35 years old mechanically enhanced human
citizen of Canada member of Alpha Flight
widowed
Go backHeather is someone you meet formally, and get to know much later, when you turn up soaking wet on her doorstep and she makes you tea and tells you that if you get pneumonia, you're on your own. Don't drip on her papers. Alpha Flight, which she leads and administers, is the only one of the militia teams I encountered to be commissioned by a national government. The immediately obvious result of that authorization is a mass of paperwork that crowds the kitchen table and inevitably gets knocked to the floor. And she ignores it, and watches you.This, at least, was my experience of her. I was grateful at that point for any kind of shelter, having come north for reasons passing understanding, and I didn't have a photosession with her, or any of Alpha Flight, particularly in mind. What I hadn't previously gathered, though, was that as a group the Alphans are a great deal less camera-shy than the other teams, most likely because they work in the public eye. Once I'd shed my rain-soaked jacket and basked in her exasperation for an hour or so, Heather asked me if I'd considered including any of her team in my project.
It was one of the rare instances when I photographed someone before I knew them well. I took this picture early that same morning, in a corner we cleared in Heather's office. She paid almost no attention to the camera, but watched me wherever I moved in the room. And eventually I just sat opposite her, watching back.
There's nothing in the photo that I can find to suggest the level of grief Heather carries with her, and I'm not sure whether that's a result of the strength of her public persona, or the extent to which I was a stranger when I took it. In the days afterward, I became aware of the absence of her late husband, Mac (James MacDonald) Hudson, in the house. Heather became team leader after his death, and both she and the other team members are quietly aware of that fact.
It doesn't, as far as I could tell, undercut her stature in the eyes of Alpha Flight. In a household of adults rather than teens, she is closer to being "commander" than "mother", but seems to have settled into a cheerfully lamented "bossy big-sister" role that keeps a lid on the high-energy chaos of the Alphans' daily routine.
Sinclair: Why do you work in the field with Alpha Flight? As far as I know, you're the only non-mutant to take on a job this dangerous.
Heather: When Mac organized Alpha Flight and Department H [the government agency responsible for the team], he specified "Canadian paranormals," but that rule was bent long before I took over. And Mac wasn't a mutant either, but it got to the point where there was no one qualified to take the team into the field, after Wolverine moved to Westchester. After Mac died, I tried commanding from behind a desk, but I wasn't comfortable putting people I lived with in danger while I got to watch from the sidelines. The technology that Mac used when he was Guardian was still around, and nobody was using it. We're safer, I think, with all our eyes on the fight.
Sinclair: Have you wanted to change your mind?
Heather: About every other day. Nobody should have to travel with that many egomaniacs in a small plane.
[voice from another room: 'I heard that!' Heather: You were meant to!]
Sinclair: Do you worry about being used by the government to enforce policies you don't agree with?
Heather: All the time. Wish I didn't have to worry, but it's come up now and then. I try to make it clear that we're not a secret police force, that we won't do things like move against protestors or act as a political brute squad, but it's a fight more often than I'd like it to be. And there's always the threat that we can be replaced. There's someone from the Department who loves to say that whenever I tell them, 'No.'
Sinclair: Do you think they will?
Heather: I don't know. I'm not going to resign, though. And we have a certain amount of clout precisely because we are so high profile. If we all got fired tomorrow, somebody would ask why.