Life Goes On, page 14
part #7 of The Yellowstone Event Series
It was snagged hard, too. And he’d already lost his best lure. He didn’t want to lose his best backup as well.
Now, we’ve already established that Jacob wasn’t the most graceful man in the world. He was klutzy and clumsy and prone to mistakes.
Most of his mistakes weren’t fatal.
But then most mistakes aren’t fatal for any of us. We only get one of those.
Jacob, in his quest to free his snagged line, leaned out of the canoe just a bit too far.
He’d have gotten away with it in a flat-bottomed fishing boat. But a canoe isn’t quite as stable.
As he capsized the vessel and went headlong into the water he was more worried about losing his day’s catch than he was about drowning.
All fishermen know that wearing chest waders in a boat is a bad idea.
All fishermen except for Jacob, that is.
The waders instantly filled with water and made him as heavy and as buoyant as a cement block. He went straight to the bottom of the lake, where the water pressure forced the air from his lungs.
Had he been a faster thinker with nimble fingers he’d have been able to unsnap the waders’ clasps and kick himself free from them.
But instead he panicked. And in his panic, finding his lungs suddenly emptied of air, he inhaled mightily.
Not air, but murky green lake water.
He was dead in less than a minute.
Chapter 43
Since she’d become pregnant Katie was prone to having very vivid dreams.
By chance, at the very moment Jacob died she was dreaming of him.
They were at opposite ends of a meadow. A meadow filled with tall grass and sunflowers. And in her dream he was calling to her.
They were playing hide and seek, the three of them were. Katie and their baby, who in this dream was a girl (sometimes it was a boy), were hunkered down in the grass and hiding from him.
The baby was probably three years old, with long blonde hair and striking blue eyes.
They were giggling when Jacob finished counting to a hundred and uncovered his own blue eyes.
The high grass was just tall enough to hide their location as they lay prone, listening to Jacob calling out in the distance.
“Come out, come out, wherever you are…” he called several times.
When he got tired of that, he did his best impression of the Wicked Witch of the West.
“I’ll get you, my pretty… and your little dog too!”
As they pressed their bodies into the ground, a butterfly came by and landed upon Katie’s hand.
The baby, still at the age where such things held wonder, marveled at the tiny creature and reached out to it.
In her dream, Jacob stumbled on a rock and fell hard.
Hard enough for Katie to hear him fall.
She was concerned enough, in her dream, to come to her feet to check on him.
In real life her dream was over.
She awakened at that point and called his name.
“Jacob?”
Before her nap she’d looked out at the lake and saw her husband fishing.
Now he was nowhere in sight.
The canoe, two hundred yards away from her and capsized, had a profile only a couple of inches above water level. The water was just choppy enough to hide the vessel from her view.
She assumed the fishing was bad and he’d rowed the boat back in; then walked to another place along the shore where he might have better luck.
She walked outside and scanned the shoreline.
She felt a bit unnerved, but refused to let herself panic.
After all, she’d slept for over an hour.
Anything could have happened within that time.
He could have given up on fishing and gone somewhere with his friends.
He could have gone to help another homesteader work on their cabin, and add a couple more hours to his labor tally.
He might have come up empty handed fishing and gone to see if he could shoot a couple of ducks instead.
The one thing she refused to consider was the one which, unfortunately, came to pass.
He was dead… drowned because of his own stupidity.
She’d already disowned her parents.
She’d chosen this man over her family.
She’d left behind everyone she knew in the world to come to this faraway place, to start life anew.
She didn’t know it yet.
But she was now all alone.
She did the only thing she could think of to do.
One by one she walked down the long line of recreational vehicles, knocking on each door.
A few of the couples had gone hunting or fishing themselves.
In some cases the husbands were gone, the wives left behind with the kids.
Theirs was a world where traditional parental roles reigned supreme. With just a few exceptions the men got out to do the “manly” stuff and the women were the homemakers.
It was like Etlunka Lake was stuck in a time warp, never progressing past the Ward and June Cleaver stage.
Many of the men were at home sites, helping others build their cabins, so that someday those others would return the favor.
The wives left behind who weren’t burdened with small children offered to help Katie in her search. She collected women as she went.
Two jumped on motor scooters and headed in opposite directions. They’d drive around the lake and meet on the other side. If one of them came across Jacob there was just enough room on the scooter’s seat for a ride back.
Katie, Hannah and Gwen had become good friends in recent days.
And it just so happened Hannah and Gwen were strapping young Samson into his stroller for a walk along the beach when Katie ran up to them, out of breath.
“Honey, what’s the matter?” Gwen asked.
“Have you seen Jacob? I can’t find him anywhere.”
“No. I’m sorry. We haven’t seen him at all.”
“Is it possible he went fishing or hunting with Melvyn and Tony?”
