Four Quarters of Light (34 page)

I was about to ask him where he had learned his skill when I noticed a large unfinished painting mounted on an easel near the window. It was of a herd of bull walrus sunning themselves on a rocky outcrop. Now, male walrus are ugly and aggressive
creatures, but not my Russian painter's walrus. They lay in sublime repose and looked out of the painting, inviting you to join them. I could see why ancient mariners had mistaken them for mermaids and mermen. Each of Vladimir's walrus looked the same, yet each expressed its own personality.

‘It is a fabulous piece, Vlad,' I said, suddenly using the familiar diminutive of his name. ‘Would you sell it?'

‘No,' he said firmly. Then, in a softer tone, he explained, ‘I cannot, because it is not finished. I have been working on it four and a half months but I think it will be maybe a year old before I am finished.' I declared that his painting was superior to his sculpture and he looked from me to the painting and back to me again. ‘You are right, of course, and you know why?'

‘No.'

‘Because they remain with you longer.'

I wasn't sure if I was able to take this debate on the arts any further and declined another top-up. Vladimir was not drunk, but he enjoyed stimulating conversation and I was interested in how this ex-gulag guard who had the soul of a saint had found himself in Alaska. His answer was surprising, but exactly what I should have expected. ‘It is too confusing, and more importantly it is wasteful of time,' he began. ‘People here spend too much time doing things to save time so that they can do the really important things. But they never have any time to do these things. They sleep for eight hours, they spend three hours eating and drinking, then another two hours on insignificant things. Why do they not do what they want to do?' I was listening intently, but the complex mechanics of what he was trying to say were baffling me. He finally got to the point. ‘The spiritual dimensions of people's lives are hidden from them. Life,' he said, pointing his finger towards the heavens and then at his heart, ‘has little meaning without it.'

I left his apartment as he had to go and collect his wife, who was a Russian teacher. I took a last glimpse at the sparsely finished room and the studio packed with half-finished paintings, photos of ice sculpture, brushes, hand-made ice-shaving chisels of every description, and a table full of charcoal sketches and photos of his
wife and his family taken somewhere in Siberia. Vladimir hadn't got much, but his room was full to bursting.

My next port of call was with John Luther Adams. The name suggested an eccentric revivalist preacher or an attorney of law from somewhere in New England who could trace his ancestry back to the Puritan founding fathers and whose own father had written a book on religious ethics and the history of religious dissension. John Luther was nothing like this. He described himself as the most northerly composer in the world. Inside his meticulously maintained cabin in the woods, John spoke with single-minded passion about Alaska, and particularly the Arctic region, as an inspirational place. Here was a man who was used to being alone. I supposed that was in the nature of being a composer.

I spoke with him of my book about the blind harpist and mentioned my mysterious correspondent and her confiding to me that the composer I was writing about was a ‘Dreamwalker'; for some reason I didn't mention that I had met this woman again. The word seemed to knock down the awkwardness between us. I had come to ask this man about what brought artistic and creative people to this extreme land. I never needed to ask the question. My book about the Irish composer Turlough Carolan had done the trick.

John was about my age and had come to Alaska when he was twenty-two. He was, as he described it, ‘looking for a home place', somewhere his creative energies would be liberated. The minute he arrived he felt that the landscape resonated with something that commanded him to stay. This was home! I had already discovered that when I asked people why they came to this northern extreme, or indeed why they stayed, they spilled out in front of me a tea chest full of ready-made reasons. Yet all they seemed to do was obscure the essential answer I was looking for. John Luther Adams, like everyone else, had his own reasons for leaving the lower 48. He admitted that after thirty years he was still discovering what kept him here. He also admitted to finding the bleak, dark winter dreadfully frustrating. He drowned himself in
sun-lamp therapy to hold back the SADs, the debilitating depression that descends every winter that Jane Haigh explained to me while describing her need to become a ‘snowbird'. Did John feel the same compulsion? ‘Sometimes,' he confessed, but he never acted upon it. He was too obsessed with the extremes of ice and rock, light and dark, the roaring aurora and that incredibly mesmeric white silence.

