“But not till you get that body damage tidied up,” Tad murmured.
“And you don’t want to spend all of your time in the truck,” Judy went on, as though she hadn’t heard him. “A walking routine will help you get rid of this. I’ll help you design an exercise program.” She actually poked my belly with her astronaut’s fingers. Tad’s eyes were amused. His mustache twitched.
“Does she like me or what?” I whispered when she had moved out of hearing distance.
“Judy doesn’t have time for small talk,” he said.
The thug behind the counter and I arranged a trade-in on the Honda, and I wrote a check for the balance. When I drove away from Unity in my new truck, the Lab stood in the bed, legs wide on either side of his stocky body, as if he had chosen me for something. We bounced up the driveway, through the fence of peeled stakes, and I stopped just before turning onto the highway, at the sign that said Open. I looked in the mirror as the dog gathered himself and leaped out, sailed over the tailgate. He trotted back to his weird and dingy domain. Disappointed, I turned onto the highway.
But delight quickly returned: to have wheels again! My truck and my newspaper were back on the scene. That’s how I saw it at the time, but there’s another way to see things—the Ranger and the Mercury were decorations in the margin of the old map of Fairbanks. Like a little cherub or a wind god, cheeks puffed, blowing curls of smoke.
FIVE
THAT WINTER A FAIRBANKS LEGISLATOR DOWN in Juneau proposed opening up the state forest near Fairbanks for logging and timber processing. He hit on the idea of offering twenty-year concessions to large timber companies from outside the state. You could not have predicted the outcry. That bill in the Alaska State Senate became an unexpected rallying point for Fairbanksans of every political view.
In spite of our dwindling oil royalties, lack of revenue, and refusal to pay an income tax, most of those who spoke up in response to this proposal—a real assortment of people for a change, not at all the usual suspects—soundly repudiated it. Our trees are so marginal, the senator claimed, and our location so remote, that in order to attract capital we need to offer a real attractive package. For reasons that weren’t clear to me, most people in Fairbanks—going by public testimony and letters to the editor, that is—did not buy this. They found the argument unacceptable.
Over the coldest months of winter, we followed this bill as it worked its way through the senate.
The big daily came down hard in favor of timber concessions and pushed for the bill’s passing. Their editor even came up with the weird premise that logging would result in “stable habitat for some of our more edible wildlife such as moose and hares.”
Hares? I circled that one with a Sharpie and gave it to our cartoonist. Poor sucker, I thought, trying to bulk out a sentence, we’ve all been there. Whoever wrote that sentence knew it lacked a balanced set of vocables. Edible wildlife, he wrote, struggling already, such as moose…and, and what? What else is there, that’s not a predator? Can’t say beaver or muskrat; so he grabbed at hares.
“To be starvin’ on rabbits up there,’” Felix sang, after seeing that comment. He knew a lot of songs.
“Which of your Irish poets is that, Felix?”
“Not Irish. Robert Service. He’s very popular back home.”
I chuckled. “Thought it would be like that in Alaska? The deep deathlike valleys and all that?”
I should have known better. Never get a poet started. Felix began to declaim.
“The Wanderlust has lured me to the seven lonely seas, Has dumped me on the tailing-piles of dearth…’ Everyone else in my family went to New York, but I wanted to see Alaska.”
“Not like in the poems, is it?”
“But I didn’t expect it to be,” he said, prompt and mild as always. Not disappointed in the least.
Gayle went down to the public teleconferences to cover the local uproar over this bill, and I joined a number of Fairbanksans on a two-day trip to Juneau, where they lobbied against it, and another legislator proposed an alternative: salvage sales of those acres known to be foredoomed, somehow, to loss through wildfire or insect infestation.
“That would be the whole damned forest!” shrieked a forestry professor in the hallway outside the senate, actually jumping up and down in frustration.
Back home we sat down in the newsroom to divvy up our tasks.
“So many people oppose this bill around here,” I said. “It’s not falling out into the usual factions. It’s kind of wonderful. We have to show that.”
