Dirt Work (28 page)

Dark is also an adversary. Some begin to lament the growing dark in September and soldier on until spring with a bitter resolve that connotes pioneers in sod houses. Everyone has a tip for thriving in the dark months—buy a SAD light, dump that needy boyfriend, take up knitting. The way I learned to love the Interior winter was simple: move vigorously outside for at least an hour and expand my sense of day. In June we sleep when it's light, and in winter, dark needn't mean quit. A full moon lights a night skijor, reflected starlight on snow a rural street lamp. January evenings mean lit candles in windows, a dim log cabin the excuse to let Christmas lights glow for months. Winter tells me, push past the limits the body's clock sets for itself. Expect darkness. Watch for light.

Dark can be inconvenient. I hate quitting a task because of a forgotten headlamp or a waning moon, hate banging my shin on the porch step on the way from the outhouse when it's too dark to see. There's pressure in winter daylight, time slipped through fingers: at two o'clock you think about dinner, at seven, bed. If you're sad or overwhelmed, dark seems bottomless, a soul-plummet in the worst kind of free fall. Dark is also magical. Winter feeds a primordial hunger, an urge to curl up and lick your paws, to pause on the questions that light rushes us past. I take my cues from our two old sled dogs, who sleep soundest in winter, curled up in a pocket they've melted in the snow, or so near the woodstove their coats are hot to the touch. Deep winter is the cave of the year.

Sanity hangs in the balance of light and dark. A year in the Interior is like a day anywhere else; the spectrum makes sense. Together, the seasons have symmetry, the calendar folded on itself like a paper snowflake. Now that I am home here, it's hard to imagine anything less extreme. My body has been calibrated toward the twelve-month cycle, and I sleep with sun on my face in June and wake at 6 a.m. in December (groggily), ready to begin a day in a day that has not yet begun.

I'd traveled one hundred miles down the Copper River in Cordova, but it wasn't until I moved to Denali that I went dip-netting. This style of subsistence fishing is how many Alaskans put food on their tables. A dip-netting permit (for residents only) allots fifteen sockeye per person or thirty per family. This is not the Alaska fishing of tourism catalogs. No fancy casting or photogenic flashing fish arced out from a line, drops of water catching sunlight. Picture instead a net the size of a kid's swimming pool on a ten-foot handle, a slow, sweeping motion, and hours of nothing happening. The Copper is the place to participate in this Alaskan right of passage.

Copper River reds are the best salmon you can catch or buy, a delicacy that sustains a thriving commercial market. Sockeye get shipped fresh from ocean docks to Seattle sushi bars, five-star restaurants in Cancun. Now imagine that same fish, practically free, on your dinner plate all winter. The flesh of a Copper River red is the color of sunset. It's rich in essential fatty acids, flaky and moist, perfect for smoking or eating raw. When you're grilling Copper River sockeye over a beach fire half an hour after you landed it, you can't help but feel smug—in Chicago some sucker's paying thirty bucks a plate for this fish on ice two days older—and also lucky: eating local at its barest, and most elegant.

Of course, first, you have to catch the fish. Our first summer in Denali, Ralph invited Krusty and Gabe and me to join him and some friends for their annual dip-netting trip in June. He lured us with tales of runs so thick you could barely rest between catches, limiting out in hours. Ralph handled the logistics—four giant coolers, nets and poles, the ropes for anchoring ourselves to sheer cliffs that rimmed the best spots, enough Ziplocs and garbage bags and tarps to wrap a house with. His wife packed us ham sandwiches and sliced carrots and beer and Snickers. We threw fingers for driving shifts.

The drive itself signified the beginning of an epic. From Healy it's an eight-hour trip, the middle leg over the bone-jarring gravel washboard of the Denali Highway. We left right after work, a three-day weekend ahead, and arrived at the river in the middle of the night, ready to begin our assault. The fabled catch eluded us, though, and despite nearly thirty hours of fishing, our group netted only twenty-five of our legal 150-plus claim. It rained on and off and the black flies were heinous, and by the drive home we were all so sleep-deprived and slap-happy that over burgers and beers in Glennallen half way back, getting so badly skunked seemed almost funny. Our paltry haul was a blessing when it came to the gutting, cleaning, and packaging phase, which lasted into the wee hours of Sunday anyway. We stumbled into the shop Monday morning with bloodshot eyes and hands that reeked of salmon.