“I’m afraid not. They didn’t go hunting or fishing today. They’re at one of the cabin sites helping notch timber. They left early this morning so they could get several hours in before the mosquitoes got active.
“They should be home soon. We can ask if they saw Jacob on one of the cabin sites.”
As it turned out, that query would never happen. Because it wouldn’t be necessary.
At that very moment all heads turned toward the sound of a man yelling.
He was at the very end of the small dock, elevated two feet above water level.
That gave him a better perspective than Katie had when she gazed out upon the lake a few minutes before.
He was also well over six feet tall.
Katie was so tiny her friends nicknamed her Smurfette.
That helped too.
The man was pointing far out into the lake, where he spotted a capsized canoe.
It had just enough trapped air to keep it from sinking to the bottom of the lake, and was riding a couple of inches above the water’s surface.
There was no sign of Jacob.
Chapter 44
The waters on Etlunka Lake were choppy when Jacob fell overboard.
They’d gotten choppier since.
Absent any other clues, choppy waters are a good indicator for fishermen that a storm is brewing, for a low-lying wind is often a precursor to the storm.
The sky had already started to darken. The trees around the lake were starting to whip.
There wasn’t a lot of time before the sky opened up and made their job exponentially more difficult.
For the time being, there was no definitive clue that Jacob was alive.
But then again, they couldn’t be sure he was dead, either.
It was possible he was treading water, but that his face was so low in the water the choppy waves were hiding it.
If there was any possibility he was still alive out there, the residents would band together and move mountains to rescue him.
Within twenty minutes every boat with a motor on it was searching the area around the canoe.
That was a significant feat in itself, considering there were no working telephones at the lake. No cell phones either. No radios, other than Louis Castillo’s ham radio.
Louis ran to the back of his RV, where the ham was set up, and sent out a mayday call to the FEMA security patrol.
FEMA, in turn, sent out an emergency call to the Alaska State Troopers. The Troopers had two pontoon planes in the air within minutes: one from nearly Ekatooey Lake and one from Anchorage.
Both were on the scene within half an hour, scouring the lake from above while men in a dozen boats scoured from the surface.
The weather kept getting worse, forcing both planes to land and tie up.
There was no sense in risking an even bigger disaster.
When the skies finally opened up visibility was near zero. The boats were far more likely to crash into one another than to find and rescue poor Jacob.
After three hours the search was called off.
Katie clung to false hopes, as newly widowed women tend to do.
While her friends gathered around her to console and comfort her, she kept insisting, “No. I refuse to believe he’s dead. He’s out there treading water, you’ll see. He’s tough. He’ll stick it out until the weather lets up. Then he’ll swim to shore.
To bolster her beliefs she parked herself on the shoreline, in a driving rain, and called out to her husband over and over again.
“Hang in there, baby. Just hang in there until the rain stops, then we’ll come and pick you up. I love you, baby…”
To the women, and to many of the men as well, watching Katie was too much to bear.
Many were reduced to tears and turned away.
Despite Jacob’s many flaws, he must have had some amazing qualities as well. For it was obvious this woman loved him unconditionally.
It was hours before she finally gave up hope and let her friends coax her inside and cover her shivering body with blankets.
The body wasn’t recovered for several days.
Lake water, you see, turns into a vigorous turmoil during a violent windstorm. The water is churned wildly, not unlike a washing machine’s agitator.
Things get moved around beneath the water.
In Jacob’s case, when his chest waders filled with water he shot straight to the bottom of the lake. Once lifeless, he more or less stood upright, the storm churning the water and making his limp body weave back and forth.
In the murky water he looked eerily like one of those air-blown stick figure balloons that used car dealers place in front of their dealerships to attract customers and cause traffic accidents.
Jacob went down in a place where the lake bottom sloped down toward its deepest point.
Slowly, a bit at a time, the roiling water pushed him down the slope.
Divers couldn’t even begin their search for two days. They had to wait for the sediment at the bottom of the lake, churned up by the storm, to settle again.
Until that happened they couldn’t see their hands in front of their faces.
The Alaska National Guard’s divers were old pros.
By looking at a topographical map of the lake they had a pretty good idea where poor Jacob wound up.
And they found him more or less precisely where they expected.
Odd thing was, it was over two hundred yards from where he went into the water.
The body was in bad shape.
So bad, in fact, that they wouldn’t let Katie identify it.
That somber task fell to Jackson Benedict .
A body which stays underwater for any length of time is bloated and pale.
Decomposition starts despite the lack of oxygen. Decay ulcers which look like bedsores break out all over the body and it rots from within.
Even worse, what some old-timers call “fishes’ revenge” occurs.
Sometimes the fisherman eats the fish; sometimes it’s the other way around.
