I started swimming at six, running at eight, and skiing as a teenager. The summer I was ten, my mom dropped off my brothers and me for lunchtime runs with Dad from his midtown office, and we ran 10k races on the weekends. At one point Sam had the third fastest time in the nation for a five-year-old running a 10K. He may have been one of three five-year-olds who ever ran a 10K. I continued swimming competitively most of the way through high school. In many ways, our life in Anchorage was not unique from those who lived in any other American city of similar size, other than an appreciation for and acceptance of the wildness around us remembered by the regular visits of moose, the practice of earthquake drills in elementary school, and an awareness of Cold War fears that manifested in my drawing designs for houses with complex bomb shelters.
When I was ten, we moved to the house I remember as my home, farther up the hillside, surrounded by more than an acre of forest. It was modern for its time in the early 1980s. We moved at the height of the economic boom, which collapsed only a few years later, at the same time my parents’ marriage fell apart. I anchored myself in that home in the midst of our family’s disintegration. It sat in the foothills of the Chugach, which formed a fortress, a high protectorate. The mountains stood as sentinels, points of reference no matter where I might be. I had the smallest room, but one with windows on one side and a balcony with a sliding glass door on the other, looking out to the mountains behind, the city below and the sea beyond. Orion, the hunter, marched across the sky at night, club and shield in hand, belt glistening, from the shale arêtes of the Chugach, above the spruce and birch forests, and around our house to the rainbow strip of reflection that was Cook Inlet, across which Mount Susitna, the Sleeping Lady, reclined. Ursa Major and Ursa Minor traversed the sky too, Big Bear and Little Bear. I had read the myths: Zeus turning the beautiful goddess Callisto and her son into bears and flinging them into the sky to protect them from his jealous wife, Hera. Part of Ursa Major made up our Alaska state flag, the Big Dipper, “eight stars of gold on a field of blue,” as the state song goes. Polaris, the North Star, is one of those eight stars. This world around me, mountains, stars, and sea, told me I was safe. As did waking in that room to find my door nudged-open in the night by my dad roaming the house to check on everyone while we slept.
Dad introduced us to the Chugach Mountains as we grew. One year we ascended Flattop as the weather came in; Dad carried Sam, still a small boy, on his shoulders on the way down as we tried to beat the storm, losing his hat to the wind. I cried unreasonably. I’d liked Dad’s hat, and it was gone, and we raced the rain to the car and I felt the urgency of danger. Another year we kids scrambled up the rocky O’Malley Peak with Dad, reaching the ridge and then false peak after false peak, finally signing our names on the ledger in the hard plastic tube at the top. I knew the contours of the mountains and valleys on each side of Flattop Mountain, and had camped in the mountains beyond what was visible from the city in each direction.
My mom divorced my dad when I was twelve, explaining that she just didn’t love him anymore. This act shattered an idyllic childhood into shards that continued to slice our souls and each other decades later, and introduced doubts like many-headed monsters into my pubescent and faltering sense of self-worth. She reveled in her newfound freedom. Dad bent under the weight of betrayal and financial hardship.
The things I remember:
Eating out at Denny’s frequently, and Dad jumping up from his Asian stir-fry with the other men in the restaurant when a domestic dispute turned physical in the parking lot; unlike the other men, who clustered inside the door, Dad continued through and pulled the man away from the woman to allow her to escape.
Eating at a little Italian restaurant called One Guy from Italy in a strip mall off Northern Lights that looked just like every other strip mall sprouting across the oil-money-infused and minimally zoned city of Anchorage. Dad inevitably got tomato sauce on his tie.
Dad trying to make lasagna for us one night, and becoming irate when I told him he needed to boil the noodles first. That’s when I started to help cook.
Dad trying to do our laundry, and shrinking my favorite striped Esprit outfit, which wasn’t supposed to be put in the dryer. That’s when I started doing my own laundry.
Having to put Tampax on the shopping list for Dad in silent mortification, which became exponentially worse when he brought home the wrong kind.
