water like a silk sheet
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From the monthly archives:
September 2008
Petersburg, Alaska
AAlaska, that wild state of affairs up north, has occupied a place in my mind like the corner that gathers cobwebs in an attic. To its inside passage my love fled ten years ago, and to its mossy, creosote-soaked pillars I have been tied since. In a manner of speaking. He worked at the fishery, slept in the woods like an animal, and sent me postcards to let me know he was alive. He read Notes from the Underground as I waited, but he stayed too long in this place where my voice, my hands, couldn’t reach him.
This story occurred so long ago that its telling is positively maudlin; we were children then, we’re good friends now. However, when I picture Alaska it always takes on this tint, this bruised color beneath the snow. I am sure that my visit to Petersburg was a bit bluer, a bit truer for the memory. In the strange way people can be, I felt better having seen the patch of trees where he slept, the coffee shop where he sat. I felt as though these places were telling me a story. The story of–I don’t know–the story of a young man running away from love? A youth gone wet-faced into the wild? or just a story of boredom?
“Lots of people moved here to escape the law,” Kira explained to us, kicking a rock with her foot. Our ferry arrived early and quietly, slipping into town and without much fanfare slipping away. Tom and Kira know everyone in Petersburg: waving at passers-by, it seems like they all have a story to tell. This guy lives in a filthy trailer and builds wood furniture so beautiful it’d make you weep, that one drinks his own urine–for the health benefits, he swears! Most everyone here is here only seasonally; they subsist on the fish.
I asked Tom, who has worked at the Petersburg fishery for over a decade, if the Alaskan salmon are being depleted beyond conscionable levels. Of course, the next question is, “whose conscience?” That of the owners of the canneries? Or of the fishermen whose lives depend on each season’s yield? The consumers’? As it turns out, it does seem that the yearly cull of Alaskan salmon is highly regulated and that the fish have a swimming chance. This was not always so. Overfishing in the region prompted President Ike to declare Alaska a “federal disaster area” in 1953, meaning that his government (which was responsible for funding the management and research necessary to prevent a, umm, disaster) had failed. Upon statehood in ‘59, this responsibility transferred to Alaska, and the situation improved, then dipped, then improved again, till the Happy Now: thirty-three state hatcheries releasing 1.2 to 1.4 billion juvenile salmon per decade, and a limited entry permit system controlling the volume of fishing allowed.
Bully for you, Alaska! Oh, state of Midnight Sun, of the Northern Lights. The word “Alaska” comes from the Russian “Alyaska”, which came from the Aleut “alaxsxaq”, meaning literally, “the object toward which the motion of the sea is directed”. As game hunters have argued, an animal’s usefulness to us is what guarantees its survival (sigh…this is the sort of animal we are), a theory so neatly exemplified by the wild salmon who–for goodness’ sake!–have steps built for them in particularly steep upstream areas. If we can save these shimmery and dumb creatures from extinction, where are the government-funded elephant orphanages? The laws that curtail the use of heat-seeking weaponry, fired from aircraft, against fleeing wolves?
Now that Kate and I are back in the “lower 48″, staying with Amanda’s parents in Centennial, CO, I remember Alaska the way I saw it: spare, chilly and through a haze of drunkenness. We had arrived on the last day of fishing season; everyone taking to the streets in a great bellow of exhaustion–the kind of exhaustion you feel when, at 2 am in a bar in a strange town, the prospect of walking home seems more tiring than that of having another drink. It is a happy, smiling exhaustion. When finally we did make it back to Kira and Tom’s place, we’d tipped over into that magic zone where nothing at all was tiring, and stayed up late making pizza, taking pictures and laughing so much my throat hurt for days. Petersburg is a picturesque, quirky and altogether disquieting place. I woke early the next day to shoot pictures of the misty mountains and found myself chatting with one scruffy local after another. Nowhere is loneliness more profound than in a fishing town at six in the morning. It’s touching, really…all these renunciates, misfits and young summer workers mashed together…at once running from and striving toward women.
And what else is there?
I’ll never know why my friend went to Petersburg, Alaska. But now I have seen the town, I have felt its allure. Like a woman, like the “object toward which the motion of the sea is directed”, this wild place which called to (and claimed) Chris McCandless at twenty-three, Alaska has left me with a new sort of hunger. More of an itch, actually. It’s really no big deal. I’m sure there’s a topical cream for it.
