It’s May and warm—almost hot, actually—as close to summer as we get here in Southcentral Alaska, and that means it is time to kill animals and eat them, as people have done since time began. I have a problem with that. Not an ethical one, a personal problem. I’m a manly guy. Ask anybody who knows me. Really. I have a big hairy moustache, a filthy mouth, a dented pickup truck, a bad back. All the right stuff. I’m telling you, manly. But—and this is an embarrassing thing for an Alaskan male to admit—I’ve been having trouble killing things lately.

The salmon season is about to open on the Anchor River, behind my house, here at Anchor Point. There is almost nothing I’d like better than to lay a quivering slab of fresh king salmon on a hot grill on opening day. To do so I’ll have to catch one, smash its head with a rock and slit it’s gills open to bleed it out, and then bring it home and hack it into pieces like a secondary character in a Scorcese mob movie. All of which I have been doing for years, but suddenly find a little disturbing now.

Maybe it’s just my age. Now that I’m retired and living with the knowledge that my own demise is not as far over the horizon as I once imagined it, I’m less inclined to shorten the lives of other creatures. Maybe I just spend too much time alone here in the house in the woods thinking about stuff like this. Or maybe it’s the fact that five years ago, on March 6, 2004, a Saturday, my 27–year-old daughter, Lorien April Chiappone died of cancer in a hospital in Buffalo, New York, and that ever since then I have had a hard time watching living things expire. I suppose that could be a coincidence. But I doubt it.

When I was a teenage boy, I loved to bring fish and game home and watch my mother cook with it. Black bass, brook trout, big gray squirrels. I remember a pheasant that ended up in Sunday spaghetti sauce. How improbable is that? A Southeast Asian bird, shot in New York State, made into Italian food. Talk about the American melting pot. Those are good memories.

But I have to admit I never cared for the gritty, hands-on realities of the sport: a rabbit’s steaming innards pouring out onto the frozen weeds; the sickening crunch of a bird’s neck breaking in my hands. Let’s face it: I liked the idea of hunting. When it came to the blood and guts, I was a complete cupcake. I gave up hunting altogether some time in my early twenties, claiming I was too busy trying to support my growing family. I kept fishing, though. Fish were easier to kill, somehow. A friend says that’s because they do not have the ability to blink their eyes. He says it’s easier to kill things that cannot blink. Perhaps he is right. Plus, they don’t squeal or bleat or shriek either.

I suppose I could give up meat altogether, and trade being neurotic and depressed for the glow of sanctimony that seems to come from eating three uninteresting, unsatisfying and unpleasantly green meals each day. Or I could really confuse myself and only eat chickens and fish, but not sheep or cows or pigs for reasons too logically abstruse to explain—even to myself. No thanks. I’ll stick with the hypocrisy I’m familiar with.

Something has to die for me to live. To live authentically, I need to kill it myself, and I really don’t want to anymore.

But I’m avoiding the real subject here.

Grief is the subject, and it’s difficult to predict when it will appear, or how intense it will be when it does—let alone what might trigger it. A couple months after my daughter died, I was working on my house with a young friend, Doug. We were finishing the back deck, hammering away in the warm spring air. I had been in a fog since Lori’s death, but the pain was numbing out by then, and it’s possible that I even stopped thinking about her altogether for a few hours that day, busy with the work at hand, enjoying the good weather, the company of a friend.

One of our cats was out: Ed, a dark brown Siamese the size of a prehistoric beaver. We usually keep our cats indoors, in part because of their murderous tendency to kill voles and line them up on the doorstep. I can’t stand to see even rodents die anymore. But Ed the cat is so old and fat and slow, you take one look at him and just know that the only thing he’ll ever kill again is a can of mackerel.

