The Grave Robbers

4071 MacINNES St. Anchorage, AK - 1969

Somewhere around my 13th year of life my parents made the determination that they wanted to create their own empire.  Okay, I admit that sounds a bit dramatic.  In truth they decided that they wanted to construct their own house.  My stepfather was a gifted architect and I suppose for him the house we were living in was not his own.  Divorced couples often feel this way.    A second spouse (my stepfather) moving in to the realm of a previous one always feels a bit awkward I suppose.  Or maybe it was the fact that my father who was a creative planner, had simply run out of options to recreate the interior of our old house.  This was despite a number of amazing reconstructions.  He had built wooden shelves ingeniously constructed in the kitchen, basement and my bedroom.  His crowning and in many ways most interesting achievement was the creation of a giant aviary built over the open two story entry way to the house.  The space was an enormous cage fronted by strands of monofilament fishing line that almost created an illusion of an open cage.  A custom built bird feeder accessed by a former closet with numerous channels for bird seed and other treats.  At the center was a giant piece of drift wood it’s weathered grey branches extending for ample bird vantage points.  The aviary was filled with finches with exotic sounding names that colorfully tweeted and pooped to their hearts content.  

My parents had a predilection toward exotic animals entering our world.  At times they owned lizards living wild in our house along with fish and potbelly pigs.  I never quite understood the obsession.  Perhaps it was the result of my own attempts at owning rats and quite misguidedly shrews.  The tiny little buggers made a nest in our garage and with a live trap I caught them and moved them to an aquarium in my room.  The smell eventually became so disgusting I think all were eventually liberated outside somewhere.  The rats both met their own demise in their aquarium torture chambers.  My first one was laid to rest in our back yard where my father helped me make a wooden tomb stone that stoically said,  “Here lies Alfie, he was a good rat.”

As a young child my first companions were two dogs.  One was a Shepard mix and the other a poodle runt with three siblings kept by my grandparents.  There was the rhinestoned studded collared Dolly, Dawn and George.  Oh yes… and Charlie, the forgotten brother, he was ours.  Perpetually horny and with bad teeth he was the brother kept hidden away.   Both had migrated from Los Angeles to Alaska with my parents when they moved north.  The Shepard was a loving companion named Missy who partially adopted me as her own.   I don’t think veterinarians cremated household pets back then, at least not in Alaska, and when the dogs died the disposition of their bodies was left to us.  The Shepard was the first to go.  She died on Thanksgiving and we buried her in a rectangular trunk just behind the foundation of our house in an area that served as a garden.  Charlie, the poodle, was the second to go.  His little furry body was placed in a styrofoam cooler, taped shut and after some excavation buried on top of the first dog’s final resting trunk.  

For a young boy that house was a bit of a magical place.  I occupied half of the basement.  It was my own dukedom with windows on either side at ground level.  One faced the driveway and the other the opposite side of the house.  This arrangement provided ample opportunity to observe a car pulling up in the driveway.  I spent seemingly half my life on “restriction” for what I cannot remember, perhaps I was an awful child.  My friends would secretly visit me during my house arrest and then at the sight of my parents returning to the house take flight out the back window.  Shoes would be chucked out after them as they vanished like skulking thieves crossing a wet lawn or a frozen field of snow.   This was a particular challenge for one overly tall friend who is probably paying the price today for the contorted shapes he had to make to fit through the window.    

Leaving my own childhood empire was difficult but everything that changes a child’s world is hard.  Children are extremely resistant to change.  I can’t imagine what it must be like for those that spend their life moving from place to place.  My parents were sensitive to my dilemma and allowed me to attend the high school in the district of our former home.  One of my closest friends at the time was a shy boy named Robert whom I had befriended years before.  I think we became friends somewhere around the second or third grade when my parents, tired of seeming me alone, told me I needed to find a friend.  Robert and I went ice skating together on the outdoor rink of our elementary school and from that day forward our friendship was forged in steel.  Robert was a kid with great promise but no family to back him up.  He was the youngest child of a Catholic family of five.  His mother was an Irish immigrant and his father seemed to have nothing much to do with his children leaving Robert as a sort of after thought.  He had no toys and brought his lunch to school every day in a paper bag that he reused over and over again.  At any rate, we bonded and stayed close friends until I moved away from Alaska after finishing my university studies.  I flew him to Washington DC once using my accumulated miles to visit me.  I wanted to show him a world outside Alaska existed, I think it was the only time he has ever left Alaska since moving there as a child.

