Asylum--Chapter Eighteen Winter Birth

Chapter Eighteen
Winter Birth

By mid-February my sisters had gone home and left me alone in San Jose, assuring me I could manage on my own now. Although my mind had started to return, it felt weak and weary. If my brain could be unsteady on its feet, it was. I realized I hadn’t emailed Moana since shortly after my trip to Eagle in September. At that time, she had been thrilled for me, convinced I had somehow managed to find my soul mate over a thousand miles from home. She understood the draw of Eagle and how it satisfied the longing for the natural world I had felt since a teenager.

I finally emailed her, and Moana wrote back, “I am baffled with your mental condition—not that I know anything—but I guess I don't ‘see’ you or hear from you when you are not doing good. It's hard for me to imagine you, one of my oldest and dearest, smart, creative, and wittiest of friends, having to spend a week in the mental ward. I can't help but wonder what catalyst, what groundwork fell into place that led you down the road to the breakdown. You have Billy and Eagle. What’s keeping you in San Jose? What’s going on with Thomas? Couldn’t you go back to Pullman if you don’t want to move to Alaska right now? Here I go, sticking my nose where it wasn't asked to be, but I can't help think that if you were living closer to family or friends for support when you felt yourself being drawn into this depressing abyss, perhaps the fall wouldn't have been so severe, or you might have escaped the full-blown breakdown.”

I replied, “Since I got ‘home’ from the hospital, I have been feeling disoriented, strange, and fragile. One of the things that I am trying to do to keep from sinking into such depression and hopelessness and anxiety that drove me to think of killing myself is to reassure myself that I am loved and that people do care if I continue to exist. Seeing how much my sisters love me helped me a lot. It is a treasure to know I have been able to stay friends with you for so long and to continue to feel close to you.” 

The email exchange with Moana made me think maybe I was starting to be able to communicate with people again, that I might be fit to be among the living. 

Though I did not feel well enough to travel, I needed a respite from the city, and I longed to see Billy. I had no cash left and had almost maxed out my credit card, but there was enough for one more flight to Alaska.

I called to give Thomas my cover story: I was going on a ten-day writers’ retreat in Carmel, California, fifty miles away. It sounded implausible to me—a retreat from a writing fellowship?—but it was the only excuse I could think of.

“You won’t be able to reach me there. They don’t want you to be talking on the phone. You’re supposed to be focused on your writing.”

“But why are you going to Carmel?”

“It will be quieter there. And I can find out about Smokey’s years there in the twenties.”

Thomas was uncharacteristically silent, then he said, “I can feel you slipping away from me.” There was bewilderment and sadness in his voice. “I don’t know why, but I can feel it.”

The space between us had expanded beyond mere thousands of miles to some immeasurable distance I could no longer fathom.

“If I could just get you out of California, pry loose this toehold you have on independence,” he said. “Get you up to Alaska.”

I felt a flash of anger at his wish to undercut the precarious independence I had experienced in San Jose. No, I hadn’t gotten through the nine months I had so blithely said I could handle. I’d barely made it to six months, and I obviously was not coping with it well at all. But I had survived, thanks to Billy. 

Yes, I was coming to Alaska, but not to see my husband. 

The mail plane took off from Fairbanks, flying directly into the sun, which was just rising at ten-thirty in the morning. Instead of flying due east over mountains the whole way, we went northeast and then followed the Yukon River south. Unlike my last flight to Eagle, when I had been preoccupied by the youthful pilot’s antic flight maneuvers to keep the small plane aloft in the high winds, the flight was calm, allowing me to concentrate on the landscape passing below. The river was broad and snow-covered, with only an occasional patch of bare ice showing. Its course lay between low, forested mountains, dark with spruce. The river twisted and turned, curving back on itself. We tracked the changes from the air as if we were following the tracings of a graceful ice skater. The slow banking from left to right and back again made me feel like I was being rocked in slow motion, lulled into a feeling of safety. Smokey had described Thimbleberry Island as a “haven of peace,” and that is how I felt, returning to the sanctuary that was Eagle.

I sat in the back of the plane behind the only other passenger. Hearing the pilot call him Corbin, I recognized the name and knew he was an experienced dog musher who lived on a homestead downriver from Eagle and worked summers piloting the Yukon Queen to Dawson. He wore a full complement of winter gear, like most locals did when flying, donning a parka, insulated pants or coveralls, and heavy boots or mukluks, just in case the plane went down. “If you don’t have it on, you don’t have it with you,” they said. I always got a bit nervous when I heard the pilot’s pre-flight patter, which included the required statement that “the survival gear is stowed in the tail of the plane.”

