Asylum--Chapter One Heading North

ASYLUM IN THE WOODS

A MEMOIR OF SECRET LOVE IN THE FAR NORTH

By T. Louise Freeman-Toole

Introductory Note--This is the final completed work of Louise Freeman(-Toole). Louise committed suicide in October of 2016, leaving her works in confusion. This version of the book is not the final final version, it is the version that her agent sent out in a failed effort to find a publisher. There are numerous updated versions somewhere, and hopefully we will find the final final version eventually. In the meantime, those of us mourning her death will find some comfort and meaning from this version which remained substantially unchanged to the end.

RFT 

Chapter One

Heading North

When I asked for a room at the Mush-on-Inn for two nights, the clerk asked “What’s the matter, your car break down?” No one spends forty-eight hours in Tok, Alaska, who doesn’t have to. 

“I’m waiting for the mail plane to Eagle,” I explained.

The woman had the doughy skin and bleary eyes many Alaskans have by winter’s end. She just nodded, not inquiring why I was going to the isolated community just one hundred and twenty-two miles from the Arctic Circle, well before the start of tourist season. If she had asked, I wouldn’t have known what to say. It was unclear to me why I was being driven to go north, ever farther north.

Tired after my long bus trip from Canada, I immediately went to my room and took a nap. When I awoke, I lay in bed wondering what I was doing in this lonely crossroads, far from my home and family in Washington State.

Two days later, the pilot picked me up at the motel. As square-jawed and jauntily confident as any WWI flying ace, I could easily imagine him in a leather flight helmet with a dashing scarf around his neck. He drove out to the airstrip, threw a couple of bags of mail and my baggage into the back of the Cessna, and the two of us were off. We flew for a long time over snowy, jagged mountains that continued in all directions as far as I could see, untrammeled wilderness stretching all the way to Canada. The pilot shouted above the roar of the plane, “There’s your first look at the Yukon River.” Strangely enough, the broad frozen river below us was headed, as I was, directly north.

We followed the graceful bends of the Yukon over islands of dark spruce until the plane finally banked and circled over a cluster of buildings set on a high riverbank. A toy town, with a tiny church, a white schoolhouse, and a scattering of Lincoln Log cabins. It nestled at the foot of a promontory of rock thrust into the river. I peered out the window, forehead pressed to the glass, enchanted with the place before we’d even landed.

My feeling for Eagle was to become not just a simple infatuation, but a conviction that this was where I needed to be right now, never mind that my real life existed fifteen hundred miles away. It wouldn’t be merely a beautiful setting and a picturesque little town, that made me want to stay, but also a solitary fur trapper—all gentle hands and soft beard, smelling of wool and wood smoke—whom I came to love with a passion so dazzling in intensity it became an obsession, consuming my life, destroying my marriage, and bringing me to the brink of insanity.

I hadn’t spent more than eight consecutive weeks at my home in Eastern Washington in the past six months. I missed my kids, although my older son, Emlyn, was away at college. My younger son, Ambrose, was busy with his rock music and earning his GED. I had to admit I didn’t miss my husband, Thomas, and his constant emotional turmoil, which all too often erupted into anger directed at me.

Normally a homebody, I had been hopscotching from one writing residency to another, from Sitka, Alaska, to New Hampshire, and back to Alaska, the last time to the small town of Skagway. I’d landed there when winter was still spitting sleet into the wind that blew constantly down the narrow valley between the steep mountains. I stayed until spring carried in the influx of young summer workers, each looking for his or her own Alaska adventure.

My grandmother Smokey and her husband, Scotty, had lived in Skagway for five years during the 1950s, before Alaska gained statehood. I was there to work on a book about her life. Smokey was fifty-seven when they moved from California to what she called a “crazy little almost ghost town” of empty cabins and boarded-up storefronts, populated by an assortment of oddball characters. Scotty, an old sourdough, had lived in Alaska since the 1920s. After they left Skagway, they moved all over southeast Alaska, finding adventure wherever they went. In the past two years, I’d traveled to Ketchikan, Sitka, and Juneau, searching for clues about Smokey and why she came to the Last Frontier. If I could figure that out, maybe I could figure out why I, too, was drawn so far north.

It was my grandmother who had hooked me on Alaska when I was still a girl. By the time I was born, my grandfather had retired and they had moved from Skagway to a remote island north of Ketchikan named Thimbleberry Island. It was an occasion whenever one of Smokey’s long, detailed letters arrived in the mail. My father would read it out loud to the whole family after dinner, all seven of us children still sitting at the table, rapt. She wrote about the deer and squirrels they tamed to eat out of their hands, the wolves they watched cavort on the beach over on the mainland, bears that came into the cabin clearing, and the nifty bush plane that landed on the water just yards from shore, bringing mail and groceries.

It wasn’t just my grandmother’s life in Alaska that fascinated me: it was Smokey herself, although—or perhaps because—I only met her once. She came down to Redondo Beach, California, to visit my family when I was ten years old. While other grandmas had their hair colored and coiffed and wore dowdy print dresses, my Alaska grandmother wore pants and her straight, steel-gray hair was cut short like a man’s.

I thought Smokey got her name because she had a husky laugh and her breath smelled like cigarette smoke and her clothes like wood smoke. But when I grew up, I found out she became “Smokey” when she moved to Alaska because if she signed her paintings with a masculine name, they sold better. She sent us a painting each Christmas, often of a cabin beneath the northern lights. The smell of wood smoke wafted out of the crate when my dad pried off the lid. It smelled like Alaska to me.

When Smokey and Scotty visited us, I hung on my grandmother’s every word as she narrated an exciting tale about the search for a plane that had crashed near the island, or about an old Tlingit Indian hunter who’d visited their cabin. Smokey would pull a cigarette out of a silver case, pick up her long ivory cigarette holder shaped like a polar bear, and put the cigarette in its gaping mouth. Gesturing with the holder in hand, she’d continue her story, laughing loudly and often. I was enthralled; she seemed so exotic and larger than life. And so unlike me.

.

Throughout my childhood, I didn’t venture far without one or more of my six siblings. I felt safe in the crowd. I was small for my age and prone to nervous stomach aches. My parents treated me like I was fragile, and I grew up to think of myself as weak. Piano lessons were a torment, as I was too shy to speak a word to my teacher, a Dutch WWII vet with a disconcerting blind eye. Despite years of swimming lessons, I never swam far out in the ocean, fearing the rip tides might sweep me away. I clung to my older sister at Girl Scout Camp—a terrifying experience among all those strange girls—and refused to ever go again. I’d rather stay home and read. I loved our family camping trips to the Sierra, where the gentle soughing of the wind through the towering pines suited me more than the crashing of waves on a beach. There was something about the mountains that emboldened me. I clambered up rocks, ventured into cold rivers, and went on exploring expeditions with my little sister. But back at home, I retreated into my role as the timid one, the sensitive one. 

I felt I would never grow up to be like my brave, strong, adventurous grandmother who lived in the wilderness, shot guns, cooked venison on a wood stove. I realized even then that my fearfulness of new people and experiences meant I was to live a circumscribed life. I read of adventurers and explorers, scientists and inventors, and knew I would make no great discoveries, explore no new places once I was outside the family’s fold. Aside from an occasional trip to the mountains, I envisioned I would spend my life in libraries or curled up by the fireplace, reading. It didn’t sound like a bad way to live, but it wasn’t the stuff of stories like Smokey’s.

I did indeed, grow up to work in libraries: a friendly small town library; a city library frequented by many homeless people; a university library where I descended into the dank underground stacks to retrieve obscure tomes; a health sciences library where I checked out skulls to medical students. But over the coming years, my life was to take some unexpected turns, and I found myself following in my grandmother’s footsteps more than I could have imagined as a child. 

 

I had received a writer-in-residence fellowship at the Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park in Skagway to work on the book about Smokey. When my allotted month was up, in early April, I couldn’t bear the thought of going home. My ears were full of the ghostly sound of Skagway’s wind, my eyes were full of the underwater-green of the northern lights, my heart was full of the wildness that was Alaska.

I rashly decided that Thomas and the boys could wait. I realized I was being selfish, putting my needs above those of my children and husband. But when was the last time I had done that? I’d put my family first for so many years that I hardly recognized—let alone acted on—my own desires anymore. Perhaps it was the moment to do just that. Emlyn was enjoying his sophomore year at college in the western part of the state. Whenever I talked to Thomas, he said, “Ambrose and I are having a great time together. He doesn’t need you.” My youngest was just seventeen, and I didn’t want to believe he no longer needed a mother, but I took my husband’s word for it.

