Framing a backcountry emergency as an extended luxury tour is no enviable task, but Malcolm did his best. “We have a cook,” he announced, his voice confident. “We have plenty of food and water.” The tourists looked grim, but he gave them a pleasant nod and then stepped outside, gesturing for the staff to follow. “I don’t care what you need to do,” he whispered once we’d gathered around him. “Just keep them happy. Do whatever it takes. Act like this is the best thing that’s ever happened to you. And for God’s sake, don’t do anything that could get us sued.”
That afternoon passed in a haze of card games, the tourists constantly checking their useless cell phones, the weather reports from Juneau steadily bleak, and at some point it became clear that the tourists would have to spend the night. The guides would be ceding their tents, cots, and sleeping bags to the tourists—we had extra sleeping bags for emergencies, so there were just enough—and after a meal of meat loaf, real mashed potatoes, and chocolate cake, Malcolm went tent by tent to make sure the quarters were ready. He’d decided we should call the tourists “guests,” as if they had been invited over for a dinner party and just happened to be spending the night. “Put all your stuff in trash bags,” he said to the staff, “and pile it outside. We want to make sure the guests are comfortable.”
When he reached our tent, Malcolm made Rebekah and me take down the perfume ad we had tacked, semi-ironically, to the support beams. “We can’t have guests sleeping under a naked picture of Leonardo DiCaprio,” he said. “No. Don’t argue. We just can’t.” But when Rebekah reached to take down a photo of a baby from a day-care center where she’d worked back in Indiana, Malcolm stopped her. “Put that somewhere prominent,” he said. “It makes us seem human.”
Rebekah surveyed the empty tent. “Where are we going to sleep?”
“I really don’t care,” said Malcolm.
Back in the community tent, the tourists were gathered around the three tables, playing Go Fish and Parcheesi. A few guides hung around outside, sitting on a pair of snowmobiles, not saying much. Every twenty minutes or so, one would take a long breath, stretch a smile across his face, and pass through the tent flap. “Parcheesi! I love Parcheesi! Who’s up next?” Whoever had been relieved would step out of the tent, visibly deflate in the chill air, and collapse onto the empty snowmobile seat. In this way, the tourists were infused with a constant rotation of freshly faked enthusiasm.
When it was Rebekah’s turn, she stepped off the snowmobile and headed toward the tent.
“Rebekah,” Chad called after her.
“What?”
“Just remember,” he said. “Jesus hates you.”
I took my shift in the tent just like the others, but it startled me to realize, even under the circumstances, how little I cared about the tourists. It seemed that their happiness was a bomb that could detonate at any time, and my job was to keep it from doing so. I had, at that point, spent a total of six months giving eight rides a day, eight hourlong tours in which I assured the tourists that the situation I blamed for my misery was, in fact, the Best Job in the World. Of course I understood why they saw it that way. I saw it that way myself, when I tried to be objective. After all, wasn’t I the girl who was obsessed with the north? Wasn’t I surrounded by snow, by wilderness, by dogs—the very things I’d wanted? On my best days I was grateful for the amazement on the tourists’ faces, a reminder to appreciate—to try to appreciate—the astonishing scale of the place in which I lived. But most days I played by script. It was easy to pretend, to act delighted by all things Dog and Glacier, fascinated by every detail my giddy tourists reported about the cruise—a whale that very morning!—and their trip so far and their relatives stuck at home and their new Welsh corgi.
I was still a great guide, as evidenced by the generous tips and teary hugs I received, and the grateful letters that came up occasionally, wadded in a pilot’s pocket. But I had decided that my energy was needed elsewhere, or rather that I needed it more. It felt like all I could do to stand in the snow, watching the patterns of light on the mountains, noting again the oppressive smell of propane, ducking my head at another sexual remark of the kind that, without Dan on my side, I was no longer spared. “Another one, Blair,” a pilot would call, letter in hand. “What are you doing, giving blow jobs?”
