Trucka de La Ducka

 Like flying bowling pins they came around the bend of the river at lightning speed. I rose up in fitful attempts from stiffened knees. I brought the shotgun to shoulder height, pointed it vaguely in the direction of the quacking pins and blasted. The morning air shocked the boom against a small mountain opposite the river and bounced it back threefold in strength. Woody popped up and was halfway into the water looking out expectantly for the splash, his signal to do what thousands of years of genetic programming had inspired--to leap and swim that river with feet pumping and tail rudder straight for the feathered prize.

There was no splash. The bowling pins swept out of the picture like phantoms. Woody stood amidst the river grasses up to his knees in the water looking after the disappearing ducks as if a curtain had come down prematurely on a good movie. He turned with a look that said, “What? I’ve been doing my job hovering in the cold with you for 45 minutes? And this is what I get…” I was six foot two inches of ashamed man, ashamed by a dog cheated at the height of his birthright promise, a powerful, capable, hunting dog…looking right at me with no where to go.

I never was much of a hunter. But, the stirring I had seen inside Woody from an early age—the generations of British Isles calling, the ancestors shivering on the foggy flats in the duck blinds in pre-dawn, the anticipation, the restraint, the waiting, the coming of wings, the shotgun blast, the adrenaline rush, the great plunge into icy water, the noble duty, to rush out and bring warm feathery creatures proudly back to the praising hands of the one who feeds him had led me to try, on his behalf.

Often on beach walks I had seen him instinctively look toward ducks when they flew overhead like he was hearing some ancient siren song. Then he’d turn to me, as if I had the answer. I was not a fan of killing animals. But the look of countless eons of work and desire in those dog eyes made me attempt to serve that call inside him.

“Come on man,” I said to him as I turned to walk away up the little rise to the logging road, to the truck and a warm fire back at the red cabin. At the road, I turned back. Woody was still down below in the river up to his knees, staring at me.

Two days hence my brother Louie and his wife Franny were coming to Ketchikan.  Louie had bought me my first shotgun, a Winchester 870 pump. I had been practicing at the local rod and gun club yard, hitting two out of ten skeets—on a good day. I had been training Woody with a special retriever toy that used 22 blanks and shot a hard white cylinder 75 feet out to the water. I'd make him wait, shivering with energy. When the charge exploded he would watch in absolute amazement as the white bird ascended to the sky and fell back to the ocean like an Apollo capsule returning to earth.

I'd hold him at my side by command and keep his eye on the spacecraft until it hit water. Then I’d whisper, “Woody" and he would blast off, the great leap of ages, dog-breast crashing waves and swimming unerringly to the floating capsule. He'd smack it out of the water, whip his head around immediately, paddle hard to deliver the missile to me, snorting exertion through his nostrils as he swam. He’s rise out of the water like a dripping teddy bear, shake off and then dance around the beach rocks waiting for the next blastoff. After a few months of this, I figured he was ready for the real thing. Today however, along the White river, I had failed him.

Franny and Louie and their Golden Retriever Jake arrived in Ketchikan on Alaska Airlines flight 67. I picked them up in my 21-foot Sabrecraft, the boat I had bought from my dad. The ride back from the airport was as rough as my relationship with him. The boat that had appeared in numerous recurrent dreams of mine over the years. The dream always of this very boat floating away from me, floating away from the dock. Sometimes I'd run after it. Sometimes my dad would be in it. Almost unconsciously I had bought it from him, to keep him close, I guess.

The day was sunny but blustery, 25-knot winds from the north, five-foot waves. We docked in Ketchikan—a strewn out, “industrial dump by the sea,” and made a beeline for one of Woody’s favorite hangouts, the Arctic Bar, whose logo was a couple of bears humping.  Woody bopped right in and went out back to the deck and greeted his friends, any drunks who he might engage in a little game of toss the beer cap, or might give him a bite of cocktail peperoni stick. The deck of the Arctic was a special place where crunchy Alaskans sat in afternoon glinting sun, watching the fishing boats go by, having a smoke, and looking out over at the crisp outline of trees and funky homes on Pennock Island across the Tongass Narrows.

That night in my little red cabin we laid out our provisions.  Franny was in the kitchen making up some food for the hunting trip. Jake was busy eating Woody's dog chow. Every time Woody went near his bowl Jake would shove him out of the way and gobble up as much as he could. Woody accepted such impudence with a kind tolerance, a Taoist gracefulness of being the guest in one's own home.  Louie, quiet as usual, his six-foot sturdy frame and dark brows concentrating on a task. He had the shotguns out cleaning them.  Franny was pouring water from the Jerry Jug on the kitchen sink.

Water for the red cabin came from a mile away, a creek that came down from the mountains behind town. She was a countrywoman. Blond, pretty, without an ounce of fat on her body, thin limbs and strong—a worker.  And she was six month pregnant with her first child, a kid they’d name Jeff and whom I called Goober. As she hefted the Jerry Jug back to the floor Jake and Woody began wrestling, tumbling over and lying next to each other boxing and clashing teeth. This felt good to me, a rare moment of family. For two years I had been diving deeper and deeper into solitude, just Woody and me.                  

The next morning woke cold. I had slept on the floor of a small side room shivering in my sleeping bag. I went out to the main room with its bare wood floor, simple in all respects. The main window to the beach was fogged over by the breaths of Franny and Louie and two dogs. Franny was lying on her stomach on the bed looking through a place in the window she had cleared off. A large eagle sat on the beach. His white head gleamed, his eye clear in the morning light. I made coffee, Louie fired up the woodstove. Franny, Louie and I stood looking out the window letting the coffee warm our hands and insides. The morning waves were midnight blue and crested with snowy tops that splashed in the sunlight.

Then no more than sixty feet out from us the ocean exploded. Two killer whales rose like nuclear missiles, full bodies leaping out of the water and crashing in slow motion majesty, waves rolling over the reef like a dam had broke.

I yelled and whooped. Louie said Whoa! Franny hooted. Woody and Jake popped up ready and we all tore out of the cabin running down to the beach.  There were fifteen to twenty whales in all, a large pod coming along the reef, like piano keys rising, their ebony flukes glistening in the morning sun.  Another two cetaceans leaped in front of us, towering ten feet above our heads.  Woody and Jake ran like madmen around and around in circles. We ran down the beach alongside them, our little yells and hoops swallowed in the great percussive blasts of air that blew through gargantuan slick-valved blowholes. Giant spumes of whale breath mist formed cones in the air and disappeared like snow blown off trees in a wind. We stopped where the beach sands turned to rocks and watched the Goliath's pass, the wolves of the sea, their great submarine bodies disappearing down the coast.

We took it as a momentous sign of good fortune and spent the morning expectantly packing for our trip—to a lake on Prince of Whales Island to stay in a rented Forest Service cabin—to hunt for ducks. After everything was packed up in the truck. Louie brought out a little wooden sign he had made and painted in funky white letters. He hung it down from the little shed I had built on the back of the pickup to cover the dogs and our gear in the rain.  We went off down the road in the beat up 67 Chevy, with a sign from the back swinging over Woody and Jake’s head that read: Trucka-de-la-Ducka. 