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My Own Private Telluride
WWe’re in Telluride, CO, a strange little town off Hwy 145 that has the air about it of a Swiss ski lodge made of chocolate. I imagine at night the residents (all two thousand of them) issuing forth from their cottage beds deep into the mountains, to stir up more chocolate. We will not be staying long. It is an expensive place to be. Unfortunately, we’ll miss the Blues and Brews music festival this weekend, but somehow we will manage. I never did much cotton to the blues–I like Leadbelly et al. but the songs don’t touch me like they seem to others. Give me a sappy Korean pop song from the 80’s–now that’s mourning to a tune.
We came to Telluride by the invitation of a man we met on the Alaskan ferry. Of course that ferry ride was one big drunken party–I remember playing an old piano in the bar and people giving me money. If it was silly of us to hold him to plans made there, then silly is as silly does. But, you know, a gentleman means what he says and says what he means, right? We arrived and this tree-hugging, lily-livered liberal was alternately “too tired” to come out and “too busy” to accommodate us. “I kinda have to feng-shui out my apartment,” he said. “I gotta get a steam cleaner,” he said. He had promised us a tour of Telluride and fresh-baked pastries. What we got was a $150 room at the Victorian Inn.
The townsfolk here are friendly and very well dressed. Handsome college kids play instruments on the sidewalk, ruddy-cheeked; Telluride women (in their thirties through fifties) are especially beautiful–they have a shine in their eyes that softens the face, and they are always smiling. I wonder why: twice since our arrival, we’ve been told about the unreliable nature of Telluride men–by the men themselves. The streets are teeming with people this week before the festival. Everyone asks us where we are coming from. We tell them about Yellowstone, the Lewis and Clark Caverns, Redmond, and days spent driving against dusk.
But they hardly seem to care.
They want to know about Alaska
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lament
WWe could never make it to the Fall. The Halloween Express will not give any gifts this year, again. But, She would be a gift to any man. You love the autumn, the red leaves and long white limbs. Scarred and Ugly limbs made you a forest of boredom. You have never known a forest of beech, of oak, of chestnut. Those are forests. Do I ever go to another man? With this face? This is a face that is known. How would you like to be ugly, Beautiful One? I was born ugly. All of my life I have been ugly. You, beautiful, who know nothing about women, do you know how an ugly woman feels? Do you know what it is to be ugly all your life and inside to feel that you are beautiful? Life is very strange. I would have made a good man, but I am all woman and all ugly. Yet, men have loved me and I have loved them. You and other men look at my ugliness yet there is that feeling that blinds him when he loves you. I, with that feeling, blind him, blind myself. Then one day, for no reason, he starts to see you ugly as you really are and he is not blind any more and then you see yourself as ugly as he sees you and you lose your man and your feeling. Do you understand this, Beautiful? After a while, when you are as ugly as I am, as ugly as women can be, then, as I say, after a while the feeling, the idiotic feeling that you are beautiful grows, slowly in once again. It grows like a cabbage. And then, when the feeling is grown, another man sees you and thinks you are beautiful and it is all to do over. Now I think I am past it, but it still might come. You are lucky, Beautiful One, that you are not ugly. You and your women are lucky.
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little Ben, waiting to exhale….
TThe Chevy’s latest quirk is to decelerate on inclines to a disturbing 30mph; as we wound slowly up the road Kate murmured under her breath “This is not Seattle”. I’d been telling her for weeks that we would stay in Seattle, the City of Flowers, because in a silly way I thought my friend Jamie lives there. She doesn’t. She lives in the Cascade Mountains, on the outskirts of Redmond, WA. We passed a building with a jubilant sign declaring “Teriyaki Milk Barn!” and took a left.
I called Jamie five times, crossing little bridges, passing farms pastoral and weird, twisting our way up the mountainside. I looked forward to seeing the home she’s made with her husband, Bryan, a video game developer from Everett. What’s little Jamie been up to all these years?
I can’t really say how we met; she was a grade beneath me in high school, but her smarty-pants program and mine often threw us together. Was it a party? Doubtful–I rarely got invited. Soccer? Model U.N.? Shucks, I forget. She helped me with math homework, I made ouija boards for her friends. In the summer of my junior year, I left home and stayed with her family till graduation. I was given a room of my own and loved it. Jamie seemed to me then a kind of “golden child”: pretty, blonde, smart, friends with the freaks and the geeks (this was before they got their own show), possessing of gentle parents who allowed her a cool boyfriend, and –to top it all off– her mother raised rabbits in the backyard.
