In the morning, a few minutes before seven, I leave Jim and Kari asleep in the cabin and walk up to the cafeteria to sit and drink coffee and watch the sea and sky grow lighter. We are two days out of Prince Rupert, British Columbia, headed for the ferry terminal at Haines, Alaska, then back onto the highway toward our home in Nelchina. We have intentionally lengthened our journey to take this ferry; it is a break from solid ground that we decided to try. We could have driven all the way home through the crystal frozen interior, and we wouldn’t have put any more miles on the truck, but we would have missed all of the west slope of the Canadian Rockies and the coastal range, the trees growing larger and the air moister until snow gives way to a shroud of rain and fog streaming on the windshield, hiding all but the toes of cedar and hemlock and white spruce with their hint of giants. Prince Rupert, at night when we arrived there, was a collection of smeary lights through rain. Entering the ocean this way, the uncertainty is mythic.
I can’t tell what kind of weather is out there this morning, but I can feel that the boat is humming and traveling evenly through a calm. Because it is still dark, I can’t know if it is a calm made by the mountains wrapped around us in a narrow channel of the inland passageway or if it is a more general calm, a calm sea everywhere on this northern coast. We passed Wrangell in the night so there are new passengers on board, new faces already out in the narrow hallways of the cabin deck, shuffling up toward the daylight as I am doing. I am curious about them, why they are here. For a landlubber like me, merely riding on the sea is exotic, so it is hard to imagine that this is just another highway.
At the cafeteria, there is a woman sitting behind the counter reading a book. She is wearing the white shirt and dark blue slacks of the Alaska State Ferry system. A few yards away, an older Native woman stands, leaning on a cane. She looks at the woman seated by the cash register but does not come close enough to get in the woman’s direct line of vision so the woman continues to read. With a slightly exasperated shrug, the Native woman turns and hobbles back toward the tables. She doesn’t look at me, but I know the shrug was for me, for our customer solidarity against the impersonal officialdom of cafeterias and uniforms.
When I set my books down on a table near the window, the Native woman is at a table next to me. “I can’t find out what time they open,” she says.
“I’ll find out,” I say.
When I ask the woman at the cash register what time the cafeteria opens, she smiles at me and puts down her book. “Seven. If my usual crew was here, they’d be open now. But these guys go by the rules.” She angles her face away from the food line before adding, “I’ll be so glad when my own crew gets back.”
“Well, may I get some coffee?” I ask her, since it is still two minutes to seven. “You sure can, honey,” she says. The “honey” lets me know where I am. I am in a small-town diner, except that I’m on a boat, in the middle of the Inland Passage on the way to Alaska, and this is the hardened and wise and kind waitress, fifty or so, except the bleached hair is short, the cigarette is gone, the makeup is underdone. The odd stranger intimacy between women is here, however, and I thank her as I pay for the coffee and smile to let her know I hope she gets her own crew back soon.
To that woman at the cash register just now the Native woman was invisible and this invisibility is a curiosity to me. I noticed the Native woman as soon as I walked down the hallway into the cafeteria and I can feel her eyes on me as I move back to the table with the coffee. She is a large woman, not yet a very old woman—perhaps sixty, perhaps seventy. She has black and white hair, not gray. Her face is very broad, folded and smooth, darkening around the valleys of her large eyes. I want to help her, as I am a perpetual child who always wants to please older people, though most people in the world are now younger than I am. Also, I have seen that her failed claim on the cash register woman’s attention poises her against the hidden motion of this boat, its unspoken rules.
“I want to have some breakfast,” she says, “but I don’t know what they have.” Well, of course she had to walk past the big black sign with the white magnetic letters that tells what they offer on the menu. Later I will find out that she is no stranger to this ferry boat with its black and white magnetic signs. But she wants to talk about what they are serving for breakfast with someone, and this dialogue is not encouraged by the cafeteria system. Today I will be her human link to breakfast, and I am pleased.
