I’ve often stared at the documents when I happenstance upon them on the way to Something Important. Scraps of paper with official seals and signatures attest by oath I am who I am. Eyewitnesses swear I pressed forth to life from my mother’s womb. Mother testified to the same every year she was alive. Her generous gift on my birthday was a phone call and a repeated litany of my excruciating offenses while navigating my way into the world. This mass of cells, nerves, muscles, bone, and water is who they identify as me to the world. They are so certain while I’ve been searching a lifetime for who I am. Where I belong. Hoping my real family will find me again.
The birth certificate attests I was born in Valdez, Alaska. Territory of the United States. A place existing only in memory, fading photographs, certified by documents worn with curiosity and handling. A location kept alive by a 3 March 1891 plat map commissioned by the land office of the United States. Important locations noted in my father’s ancient turn of the century script his great grand chlldren are no longer taught to read. “Ma’s house. Pa’s doghouse”. My sister’s starting out trailer homes. Uncle’s square on the plat.
The passport states Valdez, Alaska. The place I was born no longer exists and I ponder the pompous certainty of bureaucracy. The passport is second witness to nothingness. An underwater landslide generated by the 1964 earthquake emptied the bay with one inhalation then expelled the hoarded seawater hurling a devil’s path up through the town leaving only destruction and mud.
Birthplace: Valdez, Alaska. The idyllic small town where I was born was declared no longer safe after the earthquake and the inhabitants “relocated” four miles away. The oil port, extreme sport, tourist destination of the town now named Valdez has nothing to do with me. I have no memories to connect me with the “new” town. The extended family didn’t recover and scattered in miniature diaspora, a rupture never repaired. Only the cemetery was left undisturbed.
There is no cherished family bible with my name ceremonially entered with a firm hand to acknowledge my place as part of a lineage. After all, my brother was dead and I was only a girl. My father’s disappointment palpable as he tried to remake me as a son.
Reality is locked into two photographs. Spirit traps offer proof of who I am. Where I once belonged.
Some photographs of times past exist simply to amaze us and others open our soul for a look at what drives us, who we are and how we came to be what we are. Images piece together and verify memory bringing us our own truth long before we allow ourselves to know.
The idyllic glow of childhood conceals the town and the gang of children running carefree in the light of Alaska’s eternal summer,
I stare at two grainy photographs with a vague ache around my solar plexus and decades later still miss my father. My body leads the parade into the past.
The first photo is a front view of the house I was born into. The grasses around the house are golden, the color of fall in Alaska. The trees are bare limbed, a prescient foretelling of winter. Two stories, black tarpaper somehow held up to the bludgeoning of winter by wooden strips. A barn roofline indicates the house may well originally have been a barn. As with almost everything, wood measured larger back then, what appears to be six inch boards formed a walkway from the street up to the front door where dad knelt working at some finer point of securing the house for temperatures and snow. His body half turns and he glances back over his shoulder at me. His coarse work jacket another museum of memories, collected and catalogued remembrance of the times I leaned into his broad chest as he lifted me to what seemed the sky, I buried my face in his coarse jacket, inhaled the smell of sweat and Old Spice and felt safe.
I’m dressed in red. Red rubber boots, red corduroy pants faded to pink, a deep red, cover the butt fall coat. Red outerwear a talisman against being lost. Red can be spotted from the air or floating in the ocean. My pose forever suspended in mid-stride contrapposto and the tilt of my head evinced interest in what occupied Dad. A silk head scarf protection against the ever present mosquitos.
The door seems right sized and normal in the photo, not the heavy and enormous trap for fingers on the day my mother walked away and left me standing there for what she termed a lesson. I’ve yet to understand exactly what her point was. When the man came to deliver the heating oil, she told him through crocodile tears she was afraid to open the door and further damage my hand.
When dad returned from his stint on Thompson Pass and saw the mess of my fingers losing nails he made a hot milk and bread poultice to draw out infection then held me close. I leaned into him and wailed when his jack-of-all-trades hand engulfed my small child’s hand then submerged it into the hot, pulpy mess. In hope the nail bed would recover, he tenderly taped sewing thimbles onto each fingertip to protect from more infection and further injury.
Fingernails left me and for weeks I endured the treatment, my father supporting my back while I howled.
In the photo, curtains at the windows are closed on my parents bedroom window and I measure again in my mind snow up to the second story windows.
A boardwalk beside the street ends at our house on one side and continues into town on the other. Directly behind the house was the bay. Mountains heavy with low termination dust jutted up from the water and a glacier rose directly behind. The snow at higher elevations beautiful yet bringing a vague unease and urgency to prepare for winter.
The unexplained curiosity is an old metal garbage can sitting at the boardwalk end. Was Alaska of that era sophisticated enough for trash service? Or was the positioning to keep inquisitive bears away from the house?
The most pressing memory independent of the photographs is the boardwalks. I’ve remembered all my life the hollow echo, the slight tremor of footsteps and splintering texture of rough wood when I sat dangling my feet over the edge to ponder the deep thoughts of childhood. On one walkway constructed from the house to the outhouse, I observed one of the mysterious rituals of teenage half-sisters. They filled a large utility tub with water warmed on the cast iron house stove. Then they stood on the ground to wash their hair. In summer. I much preferred my bath in the wash tub on the kitchen table.
The second photo was taken from an upper window or the roof. The foreground records shingles missing in a few places and a gaping hole provides a view into a large, black central pit of a back porch or storage shed. Spent fireweed are a rust and pink relief, going to seed as a trusted messenger of snow due in six weeks. Three woodpiles with logs longer than a usual cut for burning, what looks to be an abandoned swing set with a basketball back board, and the outhouse. All deep in water of a high tide melded with half submerged ochre grasses and the pale, grey blue bay itself. Several ships in the deepwater port snugged up to docks, canneries and warehouses, long low buildings balancing on the stilts of wooden poles appear to be floating in the water. The snow is the same on the mountains. Deep fall.
The knowing of my origin story was there in the boardwalks, there in my longing to migrate north as soon as the air turns crisp with fall.
Scrutinizing the still vibrant colors and the sea surrounding the house I experience again the inexpressible ache for the unnameable. My Welsh ancestors have a name for this feeling. Hiraeth. A message from our soul about who we are if we only look, listen. Knowing is embedded. Admitting we know may be another, more difficult exercise. Intellectual reasoning and topography explained the call of the sea, the longing. Within the photo I feel the answer resonating in my body, an explanation of the preoccupation with returning my whole body to the sea when I die.
I was literally born into the arms of the sea and twice a day the rhythms of the tides whispered their stories to me as an infant and disclosed secrets to a young child. The sea and the moon and I are one ~ and lonely when the tides turn. I’ve tried to ignore the inexorable pull of the tides. In service to ‘normal’ I suppressed the truth of the migration resonating in my body.
I declare no more. I respect my rhythms and need for the ritual of return. I will be gone with the geese in the spring to return to the north and the cold, cold sea. Because I know who I am. And I know what I know. When I forget, the sea reminds me.
