If You Lived Here, I'd Know Your Name Part 15

LEE HEINMILLER, TONY TENGS, and I were all having coffee at the Bamboo Room. Tony's father, Marty Tengs, had owned the grill and adjacent Pioneer Bar for years. Now Tony's sister, Christy, and her husband run the place. Tony and Lee had just finished setting up the sound system at the Alaska Native Brotherhood Hall for Matt Bell's funeral that afternoon. "At least you'll be able to hear what people are saying," Lee said, taking a bite of his cinnamon roll. Matt was twenty, and had drowned three days earlier in a popular swimming hole. These guys were helping because they grew up with Matt's parents. Lee's mom and dad were one of the original families who bought the old army fort after World War II, along with Marty and Allie Cordes and Ted and Mimi Gregg. Tony helped choose the music for the service. Another friend was going to play the piano, but there would be taped songs too. "They're going to use 'Tears in Heaven,'" Lee said.

When I heard that, I thought maybe I shouldn't go. If I do, I thought, they better have a stretcher and the ambulance crew standing by to pick me up off the floor and carry me out when it's over. Eric Clapton's anthem to his four-year-old son who fell from an apartment window to his death makes me cry when I hear it on the radio. Hearing it in a packed community hall, looking at a casket, will unglue me.

Earlier that morning I had gone up to the Bells' house to get some background for the obituary. Matt's mother had a new puppy sleeping at her feet. It was born with three legs. She said Matt had brought the dog home recently and talked her into keeping it. At the time, she didn't know why. They were a family of four-two parents and two sons-and now there were just three. She thought Matt wanted her to know that, like this three-legged little dog, they'd be okay. She thought he may have known that his life would be cut short.

I told the guys about that, and Tony said, "Did they tell you about the visitation? About seeing Matt-I mean, his ghost?" They had. Apparently, the day after he died Matt's ghost stood right in his parents' living room and talked to his father, rea.s.suring him that he was at peace. I told Tony and Lee that I believed it.

Tony said he thought it was true, too. The night before he had been with the Bells at the fire hall saying their last good-byes to Matt, whose body lay in the casket. "His face had this bloom," Tony said, "like you could see his soul."

I've worked on other obituaries during which the family told me of signs they'd gotten from another world. Once, a long-dead brother came to see his ill sister the night she died. I think he encouraged her to come with him wherever he spent eternity. The brother's ghost even stayed in the kitchen with her spirit after his sister died. They banged pots and pans and made all kinds of noise, until the widower told them both it was time to go. The thing that spooked me most was that the brother had died at nineteen from a brain tumor and a stroke had felled his younger sister when she was eighty-three. I asked Tony and Lee if they thought that answered Eric Clapton's question: "Would you know my name if I saw you in heaven?"

"Sure, it does," Lee said, and launched into several tales of his own paranormal experiences.

Rather than fearing the unexplainable, people in Haines tend to embrace it. We want to believe there's more going on than meets the eye. Take last winter's close encounter with the great beyond. It happened one early morning in January, during my annual low point, when I was wondering if I had clinical depression or the light-deficit illness common in northern regions, seasonal affective disorder. Or was I just in a really bad mood? Then something incredible happened. A brilliant flash lit up the yard brighter than summer suns.h.i.+ne. It was like lightning, except there was no thunder. No bang, no smoke, no crash or burn. The whole family froze, and before we could even duck, it happened again: A second flash made a positive, then negative image out of the basketball hoop and spruce trees in our snowy yard.

"Whoa!" yelled one of the kids from the mudroom. "What was that?" We ran to the windows but couldn't see any flames or smoke. On the back porch, there was no remnant of that flashbulb-bright light. The only glow at all was the midwinter sun slowly rising. Chip guessed that a transformer out on the road had exploded. I thought a jet had fallen from twenty thousand feet up on its way between Juneau and Anchorage. But why was it so quiet? The teenagers put a colander on their little brother's head, made s.p.a.ce-alien noises, and sang, "It's the end of the world as we know it." The announcer on KHNS said no one knew what the mysterious flash was, but callers confirmed that it had lit up the sky from Mud Bay Road all the way out to Mosquito Lake. They saw it over Main Street in Haines and fourteen miles up Lynn Ca.n.a.l on Broadway in Skagway. It was weird and sort of thrilling.

s.p.a.ce-alien invasion or not, the kids had to go to school. On the way back from dropping them off, I stopped in at Mountain Market. Everyone was talking about the flash as well as the accompanying boom some folks had heard. A few people recalled the series of UFOs that normally skeptical people swear they saw some winters back. I thought about the night I was nursing J.J. and watched one of those flas.h.i.+ng green lights travel over Lynn Ca.n.a.l through a starry sky. It sure looked like a s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p to me, too. We never did find out for certain what it was.

