She had arrived in Wasilla with nothing but hard-won experience. She had been distrusted by the local real estate community, simply because she had taken over an office they had grown to despise. Now she was a leader of the Rotary club and prominent in fund-raisers and food drives. She was on the board of the Christmas Friendship Dinner, which served a free feast to the needy for the holidays. During the darkest moment of her life, she had lost faith in God, but through her daughter’s example she was once again an active and enthusiastic member of a church. It was nice to have the Affiliate of the Year Award because it honored not only her financial acumen—her ability to turn a profit—but her service to the community. And there are few honors greater than the respect and recognition of your peers.
But Vicki never talked about the award. I had to poke and nudge her before I even learned about it. Instead, she talked about the people she helped: the mortgage brokers who lost their values chasing the dollar and who she was able to turn around; the young men and women she mentored; the clients whose dreams she helped fulfill. She worked with one woman, who didn’t speak English, for more than two years to help fix her credit and secure an affordable loan. A year later, that woman’s son came to see her.
“Do you remember me?” he asked.
“Of course.”
“Well, I’ve gone to college,” he said, “and I want you to know that I’m studying finance because I saw what you did for my mother, and it changed our lives.”
That’s the recognition Vicki cherished. That’s the story that brought a tremble to her voice. That’s the mission that got her up in the morning and motivated her to work hard every day.
“I believe a house is a stabilizing factor,” she told me. “It helps create a healthy family life. That’s what I’m doing when I write a loan. I’m giving a family a better chance to succeed.”
I feel similarly about libraries. I think they are a stabilizing factor in communities. I think that, at their best, they bring people together like few public institutions can. That was always my focus: to make the library work for Spencer, by making it work for the individuals who lived there. I didn’t want money or fame; what librarian has ever gone into the business for that? But I believed, by working the right way and for the right reasons, that I could change my corner of the world. And so did Vicki Kluever. In the end, we both accomplished our goals.
And yet, for all our similarities, I remained skeptical of our sisterhood. We came from such different parts of the world; how much could we really have in common? Northwest Iowa, where I’ve lived most of my life, is spectacularly flat. The nearest ocean is more than a thousand miles away. We have frigid winters, like Alaska, but they are followed by ninety-degree summers. And while the vast fields of corn and soybeans are beautiful in their way, you are often hard-pressed to find anything more interesting than a few trees on our endless horizon.
Kodiak Island, Vicki Kluever’s home for much of her life, is a rugged wilderness, buffeted by the Pacific Ocean and covered with thick, damp plant life. Its mountains rise straight out of the ocean and often plunge straight back into the water on the other side. The shoreline slashes back and forth, marked with tide pools pounded over the centuries into the island’s volcanic rock. The landscape is spectacularly varied, ranging from flat and treeless to mountainous and blanketed by towering spruce trees. The grassy fields and mountain meadows, buried in snow half the year, turn emerald green at the first opportunity, then explode with wildflowers in the summer and locals picking wild berries in the fall. In Iowa, life is slow, defined by the seasonal accumulation and depletion of the soil; in Kodiak, life is dramatic, shaped by the ocean’s ferocious storms. In Iowa, the cycle is defined by planting, harvesting, and the rotation of crops; in Kodiak, the cycle begins with the salmon, who are eaten by the bears, who leave scraps for bald eagles and foxes, who leave scales and bones to enrich the soil. In Iowa, the land is tamed, marked out in perfectly straight mile markers and sold to the highest bidder; in Kodiak, it is wild and unforgiving, possessed by the Sitka deer and the Kodiak bear, the largest land mammal in North America and one of the biggest bears in the world. And, I hear, the whole place smells of fish.