Two years later, the skunking a vague memory, Gabe and I were ready to have another go. Time, that great revisionist historian, had done its job:
So we spent three days slaving away for thirty pounds of fish that would have cost less in the grocery store than the gas it took us to drive to the river. It was fun, yeah? And that won't happen again, right?
Krusty, the eternal optimist, had better luck the year prior, and anything with Krusty was guaranteed good fun. We bet this time it would be different.

It was. The dirt road along the river washed out that spring, so the best holes were a several-mile hike from the parking area, complicating the process. It was August, not June, with sun, no bugs in sight, temperatures cool enough to be comfortable in rubber fishing gear but warm enough to be pleasant. And, this time, we caught fish.

Krusty, a loyal sort, went right to a favorite hole two miles up the road, while Gabe and I tried closer spots first. No luck. Around dinnertime, we went out the road, too, and in the distance saw Krusty hiking toward us, nearly flattened under his backpack-load of thirty salmon, weighing more than 150 pounds. A strong and grinning hiker under most circumstances, Krusty was staggering. He lurched up to us and stopped. The hole was pumping out fish faster than he could net them, he said. I could read it in his eyes:
Get your asses out there, you lazy fuckers, quit waiting for something to jump into your truck!
We went in opposite directions, Krusty to clean and pack his fish, Gabe and I to haul in a burden of our own.

After a two-hundred-foot descent to the river over slick rock, we encamped on a large outcrop pitched toward the boiling hole. The current created a mini-hydraulic into which no passing fish, it seemed, could avoid being drawn. Gabe stuck the net in the water.
Wham
, fish. He swung the fish to me, my knife in hand to kill it, bleed out the gills, descale, and get it on a stringer. The instant the net hit the water again, another fish. We hooted in disbelief. At first it was comical, then biblical (three in one net), and then ghastly, as I bludgeoned fish faster than I could bid them thanks. Fluids warmed my palms through gloves. I scooped handfuls of roe out of the females, brilliant pearly orange treasure heaped on the rock in a steaming pile. I tasted one, a salted burst, and the musky flavor courted my mouth for hours.

By midnight, it was too dark to fish (August, after all), and we called it quits with twenty-three. Seven shy of our legal take, we'd reached our killing limit. I am not squeamish by nature. I believe it is right to eat animals we kill ourselves, honorable even, if done well, in moderation. And I love salmon, all winter long. But that night, I just couldn't slay anything else. I had so much blood on my hands, on my Hellies, on my cheeks, and in the hairs hanging out of my ponytail. I saw in a quick flash how unbearable life would be had I to account for each of the invisible deaths my thriving demands—bugs on my windshield, the critters displaced by ski runs and bike trails, the ones that make my meat, my boots, my gloves.

Night dropped, the melancholy end-of-summer clear, and there was no time for introspection. The fish had to be cleaned fast or the flesh would taint, an inexcusable waste. We hauled our load up to the roadbed and unsheathed knives—fish beheaded, gutted, stuffed into plastic bags, split between backpacks (mine half as heavy as Krusty's, thank God). We shouldered the long poles, nets a tripping hazard dangling down near our XtraTufs, and trudged into the dark. The arches of my feet ached. Thirty-six hours with no sleep. Fish slime in my ears, a year's worth of protein on my back. I should have felt proud, but it was too much effort.

