Asylum--Chapter Seven Summer of Fires

Chapter Seven
Summer of Fires

That was the summer of the fires. It was a record year, with almost seven million acres burned across the state. All around Eagle, wildfires raged through the mountains and across the unusually dry tundra. I became obsessed with the fires. The acreage consumed got national coverage, and I listened for mention of it on the radio and scanned the local newspaper daily. I checked the Alaska fire service website several times a day and downloaded their maps showing the locations and progress of each fire. Thomas didn’t understand why I was so concerned but chalked it up to my tendency to catastrophize everything: of course the fire would reach Eagle; of course all the quaint and curious cabins would burn down.

I waited anxiously for word from Billy. To relax, I reverted to an old habit: listening to NPR and coloring in adult coloring books of folk costumes from around the world, Japanese block prints, mandalas. It took my mind off Billy and the fires, at least temporarily. In July, his letters grew more infrequent, and my anxiety ramped up when I stopped hearing from him entirely. I emailed Billy’s friends Judd and Merry, whom I’d met in Eagle in the spring. I asked if they’d seen him lately. Merry replied that he had gone downriver to help clear brush around several remote cabins that were in danger. I emailed her a couple of times a week, and she kept me apprised of the state of the fires—how close they were to the town and what people were doing to mobilize against them. But she’d heard no word about the men fifty miles down the Yukon. 

I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. I was afraid something terrible had happened to Billy and the other men, and I was convinced the whole of Eagle—this place I’d just discovered and that already meant so much to me—was going to go up in flames. When Billy finally returned home, he found a handful of worried letters from me waiting for him in his post office box. Merry told him I’d been emailing her and was anxious to hear from him. Billy had never used a computer in his life, but she sat him down at her computer and he laboriously typed out, “My dear sweet tender gentle friend. Wipe your eyes and eat some food. Don’t mourn. We are all still well.” I relaxed a little, now I was back in contact with Billy. And by email!

Billy called me his “gentle friend,” but I was starting to feel like so much more—or wishing I were. He was the gentle one, speaking hesitantly, with a slight and appealing lisp. His voice was a counterpoint to the harshness I often heard in my husband’s voice, so often full of demands or recriminations. I wanted to feel Billy’s butterfly-soft lips on mine again, his tentative touch, his murmurings in my ear, full of wonder and appreciation.

Every few days, when Billy got a break from setting up portable water tanks and pumps at vulnerable properties at the edge of town, he took the time to go up to Merry and Judd’s cabin to email me. He was working sixteen-hour shifts, and some nights he and the other crewmembers just fell asleep on the ground next to the fire truck. He wrote that the sky was an ugly yellow and ash was falling heavily. “That black spruce, it’s like gasoline on a stick.” The smoke was too thick for the plane to fly mail in from Fairbanks or to fly anyone out, even in a medical emergency. People were moving their snowmachines and boats to the airstrip because they would be safer there on the open, graveled area. The Taylor Highway was closed, too, because of the flames licking along both sides of the road, so no one could get in or out of Eagle by truck or car. Before the highway closed, a bus was standing by in Tok to evacuate Eagle but most of the residents refused to leave, wanting to stay and defend their homes, so that plan was scratched. 

Billy’s messages were always brief, reassuring, and sometimes more than merely cordial. He had said he just wanted to be my friend, but his letters were starting to imply more. My mind reeled with the complications that might ensue, but I was also thrilled by this new development.

Ever-reasonable Moana said on the phone, “You can’t keep on the way things are going if you expect to hold onto your marriage.” She said this noncommittally, as if my marriage was quite possibly not worth saving. She had never liked Thomas. 

Referring back to my first letter to him, Billy wrote that he felt much angst at the thought we were carrying on a correspondence even though I was married. He emailed me, “I feel that to have dusted off myself and disappeared might be a final affront to God. How could I cast off so fine a gift as a woman with deep feelings for me . . . these are some of the thoughts that come to me in quiet moments. I yearn for the sound of You, and to see and feel You. To get to know and be known are high on the list of things yet to be done in my life.”

