Dirt Work (26 page)

Healy is in some ways a town all its own, unlike anywhere I've been, where the post office bulletin board boasts lynx hides for sale (from a local fourth grader with a trap line) and the air smells like coal dust and tundra plants mixed by a muscular wind. In other ways, it's Interior Alaska's version of the same town you pass through on the way to any park, both entry and buffer. However common, or however special, Healy is the odd little place I've called home. It's a place made up, in part, of seasons.

By September, Healy hunkers down. Tourism done, restaurants and gift shops board up their windows and the only stoplight for one hundred miles blinks, then goes dark. Life gets stripped down. Fairbanks is two hours north by snow-packed, two-lane highway, and we go on biweekly, daylong binges: groceries dog food building materials bookstore doctor visits Thai food a movie (if there's time). Other than that, we're on our own. Healy has a little store where you can get a rock-hard avocado, chips at $6.50 a bag, or a gallon of milk for the same. There's no stocking-up in Healy. In winter, you get what you get.

Don't come to Healy looking for chai. This is not
Outside
magazine's Best Town in America. No ski resort, no health-food store. And though I've used—and often miss—that cultural tackle, Healy has the charm that comes from its lack of artifice, the old kind of dorkiness—uncalculated. An informal tai chi group meets on Thursday nights in the school gym. No yoga studio with fancy workout clothes; we bend and bow in baggy long underwear to the tinny commands of a Chinese woman on a warped VHS tape. Here,
chi
smells more like sweaty socks than incense.

Like any small town, Healy has entrenched divisions—pro-road, anti-mine, more wilderness, no zoning. Yet, nothing's simple. Park employees have trap lines and coal miners have dog teams. We all complain about the price of gas and the weeks at 40 below. Healy is a tiny and pragmatic place, invisible to anyone who doesn't live here, and that's what bonds those of us who do. There are ideological divisions and old grudges, to be sure. But animosities have to sit alongside what we have in common: remoteness, self-reliance, weather that matters. During a deep freeze, everyone clumps around in the same insulated bibs and bunny boots, politics bundled beneath the veneer of the practical.

Solitary tasks make up the winter days of many residents—hauling water, running dogs, caring for the baby, drywalling the basement. To ward off too much loneliness, locals gather for any reason we can muster: book clubs, knitting groups, poker and hockey games, school pageants, a periodic slide show by someone back from afar. At the community center, a chili feed, a borough hearing, and midwinter, the holiday extravaganza—Healy on Ice, where Santa rides a Zamboni at the outdoor rink behind the school. Don't let this list fool you. Healy is quiet. Some days when the palette is gray and white and all talk is of projects and weather, I wish for color and art, noise, live music, free lectures about something I've never thought about before, a nutcase on a busy corner with a wacky sign. Some days when the cabin feels dark and small and there's no way to stay warm outside for longer than an hour, I wish for a clean, well-lighted space, a hot drink amid the bustle of the public sphere, the haven of anonymity. Not here. There's no hot, no bustle, no public. No anonymous.

Up here, winter makes you local. Denali as workplace means summer months on the trails, tools in hand, always on the move, crowds of seasonals gathered at bars and parties and river pullouts. It's clear why anyone's here—the job is full time, the world hospitable. Summer is an easier place to live, but the other three seasons make this home.

When we chose to stay past the usual cusp, the reason wasn't the weather or the job or the potlucks. We stayed because right now, it's where our life is. With the exodus of summer's ease, we settle in with canned goods and Netflix and our ski loop behind the cabin, where the snow blows into drifts as hard as tarmac and we never see anyone.

Wind is wild. No one has figured out how to domesticate wind. A turbine, a windmill, they collect, not control. Wild is the cabin groaning in a strong gust, a skier hunched against a winter storm, a car on a bridge that can't stay its course into blowing snow. Wild is a tired sled dog curled tail over nose in a melted hollow in the snow. Wild is a summer wind, full of dust and clatter. Wild finds the lee, sleeps.

It was hot and windy on the Savage River trail and Jerry and I were doing a gravel patch job, an afternoon errand. After the last shovel loads and before driving back to the shop, we took a break. I was always eager to avoid tourists, but it's hard to hide in tundra. We slunk into a depression twenty feet off the trail and I turned my back on it. Jerry is decidedly friendlier than me; he faced outward, leaning on his pack. Moments after we sat down and popped open Tupperwares for cold leftovers, I heard a voice. I chewed and rolled my eyes at Jerry. They always found us.

