How My Dad Became The Night Dispatcher
Circa-1980 something
Building a marriage while running a 24-hour-a-day taxi company in Alaska was not easy in 1980. Years later, after my mother left Alaska with me and re-settled in her hometown in California, after Reagan left office and she was done snipping that the President was responsible for her divorce and bankruptcy, somewhere in mid-childhood that was straddled between two geographies and two parents, my parents found agreement in one of their long evening phone conversations —they never should have bought the taxi cab company.
By then the taxi cab company had sold, but a few crumbs remained that became my father’s livelihood. First, he and his brother got a contract to deliver UPS parcels. Visiting my dad in Alaska at five years old meant driving around in an old truck stuffed with boxes and listening to the public radio station, KBBI AM 890. I remember holding my breath when a Doberman pincer lunged at his calves as he dropped a package on someone’s porch. I remained terrified of that house for the rest of the summer. Driving all day was otherwise boring, but the smell of the dust on the dirt roads and the green pushki (cow parsnip) and the bay converged and made me feel good to be home.
When the UPS gig didn’t last—it grew too fast and gave way to actual UPS drivers in brown suits—there still remained one last crumb: a contract with the electric company. After business hours, the electric company transferred their phone lines to our kitchen, and my dad became steward of the lights from 5 pm- to 8 am, all weekends, and all holidays.
“It gave me my freedom,” my dad would say until he retired in 2015. “I could do whatever I wanted all day long.”
This wasn’t entirely true. Well, actually, mostly not true at all. We did take grand adventures—drives and hikes as far as you could go and return in six hours—but we were like a Cinderella racing to catch the phone at 5 pm, out of breath, high-fiving each other that we had made it before the bureaucrats noticed our delinquency.
Some nights he could sleep. But the contract grew larger, and the area he covered grew to the size of West Virginia. He papered the walls of our duplex with maps of the electrical grid. He studied them. Became a self-taught engineer calling out crews to restore power. He took seriously the lives of the men he woke in the middle of the night to send out in hurricane-force winds; he felt his culpability if he misdirected them and they were electrocuted. No one ever was.
My dad didn’t think he needed a bed. By the time I was 13, computers and phones were the main feature of our living room. He slept on the living room floor covered in newspapers. The New Yorker, New York Times, Atlantic Monthly, Anchorage Daily News, and of course, Homer News, occupied more space in the house than we did. He would fall asleep reading, and the sound of crinkling paper would wake him up when he rolled over.
“You won’t believe what I read last night!” he’d announce when I stumbled downstairs to make breakfast.
And when he wasn’t reading and the phones were quiet, he was writing. Yellow legal pads with a left slant of his unique script. It seemed he was always working on a letter, but now as I go through all of the Homer News, I note his long absences. I map onto those silences and the other pressures that were shaping his life.
That my mom would blame Reagan and not my dad for our family’s 3000-mile sprawl from Alaska to the Central Valley of California, says something about her respect for my dad and her belief that people like us were bearing the brunt of bad government policies. The move, however, did not improve her prospects, and by adolescence I resented her shortcomings and geography. Summer in the Central Valley was burnt and brown; like living in an oven. We spent afternoons inside without air conditioning in 110-degree heat draped with wet towels. Though that part of the state is sometimes called the “breadbasket” of California, the only abundance I was ever certain of was our empty refrigerator shelves and endless bills we never had enough money to pay.
The brown landscape of my home with my mom was dystopian compared to the abundance Homer offered: rampant green, glaciers & pink mountains, a sparkling bay, endless summer nights, and a bounty of food and friendship. Smoked salmon that made our fingers sticky, raspberries smeared on our cheeks, and fireweed growing recklessly everywhere.
It’s less uncommon to be raised in disparate geographies now, but in the 1980s and 1990s, my parents couldn’t have chosen a more unique arrangement.
But, the picture. I see my dad’s exhaustion. His annoyance with whomever is on the other end of the lens. He still has hair. The picture could be 1985 or 1995. Gone is his sparkle; he’s just making a life, dammit. I don’t know where the picture came from. It surfaced on top of a pile in the way that sometimes things are magicked like that. It’s been on my desk for years now, until our puppy pilfered it last year and nearly digested it. I think the chew marks add character and a nod to impermanence.
My mom used to tell this story. My dad was writing all the time and never thinking much about it. They’re moving around. Whenever he’s not paying attention, she takes his discarded drafts and puts them in a suitcase. She not hiding them; she’s saving them. And one day he longs for his lost essays. Where could they be? Why was he always losing things? Then she hauls out the suitcase with all of his scraps of ideas and words and they are both happy.
Most memories are like a smooth stone from a riverbed. Nothing on their own, but cobbled together, they make a form and derive something close to meaning.
My parents never should have bought a taxi cab company. But they did. And my life story unfolds from there.
Here’s another picture of a picture. This one is 1979. I don’t know the person, but they are running headlong into a future and everything about the moment is good: the strength of their body, the rhythm of their breath, the way their hair is flying off, how the field is breaking into seed—I wonder if it felt like luck. Or just another day with endless days ahead.
Until next time,
Mercedes
Notes:
Thanks for reading! If you have a memory to share, please do. I’m conscious that as I’m constructing this story, it intersects with many others!
Did you miss my first essay in the series? No worries! Find it here.
Do you remember the Sterling Cafe? If you do then you might appreciate this 2-day workshop with the Alaska Humanities Forum. In small-town Alaska, we lose so much when we become polarized. Let’s grab a cup of coffee and learn how to talk to each other again.
Developing a writing practice is grounding and empowering. Join me in participating in Tersa Sundmark’s 10-day journaling prompt series. It’s a low-key way to reconnect with your creative self.
Sarah Smarsh ties her life story to Reagan-era policies in her memoir Heartland. It’s a good read. Order it from our local bookstore.
Next time…I’m trying to decide whether to share a sampling of letters from a bygone generation, to lament what didn’t happen on the Spit in 1980- something, or to tell about beating my dad to the paper. Stay tuned.
What a strong stylist you are, Mercedes. Vivid scenes come alive with sounds, aromas and precision.
Plus, elegant insights such as this grab hold and compel a second reading, s-l-o-w-e-r this time:
"Most memories are like a smooth stone from a riverbed. Nothing on their own, but cobbled together, they make a form and derive something close to meaning."
Eager for installment #4. No pressure.
Lovely, Mercedes. I love your writings. I have learned so much more about your dad than I knew before reading this. Still admire him lots! Especially for helping you to be who you are today.
Dale Raymond was at Homer High when I was there- his mom was Mary Raymond who just recently died. Long time Homer family. Keep on writing- your writing is engaging and thought provoking. Thanks. Sue Post