. He wanted to see in real life the memory colors of his mind. Still playing, he opened his eyes to a beautiful sketch-study in coal and lead. Evan might have cried to lose his silly dream, but as he turned he saw Uki. She was just inside the open flaps of the tepee, backlit by potbelly glow. She was lying on some kind of white fur rug, minus the paws and head (actually a flokati wool rug she had ordered from San Francisco). She still had on her now-unbuttoned anorak and mukluks but was clearly bare beneath. Uki outweighed Evan by some fifty pounds. Her thighs were Vikings. She was an Eskimo Berserker, warrior of the North. She stroked the flokati.
Four Years Later (Exactly Twenty-five Years After the Earthquake)
Good Friday, Valdez 1989
The little sea otter, who didn’t know she was an otter but thought of herself as something that might translate as Fur Ball, wrapped a dark ribbon of kelp around her middle to keep anchored amid the currents. Fur Ball floated on her back. Reaching into the skin-pouch on her chest, she pushed aside her foraging rock and retrieved a bunch of thistly purple sea urchin she had just caught. She laid the urchins on her stomach and pulled them apart with her retractable claws. Breakfast done, she cleaned her fur like her life depended on it, then took a nap. She had no idea how cute she looked bobbing in the currents, her little paws crisscrossed on her gray-speckled chest, her long silver whiskers and her triangle ears.
While the sea otter slept, 10.8 million gallons of unrefined Alaskan crude oil poured into the Prince William Sound and inexorably spread to the shore waters. The otter woke up engulfed in sludge. In a panic she used her paws, her tongue to try and remove the oil, but with every wave she blackened. She shut her ears and her nose to keep the oil out. But the oil matted her fur. With her fur in clumps, water for the first time in her life penetrated to her skin. She had the thickest fur of any sea mammal; she did not know cold. The sea otter started to shake and she felt confused. She quit trying to clean herself. She let the kelp ribbon go and dropped her favorite rock. She tried to blink the black out of her eyes, to see something that she would recognize. It was so cold. Her heart slowed. Stopped.
Because the oil matted her fur.
The second Good Friday massacre took place on March 24, 1989, when the tanker Exxon Valdez struck Bligh Reef, twenty-five miles out from Valdez. The animals didn’t stand a chance; they never do when it comes to humans.
In the years after the oil spill, scientists were extremely interested in comparing the DNA of the animals before and after the event. Thus the Grace Budge and Henry Wilson Room rose to great importance. Three professors from Stanford University came to the Valdez Museum and Curiosities and Mrs. Shelton was quite proud to be able to show them Grace’s life’s work. She herself had not looked at the specimens in years (because really they were quite dull). But when she opened up the gliding display drawers she was shocked to find a great deal of the birds’ wings missing. They had flown the coop. It was a feather-heist of horrific, national scientific loss.
No one thought to Sherlock the culprit in the classified ads of American Fisherman.
Some weeks later a large unmarked box arrived at the museum. When Mrs. Shelton opened the package she literally shrieked with joy which caused her to drop the box on her foot, breaking her big toe. Inside were not all but many of the missing wings. The willow ptarmigan, the coot and killdeer. The Arctic warbler and the yellow-eyed snowy owl. And a single pink flamingo plume the scientists were never going to figure out. A lot of the specimens had been plucked, but not completely denuded. Mrs. Shelton immediately called Stanford.
Not all was lost.
&
nbsp; Evan finally got his first viewing of the extremely rare, some say legendary Alaskan pink flamingo. It was around the time of the second Good Friday massacre. Uki was going to college and Evan was on fire with the Phoenix Philharmonic. Maria lived with them and filled the adobe house with the dry smell of chili peppers and coriander. She was certain spicy foods would help bring on a grandchild.
The sighting was on the night of Evan and Uki’s first wedding anniversary, it was in fact his anniversary gift. The couple were in bed. When Evan spread Uki’s totem-pole thighs to get at what he affectionately called her Eskimo pie, his line of sight was distracted. Carved in the smooth cedar of her inner thigh was a flamingo! Not in the ubiquitous position of a lawn ornament but in full, glorious, awkward flight. So there could be no doubt as to the type of flamingo, Uki had had the tattoo artist add a twist of calligraphy beneath the bird that spelled: PINK.
Evan was similarly tickled.
Silver
A quiet tale of loud events.
In late October or early November the first snow would fall. It always started at night, like a secret, a quiet descending. By morning the last of the autumn leaves would give up the ghost of color and hunker down to the serious job of mulching. Those still stuck on the trees, held by a last woody thread, would freeze and shiver, and when the sun came up it would strike the leaves silver.