Then there's electrician Erwin Hertz's story. When he was fifteen, back on the family farm in Montana, he saw a flying saucer. He was getting the cows in from a lower pasture when he felt as if someone was watching him. He turned around and saw a giant s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p with lights all around the top. "I froze, looking at that thing, and it was looking at me," he recalled to the group at Mountain Market. Before he stepped out into the snowy parking lot with his coffee and m.u.f.fin to go he said, "I can still see it right now." He had no doubt that the bright light everyone was talking about could have been a visitor from another world. He's even almost been to one. When Hertz (everyone calls him by his last name, even his wife) was a newlywed he was working as a logger and was. .h.i.t by a falling tree and transported to another dimension. "I learned that I could go anywhere in the universe on a thought," he said. It felt so good to be floating out there above his body and the friends who were trying to revive him that even though he had just married and was very much in love, he lost all desire to be on earth. Maybe that's why Hertz seemed to handle his son's death so well. Jesse was just twenty-eight when he died in a car wreck out at 18 Mile on the Haines Highway.

One Mountain Market color commentator, who didn't share Hertz's hope that the unexplained phenomenon might be friendly Martians or a visit from angels, said the whatever-it-is was "definitely man-made on this planet." He knew because he'd heard it from a friend who worked at a remote radar site above the Arctic Circle. Someone else said it was a stray missile from Russian tests scheduled for later in the week on an island in the Pacific. "Think about it," he whispered, leaning in close. "Why would they tell us what they're doing out there? Like we'd ever tell the Russkies just when and where we're going to test top secret weapons?"

"There's nothing in Haines," one of the fuel-truck drivers announced, helping himself to a refill of coffee. "Fred saw it up on the pa.s.s. It probably hit near Whitehorse." At noon, the radio news reporter chasing the flash and bang announced that "it" might have crashed outside the tiny town of Carcross (short for Caribou Crossing) up on the White Pa.s.s, over the mountains between Skagway and Whitehorse. Still, no one knew for sure what "it" was.

Thinking back now on all of this makes me realize that there are some surprises still left in this world. We don't know something about everything. Big Brother might be watching most places, but not Haines. He hadn't caught this flaming fireball from outer s.p.a.ce that broke through our sky and careened over the mountains of southeast Alaska and the Yukon. No one knew about it all. Except us. It had taken the better part of a whole week to convince people Outside that we had actually seen what we'd seen.

When I asked my editor at NPR if I could do a commentary on it, she said no, because they couldn't confirm that it had happened. I think she thought I was making it up. Luckily, there were pictures. One Canadian real estate agent posted them on the Internet, so I was able to write about it in my Anchorage Daily News column and for the Christian Science Monitor.

Turns out, after checking reports from Haines, Skagway, and the Yukon, scientists all over Canada agreed: "It" was a meteorite. A falling star. It could have smashed into Haines, eliminating all of us, just like the dinosaurs. Instead, it blew up in the sky and scattered charcoaly bits of the heavens on a frozen lake, miles from anyone. After we'd had a day or two to get used to the idea that we had seen-and survived-something rarer than a total eclipse of the sun and more unpredictable than a tornado, people were calling it a miracle, and smiling when they said it. A good mood prevailed. Rather than be terrified about our near miss, we were thrilled. All eyes and hearts tilted toward the sky and the beautiful, mysterious, and very good universe.

