Molly Revisited

Above The Timberline

by Wayne Mergler

Note: The following column was written two or three years ago, but I think it bears publishing again at this time. The young woman—I’ll still call her Molly—who is the subject of my piece came into the bookstore again today. She is still young, still lovely, still vibrant with life. We remembered each other and talked like old friends. Once again, Molly was on her way to Barrow, this time to celebrate the 100th birthday of her great-grandmother. She was excited about the event. Molly is now a freshman college student at the University of Alaska/Anchorage. She came in with her cell phone, her iPod, and her Kindle. She is as much a part of the mainstream 21st Century as any young woman anywhere could be, a fact that both delights and amazes me since I have watched with great interest the cultural evolution of Molly’s people over the 43 years I have lived in Alaska.

ANCHORAGE Alaska—(Weekly Hubris)—3/21/11—“Think of all the changes your grandmother has seen in her 100 years,” I said to Molly.

Her dark eyes widened and sparkled like polished onyx. “Oh, yes!” she said. “She still remembers when she first saw her first white man. She said to herself, ‘What is wrong with that man? He must be sick. He has no color and his eyes are washed out like the sea!’”

Molly laughed in delight at telling me this. “There were very few white men in Alaska in those early days,” she reminded me. “He was a real curiosity.”

My visit with Molly was short; she had a plane to catch. But she did buy a book—a volume in the currently popular Hunger Games trilogy—and waved happily at me as she dashed away. Her cell phone rang on the way out.

“Hello?” I heard her say; then, “Yes, yes! I am on my way!”

And Molly is indeed on her way. I thought about her most of the day. Below is the column she inspired me to write a couple of years back. It seems to have even more meaning for me now.

I’ll call her Molly, though I doubt that is her name. I never asked her name. She came into the bookstore at the Anchorage airport, where I work part-time. It’s odd, I suppose, that I didn’t ask her name, since I learned so much else about her during our brief, 30-minute conversation last week. I learned that she was 15 years old, that she was born in Barrow, Alaska, but had lived now in Anchorage for the past six years. An Inupiaq Eskimo, she was small-boned and delicate in appearance, with large black, almond-shaped eyes and waist-length hair the color of the raven her people so venerate. She was very bright and very lovely. She was flying, with her mother, to Barrow for Thanksgiving and was looking for a book to read on the plane. We talked as we searched the shelves, as I made suggestions and asked questions about her reading tastes.

“I am reading Wuthering Heights now,” she told me, sparkly-eyed. “I love it! But I am almost finished with that one.”

I asked her if she had read Jane Eyre.

“Oh, yes!” she replied. “That one was very good, but I am liking Wuthering Heights better.”

I expressed some mild surprise at that; most teenage girls, I remember, seemed to prefer Jane Eyre.

“I think it’s because it reminds me of Barrow,” she went on to explain. “All that roaming on the moors. It’s like the tundra—and the way the wind sweeps over it. And how they call out to the wind! I used to do that!”

For those who don’t know Alaska’s map, Barrow is the northernmost point of the state, a town literally at the very top of the world, 350 miles north of the Arctic Circle. With its population of 4,000, it is the largest Inupiat Eskimo community in the world. Built on permanently frozen ground, Barrow has no underground sewers or water lines, no paved streets, no paved sidewalks. Polar bears roam the beaches and forage in the city refuse dump. Whales are annually hunted and harvested; seals are hunted through the ice in winter. In Barrow, the sun sets in November and is not seen again until February; in the summer, the sun rises in May and doesn’t set again until August. That is where Molly was born and where she lived until she was eight years old and moved to Anchorage, the big, white man’s city far to the south.

I asked her which she preferred, Barrow or Anchorage.

“Oh, Barrow!” she answered without hesitation.

Again, I expressed mild surprise. I would have thought a 15-year-old girl would prefer the big city with its shopping malls and theaters and many activities for teens. But Molly explained to me that in Barrow she felt connected. “I love our traditions,” she said. “I know who I am in Barrow.”

“Who are you in Barrow?” I asked her. “Are you someone different there from who you are in Anchorage?”

“Oh, yes, I’m very different there,” she said. “In Barrow, I am an Inupiaq girl. In Anchorage, I am almost like a white girl. I have many friends in Anchorage but, in Barrow, we are all family, even if not by blood.”

I marveled at this wise, bright-eyed child who read the Brontés and spoke so passionately and so comfortably about her life and her loves.

