My Name was Supposed to be Elizabeth Ann

Late June, Hubby and I were preparing for our trip to Alaska and the Yukon, an adventure over one year in the making. He’d traveled to Alaska before, on a fishing trip with a buddy years ago, but I’d never been and was both excited about all we’d planned and anxious about being away from home so long, nearly a month. My to-do list seemed never ending and, wanting a distraction, I began rereading Kate Morton’s The Forgotten Garden a few days before our Vancouver flight.

I’ve been the Australian’s fan since 2014, when a friend recommended Garden, and have since read all seven of Morton’s books.  Their chapters alternate among timelines and POV characters, each a compelling blend of history, mystery, and family, and the myriad ways in which secrets forge and link characters. 

Like in real life, but with neater resolutions.

My mother loved Kate Morton, too, once I’d introduced them. I bought us copies of each book as they were released, and we used to conduct impromptu book chats during our long-distance phone calls, guessing at motivations, culling clues to explain how the POV characters’ stories were connected. Sometimes we figured out the patterns. And sometimes in our rush to The End, we missed them. We speculated about how Morton kept track of the story threads as she wrote and whether we could spot them better with a rereading. We never reread any of them, however. Too many books, too little time. You know?

It was Mom’s copy of The Forgotten Garden that I pulled from my shelf. 

I am an unapologetic homebody, but when I travel Hubby teases I become adult Dora the Explorer, studying maps and reading signs, chatting up strangers and trying to uncover the mysteries of each destination. 

I also take pictures. Lots of pictures. 

This trip, I snapped nearly 2000. I am slooowly culling and organizing.

Here’s one of my favorites:

Here’s another: 

And here’s a third:

In Ketchikan, our trolley driver/tour guide ferried us up the town’s steep, sinuous hills to Totem Bight State Historical Park, home to fifteen salvaged, restored, or duplicated totem poles from once thriving Native villages. As Luke explained, stories commemorated by each symbol and its placement remain known only to a pole’s artisan while carving, their significance to be revealed at a ceremony celebrating the completed pole’s installation. However, no one knows what or who inspired the pole in my photograph.  Guides refer to it as ‘the mystery pole’ because its craftsman died before that ceremony, and the stories he intended to share remain buried.  

Only later in Anchorage—five days and six stops too late—did I think to ask, Is that why the park’s brochure claims it’s home to fifteen poles, but only fourteen origin stories are included? What can we infer about the mystery pole’s creation, based on what’s known about when and where it was located? And, what might its creator have done differently with his stories, had he known they would die with him? 

So many questions, so little time.

Speaking of questions, when you’re travelling, visitors and locals alike ask strangers, Where do you call home, and What brings you to this corner of the world.

I asked too, and learned that, while some native Alaskans live up north year round (like ‘Klondike Kate’ in Skagway and Fairbanks’ Riverboat Discovery captain and crew), most who live and work its tourism industry migrate seasonally from the lower 48 and beyond. Much like the 1896 Gold Rush stampeders who flooded Alaska’s and Canada’s Klondike region (like Call of the Wild’s Jack London), they come seeking opportunity and adventure, often leaving homes and families for six to eight month stretches before ‘over-wintering’ in less hostile climes.

Luke hails from Utah, where he drives a school bus. Jubilee works the cruise ship’s omelette station, calls the Philippines home, and called me Mama Elizabeth.  Arief waits tables in the ship’s dining room, originates from Indonesia and, before boarding, had celebrated his favorite niece’s wedding back home. Married musicians Jake and Laura drove from Dayton, Ohio, to entertain cruisetour guests at Denali Square, and Courtney from Arkansas leaves her elementary-aged daughters back home with her mother while she leads covered wagon tours through the Alaskan backcountry. 

Meanwhile, Josie from Georgia had never flown nor left her state and one day decided on a whim to do both, becoming a zip line guide in Ketchikan and Skagway. We met her in Denali, where she conducts nature talks and walks along the park’s trails. She looks twelve and could, as Hubby said, split a raindrop she is so tiny. More importantly, she is brilliant and funny and passionate about her subject, contagiously so. She calls herself an “environmental educator” and a huge “rock nerd,” and in the years since leaving Georgia, she’s earned several degrees and is considering her doctorate. Now, she can’t ever imagine returning to Georgia fulltime. Alaska has become home.

Like the glaciers advancing and retreating along the mountains and waterways, sometimes we see only people’s faces, not the ice shelf beneath the water or the ice river that stretches miles into the forest, nor how what we do or say Here affects what is done or said There. When the Harvard Glacier (above) calved one quarter mile from our ship’s bow, we heard the ice scream before it split, saw the avalanche before hearing its roar, felt its waves percuss the ship before the ship teetered and we grasped its rail for balance.