Still, somehow that day, Ed managed to murder an ermine—a beautiful short tailed weasel in its brown phase, about nine inches long, and not quite dead when I found it lying on its side on the bottom step of the porch where Ed had proudly set it. The ermine looked unscathed but for a clump of mashed fur, damp with cat spittle, on the back of its broken neck. Windpipe crushed, it clawed the air with its front feet. I stood their gasping, unable to look away from it. Doug, intuiting that I was in only slightly better shape than the poor weasel, told me that he thought it would survive if he hid it in the wood pile, safe from the magpies and ravens until it could snap out of it and run again. It’s good to have friends who will lie to you when you need them to. You can’t count on always being able to do that for yourself.

In late February of 2004, I spent several days with my daughter at my brother’s house back east on the shore of Lake Ontario; my brother and his wife were in Florida at the time. Lori was very ill with the disease, and ravished by the brutal treatments we visit upon cancer victims in our unwillingness to let death win too easily. But she was in good spirits in spite of all that. We had the house to ourselves, and late in the evenings we watched DVDs. She was in pain from the uterine tumors and she sat in my brother’s lounge chair with a bag of ice pressed against her lap and a heating pad on her lower back, pointing out flaws in the continuity of the film Gladiator. “How could Ridley Scott not see that?” she snorted. She was a merciless critic, just like her old man. Sometimes, momentarily, I forgot exactly why we were together there like that. I hope she did too.

One day we went to the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, where she was about to start taking an experimental chemo cocktail in a pharmaceutical trial. To keep the trial results legit, Lori needed to be “randomized,” a transitive verb I had never heard before. There could be no inadvertent bias in the pairing of the patient and the particular combination of deadly poisons they were experimenting with. Randomized. To me, everything about this seemed plenty random. Why her, for example? I had lived in the same industrial upstate environment for 30 years before moving to Alaska. Even worse, I had worked in the chemical plants. I had smoked. Why her and not me? Why not some other unlucky person we didn’t even know? That hospital was full of those. Okay, that was a very ungenerous thought. But if you ever have to go through this, be prepared to entertain a few.

One day we went to the Seneca Indian casino in Niagara Falls. We played video poker. We ate crab legs. I didn’t even know Lori liked crab legs. That would become my explanation for why I seemed to be handling the grief so well. “I hardly knew her,” I’d say, when asked how I was dealing with her death. “I’m fine,” I’d say. “Fine.”

Shortly after the weasel incident, I started carrying spiders out of the house whenever I found them struggling up the smooth porcelain sides of the bathroom sink. At one time I would have simply run the water and let them take their chances with the drainpipes. Not anymore. I cupped them in the bathroom glass and slid them out onto the back porch. Nothing was going to die under my nose any longer—not even arachnids. The cats were not allowed out at all. Frustrated, they turned their hunting skills on torpid windowsill houseflies, eating them with a nauseating crunch of carapace I could hear across the room. I would yell, “Wait! Wait! Stop!”    

Crunch.    

I could not save everything, but at least I was not involved directly in anything’s destruction. I don’t think I killed any salmon that summer for the first time in two decades. I don’t remember digging clams either. It looked like I was going to have to join the enormous ranks of those in denial and let other people do my dirty work for me. I don’t think that’s healthy, but I was not killing anything with my own hands for a while.

I had to stay busy. I decided to put in a small rubber pond next to the garage. My wife, Lin, and I went to the local feed and pet supply store, The Wagon Wheel, on the Homer Spit Road and bought five tiny goldfish for the pond. The kid at the store referred to them as “feeders.” But these five lucky ones were never going to be fed to anything. Not by me. They lived in the pond all summer, and in the fall we moved them to a thirty-gallon aquarium in our living room near the wood stove. We’ve had them for three years now. They are probably five inches long and have names: Eenie, Meenie, Miney, Moe and Sylvia. They will live forever, and when Lin and I die peacefully and at great age, the goldfish and the cats will fight over our estate.

I was doing fine. See? Sense of humor intact. Fine.

