This is a tad bit long, apologies in advance for that. I’ve never been one for telling stories. I seem to lack that intrinsic succinctness that others enjoy.
I hope I can make up for my lack of conciseness with a firsthand account from my childhood.
Names and places are obscured to prevent retaliation from the parties involved or breach of privacy for others.
I grew up in a sleepy town in the PNW. It’s your typical decaying town, one which seems to be inflicted with socio-economic hardships. While some would blame the opioid crisis, or perhaps the recession on its current state, the truth is that the city lived a series of short lives. Each one managed to be imbued with an interminable hope which would, once more, be crushed by yet another act of God.
While others raised in the southern portion of the state grew used to earthquake drills in their schools, we knew there was little one could do if another quake came to pass. One, particularly of the older persuasion, may remember Good Friday of 1964.
Four minutes and thirty-eight seconds.
That was how long it took for the town’s citizens to recognize God’s unbridled wrath.
But it wasn’t the quake that did in the town, for once the shaking subsided, and the citizens breathed a sigh of relief, others took note of an abnormal occurrence along the shoreline. Imagine the confusion as the very sea itself began to give up its constant licking of the miserable beaches of mud and rock, as though some unseen giant was quenching his thirst.
32 lives would ultimately be claimed in the ensuing chaos as the sea made a valiant effort to reclaim the area in the form of a tsunami.
This marked one of many deaths of the town, for the townsite was deemed incompatible with habitation. One can visit the old townsite to this day, should they feel a strange compulsion to, though I must warn you, there is not much to see. Aside from the missing trees and compacted earth, the only indicator that a town ever occupied the space is the solid concrete base of the long-gone postal office.
Over a handful of years, the new townsite would be established, bearing the same name. It would slowly build up, becoming a notable spot for fishing– one of the best spots in the whole of the United States, as a matter of fact, a source of pride for our community.
But, once more, the looming curse of the Prince William Sound would strike down the city, for an “Onxxe” tanker named after the city, engorged with the inky black and poisonous blood of the state like some godforsaken mosquito, impaled itself on a shallow reef in the early morning hours of March 24th, 1989.
If you have had that especially bothersome itch of prior knowledge surrounding just what this city may be, it likely is thanks to this disaster.
At the time, my mother snatched up whatever work she could get, and amid the environmental and PR disaster, things were strangely good in the face of tragedy. The usually quiet and empty hotels were suddenly packed to the brim, enabling her to get a temporary position as a housekeeper. I distinctly recall asking her about that time, and she explained the rather conspiratorial miasma surrounding one client that stayed for quite some time. She was to see nothing, hear nothing, say nothing. Not to the press, to fellow staff, or to family.
Unfortunately, as much as it would add to some fantastical story detached from reality, the truth was rather mundane.
CH, an increasingly prominent enemy of Onxxe, was staying at the hotel and insisted upon secrecy to avoid harassment. His story is one worthy of an HBO dramatization, complete with being spied upon by Wackenhut Security Solutions a la the KGB and Legasov in the Chernobyl mini-series.
Strange to realize the lengths Onxxe was willing to go to in an effort to prevent CH from investigating the incident, not to mention their clash with federal investigators into the rates of cleanup crews catching the rather mysterious “crud” that seemed to be going around.
Disaster and a corrupt, unfeeling corporation working to wash away their sins. A rather unsightly, unflinching glimpse at the reality of the exploitation which continues to define the state.
The spill itself caused widespread death and disease in the region in all sorts of capacity. Wildlife perished, but it also played a role in killing the faith of the residents of the town and the broader Prince William Sound. The salmon and seagulls washing ashore were the metastasis of the very death of God for our town.
And so, as the community crawled, beaten and bloodied, into the 21st century, the town once more had to find its footing, shakey as ever.
During this time, as the city rotted away like the sunbleached carcass of a salmon baking on the shore during a run, I would finally enter the picture.
My mother had a string of tragic miscarriages for years. She thought, after three children, she had been unceremoniously deprived of her ability to have any more.