“How's the spare tire,” Louie asked? Louie always worried about flats. He was an engineer by trade, a brilliant inventor really; his mind always on goals, considering the details of what made things tick and considering contingencies, always planning ahead.

"Fine. Don't worry about it," I said. 

We took the small ferry over to Prince of Wales Island and drove up the island as the afternoon light faded. A small misty rain began to fall. Woody and Jake were happy to have their little house with a roof in the back of the truck. Their noses were rich with the smells of forest and wolf, gasoline from chain saws, sweat, marmots, heron breath and lupine. The drive was longer than we figured. By the time we got to Sweetwater Lake, it was dusk.

We parked close to the lake and hiked down to the shore and poked around with our flashlights. No cabin. We did however find a small skiff with an Evinrude 15hp on back pulled up against the shore. There was a gunshot in the bottom. We decided to borrow it and search for the cabin by water. We loaded up all our gear and dogs and six-month pregnant mom and went cruising. I used a little cedar cone to plug up the gunshot hole in the floor. The lake was beginning to freeze over, the boat had to crunch through the ice. I sat in the bow with a flashlight poking into the dark. Woody and Jake leaned forward on either side of me bristling with life; always, to them, every moment a new adventure.

The lake was dark and silent. The trees along the shoreline were tortured and twisted and seemed to reach out at us. The sound of the Evinrude echoed from the woods and advertised our presence. It gave me a spooky feeling. It seemed we were moving through some Halloween landscape, red slavering eyes about to be caught in my flashlight beam.  I took comfort in the fact I was flanked by 160 pounds of dog energy. Then we saw the cabin.  It was small and dark brown and engulfed by black trees around. It really did look like some set from a horror movie. We landed at the beach in front. There was no sound but the few small waves from the boat hitting the rocky sand shore, and the clanging of aluminum as dogs and people made for the beach. We went up onto the little porch of the cabin and opened the door.

Inside, where we expected an empty cabin were guns, playing cards, sleeping bags, Campbell’s soup cans half opened, dirty clothes strewn on the floor, a kerosene lamp, a half package of beef jerky, Rainier beer cans on the wooden table, a couple more on the floor crushed in half, a Bowie knife out of its sheath. Shotgun shells. The air smelled of burnt beans and men and oil. No one spoke. It was hard to figure out what was going on, where we were. We expected the flashlight to any moment reveal a bloody body. If I felt spooked before, we all felt downright creepy now.

Then we heard a sound, like people in a fistfight from somewhere down the beach. We went back outside. We saw flashlights waving around down the shore from where we had picked up the boat. Voices were yelling at us.

"Hey, bring that boat back here. Goddammit. Hey…Shit. Bring that boat back!" Another voice joined in and then a third. We couldn't make out the words anymore, only an angry drone. It sounded like maddened bees drunken out of their minds.

We climbed into the skiff and made our way slowly back along the watery path we had made through the broken ice. Intermittently, we could hear the men screaming and an occasional "Goddammit" floated across the lake to us.  Their flashlights poked at us like swords. As we got closer the beams cut across us. We could see the outlines of guns, three or four men. We were so vulnerable coming in to them from the water. Just three weeks before two people had been killed at a lake close by during a shootout at a Forest Service cabin. Drunken men, Alaska, guns. It felt to me like any moment a gunshot would ring out, a bullet ripping through my chest. I put my arm around Woody who sat next to me on the wooden seat. As we drew closer to the beach the drunken bees got louder.

 “Hey,” I yelled. “We got a pregnant lady here.”

The four men had their guns ready and leveled at the ground. One kid about seventeen, skinny and chewing Copenhagen rocked his 30.06 around in small circles waiting for the slightest provocation to use it.

"What the hell you taking the boat for?" sputtered a medium size guy, with a scratchy little mustache in a camouflage hunting jacket and Ketchikan Pulp Mill cap on his bald head.

"Hey,” Louie said to him with a soothing yet fatherly inflection as the boat crushed against the sand. "If you can settle down a moment, I want to explain our mistake to you guys. I don't think we pose any threat to you gentlemen.”

Woody hopped out and went over to the biggest guy of the bunch, a tire bellied black-bearded Alaskan guy and gave him a friendly body language dog hello. The guy couldn’t help himself from reaching down, petting him and returning the greeting. He laughed slightly and told his friends to calm down. Louie explained to them what was going on. How we had come here, hadn’t found the cabin, seen the boat and had borrowed it.  I told them we had the cabin reserved for the weekend. This set up a howl of protest from the guy with the crummy mustache in the pulp mill cap. “No way, we got it tonight. We got it reserved,” he said. His little mustache flicked side to side over his thin lips that were as taut as piano wires. He was in his thirties but never quite got past high school in a small town. Lot of them kind up here in Alaska.  

Stupidly, I had left the receipt for the cabin back in Ketchikan.  We worked out a negotiated settlement. The drunken bees would spend this last night in the cabin. We would camp out on the beach. Tomorrow the cabin would be ours.

It was a cold night camping out, but quiet, in crisp October air. Stars so rich in the sky they looked like champagne bubbles. I kept pulling Woody over on top of me to get some warmth.  He shuddered every now and then and dreamed of flying birds and laughing whales.

Early the next morning a big old raven woke us up to tell stories. Then we heard the outboard coming back across the river towards us. The bees were heading our way. When they hit shore, they were pretty quiet, almost sheepish. Maybe they felt a little bad for making a pregnant woman camp out on a frozen beach. They didn't apologize, but they left quickly. The skiff turned out to belong to the Forest Service.

We motored over to the cabin, swept it out and moved in.  For the next two days Louie and I cracked through the ice with the boat and tried to find ducks. But mostly we watched Woody and Jake ice skate. We sang songs and joked around and got drunk on box wine. Franny made great meals. We even shot a duck. Jake got to plunge in and bring it to us, a sad little merganser that we cooked up on a campfire and tried to eat a little of. It tasted like old sharks. We fed it to the dogs who were delighted.

By the third day, the ice had grown so thick we couldn't break through it. We decided to hike out. We packed up and walked a mile through the forest next to a small creek, beneath soft cedars and spiky spruces, avoided the spidery arms of devil’s club and picked blueberries when we could. We came out on the road a quarter of a mile from Trucka-de-la Ducka.

We piled on down the highway. It started to rain. Woody and Jake huddled together in their little condominium, dipping their noses into folds of warm fur. Louie was driving. Bumpa bumpa bump. Flat tire. There was something about my brother and flat tires. He was hexed I was sure of it.  We changed the tire and drove on.

"We better not get another one, "Louie said."  Just before sunset we pulled into Craig, a tough little fishing and lumbering town on the south of Prince of Wales Island at the base of surrounding hills denuded of all trees from the voracious unchecked logging in the Tongass. It faced the Pacific Ocean. If you could look far enough across the harbor you might see the fishing fleet in Yokohama.  We checked into a hotel. The next morning we would have to make the two-hour drive to catch the ferry in Hollis to take us to Ketchikan.

