by Daniel Bliss
He was the subject of the first poems I wrote. The first words came when he was on a peacekeeping mission after the Bosnian War as part of the Dayton Agreement. No one had introduced me to writing poems to deal with the stress of having a father deployed to the most devastating conflict in Europe since World War II. I just started writing new lyrics to the country songs playing from my mother’s radio or whatever happened to play on CMT. Every word focused on how much I missed him.
Despite being old enough to form clear memories, I don’t remember any of those words, just like I don’t remember much of the year he was gone. I do remember the day before he left, sitting in our backyard watching planes deployed from Fort Drum, New York, and him pointing to the sky, saying he’d be on one soon. I remember placing a GI Joe action figure resembling my dad in a desert battle deployment uniform beside my bed and saying goodnight each evening.
The day he got home burned clearly in my mind: the Tenth Mountain’s plane had arrived much later than expected after being held up during a layover in Germany. Through tired eyes, I watched as he marched proudly across the gym in uniform with the rest of his division. I ran to him faster than my legs should’ve allowed and wrapped my arms around his waist, smacking my forehead against the pistol strapped to his hip.
The year between those moments is mostly a blur of intense stress. The first few weeks he was gone, I’d go to the bathroom at school and sit with my legs tucked against my chest on a closed toilet lid to whimper. I refused to allow tears to soak my shirt; didn’t want anyone to think I couldn’t handle his deployment. Tears were always the last fifteen minutes of school, right before I could sprint to the bus. On the thirty-minute ride back home, the swelling of my eyes would go down, and the red would dissipate before my mother could see. I don’t remember the day I stopped or if I ever did.
Having a parent deployed is one of the few experiences my father and I share. His dad was deployed to Vietnam towards the end and most dangerous time of the war. My father would’ve been near ten when my grandfather was deployed, slightly older than I was when he was deployed to Bosnia. He would have certainly been old enough to understand how dangerous Vietnam was, especially for a highly trained and decorated ranger like my grandfather. I once asked my father how he felt during my grandfather’s deployment. He responded with a shrug and said he tried to build a treehouse on his own.
There has never been a handbook to successfully teach military children how to deal with the stress of a parent’s deployment. As callous as it sounds, you’re just expected to deal with the days, months, and maybe years they’re gone. Even when schools have programs to help with the stress, military brats tend to avoid them entirely, believing no one outside our subculture can ever fully understand the unbearable stress. The tears so heavy, you struggle to cry over anything else later in life. We all try to find ways to deal with the stress. We try to forget, we try to build a treehouse, we try to hide, but none of us ever successfully find a way.
It’s estimated that about five thousand out of two million military brats have lost a parent in the last decade, well under one percent. However, those deaths touch every aspect of life on base. Those kids were the ones I went to school with, the ones I called friends, and the ones I saw develop anger issues due to the loss. That one percent doesn’t account for the parents who came back changed, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, turning them into distant people, emotions completely unrecognizable, with no way to ever fully get their original selves back home.
Twenty years after my father’s deployment, I still avoid public restrooms, the smell of the heavy pine cleaner reminding me of that crying kid I used to be. I learned after two decades, it can find me anywhere, including the one public restroom in Ninilchik, Alaska. I wash my hands quickly, throw the towel in the trash, and burst back into the fresh air.
“Dad,” I shout as he stares into Cook Inlet. “Dad,” I try again.
He can’t hear, much of his body deteriorated by twenty-eight years of the army’s demands. His knees ache from jumps, his arches have been flattened by jogs in combat boots, and his hearing is ruined beyond repair. He’s got the classic “military hearing,” or what civilians and doctors call near deaf. The veteran’s association issues hearing aids regularly, but he’s always refused to wear them, too proud to admit his body doesn’t hold up the way it did when he was a young soldier.
“Dad,” I shout for a third time. He finally turns to acknowledge me.
