I was out at the town cemetery this week, visiting people I used to know.
Hertz is out there, with Joey and Jesse, and Joan Comerford and Frank Wallace and Molly Hibler.
Someone left a full can of beer at the headstone of Leo Smith. Six years ago, the newspaper ran a front-page Memorial Day photo of Leo, kneeling beside a friend’s grave in the little grove there. After a bad spill on his Cat four years ago, Leo was put to rest at the same spot.
I came across a door-sized slab I hadn’t noticed before, inscribed with seven names, the entire Sullivan Family. The marker memorializes a tragedy that is perhaps our town’s most heart-breaking. Patrick and Mary Lou Sullivan took their five children and pet dog out for a boat ride on June 22, 1974, and none came back.
Only Patrick’s body was found.
The Sullivans lived in a trailer at the old fox farm property near 2 Mile Lutak Road. It was a hot Saturday and Lutak Inlet was calm when Pat and Mary Lou piled their family onto a 16-foot riverboat to go halibut fishing in Taiyasanka Harbor.
But the wind blew up while they were out, as it can in Chilkoot Inlet on hot, summer afternoons. None of the five Sullivan children – Shaun, 13, Nyla, 12, Desiree, 10, Harlan, 9 and Corbet, 5 – could swim. Patrick’s body was discovered tangled in lines attached to the overturned boat, each arm reportedly extended in a clutch as if he’d gone down trying to hold up two others.
The tragedy pounded home the need for swimming instruction, and Ray Smith, Mary Lou’s father, started collecting donations for a town pool. Smith raised $16,000 by the time the state’s oil money started flowing into town. Ten years after the seven Sullivans died, Haines had a pool.
Regulations, they say, are written in blood. Tragedies motivate us to act.
While I was at the graveyard, an acquaintance walked by and we chatted. As he is a recent arrival, I showed him the Sullivan headstone and explained the connection to the pool. He asked me if I thought the town might fund avalanche-safety efforts in the wake of the skiing deaths of two young Haines men – Zane Durr and Matthew Green – in Chilkat Pass in January.
Our government gives only a pittance to all its nonprofits these days, I said, so that’s probably not likely. Maybe someone should start collecting donations to buy some loaner self-inflating “air bags” that keep skiers afloat in avalanches, I said.
I told him how residents, fishermen and others donated to buy everyone in the gillnet fleet a low-profile life vest after longtime resident Richard Boyce fell off his fishing boat and drowned in 2012.
The Haines Avalanche Center last fall asked the Haines Borough for $20,000 to boost their efforts monitoring local backcountry snow conditions. It was a big ask, as the amount is nearly as much as the government annually gives to all nonprofits combined.
The air-bag systems cost $500-$800 each and could be checked out like library books to skiers heading into the backcountry. If the aim is to protect young people who often underestimate risk, loan perhaps could be limited to people age 25 and under.
Backcountry skiing is a relatively new activity around here. Videos and magazines selling its glamour abound. Much less attention is given to its inherent dangers and how to navigate them.
Because protecting lives costs money and because we rarely imagine ourselves as victims, we don’t take hazards as seriously as we should. Only when the cost in lives runs too high do we take action.
When young people die, we tend to move with more resolve, as we should.