When I called Thomas, he said, “I miss you. When are you coming home?”

“In another month, maybe. I want to go someplace farther north. Everyone says you haven’t seen the real Alaska until you’ve been to the Interior— the area up around Fairbanks. It’s huge and it’s practically empty except for some villages out in the bush.”

On previous trips, I had only been to southeast part of the state. There the mountains were lower and the ocean was a protected inside passage; the fact that most of the towns were on islands made me feel claustrophobic, unable to get in a car and head out in any direction. Smokey had loved the sense of the self-containment to be found on an island, but it was not for me. She had never been north of Skagway, but I wanted to experience the wild Alaska of the Interior. I realized that it may not be the wisest thing to do. By stretching our separation, I risked losing what tenuous connection remained between my husband and me. To my surprise, Thomas said “Okay,” although rather begrudgingly.

For the past year, my friends had started asking me why I was gone so much. My answer was always “I’m researching a book. I need quiet to be able to write,” which was true, but there was more to it than that. When I was away from my home in Pullman, Washington, for extended periods, I was usually more at peace, especially here in Alaska. I felt alone, whether I was at home or hundreds, even thousands of miles away. Thomas and I had slept in separate rooms for years. We were still intimate, but in a disconnected way. We came together, then separated, each retiring to our own private space. We told each other it was because we liked different sleeping environments: he preferred the heat turned to eighty, the fan on high, and the TV going; I needed an open window, a light quilt, and silence.

Travel was not only an escape for me. The Alaska I had imagined as a girl had begun to materialize before me, becoming clearer with each trip I made north. My far-away grandmother, who had died before I’d gotten a chance to know her, was becoming clearer, too. My friends asked, as well, “Aren’t you getting a bit . . . um . . . obsessed with your grandmother?” I knew my consuming interest in Smokey had started to seem a little strange, so I joked, “All biographers begin to identify with their subjects.” But I could trace my obsession—if that’s what it was—to the spring I graduated from college.

For a graduation present, I had asked my parents to send me to Alaska to visit Smokey. At last I would get to meet, as an adult, this figure who had fascinated me since childhood. I imagined myself sitting in her room at the Sitka Pioneers Home, listening to absorbing tales of her many adventures. I’d hear more about the island, her encounters with wildlife, the risks and rewards of life in the bush. She would even tell me about her childhood and what my father had been like as a boy.

But Smokey died just three weeks before I graduated. I was devastated. My only opportunity to get to know my grandmother had vanished. I had no idea at the time that this missed encounter would alter the course of my life. If I had been able to meet her, much of my curiosity would have been satisfied. Perhaps the reality of the aged, infirm woman before me would have dispelled the almost mythological status she had attained. And I would have gotten the answer to the question I longed to ask: Why did you move so far north from your family and everything you’d ever known?

When claiming Smokey’s belongings, stored in the basement of the Pioneer Home, my dad and I discovered a treasure trove of trunks and boxes full of old journals, photos, memorabilia, and letters going back as far as WWI, all meticulously organized and labeled. I shipped the stuff home and, over the years, read every bit of it. This was how I got to know my grandmother—through her writing. It was difficult going sometimes because she as times, she documented their daily activities on a calendar, squeezing as many as eighty words into a one-by-one-and-a-half inch square.

I discovered details of Smokey’s early life that even my dad didn’t know. (He’d spent most of his childhood at boarding school and hardly knew his mother.) She was the only child of a wealthy newspaper publisher and stockbroker. Her first memory was of crawling around on a polar bear rug by the fire in her parents’ Chicago apartment. By the time her parents moved to proper and prosperous Pasadena, California, she’d become an irrepressible tomboy, tearing her stockings climbing trees and artfully escaping the watchful eye of her governess. At the private school she later attended, which prepared girls to take on the duties of Pasadena society women, she wrote a tongue-in-cheek advice column under the name Madam de Schnitzenheimer. She once delighted in thumbing her nose at her mother (the former owner of a stylish millinery shop in downtown Chicago) by advising one girl how to make a picture hat for less than six hundred dollars using only two wooden mixing bowls, pink crepe paper, orange and purple silk ribbons and four pampas grass plumes dyed Irish green. I was glad to learn that my grandmother had loved books as a girl. While waiting for the cross-town trolley, she used to sneak into the public library to peruse collections of fairy tales, which her mother—disapproving of such nonsense—forbid her to read.

When the U.S. entered WWI and college grew dull with the departure of her male chums, who all enlisted immediately, she dropped out of the University of Southern California to become a reporter for her father’s newspaper, loving nothing more than an exciting night of ambulance-chasing. One of her many beaus wrote at the time, “You want to do everything that anybody else ever did, even if it was a boy that did it.” In the roaring twenties, she made a terrific flapper, dancing her way into the arms of a blonde-haired playboy—my father’s father. They moved to the bohemian coastal community of Carmel, California, all free love and bathtub gin. It was only after that marriage ended in divorce and her next husband died in a car accident, that she finally met the love of her life: Scotty. Wouldn’t anyone find a woman like that worth writing about?  Still, it was the last three decades of Smokey’s life—her Alaska years—that had captured my imagination. There was something that had drawn her here and had grabbed hold of her. I felt that pull, too, and wanted to understand why.

Whatever the reason I was in Alaska, I found that it allowed me the space to try to figure out what to do about my troubled marriage and the chaotic, noisy environment our household had become. Aside from occasional stints as an adjunct lecturer at various colleges, Thomas had always made his living by giving private music lessons at home, and the sound, which I had once enjoyed, was starting to drive me crazy. In an effort to get us out of school loan debt, Thomas had expanded his studio into a music academy that had gradually taken over most of the house. All of the furniture—except the piano—had been moved out of the living room and the dining room. Chorus took place in the living room, music theory classes were held in the family room, and the dining room was transformed into rehearsal space for the kiddy orchestra. I felt trapped in my bedroom, where I was trying to write. I ended up working at night when the house was quiet, but then I couldn’t sleep during the day, and I became groggy and irritable.

Once our children grew too old for playing in the backyard, it had become my private refuge where the violin and piano lessons came as a distant, pleasant sound, and I gardened to my heart’s content. But the students eventually invaded the yard, swarming over my patch of wildflowers and fighting noisily over space on the trampoline. My life, once safe and predictable and fairly comfortable, had started to spiral out of my control.

Sitting on the steps of the park rangers’ housing I stayed at in Skagway, I studied my Alaska map, looking for a place to go. I set my sights on Eagle, a bush village on the banks of the Yukon River, five hundred miles north of Skagway. There, I learned on the internet, I could stay in a cabin rent-free if I volunteered part-time for the historical society. Perfect.

It was not an easy—or cheap—place to get to. From Skagway, I caught a ride across the Canadian border to Whitehorse in Yukon Territory, one hundred and ten miles away. There I spent the night at a hostel before taking an eight-hour bus ride to Tok. The only way to get from there to Eagle at that time of year was to fly on the twice-weekly mail plane. There was a road—a largely unpaved track that led one hundred and seventy miles over the mountains—but it was still closed, as it was for a good six months out of the year.

The “bus” from Whitehorse to Tok turned out to be a battered van the size of an airport shuttle. The passenger door was held closed with a bungee cord. The only other person aboard was a red-haired, freckled Scotsman named, predictably enough, Angus, who said he was on his way to Fairbanks where he intended to make his living playing the bagpipes. He had been invited to play the bagpipes at a local bar, some kind of temporary gig; he was sure this indicated there was a pressing demand for bagpipers in the Fairbanks area.

I asked what his previous occupation had been in Scotland and he said, “I’m a deerstalker.”  I had to ask twice, unsure if I’d understood his brogue.

“What is that, exactly? I asked.

“Well,” he explained, “it’s very like your hunting guides here.” He was the personal deerstalker for a British viscount on the Isle of Jura off the northern coast of Scotland, a place the Vikings had called Deer Island. He looked out the window at the rocky outcroppings, bogs, and stunted trees of the passing landscape—perhaps not too unlike the isle of Jura— and said in a melancholy tone of voice that it made the wilds of Scotland seem very small. 

I asked Angus what his job-hunting strategy would be, imagining it might be hard going making cold calls to restaurants and hotels, trying to sell them on the idea of hiring a bagpiper. He opened a side pocket on his bagpipes case and pulled out a letter of recommendation from the viscount himself. It bore an impressive-looking letterhead, but the text consisted of a single sentence, neatly centered in mid-page.