“Shall I help you?” I ask her, and she says yes, and she heaves herself up from the bench and moves slowly out from between the steel-anchored tables with her cane. We look at the menu on the wall together. She orders oatmeal, and we go around the line putting this and that on the tray. I carry the tray for her, get the butter, put ice in the water. This is no different from helping any older person, and yet it is a little bit different from helping most older people. There are no effusive thanks, no apologies for having difficulty in walking and carrying a tray at the same time. Without much smiling, there is a comfortable formality between us that never moves to the friendliness that might require explanation and apology.
I sit and talk with Hallie for much of the day, between small adventures with my daughter. Kari has the kids’ toy room located, down on the cabin deck, but the forward lounge is also a good place to play Barbies, so she drags Jim or me up and down the stairs. We alleged adults are a little dreamy here between foggy shorelines. Jim has a Tom Clancy novel shoved under one arm as he is relocated again and again by our enthusiastic daughter, and he would like nothing better than to find just one place to sit and read it. I am carrying a book and a tablet around too, like props, but off and on all day I return to the cafeteria where Hallie is waiting for me. I carry her food and learn the names of her children and grandchildren.
When Hallie sees I have a notebook, she assumes I will want to write down things about her. She says, “I can tell you some things you can write down,” and she makes a little project of me. We draw pictures of how she cuts salmon, both for the strips and for the “newspaper style,” where the fish is cut in layers but not all the way through, so that the cut fish is laid out in a big sheet, three times as wide as the uncut fish. I write down the recipe for the brine and how long the fish should stay in the brine. I write down “green hemlock” and “alder,” though I will not be within two hundred miles of a hemlock when I smoke my fish, and I draw a picture of the smokehouse she describes, with Hallie correcting what I draw, making sure I get it right. I tell her I won’t be able to cut the fish the way she does unless I have the knife in my hands and my hands learn the work, because that is how I learn things, but she shakes her head at me and says, “I know you understand this. I can tell by watching your eyes.” Then, in the same tone of voice and with the same patience, she gives me a recipe for her baked chicken, which uses barbecue sauce—Lea and Perrins—as well as onion, green pepper, garlic, and cheese.
I tell Hallie how we smoke our fish from the Copper River in a hot smokehouse that kippers the fillets, and she tells me it is all wrong, not to do it that way anymore. She is very serious about this.
There is a tape, she tells me, of the Klawock dance group when she took them to the Fairbanks Native Arts Festival in 1978. Someone promised her a videotape of her group’s performance, but she didn’t ever get it. “Could you find that for me?” she asks, and I tell her I will try. She tells me about some people she knew in Fairbanks, but I only know a couple of them. She sends her greeting with me, to them, and I wonder why it is that this kind of greeting is so much better than the mail or the phone, this human relay which says “I have seen and touched this person who sends their greeting to you. They really exist, still.”
We get hungry again, not surprising after all the talk of food, so we eat cheeseburgers together, and we still have fries and water on the table when the boat starts to ride big swells, tipping back and forth so that we catch the plates and glasses each time they reach the edge. We are entering Frederick Sound, and the swells are coming at us from the wide Pacific entrance. The wet brown rocks and feathery trees that were so close to us an hour ago and the little flags that marked our daylight way through the channel are gone. We are in a wide, gray ocean.
Hallie draws me a picture of Prince of Wales Island, with the roads to Craig, Hollis, and Hydaburg drawn out in thin strands from Klawock. When she adds on the little roads that go to logging camps, Klawock looks like the sun, sending out its rays over the wet, forested island.
A young waiter strolls past us, comically exaggerating trying to walk on a swaying boat, and he says, “I think we are lost,” conspiratorially but loud, so that everyone can hear him. “If I was talking to another Tlingit woman,” says Hallie, “I would say, ‘He likes himself too much.’” I agree that this is so, happy to be invited to the underground of Tlingit women’s commentary on young cocky waiters, however briefly.
