Four Quarters of Light (6 page)

The cabin was bathed in a soft aura of light as it filtered through the worn curtains, and the incense of pine resin accompanied me to bed where I suspected my mattress would be stuffed with more imaginings than my head could hold. After all, here we were right in the middle of a forest that was home to hares, lynx,
squirrel, moose and a host of other animals that must sooner or later get curious. I took a last peep through the curtains, hoping something would stir in the clearing around the cabin. Nothing moved.

I remembered it being explained to me why it was necessary to create a big clearing around one's house. Apparently the bush receives more lightning strikes during the summer months than it has people living in it and it is wise to put some space between your home and forest fire. When I asked how come the forest cover remained so extensive, the curious phenomenon of how the black spruce cone can remain unopened for many years before it explodes and the ash and sunlight fertilizes it was explained to me. I noticed the close proximity of the aspen and birch behind the cabin, and then I noticed how the tree line to the front was several feet inside the stumps of the original clearing. If lightning struck anywhere near us the whole place would flare up like a roman candle! In Alaska you had to survive more than the cold, it seemed.

The following morning I examined my map of Alaska. The green patches marked the numerous natural parks, but around them and holding the place together was a vast expanse of white. There were a few place names at the intersection points of rivers, but the further north you looked the more unrecognizable these place names became. They were Inuit names, full of the strangeness of an old race and a language system at the very edge of extinction. Further south the names were Athabascan Indian and European. Takoma, Tanana and Galena mixed with names such as McGrath, McCartney, Georgetown and Crooked Creek. Lots of the European names had a strong Irish influence, but even this did not ease the apprehension I was desperately trying to hide from myself as much as from my family. After all, I was taking them into a land about which I was becoming increasingly confused. I had pored over these strange place names before departing from home. Then they were tinged with magic and adventure, but now that these names had become a reality I was less intrigued and my anxiety level soared. Alaska was not the edge of
nowhere, Alaska was what you fell into when you were over that edge. Alaska was uniquely its own place, and that's why I was drawn to it. It challenged you in the deepest parts of yourself.

I looked again at the map and noticed how the few familiar names were obliterated by Indian and Eskimo words with their abrupt closed-vowel endings. I was entering into a world where there were no roads to or from such places, and I thought again of Conrad's expeditions into dark landscapes where all the selfassuredness of European civilization was worthless and washed away in a moment. I scanned the names, trying silently to get my tongue around them and by doing so dispel some of the mounting worry.

‘Do many people live in these places?' I asked Pat awkwardly later that day.

‘Hardly,' she answered, ‘a few families perhaps. Some of them are only names, left over from the early exploitation of the place. But I can't really say. In any case there are a lot of reasons for not going to a lot of places.'

As instantly as she said it I wished I had not asked her.

‘What time do I have to be at the dog musher's tomorrow?' I asked.

Pat replied, ‘People up here don't tend to watch the clock too much. He'll expect us when we arrive, in the afternoon.'

Later, I looked again at the extensive white expanses on the map. It did not signify snow but emptiness; the strangeness of the ‘Great Land' roared out at you. I thought of my young sons, especially Cal who had not yet learned how to walk, and a small part of me somewhere felt that my own first footfalls in the remoter corners of Alaska might be just as momentous as his.

The dog musher's cabin was a short drive out of Fairbanks and I knew we had arrived before the homestead came into view – a continuous howling announced the fact to everyone for miles around. The cabin was a small log-built construction with a smaller outhouse some thirty-five feet from the main house. In the foreground, squat wooden boxes and upturned barrels were splayed about; each had a dog sitting beside or a few feet from it and all were chained to some fixed point driven deep into the ground beside each of these kennels. Some of the animals had jumped on top of their kennels, others strained at the full extension of their chain, but all had their heads tilted fully back and their jaws partly open as they carolled to the heavens that I had arrived. I looked at Pat. ‘It's okay,' she said, ‘they're just saying hello and welcoming you.' I accepted her word without question, telling myself that if I was going to get on with these creatures I had to convince them I was not afraid. I have had enough dogs in my life to know that animals can sense fear in an instant, and it disturbs them, perhaps because it touches something primitive buried deep inside them.

‘What's our musher's name?' I asked.

Pat smiled at my question, the guileless smile of the innocently dumbfounded. ‘I'm not really sure. You see, I don't know him too well. In fact, I hardly know him at all. I only know of him and got directions here from someone else, another musher. You'll meet her some time during your stay. She's a lovely woman and a real Alaskan.'

I quietly registered the fact that mushing was not a male preserve, then queried, ‘But didn't you ask what his name was?'

Pat explained that she had met the man briefly some years ago; she remembered his name as Dan. But in trying to make contact again through other mushers who knew him and could explain how he might be found she'd been confronted with the fact that not everyone knew him as Dan. Some called him Luke, others Mike, and some knew him as Ben. None of them could agree on a surname.

‘So what do I call him?'

‘Dan should do, unless he tells you otherwise. Mushers are a special breed.' Pat laughed at the unintentional pun before continuing. ‘They are quiet, even reclusive. They can be quirky, occasionally bad-tempered, just like their dogs, but most of them are pleasant and if you can get past all the quirkiness they are quite likeable.'

I could do nothing but take her word for it.

As Pat was driving off she advised me not to wait on ceremony. ‘Just stamp the snow loudly off your boots, give the door a good bang and go right in.' For a moment I remembered my own instinctive thinking about showing fear in front of animals and decided that this was also the best policy to adopt for Dan the dog musher.