As he was talking, he referred to his life in Alaska as a sojourn in ‘the Big Lonely'. It held him in its bone-numbing, icy grip and would not let him leave no matter how he might rage against it. He spoke of years spent walking in the wilderness and listening to the ‘Arctic litanies' that sounded to him out of the earth and air. From the time he'd first arrived in Alaska he had been acutely aware of the ‘presence' of the place. It was something I too had felt. This sense of a ‘presence' in the landscape had deepened as the years passed. It had propelled and challenged him. It was, for him, ‘the measure of everything we do and are'. By way of explanation, he talked about a piece of music he had worked on for six years, until he was content with his composition and even sure there was real quality and merit in it. One morning he pulled back the curtains, looked out on to the Alaska Range and realized how insignificant the work was.

But he remained working and living in the wilderness. ‘The sonic geography of Alaska is so rich it requires a lifetime's devotion,' he declared, and put on some of his CDs. Birdsong and the noise of wind, water and thunder floated around the room. Obviously John was no conventional composer, nor was his music melodic in the classical European sense. His harmonics were stark, disturbing and deeply penetrating. Inuit voices spoke from behind the music, calling out their native place names. The music was like the names the natives had given to the land – void of elaborate description yet full of the experience of the place. The ghostly voices resonated with ancestry and myth. As I listened, totally overwhelmed, John spoke about the ‘salvation of silence', that great mysterious quiet that wraps around you in the bush. I knew it from my own night on the lake. And when he
spoke about music as a metaphor for silence I was with him all the way. There is a quality about silence that suspends time and makes every sound clear and precise. The composer's music was an echo of and a portal into that silence; it was not a representation of the place. It was its own landscape; it had moved beyond external reference. You didn't just hear the music, and it didn't throw up images of the wilderness, you felt it resonating from somewhere deep inside you. Describing landscape in words or music is limiting work. Like the Renaissance idea of perspective, it sets us at a distance from the object, detaches us from its organic being. It is a two-dimensional thing that misses something elemental.

I was becoming intoxicated with our talk, and with the music which elaborated on the words. But what was this ‘sonic geography'? Even as John was trying to define some kind of extraterrestrial terrain, somewhere at the crossroads of imagination and place, I was suddenly blasted into that place by the forceful, trance-like, driving rhythms of the drum. John's mountain music exploded at me like the first sight of the mountain ranges. It penetrated through my bones and rooted me into the stone as if I were petrified flesh. It was scary; I felt I could not escape it. Like the mountains, the terrifying noise of the drums was everywhere around me.

The music was removing the necessity for conversation, but when the composer spoke about the timeless place of forgetting and unknowing I knew what he meant, for that's where Alaska is, and John Luther Adams's music can take you there.

John had begun our conversation by trying to explain why he had come to Alaska. He was looking for a home place. But I felt he had discovered that home was within, and that home was also in his music. I left him sitting in the corner of his minimalist white room, gnome-like, his knees bent up to his chin, his long arms and fine-boned hands draped over the arms of his chair.

Big John arrived in a big, powerful 4 × 4 half truck that had the same roughshod appearance as its driver. I could hardly have
expected anything else. We drove into the hills, exchanging easy conversation about Ireland and Alaska.

Big John didn't have the erudite intensity of John Luther Adams. However, like Adams, he had hitch-hiked up from Florida, where he had been studying with a swimming scholarship, in his early twenties. He had come to Alaska for a ‘bit of an adventure' and hoped to pick up some money along the way. He never made the return journey and by his own admission had picked up a lot more than a few dollars. He really wasn't sure how much land he owned, but he knew it was a lot more than anyone else. He leased out several of his mines to local prospectors, and the ‘rental' on the lease was one tenth of the value of gold they extracted. How did he know how much each mine produced? ‘One thing you need to learn fast about miners,' he informed me with a serious expression. ‘Never ask them too many questions, never ask how much they are digging, and absolutely never ask about the quantity or quality of the gold they process.'

