Still Points North

by Leigh Newman

  Even as a teenager, I could never pull off much fake blasé when it came to that last leg of the route. I annoyed the stewardesses for the entire flight with mature questions like, “Are we there yet?” and spent a lot of time trying to decide if the flight was technically three hours long (the time in the air) or four hours (due to the one-hour time difference with Seattle) or five (since the real time change between Alaska and Seattle was two hours; officials had changed the Alaska time zone in 1983).

  And yet, as I got older, as much as I looked forward to landing in Anchorage, I’d proceed home with Dad and Abbie, go directly to my room, swing my leg over the windowsill, jump off the second-story roof (holding fast to a certain blue spruce), and run off into the sun-whitened night.

  There was another kind of Alaska that I’d discovered, one filled with people instead of grizzlies or alders, one whose dangers came not from faulty plane engines or misfired shotguns, but from high speeds on snow machines or drunken fistfights on the shoulder of the road. This was the wildness of town, where I tried—and almost succeeded at—getting as deeply lost as if I had actually wandered off into the bush the way I’d planned as a girl.

  Next door, the Bardells had grown up faster than me and far more excitingly. By fourteen, I had become their oddball younger acolyte, also known as “our neighbor up from Boston” (a geographic mistake that never felt worth correcting). At thirty-six-hour keg parties and late-night dark sawdust bars, populated almost entirely by adults who had escaped their violent-offender records down in the Lower Forty-Eight, you could find me cheerfully doing shots and playing pool and staring in unrelenting worship at the Great Alaskan twenty-one-year-olds who surrounded me.

  The things my older northern idols knew: how to kiss a boy with chew tucked in his lower lip, how to water-ski on one ski, how to tell a Sammy Hagar guitar solo from a Van Halen one, how to turn doughnuts in the snow without crashing into a drift, how to tell who was a stoner or who wasn’t by the placement of the eyeliner either inside or outside the base of their eyelashes, how to shoot a black bear in your outhouse, how to get a job wiping oil off individual pieces of gravel with a paper towel (courtesy of the Exxon spill), or a job on the slime line, gutting salmon for canning, or—the real bonanza—a job forklifting at a brand-new store in South Anchorage called Costco, which came with full benefits, including dental.

  I soaked up all this information, usually while terrifically inebriated and leaning on some tree-trunk bar stool, my purse filled with assorted forged IDs. In response, my idols patted my head and tried to suggest we go home—a difficult task when it came to me at two or three in the morning. I never wanted to go home. I was always the last to make it into the car or onto the back of the motorcycle. Even dropped off, standing in the driveway at my house, I’d wait awhile before facing reentry, curling up with the dogs in the doghouse, the way I used to as a kid.

  Sitting in the Seattle airport, I can walk those stairs in my mind, avoiding each creak and sigh of the carpet-muffled steps as if I were still fifteen. That was the summer that Dad and Abbie had had another baby, a boy named Jack. His room was just in front of the landing, and if I opened the door very, very slowly, muffling the brass hinge that rubbed on the frame, I could quietly lurch inside and watch him sleeping in his crib.

  His hair was fluffy duck-blond, his ears pink. He made huffing noises when he breathed and smiled, like me, in his dreams. But that was as far as my observations—and attentions—were allowed to go. I had decided early on: I wasn’t going to heat up Jack’s bottles or blow into his belly button. My other brother, Daniel, needed me. He and I were each other’s me for you in “Tea for Two.” He and I were a team, the way Mom and I were a team down in Baltimore. So what if some cuter newer brother had showed up. I wasn’t just going to forget about Daniel or replace him—no matter how soft the skin on Jack’s forehead was when I stroked it, no matter how much I liked or—let’s face it—loved him, in secret.

  One night, I gave in and picked Jack up. We made our way, carefully yet drunkenly, over to the rocker, where he lay on my chest, half asleep, trying to nurse my chin. He was so round, so prone to random inexplicable smiles. He snuggled. He nuzzled. Daniel had been so different as a baby—wailing, furious, unless you turned him facing out from your chest so that he could see the world. Is this how life is, I wanted to ask somebody, that we are who we are from the moment we’re born? And if so, who was I? Did everybody know just by looking at me—the way I knew just by looking at my brothers? Or was I too polluted and confused for anybody to see it anymore? I lowered Jack back into his crib and slunk back down to my room.

