Ardella Hagen, known for birch-bark creativity, plans to take some of that beauty with her
TALKEETNA -- Swirls of wood smoke rise from the stovepipe of Ardella Hagen's little studio in the woods. Through the window panes, you can see it's a party. Spiced crab apples, cinnamon rolls and other goodies are laid out. Coffee and tea are brewing. You can hear it's a party too. The tap, tap, tap of hammers is constantly interrupted by bursts of laughter.
The reason for this revelry is that Hagen, her daughter and a couple of friends are putting the finishing touches on her coffin.
It shouldn't come as a shock to anyone that one of these day she'll be trading her pulse for a harp. Since she's an artist and planning to be planted, why not go down in something hand-made and beautiful?
That's Hagen's thinking. She's a birch-bark basket master, so she's going down in a big beautiful birch-bark box.
This isn't something she or anyone else at this coffin bee expects her to be needing anytime soon. At 76, she's battery operated, as she puts it, with dual hearing aides and a pacemaker installed in her chest. Other than that, she's in good shape.
Until it's time to go inside, she'll make use of her coffin as a piece of furniture. After it's varnished, she'll either put a glass top over the lid and use it as a coffee table, or set it up on end and add shelves for a bookcase.
Some who hear of this get all flabbergasted. Like Jill Choate's friend who rang her cell phone during this coffin-making party and asked what she was up to.
"Oh just bangin' on a coffin," she said.
Pause.
"That's right, makin' a coffin. Well, it's my friend, Ardella's. She's not sick, and she's not dying. We're just doing it because we really like her. We're making her coffin. Yup. And we're covering it with birch bark and twigs. Isn't that cool?"
Once people get past their initial alarm, they usually warm up to the idea.
"Why didn't I think of that?" they'll say.
They didn't, and most likely wouldn't, because death is such a taboo topic.
"It is," Hagen said, "but it shouldn't be."
Hagen has been working with birch bark for 14 years, after learning from her daughter, Cindy Durham, who learned from a Native friend.
When she ran out of friends and family to give her baskets to, Hagen started selling them at Anchorage's Saturday market and elsewhere. She's up to 9,077 baskets so far. Actually they're more vessels than baskets, from palm size to big enough to tote a toddler.
She's passed on the secrets of her birch-bark artistry to many others, including Choate and her 16-year-old daughter, Jennah. Jill Choate is a renowned basket-maker herself, only hers are made of woven reeds and incorporate antlers. She travels all over the Lower 48 giving workshops. She and Hagen teach each other.
Choate and her daughter call Hagen "the master." They call her "Yoda" too.
Point is, you don't send a woman like this off in a fiberglass box.
Dressed in a denim skirt with a white hankie poking out of one pocket, a turtleneck, thick socks and ankle boots, Hagen thinks just as sensibly. She doesn't see the point of spending big money on a casket.
Hers cost about $100, and that's only because she splurged.
"I got solid brass nails instead of brass covered," she said.
The three-quarter-inch plywood base ran $70, the nails, $29. It's the labor that makes it invaluable, and that labor is all about love.
The idea for this project began stewing after Hagen found a pattern for a make-it-yourself coffin in Mother Earth News. Then, poking around the Internet, Choate came across a coffin covered in birch bark for sale on eBay.
"I thought, every birch-bark basket maker should be buried in this. So I told Ardella about it, and she said, 'I have these directions; we need to do it.' "
First, Hagen's daughter took a tape measure to her.
"What it is, is 4 inches wider than your shoulders," Hagen said, "Five inches longer than your length, and 14 inches high."
Next Hagen's son-in-law, Burt Durham, put together the simple plywood box. Then the women went to work on it.
They divvied it up like a patchwork quilt. They glue-gunned and hammered down all the various colors and textures of inner and outer birch bark, adding twigs, leaves, lichen -- all materials that rose from the soil, all materials that will someday return to it.
One of Jennah Choate's blocks has twig swirls, a sun and a moon. Another has twists of bark representing the northern lights.
One of Durham's blocks is a log cabin quilt pattern overlaid with birch-bark applique, including a black bear to represent the one that broke into her mother's house and raided the kitchen.
Each section either came with a story or inspired one afterward.
"This one, you've got to look at it this way," Jill Choate said, turning her head sideways. "This is supposed to signify the Alaska Range, the mountains of Talkeetna. And of course we've got the birch trees. So it's like this is the final salute to Ardella as she traipses through the mountains and goes off into the sky to say adieux."
"Isn't this a wonderful thing to be buried in?" Hagen said of the finished product. "Isn't it pretty?"
Too pretty. Her son-in-law likes to joke about putting a trap door in the bottom, so only she goes in the ground. But no, it's going six feet under too. That will be at the Talkeenta Baptist Church down the road.
Some day. In the far-off, very distant future would be nice.
Daily News reporter Debra McKinney can be reached at dmckinney@adn.com.
