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(back to page 4)
He said he'd never forget it. Then I asked him, a little wistfully, if he thought babies would ever be born in Haines again. His answer startled me. Sarah's birth, he said, was "the perfect example" of why he'd quit obstetrics. "If things hadn't gone right..." he began. Then, seeing the look on my face, he changed his tack. "Healthy women who are well prepared can and do have catastrophes. It really isn't safe," he said. "I loved delivering babies. Those were wonderful, almost home births, but I hated being so apprehensive, doing acrobatics without a net."
This week safety was very much on my mind. I had four obituaries to write: An old man had died of cancer at home and three people closer to my age had been killed when their skiff had capsized in rough water between Haines and Skagway. Gathering information for the obituaries of the drowning victims was painful and sad. At the Pioneer Bar, where the woman who died had worked, I learned she had been afraid of the sea. "I just can't imagine how terrified she was when the skiff turned over in that cold, cold water," Christy Fowler, the bar owner, said.
The skiff captain, Dan Burnham, had regularly taken his little boat between Skagway and Haines–about fifteen miles–and had never had any trouble. Dan was a lifelong Skagway resident who had recently moved here. "I'm sure he thought it was perfectly safe or he wouldn't have done it," one of his friends told me. While I was at the house of the third victim, a retired logger, his grown sons got into a big fight about where their father wanted to be buried. When someone you love dies senselessly, the line between grief and anger gets really blurry.
As I was researching the obituaries for the drowned trio, Jim Hatch lay dying of cancer with a church choir at his bedside. "They sang him into heaven," his widow told me when he finally passed away late that day. Even though his family assured him that it was all right if he said good-bye, that he was so sick they would understand, and that it was time for him to go–Jim stayed. He hung on so long that the choir started repeating songs. "He liked the music so much he didn't want to leave," said one of the singers. Which put me right up against the paper's deadline.
After turning in Jim's obituary late that night, I lay in bed, not sleeping. Three bad deaths and one good one, but the endings were all the same. "What's the point?" I said loudly–twice–to wake up Chip. When he turned toward me, I told him that if the biblical "three score and ten" life span was correct, we were past the halfway mark. "Shouldn't we stop for a minute and reevaluate here?" I asked. "I mean, why get up and go to work if we're just dying anyway?"
Chip yawned. "Because that's what people do," he said. Then he put his arms around me and fell back asleep before I could argue. I listened to his heartbeat and thanked God I'd married such a steady, good man.
The Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium has transformed our former clinic into a million-dollar state-of-the-art rural health center, with three doctors, a dentist, nurses, counselors, and physician's assistants. When my son, Christian, broke his hand a few months ago, we got to look around. The X-rays came up on a computer, instead of a plastic sheet developed in the closet, like in the old days. Now they are e-mailed to a bone doctor in Seattle for advice. The little brown paneled room where I was in labor with Sarah is long gone.
The new clinic is beautiful, but I miss the old one. Not the building, but what happened in it. I'm sad we can't begin the circle of life in Haines anymore. My friend Nancy, who had all her four children in Haines, says that even with the new clinic, without a hospital nearby we still have to "accept medical risks just living here."
It is precisely because Dr. Feldman understands those risks that I took Christian to his new office next door to our house when he complained of terrible stomach pains. I knew Dr. Feldman would know what to do. Dr. Jones had taught him well. My great-grandmother had died when her appendix ruptured. My grandmother lived with us when I was growing up, so I heard the sad story every time anyone had a stomachache. The day we visited Dr. Feldman, the weather was bad: raining hard sideways on the shore and snowing on the mountains. No planes were flying to Juneau, and the ferry had left a couple of hours ago. The only way out was the road to Canada.
Dr. Feldman prodded, and Christian jumped in pain. An old dog pushed open the door between the living room and the office and walked in, but the good doctor didn't notice. He scratched his beard and looked out the window. He thought for a long, silent minute and said, "I'm pretty sure it's appendicitis. If he was my kid, I'd be on the way to Whitehorse." He guessed we had twenty-four hours from those first bad pains–which meant we had about ten hours–until it might rupture. "And you don't want that to happen in Haines," he said. He called the Alaska-Canada border. The officer said it was snowing and the road was closing for the night. We had to leave right then or we wouldn't get through.
In the summer, on a nice day, you can drive to Whitehorse in four hours, or so I've heard. It takes twice that long in a car full of children who never pee in the bushes at the same pit stop. Eliza and Sarah were old enough to be in charge while we were gone, so we didn't have to take the whole gang. But we were in the middle of a winter storm, and our new snow tires hadn't arrived. The old ones were fine for around town, but we couldn't afford to skid off the road right now. We borrowed our neighbors Steve and Linnus's sturdy truck and, in a flurry of purposefully calm activity, they helped us grab essentials before we kissed the girls good-bye. Following an old Haines rule, we dressed for the weather, not the vehicle. Just in case. It was snowing hard when the officer waved us through Canadian customs. From there, we headed over the Chilkat Pass through 120 uninhabited miles, to Haines Junction, Yukon Territory–population six hundred.
At the top of the pass falling and blowing snow brought us to a complete stop. We couldn't see the road. I hoped we wouldn't have to turn back–what would we do then? But the headlights caught the reflective tape on the tops of the eight-foot-tall snow-plow guide poles, spaced about every fifty feet on either side of the road. Chip shifted into a lower gear and we skidded from pole to pole, hoping the road was still underneath us somewhere.
(continued on the next page)
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