  Three hours later, Dad woke me up. He was standing in the doorway in his chest waders, visibly trembling with rage—either because he’d heard me stumbling around at 3 A.M with his newborn or because I wasn’t up, dressed, and ready to go fishing for reds. “Hit the deck,” he said. “I’ll give you seven minutes to get your gear—and the rest of you—into that plane.”

  If there was one thing that had not changed in my life, it was my fear of Dad. I was still acutely, dizzily terrified of him, which is why I usually chose to lie in order to get out of fishing with him or hiking or doing anything at all. He rarely called me on these mumbled, obvious excuses, and I wasn’t sure why. Today, however, I sensed some kind of newfound resolve from him: He had had it, understandably, with his wasted underage daughter staggering around town.

  I had had it with me, too. I wasn’t even sure what I was doing or why I was doing it. I just wanted out of that house. And at the same time I wanted back in—into the family, into some mythical life where you ate dinner with your parents and talked with them about … what? I wasn’t sure.

  “Hit the deck,” Dad said again.

  I sat up. I looked at him. And I said, “I’m not going anywhere.”

  There was a long pause, when he should have been pulling me out of bed and dragging me down the stairs. Why wasn’t he? I shriveled into the bedcovers. What had I done?

  Finally—years later, it felt—he shrugged and said in a flat, dead voice, “Suit yourself. Go ahead and give yourself away like a birthday present. I don’t care what you do.”

  I set my face to match his voice—flat, check; dead, check.

  And out he went.

  For the rest of the summer, everything was settled. I saw Abbie and the boys in the mornings, before my various assorted jobs at different restaurants. But Dad and I lived in different countries while inside that house, crossing paths only on the way to the microwave or to the closet for a rain jacket.

  The weeks passed. I missed the king run, the silver run, the reds. Dad said nothing. I missed going to Homer to fish for halibut. Dad said nothing. Until, one odd day, he showed up at the Mexican restaurant where I worked as a hostess. I had my uniform on—a fabric hacienda of white polyester and black lace ruffles, with a button over the décolletage extolling, as if it were a life philosophy, CORONA!

  Dad rocked on his heels. Waiters passed by us, bearing flaming pans of fajitas. Somewhere in the vast stucco dining room, a table of twelve was singing “Happy Birthday.” “I was thinking,” Dad shouted over the last chorus, “of going caribou hunting.”

  I nodded. I had a green crayon in my hand from the packs we gave out to kids. I drew a daisy on the waiting list. “Oh,” I said, casually. “I guess I could go with you … if you wanted. As long as I find somebody to switch my shift.”

  Two hundred nautical miles away from town, it was already the first of the two weeks of autumn. The rivers below the plane lay lead-colored and salmon-less. The leaves on the low bushes had turned a thin, tissue-paper yellow, while beside them whole plains lay enflamed in raging red moss. The contrast, the speed, the violence with which the world up north changes—I’d forgotten. It’d been such a long time since I’d seen fall from the sky. Dad lowered the stick and we swooped down—again and again—but no caribou.

  Finally, by the Naknek River, we spotted a sparse, loose, grazing herd. We landed on t
he river, tying down the plane to some alders, me pointedly using Dad’s complex, semi-overwrought system of half hitches upon half hitches. After which, the dread kicked in. Why had I agreed to go hunting? What had I possibly been thinking?

  I got busy, the best way to avoid talking. I pitched the tent. I loaded day packs. I pumped the camp stove and boiled up spaghetti, then served it still in the pot, the two of us forking slabs of margarine into the noodles and passing the salt. The last of the season’s mosquitoes pulsed in dense clouds above the firelight, almost but not quite stymied by the smoke.

  “Dad?” I finally said, “uh, you know that I’m really excited about tomorrow, right?”

  “Me too.”

  “It’s just. Well, I’m not so into killing a caribou.”

  The flames spit and crackled. Dad tossed his coffee grounds into the dark.

  “Actually, I don’t want to kill anything. Ever again.”

  Dad stared at his knuckles.