The ferocity of the stamping of the snow from my feet on the cabin porch must have clearly declared to whoever was inside just how apprehensive I was about this first meeting with a stranger with so many names. The cabin, however, was completely different from my expectations. The place was warm and comfortable and very practical in every way. In the centre of the far wall of the main living area was a great log-burning fireplace, and to the
side of that a pile of logs and an assortment of newspapers – my eye caught a pile of
National Geographic
magazines. In the centre of the room was an old settee and on either side, cosily embracing the fireplace, stood two even older easy chairs. The proper state of their dilapidation was hidden by the fact that all three items of furniture had either a tartan throw spread over them or what looked liked ex-army blankets. A big TV and an expensive hi-fi glowed amid this cosiness. The kitchen was an open-plan affair on a raised platform leading from the main living area; it too was unexpectedly tidy. I'd been anticipating the kind of comfortless disarray that marks a single and reclusive male living on the outskirts of the Alaskan wilderness. I couldn't help but be confused by the casual order that confronted me.

Dan the dog musher spoke up. I had not seen him as he was standing behind the place in the kitchen where he seemed to have hung all his bulky coats and overalls. His voice simply said, ‘Hello, I've been expecting you.' He said little more beyond suggesting that I should get myself a seat by the fire. He moved about swiftly and silently after that. The minutes seemed protracted by my own anxiety about whether I should stand up and say, ‘Hello, my name is Brian Keenan, what should I call you?' Instead I watched him move about the kitchen, presumably making coffee and something to eat. He was tall and lean and wore the proverbial check shirt and braces, which held up a worn pair of denims. He sported a well-kept beard beneath which I fancied I might find the remnants of a young James Dean, a middle-aged Clint Eastwood and a mature Gene Hackman, if such movie icons could be mixed into one person. Dan the dog musher seemed at every point a classical Alaskan male.

I sat a little nervously on my easy chair waiting on Dan to make the next move or at least to say a little more to ease the log-jam of the silence. As I waited, part of me became aware that men like Dan are part of the silence of the place, as if they had subsumed a greater silence into themselves and words only cluttered up the cleanness of it. I tried to occupy myself by taking mental notes of the cabin I was in and looking inconspicuously at Dan. My first
impression, on arrival, had been that the cabin and its environs had all the possibilities of being the perfect location set for an early John Ford western.

In a country where distance frequently makes even your nearest neighbour a stranger, or at least someone who lives twenty miles over the rise and whom you rarely see, I expected our conversation to be forced and filled with more of the kind of silences I had already encountered. But when it came, conversation was slow and easy. It was the sort of exchange I suppose travellers at an airport might share before they set off to their different destinations from the different places they had come from. I answered his questions about Ireland and he talked about life in Alaska. Dan, it seemed, had had many jobs since leaving the army but nothing particularly skilful and nothing that fired his enthusiasm enough to stick with it. His longest stint was working as a carnie, a casual labourer with a travelling circus-cum-carnival. As I listened to him talking about his life with the carnival folk I thought that perhaps the seven or eight years he had spent travelling around America working at the canvas rigs and living with these people who exist at the edge of normal society, even if they bring some curious entertainment with it, had predisposed him, in a way, to Alaska. I suppose if you live with a bunch of people whose life and work is carried on at the very margins of normality you become part of that and find day-to-day existence in a normal lifestyle hard to deal with. I talked over these thoughts with Dan but he seemed unimpressed, though not uninterested.

Our conversation continued, and became easier as he got a hold on who this stranger was in his cabin. I thought I would dare to do what I had been advised not to do. I explained to him how people didn't seem to know his name and how Pat, when trying to locate him, had rung around a few other dog mushers and had been given different names. Dan listened and laughed unselfconsciously. ‘Many people arrive in Alaska and change their name as soon as they set foot in the place, or as soon as someone asks them who they are,' he answered by way of simple explanation.
I pushed him on the subject, trying to burrow my way into his personal story. He laughed again and shrugged his shoulders, saying once more, ‘Nobody cares up here too much anyway.' I thought about what he said, and part of me agreed. After all, it's not so much why you come to a place but what you do with the place when you get there, or what you do with what it does to you, that matters. So I left him with his past. It didn't really concern him, so why should it concern me?

Soon we were talking about his dogs, the two dozen or so animals he kept outside. They had gone quiet over the time we had been together, almost as if they had accepted that I was here and that there was no need for any more uproar. Dan had drifted into dog mushing like everything else he had done, but now he enjoyed it to the exclusion of everything else. I wasn't convinced by the exclusion of everything else bit and pointed knowingly to his expensive hi-fi equipment. ‘Maybe dogs and music are a way of dealing with this country,' he said. There was almost a wink in his eye. ‘Mushing helps you get into the country. When you are behind a team of dogs you can go anywhere and there is nothing your team won't do for you.'

‘And the music?' I said, pushing the question.

‘Sometimes the weather gets wicked up here so you turn on some heavy rock or turn up some Beethoven and you can blow the whole friggin' place away.'

I sensed that maybe Dan was making up some sourdough story just to keep me amused, but the idea of a blizzard blowing outside and Beethoven, Bach or Led Zeppelin breaking decibels inside while Dan's two dozen dogs howled their own accompaniment seemed to me absurdly honest.