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Adventurer in life's bewilderness

Friday, June 10, 2011

Bewilderness

 
“So you’re goin’ to the Bewilderness.” Her brow furrowed, drawing my gaze to her dusky eyelids. Mom’s cleaning lady looked up from the dress as she set the iron on end. “Who’d’uv guessed you’d leave Rochester an’ drive all that way. An’ fo’ what?”

Duct-taped to the aqua 1954 Ford station wagon window, a hand-crayoned sign proclaimed, “Alaska or Bust.” The day America’s Last Frontier joined the Union, Dad’s dream took flight. An Alaska homestead and hunting grounds that dwarfed his haunts in Pennsylvania and Wyoming awaited him up north.

It took three boomerang trips to land in Haines. On the first two cross-country camping trips, the odd-ball dictates of our Ma and Pa Kettle parents caused me to think they were among the authors of Murphy’s Law. From New York to the Dakotas we heard “Your Aunt and Uncle So-And-So will be glad to see us. No need to call ahead.” Only to be greeted by “Nothing much going on here.” In Yellowstone, a sporting night with other teen campers and human-conditioned black bears got my older sister and me whopped with the belt that “hurts me more than it does you.” 

We managed to survive the thousand miles of serpentine, permafrost-heaved, gravel road of the AlCan Highway, despite flat tires and rocks spat at our windshield by caravans of oncoming semi-trucks. In the Yukon Dad’s puckish disappearance with a concealed weapon and return announcement “let’s have chicken tonight” turned out to be a campfire roasted porcupine. All four Nelson children went without supper.

For nearly forty years after “proving up” on the Mud Bay homestead, Dad stuck to the routine etched in his being as deeply as the ruts in his clay driveway. His gnarled hands worked the soil and harvested lettuces, kale, chard and root vegetables. When subsistence fishing opened on the Chilkat River, he hauled his skiff to Letnikof Cove and gill netted Sockeye that he smoked and canned to hold him until the following season. He collected eggs and set a lantern in the chicken house to keep the water dish from freezing on the coldest nights.

Except for those three road trips—the last one in 1966 to move my family to their temporary home in the Fort Seward Quonset hut—I only visited my Alaska family one time—the summer of 1973 after my third child was born. At some point in the mid-1990s, now dim in my memory, Mom’s once perfect script looked like hen scratchings and Dad’s scrawling block print letters foretold of barged food orders so enormous my children could inherit 50# bags of black beans, green lentils and brown rice.

The decision to spend winters in coastal South Carolina and summers in Haines was easy, thanks to the Internet. Who wouldn’t want to look up from their work to see the panoramic emerald waters of Lynn Canal with a backdrop of jagged peaks? I teleworked between the East Coast and Alaska, and commuted the seven miles between the homestead and Mom’s cabin on FAA Road. The same fingers that raced across my laptop keyboard tended my declining parents’ every need. I took on new tasks each day until their life became mine. And their dreams became mine.