The eyes always go first. The eyeballs and the lids which cover them are the softest and most pliable external parts of the body.
They’re easy for the fish to eat. Especially after being softened further by several days in the water.
In Jacob’s case, he died in a panic, meaning his eyes were wide open. That made it easier for the fish to eat his eyeballs.
By the time he was dragged out of the water he was a terrible mess. Katie wanted to see him but Jackson and the others wouldn’t let her.
“Remember him as he was, not as the lake made him,” Jackson said. “If you see him as he is now the vision will haunt you for the rest of your life.”
Chapter 45
It was a very sad time at Etlunka Lake.
Jacob’s body was taken to a funeral home in Anchorage and prepared for burial.
His service was paid for by Jackson Benedict and was attended by almost four hundred people. Nearly all were residents from the Etlunka Lake community, but fully half of them had never met the man.
It’s sometimes odd, how new traditions are born.
Jacob was the first person to die at the lake since FEMA started its relocation program there.
Now, being the first to die anywhere isn’t an honor many people are standing in line to compete for.
But somebody had to be the first, like it or not. And in this case it happened to be Jacob Moriarty.
His new friends and neighbors thought it fitting to honor him in some manner.
Somebody recalled seeing an old four-wheeled caisson in a barn outside of Anchorage.
It reminded him of a similar caisson he’d seen during a funeral procession at Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, D.C.
He talked the caisson’s owner into donating it to the lake.
“I reckon so,” the old codger said. “It’s been sitting in the same place since I was a young boy. My father traded some fish for it, I think. He never used it. And if I had a use for it I’d have figured it out a long time ago, I reckon. It’s yours if you can find the horses to drag it out of here. That’s one thing I ain’t got is horses.”
As it turned out, horses weren’t a problem.
They found two white horses, both mares, at a farm on the other side of Anchorage and passed the hat among lake residents to buy them.
They weren’t as pretty as the ones at Arlington, and certainly weren’t outfitted as well. But the rigs that came with them were more than adequate to pull the old caisson.
The day before Jacob’s funeral the caisson was given a fresh coat of paint and parked just inside the entrance to the lake.
After a service at the funeral home in Anchorage the body was brought by hearse to the lake, where pallbearers transferred the casket to the caisson.
When FEMA designed the new encampment at Etlunka Lake they foresaw the need for a cemetery.
The five acre plot at Space 1000 was designated as a burial site for those who perished at the lake.
Jacob would be the first.
Once the casket was on the caisson it began the slow march to Space 1000 half a mile away.
Katie Moriarty walked behind it, accompanied by several close friends.
Both sides of the roadway were lined with recreational vehicles. More than six hundred, in total, as nearly all the other residents wanted to pay tribute in some form or fashion.
Even those who never knew Jacob and still didn’t know Katie.
As the caisson approached, people stood outside their RVs to watch as it passed.
Men took off their hats and bowed their heads when it came by.
Many of the women cried. Partly out of grief for the new widow. And partly because they knew that their own husbands could have been on his way to his final resting place instead of Jacob.
At the gravesite a resident who also happened to be a Baptist minister presented a simple but very emotional service as he presented Jacob’s soul to God and asked Him to watch over young Katie.
Nobody was trying to make new traditions.
Everything they did that day was thrown together to pay tribute to one man, and one man alone.
No one considered that when the next funeral was held eight months later, the family would remember the touching tribute paid to Jacob and would request the same service.
It’s said that any act performed one time is merely an act.
But that the same act performed twice is a habit.
If that’s true, then the same act conducted over and over again becomes a tradition over time.
No one knew that fifty years after Jacob’s burial, remains would still be transferred from Anchorage to Etlunka Lake by hearse, then loaded onto the same tired caisson.
Horses don’t last as long as caissons, and fifty years later it would be pulled by new horses. More majestic horses.
The road to Space 1000 would still be lined with vehicles, though by that time the RVs would be mostly gone. They’d be replaced by automobiles and pickup trucks.
But the process would be the same.
The men would still remove their hats and bow their heads as the deceased passed. Many of the women would still cry.
And the family would still march behind the caisson with a few choice friends, taking what would become known around the Etlunka community as “the long walk.”
It’s funny how traditions are sometimes created by people who have no intention of creating them.
Jacob was the first to be buried in such a manner. But he certainly wouldn’t be the last. Generations later, Space 1000 would be nearing full capacity.
It would be a sea of gravestones, each one summing up the life of a departed loved one.
But in all five acres, no other grave marker would share the same words as Jacob’s.
Jacob’s was the only one which could make the claim to be first.
For his read:
HERE LIES JACOB MORIARTY
THE FIRST PERSON BURIED
IN THIS CEMETERY
GONE BUT CERTAINLY NOT FORGOTTEN
Chapter 46
