Asylum--Chapter Twenty-two Epilogue

Chapter Twenty-two
Epilogue

Nine months after I’d moved to Eagle, I returned to Washington to get some of my belongings. In the basement of our house were boxes and boxes of letters going back thirty years. What was I going to do with them all? I picked one box at random to sort. It was filled with letters from the 1970s and ‘80s, everything from the chatty notes my mother wrote me when I was away at college to cards from friends congratulating me on the birth of our first child. To my surprise, there was a single typewritten sheet, which I’d composed one boring day in my high school typing class and had apparently forgotten to give to Moana. It was from our Rocky Mountain High period when she and I had written long letters to each other, fantasizing about our future life in Colorado, gamboling in the meadows and rafting the rivers with all our cool friends. Oddly, this one was not about Colorado at all.

 The letter detailed the journey my imaginary boyfriend and I took, looking for somewhere to settle. Colorado wasn’t wild enough for us, anymore. We checked out Montana and then British Columbia and Alberta, but still we were pulled farther north. It wasn’t until we hit the border of Alaska and Yukon Territory that we found the perfect place—a little town situated against a bluff. I described a wide, flat valley filled with wildflowers and snow-capped mountains in the distance. There were many Natives (or “Indians” as I called them in the letter) in the community, and I was making my living writing about local people and events.

I had no memory of writing the letter, nor no knowledge then of a place called Eagle. And yet the similarities between my dream future as a teenager and my present-day reality were uncanny. Eagle sits in a broad river valley at the base of a huge rock outcropping. Through the woods, it is only two miles from the Canadian border. In summer, wild roses and fireweed bloom everywhere and snow lasts on the far-away mountains in Yukon Territory well into summer. Han Athabaskans make up a good portion of the population. The serenity of Eagle had even given me back my ability to write, and at the time I found the letter, I was, indeed, writing a column for the Anchorage newspaper about local characters and small happenings in my daily life.

Across the Yukon River, not a half mile from our cabin, Eagle Creek flowed into the broader body of water, merging and flowing north. And the name of my long-ago imagined home? Eagle Creek.

In the years to come, my knowledge and understanding of life in the north deepened. Mine was not the same experience of the more adventurous people in Eagle, who ventured far into the wilderness. Reverting to the homebody I’d always been, I became strongly attached to the cabin in our little clearing, which became a world of its own. 

My youthful fantasies had never included the bald realities of living without electricity or running water, breathing air so cold it could frostbite your lungs, or dealing with swarms of mosquitoes that could drive even caribou insane. But I no longer romanticized either Eagle or Alaska, recognizing the good along with bad and accepting them both. It took time to adjust to life in the bush, and I eventually learned how to can salmon, raise a garden, whittle spoons from diamond willow, and hunt for grouse with a .22. I got the hang of buying six months’ worth of food on our twice-yearly trips to Fairbanks. 

The first winter, as I struggled to adapt to my new surroundings, I asked myself, “Can I do this? Can I bear the cold and dark? Can I learn everything I need to do to survive here?” Eagle was a place of extremes—severe cold, unbearable heat, long distances, terrible roads, deep isolation. Life here was inconvenient, arduous, often uncomfortable and sometimes scary. As Billy had once said, “Everything is hard when you’re this far.” “Far from what?” I’d wondered. Now I knew. During occasional low points, it seemed like nothing but hardship and privation. But I told myself it was an exercise in learning to do without. How much did one really need, anyway? I found the answer: remarkably little.

The second winter, I realized that “Yes, I can survive here.” I was growing in competence and confidence in this challenging environment. Muscles I never knew I had grew stronger from hauling wood and water. Whenever I put on my dirty, well-worn work gloves, I knew the rewards of doing honest labor. 

Although it was a struggle for me when the thermometer plunged to fifty below and the sun did not rise above the mountaintops for a month, the winter held gratifications of its own. On clear, moonless nights, the multitude of stars reflecting on the snow was so bright we didn’t need headlamps. Going to the outhouse in the middle of the night was not something to dread, but a chance to look up and see bands of green light shooting across the sky. It was not always easy living in close quarters—privacy was a thing of the past—but Billy and I spent many snug evenings in the loft lying on a pile of caribou skins, reading out loud to each other. And when spring finally came, I felt I’d earned another notch on my belt for making it through another winter. 

In summer, night and day merged into one months-long dreamtime. There was no particular time for dinner or gardening, breakfast or bed. Our lives continued at all hours, and we wore ourselves out playing and working til we fell asleep with our clothes on like children who’ve stayed up long past their bedtime. On hot days, we took turns lying in the hammock in the shade: I stared straight up into my favorite birch at the leaves fluttering against the blue sky and listened to the birds; Billy sat rocking with a beer and our cat, Bitty, on his lap. We skinny dipped in warm ponds and the cold Yukon. Billy replaced his aluminum canoe with a sturdy wooden boat he built himself, and it took us far downriver where we visited friends and explored islands covered with fragrant wild sweet peas. On a few memorable nights, we stood by the open window and listened to wolves howling, the sound echoing down Eagle Creek. 

Gathering blueberries on the tundra was an absorbing way to spend an August afternoon, and when September came, there were cranberries to pick in the woods. As cold weather approached, people in town called to each other, “You ready for winter yet?” And, with a full larder and many cords of wood stacked in the yard, it was a pleasure to say, “Yes, yes we are.” Eating what we caught, hunted, gathered, or grew was deeply satisfying, and I came to enjoy caribou, moose, and bear more than store-bought meat. The steady routine and unhurried pace of our days restored my emotional equilibrium to a level I hadn’t experienced in years. I made close friends and regained my enjoyment of music singing harmony with them at community events.

And the most treasured thing of all: Silence. While out for a walk, I would stop in the middle of the road so the gravel ceased crunching underfoot, or I would pause in the middle of the woods so the snow no longer squeaked beneath my boots, and I would stand there, just listening, listening to the silence.

It never ceased to amaze me that my long-held dream of living close to nature had been realized. The woods, the river, and the mountains became intertwined around my heart. My obsession with Alaska had yielded results beyond my expectations, though it had come at great cost. Whenever I felt too old to start over and handle life in the bush, I thought of my grandmother’s example. If she could do it at age sixty-two, I told myself, then I could do it at age forty-eight. When they moved from Thimbleberry Island to Sitka in 1965, Smokey wrote, “We left the island with no regrets. We’ve proved what we wanted—that we could meet the challenges of the wilderness at our age.” Eagle was its own kind of island, and I was lucky enough to have washed up on its shore. I had found what I was looking for this far north, and I had proved I could survive the trials not only of Alaska, but of life itself.

Although it was painful to be far from my sons, both geographically and emotionally, they eventually stopped being angry with me, and we found our way back to each other. I re-established contact with Thomas, happy to have him back in my life. We shared an unbreakable bond of mutual affection born of our long years together and the connection through our children. He had come to love his life in Taiga. Alaska had wrought its magic on him, too, he said.

Billy continued to be kind, considerate, and full of gratitude, experiencing a kind of contentment he’d never known before. He described our romantic idyll in his peaceful cabin as living in “a golden bubble.” Indeed it was, as we shared our splendid seclusion from the world. Life went on, little changed, and I learned to live wholly in the present, concerned with the things that mattered: shelter, food, warmth, and above all, love.

END