John Francis Lang died at approximately 3:30 a.m. on Wednesday, October 31st, 2007. He was fifty six years old and had spent forty one of those years fighting a disease for which there is no cure. It was a battle of attrition and constant loss, with, in the end, only the possibility of a negotiated surrender.
After the cremation, when my mother asked where we we thought John would like to go, my brother Jim and I both replied that we should take him back to Metlakatla, where he had been happiest and healthiest in his life.
This is a story of a victory, one engineered by John himself and also a story of coming home.
In one of his many incarnations, my father worked as a Communications Technician at a military communications site on Annette Island in the Alaskan panhandle. We lived in the Tsimpshian indian village of Metlakatla.
There was always more than enough to do in Metlakatla for myself and my siblings. John was thirteen, Jim was nine, Bernadette was seven and I was six years of age and Metlakatla was entirely our playground.
Metlakatla, Alaska. The City Dock is just out of the picture to the left, the rock wall of the Marina is just beginning at the right. Purple Mountain looms at the left edge.
We came to Metlakatla in 1962, pulled along in the wake of my father's wanderlust like leaves. I remember the first night we landed there because we walked along, surrounded by quonset huts, and then went into one and watched 'Snow White and The Seven Dwarves' projected on a sheet at the end of the hut. I found out later that this was at the Coast Guard station, some six miles from Metlakatla on the eastern side of Annette.
John, the oldest child, took to the opportunities that island life provided as though one returned from the desert and longing only for water. In the summer, John was gone from sunup to sundown, almost always on Chester Bay with several indian friends, almost always fishing.
The waters around the Alaska panhandle are some of the wildest on the planet, and the deepest. It is not uncommon, after a large storm, to discover full grown salmon languishing sixty feet above the forest floor in the arms of the pine trees and redwoods that stand resolutely to the very edge of the land. Indeed, when we went to deliver John to his destiny, the depth meter read 120 feet while still within a stones throw from the shore.
The Canadair Beaver pulls up to the dock, engine shut down, and a handler grabs one of the ropes that hang from the wings. The aircraft does not slow down appreciably at all, sliding like mercury across the surface. At this point, the pilot abandons ship and jumps to the dock, grabbing another line that, again, does not slow the plane down. It seems to think that it may be able to make a break for it. But the craft is hauled back from the brink, the pilot narrowly missing a heavy ribbing the next day for allowing his aircraft to drift away from the dock with no pilot on board. We all climb down from the plane into a horizontal rainfall, 25 mph winds and a cold that locates every opening in a jacket or sweater with unnerving accuracy. We have arrived, myself, my brother Jim, sister Judy and our uncle, Jess Edge. Jess spent a lot of time with John and comes to say farewell. However, if the weather is like this tomorrow, we won't be going anywhere.
The next day arrives with clouds, but much less wind and rain. I head out early towards the City Dock. In my memory, it is huge, capable of holding 150 people comfortably. In the present, however, it is something else entirely. The dock that I remember as big enough to be a good sized parking lot is less than twenty five feet deep and thirty five feet wide. The twelve by twelve logs still decorate the edge, but everything in between had shrunk. John was often fishing from this dock, especially when he had one of his younger brothers or sisters tagging along.
The City Dock, somewhat smaller than my memories.
The depth of the water explains John's stories of the various species that he and his friends coaxed up from the Bay; hagfish, monkfish, ratfish and even a slime eel or two. But these were, by no means, the extent of his repertoire. Sometimes, in the early morning, Jim and John would tie a silver pull tab from a pop can to the end of the line, then liberally salt the next two feet with tiny gold hooks. This usually yielded a string of herring for breakfast. At times, mom would command John to go get 'something fresh for dinner' and he would return with several rock cod or, after going to the lake near Yellow Hill, several fresh trout.
John removing a hook from a catch after a day on the water.
As an avid and increasingly skilled fisherman, John was capable of bringing home nearly anything he wanted. The one that eluded him, though, was the big one, the fish that all adults went fishing for and that the Tsimpshian had imbued with the very meaning of the cycle of life- the King Salmon.
The rest of the kids all spent each day that we could away from home, exploring our environment. I was often accompanied by my older sister Bernadette while Jim, being the ripe old age of nine, went farther afield, exploring the ruins of the old power station across the bay that sat at the base of an enormous waterfall, or climbing Yellow Mountain behind the town, or playing with the dogfish that hung around the sluiceway at the canning dock.