“We had a bit of a communication problem,” Angus confessed.

I nodded. “I can see that.”

He read out the couple dozen words, which said, in effect, that yes, Angus had indeed been in the viscount’s employ as a deerstalker for a period of two years. The Scotsman folded the letter with an air of great satisfaction, as if it had been quite a coup to have wrested that one line from the taciturn viscount.

I asked Angus if he wanted some beef jerky, which he seemed to regard as a primitive food of the American frontier. He chewed it with a thoughtful look as if he were tasting pemmican straight from Kit Carson’s parfleche.

Two days after bidding good bye to Angus and wishing him luck, I took the Cessna to Eagle. When we touched down at the small airstrip, Nancy, the head of the historical society, was there to meet me. She asked me why I’d been interested in the volunteer position. I told her I was writing a book about my grandmother’s years in Alaska, and I wanted to see what life was like in the bush. She brightened, saying , “Oh, so you must have read about Eagle in Coming into the Country.”

I’d read John McPhee’s classic book on Alaska when it was published in 1979. I was embarrassed to admit that, since then, I had completely forgotten the names of the towns McPhee had written about, and there was no association in my mind between Eagle and the book I had so admired. In the weeks ahead, I found that the locals were always disappointed to hear this; to them, Eagle had been immortalized in print and they expected others to remember this. Even then, almost three decades after the publication of the book, a few people still made the pilgrimage to Eagle after reading Coming into the Country.

Nancy gave me a tour of the town, puttering along at fifteen miles per hour. We passed a large hand-lettered sign telling visitors to observe the slow speed limit, which made the roads safe for pedestrians, bicyclists, school children, and sled dog teams. 

The whole town was little more than a scattering of log cabins amongst the trees, along with a general store, laundromat, gas station, and post office. I was happy to see there was a library, a log structure with an outhouse behind it. As Nancy drove past several old but neatly restored buildings, she explained that they were all that was left of Fort Egbert, an army outpost established in 1899 to bring law and order to the rowdy miners who had flocked to the area during the Klondike gold rush. As many as six sternwheelers a day arrived from Dawson City, Canada, seventy miles upriver. The town had swelled to more than a 1,700 people, well over ten times its population today. It was hard to imagine this placid place bustling with people and commerce.

As they tend to do, the gold boom went bust, and the more determined prospectors moved north, lured by rumors of fortunes to be made in Nome. Saloons, dance halls, whorehouses, and other businesses that had catered to the miners closed, and in 1911, short-lived Fort Egbert was abandoned. Eventually the sternwheelers stopped running, and Eagle languished for years, reduced to a few holdouts who had settled down with their families. The town remained isolated until the 1940s when the Taylor Highway was carved out of the mountains, connecting Eagle by road to the world outside. I wondered why they’d even bothered to build the highway, since less than ten people were still living in Eagle at the time.

Nancy took me to the cabin where I’d be staying and showed me how to work the oil drip stove—a process that involved letting fuel oil drip into the bottom of the stove and lighting it with a match, which then created a cloud of vapor that burned continously. After unpacking, I walked back through town to look more closely at the restored buildings: the courthouse, the officer’s quarters, and the customs house—a necessity because Eagle was the closest town to the Canadian border. I climbed the hill above the barn that had housed more than fifty of the army’s mules and looked down on what was once the fort’s parade ground. The long open length of it, leading to the river, now served in summer as a grass airstrip for local pilots. Two small planes—one bright blue, the other bright red—sat, noses up, to one side.

The late afternoon sun threw corrugated Eagle Bluff into high relief, showing every ruddy crag and crevice outlined with snow. The Yukon River was forced to make a sharp curve around the massive outcropping of rock. A tree-covered island sat gracefully in mid-river. Behind me rose the wooded flanks of a mountain. Before me, across the frozen Yukon, lay a great expanse of forest that stretched to far-off snow-covered peaks in Canada. The impression was of both vast distance and sheltered space. I’d never seen a more beautiful place in my life. I stood in the cold, taking in the view for a long time. As dusk fell, warm lights appeared in nearby cabin windows, and the town of Eagle seemed safe and welcoming. I ambled back to my own cabin, feeling like I had stumbled upon  the one spot in the world that could cure whatever was ailing me.

Asylum--Chapter Two Break-Up

Chapter Two
Break-Up

At the post office the next morning, I talked to the postmistress about getting mail by general delivery. She scrutinized me openly and watched closely as I wrote down my name and home address, as if I might be writing down an alias and fake address. A lot of people came here to hide out, I’d heard: women healing from heartbreak; men living under the radar to avoid paying child support; Vietnam vets looking for a place where the world spun a little slower; old hippies with years of drugs catching up with them. Had I come here simply to hide out, too? But why? I had two loving children, a husband with whom I shared a long history, a comfortable house with a yard filled with fruit trees, a close circle of friends, and the satisfactions of a small town where I felt involved and connected. What was lacking? What could I possibly find here that I could not find back home?

 As I was turning to leave, I saw a pile of day-old Fairbanks newspapers on the counter. 

“Go ahead and take one,” the postmistress said. “They’re for the kids to use for school assignments. How many students we got over at the school these days, Billy?”

A small man with a grimy red bandanna around his neck who was studying the announcements on the bulletin board—a Fish and Game meeting, a community spring potluck, a pair of winter boots for sale—said without looking up, “Oh, around twenty-two, I think.”

“That sounds about right. The papers are usually a few days old by the time they get here. Don’t matter to us if we get our news a little later than the rest of the world.”

The man named Billy nodded in agreement. “And when all else fails, they’re good to use in the outhouse.”

The postmistress barked out a laugh. Billy’s eyes met mine for a fraction of a second, long enough for me to see they looked kind and amused. He immediately blushed, the red visible even through the layer of dirt on his face. Ducking his head, he hurried out the door.

I didn’t know then that this was my first glimpse of the man who would change my life irrevocably. Later, looking back, he said he remembered that brief encounter. “You looked professional, pretty, a little sad.”

I took one of the newspapers, still interested at that point in what was going on Outside, as Alaskans call the Lower 48. It wouldn’t take long for me to forget about the busy world beyond the mountains, not long before I felt the only place that existed was Eagle, and the only man who mattered was that unlikely figure in the camouflage cap who had ducked his head and disappeared.

I walked around town with the newspaper rolled and tucked in my back pocket. The streets were empty, and it was almost eerily quiet. Cabins moldered into the ground, their roofs caving in and walls collapsing as the permafrost under them melted and shifted. Some log cabins, askew on their foundations, looked like they couldn’t possibly be lived in, until I saw a thread of smoke coming from a chimney. 

I thought of the spring bustle in Skagway as they prepared for the cruise ships that would soon dock there every day, disgorging thousands of passengers who’d thunder down the wooden boardwalks in their quest for Alaska souvenirs, many of which are made in China. Other, more adventuresome people came to Skagway to hike the arduous Chilkoot Trail, the route hopeful men—and a few women—had taken to Canada during the Klondike gold rush. On my wall at home hung a watercolor Smokey had painted in 1954 soon after they moved to Skagway. In the foreground were the rotting pilings of the old barge mooring. Smokey had wielded her brush with one hand and a magnifying glass in the other to paint the minute buildings in the background, each one notated on the back of the painting: the Golden North Hotel with its red dome, the Pack Train Bar, the customs office, the railroad station. She added a personal note to my family: “So the people I love in the Golden West can have a glimpse of the Golden North I love.”

With their mining history, both Eagle and Skagway reminded me of the almost-forgotten towns I’d explored high in the Colorado Rockies in the early 1970s. When my best friend, Moana, and I had started into the restlessness of adolescence, we became dissatisfied with our life at the beach, which people all across the country would have envied. Moana shared my love of the mountains, and Colorado became the object of our fascination, allowing us an imaginary escape from the city. We celebrated every appearance of 10,000-foot Mt. Baldy, which had once presided over Los Angeles but now was rarely visible through the smog. We read Euell Gibbons on foraging edible plants, took a wilderness survival course, and learned to identify Colorado wildflowers. We envisioned ourselves surrounded by bighorn sheep, elk, and hawks, instead of nothing but pigeons and seagulls.

Moana and I visited Colorado twice, enchanted with the beauty of the Rockies and the old mining towns of Ouray, Silverton, Leadville, and Telluride, long before they were turned into ski resorts and tourist destinations. We cherished the idea of Colorado for two interminable years, hanging onto it like hope itself. But Moana and I never moved to the Rockies. She married soon after high school and eventually moved to Texas. I wasn’t brave enough to move so far away by myself and—to my immense disappointment—ended up living at home and attending a nearby state college. But the image of those mountain hamlets with their rickety wooden buildings stayed with me. And now here I was in Eagle, a time-warp town that rekindled my old desire to live surrounded by nature.

