Correcting the Landscape by Marjorie Kowalski Cole

Author:Marjorie Kowalski Cole
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-08-17T04:00:00+00:00

TEN

…dense forests filled with trees—I do not exaggerate—of a kind you never saw before, probably hybrid trees resulting from the mating, it could be, of white pines and willow trees, grafted together out of sheer loneliness. I mean, these are odd-looking trees, barbaric and sad, and there are entire forests of them growing unobserved and unlabeled up there.

—CHARLES BAXTER, THE FEAST OF LOVE

WE WERE A SUBDUED NEWSROOM FOR a few days. Noreen kept after the police department over their investigation into Cathy’s death, and I forced myself to stay at my desk for a change and go through the nonbreaking news. In the Federal Register the EPA reported progress with the cleanup of a salvage yard near the military base where drums of toxic chemicals had been stored for decades, above the water table into which hundreds of nearby homeowners sank their wells. I looked wearily at the announcement and wondered if I had time to follow it up. Just this once could I please slap this verbatim in the paper? And here was something else I ought to try to sort out, Mental Health Trust Lands.

This one had been around since statehood, at least. So that the mentally ill would not have to be shipped outside to Morningside Hospital, in Oregon—“inside, outside, Morningside,” they used to say, an Alaskan’s three choices—the federal government had transferred land to the new state expressly to raise money for a state-run hospital. Over the years the land in question got lost, sold, and traded, nibble by nibble. Under the hawk eyes of developers, however, every bit of land to which the state of Alaska held claim was suddenly more valuable, and legislators in Juneau had introduced a bill to find these acres and use them to fund health services. It was a boring, complicated issue, like most public policy issues, but it mattered.

Finally a press release got my attention. The local Native corporation announced that they will distribute cash dividends at the end of this quarter, twelve thousand dollars to every stockholder. Holy Toledo. A lot of that cash was going to go up in misery. To be flush with cash so abruptly was going to put a lot of people in an awkward position. Who could doubt it? What would Cathy Carew have done with twelve thousand dollars?

I needed either to sort through these stories right now or force myself to confront the problem of our own revenue here at the Mercury. I couldn’t decide which task was less attractive to me.

Within a couple of days Noreen made herself unwelcome downtown, probably by not bothering to conceal her fear that the death of a Native person in the Chena River was going to become a low priority for the detectives. Noreen wanted to be loved by the right person, but to her credit she was not at all afraid of being disliked. She managed to arrange a conference call between the two of us and the lead detective.

Lieutenant Phil Sloan talked fast: his nickname was Class Four, after a Class Four river—rapids and waterfalls.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.