fried halibut on joel's front porch

a creative nonfictional essay

The year was 2008, but that didn’t matter to me because I was three years old and I wanted to pick strawberries in the woods. It was dark and a fire glowed somewhere nearby, surrounded by numerous adults who talked and laughed and gripped their tin cups full of steam. I’d attempted to pick up an ember earlier–it was so pretty, so bright and orange–I didn’t know it would burn my fingers if I tried to hold it. The adults stopped me before any damage was done, but their sudden panic startled me and left me embarrassed. 

So, I snuck away to hide my face, and now I’d forgotten all about the incident because the strawberries were wonderful and sweet. They were so sweet, in fact, that I didn't hear the frightened adults and the voices repeating “where’s Sophia?” as they searched frantically between the trees for my tiny, curly-topped head. I’m sure it was only a minute or less before the panic was once again over and Papa swooped me up from my crouched position, carrying me back to the fire.

“Sophia!” they exclaimed, placing me in a camp chair. “You scared us! What were you doing all alone in the woods?” 

“I was picking strawberries,” I said matter of factly, and licked my lips. 

I was unaware of this at the time, but the adults all exchanged a glance–confused at first, but it quickly turned into a round of warm laughter. There were no strawberries here, but to me the woods were full of them, a new collection of red treasures under every leaf I turned. There wasn’t much else that mattered. 

…

The adults had names, and eventually I learned them. 

There were the Nyquests, Shane and Sheila, with their kids Tristan and Taylee and their yellow lab Abi. Shane built houses, Sheila was a teacher, and their trailer house was perched right next to our trailer house on Bayview Court. They drove a silver truck quite similar to ours–one time Sheila mistakenly got in our truck and attempted to start it with her key. My parents said nothing, just stood there and laughed. The Nyquests were the kind of people you could laugh at, because they had no shame in laughing at you (but I didn’t quite know this yet because I was between the ages of four and eight).

I did know that Sheila’s kitchen was bedazzled with red apples–apple towels, an apple rug, and even a kettle in the shape of an apple–and she made home cooked meals that we could sometimes smell from our own kitchen. Often, Mama sent me over to their house for ingredients, or anything we needed that they probably had: baking soda, sour cream, ginger ale, double A batteries, the list goes on. The Nyquests were also the kind of people that you could spontaneously have dinner with, no questions asked. But again, I suppose that was most people in the Thorne Bay community. 

Eventually, both the Nyquests and my family moved out of our trailers and across the street to two much bigger houses that overlooked the bay (hence our street name). They were farther away from us now, but we could still hear their laughter and smell their barbecue from our back porch. They also had a trampoline, which became a crucial summer activity for me and my three younger siblings. We skipped to their front door as often as we were allowed, to give Abi a quick pet, then kick off our shoes and bounce until we were tired and thirsty. I onced asked Mama if we could get a trampoline, but our backyard was too small and the Nyqests had one anyway. 

Then there were the Jensons, Joel and Deidre, with their kids Luther, Amy, Ian, and their teacup poodle Chloe. Joel taught across the hall from Sheila, Deidre worked in the district office, and their trailer house could be seen from Bayview Court. Ian walked Chloe around in the mornings before school, and sometimes I observed from the front porch as she trotted around in her little pink coat. Then I’d walk to the school with my sisters, and one year it was Joel’s classroom where I spent my days. He taught me how to write a five paragraph essay and to play the ukulele, and he read us books in his thick Minnesotan accent. He completed Mad Libs with us during free time, and he found them as funny as his students did, the classroom roaring with rowdy third grade laughter. 

There were countless dinners spent on the Jensons’ couches, paper plates and instruments strewn about the living room. It’s orange in my memory, and the carpet was somehow soft and rough at the same time. I would run my hands over its fibers as the moms conversed in the kitchen, the kids watched TV, and the dads strummed their guitars and mandolins. There was a glorious compilation of songs played, from gospel to folk to Celtic music. If suitable, Joel would pull out his recorder and finger an exuberant tune, and I would watch carefully to see if I could do it myself. Joel would keep the rhythm and Papa would sing: 

The bells are still ringing, can’t you hear what they say

You can always go home… you just can’t stay.

The words became slightly important to me then, but only because I didn’t know what they meant. I wondered what it was like to be unwelcome in one’s own home, and the thought made me feel rather uncomfortable. Later I would learn all the words to that song and sing it onstage with Joel and Papa on either side of me. The adults would cry and the audience would stand up in applause, and I wouldn’t quite understand why. 

There were many others–the Clowars with their kayaks and pet deer, the Gunkels with their fish camp and their daughter Addie, the Wises with their goats who lived across the bay, the Thomases with their hunting dogs and everlasting snack supply. There wasn’t anybody in the town of Thorne Bay that I didn’t recognize when I passed them on the street or saw them in the produce section of the little red market. Friends were everywhere and everyone, in the school on the top of the hill, the church at the bottom of the hill, wading through Gravelly Creek on Sunday afternoons with fishing poles in their hands. There were dinners on porches and jam sessions in living rooms that brought the town to life at night, and among those people were us.

Us, the Martin family, with our curly hair and our equally curly dog Coach. We used to live in a little trailer but then we moved across the street to a big blue house that overlooked the ocean when the last of us was born. First it was me, then Jolie, Tess, and Everett, all of us born two years apart from one another. Our friends had grown so accustomed to us supplying new babies for them to hold at church events, they were all shocked when my parents decided to stop. “That’s a lot of energy and a lot of hair,” said Shane’s dad after meeting our family for the first time, and the adults laughed because truer words were never said. 