When I’d left Skagway in spring, the season kept rolling back the farther north I went until it was winter again, with the rivers frozen and the migrating birds still on their way from the south. I had managed to travel backward in time, not only to an earlier month of the year, but to an era when people lived in log cabins, hauled their own water, and visited the outhouse in below-zero weather. Maybe here I could start to understand my grandparents’ experience after they moved from Skagway to Thimbleberry Island, where they also had lived without modern conveniences.

The cabin where I’d be staying had electricity but no running water. Like most people in Eagle, I would have to get my own water from the well house, built in 1903 and still in use. I could see myself now, trundling down the street with my water jugs in the little red wagon on the porch. Public showers were available at the general store, called Eagle Trading Company, for those who could afford seven dollars for a much-needed shower.

The building that housed the historical archives where I’d be working was a small log cabin next to Redmen Hall, once the home of the Improved Order of Redmen. (The members of the benevolent fraternal organization apparently did not find it ironic that the real “red men,” the Han Athabaskans, lived three miles away in the Native Village of Eagle, separate from the City of Eagle.) Beneath a knothole in the door were carved the words, “secret societie’s Peep Hole,” the apostrophe helpfully penciled in by some local grammarian.

I’d volunteered to organize the society’s large collection of oral history tapes. 

While labeling and filing tapes, I listened to interviews with old-timers who’d worked the local creeks and rivers decades earlier. They told absorbing tales: the thrill of discovering a promising creekbed, sure-fire plans gone bust, and the occasional find of a sizable nugget that made it all worthwhile. The names they mentioned spoke of the original Klondike-era prospectors’ extravagant hopes: Bonanza Creek, Bullion Creek, Gold Bottom Creek, as well as the inevitable disappointments: Hard Luck Creek, Last Chance Creek. Most miners, even those today, did little more than break even.

After I’d put in my four hours, I’d swing by the river to check the ice, as just about everyone did at least once a day at that time of year.

Every morning, men clustered at a bench near the general store to assess the condition of the ice. It was known as the millionaire’s bench because of its “million dollar view” of the river, the bluff, and wooded Belle Isle. The men wore wool shirts or camo jackets and dirt-impregnated vests. More than one carried a gun on his hip. The older ones had washed-out eyes, the look of too many hard winters. A heavy bearded man—a useless designation, as they're all bearded in Eagle—who remained sitting on his four-wheeler said, "Last night when it was real quiet down here, you could hear the river running beneath the ice. Should be eating away at the underside pretty good now." He pointed to a section of ice a dozen feet from the riverbank. "See that crack just past that dark patch? Grown a good eight inches since yesterday." 

A tall spare man wearing a battered hat that looked like a relic of the Spanish-American War, nodded. "Won't be long now. Three or four days." There was general agreement all around. “Four, tops.” A vigorous throat clearing, a glove put on with a bit more animation than usual, seemed to speak of a growing anticipation, of the welcome with which the breakup would be greeted.

Nancy had told me about Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve, which started downriver at the colorful folds of Calico Bluff and continued—all two and a half million acres of it—for more than150 miles before it reached the small town of Circle. Accessible only by boat or air, the preserve was one of the least-visited national parks, attracting fewer than two thousand people a year. The number one message given to those who ventured into the remote area was “You’re on your own.”

Every spring, the rangers set up a camera on Eagle Bluff to monitor the peregrine falcons’ nests, making sure their eggs hatched successfully. Once an endangered species, the peregrines had made a comeback and existed in significant numbers along the Yukon River. "The Park Service has hundreds of hours of tape,” Nancy said. “You might like to see them sometime.” I imagined the men on the millionaire’s bench watching the tapes with the same unhurried interest with which they observed the ice.

"See the crack up top that egg on the right?" 

"Yup," says the other guy. 

"Grown a hair since yesterday.”

“Oughta be any day now."

Maybe someone rustles up some popcorn and they settle in for a spell of egg watching.

The men were right. Breakup came exactly four days later. 

Across from the well house was a red British-style phone booth where I made occasional calls to Thomas on a line with a sputtering connection that often cut out. He seemed impossibly far away, and it wasn’t just the bad phone line. It had been a long time since I’d felt close to him. Ever since we’d met my freshman year at college, we had been making music together—playing violin and piano pieces at recitals, working as church choir director and accompanist, even writing children’s musicals. But we’d ceased to function as a team years ago. 

Six years older than I, Thomas was the teaching assistant for my music theory class. I’d taken piano lessons since the age of ten, and over the years, music had come to mean more to me, substituting, in some way, for the nature that was largely inaccessible to me. Writing had become another outlet, and I wrote poetry and song lyrics while supposedly taking notes in high school English. Waffling between music and writing, I chose to major in poetry and minor in music, much to my dad’s consternation. An engineer, himself, he thought I should major in something more practical. My mother, who had been an accomplished pianist before she married my father, was delighted I would be continuing my music studies.

Thomas cut an odd figure around campus, wearing (in the mild Southern California winters) a striped scarf and a long, heavy overcoat he called his “Beethoven coat”—the kind of thing the genius would have worn stalking through the streets of Vienna. He was brilliant and eccentric, and I was drawn to the romance of his life as an impoverished street musician, playing the violin on busy L.A. street corners before going home to compose deep, brooding symphonic works. He saw in me a talented and impressionable young girl—still in braces—one he could form into his ideal woman.

Thomas wrote a musical portrait of me, and for the next two decades the “Louise theme” reappeared in composition after composition. “Every piece I write, I write for you,” he said. He declared he loved me in the “high old way”—meaning in the manner of Yeats and Donne. He didn’t recognize then that in a marriage, a spouse also needed to be loved in the practical, everyday way, being seen as a real person with faults and foibles, and not as an idealized figure. No wonder I never measured up to his expectations.

Thomas’s emotional volatility surfaced early in our relationship, often exploding in anger. I made excuses for him, as I did through the following decades of our marriage. Thomas was a misunderstood genius, an artist with a capital A. Shouldn’t allowances be made for his mercurial temperament? But my dad had reservations about Thomas even then. He’d growled at him one day, “I don’t like how you yell at my daughter.”  

So many things upset Thomas, bringing on either his anger or his urge to withdraw. I tried to shelter him from having to deal with strangers and unfamiliar situations, which—for no reason that I could see—caused him undue stress. I was constantly smoothing things over with friends, family members, and the parents of students, who found his speech inappropriately frank and his actions rude; my efforts were seldom successful, and he wound up losing students and alienating many people.

Finally, five years before I came to Eagle, Thomas had been diagnosed as having Asperger’s Syndrome, as it was called then. Finding out he was on the high-functioning end of the autism spectrum was a relief to him, as he had an explanation at last for why he didn’t understand the world and the world didn’t understand him. Now I saw a reason for all his maddening habits that had made life at home so difficult: his inflexibility; his focus on his music to the exclusion of all else; his frequent retreat into his own isolated world where the kids and I dare not intrude. In public, I had often been embarrassed by his strange speech and clothing, and his disregard of social norms. And worse, I was humiliated by the way he yelled at me in front of other people, though I could see now why he erupted into anger so frequently: it was when he was unable to control his environment. (And by extension, me, if I had failed to predict—and provide for—his needs.) 

Once he was aware of them, Thomas took an almost scientific interest in his symptoms, analyzing what social abilities he lacked. He made a conscious attempt to work on facial recognition, often asking me if two actresses—who appeared indistinguishable to him—were in fact the same person. He watched me make small talk with strangers and he tried joking with cashiers and waitresses, but he never came across as funny, just weird.

I appreciated his efforts, but, to some degree, I felt the diagnosis may have come too late. Damage had already been done to our relationship. Most married people with autism wind up divorced; they just wear out their spouses. For over two decades now, I had acted as a buffer between Thomas and the world. I felt completely sapped, utterly depleted at the thought of going home and resuming that role.

On the day the ice on the Yukon River went out, I left Redmen Hall and felt an even deeper hush than usual. The dozen sled dogs across from the hall were uncommonly quiet. There were no children playing in the road, no four-wheelers toodling along. When I got within sight of the river, I was startled to see the slow movement of a huge expanse of white—as if one of the snow-covered streets was advancing down the valley.