I like being made aware of the unwritten system that Native people have, where you share what you get, and the younger people look to the older people for advice on the right way to live and the right way to make things, and they take care of the older people without really thinking about it, or perhaps the thinking about it is a part of the already accepted obligation, felt but permanent. The sharing between family households is part of my heritage, too, from rural eastern Oregon, but the constant identification of “self” as part of a “we,” as in “we this community” or “we these women,” is a gift from little towns along Alaska rivers. I recognize connections outside my family, or perhaps it is my family that has been extended. Somehow when the thinking goes, “This is what we are doing,” instead of, “This is what I am doing,” the thinking about taking care of other people, for example, is affirmed and not uprooted. To say that Native people affirm their connections is an idealistic and generalizing way to look at Natives, but it is also a real aspect of life in the communities where I have lived. I believe that it has helped me to appreciate being a female in my own family, being able to say, “This is what we do, we women,” sharing food and talk and the right ways to make things. This is a gift I make use of. But there is more. There are gifts I can’t make use of, can’t melt down, things I must learn to accept in both senses.
I am on the Kobuk on a fall day, a colorful August day of bright yellow willows and red blueberry bushes, nippy and clear. Jim and I have been moose hunting and we are motoring home in Brian’s boat, past the white wall tents and fish-drying racks of people we know from villages downriver. We have another woman with us, Debbie, a Park Service employee who has come to the Kobuk to learn about its people and how to plan the parks around them. And when Josephine Woods, a woman we know from Shungnak, comes down the beach to wave us in to her fish camp, Debbie says, “No, we mustn’t. We can’t disturb the people while they are engaged in their subsistence activities.”
“She wants us to visit,” I point out. “And she probably has something good to eat,” Jim adds. Debbie is a friendly, reasonable person, but like all agency-indoctrinated people, she wants the upper Kobuk treated like a living museum. We are not supposed to eat and visit with the displays. We argue a bit, with Josephine standing on the bank, looking at us. Finally Debbie gives in, and we motor over.
“What’s wrong, do you think I’m from NANA?” Josephine asks, then she laughs and we all laugh after her, a little nervously I think, because Josephine has nailed an issue directly. NANA is the regional Native corporation, and its stance is often political and anti-white in order to turn the hurtful tables. But of course the harsh words continue the hurting when they drift down to actual people. Upper Kobuk people have minds of their own, though, and Josephine was reminding us of that. To assume “they all think alike” is just as stupid and prejudicial as “they all look alike.” What forms the “they”? Debbie is beginning to see that Eskimos on the Kobuk are not monolithic in their opinions and personalities, but this embryonic sense of the Kobuk country’s complexity will later desert her as she writes for her NPS questionnaire the question, “Do white people bother you?”
Josephine feeds us half-dried salmon and lingonberries with seal oil and sugar. We soak up the warm food and the orange light of an angled sun through white canvas. Josephine’s husband, Wesley, sings us a song in Inupiaq. We don’t understand the words, or the dance he tells us about and explains. We have this in common with many Native people our age. I think it is very kind of him to give us this song, a little like pearls before swine or maybe more like one concentric ripple from the center of a story. If we come again, if we hear the song again, if we build the small circle around the little stove again and again, listening every time, then we will remember just a bit and the song will build into us, with the fish and the berries and the river. Then we’ll know something about something, about the center of this culture where the ripple starts. We stay and talk until the sunlight goes behind Cosmos, and then we go out and get ribs and liver from the moose to leave with them and start the boat downriver for the boat landing.
The ferry will pull into Sitka at 6:00 p.m., and this is where Hallie will get off. Hallie tells us that her daughter will pick her up and take her to the hospital, where the doctors will look at Hallie’s knee and check out some other troubles she’s been having. When the loudspeaker tells us that Sitka passengers can disembark, Kari and I walk Hallie down the sloping metal ramp from the boat to the terminal building. I am putting a jar of my mom’s peaches in Hallie’s bag when the daughter clicks up in heels. She asks me what I’m doing, and I feel embarrassed. Here I am, some strange white person, rooting around in her mother’s luggage. Hallie says, “She helped me, on the boat.” I am still on the suspicion list of this well-dressed, curt daughter, who says, “Well, she better.” But Hallie is smiling one of her first smiles at us, and it lifts most of the clouds off the moment. “Take care of yourself,” I say. We say good-bye and Jim brings the dogs down off the boat to play fetch. It’s seven miles to town and we missed the only bus, so we’ll see Sitka some other year. We run around in circles in the rain for nearly an hour, in someone’s big equipment yard next to the ferry terminal.
