Across the fire, the boy tucked the blonde’s hair away from her cheek. “You’re sexy,” he murmured, leaning to kiss her. She turned her face. “You’re sexy,” she imitated nasally, making exaggerated kissing sounds with her mouth. Both girls stood from their respective laps and went back to the house. The boy sank back into his hood and slumped forward with his elbows on his legs, but Zoran just turned and began to pet my head, like a dog’s.
He was an artist, he said. He made paintings of angels. He’d made a painting of the angel Gabriel rising to heaven after having informed Mary of her forthcoming virgin birth, and he’d put it on a website and sold it to a family in Alta, a few hours north of Tromsø. But when the painting arrived, the angel’s eyes had chipped off. The family was so freaked out to have an angel with no eyes that they bought Zoran a plane ticket to come fix it, and since then he’d just stayed.
“But you,” he said. “You are an artist, too, a writer. But I don’t believe it. Because where is your passion? How can you have art with no passion?”
“I have passion,” I said.
“Where is your passion, then? Where is your love?” His fingers were gentle but calloused, snagging strands of my hair.
“I have plenty of love,” I said. “I love my boyfriend at home.” It was worth a try.
“That is so far away, it doesn’t count. You’re in the north now. How can you be truly in the north if you don’t let yourself love here?”
Now I knew where this was going. “No, thank you.”
“Will you not make love to me?”
I shook my head.
“I would like to make love to you,” said Zoran.
Helge Jensen scooted close on my other side. “My friends are fair people,” he whispered.
“I am just being honest,” said Zoran. “I see you, you’re a beautiful woman. I am a passionate man. I think to myself, I would like to make love to her. So I am honest.”
“All my friends are fair,” whispered Helge Jensen. “If anyone is bad to you, I’ll fuck them up. You’re safe now that you’re friends with me.”
“I have so much passion to give you. For the sake of art.”
They were both in my ears at once, touching me, murmuring at me. Someone’s hand was on my leg, someone’s on my back. A log broke in the fire and sparks rose to the blue sky and there were voices and hands and hair against my cheek. Then something wet: Zoran had licked my neck.
“It’s okay for you to touch my hair,” I said, “but please don’t lick my neck.”
Zoran nodded. “I just don’t understand how you can have art without passion,” he said mildly.
Helge Jensen was telling me a story—maybe he’d always been telling me a story. Something about the military, a friend, a good friend—something about trust and meaning. A shipwreck, maybe, or was it an airplane, or was it a friend—such a friend—with meaning and learning and trust, the best trust he’d ever had, back in the military when he was a young man with a friend and love and so important.
“I’m going home,” I said. I needed to leave. I put my hand on Helge Jensen’s back. I could feel his spine through his sweater. I knew that the only way for me to leave was if I touched his back when I told him I was going. He nodded. He was still telling the story, or maybe he’d stopped. I rubbed his spine and thanked him for the dryfish and the evening and I said good-bye and the hooded boy sat alone and watched me go.
It was late and Zoran had work in the morning, so I drove him, too, to a yellow house at the far edge of Mestervik. I pulled half up the driveway but Zoran wouldn’t get out of the car. He was talking about something. Gratitude. He liked me, he said. He was going to have an exhibit in Storsteinnes that I should attend, an exhibit made of lights made of brain waves. He was still in the car. Why was he still in the car? “It’s time for you to get out of the car,” I said. “Open your door.” He opened the door and I pushed him until he stumbled out. He was smiling, still talking when I drove away. I drove home slow on the turns, careful, and pulled the hidden key from the fleece-lined pocket of the coveralls hanging by the door and tiptoed up the stairs, through the kitchen to my room, tiptoed to my bed where I pulled the curtains shut and lay down, so glad to be alone.
