Looking for Alaska

  Riding in the plane, on this mellow northern July day, I could barely breathe. The things I saw, the majesty! Everything I could see was a brilliant green, and the waterfalls, there were so many. The rivers—oh, how they curved as if they were made for me. As we were forcing our way through the tumultuous, rocky air, I thought, this is it. This is the most beautiful place I’ve ever been. Yes, there’s rain, as you might have heard, but it only adds to what this place is. There are mountains with snow, mountains without. Some are a fresh and water-fed green, a luscious, luscious green. Some are bare and a grayish brown, only with slanted rock. Some are hidden, some are small. And of course, there’s the water, everywhere I look, surrounding me.

  As I climbed out of the toy plane in Larsen Bay, I looked around trying to discern who Leslie or Duncan Fields might be. My dad had told me that Leslie was a petite woman with short dark hair and that she had an intense, dramatic look to her. Looking under one of the plane’s wings, I found her, not far off my father’s description. She was walking toward me in a long, red raincoat and she was wearing makeup, a surprise to me. I hadn’t expected an Alaskan bush woman and mother of four to be wearing blush and lipstick, to look so pretty.

  “Leslie?” I asked.

  “Yes. Rebekah? I thought you would have darker hair.”

  “Yeah, it’s got some color on it.”

  I liked her immediately. I turned to my bags, and together we carried them over to what looked like a broken-down, abandoned pickup truck. Except it couldn’t be because there were kids in its bed and more climbing up. All of their eyes were on me, checking me out trying to see if their new nanny was cool, if I was the kind of nanny who would sneak chocolate to them when Mom and Dad weren’t around. Duncan, Leslie’s husband and the father of all these bush-eyed children, was looking through a large, blue dry-bag sorting out letters and packages, their mail.

  “Rebekah, it’s good to have you here.” That was all he said, but it was enough to make me feel welcome. In a sweet, gentle voice I introduced myself to the children.

  Duncan and Leslie Fields on Uyak Bay. PHOTO BY REBEKAH JENKINS

  “Hi. I’m Rebekah.” I looked toward the oldest-looking boy, who had blond hair and big, pleasing eyes. “What’s your name?”

  “Noah.”

  Another, younger boy standing beside him said he was Elisha. He was little and cute and brown-haired.

  I asked another child, “And your name?”

  “I’m Naphtali.”

  She was the oldest and the only girl, the queen with a capital Q. She had beautiful amber-green eyes and olive skin with long limbs and sandy blond hair.

  I thought to myself, how am I ever going to be able to pronounce that name? I must think of something else to call her, or only talk to her so I didn’t have to call her by name.

  I looked into the remaining child’s eyes. He’d stood there all the while behind the others and stared, sizing me up.

  “And what’s your name?”

  He stared at me bashfully and in a quiet, almost voiceless sound said, “Isaac.”

  So there we were, all together, in the back of this worn, golden-colored pickup headed for who knows where. We stopped only minutes down the gravel road and parked next to the strangest-looking vehicle I have ever seen, a yellow-and-black-tiger-striped, two-door whatever. I wondered what kind of place I was in. Out of the ol’ pickup truck we all climbed. I was only following everyone else. I had no idea what was going on. Leslie appeared from the cab of the truck and spoke to me while unloading all-different-size bags and duct-taped boxes.

  “We’re not going straight to Harvester Island. There’s this picnic every summer for all of us who fish out of Larsen Bay. So that’s where we’re headed, as soon as we get the skiff loaded up. We should be there several hours. It’s a rain-or-shine kind of thing. Oh, do you have any other shoes?”

  I was in flip-flops, which are definitely not the right kind of footwear for bush Alaska.

  “I’ve got these!”

  I fished around in my bag for my standard brown XtraTuf rain boots that Dad had bought me in Seward. Leslie watched me curiously, not knowing what I was looking for.

  “Those will be perfect! They’ll be great for fishing,” she said.