Kari can’t believe we have a room on a boat, with a whole bathroom in it and even a shower. We can hardly ever get her to take a shower at home, so we are amazed when she demands a shower right away on the boat and actually takes one after we get the water just the right temperature. She washes her hair and rinses it all by herself then reminds us that she has done it so that we congratulate her. Then the bath towels go up as stage curtains between our packs and the one chair, and we are treated to a most amazing puppet show featuring Barbie no. 1, Barbie no. 2, and the large plastic dinosaurs called, for the moment, “Tony” and “Lisha.” Barbie no. 1 is eaten by Tony, but Lisha is a doctor dinosaur and she fixes the previously dead Barbie. Tony is eventually returned to kindness by the wise Lisha and all is well again in Barbie land. We are in this honeycomb cell of our own family, and around us are other travelers, stacked together for a few days, our destinations as similar as they ever can be.
We turn outward to the air and the ocean every few hours. I walk around the decks, staring at the other passengers, wondering why they are on this swaying ferry in the gray winter sea instead of eating a bag of peanuts on MarkAir or Alaska Airlines and arriving home in time for supper. One answer is that some of them are locals, like Hallie, and this is their highway. But no answer is ever quite as good as its question.
Outside and to the front of the boat in the early morning, I am in front of the main lounge and below the pilothouse. It’s dark, and the air is cold and half sea itself, but there are lights from the shore, close to us now on either side. There are green lights on buoys to starboard and red lights to port. They mark the narrow channel. Once in a while a spotlight shines out from the pilot deck above me to illuminate the wet rocks of an island or a reef that would have been covered in high tide. I can barely stretch up on my toes to look up and behind to the upper deck and see the heads of one or two crewmembers moving in the pilothouse, watching the channel and talking. A man I presume to be the captain walks out onto the upper deck. He is portly and gray-bearded. I wonder if his appearance got him his position or if he adopted it afterward. This occupation is strongly in the traditions carried down from sailing, from steam. This is a ferry boat and not a triple-masted schooner, not an Alaska steamship. But the descendants of the mythic seafarers are here, and this is the real ocean, hiding the real reefs and rocks. Above me is a room full of radar and radios, legacy of navigational technology achieved during the Second World War, where mysterious signals vectoring with satellites now locate us precisely on the surface of the sea, between the hazards of this channel. But the power we give this crew—those of us against the rail in our little coats or inside the glass room in the lounge chairs or sleeping in the cabins—is as absolute as ever because the rocks are just as hard and we are just as fragile, riding inside this metal tub.
I don’t see any women in the crew. There must be some women working as mates or other crew on these ferries, despite the old maritime folklore against their presence. But I have only seen women working in the cafeteria, women cleaning the rooms. I finger my own prejudices here and wonder if I would be comforted to see a woman’s silhouette up in the pilothouse. There is Joe Hazelwood of the Exxon Valdez to consider and also the captain of the Princess Sophia, who went down with his ship in these waters in 1918. There were boats all around the Princess Sophia that could have rescued her passengers and crew, but the captain wanted the people to be taken off the reef-struck passenger liner by another ship of his company, the Canadian Pacific Railway. And then it was too late. Much of the early history of the territory went down with those four hundred passengers, among them the young man who was a close companion of Hudson Stuck, Walter Harper. Harper had been the first person to set his foot on the top of Denali, the great one. One hopes for captains less concerned about companies, about nationalities.