Perhaps it was a consequence of the poison seeping into the town– as the science surrounding it grows, we only now are able to point to its increased rates of miscarriage following the Gulf oil spill. But, despite my unlucky nature, I somehow beat the odds.
If the musings of my sisters are to be believed, I think this string of tragedies changed her. She had tried her best to be a good mother, but you can only bring what you know to parenthood, and she came from a less than ideal environment.
Perhaps this was why she babied me a disproportionate amount, much to the ire of my siblings.
Given all of this, I found myself growing up in the town in the early 2000s with a sort of blindness. Be it one of childhood ignorance or a chronic inability to focus on the bleak nature of reality, there was never a moment in which I recognized that the outside world was much of anything. It was an infinite expanse to explore, to treat as a sandbox.
The first time that I found this worldview challenged was sometime in the short summer of 2007. Next to the home which we lacked the means to afford and yet lived in, there was an undeveloped lot. It was peppered with tall, narrow trees and towering bushes of indeterminate type. But one specific plant I became infatuated with was the looming stalks of Wild Celery.
They smelled of anise and wilderness, and while some claim the white bloom atop them carries the scent of vanilla, I never noticed it. Instead, I focused on how they snapped when struck with a stick. They would burst apart with an electric crunch and spit out sap which would splash onto the underbrush– and myself.
One of the harshest lessons to learn about Wild Celery is that the sap acts as a phototoxin.
Combine one part sap with one part skin, add a healthy helping of sunlight, and you’ll find yourself with blisters that feel as if a piece of red hot metal is being pressed against your flesh.
The first time this happened, my mother insisted that I travel with my father to Safeway, the only grocery store in the entire town.
This would mark the day in which I learned what aloe vera was as he plucked an oversized bottle of it from a shelf too tall for me to reach. It soothed the horrific burns to some degree, I’ll admit. But even so, this marked the first instance in which I realized that the outside world presented threats.
One fails to recognize, especially while young, that the world’s evils are not monsters in eccentric costumes– the threats of reality are often mundane.
This became evident when I was forced to accompany my sister as she worked on a project at her high school. In an effort to showcase the dangers of drunk driving, a wrecked car was stationed out front of the school. Props were strewn about by my sister– empty beer cans, a wallet featuring a fake student ID, the whole nine yards. It only occurs to me now the inappropriate nature of this, as I believe it was a response to one of the members of the graduating class perishing in an incident of a similar nature– a fact that I only recall as during my sister’s graduation a photo memorial was projected during the ceremony, accompanied by the cheap speakers blasting Forever Young by Alphaville.
To realize, far too young, that all that awaits someone in the event of an untimely death is a public display of solidarity from a collection of students who barely knew you was, well, rather bleak.
The true culmination of these brief moments of clarity was in 2010.
A friend of mine, who, for the sake of their privacy, we’ll refer to as Akiak, became obsessed with telling stories during the summer.
His older brother had graduated the year before and, as a parting gift, had given him a collection of unused composition notebooks– the black ones with a white pattern resembling television static, you no doubt know the type.
With an assortment of cheap pens emblazoned with local company logos and 2B pencils sharpened with a Swiss Army knife over a trashcan, Akiak would carve into the pages as though he was Martin Luther.
He wrote science fiction, no doubt a consequence of traveling to the largest city in the state with his brother the previous fall and watching District 9 in theaters.
Stories of dramatic human and alien encounters, horror stories of probes and abductions, or capsules containing mysterious plagues from other worlds.
His writing wasn’t exactly good, but he put enough heart into it to sell his ideas, outweighing the tropes and predictable plot points.
His stories changed when he found the trailer for The Lovely Bones. It had been out for a few months, though he was unlikely to convince his parents to take him to see what they saw as a gruesome murder-flick. They were a part of the persistent religious pocket that remained in the town and had a prominent conservative streak. Thus the movie about the girl named Salmon having who knows what happened to her didn’t strike them as something to show their young son.
