Chapter Thirty-Seven

Bellingham to Ketchikan

Victoria secured her blue pup tent with sand bags to the back deck of the Marine Vessel Kennicott. Then she tied a guy line to a navigation light post.  She crawled inside with her pack, roll-up mattress, and sleeping bag.  When she looked through the tent flap a few minutes later, she saw a float plane rock against the whitecaps and break loose to the north.  A white-hooded eagle soared against the dark green shoreline with a large fish in its talons. Mount Baker and the North Cascade Mountains backdropped the harbor to the east.  Victoria took a deep breath and smelled the salt air; finally, she was on her way to Dutch Harbor.

After her long car trip from Michigan, she relaxed at the thought of floating the Alaska Marine Highway.  Her epiphany in New Mexico and her two-day stopover in Santa Cruz set her in a new frame of mind, a new appreciation for present experience, and a loosening of her tight steering wheel grip on living.   Even though the Kennicott could hold cars, she decided to leave the Honda in Bellingham, because there was really no place to drive along her route.  She would travel 3500 miles by water to Dutch Harbor through the Inside Passage, across the Gulf of Alaska and along the Aleutian Chain. No more driving for a long while.  Her first stop would be Ketchikan--38 hours away.  She missed Scratchy.  Victoria had given Nick a two-page list of instructions for taking care of Scratchy: regular brushing, trips to the groomer, intervals for changing the litter box, and the phone number of a local veterinarian.  She bought a magnet, and posted the instructions on her father’s refrigerator.

Just a few feet to her left, another tent, a bright orange one, had just been placed, and Victoria could hear someone rummaging around inside, zipping sounds, mumbling, and a loud, “Ouch!”  A few minutes later, a young man popped his windburned head out of the tent fly, and raised his nose like an animal reading the wind.  He looked over at her, and gave her an enthusiastic and reassuring smile.  “My name’s, Chris Caldwell.  What’s yours?”

Astounded at his directness, Victoria just said, “Victoria.”

“Well glad to meet you, Victoria.  You have a very proper name.  Is that what you go by or do people call you ‘Vicky’ or ‘Tory’ or something less formal?”

“No, people call me Victoria,” and she added, “I drove out here from Michigan in my car.”   

“Never owned a car.  I have a bicycle below.  I’m into bicycles.  Bicycles saved my butt--moved from an all-night crowd to a keep-fit crowd.  I design and manufacture custom bicycle wheels in Portland--humming perfect wheels.  I ride every day, except when I’m on boats, of course, and I fly float planes for a hobby.  What do you do?”

“I used to work in quality control at a paperboard mill, but I’ve been laid off...so now I’m not quite sure what to do next.  I like to create things like you do...I make hand-crafted paper.”

“Craft papermaking...sounds like fun.”  Chris proceeded to ask her to explain the processes she used, and kept asking more questions.  He seemed sincerely interested in her hobby, and looked right at her when she talked.  His intensity struck Victoria as genuine, but she wasn’t used to this kind of attention--a new experience, having someone wrapped around her interests.

She looked him over.  Chris looked about five foot eleven and 160 pounds with a long torso and muscular legs, about her age.  He was lean, and when he stood up, he looked as straight as a redwood tree.  He had short, sandy hair, ice blue eyes, and an angular jaw, a more handsome and much leaner version of a Route 66 giant.  He wore a light blue rain jacket with a hood and canvas khaki cargo pants.  He seemed to have a permanent smile and animated face.

Victoria liked Chris, and Chris liked Victoria.  Victoria knew Chris was special after only a few minutes of conversation--he was likable, looked just right to her, and spoke in respectful tones beyond the words; she could see herself forgiving all his unknown flaws, giving him the benefit of any doubts.  They became friends effortlessly, especially since Victoria’s habitual guards were down, and Chris never really had any--he seemed to be free of hang-ups or expectations, just there: calm, warm, unassuming.  He stunned Victoria; she felt he made sense. 

When he talked about his bicycle wheel business, she understood his language--building quality into the design, sourcing for the best, most durable components, overcoming bottlenecks in the assembly process, creating marketing and distribution channels.  His enthusiasm for what he called his life work inspired Victoria.  Chris lived in his own way, he worked hard and had fun at the same time.  Like Victoria, he loved detail.  He could talk for an hour about bicycle construction in his relaxed manner, and he used his expressive face and large hands for emphasis.  To listen to Chris, you had to believe bicycles had souls.  He described himself as a wheel builder--a craft manufacturer of bespoke wheels.

Both of them were headed for the same destination:  Dutch Harbor.  Chris wanted to go for much the same reason as Victoria:  because it was there, and he was also a big Deadliest Catch  fan.  From Bellingham, the MV Kennicott plowed northwest through the Inside Passage to Ketchikan.  Their itinerary would take them from Ketchikan to Juneau to Yakutat to Whittier to Chenega Bay to Homer to Kodiak Island.  Once they arrived in Kodiak, they would switch ferries to the MV Tustumena (“Rusty Tusty”), then travel two days further to Dutch Harbor on Amaknak Island, and the neighboring Unalaska Island.  Located where the currents of the North Pacific meet the Bering Sea, Dutch Harbor was the largest fisheries port in the United States.

Chris also viewed Dutch Harbor as an exciting place to visit, but for different reasons.  In addition to cycling, Chris loved to fly, and he had scheduled some air time at the seaplane base.   He belonged to a flying club in Portland, and flew a Piper seaplane once a week.  Victoria told him how she wanted to see the Dutch Harbor crabbing fleet featured on the Deadliest Catch;  how she hoped to see the wheelhouses of one of the featured vessels--Cornelia Marie, Wizard, Northwestern, or Time Bandit, and imagine the crew ducking the heavy crab pots with the gale-force winds of October lashing over the decks. Chris thought this was a fine idea, although he had never watched a single episode.

The first morning, Chris and Victoria went below decks for coffee, and then returned on deck with Chris’ thermos.  From the open deck, they watched for whales, porpoise, seals, otters, and eagles; when it rained they would go to the forward lounge.  About nine o’clock, they walked through the self-serve food court for breakfast.  Later in the day, passengers provided musical entertainment on their guitars or harmonicas. They attended a talk by the Forest Service.  Before dinner, they used the showers on board.  Passengers thought they were a couple, and this amused them.  She felt so comfortable around Chris.  He seemed kind and harmless, and so relaxed.