As I read these words at the computer, Thomas was sitting on the couch across the room. Trying to get my attention and not receiving a reply, he said plaintively that I must be punishing him for some old wrong.

"You haven't seen that I'm trying to be nice to you, that I'm trying to not be on your case about everything? Doesn't that make any difference?" 

Torn between Billy and Thomas, Thomas and Billy, I turned away from my husband as tears streamed down my face.

Coloring blocked out my constant thoughts of Billy, though it was no longer relaxing. Unable to tear my eyes from the page, I colored until my hand cramped, my vision blurred, and my stomach growled with hunger. One day Emlyn, home for the summer, stood in the doorway watching me.

“Mom, why do you keep coloring?” he asked worriedly.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I can’t seem to stop.”

My son, more than my husband, could see that something was amiss.

I started seeing movement out of the corners of my eyes—small dark shapes darting toward me. Several times I grabbed up a magazine, thinking a spider was about to run across the page of my coloring book. Over the next couple of weeks, this began happening so frequently that I had my eyes checked. The optometrist said it was nothing—just naturally occurring specks floating across my field of vision. I had other things to worry about, so I put the “floaters” out of my mind. It wasn’t until later I learned this was the first sign that something was wrong, very wrong.

One afternoon we got home from the grocery store to find a letter waiting for me with the return address of San Jose State University. I tore open the envelope, crowing, “I got the Steinbeck Fellowship!” No sooner were the words out of my mouth, than it came to me all in a flash: I would go to San Jose and there I would feel free and unencumbered; I would have time alone, time to think, time to write, and the space—both mental and physical—I needed to do these things; my years of motherhood appeared to be behind me and the future stretched enticingly, unpredictably, before me. In the shock of the moment, it even seemed conceivable I could survive in an urban environment, despite my love of the wilderness, because I’d have my own place for the first time in my life, and I could make it however I wanted it to be. It would be a challenge, and one I eagerly embraced.

I dashed up the stairs, threw myself onto my bed, and started scribbling madly in a notebook, writing a grandiose acknowledgments page for the book on Smokey I was sure I would complete in San Jose. I thanked other writers for inspiring me, named librarians who’d helped me, and expressed gratitude toward my family for tolerating my long absences. Thomas came into the bedroom and, catching sight of my open notebook, looked disconcerted at the scrawled handwriting covering the pages. “What’s that?” he asked. Seeing it through his eyes, I realized how crazy it looked.

“It’s just something for my book,” I said, and hurriedly pushed it under the bed.

It was only later that I understood those illegible scribbles and the impulsivity with which I made the decision to accept the fellowship, but I am still amazed and ashamed at how little consideration I gave to Thomas or our boys. I thought only of myself. I should have realized my relationship with my husband would be sorely tested, and that my sons were not totally grown up and still needed my support.

My sister Ingrid, who lived only seven miles away on the other side of the Washington-Idaho border, was sad at the idea of me being gone for nine months. My little sister and I had been close ever since we’d been children, and I would miss her terribly.

Thomas’s and my plan to move to Alaska sometime in the future did not remain up in the air long; seven weeks after hatching the idea of going north, I was browsing on the internet and came across an ad for a music teacher in Taiga, a town of five hundred people in the Alaska Interior over three hours south of Fairbanks. Acting on impulse, I called the school district and was told that if my husband didn’t have a teaching certificate, he could earn it through distance education while he worked. The woman corrected my pronunciation; the town was called “Tie-ga,” not “Tay-ga.” It meant “boreal forest” in Russian, she said.

It sounded like the landscape around Eagle—the dark black spruce and bright white birch interspersed with bogs and mossy patches—that continued across the Yukon River, merging into the boreal woods of Canada, the largest intact forest in the world.