It appeared the entire population of Eagle was gathered on the bank. I asked the woman next to me how everyone had heard so quickly. "There isn't much that gets past the people in this country," she said, before calling to a young woman who pulled up in a beat-up Toyota loaded with several children. "What'd they do—send up a smoke signal to you guys up on Telegraph Hill?" The young woman laughed and replied, “I’m glad the ice went out today. Tomorrow the kids will be in gun safety class and wouldn’t have been able to see it.”

Some of the adults had a vaguely surprised air—a look of remembering something forgotten over the last six months: that rivers are meant to move, that water flows, that muddy brown, not white is the true color of the Yukon. Everyone, from children to old people, stood silently, respectfully watching the long-awaited passing of winter. We were all mesmerized, watching the shifting shapes sail past. Square pieces careened into shore, the impact sheering off the corners and sending them spinning like a teacup ride. Some round pieces were edged with rims of ice like frozen lily pads. Segments broke apart and reformed, creating a slow-moving monochromatic kaleidoscope. A dark casket of ice heaved up from below, water streaming from its sides. A chunk the size of a killer whale—the upper half black with embedded silt—breached and dove again. Some sections of ice were big enough to hold their own pools of meltwater, mobile reflecting ponds. A perfect ball rested on the water, balanced on a shelf of submerged ice. The Venus de Milo, cold and gray-veined as marble, floated by. Along came a human form of stacked blocks, like the inuksuk the Inuit built on the tundra to mark their way, and here it was, sailing north toward them, marking none but its own passage.

As the sun slid down behind the mountains, the crowd dispersed. The last man to go shrugged before turning for home. "If you seen one breakup, you seen ‘em all," he said. I thought of the girl I'd seen the day before, squatting on a patch of dry ground on the muddy road in front of her house. Her blonde head was bent over her task involving a toy shovel. In a town of one hundred and thirty people where the winter lasts six months and temperatures plummet to sixty below, I wondered what kids did for fun.

I asked what she was doing. "Scoopin’ gravel,” she said, scraping a pile of it together. She answered my questions cheerfully but with the same economy of words as the men down on the riverbank. I learned her name was Brianna, she was nine years old and in third grade. 

“What do you like to do when you're not scooping gravel?” I asked. 

“Climb on piles of dirt.” 

“Do you like to climb trees, too?" 

She wrinkled her tiny snub nose, a bit disdainful, perhaps, at the thought of climbing one of the stunted trees that grew this far north.

“Nah,” she said, “Just piles of dirt.”  She unzipped her sweatshirt part way and pulled it open like Supergirl to show me her jersey imprinted with the words MUDD 10. 

"Are you looking forward to breakup? " 

"Nah,” she said, “I seen it before. Lotsa times.”

“Nine times, right?”

She considered a moment before her eyes widened in astonishment at her own long history in this world.

Although it was still cold and there was not a hint of green anywhere, it was time for the spring potluck at Redmen Hall. I thought of my home in a small college town set in a region of graceful hills known as the Palouse. There the wheat, which had overwintered in the ground, would be just showing as a shadow of green. Soon it would erupt into a riot of brilliant emerald, spreading over one hillside and another. It was my favorite time of year there, and I was a little sad that I was missing it.

At Redmen Hall, I helped set up tables beneath a painting of an Indian wearing a skin shirt and leggings with large lettering advertising the “Indian ‘Poverty Ball’ New Year’s 1931.” A woman in a long skirt put an armload of firewood into an iron stove shaped like a round-topped steamer trunk. A grizzly bearskin was nailed to the wall between a caribou head and a set of moose antlers. The tables began to fill up with platters and casserole dishes.

It was obvious some people were getting low on food supplies. I imagined their freezers—stuffed last fall with king salmon steaks, grayling fillets, ground moose meat, caribou roasts, sweet wild blueberries and tart lowbush cranberries—were almost empty now with just a few tough cuts of moose, and their root cellars were yielding up the last wizened turnips and potatoes. They must be craving fresh fruit and vegetables and already making their grocery lists for a trip to Fairbanks, though the road wouldn’t open for a couple more weeks.

A tiny woman with a gray waist-length braid got out a fiddle and began to play. Two men joined her on guitar. Oblivious to the music, a toddler lay asleep on a bench covered with a black bear skin. I went outside and saw several people standing around the barbecue, hoping for one of the half-dozen caribou steaks someone had managed to save from the winter hunt. From inside came the sound of “Home on the Range.” A mosquito landed on a man’s hand. He killed it with one swift finger. Picking it up by a leg, he hefted it and said, “Put a hook through that and it’s almost big enough to use as bait.”

Although I would have loved to see the land once the wild roses started blooming in June, part of me was glad I’d be gone by summer and would not have to deal with swarms of mosquitoes, not to mention the heat. Eagle was known for its extremes of weather; in winter, it was often the coldest place in the state, and in summer, the hottest.

I filled my plate with salmon cakes, biscuits, and beans and took a seat next to a woman in her thirties with violet eyes and prominent cheekbones who sat across from a whole row of equally striking girls—her seven daughters. They all had high coloring and eyes like rocks and minerals—brown flecked with sparkles of yellow and green. She introduced herself as Lorena and quickly pointed to each girl as she said their names, all of which started with L. Her face showed traces of a deep weariness I learned was the result of getting eight children—“That’s my son over there,” she said, pointing out a boy of about six at the next table—and a flock of chickens through the long winter.

“We got just eighty chickens left now. We started out with two hundred.” 

She was raising the chickens in a room attached to their house, which was not far from my cabin. It was a caboose-shaped dwelling built of plywood.

“It’s a lot better than the tent we lived in for twenty years out in the woods. We just got electricity, too.”

I complimented Lorena on her children’s good looks and behavior. They were all sitting quietly, eating with focused attention on their plates piled high with food. They were dressed in a motley assortment of clothing, all of it very clean.

“How do you manage doing laundry for that many kids?” I asked.

“I do five loads a day in my wringer washing machine. The roof doesn’t have any insulation so the snow melts and collects in this one spot. Dell took his shotgun and put a hole through the roof and ran a hose down to the washing machine.”

  It sounded hard to believe, but so were many stories I heard in Eagle. My look must have changed from disbelief to pity because she said, “I don’t consider myself a poor woman. It depends on what you consider wealth. It’s a matter of what’s enough. I can raise enough food to feed the young ’uns.”

This was the first time I’d ever heard anyone use this term, which fell easily from her lips.

“People bring me salmon, moose, whatever, and I can it and keep half of it. It takes me three minutes to fillet a salmon.”

She described an assembly line process she had developed for butchering chickens, which started by pulling off their heads and yanking off the skin. “Some of the girls can’t stand to do the killing, so they do the cutting up.” I looked down at my plate, grateful I wasn’t eating fried chicken at the moment.

From later conversations with her, I learned that Lorena had married for the first time when she was fourteen. After an annulment, she married again at age sixteen; by the time she was eighteen she was a widow, her husband having been murdered in a home invasion burglary. No wonder that, although she was still in her thirties, Lorena looked like she’d lived several lifetimes already.

With warm weather approaching, I detected in the men a kind of loosening, an expansiveness, a restlessness to get out there on the river, to go fishing and bear hunting. In the women there was also an excitement, but it was a coiling of energy, a gearing up for the long days of gardening and canning. They were hitching up their pants and taking in their belts a notch, rolling up their sleeves. They were getting ready. I envied them their season of growing oversized vegetables in the endless summer light, their shelves stocked with jars of fresh salmon, their cellars full of potatoes. I had just gotten here and already I didn’t want to leave.

The highlight of the evening was the dessert auction. Some of the women had brought homemade donuts, spice cookies, and pies, but there were some sad-looking desserts made with a few hoarded ingredients, such as little mounds of Cheerios stuck together with peanut butter and powdered sugar. Lorena had brought a devil’s food cake made from cocoa and pancake mix.

“It’s really handy when you don’t have any eggs or butter,” she said.

 Or baking chocolate or flour, I noted to myself.

Little Brianna bid on a paper plate of raisin oatmeal cookies but lost out to a tough-looking guy with a hard squint who explained it was his turn to bring cookies to Bible study that week. “Unless there’s a Clint Eastwood movie on. Then I might stay home and eat them all myself.” I noticed Brianna hungrily eyeing the piece de resistance—a three-layer Boston cream pie someone had carefully carried home on the plane from Fairbanks. The bidding got faster and the less-determined dropped out as the price rose to twenty-eight dollars, then thirty-two, until it was between Brianna and the pastor of the bible chapel. Brianna got the nod from her mother and called out “Thirty-six dollars!” The pastor bowed out and Brianna got to go home proudly carrying her cake.

