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.