First published in Skirt, June 2012
Every summer, our family sails north on the ferry to spend time in our little cabin on a stretch of beach in Haines near our home in Juneau. We haul water and use propane lights. Our cellphones don’t work very well. We while away the hours with friends and neighbors, watching animals and eating and playing games. In the evenings, we play board games and party games and card games. One of our favorite games when our kids were young was poker with Nowyta. A transplanted Texan who loved Alaska, Nowyta ran our summertime poker games with great enthusiasm. She would call together all of the neighbors after a day of fishing or building or just staring at the view. With 70 years of experience behind her, she supervised the games with the toughness of a Texas Ranger. “I sure as heck didn’t come here to play checkers,” she’d say when everyone checked instead of betting. It wasn’t any fun when players didn’t commit to playing. Who knew that poker could contain the blueprint for life? During the summers in Alaska, when the light stretched long into the night, so did the poker games we played with our neighbors.
According to Nowyta, only four games were fit to play: Draw, Stud, Lowball, and, of course, Texas Hold-Em. She was tolerant about playing games like Anaconda or No Sweat, but it was perfectly clear that they did not qualify as serious poker. When you played with Nowyta, nothing was wild but the dealer.
Now, I know that Nowyta had played in some mighty high stakes games with real gamblers and I’m sure she held her own and walked away not only with the shirt on her back, but probably those of everyone else at the table, but it wasn’t winning big pots that mattered to her. It was making sure that everyone got to play from the time they were very young. She told us that she herself had learned at her “Daddy’s knee.” Nowyta started the youngsters when they were old enough to hold a hand and fan out their cards. Usually the kids’ hands were big enough by the time they were 7—and if not, a willing adult stood by, ready to assist. When my younger daughter was 14, there was no mystery in raises and calls and winning a pot was not that unusual for her. At 18, my older daughter was ready to run games of her own and play with her Dad’s cutthroat poker buddies. She even cleaned up occasionally.
But the way we played summertime poker was never high stakes or no limit. Instead, Nowyta taught us a way to keep everyone in the game—she called it Depression. She said it started during the Great Depression when very few people had money to spare. The rules are simple: nobody can lose more than the buy-in. For us, the buy-in was $2.00. If the chips in front of you disappeared, you just kept playing. If you won a hand, you only got half the pot. Playing this way kept everybody in the game. For my money, playing Depression taught the most important lesson of all. You have to take care of your neighbors. If you share the wealth, everyone can keep playing. Isn’t that the point? As Nowyta would say, “Dang right.”
Sometimes, when I think of those long summer nights when the sun streamed in through the cabin windows and the hummingbirds fed continually from the red feeder, I wonder what my children learned, and for that matter, what I learned from Nowyta. It seems to me that poker is good training for life. Isn’t the object of poker to make the best hand out of what you’re dealt?
One of the lessons Nowyta taught us was that you have to pay attention—you have to stay present if you are in the game. And you always have to commit to a game before you can play—by betting, not checking. Once you take the initiative by betting, you are bound to your course of action. Sometimes you even have to bluff to stay in the game. Then, with every move, you calculate the odds and take risks without being able to control the outcome. Sometimes, you fold a winning hand. And sometimes you win with a nothing hand. And that, above all, it’s fun—fun to play with other people, fun to be with people of all ages, fun to see how each hand will play out, fun to win, even fun to lose.
Nowyta is gone now and we sometimes play poker in her memory when the sun streams in through the cabin windows and the hummingbirds gather around the feeder. Nobody checks much because Nowyta taught us to commit to the game: “I sure as heck didn’t come here to play checkers!”
