The clouds to the north had sunk low enough that only a strip of mountain was visible, black stone between white and gray. I stared at the dark line, thinking of my body, my location in space, in a way that I hadn’t for months. Here I was, in the middle of nothing and everything. Here I was, in Alaska. I didn’t know if I was running toward my life or away from it.
It was late afternoon when the rescue helicopters made it in. We hadn’t known they were coming—hadn’t let ourselves hope for it—and we had begun preparations for a second night, had gathered the tourists in the community tent to break the news. That was when we heard the thin rumble, so quiet that I thought, at first, it was in my own head, and everyone froze, listening, and then began to cheer. The tourists rushed outside, clutching their jackets as the birds landed. I stepped back and watched from the kennel, sitting on a doghouse as some guides ushered the diabetic man into the nearest helicopter. Rebekah and the other tourists climbed into the other four.
I don’t remember whether any of the tourists hesitated and looked back. It’s true that earlier, a few had made remarks about wanting to stay. “I can’t believe you get paid for this,” they’d said, declaring that if they could take the summer off, they’d love to come work here. This Malcolm noted as a success. But in the moment, midrescue, the dogs were in a frenzy, yelping and leaping at their chains, and snow rose and everyone’s clothes snapped in the wind, and the pilots were shouting, and the noise of the rotors drowned out everything else.
I remember this, though: When the helicopters first came into view, all of the guests, as if by instinct, raised their arms, reaching. And without realizing it, I did, too.
For years afterward, Dan would maintain that I had changed, gained some new or darker side that was, as he once explained in a letter, “without a doubt, not beneficial to who you are.” I was young, starting college; of course I changed. I changed my clothes, my eating habits; I made new friends, tried yoga, worked as a telemarketer. But the change Dan meant was less obvious: the fact that I no longer went limp and let him touch me; the fact that, when forced to choose between the bitter protection he offered and the exhaustive work of shielding myself alone, I knew that I could not be with him. And yet the decision burned. Turning down Dan—choosing jurisdiction over my own body—felt like choosing exile from the very things in which his approval had granted me legitimacy. What role did I have, really, on the icefield, or even in dogsledding? Who had I been there? I didn’t remember. Though I couldn’t explain it at the time, leaving Dan felt like leaving everything I’d been working toward, all the ways I’d been trying to prove myself. And for a while, that’s exactly what it meant. I left him and I didn’t come back.
The change Dan lamented was that I had started to trust myself. But the way I saw it, I had flunked out of the north.
CHAPTER NINE
IN AUGUST, ON THE FIRST CLOUDLESS AFTERNOON in weeks, Jeanette made hay. Rune stopped by the shop for a six-pack of Tuborg and a bag of potatoes, then drove a dirt road into the forest to work his chainsaw in the warm summer air. Helge Jensen took Abdullah out fishing and boiled fresh-caught cod on the shore. The Sailor drove to the Polar Zoo, the northernmost zoo in the world, where he admired the albino grizzly bear, Salt, and his brown brother Pepper. Anne Lill took her grandson to Storsteinnes to watch monster trucks destroy each other. He the Rich One looked for, but did not find, cloudberries. Arild and I closed shop at six, then drove to the island of Sommarøy, west of Tromsø, where I gathered pink shells along a white coral beach. We made it back to the city just in time to buy sweet rolls for the drive home. The mountains were nearly pastel in the soft night sun, and patches of fjord boiled with herring, seagulls circling above. The lambs were wailing when we arrived. They were stuck in the garden, and dinner was late. “One thing I’m glad I’m not,” said Arild, “that’s a nursing lamb in Mortenhals.” But I thought, as the lambs gulped their milk, that there were plenty worse lives to be had.
Sometimes I asked Arild that—what life would he want, if he were not the firstborn son of the shopkeeper in Mortenhals? Where would he be? He would not, he said, be anywhere but here. But he allowed that he might not want to run a shop.
“You could be a dogsledder,” I teased. “You could be a seal hunter.”