I remember the insidious financial strain as Dad navigated a divorce and ran a small law practice that, like the rest of the Alaskan economy, was utterly dependent on oil revenues and staggered under the oil crash of 1986 and the crippling state recession that followed. I remember Dad showing up to our swim practices exhausted from work and sitting in the bleachers, his shoulders sagging with fatigue. I remember asking Dad why he was doing so much with the swim team board and at church when he was so tired and working so hard. “‘To whom much is given, much is expected,’” he quoted with a tiredness that ran deeper than I could comprehend. I always knew him, throughout his life, to volunteer in meaningful and behind-the-scenes ways, and he did so with joy, his manner and execution learned from his parents before him. I remember putting together a party for Dad, trying to imitate what we had seen grown-ups do in earlier years, wanting somehow to acknowledge his Herculean efforts. I hung a sign in the kitchen that said “We love you Dad!” and cut up carrots on a platter served next to a bowl of ranch dressing.
I learned quickly, as kids do, how to adapt, constructing a facade of success that I wielded like a shield. In high school I was president of the debate team, captain of the swim team, and editor of the literary magazine, which we laid out with paper and glue. I figured out what I needed to do to get mostly A’s in honors classes at my large public high school, and didn’t do more. I learned that if I kept busy by doing a lot of things and doing them well, I didn’t have to think about anything I wanted to avoid; I could get the attention a first child craves, and be excused from things I wanted nothing to do with, like family counseling. If I performed, I was left alone. As soon as I had my driver’s license at sixteen, I moved my small stash of things from my mom’s house, where we spent every other week, back up to Dad’s house on a day when he was in Kodiak for business.
Five years after the divorce, Dad met and married Kathy, an elementary school teacher only a couple of years younger than he was with a quick smile and an easy laugh, light-blue eyes, and rosy cheeks. They married the summer I left for college. I regarded my new stepmom with considerable wariness. I went along when she scheduled a color assessment for me, coaxing me beyond my tomboyish ways. I wore the clothes she bought. She treated me as a daughter at times and a friend at others. I welcomed and resisted both. Though craving maternal affection, I didn’t want to recognize the shift in dynamics in our household. We weren’t any of us so different from the bull moose that wandered across our lawn. We sparred to establish dominance—my father as parent, me as teenager growing into an adult; my stepmother defining her new role, me resisting change to the precarious settlement of earlier family brokenness. We left a few antler prongs on the ground. Once focused exclusively on us kids, Dad found happiness with his new wife. I was too self-absorbed to worry about parental satisfaction. My one aim in life had been to please my father. I didn’t know what to do if he was no longer as interested. The dynamic of women in a household could chafe through civility at times to reveal a hardness as sharp as the shale on the Chugach behind our home.
Despite the challenges, Kathy brought a beauty and an elegance to our lives that I loved, even as she managed our home with a fastidiousness beyond my tolerance. She and Dad remodeled the entire house soon after they were married, making it their own, and rules changed to maintain its shiny newness. I grumbled during each visit home from college. Kathy was focused on managing her house. I just wanted to relax at home. I was the less gracious of the two of us.
Dad and Kathy now volunteered together, serving as a Big Couple to a young boy in downtown Anchorage;
they worked in the church, doing everything from serving on the vestry to washing windows and delivering food from the church’s food kitchen.
Reluctantly, I learned from Kathy to appreciate beautiful things, to set a lovely table, to put together healthy and inspired meals. She shared my ideas too, adopting the latte I liked as her new coffee drink, and asking me about recipes I was trying. We made pie crusts together and my favorite lingonberry-orange-nut bread.
