Dana Stabenow

Growing up I lived on a boat in the Gulf of Alaska, a 75-foot fish tender named the Celtic, that spent her winters tied up to the old fuel dock in Seldovia. One of my least favorite memories of that time is getting on and off the Celtic at low tide. Especially in the dark, and in the winter, when the forty-two foot ladder was encrusted with barnacles on the bottom and rimed with ice at the top.

It was, in fact, low tide that Monday night the October I was seven years old, when my mother dragged me up that damn ladder and down the boardwalk to the city hall. The basement was a small, musty room with shelves crammed with books against the walls, peeling, rickety tables overflowing with more books, and still more metal shelves painted Army gray from which yet more books spilled onto the floor.

In the center of the room was a desk, and at this desk sat a woman. She was small and slender, and wore a flowered housedress with a lace-edged apron over it. Her graying hair was pinned up in soft curls, and her shrewd blue eyes looked at me over her half glasses.

Her name was Susan Bloch English, the founder of the Seldovia Public Library. It was open once a week, on Monday nights, for three hours, seven to ten. Because there were so few books, each patron could check out only four at a time.

My mother told Susan that I was reading on my own, and that I had moved beyond picture books. Susan suggested, "Why don't we try her on some Nancy Drew?"

Half an hour later I was curled up in my bunk in the chart room, open to the first page of The Clue in the Old Stagecoach.

I finished The Hidden Staircase after dinner the next night.

Mom said, "Maybe we'd better check out four books next Monday."

Eventually Susan broke her rule and let me take home eight whole books at once. I could barely carry them all in my seven-year old arms, let alone get them down the ladder to the Celtic, so I'd stand at the top of the dock and howl for Mom to come out on deck so she could catch them and I could climb down safely.

I read everything, in bulk, indiscriminately, whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. I traveled to Cathay with Walter and Tristram in The Black Rose* by Thomas B. Costain. I ran away with Penny, Nick and Ben on the Hardalee in The Lion's Paw by Robb White. I fought for the Venus Republic alongside Don Harvey in Between Planets by Robert Heinlein. I wintered at Snedeker's on the Oregon Trail with Jim and Emma in The Lost Wagon by Jim Kjelgaard. I climbed the Matterhorn with Richard Halliburton in The Royal Road to Romance. I flew the Atlantic with Charles Lindbergh in We*. I was on a voyage of discovery, into worlds real and imagined, with heroes I came to love and admire and villains I came to despise and detest, and my life was all the richer for it.

This uncensored bibliography did give my mother and Susan occasional pause. For example, when I returned Margaret Landon's Anna and the King of Siam and exchanged it for D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover. Years afterward, my mother confessed to clutching when I brought that book in the door. I don't remember it, but she swore that when I'd turned the last page she asked me, oh so casually, what I'd thought of it, and that I replied, "Kind of boring," and reached for Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring to liven things up again.

We moved on shore for good when I was in the eighth grade. By then, I had grasped the concept that one could own books as well as check them out. There was no bookstore in Seldovia, and there wasn't one across the bay in Homer, either, so I saved my baby-sitting money and ordered them by mail from Shorey Book Store [1] in Seattle. My first title, my first very own book was Nancy and Plum* by Betty MacDonald.

I still have it, shelved in the M's in the fiction section of my very own personal library, nine sets of shelves and counting.

And I don't have to climb a forty-two foot ladder to get to it.

[1] Shorey Book Store 1109 N 36th St # C, Seattle, WA 98103 (206) 633- 2990

*Only available in a hardcover.

 

Dana Stabenow is the author of seventeen novels, the most recent of which is The Singing of the Dead. She lives in Anchorage, in a house, not a boat.