I remember one night when Robert was over visiting me.  It was the dead of winter and we were trying to pack out our house and move to the new one that my parents had built.  The house was still under construction but the buyers of our existing home were not flexible and wanted us out.  My parents must have suddenly remembered our dogs buried outside the house.  I am sure that they didn’t want to leave them to the new buyers who would innocently discover them one day.  I can imagine the buyers minds would be filled with the anticipation of buried treasure only to find canine bones.   My father told me I needed to dig them out and had to do it before I could spend anymore time with my friend. I am sure he must have told me before and I put it off until my friend was with me.  I had a habit of doing that as a boy which could account for my neurotic obsession today of doing everything I have to do as soon as I know I need to do it.  This tends to create enormous anxiety as I feel assaulted by numerous tasks that all appear necessary to accomplish seemingly at once.   My parents plan was to move the trunk and cooler to the new house and in their frozen state have one of the excavators working on the construction site burry them deeply in the earth.  

As if sent out by Dr. Frankenstein, Robert and I headed outside into the pitch black freezing Alaska night.  Like two grave robbers we grabbed a pick and shovel from the garage and with light streaming through a basement window consumed by pitch black darkness, I plunged the pick into the frozen dirt with all the success of an axe against a concrete wall.  Robert stood by with the shovel partially amused and partially speechless. I am the type of person that feels a lot of stress from obligations and demands and I must have been vocally frustrated.  Each strike seemed to dislodge small amounts of dirt frozen like ice cubes being picked with an ice pick.  I remember one of my neighborhood friends Mike who was three years my senior, dropping by to analyze the situation.  He made a couple attempts at digging and then fled into his warm house.  Robert and I continued to struggle like grave robbers in the darkness of an Alaskan winter.  It seemed like an eternity passed when finally I felt the sickening feeling of my pick striking something soft.  Desperately I peered with almost no light into the hole when I realized I had punctured the styrofoam cooler.  The vivid image of Charlie’s frozen furry black body filled my mind.  I remember wanting to vomit.  Together we lifted the the two boxes out of the ground and placed them in the back of the house.

I can only wonder what Robert must have thought.  He was truly torn.  He was an independent kid, so independent that no one cared for him.   He must have listened to my endless complaints of obligations and frustrations with truly mixed emotions.  On the one hand he probably didn’t want to be me but on the other he did.  Each complaint emanated from a family and the obligations surrounding it.  He had no such obligation but at times I think he wished he did.  The closest thing Robert had to a family was being with me and my own.  Robert and I made our way through high school and on most occasions he was truly a better student than I.  That said while I dated and participated Robert was always on the outside looking in.  

When it came time for college I viewed it as a gateway to the next stage of life.  Robert tried it but never finished.  He was not introduced to the world in the same way I had been.  I grew up traveling with my parents around America and to Europe.  Robert never left his tiny corner of Alaska.  I wanted desperately to pull him along with me but I knew in my heart he would never follow.  

My son has had much the same experience with his friends.  He was raised around kids with little concept of the world beyond their doors.  My son on the other hand began his life in another land and has joined us in our travels ever since.  Today he is studying at a Thai university, as far from the world of his friends as he could ever be.  He wants them to understand but like me, is coming to accept the fact that they really never will.

That frozen winter when we moved into our new house devoid of walls and slept on plywood floors was a book mark in life.  It was a change that marked an end of one period and the start of another.  A point where my childhood memories of Legos and Lincoln logs terminated.  When I was a young child before moving to the basement my mother would send me downstairs to take meat out of the freezer for the nights dinner.  It was dark and terrifying and I was certain a bear lived there.  My mother would give me a wooden spoon and convince me that if I was to see that bear I could just bop him on the head and run back upstairs.  In life it feels like we are always running.  Moving from one point into the next.  We look back with vivid memory but know our times are passing.  Still as I walk confidently into the future I know in my heart that my childhood was only a few steps behind me.  Somewhere in a deep mound of dirt outside a house in Alaska my beloved canine friends remain perpetual guardians of my youth.