We have all visited the Coast Guard station, the airport, and the White Alice station my father worked at. All of them were busy forty five years ago, all are abandoned now.
The Annette Airport in 2008 and in 1957.
Jim is amazed by how small the old Marina is on the north side of the bay. He remembers playing there and that it was huge. His memories, too, play tricks on him.
Everywhere I walk, I see myself, my sisters and my brothers on the island so long ago. It's as though I am accompanied by ghosts in my travels here. In the old part of the village, nothing has changed. The same houses stand, some in a greater or lesser degree of repair, but the same houses. We finally locate our old house and the location of the photograph of John and his fish that has become an icon of that time and that story. Remarkably, the same white picket fence still stands.
Judy and I standing by the same white picket fence John stood in front of forty five years before with his fabulous salmon.
In only three short years, we live a lifetime of adventures and this place takes hold of us. Jim losing his lens from his glasses, me catching a cod with a bamboo pole that broke under the stress of the fight, but was caught in mid-air and saved by Bernadette, sledding down the hill in front of the church, picking up Japanese fishing floats on the beach, finding a very annoyed octopus stranded by the low tide. Through it all runs the thread of John's fishing and his union with the bay and the people, and their union with him.
What we didn't know at the time was that this would be the last time John would experience the full freedom of movement that a healthy body provides. At the age of fifteen, he will fall off of a stool, striking his head and beginning a history of epileptic seizures. This will, in turn, reveal a slowly growing brain tumor. The brain surgery procedures at that time are crude and the blinding artistic talent that had begun to show itself a couple of years before becomes gradually more and more stunted as the surgerys pile up and the tumor keeps steadily making progress. The realization that he is dying comes after a final stroke, when he tells me, "I know I used to draw things, but I just don't have any desire to do that any more."
Six weeks later, I'm having trouble sleeping and sitting at the computer at 4:30 a.m. when the call comes from the nursing home. "I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but your brother John passed away in his sleep sometime between 2:30 and 4:00 a.m."
Back in the present, the time has come and we are all on a small fishing boat, thoughtfully provided by the Chief of Police, heading for the place that John often fished, and where he caught his salmon.
At the base of Purple Moutain, in the arms of Chester Bay, Jess reads a poem of John's that we found in his writings.
Unity
Tall mountains all most folks enthrall
And "why?", I think I know.
To Heaven high, they glorify
With praying peaks of snow.
On bended knees, bedecked with trees,
They thank the One who makes
The ducks whose flocks adorn their smocks
Of clear blue mountain lakes.
The lakes provide a great divide
That illustrates extremes,
They’re things we’ve tried but been denied,
While mountains are our dreams.
Those lakes and creeks and snowy peaks
All really make up one;
That stillness seeks, then softly speaks
Of He who gave His son.
(copyright John Lang, 2007)
One day, when my mother walked into the hotel she was staying at for a convention, the hostess told her that it had been requested that she phone home. Wondering which child had drowned, she called and John answered. "What's going on?", my mother asked him. "I caught a thirty five pound King Salmon today", John replied.
It seems that John had tired of missing the prize and went to see the father of his friend, Paul Brendible, for advice on how to catch the King.
While it is true that you must be a member of the tribe to own property on Annette, the Tsimpshian are unfailingly and genuinely polite and helpful to all who come their way. Mr. Brendible gave John some important pointers and the next evening I was wheeling my red wagon up the road to the Brendible's house, John walking proudly beside, with his salmon covering the entire wagon, and then some. The fish was as tall as I was, and considerably more impressive. Mr. Brendible laughed when he saw it, and told the story for years afterward.
When my aunt came to have some of the salmon, she said, "There's nothing as good as having Johnny-Caught Salmon!"
As I spread John's ashes into the water, I don't trust myself to speak. Every single day that John lived, there was only one thing that he could count on, that each day he would be able to do just a little less than he had been able to do the day before. But I never ever heard him talk about giving up.
Finally, I say to him as he is leaving, "In all my memories of this place, you are always fishing. Now, you always will be."
When I finish, Jim looks up at Purple Mountain and says, "That's a pretty fitting headstone."
John Lang and the salmon that he stalked and landed on his own, one of the happiest moments of his life.
(John passed away of complications from Multiple Endocrine Neoplasia I, along with a number of volunteer problems that appeared with the severity of his case. For more information regarding this disease, please see this link at the National Institute of Health)