Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
— 28 —
Let Freedom Ring
(on the first anniversary of 9/11)
I'VE BEEN THINKING A
lot about freedom of late, particularly when I went home this year
for the Fourth of July. Home is Seldovia, a village of about 500 people on the southern
shore of Kachemak Bay, a place of heart-stopping beauty built on the precarious edge of a
deep blue fjord at the foot of precipitous green mountains. You can't drive to Seldovia, you
have to fly or take a boat. Aleuts lived there first, and then came the Whites, and after them
the Filipinos, and now we're all mixed up together in a wonderful jumble I call family.
I went home because my friend Kathy, born Quijance and now Gottlieb, had decided it
was time for a family reunion, and it had to be in Seldovia, and it had to be on the Fourth of
July. The Fourth of July is Seldovia's biggest day, everyone comes home and so do a whole
bunch of perfect strangers from all over Alaska and even Outside. The airport has planes
parked wingtip to wingtip and boats, power and sail, pleasure and fishing crowd the small
boat harbor. The day is small-town America made flesh, with a parade and the dead fish
pass and chainsaw carving and the Old Crab Auction. Don't ask, okay? It's Seldovia, it's
the Fourth, and we don't give a damn how you do it anywhere else.
Kathy's daughter Tanya and family were coming from Knoxville, daughter Monica and
family from Tucson, daughters Marie and Esther and families from Anchorage, son Tim
from Anchorage, me from Anchorage. Husband Kevin and Kevin's brother Jordan from
Seattle would be there, and daughter Angel and her family live there. "You have to make
Auntie Dana's famous spaghetti," Kathy told me.
"For how many?" I said.
"Thirty-six."