  It sounded good to me. I was ready with my knee-high plastic boots, waiting to be shown what this fishing family’s life was about. We loaded the aluminum skiff that was anchored down past the wooden sidewalk between the one store that the people of Larsen Bay have to shop in and the red-roofed buildings of the cannery.

  I hadn’t really noticed much due to all of the excitement in the fifteen minutes since my arrival. As we were walking over the rocks to the water and the anchored skiff and up onto the wooden boardwalk of Larsen Bay, I did begin to notice some things. A lot of young people my age were walking around in bright orange rain/fishing gear. Some were talking on the few pay phones. Some were sitting on the benches in front of the old buildings and windows of the Larsen Bay boardwalk. I assumed they were mostly college kids up for the summer to work. I assumed that they were somewhat like me—that, thanks to good fortune, they had ventured to the wilds of Alaska to find something.

  And then there I was at the annual Larsen Bay picnic in the midst of real live fishermen and fisherwomen. Everywhere I turned were young men with beards. Otis Redding was playing on a small CD player. All the young men were congregated around it. It was still raining, but no one cared or even seemed to notice. Instead, everyone was standing in the food line clothed in bright orange and yellow or lime green, talking to fellow rough and tough fishing friends. Leslie and Duncan were who knows where. At first I immediately latched on to the kids, Naphtali especially. I asked her who these people were and what usually happened at this sort of gathering. She didn’t have too many answers. She was more interested in playing with her friends and her cousin Rachel, who lived right across Uyak Bay on the mainland of Kodiak, about seven hundred or so yards from Harvester Island.

  Eventually, I made myself talk to the men and women who were holding the babies, because babies are one thing I know. All the bearded, attractive, weathered, and wet young men were a different story. I’ve got no brave heart there. Nope, I stuck with the babies. I googled and goggled with them and more than occasionally snuck a glance in Otis’s direction. Overall I liked being there, although I felt both at home and lost at sea in this crowded, colorful land of XtraTuf Alaskans.

  Before I knew it, we were headed out the bay to their island where I would live. I put on some borrowed bright orange overalls and was thrown and bumped around by the waves and slapped by the wind, all the while feeling the hard raindrops freckle my traveling face. Harvester Island is a 380-acre island that rises up from the fin-whale-populated waters of Uyak Bay. It is covered with raspberries and simple meadow flowers (later I would come to pick them so that we could look at something pretty at mealtime). There are horses, one named Rocket, the other named Winddancer. They have been brought out for the summer so the Fields children can learn how to ride. Duncan had to ship the horses out to the island by boat. There are trees with eagles nesting, a white-planked house that sits a hundred upward yards from my new abode, the dock house that Leslie and Duncan built over twenty years ago when they first made Harvester their summer and fishing home. They are the only houses on the island.

  One of the first books I read on Harvester Island was a small book of Leslie’s poems. She is a writer like I want to be. I often sat on the dock and read her words.

  MONDAYS ON THIS ISLAND

  by Leslie Leyland Fields

  Mondays on this island are like any other day or hour.

  Choose the century.

  It could all be the same scatter of gravel on the beach,

  The same shatter of the sea into foam,

  The hiss as it gathers for the next.

  The summer sun is no clock

  And the birds only hint at the seasons,

  Their flights mostly circular,

 
Following the currents that move in giant spirals

  Arcing from this shore into the gulf and back again, again,

  Neither hot nor cold, only temperate, moderate,

  The climate of any island, at any time.

  I am told the grass here is brown in winter,

  That the darkness settles like a bear against the sun,

  The mountains sink white into sleep.

  Summers they say are brilliant.

  The mountains burn and always the sun, the sun.

  I have not seen this.

  Right across Uyak Bay, I can see boys, lots of bearded boys who look like they are straight off the cover of GQ. They are young and stout and from all across North America. They are the crew members. They work for the Fieldses and reside all summer on Bear Island, the ten-acre candy store of an island just two miles beyond my boatless reach.