  I stared at the untied lace of my wader boot. I knew what I looked like to him: a big liberal ding-dong from Baltimore, a hypocrite who no longer understood the reality of the food chain. Maybe I was that. Or maybe I was the person I’d always been, the one who had tried to rescue mauled baby ducks as a little girl, using a lightbulb and a shoe box. Who was also the same little girl who used to help her dad blast healthy grown-up ducks straight out of the sky.

  Or maybe I was just trying to tell him that I wasn’t his daughter anymore, really sock him one in the heart. It didn’t feel that way. But maybe that’s what I was doing. Because that’s what it looked like from the outside. Bagging a caribou is an Alaskan teenage tradition. Everybody does it. With their dad.

  “That’s all right,” he finally muttered.

  “I brought my camera!” I said, too quickly. “I’ll take wildlife pictures!”

  The next morning at dawn, we set out, the world wisped in fog. A light drizzle pattered off the leaves. The sky hunched low and gray and endless. We bounced along the tundra, our feet springing off the dense, spongy moss. Dark red bearberries flashed through the yellow greenery. Sometimes there were streams, and we crossed them. Sometimes there were large alder patches and we skirted them. But mostly, we walked along on the open plains, our breath misting in the wet.

  I moved carefully, mindful of my thin, easy-to-tear chest waders—so much lighter and easier to walk in than hip boots. I was a grown-up, finally, at least in terms of outdoor gear. Mom’s old manual thirty-five-millimeter swung awkwardly around my neck, banging every now and then against the stock of my rifle.

  A few miles later, we spotted the tracks of the herd. The terrain here was slightly hilly. Dad motioned for me to follow, slow and quiet, then for me to drop flat to my stomach and crawl. We bumped along on bellies and elbows under bushes. Dad stopped to glass in, his spotting scope raised. I picked up my camera.

  Not a hundred yards off stood three caribou. A cow and two bulls. They were grazing near some dwarf willows by a pool of water, fed by a stream. We set up under the same willows, protected by the drapery of fog and leaves. I snapped off a few shots, softly, no flash: The cow snuffling for a drink. The bulls rolling in the dirt, scratching their backs.

  Dad settled in, focusing his scope. I kept clicking away, the heavy camera strap cutting into the back of my neck. Every once in a while, I swung the lens over and shot Dad, his cheek pressed on the dark metal of the gun.

  I watched his finger, waiting for him to ease it back slowly. But suddenly the bull leapt up, as if he’d heard something. Dad’s gun went off. The bull turned, the shot ripping into his front leg instead of his chest, and crumpled. The other bull bounded off into the bushes. The cow circled for a moment, confused. Dad took another shot. The cow bolted for the tundra, but the bull—by now hit twice—staggered up to standing.

  Why wasn’t he falling down? Dad tried again. The shots were so loud, so definitive. The buck crumpled but dragged himself forward, as if he was going to get out of there, as if nothing was going to stop him, no matter how many bullets he had in him. But he was going the wrong way, into the stream. Toward the bushes, I told him in my mind. Turn around.

  He took a few stumbling steps into the water. Then sank to his knees. One more shot.

  It was time for him to die. Why didn’t he just die? It took a while, though. He struggled and struggled, and finally pitched forward, still shaking his antlers and legs, until he stopped, floating on the surface of the pool.

  For a while, nothing moved. The smell of burnt metal hung in the air. The bull turned along in the current. I put down my camera, feeling suddenly exhausted. Blood darkened in the water, spreading out.

  Dad headed down to the beach and waded in, fighting the mild current, fishing around for something on the bull to hold on to. I picked up my camera and, almost without thinking, started shooting again: Dad up to his chest, then his shoulders in water, Dad steering the bull toward the shore, Dad pulling the entire four-hundred-pound carcass by the hind leg, dragging it over the shallows to land. It didn’t feel like real life, looking through the lens. I didn’t think to scurry over and help. Dad was on another planet. The rain was on another planet.

  “Put that down!” He was pointing to the camera. “Nobody wants to see pictures of this mess.” He sounded upset, though, more than angry.

