Kathleen, Queen of the Desert

Originally published in The South Bay Daily Reporter, California, Summer 1994.

I sure didn’t think much about Native Americans sitting in a classroom in Robinson Elementary in the 1950s, a Dick and Jane book in my lap. There were no Indians left in Manhattan Beach. Nobody with Mongolian cheekbones or long shinny black hair. My brothers wore crewcuts with a little soap to slick the front up. I wore skirts and hard shoes. We all looked like Dick and Jane. Ancient Manhattan Beach history for me was the Red Car and the year Joe’s Candy Cottage opened.

Nobody I knew could skin an animal or leach the tannin out of ground acorns. Well, okay, my dad was getting the nag of our barbecue and my mom was able to broil a pretty mean swordfish steak but I wouldn’t saw California Indian survival skills were too much in evidence.

Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins (based on the true story of an Indian girl marooned on St. Nicholas Island for 20 years) didn’t get published until 1960, and it wasn’t until I was in high school that I heard the haunting story of Ishi, the orphaned northern California Yahi, the “last wild Indian.” We did get heavy doses of Junípero Serra at Robinson and Center. And you didn’t need to attend American Martyrs to get the message that the mission system was pretty damned terrific. Gabrieleňo or Juaneňo Indians in Manhattan Beach? They never crossed my mind.

Before we moved up here to Nome, I studied the atlas. I saw how close Nome was to Russia. Now we’re not the closest point in America to Siberia; the village of Wales is closer than Nome. But we are the area that used to be part of the land bridge. Just look at how shallow the Bering and Chukchi Seas are even today. I am truly excited to be in a place where aboriginal life on my continent had first arrived. There’s even talk now of a Beringian International Heritage Park on both sides of the straits.

So there I was slumped on a bench in the waiting lounge of the Norton Sound Health Corporation clinic in Nome, coughing and blowing my nose and worried my lungs might collapse. My husband had just been called into an examining room by a nurse. He thought his lungs might collapse, too. One of his coworkers had just his lungs pumped of fluid at this hospital two days before. The librarian told me, “Lots of people get sick when they first come to Nome. It just takes a while to get used to our bugs.” So, as I waited at the clinic that afternoon, the Bering land bridge wasn’t really on my mind. Until these two guys came in.

They both looked about 20 years old. The short one wore a jacket that said “Shaktoolik Native Corporation” and seemed in pretty unhealthy shape, maybe checking into the hospital. His friend, about 6’3”, was the largest Native Alaskan I’d ever seen. Athabascan maybe. He had a wide, solemn brown face with thick black hair cut bluntly at his shoulders. After speaking softly with the woman at the admitting desk, he steered his friend to a lab door and then strode off.

Replace the high tops with sealskin mukluks stuffed with dry tundra grass and this guy could have been the Ice Age hunter tracking polar bears farther and farther until he was standing on a new continent. He would have returned to his travel igloo and brought more hunters across. They’d go farther and farther into Alaska and Canada, bringing their families, having more babies, spreading out. This man could have led the crossing.

But why did they just cross during the Ice Age? The sea is frozen from October to April so why didn’t these Asian nomads just walk across on the ice? “Too risky,” the Texan who manages the Polar Gift Shop told me. “Even when they had a dog sled race from Nome to Anadyr on the Chykotskoye Peninsula, Russia, several winters ago, they had to use helicopters to take the dogs across the straits. You go out on that sea ice and one day it’s solid, another day there’s a huge crack in the same spot. Then the next day that crack may be closed.” They could only cross by land when the glaciers had sucked up all that ocean and the journey was predictable. The Ice Age ended, the land connection flooded, the migration stopped. But these nomads’ descendants are still here, in Wales, in Shaktoolik, and in Nome, smoking salmon, having more babies, and hunting whales.

In 1946, my father crossed the land bridge that connects Cleveland with Los Angeles. Not pursuing polar bears but after a dream of making movies that perhaps wasn’t much less risky. His parents and my mother’s parents weren’t too happy about it. Ohio was a perfectly good place to live. But my grandparents’ ancestors had also left their homes in Germany, the Netherlands, England, Scotland, and Ireland to settle in the Midwest. So here I am back at the site of the land bridge. Another wave of immigration. Circling back.