It so happened that a whole cohort of Thomas’s students—the children of Korean doctoral students at the university—were all returning to Korea that autumn. In one fell swoop, his music school would lose half of its students. Maybe this would be a good time to move, though so much earlier than we had planned. It seemed like providence. What about my fellowship in San Jose? We’d worry about that after he found out about the job, we decided. There was no guarantee Thomas would get it.

A week later, at the beginning of August, Thomas flew up to Alaska and was offered the position before the interview was over. When he called to tell me the news, he sounded tired but excited. There was something else in his voice, as well. 

“It’s kind of scary,” he said. “It’s so huge.”

The Interior was an intimidating place, with its towering mountains, harsh weather, and powerful, swift-moving rivers. I hoped it would come to have the same attraction for my husband that it held for me. Perhaps he, too, would feel the profound awe we seldom experience in our modern, man-made world. 

“It’s such a big change and so sudden,” he said.

“What’s the town like?”

“Well, there’s the school, and a lot of churches—at least four I counted.” He paused for a minute to remember. “Post office, two gas stations and a small grocery store. Two restaurants—I know because I ate at both of them. Maybe two or three tourist shops. I think a hardware store. A motel, but it looks like it hasn’t been open in quite a while. That’s about it. Some houses.”

“I thought five hundred people lived there.”

“Yeah, but most of them are off in the woods. You can’t see them.”

“Is there a library?”

“Yes. It’s pretty cute—little. I think you’ll like it.”

“What’s the landscape look like?”

“You’re going to love it. It’s flat most of the way from Fairbanks, but the woods just go on forever. It’s more mountainy around here and there’s a river—the Chulitna. The view of Denali is incredible. ”

I’d always wanted to see Denali, the tallest mountain in North America; it was iconic of Alaska, just like the Yukon. Lots of space, an expanse of forest, rivers, and a dramatic marker on the horizon—something solid and enduring. It sounded good to me.

Thomas told me about the job, explaining he was to be the kindergarten-through twelfth grade music teacher in the large, sparsely populated school district. He’d also be traveling to a Native village north of town once a week to teach in their one-room schoolhouse. The principal there said the students—all eighteen of them—went out first thing every morning, no matter how cold it was, to sing the Alaska state song while standing beneath the blue flag with the Big Dipper on it.

 “Well, are you up for it?”

“Yes, definitely. I just want to get down to work.”

“What about my fellowship?”

“Let’s talk about that when I get home.”

No sooner had he gotten back to Pullman, than we leapt into the discussion of San Jose versus Taiga; California versus Alaska. We came to the same conclusion: why not both?

 “Look,” I said, “we’ve both been waiting for a break. These opportunities are staring us in the face. How can we turn either of them down?”

Thomas felt that the fellowship would advance my writing career. I appreciated how he had encouraged me since day one. You can be a writer, he’d told me when I was seventeen. You are a writer. We both thought the job in Alaska would be a good move for Thomas professionally. For once, he would have a “real job” with benefits, including whole summers off.

When I told Ingrid of my plan to move north to be with Thomas the following June after I completed the fellowship, she was dismayed to realize our separation would be not just for nine months, but possibly permanent. It was painful to think that our close relationship might be diminished by distance.

I called Moana, which I had been putting off, knowing how she would react to news of our dual move. 

“You in San Jose?” she said, incredulous. “When you could be going to Alaska? Don’t you remember how much you hated California? 

“Yeah, I know. It won't be much fun to deal with the big city and smog, but I can survive anything for nine months.”

“That is a long time.”

The thought she was right occurred to me but I pushed it out of my mind. “Yes, but I can look forward to moving to Alaska at the end of it.”

