Dewey's Nine Lives

Kodiak Island, Vicki Kluever’s home for much of her life, is a rugged wilderness, buffeted by the Pacific Ocean and covered with thick, damp plant life. Its mountains rise straight out of the ocean and often plunge straight back into the water on the other side. The shoreline slashes back and forth, marked with tide pools pounded over the centuries into the island’s volcanic rock. The landscape is spectacularly varied, ranging from flat and treeless to mountainous and blanketed by towering spruce trees. The grassy fields and mountain meadows, buried in snow half the year, turn emerald green at the first opportunity, then explode with wildflowers in the summer and locals picking wild berries in the fall. In Iowa, life is slow, defined by the seasonal accumulation and depletion of the soil; in Kodiak, life is dramatic, shaped by the ocean’s ferocious storms. In Iowa, the cycle is defined by planting, harvesting, and the rotation of crops; in Kodiak, the cycle begins with the salmon, who are eaten by the bears, who leave scraps for bald eagles and foxes, who leave scales and bones to enrich the soil. In Iowa, the land is tamed, marked out in perfectly straight mile markers and sold to the highest bidder; in Kodiak, it is wild and unforgiving, possessed by the Sitka deer and the Kodiak bear, the largest land mammal in North America and one of the biggest bears in the world. And, I hear, the whole place smells of fish.

And yet . . . Vicki and I were about the same age. We were raised in a similar blue-collar environment where boys were the future and girls were leaned on for emotional support. We were both good daughters from tight-knit extended families. When farm life overwhelmed or bored me, I found comfort in the back fields of corn, where I knew even Sputnik couldn’t find me; Vicki found refuge in the forests and on the beach, away from the arguments and chain-smoking of her parents’ home. Kodiak and Spencer, three thousand miles apart, were both classic small towns, with tiny schools and party-line telephones. Everybody at least knew of you, which meant they either gossiped about you or helped you, and often both. In Iowa, we lived off the land. In Kodiak, they farmed the ocean. The coming and going of the fishing boats was their traffic; the supply barge from the mainland, frequently delayed by rough seas and carrying only canned or powdered items, was their grocery store; the tide pools and beaches were their playgrounds. Is that so different than life on the farm, where the rumble of traffic meant tractors, and the best food was taken right out of the field?

We were strong by necessity, Vicki and I, proud of our descent from a long line of independent women. My great-aunt Luna Morgan Still founded and taught at the first school in Clay County, a one-room sodbuster constructed of grass and dirt because, even in homesteading days, there were no trees to build with. My grandmother was the rock of my family, holding it together after her husband’s early death, with a toughness and generosity that inspired me. My mother ran her family’s restaurant when she should have been in elementary school; she raised six kids on a farm with no air-conditioning or washing machine; she battled cancer for thirty years, suffering pain and indignity without complaint. She leaned on me, her eldest daughter. And by doing that, she made me strong.

Vicki Kluever’s ancestral line stretches six generations on Kodiak Island, back to the Alutiiq natives who had survived in that harsh land for ten thousand years. She has fond memories of walks in the Kodiak woods with her dog and of late summer outings with her mother and aunts to pick berries, but it was her grandmother who inspired her. Laura Olsen was Alutiiq-Russian-Norwegian, a product of the great melting pot of Kodiak. At sixty-two, already a widow, she moved from the town of Kodiak back to her ancestral land on tiny Larsen Island. The island was named after her father, Anton Larsen, a Norwegian who had immigrated to Kodiak alone on a steamship when he was twelve years old. For Vicki, traveling to Grandma’s house meant a long drive over a mountain pass and down a rough dirt road to Anton Larsen Bay, a twenty-minute skiff ride, and a hike up the beach to a steep embankment. Grandma Laura had no telephone, no electricity, no central heat or running water. She had a large garden and a well, washed her clothes in a hand-cranked ringer washer, chopped her own wood, and kept chickens and a goat. She set her own fishing nets, and she maintained her own fishing gear. The door to her tiny house was always open, her rooms were always neat, and Vicki rarely climbed from the skiff without smelling fresh cookies and bread. Grandma Laura had no use for cigarettes or powdered milk or electric lights, the staples of existence in the Kluever home. She subsisted off the land and the ocean, like the Alutiiq and the early settlers, and she was happier than anyone Vicki had ever known.