We put Jake and Woody into the front of the Chevy and walked up the street toward the Hill Bar, a frame building that looked like an oversized house painted pink with gargantuan deer horns—maybe dinosaur’s horns—presiding over the front door. As we walked down the muddy street Jake and Woody sat behind in the truck like Pharaohs, motionless with intense eyes beaming onto us, dog minds full of miscomprehension, serious long nosed faces arrested in noble indignation: "How could you possibly be walking away from us? You obviously didn't mean to forget us? How could you possibly go somewhere without taking us?" 

The Hill Bar was a big dark wood place. You smelled the residue of a thousand weekend fights, blood and bad beer ground into the wood floor, and swashed out each morning with an old mop. We picked a table over on the side. Louie went up and got some beers. Out the window we could see the big gray door of the day's coffin ready to close as the clouds lost their light. Seiners at the dock had turned on their 1000-watt quartz lamps and turned the dock into a Hollywood set. As Louie sat back down with the round of four-dollar beers we started to laugh about the adventures of the past three days.

A shadow arose over the table. I looked up to my left to find this enormous dark wall standing there, this huge man like a three hundred pound sack of black beans, looking down directly at Franny.  She sat at the end of the table on the opposite side from me, Louie beside her. Our conversation dwindled under the gaze of the dark leviathan before us. Maybe he was the guy who killed the dinosaur over the door. His head was the size of a large and spoiled pumpkin. Surrounding the pumpkin was thick hair so black it seemed stolen from the darkest fibers of the earth. He was a walking black hole. He could block out the sun with a fist.  He had a fierce mustache and beard like black steel wool. We couldn't see his lips, just a dark maw where his mouth was supposed to be.

"The abyss," he said, his voice slowly rumbling out from the catacombs of his mountainous body.  The abyss. That's all he said. Then he sat down.  I had to move over to accommodate him. He took up two thirds of the table. He stared at Franny with a hunger. She returned his stare not showing any fear but rather disinterest, like she wasn't convinced he existed.

The abyss spoke again. "The pretty bird flies in the petrified air.” He spoke like some dark prophet. "Everything is frozen like steel,” he said. “A man works. And the workin’ man is kept down. Little men fall. Legs crossing the river stumble. We step on the bodies to survive.” The abyss waited for this to sink in.

"Well yeah, it’s like that isn't it," I said in a half joking tone trying to befriend the dark wall next to me. “And sometimes we take a swim ourselves."  He turned slowly towards me acknowledging my existence for the first time. He looked at me the way a man might look down on a fly on the table just before slamming its guts with a big palm. His forearms were bigger around than my neck.

“Hey he was only kidding,” Louie said, deflecting the dark wall's attention away from me. “He didn't mean anything by it.”

The wall looked at Louie and then over to Franny. He towered over her. She looked like a small deer caught in the headlights.  I wasn't afraid for her though. I knew if it really came down to it—if Franny got threatened and fired up—she could stare down a brown bear. What's more, she’d make a huge scene and a posse would be at her side in no time, a dozen strangers ready to defend her. I wasn't so confident about my chances though, or Louie's for that manner. Subterranean danger seeped from the pores of this dark slab of meat.

"A man can do anything he wants," he began again slowly like thick blood, "A man can work, man can search, can try to cross the great river. But always, no matter how he tries, the man comes face to face with the abyss."  There was silence at the table. None of us knew where to take this.

"The abyss," he said.  There is only the abyss." He looked at Louie a long time and again at Franny. Then he got up from the table, turned his back as big as the night sky and went and sat down at the bar.

Franny, Louie and I didn’t say a word. I took one more huge slug of beer and we three beat it out the door. Outside when we were safe, we couldn’t hold back laughing and we stumbled back to Trucka-de-la-Ducka. We snuck Jake and Woody into the hotel room, taking them around the back and pushing them in through the window. We all slept cozy that night and tried hard not to dream about the abyss.

The next day we got up and packed to go to the ferry.  To our astonishment and dismay, Trucka-de-la-Ducka had another flat tire. Impossible! Louie, for all his gifts and talents and attributes in life has one terrible karma to bear. In some prior life he must have run around loosening up wheels on chariots before the big races in old Rome or something.  I never get flat tires; for three years not one—and in one sixteen hour period we had two.

We had just enough time to get to the Hollis ferry with about twenty minutes to spare. I set out to jack the truck up and Louie took the other flat and went off down the street to find somebody to fix it. It was 8AM on a Sunday. I wasn’t feeling hopeful. Maybe we would get stuck in the abyss after all. Louie was lucky enough to find a little auto repair shed. He beat on the door of an adjoining apartment until a guy opened it. The guy assessed the damage and reported, "Them's are split rim tires. I can't touch those."

"Who can?” Louie asked.

“Well maybe try JD around the corner."

JD turned out to be one of the few experts in the world on split rim tires in Craig at 8:10 am on a Sunday. Took him twenty minutes and we had us a tire. We put it back on, waved good-bye to Craig and the Abyss and hauled across the island as fast as Trucka-de la-ducka could barrel us. Woody and Jake stood on opposite sides of the truck, their noses pointed forward, eyes blinking back the wind, joy and exuberance everywhere reading the day’s clues and happenings through hyper sensitive noses at fifty miles an hour. The absolute freedom of it all. We made the Hollis ferry with five minutes to spare.

A note

Hello dog readers,

This week we’ve had to move from our house and everything is in chaos of boxes and balls in the air.  So in place of a further adventure of woody the dog, I have two things to tell you. The first is how I’m going to proceed from here on out and the second has to do with a mountaintop encounter with Kali herself who made me change my life and led to these writings.

First, I will tell you that I am abandoning the chapter structure from here on out. Kali herself told me to write as the spirit flows and write whatever part of the story emerges in muse time. This would, she said honor the inspiration of the moment and keep me in the joy flow of writing. Ordering, editing and deletion, she said, can happen after. So, beginning next week, the stories will be nonlinear in order. Later they will comprise a book of hopefully ordered demeanor.

Now about Kali on the mountain. This past April, Sophie and I made a quick climb up Mt Si near North Bend. It’s a leg burner, four miles, 4,000 feet elevation. The final 1,000 feet was slushy slippery snow. Up top, was radiant, a spring blue clear all the way to Mt. Rainer 100 miles to the south.

As we headed down, I started to talk about my life in Alaska. “I always figured I’d write about it, don’t quite know what happened.” 

“Why don’t you write?” she said. “People would love to hear about that time in your life. Look how many people read your travel blog in Asia.”

“ I know, but it seems like I’ve lost so much…” I replied.  I stopped to tie my bootlaces. Sophie walked on, a bit imperiously it seemed.  I followed, expecting to see her around the next corner waiting, but no, she had kept on. I hurried up and found the same empty trail at the next switchback. After ten minutes I began to wonder if I hadn’t passed by her. A young couple was hoofing up the mountain.   “Did you see a woman in a red coat?” I asked. The fellow thought a moment, “Yes,” he said, “A ways down.”

“Wow, I thought, she’s really booking.” I picked up the pace until I was nearly trotting, determined now to catch up with her. Another ten minutes and I turned a sharp switchback. There in the middle of the trail stood a fearsome figure.