The second day was cold, foggy, and rainy, so Chris invited Victoria into his tent.  Compared to the inside of her tent, Chris’ tent was a picture of order:  all his gear was neatly stacked, a pile of cycling magazines lay in a corner, a small battery-lit lantern hung from a loop in the ceiling; he even had a draw-string laundry bag for his dirty clothes.  They talked about what they might do on their overnight stop in Ketchikan.  When the wheelhouse announced a whale sighting, they pulled on their rain jackets and went out to the rail.  As Victoria tried to focus her binoculars, Chris spotted a spout off the stern, pointed his long arms for her to follow, and she turned in time to see huge flukes splash the water.

They were floating through a fairyland where each new scene was even more beautiful than the last.  If it were not for the briny smell in the air, they would not know they were sailing on a salt ocean.  There were thousands of islands with lush evergreens disappearing into the mist.  With the rain, the view from the deck was an ethereal blend of light and shade, making every feature look fine and tender.  Victoria looked at all of what she saw in wonderment, very different from Route 66; everything so new and different to her wide eyes.  Even though Chris had never been in this part of the world, he seemed to grasp everything in advance, like he was her personal guide.  The former Victoria would have questioned how much the novelty and excitement of the voyage was affecting her judgment of Chris, but at the moment, she had no doubts:  he was decent, funny, down-to-earth, and attractive--period.  

The boat glided into a narrow channel with trees lining the shores. With distant views blocked by weather, Chris and Victoria looked at what was directly before their eyes.  With the steep slopes, every tree seemed to be rising above the one below like people sitting in a theater--blue-green and yellow-green spruces with the brown-green cedars blending harmoniously with mosses and lichens on their branches, then dropping to bushes at the water’s edge.  They passed so close, they could see the purple cones on the spruces.  Every once in while, they could see patches of paler green dogwood and alder; sometimes fringing cascading streams emerging white into the blue waters of the channel. 

Every once in a while, ducks would fly over them, or they would hear the cry of a loon in the distance.  From a pine spar, an eagle dressed its feathers, as if it had nothing else in the world to do.  As the two travelers sat or stood on the deck hour after hour, a certain unspoken intimacy developed, and one evening before dark, Chris placed his arm around Victoria’s shoulder and pulled her closer, and Victoria found herself leaning against him comfortably, feeling his warmth against the night air.

Chapter Thirty-Six

The Mother Road

As Zizi and Nick were seeing more of each other all the time, Victoria began to think more often about how long she intended to stay with her father.  She had moved over to the boathouse, where Zizi had stayed the first night they met, and like Zizi, she felt like a guest there.  The pressure to find a new job had disappeared with her new wealth, but she still didn’t know what to do with her life away from the paperboard mill, and her quest to find, or even to define “home,” was not satisfied by visiting her father.  She loved her father, but her father’s place was an unhomelike home. 

When Victoria was young, there were few family vacations or long road trips; Nick did not like crowds, and he had seen more than enough of the wide world during his military service.  Victoria contemplated the possibility of getting away on a long trip--she had a car, cash, and lots of time.  On the way back from their meeting with the lawyer in Grand Rapids, Zizi had playfully suggested Victoria go to Alaska.  Victoria was an avid follower of Deadliest Catch, right from its first episode.  Dutch Harbor seemed dangerous and romantic; she could almost feel the icy saltwater spray coming over the decks as she watched, and smell the fresh-caught King Crab in the holds.  The crews seemed to live free and exhilarating lives, unlike her own.  Perhaps a visit to a faraway place would help her find herself, pull her out of her self-imposed, flatline dullness.  Maybe she would meet some handsome, bearded, crab-fishing Alaskan, someone like Scott Campbell, a.k.a. Junior, Captain of the Seabrooke on Deadliest Catch, who would sweep her off her feet, not take “no” for an answer, and let her join him in the wheelhouse, and live in a cabin by the sea, and watch large brown bears eat salmon in a nearby stream.  So, as impulsively as she had uncharacteristically rented the pontoon boat to visit her father at Devil’s Elbow, Victoria decided to drive to the West Coast, catch a marine ferry to Alaska, and follow the Aleutian Chain to Dutch Harbor, a series of solo hops into the unknown.  At the edge of her unhappiness, she felt a need to change her environment, her outer world, and perhaps turn her inner world inside out to a fuller expression of life, something bolder and braver.  Her fear of change (so deep within her) still sat on her chest like an unattended marble headstone.

Always practical, Victoria mapped out a travel plan to cover parts of the country new to her, and this included most everywhere.  She decided to drive Rt. 66 from Chicago to Santa Monica, and then turn north to catch a marine ferry to Alaska in Bellingham, Washington. When she informed Nick of her plans, he was enthused for her and helped with her preparations.  He suggested Victoria return from Alaska to Michigan on a different, more northerly route, so she could visit her older sister, Anne, in Montana.  He bought her a Garmin GPS for the car.  Zizi went shopping with her at a local outfitter, and she bought a raincoat with a hood,  a windbreaker, sleeveless and long-sleeved tops, two sweaters, two bras, slacks, hiking boots, a floppy hat to protect her from the sun, bug spray, suntan lotion,  a backpack, binoculars, and a digital camera.  Victoria wanted to buy a fanny pack, but Zizi said, “no.”  Zizi wanted her to buy sexy underpants, but Victoria said, “no.”

The day she embarked on her journey, Stretch came over for breakfast with Flash, and everyone gave her a cheerful send-off, except for Scratchy who had no interest in travel.  Stretch supplied her with his homemade trail mix for the journey--Texas pecans covered with local maple syrup, both dark and light chocolate, and Michigan-grown dried fruit.  She felt the cold metal of the eagle keyring as she turned on the ignition.  This trip is for me and for you, Tom, she thought.  By the end of the first day, she had connected with the beginning of Rt. 66, the Mother Road, on Michigan Avenue in Chicago, and stopped for lunch at a White Castle, eating her first sliders. The enormity of the city widened her eyes, and the traffic kept her alert and on the move. 

Compared to her first response to the layoff at the mill, when she could hardly manage to change positions from the window to the chair to the bedroom, she was now in motion, at least physically; she was traveling down a rolling highway, the first two-lane Main Street of America.  Whether or not her mind and heart would open to new possibilities and experience this odyssey as an adventure and opportunity for growth, remained to be seen.