We also began spending time at the log cabin just south of Denali that Kathy brought to the marriage. The cabin became a place of making new family memories untainted by brokenness. On Dad and Kathy’s final Thanksgiving, Peter and I drove to the cabin with Dad. Peter was the only romantic interest I’d ever brought home. Kathy had arrived a day early, and in the rudimentary kitchen prepared a feast: turkey and stuffing, sweet potatoes and brown sugar, beans, four different kinds of homemade pies. Having heard that Peter liked Honest Tea (we usually enjoyed hot tea in the evenings), Kathy bought a case of it at Costco. Dad and Kathy shared photos and stories from their Canning River trip the year before; Kathy taught us all yoga poses she knew as she studied to become an instructor in her teaching retirement; all of us enjoyed a day in the snow, Peter and me on snowshoes and Dad and Kathy on mountain bikes with studded tires. As we headed out that day, Peter snapped a picture of Dad and Kathy that captured such joy as they laughed under their balaclavas, hats, and helmets that we later used it as one of two primary images for their funeral and to distribute to friends. Looking at the photo later, again and again, I saw the creases in Dad’s face mapping both greater sorrow and greater joy, both more pain and more understanding, than did the photo of him in front of that Forest Service cabin when I was a baby.
After I left for college and then the army, before every Christmas and Thanksgiving, a heavy, shoebox-sized package arrived wherever I was living at the time. Inside was a gift from Kathy, on behalf of both her and Dad (but Dad didn’t bake): a tinfoil-wrapped loaf of lingonberry-orange-nut bread. The loaf embodied the sweet tartness of cold fall days and recalled memories of picking berries a few months before on my Labor Day visits. The gift expressed love when words didn’t come easily; the sweetness of the bread balancing the acerbic taste of lingonberries was a promise to work through the challenge of reconstructing a family.
As they approached retirement, Dad and Kathy explored more and more of the rivers of Alaska, choosing a sport that did not tax Dad’s failing knees. They fell in love with the Arctic. I once prompted Dad to consider taking a vacation somewhere more exotic, Italy maybe, where he might enjoy opera and red wine, and he laughed and said he would never see all he wanted to of Alaska and didn’t really see any point in going anywhere else. After working hard for decades at his law practice, Dad glimpsed the life he imagined and knew his time was limited. He and Kathy were living it.
And in the middle of living it, they died, leaving their bodies on a distant riverbank. In the middle of my living, I received the fateful call in Portland while visiting Sam. How can we ever appreciate the full depth of each moment? Is there any way not to look back on those last conversations, last meetings, wishing we had let them seep into us completely?
Hanging up after my brief conversation with Officer Holschen, a few words in a matter of minutes altering my life forever, I sat in time suspended. Then motion resumed, making up for the pause, and never seeming to stop, though always just outside of a fog surrounding me. Leaving Portland, I started a checklist as Sam drove.
I was the oldest. I felt responsible for doing whatever needed to be done—and, most important, for making sure it was done right. Why I thought I had the ability to do this, I’m not sure. Perhaps it was the hubris of the eldest child. Perhaps it was what Joan Didion has called the “shallowness of sanity.”
A muddy sense of the necessary—though how could I know what was necessary?—drove my actions and phone calls. I called Max and Ned and left messages; Ned and his wife were traveling, we thought, back from a trip to Indonesia. We looked for alternate numbers to reach them, calling friends and work, and left messages everywhere we could, with only the request to call back as soon as possible. I knew I could not call Grandma or Kathy’s mother directly, as both were elderly and I thought it would be better to have someone tell them in person, so I called aunts and uncles to find someone to deliver the news. I called Peter. Despite our recent breakup, my connection to him was my closest and most necessary, in part because of his relationship with Dad and Kathy. He said that he would meet us in Seattle on our way to the airport, then come to Alaska a few days later.
Then we called our mom, who lived with her husband in Anchorage and who answered like anyone would on a normal Sunday. Call after call, and again and again the people on the other end of the line went into variations of incredulous hysterics. It was absurd; horror shares an edge with hilarity. Each conversation started like a sick joke. I almost snickered a couple of times, a weird and subconscious acknowledgment of the disbelief on the other end of the line, understanding how ludicrous the call must sound to unexpecting ears, wanting to let down my own defenses but afraid I would never recover.