‘So how do you know you are getting one tenth of their gold?' I persisted.

‘I don't,' he answered emphatically. ‘I take on trust what they give me.' He paused for a moment. ‘I don't tell the IRS anything and they don't either, you understand?'

‘Sure,' I said. ‘It's a mutually beneficial conspiracy of trust.'

‘Exactly,' he said, complimenting me on my understanding with a knowing wink.

A drive up into the hills at this time of the year confirmed to me just how fast summer was progressing. From a distance, the carpets of white mountain avens looked like the last remnants of snow, but as you looked closer you could see the pink blush of small clumps of moss campion and the deep purple of lupins, or an Alaskan breed of wild azalea. I mentioned to my companion the changing colours and how I understood what brought so many artists to Fairbanks. ‘Yeah, too damn many of them if you ask me. The place is coming down with artists, liberals and leftover hippies!'

Big John drove on to the mines and with macho redneck
ebullience castigated anything that even smelled liberal or left wing. I listened and smiled quietly to myself. There wasn't a word coming out of his mouth that he or I believed.

‘How did you make all your money?' I asked.

‘Luck,' he answered. ‘Like everybody else who made a little bankroll for themselves – luck, hard work and a lot of nervous energy.'

Big John's bankroll was far from small, and he knew I knew it. When Big John realized you were not going to fall for his tall tales or that you saw through his redneck persona, he spoke openly. Apparently he made his money at the beginning of the oil boom. Having obtained the contract to supply the oil fields in the far north with everything from pencil sharpeners to giant propellers, he worked an eighteen-hour day organizing fleets of trucks on the haul roads and flotillas of Dakota freight planes flying from the lower 48 with heavy precision-engineered parts. ‘It was madness. I was ordering men and machines about like I was conducting the Second World War. Christ, I was only twenty-three at the time and before I was twenty-eight I had more millions in my bank account than I knew what to do with.'

I was waiting for him to add some fantastic elaboration, but he didn't need to – the truth was fantastical enough. After the oil boom had settled and the pipeline was up and running, he looked around for something to do with his money. He had had a lot of fun with it in the meantime but was tired of fun. Because of luck and boredom, he bought up large mining companies that had ceased functioning. The price of gold on the world market was too erratic and the cost of extraction too high for the large companies to continue. Big John bought them not really knowing what they comprised. He laughed at the idea that he had become the largest private landowner in the state without knowing it. ‘Hell, I'm still trying to work out what the company owns, and where it is. Apparently, I now possess the fullest, most detailed and complete history of mining in America since I bought the company and all its records. The Smithsonian thinks I should donate it to them. But I keep telling them I had to pay a lot of
money for them and if they are that valuable to them they should do likewise. And if they don't, well, it's kind of nice to own a chunk of history.' I remembered his machine shop in Fairbanks and how all the long-outdated machines were kept clean and in working order. I believed his sentiments about the value of owning history.

I was just about to ask him another question when he announced that we were on the site of one of the mines he had leased. I could see nothing but mile upon mile of heaped rock and earth, as if a huge urban motorway was under construction. Everywhere as far as the eye could see there were piles of spoil and ugly man-made lakes that had been created when the earth was scooped up in search of gold. John told me that the miners are supposed to return the land to its original state. ‘But no-one ever sees, and no-one ever makes them,' he said. I had not expected one mine to cover such a vast tract of land, but my companion explained that the permafrost was too difficult to dig through and too cold and dangerous to work for long periods. ‘In Alaska, you just gotta scratch the surface to find gold,' he announced, pointing to the giant digger trucks hauling away hundreds of tons of the land surface to be washed by a huge machine called a dredge. After that, the waste or spoil was carted off to be dumped wherever was handy. It only took three men to work seven million dollars' worth of earth-breaking machinery, and there were dozens and dozens of such mines. ‘Well,' I thought to myself, ‘you don't have to go to the moon to see lunar landscapes.'