Kapiolani Community College
Spectrum 2000

In Sitka, Alaska, the rain sifted out of the sky in a perpetual, insipid mist from late August to early June. The cruise-ship tourists would spend their summers touring the fourteen miles of road, the Russian Orthodox church, and the salmon canning facility, and then leave, thinking they'd found another island paradise, only this time the bartenders served hot cider instead of margaritas with paper umbrellas.

Then in August, the dorm residents of the local junior college would arrive, and the sky would remain clear just long enough to teach them what they were missing. By the start of the semester, the freshmen would notice the clouds had closed over the island and choked out the sun. Then the rains would begin blowing over the streets, the harbor, the forests, and the campus in fine, silken sheets like a continuous sneeze. It rained 90 inches a year in Sitka, one drop at a time.

My parents had enrolled me in Sheldon Jackson College without my consent, and I had spent my first week in town hiding under my blanket, sleeping deeply in the hope that it would make the semester pass more quickly. I was alone, cut off from my friends and my home, and there was nothing in the little wedge of cutesy houses and summertime businesses to distract me from the anguish of it all. It felt like exile.

One morning in October the rain stopped, and wind swept the sky clear enough to lure the sunlight- starved students from the lower forty-eight into the open, like moles coming up for fresh air. My roommate Sotera had disappeared, probably into town to develop some film, and without company I didn't know what to do with myself. I meandered down the gravel road from the dormitory to the recreation hall to the library, and then I found myself on the two-lane road that ran along the lower edge of campus, staring to the right at the familiar walk to town and to the left at the road that curled along the shore toward Indian River Park. Unexplored territory. Not well populated. A little intimidating despite its proximity to the suburban oasis between school and the town square.

Full of ambiguous fears, I waffled between the lure of the bookstore and coffee shop and the moral compulsion to expand my horizons. After all, I recognized the potential for regret two years down the road when I might be unable to say anything about Alaska except that it had nice walls. So I did the brave thing and started walking toward Indian River with my hands tucked tight in the pockets of my jacket and condensation billowing upward with every breath.

I passed the beach first, a stretch of shore littered with delicate but sharp-edged clam shells and murky foam. I walked out over the sand and silt and heard the crunch and crackle of the shells beneath my shoes. I smelled the pungent odor of rotting kelp. Long brown rods of it lay in tasseled, knotted masses at the water's edge, and every piece had elliptical blisters to keep it afloat that had become useless and withered after some high-tide beaching. I didn't touch the seaweed. It had an alien quality that made my shoulder blades hunch up against one another. Seaweed at home had a fluid, accomodating nature, but this stuff seemed as stiff as basket reeds. I imagined that if I swam out amidst it, it would weave together and trap me so I could only suck at the surface of the water like a carp.

The water itself was so cold it numbed my hand, and I backed away from it, realizing this wasn't my Pacific. Whereas the ocean at home would carry you in its cool embrace indefinitely, this water would gnaw you to death in a few minutes.

I left the beach and continued down the road to the park. It had a little ranger station at the opening of the wall and a trio of weathered Tlingit totem poles stared across the parking lot as if they saw nobler things than the rusty hatchbacks and American-made trucks. Beyond them the forest stood just as straight and noble, dark and dense and innately mysterious as if unblemished by beaten down dirt trails and informative plaques.

I stepped out on the circuit trail alone and apprehensive. The cold, chalky cry of ravens punctuated the rush of waves, and my only company was a kayaker whose wheeling paddle carried him out of sight. Well watered salmonberry bushes fluttered their dark leaves at me, and urban instincts leapt to the fore. I thought about where someone might hide along the trail and what I would do if that someone jumped out at me and brandished a knife or a gun. Scream, most likely. Run perhaps. Maybe I'd play out the last moments of my life like the teaser scene of a horror movie and die tragically isolated from my family and friends back home.

Then again, maybe the worse and more realistic threat was grizzly bears. Sitka had a few that would, once in a great long while, rouse their sleepy brains long enough to come and paw spawning salmon out of the river. One man had been mauled on a hiking trail already, and I could see myself caught flat-footed by a foraging bear. The only thing I could think to do was to get down on my stomach, cover the back of my head, and cower, and that, too, would have made a great opening scene for somebody else's story.

The trail looped around an oblong strip of land like a hairpin, and I reached the bend of it and headed back roughly in the direction from which I had come. On this side of the park the sun rolled over the fir boughs and glittered on the river that ran alongside the trail. On the river's opposite bank, I saw homes on the rocky beach that faced the open ocean. It dispelled the illusion of solitude, and as I got closer to the head of the trail, I began to hear the animated exclamations of tourists.

They stood over the river on an arched bridge and pointed at the water, thickly clotted with salmon trying to get home. The river boiled with fish, and the scene had a charnel morbidity. The salmon's skins had gone whitish and patchy, and some of them lay on their sides in the mud. They wanted to get home so badly, but why?

I began to resent the intrusion of those cruise-ship retirees. They'd ruined my little adventure alone. I'd set out for a solitary hike in the wilderness and wound up on the road too oft taken, and now all I could tell people when I got back was "I took the tour."

When I returned to the dorm, I wrote a letter to my parents to tell them about the salmon, the berry bushes, and the kayaker because I knew it was the kind of thing they'd sent me to Alaska to see, but I wrote with indifferent condescension. After all, they were the kind who'd go straight from the parking lot to the salmon river, maybe with a gaggle of old ladies with curled white hair and big purses. I had taken the long, wild way, and I had done it alone. I had claimed a few miles of Sitka for myself.

Untitled
By: Casandra Lee

The mirrored globe wheeled,
And I watched couples, limp and rhythmic as corals,
Sway under the current of the
Heavy bass thrum,
Washing in waves from the
Stereo conches.
Udo, I saw you moving stiffly with
A radiant, tiny girl who
Closed her eyes against your chest while you
Stared into flickering lights.
You made a beautiful pair, and I felt
Clumsy and bloated as I
Imagined myself, listening to your slow heart.
The dancers, like corals - they wilted, receded when the
Music ebbed against itself.
The small girl drifted into those swirling, foreign faces,
And I approached on a gangplank, holding car keys within a sweaty fist.
"Komm' bei mir" means "come with me,"
A casual summons, but I said,
"Komm' mit mir" which means the same but
Different. Your skin flushed, but the hall steamed,
And I thought nothing, purposefully.
You followed me to the car, and Udo,
I was puzzled when you
Followed me up the stairs and
Into my room, and when you
Touched me, set your hands on my shoulders, the small of my back,
I shrieked and threw you into a bilingual panic.
Oh, Udo, only yesterday someone told me the nuances
Of your subtle mother tongue.
"Komm' mit mir"Ümore than a summonsÜis an
Invitation, a lover's call,
And so I must apologize, love,
For recoiling so dishonestly from your embrace.
The truth came more easily when I
Didn't know
How to speak.

Home

Acknowledgements

Contents

Index