“The time isn’t right for a bill like this. We aren’t there yet,” said No.
“Not yet?”
“Gus, this is terrific, this hue and cry, but don’t get stars in your eyes. The big problem is that the giveaway is too obvious. Logging will come, but it has to be more subtle.”
“No, what a cynic you’ve become. I don’t completely agree.”
“Wood is in short supply, it’s become a limited resource, I think. If we have something here that big companies want, they will find a way to get it when they really need it.”
“Wood is in short supply,” I repeated. “That’s an interesting idea. No one else is saying that, are they. The daily, the folks down in Juneau…they’re all talking about the forest like it’s endless.”
“As endless as the plains and the buffalo,” said Noreen.
“So Felix, why don’t you give us a sidebar on that idea. How does Alaska’s chunk of northern forest stack up, to what’s left worldwide?”
“Circumpolar,” said Noreen. “Say circumpolar, not northern.”
I looked around, proud of my staff, and saw Gayle gazing over my shoulder, frowning, looking a little sad.
“Gayle?” I said, and then thought: don’t bark at her, Gus, damn it. You don’t own these guys. You’re not paying them a living wage. Her quietness—I always rushed in too soon.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I can’t figure it out. Maybe, like you said, there are too many angles. This is real hard to understand.”
I waited a minute before saying, “What do you mean, Gayle? What are we missing?”
“Seems to me,” she said, “a few years ago when we were harvesting mushrooms and spruce cones and things, working with people who didn’t have any capital at all, the forest still provided a living. When I was growing up, it was the best part. It’s a mystery to me that people could consider selling it off—selling their own home. It’s been providing a living to my family for generations, and it—it works. The forest itself, works beautifully. Of course,” she added, “my own Native corporation is already logging.”
We sat silent for a minute, slightly uncomfortable. What do you do with such a comment? It occurred to me that there had to be a wealth of knowledge about this forest, even scientific knowledge, imbedded in the Athabascan language and in the soft speech and odd timing of the Athabascan villagers. How do we include it in the legislative debate? It’s not possible, is it? Most often bringing up something labeled Native ways of knowing means that other people in the room turn off their ears, head out for popcorn, or go to the bathroom. It’s time to stop listening, because Native ways of knowing—that’s treated as halftime entertainment, up here. It is not the main ball game. These thoughts came to me in the silence that followed Gayle’s remark.
We had to bring it into the main ball game. That’s what we should do. That’s what the Mercury could do. Somehow.
“Gayle,” I said, “when you’re at the public hearings and listening to the testimony, listen for the different points of view. Go after a few people and talk to them. It doesn’t seem like enough, does it?”
“No,” she said. “I’ll call the senator from Rampart, too. I know she’s opposed to it.”
As the weeks went by, we covered the issue from so many angles, week by week, that I began to dream of a Pulitzer, or at least an Alaska Press Club citation. I selected quotes from citizen testimony to highlight and box throughout the news pages. I no
ticed, however, that we did not get nearly as many letters to the editor as the daily, and that bothered me. It seemed to indicate a thinner readership, a lack of involvement, even though newsstands sold out and subscriptions went up.
When I went over the books I found that our income was not going up by a substantial amount, either. Not enough to cover the increased delivery expenses, my low-budget trip to Juneau, long distance charges, too much art on the inside pages. That would have to stop.
I traced the figures and found a drop in advertising sales. What the hell is this?
In addition to writing for us, Gayle had followed up her advertising accounts, and a new kid from the journalism department, a Randy something, was supposedly hustling new ads. But this did not look good. By God, here was a little flurry of cancellations. What’s going on?
I felt a childish panic, like when you step out a bit too far in the lake and the deep water is suddenly cold.
In the spring we’d get twenty-five thousand from the borough for proofing and publishing the borough foreclosure list and distributing it with every copy and then some. That was our inexhaustible cow. We could certainly hold on. Look at all these bills that I could delay, just a bit, here and there, maybe overlap payments.