Two Healy winters passed in our one-room cabin. In March, a nicer, larger rental cabin up the road became available when friends moved Outside for a “real job.” We moved in, hauled boxes of books and loads of boots on sleds over the snow-packed trail to the porch. That was the winter Gabe's job also turned more permanent, with a four-year appointment and benefits. We had just begun to think about a place of our own when the friends moving to Ohio made us another offer. They owned a piece of land on the edge of a bluff farther up Stampede, and they were thinking of subdividing, a few acres' sale to pay it off before they moved away. Would we be interested? It was a beautiful spot, with aspen groves, mountain views, a gravel road punched in to the property's edge. It was a place we could imagine building the house we'd begun to plan in our minds: concrete countertops, a woodstove, a south-facing porch. An outhouse of our very own.
Yes,
we told the friends,
let's do it.
We shook hands. Another friend, a surveyor, staked the boundaries and filed the plat map at the borough office, making it, finally, our own. It was the most money we'd ever spent on anything you could touch (college was much more). A 1993 Toyota pickup was our next-most-valuable asset, and after that, a quiver of ten pairs of skis.

We'd tapped most of our out-of-pocket savings for the land, and building the place we wanted was going to take some steps. But we knew where the story started: with dirt work, of course. Building a sixteen-foot gravel driveway was, funny enough, exactly like building a sixteen-foot bike trail. We walked alignments, flagged the best line (avoid black spruce bog to the north, granite boulders to the south), and when the ground thawed in June, rented a Bobcat from Fairbanks ($400 for forty hours on the meter, delivery included). One week, 350 linear feet, and four hundred yards of gravel later we had a driveway. It peeled off the road over a stick of culvert buried two feet deep and curved its way gently to the chosen house site. We moved some displaced tundra mats, carpeting the fill slopes just as we had on trail projects. Nic came after work one evening to run the Bobcat while Gabe and I worked the hand tools, shoveling in low spots, raking edges. The same steps as for work, only for ourselves, better.

With the driveway finished, the property changed. Before, it had been a piece of raw land, the house a mirage I could picture if I squinted hard and superimposed Frank Lloyd Wright atop Little House on the Prairie. After, it was a home site. The gravel strip led somewhere. I could see a woodshed at the end of it, stacked with split birch. A trail contouring the hill, a door opening into an arctic entry, where finally, there would be a bench and a place to leave snowy boots. A home.

The first weekend after we laid the driveway, Gabe and I went up to the land for a walk with the dogs. In the gravel surface, not yet hardened as it would by next year's rain and freeze and thaw, we saw rows of tracks: a set of a neighbor's boot prints said,
What are they up to?
A set of dog prints said,
I smell something different.
A set of brown bear prints said,
This was always a home.

Lynx. Listen:
lynx.
A feline, a cat. A verb (this links that). A word without vowels, and an
x
to boot. Lynx whose population spikes so closely mirror snowshoe hares' that you can't think
cat
without thinking
rabbit.
Lynx travels fastest at night, hunts on the ground but can climb trees and swim. On my road, a few miles down from the cabin. In the park, asleep midday, skulking the ditch line after dark.
Lynx.
The
l
rolls out shy, almost hidden in the tongue's crevice, the crick of the middle
nk
, as if poised for a leap, and
x
's secretive hiss, falling on tufted ears. Such bony structure, visible beneath the skin of animals and words.

Spring in Denali tugs at late-March days when long sun softens snow and warmer winds blow possibilities in. But March often brings the year's coldest snap; winter still has the reins. Only in late April, as southern climates watch for crocuses, do we see the beginning of the end of ice. Alaska's fifth season, squeezed between winter and spring, is “breakup.” Breakup of rivers as shed-size chunks of ice give way; breakup of frozen driveways and roads, thaw triggering spring's buckle and heave so the same potholes open up and gravel roads ripple with washboard; breakup of overflow, the layers of water and ice that percolate frozen-solid creeks and rivers; breakup of snow pack in the tundra lowlands, exposing winter-kill and last year's cranberries. It's fitting that breakup's label alludes to the end of romance: grim, gray, trudging. While it's happening, it seems it will never pass. It always does.

Look quick to catch spring. April's ice overlaps May's buds. Aspens go from hint of pale green to fully leafed-out in three days. Spring blooms thrust through snow and bushes that yield berries in August have tiny flowers while ice lingers in creek bottoms. Spring's window is short, just time enough to get its business done, jump-starting life, issuing in the fervent days of June, only three months before the freeze takes hold again. Blown kiss, curt bow, spring exits the stage quick—summer waits in the wings, ready to pass in a panic, looking over shoulder for winter's breath already on its neck.