MAYBE MATT BELL was flying around out there above Haines, too, and n.o.body knew it. Thinking about what Matt's father and Tony had said about that possibility made being at Matt's funeral a little easier. The Alaska Native Brotherhood Hall was so full that latecomers had to stand outside. A borough a.s.semblyman gave a eulogy that took us back to the days just before Matt's birth when his own brother and a friend-they were not much older than Matt was when he died-were missing and presumed dead in a plane crash. They had been on their way to a moose hunt. The wrecked plane wasn't found until years later, hidden in the woods within sight of the airport. "In those dark days," the a.s.semblyman said, "Matt's birth was the only good news in town." Then, one by one, people stood and shared their memories of Matt. His grandmother talked about giving him a red fire truck for Christmas when he was four: "His face just lit up, he was so happy." An aunt said how much she would miss hiking with Matt: "He protected me from the bears." An elderly neighbor talked about how he always came to shovel her out of the snow or fix her car: "He never said much except 'Yes ma'am.' " Clearly it was Matt's actions that spoke louder than his words, and endeared him to her.

When anyone dies, it sends out ripples of grief in a community. When a young person dies, it's more of a storm surge or even a tsunami. I looked around the Alaska Native Brotherhood Hall and counted more than a dozen parents who had survived the death of a child. In public, they appear to be an exclusive club of brave, wise, and compa.s.sionate people that n.o.body wants to join. Privately they must have moments of despair and anger. I know Hertz's wife didn't accept their son's death the same way he did.

I caught the banker's eye and wondered what he was thinking. d.i.c.k wears Hawaiian s.h.i.+rts to work, and his gla.s.s-walled office overlooking the harbor is full of large tropical plants, cacti, brain-teaser toys, and moving liquid tubes that must be related to the old Lava lamps. He also ruminates often about the meaning of life. For Christmas he gave me a subscription to the Noetic Science Journal. The last time I saw him, he told me of an out-of-body experience that he'd had when he was a little boy. He was playing with friends, one of those hyperventilating games where you breathe very fast and then someone comes up behind you and squeezes the air out of your lungs and you pa.s.s out. Your mother told you never to do that, and this is why. It almost killed d.i.c.k. He floated up in the sky and could see himself lying on the ground, while the other boys tried to revive him. He remembered looking down at a red ball on a flat roof. After d.i.c.k came to, he found a tall ladder and checked. The ball was there. "There was no way I could have seen it," he explained, "if I hadn't really left my body and soared above the neighborhood."

Looking at all the people at Matt's funeral was close to an out-of-body experience for me. I remained in my seat, but I felt as if I were high on the wall. I could see everyone clearly that way, and how we all fit together and how tightly we were all holding on to one another with otherwise invisible ropes. In school the children learn drownproofing skills at the swimming pool. Matt couldn't take advantage of that training because he had hit his head. He never had a chance. The children learn that the best way to survive if your skiff capsizes and sinks is to link arms in a circle and hold on tight. That's what we were doing for the Bells that day. When my body returned to my seat, I realized that Hertz had been speaking, and I heard him say that two years ago Matt's parents had consoled him on the loss of his son; now it was his turn to help them. Many people put their heads down. It was hard to listen to that. It was hard to be reminded of so much loss. Then Hertz threw us a lifeline. He started talking about a TV show. He said he had recently bought a satellite television dish and had been watching Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? He recalled that on one episode the question for $125,000 was, "Who was the most powerful prophet?" The guy on TV had missed it, but Hertz hadn't. "It was Elisha, an apprentice to Elijah," he told us. "Elisha gained twice as much power as his master because he saw Elijah's spirit ride up to heaven in a fiery chariot."

Chattering on that way about something that didn't make a whole lot of sense-or make anyone cry-worked as well as a life preserver to buoy our spirits. I understood why Hertz liked that image so much. He had actually seen a fiery chariot or two. Thinking about that made me-and, I suspect, other mourners-smile. Chip leaned over and whispered, "G.o.d bless Hertz," and Hertz kept on going, now talking about another question on the TV show. "This one was for sixty-four thousand dollars," he said. "How about that, a real sixty-four-thousand-dollar question."

While he talked, I looked through the open door at two eagles circling in the warm breeze high above the water. Although I've seen thousands, the sight of an eagle in flight still moves me in a way I can't explain. It's like a prayer. In Tlingit legend, all animals, rivers, and even places have spirits, just like people. Tlingits believe that human and natural spirits are not separate but intertwined, and that those spirits move throughout time and s.p.a.ce. A child who is named for a grandmother is so closely linked to the elder's soul that she is even called "Grandma" by her parents. In the same way, an old man's "uncle" can be an infant.

