Susan M. Pope: Finding My Place

Uncle Eddy was wrong. As we landed in Anchorage, I spotted no igloos, only a small flat building with a big tower, the new international airport. And snow. He was right about that. When we left Buffalo, the grass and leaves had been green, but here, it must always be winter.

As we climbed down the steep metal airplane steps into what passed for spring in 1954 Alaska, five strangers waited for us inside the crowded terminal. A big man with a cigar in his mouth reached out to hug my Dad with one arm, the coat sleeve of his other arm dangling empty at his side. A woman with brown fuzzy hair rushed to me, kissed my cheek with her thin red lips, and squeezed me into her soft bosom. Three tall boys hung back until the hugging and kissing were over, then shook hands with Dad. These people, he told me, were my Alaskan grandparents and uncles.

“Come to Alaska,” Grandpa had said. There were plenty of government jobs.

Traveling to Alaska was the most exciting adventure of my five short years: my first train trip, all the way across Canada, then my first flight all the way from Edmonton to Anchorage. It took a while to realize we wouldn’t be going back. Everything I knew was behind me—my school, my friends, my neighborhood, and, most of all, my New York grandparents who’d made me the center of their lives.

From the beginning we lived in Spenard, a separate city from Anchorage back then, with its own post office, plus a profusion of shady bars and strip joints. Our first home was a cheap apartment at the far western end of Northern Lights Boulevard. We didn’t know it, but locals called our apartments the rabbit hutches. Maybe it was their haphazard construction, or the raised wooden walkway connecting the buildings, or maybe the sharp contrast between our hovels and the expensive neighborhood across the road called Turnagain-by-the-Sea. Since I didn’t yet know how to read numbers on the doors, I sometimes burst into the wrong apartment, then halted in panic, sure that my family had deserted me in this strange and far-away land. I quickly discovered that the rabbit hutches housed a different breed of kids than the ones I had known in Buffalo. They swore, stole my toys, and dug for treasures in the dumpsters out back.

After Dad found a job, he bought a car, and we moved into a cozy house with a big yard and a view of Lake Spenard. Though close to the airport, we were even farther from stores, banks, restaurants, and what would be my school. We had no nearby neighbors.

Occasionally, Dad would give Mom a break by piling my sister and me into the car and, on his way to work, dropping us off to visit our Grammy at their duplex on Government Hill. She’d fix our hair, paint our fingernails, let us dress up in her old clothes, then send us back with Dad in the evening. I began to love her.

When I started school the next fall, we learned that the school bus didn’t stop at our house. So twice a day Mom would balance my sister on her hip and grab my hand, the three of us dodging traffic and, in the winter, snow berms along Spenard Road to get me to school and back again. After a winter of walking in complete darkness illuminated now and then with blinding headlights, breakup arrived, bringing with it the slow emergence of dead dogs from the melting snow banks. Snarling mouths and desiccated bodies invaded my nightmares.

That summer, I awakened one night to the sound of my mother weeping. I had never heard my mother or any other adult cry. I lay still, straining to decipher the words wrapped in her sobs.

“Dead . . .” I heard her say from the living room phone.

Who had died? Where was Dad? I wanted to jump out of bed and find out, but I was too scared. Finally, Mom tiptoed through the bedroom on her way to the bathroom.

“Mommy, what’s wrong?” I called out.

“Oh, Susie,” she said.

“Grammy and Grandpa died in a car crash. Your uncle David is still alive but very hurt.”

With their youngest son, my Alaskan grandparents had traveled south to visit family. The accident happened on the return trip, a head-on collision on the unpaved, notoriously dangerous two-lane Alaska-Canada Highway. Without warning, the grandmother I had begun to love was gone.

Weeks later, I came home to find my youngest uncle in the living room, staring out the window, a deep red gash across his forehead. He tried to say hello, but he couldn’t open his mouth, so there was only a grunt. I dashed from the room and hid behind my bed, wanting nothing to do with the spooky creature who’d come back from death.