Papa was an English teacher, working on the opposite end of the school from Sheila and Joel, because he taught middle school and high school instead of elementary. I spent a lot of time in his classroom before and after school and on Fridays, where I sat on the floor and flipped through books and drew on the whiteboard with as many colors I could find. I always felt slightly privileged as a child because I knew what it was like to run through the hallways when nobody else was there, and to explore different parts of the school whenever I wanted. Papa was also a hunter, a fisher, and a gatherer, as it was part of island life to make sure we were living off the land as much as possible. He did this all alongside Mama. 

Mama was a woman of many wonders–a mother of four, to start with, but also a famously reliable community member who was active in the church and the library, substituted at the school sometimes, was appointed the town liaison, cleaned the Clowars’ houses and cabins for their business, often watched over other families’ kids, and gave the cruise ship people tours of our little town. She made every kind of meal from curries to calzones, she and Papa kept a garden that thrived more and more each year, she canned foods, she dried foods, and she sang me to sleep every single night. 

We were the Martins, who drank goat milk from Jenny Wise and harvested sea asparagus every year and sang songs as often as one could think of singing songs. We were that curly, energetic group of people everyone knew and we lived in Thorne Bay, near our friends the Nyquests and the Jensons and so many others. It was a town of 500 people, less than a speck on the map of Alaska, located in the deep southeast. I suppose I didn’t know that Thorne Bay was small. To me it was the perfect size–it took me long enough to bike from Pat Rochester’s house to the Port, or in other words, from one end of town to the other. Part of me knew there was more world out there, but I didn’t think about it that much, because the sparkling bay and the salmonberries and the people seemed world enough to me. 

…

The year was 2014, but that hardly mattered because I was nine years old and my mind was in the trees, bouncing from the tops of spruces to hemlocks to cedars. Strapped into my seatbelt and jolting with each bump on the gravel road, I traced the trees and their long branches with my finger, and I bounced. We were going camping with the Jensons and the Nyquests at Pebbly Beach. We’d park on the side of the road, hike across a small river with gear (or for some of us, children) on our backs, and we’d pick a spot where the ground was soft to set up a temporary civilization in the woods. We were going camping and I was bouncing from tree to tree, and that was all that mattered to me.  

Once the tents were set up and some exploring of the mossy forest and pebbly beach had been done, the fifteen of us gathered around the campfire like so many times before. I only remember one conversation from that trip, and it went like this–

“Sophia, you probably don’t remember this, but–”

“Is this the story about the strawberries? I was just thinking about it!”

“We were camping a long time ago, and–”

“I remember this!”

“We lost you, we were so scared–”

“Yeah, you wandered off–” 

“We all had to get up and look for you–”

“We found you and you were just–”

“You were happily wandering around in the dark–”

“I WAS PICKING STRAWBERRIES.” 

An uproar of laughter from the adults, and I’m sure I laughed too. It tickled them, and still does to this day, that my imagination was so vivid at the age of three that I was able to brave the dark for the sake of picking those phantom strawberries. 

The adults laughed, and I observed closely for perhaps the first time. Joel laughed with his hand on his belly and his mouth in the shape of a crescent, Sheila laughed with her hand on somebody else, Shane’s laugh was loud and distinct, and Deidre’s eyes smiled big when she laughed. Neither the Jensons nor the Nyquests will ever get tired of the same story, and they will appreciate it fully every time the story is told. I sat in a camp chair and listened to the laughter echoing into the night sky, the crackling fire that twirled and danced before us, the ocean that gently collapsed over itself every eight seconds, and things started to matter a little more. 

…

One thing about Thorne Bay is that it evolves. The Thorne Bay community in one decade will never be the same as the next decade. People come and go, like they do, and friends are abundant only as long as you keep making them. 

The Jensons left first. My third grade year ended and they moved to Wrangell, packing their things and selling everything else in a garage sale that could be seen from our house. There would be no more living room jam sessions or bonfires or community projects or Joel laughing with his hand on his belly. Somebody else would move into their house and a different teacher would be standing in front of his classroom that year. You make new friends, of course, and you invite them over for dinner, but they are not the Jensons. 

Then the Nyqests said their goodbyes some years later, and I remember this a bit more clearly–the two churches of Thorne Bay got together for a potluck on Sunday, and we said all the sweet words we could muster. Everybody cried, of course, and I hugged Sheila as tight as I could, and off they drove to live their next life. 

We, the Martins, lasted twelve whole years on that island before life took us elsewhere and it was us having a garage sale and a potluck in July. It was us that watched the dim lights of Thorne Bay disappear behind us, and us that cried and said goodbye to our big blue house that overlooked the ocean. 

The Gunkels would leave too, and the Thomases with their dogs, and Jenny Wise would die, and so would Trish Clowar; and unaware of this, we smiled through the tears and wrapped our arms around the people that made Thorne Bay come to life with us. It all seemed a bit cliche, too much like the movies where it’s slow motion and there’s beautiful sun outside and the memories come flooding back to us in black and white. They’re still gray to me now, except the few that are orange. 

…

Recently, it was 2023, and it mattered. There are stories within stories to tell, but the thing that mattered the most is that I returned to Thorne Bay after four years of absence. Funnily enough, the Jensons and the Nyquests had both moved back to that tiny town–I suppose they could never say their official goodbyes after all. 

We sat on Joel’s front porch and ate fried halibut, fresh from the ocean that day, and I got to look in the faces of the Jensons, and the Nyqests, and the Clowars. The ocean pushed and pulled nearby as the sun went down, and we laughed about things like phantom strawberries and the famous line, “that’s a lot of energy and a lot of hair.” I’m not sure what I can bring from this moment, only that I was given another chance to see those people that I loved so much, to see who they were, and to care. 

    No one could know that Trish Clowar, who sat on the porch next to me, would be gone only a few months later. We didn’t know how sad we were about to be, but still, I somehow knew that as the sky grew dark and the ocean too, it all mattered to me.