  And, oh, the family, the Fieldses, these people I have come to know so quickly. Right away they became family to me. I have come to serve them, to be their nanny/cook/maid/friend/daughter. I have come to learn this island kind of life.

  I love this poem of Leslie’s about my girlfriend Naphtali, their daughter:

  BEFORE LEARNING TO COUNT

  (For Naphtali, Age 3)

  You were out till midnight last week

  fishing with your father and me.

  It is the herring you remember most—

  tiny thing, caught among the salmon,

  dead, but in your small hands

  as you held them to the sun

  shining back his emerald and opal prisms

  to the sun,

  he was almost

  swimming again.

  When you were done,

  you set him down among the salmon

  in the bin, petted him good sleep.

  Later, at the tender, you did not see us sort

  and toss the worthless over.

  Soon you will have a job—

  bailing and cleaning kelp from the boat.

  After that, you will get the white cotton gloves,

  children’s small, to hold and hook the net

  while others pick fish and count. Then you

  will pick and count fish and

  count 6 days till closure,

  7 nets left to mend,

  823 pinks from net #5

  60 seconds before noon on opening day

  3 hours of sleep lost last night

  4 nets still to pick in the dark.…

  Ten years from now, if I hand you a herring,

  you will instantly know its weight,

  what the canneries are paying per ton

  that year, and you will remember, as you toss it over—

  this one doesn’t count.

  This place, all of it, with its indifference and perfect photography light, shall be good for me, the timid loner in me. I plan to write for two hours a day. Not so much to ask from a girl like me, who fears the sitting, the silence, and what writing brings. But I will play that deep hide-and-seek game of the mind to come up with the words that I need to help me detail and describe what I see.

  * * *

  July 25: I’ve been on Harvester a week, or has it been a year? A lot of jumping on the trampoline today. The kids and I made up Olympic routines. I think we’re making up for the fact that we can’t actually watch the Olympics, since there is no TV on the island. We went on a picnic for lunch. Leslie and I talked about the things women talk about in the kitchen while we prepared dinner. We had a family prayer. The sun shone, the wind blew. I talked too much. I washed dishes; I gathered rainwater from the trash cans that are set out to collect it down on the porch, then put it on the gas stove to heat it. I go through that whole process every day just to wash the dishes. I listened to Andrea Bocelli. I took a picture of the sun as it faded away around 10:45 P.M. I thought about the GQ boys and my new friend Tammy, Leslie’s niece, who are all on Bear Island, and what they might be doing. And now I’m back in my blue and yellow Kelty tent that I put up on the third day I was here. I decided that I didn’t like the dock house. Too creepy. I’d rather be in a tent anyway.

  It’s late now, around midnight, and Naphtali is here in the tent with me devouring one of her books by flashlight. She reads a book a day. I have never met anyone like her. I remember the first full day I spent around her and I was stunned at her vocabulary. She was using words that even people my age don’t use. She is twelve but sometimes I swear she is much older than I am.

  Across the bay I can hear the crew’s voices, their laughter. They’re having a cookout at Uncle Wallace’s, Duncan’s brother. Wallace has a shower, a real toilet, and a washer and dryer, the only washer and dryer working around here because of a drought. The crew is there doing laundry. I don’t feel that I am missing out. I am just enjoying living this island life and acting like a kid again. There is so much kid in me. I am enjoying chasing the kids and not having to pretend that I am something I am not. Naphtali and I did take a banya last night. A banya is a sauna fired by wood. Ooh, was it ever wonderful. There has been a water shortage so bathing has been very limited. We’re taking a banya only once every seven days. I got to wash my hair and pour hot water all over my body. I didn’t even care that the water was bug-infested. I was only interested in being any kind of cleaner than what I was when I first went into the banya. I enjoyed every second.

  I am tired from the day and tired from rehashing it and want to dream. All this dishwashing and landscape and energy overwhelm me at the end of the day. One more note: the kids don’t call me Rebekah. They’ve decided to call me Leaf. I have always wanted another name. I like Leaf. I think I’ll keep it when I fly back down south.