Here’s another favorite picture:

So rare and magnificent are the North’s natural wonders, they awed even the ship’s crew, who alternated turns among their crew mates to marvel with us passengers. Some even turned upward, to wave at us and cheer.

We are part of each other’s stories, and not only in the singular moment during which our paths directly cross. I’m grateful to be reminded and grateful to carry their stories with me.

Remember Courtney? Eric was her wagon teamster, leading us and horses Jay and Turbo along the trails, and though he has lived in South Korea with his Korean-born wife for nearly twenty years, he was born and raised in Pennsylvania, about 30 miles from where Hubby and I now live, and graduated Philadelphia’s Temple University.

Also in our wagon? Four retired couples and a widow whose name I, sadly, cannot recall. 

So many people, so little time.

But this woman–also retired, and the oldest in our group–she has lived in Australia her entire life and since her husband’s death has refused to wallow but has become a solitary world traveler, including to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, relatively equidistant between my childhood and adulthood homes. She was, she shared, delighted with the Aim-ish way of life and also an avid reader who delighted–like I had–to discover that her cruise ship housed a well-stocked library. Though to be honest, she said, she read mainly Australian writers and had been too busy, this trip, to read much of anything.

Me, too. So much to explore, so little time.

Oh, I said, leaning forward eagerly. Have you ever read Kate Morton?

She had not. She had never even heard of Kate Morton, but jotted the writer’s name in her phone and wondered which title I would recommend she start.

So I explained that I’d recently reread The Forgotten Garden and had packed it in my carry-on and would have given it to her had I not already given it away. See, when my mother died I asked for her books and since then, I’ve been slooowly sorting and organizing her collection. Some, I’ve been reading and some I’ve been keeping, and some I’ve been leaving in Little Free Libraries as I travel.

I left Mom’s copy in Vancouver, British Columbia, the day before we boarded our ship. 

The widow and I chatted a bit more before returning our attention to the mountain view and Courtney’s travelogue, eventually of course continuing our separate travels. We will most likely never meet again (What are the odds?), yet I wonder whether she’ll follow up on my recommendation and whether she will think of me if she does, the American woman she met on a covered wagon in Alaska, whose name she cannot recall.

And I wonder about whoever finds Mom’s Garden, whether someone already has.

Because what I did not tell the widow from Australia but will share with you now, was that when I approached the Barclay Street LFL in Vancouver and prepared to place Mom’s Garden inside, I felt briefly overcome, my vision teary, and I thought for a moment to keep her book for myself. Losing it seemed, irrationally I know, like losing her again. Instead, I placed it inside and smiled when Hubby took my picture. See, Mom had never been further west than Ohio and would, as Hubby said, get a kick out of my scattering her beloved stories.

Honestly, I’m getting a kick out of scattering her stories.

Another detail I did not tell the widow is that on the book’s inside cover Mom had written my name, that I had given the book to her for Christmas 2014. Beside that inscription, I’d adhered a bookplate with Mom’s name, Helen Judith Miller, and below that, for good measure, written Dauphin, Pennsylvania, USA, so whoever finds it will know, I hope, that the book mattered to someone and that someone mattered to someone else, and that their love and that book traveled a long, long way to be plucked by a stranger from that little library’s shelf.

If it’s you who finds it, would you tell me?

I’d love to know your name. I’d love to hear your story.

*****

MORE ON TOTEM BIGHT…

A few weeks after our visit, the park installed a new pole, with the help of hundreds of Native community members. Four more were installed in the surrounding area. How wonderful is that?

WHAT I’M READING NOW…

Good Time Girls: Of the Alaska/Yukon Gold Rush, by Lael Morgan

On our last day in Dawson City, YT Canada, I spent several lovely hours meandering the city museum and its adjacent Klondike Mines Railway Locomotive Shelter and discovered Morgan’s book in the gift shop. So much is known and celebrated about the men who mined the north. I want to know more about the women.

WHAT I’M READING NEXT…

Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen. A reread, because it’s next up in my book club and I’m sketchy on the details.

Built with Broken Pieces, by Mindful Muser (the pen name of a former student) because… ❤

Then–decisions, decisions–something from my library pile. Any thoughts?

RECENT READS & RECOMMENDATIONS…

Heartwood, by Amity Gage. Beautiful writing, interesting characters, about a woman who goes missing while hiking on the Appalachian Trail and the search efforts to find her before it’s too late.

My writer friend Fallon Brown writes romance, mystery, and fantasy and just released Muffin to Die For, the first in their latest series ‘Cat in the Bakery.’ You can check them out here.

COMING UP NEXT ON MY NAME WAS SUPPOSED TO BE ELIZABETH ANN …

Dear Stephen Colbert, ‘There is No Resolution of the Mystery’: A Literary Scavenger Hunt

*****

Thanks for reading! Thanks for sharing!