The last time I saw her, Jamie was living on Monroe Avenue in Rochester, tending her store that sold chain mail jewelry and black-black dresses, and…I seem to recall a certain little pair of…shiny Boots of Leather? Downy sins of streetlight fancies? You can only wear those things in TOWN, Mavis, not in the country.
We turned up a driveway, rounded the bend and rolled to a stop. A screen door slammed shut and out came Jamie, wearing a black hoodie and slim-fit jeans. From her purple house scrambled a pack of dogs, many dogs! and I knew that Jamie was the same sweet kid of my heart’s memory.
These are the sort of people you want your children around: they’re vegetarians, succumb to ice cream once in a while, compost their own food scraps, and rehabilitate abused animals. He paints, she welds, he cooks, she sews. Sore from our own domestic attempts, Kate and I took heart in the love these two so clearly shared.
Maybe there is hope for us yet. Who knows? Maybe there is lots of hope.
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On the Columbia deck, Gulf of Alaska
WWhat distinguishes a “good person” from anyone else?
I’m on the Columbia ferry, a 335,000sf rig that has taken us from Bellingham, WA to Petersburg, Alaska, and is now taking us back. The public announcements overhead are preceded by a lute-ish tone sounding like my phone when it receives a text message; Though there hasn’t been a cell signal for days, I scurry after my phone at each “car deck” call. Below us, 134 cars, RVs, vans, and SUVs are held hostage in the belly of the whale, below sea level, along with 50 dogs locked in the cars. Jonah’s song rises up from their throats toward a heaven so far above them now that it must, at times, seem futile.
A week has flown by. I haven’t written anything. If there is a reason, it’s a stupid one. Have I been busy? Have I been tired, or cranky? I was raised in a rather disciplined environment. You could even say that I’ve come to love discipline for its own sake. This isn’t an efficient way to be, but what can you do? I was telling Kate about my appreciation for the steely, “Greatest Generation” characters who fought our wars and built our bridges. The most beautiful part about discipline, to me, is what you might call its “mechanism”. It goes something like this:
1. Person determines to do something that is not effortless (and sufficiently beneficial to warrant the effort, i.e. lose weight, keep in contact with friends, etc.)
2. Person starts out strong, “disciplined”
3. After a week or month, Person starts to falter in her desire to remain disciplined. She wakes up too late to exercise, or she starts thinking that she’ll never be a real artist so WHY draw EVERY DAY?? This is called sabotage.
4. The beautiful mechanism of discipline: Person can relax and simply buckle down to the task. This is because she:
A. Said she would, and
B. Submits herself to a Greater Good–both the good of her endeavors, and the good that comes from keeping your word
Now — isn’t that exquisite? Simply Splenda. Maybe discipline is one of the marks of a “good person”. We certainly recognise it when we see it, and usually with respect. Of course, my discipline falters all the time–as when I’m on a boat trawling up the Gulf of Alaska, on deck in a sleeping bag, trying to get up the get-go to write. I am not nearly so good as I’d like to be.
Last time we were on this ferry, there were entire hordes of elderly couples, a few foreigners, and a harried father with four (five? six?) terrible sons. These boys slept by day and ran about all night, squealing like puppies. I felt sincere pangs of sympathy for Dad–alternating with a wish that he would kill them. But I don’t mean to sound ungenerous.
Generosity is another trait that “good people” possess. They laugh heartily, give freely when they can, and harbor no agenda for recognition or pay. Good people have a generosity of spirit that attends their language and their deeds. I swear, you can see it in their eyes. They brim with a loving sobriety. A generous person doesn’t suffer for the sake of others–that’s something different. That is what we call “masochism”. (I have no problem with masochists, some of my best friends et-cetera et-cetera, but I prefer to call something what it is. In the way that a man without fear cannot be courageous, a man without love for himself cannot be generous.)
In Petersburg, Kate and I saw a movie called “The Straight Story”, about an old man who drives his lawn mower from Laurens, IA to Mount Zion, WI to visit his elder brother. This man is depicted as independent, proud, disciplined and kind–not a hardened soul, not a pushover either–just reliable, human, and good.
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