Arild fixed me with the long stare that meant I was being particularly foolish. He would not drive the ugly dogs, who had on occasion escaped from the folk school and eaten his sheep. He had never tolerated the smell of seal.
Though his choices were narrow by birth, his decision to run the shop had not been passive. He had loved driving trucks, loved knowing the roads and farms and people for hours around. But when the time came for him to take over the shop, he had chosen to give it all up. If he lived his life as a truck driver, what would outlast him? He’d leave behind an old vehicle, rusting by the side of the road. Sometimes, on drives, he saw a man driving the very truck he’d thought about buying. They nodded a greeting from the drivers’ seats, then passed each other by. “You know him?” I’d asked, the first time this happened, and Arild’s answer was uncharacteristically solemn. “I know him well,” he said.
Sometimes he wished he had traveled when he was young, while his friends worked ships around the world; as it was, he’d rarely ventured farther than the Finnish border, where during his military duty he drove busloads of NATO officials to peer, breathless, into the dangerous mosses and boulders of a pawn of the Soviet Union. But Arild was largely content with the path of his life. In Mortenhals the things he’d built, the things he’d sustained, would last long after he was gone. He could give them to his children, his grandchildren. Though tradition granted his firstborn son, Henning, the right to take over the shop, he secretly hoped that Henning wouldn’t be interested, and his youngest daughter, Emma, could take his place. He was close with Emma—she called to chat, he played the lottery for her every week—and she worked in retail herself. Emma managed a clothing franchise in southern Norway, and in her first year as manager, Arild bragged, her franchise had been the most profitable in its district. Henning may have been his firstborn son, but Emma, who’d gone to business school, had the soul of a shopkeeper. Her gift swelled Arild’s heart with pride.
Then there was the RV park, the sheep, the Old House. Even the Old Store, which was not just his legacy but the whole community’s—something he’d kept for them before anyone even knew they wanted it. That was his role: to anticipate needs. To provide. He was moved by his customers’ loyalty, their appreciation. Of course, there were also customers who had left him during the hard times. Customers who borrowed from him when they were broke, but shopped in the city when their wallets were full. Customers he’d lost in the divorce. But there was little point in thinking about them.
“If I didn’t have the shop,” he finally allowed, “then I would have more sheep.”
But as shopkeeper, he was part of a legacy that extended in both directions.
“And you?” he said to me. “If you didn’t have to be a shopkeeper, what would you be?”
“I don’t have to be a shopkeeper.”
“Mm,” said Arild. “Is that so.”
At first, when we’d talked about my life in the United States, it was in the context of larger things—politics, government, the American educational system. But I’d begun to tell Arild more and more. He rarely responded in the moment, so that sometimes I wasn’t sure if he was listening, or cared. But I had begun to realize that he remembered all of it, memorizing my life just as he did for his customers, for everyone he’d ever met. Sometimes he brought things up—asked about my hometown, or about my mother. Sometimes he bragged to customers, and I overheard details I scarcely remembered mentioning: “She American pia, she’s not the worst. She had a letter to the editor in the New York Times.” And I’d blush, somewhere between embarrassed and pleased.
Arild cared about my parents, and asked about them often. He approved of my father’s work in tobacco prevention; Arild himself ran a simi
lar campaign on a smaller scale, dispensing moral judgment with each cigarette pack he retrieved from behind the counter. When I mentioned that I wanted to get a sweater for my mom, he went into Edel’s closet and pulled a folded, hand-knit beauty off his mother’s shelf. Would it fit? It would. His eyes shone.
For a few years after Lillehammer, I’d felt acutely what I considered to be my parents’ betrayal. I didn’t know how agonized they’d been back at home, how they’d priced out plane tickets, how my mother had written her angry e-mail while caring for her sick father and his wife, and regretted it immediately. Still I had sensed, as my anger faded with time, that the betrayal was not theirs to commit. It belonged to the world itself, which was not as safe as they’d once made it for me. And as the years passed—as I moved on to folk school, to Alaska, into Dan’s arms and out again—I’d grown comfortable with the idea that the danger had never been theirs. That my parents’ job was to love me, and in this they were transcendent; it was my own job to protect myself.