Our plan seemed workable: Thomas would go north, I would go south, and Ambrose would stay alone in our house in Pullman. I wasn’t thrilled with that idea, but he was eighteen and old enough, I thought, to be on his own. Besides, his aunt would be only seven miles away. Emlyn would be entering his sophomore year at the University of Puget Sound. He was eager to get back to his best friend and roommate as well as his girlfriend. The drawbacks of our plan—the financial strain, the fracturing of our family—

were not apparent to me at the time, and I plunged into getting things set up for the boys. Unlike his brother, who hated the idea of his parents living so far away, in two different places, eighteen-year-old Ambrose said he was okay with us moving, as long as he didn’t have to leave his friends. Ingrid agreed to keep an eye on him, so my fears about leaving him alone were somewhat assuaged.

In addition to attending to the details involved in making two simultaneous out-of-state moves, I spent hours on the Internet ordering expensive furnishings for the apartment in San Jose—large, impractical items like an antique glass-topped end table, a delicate lamp with a shade shaped like a lily, a cedar hope chest, two art deco rugs from the turn of the twentieth century. The UPS truck made almost daily deliveries.

“Mom, why are you getting all this stuff?” Ambrose asked, concerned by what he regarded as odd behavior for me. I usually hated shopping—on the Internet or otherwise. I explained it was because I wanted to have the apartment ready to set up once I got there so I could start right in to work on my book. He was unsatisfied with that answer, seeming to find it strange and rather disturbing. I planned to decorate my antique-filled apartment with an Alaska motif, so I packed a topographical map of the Thimbleberry Island area; a 1950s map of Alaska Territory; a map showing the distribution of Alaska Native languages; the lynx skull Billy had given me, and a photo of Smokey and Scotty dressed up in gold rush-era clothes—their costumes for a melodrama they had acted in each summer in Skagway.

My mind was finally eased of worry about Eagle when Billy wrote in late August that the smoke had let up enough for reinforcements to be flown in. “We have a whole horde of fire crews in town, about a hundred of them, with heavy equipment, helicopters, the whole ball of wax.” With the arrival of a bulldozer, they began creating a fifty-foot firebreak around the town. Some of the firefighters helped residents cut down brush and trees that were dangerously close to their cabins. I worried about Billy’s place, but the thought of the lovely birch trees in his yard being cut down made me sad. I consoled myself by thinking that Billy would be so busy helping others clear their land that he wouldn’t give a thought to his own place.

A few days later, a cold front moved through Eagle and the rain came at last. As Moana had said, “Girlie, the waiting is the hardest part of all.” And now the wait was over. Eagle was okay. Billy was okay. Alaska would still be there when I was ready for it. And I was about to embark on a new adventure in California. 

The last week of August came, and Thomas said reluctant good-byes to his many devoted students. He headed north with nothing but a garbage bag full of clothes and the rest of the car stuffed with instruments—a cello, several violins, a viola, and a keyboard. (It turned out he would have trouble crossing the border into Canada, his odd choice of luggage considered suspect. Every instrument case was removed and searched and so was the car, the agents claiming there were traces of cocaine on his driver’s license. It was hours before he was on his way again.)

Then it was time for me to leave. I rented a U-Haul truck and packed it full of my new belongings. Emlyn headed back to college and Ambrose drove down with me to San Jose to help me move in. In addition to the Steinbeck Fellowship, I’d received a large and prestigious “portable” fellowship from an East Coast foundation that came with no strings attached, so I could use anywhere. Nevertheless, even with the money from both fellowships, I would still barely be able to cover my living expenses in San Jose. With the development of Silicon Valley, Santa Clara County’s cost of living was among the highest in the nation.

I would be living right downtown, just around the corner from the university. I had lived in small towns for most of my adult life. It had been thirty-seven years since I’d left Southern California. Even though Redondo Beach was just fourteen miles from downtown Los Angeles, it had felt like a different world. The only time we had ventured there when I was a girl was when my parents took us to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion to see the ballet or the “L.A. Phil,” as they called it. The thought of being in the middle of the city for the first time in decades filled me with trepidation.