That night, there wasn’t much to figure out in terms of sleeping arrangements. The men had claimed the community tent, the storage tent had no floor space, and the cook would have the kitchen, which left the vet tent for me and Rebekah. That was okay. It was far away, at least. I slung our trash bags over my shoulders and staggered through the snow, dumping them just outside the entrance. Then I untied the bags and began rummaging inside for blankets. I had my head so deep in one that I didn’t notice when Dan came up behind me.
He was holding back a dog with each hand, clutching their collars as they stood, panting, on their hind legs. I unzipped the flap and threw my blanket on the floor. “No room for dogs,” I said. “We’re sleeping here. There’s nowhere else.” A rule-follower at core, I had already checked with Malcolm, who advised me to take the dogs from the vet tent outside.
Dan pushed past me into the tent. When I followed him in, I saw that he had kicked aside my blanket and was tying his dogs into the small floor space.
“Why are you doing that?” I said. “We need to sleep here.”
“The dogs are sick,” he said.
“The dogs are fine.”
He didn’t answer.
“Dan,” I said, “why are you doing that?”
There had been times in our relationship when Dan and I had talked, really talked—about the dogs, about Alaska, about what we wanted in life. He’d put his dreams into mushing—put everything into it. And I loved it when he told me about that. I felt like a child in whom a grown-up had confided: special, chosen. Trusted. It never occurred to me to question the imbalance; it never occurred to me that I had anything worth confiding.
And now, in the vet tent, I found myself reaching back for those moments. It struck me that I’d never been afraid of him, not even when he had pressed himself onto me, when he’d hushed my objections. I’d been resigned, unhappy, but never afraid. I wasn’t afraid after the breakup, either, when I saw his anger. I understood it, or thought I did, which is as close to forgiveness as I’ve come. Even now, with thirty stranded tourists and a world of unknowns hanging over the morning, I wasn’t scared. Unhappy, yes. Resigned. And here was Dan. It all felt familiar.
Dan had loved my naiveté, he told me once—loved me for it—and it was easy now to find that same part of myself, to speak from the one place that might reach him. “Dan,” I said, more softly. The voice of a nice girl. “Why are you doing this?”
The dogs had settled down, but they looked up when I spoke, and their collars jingled. Otherwise it was near silent.
“Don’t sleep here,” Dan said. “Sleep with me. We’ll find a place.”
“I can’t,” I said.
“We could fix all this right now,” he said.
I thought about it. What would be harder, what would be easier.
“I miss you,” he said. He was crying, and the sight of that shocked me more than anything else that had happened that day. “You’re different now,” he said. “I miss who you were. You were a better person before. Don’t you remember how happy we were? We could have that back. It’s up to you.”
It was up to me—if only I would sleep with him. The unspoken standing offer, now made clear. In light of the rest of the summer, it didn’t seem so terrible: the idea that things could change, that the animosity, at least, could be over. That I could belong again. I tried to remember the feeling of Dan’s mouth on my ear, the heat of his skin beside me. Whether those feelings were more or less tolerable than the silence, the muttered comments and cruelty from coworkers, my constant prickling awareness of Dan’s whereabouts. It was hard to say.
“I told Rebekah I’d stay with her tonight,” I said. “Besides, there’s now
here else to sleep.”
“We could say we need the kitchen,” Dan said, smiling, and I was caught off guard by an image of the cook wielding ladles to defend her territory, and for a second everything dissolved, and we were two people laughing. Okay, I thought. Then, quickly, the moment was over.
“Fine,” he said. “But it’s not going to get better. When you want it to, come find me.”
Later, after the tourists had gone grumbling to bed, Rebekah and I hooked Dan’s dogs to a cable staked outside the vet tent. We spread our blankets in the small rectangle of floor between plastic chests and stacked dog crates, boxes of Neosporin and Cipro and tea tree oil. There was a folding table with zinc cream, rolls of stiff new booties, and mascara to shade the dogs’ eyes from the sun. A propane heater hissed in one corner, and the rafters were draped in dark, insulating blankets. Within a few minutes of lying down, curled beside each other, the tent had warmed enough to release the strong smell of piss and menthol. It burned the inside of my nose.
