“What?”
“Being afraid to fly.” She was genuinely curious, and a little ashamed that she had never asked him before. “Is it only mental or is it physical, or what?”
He thought about it, and out of the corner of her eye she noticed his grip relaxing on the edge of the seat. He didn’t go so far as to let go but his knuckles were less white. “It starts with the physical. I get this, I don’t know what to call it, this white flash up the back of my legs and up my spine when we lift off. It’s debilitating, like I’m not sure if I could walk if I stood up. Or even if I could stand up.”
“And you anticipate it.”
“Yeah, which is what wrecks me even before I get on the damn plane. And no matter how many times I park my ass on a plane it never gets better.” His sigh was heavy even over the headset. “I hate it.”
“The feeling, not the flying?”
“Yeah. I mean, look at that.” It was obvious it took an effort for him to turn his head to see out the window. “The best view in the world. Augustine and Iliamna and Redoubt. The Bay with all the boats carving those long, curving white wakes in it. Even on a cloudy day it’s amazing, and it was just as amazing in Newenham, and it was when I flew into the Park to talk to Jim about Grant’s murder.” His shoulders raised in a slight shrug. “I know it’s a privilege, this view, to see it. I know that. But…”
“You’ve always felt like this?”
“Always.”
He didn’t mention his father, the Air Force ace. He’d never said but she’d met the man and she could guess what his reaction would have been to his only son’s fear of flying.
To distract him she embarked on the history of the town they were heading for. Kapilat had at one time been the big town on the Bay, home to five salmon canneries, a king crab processing plant, a hospital, a hotel, three bars, and four churches with actual resident pastors and priests. There had even at one time been a sit-down, popcorn-selling theater. It had been the main port of call for the Alaska Steamship Company in Southcentral Alaska. Everyone from all the other Bay settlements had perforce come to Kapilat to buy fuel and supplies, pick up their mail, and get their hair cut and their broken bones set. The Coast Guard had stationed a patrol boat there and some of their onshore housing was still standing. Kapilat had even sent the first woman to the territorial legislature, Harriet Browne, a pilot, in fact. She’d needed to be one, since there were only four voting districts in Alaska at the time and hers had stretched from Kenai to Adak to Cordova, resulting in her logging thousands of miles on her Stinson Reliant. Wy had found a photo of Browne standing in front of it on the Alaska Women’s Hall of Fame website, and approved of Browne’s choice of aircraft as she had no doubt that Browne would have taken advantage of constituent business trips by running freight on the side. Wy would have.
Even better from an admittedly Alaskan standpoint, Browne had married at least five times—“One way to secure a majority,” Liam said—and her constituents had nicknamed her High Drift Factor Harry Browne, or High Drift Harry for short. She boasted that she had been excommunicated from the Pennsylvania Ministerium (Browne was originally from Pennsylvania), the Catholic Church (her third husband’s religion), and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (her fourth’s). That didn’t seem to have lost her any votes, either, as she had been returned to office eight times and was still around to help lobby D.C. for statehood in the late fifties.
Wy descended to five hundred feet as unostentatiously as possible in the hope that Liam wouldn’t notice, banked right to follow the bay east, and soon they were over the mouth of Mussel Bay. While the leaves on the deciduous trees had turned they still clung stubbornly to their branches, brilliant splashes of yellow and gold against the lush green backdrop of the evergreens that marched determinedly up the sides of the mountains, checked only by the snow and ice marching as determinedly down. Standoff. A dark red undergrowth formed picket lines between the warring factions, fireweed that had topped out and gone to seed and rusty leaves.
“Look,” she said, and tipped the Cessna very slightly and very gently so he could look down at the water. He actually turned his head and even more miraculously kept his eyes open when he did. As if in reward, a late run of silvers jumped and splashed in the water below, powered by their own frantic need to return to spawn in the place of their birth. “Everything else followed those silvers into here,” Wy said. “The Sugpiaq first; the Russians next, following the sea otters that followed the silvers; Western colonists after that; and après ça, le déluge. The Outside canneries, the white forefathers of the town of Kapilat, the ships of the Alaska Steamship Company, the US Postal Service, the US Coast Guard, the Blue Canoe.”
“How big did it get?”
“I looked up the census numbers. In 1959, the year the US Congress passed the statehood act, Kapilat had a population of eight hundred. Doubled in the summer when all the Outside workers came to catch and can the salmon.”
“Like Newenham.”
She nodded. “Then in 1960, the Sterling Highway was built, 138 miles long, from Blewestown to Tern Lake, connecting the Seward Highway in mid-spate between Anchorage and Seward.”
“The death knell.”
“The first toll, maybe.”
Once it became one of the few Alaskan towns with road access, Blewestown began to grow in population. Already in decline,
