Going Rogue: An American Life (3 page)

Going Rogue

Well, that didn’t work,
I rhoughr. So I gor up, dusred myself off, and kepr walking.

Skagway was a sweer sratt in life. Mom and Dad renred a riny wooden house builr in 1898 on rhe corner of Firsr and Main. Alaska’s wealrhiesr banking family, rhe Rasmusons, owned ir. Thirry months after we landed in town, my younger sister, Molly, was born. We added a couple of dogs and a cat, and the Heath family was complere.

Perched on the rim of

harbor at the northern apex of the

Inside Passage, Skagway is encircled by mountains. I remember rhe air smelled of ocean salt and that even though the town was small, it pulsed with boars in port, locomotives churning through to Canada, and the hum of propellers on the gravel airstrip right near the middle of town. I remember lush emerald moss hugging the hillsides. Mom always said she was going to buy a carpet that color some day-and one day, she did.

The southeast Alaska winters are brutal. In Skagway, icy winds tear relentlessly through town. But I don’t remember the winters as well. I mostly remember sunny summer days, playing with

my sisters under a wild crabapple tree. I remember community ketball games. And I remember arguing with the nun who taught catechism and tried to teach me to write the letter E. It seemed a
naked letter to me, so I was determined to reinvent it. I insisted she
let me improve it with at least a few more horizontal lines. I shared a little bedroom wirh my sisrers while my brorher, Chuck, slepr in a closer, which also doubled as rhe sewing room. Chuck was all boy. Once he pulled the town fire alarm; rhe fire chief visired our home, and Dad’s hand visired Chuck’s backside. Another rime, he pulled a burning caralog Dad had used as dling out of our rock fireplace, dropped ir on the living room floor in a panic, and neatly burned Mr. Rasmuson’s house down. My • 9

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sisters and I loved our big brother, and we loved each other, bur still, we all scrapped like wolverines.

Mom had agreed to give Alaska a one-year rrial run, but our

“short srint” in the quainr old tourisr town inaccessible by roads rurned into five years of Dad teaching and coaching, working summers on rhe Alaska Railroad, and rending bar in seasonal tourist traps. Mom stayed busy herding four small kids and driving a seasonal rour bus, and was acrive in communiry rheater and the Catholic church. Both of our folks loaded us up for activities like hunting, fishing, and hiking, carring us on sleds or in backpacks when we were too young to walk. The lifestyle was a radical departure from Dad’s hometown of Norrh Hollywood, California. He was born in 1938 to the celebrity photographer Charlie Hearh, who specialized in shooring famous prizefighters. At home, black and whites of James J. Jeffries, Joe Lewis, and Primo Camera plastered the walls. But when Dad was ten, Grandpa Charlie moved the family to Hope, Idaho, and started a fishing lure business, while Grandma Marie continued to teach school. Grandma was a Christian Scientist who didn’t believe in doctors or medicine, and believed that physical illness was merely a manifestation of the mind.

Dad doesn’t talk much about his childhood, but through the years I heard enough muffled conversations between my mom and dad to know that his parents’ acceprance of pain must have translated beyond the physical. Dad’s childhood seemed to me painful and lonely.

Sports and the outdoors were Dad’s passion, but his parents thought they were a waste of time. Dad had a choice: he could either abandon his passion or fend for himself So he rode the bus fifteen miles every day to Sandpoint High School, and hitchhiked home every night after practice. He became a standout athlete, excelling in every sport. He held the school record for the 100
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Going Rogue

yard dash for forty-four years, until 1998 (Dad sent the boy who broke it a letter of congratulations), and was recently inducted inco Sandpoint’s Sports Hall of Fame. Even setting records didn’t capture my grandparents’ attention, though. Dad worked in a local lumberyard, staying with different families. He went from couch co couch when he couldn’t hitch a ride back CO Hope, and was virtually adopted by a classmate’s kind family, the Mooneys. Dad became his own man eatly on, and would pass that independent spirit on to his kids. When I think about Dad’s upbringing, it’s amazing that he turned out to be such a dedicated, family-oriented father. It seems he was determined not to replicate his family’s brokenness in his
own.