But Akiak was rather persistent, even going as far as to sneak into a showing at the local civic center’s cinema before getting caught and promptly booted out.
So, with no way of accessing the film, he took to rewatching the trailer ad nauseam online and writing out what he thought happened, though changing elements here and there. He insisted that he couldn’t write about a girl in that way because it was “gross” and, as such, placed a character who was no doubt himself in her shoes.
He would go on to fill multiple notebooks with his hard-to-parse handwriting, detailing the fictional town of “Foxhole,” named after a gift shop he had seen while on a trip, and the murder of a boy, which rocked both the city and his family. It was, in essence, a shameless copy of the trailer he had seen.
The few times I had a chance to read through his work-in-progress pages, I found myself impressed by his sheer dedication to this story. Despite his immaturity in most other aspects of life, he managed to present a rather lively town filled with peculiar but engaging characters and locations– though admittedly, much of this may be seen through rose-colored glasses.
I thought about this a lot as of late, trying to place the events of 2010 in chronological order within my mind. See, in 2020, another friend had put forward the idea that we should start a podcast, and we subsequently did. Suppose my audacity superseded any need for succinctness.
We’d comb through different portions of history and public memory, breaking things down into compartmentalized themes that we could use as a foundation for an episode. For our third episode, we decided that the theme would be nationalism through the lens of vague rurality. Something along the lines of there being a flag on every broken-down corner. I’m not entirely sure why this served as the mechanism to unlock so much of my childhood, but it did.
After publication, I began to work behind the scenes on an episode themed around missing persons cases in the state, for there was a clash between the popular conspiracies explaining away those missing and the reality.
The fact of the matter is that people enjoy ascribing mystic elements to tragedies that befell communities they are not involved with. It’s rather apparent when those from the lower 48 add characteristics of mysticism like some sort of “Triangle” that encircles vast swaths of land in our state (and just so happens to include every significant population center).
I suppose it’s a consequence of a refusal to accept the cruel realities of the structures that govern us. In our rather isolated portion of the PNW, there is a pattern of laissez-faire apathy within our police departments regarding missing people, especially native men and women. Make of it what you will; label it with whatever term of the week helps you feel like you’re making a difference, but it’s a problem that plagues our state.
As I dove further into the issue for the script for this episode, I couldn’t help but feel something sitting in my stomach like a stone. Following this thread to its point of conclusion, I decided on a whim to investigate the currently active missing persons cases in my hometown, and it all fell into place with a thunderous crack.
I thought back to the final months I spent in my hometown, but this time the rose-tinted memories weren’t fitting as snugly as they once did. It was as though an ill-measured censor bar was inadequately trying to obscure events here and there, and the more I looked into it and the more questions I demanded from my parents, the more it all began to unravel.
From what I could remember initially, something had changed with my father’s work, and we had to pack up and leave in the late fall of 2010. I was never given a reason to question that or thought too heavily about our time back in the town– after all, the rationale was simple to follow, very cut and dry.
But, whether it be through blindness, repressed guilt, or the miracle of locking things behind an impossible-to-scale wall via therapy, I had brushed away what had happened in 2010.
I had pushed the “Treeline Man” to the furthest reaches of my mind.
With that last key remembered, the final layer of security fell away, and I could, more vividly than seemingly ever before, recall my last summer in that town.
In the summer of 2010, the Treeline Man took Akiak.
Akiak’s family and mine were close in that typical small-town way. If memory serves, my mom had met Akiak’s mother while working as a bus driver for the high school. Something about a trip to the larger neighboring city for a volleyball game. They had both realized they were raising young boys, and a sense of solidarity was instantly forged between them.
It was never too uncommon for the two of us to go off on day-long adventures, getting stuck in mud or whacking through Wild Celery, making sure to keep the sap as far from us as possible– a problem resolved with increasingly long sticks.
