Four Quarters of Light

by Brian Keenan

  Audrey saw the drawbacks that I impatiently dismissed. Staying in the cabin meant fetching our own water, and if there was no running water that of course meant there was no flushing toilet. A neatly constructed log outhouse with an acceptable chemical toilet and mechanical shower for which you could pump waste water from a storage tank and heat it by compressor seemed perfectly adequate to me, but my wife and mother of two children had reservations and frowned on my enthusiasm.

  I could see her point. The place was, in fact, in chaos. My forays around Fairbanks had confirmed to me that there was an excusable slovenliness about Alaskan homesteads. The front yards or back plots of most were littered with the detritus of several winters. Carcasses of old cars and trucks, some of which would make a vintage collector’s mouth water, were strewn here and there. Snow machines in various stages of disrepair seemed obligatory. Coils and coils of rusted chain and bright orange or blue nylon rope of varying thicknesses lay like somnolent snakes among the wreckage. Piles of blue tarpaulin that had been intended to protect some of this ‘gear’ from the winter snow had been blown into corners where they served no useful purpose. Snow tyres and winter wheels were stacked in short, squat columns. Stockpiles of lumber waiting for an intended or unfinished addition to the cabin were commonplace. And everywhere boxes and boxes and more boxes of God knows what. Snow shoes and skis, life belts and buoyancy jackets; aluminium canoes and deflated rubber rafts – the proliferation of stuff was interminable and every home had its own peculiar and unique collection. I loved these fabulous accumulations and played games imagining who might live in such a place. I had once queried this phenomenon with Pat, and she’d explained it with simple logic: ‘In Alaska you need a lot of stuff.’

  ‘But what about the things that are either completely obsolete or beyond repair?’ I persisted.

  ‘Well, the permafrost doesn’t allow us to dig great rubbish tips so we stockpile it. You see, most Alaskans believe that even the most useless piece of equipment will some day find a purpose, or that someone else will find something to do with whatever it is.’

  I couldn’t argue with that and I didn’t want to: these ‘middens’ were a place of endless fascination.

  ‘Do you know,’ she continued, ‘that the most popular place at the weekend is the district dump? People meet up there every Sunday just to see who doesn’t want what, and to exchange rubbish. There is always somebody who will need something that I don’t, and vice versa. Makes sense, doesn’t it? And another thing: few people up here lock their doors.’

  When I looked at her quizzically she explained that there were lots of stories of people getting lost or having a breakdown in the below-freezing temperatures and they had had their lives or their extremities saved from frostbite by finding an open cabin.

  ‘What about valuables?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, not a lot of people have valuables in the sense you mean, and in any case, if your open door has just saved someone’s life or even their fingers or feet, they simply aren’t thinking about stealing from you, are they?’ The pragmatic simplicity of Pat’s explanations to my questions became a trait of hers.

  As I sat on the raised porch that provided a sheltered entrance to our dacha I wondered at the skeletal trees all around us. They seemed greener than I had seen them a few days ago. Maybe it was because there was less snow and more light, or maybe it was because I was actually taking time to absorb rather than just looking and taking notes – or maybe I was already finding the boreal forest less intimidating now that I’d actually moved into it and become part of it. I could imagine this place in the autumn, the declining sunlight and the glistening tinge of frost creating its own kind of Halloween. All around me the tamaracks, alder birches and willows would send up amber and golden flares clarioning the winter; in the undergrowth, blueberries, cranberries and kinnikinnik bushes flaming red, amber, gold, salmon pink and high bright yellow. It would be a sea of glowing fire before the soft white mantle of frost and snow extinguished them. Amid such a vista you could excuse the black spruce its wretchedness. I looked around me again. Yes, everywhere the green serge of summer seemed to be bleeding out of the woodlands. Beyond that the winter silence of the sub-Arctic horizon lay motionless, waiting.