The wolverine ruff of Corbin’s parka was backlit by the morning sun, the longer “guard hairs” outlined individually, distinct from the rest of the shorter fur. I looked down and saw the sight echoed by the long, slender shadows of black spruce that curved with the contours of the islands, delicate and fringelike.  Areas where the wind had scoured the ice clean appeared just like open spots of black water on a rough white-capped sea. 

The pilot pointed out a lake where, on another flight, he’d seen a pack of wolves take down a moose. On the river, chunks of glassy ice caught the sun like pieces of obsidian spewed from a volcano. We approached the bluff from the back, and I was surprised to see that, from this side, it was a knife-edged ridge. We flew directly over the peak with its American flag, which always looked so small from the town below. We passed above Mission Creek, the overflow on the ice showing a pale blue, and then swung around to land on the airstrip parallel to the river. I was back in Eagle again.

For the first time I was arriving in Alaska unburdened by thoughts about my book and Smokey. No longer weighing my experience against hers, I was able to see mine for what it was: my own. After my breakdown, it was not just my grandmother’s Alaska I had left behind, but Smokey herself. I was arriving alone this time. Maybe the book about her would never get written. But that was okay. Living the Alaska life was better than writing it.

Billy and I got a ride home from the airstrip in the back of a friend’s pickup. It was fifteen degrees below zero, so Billy had come prepared with extra clothes for me. I climbed into the insulated Carhartt coveralls, oversized parka, and heavy boots and lumbered aboard the truck, barely able to move under the weight of the clothing. Billy sat down with his back to the cab and pulled me onto his lap, facing him. Enormous beaver mitts felt like flippers at the ends of my arms. Billy tied a scarf around my neck and admired the fox fur ruff on the parka hood. “Red fox becomes you,” he said. Then he pulled me toward him until our ruffs were almost touching, creating a pocket of warm air between us. We gazed into each other’s eyes from a few inches away. I couldn’t see anything around us as we bumped and bounced along the ice-rutted road, but I didn’t care. I felt warm and safe, bundled like a child and held close. 

The day seemed to pass quickly with Billy and before I knew it, the sun had set. It was just three o’clock; it had been a short day. The temperature was thirty-five below and the thermometer was plunging as night came on. There was little firewood in the cabin, so Billy had to go out and split some. Putting on my parka and gloves, I went with him.

He balanced a wrist-sized piece of aspen on end and gave it a sharp whack with the ax. It flew apart into two neat parts. He offered to let me take a crack at it. “Wood splits easily when it’s this cold.” I was dubious. I had attempted to split a chunk of wood at the ranch some years ago and had succeeded only in wedging the ax firmly into the wood. I held the ax gingerly and he showed me how to stand with my feet apart and my knees bent. He set a section of aspen in front of me, and I gave it a cautious tap. Nothing happened. I tried again with more force and was delighted when it popped apart into two not-quite-equal pieces, my aim being a bit off. 

It was poor wood, Billy explained, cut and stacked to dry just a few months ago instead of the recommended six months or longer. “Aspen doesn’t put out much heat, especially when it’s green. But by this time of year, I’m out of dry wood,” he said apologetically.

I realized that Billy was not one to plan ahead. He wasn’t like the more industrious people in town who had a two-year supply of dry birch and spruce stacked neatly in their yards. It was another way that Billy lived in the present and didn’t worry about the future. But he had kerosene for the lamps and propane for the stove, and I knew he would keep me warm and fed, as long as I wasn’t picky about what I ate.

Going back into the cabin, Billy returned with a lit kerosene lantern. He led the way to the smokehouse, a shed that appeared to be held upright solely by the junk resting against it—old washtubs filled with fishing nets, a couple of car batteries, and other objects indistinguishable beyond the circle of light. He hadn’t smoked salmon for several years, he explained, and just used it for hanging meat. I held the lantern while he took a Swede saw to the solidly frozen hindquarter of a caribou, cutting off a couple of steaks. It was the remains of an animal he had shot in December near Liberty Creek, twenty-five miles away. In the short time we’d been outside, I’d gotten so cold my fingers and toes burned. It was worrisome to think of Billy going so far up the Taylor Highway on his snowmachine in the depths of winter. The road was officially closed then and was not plowed or maintained, but locals used it as a route to the hunting areas on the other side of American Summit. I’d seen the warning sign at the edge of town: “Travel beyond this point not recommended. If you must use this road, expect extreme cold and snow. Carry cold weather survival gear. Tell someone where you are going.”

We went back inside, and Billy cooked the steaks in a skillet. They smelled delicious, and I said, “I’m really hungry.”

