Dewey's Nine Lives

Old sod schools. Unheated wood homes. Vicki and I never lived that hard, but that didn’t mean our lives were easy. Life in farming and fishing country was marked by tragedy. Early death. Accidents. Foreclosure. Financial crisis. The town of Spencer burned to the ground in the 1930s, an event that still defines both the precariousness of rural life and the hardiness of the community that, on pure willpower and muscle, rebuilt itself better than before.

In Kodiak, the defining events were the 1912 eruption of Mount Novarupta, which blanketed the island in ash, and the earthquake of 1964. The tremors from that quake rocked the island, causing the land to heave six feet. But it was the three massive tidal waves on Good Friday that destroyed the town. Vicki’s father, who was at work at the power facility, was trapped up to his neck in water for two days. The day after his escape, Easter Sunday, Vicki’s cousin roared up to their house in his truck and told them another wave was coming. That’s when Vicki saw fear for the first time. She saw it on her grandmother’s face. The whole town spent the day on top of Pillar Mountain, watching the ocean. Finally, around dusk, Vicki’s mom said, “I need my cigarettes,” and hopped in her nephew’s truck. The rest of the town followed until, by nightfall, they had all drifted home. The last tidal wave was a false alarm.

The houses were torn down and rebuilt. The boats were scrapped or salvaged, depending on their anchorage. That’s when Vicki’s grandmother, whose home was wiped out by the waves, built her primitive residence on Anton Larsen Island and moved away from Kodiak. Vicki, all of seven years old, felt her innocence recede with the tide. She had seen the power of nature and the fragility of life.

At eighteen, Vicki and I both left home. Life was short; opportunities in our hometowns were limited; we wanted to stretch ourselves and see the world. As Vicki put it, “I needed to bruise my knees, skin my face, make mistakes—and not have mom’s family watching. I couldn’t do anything in Kodiak that my mom didn’t know about before I got home.”

I wanted to attend college, but my parents didn’t have the money. As class valedictorian, Vicki was awarded a scholarship to the University of Alaska, but she preferred to work and support herself instead of living four more years on her parents’ tab and under her parents’ rules. We both found entry-level jobs in larger cities—I at a box factory in Mankato, Minnesota, Vicki at a bank in Anchorage—and settled into an independent life. A few years later, in our early twenties, we both got married. Were we in love? That’s difficult to say. In our day, small-town girls got married young. What else did we know? It wasn’t until we were pregnant that we realized how much, for better or worse, your marriage defines your life. Unfortunately for us, it was for the worse.

Shortly after their wedding, Vicki’s husband took a security job on the Alaska pipeline and moved his wife one hundred miles east (three hundred miles by the only road) to Valdez, in a mountainous region known as the Alps of Alaska. Their daughter, Adrienna—known as Sweetie—was born there in a vicious Thanksgiving blizzard that dumped four feet of snow in a single day. Two weeks later, Vicki’s husband accepted a position as a police officer at the far end of the Aleutians, the long chain of islands that extend almost a thousand miles off the southwest corner of Alaska. Valdez was remote and snowbound, but Unalaska, where they were moving . . . that was beyond the edge of the earth. That was five hundred miles down a spine of rock into the Bering Sea, one of the blackest, angriest, deadliest bodies of water in the world. The Alaska State Ferry service to the island sailed only three times a year, and the trip took seven days. The only airplane that went there was prohibitively expensive, and it only flew twice a week. Your groceries had to be ordered and delivered by mail.

Vicki dreaded the thought of Unalaska, especially with a young child. But her husband had made up his mind. When he left almost immediately for his new job, leaving Vicki in Valdez to care for Sweetie and pack the house, she realized for the first time how much the marriage had uprooted her sense of self. She had already left behind her career, her friends, her family, her home. Now she was losing her independence and freedom of movement, too.