Dressed in red, a woman that once had looked like my wife stood. Gone was her sweet and gentle demeanor. Her head was tilted down, her blue eyes turned dark and piercing. Her legs were spread apart with no way to get by her.

When I was three feet away, her arm jutted out with her finger pointed directly at my heart. “YOU!” She boomed. Her teeth had become fangs; hot saliva was dripping onto the cold forest floor.

“YOU! REGRETFUL WRITER,” she bellowed.  The woman who once was my wife seemed to tower over me, as if she had sprouted two feet taller from the sheer force of her simmering rage.

Kali jabbed the air again and reached inside my chest to grab hold of my beating heart. Like an Aztec priestess she held my life force in her hands as I lay on the altar.

“YOU REGRETFUL WRITER…,” words echoed through the woods, giving any bears emerging from hibernation second thoughts. A voice that made the cones fall prematurely from the Douglas firs and squirrel babies have nightmares for weeks. “…SHALL NOT PASS!”

Her eyes blazed with dripping blood from my severed head, steam poured from her nostrils and her arm made a sweep along the ground that made it clear that should I try and pass, my soul would beg for release from its bodily cage, no torment imagined by god, man or woman would compare.

And so I did. I laid it down right there. I vowed to leave behind the 100-pound rucksack of my regret. All the years I packed it around waiting for I don’t know what. All the years I felt as if I couldn’t start because there was just too much, I had written in too many journals, packed it away in too many boxes. I had forgotten too much.

I dropped it all, like a heavy wet wool coat, I flung it off behind me, grabbed Kali and kissed her black tongue and took it inside me until I was infused with her crystalline purpose.

She relaxed then satisfied at my offering and returned my lovely gentle wife to me. I help a spontaneous funeral right there on the trail half way down Mt. Si for my regretful writer and on that spot I vowed to begin my Woody the dog blog and to have a book ready to read by November 1, 2012.

Chapter 5 - Dog on Deck

I stood at the railing of the ferry looking back at Seattle in the Friday evening twilight, a cloudless, effervescent white-orange blued sky.  Cars and trucks rattled along the Alaskan Way viaduct like Roman chariots.

One last time I looked up at the black box of the Seafirst building looming over the waterfront. I remembered those surreal elevator rides rocketing up through a dark steel hull planted on the hillside where once Douglas Fir giants lived.  Like water pumped up a giant trunk, accountants and lawyers in stifling suits pressed between layers of going nowhere dreams, walked from one box into another, sequestered into glass splintered offices with hissing conditioned air. 

I pitched my tent on the open deck and added a little addition to one end which would be Woody's suite, his playground, his living quarters for the next 36 hours. One small issue was that dogs weren’t allowed above deck.

That night in our little tent house, I fell asleep to the open water crush of large waves breaking, and a harmonica player blowing out sweet little notes. I fell away and dreamed, Woody at my head, his deep little doggie breaths eased in and out like a child’s.

The morning came, a cradle rocking clear and ebullient, the sun rising over cedar woman hills. Little Woody bounded in and pounced on my head. But I had to keep him in the tent all day and all night or he would get taken below into the soon to be sweltering car deck.

Outside, sleeping bag and bedroll characters spread out randomly. There were tripped out hipsters, journal writing loners, sleeping lovers, Eddie Bauer dressed outdoorsers, big-gut backwoods black bearded guys and girthy cigarette-voiced Alaskan roller derby queens. Strolling through this menagerie were a few cardigan and slicker wearing grey haired boxtowners who came out of their staterooms to snap pictures of us oddities.

The day was full, hanging around on the sunny decks—hotter and hotter, listening to guitar players, eating grocery sack food, and entertaining my stowaway prince dog of boundless energy inside the tent when he woke from one of his ten naps.  I got him somewhat to figure out where to take a pee, over in the corner on the newspapers and away from the groceries.  After that we played chew on hand, tug at socks, and other exciting games. 

Eventually, he would tire himself out and collapse on his back, his legs splayed open, surrounded by a collage of Triscuit boxes, paper towel roles, paper sacks, and beer bottles. He lay out amidst his trash heap, sawing logs like a drunken logger.

Next day, in the early afternoon, strangely the ferry turned around. It followed a meandering path back across the large open channel. We learned that a large English sheepdog down in the car deck had jumped out of the small round open window at the end of the deck to escape the suffocating heat. We all stood at the railing searching the open seas for his black head swimming frantically. I thanked my instinct for not keeping Woody below.

The English sheepdog was never seen again and the ferry slowly turned back to its northbound journey. A somberness passed into the souls of everyone on deck it seemed, an unspoken understanding of how deep a loss a dog can be.

It was growing stifling hot inside the tent and I left the flap open. When Woody escaped out of it one time I thought said, "Oh fuck it, let's see what happens."

Woody headed out into a new world of sea wind, sunshine heat, smells, friendly faces and AstroTurf under his little black foot pads.  Our tent and deck friends all around beamed approval at the appearance of our gangly exuberant eyed friend.  Woody wandered from one new object to the next, each a new country of smells: a boot, a Styrofoam cup of coffee, a backpack, a Walkman, a pair of sweatpants, a dangling hand from a snoring bearded guy. 

Against the rail, two young women sat in the sunshine spread out on their sleeping bags.  When they spied Woody they erupted in that quick, high cooing and bubble that women are apt to do in the presence of babies and puppies.  They called Woody to them, clucking and oohing and making the most ridiculous faces.  This excitement created the intended effect from the object of their affections.  Woody, all tail wagging and bright eyes, bumped straight towards them. 

He climbed up onto their soft sleeping bags. The women were delighted reaching forward, saying, "Ohh isn't he cuuuuuute", in this inhumanly altered pitch.  Just then Woody stopped short, squatted and laid out a huge stream of puppy pee right in the middle of their bags.  With their hands stretched out to embrace him the clucking of the two women stopped short, their faces changing from glee to shock to disgust.

Woody hopped off and rambled back to my feet wagging contentedly. I made all due manner of apology, but had to bite down a laugh from the innocence of it all. I had to clean it up fast and get around the corner and to let it out.  Woody the dog had shown me the first stirrings of his unerring clown skills.

Over the course of the next two days, I determined to be a little more vigilant on any further forays from the tent. I made a kind of game out of it, walking behind Woody as close as possible not looking where we were going but straight down on him as he bumped along in a crazy creative zigzag all over the deck checking out everything, making friends with everybody he met.  The two women didn't cluck and coo any more when he cruised by them but stared at me as if I were the antichrist.

It was getting on towards late afternoon of our second day at sea, cooling down at last, everyone on deck mellow and peaceful.

I was taking my rightful place behind Woody on his stroll, through tennis shoes and boots and books, and ice chests, a ball of yarn, and t-shirts, and a little baby’s face, who squealed when Woody slobbered his face with a quick little tongue. He scattered a Monopoly game (in progress) and turned over a Coke can, passed through wood shavings from a bearded man whittling, sniffed a wet towel, and nosed himself happily to a big black boot and began sniffing the end of. I followed the boot up to an ankle and then a black pant leg and up to an officer’s coat and hat on top of a big red face right in front of me that opened up its mouth and bellowed, "WHAT THE HELL IS THAT DOG DOING ABOVE DECK!"