CHAPTER EIGHT
IN LILLEHAMMER I WAS A STUDENT, at the folk school I was a dogsledder, but in Alaska I would never be anything but a girl. It didn’t matter how many men’s clothes I wore, how many weeks in a row I stayed on the ice, how well I cared for my dogs. Dan wouldn’t let me forget it. I’d enter the kitchen tent to find him scrutinizing the veterinary care I gave my puppies, or mocking something he’d overheard me say to a tourist. He talked loudly to other guides about how I was too sentimental to work with the dogs or give tours. Once, as he escorted an older couple to my sled, I heard him say, “She’s good at acting like she knows what she’s doing. It’s too bad you didn’t get an experienced musher.” I didn’t believe the things he said about me, and I didn’t think the other guides did, either, but that didn’t stop them from laughing along.
Rather than confronting Dan, I became increasingly withdrawn. If I could be alone, fine; if I could be with the dogs, even better; but most human interactions made me cagey and brittle. I even came to resent the tourists—resent them for how much they admired me—and volunteered to trade my tours for the crap chores that nobody wanted, the outhouse pumping and snow shoveling that most mushers tried to avoid. The whole thing felt less like an adventure and more like an ordeal, so that it was hard to recall what I’d wanted here in the first place. In fact, I realized, I was more miserable than I had ever been in my life. I had always been someone who woke up happy at the prospect of another day; now I woke up dismayed at the prospect of having to leave my tent. And once I did leave my tent, nothing seemed to matter; with the exception of the dogs, whom I loved unequivocally, the tours and chores and meals blended into an endless slog. I didn’t want to be on the glacier, but I didn’t want to be back at college, either. I didn’t want to be anywhere or do anything. I just wanted to be locked in a room, preferably with some sled dogs, where nobody would ever bother me again.
My most pleasant hours, that second summer, were when I was assigned to dig a pit. Pits were in high demand on the glacier; we used five for melting water, one for cooling food, and a “modesty pit” in the kennel where mushers could urinate between tours. All of these needed to be regularly re-dug as the snow melted away and we moved the camp up-glacier. When I was digging, I could put on headphones, listen to music, and spend hours ignoring everything but the task in front of me. I could fall into a rhythm, jumping once on the shovel, heaving its contents over my shoulder. I could sink to my knees, my waist, my shoulders, until no one could see me, until I could see nothing but the mineral turquoise that ripened toward the heart of the glacier.
Usually it was raining, the raindrops a constant racket on my hood or the roof of my tent. That summer it rained, with few reprieves, for two months in a row. Several of the mushers gave up staying dry, and traded their jackets for neoprene. The rain made people crabby, and made some of the dogs depressed. They’d curl in their houses and refuse to come out. One dog, forced to wear a cone around his neck, stared up for hours at the raining sky—“trying to drown himself,” as one musher put it. A girl in my team named Stoic stopped eating, and grew so emaciated that she had to be hidden from tourists. She was a small, gray dog—mousy and delicate, soaked to the skin. The cook and I made her elaborate meals, mixing meat and rice and bacon fat into a hot gruel. She’d sniff the food politely. Her fur tufted vertical lines over her ribs. I couldn’t stand it. I’d sit beside her, coax her to eat individual kibbles from my swollen, bleeding fingers. “Look,” the manager told me. “Dogs don’t starve themselves to death. When she’s hungry enough, she’ll eat.” But looking at her, I wasn’t so sure. Eventually she was moved to another musher’s team at the far end of the kennel.
I felt reckless again, in a way I hadn’t since the latter months of my stay with
Far. I went for secret walks past the bounds of camp, over snowpack unprobed for crevasses. On weekends I sweet-talked my way onto bush planes and spent days in the mountains by myself. I was soggy and unhappy and, therefore, invulnerable. Nothing I did seemed to matter.
Two days of the week, I shared my tent with a musher named Stacy; but she was dating one of the male guides, and therefore seemed a member of another gender entirely. One day, during an implausible hour that somehow combined a break in the clouds with a break in tours, Stacy went out to sunbathe in a bra and shorts. She invited me along, and on a strange impulse I took off my shirt and joined her. What good had it done me to dress modestly? My skinny body looked good—smooth and long—in a way it never had before and probably never would again. The men noticed. “So, that’s what you’ve been hiding,” someone called; a few others, hearing voices, trudged out of their tents to come see. Stacy laughed and stretched her arms over her head. I laughed too, trying to copy her ease. One musher, who also worked as a photographer, took a picture of us. We grinned. “The girls of Norris Glacier,” he said. “Show me what you’ve got.” Before long Stacy and I were reclined on a pile of propane tanks in the center of camp, all abs and legs and skin between our goggles and our rubber boots. Somebody whistled. “Pervert!” Stacy yelled back. She straddled a tank, thighs open, chin cocked for the camera. The photographer suggested I climb on behind her.