And yet . . . Vicki and I were about the same age. We were raised in a similar blue-collar environment where boys were the future and girls were leaned on for emotional support. We were both good daughters from tight-knit extended families. When farm life overwhelmed or bored me, I found comfort in the back fields of corn, where I knew even Sputnik couldn’t find me; Vicki found refuge in the forests and on the beach, away from the arguments and chain-smoking of her parents’ home. Kodiak and Spencer, three thousand miles apart, were both classic small towns, with tiny schools and party-line telephones. Everybody at least knew of you, which meant they either gossiped about you or helped you, and often both. In Iowa, we lived off the land. In Kodiak, they farmed the ocean. The coming and going of the fishing boats was their traffic; the supply barge from the mainland, frequently delayed by rough seas and carrying only canned or powdered items, was their grocery store; the tide pools and beaches were their playgrounds. Is that so different than life on the farm, where the rumble of traffic meant tractors, and the best food was taken right out of the field?
We were strong by necessity, Vicki and I, proud of our descent from a long line of independent women. My great-aunt Luna Morgan Still founded and taught at the first school in Clay County, a one-room sodbuster constructed of grass and dirt because, even in homesteading days, there were no trees to build with. My grandmother was the rock of my family, holding it together after her husband’s early death, with a toughness and generosity that inspired me. My mother ran her family’s restaurant when she should have been in elementary school; she raised six kids on a farm with no air-conditioning or washing machine; she battled cancer for thirty years, suffering pain and indignity without complaint. She leaned on me, her eldest daughter. And by doing that, she made me strong.
Vicki Kluever’s ancestral line stretches six generations on Kodiak Island, back to the Alutiiq natives who had survived in that harsh land for ten thousand years. She has fond memories of walks in the Kodiak woods with her dog and of late summer outings with her mother and aunts to pick berries, but it was her grandmother who inspired her. Laura Olsen was Alutiiq-Russian-Norwegian, a product of the great melting pot of Kodiak. At sixty-two, already a widow, she moved from the town of Kodiak back to her ancestral land on tiny Larsen Island. The island was named after her father, Anton Larsen, a Norwegian who had immigrated to Kodiak alone on a steamship when he was twelve years old. For Vicki, traveling to Grandma’s house meant a long drive over a mountain pass and down a rough dirt road to Anton Larsen Bay, a twenty-minute skiff ride, and a hike up the beach to a steep embankment. Grandma Laura had no telephone, no electricity, no central heat or running water. She had a large garden and a well, washed her clothes in a hand-cranked ringer washer, chopped her own wood, and kept chickens and a goat. She set her own fishing nets, and she maintained her own fishing gear. The door to her tiny house was always open, her rooms were always neat, and Vicki rarely climbed from the skiff without smelling fresh cookies and bread. Grandma Laura had no use for cigarettes or powdered milk or electric lights, the staples of existence in the Kluever home. She subsisted off the land and the ocean, like the Alutiiq and the early settlers, and she was happier than anyone Vicki had ever known.
Old sod schools. Unheated wood homes. Vicki and I never lived that hard, but that didn’t mean our lives were easy. Life in farming and fishing country was marked by tragedy. Early death. Accidents. Foreclosure. Financial crisis. The town of Spencer burned to the ground in the 1930s, an event that still defines both the precariousness of rural life and the hardiness of the community that, on pure willpower and muscle, rebuilt itself better than before.
In Kodiak, the defining events were the 1912 eruption of Mount Novarupta, which blanketed the island in ash, and the earthquake of 1964. The tremors from that quake rocked the island, causing the land to heave six feet. But it was the three massive tidal waves on Good Friday that destroyed the town. Vicki’s father, who was at work at the power facility, was trapped up to his neck in water for two days. The day after his escape, Easter Sunday, Vicki’s cousin roared up to their house in his truck and told them another wave was coming. That’s when Vicki saw fear for the first time. She saw it on her grandmother’s face. The whole town spent the day on top of Pillar Mountain, watching the ocean. Finally, around dusk, Vicki’s mom said, “I need my cigarettes,” and hopped in her nephew’s truck. The rest of the town followed until, by nightfall, they had all drifted home. The last tidal wave was a false alarm.
The houses were torn down and rebuilt. The boats were scrapped or salvaged, depending on their anchorage. That’s when Vicki’s grandmother, whose home was wiped out by the waves, built her primitive residence on Anton Larsen Island and moved away from Kodiak. Vicki, all of seven years old, felt her innocence recede with the tide. She had seen the power of nature and the fragility of life.