  I was more than a little content with my cabin in the woods. I breathed in the air, intoxicated. In the outskirts of my imagination I was beginning to see more than my eyes uncovered. My thoughts were an elixir, fulsome and seductive. ‘Oh, what I could do here!’ I thought, and this was immediately followed by an avalanche of excited ideas and projects. In this welter of selfindulgence I began to wish that I had left my family behind and that I could remain here by myself creating my own perfect world in my beehive of a cabin. Wilderness to the creative mind is like a blank canvas to a painter: it is full of possibilities. Here is perfect peace and absolute freedom; here too may be the prologue of melancholy or bliss. In the wilderness, there are no ready-made roads; you make your own and go where you choose. I loved this undeclared absence of prohibition.

  I thought of Chris McCandless and his fatal walk in the wild. My wife was correct: in my youth I was very like him. His rapture with London, Thoreau and the mysticism of nature was my own, and even now I felt it. But age tempers you. That crackling static of reality short-circuits your dreams more and more.

  The next morning Pat arrived with a companion following her in another vehicle. They parked at the end of the path and picked their way through the muck towards the cabin.

  ‘I brought someone I think you should meet,’ Pat announced.

  There was a hint of Inuit about the woman. Her face was round and almost copper-coloured, her hair long, straight and shiny black. Before Pat could say more, the woman introduced herself. ‘Hello, my name’s Debra Chesnut. I’ll be your guide when you head north to visit with the Eskimos.’

  There are times when seemingly insignificant events, such as a casual introduction, open up doors to the most intriguing and scary panoramas. This was one of those moments, but I barely felt the tremor of it.

  ‘I am sorry,’ she continued, ‘I really have to rush off, but we should meet up soon, to discuss travel arrangements and other things.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ I said. ‘Patricia has spoken to me about you.’

  Jack and Cal were nagging at me to be taken inside, and Debra turned and walked away without saying another word to me or anyone else.

  ‘Call me,’ I shouted after her, a little anxious and embarrassed at the brevity of our encounter.

  ‘I will, soon,’ she said, turning her head in my direction. Her voice was soft and confident, as if she had already determined to do what I had only just asked her. And then she was gone. Pat was also in a hurry and explained that she had brought Debra along just to ensure that we wouldn’t be strangers when we met to arrange travel details. Then she, too, was gone.

  We waved to Pat as she roared her old Plymouth down the rutted track that led to our cabin and quickly tumbled inside. The blast of heat from the log oven was instantaneous and we all slumped onto the sofa. Cal was soon asleep, and Jack wouldn’t be long behind him. Within minutes we had both lads snuggly wrapped up in their beds.

  Over the last cup of coffee, Audrey and I discussed how the long hours of daylight confuse the senses. Your mind seems to be fooled and remains constantly in daylight mode, and then suddenly weariness slams into you. I loved this constant light and the cabin we were in seemed to energize the sleep out of me. After a brief discussion about some of the people we had met and our plans for the next day Audrey surrendered to the demands of sleep, but I wanted to sit up and see if there was any noticeable difference between the end of night and first light. I couldn’t discern any noticeable change, and after a while I too went to bed, thinking about Debra and another woman, Jane Haig, whom Pat had arranged for me to meet.

  Jane was a community activist with strong liberal views. She had all the makings of a politician, and when she told me about her book Women of the Yukon, a c
ollection of biographical vignettes on famous females from Alaska’s pioneer era, and about how the real economy of the redeveloping frontier was more due to feminine enterprise than to macho exploitation, I was intrigued. But when she confessed that she hadn’t always been a writer and was in fact a house builder – not, she emphasized, an architect – everything seemed to fall into place.

  I talked to her about the fascinating array of different homes I had seen and suggested that maybe that was part of the attraction of the place. Building your own home with your own hands and taking most of the material from the land itself is, I supposed, everyone’s dream at one time or another. She agreed. There were few rules or regulations and no planning permission to be obtained, and that inspired lots of people. Sometimes, she thought, living here reopened other doors in ourselves. ‘Everyone can be something of a visionary up here and it can sustain you for a very long time.’ She hesitated briefly, then continued with her voice lowered, almost sighing out the words. ‘But nothing lasts for ever.’