The evening of the first day, Victoria managed to visit the Joliet Museum’s Route 66 Welcome Center where she purchased a white porcelain coffee mug emblazoned with the famous “Route 66” highway sign.  Over the next seven days, Victoria took her time moving back and forth between the remnants of the highway’s two- and -four-lane roads, finding the original brick sections, stopping to see the classic fiberglas figures along the route: the iconic, humanoid Muffler Men, over twenty foot tall statues with a steely gaze, lantern jaws, broad shoulders, and big blocky shoes:  Bunyan,  the Gemini Giant holding his model rocket,  Cowboy “Sam” with his Stetson, Dude Man, the Indian, the Gas Station Attendant, Golfer, and Hamburger Man.  Victoria was absolutely dumbfounded by the sights along the road; she looked at them with the eyes of a young child; as if the objects along the road, many so old, so long-neglected, were new and erected just for her.  Rather than run-down, Victoria viewed it all as beautiful and refreshing.

She had her picture taken sitting on two enormous rabbits at either end of the trip:  one at Henry’s Rabbit Ranch in Staunton, Illinois, and the other at the Jack Rabbit Trading Post between the Grand Canyon and the Petrified Forest in Arizona.  She photographed a 1932 gas station, world’s largest catsup bottle, a thirty-foot high Abraham Lincoln beside a wagon; ate lunch at the Cozy Dog Drive-In, visited the Pig Hip Museum, and found huge turkey tracks in the concrete on an abandoned strip of the original road.  She loved driving by the classic drive-in theaters, and having chicken dinners at places like the Ariston Cafe, a 1930’s roadside diner in Litchfield, Illinois, a place whose sign reminded her of Mikage’s plan for her future restaurant.  (The tag line under Ariston Cafe’s sign read: “Serving local patrons and international travelers)

Her zigzag journey and all the strange and colorful sights contrasted starkly with her life up to this point, a life represented more like a sequence of dots on an endless straight line leading eventually to death; other than the passing of her mother, a distant concept she could not fathom and chose not to think about too hard.  Even though she followed dots on a map, the dots jumped up and down, turned her backwards at times; down bumpy, dirt roads, brick roads, as well as smooth asphalt ones with brightly-colored passing lanes.  The roads led to interesting places filled with eccentric people doing strange things, like the man at Henry’s Rabbit Ranch who took her picture sitting on the giant rabbit, then gave her a tour of his rabbit cemetery while selling car insurance to a local teenager on the phone. 

 On her approach to Albuquerque, she passed vintage motels on Central Avenue, the country’s longest main street, a welcome respite for weary travels decades ago who found a place to sleep after driving a 100 miles from Santa Rosa, the last stopover on the route.  Many of the motels were in danger of the wrecking ball with weeds growing up over the doors and windows, but tired of staying in Motel Six’s, Super 8’s, and Hampton Inns, Victoria searched for a classic old motel where she could spend the night.  Her guidebook showed the Aztec Motel, but when she arrived at the address, it was just a pile of rubble, reminding her of the discarded mountain of aluminum walkers she had discovered in the nursing home after her last visit to Cal and Tom.  

She happily found the El Vado Motel, a Route 66 treasure, rescued by the city in 2008 for preservation.  All the old rundown segments of the avenue were under pressure to be torn down, and replaced with shops, condos, upscale apartments, restaurant franchises, and coffee joints.  While the El Vado was still closed to the public, Victoria stood motionless, and looked through the chain link fence to see the adobe cabins lining the motor court, and its magnificent neon sign of an Indian woman haloed in a circular rainbow of yellows, reds, and blues.  She lingered for a long time in the darkness before moving on, frustrated she could not find a place to stay even for one night, still feeling homeless.

Victoria kept driving through Albuquerque to Gallup, and stayed in her first and only five-star hotel of the trip--El Rancho Hotel, built in 1937 as a watering hole for movie stars who arrived on Santa Fe Railroad trains to film “cowboy” movies.  When she arrived at her room, Humphrey Bogart’s name adorned the door; the luxurious room opened to a patio looking out on a large pool. Even though Victoria had over $25 million dollars in the bank, she asked for the AAA discount, and haggled over the price of the room--over $100 for the night.  She was dead tired, disappointed she couldn’t find a place to stay in Albuquerque, nearly faint from hunger, and vaguely depressed.

Victoria watched children and their parents play in the water of the pool outside her patio door, and she began to feel lonely for the first time after all the long hours of the trip.  She removed her travel clothes, let them drop to the floor, and before showering for dinner, sat on a bath towel on a chair near her bed, with nothing on and nothing on her mind.  Over the long trip, and weeks away from her daily routines, she had exhausted her defenses and thought herself out.  At this moment, she arrived at point zero in her life; something inside let go like a tightly-coiled spring breaking her reserved, unassertive, prim and proper, essentially Victorian self into small pieces.

She slowly looked down the length of her tall frame to her naked feet with new eyes, and observed her body as good, beautiful, created; even her big feet were deserving of love.  She ran her hands down her quiet, deep-breathing chest, stomach, legs, and touched her angles and curves with interest, as if she were touching herself for the first time, her hands moving like a stranger’s hands over a slumbering, feminine body.  Her limbs no longer felt awkward; they seemed to fit together just fine, in harmony and beauty, and impressed her as worthy of nurture and even praise. Victoria could feel her heart beat quicken, and a warmth and tingling in her liquefying skin; faint stirrings of arousal and desire.  

When she rose to take a shower, she felt more coordinated in her movements, more erect.  When the warm water beads bounced lightly against her in the shower, she finally arrived at a physical, mental, and emotional intersection, a point of steamy inner and outer inertia.  Forward movement could now proceed, slowly, but deliberately, like a train leaving a station, or a plane powering up the engines before take-off.  For the first time since her mother died, since she lost her home, since she lost her job, she felt a new, but pleasing pressure, a light-hearted yearning for a missing piece of something or someone.  Like a war soldier bivouacked for the winter in a deep forest without the charge and retreat of battle, Victoria was now ready to move out from her walled-off cloister into the dust and heat of mainstream life for triumph or defeat.  She thought of Zizi’s motto:  “Think positive, you can do it!”  