The silhouette I imagine to be the captain does not look down. I am attracted to this sturdy man shape, peering into the darkness beyond me. I am delighted by the primeval caretaking nature of his profession, the specificity of circumstances through which he guides this boat. I recognize how I am affected by the cap, by the beard, how I wish his wisdom to extend beyond the depth of this channel, how I wish for him to be a wise man, now that I have trusted him with my life. I wonder about my willingness to hand myself over to this guy in a cap; I feel the sexualness of this idea, and even a tinge of the troublesome dependence that can follow sexual attraction, which is somehow very like the wish for captains to be wise. Is this an ingredient of how hard it is for my culture to hand over authority, even very specific authority, to women? Of young men’s fear of older women who are immune to dependence upon them? Of this deep identification of control with male sexuality? And I wonder what convolution of self it may require for a woman to wear that cap.
Kari and Jim and I walk into the carpeted main lounge, where the big windows wrap clear around the front of the boat. The lights are dimmed here and big reclining chairs are bolted to the floor in rows. A few sleeping bags are still laid out between the chairs, though most of the people in the lounge are by the windows, watching the gray water and the islands slowly change shape. A few minutes ago Kari and Jim saw four killer whales leaping along next to the ferry. Kari’s eyes are still bright with the black-and-white flashing memory of them.
Near the window, there is a round woman in a Russian-style sealskin hat. Head back and eyes closed, she’s singing quietly. She has headphones on, and the headphones are connected to some kind of instrument she is playing on the table in front of her. It looks like a Ouija board more than a keyboard, but it has some keys on it, and many other symbols and knobs. The woman in the sealskin hat scrambles her short fingers over the board as she sings and never opens her eyes. She is remarkable in that room full of passengers for her seeming isolation.
“Mom, what is that lady doing?” Kari asks me, not softly. Several people turn to look at Kari, recognizing a four-year-old’s loud curiosity and its potential to stun and embarrass her parents. Their glances seem to ask, Oh, what odd family prejudice or practice is about to be revealed now? But I head off any such entertaining revelation at the pass. I say, “Shhhh. She’s singing. That’s her instrument.” That seems to satisfy Kari, causing her attention to fall on the strange instrument and not on the strangeness of the women in her rapt solitude. We settle our books and Barbies across from the woman.
There is a man next to the woman in the sealskin hat. He is smaller and slender, with short gray hair and a beard and mustache. I think he is a perfect French trapper type, with his thick wool shirt, his neat small face and black eyes. He has one arm around the singing woman busy in her own world; he holds on to her as if to anchor her to the big chairs in the lounge inside the blue-and-white boat. He smiles at Kari and nods his head at us in acknowledgment of our proximity and then goes on with his job of hanging on to the large musician woman. In the dearth of conversation from the pair, I imagine that it has been a lonely winter of trapping for him and that he is bringing a sweetheart back to his cabin in the woods. Perhaps she is his cousin, and it is a marriage of convenience. She used to be an opera singer, and still dreams of chesty soprano parts. These speculations entertain me, even while I know they are not nearly as interesting as the real people. The couple’s silence invites the legendary and stereotypic from my personal store of Alaskana: He will teach her to make biscuits and fry salmon and moose. He will have to buy a generator so she can play the Ouija keyboard. She is learning to love him.
When we see them later in the cafeteria, his arm is still around her and he is grinning a gap-toothed smile at us. Now they are both wearing fur hats. Kari is happy to see them again and goes right over to ask the woman about her “instermint.” We find out the woman is Tlingit, from Klukwan, and she and her husband live with her mother’s family. Sometimes she brings all her sound equipment on the ferry, and her friends do too, and then they make rock and roll music all day, wherever they are going. Very slowly, and with a heavy accent, the man tells us, “My wife is a composer.” He gives her shoulder an extra squeeze, and she squeezes him back, giggling. “He’s Italian,” she says. And adds, “My mother made his hat.” The hat is sealskin, like hers, but with a broad, fastened-up brim that announces his name, “Jesus,” in sequins. I think she already loves him.