  I helped him drag the bull to drier land. There he showed me how to field dress, first cutting the throat to drain the blood, then removing organs and genitals. A soft, hot cloud of musky dead rose up around us. I breathed through my mouth, and started skinning, easing the knife through the soft white tissue between the muscle and hide. We sawed off the legs, quartered the carcass in silence, and stored everything up in garbage bags.

  The light was failing as we packed the meat back to camp and cached it in some semi-high trees. The rain turned heavier. We made a fire, washed our hands and arms in the river.

  “I’m sorry,” Dad said, unlacing his wading boots. “That was about as lousy a hunt as you could have.” And then he just kept going on: He had missed the shot over and over, he had made a bad situation worse, he had ruined my first big trip. “It was my fault,” he said. “It wasn’t supposed to be like that.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Dad sounded so sad, so embarrassed, so unlike Dad. “Don’t worry about it,” I told him. “I’ll throw away the film.”

  Back in Baltimore, though, a few weeks later, I looked over the contact sheet in the snug red light of the school darkroom. The photos were very gray from the mist near the water. But the way I’d shot them, from the neck down, you couldn’t see my father’s face. In the sequence, the bull crumpled, the cow jumped frantically, then the perspective tunneled down to a close-up of a man’s arm, dragging the leg of a dead animal behind him in the mud.

  I mounted the photographs on poster board. I titled and captioned them. Then I hung them in a hallway, which was when I began to regret the whole idea. I never talked about Alaska in Baltimore—not just because it might seemed uncouth and, well, slightly more innard-flecked beside the other girls’ stories of summer sailing camps, but also because it hurt to talk about it. I had enough trouble keeping myself going as it was. Why add a dollop of Dad?

  For days, I waited. Someone was going to say something. They had to. But nobody did. Was I that invisible? Perhaps. I asked my English teacher, Mrs. Green. Despite Roland Park Country’s draconian rules, the instructors at the school were some of the most wonderful, comforting, truly original people on the earth—the kind of women who sang to their students “Ladybugs! Cross your legs, pretty please, I can see your name and address!” but spent each summer in Krakow, working on their third PhD, this time in ancient Slavic dialects.

  Mrs. Green, a lanky lover of Eliot and Browning, once wrote NO FLUFF! on a piece of paper (as in: no fluffy writing), folded it into a hat, and wore it on her head for an entire class.

  “What do you think?” I asked, pointing to my photos, trying to be casual.

  She lowered he
r reading glasses, peered, peered … and peered some more. “It’s very modern,” she said. “It’s geometrical? A study in forms?”

  And then I understood. She couldn’t actually make out the caribou or my father. The mist and drizzle—as well as my inability to focus—had turned the photographs into a fuzzy, grayish blackish blur. That is, unless you knew what was there.

  I felt so relieved—and ashamed. Because even if no one at my school recognized what I had tried to show them, I was pretty sure that Dad had figured it out. He wasn’t stupid. He knew what he must have looked like, dragging a dead animal around by the leg. There really wasn’t any reason for me to have captured those images and shown them to strangers out of context—unless I was trying to show the world what a cruel, blood-hungry butcher I had for a father.

  “We’d like to welcome Flight 4924, service to JFK International,” a man’s voice singsongs on the microphone. I start, jumping out of my seat—back in Sea-Tac, back in reality. I check for my bag, to make sure it’s still there. It is. The great thing about a duffel is that you can mash it into an overhead compartment, allowing you to take twice as much stuff on board as in a hard roller suitcase—meaning that not only do I never check a bag but also if I want to walk up to the Northwest desk and change my flight and head up straight to Alaska, I can.

  A little pastoral scene glitters through my mind: Dad and me standing by the smoking grill, slapping backs, talking and laughing everything off. Because lots of kids sneak out and drink and lie and act like self-centered, self-destructive jackasses for a while, don’t they?

  Then why do I still feel so guilty? Why do I feel like I’ve ruined something that can’t ever be righted, even after all these years and, at this point, ridiculous amounts of distance? There’s this huge, ugly gulf that opens up every time my father and I talk—and we just keep skittering over it, ignoring it, chatting about his new vacuum sealer for frozen fish or my latest trip to Turin. I’m not sure if he’d be hurt or relieved if he found out that I’d come this close to Alaska and chosen not to pay him a visit.