That big lens over his face. I started to shake my head, but sensed movement behind me, and turned.
There was Dan. He had passed between tents, glimpsed us, doubled back, and crossed his arms. His anger was tangible over the distance: whatever I was doing, the sight of me—it hurt him. I changed my mind and slid onto the tank behind Stacy, spreading my legs, miming more sexuality for the camera than I had ever performed for Dan. I felt him watching. I felt the damp breeze off the ice, the cool metal of the tank against my thighs, the approval of the gathered mushers who had hardly spoken to me all summer. I closed my eyes and arched my back, shifting with the clicks of the shutter. Another pretty young thing. Bathed in light, or something.
Later that day, Dan spoke to me for the first time in weeks. It happened quickly. He was exiting the community tent, and I was entering, and before I climbed fully inside he’d blocked my way, stepped into my space as if challenging another man. “Why don’t you ever think before you do anything?” he spat, and I felt filled with pride and defiance, and then I went back to my tent and crawled into my sleeping bag and zipped it up to my forehead and cried.
It never occurred to me to leave. I saw no way out but time. I had committed to a summer on the glacier, and I would complete it, no matter how miserable. Rebekah was miserable in her own way, too: she yearned for home with an intensity that I recognized but could not relate to. If girlhood hadn’t been enough to bond us, longing was, and as the weeks passed I began to see time with Rebekah as the only respite glacier life offered. We had both developed a taste for apocalyptic novels, which we borrowed from the Juneau library using a fake address, read by flashlight, and traded furtively. When tours were cancelled due to weather, we’d sit on our cots with cups of trail mix, bartering M&Ms for dried pineapple, talking about Norway and Indiana. “I just want to go home,” she said. “Don’t you want to go home?” With just a month left in the season, Rebekah bought plane tickets for a weekend trip to see her family. She counted down the days: Eight. Seven and a half. Seven.
My own escape was internal. I daydreamed about escaping the north as much as I had once dreamed of reaching it. Perhaps encouraged by the novels I read, I developed elaborate strategies for what to do if some disaster struck the rest of the planet, if the helicopters ever stopped coming, so as not to be trapped on the ice forever. I could steal dogs and sled down the south tongue of the glacier, then walk the shoreline of the Gastineau Channel back to Juneau. I could scale mountains using ganglines for ropes. In my deepest daydreams, the rest of the world was simply an idea, a concept that might or might not exist at any given moment—certainly not a place that could be relied upon to save us.
When the day came that Rebekah was scheduled to leave to see her family, she still hadn’t driven a sled, so I begged an hour off and we hit the trail with enough time for a quick ride before her departure. We had just taken off when five helicopters rounded a distant mountain single file and roared into camp, coming down fast on the ice, hot rotors thumping. Moments later, nearly thirty blinking tourists stood around the American flag at the edge of the dog yard.
It was not a scheduled landing. I knew it, and all the other staff knew it, but we also knew better than to acknowledge to the tourists that anything was unusual. So the other mushers didn’t even glance at each other as they corralled the tourists together with big smiles and shouts of “Welcome to Dog World!” Rebekah and I, partway down the trail, stopped our dogs and watched from a distance. The tourists seemed happy—we could hear the buzz of their excitement—and the guides ran around harnessing dogs and hooking up teams as quickly as they could. The pilots huddled behind the helicopters.
It turned out that a sudden storm, a wall of cloud between Juneau and the glacier, had blocked their usual flight path, forcing them to forgo the flightseeing tour and make an early landing. Now, from the glacier, the weather looked overcast but by no means terrible; visibility was better than it often was. The pilots decided to continue on schedule. They lifted off in a line, heading back to Juneau. In an hour, they would return to pick up the tourists and drop off the next group. The other mushers took off with their tours, and Rebekah and I continued along the trail.