On our drive to Homer, we’ve stopped in Ninilchik, a village entirely out of place in the modern world, a Dena’ina Athabaskan lodging area for hunting and fishing before Russians and Europeans arrived. In 1847, two Russian families officially founded the village, the Kvasnikoffs and Oskolkoffs. The descendants of both families often married Alutiiqs in the area. Like many small villages across the Kenai Peninsula, Russian was the original language of Ninilchik. However, the isolation and heavy influence of Indigenous languages created a unique Ninilchik-Russian dialect still being studied and documented by both Russian and American linguists.
The US census reports a population of 845 and a thriving tourism fishing industry in Ninilchik. Research also tells you about the 60,000 acres and 300 buildings burned during the 2007 Caribou Hill Fire. Where my father and I sit, none of that seems possible. No commercial fishing boats are waiting patiently at port. Only a dozen buildings comprise the village’s core; maybe 70 people could live here. The winding stream cutting around the village moves peacefully. None of it looks like it was ever scorched by time.
“This was one of your mom’s favorite places to stop,” my dad tells me. “She had a painting of that chapel,” he says, pointing to a small church looking down on the village. “But we lost it in a move.” The church is the Holy Transfiguration of Our Lord Chapel, a Russian Orthodox church built in 1901 on the same spot as Ninilchik’s original church. The green roof and white-sided chapel is only 20 feet by 50 feet and roughly designed to look like a crucifix. Crosses marking graves overgrown by weeds match the design of the church.
A lot would be lost in moves. Stuff would break, get misplaced, or be shoved into a box, never to be seen again. The army allows each family a specific weight allowance when moving. Rank and size of family determined how much the army would move free of charge. I never knew our exact weight limit, but I knew we never went over, a point of pride for my father. Like most military families, we’d have the rushed yard sale to get rid of whatever could be replaced whenever we got to our next assignment.
Raised with the willingness to lose things, I learned how much in life is replaceable at a young age. We weren’t afforded the luxury of being like Ninilchik, couldn’t hold off time. We had to keep moving, to keep changing.
According to Alaskans, Homer is the “end of the road,” or at least that’s the nickname for the city of just over 5,000 people. Homer’s defining feature is the four-and-a-half-mile spit stretching out into the Kachemak Bay. The long and narrow piece of land sits only 19 feet above sea level and is under constant assault by violent sea storms and crashing waves. The Great Alaskan Earthquake of 1964 devastated the entire state and sank 508 acres of the spit, leaving it mostly gravel and sand. Still, businesses rebuilt, and locals resettled the spit, covering it in fishing boats, hotels, campgrounds, art studios, tourists traps, and most famously, the Salty Dawg Saloon. Established in 1957, the Salty Dawg’s walls are covered by thousands of one-dollar bills and the occasional bra; it was featured as the local watering hole on the hit show Deadliest Catch.
What interests me most about the spit is Nick Dudiak Fishing Lagoon, the first place I’ve mildly recognized, not by memory, but by a photo of my father and grandfather standing on its gravel shores, proudly holding up freshly caught salmon sometime in the early 90s. Maybe it’s because of the memory that my father makes us stop at Nick’s immediately after checking into the hotel.
From the spit’s two-lane road, Nick’s doesn’t look like much but a crowded mistake of nature. The artificial lagoon is crowded by fishermen of all ages, both of the local and tourist variety, and accessible to nearly everyone. The purpose of Nick’s was originally to give all fishermen a cheap and accessible way to catch authentic Alaskan salmon. For those who couldn’t afford or physically weren’t able to go on a chartered deep-sea trip, the lagoon is the perfect way to fish. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game maintains the fishing hole and even installed a wheelchair ramp. Every spring, Nick’s is stocked with salmon from the Trail Lake Hatchery. When salmon runs occur in the summer, the lagoon becomes packed.
The tires of our rented Camry grind against the gravel parking lot. My father excitedly exits the car, nearly leaving the keys behind as he rushes to the high edge of the fishing hole. I follow close behind, just in time to see a sea lion breach the calm surface to steal bait from a line perfectly cast to the center. On every side, fishermen pull salmon out of the water at a pace I didn’t think possible. The air is thick with the sound of strong fins smacking against gravel shores, and fishermen excited with the thrill of a freshly caught trophy.