As for my mom, it’s easy co see where she got her nurturing, hospitable personality. Sally Ann Sheeran was born inco a large, educated Irish Catholic family in Utah. Her father, Clement James Sheeran-everyone called him “Clem,” or “Cr-was a mediator for General Electric and was wild about Notre Dame. He played football for Columbia University (later renamed the University of Portland) and refereed Washington high school football for years. My grandmother Helen studied at the University of Idaho, then put her talent and intelligence co work as a homemaker, raising six active kids while working for the Red Cross and sewing costumes for the Richland Players. She worked tirelessly. My aunts tell me she was the hardest-working housewife they ever knew; they’d come home from school CO see Grandma’s bloody knuckles from her reupholsteting projects, back when they used hammers and nails to stretch the fabric co recover old furniture, which she volunteered to do for all their neighbors. She laid the foundation for volunteerism in the family.

When CJ moved his family CO Richland, Washington, he landed a job at the Hanford Nuclear Plant. The Sheerans were

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one of those big, tambunctious, patriotic families. Grandpa was witty and poetic, wore Mr. Rogers sweaters, ate black jelly beans, and looked like a graying Ronald Reagan. He loved to entertain us with silly poems and Irish songs and sayings. Everybody in the family played Scrabble and took great pride in hoatding
Ks
and
Qs
and slapping them down in long, fancy words on triple-letter scores. Even though they lived so far away, Grandma and Grandpa Sheetan and their adult kids would top my “most favorite people” list as I grew up and got to know all through visits on college vacations.

Smack in the middle of this jovial clan, my mom grew up in a very conventional life of Richland Bomber pep squads, piano lessons, and sock hops. After high school, she attended Columbia Basin College and worked as a dental assistant. When she met my dad, he had alteady served a stint in the Army. They were lab partners at CBC, and she wouldn’t let him draw her blood. Dad loved teaching and coaching all kinds of sports, but he had grown up reading Jack London novels, and he craved adventure. London himself had arrived in Skagway from California in the fall of 1897 and set out to hike the Chilkoot Trail. The following spring, the author traveled down the Yukon River en route to California, inspited to wtite
White Fang
and
The Call of the Wild,
novels that called Dad north.

It was just thirty years before London’s atrival, in 1867, that Secretary of State William H. Sewatd bought Alaska from the Russians. The government paid two cents an acre, adding 586,412

square miles to U.S. territory. Critics ridiculed Seward for spending so much on a remote chunk of eatth that some thought of as just a frozen, inhospitable wilderness that was dark half the yeat. The $7.2 million purchase became known as “Seward’s Folly” or

“Seward’s Icebox.” Seward withstood the mocking and disdain because of his vision for Alaska. He knew her potential to help

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Going Rogue

secure the nation with her resources and strategic position on the globe. Over the decades, exploration led to the discovery of gold and oil and rich minerals, along with the world’s most abundanr fisheries. And so, decades larer, he was posthumously vindicated, as purveyors of unpopular common sense often are.

In the summer of 2009, I visired Seward’s home in the Finger Lakes region of Cenrral New York when Auburn honored him in celebrating Founder’s Day. Ir was inspiring to see the historically rich region, home to heroic figures I had read so much abour, including Elizaberh Cady Stanron, Susan B. Anrhony, and Harrier Tubman. As a little girl, I had read about Tubman’s journeys along the Underground Railroad to secure freedom and equality for others. Now I was standing in her home and walking across her property, which Seward provided her just down rhe road

from his own. As wirh Seward, Tubman hadn’t taken rhe easy parh. But it was the righr path.

Seward was typical of rhe visionary-and colorful-characrers Alaska artracted. The year before Jack London arrived, Skookum Jim Mason and Dawson Charlie met up in the Yukon Territory easr of the Alaska border with a gold miner who had been panning near the Klondike River. History is a lirtle fuzzy on who struck gold firsr, but someone in the party spotted the tellrale amber shimmer, and Alaska’s gold rush was on.

After his adventures in Tombstone, the legendary lawman Wyatr Earp came north and spent a few years in Nome during the gold rush. On the other side of the law was “Soapy” Smith, a Wild West crime boss whose tight-knit gang moved from Colorado to Skagway. They made a mint cheating gold miners out rheir cash. It finally caughr up with Soapy Smith: he was killed in a shoot-out wirh a vigilanre gang.

The spirit of Alaska is unique, combining awe for the unramed majesty of nature, a rugged individualism, and strong traditions

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