I had always liked nights on the glacier—the thin buffer of time between leaving the dog yard and falling asleep. Most evenings I spent an hour or so grooming trails on a snowmobile, gunning the engine constantly to keep the metal grader from catching in the snow. It was an optional job, cold and loud at a time of day when most of the others were settling in after dinner, but I volunteered whenever I could. I’d realized early on that driving the trails was the only time I could be alone. I loved it when a fog came in, when I couldn’t hear voices or the dogs and couldn’t see anything but white opening up in front of me, white closing in behind. When I finished the rounds I’d pull up to an empty camp, a silent ghost town with just the faint glow of flashlights showing through tent walls. My tent was the farthest away, about a hundred yards from the base of a triangular mountain we called the Guardian. I’d peel off my clothes carefully, draping the rain shells and long underwear over the dozen lines strung from the central rafter. I hung my boots up last, upside down, catching the toes in loops of string so that moisture drained overnight. Then I’d tiptoe through the jungle of clothes and fast-spreading puddles to fall into my cot, zip my sleeping bag, and exhale.
Now, in the vet tent, Rebekah was not asleep. I could hear her turning, could make out the tiniest of whimpers. It was black in the tent, the snow’s glow blocked by the insulating blankets—the first darkness I’d seen in weeks, and even that was unsettling. I whispered, “How are you doing?”
“My flight,” she said, voice muffled by her pillow.
I’d forgotten. “Your parents will understand.”
She sighed. That wasn’t the point.
“I’m sorry the guys are so mean to you,” I said. It was the first time I’d acknowledged it aloud. “I wish they weren’t.”
“What do you mean?” Rebekah, more audible now, must have turned her face toward me.
“You know,” I said. “When they make fun of you. Jesus stuff. Everything.”
“They’re just being guys,” she said. “That’s how they do things.”
“But it shouldn’t be like that. You shouldn’t have to go home because of them.”
“I’m going home because I miss my family,” she said.
We lay in the darkness.
“They’re meaner to you than they are to me,” Rebekah said. “I mean, if I can say this—Dan is the worst.” She told me how she’d met him at the beginning of the summer, before I’d arrived in Juneau, and he’d said “all sorts of stuff” about me. “I was pretty nervous to share a tent with you, actually, after what I heard. Then I met you and within five minutes I was like, what was he talking about? ’Cause you were so friendly.”
“No,” I said, thinking. “That can’t be. He still wanted us to be together.”
Rebekah didn’t answer. I had the odd, sudden feeling that she was embarrassed for me.
I thought: We were never happy. Neither of us. Of course.
It took me a long time to fall asleep. I wondered how many of the tourists were also awake, twisting in their borrowed sleeping bags, blinking their eyes against the constant, unfamiliar glow of the ice. In the morning I went to the kennel early, moving team by team, working to get all the dogs fed. I wasn’t used to caring for the other guides’ dogs, and when one of them nipped my arm, I felt like throwing down the food in frustration. But reaching my own team felt like coming home. I took my time with each dog, rubbing ointment between their toes, kissing the dips between their eyes. I took pride in brushing them sleek and stretching their muscles with my thumbs.
So maybe I could relate when Dan found me at the vet tent later that morning, where I was rolling up a blanket and—yes, a little—lingering in the quiet dark to feel whatever it was I couldn’t understand enough to identify, a big feeling, something growing, and he said he was angry about the dogs. That’s how he said it: “I’m angry about the dogs.” And he had a point: he’d put his dogs in the vet tent, and I had moved them. For a moment it didn’t matter that we both knew the dogs were fine, that they’d have been happier outside anyway, that there’d been nowhere else for me to sleep. The mushers had a tacit agreement not to interfere with each other’s dogs, and I had broken it. I apologized, then turned back to my blanket. But Dan was still there.
“I’m angry about the dogs,” he said.
“I’m angry that you talked about me to Rebekah,” I said.