Then this happened: We bought a plecostomus, a suction-mouthed algae eater, to clean the green slime off the aquarium glass. I came downstairs one morning to find it floating on the surface, too close to death for my tastes. I poked it with the little wire-rimmed net and it swam to the bottom and then lethargically drifted back up. My heart started hammering. I called for Lin. She came, almost at a run, the sound of panic in my voice startling her. I was staring down into the tank. I said something that made no sense. She took the net away from me and assured me the fish was just resting. It died later that day and we replaced it with a second plecostomus the following week. That one lasted a month. No more plecostomus. I’m not that fine.

I’ve killed a lot of fish on purpose, of course: hundreds of salmon in my years in Alaska, for example, even with the most inefficient method of all: a fly rod. I murder enough Kenai River sockeye each summer to last all winter, canned in pint jars. I’ve killed and smoked silvers by the dozens over the years, and generally catch at least one Anchor River king each season. I’ve killed some halibut. But for sheer numbers, nothing can match the razor clams I’ve sent to invertebrate heaven.

Last summer, four years after Lori’s death, I went clamming with my friend Pete. Around our house, Pete is fondly known as Commodore Clam. I think the man can spot a razor clam dimple from the top of the bluff overlooking Cook Inlet. He may be able to see clams on the other side of the inlet. Thanks to his guidance, one day late last summer I was home cleaning a nice bucket of clams when I had an episode much, much worse than the weasel or plecostomos moments.

Bear in mind that I had already killed over a hundred clams that summer without a thought. They are brainless, spineless, faceless bivalves. It’s almost like digging fishy smelling potatoes. Clearly, my willingness to slaughter them meant I was getting better, mentally healthier. It had been four years. The grief over Lori’s death was beginning to fade into the past, right? I had gone dipnetting for red salmon earlier that summer; it was a joyous and bloody massacre. I had murdered a couple nice halibut, impaling them with the gaff and then happily beating their brains out all over the deck of a friend’s boat. I’m telling you, I was a high functioning, meat-eating man once more.

Not quite.

Lin was at work, and I was cleaning the clams alone in the kitchen. Pete had shown me a way to speed up the process by blanching the live clams in boiling water to kill them instantly and open their shells. I had a large pasta pot boiling on the stove. I would throw four or five live clams into the water and then lift the basket out and run them under the cold tap to stop them from cooking. The meat separated from the shells cleanly, and the guts could be cut out with a quick slice of the knife. As a large glass bowl filled with the tasty clam meat, the plastic bucket of live ones steadily emptied. Almost finished, I laid the last four living clams on the kitchen counter and waited for the water in the pot to come to a boil once more.   

Virtually all razor clams are more or less identical. Their “noses,” the long snout-like feeding tubes that reach to the surface of the sand; and their “feet”, the diggers they use to burrow into the sea bottom are the same rubbery, tan colored flesh on virtually every one of them. But there on my kitchen counter, right before my eyes, was a strange pink and brown striped clam like I’d never seen before. And although the other three remaining regular looking clams were slammed tight inside their shells and lying quietly on the counter top waiting to be boiled alive, this weird pink one was madly digging at the Formica with its foot, twisting and heaving and futilely attempting to burrow into the plastic.

For a second I thought I was hallucinating. Then I thought it was a practical joke. I actually thought my friend Pete had slipped some sort of gag gift, wind-up clam into my bucket (I wouldn’t put it past him). But this was a real live clam. Too alive. And it did not plan on getting itself boiled, gutted, chopped to pieces, sautéed with garlic, and dumped over linguini. Okay, maybe a clam can’t think that far ahead. But this son-of-bitch wanted to live! That much was indisputable.

I had a panic attack. I went dizzy. My heart felt like it was swelling and shrinking over and over. (Yes, I realize that that is more or less how a heart works. But you aren’t supposed to be acutely aware of it). I watched the creature struggling, levering its shell off the countertop, straining and writhing like an overturned turtle as it tried to burrow into the Formica. I kept staring at it, waiting for it to stop and lie still like the others. But it would not. The anxiety roared through me.