Canceled advertising accounts—I’d rather see a bear in my driveway. Two restaurants, an insurance company, a furniture store, and an automobile alignment place that I knew to be rabidly right wing—maybe they were fed up with our political drift of late, however they saw it. I’d get on this Randy kid to see what’s up.
I asked Gayle if she had any idea why they canceled. “‘We’ve come to believe that the paper is not what our customers read,’” she repeated. “That’s what the one fellow said. Do you want me to—”
“Oh, Gayle, no, you’re doing plenty.” I felt so strongly about this that my hand went out and gripped her bare forearm, briefly, and a shock went through me. It was just meant to be a gesture. But the palm of my hand was suddenly loaded with sensors: the warmth of her arm, the tendons, the hard oblique shape of it, the exact width from narrow to the wrist, widening toward the elbow—suddenly the palm of my hand took a reading that I could have used to find Gayle in a crowd.
I removed my hand and looked at her. Her eyes, with that same light, deep inside, were as reserved and expectant as always. Yes, what is it, she could have been saying or thinking, nothing more. I didn’t know. I didn’t get the clues.
The timber concessions bill passed the Alaska Senate and headed to the House, and the storm escalated. Gayle tallied the speakers at every public hearing, talked to the legislative information office, and told me that testimony was running five to one against this legislation; but the Republican senators remained convinced that a “silent majority” supported the bill.
“Not a whole lot of thinking is going on down there,” Noreen raged. “There are not even any costs listed in this bill. What, do they expect it’s all gain, no expense whatsoever? Don’t they know the least thing about human nature?”
“It’s standard procedure to minimize the negative when it comes to a pet project,” I said, and thought, zero expense, all benefits: like Gus Traynor taking over the Mercury. “Even businessmen can forget about things, No. That’s human nature for you.”
I’d forgotten about Dr. Leasure’s view, too, so one afternoon when Gayle and I left the Department of Natural Resources, after a public hearing, and headed back to the office, I was astounded to see the transformation that had taken place on the clear-cut since October. Dozens, maybe fifty or sixty, little tourist cabins, like fancy storage sheds, stood cheek by jowl on the spot. We couldn’t stop, but we stared from the highway bridge and I slowed the truck. Row after row of unfinished cabins sheathed in pink insulation were lined up from the highway access road down to the river’s edge. The lookout resembled nothing so much as an enlightened camp for migrant labor, a happy stop for road-weary travelers like those in The Grapes of Wrath.
The setting sun turned the whole scene a creamy pink, the sunset and the insulation both casting something like alpenglow. How strange to see beauty in these altered acres, this artificial set. That was it—a movie set without the movie. Action to be provided by the customers.
I looked at Gayle, and she pressed her mouth together firmly so that her tattoo lines rippled.
Compared to the tremendous energy of disposable income, of investment capital or whatever that flows across Alaska, what’s a weekly paper? I thought. We have to stay alive. We can’t come down on our best patrons for minor offenses. Who’s going to watchdog the big problems?
“Tourism is the future,” I muttered. “They need somewhere to sleep, those people.”
“What you get used to,” said Gayle. Blunt, not explaining herself. I didn’t ask her to explain, either.
Instead, I threw a meal at the problem. When we got back to the Mercury I coaxed her next door to the Palate for a vegetarian burrito. In the parking lot of the sporting goods store, we studied a huge ice carving of a man and a dog skijoring. Ice art, excuse me, not ice carving. The skier bulged with crystal muscles. The dog leaped forward against the towline.
Now there was an idea. Why not take a short break from this forestry activism and get on down to the World Ice Art championships next week? Gayle could get Jack inside the Ice Park with her press pass. A dose of beauty would cheer us up. Jack would love all those medieval fantasies made larger than life. Tad Suliman had bragged that Judy Finch was carving a griffin; I said I couldn’t remember what a griffin was, and he admitted to the same ignorance.
“I didn’t tell her, but I went to the library and looked it up,” he said. “Body of a lion, head and front claws of an eagle. Soon as I saw the picture I remembered. Alice in Wonderland.”