“It’s the cold that does that to you. It takes a lot of energy for your body to keep itself warm.”

I took a hesitant bite of the caribou. It was relatively mild-flavored and considerably less gamey than the venison I’d had. Billy was relieved to hear I liked the meat but didn’t quite believe it until he saw that I ate almost the whole steak, leaving just a small amount of food on the plate, as was my habit. (Billy called it “leaving a bit for the Brownies.”)  

After dinner, I said, “Tell me a story.”

Billy thought a minute. “Okay. This was my first winter.”

I snuggled down on the couch, pulling a blanket up to my chin, expecting a quirky, amusing story like he often told. Billy sat next to me, his arm around my shoulders.

“One day in January I came home from checking my rabbit snares, and I saw a pair of snowshoes resting against the doorframe. I said ‘Hello,’ to the cabin and someone hollered back. Crocker was in here and said he had to come inside to warm up. ‘My feet’s froze.’

“I thought he was just saying, ‘I’m mighty cold.’ But his feet were actually frozen.”

“How did you know?”

“They’d been cold so long they’d stopped hurting. Someone had given him a pair of bunny boots—they’re insulated rubber, the best thing you can wear up here—but he burned them to keep warm. He was camping not too far from here, over by the Jones’s old place. He didn’t want anyone to know where he was but it was no secret. He was just in a survival-type hooch.”

“What’s a hooch?”

“A tarp stretched over a rope between two trees, real low to the ground. All he had to eat was oatmeal.”

 “Why didn’t he go out to the road and flag someone down?” 

“He had a glitch. He didn’t want to accept help. His attitude was ‘I’ll show ‘em.’ He was sort of scary. He read a lot into the Bible. Apocalyptic stuff. He thought that when Christ comes again he was going to help him kick souls into the fiery lake. We would talk about guns and that would sort of calm him down.”

“So what did you do when he showed up here?”

“I walked to Delmer’s because he had a snow machine to take Crocker to town. We loaded the poor guy on a sled and took him to the clinic and they medivacced him to Fairbanks.”

“What happened to him?”

“He lost one foot and half of the other.”

I shivered at the thought of the bone-deep chill that lay outside and the dangers it held. I shivered, too, at the demons that could pursue one as relentlessly as the cold. 

I had found my place of refuge, but even here there was no escape from death. I’d arrived a week after the Troll’s funeral. Billy had called me in San Jose to tell me the news, his voice tired and jagged. The Troll had started having trouble breathing one day and by the next morning it was obvious he needed to get to the hospital. His wife and Billy had been trying to load him onto a sled when he stopped breathing. They tried to resuscitate him but without success. An autopsy in Fairbanks determined he had died of a heart attack. The Troll was forty-two years old. His daughter, Spring, had just turned four. Billy told me these things in as few words as possible, wanting to spare me, or spare himself, I didn’t know which. Maybe both. I wished I could’ve been there to put my arms around him. He sounded like he needed it. The Troll was more than just a trapping partner; he was Billy’s closest neighbor and a good friend.

A death in a small community hits everyone hard, and Eagle was no different. This was the second death that winter. Just a month earlier a man from the Native village had died coming back from the liquor store, seventeen miles away at the top of American Summit. The only building for dozens of miles, the wind-battered store was run by a gloomy woman named Delores who had a tattoo of Eeyore on her right forearm. That day, it was snowing hard, the man wasn’t dressed for cold weather, and when his snowmachine broke down, he walked for help, but eventually sat down in a snow bank with a bottle of vodka. He never got up.

What helped people deal with these deaths was that, like everything else in Eagle, funerals were a do-it-yourself affair, with everyone pitching in to help. Without an impersonal funeral home, a canned memorial service, or paid gravediggers, there were just willing friends with hammer and nails to build the plywood coffin and shovels to dig the grave.

On the day of the Troll’s funeral, it was fifty degrees below zero but the bible chapel was packed with people. Billy was one of the pallbearers. Following the service, a trail of snowmachines followed the pickup truck bearing the coffin to the cemetery in the woods. It had taken a couple of days to dig the grave, using the traditional method of building a fire on the burial site to thaw the permafrost. The men used pickaxes to scrape through a few inches of half-frozen soil, then rebuilt the fire and stood around and watched it burn down to embers before repeating the process. After the top layer of tundra was thawed and scraped away, the shoveling went fairly quickly through the dry silt and gravel below. This method of burial seemed particularly fitting for the Troll, the miner, because it was the same way prospectors in the old days had thawed the ground in winter to dig for gold. Eventually the grave was to be capped by a home-made gravestone reading simply, “Spring’s Daddy.”