Breaking the Ice (8 page)

Karla had seen enough of Alaska from the window of a plane, however, to be able to picture the landscape they were flying over. White-capped mountains stretching in every direction to the horizon. Wild rivers. Endless desolation.

The plane hit a pocket of rough air, but it wasn’t too bad. Bumpy, like riding the Mind Bender roller coaster at Six Flags Over Georgia. And Bryson had warned her, so Karla was able to ride it out without becoming too alarmed. Then the plane dropped abruptly, ten feet or more, and her stomach lurched.

“I’m cold,” she said, bunching her fingers around the tigereye necklace in her pocket. “Can’t you turn up the heat any more?”

“Yeah, sure.” The pilot turned a knob on the control panel but Karla couldn’t feel any measurable difference. She craned her head, trying to spot where the heat was coming from, and saw Bryson yawn and rub her eyes. Not a minute or two later, she yawned again.

“Are you sure you’re all right to fly? You look like you’re about to fall asleep.”

She sat up a little straighter and blinked several times. “I’m fine.”

Karla’s unease grew when she soon yawned again. Maybe if she got Bryson to talk, she would stay awake. Karla could also perhaps forget that she was
careening over a vast winter wilderness in a flying sardine can with a sleepy pilot. “Don’t get me wrong, the scenery is nice and everything, but why does anyone want to live here?”

“Sure not for everyone,” Bryson replied. “Most people can’t live without their big-screen TVs and cell phones, never mind having to do without things like refrigerators and electric lights, if you live in the bush like I do. Heck, it’s hard sometimes even getting the basics, like Band-Aids and aluminum foil. Especially during fall freeze-up and spring breakup. Everything stops for weeks, or weather can keep you homebound for really long stretches and you gotta rely on what you have on hand. You learn to improvise.”

“So you don’t live in Bettles?” From what Karla had read, the village itself was isolated enough. What did living in the bush mean?

“Got a cabin thirty miles from there, in the mountains,” Bryson said. “Well, thirty miles by air. By boat, it’s almost double.”

“So you really do spend a lot of time in this plane.”

“Yup. Ferrying clients, mostly. And a couple times a month, I run supplies for the village. During the warm months, anyway. Once everything freezes, they plow a temporary road that links up to the main highway, and semis haul in everything, including all the big, heavy stuff planes can’t handle. Lot cheaper to get stuff that way, so that’s when everybody stocks up for the whole year.”

“I read online there are only forty-something people in the village.”

“Got to be from the 2000 census. Just twenty-seven now. Once the school closed, we lost some families. And a couple of cheechakos moved on.”

“Cheechakos?” It sounded like a breakfast cereal.

“Newcomers. Outsiders who come here loving the idea of Alaska and
think
they want to live here, till they find out how tough it is. You spend a couple of hard winters here, you’re a sourdough. Term started during the gold rush, ’cause prospectors used to survive on the stuff. Think we have it tough today, you should see the way they had to live.”

“So that brings me back to my original question.” The plane abruptly fell several feet again, and Karla gripped the edges of her seat. She didn’t continue until the plane had evened out. “You said you’ve been flying in Alaska more than twenty years. Why does anyone choose to live here? Why did you?” Maybe she could get some insights into the kind of person her sister was.

“As many reasons as there are mountains, why people live here.” Bryson recalled the many discussions she and her friends had had in the Den on that very topic. Some locals were secretive about why they’d come, which provided ample fodder for lengthy speculations over a few beers. On the run from the law. Antisocial. Unabomber. Illegal alien.

Most folks, though, were pretty forthcoming about what drew them to Alaska. Grizz and Ellie were eternal flower children, homesteaders who came to live off the land and start a commune that never really materialized. Instead they founded a roadhouse as a way to draw the community together, which it had accomplished in spades. Their past showed in the peace-symbol T-shirt that Grizz wore a lot, fashionable again with a new generation, and in the preponderance of classic tunes from the sixties and seventies that made up the bulk of the 120 selections in the jukebox, a 1954 Rock-Ola 1438 Comet that Ellie found online in a Seattle antique shop.

