It was mid-morning outside Wrangell, Alaska on September 16,
1974, and we’d heard there were jewels to be found down the beach a mile, if we
were patient and lucky. 1,000 to 10,000 years ago, the forefathers of the
Tlingit Indians sent their shaman walking over these same rocks to work their magic
carving designs into small boulders for what must have taken weeks or even
months. We were following their paths in hopes of creating rubbings of their
stone carvings. It was my twenty-fourth birthday, my first trip to Alaska, and the first day of sun in
the past 10 days of travel to get here.
We found the petroglyphs. We spent the next several hours
laying the paper over the images of faces, whales and spirals, then rubbing the
sides of the crayons across the paper to produce the pattern in the rock underneath
in relief. In the process, we attempted to understand – to somehow intuitively bridge
the gap between the millennia – so we might in a small way comprehend what it
must have been like on this spot for those mystics. When we carefully rolled
our papers, packed away the gear and headed to the van with the incoming tide,
our heads were full of possibilities and we were dizzied from the experience.
We were halfway back, commenting in low voices about what a
magical time it had been, when we heard a sound like a rock falling in water – only somehow different, more
organic. More alive, and it wasn’t coming from the ocean just a few feet to our
right. It was coming from overhead, behind us. We turned to look, and saw two
large, black birds flying up the beach, maybe twenty feet above us. One of them
made the sound again – and as it did,
it pushed its wings down and rose in the air a foot higher than its companion,
then folded its wings tight against its body, rolled onto its back and fell. It
dropped until it was six or seven feet from the rocky beach, then rolled upright
again, spread its wings and flapped up to its mate, who had been leisurely
flying along the entire time. We watched, not believing what we had seen when a
few seconds later the other raven made the same sound, pushed itself higher,
rolled over and repeated the same move! We watched as they flew over us and up
the beach the same direction we were traveling, continuing to fall and fly
again as they went. Each time, they made the sound before dropping. Never had I
seen a bird fly for the sheer enjoyment of it, as if it had discovered that since
it could perform such a maneuver, it
would. As if to say to any observer, See?
Look what you can do.
I listened. I realized what was possible, and I moved to
Alaska the next year. Ravens would continue to haunt the fringes of my life
there, but as I chose to frequent the water instead of the shore, my life was visited
more by seabirds than the black-feathered trickster and deliverer of fire. But
raven was there the day I left.
We lived in the Kenai area for 22 years. In late November of
1997 I got a job teaching at the Evergreen State College in Olympia,
Washington, where I still live today. In Alaska, I divorced, fell in love
again, remarried, had two children, became a commercial fisherman, taught
middle and high school, learned and taught photography, built a house, built a
new boat. I built a life as an Alaskan, as a fisherman, as a husband, as a
father. And now we were leaving.
I pulled our van into the shipping warehouse, out the
loading dock and onto a trailer packed with our possessions. Afterward, I
signed the papers authorizing the shipping company to send that trailer
containing everything we owned except our pickup truck parked out front to
Anchorage, where it would be loaded on a barge and shipped to Seattle. If everything
went right, it would arrive in Olympia a few days after we did. In the truck outside, my wife and two sons waited
for me as a full-blown blizzard raged around them. I stepped out the door and into
a white-out of silver-dollar flakes swirling in a stiff wind. I wondered if our
belongings would even get to Anchorage as I stepped across the porch and down
the steps to the parking lot. Halfway down, I heard a croaking behind and above
me. I know that voice. I turned
around, and there he was, all fluffed out against the cold, hunkered down in
the snow on the peak of the roof, looking right at me as if to say, You sure about this? We stared at one
another for a long moment. I pursed my lips and said, “No.” I lowered my gaze
and shook my head, then looked up one last time. He was still there. “I know,”
I said aloud. “I can always come back.” He never said, No you can’t. I found that
out on my own.
I did, eventually, return to visit. Of course that wasn’t
what I meant in the snowstorm, but I’ve been back to visit several times, and
many were to read my poems and writings about Alaska at fisher-poet events. One
of the first times, I went to Kodiak in April of 2008. I spent the night on a friend’s
boat in dry-dock in the Kodiak boatyard. The yard was deserted and after a late
night, I awoke to a thickening spring snowstorm. My friend was already up and
gone, so I walked out on deck in my sweats and went to pee over the stern as
the snow dropped straight down from low, gray clouds overhead. There was no
wind. The flakes hissed as they landed on inches of white coating the decks of
the boats, their rigging and the gravel of the yard. Holding my arms close to
my chest against the cold, I turned to go back to the warmth of the cabin – and
I am not making this up – I heard a sound I hadn’t heard in over 30 years, like
a rock, falling in water. I recognized it immediately (I had told the Wrangell
beach story dozens of times). I twisted around to look. Across the yard came
one, no, two ravens, flying at rooftop level. I had looked too late to see if
one of them had rolled over. They were just flying… then I heard it again, and
sure enough, one of the large black birds lifted a few feet into the falling
snow and rolled, dropping toward the ground like a stone above the ocean. She spread
her wings and flipped at the last second, then rose to join her mate, flapping together
through the flakes until they disappeared behind a curtain of white.
I haven’t seen a raven in a long while. It’s been over a
year since I was last in Alaska. I don’t recall seeing one the last time I was
there, though I can’t imagine they weren’t present. I wonder if I’ve stopped
looking, or if they’ve given up on me. I don’t much like either of those
possibilities. There are charmed places near where I live where ravens live and
work their magic. I think I need to find one.