Soon he was joined by his brothers. Our one-bedroom house had to accommodate three more people, smelly teenage boys. I became the little sister they’d never had, the victim of their relentless teasing, a safe target for their grief and anger.

That spring, I found my escape. The landlords put our house up for sale, and we were forced to move. Eventually, our house would be razed to build a hotel.

Grimy snow still clung to the brown grass when we pulled up at our new house in the heart of residential Spenard. The morning breeze carried the damp, heady scent of an Alaska spring—hope and melting dog poop. Heated by a smelly oil stove that took up most of the living room, the house was a two-bedroom box, painted steel gray inside and out. But it was ours, the first home my parents had ever owned.

My sister and I would share a bed in the walk-in closet off my parents’ bedroom, and my Uncle David would take over the second bedroom while his brothers, who came and went, would sometimes sleep in the living room. Our new house had a fenced yard, a grocery store down the street, a bowling alley a block away, and other kids nearby. Best of all, I could walk to school by myself.

While the grown-ups moved furniture into our new house, Mom scribbled a grocery list on a piece of paper and sent me to the store. I had never been to any store by myself. She trusted me. I was old enough to go to the store all by myself.

I pulled on my rubber boots and turquoise parka, then headed toward the big concrete store at the end of the street. Puddles dotted the muddy street. Giddy with freedom, I splashed from one to another. Water ran down ditches on both sides of the road, little streams with floating pop cans, popsicle sticks, paper cups. I edged to one side to watch the flow, easing my boots closer and closer to the lip of the ditch.

With one spectacular tumble, I lost my footing and plunged into the water. Stunned, I sat gasping for a few seconds, up to my neck in frigid water. Then I scanned the street for witnesses. My first day in my new neighborhood, my first solo trip to the store, and I’d made a fool of myself. I kneeled on the bottom of the ditch, then inched myself out of the muck. Water poured from my parka and sloshed in my boots as I stumbled back toward the house, trying not to cry.

Mom ordered me to change clothes, handed me a fresh grocery list, and sent me off again. This time I succeeded. Over the next months and years, I would retrace the steps to the store and back hundreds of times. Within the grid of streets bounded by three highways and the Alaska Railroad, I felt a kind of safety, sheltered from the cycles of decay and renaissance for which Spenard was known.

With their bare hands, Mom and Dad transformed the shabby little house and scruffy yard into a respectable middle-class home. That house, along with all the others in the neighborhood, would withstand the 1964 earthquake with no more than cracked walls, broken dishes, and splintered picture frames.

Occasionally, my best friend Judy and I would burst out of the neighborhood, following the railroad tracks into the wilds beyond the Tudor Road industrial zone, where you could still glimpse the wilderness that Spenard must have been when Joe Spenard cut the first crude road from Ship Creek to the lake. Each time, we made sure to race home before our mothers called us for dinner.

At some point, I couldn’t say exactly when, Buffalo became a faint memory, like a picture in a scrap book, a foreign place crammed with people who spoke a different language and lived a different life. This was my place: Spenard.



Susan Pope moved to Alaska when she was five years old. She has been writing poems and stories since she could print sentences on fat-lined paper. Her first published work was a poem she wrote in the third grade which won a prize in the Anchorage Daily News creative writing contest. A fascination with people’s stories is the thread that links all of her work. Her stories are grounded in place and she believes that by telling and hearing stories we come to know and understand each other. Pope’s essays have appeared in Pilgrimage; Damselfly Press; The Southeast Review Online; Crosscurrents North: Alaskans on the Environment; Cirque: A Literary Journal of the Pacific Rim; Persimmon Tree; Bluestem; The Delmarva Review; Under the Sun; Under the Gum Tree; and the anthology, Deep Waters, by Outrider Press. When not writing, Susan enjoys hiking, biking, and exploring Alaska with her husband, grandchildren, and friends.