For a while, at least, the ride was lovely—maybe the best I’d had all summer. It wasn’t raining, Rebekah was laughing, and the tourists’ voices sounded from the other trails, where other people were responsible for them. But within fifteen minutes another rumbling echoed over the glacier, and a tiny figure in an orange vest zoomed toward the dogsled trails on a snowmobile. This was Malcolm, our manager. We’d been warned about orange vests: they were used to signal urgency. In all my time on the glacier, I couldn’t remember seeing one used.
Malcolm waved to the tourists as he passed them—“Stunning, isn’t it?”—and came to a stop next to Rebekah and me. “We’re in trouble,” he said. “The pilots can’t get back.” His voice was higher than I’d ever heard it. “Nobody’s hurt, but the tourists are trapped here now. They’re trapped here.”
Rebekah was jumping a little on the sled brake. “What should we do?” she said.
He told us to let the staff know what was going on without alarming the tourists. “Just tell them they’ll be here longer than expected—maybe an extra hour or two until the weather clears. And, girls? Try to make it sound like a good thing.”
Rebekah drove fast around the trail, and we were waiting in the kennel by the time the other teams returned. We split up to spread the word: “Great news! You get a longer tour than usual!” While the tourists cheered and rushed to pet the dogs, I sidled up to each musher and whispered an update in his ear. Chad snorted—“Nice one, Blair”—but Henry, an older guide whom I considered a friend, nodded and squeezed my arm before returning to his group. I had been hoping that Rebekah would reach Dan before I did, but by the time I’d worked my way over to his kennel she was still several teams away, giggling sharply and gesticulating to a man in a cowboy hat.
When Dan saw me coming, he led his tourists away from me, toward the lead dogs who had flopped down in the snow. “This here is Mo,” Dan said. “He’s awesome.” I noticed that he was following instructions: Mo was short for Money, but Malcolm had directed him never to use the dog’s full name, since tourists might think he was angling for tips. When I reached the group, I put on my biggest tour-guide smile and gave them the news.
“Wow!” said Dan. “Why don’t you all pet Mo for a minute?” He walked a few feet off, head down, and I followed. “What’s going on, Blair?”
I told him the birds couldn’t get back. This was the closest that Dan and I
had come to being alone together in two months, and I couldn’t help noticing how familiar he was. A strong man with small features, small eyes and ears and nose and mouth. We were standing very close together.
“Okay,” he said. He crossed his arms.
“Just keep them happy for as long as possible,” I said. “I’ll let you know when there’s more information.”
For just an instant, Dan looked up, and our eyes met. “Don’t tell me what to do,” he said. “And next time, send Rebekah. At least she knows not to interrupt me when I’m with tourists.” By the time I gathered a response, he had walked away.
Back at camp, Malcolm and the cook stood around the satellite phone, talking in low voices. They had called the cruise ship to say that the passengers would be late; the captain had agreed to wait three hours, but no longer. The cook was heating a massive pot on the propane stove, preparing cocoa. Their goal was to keep things fun for as long as possible. Let the tourists hang out with the dogs, then bring them in for hot drinks. They were making plans for snowmobile rides and a snowman contest. As long as the backup helicopters arrived within an hour or so, there was no reason for the tourists to worry.
But after a half hour in the kennel, when the weather had only worsened, we took the tourists into the community tent and fed them digestive cookies. Malcolm broke the news: They were stranded. The helicopters couldn’t make it in. “No,” a man said, “that can’t be. My ship is leaving.” This was met with nods of agreement. The snow, the ice, the expanse of it all—it wasn’t a possibility. Then the tourists were angry, at the guides for bringing them here, at the pilots for misjudging the weather, at the ships for not waiting. Didn’t we understand that this was a serious inconvenience? A woman had left her infant child with a babysitter. A couple was worried about standing up a dinner date. A few people raised concerns about medication they needed back in Juneau—the pilots, crabby because of the constant Enya music they were required to play while flying, had passed a rule that bags weren’t allowed in-flight—but their voices were lost in the general despair.
Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube Page 15