"Um, oh" I stammered a bit. "It’s ah pretty hot.”

"YOU WILL GET THAT DOG DOWN BELOW NOW!” Mad shipman erupted in my face.

"Okay, yes," I said, scooping Woody up. Mad officer began to lead me away.

"Let me uh, get his box," I said, and turned back and walked to the tent. Mad officer heeled and followed me back the whole way. He stood in front of the tent as I bent down to unzip it. I reached inside for his shoe box, grabbed it, turned my body momentarily so mad officer couldn't see what I was doing, took the lid off, threw Woody across the tent, put the top on the box, zipped up the tent and stood up box in hand to face our accuser.

He then most officiously led us back along the ship. All of our new deck friends, said, "Bye Woody." I was led down three flights of stairs to the car deck, all the while carrying an empty box talking to it, “Its okay buddy. You’ll be alright.”

It had to be 95 degrees down there. “I’m worried he won’t make it in this heat,” I said.

“Keep a window open and you can come down every two hours when the deck is open to let him out,” Mad officer told me with no chance of parole. He proceeded to tell me all the regulations I had broken and what he could do to me for breaking them. I opened the car door, put the empty box on the seat, cracked open a window and said, “Bye Woody.” I backed out and quickly shut the door.

"Okay,” I said to mad officer, “I am really sorry about that.”

He left me and I went back up to the deck to stop Woody’s little squeak barks from getting us in a heap of trouble.

After dinner, I came out of the tent for a break and walked around the deck. An Alaskan fellow about 40 years old with a baseball cap was stretched out in a chaise lounge reading a book. He looked over the top of it, "Tell me something,” he said.

I raised my eyebrows.

"Was there anything in that box you took below?"

I shrugged my shoulders. Our little secret.  The guy nodded, let out a wry grin and went back to his book.

As the twilight began to play moonlight and silver on the water tops and the shoreline sent back only a message of deepened peace, I felt like my life had just begun.

Chapter 4 - Dog with a parachute

I sat in the Seattle library researching dogs. My head swam with setters and blue healers, shepherds, huskies and Burnoose mountain dogs. And when I was ready to just flip a coin, I came upon a hardbound book written in 1965 with a handsome prince-like black dog on the front. The Complete Labrador Retriever it said and it was written with an English countryside formality and had pictures on the back cover of groups of men in foggy fields wearing shooting coats, fedoras and leather gloves, with noble attentive Labrodors waiting at their feet. They looked like winged messengers to me.

I opened it at random and my fate was sealed. For there on page 119 was a black and white photograph of a yellow Labrador retriever in an airplane during the Second World War. He was perched at an open door with a parachute on its back. His master dressed in British army fatigues was steadying the dog to help him get a clear jump. And on this dog’s face, 10,000 feet above some dusty landscape was a face of fearless intent, full to the brim with loyalty and excitement, a readiness to do whatever job it was. The caption described him as a member of the 104^th airborne canine division. I didn’t need to read anything else from the pipe-smoking author about these dogs. Any dog amazing enough to parachute on command was the dog for me. I wanted a retriever, a working dog, someone to go with me into the deep woods of Alaska, a dog to leap into adventures with.

A week later, I was with my friend, Dog Lady in her little yellow Toyota truck with a canopy top and a back end full of horse tending gear, saddle pieces, bits, brushes, and the smell of dry hay.  Dog Lady was a veterinarian assistant, someone who seemed to be more at home with animals than humans, a friend from college days. Country pretty, innocent and slightly shy. She had straw blond hair, magnetic blue eyes and an olive-browned complexion. I had long been attracted to her, but was too afraid to be direct about it.

We drove out of Seattle along some back roads for a while, as the sunlight turned her skin warm and tropical and her soft hair blew in the wind.  I wanted to reach out for her, put my hand on her warm leg, only a foot away—but my gut got tangled up and I had to look out the window at the tall conifers passing by as the sun specked through the limbs.

The guy on the phone had told me there were eleven pups in all, but that he was going to hold on to the pick of the litter for himself.  I didn't even know what pick of the litter meant.  We arrived at a big two-story place with evergreens all around and a large fresh grassy backyard where a great gangly gaggle of Labrador puppies clowned and lounged in the afternoon sun. 

Off to the side in some shade by a tree lay Brandy Pride of Postelwait, the bride of a certified Labrador champion named Nickelodeon.  A group of little vanilla colored pups sucked on her teats, drunk on the warm blood milk. Brandy Pride looked off lazily with a noble bearing like she was Isis, queen mother of the gods.

I wandered around the yard, looking at head size, paw size, brightness of eyes—not really knowing at all what I was doing—but following a checklist I had found in a book under a section called “choosing your Labrador pup.” Dean the owner of these dogs, a middle aged guy of average height and a reserved bearing, made it clear he did not raise dogs for money but rather to keep the strain of Labrador’s in the world clear of poor breeding. He raised labs as a craft and out of love, he told us. Beneath his studied demeanor he emitted hints he was not about to let go one of his prize doggies to some dope.

"She's a beauty," I said nodding toward Brandy Pride.

"She's a fine animal," he said and picked up a red rubber ball. Like an invisible signal through racing through the atmosphere Brandy Pride became instantly alert, eyes peeled onto that red ball.  Dean tossed it over a fence. In a motion that had no beginning and no end Brandy left behind a scatter of sprawling milk sputtering babes and covered the 45 feet in one movement leaping over the four-foot-high fence—her front legs jutted out like Wonder Woman flying and her back legs tucked in like a rabbit’s—clearing the top board by an inch, a portrait of exquisite grace. She nabbed the ball, hopped back over into the yard effortlessly and plopped down to assume her regal pose while hungry little puppy tongues scrambled back towards her languorous nipples.  I looked wistfully at Dog Lady’s silhouette standing beneath a tree and I envied those pups greatly.

I wandered around the yard looking at one puppy to the next. I have heard all the stories how, when a person entered the room, a puppy had come right up to them and they just knew it was their dog—some cosmic connection became immediately apparent. I didn't feel any of that.  But I did notice this one little guy sniffing at my foot and wagging his tail. Most of the other pups were lounging around aimlessly. This one had a real nice head—well proportioned with sunbeams in each eye.  I picked him up. He didn’t lick me in the face like in those cute doggy commercials; he just grunted at the pressure I was exerting on his milk fat little puppy gut. But in his eye I saw the look of a dog parachutist.

I put him down and walked around some more before sauntering over Dean's way.

“I'm from Alaska,” I said trying my best backwoods nonchalance and self-confidence. “I live in the rain forest in Southeast,”

Dean nodded his head but remained silent.

"Good healthy country for a water dog,” I said. Dean nodded. I looked out over his brood of little vanilla drunkards and just stood there with him for a while. 90% of getting something you want is right timing. The other 10% is luck. I stepped over to where my new little friend was, picked him up looked him over with a critical eye. I looked in both his ears, though I had no idea why. I looked under his gums at his teeth. Yep there were teeth there and they were white.