“A soft topic, not hard news,” I said to Gayle over our lunch. “But we owe it to ourselves. Ice art sells copies, too.”
“Jack would like that,” she agreed. “I don’t let him roam around much.” Did she look a little stressed?
“It must be very difficult sometimes. How is everything going?” I said.
“It’s not like when we were kids and on our own all the time. I can’t let that happen, especially not these days, in Fairbanks. Too dangerous. I’m on him like a hawk. I’m sure that’s not good for him, Mom hovering all the time. But I can’t bear to take a chance. I know what can happen.”
I had no knowledge of this—how it would be to watch out for someone else.
“What I see, Gayle, I think you’re doing a good job with a tough situation.”
“It’s not so tough. But it’s a little crowded at my house right now. My cousin moved out from Allakaket to stay with us for a bit, and she’s still a kid. She likes to have a good time—doesn’t have that out of her system yet. It makes me very nervous…I know it’s important for Jack to have these ties to the village, but she’s not the kind of girl you want to look after your children, either.”
“Can she stay somewhere else?”
“I don’t want to push her out. Eventually, she will.”
“Gayle, are you overloaded? Don’t let this get to be too much for you,” I said.
She finished her burrito, scraped up the last of the sauce and the cheese, licked her fork.
“I like to keep busy,” she said, “while I’m thinking about things. I like myself better, when I’m working.”
With that remark, a door slid partway open. I didn’t know what to say in response, but it seemed I’d been invited to know her a little bit better.
I paid for the lunch and we walked back to the office, past the skijoring pair, taking our time.
SIX
THE NEXT FRIDAY, THE FIRST MORNING OF the big-block competition, Gayle and I went down to the Ice Park, where she intended to interview the sculptors at work. She would take Jack with her on Saturday, using her press credential.
An ice arch greeted us in front of the main gate; we walked through it into a shoulder-high labyrinth built of snow blocks, like the walls
of a Canadian igloo, which spilled us out onto the main thoroughfare of the park. Halogen lights behind colored lenses cast exotic colors onto an ice castle.
Cat drivers like Tad Suliman had spent the past week getting two- and four-ton blocks of ice into place. In just a few minutes, when the competition began, carvers would work against the clock—seventy hours from start to finish—to create scenes that would last only three days to three weeks, depending on the weather. Last year, one team carved a few baseball players, and the slim, tapered baseball bat softened and drooped down to the ground after only a couple of days’ exposure to sunlight, even while the slugger waited for the pitch, as solid as ever. Blue tarps now shielded works in progress from solar radiation, although this morning it was perfect weather for carving: ten degrees.
We were standing next to a Russian team as the buzzer sounded. A carver attacked his tower of blocks with a rotary drill, and after a couple of minutes he was covered in white crystals, from eyebrows to beard, a thick mask built up of the powder that flew back from his drill.
I was in a rare, perfect mood: I came here to be tickled, to be astounded, by the things that happen when an artist’s ideas take shape, and Gayle Kenneally walked alongside me, in her calico parka and diamond-patterned mukluks. A field trip like this was dessert for a newspaperman. I put timber legislation and unpaid bills to one side. Time to enjoy living in Fairbanks, I thought.
The emerging creatures around me were transparent. The clarity of pond ice from Fairbanks was world-famous, even being shipped to competitions in Canada and Minnesota. I reminded Gayle to include that in her story.
A team from Sapporo, in matching red snowsuits, used small chain saws to make their first cuts. Handsome Kazakhs stood smoking, while one man chipped and scraped, checked his drawings, chipped some more. Another team had set their design on top of a sawhorse: it was a large rubber cricket. Or was that a good luck token?
Poets talk about April being the month of despair and insanity, but up here I wonder if it might actually be March. The days are getting a little longer, but the cold nights and dirty snow are saying, “not yet, not yet.” Maybe that’s where this crazy creative impulse comes from, this ice carving. Maybe it’s a subtle little madness that comes from spending too much time in winter’s featureless landscape.
Correcting the Landscape Page 6