Every so often, we could bother one of our siblings or parents to drive us out to spend a day in the nearby canyon. Particular sights of interest were that of the falls– which my father insisted to never drink from, as he had gotten incredibly sick with beaver fever after doing so many years prior– and the old railroad tunnel.
The tunnel was imbued with this fascinating mythos, for it had been the source of conflict between competing rail companies in the early 20th century. It grew into such an all-encompassing matter that armed members of each company levied rifles at one another in an infamous shootout within the canyon on September 25th, 1907, which left one dead and many wounded.
Western-style shootouts and a creepy tunnel dug directly into an ancient and imposing canyon. Could one envision something more fascinating for two small-town kids?
But, during one of these day trips, with our parents distracted, chatting about the state of the economy and the refusal of cruise ships to visit the town anymore, we wandered out of their sight and further into the gravel wasteland of long-abandoned projects in this chunk of the canyon. Every so often, we would scan the treeline for bears or other interesting sights, but eventually, Akiak came to an abrupt stop and froze.
He tried his best not to point, all the while guiding my attention towards a figure a fair way up the treeline.
Standing between two wind-swept evergreens, just below the clear short grass of the mountain, was a man who I initially thought may have been a hunter– adorned in dark clothing and face obscured by distance. It was a short encounter, but in the way kids do, we began to explore great fictitious tales involving him. A bounty hunter, a time traveler, a man raised by wolves, things along those lines.
It was all poking fun at the strange man in the treeline. Creative as ever, we stuck with referring to him as the Treeline Man– absolutely revolutionary naming schemes on our parts, no?
These stories would blend into Akiak’s fictional worlds, chiseled into pages via his near-constant writing. It was, in our minds, a one-off thing.
At least it was, until we saw him again, this time, the comfortable distance of the treeline was gone, and genuine fear began to build between us.
Construction near our homes had placed a sizable pile of timber and concrete scraps in a pocket of the woods. We promptly laid claim to it, referring to it as the Fort.
Using what we had on hand, we would piece together a mock flagpole and race to my house to steal a white t-shirt from my sister, much to her annoyance. Like a vexillological commission, we argued for hours over what would truly embody our newly independent nation of the Fort. What we ultimately arrived at was a crudely made rectangular flag with a white base and a set of three patchy sharpie triangles with a red nine-pointed star above. Though each component managed to be both off-center and lopsided, personally, I think it helped by adding to our agrarian revolutionary aesthetic.
With the sun angled relatively low in the sky, we opted to steal some bulky D-cell-powered flashlights from my father’s garage and set back out into the woods to hoist our flag and proclaim our new fortress.
As we did so, securing the brutish flag with extra scraps of cloth from the sleeves, we planted it in the center of the Fort, propping up additional sticks and twigs for added support.
Akiak began to hop around in a mock-astronaut fashion, quoting Neil Armstrong’s immortal “One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind” before promptly tripping over a branch.
As he laughed, trying his best to not appear weak despite his scraped knees, he grew quiet, eyes looking past the Fort and into the expansive woods behind us.
Following his gaze, I could not see anything in the increasingly dark foliage.
I picked up one of the flashlights and illuminated the shrouded abyss, only to find nothing. Akiak insisted that he saw something move just outside of the beam.
Understandably unnerved, we opted to call it a day and return to our homes.
It would be on this night that I told my parents about the Treeline Man, though they didn’t exactly believe me.
They understood that someone may have been up in the treeline, perhaps a hunter, hiker, or surveyor, though they severely doubted that some sort of “Treeline Man” would have been in the woods that night.
They chalked it up to a loose dog, or maybe a moose, and I believed their explanation with no better theory to fall back on.
We’d carry out many more uneventful days at the Fort, save for the occasional strange noise, but the woods are often loud, things crack or crunch, animals scurry about, nothing to lose sleep over.
After one of these instances, Akiak ran out of sight to piss, only to come back in a frantic state, arms flailing about.
“He took my picture! He saw my face!”
I had to clarify who he was referring to, and with little hesitation, he barked, “The Treeline Man!”
