III. Trip to Eagle

The town of Eagle is at the end of a long gravel road, euphemistically called the Taylor Highway.  It is reputedly the worst, most dangerous road in Alaska.  There is a popular bumper sticker that says, " I survived the Taylor highway. " The road winds up and around through dramatic scenery, dangerous gravel pits and bumps, torturous winding curves, and sheer drop-offs into deep canyons, for about five hours coming from the Tok- junction cut-off.  The single other point of civilization is the town of chicken, situated about halfway between Tok and Eagle; it boasts the only commercial gas station on the Taylor highway.  People in Eagle buy gas for their Chevy pickups and 1982 Datsuns from a guy who sells it from tin cans in the back of his truck.   The Taylor Highway isn't even open to automobile traffic for six months out of the year, since plowing the road would be prohibitively expensive; so most people go back and forth to Eagle in the mail plane, a Piper Cub two-seater, which makes two trips a week from the air strip in Tok—this is how Tina got there the first time. 

The deal was she got to stay, rent free, in a one-room attic apartment, with no heat, no water, and no electricity, in exchange for doing two or three hours a day of work in the Historical Society office putting their records in order, organizing tourist materials, and going through their archive of old letters and legal documents. She  agreed to stay for about a month.  She told me it was a chance to  experience firsthand the type of rugged subsistence lifestyle her ancestors had lived in the early days of Alaska.  She was always big on getting the feel of the subject before she wrote about it.  I was disappointed that she was going to be away for another month, but I was trying to be supportive of her work, and I was hoping desperately that this quiet isolated place would finally inspire her to write something.  

Her insomnia had settled into a somewhat stable pattern: basically she stayed  up for about three days with practically no sleep, then she would collapse and live in a daze  for the rest of the week.  This had been going on, and getting worse, for several years, but I thought nothing of it because I knew of many historical figures who also slept very little and accomplished amazing things.  For instance, I had heard that Einstein slept only two or three hours a day his whole life;  on second thought, I don't know if this is actually true,  but I have another friend, and a composer from New York, who also sleeps very little, so I thought Tina's erratic sleep habits were a function of character, I didn't know that she was sinking deeper and deeper into the manic phase but of a bipolar episode.  I liked to think of us both having  eccentric personality traits in common with the great geniuses of history and I romanticized our symptomatic behavior like a novelist coining interesting characters,  not like a doctor observing very very sick people.  

I actually had many lovely phone conversations with her from  Eagle; she said she was having a very good time there, and that she was developing a kind of notorious reputation in the small town because she could be seen lurking about  in the middle of the night, therefore becoming an appropriate topic of small-town gossip.   She told me about regular meetings in the gray midnight sun  with a three legged dog,  and conflagrations of ravens gathered about  spots of road kill, like witches at a coffee klatch, who eyed her rude intrusion with suspicion from the road, then spoke to her of cabbages and kings from treetops above the town.  She spoke of the river still frozen, and the wind above the spruce, as it whispered dark anomalies of dead Indians.  She slipped along the icy banks in her brown boots,  and shared undisclosed unsung histories with the earth, with the sky, with the foggy gray, and felt her soul, her essence of body intermingled   with the message of the mist and the mud. 

She seemed tired, but peaceful; I only worried that she was not getting enough to eat, because she told me stories of living for three days on a box of saltine crackers, or coming home with a napkin full of leftovers from a Sunday potluck.  Although our long conversations about her experiences in the north, made me ache for her, I got a sense of satisfaction from knowing that she was at least calm and somewhat positive.  I do not remember having one desperate, hysterical phone conversation with her the whole time she was an Eagle, although I had many such phone calls from many other places. 

[ It may not be inappropriate, at this point, to mention how deeply in love I am and will always be with my wife.  It was with amazement every day that I rediscovered that this magnificent woman had chosen me;  every morning held fresh astonishments that this person, who seemed strange and new every time I met her, was truly mine. I had set out early in life to find a woman who was my artistic equal, because I thought only a great artist could understand another great artist.  I met her when she was only 17 and it is to my credit that I recognized at such an early stage the incipient genius  that was to achieve such  a glorious flowering by middle age.  

Yes, she was beautiful, and that was a nice part of the package; but she was so much more and became so much more with each passing year, that  I was daily overwhelmed by my incredible luck at finding someone so completely able to take in the vastness of me, and, in spite of my eccentric, antic,  totally bonkers behavior, to understand me, to appreciate me, and to love me.  She knew that that she herself was very hard to live with  because of her moods, her irritability, her constant nagging criticism of me, and her relentless self doubt and  unreasoning self-hatred; but I knew I was hard to live with too, and I figured that's just the way artists had to live, a la La Boheme, and, although I was always  a little bit glad to see her go on one of her trips, after about two to three weeks I began to experience a hole in my gut, an emptiness, a longing which, after four weeks, began to develop into a physical pain which only her physical presence could assuage.  It was as though a piece of me, a vital organ, were missing from my body, and the dissipation of that missing liver or kidney began to manifest in somatic symptoms. They say that  people who are spiritually connected have an actual strand of astral material bonding them; that, after some length of separation, that string of neutrinos begins to stretch and separate, causing intense physical distress. Thus, loved ones parted by death, feel that separation in their bodies, not just in their minds; and so it was that I suffered from Tina's absence, comforted only by the thought that it would be over soon, and she would be in my arms once again; that the missing part of myself would be restored, and I could function once again as a whole, albeit damaged, human being.

You must understand that for the First 20 Years of our lives we never spent more than a week two apart, so it was not until this year will that I really understood how deeply I loved her, and how much I needed her.  I thought, in spite of all our worldly miseries, that, as she herself had said in our wedding vows, we had met some place essential and agreed, and that none of the legion of mundane disappointments and frustrations could touch that center of our combined beings. Perhaps people with asperger's feel too much, assume too much, say too little, and regret more than it is possible to regret. I was soon to count the shards of my broken heart on the rocks of the Taylor Highway, and it was all too much, but it was all fair--more of this is to come.]

 All the time she was in Eagle, I was concerned about her, as if some presentiment of disaster were hanging over us, but I got precious little report; she hated me nosing into her head state uninvited, so I figured no news was good news.  One of the symptoms of our marriage's dysfunction was that I was not allowed to question her about her mental condition; as I mentioned before, my idea of marriage was that we were one being absorbed one into the other, sharing each other's successes and defeats, and privy to all each other's secrets.  Tina didn't see it that way at all; she demanded privacy on many levels: she hated me reading over her shoulder as she wrote e-mail's, she hated leaving the bathroom door open, it was hell trying to get her to tell me how much she had paid for certain thing so I could balance the checkbook, but most of all she could not share in my music making, and would not share her process of writing with me, although on many occasions I bailed her out of the deadline crunch by organizing material, typing out documents from longhand copies, and Xeroxing paperwork to be sent out in 45 minutes.

She told me many cute stories of the backwoods clans in Eagle, including retired Califonia hippies, families of fundamentalist Christians living 5 miles from the road,   and two days before she left,  of  a hermit fur trapper named  Dan Tucker, who earned his  living during   the summer fighting fires.  She told me of a midnight boat ride she took down the river with  him,  of his charming solitary ways, and of his dirt floor shack.  To break the suspense, I may as well tell you now with that she fell in love with Dan Tucker,  and slept with him her last night in Eagle (although she lied to me, at first, and said she did NOT sleep with him until several months later).  Anyway, it was because of him that the most difficult trial of our lives began.