At eighteen, Vicki and I both left home. Life was short; opportunities in our hometowns were limited; we wanted to stretch ourselves and see the world. As Vicki put it, “I needed to bruise my knees, skin my face, make mistakes—and not have mom’s family watching. I couldn’t do anything in Kodiak that my mom didn’t know about before I got home.”
I wanted to attend college, but my parents didn’t have the money. As class valedictorian, Vicki was awarded a scholarship to the University of Alaska, but she preferred to work and support herself instead of living four more years on her parents’ tab and under her parents’ rules. We both found entry-level jobs in larger cities—I at a box factory in Mankato, Minnesota, Vicki at a bank in Anchorage—and settled into an independent life. A few years later, in our early twenties, we both got married. Were we in love? That’s difficult to say. In our day, small-town girls got married young. What else did we know? It wasn’t until we were pregnant that we realized how much, for better or worse, your marriage defines your life. Unfortunately for us, it was for the worse.
Shortly after their wedding, Vicki’s husband took a security job on the Alaska pipeline and moved his wife one hundred miles east (three hundred miles by the only road) to Valdez, in a mountainous region known as the Alps of Alaska. Their daughter, Adrienna—known as Sweetie—was born there in a vicious Thanksgiving blizzard that dumped four feet of snow in a single day. Two weeks later, Vicki’s husband accepted a position as a police officer at the far end of the Aleutians, the long chain of islands that extend almost a thousand miles off the southwest corner of Alaska. Valdez was remote and snowbound, but Unalaska, where they were moving . . . that was beyond the edge of the earth. That was five hundred miles down a spine of rock into the Bering Sea, one of the blackest, angriest, deadliest bodies of water in the world. The Alaska State Ferry service to the island sailed only three times a year, and the trip took seven days. The only airplane that went there was prohibitively expensive, and it only flew twice a week. Your groceries had to be ordered and delivered by mail.
Vicki dreaded the thought of Unalaska, especially with a young child. But her husband had made up his mind. When he left almost immediately for his new job, leaving Vicki in Valdez to care for Sweetie and pack the house, she realized for the first time how much the marriage had uprooted her sense of self. She had already left behind her career, her friends, her family, her home. Now she was losing her independence and freedom of movement, too.
But like a dutiful wife, she lugged her child on the two-week journey to their new home in the Bering Sea. She found the land more harsh and foreboding than she had imagined: rocky, barren, and crosshatched with old trails. A huge military depot, abandoned after World War II, had left the island littered with battered run-ways, crumbling docks, and rusted artillery pieces. As she drove into her new life, Vicki saw rows of old concertina wire stretched across the horizon. There was beauty there, it was hard to deny. Standing in the howling wind above crashing waves, it felt like the end of the earth, and how many people ever get a chance to stand there? But if the island offered a beautiful loneliness, it was loneliness nonetheless. And isolation. With that concertina wire, Unalaska felt like a prison in the middle of the sea.
That winter, Vicki suffered a miscarriage. It was a dark time, literally, with only a few hours of sunlight a day. Her marriage had been crumbling for years; in that long twilight, it seemed to break and sheer off like tree limbs under ice. When I was married to an alcoholic, I thought of my house as a coffin. Day after day, I was being buried by my husband’s neglect. But at least I had friends and family nearby. I had a place I could go for comfort. Vicki Kluever’s whole world was a coffin. She had no place to turn. She asked God for help, for a sign, and when she heard nothing but the howling of the wind, she lost her faith, too. By the time winter finally broke, she had made a difficult decision, one that I and many other women have agonized over: She told her husband she was leaving. When the Alaska Ferry Service arrived a month later, she returned to Anchorage with only her daughter and a handful of possessions.
There is a strength that comes from growing up in a small town. That strength is the realization, at a young age, that nothing is ever a given. More often, it is taken by things beyond your control: a flood, a drought, a storm, a pollution bloom, or an unlucky toss of the nets. You can’t worry about the bad things. Yes, they hurt. But you move on. You understand, as a life code, that you have no right to money or happiness or even stability. If you want those things, you have to earn them.