“Ex-cuse me?” said a man in a thick German accent, shouting from the trail. “Is zis vair I may see zee moose?” Trapped in our coin-operated nature show, I swiveled toward him. As protocol, the leader usually answered, so I explained in a half shout that yes, he could see one here, but there was no guarantee. Undeterred, the man chattered on: he was sure zis was zee best place; after all, a sign on the road said to watch for moose here. I nodded, feigned enthusiasm. “Good luck,” Jerry said. Finally the man seemed ready to move on, but then, a few steps away, he whirled back to us and announced in a grave voice, oddly projected, as if for an audience, “In zee river, I have seen sree ram.” He paused for effect and held up sree fingers, which then morphed to the side of his head to illustrate a Dall sheep's horn—“wiz zee full curl!” he finished proudly, with a flourish.

I snorted. Jerry looked at him for several seconds, quiet. Then he said the simplest, most American thing he could possibly have said, in a deadpan voice: “Cool.” The man stood in the trail, nodding, waiting for further comment. Jerry just smiled and nodded back, a kindly tundra Big Lebowski. I laughed. Zee man moved on. Later, at the bar with a pint glass in hand, Jerry and I made a toast: “To zee full curl!”

An axe chops. A rock bar pries. A chainsaw fells. A boat floats. A skid steer excavates. And a shovel? A shovel does everything else.

A clinometer is a layout tool that measures slope angle: rise over run—the amount of vertical gain from one point to another—as a percentage of 100. It's brushed steel, about the size of a deck of cards. You peer through the sight one-eyed at an object in the distance, while a scale in the foreground measures the slope of your gaze. Simpler than a transit, more precise than a laser level or that old standby, the eyeball, a clinometer is both hired hand and referee, a partner that hangs on a loop of cord around the neck and fits easily in the palm of a hand.

The sum total of my survey experience in Glacier had been that small section of dusty reroute with Cassie. But as the child of a surveyor, I'd grown up playing with lath stakes and orange flagging, knew the smooth feel of the brass plumb bob, the familiar scrawled numbers in tiny logbooks. I was ready to learn. My Glacier opus was surpassed one month into Denali. With front-country trails going in like gangbusters, the clinometer became a ubiquitous sidekick. Lay out new trail right, I learned, and you'll sidestep a host of maintenance issues. Survey done poorly, misery and maintenance will follow the trail crew all the days of its life, and it shall dwell in the house of grumbling and recrimination forever.

A well-laid-out trail considers many angles: user group (hikers, horses, bicycles), intended use (nature walk, commuter trail, wilderness access), outslope that will incite good drainage, the steepest grade a certain soil type can bear. The design must also keep in mind terrain obstacles (cliff, stream, pond), overall topography, views. A curvilinear trail corridor follows contour lines, is visually interesting to the user, with enough sight distance to prevent surprise collisions with wildlife. A good trail is both structure on and interpreter of landscape.

The proper use of a clinometer relies more on good eyes and a little patience than any technical finesse, but great layout skills develop only over time and miles. Even one sharp set of eyes can put in a rough flag line, but the best trail layout is a team effort, a mutual plod over downed logs and wet bog and around bedrock outcroppings, talking in call and response:
a little uphill, aw, shit, there's that spring, try there, okay now over, we need a grade reversal soon, think we can make the pass at 10 percent?
Then, return the next day, the next week, or the next season, and you realize it needs to change. You shot too steep and hit the cliff band that you meant to stay below. Ground that was dry in September is wet in the spring, requiring turnpike. There's a beaver dam, an old-growth tree, a big swale that would need to be bridged because the topography is too steep on either side for contouring. Good trail layout requires that you care enough to keep pounding the same stretch of ground long after
it's good enough
has occurred to you, and at the same time that you remain sufficiently divested so you can scrap a plan for a better one.

A good survey is undetectable. Finished trail seems like it was always there, and draws no attention to itself. A poor survey, on the other hand, is noticeable. A too-hasty flag line may set you up for a lifetime of trailwork heartache: steep grades, mud pits, erosion, blown-out tread, failing turns, washouts.