She walked down to the dining room and bar, and at first, she noticed only couples, but then she turned to a baby googling at her.  She smiled back at the baby, and then engaged the parents in conversation, exchanging travel chitchat with them, and asked to hold the baby.  Victoria had always thought “small talk” a waste of time, but she actually enjoyed hearing the couple talk about their first trip along Route 66--what they saw on the road, where they stayed, what they ate.  She went over to the bar, and started talking with two oddly-dressed men who turned out to be golfers.  Victoria had never played golf, but the two men were not reticent about explaining the sport to her:  the terms, the rules, the challenges of the fairways, sand traps, and rough; the practice and skills required, the equipment, the gadgets, the thrill of competition and the frustrations of the game.  Victoria had never won nor lost anything in her life beyond a board game.  She talked with the two men for two hours over beer and whiskey, her debut into the world of social give and take.  She even laughed at jokes she could not understand; she wasn’t even offended when one of the golfers called her, “Vicky.”  She felt incomplete and whole at the same time, as the weight of being “Victoria” drifted away unnoticed.   Back in her room, she looked out and up to the unthinking moon and stars, her mind attaching no adjectives to them; unfiltered by mental cobwebs to trap and alter what she sensed not only with her eyes, but through her entire body.  The moon and stars were simply moon and stars, and she was simply a woman.  

By the time she completed her Route 66 journey, she had driven over 2,500 miles through eight states:  Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, and finally, California to the road’s end, a few blocks from the Santa Monica Pier.  After a night in a motel on Manhattan Beach, she drove Rt. 101 up to Gilroy, then over to Santa Cruz, and checked into a motel on the ocean for two nights of rest and relaxation.  She was close to her point of embarkation, but now she wanted to let her new way of being sink in without the press of travel.  This prisoner of time and measurement allowed herself to get off schedule.  

In the morning of her first day in Santa Cruz, she walked the same beach where Mikage had met Axel many years before.  She talked with people, played with small children, bought Bay Shrimp in a paper tray at Stagnaro’s, and visited the amusement park.  In the afternoon, she walked into a book store and browsed the shelves; purchased a used novel, and read on her patio in a reclining lawn chair overlooking the Pacific.  Like a neglected book standing for years on an upper shelf, she removed the dust jacket from her shelved life, and began to turn the pages.  The first evening, she bought a pre-paid phone card, and called her father to let him know how she was doing  She asked to speak to Zizi. 

“Zizi, this is Victoria.”

“How have you been?”

“I changed.”

“How?”

“I stopped thinking and started breathing, and then I lost control...the chaos in my mind exploded and what was left...well, I feel free...beautiful and free.  Maybe these feelings won’t last, but it doesn’t matter, because this is how I feel today.”

“What are you going to next?”

“Rejoice...and make new friends on this trip...and I’m going to take it easy and not worry about the future, and I’ll buy a cell phone so we can talk...by the way, how are things going with you... and my father?”

“I love him, but I still cannot shake off my past...he may get tired from me, but so far he is very patient.”

“He’ll wait until you’re ready...what ever you’re facing, you will not face it alone.  Remember the advice you give to us, ‘Think positive, you can do it.’”

“ I will...good-bye.”

 Two days later, the new Victoria arrived in Bellingham, refreshed and ready for adventure, like a feather about to be carried away by the wind.

Walt and Naomi

Walt and Naomi

Chapter Thirty-Five

Little Traverse Bay

A Novel

by Randy Evans

Walt might have spent more than ten years in prison, mostly because of dealing drugs, but Sheriff Parks contacted the County Prosecutor to request a reduction in his sentence. Some months earlier, a retired agent from the CIA contacted Parks, and gave him classified information on Walt’s service.  Now Parks knew more than he could say to others.  The judge provided Walt with a light sentence, and then referred him to the local mediation agency, because Stretch was still highly irritated with Walt for burning down his cabin, and placing Flash in harms way.

Stretch attended the hearing, and said to Walt, “Ever built a house?”

Walt said, “Nope, never did.”

“Well, when you get out of jail, you’ll find out.  I’m not going to rebuild my place without help, and it might as well be you.”

Almost immediately, Walt was permitted work releases from prison, and he began to help Stretch create a new home.   Stretch had time to give thought to how he would redo things, and he designed the cabin to be bigger and better in every way.  He found a local stone mason to help him use stone to construct the exterior walls.  He decided to have a large kitchen and nook so he could invite Nick over for breakfast once in a while “to return the hospitality”;  a dog door, “for the convenience of Flash”; and a stone fireplace with a big hearth, “for Flash to warm herself by the fire on winter evenings.”   Walt and Stretch gradually and grudgingly became friends, working in the hot sun no longer shaded by the burnt trees that once circled his cabin.  After a long day working on the construction site at Devil’s Elbow, they would sometimes have meals together at the Moose Jaw, and occasionally, Nick and Zizi would join them.  Even though he didn’t have to, Stretch paid Walt for his labor.

Once he got out of jail, joined an evangelical church.  Some Sundays, he would stand up in the middle of the congregation in the middle of a sermon, and say, “Reverend, I disagree with what you just said.”  The preacher would ask if they could discuss his concerns after church, and they did...often.  Walt also joined the local Eagles Airie.  Sitting at the bar one night as a guest, he asked how he might join.  He was concerned about his past.  One of the Eagles turned to him and said, “Do you believe in God?”  

“Yes, sir, I do,” Walt replied.  

“Then you won’t have any trouble gettin’ in!!” the Eagle said.  Walt tried to buy drinks for everyone, but it was against the rules.  Later he was more properly initiated, and since he was a veteran, his first year’s dues were waived.  He actively served on committees and fund-raising events.  He even won a 14-foot Lund fishing boat, motor, and trailer in a raffle.   Walt also joined the American Legion Hall where he would make up war stories with such detail that no one could question him.  Then he would mix in some true stories, stranger than his fabricated ones.  He eventually gave up drinking, but he never gave up talking.

To supplement his income, Walt applied for employment at an ice cream and fudge factory in Petoskey.  His first job involved paddling fudge on cold marble tables and hand dipping granny smith apples in caramel. Next, he was assigned to mix over thirty different ice cream flavors.  Sheriff Parks vouched for him when he applied, since Walt had to check the “ex-felon” box on the employment application.  When he interviewed, he didn’t mention he was a highly skilled meth chemist, but once on the job, he became nearly irreplaceable.  After a year, the company gave him responsibility for orienting new employees.  He took special pleasure in reviewing the “drug-free workplace” policy.