“I’m taking a liking to this one," I told Dean.

Dean let out a little blast of air like an old cowboy would to humor a new wrangler to town. Between a stalk of straw hanging out of his teeth, he said,  "That’s the pick of the litter. That’s the one I’m not going to part with."

A whole bunch of things happened inside me at once in that moment standing in a sunset afternoon grassy yard with a dog under my arm and a reluctant owner six feet away. My heart began beating faster. I felt beginner’s pride that in one chance out of eleven; I had picked out the best of the crop. Though I had been only partially settled on the dog when I picked him up, Dean’s refusal now made me want him more. All of this happened in the space of a tail wag. I had to hold it in beneath an accountant’s inscrutable face and act like it was no big deal.

I put Woody down and walked back slow like to old cowboy Dean.

"Yeah, well I'm kind of attached to him,” I say.  “Big mistake!” the gerbils inside my brain screamed out. Negotiation error number one. I had let out my attachment way too early and with too much energy, too much want.  You gotta be able to walk away. I could see Dean's resolve harden in his face. He sensed the strength of my interest and matched it with his ever more firm resolution to not let go.

"Not that one." He said with finality.

This had the effect of making me absolutely convinced I had to have this one dog, even though there were ten equally fine other pooches meandering around.

"Aw, you have all these others left,” I said easing into a friendlier tone with failed jocularity.

"You have all those others to choose from," countered the old cowboy curtly.

God, now I wanted that dog so much it hurt. Dean’s obstinate refusal made me nearly obsessive. To the outside world, though my face still belied the calm of a country pond, the gerbils were shouting like they were on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. I looked back at Queen Isis for a while and then at Dean. He was looking away at the woods beyond his yard.  No opening. Big impasse.

I pulled out a photo of the little red cabin and showed it to Dean. “He'll be living in the best outdoors," I said. "Good Labrador country.” I paused struggling for something more to say. “Lots of ducks," I added weakly.

Dean stood there looking at the photo. He said nothing.  He seemed to be getting impatient. Long moments passed in silence, the warm summer breeze blew pine smells mixed with cut grass and puppy breath.  I wrestled for something else to say but was growing too nervous, the spool of yarn in my gut tangling up. I felt everything in my life teetering on this one moment. I was sure felt Dean was about to tell me to get back on my horse and get outta town.

Enter the angel of providence. From out of the heavens, it seemed to me, came a voice. It came from inside the house through an open screen door. It was a woman’s voice. "Oh for God's sake Dean, let him go." It was Dean’s wife who had been silently surveying the entire negotiations. She emerged from inside to the back porch.  "You got more dogs than you know what to do with."

Dean didn’t say a thing. He didn’t look up at her or acknowledge her presence. He just kept looking at the photograph of the red cabin

"Shut up Ward, Don’t say a thing,” commanded all the gerbils in unison. “Not a word!" I hung on the precipice of the exquisitely tense moment.

Dean looked over to the woods again. He sighed. "Well, I'm going to have to charge you more for that one," he said at last.

"Hmm" I said slowly like this was a bit of a problem for me. I took a deep breath and squinted my eyes a bit and deliberately rubbed my chin. Inside I'm screaming, “Hot diggity dog! Hot diggity fucking yeah!” Right then I felt like I could have run over and really told Dog Lady what I thought about her and kissed her right on her gorgeous lips. 

"How much?” I said slowly and a bit troubled.

"Dean thought for a bit. “Three hundred.”

I looked down like I was thinking this through, but was surer than ever that I really was going to kiss Dog Lady as soon as we got out of there. "Okay" I said, “I can handle that."

We all went inside. Dean’s wife coaxed the last of his grumblenss from him, wine came out in celebration and so did scrapbooks full of dog pictures and pedigree charts. I paid Dean and we parted all smiles and friends. I had to leave the pup for a few more weeks until he was weaned from the Earth Mother’s tit. 

Back in the truck, still parked in the driveway, I was overflowing with joy. I looked over at Dog Lady, She was talking about how wonderful that new little dog was, and how nice those people were.  I couldn't hear a thing. I started to move toward her, my heart pumping out the back of my neck.  At that moment, almost by instinct, she put the truck in reverse and I hesitated. She looked in the side mirror to back out. I went to reach for her hand on the gearshift when a wave of anxiety as big as a tsunami flushed over me. I thought I would faint. The yarn in my abdomen had turned to ropes and had lassoed every muscle in my body. Dog Lady pulled the truck out and we drove away. 

Two weeks later, I returned to Dean's and picked up my new little buddy. Driving away through the country roads I took him out of his box and put him on my lap. He sat there sniffing around, his warm milk smell wafting up to me with the cool air coming in the window, and just then a Woody Guthrie song came on the radio.

As I looked down on this fresh little perfect bundle of bright vanilla soft fur, with the two of us heading out over open road, some feeling came over me like a soft sheet. It felt like the greatest adventure of my life had begun. “Woody,” I said quietly. And felt its sound come from inside me as if it had always belonged there. It moved out in to the afternoon sky as another bird song, something sweet that sang the world into clearer focus and infinite goodness and possibility.

“Woody,” I said again.

Chapter 3 - The Little Red Cabin

The water rocked me gently. I lay alone in the bunk of a houseboat in Ketchikan inside my sleeping bag listening to waves galunk against the hull. I felt safe, maybe for the first time in my life. I felt safe that no one else in the world knew where I was in that moment. There was no one there to feel I had to please, no one there I had to get to like me, no one to give me a grade.

For a month the waves had rocked away the confusion of my Boxtown life. The three-piece suit masquerade, the constant attention to clock-time, to keep myself, “billable.” Away from the force field of a family that felt like strangers. Away from the noise of cars, the passing of jets, the ringing of phones.

I was still accounting, but at least for Alaskan Natives and not boxtowners. I had taken a job as a controller for Cape Fox Corporation, A Tlingit Indian company a few miles south in a little town called Saxman.

The sun had poked its wintry head above Deer Mountain. I pulled on a pair of pants that were as cold as frozen pasta. I crunched over frost sunbacklit on the dock, like shimmering fur, blue, silver and red in the dawn. I fired up the little Volkswagen Rabbit the company had leant me and scraped ice off the windshield with a piece of broken PVC pipe I found next to the dock.

A woman from Saxman had told me about a cabin out north she thought had been abandoned. It sounded intriguing. I drove passed the Mecca tavern and to a dirt road about thirteen miles out of town that dipped and curved down toward the unseen ocean. Around one corner, a dog popped its head out of the bushes. It was a Norwegian elkhound and it appraised me malevolently as I drove by. In a few short months he would be known as the “Devil Dog” and would become Woody’s arch-enemy.

I found the little clearing in the trees the woman told me about and pulled in. I stood a moment listening to the stillness of the waking day. A two-foot wide wooden ramp led steeply down into the dark woods. There were no railings and it was a four to five foot drop on either side. A few remnants of green sandpaper skid pads held in tatters by nails remained on the boards. The ramp was wet, as was everything perpetually in this forest where it rained thirteen feet a year.