If you survey with someone for days or weeks in a row, you begin to see them reduced to the part you aim for when squinting through the clinometer's sight. The brim of Krusty's hat, Gabe's mustache. Many survey partners are much taller than I am: as their target, I have to raise an arm above my head. The piece of orange flagging tied around my watchband is easy to see in heavy brush, ornamentation born of necessity. For a girl who's lost a grandmother's bracelet, countless watches, every barrette she's ever worn, and her wedding ring, it's the best kind of adornment: offhand, unique, and replaceable. A sign too, of temporary importance, a moment and place when I was a part of landscape, to scale, the bright and moving marker around which everything else fell into place.

Autumn in Denali beguiles me every year, when the world on fire reinvents shade, palette, tone. People think of New England for colors, the Midwest, or prairie towns, full of hardwoods that easterners brought to line the boulevards of their adopted homes. No one thinks of Denali. My sister says, “You don't have any trees, do you?” But color doesn't need trees. Fall colors the North not in canopies overhead, but on the ground, chemistry's carpet unfurling underfoot. Reddened willows, lichen's green glow, squashy mushrooms in earthen tones. Berries—snow, cran, blue, cloud, nagoon, bear, salmon—orange and white, wine and almost-black. Aspens draw eyes up with their taffeta glimmer and lisp, but in autumn's conversation, the ground has the floor.

I am an existentialist at heart and I love fall in part for its contemplative underpinnings, the way it makes me notice the concrete world (everything's dying) and think about the abstract one (everything dies). When trees and brush go aflame right before leaves and blooms pale at winter, I also wonder: will I have even
minutes
as full of purpose as these plants do, when my hue is tinted by the tasks of my hands?

I left trails early one season to teach for a semester in Oregon. This was the fall after I finished my MFA, just before we'd decided to stay in Denali for good, and at first I felt ambivalent. I did not go to grad school in order to become a professor. I had never asked the academy to save me from a life of labor. But this job was appealing. One semester long, a unique off-campus program that I had attended as a college student, where I fell in love with the West. Housing provided—my own cabin, with running water! Low commitment. It seemed stupid to turn it down so I could spend two more months digging holes. I took it. It was my first teaching job, among faculty I admired, and while my crew finished the season's work in a hard and early frost, I shored up my notes, took my place at the blackboard, and lectured on Nabokov and poetics, poststructuralism and Zen. I led small group discussions and a writers' circle. The students wrote papers and gave presentations under my guidance, similar in some way, I hoped, to the kind that had so benefited me a decade and a half before.

My closest neighbor lived in a trailer just up the gravel drive from my cabin. Dale was an outdoorsman/nonprofit activist who worked to preserve the local Siskiyou Wilderness against unchecked cattle grazing and ag-biz industry. He'd climbed Denali in the seventies and, in a wicked storm near the summit, lost his hands and feet to frostbite. You'd hardly know it; with dexterity, grit, and a scrappy horse named Pancho, Dale managed to do what anyone could—cook, browse magazines, drive—and more that most people cannot—tie knots, care for stock, lobby politicians. He'd stop by on the way to or from his trailer, often on horseback, and we'd chat about climbing, our dogs, or Alaska. “Ah, Denali,” he'd say wryly, holding up a rounded stump: “I left a piece of myself there.” Dale was the only person in my life those few months who understood what I missed from back home.

My friend Daryl, one of the head professors, worked the property's timber stands on weekends, thinning the mixed conifer forest for firewood and forest health. He often invited me to cut with him because he knew I had the same crush on the chainsaw that he did, and the same love for the afternoon break we'd take when we shut off the saws and leaned against cut rounds in the late-fall sun. A few times, Daryl and I took interested students into the woods to learn to run a chainsaw. I told them the rules I knew
: use your brake, wear chaps, watch the tip of the bar, take your time.
On Friday afternoons, the community tackled chores; my group chipped away at a semester-long project—building a trail to the creek. The students vaguely knew this had something to do with my “real” job. What exactly did I do again? They clutched shovels and hoes, loppers and mattocks, all heavy and cumbersome in their hands. I held up a pulaski, as familiar to me as Kierkegaard or free verse, and I tried to explain.