One day, Walt was walking down Mitchell Street towards the Bay with his head down against blowing rain from a stiff northwest wind.  He nearly knocked down a beautiful middle-aged Odawa woman walking in the opposite direction.  He caught Naomi Greenleaf on his own way down to the sidewalk, and she cushioned his fall.  She looked up at him without fear or surprise, then asked him if he was hurt.  Years later, Stretch would tell the story over and over about how Naomi and he had “fallen” in love. 

 Naomi embraced people she met with a spiritual aura, sparkling charm, gentle grace, and a sense of harmony with the world-at-large.  Her skin was deeply tanned by the sun, and her thick brown and white-streaked swept-back hair framed a handsome face with high cheek bones and keen, intelligent, bouncing eyes.  She was divorced, and taught Anishinaabe language and culture at the community college.  After the sidewalk incident, Walt asked her out, and they began to see each other.  On the first date, their acquaintance could have ended.   When she told Walt she was from the native community, Walt asked,  “How Native American are you?”

Naomi was first inclined to reply, “How white are you?”, but instead, she simply said, “I am perfect and beautiful.”   Walt was struck by her kind response to what he quickly understood to be an insensitive question.  She noticed a shamed look in his eyes, and forgave him instantly.  One evening, Naomi told her story.

“Our Algonquin language and culture are not like the tribes to the West.  While we have always hunted, fished, and traded, the Ottawa, Chippewa, Objibwe, and Odawa people share peculiarities not found elsewhere.  Our precepts, not unlike the Ten Commandments, guided every facet of our lives in our native community, and taught to children daily by their parents.  Our language has a unique sound and sense unfound in other Native American languages... so sophisticated, some have thought its roots derived from a far away ancient land.

“My grandmother lived in this area in a tar-papered shack down by the Bear River on the edge of Petoskey, a place we called Hungry Hollow, a town-within-a-town; she told me our ancestors went back 2500 years.  When my grandmother was a poor Indian girl during the Great Depression, she wore flour sacking from the flour mill down the river near the Bay.  She used to watch the freight trains bring in people looking for work as fruit pickers; sometimes whole families would appear in the boxcar openings. 

 “My grandmother spent her days with her brothers and sisters rummaging through the city dump, looking for edible food, pop bottles and corks; anything they could sell or trade.  One day, when my grandmother was a teen-aged girl, a one-legged hobo appeared standing in a freight car door.  (He had lost his leg trying to catch a train ‘on the fly’ when he lost his grip on the hasp of the railcar door and fell beneath the wheels)  He was ragged and dirty, hungry and thirsty, and my grandmother observed the suffering in his face; took care of him that day, and for the rest of her days.  He became my grandfather.” 

Naomi must have seen the suffering in Walt’s pale white face in the same way her grandmother had.  After six months, Walt asked Naomi if she would marry him.  Robbed of a normal life for so long, Walt had no time to waste, and Naomi was willing, as she had also suffered, and desired a life of love and intimacy.  Walt asked Stretch to be his best man.  Nick, Zizi, and Victoria attended the wedding. The ceremony was not unlike the one Victoria had witnessed at the Hack-Ma-Tack Inn.  

In preparation for her wedding, Naomi bathed in the waters of Little Traverse Bay to be blessed by the spirit of the Earth.  The outside ceremony took place around a fire surrounded by a large stand of birch trees, with birch bark flapping around them in the breeze like continuous soft applause.  During the first part of the ceremony, “warriors” captured a tree and presented it to the couple as a gift from the earth.  An eagle feather was placed on top of the tree, and women covered the roots with soil.  The celebration ended with a pipe ceremony around the fire circle, and Stretch officiated as the pipe carrier.  (Years later Stretch would also receive an Odawa name of honor:  “Pipe Dancer.”  After the ceremony, Stretch broke with tradition, and provided Nick with a cigar.

Naomi and Walt were created for each other.  As a couple, they led a skillful, well-organized, productive, and successful life.  After several years of saving and hard work, Walt and Naomi purchased a small farm high on a hill over looking Little Traverse Bay.   On the farm, Walt raised goats, and Naomi grew vegetables.  Walt continued his work at the ice cream factory, and Naomi followed her teaching career.   Every year in June, Naomi would throw a large outdoor birthday party for Walt, giving him the adoration and visibility he had yearned to receive.  Out of Vietnam, drug dealing and addiction, Walt achieved redemption at last.

After many years, Naomi applied to the the Elder of the Tribe to grant Walt a given Indian name.  After much thought and consultation with Walt’s “Guides,” the Elder agreed to a naming ceremony and a name.   Naomi braided her hair, and wore an ankle-length dress to the ceremony adorned with handcrafted regalia.  In a circle around Walt, his friends and neighbors honored him with the name, Ableegumooch, a trickster rabbit from an Algonquin legend.   His full name,“Brave Rabbit Standing in Open Field,” aptly described Walt’s growth and identity. 

Naomi and Walt lived to be the main characters in their own story, and Walt realized his dream of having a proper identity.  Over the long years of their marriage, Naomi taught Walt how to create a home life in harmony with nature and with her culture.  After so many mistakes and so much suffering, Walt opened his future to happiness.  

As Walt was first beginning this long, happy journey into meaning and purpose, Victoria was first beginning hers.

Little Traverse Point, A Novel by Randy Evans

Chapter 31

Bright Stars

Mikage, Victoria, and Zizi decided to have dinner at a local seafood restaurant in Holland on the channel leading in from Lake Michigan to Lake Macatawa.   Along the way to the restaurant along Ottawa Beach Road, Victoria noticed the local yacht club workers busily lowering boats into the water in advance of Memorial Day Weekend.  Captain Sundae, the popular ice cream shop, opened the new season.  A line formed in front, and children sat on picnic tables licking cones and dipping plastic spoons in paper cups.  As they sat down at their table, a middle-aged waitress was tying an apron over dress clothes.  “You were at the memorial service, “ Zizi said.  

“Yes, I waited on Tom Albers and his family for over twenty years.  He was a good man...the best.  After his children died, and then his wife, he used to come here alone every Thursday night until he ended up in the nursing home. He loved to flirt with me in his own harmless way, and I loved to flirt back. He used to say I was beautiful, inside and out.”  Her eyes watered as she changed the subject, “See the boat replica on the wall up there?  Tom’s boat.”

The women looked up.  The walls of the restaurant were covered with the model boat hulls.  The name of Tom’s boat was printed on the stern:  “Bright Stars.”  

Tom called his daughters his “bright stars,” the waitress said.  