I picked my way carefully down. At the bottom of the ramp, I turned and bounced over a series of boards suspended over the mucky ground that ran a narrow path between dark hemlocks.  Each board was tilted a different direction, one to the left, the next to the right, each lower or higher than the next succeeding board.

This maze of boards etching a funky path through these woods would become for five years an obstacle course I learned to walk and even run over sometimes in the pitch dark, by way of something I came to call "foot seeing." This involved a meditative awareness and trust to go forward, keeping my eyes not down, but up and to the trees looking for the subtle gradations of the darkness between the treetops and the sky to steer my feet by.

I walked slowly through the forest and heard the ocean washing through the trees. It stopped me in my tracks. The waves seemed to reach inside to my own internal tidal flow, some mysterious ebbing and flowing that did not know about clocks or spreadsheets. I swayed to the music of it and took perhaps the first deep breath in my life.

I watched the slight breeze jostle the delicate hemlock branches. I allowed my sight to unfocus slightly and see the pattern of many tree limbs bending, bowing, dancing, silent together, endless. Without knowing it at the time I had stumbled upon a practice that would heal me for many years. It had something to do with the dance of every present moment in the wilderness. It was a place without thought, simply a watching of movement, the breathing sounds of the wave’s undulations over the reef.  I was suspended in time.

Some unrest pulled me out of this beauty trance. Around one more bend of trail I could see the sun spilled sparkle of water flash between dark limbs swaying.  I breathed the breeze flowing gently upwards from the sea. Then I saw the cabin, a faded wine red. The roof hung down over the forest like a hat brim pulled down above the outline of a door, like a shadowy eye.

I walked inside and found myself in a rough little kitchen with an oil stove at one side. A rusted out iron-frying pan sat in the sink. I tried the faucet. Nothing. The kitchen was open to the main room, a rectangle about twelve by twenty feet. It was littered with detritus from some beer-canned transient who had been using the place. There was a moldy torn cotton sleeping bag, an old red vinyl recliner chair, and a Leave It to Beaver style 50’s couch gone bad with some raunchy porn magazines strewn about.

It felt slightly dangerous to be there. And yet it was clearly abandoned. The air smelled of slightly rotted wood that had been dried to sweetness by the window sun.  The source of light for the cabin was a lovely picture window like looking through a Nikon viewfinder. Outside the window stood a rickety old porch flecked with faded paint. Rimming the porch were sweet green hemlock, cedar, and spruce limbs. I kept expecting to hear footsteps, to wake up from this dream. 

The cabin sat up twenty feet above the beach, to where a set of crotchety stairs descended. An old unstable picnic table rested in the middle of the porch.  Below, and beyond the trees, waves were peeling across a black rock reef. The sea spread out onto the horizon held down by pale blue distant mountains. In the center of all this water—an intermittent spark, a crack of white lightning.

This was the light that would frame my consciousness, my thoughts, for five years. The lighthouse beam that would take on the proportions of my heart, would settle me with its presence, would frighten me at times as it silently filled the pitch dark of the cabin blazing everything with a Hitchcockian light before sinking me once again into a sea of total blackness.

The little red cabin had found me. Now it was time to get a dog.

Chapter 2 - A Fire on Fourth Avenue

 It was five o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon. I looked up high as the Seafirst building’s walls receded like train tracks blackly into the sky. In each of its little windows held a person separating the world into numbers and slicing truth into right and wrong.

My face was painted mime white and I wore black jeans, a black t-shirt, a black vest, and white gloves.  In front of me on the sidewalk stood a mannequin dressed in my dark pinstripe wool suit. I drew a large circle in chalk around him. A small crowd began to appear. I carefully buttoned his vest and put a hat on his head. I picked up a child’s small watering can with little flowers on it that I had bought at a toy store and began to sprinkle him. I hoped the smell of gasoline would not carry too far in the breeze.

I lifted up his hat and poured over his head, pulled out his belt buckle and dribbled onto his private parts. A lady in the crowd let out a laughing gawk. I then took a deep bow and deftly flicked a lighter. My friend went up like a Buddhist monk protesting a war. The crowd scattered and screamed and I ran.

I ripped around the corner to Seneca street and across into a small alley. I burned along it in my black Chuck Taylor’s and at the end ran down and jumped into a Chevy station wagon my friend Dewey was driving. I threw myself in the back between the seats and yelled, “Go! Go! Go! as we zipped out. I made him go around the block as I lifted myself up to see out the window, a flaming accountant in front of a big black monolithic boxtown coffin and tore out of that city never looking back.

I shook awake from my combustible daydream on the back deck of the Alaskan State Ferry on its way to Ketchikan. The sun was out and the air clear and buttery. Surrounded by my audit bags, I looked out on tents of people who had camped for the three day ride, many chatting quietly, eating, reading or playing Grateful dead music. A lot of us watched a colorful group of kids playing hacky sack. They were amazing.

I pushed aside my fears of rejection and discomfort and stepped into the circle. One kid kicked the small multi-colored sack a dozen times acrobatically before popping it expertly over to a girl in dreads who kneed it and flicked it with her ankle to a big guy who bounced it off his chest, to his knee and then from one foot to another before careening it to his pal who shot it my way.

I saw it coming, all eyes on me, out of place in my slacks and blue button up shirt. I kicked it with my left foot and watched along with everyone else as it sailed in slow motion over the rail and into the endless ocean of the Inside Passage and sink evermore out of sight. A kid in a rainbow colored t-shirt ran to the rail and moaned pitifully, “No!  That was my special sack. My dad made it for me and I’ve had it five years!” He and his friends looked forlornly into the sea, then walked away from me without a word. “Sorry,” I stammered weakly.

I was on my way to a small Haida village called Kassan to do an audit of their Native Corporation. In boxtown when I first heard that the firm had jobs up in Indian villages in Alaska I raised my hand and said, “Give me every one of those.” The other accountants wanted to stay in the city, to audit banks and manufacturing companies and scoffed at my Alaskan dreams. For me it was simple: a way out of the box.

Deep-forested islands passed by. Mile after mile through the Canadian islands, now and again we passed a lone cabin or a very small village.  I felt I could reach down into the ink-blue sea and scoop up a handful of liquid dark velvet to clothe some handsome young woman in. On some rocks a half dozen seals snoozed. Following along in the wake some Dall porpoises raced and soared. What magical world had I fallen into?

The magic melted as we pulled into the industrial heap called Ketchikan. Its hillsides were tortured and rock and busted machinery lined the waterway. It was coming on late night and I was able to get one of the last rooms near the ferry terminal at the Landing Hotel. I went downstairs to the bar where a roomful of locals were beginning to drink themselves into oblivion. I had the best they had: a three dollar can of Budweiser and ate some grease-covered fish and chips and made it up to my room where I fell eventually into a fitful sleep.

At three in the morning my room was attacked, someone yelling and screaming, a crash of glass. Heart beating like an engine room, I shot up and flicked on the light. The room was empty. Then I heard, “You fucking asshole!!! I hate your fucking guts!” And a crash again of glass. It was a couple in the room next door to me. “Shut up bitch!” A guy roared. “Leave me alone.” And another crash. A slurred argument continued all night from the lovebirds despite me pounding on the wall and I didn’t get a wink more sleep.