Skeeter had been a commercial pilot with a major airline, and his routes often took him over Alaska. Seeing it from above had made him determined to experience it up close in a small plane, and when he had a taste of it during a month-long vacation, he was hooked. He quit his job and found a plane of his own, settling in Bettles to join the freelance cooperative after a month of tagging along with Bryson, Red Murdock, and half a dozen other veterans of Arctic Circle flying. Skeeter made the transition pretty easy, especially since he’d been based in Minneapolis and had seen his share of bad storms and bitter temperatures. He loved the scenery and independence of his new job, along with the fact he could chain-smoke if he wanted to and stop shaving every goddamn day.

Lars and Maggie had met in the Gates of the Arctic National Park when they were just out of their teens. Maggie was backpacking, doing field studies for her courses at the University of Alaska, and Lars had decided to spend his spring break from Michigan State on a solo fly-fishing adventure in the bush. Both were immediately smitten. When Lars’s charter pilot, Bryson’s father, returned to pick him up eight days later, Maggie went with him.

They married and lived in Fairbanks long enough to get their degrees—Lars in ecology, conservation biology, and environmental science, and Maggie in wildlife biology and plant biology—then settled north, near where they’d met, to work and raise a family.

“Most folks, I guess, are just the rugged-individual type,” Bryson explained. “They move here for the chance to live simply—off the land, by their wits. Testing themselves against the worst nature can offer. A few are running away from something or someone, and don’t want to be found. Or they want to get as far as possible from stupid laws and regulations that restrict how they can live. For me, Alaska is in my blood. I was born here.”

She didn’t ordinarily volunteer a lot of personal information to her clients, but the chitchat was helping her fight her fatigue. “Lived in Fairbanks for a while, and even that was too much big-city for me. Can’t fathom being anywhere else. Have to be able to breathe fresh air, see the stars, hear the wolves howl at night. Wake up to a view that always stuns me.”

“But you sure have to sacrifice a lot to get all that, don’t you? You really don’t have a refrigerator?”

“That’s just what I mean. People like you who’ve never known any difference think those are such big necessities, but they’re not, really. You get back so much more here than you ever have to give up. I’ve pretty much always done without such things, so I don’t miss ’em. I live a very comfortable life.” She rarely wanted to explain or justify her choices, but this stranger had put her on the defensive. “Hear my clients talk about how a simple power outage for a day or two makes ’em crazy, worrying about pipes freezing and doing without their Internet. Free yourself from all of that, you live a lot less stressful life.”

“You definitely have different priorities than most of us.”

“Won’t argue that. One of my favorite quotes is from the Greek philosopher Epicurus.
If you live according to nature, you will never be poor; but if according to opinions, you will never be rich. Nature demands little, opinion a great deal.
”

“No offense,” her passenger said, “but you don’t strike me as a philosophy student.”

Bryson wondered, not for the first time, why so many outsiders perceived Alaskans as ignorant hicks. “Reading is a popular pastime up here. And you get lots and lots of time to think and reflect.”

“Precisely what I don’t need,” Karla Edwards mumbled.

The answer didn’t strike Bryson as odd or unusual. Many people who were constantly on the go were afraid of taking a long hard look at their lives and the choices they made. Some of the people she and Lars met had their first chance to do so during their trips to Alaska, and they weren’t always happy about what they discovered about themselves.

“Lot of benefits to living here,” she said. “Hardships draw people together. Neighbors and friends become your extended family, ’cause you have to rely on each other. Can’t tell you how many clients I talk to who live in big cities, never even met the people living next door.”

Her passenger was silent for a long time. “That’s true of me. I live in an apartment building in Atlanta, and I don’t know the name of anyone on my floor, even though I’ve lived there six years. I nod or wave sometimes at familiar faces as I come and go, but that’s about it. When news reports of local shootings, break-ins, and people stealing your identity constantly bombard you, you become leery of inviting strangers into your home. Afraid of people knowing too much about you.”