I stayed to help clean up afterward. Running a damp rag down the long table from one end, I was vaguely aware of a man coming toward me, wiping down the table from the other direction. His sleeves were rolled up and I noticed in an abstract way that he had nicely muscled forearms. All the other men were outside smoking and talking. Who was this lone guy helping the women clean up? Glancing at him, I saw it was the man named Billy I’d seen at the post office. God, he’s dirty, was all I thought. He gave me the briefest of nods and turned to wipe another table.

The thought that I might be attracted to a man—or have anyone attracted to me—did not occur to me until later. After twenty years of being just a mom, I felt utterly sexless. Neuter, as if a part of me had dried up and fallen off like a useless umbilical cord. At that time, this unlikely man was not an object of desire—how could he be, with his filthy clothes and tangled beard? And yet I would soon be able to see beyond the clothes, the beard, the wild hair to what was hidden underneath—a sweet something that would draw me to him in ways I could not understand.

Asylum--Chapter Three The Whistle Stop

Chapter Three
The Whistle Stop

Three days after breakup, the main parade on the river had ended but stragglers of ice slid by, the now-quiet water making the individual mutterings of each piece audible. One grunted as its underbelly struck the gravel bar near the river’s edge; another hissed with displeasure as a smaller piece sideswiped it, sheering off a piece of its brown scabby flank. I climbed down the bank and walked amongst the small icebergs stranded in the mud. The last sun, slanting at a low angle, lit their translucent undersides, glowing blue. I ran my fingernail along the edge of a columnar chunk, sending a cascade of pipettes of ice tinkling to the rocks below. There were freeform, transparent globs on the sand, jellyfish of ice. I held a chunk in my hand and examined my fingers plainly visible through the clear ice. A tall iceberg passed in the water, leaning precariously. Fifty yards downriver it turned turtle and exploded, sending chunks splashing into the water and onto the bank, making a sharp report like gunfire that echoed against the bluff. An imposing figure sailed parallel to shore, a lone dowager with a sagging gray bosom. As it passed, I could hear it crunching softly, a delicate, watercress-sandwich kind of sound. Before I turned to go, I watched one last piece of ice pass by, making a swishing, sweeping sound like the man with the push broom who follows the parade.

The next day, I decided to walk from one end of the town to the other along the river, next to the ice piled on shore. Halfway to my destination at Mission Creek, the strip of shore suddenly narrowed. The rocks shifted beneath my feet. I slipped and almost fell into the water, which was cold enough to paralyze your muscles within minutes. I scrambled onto the ice and stepped carefully from one chunk to the other, but it was slow going. The graceful ice shapes that I’d seen, just a few days before, floating peacefully past, were now frozen into a wicked jumble with hidden crevasses, and I repeatedly plunged in up to my thigh.  As I pulled and twisted to get my ankle free, it occurred to me I could break a leg and no one would know. It was after five and the store on Front Street just above me had closed. The sound of cars coming and going had stopped. 

My only choice was to somehow scramble up the riverbank. Thick roots protruded from the dirt far above my head. Teetering along a tree trunk that had come to rest at an upward angle, I was able to grab one of the roots. With a strength I didn’t know I had, I pulled myself up, hand over hand, until I reached the top. I stood there, feeling foolish for thinking I could take a stroll along the river at this time of year. I reminded myself that this was not the tame landscape of the Palouse, where shallow streams meandered between the hills. It was more like my friend Liz’s ranch in Idaho, where I’d had to be very aware of my surroundings and alert to possible danger. There it might be a well-camouflaged rattlesnake, here a hidden crevasse.

My parents were already dead by the time I started going to the ranch. I had sometimes wondered what they would have thought of me—their shy, weak daughter—rowing across the broad Snake River or chasing after half-wild cattle, my chaps flapping. As a teen, when I had wanted to go backpacking in the Rockies or take an Outward Bound course, my mother would say, “You’re a city girl. What makes you think you can do things like that?” Her words echoed what Smokey was told when she married for the fourth time and moved to Alaska with Scotty. Her elderly father was dismayed at the news they were heading north. “You’re a city girl,” he wrote to her. “You have no business in Alaska.” As I trudged back to my cabin, shivering and with my pants stiff with half-frozen mud, I doubted myself, too, asking “Do I have any business in Alaska when I’m not, and may never be, as competent and self-reliant as Liz or the women here in Eagle? Do I have any business being here when my home is so far away?”

After I cleaned myself up, I climbed the ladder to the loft and huddled under the blankets, trying to warm up. Sleeping in a loft was a novel experience for me, and the low ceiling made it feel cozy. I’d dragged the bed close to the railing so I could look down at the simple scene below—the rustic furniture, the pegs on the wall holding my rain coat and hat, and the window sill where I put treasures I’d found— smooth river rocks, pieces of driftwood, and scrolls of birch bark. The only thing I didn’t like was the oil drip stove, which I’d never quite gotten the hang of lighting. When I mistimed it, the vapors erupted into flames with a terrifying “whoosh.”

I enjoyed having my own private outhouse, where I would sit contentedly with the door propped open a crack, reading old magazines about bush flying and muzzle loading. I wasn’t even bothered by the barking of my neighbor’s three-legged hound dog, chained just a few yards away. The dog had run off and gotten its leg caught in a lynx snare, and by the time it had limped home, the leg was full of gangrene and had to be amputated. Sometimes the daughter visited and the dog hopped over to her, baying ecstatically. She rubbed his ears, cooing “Oh, Blacky boy, you don’t have a leg.”

I met another one of my neighbors when I passed by her cabin and the stout dog on the porch barked at me. I recognized him as the one I often saw hauling his owner around town. A thin old woman, listing slightly to one side, came to the door. She had a sharp, intelligent face and a thick mane of hair dyed a flattering shade of red. Hushing her dog, she said, “Oh, I’m so glad to see you!” as if she’d been waiting for me for a long time. She held out her hand, and I was surprised to find that she had the strongest handshake of any woman I’d ever met. Ushering me into the one-room cabin, she asked with a roguish grin, “How would you like a little Bailey’s Irish Cream?” 

She talked on as if we’d just left off in mid-conversation. “I’m so bored, I can’t wait til the road opens and I can drive to Tok. I always get a hamburger, do a little grocery shopping, and then come home.”

I marveled at an elderly woman—eighty-five years old if she was a day—driving one hundred and seventy miles on a bad road just for something to do. I took the cup offered to me and sat on the couch, pushing aside a pile of wildlife calendars. Assessing me with a keen eye, she said, “You’re that writer I’ve been hearing about!”

“Yes,” I said, relieved she hadn’t mistaken me for someone else. “And you’re Esther. I see you sometimes walking your dog.”

 “Well, I can’t get around like I used to but Flash needs his exercise. This darned arthritis. Oh heck, that’s the way it goes. But you have to keep moving.”

There was a bark or two outside, and Esther immediately got a bowl of dry kibble, on top of which she put a dollop of canned dog food. Her dog heaved himself up the stairs and came inside.

“I just can’t seem to get poor Flash to eat,” she worried, setting down the bowl and patting his well-padded back. “There you go. Now eat up, that’s a good boy.”

I looked around at the walls covered with pictures of otters, tigers, seals, and other appealing-eyed creatures and said, “You must love animals.”

“Yes, I can’t stand to see an animal suffer. You wouldn’t believe the way some people around here treat their dogs. They keep them chained up, half-starved. If I see a dog like that, I’ll sneak into the yard and give the poor thing some food. And the owners yell at me, like I’m the one doing something wrong! Once I even got in trouble for trespassing. I don’t let that stop me. But that’s enough about me. So,” she said, leaning forward eagerly, “what are you writing?”

I told her about my book and how my grandparents had moved to the bush when they were in their sixties. Esther listened intently and when I was finished, she said,

 “I always wanted a cabin in the woods, too. Just as soon as I retired from teaching, I came out here from Michigan. People couldn’t imagine what I was doing, a single woman moving to Eagle at my age. I had such a wonderful time back then! I had my own boat and a four-wheeler. I learned how to use a chainsaw and cut my own firewood. Hiked all over. I’d take my snowmachine downriver and visit people.”

I supposed that by “snowmachine,” she meant “snowmobile.” Another unique word that wasn’t used Outside. I still had a lot to learn about Alaska.