After the waitress left the table, Zizi said, “He called me his “Bright Star” when he gave me the eagle key chain.”

“He did the same with me,” Victoria said.

Two tables over, German tourists were having difficulty with the menu.  Mikage excused herself, and translated for them.  The German couple were from a little town on the Bodensee near where Mikage had lived with Axel before their divorce.  They had a short, fun conversation about three favorite German conversation topics--beer, bread and cars.  She recommended they order perch or walleye.  Mikage returned to the table as the dinner salads arrived.  

The three women all felt the need for comic relief from the heaviness of the service, so Mikage entertained them by recounting the plots of Hindu soap operas she enjoyed viewing on the Internet.  “It must be so much fun knowing all these languages,” Zizi said.

“I have a special gift.  I plan to use my gift and my love of good food together in my business.  I intend to attract people who are more fluent in languages other than English to a new restaurant, and fix them their favorite foods,” Mikage said.

“You can make it happen!” Zizi said.  Just as Zizi had said to Walt when he wanted to change his life, Zizi used her mantra of encouragement, “You can make it happen!.”  “Why don’t you move to Northern Michigan so I can help you?  The hospital’s heart and vascular center is drawing patients from all over the world.  I could refer them to your restaurant...as long as you don’t give them fried food.”

“Would you like me to move to Northern Michigan, Victoria?” Mikage asked.

“Of course, I would like to be with you in any place...I’m just unsettled right now.  The time with my father is temporary...a visit until I figure out what to do.”  Victoria had difficulty giving direct, clear answers.  Rather than a resounding, “Yes!,” Victoria saw the world in nuances, qualifications, complications, and shades of gray.”  

“Well, if I move Up North, and Zizi is already Up North, we will have to capture you so we can all be together,” Mikage said.

“You have always taken good care of me,”  Victoria said.

 “Tomorrow you both will have great food for breakfast at my place,” Mikage said.  “In honor of my new Egyptian friend, we will have an Egyptian breakfast:  bean cakes, eggs, pickles, and tea.”

“I have not eaten bean cakes since I left Cairo...thank you, Mikage.”

Before Victoria and Zizi went to bed in Mikage’s extra bedroom, they placed their open palms together under a lamp with one eagle key chain in each hand. The key chains belonged together.  Rather than reflecting light, the turquoise eyes of the eagle and the gold beaks emitted light like sparkles from a web of stars.  Now the two young women, Tom’s adopted “Bright Stars,” had a connection not only through Victoria’s father, but through this mysterious new connection to Tom, their mutual benefactor. They were talking quietly from either side of a queen bed, when Mikage entered the bedroom.  Mikage was thirty years older than the two young women.  She walked over and tucked the blankets in around Victoria, then kissed her on the forehead, and did the same for Zizi, as if she had found two lost, motherless children.  This night, for all three women, the hard edges of loneliness disappeared, past failures dulled and the future did not threaten. When the women slept, their dreams were peopled with a healing web of friends and family.

Zizi dreamed she danced through the garbage, the garbage city filled with bright, cheerful colors.  The best of the old times came back.  She was a girl with pretty bare feet, riding a mule with her brother behind her with his arms holding on tightly around her waist.   Her father led the mule with a rope, walking beside her mother.  A princess from a fairy tale wearing a paper-thin shawl, she looked confidently for a bright-eyed girl friend, feeling sad and pleasurable at the same time.  Around her, the mounds of garbage transformed into castles, cathedrals, museums, and stately homes.  She rode gently over the rough landscape, and the garbage smelled like the sweetness of spring, and everything...everything was holy and good.  She slept with a smile, and woke smiling.

The next morning opened bright and sunny.  Victoria and Zizi wore their best clothes to meet with the lawyer, then walked over to Mikage’s diner where she had arrived two hours earlier to prepare food for the day.  Victoria pointed to the factory windows of her former loft apartment, “I lived up there for ten years while I worked at the paperboard mill.”   She was going to say more, but her throat choked up.  From a loft just above them, there were cries of a child, and splashing water, a mother bathing a small child;  from a distance, the thumping sounds of cut-off presses from the board mill, and everywhere, the noise of a new work week.  The steam whistle from the mill sounded the change of shifts with a single note.

Only a few weeks ago, her becalmed, inert life had been predictable, under control, here in this small town.  Now Victoria felt suspended, uncertain about the future.  Like a spring sapling with dull roots stirred by rain, Victoria was in grave danger of growing beyond her well-constructed defenses.   Her life seemed out of order, outside the acceptable limits of her personal quality of life control chart.   Like an awkward limb reaching to grow, she felt a faint disturbance inside--deep in her pith.  She felt strange to be in this familiar place with unfamiliar feelings.

When Victoria and Zizi entered the restaurant, Mikage was so excited she dropped a white plate on the floor.  It shattered.  Not stopping to pick up the shards, she came around the counter and hugged them both.  

“I hope you slept well last night.  I’m sorry I had to leave so early...it’s necessary when you do everything yourself.”  She poured coffee and placed a teapot on the table for Zizi.  “Now tell me how you two happen to know each other.”

 “We met by accident...my accident,” Victoria replied.

“You ran into her in your car?”

“No, in a boat.”

“In a boat...”

Victoria explained the surprise visit to her father, the crash landing on the deck, and her discovery of Zizi at her father’s place.

“How did you arrive in Northern Michigan from Cairo?”

“Tom Albers visited me when I worked in a rug factory as a little girl.  He gave me this key chain.  He told me the eagle would protect me, and give me strength and courage.  Every month thereafter, he sent checks.  The money allowed me to go to school, and later the university and medical school.  I received a fellowship to finish my residency in general surgery at the regional hospital in Petoskey.   Just as your special gift is speaking many languages, my special gift is through my hands.  Weaving rugs and mending hearts are much the same.”

Mikage smiled, and began to converse with Zizi in Arabic, one of the nearly fifty languages she had mastered with her polyglot brain.  Speaking Arabic thrilled Zizi, because she loved to speak  her native language, and hear its ancient rhythms from others. 

Mikage returned to English, “And now we will fill our empty bellies.  Ten minutes later, Mikage returned with the bean cakes, eggs, pickles and sweet rice for desert.  

“So what you are doing for me now, talking in Arabic and serving Egyptian food...this is your dream of a future restaurant,” Zizi said.