  I looked at her and wondered if today’s women in Alaska had inherited the spirit of the women in her book.

  ‘They were quite singular women and it was a very different time,’ she said. ‘I suppose there’s a bit of them in all of us who came here.’

  Jane seemed unsure so I redirected the question to her. ‘Well, how do you feel after a quarter of a century?’

  She answered without hesitation. ‘Oh, I think I’m slowly turning into a snowbird.’

  I was puzzled. ‘A snowbird?’

  Jane smiled and explained how sooner or later the ‘SADs’ got everyone in Alaska. I spoke English, but I was having trouble understanding her. Snowbirds and SADs were beyond me. ‘Seasonal affective disorder,’ she explained. ‘When the long winter dark sets in, so does depression. Everyone up here suffers from it one way or another, but particularly women.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘Biology,’ she answered. ‘The prolonged darkness really affects women’s irritation levels, and women’s lives are more enclosed here anyway.’

  I noticed she emphasized the word ‘enclosed’. ‘How?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, most women’s lives here are involved with looking after the home and kids and spending a lot of time preparing for the winter. Hunting, shooting and fishing is not a big part of a woman’s psychology, so they can’t get out from the pressures of the dark.’ She hesitated again. ‘Unless she becomes a snowbird – someone who migrates out of Alaska for the winter months and returns when the worst is over. But “snowbird” is a term of mild abuse up here.’

  ‘Why? Birds migrate, animals hibernate, or migrate themselves. It seems entirely rational to me, so what’s the problem?’

  Jane Haig smiled wistfully and simply said, ‘Tell my husband that.’

  Over the evening we discussed how difficult it had been to have her books published. Many Alaskans, she thought, were poor historians of their homeland. Some of them, when confronted by the reality of the place, admitted they knew very little about it. ‘Unless you are really into it, many Alaskans don’t travel much outside their back yard.’ I commented on the emptiness of the town, and Jane explained that the town didn’t really function as a social centre. ‘Alaskans might get worked up about the big issues but they are not really civic-minded. We don’t even have a proper city police force here because no-one wants to pay for it.’

  Jane gave me a few of her books when we parted. I watched her as she walked towards her car and wondered if she would ever fly off from this place. I looked at her books about women and sleigh dogs and asked myself whether people who write social histories about a place ever leave it. Perhaps Jane’s books were her way of dealing with the SADs and her increasing urge to become a snowbird.

  Sitting on my porch, well past midnight, I thought again about her words and looked at the spindly trees all around me. They were withered, shrivelled and feeble, and I wondered if that was what happened to your soul up here if you subjected it to years of long, cold darkness without some kind of nurture. I knew what it was like to be trapped by malign and dark forces, and I also knew that being fettered and controlled by something dark and unknown is the deepest irrational fear in all of us. Yet some of us are forever drawn to its edge. We want to look into it, maybe to diminish its hold on us or, perversely, because it excites us. Was that why I came here? Was that why young Chris McCandless died here?

  I looked around again. The night had come and gone with no perceptible change of light. Time, it seemed, had stood still. I could cope with the everlasting light but the silence was something different. Somehow it seems to exaggerate the bigness of the place. You wait and you wait, yet nothing stirs. Even the wind is noiseless. It moves through the spindly landscape leaving no visible sign of itself. If you dwell on it, the silence is disturbing, as if there is something out there waiting, motionless, breathless and invisible; for a moment the chill on your skin seems to come from an anxiety within rather than the dropping temperature of the early morning. It was time for bed, I resolved.

  The cabin was bathed in a soft aura of light as it filtered through the worn curtains, and the incense of pine resin accompanied me to bed where I suspected my mattress would be stuffed with more imaginings than my head could hold. After all, here we were right in the middle of a forest that was home to hares, lynx, squirrel, moose and a host of other animals that must sooner or later get curious. I took a last peep through the curtains, hoping something would stir in the clearing around the cabin. Nothing moved.