I fanned myself with the funeral program and wondered if eagles and spirits and mountains and maybe even strange lights and meteors are G.o.d's way of getting our attention. Do we feel G.o.d's presence because we are looking for him, or do we feel it because he is looking for us?

Then Tony hit the play b.u.t.ton on the stereo and Lee fiddled with the dials on the amp and we all listened as Eric Clapton wondered out loud if his dead young son would recognize him if they met in heaven. Grown men had tears running down their faces.

When I got back from the service, the house was quiet. Christian was the only one home. I hugged him and told him I loved him and said he could have anything he wanted. "You name it," I said. "Anything at all." Just please, I didn't say, don't die before I do. Please don't let me talk to your ghost. I don't want to watch you leave me on a fiery chariot or eagle wings. I don't want to know if I would be as brave as Hertz. Even if you would know me if you saw me in heaven, I'd rather just believe it's true than have my own story as proof. I never, ever, want to join the club of parents who have lost children.

Right then I would have given Christian a trip to Seattle to see the Mariners play, a thousand dollars, and a puppy. His eyes lit up at the possibilities. He knew I was serious. He could also tell that I was little crazy with real and imagined grief. He smiled and said, "How about a bacon cheeseburger, fries, and a milkshake at the Bamboo Room?"

The exterior wall of the Bamboo Room and Pioneer Bar has a photomural from the old days on it. In the picture, Tony's father is the smiling, black-haired bartender. Larger-than-life-size young men and women turn around and smile for the camera from their stools. I recognize most of them. I wrote their obituaries. Like Tony's dad, they are gone-but not very far. I couldn't help feeling that someone I couldn't see-maybe a whole bar full of someone I couldn't see-was watching with approval as Christian and I slid into the red vinyl booth and picked up our menus.

DULY NOTED

Haines's own Dixieland-style swing band, Lunchmeat and the Pimentos, traveled to New Orleans for the Crescent City's world-famous jazz festival. While there, Beth MacCready's father, Douglas MacCready, married Carrie Bradley in an eclectic service in Jackson Square on May 2. The French Quarter wedding was held next to a statue of Andrew Jackson inscribed THIS UNION MUST AND SHALL BE PRESERVED. "We pa.s.sed around champagne to everyone in the square," said Beth. "It was great."

This month's Alaska magazine features a photo of Sharon Miller in her sightseeing buggy pulled by a llama. She described the enclosed red wooden carriage as a "colorful phone booth on wheels." Sharon told the magazine that a wolf killed one llama this winter, but the five remaining llamas are "thriving." She also said llamas are smarter than they look.

Monday's ferry was filled with the first tourists of the year, a group of Elderhostelers from New Zealand and the U.K., as well as a host of musicians returning to Haines from the Alaska Folk Festival in Juneau. Dr. Feldman played the concertina while a pickup chorus sang sea chanteys. The informal concert took place in the ferry's forward lounge.

Three Haines grandfathers are resting up after a seventeen-day float trip down the Mackenzie River. Tom Jackson, Bob Budke, and Wayne Walter undertook the trip in a flat-bottomed riverboat, a Lund skiff, and a Zodiac. They started on the Muskwa River in Fort Nelson B.C., and then joined the Mackenzie via the Fort Nelson and Liard Rivers. "It was a nice trip, challenging; it was not your Disney World trip," said Tom, who also mentioned that the biggest problem was finding level, mud-free campsites.

When Death Didn't Stop for Angie

WHEN CHIP'S GRANDMOTHER Angie had a heart attack a few weeks into the new year, we flew to Virginia to say we loved her, but we packed dark clothes. Angie is almost ninety-four. She looks a hearty eighty. She walks with a cane but stands up tall and has plenty of wavy white hair. She watches C-SPAN so she can yell at the Democrats, and she usually wins at rummy because she cheats.

