My ancestors had no written language, so they told their stories to the trees. Ten thousand years after the Tlingit people settled Alaska’s southeastern archipelago, these islands remain stippled with monuments to their myths: totem poles, carved from massive logs of cedar and adorned with images of animals and spirits, rise up from the damp earth like great scrolls. When I was young, my grandmother taught me how to read them.



The first lesson was this: Always start at the bottom, then cast your eyes upward in search of the unfolding story. This became, for a time, my preferred way of investigating the world around me. A boat was measured first by its barnacles, and a person by their shoes. In Petersburg, where I grew up, commercial fisherman like my uncles and my grandpa all wore the same brown xtratuf boots. In the jail where my father lived, everyone except the guards wore cheap slip-ons with thin soles. My grandmother, whose feet were badly crippled by rheumatoid arthritis, could only wear sandals; surgeons had made it possible for her to walk in her later years by inserting steel rods, as thick as pencil leads, down the length of each toe, and they protruded like antennae, glistening with antiseptic ointment. She kept the ointment in her medicine cabinet, along with many other things that captured my imagination.



On the bottom shelf of the medicine cabinet, next to her denture cream, she kept in a small velvet pouch her glass eye, which replaced one that she’d lost when a schoolyard bully threw sand in her face. On the middle shelf were salves and ointments. And on the top shelf, far from my reach, sat a collection of translucent orange pill bottles, each stamped with her maiden name: ROSEMARY RUTH AXSON.

Pain management was central to my grandmother’s daily routine. While rubbing ointment on her swollen hands, she’d tell me about the nuns who would rap her tiny knuckles when they caught her speaking the Tlingit language in school; when her back ached, she’d swallow a painkiller and talk about her years hunched over a fish-gutting table at the town cannery; and when her head ached, she’d pour an Excedrin from its giant green bottle and sit with me in silence until it started working. She made from these moments of temporary relief a life worth living.

In the spring of 2003, I visited Alaska after a long time away, and found something new in her medicine cabinet. It was a painkiller called Oxycontin. Swallowing these opioids made her bright and cheerful, I noticed, then, as the hours passed, quiet and withdrawn. When the time for her next dose drew near, she grew irritable and anxious. These symptoms were familiar to me: As a child, my mother had for a time abused heroin; more recently, at the age of twenty-one, I spent a weekend in jail for passing bad checks at a supermarket in Seattle, and had shared a cell with a heroin user who passed the nights vomiting and sweating through his sheets. My grandmother experienced something only a bit less severe when she exhausted her supply of Oxycontin before her prescription could be refilled.