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.   

Frugal

No one ever told me why Grandma Benson took her glass eye out every night or why it was in her head in the first place. I have both eyes, but only see with half of each eye. Fortunately, it’s the right half. So even though our partial blindness, well, was different, I always identified with her, because we were both frugal. We knew how to use what vision we did have to advantage.

When my parents fought over nothing and the house became frigid, I packed up my little red wagon and followed the cracked sidewalk over to grandma's for an extended stay. She never turned me away. Or said, “Where’s that stiff upper lip, kiddo. You belong at your own house.” No, grandma let me play shadow. I learned how to sleep in a cuddling S, so close our bodies breathed in unison. In a duet we jumped out of bed seconds before the alarm blare. With flowing Isadora Duncan movements we flounced the feather pillows, folded over the starched cotton sheet and straightened the limp chenille bed spread around the pillows.

I felt as though I looked into my future sitting across from grandma at the grey and white Formica kitchen table as we breakfasted on the everyday half of grapefruit, the bowl of Irish stone cut oatmeal, and sipped black coffee I shouldn’t be drinking at such a young age. Grandma let me. She accepted me exactly as I was.

Weekdays she sat at her cubby desk and dialed routine morning telephone calls to fellow Rebeccas, Royal Neighbors, Busy Bees, Eastern Stars, 4-H and Girl Scout leaders, and the shut-ins.—after listening to the farm report on the radio and making strategic calls to the corn futures broker and sometimes her banker. If she had been a man, she would have been a CEO. Instead she managed an Iowa corn farm and wore cotton print dresses.

Business over, she spent a few minutes on the New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle published each week in the De Moines Register. She finished the puzzle and sent it in religiously for decades. I listened carefully to glean her networking skills. I read the hints Down and Across and decided I wasn’t cut out for trivia.

Grandma made a life from scratch: soap from lye and lard, deep-fried donuts in rendered bacon fat, her own patterns for her and her daughters’ dresses. She recycled and composted everything. Water from her eaves went into a cistern for bath and laundry. No water went down the kitchen drain.

At night after supper she carried the dish pan out the back screen door to the garden compost pile and flung the water over the fence in one graceful arc.

This is my opinion and it's very true.

When Tony Schwartz made this amazing statement to a grad class at the Center for Understanding Media sometime in the mid-1970s, I fell out of my seat laughing inside, and a moment later I was hit with the realization that we all have slightly different truths. His uncanny ability to proclaim advertising truths relevant to millions of people—oxymoron intended—and my love-hate relationship with the all-encompassing world of public relations, caused me to lend credence to each person's truths. And now, after all these years, to speak my own truth. As you might imagine, some truths are fiction and some are not.