  I remembered it being explained to me why it was necessary to create a big clearing around one’s house. Apparently the bush receives more lightning strikes during the summer months than it has people living in it and it is wise to put some space between your home and forest fire. When I asked how come the forest cover remained so extensive, the curious phenomenon of how the black spruce cone can remain unopened for many years before it explodes and the ash and sunlight fertilizes it was explained to me. I noticed the close proximity of the aspen and birch behind the cabin, and then I noticed how the tree line to the front was several feet inside the stumps of the original clearing. If lightning struck anywhere near us the whole place would flare up like a roman candle! In Alaska you had to survive more than the cold, it seemed.

  The following morning I examined my map of Alaska. The green patches marked the numerous natural parks, but around them and holding the place together was a vast expanse of white. There were a few place names at the intersection points of rivers, but the further north you looked the more unrecognizable these place names became. They were Inuit names, full of the strangeness of an old race and a language system at the very edge of extinction. Further south the names were Athabascan Indian and European. Takoma, Tanana and Galena mixed with names such as McGrath, McCartney, Georgetown and Crooked Creek. Lots of the European names had a strong Irish influence, but even this did not ease the apprehension I was desperately trying to hide from myself as much as from my family. After all, I was taking them into a land about which I was becoming increasingly confused. I had pored over these strange place names before departing from home. Then they were tinged with magic and adventure, but now that these names had become a reality I was less intrigued and my anxiety level soared. Alaska was not the edge of nowhere, Alaska was what you fell into when you were over that edge. Alaska was uniquely its own place, and that’s why I was drawn to it. It challenged you in the deepest parts of yourself.

  I looked again at the map and noticed how the few familiar names were obliterated by Indian and Eskimo words with their abrupt closed-vowel endings. I was entering into a world where there were no roads to or from such places, and I thought again of Conrad’s expeditions into dark landscapes where all the selfassuredness of European civilization was worthless and washed away in a moment. I scanned the names, trying silently to get my tongue around them and by doing so dispel some of the mounting worry.

  ‘Do many people live in these places?’ I a
sked Pat awkwardly later that day.

  ‘Hardly,’ she answered, ‘a few families perhaps. Some of them are only names, left over from the early exploitation of the place. But I can’t really say. In any case there are a lot of reasons for not going to a lot of places.’

  As instantly as she said it I wished I had not asked her.

  ‘What time do I have to be at the dog musher’s tomorrow?’ I asked.

  Pat replied, ‘People up here don’t tend to watch the clock too much. He’ll expect us when we arrive, in the afternoon.’

  Later, I looked again at the extensive white expanses on the map. It did not signify snow but emptiness; the strangeness of the ‘Great Land’ roared out at you. I thought of my young sons, especially Cal who had not yet learned how to walk, and a small part of me somewhere felt that my own first footfalls in the remoter corners of Alaska might be just as momentous as his.

  Dog Mushing

  The dog musher’s cabin was a short drive out of Fairbanks and I knew we had arrived before the homestead came into view – a continuous howling announced the fact to everyone for miles around. The cabin was a small log-built construction with a smaller outhouse some thirty-five feet from the main house. In the foreground, squat wooden boxes and upturned barrels were splayed about; each had a dog sitting beside or a few feet from it and all were chained to some fixed point driven deep into the ground beside each of these kennels. Some of the animals had jumped on top of their kennels, others strained at the full extension of their chain, but all had their heads tilted fully back and their jaws partly open as they carolled to the heavens that I had arrived. I looked at Pat. ‘It’s okay,’ she said, ‘they’re just saying hello and welcoming you.’ I accepted her word without question, telling myself that if I was going to get on with these creatures I had to convince them I was not afraid. I have had enough dogs in my life to know that animals can sense fear in an instant, and it disturbs them, perhaps because it touches something primitive buried deep inside them.