We, once more, rushed from the woods and back to the neighborhood. Akiak insisted on having his mother come to pick him up, as he refused to walk the long way to his home.
A few weeks would pass, and while he would still come over, we had essentially abandoned the Fort to its foreign occupier. Instead, we stuck to my house’s relative comfort. I had to admit, though, that it was growing rather dull. After hours spent insisting that we do something new and fun and baiting him on that it would be great inspiration for his stories, he finally cracked, and we devised a plan.
That night, we would sneak out of our respective homes and meet at the Fort. There was no fundamental rationale behind why, aside from the inherent thrill of doing something wrong. That night, as soon as the clock struck 11:45 and my parents were fast asleep, I cautiously descended the stairs and out the back door.
Each step of the staircase from the back deck to the ground groaned and threatened to announce my escape. Still, eventually, I found myself sneaking across the backyard and into the woods, navigating under the moon’s guidance as I feared that the flashlight might attract unwanted attention.
After perhaps ten minutes, I found myself arriving at the Fort, our flag proudly flapping in the cool night breeze.
I sat there, waiting for Akiak’s arrival, which should not have been too far off, and yet five minutes turned to ten, then twenty. The clunky and rather shoddy glow-in-the-dark watch I had revealed that half an hour had passed, and I finally grew annoyed.
Had he seriously chickened out? Was he cozied up in bed while I was out here shivering in the dark like a dog left out in the rain?
With a huff and puff, I returned home, as cautious in my return as I was in my exit. I was awakened by the frenzied shaking of my mother, insisting that I get up and get dressed as something was going on.
I felt a stone sink into my chest, for I thought I had done something wrong. A sick, sour sort of feeling washed over me. I thought for a moment that someone had seen me, and now, I was going to be in a world of trouble with my parents.
I threw on a particularly tragic horizontal stripe long-sleeved shirt, one that my mother had doubtlessly pulled from the discount rack at Old Navy the last time we visited the big city. It was black with orange stripes, making me look like a Halloween decoration, but I hoped it would placate her wrath a tiny bit, assuming I was in trouble.
Instead, I saw Akiak’s mother sitting at our counter. In the corner, my father spoke to his in a hushed tone.
A weak smile crossed her face, but her face was sunken.
She asked if I had seen Akiak today, to which I responded no and asked what had happened. She explained, with a voice pushing her to her limits, that they had woken up to the front door unlocked and his bed empty.
She asked if he had mentioned being unhappy or had thoughts of running away, to which I couldn’t say. I thought he had a reasonably happy life; he had never complained much about anything. He was a happy kid.
Though it came to my mind, I had to think through just what to say about the night prior. I assumed lying about his part would be wrong, but I, rather selfishly, focused on the potential trouble I would find myself in.
As such, I explained that the previous day he had mentioned how he wanted to go to the Fort after dark, a lie, and that I had told him it was a bad idea as we would get in trouble, another lie. I suggested that maybe he had ventured off into the woods after dark and got lost. A sort of relief washed over his mother, and she hopped up.
My parents followed his to the door, where his father patted me on the back, telling me I was a good kid for telling them the truth like that.
It made me sick to my stomach.
I remember plain as day how I had told my parents immediately after Akiak’s left that the Treeline Man had taken him, something which they scoffed at, until I mentioned the incident in the woods in which Akiak claimed he had taken his photo. It visibly unnerved my mom, who proceeded to shake her head, attributing it to an overactive imagination.
“They’ll find him,” she insisted.
“They always do.”
I never saw either of the two after that night.
Staring at my research for an episode of the podcast, I find myself at a loss.
Visiting the site for active missing persons cases within the state, Akiak’s sits towards the bottom of the page.
Clicking upon it reveals a bulletin posted for him in late 2010, completed with his elementary school yearbook photo.
I honestly thought he would have been found– he should have been found.
But, it seems no one ever did.
I long for the days of Wild Celery, of not knowing of the man watching us in the treeline.
The dangers of the world were easier to comprehend back then.