For that moment, there in the dark, all that mattered was the fact of his body before me, the fact that he did not—and could not—touch me, the thoughts I couldn’t find in my own head. We talked as if we were human beings, as if talking was even an option. The one dog had a sore, Dan explained; he needed to keep his foot dry. And now he’d been in the snow all night and soaked off his scab.
And that was where I finally let myself disagree with him, and told him so. Whenever a dog in my team had a scab, I rubbed it with a toothbrush until it came off, until the skin underneath was pink and silky. When the scab re-formed, I scrubbed it off again. Sometimes I’d need to open the wound a dozen times before it finally healed over smooth. But if I did it right, it hardly left a scar.
That was the last gift Dan and I gave each other: a disagreement over dog care. Something real. But then he started to yell, and I to cry, and we hated each other with utter passion and an equally utter lack of discrimination—I hated his hat and his small hands and his stupid Canadian accent, and he hated my braid and my men’s Carhartts, and we shouted things that neither of us quite understood about dogs and love and responsibility.
Later, during that second day’s Go Fish and poker and snowman contests, I would not forget that moment with Dan. It stayed in my head as I watched the sky, the fog and drizzle and clouds rolling in and those same clouds pulling apart again, through the hours stuffed with laughter and nerves and false cheer. One of the tourists, an insulin-dependent diabetic, was at risk of slipping into a coma if he was stuck on the ice for another day. But nobody could know, Malcolm decided: the tourists mustn’t worry, absolutely not. They were busy pining for their ships, and we were to keep it that way.
I’d turn to the tourists beaming, and play cards and tell tall tales that I swore up and down were true—it didn’t matter what I said, so long as I kept the smile. The pretense felt familiar, easy. Every hour brought whispered rumors of rescue attempts from Juneau, mountain climbers scaling cliffs with insulin in their packs, helicopters bringing skiers to the edge of the icefield before turning back, caught in a cloud. It was nice that they were trying, I thought vaguely. The rescuers seemed fake to me, like people who had died before I was born. I knew we were on our own. We had always been on our own.
Rebekah spent the day in the kitchen, washing pots and chopping vegetables. For my part, I hung out with the tourists, driven less by a sense of duty than a desire to appear purposeful while avoiding my increasingly agitated coworkers. For close to two hours I spoke softly to the diabetic man, who I guessed was in his midfifties. He sat on a cot, breathing slowly, radiating a cal
m I envied. I tried to tell him the stories I’d perfected over months of tours, but they felt empty to me, forced. Halfway through a secondhand story about a polar bear encounter, which was one of my standbys, I found myself wishing that I’d never started telling it at all. Instead I took a piece of paper and drew a picture of the man, taking my time. I tried to capture the angles of his broad face, his soft skin. When I finished, he admired the sketch at length, then tucked it into his breast pocket. He took my hand. “I’m honored to be spending this time with such a lovely young woman,” he said. I squeezed his hand and felt like a liar.
When the man fell asleep, I left his tent and went outside. The guides were sitting on snowmobiles, facing away, looking out over the icefield. It took me a moment to realize what they were watching. There was a figure in the distance, heading away from us. “He won’t get far,” someone said. “He’ll either get spooked and come back, or he’ll fall into a crevasse.”
“Who is that?” I asked.
“Chad,” the guides said in unison. One of them added, “Either he’s gone for help or he just lost it.”
“Lost it?” someone else said. “What’s to lose?” They all laughed.
Chad waved. He was so small; the idea of watching him horrified me. I thought about going into the community tent, but instead I went to the guest outhouse and locked the door. It was, we were frequently told, the cleanest outhouse anyone had ever seen, with a vase of silk roses beside the toilet seat. It smelled nice in there, like biodegradable cleanser. I stood with my eyes closed, leaning against the door. But at some point I noticed myself, a sad, foul-smelling girl hiding in an outhouse, and once I’d noticed that I couldn’t un-notice it. I squirted sanitizer on my hands and trudged back out into the snow.
Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube Page 16
