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.