“Yes, this is my dream, but also my plan.  I intend to purchase a restaurant property between Petoskey and Mackinaw City,” she said.  I have saved for years for a bigger place.  I want a business where I can prepare local food for local people, but also attract new people from outside the area...tourists, other visitors, and someday, people who come to Northern Michigan mostly to dine at my restaurant.  I have planned to do this for the past two years, but I needed to find a new place.  When I rented a cottage in Northern Michigan last summer, I decided to move.  I have already purchased a two-bedroom house on Burt Lake, and two days ago, I closed on some commercial property just north of downtown Petoskey.”

“Wow,” said Victoria.  “Why didn’t you tell me when I left to visit my father, you intended to move up there?  

“I wanted to surprise you,”  Mikage said, “and I wasn’t sure my plans would work out.”

“It is strange,” Zizi said.  We are all displacing ourselves, either by accident or design, making our up here, just as your father did, Victoria...and Stretch.”

“What an odd name...who is Stretch?” Mikage said.  

“He’s my father’s best friend and neighbor...a tall native Texan, a little older than you.”

Zizi concluded the breakfast by raising her tea cup in a morning toast.  “If I have learned nothing in my life, I have learned one thing:  ‘Celebrate the temporary!’”

The young women raised their mugs:  “Celebrate the temporary!”

When the three women rose from the booth, Victoria picked up the pieces of broken plate, as customers began to arrive.  Zizi cleared the table.  They said their “goodbyes” to Mikage, and were off to Grand Rapids.

Lizzie and me with our best friend

Way North, A Novel by Randy Evans

Chapter Thirty

Twin Key Chains     

Mikage gave Victoria an account of what happened to Tom in her brisk, businesslike way:  “Tom broke his hip the day after you left town...then he broke his other hip, became bedridden, developed pneumonia, and died yesterday.  The nursing home called me, because you placed my number in your contact file...it’s so sad...I know you and he were close. The memorial service is scheduled at the nursing home a week from today...oh, and a lawyer from Grand Rapids called me, and said you should try to find a Dr. Rozeta Zahra at the regional hospital, and bring her with you to the service...she’s a heart surgeon.”

“Thanks for getting hold of me.  I’ll be there...strange...I know Dr. Zahra.  Would you attend the service in Zeeland with me, Mikage?”

“Yes, of course...I miss you terribly, Victoria.  You can both stay at my place.  By the way, you need to buy a cell phone...then we could talk once in a while.  Don’t be so cheap!”

“Maybe I will when I can afford one.  I miss you, too.”

Victoria rejoined the others where the cars were parked.  She pulled Zizi aside, and told her about the death of Tom, and the unusual request from the lawyer in Grand Rapids.  Zizi had no idea what this was about, but she could see Victoria was upset.  She also had no idea how anyone could know her to ask about her.  She quietly placed her arm in Victoria’s, and said, “I will go with you.  I’m not on call next weekend.”

“Zizi, I didn’t know your first name was ‘Rozeta.’”

“Do you like ‘Zizi’?...I chose it to be my American name...it’s what my little brother used to call me?”

“Yes, I like ‘Zizi,’ although ‘Rozeta’ sounds pretty, like a flower.”  As everyone left the cemetery, an eagle circled the sky rounding out the day.

The next Friday, Zizi and Victoria loaded the Honda for the weekend, and headed south on Route 131.  Victoria explained to Zizi how she had worked at the nursing home part time, and how attached she had become to the patients there, especially Cal and Tom.  As Victoria talked, Zizi looked over towards her and something glittery caught her eye on the steering column.   She had to catch her breath.  In the ignition, a silver and turquoise eagle key chain dangled, catching the sunlight.  She leaned over to examine it more closely.  The face of an eagle with a turquoise eye and gold beak was etched in the round silver piece attached to the clasp. Victoria’s key change was identical in every way to the one her benefactor had given her in Cairo during his visit to the rug factory when she was a child.

“Where did you get that key chain?”

“Tom, my patient at the nursing home, gave me the chain years ago...we’re going to his memorial service tomorrow.”

  “Could you please find a place to stop?” Zizi said.

The women remained silent until Victoria exited the highway, and pulled the car to a stop in a rest area.  After taking deep breaths, Zizi reached into her purse, and with her hands shaking, she pulled out her benefactor’s key chain.  The two women placed them side by side, and examined the twin key chains.  

“My benefactor gave this to me when I was a little girl.  For years, I didn’t even know it was a key chain.  I treasured and guarded it as my only possession.”

“What is the name of your benefactor?”

“I never knew his name, but his monthly checks came from a law office in Grand Rapids.”

The two young women sat there together in the car amazed, starring out through the windshield at the highway overpass, then starring back down at their radiant objects.  Neither one of them had lived with an ounce of mystery in their lives.  Each woman was a hard-core realist, prepared to have their hopes and dreams run down by circumstances.  This coincidence arrived with seeds of hope and change.  Victoria returned the key chain to the ignition and drove back to the highway.  For the rest of the trip, Zizi asked Victoria to tell her as much as she knew about Tom Albers.  Her benefactor now had a name.

Victoria and Zizi met Mikage at the nursing home in Zeeland right before the service.  Tom had lost his wife the year before, and lost his two daughters years earlier in a car accident.  In the front row reserved for family, a single well-dressed woman in a gray suit sat erect,  looking forward as a men’s chorus gathered to sing. Patients and the nursing home staff filled the dining room, a large open space that would serve as a chapel.  Even though natural beauty surrounded the home beyond the chain linked fence, the ivory pallor of the patients’ faces showed no signs of contact with the out-of-doors, trees, grass, and earth.

The janitors arranged folding chairs around a makeshift folding table altar covered with a food-stained white table cloth.  Candles stood crooked in tarnished candlesticks.  On another table, they placed a podium with a Rotary emblem on the front, and rolled in an upright piano.  Flowers received at the reception desk, but not yet delivered to a room, were borrowed for the service.  The janitors looked like scene changers for a drama production, dragging pieces from a warehouse, and standing by to return them when they were no longer needed. 

The nursing home administrators selected a local preacher to perform the service.  He knew nothing of Tom’s life history.  A tall, rough-looking man in his late fifties, he wore a black ill-fitted suit with a black vest and a black tie.  His stiff limbs stuck out from the sleeves and pants like dead branches from a hollow tree trunk.  A large pendant holding a silver cross hung over his vest.  Briskly entering, the room was full of people he didn’t know.  He shook everyone’s hands like they were members of his flock, although he never mentioned anyone by name, and no one called him by name.  He sat down hard on a folding chair with a pained face, as if he was used to sitting on cushions.