“That’s just what I mean. Here, you got bush hospitality. Most people in the wild never lock their door when they’re away, ’cause you never know when someone might get lost, or hurt. Your home might be their only chance to survive. Gotta trust they won’t take advantage of that.” Bryson thought back to the time she and her father needed to enter a stranger’s unoccupied cabin because they’d had to ditch the plane in a sudden blizzard, when the wind chill was thirty below zero. They’d left behind some money for the firewood and food they’d used, and a note thanking the owners for keeping to the tradition of providing an open, well-stocked shelter for those in need.

“I can’t imagine being that trusting,” Karla said. “Then again, I can’t imagine living so far out in the wilderness that such a thing could be necessary. How do you deal with the isolation? Don’t you get lonely?”

“Sure. Doesn’t everyone, regardless of their geography? Do your location and luxuries mean you never get lonely?”

There was a very long pause before she got an answer. And Karla’s voice, when she finally spoke, was melancholic. “No. They don’t.”

Bryson had obviously hit a nerve. “Didn’t mean to pry.”

“You’re not. Besides, I asked you first.”

“But
I
didn’t have to
think
before I answered.”

Another long silence followed. Bryson glanced in the mirror, but it was too dark to see Karla’s expression. The dim light from the control panel only let her see that she was staring out the window into the darkness. “You can’t run from it, you know,” she said. “It’ll follow you wherever, even up here.”

“I’m not running from anything,” Karla shot back angrily.

For a while there, she’d been almost pleasant, but the reprieve was short. The petulant child from the airport was back. “If you say so,” Bryson replied. “Then why are you here?”

“Not that it’s any of your business, but I guess you could say I’m on a voyage of self-discovery.”

If you ask me, you’re already a little too self-absorbed.
Bryson spotted the welcome lights of Bettles in the distance. “What makes you think you’ll find yourself here?”

“I’m not sure,” Karla said. “But a part of me believes that whatever I’m looking for is here.”

“You’ll soon find out. That’s the village up ahead.” Bryson wasn’t sure whether it was her fatigue or the company, but the trip up had seemed to take an eternity. She’d had more than enough of her difficult passenger. Sue was due to pay up in spades, and soon. Bryson hit the transmit button on her radio. “A2024B Piper to BTT.”

“BTT to A2024B Piper. Where ya been, Bryson? Everybody’s waiting for you.” The voice wasn’t the raspy baritone she expected.

“Got held up. Where’s Skeeter? Why’re you manning the radio?”

“You’re the only traffic left tonight. Skeeter ate somethin’ baaad.
Way
bad. He’s been in the can the last hour.”

“Coming in on final approach. Pass the word, will you, Lars. I don’t have everything. Only about half.”

“You better have a good reason ready.” The reply was lighthearted, but Bryson knew Lars well enough to catch the undercurrent of concern in his voice.

The warning wasn’t necessary. Bryson was already doing a mental checklist of who was expecting something, which included most of Bettles, a few Evansville natives, and a handful of bush residents. She focused on the ones who might react poorly to the news they’d been waiting for her in vain.

Everyone was cautious around Dirty Dan, because even though he seemed harmless, no one knew anything much about him, and there were plenty of crazies in Alaska. Crazies who holed up there because society had shunned them elsewhere, and people who cracked from the strain of cabin fever. Both types could be unpredictable. There were also the chronic alcoholics who occasionally got mean when they were soused, and more than a few of those were around.

Bryson glanced at the illuminated dial on her watch. It was almost nine thirty. She might have been back as early as four or five, if she hadn’t had to make so many shopping stops only to get further sidetracked by her unexpected passenger. The folks waiting for their orders had probably started gathering at the Den around three—such supply trips were a highlight of the week, or month. So everyone had certainly had ample time to get loaded while they all sat around waiting for her.