Bear Down, Bear North: Alaska Stories

What You Can Endure

Inmydeepswimmingdreams,mymothertellsmeIcan’tcomehome. Not for the things I have done, but for the things I haven’t. There’s a story she tells about my grandfather, Fox, leaving her at a hunting stand miles away from the homestead, alone, in the dark, when she was eight.No lantern or light in late September.“Colleen,you’re the oldest,” he says. “Find your way.” She has a rifle. Behind every tree, anothertree,anothershadow,orabear.Thewoodssothick.Nostars to follow. “If anyonetellsyoutocutyourhair,”shesays,“itmeanstheydestroy beautifulthings.”Herfathercutherhair.Foryears.Hackedabovethe shoulders with the bluntness of practicality. His jagged cuts marked his return from Korea, from working on the slope in Prudhoe Bay. She never wore her hair short when she had a choice.She let it grow down her back,black and straight or in a braid. She makes me feel the top point of her skull where there is a dent the size of a poker chip.“You have it too.Your brother doesn’t.I have this mark and you have this mark and we were once whales.” When I dream about my mother,I dream of whales. Shesaysshedidn’tlovemewhenIwasborn,ittooktime.Sheneeded to know I would live,survive,prove to her I was strong enough.I was what you can endure > 138 > what you can endure four years old before she knew. She had fallen asleep on the couch after putting me down for a nap.I crawled out of the bed and found her only tube of red lipstick and painted my naked body, a toddling flame,and rolled across her white rabbit fur rug,over and over again, rolled across the walls,her bed sheets.“A little warrior,” she says.“A goddamn mess of a comet.” “Godismoreof awhalethanaman,”shesays.Here,thebloodwashes up on the shore and melts the ice.My bare feet are tinged and lapped withred.Thecoldsnow.Thebloodwarmandpoolingfromthewhale’s belly. They have stripped the skin and a layer of fat with chain saws. A whale out of the ocean is a mountain, a horizon, a different bend of sky. “Did you wash your hair?” she says. “It’s as slick as cod-liver oil.” Which is the worst thing. A spoonful she had to choke down either beforeorafteradinnerof rabbitstewormoosechili.Once,shefound a bottle of her father’s cod-liver capsules hidden in a cabinet. Fox’s secret stash for himself. “He didn’t want to down a spoonful of the godawful-tasting stuff.But he made us kids do it.” “I washed my hair,” I say. “Idon’tbelieveyou,”shesays.Butshebraidsitanyway.Herbraids are never straight or neat—they are frayed and wild and I don’t dare undo them. We are crossing Chinitna Bay on a fishing boat. The cousins and I huddle in the cabin and wait for the Coast Guard to pass. We have too many people on the boat. Then there is shouting, “Come up, come up.” A whale. We scramble to the deck. A humpback shoots out of the water, twisting in the air, white fins raised to the sky, gray back slamming into the water. My uncles are hollering and spilling what you can endure > 139 their beer on the crowd of us.Another whale breaches,leaps up from undertheboat,bellyanarm’slengthfromtherail.Weallshrinkback, me holding on to the hood of my mother’s jacket.But she has a hand out,reaching and then brushing the white belly of the falling whale, the splash soaking her.My uncles net the floating bottles they threw overboardintheircelebration.“Touchyoureye,”shetellsme.“That’s what it feels like.” There is a story about how I was almost never to be.My mother goes fishing for reds with her brothers who are brand new commercials in Cook Inlet. Everyone is lined out along the rift, where the water is discolored, boats stacked three hundred yards apart, each with nine hundred yards of net out for the catch.They’re in an aluminum boat and the drunk captain next to them,Sarge,is driving an old wooden rig. All the crews are cobbing with the six foot rollers and then the winds change. The boats turn and all the nets tangle together and they’retangledupwithSarge.Theytieuptohimsotheycanseparate thenetsandSargeisstilldrinkingsohe’snohelp.Andtheycan’tfind a good enough tie-up and their aluminum boat keeps banging into Sarge’s old wooden rig. Then the tie breaks and tears a cleat off of Sarge’s port and he says to hell with it and throws his boat into...