I remember so well the first Native students I taught when I first moved to Alaska 40 years ago. They would now be the age of Molly’s grandparents. In those days, there were no village schools in the Alaska bush. Indian and Eskimo high school students were taken from their families and flown into Anchorage (and a few to Fairbanks) to go to school. I was a young teacher, fresh from college in the Lower 48, filled with ideals and enthusiasms, but little experience. Many of these kids from the villages had never before seen an electric light or a flush toilet. They spoke only rudimentary English. I remember that they were painfully and cripplingly shy. They had been dropped, unceremoniously, into the crowded, noisy turmoil of the predominantly white big city schools, when they had known, for the most part, only quiet and calmness and an alien (to us) sense of time and space.

They were often late to class, if they came at all, because they often got lost in the labyrinthine and foreign halls of the high school and, more typically, because they did not understand the concept of getting somewhere on time, at a specific time, or that failing to do so would result in consequences. I remember bewildered Native students in after-school detention halls because they had been tardy, when the whole concept of tardiness was incomprehensible to them.

I remember Louise, a young girl who could well have been Molly’s grandmother, who came into my classroom one afternoon after school to talk about something I’ve now forgotten. I was engrossed in piles of paper-grading at my desk and did not hear her quietly enter the room. I’m not sure how long she stood there, silently and patiently, as I attacked the massive stacks of papers with my red pen but, finally, I heard a soft, nearly-whispered voice say, “Someone is here.”

Not “I am here,” or “Excuse me,” or even “Hello.” Just the quiet “Someone is here.” That is how they always referred to themselves. To announce herself as “I” would have been, for Louise, unthinkably rude, an aggressive intrusion . . . “un-humble.” I cannot tell you how charmed I was by her graceful reminder that I was needed beyond the piles of papers that had so consumed me for the moment.

Sometime in the 1970s, rich with new oil money, Alaska built schools for all the villages in the bush. Modern schools, with all the modern technology and equipment found in any school in Anchorage or Juneau. So, the Indian and Eskimo kids of the bush no longer had to leave home, no longer had to suffer through the inexplicable big city schools that had made their parents so unhappy. Molly’s parents attended the bush schools. This, after a long battle by many Native elders to get schools into the villages, was viewed by everyone as progress. Molly is not so sure.

“The bush schools were thought to be a good thing,” she told me, as we scanned the shelves of the bookstore together. “But I think they allowed my parents to hide from the world. My grandparents were unhappy in the city, but they learned about the ways of the world. My parents suffered less, but have done less well. They did not have to learn about the world.”

She told me that her father, like so many Natives of his generation, had suffered from alcoholism and drug addiction. The child of parents who had been encouraged to give up their Native culture to assimilate into the mainstream of white America, he found himself rootless and cultureless, living in a strange, hybrid world: not white; not Native.

“He was lost,” Molly told me.

Her mother, she said, had done better. She is not happy in Anchorage, away from her village, but she is there for Molly’s sake. She thinks that Molly will fare better if she knows the brave new world that is out there beyond Barrow. And she may be right, because Molly seems to be thriving in both worlds. She struck me as an example of the very best of both worlds. Her traditional Inupiat culture is alive and well in her village, and she is an active part of it all; yet she is comfortable, too, with the mainstream world and reads the Bronté sisters with delight. For Thanksgiving, she told me, her family would eat turkey, walrus meat, and muktuk (dried whale blubber.) They would dance their Native dances and chant their songs. And Molly would be home in time to attend the Christmas dance at the Anchorage high school, where her date, a white boy named Nathan, would be waiting with corsage in hand.

I asked Molly what she wanted to do with her life. She wants, she told me, to go to college, maybe in California or Washington State, where she might major in English or in political science. She would like to be a writer, she said, or maybe go into politics. I asked her about our governor, Sarah Palin, and what she thought of her recent rise to fame. Molly wrinkled her nose. “I liked her as a governor. I didn’t like her outside of Alaska. She kind of embarrassed us.”

At last, Molly made her choice of book to purchase: Jane Austen’s Persuasion.

“Do you like Jane Austen?” I asked.

Yes, she had read Pride and Prejudice and Emma.

“I like the small town life,” she said, “with all the neighbors and the gossip and the romance. It’s like Barrow.”

There are those up here who think that Sarah Palin may be the future of Alaska’s contribution to national politics. For me personally, I’m voting for Molly.