  * * *

  July 30: Dad’s coming in two days for a weeklong visit. Duncan took all the children down to Bear Island today for the afternoon because fishing is closed. So Leslie and I were left to our tiredness and sisterhood. We talked and talked of many plunging things; of dependence and why women bond and how dangerous friendship can be between women because a woman can stop relying on her spouse to meet her emotional needs and come to depend solely on her female friend. I’ve seen this in my relationship with my mother. We fight the same wars, we women, and I think as time moves on the island, Leslie and I will armor up together as well and become sisters too. It is nice to be with Leslie, for she knows me even when I do not have the words to show who I am or what I mean. We are a lot alike. We both write poetry. We both are sensitive, even to the smallest of life’s things. And we both are warriors.

  * * *

  I will never forget it. Duncan and I were almost to Harvester Island, and there was my daughter, standing there with everyone else, waving hello. I felt like crying but I didn’t. I was coming to her world. The moment I got off the boat, Rebekah and all the kids came down wanting to show me everything on the island that they loved: the eagle’s nest in a tiny, wind-smashed tree; their two horses; the place where her tent was—one horse had apparently knocked it down, thinking the tent was in its territory. I saw the dock house where Duncan and Leslie had lived before they built a house themselves. Their house reminded me of that house in the Andrew Wyeth painting Christina’s World, with the young woman sitting in the field looking up at it. I saw the area out in the bay where they’d been seeing all the fin whales spouting, and I noticed the clarity of the ocean. I was shown the banya, the house, the kitchen where Rebekah did the dishes, the trampoline, and the books the kids were reading. I could easily see that Rebekah had become part of this family; what a beautiful thing to watch her as she so elegantly moved in this universe. I felt thankful that she was allowing me to see a bit of it.

  The Fields’s children stage their own Olympics on Harvester Island. PHOTO BY REBEKAH JENKINS

  Right before I left, Rebekah and I and the kids walked to the top of the island; it reminded me of a small green volcano in shape. It was a tough walk, but it seemed that from the top we could see the whole world, together and separately.

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  Unalakleet

  You better have a fantastic sense of humor if you live out in Alaska. The farther out you are, the more laughter you need. That three-day storm just met the new three-day storm, your flight’s canceled for a few days. The bears pulled your net out of the river and ate everything in it. You can’t find your way back to the village from Bethel. The snowbank now covers your house. The king salmon barely showed up in the river. Smile, life is good. The farther out in Alaska I got, the more smiling, joking people I seemed to run into. This was especially true in Unalakleet, Alaska, on Norton Sound on Alaska’s western coast.

  Probably the whining, super-uptight types died off long ago, when life was so much tougher. Not long after Christ died, a Roman orator said, “Many who seem to be struggling with adversity are happy; many, amid great affluence, are utterly miserable.”

  A friend of mine from Nome introduced me to Boyuk Ryan, who lives in Unalakleet and is mostly Eskimo, 13⁄16, to be exact. He has the dancing eyes of the Eskimo, and he is always ready to deliver a story. One morning he was sitting in the backseat of an eight-seater plane, the kind that takes people and freight from village to village all over Alaska. The plane was full; a few people were on their way back from Anchorage and were loaded down. There was a delay, could have been a hundred reasons. Most of the passengers were relaxed and waiting for the pilot in silence, but a few, well, maybe they’d had a bit too much fun in Anchorage, they began to complain. “Where is the pilot?” they said. Ten minutes later they regressed to “Where is the pilot, why are they always late?”

  Then one said, “If I knew how to fly this stupid plane, I’d do it.” Boyuk, who is as relaxed as he is intensely energetic, got an idea. He got up from his seat in the rear, squeezed his way into the pilot’s seat, and said, “I’ve flown on this plane enough times, I’ve watched these pilots—I think I can fly this thing.”