The striped clam looked different from the others. That was the worst part. It looked different. It acted differently. It was an individual. And it wanted to live! I started hyperventilating. The water was boiling. The strainer basket danced in the kettle, rattling impatiently. I kept thinking, “I am not going to make it if I kill this clam.” My head was coming unscrewed. I really thought I was going crazy. I was going crazy.

There was no one home. We live in the woods, out of sight of our few neighbors. There was no one to talk to, no one to show this clam. If I phoned Lin at work, she would hear the hysteria in my voice. She has lived with me for nearly 30 years. She knows how these things go. I’m not the sanest person in the asylum on my best days. She’d be frantic. I didn’t call.

Instead, I did what I had to do.

Hours later, when Lin got home, we had drinks and ate the clam appetizers I had prepared: pounded and dipped in egg and parmesan cheese and breaded, and fried in olive oil. I must have been uncommonly quiet. She studied me and asked what was going on. I hesitated. I tried to blow it off—just another one of my moods. Of course, I can’t keep anything from the woman. I finally told her the whole story about the strange clam, the way it was digging into the countertop so desperately. My wife is used to my antics. It is my sworn obligation to make her laugh at least once every day, and no joke is too ridiculous, too childish or too stupid for me to attempt. But Lin is a trained counselor. She could see that I was not joking. She can read me faster than a Janet Evanovich novel.

She said, “You took that clam back to the beach and let it go, didn’t you?”

I had indeed. When the clam wouldn’t stop struggling, I finally turned off the stove, put the unique creature back in the few inches of seawater remaining in the bucket and carried it out to the truck. I was at the beach in six minutes. The tide was coming in by then. I put the truck in four–wheel and drove to the edge of the water, not wanting any of the men at the boat launch to see me carry a clam to the ocean and gently set it in the muddy surf line. I drove back home, restarted the stove and finished cleaning the remaining three clams. I got out the meat hammer and the breadcrumbs and made them into cocktail snacks.

I had to kill those last three or I was really going to have a problem. I had to. Even I could see that.

A component of our humanity, I suppose is the ability (and the luxury) to choose which organisms around us we are willing to kill and which we are not. By choosing, we have a sense of being in control of another creature’s life, and by extension, control of our own life. If, out of necessity, we had to grab and stuff into our mouths every edible thing in our paths, just to stay alive—every insect, grub, worm, spider and lizard that hopped or crawled into our line of sight—we would not feel in control, or even very human. On the other hand, not being able to stop a death when we want to—say, our own child’s, for example—is a dispiriting reminder that this sense of control, this notion that we get to choose what lives or dies, is situational at best.

In the spring of 2003 I was driving between Anchorage and Anchor Point when my cell phone went off and I saw an unusual area code displayed. I answered to find my daughter Lori on the line. Lori had been about three years old when her mother and I divorced. She and I had been friendly over the quarter century we lived on opposite sides of the continent, but we were not close. It was extremely odd for her to call out of the blue this way. I pulled over into the gravel parking lot of Spenard Builders in Soldotna and asked her what was going on, and she said: “It seems I have a little cancer.”

She was fit and strong and otherwise healthy: a cheerful, tattooed and pierced, 27-year-old, neo-hippie Deadhead with an education in outdoor recreational studies and a yen for camping and canoes and such. She was supposed to be married in the fall of the year she died. Her fiancé, Alex, is an electrical engineer with a good job. They had put money down on a house. They had a dog.

This is the killing season. The king salmon opener is May 15th on the Anchor River.

Unless it rains hard between now and then, fishing could be good. There is a monster low tide coming up on the Memorial Day weekend and the clamming should be great. Anglers are already getting halibut offshore at Anchor Point. It’s time.

Only two jars of Lin’s home-canned salmon remain on the shelf in our pantry. There are no more bags of clam meat in the freezer. I have to kill something, soon. If I can. If I’m healthy enough. I have to.

At the time of Lori’s initial diagnosis, the doctors at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo—given the relatively non-aggressive type of tumor they thought they were dealing with—declared that my daughter had a 93 percent probability of becoming completely well again.

Completely well again.

I like the sound of that.

I wonder what my odds are.