Ravens

During the winter of 1988, not long after I moved to Kodiak, the police scanner went off in the newsroom, broadcasting a report of a dead body in an abandoned house. One of the other reporters went out to investigate and returned a little while later chuckling to herself.
“It was a raven,” she announced.
“A dead raven?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “The raven wasn’t dead, it was on the roof.”
The blank look on my face betrayed my confusion, so before I could respond, Nell explained that an old woman who lived near the house had noticed a raven perched on the roof. And as she explained to the police, “everyone knows a raven on the roof means someone has died there, or will soon.”
There was no body in the house and we laughed about it then, but sometime later that year a grader scraped a skull out of the road near that house. It turned out to be very old, and was thought to come from a Russian-era cemetery, long forgotten but marked on old maps. Probably a coincidence, but the old lady’s story still crossed my mind.
I hadn’t thought of the incident until the other night when I was walking out to the shed on an unusually quiet evening. No road noise, no lawnmowers thrumming in the distance, even the sled dogs lounged on their boxes staring at me in eerie silence.
By chance, I glanced up into the treetops and saw six or seven ravens in the branches above the shed. They were dark blotches against a darkening sky, so I’d be lying if I said I could see their black eyes following me, but it sure felt like it. I instinctively glanced at the roof of the house and felt oddly relieved that no black bird was perched there.
Back inside, I mentioned the ravens to my wife and she said she had noticed them also, and found them disconcerting. My 9-year-old daughter overheard us and piped in, “Yeah, I saw them too,” she said. “They’re freaking me out.” That about summed it up for all of us.
When I went to bed that night I had a hard time falling to sleep, I kept thinking about the old lady’s superstition, and listening for the sound of bird feet scrabbling on the roof tiles.

My junk, your stuff

ONE OF THE MORE tenacious Alaska cliches is that we're all pack rats. It is tenacious because there is more than a little truth behind it.
If you've traveled anywhere in Alaska, either remote or urban, you've probably seen plenty of homes surrounded with the discarded but notfully- disposed-of detritus of life here.
The practice of pack-ratting was more prevalent in days past, when lines of transit to and from the Lower 48 were less reliable. The farther out you lived, the more likely you were to hang onto that old truck or snowmobile or washing machine, just in case the new one failed.
A man who runs riverboats on the Yukon told me the story of a fellow captain who once lost power and drifted helplessly in the big river’s current until he spotted an abandoned truck on the bank. He secured the boat to a tree and attacked the old truck with his tool kit. When he returned to his vessel he carried an armload of harvested parts. Soon the riverboat’s engine coughed to life and he went on about his business.
Such stories once held a lot of sway in this state justifying our practice of moving things out of the house but not necessarily off the property.
Still, I used to shake my head whenever I saw a cluttered place, and wondered why people would live in such a beautiful setting and surround themselves with junk.
"I'll never become one of those guys," I thought to myself.
But this last weekend as I looked around the yard I realized that I might be slipping.
A 55-gallon burn barrel still rests next to the shed we built last fall. A wooden boat that hasn’t seen the ocean for two years is dry docked on the hill next to the house. A borrowed snowmobile rests on a trailer next to the old shed. Two retired dogsleds and a camper shell are peeking from a melting snow bank in front of the old truck, which, for the record, still runs.
The four-wheelers—one running, one not—are hidden under the deck.
I’m not sure how this happened.
But as I looked at each relic, I realized that my stuff is different. If I can get that dead four-wheeler running, I could probably get $500 for it. The boat will sail again, if only to our land on the other side of Kachemak Bay.
The snowmobile runs perfectly, I just have to get the brake lights working on the trailer before I can take it out on the road. The burn barrel may not be legal but, from where it sits, it can’t be seen from the road, so it can’t move. The camper shell will trade places with the dog box on the truck when summer comes. And the sleds, well, who could bring themselves to part with two weathered, rustic-looking dog sleds? My wife put plants on one last summer and it looked great.
I still don’t know why people would live in such a beautiful place and surround themselves with junk.
Surrounding one’s self with objects that are potentially lucrative, relatively attractive and may well be useful one day, well that’s another story.