There is an old man I’ve seen every day since we started from Prince Rupert. He’s usually smoking outside on the deck or just standing behind a door or stairway where he can get out of the wind, or he’s sitting in one of the lounges by himself. He’s thin and nearly transparent, with longish white hair and a straggly beard that emerges unevenly from all around his face. He wears a big red plaid wool jacket and looks straight ahead, even when people are pushed up against him talking and eating. I’ve seen this look before, on my own father. This was the look my father wore when he was sitting in the back room of our family grocery store, thinking, thinking about being someplace else or living in some other time, and he was annoyed with those of us in his real surroundings, or he just wanted to be alone and couldn’t figure out any other way to get there. It’s probably the vestigial urge to annoy my father that makes me want to say hello to the man in the red wool jacket.
When I finally do say hello, the greeting misses him by a mile, hitting the people at the next table who stop their conversation to turn to look at me. It makes me wonder if the man is senile, or deaf, or very determined not to respond. I decide to leave him alone.
But a few hours later I am walking by a lounge and the old man catches my eye for just a second, then unhinges his gaze again, so it seems there is someone in there who might want to talk. I sit myself down next to him, in the row of lounge chairs facing the empty row of lounge chairs on the other side of the room. The chairs are bolted to the floor; there is no way to sit down and face the man without being twenty feet away from him. And although I am now very close to him, I am not in the way of his gaze, which is blankly forward again. I say hello anyway and I comment on the snow line, considerably farther down the slopes here in the Lynn Canal than it was at Petersburg. The snow makes the mountains look like they have long petticoats on, but I don’t mention this. There is a long silence. I am a pest, I think, and I look around the room, hoping that a graceful exit behavior will now occur to me.
“Well,” says Leonard, which turns out to be the old man’s name—Leonard Joseph—”it’s colder here than it is in Ketchikan. Ketchikan is a good place to winter.”
I’m looking at Leonard’s bedroll, on the floor against the metal wall, the only wall without chairs bolted against it. He has a full-length Therm-a-Rest mattress and a Woods bag, that wool-lined, down-filled, and canvas-covered bag famous among old-time Alaska outdoorsmen for sturdiness and warmth. You can sleep outside in even an Alaska winter if you have a “four-star” Woods bag—and a dog team or snowmachine to carry it for you. It’s a heavy bag and most backpackers have never heard of it. There is a large worn frame pack next to the bedroll and a pair of scuffed up Redwing boots with the tops laid over next to the pack. The bedroll and pack and boots form a neat line against the wall. On his feet, Leonard wears a pair of Romeos, those slip-on leather shoes with the little triangle of elastic between the toe and the heel but below the ankle, and some not-quite-white socks.
Romeos are old person shoes, and everyone seems to know this, though the shoes are much too comfortable not to be shared with younger generations. I was swinging Kari in a Fairbanks playground one time when a neighbor girl about eight years old came over to visit with us. She sang us the songs she was learning from the other kids at her school, jump rope rhymes and “Glory Hallelujah, teacher hit me with the ruler,” songs remarkably like the ones I learned thirty years before, three thousand miles away. Then she asked me if I was Kari’s grandmother. Taking a breath, I said no, I was Kari’s mother, and why did she think I was her grandmother? “You have old shoes,” the girl said. I was wearing my Romeos.
Leonard tells me he was a civil engineer for the U.S. Army during the Second World War and after. He worked on communications stations and spent most of his time out in small stations in western Alaska around Bristol Bay and up as far as Unalakleet. “I spent some time here in Haines too,” he said, “but it’s too cold. I like Ketchikan in the winter because it doesn’t take much to keep warm.” I look at the bedroll again. It doesn’t look like Leonard is getting off here. “Going to Haines?” I ask him. “No, I just like to ride around,” he says. It occurs to me that Leonard might be a very familiar face on this loop, the long way around that goes out to Sitka, up to Haines and Skagway, and back down the channel openings to Ketchikan, a journey of just over a week. Senior citizens ride free.