If someone reads this to her, she will say, in her New Hamps.h.i.+re accent, "That's a d.a.m.n lie." Then laugh, because she knows it's true. Angie has lived near her daughter, Chip's mother, Joanne, her whole life-and the last thirty-nine years in the same home. Angie baked the pies, birthday cakes, and chocolate-chip cookies of Chip's youth. She knit him mittens when he was small and told him to cut his hair when he got older. It's almost as if he had three parents.

That's why we left Haines for Virginia at noon-about two hours after Chip's cousin called saying, "If you want to see Angie alive, you better be here in forty-eight hours." Eliza was still home for her winter break from college, so she promised to take care of everyone. We managed to fly out at a clear hour between snowstorms. Planes hadn't flown in or out of Haines for a week, so we were lucky. The ferry wasn't an option because one had just left and there wouldn't be another for two days. We got the plane tickets on free miles I didn't we know we had. Chip took all of this as some sort of sign we were meant to get there. But as the Alaska Airlines jet took off in Juneau, I thought, a little wistfully, that we could have gone to Mexico.

We flew all night and drove right to the hospital from Dulles Airport with Chip's father, Phil, who chatted with every tollbooth worker on the way. Angie was in the intensive care unit. It was a shock, seeing her in a hospital bed, with all the monitors, tubing, and blankets tucked mummy-style up to her chin. Chip kissed her on the cheek and said how well she looked. He also whispered, "I love you," something he doesn't say easily. Angie was so happy to see him she glowed.

I want to be like Angie when I die, old and in bed. In my daydream I'm under my own quilts, with a dog on the bed and the familiar view out our bedroom window. Chip is there-I have already decided I have to go first. I don't think I can live without him. Then, still in my little dream, I think, Wait, if I'm that old I probably can't get upstairs; so I adjust the scene and move our bed down to the sunroom. And this way there's more s.p.a.ce for everyone to gather in the living room. Then I think, Hold it, what are you doing? Come back to Angie and Chip. This is a real end-of-life moment. Pay attention. Be present. Maybe it's the long trip, or the Dramamine, but when I try to focus on Chip and Angie again, everything is blurry.

Angie has a black eye, the result of a tussle when her heart stopped in the middle of the night. "You should see the other guy," she tells Chip. We stayed at the hospital all day with Chip's sister, parents, four cousins from New Hamps.h.i.+re, and Uncle Pete, taking turns sitting with Angie in pairs. (The ICU rules allow only two visitors at a time.) I was with Chip's mother when we noticed Angie dozing off. I could feel Joanne tense up when Angie's eyes shut. We both watched the monitors blip and flash heartbeats and respiration. I thought, What if they stop, what if she dies while we are sitting here?

Joanne must have been thinking the same thing, because after three or four long minutes of staring at the machines in silence, she said, "Let's go get some lunch."

In the cafeteria, Chip's cousin Cheryl, who manages a nursing home in New Hamps.h.i.+re, where everyone in the family lived until Chip's parents, with Angie, retired to Virginia to be closer to Chip's sister, Karen, said that when her clients are near death they often see a white bird on the windowsill. Sometimes they talk to long-dead children or spouses. She said one man asked her when his wife was coming back and when she reminded him that she had pa.s.sed away nine years ago, he said, "That's right, I forgot-you can't see her, can you?" Cheryl believes dying is walking through a door into another world-and that it doesn't always lock behind you.

"Sometimes," she said, "people even die and then come back to life." A while ago, she had declared a woman dead-"I mean she was dead. No vitals, gray skin. Dead." About half an hour later Cheryl was tying an ID tag on the dead woman's toe. "She sat right up and asked what the h.e.l.l was I doing?" Cheryl said. "I know she was dead, so I nearly had a heart attack myself."

I said she must not have really been dead and Chip's sister, Karen, agreed. "There is no mistaking death," Karen said. But she also thought there was something to Cheryl's death-as-transition theory. Her favorite horse had died recently, while she was competing in a horse trial with him. He was running at thirty miles an hour when his aorta ruptured. "It was like pulling the fuel hose off an engine," Karen said. "He dropped like a ton of bricks." What she couldn't explain was how, at the moment of death, he managed to fall skidding sideways, keeping her safe, rather than tumbling headfirst and killing her. "I had a real bond with Scotty," she said. "He felt the same way. He loved me even after he was technically dead." Cheryl nodded. Then someone else got out a deck of cards and a noisy game began.