As impossible as that sometimes seemed.
BACK IN COLLEGE, AFTER LEAVING ALASKA, I had studied environmental law and coached the synchronized figure-skating team. I taped pictures of sled dogs to my walls, promising myself that it was only a matter of time before I’d be back on the runners. I wrote about the Arctic for my classes whenever I could, and eventually started writing about it for magazines, too—another chance, like being a guide, for me to make myself an expert. I thought often of the dogs I had loved: Saddam and Condy, Jaxon and Stoic. Sometimes I pretended to strangers that I was Norwegian, only visiting the States for a short time. “Call me Målfrid,” I’d say, with just the right touch of accent. The north still governed my thoughts, my daydreams; only this time, whenever I thought of going back, I had a dozen reasons to put it off. I couldn’t afford it, or I had to take this job, that opportunity. Not once did I let myself think that I was simply afraid. The north was supposed to have fixed my fear.
“Should we go back to Alaska?” I asked Rebekah each spring, on the phone. We’d sit in silence, pondering our excuses, before deciding that this was not the year. Maybe next year. Maybe the year after that. But soon Rebekah was married, pregnant, settled in a way I could only marvel at from a distance. She said, “I would never let my daughter do what we did.”
For those years I was serious, devoting myself to school and work; upon graduation, my class would vote me Most Likely to Be Found in the Library. I did not date. I did not go to parties. I did not drink at all. I told myself that I didn’t like that sort of thing. That my aversion to alcohol had nothing to do with the last time I’d gotten drunk, at a bonfire in Juneau, and leaned on Dan the whole way home.
It would be two years before I slept with anyone else, before I met a shy boy—in the library—whose lips I thought about at night, who kissed me gently before the first time we had sex and whispered, “We don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.” I almost cried. It hadn’t occurred to me that even then, lying naked beneath him, I still had a choice.
Besides, I wanted to.
It was this wanting that astonished me more than anything. That I liked sex. That whatever had happened with Dan had been something he’d done to me, rather than something we’d done together. It wasn’t like this, wasn’t two people drawn to each other and discovering how close they could get.
Two years later, when I went to graduate school, I met Quince. He had dark hair and pale blue eyes and a dangerous, direct way of talking—to peers, to teachers, to anyone—that made him somewhat polarizing among the other students: he called bullshit when he saw it, particularly if that bullshit had to do with justice, or gender, or art. He was a writer and sometime cowboy who had recently ridden his horse across South Dakota, and lived on a farm in northern Wisconsin, in a light-filled house made of logs that he’d skidded from the forest with a team of horses. He loved the cold, loved the Wisconsin winter. In the two-dimensional world of academia, his friendship was a balm, a reminder of what felt real. Soon after we met, he invited me to pick up his horse, which an aging cowboy had just driven four hundred miles and dropped off at a local McDonald’s. Over the next weeks Quince taught me to ride bareback, up and down the road in the dusk of the prairie night; eventually he climbed on to ride double behind me. His horse’s body language seemed foreign, impenetrable, compared to the easy expressiveness I’d learned to read in a team of dogs. It didn’t help that with Quince’s hands on my hips, I had trouble thinking at all.
With Quince I found a balance that I hadn’t known I was missing, someone who moved easily between worlds I’d felt alone in straddling. His relationship to nature was at once awed and utilitarian. He was a hunter and veteran who wrote for a magazine about nonviolence; he split his time between New York City and the Northwoods, and praised equally a friend’s award-winning symphony and a neighbor’s technique for canning tomatoes.