“Oh,” Esther exclaimed, “the best trip I ever went on was with Jack Gibson as my guide. We took a boat down the Porcupine River. It’s way up north somewhere. A black bear came up really close, and dummy me, I hollered for Jack instead of just standing there watching it.” She was silent for a minute, remembering those days with a smile. “When I die, I want my gravestone to read: Here lies Esther. She finally found her wilderness.”

I said goodbye to my newfound neighbor with reluctance. She was invigorating to be around, with her crackling energy and quick laugh. The way she talked about her plucky solo jaunts when she was “young” made me feel like adventures were possible for me ahead, as well. Life wasn’t over yet. She waved to me from the door, “Come back any time!”

I spent a fair amount of time in the library just browsing the shelves, which held an eclectic collection of mostly donated books: dog mushing and home taxidermy, knot-tying and secrets to finding gold, small engine repair and remedies made from native plants. There was a whole section of leather-bound books dating back to the gold rush days. I checked out a well-worn copy of Coming into the Country.

One day I sat in a rocking chair close to the wood stove, paging through The Eugenic Marriage and Ole Mammy’s Torment, listening to the occasional conversation at the check-out desk. 

“Oz books again, Mandy?” The volunteer—the pastor’s wife—at the desk smiled at the young girl setting down a stack of books that came up to her chin. “How many times have you read Ozma of Oz? The girl spoke up proudly. “Three times. But I still want to read it again.” She reminded me of myself at her age, biking home with my handlebar basket so loaded with books that I could hardly steer. This little log cabin was far different from the Spanish-style library where I had sat reading as a girl, listening to the waves breaking on the beach outside the open window. 

A man with prematurely gray hair walked in and said, “Fish and Game meeting Wednesday.”

“I’ll be there,” said the one of the two brothers who ran Eagle’s small power and telephone company. “I want to hear the forecast for the king season. Hope it’s better than last year. Next thing you know they’ll be shutting down our fish wheels.”

There was a wooden model of a fish wheel by the window, and I would have liked to see a full-sized one—ten feet tall—turning, turning in the river, scooping up the huge fish. Sitting there, listening, reading, soaking up the warmth from the fire, my contentment was marred by a sense of guilt for being gone from home so much in the past year. It felt strange to be away from my children for so long; the boys and I had always been close when they were growing up. Thomas and I had homeschooled them for much of their childhood. I’d reveled in having such huge expanses of time with my kids while other mothers were squeezing in “priority” minutes here and there between school and daycare and homework. 

With Emlyn, an absent-minded freckle-faced kid with glasses, I had engaged in long, far-ranging conversations about the world and space and books. My communication with Ambrose, a sensitive, vulnerable-looking child, had always been on a nonverbal level, as we spent hours together exploring the fields around our house and days at a time at my friend’s, forty miles south of Pullman. I missed my sons’ boyish voices, just as my mom had hated the silence in our huge house after her seven children left home. Maybe, I thought, I was running away from the empty nest my house would soon become; then it would be just Thomas and me living under one roof, each aloof and alone.

I had gradually withdrawn from Thomas because in some ways, his diagnosis had made things worse. He now had an excuse for his often hurtful behavior and made no effort to keep his temper in check. Throughout our marriage, he had been prone to shout at me for the smallest of infractions—everything from not rolling up the car windows before a rain to forgetting to record checks in the checkbook. He called me a blithering idiot, a quitter, a royal fuck-up, a total bitch, and was constantly putting me down until I came to think of myself as he did—incompetent, stupid, and at fault for everything. He frequently made threatening statements that began with, “Don’t make me . . . “

Even before Thomas and I had gotten married (we were engaged for two years), my dad had expressed reservations about Thomas and had growled one day, “I don’t like how you yell at my daughter.”

After one of Thomas’s more recent outbursts in front of a piano student, the girl—a sweet ten-year-old Korean kid who had once put on my lipstick and made kissy lips on the bathroom mirror—came into the kitchen and said, “He doesn’t treat you very well.”

“I know,” I whispered, as if it were a secret between just the two of us.

“Why do you put up with it? If my husband yelled at me that much, I’d be out of there,” my friends said. “He’s worth it,” was always my answer. There were so many things I loved about Thomas. He cried when watching sentimental old movies like the Christmas classic Miracle on 34^th Street and choked up when one of his students had a breakthrough, even if it was just a beginning adult student successfully struggling through “Go Tell Aunt Rhody” for the first time or a precocious seven year old sailing note perfect through “Fur Elise.” He became the loving father of my children, and I saw him in both our sons—in Ambrose’s intensity and musical talent and in Emlyn’s quick intelligence and delight in words. We took long walks through an overgrown orchard at the edge of town, talking of ideas, music, our children, our future. 

I spent most of my waking hours in Eagle—which were dispersed randomly around the clock, with the twilight hours of one and two a.m. being my favorite time—drifting around town, ambling along the riverbank looking for rocks, and poking around a long-abandoned dump—a graveyard of Blazo fuel cans, dented tin buckets, enamel basins with the bottoms rusted out, and coffee cans with scenes of camels and men in flowing, multi-colored robes. Sometimes the full moon was so bright it hurt my eyes if I stared straight at it.

The nighttime hush made Skagway seem like a noisy metropolis in comparison, although even there, the sounds had been old-fashioned and soothing: train whistles, the low blast of the ferry’s horn, the drone of prop planes overhead. After living the first twenty-seven years of my life in cities, Pullman had seemed quiet to me, with no obnoxious noises, just a basketball bouncing in a neighbor’s driveway, a combine harvesting wheat on the hillside, the announcer’s voice at the high school football game carrying across the fields. But the silence in Eagle echoed like a slow-ringing bell lingering in my ear. I became like the Victrola dog, going around with my head cocked, listening, listening hard to that hypnotic absence of sound.

In addition to working on my book, I decided to write an article about Coming into the Country, a kind of “where are they now” piece about the people McPhee had described so vividly. The first person I approached to interview was the man who had been featured prominently as “the central figure in town” because he was not only the mayor, but also the postmaster and the customs agent. 

Marshall was eager to talk. As soon as I sat down in his living room, he opened up.

“I was very upset when that book came out. McPhee tread all over people’s private lives—he didn’t care. He wrote about people’s problems and situations—gossipy stuff. He made Eagle sound like a pretty rip-roaring place. If it hadn’t been written up that way, it wouldn’t have met his object in writing the book, which is to show that Eagle attracts idiosyncratic people who came into the country for their own reasons, which they are fulfilling to the best of their capacity. It attracts people looking for adventure, people who want to prove themselves. Some are hiding out or running away from something.” He finished emphatically, “I’m not running away from anything.”

Marshall looked like a man who knew who he was and where he belonged. In the years since McPhee’s book was published, he had become the town’s respected elder statesman who presided over community gatherings, always being asked to say a few words. McPhee had described Marshall as having “a lightness about him, of manner, appearance, and style.” He was still that way. Although Marshall dressed in the same outdoor garb as the rest of the men in town, he always managed to look rather dapper.

“Whatever happened to the other people in the book?”

“You’d be surprised,” Marshall said rather mysteriously. He got up and returned shortly with a notebook. Inside was a list of all the people who were in Coming into the Country. He’d kept it up to date over the years, making notes on their whereabouts.

“A lot of them are dead.”

I didn’t find that surprising, given that we were talking about almost three decades ago. 

“The older ones, I suppose.”

“No, old-timers and young ones. Kind of strange.”

Out of the forty-seven Eagle residents named in the book, four were murdered, one shot herself by accident, one shot himself on purpose, two drowned, two were killed in a plane crash and one in a car wreck. Another sixteen people left town.

“There’s only a few of us left.”

We sat in silence for minute, drinking out tea, considering the list. Even though McPhee had written that “The country is full of stories of unusual deaths,” I was still a little spooked.

Marshall laughed suddenly. “After Coming into the Country came out, people from Outside used to line up at the customs desk with their passports open and their book to be signed and stamped. Some people even moved here after reading that book. Ask Lydia, the postmistress.”

So I did. The next day, I mailed a letter to my kids and asked Lydia if it was true she came here because of McPhee’s book.

“Yup. We lived in Georgia and after we read Coming into the Country, I sent my husband up to Eagle to check it out. It was fifteen years after the book came out but he came back and said, ‘It’s just like he wrote.’” They promptly packed up their four kids and moved to Eagle.

