Inside Passage, A Memoir

Introduction

“Looks like you’re going to have that baby any minute,” a guy at the table nearest the stage says. He has weekend stubble and the cargo shorts-paired-with-flip-flops thing going. It’s Sunday evening at a local brewery in a mountain city in Montana, so he fits right in. “Don’t worry. I got you if it goes down.” He raises a full pint glass in salute. “I’m an EMT.”

I smile, adjust my mic stand, and do a mental eye roll. Wouldn’t that be fun? Delivering my baby on a brewhouse floor with a drunk heckler to assist?

“The baby should make it through a couple more songs,” I say, strumming my guitar. “This one’s a true story.”

I only play music for the fun of it: a few originals, a few covers. Mostly early evening shows at breweries and distilleries, and art galleries. I thought for a time that I might make music my life’s work one day, but I let college suck me in instead. Then more college, some travel, marriage, now kids. Besides, without my sister’s songbird highs and my mother’s silken lows, what good is my own voice to me beyond casual enjoyment?

I remain a lazy musician, wholly averse to the hustle. My sister’s doing it: late-night gigs, radio appearances, an album a year, the occasional indie film score. It looks good on her. It also looks hard.

I played with my daughter strapped to my back when she was tiny, but she’s recently discovered the power of her legs on an open dance floor, the thrill of fast circles in a crowd of dancers. Very little in this world feels as perfect and true as picking my way through a song with my kid out there, holding hands with her best friend, working her way through a toddler two-step until they fall on top of each other, laughing, in the small space they’ve carved out in the crowd. The smile in my husband’s eyes as he lifts them back up and teaches them to spin each other.

Tonight’s show has gone past bedtime. My daughter aims tired eyes my way at the end of a slow tune and blinks heavily. I know what’s on her mind. She shakes loose from her father, makes her way to the stage, and climbs up. I set my guitar in the stand, lean into a stool, and pull her to my lap for the last song. She curls her legs under the round curve of the baby in my belly and lays her head against my heart, singing along. She knows these songs already.

As we’re packing up, the EMT stops by. “Making a family band?” he asks, nodding at my daughter, busily strumming my guitar now nestled in its case.

His question summons the yaw and snap of our family tent in a Southeast Alaskan wind, my mother and siblings pressed close under our shared blankets. Ravens cawing from the trees outside, a sea of campers rousing for another day of bass and fiddle and guitar in the endless string of music festivals that may have been the happiest and loneliest part of my life. The creosote and steel tang of the harbor as we board yet another ferry, bound for Ketchikan or Juneau or Sitka or Haines, compelled by our family curse to chase the music and wander, wander, wander. The loneliness of being perpetual new kids softened by the sweetness of Mom’s guitar on her lap, my siblings and I on the floor at her feet reading an endless pile of books and jumping in when the harmony grabs us. The pure knowing. This is my place.

“I would do that again,” I say.

Chapter 1. By Any Other

“Make sure the drunks sleep outside,” my mother says, splashing cold water on her mouth at the trailer’s kitchen sink. She pulls long, dark hair away from her face and leans in, drinking deeply from a cupped hand. She gasps and lays her head across one arm on the lip of the sink.

Twenty years and change, my mother is all belly and glowing olive skin and great doe eyes. Freckles form bright constellations along her cheeks and arms. Summer stardust, she calls them.

She pushes away from the sink and leans her petite frame into my father’s massive one, nearly a foot taller than her. He is forty years old, broad-shouldered, and tan in a way that Nordic redheads only ever manage through repeated sunburn. His given name is David, but he’s been Dude since his first set of kids were toddlers who couldn’t quite manage “dad” more than ten years earlier.

She’d met Dude at a music festival and fallen in love with him on sight. Compared to the martial law of her mother’s home, Dude’s free spirit had seemed like a dream. She’d taken in his booming voice and broad muscles, the red curls springing from his damp forehead, chin, and chest, and told him: “I’m going to have your babies.” He might have been twice her age, with two teenage kids and an ex-wife down the street, but what did that matter? She had a plan.

The screen door of the trailer slaps open, and a neighbor leans in with a small wood pipe. “Hey, Dude. Some fresh to take the edge off?” Dude accepts the pipe, gently presses the fragrant green bud with the butt of his lighter into the bowl, and tokes. Outside, someone strums a guitar and plays through a few bars before a fiddle jumps in.

