It was open once a week, on Monday nights, for three hours, seven to ten. Her name was Susan Bloch English, the founder of the Seldovia Public Library. Her graying hair was pinned up in soft curls, and her shrewd blue eyes looked at me over her half glasses. She was small and slender, and wore a flowered housedress with a lace-edged apron over it.
In the center of the room was a desk, and at this desk sat a woman. 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. 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. 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. One of my least favorite memories of that time is getting on and off the Celtic at low tide. 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.
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