I didn’t have time or energy to help those I spoke with to maneuver through their responses. And shouldn’t I be the one in hysterics? I wanted to beg for people to be gentle, to be calm, because there was only the thinnest thread holding me together, and if they were too distraught, I might collapse. I cut conversations short with a sense of guilt and inadequacy. In an instant, all of my emotional reserves had evaporated, the way a fiery explosion consumes a tree, all at once. I had nothing left, feeling only a numbness and a shock I understood much later to be a blessing, a natural anesthetic for the crippling pain.
At SEA-TAC airport, I watched Sam, to see if I could help him somehow. He stared blankly out the terminal window. Sitting next to his wife, I looked without seeing at the People magazine she had brought me. “Mind candy,” she said. But she overestimated my capabilities. I couldn’t even open the cover. The magazine sat on my lap, a dead and useless thing. Despite the flurry of planning in those first five hours, my brain was foggy, and I had the feeling of stumbling along a craggy Chugach mountainside, lost in clouds that had engulfed the mountain.
We arrived in Anchorage June 26. At that time of year, even at 10:30 p.m., bright daylight reflected off the snow in the Chugach. The sun’s persistence—the same sun which had illuminated extended hours of running through the yard when I was a child—now felt like an interrogation. Exhausted, I squinted into it through the airplane windows as the plane taxied to the terminal.
Walking off the plane, I held my breath as though preparing for a gut blow. I would have welcomed it in lieu of the gaping, jagged hole of Dad’s absence. I looked around blankly, expecting everyone to understand the horror I felt, the appalling emptiness. Instead I saw a scattering of unfamiliar faces, not looking at me or understanding, searching for other faces, smiling. It was odd that each of these people could not see the rupture of the world, that they could not understand that bedrock had cracked.
On every previous trip home, at least twice a year for fifteen years, Dad towered over the other greeters, usually just to the left rear of the crowd. His eyes embraced me well before his arms could, his enthusiasm and excitement to have his kids come home the focus of his attention. Kathy was always standing next to him, tall, lean, and smiling. After college, years in the army, graduate school, and finally settling in Seattle, I made that trip home twice a year. Dad’s and Kathy’s jackets changed from heavy down in winter to windbreakers in summer, and Dad’s hair changed from jet black to sprinkled with salt, alarmingly more so lately, I thought. But his eyes never dimmed.
As my mind travels back through each moment of that dark night, the fear of revisiting the pain in those times and places is matched only by what I have ceased to think of as an ironic fear of losing that pain and those memories.
A year before Dad and Kathy died, I’d been on a mission trip to El Salvado
r with my church. Our last two days in country we spent on the beach. I swam in the ocean, out beyond a strong surf. Another man on our team called to me, and I swam over to him. His eyes were wide. Seeing his terror, I took his arm. I yelled at him to swim with his other arm, but his fear paralyzed him. I held on to him, sidestroking as strongly as I could, focusing on the beach, and trying not to notice the rolling and pounding froth in front of us, the force of the water pulling my body. The surf pulled us toward the rocks. Despite a sinking sense of failure, I continued a strong stroke, my strongest stroke. At last, we broke through the surf, just before the sea would have thrown us on the rocks. I pulled him into shallow water, walked him onto shore.
This was different. Now it was my eyes that were wide. Waters overwhelmed me; there was no shore in sight. There was no one to call. I struggled in vain, sinking deeper, vaguely aware of a cold pressure building, flashes of light far above, but feeling the uselessness of struggle as I descended into darkness. I could not take a stroke. The froth overcame me. I could barely breathe. I did not know to cry out. I had no words for prayer.
The first night in Anchorage, I slept on the couch in my mother’s house. I had never stayed in her house when visiting Anchorage, considering my home to be with my dad. She had picked us up from the airport, giving us hugs and having as few words as we did. We arrived late. We could go to the house I knew as home in the morning. I lay awake, staring at the ceiling, unable to sleep because of the light and the horrible chiming of a grandfather clock. My mind traveled at the speed of my flight home—faster, even—without navigation or destination, pinging through space.
North of Hope Page 8