Lydia was right. Now, many years after her family moved here, and almost three decades after McPhee said that Eagle was “where civilization stops,” things had changed very little, at least to my eyes. The population still hovered around a hundred and thirty, give or take a dozen summer people. There were the same log cabins, gravel streets, outhouses, and the all-important well house. Life was still dictated not by the clock, but by the seasons; people still drew sustenance from the soil, the river, and the woods; and the town had not lost its sense of timelessness and being far from Outside. In a world of change, such continuity was deeply reassuring. I was tired of experiencing a let-down after reading an old National Geographic about some fascinating part of the world, and knowing it was, by now, no longer the same—another irreplaceable culture gone, another unique place lost. In Eagle, much good still remained.

I later learned the lack of so-called “progress” was attributable not only to Eagle’s isolation but to a deliberate effort to retain the unique character of the town. One year the city council accepted the Department of Transportation’s offer to pave the roads in Eagle to keep down the dust. However, the council hadn’t bothered to ask the residents if they wanted paved roads. Someone got wind of the plan and drew up a petition against it. Almost everyone in town signed, including some teenagers and kids, maybe even a dog or two. The plan was scrapped. As one local said, “Why would we want to become like everywhere else?” The people of Eagle liked things just fine the way they were. Leave all those fast-paced changes to the Lower 48.

I learned to take my own time, too, as I walk in the woods. Stopping at a young aspen tree, I put my hand around the narrow trunk like taking a child’s wrist to cross the street. I stroked the tender bark with the color and nap of a ripe peach. I had the sense of waiting for something to unfold, like the trees around me with their buds swelling in the lengthening days. At their feet lay last year’s leaves, fascinating in their variety. Those that had decayed beneath the snow were slick and blue-black as a sheet of mimeograph paper peeled from the drum. Others were bleached and rolled into tubes, hollow and weightless as bird bones. The ground underfoot was uncertain, giving way in places like I was stepping on a roll of chicken wire. Birch trees, rotted from the inside, left nothing but a white collar of bark where there had once been a trunk.

As the weeks passed, tiny leaves unfurled. The woods smelled sweet even before the first purple crocuses appeared, and green showed in the crevasses of Eagle Bluff. I came across animals that seemed to have little fear of humans, although the small red squirrels should have been afraid of people because they had always been a target. The Han Athabaskans used to make their soft fur into baby clothes, and now locals shot them and threw them to their dogs as treats. Squirrels were considered more than a nuisance—even a danger—because they liked to eat the insulation beneath cabin roofs. I saw one dog tuck a tiny squirrel into its cheek like a wad of tobacco and meander off with it.

The spruce grouse, which reminded me of frumpy housefrau, were good company as they went about their business looking for insects on the forest floor, undisturbed by my presence. The snowshoe hares didn’t freeze on sight like cottontails, but continued on their way. One traveled down the road with me, staying just a few yards ahead, lifting each long white foot deliberately like a child wearing her father’s slippers. In the long slow twilight that never ended, a weasel-like marten emerged from the brush and, catching sight of me, turned and humped its way back into the woods, unhurriedly, exhibiting not fear but rather annoyance I had interrupted his midnight quest for food.

From my cabin window, I watched two gray jays—or “camp robbers” as the locals call them—tussling in the air. They plummeted to the ground onto a pile of leaves. The strong one took the other bird’s wing firmly in his beak and threw it left and right like a wrestler, the weaker bird protesting audibly. Later, after the smaller bird had been vanquished, the aggressor turned on me, dive-bombing me and doing a touch-and-go on my cap. 

I observed the townspeople closely and noticed that few had a full set of teeth. Their teeth were chipped, broken, or missing. Some were gold-rimmed as an old schoolmaster’s spectacles, others like trees leaning in the unstable permafrost. But there was no self-consciousness, no smiles hidden behind a hand, just a scattered handful of discolored teeth in the midst of a wild white beard or showing in the lined face of a woman who’d gardened under the midnight sun for decades. 

Fewer women than men were visible in this male-dominated environment, and I was the only woman who frequented the small establishment that could generously be called a coffee shop. The Whistle Stop held little more than a few tables, a freezer and microwave, and a bottomless pot of coffee. People helped themselves to frozen cheeseburgers and corndogs and warmed them up in the microwave. Wall decorations included the requisite moose and caribou antlers, a map of Alaska, a four-foot-long two-man saw, an otter pelt, and a large leg trap—big enough to catch a wolf, I was told. In the window hung a few dream catchers for sale, beaded by local women. The owner often sat behind the counter doing leatherwork, tooling a moose or eagle into a belt or knife sheath. He usually had country music playing, but whenever I came in he put on a Gordon Lightfoot tape. I didn’t know whether to be touched or insulted. 

For the most part, the men ignored me and talked amongst themselves. Like everyone else, I wrote my name on a Styrofoam cup, put it on the shelf and used it again the next day. I lingered over my coffee, just listening. Smokey had written about newcomers to Alaska, “The only cheechako who is popular without reservation is the one who keeps his ears and eyes open and asks questions cautiously and only when he must.” As a cheechako, or newcomer, I didn’t expect to be popular, I was just grateful to be allowed to stay without being run out of there. When anyone did speak to me, I had to refrain from my usual tendency to ask too many questions; it was our natural curiosity that had led to both my grandmother’s and my own involvement in journalism—hers as a newspaper reporter and mine as a freelance writer.

I was interested to view the men at close quarters, noting a few of them were so dirty they looked like a cross between a homeless person and a chimney sweep, with soot ground into their pores, and their beard, hair, and clothes stiff with grime. I listened to stories about people with names like Memphis, Greek, the Lieutenant, Noodles, The Troll, Jackerbob. Someone mentioned a guy who’d just come off a bender, his eyes looking “like two piss holes in the snow.” The chief of the Native village saw a Dall sheep, a big one, on the bluffs across the river. A neighbor had a new hound pup. Someone’s chainsaw had gone “tits up.”

Like the two gray jays I’d seen grappling in the dirt, the men occasionally engaged in their own less-obvious tussles, trying to one-up each other with bear stories. I got the feeling these tales had been exchanged many times over the years until the details were as well known by the listeners as by the teller. The black bear that chased the cat through the cabin door but got his head tangled in the mosquito netting just long enough for the woman to grab a gun and shoot it. The eight-foot tall grizzly that came through the dog yard, swatting fifty-pound sled dogs into the air with its enormous paws.

These stories were told with a certain swaggering tone, an air of bravado that was understandable but somewhat irritating all the same. All except one. The small, unassuming and spectacularly dirty man named Billy, whom I’d met at the post office, was prompted to tell about the time he shot a grizzly through the plastic window of his cabin. He told the story sketchily, with a humorous, self-deprecating air, as if he scarcely believed it himself. After the other men left, I ventured to ask him for more details. He refused to sit at the table with me, but hunkered down on his haunches against the wall while he told me about having to kill the bear because it kept coming around to get the salmon drying on his fish rack.

There was something appealing about this curious figure, and I looked for him whenever I went into The Whistle Stop. Gradually he ventured a little closer to me, until one day he sat at the next table over. He sipped his coffee and remained quiet until I couldn’t refrain and prompted him with a question. He paused before he replied, gathering his thoughts. He spoke slowly and quietly. He had a strange calm about him, a stillness he exuded, which fell about him like the warm glow of a kerosene lamp. I wanted to stay in that circle of tranquility, so I kept him talking.

 “If you don’t mind telling me, where do you live?”

“Four point eight miles out of town, figuring from the post office. Upriver, past the Native village.”

 I nodded, as if I knew where that was. Almost everyone I’d ever met in my travels around the state had an interesting story about how and why they came to Alaska. I kept my ears open for these oft-told narratives; perhaps if I heard many other people’s reasons, I’d discover my own. I asked Billy how he wound up this far north.

“I got a job on a hotshot crew. I’d never been to Alaska before, but I lit out of Arizona as soon as I could.”

I must have looked puzzled because he explained, with a hint of pride, that “hotshots” were specialized, highly trained firefighters sent into particularly challenging situations, usually in remote areas, where they were dropped off by helicopter. It was obvious he missed the job, which he had quit ten years earlier for reasons he didn’t state. I wondered, too, what had made him flee Arizona.

As I watched Billy talk, I looked him over. He was a short, slight man dressed from head to toe in camo, which many people in town wore—even the women. “Good for hiding the dirt,” one woman told me. He had brown, tangled hair that fell to his shoulders and blue eyes barely visible through the dirty lenses of his glasses. Of course he had the requisite Alaska beard, long and untrimmed. It was hard to tell how old he was, maybe in his late thirties, a few years younger than me. That was the last I saw of this intriguing character for a while. I didn’t lay eyes on him again until a few days before I was to leave Eagle.