On Friday morning, I picked raspberries with my older grown daughters. One is studying to be a teacher and the other is married with a home of her own. It was good to be with them and hear them talking about everything and nothing, from concern for a friend who is in jail to how many cups of berries make a batch of jam.
It seems like that combination of sour and sweet makes life, at least in this small town, somehow richer. Haines is big enough for trouble but small enough to know, and often love, the troubled. Maybe that's why my daughters came back after college. I know it is also why later the same day, when the clouds had blown off and it was warm enough to run in shorts and T-shirts, I took the high school cross-country running team, which I coach, for a run down the road by Eagle's Nest Trailer Park, past the softball fields to the Jones Point Cemetery.
We stopped by the grave of a boy who had run cross-country, played basketball and been a star on the track team. He died a few years later drinking and driving. It is still so sad I can hardly stand it. I told the kids all that, and pointed to another, newer grave of another good boy who died that way. I reminded them that even cross-country runners, my favorite people, make mistakes, and one was all it took to put these sweet boys in the cemetery forever.
Later, my youngest daughter, who is on the team, said it put a damper on the light mood. I know that. But I hope it also gave them something to think about as we continued our run, out past that sunny graveyard, around the point and along the beautiful beach. I hope they appreciated the way their hearts beat as they climbed over the hill back to school, and that when they got home, they kissed their moms on the cheek and fed the dog without being asked.
I was making jam late into Saturday night when there was another drunken-driving accident involving a popular young guy -- fortunately he'll be OK. I had already planned an extra-long practice Monday and, after hearing that, was especially glad. Some kids were still working summer jobs, some didn't come, but 14 runners hiked up and over Mount Ripinsky. Only four of them had ever before climbed the mountain right in their backyard, and only one had ever walked the whole 10-mile traverse up and over the ridge to town.
It took three hours to climb the steep rainforest trail and then go up through the slick mud of the brushy bear meadow, full of blue, purple and yellow wildflowers. We had lunch on top of Peak 3920 (named for its elevation) and walked down the other side into the greens, whites and rocky grays of the alpine carpet through thinning clouds, some below us, some above us and some moving right through us, like smoke. On each side, way down below, were inlets, rivers and lakes. I hummed bits of the "Sound of Music" and felt like an older, muddier Maria as I watched the happy hikers, all in a colorful row, winding through what has to be the prettiest place in my world and theirs.
It was sunny by the time we scrambled up to Mount Ripinsky (3,600 feet). Everyone signed the trail register before jogging down through the deep woods, then out onto the dirt road past the newer homes on the hillside, the older sidewalk to town and right by the red Assembly of God Church, the Captain's Choice Motel and the Pioneer Bar. We saw one of the American Legion officers near the hall, a Vietnam veteran, and said we missed him up there, but he said he'd had enough mountain marches to last a lifetime. On Main Street, one of the boy's fathers stepped out of the grocery store and waved. We jogged by the hardware store and the library and cut across the field to the schoolyard. The superintendent met us and said he wished he had been able to skip work to come.
Before we went to sleep that night, my husband said the kids will remember their mountain run forever. I hope so, and I hope that for them, forever is a really long time.
Heather Lende lives and writes in Haines and is the author of "If You Lived Here, I'd Know Your Name." She can be reached at hlende@adnmail.com
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