Aides brought in extra chairs, and helped arrange people attending in wheel chairs. Tom had been a patient for nearly eight years, and he was well-liked.  There were over fifty people from the nursing home, both patients and staff, a few retirees from Tom’s company, and stone-lipped Cal, Tom’s best friend.  The residents wore pale, bleached out clothes, so the gathering looked like a faded photograph. The three women sat down beside Cal, and Victoria held his weak hand.  Even though Victoria had left only two weeks earlier,  Cal looked more vacant and frail, his eyes less focused.  The preacher’s young assistant passed out hymnals without a word.  He looked like he didn’t want to be there, but rather seemed like an indifferent guide in a museum, waiting for the quitting time.  After doing his duties, he sat down not even watching, reading his Bible.

 A plump woman with bulbous eyes and wild hair shuffled in with a walker in the row in front of Cal and the three women.  She smelled like lavender and the nip of Yukon Jack she used to get her medicines down.  Her red rouged face looked folded like a rose pressed long ago between pages in a family bible.  She wore a bright-colored, flowered sun dress, a contrast to the faded clothing around her.  She commented to no one in particular, “When you’re old, you need to wear bright colors.”   She stared down at one of the seats.  “I’ve heard a lot of good things about this chair,” she said, and sat down. She winked at Cal, but he gave no response.  After some gospel hymns and and a call to worship, the preacher rose to speak in a bull voice punctuated with periodic pauses and the repetition of certain words for emphasis:

“We pray to God that our recently departed brother, Tom, Albers was saved...saved by Jeeezus before he died.  Firstly, and you all know more than I do about this, being saved by Jeeezus is like cannin’ green beans.  Once the jar is sealed, how long are the beans good for? Now I know some of you people have canned before.  How long are canned green beans good for? (A man in the third row answers, ‘about a year’).  No sir... they are good foreeever if Jeeezus seals them!  If you are saved, you are seealed by the Lord!  Ameeen!  And once you’re saved, when your body dies, you will go to Heaven, and when the Rapture comes...and my brothers and sisters, it will surely come... in 1/165th of a second, you will be taken bodily out of your graves...if you are saved.”

Even demented Cal knew where this was heading, and nodded to his nurse for a bathroom break.  The nurse wheeled him out, and he never came back.

The preacher continued with his dramatic pageantry, holding his cross with dirty fingernails:

“Nextly, we need to ask ourselfs, what can we do here in this nursing home where you all don’t do anything.  Why, you can pray...not so much for your families, ‘cause everyone prays for families, but you can pray for other people like your pastors, people who do things.  So while you’re here takin’ it easy, you need to make intercessory prayers, and you need to pray for our country, because our country is in a whole lot of trouble, and you have to do it with desire, fervent desire.  You have to desire what you are prayin’ for---Ameeen!  I know that we all have to do this for ourselfs, because my own life is a battle with Satan...but I am convicted that prayer moooves the Hands of God.  Let me say it again, prayer moooves the hands of God.  Lastly, you have to believe this ‘cause if you’re saved, this life here in this nursing home is the closest to Hell you’re goin’ to git.  So pray for people who are doin’ somethin,’ since you all have a lot of time in this nursing home.  Jeeezus, Jeeezus, Jeeezus, Ameeen!”

As soon as the preacher said the word, “Satan,” Blackie, a jet black Scottish Terrier therapy dog, playfully called “Satan” by the patients, came running into the cafeteria stage left, and proceeded to nip at the preacher’s pant legs.  After some great entertainment, serving the residents as a talk subject for weeks, one of the attendants dragged the dog away stage right to isolated applause and muffled laughter.  Everyone was amused except the preacher who smiled while swearing under his breath.  During the rest of the sermon, the preacher’s leg twitched as if the dog were still present.  One of the men a few rows back from the front, opened up a newspaper and began to read, mouthing the print in a low voice.

After the preacher added some volume to his voice and provided more affirmations of conditional immortality, he stopped talking at last, the men’s chorus sang, the closing hymn ended, and the benediction closed the service.  Throughout the service, the preacher avoided the sad eyes of the patients looking for love; instead he looked up at heaven waiting for angels to speak.

 Mikage said,  “I don’t think he likes people...and he didn’t have much to say about Tom.  He also frightens me with his talk about the world coming to an end...it’s depressing to think we may all be blown to pieces in a fraction of a second.”

“Not a lot of love coming out of his mouth...just dusty and dull words,”  Victoria said.  “The part about the green beans...well, I’ve never put up green beans or anything else... but he seemed kind of silly to me.  And then at the end, he dismissed us like poor students, and practically ran out of the building along with his assistant.”

Zizi did not criticize the preacher like the other women.  In fact, she astounded them with another example of her unremitting compassion.  “I have met kinder preachers,” Zizi said, “but he asked us to pray for him.  We cannot regard him in the same way he regards us.  We must see him as someone who suffers like us.  I will pray for God to unseal his heart.  And besides...I could still hear God speaking to me through him, even through his silliness.  He said he is battling with Satan...I have the same battle.”

The old woman in the row in front of them wept, looking down at the yellow tennis balls securing the legs of her walker. She kept trying to arrange her skirt with one hand as she watered the linoleum floor with her tears. The three women gathered around her, and comforted her.  She said, “Where’s Cal?”

“He needed a bathroom break,” Victoria said.

“That old skunk takes a break when ever he wants to get out of something...does the same thing when we play word games and balloon volleyball,” the woman replied.  People began to gather at the back of the cafeteria to snack on dry boxed cookies and lukewarm soda from big plastic bottles.

The woman in the gray suit approached the three of women.  “I’m looking for Victoria Randall and Rozeta Zahra,” she said.

“Yes,” Victoria said, answering for both of them, and this is my friend, Mikage Hoshimoto.

“My name is Hannah Zimmerman. Black streaks of mascara showed evidence of tear stains on her face, and she kept daubing her eyes with a small white handkerchief.  Could you please come to my law office in downtown Grand Rapids on Monday morning at nine o’clock?  The matter has to do with Tom Albers.”

Victoria and Zizi agreed to meet Hannah the next morning, shook hands with her as she departed, and then accepted Mikage’s invitation to spend the night at her apartment.