In the morning I piled my audit bags into a Cessna 185 floatplane and was soon above the turmoil twelve cylinders rap-a-papping against my headached cranium. Below I could see toy fishing boats, tugs and a small sailboat plying the waters of the Tongass Narrows. I could see over to Gravina Island and the green-grey graveled surface of the airport runway. Between it and Ketchikan ran a small ferry that looked like a floating Birkenstock. A flock of seagulls jumped out of our way and as the engine settled into its cruising speed. I began to relax a bit.

We made our way up the channel toward Clover Passage. Had I known it, if I had looked down, 13 mile north of town was a little abandoned red cabin by the sea where Woody and I would one day live.

We headed north and west out across Clarence Straight. A single fishing boat unzipped the channel with its wake. We then curved a long deep drop into a half moon bay on Prince of Whales Island. The pontoons hissed as we slid along the water and the pilot dropped me off on the end of a long dock. He unloaded my bags and shoved off. The big pistons fired up and soon the plane was thrumming its way like a large hornet into the blue morning. As its drone slid out of earshot, I turned to survey my surroundings. Tall spruce, cedar and hemlock trees ringed the beach. I saw a building here and there but otherwise the place seemed was deserted.

An enormous bald eagle slowly and large-winged wrapped itself across the prehistoric sky. A seal popped its head up and stared at me in my white button down shirt and two audit bags on the dock, then blinked incomprehensively and slipped again into the quiet dark bay.  From somewhere, a raven let off a sound like a giant knocking on a large hollow door, echoing off the trees and the surrounding green hillside.

Something hit me between the eyeballs, something that would not let up for the next fourteen years. It was this: the gourmet air and water of this Alaskan land. An almost preternatural brilliance and clarity of the light. I felt as if I was looking at the world through newfound eyes. Through my nostrils poured the freshest sea cooled air imaginable. Inside, I sensed something I had been seeking all my life: freedom, the freedom of being out here, amidst the raw world beauty and not a building in site. Nothing for an elevator to rise in, only trees and mountains to climb.

From the far side of the bay I spotted movement. A four wheel all terrain vehicle rolled itself along the beach and over a few stray drift logs. It made its way to the dock and putted out to me. A smiling older Indian man with a crew cut said “Hi, I’m Louie. Pile aboard.”

Louie turned out to be the president of the company I had come to audit. I wondered what the boxtowners would say if they could see me then, bounding along on the back of the ATV along a beach, my arms wrapped around the waist of the president of the company.

“You come at a good time,” Louie yelled to me. “There’s a potlatch starting now.” We putted our way along the beach. Louie drove me into the woods past some Bureau of Indian Affairs stick frame homes. A few small kids on bicycles and trikes starred at me as if I were shape shifter, a wolf that Louie had caught in human form.  We passed by a single grey totem pole, with an eagle at its top, a beaver and salmon below it. Nearby was a dilapidated cedar house, built of large planks weathering its ghosts into the day.

We stopped beside a simple rectangular community hall. Outside teenage boys were carrying in big aluminum cooking pots. Some elders dressed in bead vests and beaded headpieces ambled in. I was looked at as an object of curiosity but because I was with Louie I was accepted nonetheless with a harmless aloofness.

I was here to do an audit of these people’s corporation, Kavilco Incorporated. It along with 225 other Indian corporations existed because of oil. Enormous fields had been discovered near Prudhoe Bay. The government was now very interested in Alaska. They wanted to build an 800-mile pipeline from the North Slope to an ice free port in Valdez so it could fuel our oversized cars and trucks.  Smartly the Alaskan Natives, seven distinct tribes overall, blocked the pipeline in court. Suddenly the U.S government was deeply concerned about their moral obligation to settle aboriginal land claims in Alaska.

So Richard Nixon signed into law the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANILCA) whereby Alaska was split into thirteen geographic regions, each assigned a regional corporation and given land and money. Within these thirteen regions, local or village corporations were formed as autonomous organizations. Overnight villagers were made shareholders and the corporations collectively given deed to hundreds of thousands of acres of land and millions of dollars of money. And the oil began to flow.

It was a rare and strange kind of social experiment. Take a people who had historically made decisions collectively marshaled by the matriarchy of each village group, and superimpose a new class of natives called shareholders, onto the village structure. Some of these shareholders became leaders in the corporation and some got a lot more than others. Everyday villagers were handed a piece of paper telling them they owned 100 shares of stock.

In Southeast Alaska, where Kavilco was, the land the corporations were deeded happened to include prime old growth timberlands. Over the course of the next twenty years the vast majority of these lands were logged off to stumps through sales the village corporations made with Asian companies. Ancient old growth trees, the last of the major great stands in America were shipped by the billion board feet as round logs over to Japan, Korea and China.

The village corporations made and mostly squandered huge sums of money in the game and not so coincidentally had to hire white managers, white timber companies, white engineers, white road builders, white lawyers and white accountants to take care of it all. White senators and congressmen made out pretty well too. Eventually a Native elite would rise as corporate officers and they made out pretty well too.

But I didn’t know any of that as I stood the lone white man inside the Kavilco community center this June day, deep in the forest with the nearest automobile a distant island and 50 miles away.  I was surrounded by about 200 Haida and what struck me most was the entirely of the generations there. Grandmothers and grandfathers, teenagers, kids, infants and adults, all mixed in and participating. Long tables were filled with people sitting and eating, many dressed in regalia, sipping pop, juice or coffee. A man up front was talking on and on in Haida and a few people seemed to be listening.

Food tables were laid out with platters and bowls filled with fresh salmon, white rice, seal meat, herring eggs on hemlock branches, blueberries, huckleberries and salmonberries, tired looking salad but also fresh seaweed collected from the nearby rocks, razor clams, limpets and plenty of Indian fry bread, which wasn’t very Indian really but white flour and sugar deep fried in Crisco.

Through the night storytelling, singing and dancing, mostly line dances with dancers dressed under large wool blankets decorated with numerous beads into designs of animals: wolf, beaver, halibut, bear, raven.  Where was I? I felt an old nemesis of mine, a displaced discomfort and aloneness creep into my body.  I did what I usually did, I sought out the dark.

I slipped out of the hall and walked on down the evening trail feeling relieved to be alone and anonymous. I found my way down to the beach. It was a glowing clear summer night. The moon was half full and waning.

The sky was still bright and deep blue even though it was past 10pm. The bay was as still as a Zen monk floating in his orange robes. A golden retriever ambled up and I ran my hands through his coat. He responded like a miner who had struck gold. I sat down on a beach log and pressed my hands along his spine and below his muzzle to the loose skin of his chest and above massaging his neck. I don’t know why, but my hands knew how relax a dog into bliss. He didn’t ask me who I was or what I did. He stayed by my side as if I always belonged with him. It felt good to be with no one but a dog.

Over the horizon I saw a faint glow. Maybe it was the dropped down sun or perhaps the glow of a mannequin in a suit burning on Fourth Avenue six hundred miles away.