Those more experienced with fishing in Alaska quickly inspect their catch to see if it’s a silver or pink salmon. If it’s silver, they club it to death with what looks like a brightly colored police baton. A few quick smacks with the thick plastic against the skull of the salmon kill the fish quickly without blood spraying everywhere. The handful of groups who don’t know what they’re doing keep whatever they catch, unaware of the significant difference in quality.
Pink is about the lowest quality salmon you can catch in Alaska; humans can consume it, but it is most commonly used in dog and cat food. The taste is slightly off compared to the more quality fish. Its texture is slimier on the tongue, the taste saltier, almost as if you’d bitten straight into a fish oil pill. Silver salmon are what you’ll find in quality restaurants and most grocery stores.
Fishing had always been a significant part of my relationship with my father. We had fished in as many places as we had lived: the rocky shores of the Pacific Northwest, between the islands of the St. Lawrence River, in the stocked lakes of Oklahoma, and more. The first fish I ever caught was at a small pond outside of a castle-turned hotel in Italy. We sat on the banks for hours, catching nothing, not even a bite, before a local speaking in broken English gave us a bag of special maggots. On the very next cast, we caught a fish; something small looking like a rainbow bass. Seeing my dad so happy made me fall in love with fishing.
My father keeps walking around the edge until he reaches where the water from Coal Bay and Kachemak Bay rush into the fishing hole, creating a strong current to force salmon in. Even though the water around Homer is never warm enough to stick a foot in, a handful of brave and grizzled fishermen in thick waders up to their waists fight the current and rising tide, all for a chance at the best salmon.
Seeing my father’s stride, it’s impossible not to see my grandfather, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Fred Bliss. The relatively short strides are eerily similar, to the point that everyone in the Bliss family has noticed at various points in the last few years. I didn’t know my grandfather all that well. As a child, I’d spend a few weeks in Muskogee, Oklahoma during the holidays or the melting heat of summer with the Bliss side of the family. But from eleven to twenty-five, I didn’t see or hear much from that side of the family; life simply got in the way. The pace of our moves picked up in my teenage years, and there wasn’t time to find our way back to that dying town outside of Tulsa.
When I did return, it was for my grandmother’s funeral. During those fourteen years away, my grandfather suffered a series of strokes that left him near blind and weakened his once commanding voice. The West Point football star and Vietnam veteran, once, I thought, the strongest man alive, was betrayed repeatedly by his own body. Yet, somehow, with the small remaining focus his eyes could muster at any given time, he recognized me. The numerous medical issues had left him hunched over, relying on a cane, leaving me towering above him in a way I never could have pictured as a child. With his free hand, he reached up, touched my right cheek, and didn’t even ask if it was me. With a broken voice, he said “Daniel,” my full name, the way I preferred, but no one had called me in years. I had lost that name and become “Dan” somewhere in the many moves.
Wanting me to witness the catch in the current, my father waves me over. After the funeral, I started asking my father about Fred more. Pieces of him seemed to become vivid the more I allowed myself to remember, but there were still pieces missing of a man I shared a last name with. My father seemed to know all of Fred’s stories, from being the player of the game against Notre Dame to the complex details about his military career. At the end of every story, my father would refer to my grandfather as “the greatest soldier he ever knew,” a title he wouldn’t bestow simply because he was Fred’s son.
It was the same title I called my father; the only belief I’d never lose in all the miles between all the moves.
Daniel Bliss is a world-traveling poet originally from Anchorage, Alaska. He recently finished his MFA at the University of Saskatchewan and now works as an Associate Professor at Harrisburg Area Community College. His poems often focus on relationship to the long list of places he’s lived. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in League of Canadian Poets, Blood and Bourbon, BarBar, After Hours, Down in the Dirt, and many others.