“On the other end of this day, we will have the most beautiful baby in the world,” my mother sighs.

Dude nods, blowing smoke. “The most beautiful,” he says.

Or at least that’s how I imagine it because stories vary as to whether the sun shone or clouds came right down to the ground on the late July day when my mother gave birth to me, so I’ve had to piece the event together over time. Sadly, most of the guests crammed into my father’s doublewide trailer on Kona Lane were as befuddled as kittens, and no one can recall the exact day I emerged.

To be fair, some of the attendees were drunk as well as stoned. The party had started with the onset of contractions, which can last somewhere between ten minutes and eternity, according to anyone who’s ever been in labor. It’s no wonder the facts of my birth are muddled.

“I wanted you born into a community,” my mother says. “Used to be children were born into homes with three and four generations under one roof, but we didn’t have that in Anchorage, so I made one for you.” Three or four generations in that dinky trailer is a frightening thought (mobile home, my mother insists). So when I think about it, I like to imagine a great big house with a parlor for the birthing and the dying and a wraparound deck for the barefoot banjo picking. But this was Anchorage, Alaska, in 1980. Wraparound decks weren’t a common sight for trailers, or even normal houses, then.

Instead, my mother paced a fifteen-second loop around the bed, through the door to the toilet and back. She hummed through contractions, flashing thumbs up as friendly partygoers popped in to cheer her on with sloshing cans of Rainier beer.

I’d call that tight quarters, maybe even go so far as claustrophobic, but Mom says it was intimate. And she says it in such a way as to mean: I’d never been happier or more in love with the world, and if a thousand people had walked through that door, it wouldn’t have changed a thing.

When I imagine that moment, I see my tiny hippie mother with her black hair falling to her butt, dark eyes wide and wondering as she breathes through her first childbirth, and she is in full bliss mode. When the pain is intense, she doubles over and says, “Goddess, help me!” When the pain is light, she sings, “Summertime, and the living is eaaaaasy.”

Then from the front door, I hear a raspy man’s voice, “Fawn, where’s that baby? Let’s get this party started.” I have very few major childhood memories without some pleasant drunk guy interjecting something totally ridiculous and inappropriate during a magical moment. I can’t even summon an imaginary scene without that guy popping up.

Among the community members invited to the party-that-was-my-birth were my father’s oldest children from his first (and only) marriage: Zachary and Cimberlee (as in Kimberly with a “k” but with a devil-may-care slant to the spelling). Zach and Cim were teenagers then, and as the children of a well-known Anchorage pot dealer, I doubt my birth party was their first hoedown. Also in attendance were two out of three of my future stepdads: C.A. and Brian. I can’t summon a single thing to be grateful to Brian for, but I have C.A. to thank for saving my life that day when he invited a friend to the party who knew a midwife.

The way Kim remembers it, she got a call out of the blue from her friend, C.A., who was attending a birthing party. Some years before, Kim had assisted a midwife with a few births, but she had no formal training and balked at the request. “Listen,” C.A. told her, “there’s a twenty-year-old girl in labor right now with her first baby. It’s coming with or without you, and I’m pretty sure there’s not one person here who knows what to do about it.” I can imagine Kim pacing her living room, debating whether to call her midwife friend. Picking up the phone. Putting it down. The worried circle of her thoughts until, finally, she got up the courage to at least ask.

When I eventually drew my first breath, it was thanks to Kim’s midwife friend. She’d shown up in time to unravel the umbilical cord wrapped three times firmly around my neck. Then she thumped me vigorously on the back until I got pissed off enough to scream about it.

By that time, according to legend, most of the partygoers had dropped like smoked-out bees, so my mother and I had us a nice long getting-to-know-you spell through the quiet hours. We laid awake all night, breathing each other in. She hummed “Summertime” and stroked my cheeks and promised to love me always. All these years later, I still can’t sing that song without yawning and feeling the ghost of her hand stroking the hair back from my forehead.

“Hello, Keema,” she said, nudging a finger into my clenched newborn fist. “I’ve been waiting to meet you for a long time.” I curled into her voice, settling into the familiar comfort of it.

I must have seemed a changeling in her arms, all red fuzz and ivory skin, eyes the exact shifting blue-grey of the Wrangell Narrows. In photos, I shone like a small surprise against the backdrop of her long, dark, Black Irish hair, wide coffee-colored eyes, and coppery skin.

She may not remember the date of my birth, but she recalls our first quiet hours the way you might recollect the wonder of warm socks on the first cold day of the year.