He was also transgender, and had transitioned three years earlier—at age thirty—from female to male. It’s too easy to pin personality to gender, particularly for trans people, but in his case, I believe one result was this: a lifetime of knowing that his truth was not what the world saw had helped him form a vehement moral system, one that didn’t necessarily align with social rules. Chief, to him, was friendship—supporting the people he loved. He delighted in surprises, postcards and packages that he sent constantly to his dearest. If you were his friend, he would turn up from across the country to celebrate your accomplishments; if a family member died, he would be there washing dishes; if you were depressed, he might give you some challenges—eat almonds on Mondays—to get you through the days. He thought nobody above or beneath him. If he believed something was right, he found a way to do it.
Quince had always been masculine, but testosterone brought out impulses in him that he did not recognize, that we both struggled to understand. One night, soon after we first slept together, he held me in the dark, kissing my forehead and my hair. “I adore you,” he whispered. Then his arms hardened around my shoulders. “What is it?” I asked, and when he spoke again he sounded genuinely surprised: “I want to kill anyone who hurts you.” I stiffened at the violence of the words, then relaxed into them. How to describe how safe that felt, to have male strength—the ferocity of it, an anger I’d never understood—poised at my defense? And sexy—it was definitely sexy. What did that mean? About me, about him? What I feared most was men, and what I feared for was my body, and yet my body wanted men, and there was no answer for any of it.
No, that wasn’t right. There was an answer for some of it. And that answer, I felt certain, was somewhere in the north, if I would only go and find it.
I still wanted adventure. I had always wanted adventure—wanted the thrill and the stories and the identity that came with it. But I’d become acutely aware that adventure was a kind of violence, too. It was there in the mountains and the ice and the deep cold, the speed of the dogs and the changing weather. It was there in Dan. Of course, I knew that Dan was not Alaska. But he was part of it, represented some hard masculinity that seemed to thrive in the north, and that I didn’t want to be shoved up against. Not again. I wasn’t sure if I could handle it.
But at the same time, I wasn’t sure I’d feel safe—anywhere, really—until I had proved to myself that I could.
CHAPTER TEN
FIVE YEARS AFTER LEAVING ALASKA, I came up with a new plan for going back to Norway. I had not been there since graduating from folk school. But now an editor had put me in touch with some reindeer herders who would let me join them, and their herds, as they crossed the tundra in the annual migration out of Kautokeino, in northern Norway’s barren interior. The twin jobs of reporting and writing a feature story would give me the structure and courage I needed. I imagined myself fording rivers, taking notes around a campfire, riding an ATV over a sea of sunset-colored mosses. I bought a return ticket for two months later.
Ten days before I was supposed to leave, I received a message from the reindeer herde
rs. They had set off earlier than expected, and were already deep in the wilderness. I was still welcome to join them, they reassured me; but even I knew that the task of setting off alone onto the tundra in the hopes of possibly running into a particular herd of reindeer with a two-week head start was not a realistic one.
Still, I never considered canceling the trip. The momentum propelling me toward Norway—the ways I’d been mentally preparing for it, running through scenarios, getting used to the idea—seemed to exist independently of any particular plan or goal. I didn’t know where I would go. I just knew that if I waited any longer, I would no longer be able to buy my own excuses, would have to face the fact that I was no longer connected to the self that I’d built there. Quince held me all night before I left. I couldn’t stop crying. “What’s wrong?” he kept asking, but I could only shake my head, overwhelmed with emotion that would drain into numbness as soon as I stepped onto the plane. Returning north, once more alone, seemed like the most terrifying and the most inevitable thing I’d ever done.
The strangeness hit me as soon as I landed in Oslo. For one thing, everyone spoke Norwegian, which was a language I regularly thought in but hadn’t heard in years. It had begun to feel like a private language to me. Now everyone was walking around, speaking the words from inside my head. The streets were clean and the people were well dressed. They were almost all white. They almost all wore Nike sneakers. I went to a thrift store and bought a wool sweater and then I went to a 7-Eleven and bought three sweet rolls and ate them all in a row. Then, because it was only noon, I went to the National Gallery and sat on a leather bench for two hours. Across from me was a painting by Edvard Munch called The Dance of Life. Couples were dancing on a shore, but one of the men was a green monster with a red mouth. His partner in white looked away, his arms around her waist. The moon shone on the water.
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