Trying not to talk too much, but wanting to, I say the chili wasn’t too bad in the cafeteria. “Bah!” Leonard says. “This food is no good. They don’t care what they serve here.” He had pancakes and the middles were runny, he says. He adds, “I make the best pancakes in the world.” This is said without any self-irony, as he turns to me in the first direct, head-on gaze we’ve had, and his eyes are very blue, with little slices of black circles in the irises. “I had one of those griddles, and one of those pans, too, with the coating on them, they call it ‘Silverstone,’ and I left them at the dumpster.” When Leonard says “Silverstone,” he squeezes the word out of his mouth distastefully. I don’t think the cook crew on the ferry is using Silverstone, but I get what he means, about shortcuts, about mistreating the food and not caring.
Jim and Kari come up and, surprisingly, Leonard introduces himself, leaning on the arm of the chair in Jim’s direction. Kari looks at Leonard and at the sleeping bag and gear against the wall. I feel a question coming, maybe one I would ask too, but she keeps it to herself and crawls into the chair beside me, content to watch the green water and the forest slide away from us. Later she will tell me that Leonard lives on the ferry and I trust her knowledge of this. Jim and Leonard talk about cast iron and cookstoves. Jim wants to talk about trapping out west, but Leonard drags the conversation back to cooking. “No, there’s another kind of fry pan I mean. Not cast iron. Not this new stuff. Do you remember those steel pans, those thick ones with the long handles they used to make?” Jim does; I don’t. “Well, I found one in a pawn shop. And I knew the fellow didn’t know what it was worth. And I gave the guy two bucks for it. And so I have a pan like that and a griddle made out of the same stuff. It curves up at both ends and it never sticks, never does.” Well, doesn’t it warp, I ask, if it isn’t cast iron and the fire cools down on one side?
“Nope, never does. It’s thick, thick steel.”
Leonard bakes bread too—somewhere. I don’t quite get where this cabin is that he’s talking about—in Ketchikan, or Haines, or somewhere out on the Bering Sea coast, and I can’t tell if this is Leonard’s present time or his memory. “Friends come down to see me and I cook. That’s what I like to do, is cook.”
The smell of Leonard and his stuff is all around us now. Not unwashed, exactly, but a kind of cabin smell, out of place with the metal and plastic and diesel of the humming boat. It reminds me of visiting the little houses of old men we know, full of smoke and coffee and the sweaty sweetness of a bedroll slept in night after night. Now Leonard is showing Jim the curve of the griddle, thumb and two fingers held stiffly out, stained yellow to the first joints, describing the curve with his whole arm from the elbow. In this motion, he is dignified and spare and eloquent.
My father would do this, too—talk to strangers, come out of isolation to hold court on a favorite subject such as a fishing lure for bass or how to pick a ripe cantaloupe. That is when I would hear my father as the knowledgeable, expressive man he could be when you caught him unawares, no axes to grind, no children to correct. I used to be jealous of strangers, that my father would talk to them as if they were all good people already and did not need to be improved, as if we could all share what we know and take the other knowledge home, reciprocally. There would be a lot more swearing when my father talked, of course, mostly “helluvas” and his favorite exclamation, “Hell’s bells!” I’d love to be able to squeeze that one in sometimes, but not now. I am a female, so for Leonard that strange, excluding chivalry of old men is probably in effect. I can rest here in it for a time. I wonder if Leonard has any family. But I don’t feel like asking; he has already gone out of his way to care about us.
“You know what I’m talking about, you people,” Leonard says, to us as if few other people could know about having a good cookstove. He says this with a near-smile, then, “Well, I need to get a cigarette,” and he’s up on those pin legs, walking out of the lounge very slowly but straight, with the kind of inward attention that I was mistaken about, that made me think he might be mentally ill or sick when I first saw him. Still, it is hard to say how deep the silence is that he crossed to talk to us.
Haines is our stop. We will be in Haines Junction on the Alaska Highway by ten o’clock tonight and we’ll be in Nelchina by tomorrow afternoon. I think the universe is going to seem a little scattered and less contained for the next few days, perhaps more dangerous. I have grown accustomed to this boat, where I have the boat in common with the other travelers. It is a foothold, a foothold on the sea.
When we get off the ferry I look around for Leonard, to say goodbye, and I find him in the lounge with the tiny tables, playing solitaire. When he sees me he raises his hand, “Have a good trip, now,” he says.