“You came out with your eyes wide open,” Mom likes to say. Except when I tell stories about our growing-up-together years. Then she rolls her eyes and says, “I should have known you’d write about it all.”

~~

For four-and-a-half months I had my mother to myself. Four-and-a-half months of coos and kisses, dance parties, and long wakeful nights staring into each other’s eyes. There were surely tears on both our parts. And quiet moments lying side by side, inhaling each other’s breath. Becoming. Four-and-a-half months in which something so strong and painfully important grew between us that I’ve spent the rest of my life trying to elbow my way back into the circle of her arms.

Four-and-a-half months.

Then two cells became four, became eight, sixteen, thirty-two until eventually, they blossomed into a girl just like me, but longer and hungrier and crankier. A sister filling up that womb I had only just left.

Tekla got it easy. She was named for our father’s Finnish grandmother. Tekla means “pearl.” The name carries history since we’re third-generation Americans on our father’s side. I’m still not sure whether that means his mother was born here or moved here as a girl because I never met my father’s parents. Tekla got a piece of our father with her name, which maybe gave her something to hold onto through the years of radio silence.

For most of my childhood, what I knew of my father could be tallied on one hand: his name wasn’t really Dude, but everyone called him that, our red hair came from him, and my sister was named after his grandmother. The rest is a question mark I’ve chased all my life.

~~

It’s the first thing people ask. Keema? they say. Or, more often: Kina? Tina? Kim? Then, What an unusual name. Or, Is it short for something? What does it mean? As if with my name, I’ve gone and volunteered some new existential crisis they have to pick apart before bedtime, or they’ll never sleep again. Perfect strangers will stand by, receipt and bags in hand, to listen to the story of my name when I get carded at the grocery store, and a clerk innocently asks about it.

It was my mother’s name first. In third grade, her Camp Fire class made up names for themselves, drawing on words from various Native American languages that represented their young selves (bird watcher, artist, tree climber). Then, in an act of imaginative play and cultural appropriation, they took the first letter from each word and lined them up to create an all-new name. Mom’s letters landed on X-E-E-M-A, which struck her brain as toxic somehow, so she threw out the “X” and went hunting through the alphabet for a more romantic consonant, eventually landing on “K.”

There were times I laid awake imagining who I’d be now if I had one of those other names Mom tried on. I’d run the alphabet and consider the many consonants my mother had to choose from: Deema, Feema, Geema, Heema, Jeema, Zeema. Then, for kicks, I’d imagine myself as a Mary, Kristy, or Tiffany with a high, side ponytail. An Anne, Jordan, or Tristen. Or, knowing my mother’s hippie heart: Rainbow, Leaf That Sings, Sunshine, Dharma, Om.

~~

Once they’ve figured out the spelling, many strangers feel compelled to share odd bits of trivia with me:

In South Asia, the traditional minced meat dish used in kebabs and naan is called keema.

One of the Buddha’s original female disciples was called Khema.

There is an independent learning school in California called Keema High (Home of the Wildcats!), which is only notable in that I am a Leo who dropped out of high school.

I once heard that my name translates to “girl” in Hawaiian, while someone else said it means “faces the wind” in one of the many Alaskan Native tongues (I’ve never been able to verify this claim). A friend of mine from Saudi Arabia says my name sounds phonetically like the Arabic word qeema, which means “value.”

In high school, I had a Vietnamese boyfriend by the name of Thang, who stood a solid twelve inches taller than me and, the way I remember it, had the arms and shoulders of a wrestler. Whenever his mother answered the door, she tittered at the sight of me. “Thang!” she’d holler over her shoulder. “Your girlfriend’s here!” Then she’d press her hand to her mouth, shoulders trembling with silent laughter as I moved on down the hall.

It went like that for months before I finally asked: “Am I missing something?”

Thang smiled and bent to kiss my cheek. “It’s your name,” he said. “Didn’t I tell you? It’s … uh. Well … dog poop. In Vietnamese, I mean.”

~~

It boils down to this: in third grade, my mother knew she would grow up to have a redheaded daughter and that she would name her Keema—this being no small miracle considering her dark eyes and hair. Thereafter she named all of her favorite dolls Keema and told everyone about the little girl she would have one day.

She had a plan, my mother. And that plan was me.

When you break it down, my name means “daughter of Fawn.” Sometimes that’s all the answer I give.